Prior year. Moving two further columns to the right, you can see expenses were more or less on the level of the first half of fiscal year 2024. In conclusion and summing up, on the consolidated group level, revenue was EUR 112 million, and gross profit margin was at 6%. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 22%, bringing our adjusted EBITDA to EUR 25 million. The group's adjusted EBITDA of EUR 22 million corresponds to a margin of 20%. Next page. Coming here to the next page, we come to our financial levels structure, and I would like to run you briefly through this. End of June, the net debt loans amounted to EUR 77 million, with cash of EUR 26 million. We are left with loans of EUR 51 million. Furthermore, adding EUR 19 million from other financial liabilities and subtracting EUR 17 million of net debt refinancing brings us to EUR 53 million in total net debt.
If you compare that to EBITDA of the last 12 months, this corresponds to a leverage of 1. As our limit for KPI is somewhat 2.5x EBITDA, we consider our current financial position as more than conservative. This concludes the first part of our presentation, and I'll now hand over to Paul, who's in charge of our acquisitions team. Paul?
Thank you, and hi everyone. As usual, let me start the operational deep dive with a quick look at Bike leasing. As already hinted at during our full year's earnings call last week, the growth of Bike leasing's corporate customer base continued throughout Q2. The number of corporates now stands at around 78,000, with around 3.9 million employees behind them, representing a year-over-year growth of 17% and 8% respectively. This also shows you that the onboarding was particularly strong in SMEs. With approximately 71,000 units, the number of brokered bicycles in H1 was below the previous year's level, primarily due to extreme discounts within retail and an increasing number of blocked customers due to deteriorating credit scores across Germany. You might ask now, why should discounts within retail actually have a negative effect on newly leased bicycles since we are only a solution? Irrationally, that's how it is.
A lot of retailers have started not discounting bicycles that go into leasing programs to counteract the commissions of leasing platforms. Hence, just as an example, if you get offered a 50% discount on a cash purchase compared to savings on the non-discounted price through leasing, it makes more sense to buy, at least if you have the disposable income to do so. This is also underlined by the fact that the average bike financed through bike leasing has not seen a large decrease over the last months, meaning heavily discounted bikes are not being leased. This being said, H1 last year was also unusually strong on a full year comparison you can see on the right-hand side of this page. In 2023, H1 had a share of annual units of around 52% and 53% respectively, meaning that you could say H1 and H2 were broadly speaking the same.
Last year, however, H1 had a percentage share of 8%, mainly driven by the deteriorating consumer behavior in the second half of the year. Last but not least, the growth of corporate customers at Prob onio is also continuing development. Since acquiring the company in April last year, with upselling starting at the end of August, we have now grown the number of corporate customers by more than threefold, from around 800 to around 2,500 by end of June. Nevertheless, just looking at the number of Bike leasing customers is a significant way ahead of us. Turning over to the next page for a more operational update. As already announced a couple of months ago, and you might have seen that, Bike leasing decided to introduce a new partner participation model from August 1 this year onwards.
Bike leasing historically refrained from collecting a commission from its retailers in comparison to our competitors for the business and even paid a premium for corporate customers recommended by retailers. Unfortunately, it became more and more obvious that only a select number of retailers understood this key advantage that Bike leasing offered, while the majority did not differentiate between Bike leasing and other providers. You can just, let's say, think about what I said five minutes ago about the not discounted bikes going into leasing. This is, of course, one example of exactly that. This had to be fixed. Needed fixing. Hence, Bike leasing introduced its partner participation model as a fair system for all parties involved. The new model is based on a partner participation of 6% on every bike, however, with an absolute cap of EUR 300 net per bike.
As Bike leasing aims to continue a partnership approach with its retailers in relation to new customer acquisition, as it always has been, retailers see reimbursement of 50% or even 100% of the upfront fees activity end that year. As a step even further, not only a reimbursement, but also a 3% premium on top, starting from the 21st bike onwards that were ordered by customers recommended by those retailers. To phrase it less technically, retailers that benefit from Bike leasing's customer base and volume without providing reciprocal support pay a partnership fee going forward, which is only fair if bike leasing bears all the sales and marketing costs themselves otherwise. Retailers with limited or normal support are reimbursed 50% or 100% respectively. This means every retailer can return to their status quo, meaning no fees at 100% reimbursement.
Lastly, those retailers that actively support bike leasing and help us increase the customer base will earn even more than they did before, meaning the 3% on top. Not only is this a fairer system for bike leasing [Foreign language] vis-à-vis its retailers, but also fairer among the retailers themselves. If you think about it like this, a retailer who actively waved our flag, did company events with us, etc., earned the same margin per bike as did their neighbor, who did nothing but benefit from the volume generated by those activities. Now, they're actively rewarded for the partnership work you do with us, bike leasing. With this, turning over to IHSE. As mentioned by Marco earlier, revenue at IHSE grew very slightly year- over- year. Though their H1 revenue was broadly in average revenue levels over the last few years, as you can see on the right-hand side of this page.
This, despite the turbulences in relation to the postponed annual report that naturally caused a lot of operational distraction. In addition, the revenue was not only group level, but also across the regions EMEA, Americas, and Asia-Pacific, even though within APAC there was a shift away from China to other APAC. On a very positive note, we see that in H1 our investments in various certification business development activities within the defense segment are starting to pay off now. While the government and defense vertical already showed a 20% weight in fiscal year 2024, this increased to even 44% in H1 of this year. While those projects usually have a long lead time until they turn to revenue, they usually come hand in hand with even higher gross margins than the usual IHSE projects.
This is also what you can see in the gross margin development of IHSE in H1, which increased significantly. On the next page, also a less quantitative and operational update on what's going on at IHSE. In H1, IHSE achieved two new product-related milestones. Firstly, IHSE's secure extenders were approved for the NATO Information Assurance Product Catalog, or in short, NIAPC, meaning that these IHSE devices offer the highest level of protection for all NATO data classifications. This is another milestone in the ongoing expansion of our presence and relevance within the government and defense space. Secondly, IHSE announced the upcoming launch of its new Draco Xstreme extender generation. This new device generation is based on a completely new hardware platform and implements IHSE's JPEG-XS video compression algorithm for higher compression efficiency.
What that means for less technical, myself, you can have the same data transfer across it with less bandwidth in the customer's network behind that, which makes it cheaper and more efficient. This concludes my section, and handing back over to Marco for the outlook.
Yeah, thank you, Paul. Switching over to the two pages of today's presentation, our outlook for the fiscal year 2025. As mentioned at the beginning, we expect revenue between EUR 225 million and EUR 235 million, corresponding to solid organic growth of 10%- 15%+ 15% compared to fiscal year 2024. For adjusted EBITDA, the group plans a range of EUR 50 million-EUR 55 million, which represents a decline of -15% to -23% compared to the adjusted EBITDA for the 2024 reporting period. As part of the ongoing transformation of bike leasing from a single product provider to a multi-benefit platform, the 2025 fiscal year is expected to include significantly higher expenses for personnel and other operating costs. These increased expenses are primarily driven by the strategic growth initiatives, particularly the rollout of the digital multi-benefit platform, ponio.de, and the development of the used bike sales platform, bike2future.de, established in 2024.
Despite initial signs of recovery in the German bicycle market, the overall environment remains changing. High inventory levels among bicycle retailers continue to lead to significant discounts in retail, which impacts not only the resale prices of used bikes, but also the demand for new company bikes. The Executive Board expects this situation to persist into the second half of 2025, and this is reflected accordingly in the full year forecast of 2025. A significant portion of the higher expenses in this year will be offset by the introduction of a bicycle dealer commission, as Paul just mentioned, which became effective on August 1 and is already common practice among most competitors. Please note that this forecast assumes that there will be no further change in the scope of consolidation within Brockhaus Technologies . The reason for this approach is the difficulty in predicting the nature of future acquisitions.
We do not believe that any estimate is sufficiently reliable, even though we are constantly working towards finding the next hidden gem in the market. That concludes our presentation, and we are now happy that I would like to hand over to the operators. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press nine and star on your telephone keypad. In case you wish to withdraw your question, please press three. Please press nine and star to register for a question. We have a question coming in from Lukas Spang, Tigris Capital. Over to you.
Yes, thanks. Hi, good afternoon, gentlemen. I would be interested in the, again, on the of Prob onio. You showed now 2,000 and 2,500, which is roughly 1,000 more than end of 2024. The first part of the question is, would you think that this could be a fair assumption or a fair run rate going forward? Let's say six months and go and beyond. You have more than one year of the acquisition, and you mentioned that you have started with the product upselling activities in August last year. What is your experience in terms of price per employee on the product side?
Maybe to take the first part regarding onboarding speed going forward. Of course, we won't give out a forward-looking statement on that. Just to phrase it more generally, it would be a shame if we, let's say, gain traction and experience and do more work with Prob onio just for the curve to flatten down again. What we see is after now a year, a bit more than a year of ownership and also sales conversations, that the sales cycle is significantly longer than initially expected. You always win, especially in the SME segment, you win customers on a frequent basis without doing a lot of work. On the enterprise side, we realized that the sales cycles are super long because it's multiple teams involved on the corporate side, budgetary questions involved.
They usually start, if they decide for it, with a small pilot group within a larger enterprise to test it out for a couple of additional months before rolling it out to more teams. Even then, it's not a switch of pilot phase completed, now everyone gets it, but it dribbles down, so to say, through an enterprise, which is something that we are having as a learning here. The second part of your question was related to, sorry, could you repeat that?
What is your experience until now in terms of the average price per ?
Yeah, we can't disclose that, also because it differs really from customer to customer. There is, of course, a couple of even free benefits that you could use to, let's say, avoid budgetary questions internally. There are also some, let's say, very prominent benefits. However, they come hand in hand with higher costs for the employer. Just, let's say, as one example, vouchers. Many people think vouchers are something new. Something that is in the German Mittelstand since ages already is vouchers for petrol stations. The difference is that previously, people have picked them up physically, and now they can do it just digitally through Prob onio. The pricing of our different modules is available online, so everyone can see that. However, we won't, let's say, give an expected number per user what we expect to earn so far.
Is it like you expected or higher or lower than when you bought Prob onio?
We can't disclose that really, also because, to be very honest, it differs too much from customer to customer. We have some customers that jumped on board directly with the all-in-one package, which you would have not expected them to take up. Some of them start with only a very, very small package at the same time. It is very hard to say at this point in time. I think it becomes clearer the more customers we actually onboard.
Okay. On the enterprise area, what is the current split in terms of enterprise versus small and medium companies?
Actually, I don't have the split. I know that we have some enterprise customers, especially those that are very loyal Bike leasing customers as well. As I said before, in those cases, they have not rolled it out to each and every employee yet. We have a couple of, let's say, call them enterprise customers, but the vast majority is also in the SME space, which is not very much a surprise because the majority of Bike leasing customers are SMEs.
Okay. Last question on Prob onio. Last time we discussed your expectation from last year concerning the mid-single- digit and EBITDA contribution for this year. I don't want to repeat the question again, but from another perspective, what is the current cost base of Prob onio, if you can share maybe some light in this regard?
We don't split that out because it's also, let's say, intrinsically embedded in Bike leasing by the time now, right? Of course, we have some differentiated headcounts that we can split and some other operating expense that we could split. At the same time, there is a lot of, let's say, crossover work going on as well. Splitting that up, you would then also need to prorataize, I don't know, management time and capacities, cross-functional development, etc. Even if I would have the split in front of me, it would not be accurate.
Will they stay separate brands in the future, or do you also consider to bring them together as one brand?
A very good question that we are considering, but the reality is Bike leasing is a very strong brand, and Prob onio is, let's say, an ever stronger becoming brand. I don't think it makes sense to change one into the other, but it's more a question of how you can harmonize the brands with each other.
Yeah, okay. Thanks.
Next up is Kai Kindermann from Montega AG.
Yes, thank you. Hello. I'm here on behalf of Christoph Hoffmann, and I have a question with regard to the shareholder structure. According to the last two annual reports, Mr. Brockhaus's share increased 1% from 21.4%- 22.4%, and we couldn't find any director's dealings applications. Could you please explain how this increase took place?
I can take that as well, but Marco to jump in if I'm mistaken here. I think it's not an increase per se, but it's a change in, let's say, percentage voting rights due to the buyback that we did. We did a, if you remember, a share buyback end of 2023, it was, in the amount of 5% of shares outstanding. Those, accordingly, don't have voting rights anymore, which automatically increases everyone's voting percentage. This is what happened here. That's why there's no director dealing because it was not a dealing.
Thank you. Just as a follow-up, are there any restrictions on insider purchases, or are they possible again with the publication of the half-year report?
Hello, this is Marcel speaking. This is something we cannot comment on, sorry, about. If we have to ad hoc any important information, we certainly will do so ASAP. If not, this is something which cannot be communicated to the outside.
Okay, that's it from my side. Thank you.
At the moment, there are no further questions. If you have any additional questions, please press nine and star. We're coming to the next questioner. It is Sebastian Weidhüner from Paladin Asset Management. Over to you.
Hi, good afternoon. To start with some add-on on Prob onio, you mentioned free benefits by Prob onio. To get it clear, are there any corporate clients in the 2,500 who don't pay anything?
Honestly, I don't know. There might be some older clients that have only, let's say, a limited amount of basically free benefits. I'm not aware of, let's say, a big share of clients who have been onboarded for free because they wouldn't bring us anything, right?
Okay, right. Could you please share how much or how many employees those 2,500 corporate clients represent?
We don't share that. We might add that at a later point in time, but so far, it's not a KPI that we're communicating.
Okay. In the previous H1 and also in the Q1 report, you disclosed the gross margin of the bike brokerage business. I was missing this kind of information. Could you please provide an update for Q2 or for the full first half of the year?
Good catch. There's no specific reason why we deleted it. It's stable, so there was no significant change there. We just excluded it because we added it for some additional clarity. At the same time, the returning bikes business is, let's say, business model imminent. We can't really split those two, at least yet. That's why we just circled back to coming back to the consolidated gross margin for Bike leasing. If you would scale out, it's still stable as reported in the past.
Okay. Stable would mean 92%, right?
90% ish. I don't know the exact number, but at that level, yeah.
Okay. You mentioned the cash flow was due to a delayed payout of a big refinancing. Could you please explain the reason for this? More generally, would you say that refinancing partners have become more cautious or less willing to purchase receivables, or do they demand a higher risk premium?
No, not really. Maybe by way of explaining it again, technically, Bike leasing always purchases the bicycle from the retailers because it's just quicker, because you need to mimic a cash purchase at the retailer. Hence, we purchase them in T-0. At the same point in time, Bike leasing turns around and sells them off to leasing companies. In the case of external leasing companies, we get the cash in, I don't know, one or two days' delay. In case we sell it to our own leasing subsidiary, it's, of course, sold off, but it's still intercompany. The leasing company, again, turns around, let's say, quite quickly and sells it off to either banks, meaning forfeiting, or securitizes it, or takes up loans to refinance them or cash.
The speed in which, in all those, let's say, non-recourse cases I just explained, so giving it to external leasing companies or in our internal company, giving it to banks and forfeiting or to other investors in terms of securitizing, the speed in which we get the, let's say, reimbursements or the payments for those receivables differs from institution to institution. Some of them are more, let's say, linked into our processes already where we get the cash quite quickly. Sometimes you have, especially in the securitization part, structures that only purchase receivables on a weekly or biweekly basis. In this case, it was unfortunate that the, let's say, purchase date was just shortly after the cutoff of June 30. This is the only reason there's no, let's say, increased caution or so. It's just standard processes, and the payment date, unfortunately, was in early July.
Okay, got it. No higher risk premiums from the buy side?
No, it's rather that the interest rates have, again, been decreasing over the last month. They have been increased with the interest rate increases, which is why we shifted from a fixed to a floating rate system. Over the last month, they have started decreasing again.
Thank you. With us for now, after Q1, you reported a year-over-year decline in brokered bikes of just 10% in April, and then even a 6% increase for the first three weeks of May. The H1 number should imply a drop again in June. You already have data for July and the first week of August. How do you assess the current trend based on these numbers?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. June was a bit of a disappointment because coming out of Q1 and into April and May, we thought that, let's say, the bottom of the market has been surpassed. Apparently, this wasn't the case, right? That's what costs us a couple of units. The good thing is that the delta to previous year is becoming smaller and smaller. I think in Q1, we were still some 20% behind the previous year, and now we are some 12% behind the previous year. As I showed you before, we had a pretty strong H1, unusually strong H1 last year, and a weaker H2. The comparables against which we fight, so to say, become smaller now in H2. We think the number will improve. If you listen to the bicycle industry and go to Uruguay, you basically hear the same talk every year.
It's just being postponed by another 12 months, right? The bottom of the market and excess inventories, etc., has been reached. Six months later, it is announced that it has not been reached yet, and there's still excess supplies. We actually don't have the crystal ball and can tell you when the market and especially the discount situations will normalize again.
To be clear, did the delta fall below 12% in July?
I don't know. I don't have it in front of me. B, we wouldn't comment on that now on a month-to-month basis.
Okay, thank you. That was it for now. Maybe I return later for some final questions. Thank you.
The next question comes from Guillaume Pech from Bercorak. Over to you.
Yes, hello. My question has just been answered. I was going to ask you about the gross profit as well. That was not disclosed in Q2, but Paul, you did answer it. Thank you.
Great. Yeah, again, there was no specific reason. We can also re-add it, but we thought it's business model imminent, so we come back to the consolidated figure.
Thank you. We are coming to the next questioner. It is Werner Friedmann from Ascendis.
Hello, and good afternoon. I have two questions, actually. The first is on maybe again this topic of selling the used bikes. Maybe you can just give a number of what the sales volume in H1 was that you sold used bikes for. Is this a part of, if I look into your half-year report, I see the sales mix, and there's a EUR 35.2 million sold products number. Is it catched here?
Correct. We are just looking up the number, but when you look at sold products within bike leasing, that is the number of used bicycles sold. It's the EUR 35 million in H1 this year.
That's a lot. Okay.
Yeah, that's a lot. To also be transparent here, this includes each and every bicycle that comes out of the leasing contract, irrespective if it comes to us physically or not. I think last year, the split for a normal leasing term ends after 36 months. We always offer the employees who have used it to purchase their own bicycle, so to say. Last year, I think it was 93% of employees who take this option. Anyway, those 93% still run through our revenue figure with a close to 0% or ± 0% gross margin. They are included here.
Okay. Maybe you could be more specific in this shopping, I think it's in the Darmstadt Weiterstadt. What's the sales currently there, and what are you expecting for next year?
Yeah, we haven't reported that yet. We can think about adding that in the next report. That's a good point. So far, the sales in the physical store have been on a lower but increasing level. It has been increasing month- by- month. You can also not look at the physical store separately, you need to factor in also the B2C online store and the B2B online store because we have connected our retailers that we anyway have on the platform. At Bike leasing, we have connected them also to the B2B online shop of Bike2Future. It's not only B2C going through them, but also B2B.
Okay. That's understood. If you can add that in the future, it would help in interpreting the numbers. The second question actually is on your new dealer agreements. It would be to gain more insight into the relevance of the bike dealers as a sales channel. How many of the 71,000 bikes in H1 actually were referred by bike dealer retailers? Is that only 1,000 pieces, or is that a meaningful number?
Also, I don't have the exact split in front of me, but it's unfortunately a low %. That's also one of the reasons, as I hinted at earlier, why we introduced this partner participation model now, the new one, because we see that it's always the same, let's say, select number of retailers who understood the advantage of our commission-free model. They were actively waving our flag and pushing us in the market. They are also the ones that should now earn the 3% premium, by the way, right? They are being honored through the new model, and they like it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of retailers didn't care about the differences, but they treated everyone the same way.
That's also why we switched now to this system, because we can, let's say, we make the goods or we make the active retailers profit from the new model, while everyone else needs to then also pay a fee towards us as to everyone, because if everyone's treated the same way, then we can also get a commission.
Okay, understood. Thanks a lot.
A follow-up question comes from Lukas Spang, Tigris Capital.
Yes, thanks. One follow-up on IHSE. You showed the more or less stable development on the revenue side for, yeah, several years. In the past, we know there was this China impact, which was bringing down the revenue for the company. Now going forward, we also discussed that in the past, that it's A, not your ambition that you have flat revenues or even declining revenues at a portfolio company, and B, that you have just a margin like currently. You rather aim for a 30% EBITDA margin at your companies or portfolio companies. Going into the second half now of the year, and also already looking into 2026, what are the measures you are doing on IHSE to bring the revenue growth back on a substantial growth? Let's say at least double- digit and also in terms of the profitability.
To start maybe with the second piece. The profitability at IHSE is always a function of top line, because if top line comes, the margin more or less automatically falls out of it. Anyway, we have a close monitoring on the operational efficiency there, right? You can have a certain fixed cost basis with an eye on potential revenue. If you do not achieve revenue for an extended period of time, then you also need to think about if the cost base is still adequate. The more interesting question is, how do we come back to a double-digit growth, which IHSE has been achieving? If you look at a 15, 16-year+ time horizon, they have achieved a, it was sometimes a bumpy road, but over the long term, have achieved a 10%-ish top line CAGR. The answer is by systematic segment business development.
We have more mature markets, which is air traffic control or broadcasting. We have now worked a lot and invested a lot of time and money into bringing up a third vertical to a similar maturity level, which is defense or government and defense, which has worked out nicely. This is, I believe, what we need to replicate, right? Bring those forward and at the same time look at which other verticals are there to be systematically built up. The more you have, hopefully, the more diversified you are then also from solitary projects, which, however, will always be part of the nature of IHSE. There will always be, in some years, some very big projects that are then hard comps to fight against in the next year. We tend to focus on the baseline revenue. That is, of course, the goal to bring that up again.
Do you already see some fruits of this in your pipeline or your lead generation and discussions with either existing customers or new customers?
I mean, the pipeline usually looks good. The question is just how quickly do those projects, A, are they being run by IHSE? B, how quickly do they turn into order intake? C, how quickly do they turn from order intake into revenue? I think we have shown that in the defense space, we have built up quite some good project relationships that have brought our margin up in H1. However, those also were projects that had a very long lead time upfront. Those are not topics, let's say, that were originated in H1 and already converted in H1, but they all, let's say, had much longer lead times. The benefit of that is that once you're designed into such a system, you basically collect more orders from every system that is being sold.
Going into the second half of the year, do you think the revenue growth will pick up or further pick up?
Yeah, without being the boo man, we don't guide on an individual basis, of course, as we have never done before.
No, from a more qualitative perspective.
I mean, we have a good pipeline in front of us, yeah? A good pipeline order backlog. We are positive, but you always have to see which projects still are being realized in the correct year, yeah? You saw last year what happened if someone wanted to change that, which led to a hefty postponement on our side for the annual report, which is incorrect to do. The nature of the business is a project business. Even if I would hand you out the project pipeline for H2, unfortunately, you can't be sure that all those projects are being realized also in H2.
Yeah, sure.
That's why even qualitatively, it's hard for me to give you a judgment because we have seen everything. We have seen all the projects that we see in the pipeline turn out to be in the same period that we expected them to come. Those are then very good years. We have seen very bad years where everything is being postponed, basically. That's unfortunately the name of the game.
Yeah, okay. Thanks.
At the moment, there are no further questions. If you have any additional questions, please press nine and star now. The follow-up question comes from Sebastian Weidhüner, Paladin Asset Management.
Hi again. In the first half of the year, we saw ERP implementation costs of EUR 2.3 million and one-off compliance costs of EUR 3.0 million. How should we think about these two items for the second half of the year?
Hi, this is Yannick from the Finance department. To start with the second one, the compliance costs will be significantly reduced in the second half, not as high as in the first half of the year. For the ERP system implementation, I think it should be quite constant over the next quarter.
Okay. Do you plan to end these costs, the ERP costs in this year, or are we seeing some in 2026 again?
A good question that we can't answer, to be honest, because we need to see how the implementation and rollout continues. As you can imagine, it's a quite complex project. ERP projects are always complex, but yeah, we are making meters here step by step. We are not yet, let's say, close to the finish line. There might be more to come. If it ends this year or if it shifts also into next year, honestly, we don't know yet.
Okay. Thank you. Also, in the first half, bike leasing paid a EUR 10 million dividend. From my point of view, Brockhaus Technologies was able for the first time to upstream your share to the holding, even though the acquisition financing hasn't been fully repaid yet. Can you comment on that?
Yeah, that's technically correct. The reason is good relationships with our financing partners. In that case, the normal procedures would have been that they are mandatorily repaid on the EUR 5 million as well. We were given the option to upstream that into Brockhaus AG, which, of course, is more favorable for us because that gives us optionality.
In the last call, we talked that a bike leasing dividend would be needed to do a share buyback again. Is this possible now, or how should we look at this?
No, without having the exact numbers in front of me, but a dividend of, let's say, what was it, EUR 5.something million that came up were not sufficient to, let's say, fill up the, how's it called?
Return earnings.
Yeah, return earnings sufficiently for a new buyback. There needs to come more for this.
Okay, clear. Are you planning to repay the subordinated loan in full in view of the expected strong cash flow in H2?
It's, of course, one of our key priorities. We want to repay it because it's a quite high interest rate that we pay on it. Since we own 95% of the hold core, it's also 95% of the interest that is, let's say, EPS relevant for us. You can be sure it's on top of our agenda.
Okay, thanks. Two questions left. The first one, you state in your report that Prob onio and Bike2Future cost EUR 5 million in additional OpEx. However, the delta between gross profit and adjusted EBITDA in this segment was EUR 12 million. Could we assume that the remaining EUR 7 million is to the brokerage business?
If you mean with brokerage business, Bike leasing as a standalone entity?
Yeah.
Yes.
Can you get more specific about the M&A pipeline? Have there been any deals in the last eight months that were close to completion? Are you at the moment working on something there?
Yeah, we are not giving, Marco?
Maybe I jump in here, Marco Brockhaus. We are not guiding this, you know that. Yes, we are looking at certain transactions in the market, always with the same high level of selection detail. Yes, sure, we are looking at transactions and also on a certain one, but nothing yet which we can talk about.
Thank you very much.
Welcome.
Any additional questions? Please press nine and start now. No, it's just withdrawn. There are no further questions.
All right. As there appear to be no more questions, thank you all very much for attending today's earnings call of Brockhaus Technologies AG. I would like to use this stage and moment to thank our employees for their outstanding work and performance, as well as our shareholders for their continued trust and support. Thank you very much for that. Goodbye and have a great day. Thank you.