Verve Group SE (VRV.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So good morning to our guests in America. Good afternoon to our guests in Europe. My name is Ingo Middelmenne and as the Head of Investor Relations of Verve Group, I'd like to cordially invite you -- I'd like to cordially welcome you to today's earnings call of our company. As you see, we are using a new conferencing system from today onwards. It now allows our private investors to participate live in a listen-only mode. Our institutional investors and analysts will be able to ask their questions live in the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] We have had an intense quarter behind us with all of the effects and initiatives for us to explain. As usual, we have prepared a presentation for you to provide you with some additional insight to increase transparency for you. After this presentation, we will, of course, take the time to answer your questions. Please be reminded that the entire call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded and will be made available publicly on our website following this call. [Operator Instructions] And now I'm handing you over to our CEO, Remco Westermann, to guide you through the first part of today's call. Remco, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ingo. Also from my side, a warm welcome to Verve's presentation of the third quarter 2025. As usual, I will present the headlines and the latest developments, followed by Christian, our CFO, who will present the financials. Q3 was a very important quarter for Verve, which laid the foundation for further strong and profitable growth. As a very important milestone, we finalized the unification of our in-app platform, which leads to cost efficiencies as well as revenue opportunities. We also continue to invest in growth by further strengthening our demand side, adding more sales employees and also acquiring 2 demand-side-oriented companies as well as by further investments in our products, data and AI. While revenues and EBITDA for Q3 2025 were down versus Q3 last year, we started seeing the positive effects of the unification and the growth investments by the end of the quarter and even stronger in Q4. Let me lead you through the Q3 presentation. Let me start with an overview of our main events. As already mentioned in the introduction, as planned, we successfully finalized the in-app platform unification project. This leads to lower cost. One platform requires one team and as such, is much more cost efficient as several platforms. But even more important, the unified platform is better performing platform, which is and further will continue to be improved, showing better performance and as such, leading to revenue increases. Our second strong growth driver is further investment in our main growth drivers. We have a great product portfolio, and we are further investing in product, data and AI with also emphasis on our ID-less targeting. But these products need to be sold. And that means growing our sales team with approximately 4,000 small and midsized agencies in the U.S. plus the holdco agencies, a substantial sales team to address those is required. We are actively growing our sales team organically and also nonorganically. Coming to point 3, acquisitions continue to contribute successfully to our growth. With the acquisition of Captify Technologies, we had strong positions in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, extending sales, customer reach and adding intent data to our portfolio of contextual and ID-less targeting solutions. With Acardo, we acquired a strong addition in Germany, enabling us to get stronger in the German market with strong CPG contacts and great solutions for retailers and CPGs, among others, with solutions such as couponing and measuring via retail cash assistance. Getting to the financials. Point 4, Q3 revenue was impacted by the unification project, as already mentioned before, temporary lower revenues and higher costs till mid of the quarter. On top of that, we faced a softer market with our political ad spend and with sectors such as, for example, CPG being weaker. Based on a change in revenue recognition, we are, however, reporting higher revenues than last year. This is based on having more margin and revenue controls on the unified platform. Christian will cover this later. Number five, our EBITDA came also in weaker due to lower revenues, one-offs of efficiency measures and increased cost based on, for example, hiring more salespeople where costs come well before the revenue come. Also, weaker U.S. dollar did not help us as the majority of our revenues are in the USD, while a large part of our costs are in euros, and we also report in euros. Coming to the last point on the page, while Q3 and Q2 were not strong quarters based on the before mentioned, by end of Q3, we started to see increased momentum. The momentum continues into Q4 with a performance single in-app platform and efficiency measures and growth initiatives starting to show effect. Based on this strong start into and further positive outlook for Q4, we reaffirm and narrow our 2025 guidance. Christian will cover that in more detail. Looking at our main KPIs. What we see here that we -- in Q3, we were also able to further strengthen our already strong in-app position. While LLMs like ChatGPT and the likes put web advertising and web publishers under pressure, in-app is a nice growth area to be in. Mobile now represents 97% of our revenues. Whereas also CTV is a very interesting segment, we saw CPMs and margins coming under pressure based on more supply getting into the market, while a lot of demand is still stuck with spend on linear TV. First CTV share of revenues is down from 4% in the last quarter to 3% in Q3, which is reflecting this. We are further investing in solutions for CTV that are differentiating and expect CTV to be the growth driver for Verve also in the long term, but don't want to work for low margin and as such, saw lower revenues in this quarter. I'm very pleased with the fact that we were able to increase the share of demand versus supply. As previously mentioned, the more we directly sell to demand and the more balanced our supply and demand are, the stronger the company gets. Demand now represents 31% of revenues, up from 25% in the previous quarter. Based on our investments towards brands and agencies, we expect the share to further grow. We are also starting to see positive effects of our investments in markets outside of the U.S., with the U.S. now representing 75% of our revenues versus 79% in the previous quarter and Europe increasing to 12% versus 9% in Q2. Revenues and earnings performance were impacted by investments and changes in revenue recognition. While Christian will go more in detail, I cover the main financial KPIs, revenue and EBITDA on this slide. Revenue is 3.3% down versus last year on a like-for-like basis. And due to the unification and more control on margins, we, however, had to change our revenue recognition and as such, show higher revenues as reported revenues. EBITDA is 22% down versus last year, which results from the lower revenues as well as from the higher cost due to the unification effects and the increased costs for our growth investments. Coming to our KPIs. We saw an increase in ad impressions to 288 billion in the quarter, 18% up versus last year. While revenue was down, this shows that CPMs and margins came down, reflected by a weaker overall market and the mix shift away from CTV. Based on platform unification, onboarding and scaling were slow in Q2 and Q3. However, from the mid of the quarter, we ramped up onboardings with our number of overall software customers increasing by 6% and including M&A actually by 23%. Our number of large software clients also again started to increase by 3%, excluding M&A and 12%, including M&A versus the last quarter. The net dollar expansion rate with 90% was a bit lower than last quarter based on the onetime effects and market weakness with, for example, lack of political ad spend. Our customer retention rate remains at high levels with our over $100,000 client retention rate at a solid 96%. Looking at growth drivers. Our product innovation continues to be a strong driver. Here, for example, the scaling of our ad formats. Verve continues to increase impressions and conversions through full screen and video ads. We see a strong 56% year-on-year growth with now EUR 14 million revenues in Q3. Another area of product innovation is our ID-less targeting, as investors know. We continued our product innovation into this area as well. The ID, the old backbone of user tracking and ad personalization continues to disappear. We further invest and scale our ID-less solutions. The acquisition of Captify adds further capabilities with their intent data. We were able to grow our iOS revenues by 29% to EUR 187 million LTM. Coming to platform unification. I mentioned the word several times in this presentation already. This is also a slide that we have shown previously. We started our business in AdTech by gaining critical mass through acquisitions. But to be successful in this business, a cutting-edge technology setup is key, and that means integrating platforms. In Q2 and Q3, we saw a temporary pain of that. But by end of Q3 and in Q4, we see the benefits. Important to mention that the latest acquisitions, Captify and Acardo are simple cases that strengthen our demand side and don't require technical integrations. Talking about our acquisitions, we are happy with them. We acquired Captify and Acardo. Captify just being a half month consolidated into the third quarter, Acardo being consolidated from the start of the fourth quarter, but both strengthening our business. Captify strengthened our sales teams in the U.S. and the U.K. and Australia. They have strong agency contacts and contracts that those can be levered. For example, if they have a contract with an agency, we can also start selling our other products into that. So that really adds. There was only very limited overlap actually from the agency contacts with, let's say, the previous acquisition Jun and the further contacts we have in the U.S. Search intent data for targeting are added by Captify and they are adding substantial revenue, whereas we paid an attractive multiple. Acardo supports Verve in building stronger positions outside the U.S., especially strengthening our German position. The strong relation with CPG brands can also be levered internationally. And also their couponing and cash register data capabilities, we see as a potential game outside of Germany, but also, of course, to further lift that inside of Germany. Coming more towards the future, we continue to invest in structural growth that sometimes hurts as we have seen also in Q3. But if we look at the overall growth of this company, it has always played out in the mid and the long term, and we expect all the investments we do also to do and to already show in Q4. One area, important area, further improvement of platform and AI performance, a unified platform is the base for further scaling and increased efficiency, and we continue our investments in AI and data as well as further yield improvement of the platform. And as the second, further scaling of our demand side by further scaling our sales organization, targeting a sales headcount of 150 sellers in the U.S. by end of 2026 as well as expanding and improving our product and services portfolio with focus on verticals such as retail, CPG and media companies, but also in podcast, for example, we've seen really nice results. And additionally, we are working on the demand side solutions based on the nice additional possibilities you have with generative AI and agentic technologies. We also expect to be able to show nice progress in that field. That brings me to the end of my part, and I would like to hand over to Christian.

Thank you very much, Remco. So my plan is to cover the financial performance of Q3 in numbers, but actually also spend some time in drilling into some of the underlying dynamics and drivers of the performance, and then I'll end on guidance for the year. So firstly, looking at revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We report 25% revenue growth for the quarter from EUR 114 million to EUR 142 million in Q3 this year. You will note a callout of EUR 32 million here shaded in purple, and this is the impact of the change of revenue recognition, which I'll come back to and explain. If we normalize for that on a like-for-like basis, we had a growth of -- a negative growth of 3%. And if we look at the organic growth of the business, taking into -- adjusting for M&A and adjusting for FX because we also had some headwinds from FX, we declined 4 percentage points, 4.1 percentage points. We report EUR 26 million in adjusted EBITDA for the quarter. This is a decline from previous year of 22% and also sequentially, we are lower with EUR 3.4 million. Now if we look at the EBITDA margin, with the addition of the revenue recognition and the top line of EUR 142 million reporting, we will report 18% in adjusted EBITDA margin. However, you look here at a comparable EBITDA margin from going back in time here in the light blue line, we would, on a like-for-like basis, be reporting 24% in EBITDA margin. So despite a somewhat soft quarter, we generated operating cash flows of EUR 34 million. That's actually a doubling from last quarter, which was EUR 15.2 million. I should, however, note that we also have a negative impact of working capital of EUR 29 million, EUR 29.6 million, and this is majorly caused by lower use of our securitization program. All in all, we invested EUR 34 million, and that's a combination of M&A for Vivento and Captify and also continuing to invest in the platform. I'll now try to dig a little bit deeper into the revenue and the top line and the performance of the quarter. So most importantly is probably one effect of the change in revenue recognition, which has an impact of EUR 32 million. As we move our mobile in-app volumes onto the unified platform, new unified platform, this platform has a significantly enriched control features for pricing. That means we can determine some of the pricing and the floors. And this essentially means that we also bear the burden of making the campaigns work. Now by IFRS 15 standards, that means we need to recognize the revenue on a principal basis, i.e., on a gross basis, where it was for this part, previously recognized on a net basis. As I said, it adds EUR 32 million to revenues. It has no impact on EBITDA. And this will be the principle that we will continue to recognize going forward. Positive impacts. We had -- as Remco referred to, we had very strong iOS growth, 29% growth on an LTM basis. We also had a good contribution from higher video and full screen volumes lifting our revenues, and we had -- we consolidated in Captify from the mid of September with some contribution. In terms of negative impacts for the quarter, the main one I would probably call out is that we did see a continued effect of the platform challenges after the unification until and including July and just the start of August. We also communicated that last time. From there on, we've seen an improving momentum through the quarter. So it's mainly July and some of August that was impacted, but it does have a negative impact on the revenues for the quarter and therefore, contributions. Aside for that, please keep note that in -- when you compare it to last year, we did have some political revenues in Q3, actually even more in Q4. In Q3, we had some EUR 2 million, EUR 3 million of political revenues, which, of course, we do not have this year. We also see reduced CTVs revenues and continue to have FX headwinds. That brings me on to -- the covered revenue part, brings me on to profitability here showing both gross profit and EBITDA. On the left-hand side, you see a calculation of our gross margin on a like-for-like basis. So it's essentially revenues minus purchase services or COGS and you see an increase from 35% in Q2 to 37%, so 2 percentage points up. And also with 37% level, we are actually above the levels of quarters -- comparable quarters last year. I think this is very important because it really shows that the investments we're doing in the product is starting to show effect and also that the challenges we had on some -- with the unification of the platform in Q2 is dealt with. When we then look at EBITDA, and I will structure this in 2 components. Firstly, we had a number of one-off payments or expenses through the quarter. This we adjust -- normalized for in the adjusted EBITDA. But just to cover them, we had EUR 1.6 million in personnel expenses. This was mostly severance payments. Given we are now through with the platform unification, we have been able to capture cost savings and also personnel savings and including also different efficiency measures across the organization, leading to EUR 1.6 million in severance payments. We had legal costs, legal and advisory costs for M&A of EUR 1.7 million and also other expenses totaling EUR 1 million. Most of it is share-based compensation. So all together, EUR 4.3 million. Aside from that, the profitability of the quarter is affected by the lower revenue loss and also continued technical costs that continued into the quarter, and that is probably the main reason why our EBITDA is softer for this quarter. Also, after the completion of the unification, we are capitalizing less for the quarter. We did EUR 3.3 million less in capitalization for the quarter compared to same quarter last year. And as Remco mentioned, we continue to invest in our sales team and sales footprint, and that means we are taking people and costs onboard sometimes in advance of full revenues of a salesperson. All in all, EBITDA for the quarter, which is somewhat softish, but primarily driven by shorter-term effects and continued strategic investments in our sales footprint and product to say. This brings me on to operating cash flow and to CapEx development. Here on the left-hand side, you see the operating -- operational cash flow development for the period. And you will note that we have a -- we are down to EUR 66 million in LTM for operating cash flows, down from EUR 137 million. This is reflective of 2 quarters now with lower cash generation. And also, we, of course, have the one-off expenses that I mentioned before, does have a cash impact and then with the negative development in our working capital. You will also see that we are realizing on an LTM basis, EUR 38 million in cash interest expenses, that's lower than the EUR 45 million we had in 2024, and this is the benefit of the refinancing of the bonds, which we will continue to benefit going forward. At the same time, we maintain our CapEx investments here illustrated by the purple, EUR 34 million and EUR 9 million at roughly same levels as last year, and we did CapEx investment in M&A across Vivento and Captify of EUR 25 million. This brings me to adjusted leverage ratio and interest coverage ratio. And overall, we are certainly working on bringing down our leverage ratio and continue to focus on that. We have also communicated that in the case of an M&A, we could see periods where our net leverage ratio would increase temporarily. And here, we see for LTM basis September that we are at 3.1x, up from 2.4 I think this quarter basically sees a combination of outflows for M&A. And then together with the lower cash -- somewhat muted cash generation and together with also negative working capital swings, all these elements come together and reduces our cash position for the quarter and thereby, it also influences our net leverage ratio. Moving then to interest coverage ratio. We see we are actually up 3.5, so at good and healthy levels. The increase is mainly driven by the fact that we are paying less interest on the bonds. Now I focused a lot on Q3 and Q3 performance, but just taking a back -- step back and looking at things in a bigger picture. We have had certain investment phases in the company through its lifetime. And I think we demonstrate when you look at it in a long-term perspective that we are able to grow our revenue significantly as well as our adjusted EBITDA of 31% here across from 2020 to LTM today. And also we increased our adjusted EBITDA 38%. And I think that is important in -- to also have in mind as we look at the performance of Q3, and we should be evaluated on the long-term performance and Q3. That's really what I wanted to highlight with this slide. Then moving into guidance. So we've had a very strong start to trading in Q4, and that leads us to reaffirm but also update our full year guidance for the year. If we look at net revenues, we are guiding EUR 560 million to EUR 580 million. And if you look at the underlying effects here on the right-hand side, you can really see a year where we had very good and strong growth in Q1, less growth in Q2 and Q3. But with the acceleration and the momentum shift we saw actually already within here at Q3, but also then accelerated into Q4, we feel comfortable and certain that we will reach EUR 560 million to EUR 580 million in top line. I should note that the EUR 560 million and EUR 580 million -- to EUR 580 million incorporates additions from M&A and also from the change of revenue recognition principle. And we try to do that to be as precise and give as much clarity on where are we actually going to end the year in reported terms. Adjusted EBITDA, we maintain from -- guidance on adjusted EBITDA, we maintain from EUR 125 million to EUR 140 million, taking into account that we continue to make investments also both in sales and in product. That concludes my section, and I will now hand over to Remco for wrap-up and closing remarks.

Thank you, Christian. And that brings me to the last slide of the presentation. Based on the efficiency measures and the investment in our growth initiatives in the previous quarters, we saw a strong end of Q3 and an even stronger start into Q4. The unification of in-app supply platform is finalized. Customers return to former spending levels and beyond. We were able to implement team and technology cost optimizations, and we restarted new customer onboarding in Q3 and saw a good effect from that. Putting more emphasis on the demand side is also leading to organic growth. We will further continue to onboard sales and teams -- salespeople and sales support staff. We see a positive trend with regards to upselling of our combined and continuously improved product portfolio. And as well as on the supply side, we also on the demand side, see a strong momentum in customer onboarding and scaling of the customers. We continue to focus on launching and improving our products and solutions. We see that AI and yield investments on the unified platform show positive impact. We work on further improvements of our ID-less targeting, video solutions, data propositions and brand and agency solutions. And on top, the acquisition of Captify Technologies and Acardo are adding further critical mass. We started integrating measures immediately after the acquisition and synergies are already starting to show where majority of the synergies will come from 2026 onwards. And as part of the integration, we also implemented selective cost cuts with regards to overlaps and duplicates. The investments during Q2 and Q3 are paying off. And based on these investments and the improvements we see and further expect we are going into -- we have started into a strong Q4 and also expect a strong 2026. Q4 will be strong uplift versus the earlier quarters, expecting net revenues of well over EUR 200 million and with a strong EBITDA of between EUR 39 million and EUR 54 million, as Christian just showed. So even though we are not super happy with the numbers of Q2 and Q3, like some of the investors also will be, I guess, it is worth it. We are really with that, able to continue a strong growth path like we did in the past. And with all those improvements and seeing the numbers, we are very confident about a very strong Q4. I would like to thank you all and would hand back to Ingo.

Thank you, Remco. And now it's time for our Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Ellis Acklin from First Berlin.

So I'll get things rolling. My main topic really is a couple of questions about the overall ad market. So starting with that, if you could maybe give us some color on how the market is in general developing. I know you hammered home a couple of times about the absence of the political ad budgets. But aside from that, maybe you could talk a little bit about how the overall ad market is developing. And then also looking ahead to next year, we've got a couple of big events coming up with the Winter Games and also the World Cup. Do you see those as good growth drivers for next year? And maybe you could just give us a little bit of insight how you see next year developing with the ad budgets there? And then aside from that, just a small housekeeping question. It would be helpful if you could give the 2024 net revenue figure based on the updated revenue recognition methodology that you've adopted. So I'll leave it with that.

Thanks, Ellis. I think I'll take the first question, and Christian would like to take the second one. Ad market, I mean that's a story we can talk very long about. I'll try to summarize some of the headlines. U.S. is our main market. And the U.S. is with the tariffs and all those things, there's a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability in it. Overall, expectations were that it would be a super weak market this year. That's what we don't see, but there is weakness in some sectors, especially in auto and, for example, CPG, we see weakness. What we overall see is that in the open Internet, there is a consolidation trend, which makes sense because you need to be larger to do investments in AI and to grow. And if I see what we are investing in those sectors, small companies cannot do that. So that makes sense. And we see a lot of companies that are for sale and in that sense, will either sell or will, yes, drop out of the market. Walled gardens, we see different movements there. Amazon is pretty aggressive, especially at the moment, going in with their DSP and yes, hitting on some of the larger players on the DSP side with, let's say, very low tariffs and also very cheap CPMs on CTV. So that's shifting a bit. Google is withdrawing a bit from the market with all the, how to say, legal stuff that they get on their things, putting more on YouTube. So we see shifts there. And then we see channel shifts. LLMs are really hitting on the web market. So that's, let's say, another trend that we see. Political ads was strong last year because of the elections in the U.S. It was already starting Q3. Q4 was even stronger. We have taken that into account actually with our forecast that, let's say, there's also Q4 revenues in political last year. But those are, I think, a few of the big trends in the market. So it's not a super strong market. It's certainly not even a strong market, but it's also not super soft. But the shift within the market. Programmatic still winning from linear, also an important point. And yes, we hope that next year will be better. And as you mentioned, there will be some big events next year and big events normally also drive advertising spend. But also having said all this, we are still a relatively small company in this big market. And as such, there's enough growth opportunities. And the weaker revenues were not caused by the market to just say, yes, there were some elements and yes, it didn't help us, but the weaker revenues were caused by platform unification, which really was more painful than we originally expected. But on the other hand, we see now the really positive effects from that. I hope that answers your question as good as I could in the short time.

Christian?

Yes. Your question was what would have been the corresponding revenue back in the same quarter last year? And it would have followed roughly the same path of 3% decline. It would have been close to EUR 145 million.

No. Sorry, Christian, I was unclear about that. What would have been the top line for 2024 based on the current revenue recognition. So you reported EUR 437 million. I'm just trying to get a comparable basis to compare the 2025 full year numbers that you're guiding for.

Okay. I would have to come back with a number on that for you.

Okay. That's fine. You can e-mail it to me, that's all.

Yes, I'll e-mail it you.

Great. Thank you, Ellis. The next question comes from Adrian Elmlund from Nordea.

Yes. I hope you can hear me.

Very well.

Yes, very well. Okay. Perfect. So I have a couple of questions. So firstly, could we get some more detailed explanation here regarding the working capital effects? We're basically seeing 3 quarters now with rather weak cash flows, right, mainly due to working capital. But could you give some comments regarding the kind of cash generation going forward and your thoughts on that?

Sure. So it's correct that we -- in Q3, we had positive operating cash from the business, but we also had a negative swing in our net working capital, which, of course, takes some of the effect out. This was because we had lower securitization roughly of EUR 29 million. So the major effect there is really a lower use of our securitization program also because of some timing aspects. In Q4, we generally always have a good contribution of cash and also from working capital in Q4. So I would expect that it replenishes in Q4 for the year.

Kind of a follow-up on that but could you kind of explain the securitization program? Is that a onetime thing? And what will happen in the comp next year? Will it reverse? Or kind of is this systematic in any way?

It's not systematic. I would expect it to reverse -- some of it to reverse in Q4. The securitization profit is, as you potentially know that we sell our receivables on a nonrecourse basis. And we have utilized that program less this end of this quarter than we normally do, and that explains the change from Q2 to Q3 of the minus EUR 29 million.

Okay. Kind of following up on that again. Okay. So some weak cash flows here, you've seen some accelerated M&A and with that, of course, increased leverage.

Yes.

But you've also stated that going forward, you want to have reduced leverage ratio, right? I think you reduced the target some year ago. Could you perhaps give some comments regarding the leverage ratio and sort of the -- tying up the cash flow question there?

Yes. So that's true. And I -- looking at it from an overall perspective, we have been working and are working on bringing down our net leverage ratio. As I said, we also have been clear about that when we do M&A, they might temporarily move up, and that's what it's done for this quarter. And together with then a lower effect on our cash position, which is with the impact from both lower operating cash, but also the net working capital that depletes some of our cash position, which, of course, goes against the net debt. Looking going forward, with increased cash for Q4, it will improve, but I think it will take into next year as well to improve substantially, and it will continue to be a focus point for us.

Okay. Perfect. Just two more questions, if you will. One will be technical, but sort of given the platform unification here, as I understand it, it mainly affects the SSP segment, right? Could you give some explanation for why we've seen the margin pressure in the DSP? Is that mainly due to the personnel costs? Or kind of what are the reasons behind that?

Yes, Adrian, good question. Thank you very much. On the -- you're right, let's say, on the supply side, marketplace side, we have seen the unification effects that was integrating the 2 SSPs. So that's fully on the supply side. And on the demand side, we see the, let's say, the burden, but also already the positives of adding extra salespeople because if you add salespeople, you first have to pay the salaries and there's nothing coming in. After half year, you see partly things coming in. And after a year, if you're lucky, they are making -- they're starting to make the salary. So we are really investing in salespeople. So that's one point. And the second thing is, which I already said, there's a bit of a mix difference there. CTV, we put less attention on because of the margin so much under pressure. So that's also an effect that's hurting us there a bit.

Okay. Perfect. Lastly here, also a question regarding the kind of revenue recognition. Could you give any guidance what you expect in revenue recognition for 2026 so that we can put it in the model? Is that kind of EUR 30 million x 4? Or how should we view it?

Yes. I think we've been quite clear in terms of indicating -- if you look at the guidance slide, we've been quite clear in trying to indicate that it had an effect of EUR 32 million for Q3, and I think we indicated EUR 36 million for Q4. That's an estimate, of course. And I think you can take a similar proportion going forward. It will have effect for all the quarters for next year when comparing to this year. But it only starts here after July because that is when we move the volumes onto the new platform. So not entirely 3 x EUR 30 million. It will go a little bit up, but probably as an average and with also scaling with revenues, if you factor in and scale with the revenue growth for next year, you will probably have a pretty accurate estimate of it.

Okay. Perfect. That's all for me.

Did I answer?

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

Great. Great. Thanks, Adrian, for your contribution. And now the next question comes from Martin Yang from Oppenheimer.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Just want to get some more clarity on the annual guidance. So if we want to compare the guidance this quarter to the prior guidance, should I subtract the adjusted revenue in 3Q and also the implied EUR 36 million revenue in 4Q '25 revenue from the updated guidance to compare apples-to-apples with your prior guidance?

That is correct, Martin. Thank you for your question. And that is correct that we, in our full year guidance for '25 here, that's EUR 560 million to EUR 580 million. We try to take all effects that we know of, both the M&A and the impact of the changed revenue recognition into that number. So you can effectively take the EUR 32 million and the estimated EUR 36 million and deduct that, and you would have it more on a like-for-like basis.

And then the next question on gross margin. It was mentioned in the press release. Can you please walk us through how you calculate gross margin?

Yes. It's not -- it's essentially our revenues -- gross revenues minus the purchase services that will both have elements of inventory, but there will also be certain other cost elements. So it's not exactly one-to-one with TAC which I think means some U.S. companies use, but it is equal to the definitions that we have used. And normally, we've only released the separation of purchased services and other expenses once a year with our annual report. In this case, we give it out here for this quarter. Does that explain it sufficiently?

Yes, because I was doing some rough calculation based on your disclosure, but my numbers is a little off from your published gross margin in the press release.