Good afternoon, this is the Carusco Conference Operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the presentation of Moltiply Group first quarter 2025 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 may 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; Mr. Francesco Masciandaro, CFO of Moltiply. Please go ahead.
Thank you. This is Marco Pescarmona. We will rely, as usual, on the presentation available on our investor website and, more precisely, from page 18 with the Q1 highlights. First of all, we are very pleased with the results of the first quarter of 2025. If you look at the revenues, they are EUR 132.8 million, and that's up 25.3% year on year. The revenues come half and half from the two divisions. The EBITDA in the first quarter is EUR 35.3 million, and that's up 28.9% year on year. This corresponds to a 26.6% EBITDA margin, higher than the 25.8% of the previous year. The mix is 60% from broking or Mavriq and 40% from BPO and tech. The EBIT in the first quarter is EUR 22.1 million, and that's up 48.8% year on year. This is also improving in terms of EBIT margin.
The truth is that because of the effect of TTA, the EBIT does not give an immediate picture of the performance of the business. The net income is, in the first quarter, EUR 12.2 million, and that is up 8.8% year on year. The main explanation for this different performance compared to EBITDA and EBIT is simply that in the first quarter of 2024, we recognized EUR 4.6 million of dividends from MoneySuperMarket. In 2025, the ex-dividend date is in the second quarter, so similar revenues will be recognized only in the second quarter of 2025. We can move to the next page with some details about Mavriq. Mavriq, which is, as you remember, our broking division, in the first quarter has revenues of EUR 66.7 million, and that is up 31% year on year.
This is to a large extent organic, of course, also benefits from the inclusion in the consolidation area of Pricewise and Switcho , which were both acquired in the second half of 2024. In terms of EBITDA, Mavriq reported EUR 21.2 million in the first quarter. That's up 44.2% year on year. It also corresponds to an expanding EBITDA margin of 31.7% as compared to 28.9% EBITDA margin in the same period of the previous year. This is basically due to operating leverage in a situation of growing business. Looking at the EBIT, again, this is not fully represented because of the fact of.
Hello, this is the operator. Can you hear me? Hello, can you hear me?
Some comments on the performance of Mavriq. Here it's quite simple because we had growth from all the business lines. In particular, revenues were across the board up double digit. As I said before, the EBITDA overall increased thanks to operating leverage. We anticipated to have pressure on e-commerce price comparison. We managed to keep this growing in the first quarter, but the pressure remains. The pressure comes from declining organic traffic from Google in particular, and also still from Google and increasing traffic acquisition costs. This is, in a way, also related to possibly the changes introduced by Google with the entry into force of the DMA.
Regarding these changes, we, as many other operators, including the leading price comparison websites, comparison shopping websites in Europe, we all complain that we consider this not to be in line with the prohibition of favoring of the Digital Markets Act. The European Commission had started an investigation in March of last year. Finally, on the 19th of March 2025, the Commission announced that it had notified Google preliminary findings indicating a violation of this prohibition. This will likely lead to a fine and possibly some interventions to terminate this conduct. We still have other proceedings. The fines have already been given, and we have to see to take a few months, we believe. If the conduct is terminated, this would relieve us of some of this pressure. Just as a reminder, this is something that is related.
We think about favoring of Google Shopping by leveraging the nominal position of Google Search. This is a different conduct from the antitrust abuse that was the object of the 2017 decision of the Commission, but it is quite related. If this is fixed, it will be certainly beneficial. It will not restore fully the market of 10 years ago, but at least it would eliminate some distortions that are really harmful for all the operators. We just have to keep watching what is happening. At the end of Q1, also, we acquired Verivox. By the way, the results that you see, all the results do not include Verivox, or better, they include Verivox basically in the balance sheet, but not in the P&L because the acquisition was completed at the very end of Q1. There is no P&L contribution.
With Verivox, Mavriq becomes really international. Overall, possibly even 60% of the revenues will come from outside of Italy. The results of Verivox, which again is not consolidated in the first quarter, are solid, but down compared to the same period of 2024, which was characterized by an exceptional peak in switching of energy contracts. Basically, end of 2023, beginning of 2024 in Germany was the reopening of the energy market with very high saving potential from switching. That generated a big peak in volumes. This has normalized, and now the rest of the year will be an easier comparison.
In terms of expectations for the performance of the division for the next months, let's say, apart from the addition of Verivox, is basically continuation of the year-on-year growth in revenues and margins, and depending on could be a different speed, but still growth for all the business lines with the possible exception of e-commerce price comparison. First quarter was an easier comparison. From the second quarter, it's going to be difficult to be up year-on-year on this. Obviously, unless there is finally there are changes to Google's conduct. This ends the comments for Mavriq, and I'd like to hand it to Alessandro for Moltiply Group.
Thank you. Thank you, Marco. Good afternoon, everyone, or good morning if you're in the States. Going to the Moltiply BPO and Tech division, as Marco said, also on this side, we're pleased with the results. We show a growth year-on-year of 20% from EUR 55.1 million to EUR 66.1 million in terms of revenues. In terms of EBITDA, which is probably the best way to look at our margins, we show a growth from EUR 12.7 million to EUR 14.1 million, which is a year-on-year growth in percentage terms of 11.2%. The EBITDA margin slightly decreased from 23% to 21.4%. We will get to the explanation of that in a second when we look at, we kind of give you some color on the different business lines. The EBIT grew from EUR 6.4 million to EUR 7.4 million year-on-year. That is 15.3%. The EBIT margin was basically stable from 11.6% to 11.2%.
As a quick reminder, all these numbers do not include the discontinued operations that we, our Centro Finanziamenti, which was our lending platform, and which we basically sold at the beginning of 2025, or better said, we entered a binding agreement to sell, which is under judgment by Bank of Italy. We expected to obviously close the deal and finalize the deal within 2025. Moving on to some comments, qualitative comments. As we said, this has been a good quarter, and we recorded a significant increase in revenues and a healthy double-digit growth in the EBITDA. Behind this growth, there is basically a very, very strong performance, which we expected from Moltiply Mortgages, and also still a healthy performance of one of our largest business lines, which is the Moltiply Ease. We should really consider there is some unevenness in the performance between business lines.
We knew that, and we also, I think, communicated to the market that there were some headwinds. These headwinds are pretty clear in some business lines, and these headwinds are pretty significant in two business lines, which are real estate and claims. The reason is that both had a very, very strong quarter last year. One, the claims was a very significant first quarter of 2024, both in terms of revenues and in terms of margins, because it was, let's say, the big part of what we did relative to the events of the summer of 2023, the weather events. Instead, for what relates to real estate, we still had the Ecob onus in 2024, but all the Eco Bonus effect was basically in the first half, and especially in the first quarter.
You are really comparing some exceptional events to a quarter which instead did not have this contribution. These are both down in terms of revenues, on average 20%. That is what we see there. Instead, let's talk just a second about Moltiply Mortgages, which is the growth engine in this quarter and will be for the rest of the year, or at least the foreseeable rest of 2025. Here, we have a recovery of the market, which was expected. Recovery is both in terms of refinancing and new mortgages. We are seeing growth in all our outsourcing activities. Actually, we expect some more growth going forward because we have some clients that are ramping up during the second quarter. That is all good news.
I want to just point out a price effect that we're also seeing, meaning that in the first in 2025, we have the full effect. I'm sorry, there is some background noise. Maybe if Marco and Francesco, you can mute yourselves. Okay. I was saying. Okay. In the first quarter of 2025, we have the full effect, the full impact of the new regulation, which is called fair compensation, which is a regulation that impacts basically professionals and professional activities, lawyers, notaries, and so on. The impact of these laws on us was that basically there is now a minimum compensation that we have to recognize to notaries for what they do when there is a refinancing. You might remember that here we have this paranotary activity where we are basically a purchasing center for these services for banks from notaries.
We not just purchase, but we also do, let's say, post-processing and pre-processing of this refinancing. Before we, let's say that the part that we purchase from notaries has now increased significantly, let's say something like 30%. That has increased the price of our services, leaving basically stable, at least for now, our margin in euros, so our absolute margin on the rest of the activities. Therefore, what you see here is a growth that in terms of revenues is very significant, but that's not reflected in terms of margins. Margins obviously grow because the market is growing, but you will see a lower percentage margin on these activities.
There is sort of this mixed effect also behind the decrease in the profitability percentage at the EBITDA level and also at the EBIT level in the overall division, which is driven by this very, very strong price effect that I hope I have explained correctly and comprehensibly. Just a comment on the other business lines. We are seeing, as I mentioned, good growth in lease and the wealth, while loans are a little down in terms of revenues, but the profitability has basically remained stable. We lost some volumes on a contract that was not particularly profitable, so it does not impact that much our bottom line. Summing it up, we expect that this trend can continue for 2025 in terms of growth of our EBITDA margin in the next quarter.
There might be some impact, obviously, on the different timing of the different trends that I described and the impact of seasonality. Overall, and looking especially at the year, I think we feel confident in these numbers. Thank you, and back to you, Marco.
Thank you. By the way, now listening to you, I think it's also useful to give some color on the developments of the mortgage market. We no longer write about that because we are quite diversified away from mortgages. Still, I think it's interesting to know that based on data from Assofin in the first three months of 2025, the mortgage flows were up more than 40% year-on-year. There is, for now, nothing available in terms of forward-looking indicators. Maybe this was a particularly strong quarter, but the recovery that was already visible in Q4 of 2024 is clearly in the market numbers in Q1 of 2025. This was the color that we wanted to provide on mortgages. Now, a couple of comments about the net financial position.
The net financial position changes significantly between December 2024 and the end of Q1, basically because we acquired Verivox, and we also took a significant financing in order to do that. Basically, we took a EUR 400 million term loan that we used to refinance a large portion of our exposure, exposure with the same banks that gave us this loan, and to pay for the acquisition of Verivox. Our net financial position is, at the end of March of this year, negative EUR 515 million. It is also interesting to note that the current portion on page 25, the current portion of the bank debt is quite limited.
The current financial liabilities are basically the biggest part of this, which is the liability for the put and call option, the estimated liability for the put and call option on the 49% of Lercarri, the change management company that we still do not own, that will be due within the year. It is also in terms of profiles of payments, et cetera. We also have a situation that is very well manageable, basically design things based on the payments and so on, the extraordinary payments that we had to make during the year. Just as a reminder, we also have, which is not drawn now but might be used in case, a EUR 50 million revolving line that was obtained as part of the financing package that we signed for the acquisition of Verivox.
If you also consider as cash equivalent the value of the shares of Money SuperMarket, then the net financial position would be EUR 409 million negative. I think all that we have to present, and we are ready to open it to questions. Please, operator, go ahead with questions.
Thank you. This is the conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchstone telephone. To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. First question is from Alexandra Arsova, Equita. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. Two questions. The first one, medium variables. In the press release, you mentioned that the business is solid, but of course, it's slowing down vis-à-vis last year due to, let's say, tough on Amazon. Maybe can you provide a little bit more color on this and what you expect for the, let's say, performance of the year on Verivox in terms maybe both of revenues and the tax. Linked to this, I noted that you booked roughly EUR 15 million as earn-out related again to the deal with a potential, let's say, maximum of EUR 60 million, of course. On what base of EBITDA or estimated EBITDA did you book this EUR 15 million? The second question, more on the organic trends. You mentioned a very strong, of course, first quarter.
According to my estimates, I estimate roughly 15% organic growth for revenues and more than 20% for EBITDA. Maybe just an update on the second quarter since we are in mid-May. Are you seeing similar strong trends or maybe some deceleration? Just to understand whether this was more of an exception or something that was already going on continuing in the second quarter and maybe beyond. Thank you.
Okay, no, thank you. Regarding Verivox, basically the message, we are not in a position to give a precise indication on what to expect in terms of revenues or EBITDA. I would say what we are suggesting is that it's going to be down year-on-year, but still, it's not going to be a terrible performance because we are still booking a portion of earn-out. For now, the estimates are really preliminary because by the way, this adjustment year-on-year in the first quarter was expected. The energy market still remains weak in the sense that even if there is not such a difficult comparison, still, it is a market in which the savings available are more limited than usual. I would say you can read out of what we say like a contraction, but not a disaster, let's say, like a moderate contraction.
The truth is this is a business on which we want to do a lot of things and that there's a lot of potential and there's lots of assets, a good team, and many positive things on which we can build and that give us room to improve the performance, but it will take time. I would say for this year, after a bit, and again, mainly because of the difficult comparison, and then as we start working on this and delivering, we'd be able to give more precise indications. In terms of anyway, we are very happy of this transaction. This is to be clear. We are now starting to spend significant time in Germany, meeting the teams and starting to make plans and so on. This is going to be one of our priorities, if not the priority for the rest of 2025 for Mavriq.
In terms of what we see for the second quarter, I think that the message we are passing is that it's a continuation of the trends of the first quarter. Of course, you have different seasonality. You will have possibly April, which is potentially a weaker month for some things because, especially in Italy, you have a lot of holidays, a lot of distractions, even the passing of the Pope. All these things, especially for people that are thinking about, I don't know, getting a mortgage, they get distracted. I don't think this would make such a big difference. I would say the indication is this remains similar to Q1. Also, of course, for now, we don't see anything, but you have all the trade discussions, all the uncertainty about the tariffs.
All these things might bring a little bit of slowdown, but maybe whatever slowdown, if any, we see now would be visible rather than today. For now, it's like a continuation, let's say. I don't know if, Alexandra, you have anything to add on this.
Sorry, I was on mute. In terms of the mortgage market, we are seeing we actually are not seeing the first quarter as particularly exceptional relative to the second quarter, but maybe we did not see it as strong as the 40% that is said in the market. We still see, as I said, in the market, a continuation of the first quarter, at least for our performance. Actually, again, this is not a market effect that I mentioned before. Maybe in Q2, we will not see that, but definitely in Q3, we will see the impact also of the new clients ramping up.
Yeah, and I'd also say that, I mean, we now have a very diversified set of businesses. It is difficult that you have big deviations from one quarter to the next. One thing could slow down, and the other will accelerate. Fingers crossed for now. We remain optimistic that this will continue.
All right. Brilliant. Thank you.
Next question is from Gabriele Venturi, Bank Akros. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Two questions on my side. The first one on Mavriq's division. Is it right to assume that around 1/3 of the growth rate in top line comes from M&A for this quarter and around 2/3 come from bank growth? The second question on remortgages, how do you think you can give us some color on how they are impacting the mortgage business lines?
Okay, sorry. Can you just repeat because the line was not so good, the first question?
Yeah, actually, also the second. I really didn't hear that well.
Yeah. I asked if you could comment on how M&A is impacting the growth rate for the market condition. If it's right to assume that around a third of the growth comes from M&A and two-thirds come from organic growth. Second question, if you could comment on how remortgages are impacting the mortgage business line. Thank you.
Okay. I'll take the first one. Qualitatively, this is, I think, more or less what is happening. The majority, like more than half, I think one-third to third is a good estimate. It's a legitimate estimate of the weight of M&A versus organic. The majority of the growth is organic if M&A is relevant. Regarding the remortgages, we see remortgages both on the broking side and on the BPO side. Actually, I was looking at the Assofin data, and basically, purchase mortgages are up 30% year-on-year, so remortgages are growing more. We are benefiting in a different way of remortgages from the two divisions. Part of this recovery is a significant part is purchase. This is, I would say, a bit more stable. Part of it is remortgages. This is due to interest rates going down in recent months.
Even remortgages are, it's not going to be one quarter of remortgages. It's possibly going to be longer.
Thank you.
Next question is from Tommaso Nieddu Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Hello, and thank you for taking my question. Looks like a strong start of the year. I have a few questions. The first one is on margins. The improvement in margins has been outstanding this quarter. Maybe can you help us understand, especially in the Mavriq division, what were the drivers in profitability? If you can, business lines in particular. The second question is on lease. I remember in Q4, we were talking about a potential deterioration in the outlook. Did anything change? It seems to have been one of the main drivers in the BPO division. A third question, a more qualitative one, perhaps on the cultural integration with Verivox and the operational differences. Any insights there would be appreciated. Thank you.
Okay. I'll take the first and the third. The margin expansion is simple. We have different businesses and different structures, but there are some that have mostly fixed costs, like insurance or insurance-related businesses, apart from traffic acquisition costs, online marketing. All the other costs are basically fixed. These businesses, as they grow, tend to have expanding margins. In the past, this was already happening, but the mix was always switching in a way that was unfavorable. Historically, what we had was lots of businesses that were steadily growing and expanding their margins, but it was masked by a rebalancing between different businesses. Now everything is moving in a favorable direction. I would say all the mostly fixed-cost businesses, as they grow, continue to see expanding margins.
This includes, I don't know, Rastreator in Spain, which is mostly insurance, our insurance business in Italy. Then you have mortgages that had been suffering quite a lot and also in terms of margins in previous years that finally had a recovery volume. You also have an expansion there. It's a bit more variable, but still there was a margin expansion there. It's a more favorable alignment of planets. Many things have already been expanding for quite a while, but were masked by other effects. In terms of cultural integration, I think we don't expect any issues. I mean, of course, Germany is different from Spain, which is different from France. So far, we have nice colleagues, and we've just started working together.
We have a very similar culture in terms of, and this was also an important thing in driving the deal in a way, that we are customer-focused. Our approach, just as the approach of Verivox, is to treat the customers, the consumers, with respect, honestly, with integrity. It is not a sales culture. It is a customer-focused culture, and that helps a lot. Of course, we will need to do a lot of work, but we do not have any particular concern, not more than we had in other situations. Actually, we also have a lot of experience in dealing with integration projects now.
Yeah, we are having [Foreign language] .
No, they always tell us, okay, if you want to say something more funny, we can say that every time we do a meeting in Germany, but this was also with our lawyers, but also with the guys of the company, first time we see people, the first thing that they say is, "You're on time." It is like they're surprised that we are on time. Of course, that's something I would never say to anybody. We are on time, so I think we are fine.
All right. Going to the question on the lease, I hope my wording hasn't given too much importance to the contribution. I mean, lease is one of the business lines that is growing, and given the fact that it's bigger in relative terms, growing adds to the EBITDA line more significantly. The headwinds are still there because they are structural. As of today, we haven't seen that significant impact, but I wouldn't say that the outlook has changed. Again, maybe I haven't stressed it enough. Here, we have a very, very, very strong performance of Moltiply Mortgages relative to last year. We are talking not even in terms of percentage. We are talking in revenue terms in multiples. This is really strong. Again, in terms of multiple, in terms of revenues, there is that price effect relative to the notary services.
Even taking that away, this is a very, very strong performance. That is really what is driving the growth, especially in this first quarter, which for our business line was a very tough comparison to the first quarter of 2024. Moltiply Mortgages is really the key engine of this performance for the BPO side.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you also for the insights. Thanks.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. Next question is a follow-up from Alexandra Arsova, Equita. Please go ahead.
Hi again. Just a follow-up with a couple of curiosities. The first one, it's just on the insurance broking. You are still witnessing an increasing trend in premiums. Since we are seeing some normalization in inflation, I was wondering if there is also some normalization on the insurance broking side. The second one is on marketing costs. If I remember correctly, last year, there were a couple of quarters where margins were a little bit worse than expected due to some additional marketing costs since you were expecting some acceleration in mortgages. I was wondering if this year you are comfortable with the marketing costs or maybe you are thinking to increase them or how you see the competition out there and if you're seeing more pressure and then more need to do some marketing advertising or whatever. Thank you.
Okay. On the marketing costs, I would say, no, we do not see anything changing in a material way compared to Q1. Of course, you could have fluctuations. Sometimes you are better at controlling things. Sometimes you react a bit later. No, the landscape, and this is, I think, looking at the different geographies, nothing seems to be changing. Sorry. The first question, just because I am getting on a cut, so I lost a little bit of the first question. Can you repeat it?
Yeah, sure. On insurance premium, if you are still experiencing an increasing trend?
Okay. Yeah. There is still a little bit of inflation in terms of premium. Insurance in general has been a steadily growing business for a very long period of time. Of course, it tends to accelerate a bit if there is a bit more inflation. Irrespective of that, it has been growing double digits for quite a long period of time. It is continuing to do so. In doing this, by the way, because of this fixed-cost base, it tends to achieve continuously growing margins.
Thank you.
For any further question, please press star and one on your telephone. Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time.
All right. Thank you, everyone, for attending this call. As always, we are available for one-on-ones. If any of the investors are interested in interacting with us and with further and follow-up questions, thank you, everyone, and enjoy the rest of the spring. Bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over. You may disconnect your telephones.