Good afternoon, and welcome to today's earnings call of New Work SE, following the publication of the half-year figures of 2024. New Work is represented by the CEO, Petra von Strombeck, CFO, Ingo Chu, and Patrick Möller from Investor Relations. The management board will guide us through the presentation and the results shortly. Afterwards, we will move on with our Q&A session, in which you will be allowed to ask your questions directly to the management. Having said this, I hand over to you, Mrs. von Strombeck. Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Capital Markets update call. Today, we are presenting our results and insights for the second quarter of 2024. Let me start with the obvious: this will be our last analyst call because our company is going to be delisted soon. You know the reasons, and you are aware why we choose to pursue this path after Burda has approached us in April and asked us to examine the potential delisting. I can assure you that we have put the same effort into this call as always, and let me add from my side that I've always appreciated talking to you, get challenged from you, and get inspired by your perspectives and views. Thanks so much for your trust, and this is especially true in the challenging times we're in. While we faced significant macro headwinds since beginning of 2023, which put pressure on our HR solution business, we also started a significant repositioning of the XING brand from a social to a jobs network. During this period, our stock price suffered a lot, given the limited visibility of when the business will recover and starts growing again. Therefore, we welcome Burda's commitment to increase their stake in New Work to more than 74% during this period, and thus showing confidence in our long-term strategy. Precisely because we are consistently working on implementing our long-term strategy, even at the expense of short and medium-term profitability, the executive board, together with the independent members of the supervisory board, has thoroughly examined the pros and cons of being publicly listed. We have ultimately concluded that delisting is the right step for our company at this stage. We have detailed our reasoning in a joint statement, which is available on our Investor Relations website under the Delisting section. Therefore, today, we will not be answering questions regarding this content of the joint statement from the executive board and the supervisory board. Instead, we will focus on the current results and developments. Let's start with a look at the general economic climate and the trends in the German employment market. Unfortunately, the developments, particularly in the labor market, which is crucial for our core business, are far from encouraging. Recent news are packed with companies announcing job cuts, like Bosch cutting 7,000 jobs, ZF cutting 14,000 in the next 2 years, Continental cutting 7,000, Deutsche Bahn cutting 30,000 jobs in the next 5 years. In addition, the number of insolvencies is up by almost 30% versus previous year. Therefore, it's not a big surprise that the key employment market indicator continues to trend downward. The BA-X index, which measures demand for employees, is down to 109, 109 points. That is actually closer to the all-time low during COVID of slightly below 100 points versus its all-time high in 2018 at 134 points. Another far more tangible KPI is the number of open vacancies published by the Federal Employment Agency, down by 9% against an already weak last year. When it comes to the development of paid job ads in Germany, the situation is even worse. The number of job ads advertised on online job boards is down by almost a quarter. How do we interpret this? That's the current situation. This is actually negatively affecting our recruiting business, both active and passive. But the same negative trend probably affects our competitors as well. It's not an excuse, it's just a fact. So how does this translate into our core financial and non-financial KPIs? Regarding financials, the weak macroeconomic impacted our business. Q2, though, was quite stable compared to Q1 in terms of HR customers and even nicely growing workplace insights and members. We will provide more details later. So here are the key financial achievements in Q2. Starting with revenues. The worsening employment market, as well as the ongoing transition of our B2C business, have led to a decline of around 14% in revenues in Q2 2024. That is EUR 11 million less revenue versus last year and would usually lead to almost EUR 11 million lower EBITDA, given our high gross margin business. But we already started to act very cost-consciously last year and successfully concluded our group-wide restructuring in April 2024. We spent almost the same amount for marketing versus previous year and achieved EUR 17 million pro forma EBITDA in Q2 with a 27% margin. Pro forma net income came in on previous year's level. As stated in our previous call in May, Q1, so Q1 is always the least profitable quarter, given investment in marketing at the beginning of the fiscal year. You can see the progress in Q2 already. With our successful restructuring, we are confident to meet our full year guidance of EUR 55 million-EUR 65 million pro forma EBITDA. So let's have a look how the weak employment market has impacted our HR business solutions. As always, we present the quarterly development of our HR solution subscription customer base and the quarterly revenue development for the segment. I stated earlier that the B2B HR subscriber base is almost stable in Q2 versus Q1. It's down, though, by around 300 customers compared to last year. That's, of course, not a big surprise, given the accelerated rate of insolvencies and muted hiring demand during the last 12 months. As a result, revenue in our core segment is down by 10% in Q2. This is mainly attributable to the fact that we experienced declining customers for our XING 360 solution, which has a strong job ad component and a deterioration of classical job ads. Another reason for the slight revenue decline is the fact that we discontinue unprofitable offerings such as Honeypot. On a positive note, our employer branding business, based on Kununu, delivers more than a third of segment revenues and generated an above-average EBITDA margin, while the business continues to grow also in Q2. On the product side, we've been busy shipping additional AI features to our HR clients. After having introduced AI optimization features for existing job ads, we improved the recruiter workflow in Q2 by launching Smart Messages, a feature that helps particularly low-maturity recruiters draft messages to candidates that will actually get them a response. Let's now have a look at XING. As you know, we are heavily investing our efforts to reposition the platform from being a social network to a dedicated job-focused network. Of course, such a repositioning is a process that will take several years, but we are committed to embarking on this journey. While discussing the numerous marketing and brand initiatives we carried out in the first quarter to promote our new positioning, I'd like to present two examples of how we continuously change and improve the user experience in line with our new job-focused positioning. As a quick reminder, the new XING mission is to empower everyone to find the jobs that's just right. This is not only addressing active job seekers, but also everyone passively looking for greater job satisfaction, which is certainly a large part of the working population. This certainly does not come as a surprise. We very much focus on leveraging AI to launch new offers and features to our XING users. For example, our new AI-based Job Summarizer. The tool provides a brief summary of the job ad to allow faster decision-making to apply, and people like the short and crisp summaries a lot. User reviews show the relevance. We received a lot of positive feedback and ratings. The next big thing we beta launched just a few weeks ago is a Conversational Job Search. Now, what do we mean by Conversational Job Search? Well, traditional job search engines ask you to express very specifically what you are looking for an exact job title that describes everything you wish for. But what if we allow people to express what it is they want in simple human language? This is exactly what XING's new conversational search does. In your own words, you can describe exactly what it is that you are searching for, and you'll get magically good results. I hope this provides a glimpse into how we are constantly increasing value for our users. A perception shift does not happen instantly, but we are deliberately working on it to make the most out of the product vision and make it tangible. So we are quite happy with the non-financial and performance-based XING KPIs that we are tracking regularly. Among others, we regularly analyze these three performance indicators for XING. Basically, what you can see here is that our new job positioning drives job-relevant engagement, with job visits up almost 60% year-over-year. The number of applications up almost 40%, and also the response or reply rate to recruiters continues to grow by 25% year-over-year. As said, the XING transformation is a long-term process, but we do have numerous data points as well as qualitative user feedback, which indicate our progress and make us feel confident about continuing in this strategic direction. Now, let's have a look at what Kununu is up to. As you know, Kununu is the leading destination for workplace insights in the German-speaking region. This serves as the foundation for our B2B employer branding monetization, where we still employ branding profiles to corporations. During the last couple of months, we carried out a major branding campaign. The campaign, First Kununu, Then Apply, concentrated on North Rhine-Westphalia and was rolled out through analog and digital billboards and info screens in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Duisburg, Essen, and Dortmund, as well as via digital channels, radio, and social media. The aim of the campaign was to increase brand awareness for Kununu and encourage users to gain insights into workplaces via Kununu in order to make informed decisions. The local campaign was highly successful, and the results we achieved, an awareness uplift of 20%, were much higher than expected, and we will most likely scale this campaign to other regions as well. On the product side, you might remember that we also started to include job ads on Kununu recently, and we actually further improved the jobs-related features for Kununu users during the second quarter as well. As you can see, Kununu is really broadening its offering and expanding its addressable market by going from company reviews only to reviews, culture, insights, and salary data, and now also to jobs. The respective KPIs for Kununu also continue to develop nicely... A factor of seven, Kununu clearly confirms its leadership in overall traffic compared to the next biggest peer. The number of workplace insights grew by 2.4 million, or 25% year-over-year. Salary data points contribute over proportionally, 36%, to the growth in workplace insights. Almost 12 million valuable insights, like reviews, culture data, and salaries, and hundreds of thousands of employees have been added to the platform, thus further growing the attractiveness of the Kununu platform when it comes to making important career decisions. This was it from my side, and I now hand over to Ingo. Thank you, Petra. Hello, everybody. This is Ingo, and also from my end, a very warm welcome to this call. Talking to you, analysts and investors, has always been important and special for me, and of course, this call today is particularly special. But before we get into that, let me start with the usual update on our financial performance. As Petra has said, we've prepared this call as diligently as ever because we think this is important. Now, when we look at our business, overall, while the macroeconomy, and especially the labor market, remain weak, we are on track with our plans. After having restructured the company in Q1, you can see already significant effects in our Q2 figures. At the same time, we continue to implement our investment program. So let's start with the key message points. Number one, revenues came in at EUR 65.5 million, as expected, down year-over-year on the back of a weak environment. Number two, we continue to improve our access to talents on the C side. Both XING and Kununu have grown the relevant non-fin metrics, and that's important because our talent access is the necessary foundation for our winning aspiration. Number three, our continued cost management and our successful restructuring has improved our cost base significantly. Number four, pro forma EBITDA came in at EUR 17 million. That's down year-over-year, but significantly up quarter-over-quarter, given the restructuring that we have executed successfully as per April first. Number five, we do confirm our guidance of pro forma EBITDA of EUR 55 million-EUR 65 million. I'll provide more details on the following charts. Let's have a look at our P&L. As I've said, numbers overall came in according to plan. They are, of course, characterized by a difficult macro and revenue situation and our investment program. But you can also see the positive effects from our cost measures from last year, and especially from the restructuring, which we've announced in January. Revenues amount to EUR 65.5 million. That's down 14% year-over-year, driven by all segments. Reported EBITDA amounts to EUR 17 million, down year-over-year, key driver being our revenue decline and our investments, which we partially compensated by our cost-saving measures. Pro forma EBITDA came in at EUR 17.5 million, also down year-over-year. Pro forma EBITDA margin came in at 27%. Now, if you compare Q2 margins to Q1, you will see that we have increased pro forma EBITDA margins from 13% in Q1 to 27% in Q2. Of course, some of that is cost seasonality. However, the majority of that margin improvement is driven by the restructuring. Also, you will note that we have significantly reduced our structural cost compared to last year, which is good because it gives us flexibility. Reported depreciation amounts to -EUR 8.7 million. That's down year-over-year. Pro forma depreciation equals reported depreciation. Reported financial result amounts to +EUR 0.5 million. That's flat year-over-year. If you take out the revaluation of financial assets effect, pro forma financial result amounts to +EUR 0.4 million, which compares to +EUR 0.2 million in Q2 last year. This is explained mainly by getting more interest on our cash reserves. Reported net income amounts to EUR 9.1 million. That's down year-over-year. Pro forma net income amounts to EUR 9.3 million. That's also down year-over-year. Now let's move on to segment reporting. As usual, we are showing reported figures. The HR solutions and talent access segment came in at approximately EUR 11.5 million in segment EBITDA. That's down year-over-year. The development is driven mainly by the revenue decline, but also by our investment in marketing. B2C segment had EUR 7.6 million in pro forma segment EBITDA, excuse me, reported segment EBITDA. That's down year-over-year. As you know, this is XING paid memberships business and the respective cost, as well as our business unit innovations. And this is our former historical core business, which is now a cash cow. The development is driven by planned declines in revenue. The marketing solutions segment came in at EUR 0.3 million. That's up year-over-year. This is our advertising business and respective cost. On the next slide, you can see our revenue development by segments. HR solution revenues came in at EUR 48.2 million. That's down 10% year-over-year. Revenue development is impacted by the difficult macro situation. Our economy is not growing, and especially labor market data continues to be weak. As you know, the number of unfilled position is down year-over-year, and labor market sentiment is still declining. Clearly, this impacts active and passive recruiting revenues. Revenue development is also driven by our portfolio cleanup. As you know, we are phasing out Honeypot, which impacts revenue development negatively. Our employer branding revenues, however, which are based on Kununu, continue to grow even in a difficult environment. B2C revenues came in at EUR 15.2 million. That's down 18% year-over-year. You know that this development comes as planned. The key driver behind this development is direct B2C monetization at XING. With our refocused strategy, we concentrate on building our access to talent through XING, and we monetize our talent access through e-recruiting on the B side. Now, finally, let's look at the B2B marketing solutions segment. Revenues amount to EUR 2 million. That's down year-over-year and flat quarter-over-quarter. On the next slide, you can see an overview of our cost structure. In Q2, personnel costs before capitalization amount to EUR 30.9 million. That's significantly down year-over-year and down quarter-over-quarter. Year-over-year, you can clearly see the effect from our continued cost management in the past year and, of course, the impact from our restructuring as per April first this year. Quarter-over-quarter, you can see the effect from the restructuring. As a reminder, we expect full year savings from the restructuring, which you will see in 2025. They will amount to EUR 30 million in cash cost versus 2023. Now, please remember that this is the cash cost effect. Accounting cost effect will be lower, given that capitalization will also reduce with lower personnel cost. If you look at marketing in Q2, overall marketing costs came in at EUR 10.7 million. That's 16% of revenue. That's slightly down year-over-year. We do have invested more in brand marketing for XING and Kununu as part of the investment program that we've announced in January. We've spent less in performance marketing. Last cost line is other operating expenses. As you all know, it includes, as usual, external services, legal, audit, consulting, payment processing, server hosting, and other costs. In Q2, reported other operating expenses before capitalization came in at EUR 9.9 million. That's slightly up year-over-year. As you know, we have more cost to cover new regulatory requirements, such as NIS2. Let's move on to cash flows. Operating cash flow came in slightly negative at minus EUR 1.1 million, and the main reason is that we have paid out severance payments in Q2 that we have shown in our accounting P&L in Q1. Cash outs for operating investments amounted to minus EUR 3.7 million. That's down year-over-year. The development is also driven by the restructuring, because with fewer people in the product and tech function, of course, we also have less capitalization of self-developed software. Cash out for interest paid, foreign exchange, and rent amounts to minus EUR 0.8 million. That's down year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. As you know, in this line, we show mainly lease cash outs. The development is driven by a limited rent-free period in one of our contracts and also by some surface reductions in the context of our cost management measures. With that, free cash flow before dividends amounts to minus EUR 5.5 million. And out of our cash reserves, we have paid out our regular dividend of EUR 5.6 million, and with that, total free cash flow, including dividends, amounts to minus EUR 11.1 million. Last but not least, we confirm our pro forma EBITDA guidance between EUR 55 million and EUR 65 million, which we had given in January. So to sum it up, overall, we're on track in a difficult environment. The macroeconomy, the labor market, and our revenue situation remain difficult. However, our initiatives are developing well. Our investment program is on track, and the restructuring, combined with the cost-saving measures from last year, has significantly reduced our cost basis year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. This was a key driver for increasing our pro forma EBITDA margins from 13% in Q1 to 27% in Q2. Based on these developments, we confirm our guidance of a full-year pro forma EBITDA between EUR 55 million and EUR 65 million. Now, these are our numbers. Let me please add some personal remarks. As you've read in our press release, I have informed Petra and the supervisory board that I have decided not to extend my current contract, which runs until summer 2025. My reasons are purely personal. I've been with this company for more than 15 years. I've prolonged my contract three times. And more importantly, I'm now 53 years old. Next year, I will be 54 years old, if then if I prolong for another term, I will be 58 after that. 58 years in a company that has so many young colleagues here, to them, it seems like death. So for me, this is really the right time for something new. And I have informed Petra and the supervisory board early on so that we can start to search for a suitable successor and to ensure a smooth transition. I'm confident that you will understand this. To be the CFO of this company has always felt, and still does feel to me, to be a privilege. When I started in 2009, the company made EUR 44 million in revenues and EUR 12 million in EBITDA. Last year, we did more than EUR 300 million in revenues and about EUR 100 million in EBITDA. In these past 15 years, I've always enjoyed building and strengthening a relationship to you, investors and analysts, and I have considered our dialogue and discussions as an inspiration, and I still do. Next to me and Petra is sitting Patrick Möller, our VP Investor Relations, whom I want to thank as well in this moment for his very good work. Together, all of us, we've always tried hard to earn your trust. We put a lot of effort into keeping you informed in an open and transparent way. We did this in easy times as much as in not-so-easy times, and we did this because we've always believed in the high value of good investor relations. My last day is still far away. As I've said, we've initiated the search for a suitable successor. You, investors and analysts, and I, we may see each other again in a different setup, but for now, let me just say thank you very much, and take care. And with that, I hand back to Petra. Actually, to the moderator- Ah, to the moderator. because we go for the questions. Okay. Yes. Let me add, Ingo, that I'm really sad that you're leaving. We have been a perfect team, and although I am optimistic that we'll find a suitable successor, it will be a hard time replacing you. Thank you. Thank you very much for your personal words and for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session, and for a lively conversation, we kindly ask you to ask questions in person via audio line. To do so, click on the Raise Your Hand button. If you have dialed in by phone, please use the key combination star nine, followed by star six. If you do not have the opportunity to speak freely today, you can also place your questions into our chat box. We're waiting for the first questions. Nizla Naizer, you should be able to speak now. Hi, I hope you can hear me okay. Yes. Great. Just quickly wanted to wish Ingo all the best on his next big adventure, and it's been a pleasure working with you and Petra and Patrick and the team, so all the best to you. Firstly, my question is on maybe the delisting process. I'm not sure if you mentioned it already, but if you could give us an update on what the situation is there, that would be great. And I guess a general question on the overall macro environment after all the volatility we've been seeing. Again, not sure if you touched on it. Unfortunately, I had to jump a bit late, but what's sort of the setup you see in Germany? And are you still optimistic that you can find avenues of growth going forward? Thank you. Actually, thank you, Nizla, for your words. Regarding the delisting process, the offer is out. Our joint recent statement is out. As per Monday, the acceptance rate was 77%, a little over 77%, which is already now in the hands of Burda. So that's the total capital. Okay? And then the offer runs until, Patrick? August 26th. Until the August 26th. That is the process update. And then, Nizla, the second part of your question as to our business, actually, the quality of the tone was really low volume. Maybe can you repeat it, please? Sorry, I hope you can hear me better now. Yes. Yes. Great. It was more around sort of the macro environment in Germany, given all the volatility we've been seeing over the last couple of days. You know, we've been getting mixed messages that the German economy is actually staying robust. So wanted to understand from your perspective, given the conversations you have with HR departments, you know, the corporates directly, how are you feeling about the macro environment going forward? And how confident are you that there are pockets of B2B growth out there that you can go after? Mm-hmm. Actually, we are quite careful when looking at next year and doing our budgets, because although there is a small macro growth predicted right now, we've seen in the past that actually those predictions have always been corrected downward than in the following months. So when doing our planning, we are actually quite careful looking at the next year. Nevertheless, we are confident that there will be pockets and segments where we can grow, and Kununu is still a growth case, although the times are difficult. So we will certainly have a mixed picture of our different revenue streams. Understood. Thank you very much. ... You're welcome. Thank you so much, Ms. Naizer. We don't have any questions yet. Still invited to speak now, Mr. Specht. Yes, hello, good afternoon. One question from my side regarding the times post delisting. Do you still expect that management will be available for investor discussions, assuming that there will be minority shareholders left? We will never exclude talking to our shareholders for once, but obviously we will stop quarterly calls and stop quarterly reportings. There will also continue to be annual shareholder meetings, as we will continue to be an SE. So we will follow the formal requirements that there are, and we will certainly not refuse to speak to investors. Okay. Then on the operational side, you didn't name explicitly the sales target. You didn't also mention in the Q1 report, but is it still valid, your initial EUR 270 million-EUR 280 million target? At this point in time, yes. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Mr. Specht. The room is open for some more questions. In the meantime, we have received no further questions. We therefore come to the end of today's last earnings call of New Work SE. Thank you for joining and your questions. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Patrick from Investor Relations or us. A big thank you also to the management for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. I wish you all a lovely remaining day and all the best for New Work SE. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye.