Welcome everyone to Adevinta's third quarter 2023 results investor presentation. Mr. Antoine, Antoine Jouteau, Chief Executive Officer of Adevinta, will host today's conference. Mr. Jouteau, the floor is yours, sir. Thanks, operator. Good morning, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. Due to yesterday evening's announcement of a voluntary tender offer to acquire all issued and outstanding ordinary Class A shares in Adevinta by Aurelia Bidco Norway AS, we are accelerated to release our Q3 results, originally scheduled for November 23. Today, during this conference call, we will review Adevinta's strong progress in our third quarter. Exceptionally, this presentation will not followed by a Q&A session. I'm delighted to be accompanied by Elisabeth Peyraube, our new CFO, who joined us just two months ago. Elisabeth brings with her many years of experience across a wide range of digital consumer and media platforms, together with a strong track record in leading finance transformations. So we are delighted to have her on our team. We will be talking all you through yet another strong set of results this morning. We are also take the opportunity to update you on the significant progress we have made this quarter on our transformation project. So let's start with the key highlight of the quarter. Once again, we delivered a strong financial performance with 14% revenue growth in our core markets. Our EBITDA margin grew by a pleasing 5 percentage points year-on-year, to 37.6%, benefiting from operating leverage and the favorable phasing of expenses, despite the impact of our changing business mix. This produced another quarter of strong cash generation, allowing us to further deleverage the business and pay, and to pay down debt, mitigating some of the impact of rising interest rates. I'm delighted to confirm that these strong results leave us well positioned to deliver our previously announced guidance to 2023, with double-digit revenue growth in core markets and group EBITDA at the top end of the EUR 620 million-EUR 650 million range. We continue to lay the foundations for stronger, more innovative and more efficient organization. We are making good progress in the verticalization of our operations. The statutory consultation with our Works Council on the proposed target operating model has been successfully completed, and we are on track to go live with our new organization in January 2024. The convergence of our generalist platforms got underway with Leboncoin and Kleinanzeigen, and during the summer, we reached our first major milestone with the transformation of the Leboncoin platform into a multi-brand platform. I'm pleased to say that we have delivered these major changes without any disruption to the day-to-day running of the business, maintaining strict financial discipline while achieving some significant product and commercial successes in our key strategic pillars. Our top priority is to deliver value to our users and customers. In mobility, we continue to enhance our offering for users. At Mobile.de, for example, we introduced new search and filter attributes, including electric vehicles and online buying and selling. In real estate in Spain, it's now possible to search by commute time in Fotocasa. Users simply select their preferred mode of transport and the maximum time they want to spend commuting, and they will get a tightly targeted set of results. In transactional services, we introduced split payment at Leboncoin, enabling users to pay with a card and via Leboncoin Wallet. At Marktplaats, we launched a new shipping option with DHL home delivery. These are just a few examples. There are many others. Overall, activity continues to trend upward on our main platform, with traffic growing year-on-year, demonstrating the strength of our brands. Leboncoin showed an impressive performance, with visits up by 11% compared to the same quarter last year. Mobile traffic also showed strong growth, with visits up by 9% year-on-year, following the car market trend. In Kleinanzeigen, visits were flat year-on-year, reflecting the temporary impact of the rebranding and domain change, and the drop in traffic during the unusually fine weather in September. The benefits of the rebranding are now beginning to show through, and Kleinanzeigen was back on positive year-on-year growth trajectory in October. Now, let's dig into our two key verticals, starting with mobility. In Germany, listings increased by 19% year-on-year against a relatively low comparative period, mainly driven by reduced demand due to the economic environment, as well as a sustained recovery in the number of new listings through the quarter. In France, listings grew by 14% in the third quarter, mainly due to the low prior year comparatives. While in the previous quarters, lower demand levels and weaker car dealer supply had a positive impact on our platform listings and directly on our revenue in mobile, we expect these volumes to stabilize to a more normal business trend in the coming months... However, we continue to see significant opportunities for growth from the current very low monetization level and are implementing a number of commercial initiatives, including price increases, as well as product improvement and new value-added services for customers. In mobility, the price increases on 1 April 2023 led to increased monetization, with average revenue per lead up 10% year-on-year. Mobile continues to innovate in leasing, financing, C2B, and more. We introduced our new dealer packages, including a new fourth package and the redesign of the other three accounts. These new packages were soft launched in October. The early outlines of these new packages have been very well received by the majority of our car dealers. In the quarter, average revenue per dealer in France increased by 20% year-on-year. Real estate. The overall macro environment for real estate continues to be challenging, with sustained high inflation, rising interest rates, and low consumer confidence, all of which impact the property market, with obvious consequences for the number of listings available on our platforms. This is true to different degrees in France and Germany, largely due to the different market position we hold. In France, professional listings increased by 11% year-on-year, driven by a slowdown in the number of transactions, explained by the rising interest rates and the tightening on credit access conditions on the demand side for all properties. We continue to improve our monetization. ARPA increased by 21% year-on-year, benefiting from the successful launch of enhanced subscription packages in September last year, with high added value for professional clients. In Germany, professional listings continued to show impressive growth, up 79% year-on-year. There were two factors behind this. The first is the particular market dynamics in Germany, where demand for houses for sale is decreasing significantly and shifting partly towards houses for rent due to the current economic environment. As a result, professional listings stay longer on our platform. The second driver is our gain in market share and increased agent penetration. The number of professional clients increased 13% year-on-year to 10,000. We still have a lot of room to grow in real estate, and we are making sure that we continue to bring further value to agents, which will ultimately lead to increased monetization. In transaction services, we continue to see very strong traction in product adoption, with strong double-digit growth in all markets. During the quarter, we ran successful back-to-school promotions in all our core markets, which had a positive impact both on the number of transactions and on adoption. In Italy and Spain, the number of transactions in September reached an all-time high. We also continue to improve our and launch new products in all our core markets. I mentioned earlier the launch of the split payment at Leboncoin and the DHL Home at Marktplaats, but we also launched Apple Pay for our iOS users at Leboncoin at the end of the quarter, with very strong results so far. We also improved the user journey in transactional services in Kleinanzeigen with the launch of the Transaction Overview page and the Buy Now solution for individual shipping. As you can see, the overall picture has been extremely encouraging for the group, and we are delighted with the progress, the progress we have made, not only in our financial results, but also in the many initiatives we have launched, and to improve our future market positions and secure robust long-term growth and profitability for our business. I will now hand over to Elisabeth to talk in more detail about our financial performance. Thank you, Antoine, and good morning, all. I'm very pleased to be with Antoine today to review with you Adevinta's quarterly financial performance. I have to say, very pleasing on my first outing as CFO to be presenting such a strong set of results, backed by a strengthening balance sheet. Group revenues grew by 12%, EUR 454 million. This is on a similar scope basis, meaning that we have restated the revenues for the markets that we exited between last year and this quarter, which included Mexico and Hungary. Revenues in our core markets grew by 14%, despite the soft macroeconomic environment. Online classified revenues improved by 17%, supported by continued strong double-digit revenue growth in mobility, mostly driven by mobile.de. Real estate posted double-digit growth, driven by France and Kleinanzeigen. Jobs performance was flat year-on-year. Transactional revenues grew by 51% year-on-year, with strong growth in all core markets. Advertising revenues, as you might expect, were down 6% year-on-year, reflecting an overall weaker advertising market. Reported EBITDA at EUR 171 million was up by an impressive 29% year-on-year, representing a 37.6% margin. This performance was driven by, first, the strong top line evolution I just referred to. Second, lower marketing spend, down by more than 20% year-on-year, driven by different phasing, spend discipline, and prioritization across all markets. And third, the favorable spread of expenses in the period, with some catch-up expected in Q4 2023. Also, let me remind you that last year's performance was impacted by the EUR 6 million catch-up provision related to the French Digital Services Tax. These positive drivers were partly offset by an anticipated controlled increase in personnel and other costs, including transactional expenses. The increase in personnel costs fell into two areas. Firstly, the continued build-up of our global capabilities with the implementation of new operating models for support functions and our product and tech teams. Secondly, continued investment in product development in sales and customer support operations to support our future growth. This increase was partly offset by slightly higher capitalization related to the Convergence project and the harmonization of our investment policy. Let me take you through the details of our various markets, beginning with France. Reported revenues in France grew by 12% in the third quarter of 2023. Online classified revenues grew 13% year-on-year, driven by real estate and mobility. Real estate saw double-digit revenue growth. It continued to benefit from the successful launch of enhanced subscription packages in September 2022. This contributed positively to the ARPA development. Mobility revenue growth was driven by the 20% ARPD increase, mainly due to the annual price increase. Jobs and holiday rental revenues were down year-on-year. Advertising revenue were down 9% compared to last year. We saw the ongoing impact of reduced activity from media agency and programmatic, following negative market trends for classic display. Transactional revenues, on the other hand, were up 34% year-on-year on the back of transaction volume growth. Net reported EBITDA was EUR 59 million, up 13% year-on-year. Positive revenue development and lower marketing expenses, as well as a EUR 6 million catch-up provision for last year in relation to the French DST, contributed to this year-on-year improvement. This was partly offset by an increase in direct transaction costs year-on-year and an increase in personnel costs due to investment in product and technology development. The reported EBITDA margin was broadly stable year-on-year, also reflecting the evolution of the business mix, with an increasing share of transaction services and a decreasing share of highly profitable advertising revenues. Turning to mobile.de, revenue in mobile.de improved by 26% in the first quarter of 2023. Again, an impressive performance. Online classified revenues and value-added services increased by 29% year-on-year, once again, driven by the continued recovery in dealer listings, the successful implementation and execution of the dealer price increase of 15% on average in April, and a strong upsell performance. Average revenue per dealer listings increased by 10% year-on-year. Revenues from private sellers also posted a strong performance in the quarter, supported by higher C2C average price per listings and higher C2B average revenue per user. Advertising revenues decreased by 4% compared to the previous year, still impacted by the ongoing reduced level of advertising spend by OEMs, result of the current market environment. EBITDA improved by 41%, mainly driven by the positive top-line development, operating leverage, and a 15% year-on-year reduction in marketing. This was partly offset by an increase in personnel costs as a result of the annualization of investment in product enhancement and in sales and customer support operations. Accordingly, the EBITDA margin improved by a pleasing 6.5 percentage points year-on-year. Revenues in the European market segment increased by 10% on a comparable basis, led by double-digit performances in Benelux and Italy, while growth in Kleinanzeigen and Spain started to slow down, as expected. Online classified revenues were up by 13%, supported by double-digit growth in mobility and consumer goods. Advertising revenues were down 5% year-on-year. Transactional revenues continued to show strong momentum and doubled compared to the same period last year. EBITDA improved by 15% compared to the third quarter of 2022. This performance was mainly driven by the positive top line development and lower marketing spend in the period. This was partly offset by transactional costs, driven by higher volumes and by promotional campaigns to drive adoption of the service. EBITDA margin improved by 2 percentage points year-on-year, despite the revenue mix effect. Let me now give you a little more insight into the revenue evolution in our four largest EU markets of the segment. Germany revenues grew 6% in the period to EUR 62 million. This was driven by online classified, with strong momentum in real estate, with further market share gains, in mobility due to higher volumes of leads generated by Mobile.de, and in consumer goods, with strong performances from small and medium businesses. Advertising, on the other hand, was down 9% year-on-year, mainly due to the weaker global market environment and higher comparatives. Transactional revenues continue to show strong momentum, supported by multiple shipping promotion campaigns. Turning to Spain, revenues grew by 5% in the period to EUR 56 million. The major contributors to this performance were, first, the solid performance of online classified, up 6% year-on-year, driven by solid performances in mobility, consumer goods and jobs, despite lacking tougher comparatives. Second, the further ramp-up of transactional revenues. Real estate revenues, on the other hand, were predictably affected by the macroeconomic environment. Advertising revenues were down 4% year-on-year, driven by lower vibrancy, also largely as a result of the current environment. Benelux revenues continue to post double-digit growth and reach EUR 43 million in the period. Revenue growth in online classified was supported by a recovery in mobility listings and a price increase, coupled with a strong performance in consumer goods. Transactional services revenue more than tripled year-on-year and were boosted by recent launches of additional shipping options. Advertising revenues were down 3% year-on-year. In Italy, revenue grew by 20%, mainly driven by the strong performance in mobility and consumer goods, and continued strong momentum in transactional services, where revenues almost doubled. Advertising revenues improved year-on-year, driven by higher programmatic performance and new revenue streams. Let's move on now to international markets, which are effectively confined to Canada. International markets posted a 21% year-on-year revenue decline, driven by currency impacts and continued contraction in vibrancy, which affected both online classified and advertising performance. Reported EBITDA was down 23% year-on-year, which reflected the top line trend and a slight increase in personal cost in Canada, offset by a reduction in marketing and other costs, as well as by our exit from non-core operations. The reported EBITDA margin improved by 1.2 percentage points year-on-year. Although we no longer include OLX Brazil in our segment reporting, we continue to provide you with some visibility on this asset. OLX Brazil increased revenue by 1% year-on-year in local currency to EUR 44 million. Its weaker performance should be understood in the context of the macroeconomic environment, which is weighing in on our activities, particularly in the real estate business. EBITDA improved 60% year-on-year, reaching EUR 13 million. This improvement was driven by a decrease in marketing expenses, lower personal expenses, mainly due to a headcount reduction and other efficiencies, this without compromising operations and other cost optimizations. The EBITDA margin for the quarter was 29%, up 11 percentage points year-on-year. Other and headquarters EBITDA improved by EUR 6 million compared to last year's to a negative EUR 47 million. We continue to build up our global capabilities with the implementation of new operating models for our support functions and our product and tech teams to drive operational efficiencies and accelerate value creation.... This was more than offset by favorable quarterly savings of IT expenses and the largest share of cost allocations to the markets to reflect global team support. As a percentage of revenue, central P&T and headquarters costs were down year-on-year at 10%. Moving on now to other P&L items below the EBITDA line. Depreciation and amortization reduced by EUR 6 million in the quarter, mainly driven by the impact last year of the reassessment of useful lives of certain trademarks. Our share of loss of joint ventures and associates in the quarter decreased by EUR 2 million compared to the same period in 2022, due to the improved results of OLX Brazil. Other expenses amounted to EUR 30 million, with the main drivers being the ECG integration, the verticalization project, and the rebranding of Kleinanzeigen. This was partly offset by a gain on the sale of Hungary. Last year, other expenses included the digital service tax of France related to 2019, 2021, integration expenses related to the ECG acquisition, and restructuring provision related to reorganization in France. Net financial costs increased by EUR 11 million year-on-year, mainly due to the exchange loss on the loan in Brazilian real, granted by Adevinta to OLX Brazil, as the Brazilian real depreciated against euro. We saw strong cash generation of EUR 144 million in the quarter, broadly in line with last year. The main material movement from EBITDA to cash this quarter was CapEx of EUR 29 million. It represents around 6% of our sales in the quarter, and it is essentially the capitalization of development costs of EUR 22 million. The CapEx number is higher than what we have had in the past, due to integration projects, for example, cloud and ERP migration, the conversions project, and harmonization of CapEx policy across the group. This strong cash generation allowed us to continue to deleverage the business in the period. At the end of the quarter, we had a leverage ratio of 2.7 times on a clear trajectory to our medium-term target of 2 times net debt to EBITDA. We repaid an impressive EUR 94 million of debt, of which $74 million was on our Term Loan B USD, and EUR 20 million was on our Term Loan B Euro, in line with our strategy to prioritize floating debt repayments. We will continue to focus on deleveraging and reassess our debt structure to mitigate any impact from rising interest rates. In terms of our debt maturity profile, we have time in hand as no debt repayments are due until November 2025. We are taking active measures to mitigate our FX and interest rate exposures. As I just explained, we continue to reduce our floating interest rate exposure by prioritizing floating interest debt as we deleverage. Our floating total debt ratio is now around 30%. Thanks to this deleveraging strategy, our interest expenses were broadly stable despite the rapid increase in reference rates. Overall, our deleveraging and hedging have resulted in interest savings of EUR 30 million so far in 2023. In terms of exchange rate exposure, we hedge every material transaction, and we try to minimize the FX risks by keeping FX cash at an operational minimum and by hedging our M&A proceeds where possible. In summary, I'm really pleased to have reported on an excellent operational performance, translating into strong financial results for the group in the third quarter. I will now hand back to Antoine for the outlook and conclusion. Thanks, Elisabeth. In conclusion, we have had a very strong quarter. We have delivered a good financial performance while making significant progress in the execution of our business and strategic roadmap. As we move into the final quarter of 2023, we expect revenue growth to ease compared to previous quarters, lapping a strong performance in Q4 2022, and as we expect dealer listings growth to be more limited in the quarter for mobile.de, after several quarters of double-digit growth. The business profitability for that quarter will reflect the seasonality of the business and associated revenue mix, with a typically higher level of transactional revenue and related costs and employee benefits in the last quarter of the year. The phasing of expenses and investment, especially in marketing, after a low level in Q3. Third, the targeted one-off project in Q4 to support future business initiatives. We remain confident of achieving our previously announced guidance for 2023, with double-digit revenue growth in core markets and group EBITDA at the top end of the previously announced EUR 620 million-EUR 650 million range. Beyond 2023, we continue to see many further opportunities. Our financial ambition for the business remains strong, with our annual revenue growth ranging between 11% and 15% until 2026, and our EBITDA margin sitting at between 40% and 45% from 2026. We have now reached the end of this presentation, and as mentioned at the beginning of the call, this presentation will not be followed by a Q&A session. Thank you for your time, and have a very good day. Bye-bye. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.
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