Verve Group Media SE (VRV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to all of you joining us from Europe as well. My name is Ingo Middelmenne, Head of Investor Relations at Verve Group. I'm pleased to welcome you to our Q2 2026 earnings call. As usual, our call format allows private investors to join this session live in listen-only mode. Institutional investors and analysts will have the opportunity to ask questions live during the Q&A session later on. [Operator Instructions] While Q2 was certainly not an easy quarter for us, nevertheless, as the figures show, we held our ground against the backdrop of a challenging market environment and continued to grow our business. We have prepared a presentation to give some additional insights to our performance and provide further transparency. After the presentation, we will, of course, take the time to answer your questions. Please note that the entire call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded and made publicly available on our website after the call. [Operator Instructions] With that, I'm pleased to hand you over to our CEO, Remco Westermann, who will guide you through the first part of today's call. Remco, over to you.

Thank you, Ingo. I would also like to welcome you to Verve's earnings call for the second quarter of 2026. As usual, I will start with presenting the headlines and the latest developments, followed by Christian, our CFO, who will present the financials. Thereafter, I will do the closing and hand over to the moderator for Q&A. We grew our Q2 revenues versus last year. Our unified technology platform is performing significantly better than 1 year ago and provides a stronger basis for future growth. We also saw many positive signals from our growth drivers. Our existing client base was loyal and furthermore showed some high retention rates. Their spend, however, was below last year. While we also have clients that grew their revenues and while we also onboarded a lot of new clients, we saw several client segments as well as individual clients that reduced or postponed budgets. The advertising spend in parts of the open Internet was weighed down by amongst others, macroeconomic headwinds and tariffs and elevated oil prices. We saw negative effects, especially in key advertising categories such as travel, CPGs, automotive as well as parts of Large Tech. Overall, organic growth was up 3.5% versus last year, which is, however, below our expectations. Our overall revenue grew to EUR 152.3 million for the quarter with underlying 3.5% organic growth, 4.6% M&A-based growth and a negative currency effect of 1.7%. We onboarded several new clients and have a strong retention rate of 99%. Our gross margin was at a similar high level as previous quarter, showing the positive effect of our platform unification and the use of AI. Our EBITDA was slightly above last year with a stable EBITDA margin, reflecting investments in our business as previously announced. Our cash position remains strong also in the weaker period of the year. We reaffirm our guidance for full year 2026. While organic growth was lower than anticipated, the first half of 2026 was already designed as a front-loaded investment phase. We are seeing efficiency uplift from AI and organizational optimizations and have developed strong growth drivers, which we expect to be supported by the usual seasonality. Via our Ad Intelligence platform, we connect advertisers with publishers. Being mobile first, we have developed a strong position as one of the leading companies in the space. Mobile represents 90% of our revenues. Out of that, in-app represents the vast majority. We remain heavily North America and especially U.S. focused, which is the largest advertising market in the world. North America represents 75% of our revenues. Being among the top 15 ad tech companies in the U.S., we have built a lot of substance with well over 1,100 large software clients, which are clients with over $100,000 of revenues per year with over 65,000 app integrations and reaching over 2.5 billion consumers and having served 1.2 trillion ads in the last 12 months. Now I'm getting into the headline overview of our revenue, gross margin and EBITDA development. While I covered the headlines, Christian will, in the finance section, cover more details. Net revenue increased year-on-year by 6.5%, reaching EUR 152.3 million in Q2 2026. This development was driven against the backdrop of the market headwinds as mentioned and alongside the execution of technology and inventory optimization. Our gross profit margin has structurally improved based on optimizations, AI and improvements following our platform unification. In addition, and as mentioned earlier, the company continued to pursue internal optimization measures in technology and inventory. We also focus on strategic partnerships, which are based on rebates a bit lower margins, however, are expected to generate structural long-term revenues for the future. Our adjusted EBITDA was up versus the first quarter of 2026 and slightly up compared to Q2 last year. While we, on one hand, increased our cost base based on our investments such as sales team buildup and investment into retail media, we, on the other hand, are making good progress with cost savings based on AI optimization and increased focus on growth areas. I would like to now cover the development of our main KPIs. The number of ad impressions decreased. This was due to our continued focus on higher margin and higher quality inventory, less volume, more margin and better quality. Our ad impressions as a result of that decreased by 10% versus Q2 last year. Our net dollar retention rate, the graph on the left bottom side, increased to 95%. While this is above the previous quarter and also last year, it is still under 100%, showing that the existing customer base spend has decreased versus last year. Our revenue growth resulted mainly from adding new customers, similar as in the previous quarters. While the large over $100,000 per year client number was up 21.5% year-on-year, we were able to increase our total number of customers even stronger by 36%. And while clients spend less than last year, they were loyal. With 99%, we continue to have a very high retention rate, showing the satisfaction of our clients. I'll now go in more detail with regards to what drives the commercial side of our business. First of all, I'm very happy that we unified our platform. After last year's issues with unification, the platform is stable. The focus is now on optimizing margin management, data and AI-based targeting effectiveness as well as pruning less efficient and lower margin supply. If you look at the overall market, we see several developments. We are furthermore seeing a gap between walled garden revenues and the open Internet. The walled gardens are outpacing almost all of the ad tech players. In the open Internet, especially the web, ad focused publishers are under pressure based on the LLMs. And based on market pressure, we see advertisers focusing more of the spend on players that can generate measurable outcomes. We are further doubling down on growing our sales force and expanding our sector focus. As mentioned earlier, we continued our investment in growth. We continued to grow our sales team, which allows us to address more agencies and clients. Even though ramp-up takes time, we are seeing positive results from this strategy. The same comes for our sector focus. We have, within a short period of time, established the largest retail media network in Germany. While getting media budgets for a new solution takes time, we now started seeing first positive results with top brands starting tests and some of them already giving first larger budget commitments. Looking at our customer segments, we see a heterogeneous development of the segments. With macroeconomic pressure creating uncertainty, we saw different developments of sectors but also individual partners. While gaming and entertainment advertising performed well, we saw weakness in travel, CPG, automotive and also Large Tech. The FIFA World Cup did not provide a broad market catalyst, instead its impact felt primarily in highly selective areas such as prediction markets in which we are not active. We continued our focus on making our proposition better. Based on our strong mobile network position with our own SDK, we doubled down on the advertising intelligence of our platform, focused on improving the various modules of the platform, including the AI and data parts. This requires a lot of testing and efforts. Also AI-based product development supports targeting and efficiency. These are mostly internal efforts, and therefore, it's great to see that with achieving the Adweek Tech Stack award, these great efforts are also seen externally. Next to our focus on improving our offerings and increasing our customer base, we also continue our focus on efficiency. In Q2, we made changes in our organization structure to sharpen our strategic focus and optimize our cost base. We substantially reduced our workforce and amongst others, closed our Berlin office. Overall, we expect, from these measures, efficiency gains of EUR 8 million per year and the optimization led to a EUR 4.2 million one-off cost in Q2. Beyond our operational efficiency measures, relocating our corporate [indiscernible] to Ireland is a key strategic move. It aligns us more closely with our peer group and primary market, strengthening our capital market positioning for the long term while technically enable us potential future direct listing in the U.S. Overall, we continued building and growing our company. In Q2, we further focused on outcome measurement, AI, retail media and also expanding our sales capacity, with that directly addressing where advertiser demand is moving. While we don't see our improvements fully reflected in our growth in Q2, we are confident that our strategic direction remains right on point. I'm now getting to our opportunity for long-term sustainable growth. We do not have a strong supply base such as Google, Meta or Amazon, the so-called walled gardens. We united supply from thousands of apps and publishers, the so-called Internet. Looking at some market numbers, it becomes clear that the walled gardens capture a disproportionate share of the budget and are able to monetize their ad views much better. Whereas only 1/3 of consumer time is spent within the walled gardens, they attract 80% of the advertiser spend. And they are able to get $0.14 per ad spend per user hour while the open Internet only gets half of that. The strong position of the walled gardens are based on measurable outcomes at scale. And that's what Verve is building. In the past years -- we have been building scale with over 65,000 apps, 1.2 trillion ads served in the last 12 months, we are one of the largest players in the open Internet. In the past few years, we have also built our intelligence platform. We acquired several stacks and unified them, building a technology platform that includes demand side, supply side and data technology. With AI, we have and are further building the intelligence of the platform, matching the advertisers' wish to reach the right audiences and measure results with the wish of the publisher to have the best-in-class return for their ads. Hence, we have built one of the best and deepest data sets in the market. While we started with strong focus on ID-less targeting in line with market development, we added ID-based data. Also, we have added a strong position in intent-based data where we started with search intent and polling data and now lately also added LLM data. The combination of which we have now enables us to target and measure at scale. That's what we have built so far. This is great and brought us to where we are. However, we want to go further. We want to do this more sector-specific and with more market differentiation. One of the largest advertising categories are CPGs. Retail media has become a big growing part of the advertising market. But this market has issues. First of all, most digital focus goes into online stores and online shopping. But over 95% of all shopping takes place in physical stores. So that's the place where most purchase decisions are taken. Secondly, even though there are screens and other digital advertising possibilities in stores, it's very scattered landscape, and it requires a lot of effort to run a cross-retailer campaign as almost every retailer is selling its own inventory. And thirdly, measuring outcomes is almost impossible. Due to the fragmentation, the funnel for most retail campaigns is broken. There is no full funnel connection between awareness and measure [indiscernible]. Verve saw this gap and is now working on solving it. We started out in Germany, one of the most competitive retail markets in the world. While we already have a substantial part of our business focusing on digital, online retail parts, for example, [indiscernible] solutions, we now put strong focus on the physical space. We were less than a year able to build the largest multichain in-store retail media network in Germany, now including over 17,000 stores and reaching over 46 million shoppers per week. In the stores, we are able to show ads on screens. We are able to measure at the point of sale and we are able to generate strong data about consumer behavior. We combine this with our [indiscernible] technology, our intent data and our mobile reach. The result is a closed loop that includes targeting and measuring. We are seeing very strong results. With several CPGs, we have run test campaigns, and we showed our strength in improving market shares by increasing sales. As retailers are seeing a clear uplift of their sales, they are also happy with us cooperating with them. As you can see here, with our extensive digitalized in-store retail media network, we are able to show CPG advertisers where they are winning, respectively losing market share and measure the results of their advertising. Based on knowing what consumers buy and how they react to ads on their mobile, but also in-store, we can help advertisers build their branded network and increase their market positions. We see the CPG advertisers as our partners and can together with them work on analyzing and influencing buyer behavior. And even though we know that it takes time to get and scale ad budgets of CPGs with new solutions, we see very promising first results. We have now also started preparations for our U.S. in-store retail media rollout. This brings me to the end of my part, and I'm now handing over to Christian for the financials. Christian?

Thank you very much, Remco. The headlines for the financial performance for Q2 are: Number one, revenues continue to grow at a solid pace, 6.5% year-on-year. Our gross profit margin is strong at 40 percentage points and continues to prove out the structural lift versus last year. And we delivered an adjusted EBITDA, which is up versus last year to EUR 30.1 million. So the fundamentals of supporting a scalable business are in place. However, it is also clear that with more supportive market conditions in this quarter, we could have delivered a significantly stronger performance on both revenue growth and on EBITDA than we did. I now turn to some of the details of Q2 performance. Here on the left-hand side, you see our revenues and adjusted EBITDA depicted in the bars. We generated EUR 152.3 million in revenues for Q2, which should be compared with EUR 143.1 million like-for-like basis last year. That yields 6.5 percentage points growth on a like-for-like revenue basis. We had 3.5% growth from organic activities, and we had a contribution of 4.6 percentage points from acquisitive businesses. We continue to have some headwind from the currency and the U.S. dollar, but a much, much more moderate part than we've seen in the previous quarters and the headwind this quarter was minus 1.7 percentage points. That all means that both our core existing business is growing as well as the businesses that we have bought. If I now turn to adjusted EBITDA, we came in at EUR 30.1 million in Q2, up from EUR 29.5 million in same period last year. That's a 2.2 percentage point lift, roughly EUR 600,000, and we land on a margin of 19.8 percentage points. In line with our messaging in our Q1 call, we continued the sales team ramp-up and our expansion, and that is weighing on margins for first half. We expect that to reverse in the second half of this year. This is on an adjusted EBITDA basis also a quarter where we exhibited quite some items affecting comparability, all in all, EUR 9.3 million. We had personnel expenses mostly related to severances from the restructuring of EUR 4.2 million, and we had legal and advisory costs, for instance, associated with the relocation to Ireland and also the restructuring of EUR 1.5 million and other nonrecurring one-off expenses of EUR 3.6 million. There's, of course, a future payoff behind some of these larger structural changes in the organization. And while we incurred the severance payments and one-off expenses of EUR 4.2 million in the quarter, we expect those changes to generate at least EUR 8 million annualized savings comparing to our current run rate. And those savings should start to become visible in Q3 and Q4. I then turn to one of the highlights of the quarter, which is our gross profit margin here depicted on the left-hand side. We're very pleased that we generated 40.0% in gross profit margin. It's a strong uplift versus same period prior year of 6.9 percentage points. The main reasons are largely the same as we have talked about in previous calls and in Q1 call, i.e., it's the margin optimization that we are now able to do on our improved unified platform. It's optimization of our publisher ad requests and it's also our ways of working with optimizing our cloud cost. Especially this quarter, our cloud cost was, of course, also helped by the fact that we had lower impression volumes. You'll see a 1 percentage point decline from previous quarter, and that is mostly or is influenced by a stronger focus on strategic partnerships where we, through investments and rebate programs, incentivized to take a bigger share of their business. Looking now at operating cash flow on an LTM basis here depicted on the left-hand side, you see that we, on an LTM basis, had EUR 105.3 million in operating cash flow before net working capital. We had EUR 99 million in operating cash flow after net working capital. These 2 bars are roughly balanced with only a minimal investment in working capital. And this is a very positive thing and also addresses the disparity that we saw second half of last year, 2025, where there was an imbalance between the 2 bars. If I now turn to the right-hand side and an outlook for our CapEx development, we estimate that we will have a CapEx investment this year between EUR 74 million to EUR 79 million, comprising of 2 parts. One is maintenance and expansion CapEx in the level of EUR 40 million to EUR 45 million, and the other part is acquisition CapEx. We are well on plan for our expansion and maintenance CapEx trending towards the lower level of the EUR 40 million to EUR 45 million range. It's important to note here that it consists of 2 parts. So one being the EUR 9 million we have in maintenance CapEx. So this is CapEx we need to do every year to keep our platform running and well oiled. And then we have EUR 33 million in expansion CapEx. And this is essentially investments we're doing that we can turn up and down as we want and is also a flexibility we have in the face of potential structural challenges in the market. We have, for this year, EUR 34 million of acquisitive CapEx. These are for acquisitions that we have already done, including Jun Group and Captify, and we have a deferred tranche remaining for this year of EUR 9.9 million, which is scheduled for October this year. Now turning to our cash position and the movement in our cash position. We came in at EUR 132.4 million for our cash position end of Q2. That's EUR 14.8 million down from our ending cash position in Q1. You'll see here the major contributors and uses of cash. We had EUR 16.1 million of cash generated from operations, which is very solid. It's actually up versus Q1, where we have EUR 11.5 million. We had a minimal investment in net working capital of EUR 6.1 million, then EUR 8.7 million goes to investment activities. This is mainly building of our capitalized investments in development and cash flow from financing activities of EUR 16.4 million, which are mainly interest costs. I think it's worthwhile noting that we had 2 extraordinary expenses or uses of cash this quarter. We had an EUR 8.5 million one-off settlement of taxes on a tax audit of Germany from 2011 to 2019. This is a one-off. And therefore, had we not had that, our operating cash flow for the quarter would have been EUR 8.5 million higher. We also used EUR 2.7 million for selective buyback of bonds. We had the possibility to buy back bonds at very favorable terms. And given we have such strong cash position, we saw it advantageous to do so. Our securitization facility is close to fully utilized or drawn at the EUR 100 million. And now moving to balance sheet structure. Here on the left-hand side, our adjusted leverage ratio. We had EUR 462 million in net interest-bearing debt, up from EUR 448 million last quarter. The movement is mainly due to the lower cash position, and it takes our leverage ratio up to 3.3x, up from 3.1x. Our interest coverage ratio ends at 4.4x and is largely unchanged compared to [indiscernible]. That ends finance section, and I will now hand back to Remco for the guidance.

Thank you, Christian. Based on H1 performance and the anticipated growth acceleration in H2 as well as current trading in Q3, Verve reaffirms its full year guidance communicated at the beginning of the year. We guide for revenues in the range between EUR 680 million and EUR 730 million and an EBITDA in the range between EUR 145 million and EUR 175 million. Q2 and Q1 are the seasonally lower quarters of the year and quarters that we used to invest in our future growth and profitability. The first half of 2026 was from the beginning designed as a front-loaded investment phase. Although Q2 was additionally affected by less favorable market conditions, leading to our advertising partners scaling their ad spend slower than anticipated, we expect a strong end of the year based on seasonality, but especially our growth investments starting to pay off. I'm now turning to the last page of the presentation. In the last quarters, we have been building the foundation for the next phase of scalable growth with focus on more differentiation versus competition and addressing the need of advertisers for more measurable outcomes at scale. Here, I want to summarize in more detail what we are building. We have, as shown earlier in the presentation, in the past years built scale with a strong mobile in-app focus, over 65,000 apps, 1.2 trillion ad served in the last 12 months, a unified ad intelligence platform that includes demand side, supply side and data technology. And with AI, we have and are further building the intelligence of that platform. Hence, we have built one of the best and deep data sets in the market with ID-less and ID-based data and a strong position in intent-based and [indiscernible] data. As further elaborated before, we are now working on building strong outcome measurement solutions based on closed loops and providing outcomes. We are expanding our retail media network in Germany and rolling it out to the U.S., building scale, ensuring that we can measure the results and getting advertising agencies to spend on our network so we can ramp up revenues. And we continue to focus on operational efficiency, including, amongst others, optimized focus and cost. And with AI, we are working on streamlining our work processes. Another important focus point is our corporate Ireland relocation, getting leaner and U.S. ready. Verve has shown strong growth in the past years with revenue and EBITDA CAGR consistently over 30%. But with our past consistent growth path, we have also, in the last year, seen that our growth is not a straight line. With our strengthened base, our strong position, our investments in growth and further disciplined and focus on cost efficiencies, we are confident that we will show strong further profitable growth in the second half of this year as well as in the coming years. I would like to thank all our investors, employees and other partners for their trust. And I'm now handing over to the moderator for questions.

Great. Thank you both for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A, and it looks like we will have to do some improvisation as our system provider seems to have problems with the Q&A button. So I already received some questions via e-mail. [Operator Instructions]. The first question comes from our analyst from Canaccord, Matthew Weber. First question, I wanted to ask about the second half. The full year outlook implies a pretty meaningful step-up from the first half run rate. And you've pointed to a few drivers, the expanded sales team becoming more productive as well as the continued build of closed-loop solutions and retail media. Could you help us size those relative to one another? Then with the second half, does the outlook contemplate budgets that were displayed in Q2 being deployed in H2?

Shall I take the first one? First of all, thank you, Matthew. Yes, it's -- let's say, we are geared for growth and you have exactly hit the right point. I mean, we are increasing sales. That means we are onboarding more customers, as you saw in our numbers. We're working on better results that means scaling the customers that we have, so scaling the share of wallet. And we are starting with, let's say, new pockets basically because we were not strongly active in Germany and the media network there is really a strong proposition that we have. The one that you were missing is further technical optimization of the platform. AI is a strong, how to say, generator for further, how to say, better matching the advertise demand with the publisher supply. So that's another point that we're working on. And those things together -- and yes, we give guidance, but we don't go in every detail of the guidance. But those things together are showing results, and we expect to show stronger results, further results. Plus on top of it, we get this normal seasonality. And one thing, one factor maybe that's a special factor for this year, that is the midterm elections in the U.S. Elections in the U.S. normally give big budgets for media. We're not especially geared or focused on it, but it's still, let's say, also runs through our platform, and it will overall in the market increase demand and with that also prices. So if you take those factors together, where, let's say, the smaller one or the more difficult one to predict is the midterm election, which is always also smaller, by the way, than the full elections. But with all those and seeing, let's say, the start of Q3 and where we're moving within Q3, we are confident to be within the guidance.

Great. Next question also from...

Maybe answer the second question that was posed by -- I think there was a question around whether we would see an increase from displaced budgets in the first half of the year. And you can say, in many ways, we are seeing budgets from travel, CPG, automotive being more moderate than we would have expected and what the market projected. And those are typically industries where you can stop or you can moderate your spend for some time, but there are typically also industries where you do need to come back as a major brand owner to advertise. So yes, we do see some of the displaced budgets come back in second half of the year. We're also seeing right now in the last weeks, quite good traction, and we can see good momentum.

Great. So second question from Matthew Weber. On the supply side of the platform, you noted a deliberate decision to step back from non-premium inventory alongside the greater focus on strategic partnerships. Could you talk about how far through that shift you are and how we should think about the trade-off between impression volume and revenue per impression from here?

Yes, just not enough. Can I take that question. Thank you very much also, Matthew, for that one. The supply side, indeed, we have connections to a lot of publishers, but also connections to other platforms. Especially that latter part is part that you not always fully control and where we, especially in the second quarter, have worked on, let's say, more severe methodologies to look at who's bringing good traffic, not such good traffic, all in line with our mission to make media better. We want to deliver really valuable traffic and not vaguish traffic, if I may call it that way. So in that sense, we see, let's say, a reduction in views or, let's say, in ad views, as you have seen, 10% versus last year and even stronger versus last quarter. But that's really -- it's often very low quality. It's also low CPM and that brings me to the second part of your question. The pricing for those parts of advertising are often also much lower, and that's the reason that we are reducing there. Might also have had a bit of an impact on our overall revenue or, let's say, lesser growth on the organic, but it's something that we want to go through on our path towards the future to really be standing here as, how to say, strong party that makes media better. We have disconnected some partners. We have taken -- let's say, reduced volumes of certain partners. So that's, let's say, what you see the effect in the ad views. And to your question, I think most of that now is done in Q2, and we're now more into ramping up, let's say, the good ones, which we also did, of course, in Q2 and the early ones. But the biggest part of sorting this out has been done.

Sorry, I wasn't unmuted yet. So next questions come from our analyst from Cantor Fitzgerald. Question number one, for H2, what assumptions are you making with regards to the macro and advertising spend improving? And could you quantify the other contributors apart from seasonality to the H2 revenue bridge to get to your guidance?

Yes. I assume that the question was about H2 and not H1.

Yes. So what's happening in H2?

U.S. is our largest market, 75%. So that's the one that I'll concentrate on with my answer. Macro is, let's say, not great in the U.S. On the other hand, U.S. is pretty resilient. If you look at consumer, how to say, happiness at the moment, there's a big split between the ones that have money and are more well off and let's say, the ones that don't have so much money. And there you see also a change in spend. You see also that the credit card borrowings are at an almost all-time high. I have to say, the interest for houses, et cetera, is at a high point. So the situation for the consumer in the U.S. is not a super easy one. And with the war continuing in the Middle East, it's also not likely that oil prices surely will come down. So in that sense, we further expect that there will be some pressure from the market side. But that having said, as I mentioned before, the U.S. market has always been proven to be very resilient. And as Christian also said before, advertising is a thing that you can stop temporarily or you can postpone it, but it doesn't make sense to stop the long term because you lose sustainable position. And that's the part that we have seen that some budgets that were stopped or as people said, they are postponed and you never know when they come back. We see them partly or majority-wise even coming back now in Q3. So looking at the market, yes, the market is not in a perfect condition, but we are still a small party. So we have the ability to grow. We have very good products. We have very good propositions. We have an increased sales team. And we see, as mentioned, some budgets coming back from the ones that were postponed in Q2. So I'm confident that we will show strong growth. And you mentioned it already yourself, the seasonality also will come in. But I think that's also coming back to the answer that I gave to Matthew's question before.

Yes. And I think also question 2 is on that point. So did you see a trend improved in July, August, but I think you flagged that this is the case.

Yes. We see a positive trend line in Q3.

Great. Then question number three, gross margin trajectory. Q2 gross margin stepped down 100 bps Q-on-Q to 40% due to strategic partnerships. Is this the new run rate? Or should we expect further pressure? What's the H2 exit rate you're targeting?

Yes. I can take that question. Yes, gross margin, we have structurally improved since by platform unification, by efficiency, also by pruning, let's say, lower quality volumes. And let's say, it will not be a flat line. So it's not a flat 40% or 39% or like that. With, let's say, more volume, we will get into a bit more efficiency. With, let's say, more added value in our ads, we will get to a higher margin. And on the other hand, with a bit more partnering, we reduce a bit or we get a bit back on rebates and things like that. So in that sense, I would say the range we are in now, you can consider, let's say, for the rest of the year as well, that's what we're striving at, plus/minus 1% or so. If I look more longer term and with more size and more added value and more differentiation, I would rather expect that we can further increase it.

Next questions come from Benedikt from ABG. I think the first question has been answered already. Next question is walled gardens. What gives you confidence that weaker customer spending reflects postponed budgets rather than a structural shift from the open Internet towards walled gardens?

Good question, and thanks for that, Benedikt. What gives the confidence? The confidence is that this market is very big, and there's a big part outside of the walled gardens. And as I've shown in one of the slides, there's much more time spent outside of the walled gardens. But the walled gardens, let's say, they act very well together. They have great measuring, great outcomes, all these things. So it's up to us and our, let's say, peers in the market to really make sure that we can handle the scale that we have, let's say, an efficient platform, that we have the data to do the right targeting and that we can show the outcomes with that. And that's what we -- and I hope that came out clearly in the presentation. That's what we are working on is really -- further making sure that we are better in showing the outcomes and Retail Media is a good example of that because we're showing the outcomes, you can show that you are, yes, outperforming the walled gardens, and that is what it's about. And yes, to your question, there might be some budgets that went to the walled gardens. If you look at the numbers from Google, for example, they have a strong growth on their walled gardens, their YouTube revenues, and they had actually a decline on their open market revenues. So there is a bit of shift happening there. But the market outside, as mentioned, especially the ad views and the consumers that are there, the potential is there. We have to do it. So that -- I hope that answers the question.

Next question from [indiscernible], Retail Media. How material is retail media currently? And does the 2026 guidance assume a meaningful contribution before advertisers allocate their 2027 budgets?

Yes. Let me also take that one. Thanks for that question as well. Retail Media, let's say, we did the Acardo acquisition last year. So that is bringing a bit of substance in there, but it's not a huge revenue. But we see structural growth there. But if you look at the total percentage of revenues that we have not, let's say, given that number out, but the overall percentage of revenue of which we're doing in Germany is still small. Seeing, however, that, let's say, we had to use the first time to build the network that we are now, with tests, with brands and with retailers, really showing extremely good results and also already getting the first kind of budgets booked in us and also larger budgets because when we took over Acardo, they were typically getting EUR 5,000, EUR 10,000, maybe a bit larger budgets for campaign. And we're now getting first budgets in with EUR 100,000 and more per campaign. So we're doing something right there. We're showing it. Brands that we're working with are enthusiastic about it. And yes, we expect it to really ramp up in, let's say, for the rest of the year, and already saw some of that in Q3. But the bigger jump we expect next year because a lot of, I would say, brand budgets are really allocated in the fourth quarter for -- in the last quarter of the year fourth quarter for the next year. So if you do well this year, we see nice revenue jump already there, but the bigger jump would come next year.

The next couple of questions come from our analyst from Inderes, Christoffer Jennel. In the Q1 deck, full year '25 like-for-like revenue was EUR 602 million. In this report, it's EUR 637 million. What drove this change in Q1? Given the remaining unification steps, for example, CTV, concluded during 2026, will the base move again?

Maybe I can take that question. So we still have certain parts that we are unifying. We are very, very far on the web unification, and we have one remaining part, which is CTV, which is roughly half migrated. And that means that there will be a further effect also in Q3 where the remainder of the CTV will be migrated. What we try to do and why you see the numbers shift is we try the best we can to provide a like-for-like growth. And that means when we, for instance, measure now revenues in Q2, we compare it to what would the revenues have been in previous time periods had we had that level of unification. So we try to make it as best as a like-for-like comparison, and that is the reason for the shift in the number.

Next questions are on securitization. Your securitization program is similar to as in Q1, almost fully drawn. Have you now fully onboarded the new 2 entities to the program? And where are you in the process in terms of increasing the program's capacity? What should we expect going forward?

Okay. That's clearly a question for me as well. Let me start with the second part. We are right now making the final documents on an expansion of the securitization program. I expect that to be signed within the next couple of weeks. I don't want to give out too much details. Those are still being negotiated, but it will be a marked expansion of the program. And thus, we have the ability to draw more on the securitization program than we do now, which is capped at EUR 100 million. Sorry, there was a second part of the question, if you could repeat, Ingo.

And where are you in the process in terms of increasing the program's capacity? What should we expect going forward? And maybe add on also what capacity would we need at a level of EUR 1 billion in revenue?

Well, on a EUR 1 billion of revenue, we would surely need a much, much bigger size. We would be targeting at least somewhere between EUR 150 million to EUR 200 million in size. I think there was also another part of the question around Viewento and Acardo and Capify, which are other businesses that are on the securitization program now. So we are actually -- structurally, we have added extra businesses, the 2 operating entities on top of the program. There are still some, let's say, business processes that we're working on fine-tuning, but largely, they are now on the program.

Okay. I think next question goes to Remco. Why did Chief Revenue Officer, Dave Simon, leave after 4 months? And what does that do to the sales productivity ramp up?