Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the webcast results Q3 twenty twenty of SuperPart SE. At our customers' request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen only mode. And after the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. May I now hand you over to Ronnald Slabke, who will lead you through this conference.
Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah. Thank you, and welcome from my side to the q three presentation of Hyperport. So as you know already, Hyperport is growing. We have a top line growth of 50% for the first nine months in 02/2020. So we despite an challenging environment, the approach to digitalize the credit market, the housing market, insurance market in Germany is working well, and we are gaining market share in an overall more or less stable environment.
Talking about environment first. So coronavirus was there and for a major part of the first nine months. Since since March, we are, as a society, as a country, infected with the corona crisis and in these three industries, credit, housing, and insurance, it had an it had an impact not comparable as other industries, but let's say, the industries are stable, but they are operating in a different environment right now. Especially operations got tricky in this environment while the p and l's of our clients are, let's say, only minor affected during this crisis by now. Okay.
When we talk about the first nine months, then it's important to understand that, yeah, there were some ups and downs by now during this period. Especially in the mortgage market, we saw a strong first quarter, including the March, which was already in a lockdown. With the plus 10% reported by Deutsche Bundesbank, we saw a growing market comparable to last year. Second quarter was still growing, plus 6%, and a clear sign that the interest of consumers in redefining the housing situation after the lockdown was a huge change in the society. You could see that how important the your own four walls got during the the beginning of the crisis.
So a little bit surprising for us here was that third quarter was weaker from the market side. Yeah. The total quarter ended with minus 4% compared year over year to last year. We started weak. July and August were minus five, minus 6%.
September is again on the level like last year or was. When you look on this, then there are multiple options to explain this market situation in the third quarter. Maybe people were happy after the difficult second quarter to to enjoy their freedom again, to travel, make holidays with the children. So optimizing their living situation and financing a new home was not so important in this time. The last last year's third quarter was a strong quarter, especially July and August, thanks to some interest in prices.
So can be that, let's say, it all, let's say, wash off the slow start in the holiday season, and the September shows that we are back to normal so that we can stay confident that the fourth quarter did not be affected significant by the corona crisis environment. So this this state about the mortgage market. What stays intact is that even in this environment in the mortgage market, everyone understands that an increased digitalization of the whole value chain from consumer via adviser to the back office is needed more than ever, and that it's a must have if you want to survive future lockdowns. We are working with our clients throughout this last half year intensive in pushing projects forward. But what we see is that banks are in a stressed environment right now and that they reallocate their resources on a short notice.
Not that their p and l is really affected, but they their organizations were not made for this environment. And so the the stress of the organizations leads to a slowdown of strategic projects, and this is what we drive forward with them to digitalize sales funnel after sales funnel in their industries and in their businesses is slowed is is slowed down by the virus as well. And this counts as well for other b two b partners that we have that in this environment, traditional organizations are not as agile as they would be in an a non COVID environment. So we even when the need increases during coronavirus, their ability to execute is weaker. And if we see as well in the mortgage market, so a number of new clients, the growth numbers of projects, of migration projects growth, but the transact transaction numbers are not as fast accelerating as they should with the progress that we do here.
I will talk more about this later when we talk about our development in the retail banking industry. So before this, looking on other product areas and markets we are operating in, next to mortgages in the credit market comes to us the corporate finance and the personal loan market. Corporate finance, you can say that German Mittelstand is hit hard by coronavirus, so demand went up during the last quarters, especially during second and third quarter. We could advise clients and broker some subsidies subsidized loans from KW, but the typical project that we do during the summer were slowed down. So the additional fees from advising in the current environment compensated the slowdown of the other project but didn't come on top as we expected earlier.
So, yeah, in the midterm and looking forward, we expect that financing Middlesecht in Germany will be more complicated than it was in the past. The banks will be much more sensitive regarding external shocks. And let's say after working out their their web banks, they will be more picky than they were in the past. And because of this, services like RAM Capital will be needed more because it will be it will get tough for Mittelstand to finance itself. So external help will be needed, plus more transparency in the market and the funding port, we are right now positioning a digital platform for especially this increase increasement of the efficiency of markets and transparency in this, yeah, a credit market of German Mittelschlund.
So we are well positioned, but the market is is fragile right now. For the consumer credit market, it's the third largest segment in the credit platform. We saw right with the first lockdown that banks, let's say, restricted their lending policies because of fear of losses because of recession. In the summer, it was weakened again, and the restrictions were taken back partly. Now with the second lockdown coming, banks again get more picky in what they are willing to loan to consumers just on the solvency of the consumer.
It sets without any additional collateral like a mortgage. The and long term, we expect that we will come back to the pre corona situation. We have a quite healthy consumer lending market here in Germany, a very low default rate long term. So this sensitivity of the the banks in the current environment will normalize again when the the stress of the uncertainty regarding the length and the depthness of the recession is is over. This market is and it's the only one in the credit market.
We don't see additional impartments from digitalization. It's an ongoing process for the last five years already with a high speed. So so this is going forward. Everyone knows that personal lending will be fully digitalized as well, and it will be actually the first, and mortgages and corporate loans will be later. Okay.
For the private client segment, operating in the mortgage business as well, you can add that the need of the consumers for remote advice via conference calls increased during the second quarter. It during the first quarter, we see a norm saw a bouncing back and normalization. There is a group of consumers who still wants physical advice Face to face is preferred by a substantial number of consumers. So while in the third in the second quarter, a huge amount were closed remotely, Third quarter, we saw again offline business of our franchisees. So the what stated that especially younger consumers, well educated consumers stay with the remote advice because it's more practical for them.
And so if you look forward from the way how consumers will interact with their advisers, The the crisis will work work as a catalyst and increase the speed, but we will not see that consumer advice and mortgage business will be fully digitalized within a couple of quarters. This will take decades until it fully changes to a remote advice process. So what the state long term as well in when you look on the consumer side, especially, is that the crisis teaches everyone how important the own fault walls are. So home ownership got much more important here in Germany in the last two quarters, and we see an increase in demand on this side and because of this increasing prices of properties here in Germany. Yeah.
So this is a this is a is a healthy development. We are still far behind most of the developed world when you look on the property prices, so there is still a lot of growth potential just from the price increase here in Germany. And even with the second wave coming right now and a soft lockdown, which we see here in November in Germany, we don't expect a too dramatic fall in the number of transactions. So it will be a little less during the during the soft lockdown, but the increasing prices will compensate compensated partly already. So other industries, housing, real estate market, most of this, what I said about the mortgage market, is linked to the housing market.
So we saw that during the last two quarters, there was a slowdown in numbers of transactions. Third quarter was already getting better from the number of transactions. Prices decreased, as I say. The digital part of the process increased and needs to be increased. Midterm, we expect that demand will stay or even drive the prices up.
And the digitalization, especially in our target group, which are banks and their property sales agents, will stay high even if it's unfortunately like this that during the third quarter, we saw that banks are still challenged by the environment and can't focus on this strategic project and allocate resources needed so that we are moving fast forward and migrating them faster. More with this later. Property elevation was an area which was hit more than everything else in our in our portfolio because of the inability to inspect homes of people during the second quarter and the lockdown. This change in the third quarter. So from the consumer side and from the availability or accessibility of properties, we saw normalization.
The only thing which state where that some of our partner banks were not able to process all the applications they had and request the the audits and the evaluations is is sort this slowed down the growth rate there and creates such a stack of open evaluations that need to be made in the next couple of quarters. So some growth potential for us near term. The regulator here in Germany allowed more digitalization in the process, which is fine, which is helpful, which speeded up the digitalization in this area and makes us more confident about the investments we are doing here. This is a market to be changed. The housing industry, so the renting market here in Germany, saw a little impact during the first part of the crisis, the third quarter stayed the same.
So really a small number of defaults. Some projects are a little bit delayed on the on the development side, but nothing major. So you can say that housing is, in general, not affected by the coronavirus up until now. Just minor issues here. And as well, like in other industries, our partners are distracted from strategic projects to keep handling their day to day work.
This slows down something, but this is not a strategic or a sufficient change with this which will stay. The same goes here for the future. Let's say the pressure on digitalization went up a little bit during the crisis. They learned that it would have been easier with the with the ability that their workforce could work remotely, but it's an industry which is in general not under pressure because of the overall environment. And so let let's not expect too much impact here on the speed of change and speed of digitalization in this industry.
You can say that that it looks like this as well in the insurance industry. Just the competitiveness of new new players are is here more important, and so the direct to digitalization of insurance companies stayed during the third quarter. The impact on the industry on the side of premiums or losses was low by corona, but realization how dependent they are still are from the physical contact and offline services to the client Wi Fi. So the insurance world learned again as well during the last six months that digitalization is needed. We are the author there.
We are the only one capable to do this. And so let's say, the we we keep getting interest from the industry. But as well, like like in other industries, they are they are focused on day to day business and keeping the operation running away from strategic protests, slowdown, and lot of projects in the past, unfortunately. Okay. So overall market environment, that's it.
You can say we are in a stable environment overall. Just partners are slowed down because of operational reasons. We are gaining market share in this stable environment, and we, as HyperPort, are growing. We do this in a different speed. So when we look on the different segments of HyperPort, you will hear some, let's say, some small news and small updates here.
Let's start with your page on the credit platform. We saw for the first nine months a growth rate in average of 30% for all product areas for all product areas. Mortgage business is up 34% over the first nine months in a slightly positive market environment. First quarter market was minus four. Europe pays for us, again, double digit in the plus.
So we are gaining market share. Same goes for bidding society contracts, Bauschbahr, Hoxhaagen, which are typically linked to mortgage business. They are in line with this, just going a little bit slower because of the attractiveness of this product. A little bit different, the product segment, the personal loans. Because of the restriction on the lending policies, the overall market is down for the first nine months, and especially for third quarter, minus 7%.
We are slightly growing in this environment still, gaining traction on new clients. But let's say, especially in our special feature that we use as Eventide for the risk profile of banks. So banks don't want to lend to their clients, that they use your pays to outplay this business. We we see these restrictions, and we are hurt by these restrictions of other banks. So if one bank doesn't want to lend, a lot of other banks don't want to lend right now as well.
So especially in this riskier target group, it got a little bit more difficult, and we are losing there some revenue right now. But as I said earlier, yeah, we expect this to normalize again after the crisis and that this business comes back to where it was before, which will give them a nice positive impact of the on the growth rate of our personal loan business. So, you can say prime business and, less less prime business, they grow together. Right now, only the prime business is growing on your base. Okay.
There was a phone call in the green. Sorry for the interruption. Okay. Back to mortgage business and to the development in the different segments of the German mortgage market. And we see a strong gain in market share for Europase over the last nine months and the last quarter in all four segments.
But especially the cooperative banking sector and the savings bank sector is driving is driving our growth forward. In the corporate banking sector, we gained 85% year over year by now. And if they would not have such a trouble with their operation and reallocate their resources, we would be up to a 100% and more in this area. So corona slows us down here and slows our growth rate down here a little bit. Same goes for the semi bank side.
Without the corona effect, we would not be up only 35%. We would be up more than 50% in this sector. But as I said, banks have an operational issue with this crisis and to reallocate resources that they come strategic IT projects right now. Yeah. So in both sectors, we see a a strong sentiment to work with us.
They understood even better how important it is to digitalize. And, yeah, yeah, we expect in both sectors for the next years high growth rates and a fast gain in market share for the Europe based technology. So this sums up to a strong first nine months for the credit platform, plus 20%, 120,000,000 in revenue as a new record, and a clear double digit growth rate. You see here that it's the growth rate is a little bit less than the transaction volume growth rate. You see the impact of the slowdown in corporate finance and personal loan, especially.
On the profitability side, we increased our EBIT again. New record as well, 25,000,000 for the first nine months. Yeah. A little bit below expectation, we we wanted to keep the growth of all three core KPIs in line. Weaker third quarter here surprised us.
Let's say our cost side is not dependent on the revenue side, so it described our willingness to invest in the future in key account resources and IT development. And this this surprise of a weak third quarter environment resulted in an underperformance here for this quarter. We will adjust our investment willingness in the next quarters to make sure that this stays aligned again. So sorry for this coughing a little bit. It's my third call here today, and, yeah, it it tickles in my thought.
I'm pretty sure it's it's nothing to this has nothing to do with corona. Yeah. So it's different than the when you talk about the business in picture. Okay. Nothing to do with corona.
Private client business of doctor Klein. Our franchisees did a great job in the first nine months. We gained a lot of market share, plus 24% growth rate in the first nine months, above the historic numbers. Here, paid back that we were much more digital than most of our competitors are. Let's say, you can say, doctor Klein was the most digital adviser network out there during the corona crisis.
Here as well is slower in the third quarter on the on the growth rate. On one side, thanks to the market. On the other side, doctor Klein had an extremely good third quarter two thousand nineteen and extremely strong quarters, first and second. So we expect that or we see here that this slowdown is is more a base effect than a real slowdown in gaming market share. But it's a good news.
While in the second quarter, the it was getting difficult to recruit new advisers. This changed in the third quarter. 26 new advisers in the in the third quarter, and we are close to back to our long term growth rate of headcount of advisers of close to 10%. And 10% is our goal as an annual growth rate in in headcount. In addition, the productivity gains of Europace and the increased average launcher amounts brings this top line growth of 20% plus, which we are used to here in from doctor Chaney.
So doctor Klein finished their first nine months with record numbers as well. Double digit growth rates on revenue and the gross profit, especially in the comparison that we missed 24% of transaction volume and only 17% revenue increase, you see the impact of corona in the accuracy and predictability of closed mortgage. So the the conversion loss because transactions of clients are terminated or banks change their credit criteria is significant right now. So we see here that we lose some efficiency in this conversion loss because of the uncertainty around us, but still, let's say, double digit growth rate on revenue. Yeah.
But let's when it comes back to a normality, we will see a normalization of this conversion rate as well back to the pre corona level. And this means with the same number of transaction volume, we will increase our our revenue even more. Huge jump in profitability here. We had heavy investments in the last two years in key account resources to establish a better relationship with these hundreds of regional banks that Europase integrating the system and to really work with them and drive their conversion rates up, you need to invest in key account resources. Doctor Chang did this.
And because of this, got close strike their ideas with them, and this resulted in a historic high probability of this business here right now. Looking forward, we expect doctor Klein to finish with a record new high for this year and to continue its growth rate in the next year. So continued growth rate is, yeah, as well as something which is perfectly linked to the next segment and our real estate platform. We try to use our strong position in the mortgage market to gain strong positions in property sales and property valuation as well. Property sales is interesting for us because the link between transaction and mortgage is strong.
And as a consumer in a digital world world, you can expect that with every offer for a property you get, you get the information. If you are able to afford it, what does it cost you actually? And with every mortgage transaction as well, there is a valuation needed. And and in both markets, we see a high fragmentation and fragmented digital processes when they are digitalized at all. So we expanded both.
On the property sales side, we focus on the real estate agents of banks to leverage our long term relation with banks, and they are quite special need in our USP to to link the housing transaction and mortgage share with with each other. And on the property valuation side, banks are the clients and the customers. And this optimized integrated processes with the Europa system and with our long term trust and relation with banks, we see that we are able to gain market share here in this environment and gain from a lot of small intermediates which operate here or evaluators. Let's start with the sales side. We have a strong position in the savings bank industry already.
They incrementally increased it. Now 86% of all savings banks use FiO as their sales platform. We expand the reach of the sales platform. We expand the integration, and we expand the the services which are available on this. And this way drives the transaction based revenue models up.
On the other side, and this was, let's say, long term plan from us, and finally, we we are able to execute this. We are not keen on one offs and, let's say, project revenues and license revenues, which are onetime paid. So we transform this one offs to recurring revenue and increase our recurring revenue base step by step in this industry. Same goes for the ERP system for the housing industry, which is as well part of the segment here. And the combination of both that we are growing and transferring to recurring revenue that these partners are slowing down some of the project because of their need to handle this con environment and the the best interest in onetime revenues, unfortunately, resulted in a slowdown in total revenue that we are able to show to you, so minus of 6% to 40,400,000.0 only.
We we we had expected to show a growth rate here even with the or without this project business. Unfortunately, corona, yeah, didn't make it profitable. But let's say, in front of us lays growth and based on recurring revenue and not one offs. So recurring revenue, while we are quite strong in the savings bank industry already, there is a huge market open for us in the cooperative banking area. We increased our reach there from eight to 10%, so it's a relative 25% growth.
Yeah. Completely recurring our business models in the corporate banking industry. We have here a huge potential. We see that the need is even higher. Just the execution lacks again because of the the current environment.
But we expect this to continue to reach within the next years a similar penetration of the corporate banks like we have reached already in the service bank industry. And with the additional connection and integration of the mortgage services and other linked services and integratable services, even like evaluation, we see a huge revenue potential here on this sales platform. So I'd say already that Evaluation is a strong product area for our real estate platform. We were able, even within the corona environment, to sign up more partners for the value AG services. And based on the increasing numbers of business relations in the industry, in it drives the revenue up by 55% in the first nine months.
While the first quarter was very strong with a cohort of close to a 100%, Second quarter was weak because of the lockdown and the inability to access properties that need to be evaluated. Third quarter showed, again, a nice dynamic development here. So the industry is keen on a reliable integrated evaluation service that we are able to offer to them. We are investing here heavily in software development, in building this platform, in in integrating this platform with your case. Plus, we still have to scale still with a lot of workforce because of the lack of digitalization of this industry, and we can't build as fast as we scale right now.
And this is especially in the current environment, this was tricky as well because we saw quite the volatility and request by banks for evaluations. And on the other side, we had a growing workforce to execute this number of requests, and the volatility costed us money. So corona and and the crisis costed us real money here, but we see that the strategy to offer the industry a one stop solution for all their aviation needs integrated in their sales platform and in their execution platform is is a great opportunity for us. It's a huge market we are tackling here. Okay.
Housing associations, our traditional target group here presents a stable success for the first nine months. Transaction volume, more or less exactly in line with the first nine months of twenty nineteen. Revenue, slightly up. When you look on the quarterly results, you will see that we had a strong first and second quarter. First quarter was weak.
You can say a more intense holiday season plus not a significant impact from the interest side. So interest rates were pretty stable during the third quarter, and this industry reacts on volatility on the interest side. If interest rates changes, they are closing projects. So a slowdown in the third quarter, not linked to any problems in the industry. It's volatile market for us, and it was for a long time already.
So overall, for the total platform real estate means, let's say, still a pretty good revenue growth of 14% or gross profit 30%. A little bit slower than the credit platform and private clients even when this is a growth segment. So you see here the impact of corona on the growth rate. On the profitability, we already, end of last year, decided to invest heavily in the real estate platform because of the attractiveness for us, because of our strong position in the mortgage market. So, you know, let's say, we didn't expect to continue with this high profitability, especially driven by project business.
Yeah. On the other side, the plan was to stay more or less slightly profitable. So the the minus 1,900,000.0 for the first three quarters were not expected and are attribute to the corona environment that we see and which slows down too many of the projects or made it tricky for ValueEdge to execute the number of evaluations which they could have done in the second quarter. Looking forward, this will be a major growth segment for HyperBot in the fourth quarter and in the next years. And we will advise the speed of growth here up, so expect this to outperform private client and credit platform in the midterm future.
So growth rate and outperformance coming to the second growth segment, which we have within our group for the last five years. We invest heavily in software development and even acquisition of software companies in the insurance value chain. We are successful in integrating the technology, in getting in contact with our clients, in convincing our clients that the future is this for the whole insurance company for the whole insurance industry here in Germany is smart insure tech and the smart insure platform. And, you know, we we feel a strong sentiment in the market. And corona made it even more clear to everyone, and the need is is visible in the day to day work now that the traditional way of how the insurance business in Germany is run is not the future going forward.
And there is no other future than a fully day a fully digitalized platform for the 200 insurance companies. All the new incumbents, the Insurtechs, which try to compete are not sufficient and not successful when they try to operate as an insurance company as a whole. So the lemonades and ones of this world are niche players if if even existing in the German market from the number of contracts which they sign up for. So the the traditional industry, the 200 insurance companies need to integrate with these thousands of brokers and the millions of consumers on one digital solution, and there is only one digital solution out there which is providing this, and this is SmartInsurance. And the industry understands this.
The industry is more and more committed on even migrating their sales on SmartInsure. Just the execution of the IT project is terribly slow. And this, again, in the current environment, we see we see projects going forward, but slower than expected. And this results in a quite stable revenue and gross profit numbers for the segments. What you don't see here is that, in the CLSA platform, we are right now exchanging onetime revenue to recurring revenue on a fast basis.
We don't we don't want to have any projects anymore with the target groups. We want their transaction volume migrated on SmartInsure and paid depending on the volume, which is on SmartInsure, not paid by day or any other revenue stream. And so with the slowdown of the project on one side and the reduction in onetime revenue, you can't see our success in the market here in the top line in the figures. Yeah. So it's this is it's a pity.
We expect it to be a little bit farther here if not already. As you can see that in the profitability, we guided that we will be breakeven this year. You see that the slowdown in the project and in the speed of the migration keeps us in the small negative numbers, minus 1,000,000 here for the first nine months, but we are confident that there is no other future for the insurance industry. And there must be a moment where the players in the market, our partners, starts to act faster than they do right now. They still it looks like that they still need more pressure from the consumer side or more on new competitors.
And let's say the the new the the new market entrants on the sales side work with us as a platform. And if they are gaining traction, the traditional players will get under pressure. So much about the four segments and the update there. Total numbers of Hyperport, you know it's already double digit growth. Profitability, let's say stable for the first nine months.
This is in line with our long time track of growing heavily, and we keep growing even in this current environment which we see here with corona. We expect that we will end this year on this record numbers, top and bottom line, and that we will keep growing in the next years. And for this, we invested in the last two years heavily in Key Account Resource and IT Resources, and we keep this investment high even in this environment of corona. So from this, I would get back to the moderator to moderate the q and a session, please.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speaker, please dial 01 on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. And we haven't received any questions at this point.
Okay. Then it's back to me to finish this call. So around the world, and this is the English version of our podcast, Please stay healthy. Corona is the second corona virus is rising everywhere right now. So keep care of your family.
We keep care of growing this business here. We will do this successfully. And when we talk in the March, we know better how we handled the second wave in the world, and we will finish this record year of HyperPort, and we'll update you on our expectation for 02/2021. And this will be a much clearer view how we go forward from there. So thank you, and bye bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect now.