Hello and good morning, everybody. I would like to welcome you to the Analyst and Investor Call of IONOS on the results of the Fiscal Year 2022. This is our first reporting after our IPO. Thank you for joining. My name is Stephan Gramkow, and I will be responsible for investor relations at IONOS. I'm very much looking forward to being your contact for any IONOS investor relations topics from now on. Let's have a look on our agenda for today's call. Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS, will give you an update on the business and the development and achievements in 2022. Britta Schmidt, CFO of IONOS, will walk you through the financial details and main KPIs for fiscal year 2022.
We will then talk about the milestones for next year and give a detailed outlook for full year 2023. Achim and Britta will then be happy to answer any open questions after the presentation. I would now like to hand over to Achim. The floor is yours.
Well, thank you very much, Stephan. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to our conference call. I'm Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS Group, and I'm pleased to be speaking with you today about our financials for 2022. As you most likely know, almost two months ago, we successfully listed on a Frankfurt Stock Exchange, which was a significant achievement for us, and we understand that being publicly listed comes with even greater responsibilities. Timing is everything, and despite all the challenges, we are proud to have completed the IPO, where we managed to successfully place 21 million shares, raising a total volume of around EUR 390 million. With the help of our entire team, we achieved a significant milestone in our company's history.
Some of you already be familiar with IONOS, while others may be hearing about us for the first time today. I'd like to use this opportunity to give you a brief overview of our business model and strategy. IONOS is the clear number one European SMB digitalization partner and trusted cloud enabler. Our group generated a total revenue of EUR 1.3 billion last year and is mainly built on four strong pillars. Starting at the bottom of the slide, the first and largest pillar is our Web Presence & Productivity business, which contributed EUR 870 million in revenue last year. It's a very stable and steadily growing business with very high margins and high cash conversion.
We are the clear number one player in Europe with a native footprint in the largest European economies, where we are the undisputed market leader in Germany, in Austria and Spain. In the U.K., in France, in Poland, we are the strong and fast-growing number two. Additionally, we have a very stable business in North America, and very sizable business in North America with more than EUR 100 million in revenue. In the center of the page, you can see our second pillar, which is our fast-growing Aftermarket business with our Sedo brand, which contributed another EUR 250 million in revenues. With 22 million domains listed for sale and another 10 million domains parked, we are by far the market leader in this business across Europe. IONOS is increasingly becoming a trusted cloud partner for small and medium businesses.
Although this is our youngest business area, it is already self-sustaining, which means all initial startup investments and running costs are covered, and the business will start to contribute to our EBITDA going forward. Building on the investments we have already made in our Cloud Solutions business, we achieved a growth of 20% and this business already added EUR 130 million to the group's revenue. Last but not least, on the left side, you can see IONOS has a very strong brand that really helps us across all sales channels as well as in retention. Whenever a customer is deciding on an online product to build or grow his business, he will remember IONOS and will have a look at our more than 50 excellent solutions to support him.
In total, we are present and completely localized in 18 markets across Europe and North America, while our products and services, of course, are available worldwide. Looking across our competitive landscape, we can state that in Europe, our market share is more than twice that of our closest competitor, which is GoDaddy, in the Web Presence & Productivity area. This proves our leading market position in the highly scalable Web Presence & Productivity business. Again, around EUR 870 million in revenues, which is roughly 2/3 of the group's revenue. Now we have some technical difficulties here. Next slide, please. Let's have a look at some more KPIs. Starting on top of the middle column.
The 1.3 billion EUR revenue last year represents a very healthy 17% year-over-year growth and was generated by now 6 million customers. Later on, we will have a look into the drivers of this growth. From the 1.3 billion EUR revenue, we have generated 346 million EUR in adjusted EBITDA, which is a very nice 90% cash conversion. Roughly 80% of our revenue is subscription-based, providing a very reliable and stable foundation. The other 20% is transaction-based, originating mainly out of the Aftermarket business as, for example, trading a used domain is typically a transaction.
Our NPS scores is above 34 on average across the group, depending on the brand positioning, it can be as high as 70, which is really great for the industry. Please keep in mind that we report the overall NPS, including online NPS. Some large competitors only report post-contact NPS, which is usually high but does not reflect reality in overall customer satisfaction. We operate a very sophisticated marketing machinery with more than 11x CLTV over CAC. For every EUR spent in marketing, we earn EUR 11 over the lifetime of these new customers. There's a typically payback period of only 12 to 18 months for customer acquisition cost. Britta will provide a more detailed presentation on these figures shortly. It's important to note that our strong financial performance really reflects the benefits of our mostly subscription-based business model.
Our key growth drivers are net customer growth and increasing average revenue per user, ARPU. Our mission-critical products and our great services and our excellent support from our personal consultants have helped us to develop a very loyal customer base. In fact, we have been able to further improve our already impressive churn rates, which are now as low as 1% per month, really best in class. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see that we have been able to maintain strong net customer growth, adding 110,000 customers during 2022. On the right-hand side, you can see that our ARPU increased by 5.2% to now EUR 14 per month.
It's also worth noting that this growth momentum has accelerated last year, which is mainly a result of combined and improved up and cross-selling to our customer base as well as the expansion of our Cloud Solutions business. This again demonstrates the successful execution of our business strategy underpinning our predictable growth in revenue and profitability. On this slide, I would like to highlight one of our important growth levers, which is the IONOS brand. In a consolidating hosting market, having a strong and well-known brand is key to success, in addition to offering the right products and services of course.
An even strong IONOS brand will support us in many ways, for sure, with more organic customer inflow. It will also lower our customer acquisition costs in all performance marketing channels. It even helps in retention, just to name the most obvious ones. With a strong brand awareness, potential customers no longer have to search the internet for services like ours, or if they do, they will be aided by recognizing our brand standing out across all marketing noise and competitors. This is an important strategic goal and will help us to increase our market share. In addition, we are raising the barrier to entry in this market even further. On the left-hand side of the slide, you can see our first commercial with Aunt Helga, which we launched in the U.K. in September 2021.
It has already delivered remarkable results, not only in brand awareness and search volume, but also in direct customer inflow. Since then, campaigns in Germany, France, Spain, and Poland have followed. Here we can see the success of our brand campaigns in numbers and that our efforts are paying off as expected. Last year, we spent an additional EUR 31 million in brand marketing across the group, but with a clear focus on IONOS brand. Our total brand marketing spend was EUR 54 million, in line with what we said during the capital markets day. Investing in any brand is a long-term strategy that requires some patience and persistence. It is therefore very encouraging that we are already seeing great results in increased brand awareness today.
For example, looking at the campaign with Aunt Helga in the U.K., you can see that our aided brand awareness already jumped from 19 to 30 in less than 1.5 years. Due to high importance of our brand building and the positive results we are observing, we will continue to push the marketing of the IONOS brand. This year, we expect to spend EUR 65 million-EUR 70 million. However, brand marketing spend will stay at this year's level, which will just mechanically result in a decrease of marketing spendings as a % of revenue, and therefore will automatically help increase the EBITDA margin going forward. At this point, I would like to hand over to Britta to walk you through the details of the past year.
Thank you very much, Achim, welcome as well from my side. Let me start with an overview of the different revenue streams in 2022 on page 10. Total revenue grew by 17.2%, supporting our growth story with all business segments contributing. Our largest business area, Web Presence & Productivity, grew just over 17% year-over-year, supported by the exceptional growth in the Aftermarket business, which is adding 9.6 percentage points in 2022. Excluding the Aftermarket business, Web Presence & Productivity grew by a very solid 5.7% year-over-year. Our Cloud Solutions business also saw very encouraging growth year-over-year. It grew by 20%, underpinning its continued strong double-digit growth we have guided for.
It is still the smallest business in our group with a revenue contribution of around EUR 130 million, but it's growing fast, and we have reinvested most of the EBITDA contribution from Cloud Solutions to benefit even more from this strong market opportunity in the future. It is worth noting that our growth in full year 2022 was impacted to some extent by positive exchange rate effects. In particular, the generally stronger U.S. dollar against the euro had a positive impact of 2.9 percentage points on total revenue growth. Excluding the Aftermarket business, where a large proportion of the business is settled in foreign currency, this effect is just 1.5 percentage points. In total, let me say that we have achieved our targets communicated at the IPO, which was to get to a 15%-80% growth in 2022.
Let us have a look at the development of our profitability on page 11. It is important to mention that our main focus is and remains on profitable growth. As our business benefits from economies of scale, we want to take advantage of the opportunities we have in our attractive markets, which typically quite fragmented and less strong players, as Achim has already mentioned. Consequently, in 2022, we invested EUR 31 million in future growth. This was mainly an investment into our brand. We have shown you the positive results we are already seeing. This investment explains the slightly lower EBITDA level compared to full year 2021. EBITDA, and as well EBITDA margin, was in addition negatively impacted by EUR 15.7 million from higher energy cost.
Adjusted for these two effects, higher growth investments and higher energy costs, IONOS comparable EBITDA margin would have been 13.4% in full year 2022. It's 13, not 13. This is including the structural effect resulting from the strong revenue contribution of the Aftermarket business, where we typically charge a commission of 15%-20% only, so below the margin levels we see in the rest of the business. This is diluting the margin in 2022 compared to 2021 by around 1 to 2 percentage points. Again, let me note that with adjusted EBITDA margin standing at 26.7%, we are confirming what we've guided to during the IPO. On slide 12, you will find the same information on a Q4 basis. What are the key messages on a quarterly basis?
Revenue growth in Q4 remains double digit, we can already see a slowdown to 13% due to lower growth in the Aftermarket business as planned. Revenue growth, excluding the Aftermarket business, was 6.1%, slightly higher than for the full year. While the Aftermarket business grew around 48% in Q4 2022 compared to 88% for the full year 2022. Around 60% of the gross investments I mentioned before was made in Q4 2022. Consequently, the margin effect was very back and loaded. Excluding the effects from growth investments and the impact from higher energy costs, the comparable EBITDA margin is 26.9% in Q4. Again, if judging the operational performance, keep in mind the dilutional effect from the strong growth in Aftermarket. Let us turn to page 13. IONOS is an asset-light business.
Driven by our favorable server economics, we have low and predictable CapEx requirements. We are benefiting from top-line growth, a state-of-the-art technology platform already in place, and its related economies of scale. Consequently, in 2022, maintenance CapEx is broadly unchanged year-over-year or actually decreasing as a percentage of revenue, while growth CapEx, which means CapEx to further build up our Cloud Solutions business, is up by around EUR 4 million in absolute terms, but also slightly lower as a percentage of revenue, and very importantly, linked to future revenue growth. Having this in mind, we expect CapEx for 2023 to come in at around EUR 100 million or around 7% of total revenues. Please let me remind you that first of all, 2022 is fully in line with what we said before, and going forward, maintenance CapEx will continue to remain roughly on current levels.
Growth CapEx is expected to further decrease to 4% of total revenues in the midterm. As laid out, increasing energy cost had an impact on the EBITDA and EBITDA margin in 2022, despite energy cost being just around 3% of total revenue. This is why I want to talk about what we have already done to mitigate risk from energy costs and what we expect for 2023. The graph on page 14 shows the impact from higher energy costs in 2022, which is largely driven by price increases. We have decided to hedge our energy needs early for this year. By today, already around 80% of energy cost is secured. Energy prices have come down as expected. We expect energy costs in 2023 to be slightly lower than in 2022, as already anticipated.
Page 15 gives you an overview of our leverage and debt position. Net debt has been reduced over the last two years to a level of around EUR 1.2 billion or 3.5 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA at the end of 2022. Our debt comprises a shareholder loan from United Internet at a fixed interest rate of 6.75% without any covenants or pay, which is maturing mid-December 2026. This shareholder loan, combined with our robust and highly resilient business model, provides IONOS with an optimal and very predictable financing structure and currently no financing risk. On page 16, you can see the reconciliation from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow.
The most important items are, as already mentioned, capital expenditure of EUR 97 million, which is largely driven by the growth investments and will remain relatively stable as well in 2023. Secondly, interest payments of EUR 91 million, which will decrease going forward as we will continue to pay down the shareholder loan. With tax payments of EUR 49 million and a positive cash effect from working capital, free cash flow reached EUR 108 million in the full year 2022. For fairness reasons, payments for leasing should also be considered. Please note that according to IFRS 16, lease payments are neither included in EBITDA nor free cash flow. As this dilutes the comparison of free cash flow margins with historical periods, we believe it is fair to be transparent here.
Adjusted for the expenditure in connection with the IPO, which will be recharged to the selling shareholders during the first half of this year, the adjusted free cash flow is just over EUR 100 million, with very obvious potential to increase in future. Achim?
Yeah. We'll talk a bit.
Let's have a look on the major projects.
Yes. Thank you. Let's have a look at some major projects and milestones for 2023 on this page, slide 17. We will continue to work on our expansion of our Internet factory, where we make sure to use all synergies across the group. This leads to operating leverage and make sure that all brands have always top-of-the-line products for their respective markets. For our Cloud Solutions, at the infrastructure as a service layer, we are pretty feature complete. Having a compute engine with different CPU types, we have different storage options, anything from HDD to NVMe to object storage. We have software-defined networking. We have firewalls, load balancers, containers with Kubernetes, and so on.
As already said on the CMD, we are concentrating more on the platform as a service layer this year, where we want to extend our current offerings of database as a service, for example, or add services like Kafka. Of course, we will continue to work on our successful WordPress strategy by adding more plugins and more features to the Presence Suite. Everybody's talking about AI and ChatGPT these days. Even if this is not a totally new topic for a tech company like IONOS, it is now becoming really ready for mainstream, for real-world applications. We have already started development on integrating AI into some products, for example, into our site builder, into our online marketing tools, and in our domain recommendation engine, just to name a few.
We're also already using it internally to some degree for copywriting, support, product development, assisted programming, QA, and many more. I am really excited about the new possibilities that technology has, and I believe AI will drive and speed up digitalization of small and medium businesses, which will be very beneficial to IONOS.
This now leads me to our outlook for 2023 on the next page. Let me start with total revenue growth. In 2023, we are targeting a total revenue growth of approximately 10% on a constant currency basis. This is in line with the guidance provided at the time of our IPO. In Web Presence & Productivity, including Aftermarket, we are targeting a growth of 8%-10%. We expect our Web Presence & Productivity business, excluding Aftermarket, to continue to accelerate as the impact of our growth investments come through. Our expectation for Aftermarket growth is around 20%. It has come down slightly due to higher than anticipated growth in 2022, driving tougher comps. For Cloud Solutions, we assume that revenue growth should also be well into double digits, and we expect revenue growth of 16%-20% year-over-year.
We continue to see strong demand from our SMB customer base. On the larger cloud customers, we are seeing delays in the decision-making process. As we have mentioned previously, 2022 was a tough year in terms of margins, and we expect to end 2023 at slightly higher margins as compared to 2022, and growth of EBITDA being slightly higher than revenue growth. All of this, despite the investments in our growth areas and the above average growth in the Aftermarket business, which is still diluting the EBITDA margin. Due to the expected increase in EBITDA and the fundamentally high cash conversion of IONOS, we expect our net debt to fall from 3.5 at the end of 2022 to below 3.
As we are already close to the end of first quarter, I would like to give you some insights on phasing and seasonality of revenue growth and as well margin development throughout the year. We expect total revenue growth to start stronger in Q1 than the around 10% guided for the full year, driven by Aftermarkets and its phasing against comps. For EBITDA margin, we expect Q1 2023 to be lower than the full year guidance driven by phasing of the marketing spend. Keep in mind, Q1 and Q4 are usually the strongest quarters in terms of marketing. Additionally, we are adding our campaign in Poland. This results in an EBITDA margin for Q1 2023 of approximately 23%.
Excluding brand and the dilutional effect of the incremental revenue contribution of Aftermarket, we expect EBITDA margin in Q1 to be roughly in line with Q1 of the previous year. Over the next month in 2023, with gross investments stabilizing, the EBITDA margin will start to increase quarter by quarter, resulting in the minimum of 27% we are guiding to for the full year. As a general remark, let me say that we have not assumed any currency effect in this outlook, so it's based on constant currencies. All in all, our guidance is fully in line with the outlook we gave with the IPO, reconfirming the predictability of our largely subscription-based revenues. This outlook is in line with our medium-term targets. We are really confident to continue our growth journey, underpinned by our best-in-class financial profile, combining this growth with profitability and cash generation.
Let me summarize on page 19 what you should keep in mind from today's presentation. We have a sustainable and resilient business with a high share of recurring revenues. We just proved the predictability of our revenues towards 2022 results being fully in line with what we guided to. We have a very high visibility on CapEx needs for the coming years given our well-funded asset base. This is also including the Cloud Solutions business. The slowdown of the Aftermarket growth is fully anticipated and will dilute the margin less in the future. Our brand investments are expected to peak in 2023 and to stay at this level, which will support the margin expansion going forward. A lot of the investments into the Cloud Solutions business have already been made, like investments for building up infrastructure as a service features, creating a great opportunity for future growth.
We have successfully redesigned the product portfolio for cross and upsell and seamless expansion. Looking at our competitive landscape, IONOS is ready to take share. For the last bullet point on this slide, let me hand over to Achim.
Thank you very much, Britta. Since I briefly talked about AI and just as a funny roundup before we start with the Q&A session, I asked ChatGPT to write me a short summary about this presentation, and she came up with the following. In conclusion, we are proud of the achievements of IONOS in 2022. We prepared the IPO successfully, achieved strong and sustainable growth, and invested in building a strong brand. We are well positioned for continued success in the future with a strong market position in Europe and North America, and a business model built on four strong pillars. We are confident in our ability to continue growing our customer base and further increasing our ARPU while delivering strong profitability and cash generation. I think that's, that completely nails it, and there's nothing to add.
With this, I would like to hand it back to the operator to open our Q&A sessions.
Thank you. To ask, press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please limit yourself to one to two questions, and if you have any follow-ups, please rejoin the queue. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Once more, it is star one and one to ask a question. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. Your first question comes from the line of Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you. I will stick to two questions. The first is on the customer base. Could you give us some color three months into 2023 on how the customer base is behaving? Have you been able to continue your customer acquisition trends? Has churn increased or decreased? Some color there would be great. My second question is on your Cloud sort of revenue growth for 2023. There's a wide range, I guess, with 16%-20%. What do you need to do to get to the 20% versus the 16%? Some color there would be fantastic. Do you still expect the 20% growth for Cloud in the midterm, as you told us in January? Will the Cloud generate some margins in 2023 already versus the maintenance levels they were in 2022? 2 broad subjects.
Two and a half questions.
maybe let me start. on customer base or customer inflow-
Yeah
driven by our brand campaigns, we actually see very supporting customer inflow over the first three months in this year. When it comes to churn, we do see a little bit of impact due to involuntary churn due to a catch-up effect from COVID times, however, not on a material level. As well on this point, we are looking positively into the full year 2023. For Cloud Solutions, Do you wanna add something or?
No, I.
Okay.
That covers it.
For Cloud Solutions, 16%-20%, what do we need for it to come to 20%? What we're currently seeing is some reluctance in the larger customers in terms of decision-making. What we would need them to decide a bit quicker. Actually, we are nevertheless pretty confident to come in well in this guided area, and we still believe midterm to grow 20%.
Above, yeah.
Above.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe I could add, we always said in the CMD and in the roadshows that we have a very stable business with the subscription base, and small, medium business tend to do more digitalization if times are hard. Actually, that's what we can see in the first quarter. We are pretty, really pretty happy with the inflow numbers. Just like we said, and like we showed the last two crises, you know, financial crisis and Corona, we don't see a impact in new customer inflow.
That's very helpful.
Mm-hmm.
Sorry. Just wanted to confirm the break-even point for cloud and whether there will be some margins in 2023.
We're still looking to growing this year, we might be investing still for cloud to be break even. We said it's self-sustaining at the moment, we are reinvesting everything which we use. For this year, we'll not be adding a lot of EBITDA in absolute terms.
Yeah.
definitely going forward then, as stated before.
Exactly. The plan is on using the generated cash for building more products. In the long term, we have a higher, you know, higher increase in EBITDA than working on the short term.
Thank you. Very helpful.
Thank you, Lisa.
Thank you. We will now move to our next question. One moment please. Your next question comes from the line of Stéphane Beyazian from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Yes. Thank you. A couple of questions here. Can you tell us a little bit about the, what sort of non-recurring items you're expecting for 2023 and perhaps, you know, staying in the free cash flow statement, some expectations or some color regarding cash taxes and working capital, I guess could be helpful. The second question regarding ARPU and pricing. We saw 5% increase in your ARPU in 2022. Is it possible to split the contribution from what is repricing and what is upselling to customers? I think your customers probably have on average four products directly versus 3.5 a couple of years ago.
What could we be expecting for 2023, especially in terms of pricing and customer upselling? Thank you.
Let me start with the last question on, in terms of ARPU. We are targeting to see ARPU growing by majority by cross and upselling. Price increases shall not be the strongest driver in our ARPU growth. As we stated it before, we do apply a very sophisticated algorithm in terms of price increases. To be honest, if looking into total revenues, price increases undertaken in 2022 play a marginal role, with contributing less than 25% of overall absolute revenue growth in that Web Presence & Productivity. We will continue to work on the ARPU, driven by up and cross-sell. For non-recurring items, what do we expect for 2023? We do expect payments for shape.
We do expect expenses for share-based payments. However, we would see the reimbursement of the IPO costs coming in, so that might be netting out. I think that's it more or less for... In addition, we will continue on our standalone activities, so carving out the billing system. That's another item for 2023. But not significantly more to expect what we have seen already in 2022.
Yeah.
I think cash taxes.
Can I mention a little bit, of course, on working capital and cash taxes.
So-
It might be a little higher in 2022. Yeah.
I think on working capital, no change expected going forward. We continue to see a good working capital development. On cash taxes, I think we've guided to them going down slightly at the CMD. They should be in for 2023 as well.
Thank you.
You're welcome, Stefan.
Thank you. We will now move to our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Yemi Falana from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, your line is open. Hello, Yemi, your line is open. Are you on mute? Hello, Yemi. Are you on mute? Due to no response, I will go to the next question. One moment, please. Your next question comes from the line of Ben Rickett from New Street Research. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Hello there, guys. Thank you very much for the questions. Firstly, for 2023, you're guiding for Web Presence & Productivity revenue growth of 8%-10%. Can you say how much of that is Aftermarket and what that growth rate would be excluding Aftermarket? More generally, it'd be great just to get your views on what you're seeing in the web hosting market, how the competitive dynamics are evolving, whether you're seeing increasing competition from the hyperscalers. Just any comments there would be helpful.
Take the first one.
Let me start with the first question. For Aftermarket contribution in 2023, we are guiding to roughly 20% growth in the Aftermarket business. I think that you can figure out the growth at ex-Aftermarket with that one. The last question was-
Yeah.
Would you like to do it?
Competitive landscape hosting.
Absolutely.
You mentioned the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are only in the cloud section. Hyperscalers do not touch us in the web hosting productivity and where we sell domains and web hosting in e-commerce and, you know, all the shop system marketing automation tools and so on and so forth. Here, I think what we see is continuing what we already said previously is that our competitors are kind of pulling back a little bit in many markets because they really want to make some margin now or have to make some margins now. That is even actually opens up for more opportunities for us. Like I said, in the first quarter, we can see a very strong inflow on customers. That might be also a contributing factor to it.
In the cloud business, the hyperscaler is around since we started the business. We don't see additional pressure. We don't see additional, you know, offerings for them which is hampering us. We just continue competing here, you know, with all the advantages we have with the European cloud, you know, data protection with our more flexible cloud and so on, so forth. Yeah, there's no. In essence, I would say the market is actually turning to our favor, in the web hosting productivity area right now.
On the web hosting, you mentioned you're trying to integrate AI features into that workflow.
Yeah.
Are you seeing new competition from, like, AI-first website building tools?
No, I mean, that's too fast right now. First of all, you know, all the major players are for sure, and we see some results already from some competitors. Everyone is working on integrating AI. The very good first example is website builder. It takes much more than just a little bit AI engine to generate a text to make a good website. So far, the AI engines are not in that shape that you can completely automatically generate a very nice webpage with SEO optimization, everything, just by entering five words in ChatGPT. That's a far way to go. Even then, you need the hosting platform, you need the security, the firewalls, you know, all that stuff, which is also important.
You need to have a very, you know, tough technology stack to be a website hoster. You know, we don't see big competitors there. We are, you know, we are in the forefront of using that stuff. You know, I'm actually excited because that will help a lot of customers to get their webpage on earlier, easier, and, you know, and, you know, keep the maintenance or having more updates on the webpage because, you know, things is what's hard for people is usually generating a text for the webpage. Now you have with ChatGPT and other AIs, you have a great support doing this. For us, it's a benefit, you know. I'm very sure that the AI will help to increase our business.
That's great. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now go to our next question. Your next question comes to the line of Usman Ghazi from Berenberg. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Hi, thank you very much for the opportunity. Two questions, please. The first one was just on the, you know, what you're seeing in the M&A environment at the moment, obviously, with the valuations where they are and, you know, financing issues for startups and things. Just any commentary there would be interesting. You know, if this perhaps is, given the situation, it's become a bigger focus for you now or not. Then the second question was on the Web Presence & Productivity, you know, revenue outlook, excluding Aftermarket.
If I just do the math, you know, if Aftermarket domains is going to grow at 20%, then the range that you've put out, 8%-10% for Web Presence & Productivity implies that excluding Aftermarket, you know, revenue growth could be in a range of either 5% at the low end and 7% at the high end. Just, you know, could you give any color on, you know, again, what would get you to the high end of the range and what would get you to the low end? Is it, is it product launches? Is it just macro or something else? Thank you.
Okay. Let me start with the M&A. I think as stated before, it is not a priority at the moment. In terms of competition, our strategy is to outperform the competitors on the market, with a strong brand, a very sophisticated marketing machinery, et cetera. Nevertheless, we will continue to monitor opportunities and decide opportunistically, especially for product solution-
Yeah.
Nothing on the agenda at the moment. In terms of Web Presence & Productivity, Usman, you're right, 5%-7%, that's in the range. I think what will drive it is actually how do we see our inflow developing throughout this year? How do we see our churn rates developing for this year? As I stated, currently we do not see an issue in any churn rates, but we are not in full control of macroeconomic developments.
Unfortunately.
Unfortunately. I think we gave out a very a guidance which is realistic, which we will definitely achieve. Let's see how the year develops going forward.
Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Once again, please limit yourself to one to two questions, and if you have any follow-up questions, please rejoin the queue. I will now go to our next question. One moment, please. The question comes from the line of Zahir Ramcharan from Redburn. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Hi, good morning, guys. Thank you very much for the presentation. Just two from me. One's about customers, one's about hyperscalers. The first one about customers. I've seen you call out sort of weaker demand in the report published this morning that impacted growth of the customer base. I sort of assume that's due to the macro that your typical customers are facing in. I appreciate you said that there's no change in inflow of customers. Are your personal consultants seeing any change in the behavior of requirements or sort of the propensity to spend more in customers when they're dealing with them?
Secondly, there's been reports that sort of Microsoft are going to be spending billions on expanding their data center operations in the EU, and that's sort of in response to demands for data localization and compliance with GDPR. There have been reports of Google Cloud targeting the SMB market more explicitly as well. How do you think this will impact your cloud business growth? Do you think there's a significant risk if the SMB perception of big tech sort of swings positively to their favor as a result of these efforts? Thanks very much.
Well, maybe I start with the second part.
Yep.
Well, the Google and Amazon or AWS and Azure, they are spending billions and billions of EUR since many years. They just didn't start now. I think they have a larger invest these days because of their AI involvement. There's nothing new, and that doesn't help, you know, having a localized data center. AWS has a data center in Frankfurt, for example, in Germany for a long, long time. They have data centers in Paris and France for a long, long time. That doesn't help for GDPR, which is the regulation is different, you know. That's an American-owned company, so outside of Europe, means that you cannot just, you know, you cannot be compliant, fully compliant to GDPR.
That doesn't matter how many data centers they build, if they have one or 50, there's just no difference in that. We don't see these arguments which really help us a lot and, you know, and the tendency in Europe to buy local, you know, to be more sovereign here in Europe in everything we do, you know, starting from software development all the way to the hosting in the cloud. There's no shift in that notion just because they have added a few more data centers. Yeah.
Maybe just, on the first question regarding customers, I'm not sure about the weakened demand. We do not see a weakened demand, especially in our Web Presence & Productivity and our SMB customer base.
Yes.
We do see a certain reluctance in decision-making in some areas in Cloud Solutions for larger customers. As well there, we are confident that we will be able to compensate this by winning additional SMB customers.
Okay.
As stated before as well, in terms of churn rates, we are confident for the future, based on what we know at the moment. We do not see a weakened demand in our Web Presence & Productivity suite.
Okay. Thanks both. Very clear. Appreciate it.
Welcome.
Thank you. We will now go to the next question. The next question goes to the line of Akhil Dattani from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Yes, thanks. Good morning,Akhil Dattani here from J.P. Morgan. Thanks for the presentation so far. Maybe two questions for me too. First of all, on the clarity around the brand investments, can you maybe be a little bit more specific on what you're exactly spending those that brand investment on in the early part of 2023? Can you remind us on why, you know, we should be confident that longer term, the 10% revenue growth guidance for medium term can still be sustained with less overall sales and marketing expenses if we consider that the brand investments are sort of related to that.
The second question is, if you can give us an idea about how much cash in 2023 will be used to reduce the shareholder loan. Thank you.
Let me start with the marketing or the brand marketing. What we do is you can see our TV campaigns in Spain, in France, in Poland, in Germany, and in the U.K.. A good portion of that money goes to TV and also connected TV and online, you know, social media and so on for brand building. If you start, if you build a brand, it's harder to build a brand than to keep a certain brand awareness. That's the normal way to do it. You start investing heavy on brand, getting the brand awareness to a certain level, but then to keep it, you can, you know, release, or you can lower a bit the frequency of the campaigns you're doing and so on and so forth.
This is the normal process, and that's where, you know, we're in the middle of, you know, increasing the brand awareness right now. At some point it will level out a little bit, then we can, you know, communicate on brand spendings.
Yeah. I think to comment on performance marketing, which was part of the question as well. I think we've driven by the efficiency increases we are seeing year-over-year in our performance marketing KPIs and as well in our performance marketing organization. We are really confident that we have a very good level of investment here to as well drive future customer inflow besides-
Yes
... the effects from the brand campaign, which will, by the way, help as well on performance marketing.
A lot, yeah.
Yeah.
As I just stated.
Mm-hmm
... it stays at this year's level, so it's not gonna go increase. Yeah. There's no, you know, we're at the maximum where we think it makes sense.
In terms of cash, which we would use for repaying, debt, it should be around EUR 100 million. We will look into excess cash, which we have available and then pay down opportunistically. As said, we do not have any penalties for repayments.
It's about EUR 100 million.
EUR 100 million. Yeah.
could use to repay, or is it part of the EUR 100 million?
No, we will use roughly EUR 100 million to repay.
Okay. Okay, thank you. That's very clear. Thank you so much.
Thank you. We will now go to our next question. One moment, please. Your next question comes the line of Emily Johnson from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Good morning. I've got two questions, please. The first is on Aftermarket. Can you talk about what's driving that growth of in 2022 and into 2023? Any color on how much of that is coming from trading versus parking, price versus volume would be very helpful. Then the second question is, on your 2022 guide, you spoke about EBITDA growth of at least 10%, i.e., more than EUR 380 million. How should we think about the upside and downside risk to that? What sort of macro evolution is that based on? You know, if macro is better, will you reinvest? If top line is worse, what do you kind of have to pull back on to keep it at that EUR 380 million level? Thank you.
Yeah. Let me start with Aftermarket, maybe you jump in if you have some additional comments, Achim. First of all, I think the drivers are still what we said before. We invested in redesigning the product. We invested in our partner base, we do have new partners on board. This is still driving growth. The majority of the growth is coming from the parking side of the business. Nevertheless, we as well see a very good development in the transactional domain trading part.
Yeah. I mean, if you look at, we just said that we still have a very strong or, you know, pretty well strong inflow of customers. By posing productivity, everything really needs a domain. You can see from that demand that there's also very high demand for second-hand domains, for used domains, you know, because domains are a scarce resource in the end. You know, you cannot have as many. You know, you just can have every name just once. It continues to be a strong business, you know. I think that's one of the drivers or one of the more important drivers for that business.
Correct. Then in terms of macro development upside to EBITDA, et cetera. Our guidance is based on current status as we cannot predict the future for things we do not have under control, unfortunately. For 2023, this means the current level of inflation as well as current levels of energy prices. To mention there, we have already secured 80%, the volatility is really low there. In context of demand, we assume a constant level versus 2022. Already we are seeing this actually being reconfirmed in the first three months. Then I think what can we do if revenues do not come in as expected, et cetera. We do have a lot of control over our cost base, obviously.
Performance marketing and brand marketing can be adjusted if needed, if we do not believe they deliver additional value or revenue growth in future.
Thank you. I will go to the next question. One moment, please. Your next question comes the line of Stéphane Beyazian from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you. Just coming back on the marketing and the push that you've been doing. Can you say a little more in terms of geography, where you're seeing, you know, the most traction and where you're seeing that in the near future you could actually see some market share gains? That is one. The second, if I could, it's coming back on the cloud division. I know it's not always easy to split some of the costs between the cloud and the rest of the business, because there could be some overlapping. Can you say a little more about how much of the CapEx is sort of directly linked to the cloud strategy?
I guess what I'm trying to understand is how fast there could be a swing in your free cash flow if you, if you think that cloud growth is below your expectation and potentially decide to, let's say, go slower in terms of cloud expansion. Thank you.
Should I start with the domain or with the, not domain,
With the brand.
market and market share. It's not as easy to figure out what's your market share now, your gain month-over-month, because there's no reliable number anywhere. We can deduct from the domains, you know, from how many domains what company is registering or losing and so on. We have a certain overview, and there's some other companies doing some benchmarks. I would say we don't have a specific region. I think we are gaining in basically all of our regions, to be honest. If you look at the U.S., you know, I just mentioned GoDaddy cut down on marketing. If you look across Europe, we also see that tendency for other companies.
I think we have a, you know, looking at the inflow we have in the first quarter, I wouldn't say we are losing anything anywhere. We're gaining market shares across our core markets. Yeah. In terms of CapEx, I think growth CapEx is linked to Cloud Solutions revenues. Actually, it will grow or not grow in line with revenues. We wouldn't see a change in % of revenue going forward, if this is what you're looking for, Stefan.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Now go to the next question. The next question comes from the line of Usman Ghazi from Berenberg. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Thank you for the opportunity again. I'll try my luck with three questions please. Feel free to ignore the one that's uncomfortable. The first one is just coming back to Stefan's question on the cloud CapEx. You know, I mean, just your comment was that the growth CapEx is linked to Cloud Solutions revenues. That would imply, you know, cloud CapEx is sitting at roughly 50% of cloud revenues. I mean, if I look at your, you know, peers, whether it be DigitalOcean or Contabo or these other companies that are specifically cloud companies in the public cloud space, you know, they're spending roughly 20% of revenues in the cloud, you know, growing double-digit.
So you're obviously, I mean, you're spending much more. I just wanted to understand, given the efficiency of a cloud platform, is it that, you know, the increment you're spending above what your peers are spending as a % of revenue is in product development that is yet to yield revenues or is it in capacity or any color there would be helpful. The next question was just on, you know, what IONOS' strategy is for payments specifically, so payments and commerce linked to payments, given, you know, that seems to be kind of a key pivot for ID at least, and they'll be rolling out internationally over time.
just, I mean, do you see the need to own a payment facilitation platform in order to be competitive in this space or not? And then, just the third question was on the, I mean, your guidance on the EBITDA margin phasing is interesting because it does imply a very strong exit rate for margins, you know, in 2023, so well above 27%, I guess, which obviously bodes well for 2024 and onwards. Is that exit rate right to look at in term, you know, when you're looking beyond 2023 or what not?
Maybe let me start with the second question. Payment system, is it necessary or not? I don't think it's necessary. There's a lot of global players around there which do a great job, which we can partner with, and which we do. If you buy a shop solution with us, and you have the option of picking one of them, I don't think it's necessary to own them. You have to be partnered with them, make some money out of it. The most value is in for us, we are a hosting company, so we are, you know, offering the shop system with a monthly payment, you know, fixed rates, not depending on sales.
I think margins of these sales are coming down because, you know, if you say as a customer, you know, how much do you wanna pay as a percentage of your revenue you do with that shop for the hosting company offering the payment system? There's a lot of competition out there. We can use all them just to do the analog and say, "Hey, you know, would we have to own, you know, a logistic companies? Would we have to buy a FedEx tomorrow just because we have an online shop and need to ship some products?" I don't think so either, right?
I think we concentrate on our, you know, hosting solutions, e-commerce solutions, a lot of plug-ins, a lot of cross and upsell options in that area. We just partner with one of or with actually multiple of the large players worldwide.
Yeah. Maybe to comment on the cloud solutions CapEx and the growth CapEx. To be precise, roughly two third are directly linked to cloud solutions revenues. The others, the other one third is used for additional customer growth, building up new data centers, et cetera, investing in our existing data centers, besides maintenance. Which leaves us, I think, with a comparable percentage in terms of revenues. Looking to EBITDA margin exit rate, I think, Usman, I didn't get your question. What do you mean with exit rate? Going forward, how the EBITDA develop then into 2024?
Yeah. The exit rate, meaning it, you know, the, to get to north of 27% when Q1 would be, you know, far below that, would mean that, you know, the Q4 EBITDA margin-
Mm-hmm.
is obviously gonna be well above 27% rate. You know, maybe it's 30%, I don't know. You know, but that kind of trajectory, you know, implies a very strong development in 2024.
Mm-hmm.
Just wanted to see if there's any reason to extrapolate or not to extrapolate.
I think.
-from the phasing of the-
Yeah.
EBITDA margin that you've indicated.
First of all, I think it needs to be noted that EBITDA margin levels depend on the brand investments or the marketing investments made in this quarter. That's definitely something where EBITDA margin gets a bit volatile quarter-over-quarter. This is fully under the control of us, obviously. We do invest when we do see valuable customers. And when we do see our brand investments coming through, as we currently do.
Absolutely.
-see-
Yeah.
with very good increase in aided brand awareness. I think but generally, I think we are looking optimistically into 2024 as well in terms of margin development. Our midterm guidance for 20% plus is still valid.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will now go to our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Derric Marcon from Societe Generale. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Yeah. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for taking my question. Just one on my side on pricing. Can you repeat the comment you made earlier in the call about the impact of price increase in 2022, and what do you expect for 2023? Sorry, I missed that part. Would it be possible, sorry, to break up the price increase impact between web hosting and cloud software, your cloud business? Thank you.
The comment I made earlier was that roughly 25% of absolute revenue growth in that Web Presence & Productivity were driven by price increases. A very small part actually for the, for the whole business. Going forward, we will continue to focus on cross and upsell rather than price increases. We do have very sophisticated algorithms to increase prices across different products, customers, et cetera. And we do adjust this based on development in the markets, development of our customers, et cetera.
Yeah. For our cloud business, we didn't do any price increase last year. I think we don't plan it for this year either so far.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. I will now hand the call back to Stephan Gramkow for closing remarks.
Thank you, Operator, and thank you everyone for attending our today's call. Please do not hesitate to get in touch for any follow-up questions. Have a nice day. Stay safe and goodbye.
Thank you very much, everybody.