Good afternoon. This is the Chorus Call conference operator. Welcome. Thank you for joining the presentation of Gruppo MutuiOnline 1st Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Marco Pescarmona, Chairman, Mr. Alessandro Fracassi, CEO, and Mr. Francesco Masciandaro, CFO. Please go ahead. Thank you, welcome everybody to our conference call. As always, we rely on the presentation that was published a while ago on our website, we will start. I would say this time we start with the group structure on page 10. Actually with the structure of the Broking Division. Just to highlight the fact that in the beginning of February, we closed the acquisition of a number of international price comparison businesses. You remember we have signed the contract at the end of August. The operating company that we acquired are LeLynx SAS, which is one of the co-leaders in France in insurance comparison. Rastreator Comparador Correduría de Seguros, which is the leading comparison intermediation business, at least for insurance in Spain. The third operating company is Preminen Mexico, which is a comparison website for insurance in Mexico, and is one of the leaders there. This all goes under a relatively complicated structure with intermediate companies that, however, we plan to simplify these transcripts because of, you know, the history of the group, which was owned by a entity in the past. Now, having said that, you know, you know, the things have changed with the entry of, into the consolidation area. We can move to page 17 with the Q1 results, the consolidated results. In Q1, revenues are EUR 93.9 million, and that's up 20.6% year-on-year compared to the EUR 77.9 million of Q1 2022. The mix is exactly the same. 44% of the revenues are from Broking and 56% from BPO, unchanged from the previous year. EBITDA, which is now, we think one of the most meaningful measures of our performance, is EUR 23.4 million in Q1 2023. That's up 9.7% year-on-year compared to EUR 21.4 million in Q1 2022. The contribution is for 52% from the Broking Division and 48% from the BPO Division, and the weight of the BPO Division has increased compared to last year. The BPO division has contributed in proportion more. The EBITDA margin is 25% in Q1 2023 compared to 27.4% in Q1 2022. EBITDA, which, you know, is affected by the PPA allocation and then amortization, and so for this reason, doesn't give a completely clear picture, is 17.2 million EUR in Q1 2023, and that's up 4.1% year-on-year compared to 16.5 million EUR in Q1 2022. Net income, finally, is 9.5 million EUR Q1 2023, and that's down 17.5% year-on-year compared to 11.6 million EUR in Q1 2022. The reason for this decline is mainly the interest cost, because, you know, you look at the net financial position, there is a big change compared to a year ago. On top of that, interest rates have increased significantly. There is, I think you can check in the numbers, like EUR 3.5 million of interest expense that was not there in Q1 2022. Now before going into the performance, of the divisions and the business lines, let's say something about the Italian mortgage market, which has been a driver of significant swings in our performance in, let's say the last 12 months. You remember the first half of 2022, the mortgage market was doing well, and actually we're quite positive or at least comfortable with an expectation of stability for, you know, for the following period. This is not what happened. In fact, you know, with inflation, we started seeing significant increase in interest rates, and we think that was, you know, the action of the central banks was possibly one of the key drivers of what was for us, a really unexpected evolution of the mortgage market. Basically we started seeing a decline in Q3 that became a deeper contraction in, you know, at the end of 2020, at the end of 2022. In Q1 2023, basically the situation resembles that of Q4 2022. In fact, in Q1 2023, the mortgage market in Italy is significantly down both for purchase mortgages and remortgages. The target again was not expected is the purchase mortgages. If we look at the actual originations, this is the data from Assofin, we see that, you know, the drop of originations in EUR terms of new originations was 25% in January year-on-year, then 38% in February, 35% in March. Between Q1, the market contracted by one third. The gross originations, by the way, are the main driver of the majority of our mortgage revenues. This is due, by the way, for 36.3% to a drop of purchase mortgages, the product we actually thought would be stable. Whereas remortgages now have almost disappeared in Q1 2023, so the drop is not so big because there had already been an adjustment. Looking at forward-looking indicators, you know, we have CRIF credit bureau inquiries, and they point to a decline of a similar entity in all the months of 2023, in particular, 23% in January, 25% in February, 24% in March, and almost 26% in April. If this is an indicator of what's going to happen, it confirms, you know, that the outlook, you know, at least for Q2 2023 of, you know, what happened in the early months of the year. In fact, what we say is that the market is likely to contract significantly in Q2 2023. On the other hand, you know, we said that, we reminded you that the market started contracting significantly in the second half of, let's say from September, to be more precise, of 2022. In the coming quarters we will have an easier comparison, clearly. Also, we have a feeling that in Italy, consumer confidence still remains reasonably good. The impression is that, you know, part of the slowdown of the market could be sort of a reflection for people that have to adjust to the idea that interest rates are not going back to 1.5% or 2%. Once they realize that, you know, the affordability of houses remains good and, you know, unemployment is low and the economy is going okay. People, you know, will eventually adjust to the idea that, you know, they have to pay a little bit more in interest and then go back to buying properties. This is our, for now, hope, reasonable, rational hope. Based on this, we would expect a better outlook for the second half of the year for the mortgage market. Now, having said this, we can focus more on the details, and we will first start from the Broking Division on page 19. We see revenues of the Broking Division are for EUR 41.3 million in Q1 2023. That's up 20.7% year-on-year, compared to EUR 34.3 million in Q1 2022. The reality is, of course, that we have made a very significant acquisition, you know, of these four national entities were acquired at the beginning of February. The consolidation area is not the same. Actually, this growth actually comes from mostly in terms of revenues I would say from the change in the consolidation area, and then I'll comment more. In terms of EBITDA, this is flatish. It's EUR 12.3 million in Q1 2023, and it was EUR 12.3 million in Q1 2022. Of course, the margin is lower, the EBITDA margin. This is both because we acquired businesses that have that traditionally had and still have a lower EBITDA margin than, you know, the one of our Italian operations. Also because, you know, in Italy, we had a decline, a significant, very significant decline of the mortgage business, which historically has a higher EBITDA margin. These two things impact overall the blended EBITDA margin of the Broking Division. EBIT is also down. Here, I think there is a limited impact from CBA, so this is a relatively clean figure. Anyway, you know, our focus in looking at the performance would be more on the EBITDA. EBIT is EUR 9.9 million, and that's down 5.9% year-on-year compared to EUR 10.5 million in Q1 of 2022. Looking at the individual business lines of the Broking Division, well, let's say first a, an overall comment. I think more or less we did in line with what we wrote in the press release in terms of expectations and so on. Maybe, you know, I wouldn't say we were surprised, but, you know, the mortgage market was quite weak. The other business lines, we expected them to be up year-on-year, and they were up. I would say we have a robust result from the international markets business line, the business line that we created to contain basically the international entities, which are mostly doing, by the way, insurance broking. We had, you know, this strong decrease of mortgages, mostly purchase mortgages. You know, we said the market was down 36.3% year-on-year, so, you know, we were affected in a similar way. What we expect going forward is basically an improvement. We see already one positive effect, which is growth of remortgage applications. This has been around already for a few months. Actually, this started already at the end of 2022. Lots of consumers that still have a variable mortgage, and they want to switch to fixed. The problem is the banks are not very keen to do this transaction. We get lots of applications, and we close few. Still, you know, this is, you know, it's better to have it than not to have it. Whereas purchase mortgage are just weak. Regarding insurance broking, this is a good environment for insurance broking. Actually, you know, a good environment is basically an environment of inflation because people see their premiums going up. You know, you pay motor insurance in particular, but all kinds of insurance has annual premiums. You see the premiums going up, and then what you decide to do is to shop around and possibly to switch. This is helping demand. This is visible in Italy, visible in Spain, maybe a bit less visible in France, but also possibly because, you know, our French business is not as strong as we have in Italy or Spain. In general, the environment is favorable. This is in insurance broking in general. Here, under insurance broking, the comment only refers to Italy, but the concepts also apply to the international markets. Also, air and energy comparison is growing. Here, what is growing is energy. We continue to see price checks. Prices are going down, but lots of people have like fixed price contracts where the fixed price is expiring, so they really want to find alternatives. You know, lots of people also have still variable price contracts, they shop around. Hopefully, and here we are reasonably optimistic, especially with the expectation that some fixed price contracts will come back to the market. You remember here, starting about around at the beginning of 2022, you know that the market remained open, we always had energy products to sell differently from other countries. We lost all the fixed price products, we have only had adjustable price products. Now, we have some expectation that the fixed price products could come back, but, you know, we have to see. E-commerce price comparison is more or less the up year-over-year, and, you know, we can assume this, you know, should continue. By the way, one thing to point out is that now the Digital Markets Act, which will have an impact possibly on the competition from Google Shopping, will started to come into force. This is like, you know, this happened at the beginning of May, but the full application, for the full application it will take, I would say probably nine months, something like that. We will see how things evolve. You know, in general, hopefully this should be favorable. At least this is intended to eliminate preferencing by gatekeepers such as Google that operate dominant platforms like Google Search. Hopefully, if everything goes well, this should help us. You know, we will have to see how this is applied in practice. You know, the next 12 months will tell, you know, the direction that this will take. Finally regarding the international market, you know, usually we will, you know, want to give some visibility to the new international businesses. We'll comment about the international part, talking about this business line that we call International Markets. You know, the companies that acquired are producing operating profitability, the desire than that recorded by the same companies in the corresponding months of 2022. The companies are going better than last year when they were not part of the group. This is for two reasons, we think. One is, well, inflation, because these guys are selling mostly insurance. Second is, other operational improvements that we are driving in this company. We are trying to apply some of our know-how to, you see, you know, to the functioning of this company. We think that, you know, we will continue to see these favorable trends for the rest of 2023, again, thanks to the same factors. Inflation and operational improvements driven by, you know, our experience, let's say. This ends the part on the Broking Division. Now Alessandro will continue with the BPO. Hi. Thank you, Marco, and thank you everyone for being on the call. We are on page 21 with the BPO division. I'll start. Please hold the line. The conference call will resume shortly. Hello, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, sorry, we had a problem outside. I'll restart. I am on page 21 and commenting on the results of the BPO division. If we look at the revenues, they grew from the first quarter of last year from EUR 43.6 million to EUR 52.6 million. That's an increase year-on-year of 20.6%. The EBITDA, which, as Marco commented, is probably the best way to look at the performance, key indicator for the performance of all our businesses, in operating terms, grew from EUR 9 million in the quarter, in the first quarter of 2022 to EUR 11.1 million in the first quarter of 2023. That's an increase of 23.5%. Just a little note on the EBIT, which grew 41.7% from EUR 6 million to EUR 7.3 million. Here we should highlight that we still have not put in the calculation of the PPA effect for the acquisition of Trebi Generalconsult, which we finished, which we closed at the end of October 2022. Therefore this number will not remain similar, and we will see the impact during 2023. Now let's go a little beyond this with a comment on, you know, what's behind the numbers. As Marco has already basically pointed out, you know, this is actually a solid result, and it's, you know, growth both in terms of revenue margin. Reality is also it came from the change in the consolidation area. Even without change, we would have seen roughly a 5% growth in revenue than a flattish EBITDA. I mean, results are, I would say, you know, even a little better than we expected and what we had told you at the end of last year. Let's get into the various business lines. Basically, we see a continuation of what was, you know, the second half of 2023. We see a decline in the mortgage BPO, I think Marco has already commented a lot on this. We can see, you know, basically over 20% decline in the revenues here, which is basically, you know, Euro numbers completely outbalanced by the real estate, the growth in real estate services. This growth in real estate services, unfortunately, this which basically this counterbalance will probably end with H1 2023, because that's when we will not have any more the impact of the activities related to the Ecobonus. You know, the second part of the year for the real estate services BPO will not be as good as the first half. Anyway, up to now, we are basically counterbalancing the decrease in the mortgage market with this. Then as Marco has commented, in the second half, we will not see such a significant decrease probably, you know, comparing to the second half of 2023 in the mortgage market. The Loans BPO and the Investment Services BPO are basically stable in terms of revenues, and also the EBITDA is not really changing. Good news are coming from the Leasing & Rental BPO, where we are also start including the numbers of our IT business dedicated to leasing and rental, which is Trebi Generalconsult. Here, the good news is that also, without considering, the contribution of Trebi or the acquisition, we would have seen a double-digit organic revenue from Agenzia Italia. This is coming especially from the long-term rent business, because we are starting to see that the delivery of new vehicles to the rental, to the long-term rental companies is normalizing. Relative to last year, we are able to grow. Obviously, the rental companies are kind of the last in line to get the deliveries of new vehicles because these are the lowest margin sales for the OEMs, for the automotive OEMs. Here positive news and, you know, maybe not as, It will not remain as positive through the rest of the year, but, and, but, you know, we'll see clearly, growth from this business line. A positive contribution is also given by the Insurance BPO business. This is again, both in terms of Both, in organic terms and thanks to the acquisition, which we performed last year, especially the Onda acquisition, which was closed in the beginning of June 2022. Overall, for this, you know, for the second quarter of 2023, we expect to see similar results of what we have done in the first quarter. Then, you know, we'll see what happens in the rest of the year. you know, some stability of some business line is clear and also the good prospects of the Insurance and of the Leasing & Rental. What we need to understand is where the balance of, you know, the hopefully the stabilization of the mortgage market and the disappearing instead of the of the Ecobonus business will bring us, you know, if we look at in organic terms. Obviously we still have the acquisition of Trebi where we are working and it's performing as we expected, as we expect. With a growth relative to last year when anyway it was not part of our numbers. Finally, a note to say that even if, you know, against the background of a bad contraction in the mortgage market, we are seeing a, you know, a revival of the commercial pipeline. We have two very interesting prospects, which again, I'm not sure they're gonna be customers. You know, the pipeline for new customers in this business has, you know, for a number of years has not been particularly positive. Instead already last year we acquired one new customer, and now we have two in the pipeline. I hope you know. I think this confirms that a positive outlook in the medium term for the, for the mortgage BPO area, even if now it's really, you know, dragging our numbers, and not delivering results again, because the market is contracting, as Marco said, over 30%. I think this ends the part of the BPO, and I will give it back to Marco for a comment on our net financial position. Thanks to Alex. Just quickly on page 24, our net financial position. You know, we were at - EUR 195 million, so a debt of EUR 195 million as of December 31st, 2022. At the end of March 2023, we were at EUR 326 million negative. This is basically because we paid EUR 150 million for the international acquisitions of the Broking Division. Of course, we had some first generation and a number of things like waiting, like working capital and so on. This is, you know, just very much, you know, what, you know, could be expected in terms of evolution. On, in many of our contracts with banks, when they look at governance, the net financial position is actually adjusted also to consider as an equivalent to cash our investment in MoneySuperMarket. It's not in all the contracts, but in majority. Here we have some improvements, let's say, because, you know, we had 44 million MoneySuperMarket shares at the end of last year. We still have the same number, but the same shares were worth EUR 95 million at the end of December, and now they are worth EUR 125 million. Important, this helps our net equity. The changes, by the way, don't go to P&L. They go straight to other comprehensive income. The key thing is that, you know, if you also consider the value that MoneySuperMarket takes, we have this sort of adjusted net financial position. It goes from -EUR 100 million to - EUR 201 million. It's quite comfortable. I would say in general, given the operational performance, and the current level of the net financial position, et cetera, and the availability of all these MoneySuperMarket shares, we should be, I mean, in a comfortable situation also with our bank governance. This ends the presentation, and I would ask the operator to open to questions. Thank you. This is the conference call operator. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star one on their touchtone telephone. If you change your mind and wish to remove yourself from the question queue, then you may press star two. Anyone who has a question may press star one at this time. The first question is from Aleksandra Arsova from Equita. Please go ahead. Hi. Good afternoon to everybody. Three questions from my end. Actually three different issues. The first one, maybe didn't get the number, but when you were mentioning the Broking EBITDA, the organic EBITDA, what was the decline organically? The other two are on the net financial position on debt. As far as I see, this year you have something about EUR 70 million-EUR 80 million in debt repayment. Do you believe you will be able to pay this by available cash and free cash flow generated, or do you need some refinancing? The second one is, you mentioned that most of your covenants include the potential cash from MoneySuperMarket. Those covenants not including this additional potential cash are at what level of net debt on EBITDA? If you are seeing any pressure from some of the banks to maybe renegotiate the debt or just a little bit more color on this? Thank you. Okay. Well, I would say in terms of Broking EBITDA, I mean, we don't disclose the exact numbers. You know, we said the companies are doing better than last year. You know, I think you can assume, you know, just by reasoning on this, since the foreign companies, the contribution of, you know, between EUR 1.5 million and EUR 2 million in the two months, and, you know, that would be the decline without the acquisitions. Again, we don't provide precise numbers, but I think this is a calculation that, you know, is easily done, you know, along the lines that I described. In terms of debt payments, I think for now we are comfortable, so we don't have to do any refinancing. It's true that, you know, you look at our repayment plan, and there is a lot of repayments, especially at the end of 2023 and throughout 2024. You know, but also we have some cash available. Clearly, you know, at a certain point, depends on our operating performance and cash generation. If we remain at the current level of cash generation, then we will need to consume some of the available cash to repay the debt. We will end up with less cash, or we will sell some MoneySuperMarket shares. This is like the baseline scenario. If we are lucky and the operating cash performance improves, also the cash generation will improve, and it will be easier. Of course, you know, we would be happier if we had a, a, a repayment plan more spread out over time. There is no urgency to work on that if we have the opportunity. However, we agree it's better to move some payments from, say, 2024 to later years. And depending on, you know, also interest, you know, the debt market and so on, our banks are looking at things and so on, we might do a little bit of this. But again, we are quite comfortable with the current repayment schedule. We should be able to deal with it without problems. Say with covenants, of course, we would prefer to have all the banks with the MoneySuperMarket shares as an adjustment to the covenants. You know, if we are able to do that, we would be happier. Again, it's not a requirement, let's say. I would say in general, the current debt position and, you know, compared to the available resource and the cash generation, et cetera, is very comfortable. Of course, it constrains our ability to make acquisitions. If we wanted to make a relevant acquisition, this would be problematic as of today, possibly not in 12 months' time. We are a little bit constrained from this point of view. if we are able to soften some of these constraints, that would be a positive in terms of flexibility more than anything. Okay. You don't see any pressure from banks on the covenants at the moment? Just for confirmation. No, no. Why would we see pressure? I mean, the covenants in June are all okay. End of year, they should be okay. If we are close or tight, we can sell a few MoneySuperMarket shares. I mean, let's say today we keep an eye on it, but we are not concerned. Okay. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question is from Filippo Prini from Kepler. Please go ahead. Hi, good evening. There are two questions for me. The first one is still on the evolution of the line of the real estate appraisal in the two division. Is it possible to part 25 the contribution of the biggest credit Ecobonus in this quarter or possibly if you want also in 2022? Second, still on more clarification, if I may, on the outlook for the Q2 of the two division. You said in the presentation that you expect Q2 2023 to deliver result comparable to those of Q1. Does it mean that we should expect an organic growth year-over-year again +5% or basically simply suggesting to look at unchanged revenues and the EBITDA organically in Q2 compared to Q1 2023? Thank you. Well, the, so the second one, I'm saying that the rest is revenue and it should be level with this line Q2, relative to Q1 2023. That was the comment. In terms of how much it comes from the Ecobonus, you know, again, with all these four things that you can assume that at least, you know, it's more than, let's say a third of the revenues come from that. You know, we will. You know, when that goes away, again, it doesn't expire on June 30 because these are, you know, things that are sort of like due diligences on what we do. They will keep being there. If you, if you have to look at, you know, a medium term of 2024, that's the impact that we will see. I remember answering a question from you, last year, when, you know, you said, what is gonna happen. I was entirely positive because I thought that, you know, even if Ecobonus goes away, we'll still have You know, the secondary market, the reality is that we don't have a secondary market because they changed the law in February. As everyone knows, it is because otherwise people all go to debt, to public debt, and that could not be afforded by the government. Therefore there will be no secondary market for tax credits. If there had been, you know, this would be a business that maybe not at the same level, but it would have gone on because obviously banks when they buy the tax credit, they need to have an appraisal both from the technical standpoint and from the tax standpoint. This is the kind of things that we were doing here. All right. Thank you. For any further questions, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question is a follow-up from Aleksandra Arsova from Equita. Please go ahead. Hi. Just a quick follow-up on BPO mortgages. You were mentioning that you are acquiring new customers. Just a clarification, you are stealing some customers from a competitor, or you're just increasing the penetration of, let's say new customers? Thank you. Yeah. Well, Well, it's a mixed situation. you know, from the client that we acquired, last year, which has started to contribute this year, is actually a customer where we're getting a piece of business that was on ours in the past. you know, we are also hoping to increase the penetration in this client and not necessarily taking away, custom, you know, from a competitor, because the span of the process, that is now outsourced to us or to our competitors are that bigger within that client, so we hope to increase the share of process that is outsourced. Second, it has the You know, one of the two prospects that we have, it's about, it's essentially completely new customers, so it's not giving market shares. The second one would be a balancing effect, and we would enter a customer that is with our perspective. So it's a mixed situation, both, a bit of both. Okay. Brilliant. Thank you. For any further questions, please press star and one on your telephone. Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. Okay. Thank you. Maybe I'll just make Marco, again, a comment, a final comment on the fact that, you know, we were impacted by a very deep contraction of the mortgage market in the last at least two quarters, and it will continue for a while. Our performance, however, you know, of course, We made acquisitions and so on, but we think it was quite resilient. You know, the business is incredibly more diversified than it used to be. Of course, you know, this means also we take negative surprises every now and then in one area or another. You know, we are able to cruise through very difficult waters in a very safe way. Actually, this could even create opportunities. You know, I'm saying this because, you know, we think back to the situation of 10 years ago or 12 years ago, like 2012. Of course there, the contraction of the mortgage market was much worse. It was like 70%-65%, not 36%. Still, you know, even this contraction is very deep and the reaction of the company, the performance of the company is very different. we are, I think, I and Alex and everybody, we are quite proud of this transformation because it's really a different and much stronger group now. This is just a comment on the side. With this, if there are no more questions, I think we can thank everybody for participating. As always, you're welcome to contact us one-on-one for questions or anything, or, you know, meet us at one of the investor events that, you know, are planned. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may disconnect your telephones.