Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call for the JDC Group following the publication of the financial figures of Q1 2025. The CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier, and CFO, Ralph Konrad, will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to the Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions. Please note that the management team has another meeting right after this one. Therefore, we unfortunately cannot exceed the time set for this meeting. With this being said, I'm happy to hand over to you, Sebastian.
Thank you, Jana, for your kind words. A very warm welcome from the entire board member team with JDC Group. With me in the line is Ralph, and this time also you can see Ramona, Dr. Evens and Marcus Rex. Welcome. A strong start into the fiscal year 2025. We are very happy that quarter over quarter we can present very nice figures with an organic growth between 15% and 20%, as we promised. You can see that all our guidance and goals are well in sight. I'm Sebastian, co-founder and CEO of JDC Group, and with me here in the line is Ralph Konrad. I am responsible for strategy products and investor relations, public relations. Here's Ralph.
Yeah. Hi there. I'm responsible for IT platform, finance, legal, and M&A. Sebastian?
Yeah. So, yeah, Ramona, Marcus, we introduced. One slide on our business. Most of us, or most of you know us pretty well. We are now a classical platform business. That means we take in the data of all the financial service product providers. That is more than 220 insurance groups now, all the asset management platforms, investment companies, the mortgaging banks. We standardize the data, we process the data, and then we make the data visible in all kinds of systems, our own or the systems of our intermediary clients, and provide the data to individual brokers and agents, more and more the German banks, the insurance companies, and via our smartphone application also to our 200,000 direct clients. Right now, we have about 6 million data sets, contracts on the platform. Many contracts have many data, more than one data set.
So this translates in almost 3 million contracts with about 2.3 million clients. Yeah, we're one of the best-established tech stack, and we see ourselves as tech leader in the processing field of insurance contracts in Germany. Yeah, we are very happy to introduce you to these figures for the first quarter 2025. You can see that we have a nice turnover growth of almost 17%. Turnover grew from EUR 53.3 million to EUR 62.2 million. You see, well in line with last year's results. After this little dip we had due to the Ukraine and energy crisis, you see quarter over quarter over quarter that organic growth is more than 15%. You also see that the platform is scaling up. Now EBITDA grew by almost 24% from EUR 4.1 million to EUR 5 million. A very good start into a good year 2025.
Yeah. To make it a little bit more difficult for you, we changed the structure of our company from time to time. What we did end of last year was that we had three banking licenses in the group, one in Austria and the other two in Germany, one with our, the biggest one with our FiNUM company in Berlin, the other in Vienna, and the other was our liability umbrella for our intermediaries. Obviously, there are synergies in combining these three licenses into one. That is what we did. We moved it to the biggest license, that is of FiNUM Private Finance in Berlin. Therefore, about EUR 2.7 million in turnover or EUR 0.1 million in EBITDA moves from the Advisortech segment into the Advisory segment. The rest of the figures stay the same. The overall company view is the same.
It's just if you look at the individual segments, then there is a little change between Advisortech and Advisory. This is why if you see our press release, there's also a pro forma figures inside. That's basically the more realistic growth rates. You see the real growth rates as to the new allocation with the segments. Advisortech growth looks a little bit too small, and then Advisory growth looks way too big. Now we think it's the right allocation. Obviously, liability umbrella business means that we have a direct client contract. This means the better, yeah, home for these clients and contracts is indeed the Advisory business. All our segment allocation becomes more right than it was before. Saying this, we give you like two sets of figures.
One performer is what is much closer to the truth. There you can see that, as I said, overall turnover growth is 16.7%, Advisortech grew by 18%, and Advisory by 18.8%. Quite stable growth in both segments. As to this reallocation, you can see that Advisortech now looks smaller or growing smaller with 11.3%. Advisory therefore looks at an outstanding growth of 55.9%. As I said, the green figures here are the more right figures. This is as if the allocation or reallocation had been performed last year. As we said, we are very happy that the growth comes from all product groups and all business lines and also all sales channels. You can see that again, our investment financing business is up by 23%. A marginal EUR 4 million on top. Insurance is also growing strongly.
Q1 is the recurring revenue quarter. This is very impressive that also here we already had double-digit growth with +13%. You can also see that real estate, mortgage, all the alternative products are back growing with 19%. Overall, we're happy that all product groups are contributing to our overall growth. The same goes for the sales channels. You can also see that the broad IFA business grew by about 18% after taking out the liability umbrella. Officially, it's 9%. Same growth as major customers growing with 20%. Advisory, very nice growth figures as well. We're back at growth of almost 19%. Adding up that now, you can see that the relevance of major customers is increasing. We are now at almost 30% participation of the major client segment as compared to 70% now in the broad IFA business.
Okay, then let's go into the comparison by quarter. If we look at the situation by quarter, we have seen a very dynamic development after the impact of the Ukraine crisis. Before this and since then, our group has grown double-digit. And 2025 is the first year in company's history with the Q1 starting with more than EUR 60 million turnover. It's almost as strong as the Q4 2024. And this was the best quarter in company's history. So, a very good start. And as Sebastian mentioned, it's very nice to see that the seasonality of our business remains the same over the years. Only the level is increasing year after year. And this is a result of our growing asset base in the insurance and the investment segment. And we all can see and feel the impact of this worldwide tariff discussion everywhere.
The word Liberation Day will surely be the onward of the year 2025. Although there is a lot of uncertainty in the capital markets, we have a positive view and a positive forecast for the further development of our group in this year. Sebastian will elaborate on this later on. As Sebastian mentioned, due to the group's reorganization, the segment reports also show pro forma figures for the year 2024 for both segments. The column 2024 adjusted shows the figures 2024 as if the reorganization had already been effective last year. Like in the previous quarters, the Advisortech segment showed a very strong performance. The revenue was up by more than 11.3%, adjusted 18% to EUR 53.8 million. EBITDA increased by 20.3% or adjusted 23.7% to EUR 5.0 million.
Due to this reorganization, personal and operating costs fell in the segment, but even adjusted, we only see very little movement in the cost basis. It means that costs are more or less stable. This was different in the previous quarters where we had the consolidation effects of Top Ten Group, which means that we already compared the actual quarter with the Top Ten Group, comparing it to a quarter last year without the consolidation of Top Ten Group. The first quarter 2025 is the first full quarter without these consolidation effects. Top Ten was fully consolidated Q1 2024 and 2025. Against this background, the figures are even more pleasing in my point of view. The Advisory division continued its very good development in 2024 and showed also a strong start into 2025.
Revenue grew by 55.9%, pro forma 18.8%, which is, as Sebastian mentioned, rather the real growth to EUR 13.6 million. And EBITDA grew by 80.4%, pro forma 53.6% to EUR 1.2 million. In our opinion, very convincing figures representing the best in history first quarter for our advisory business. Thus, a big special thanks to all advisors who decided to work exclusively with us and to the whole team of our FiNUM group in Germany and Austria. This is a really excellent development. Let's come to the cash flow statement. We started the year 2025 with cash and cash equivalents of EUR 24.7 million. Cash flow from operating activities in the first quarter amounted to EUR 6.3 million, which is a plus of approximately 60% compared to the previous year. Very good development, which makes us happy.
In contrast, the cash flows from investment and financing activities are only slightly negative in this first quarter because we had smaller capital calls from Summitas, only smaller capital calls. We were not active in buying back shares in the first quarter, which was the case in the first quarter last year. Cash and cash equivalents increased by EUR 4.1 million in the first quarter to EUR 29.5 million. Cash on hand last Friday some days ago was EUR 32.9 million. As always, some information about share price and the bond. The share price was very weak the last weeks, you know this, and it is now developing positively. We saw EUR 21.4 at the end of close Friday. Sebastian will give you a little bit more color on the development of the last weeks in a few minutes.
We are happy that the market has responded positively to our publication today. Share price was up to EUR 23. So, market cap is now again around EUR 300 million. There are no changes in our treasury shares. We still own 147,000 shares, JDC shares. No, there's no change in the bond as well. It's valued at EUR 20 million. Trading is stable at 105%. Obviously, bond holders are happy holders. The first termination option is beginning 1st of November 2026 for the bond. And the bond is due by the 1st of November in 2028. Shareholder structure shows no changes. Okay, let's come to the spotlights. We have three spotlights for you.
The first is to give you some color on platform activity, some further, yeah, thoughts about Liberation Day and how's the world developing and what is the influence on us and some inside information about the last weeks and the share price. Okay, operational key figures. They have developed also very positively, but we start with a number that seems to be negative. The number of orders decreased by 4.3%. Nevertheless, the expected commission from these orders increased clearly. The reason for this is that we have processed much more orders in lines with higher commissions like life insurance, supplementary health, or health insurance. We have a smaller decline in the P&C business where we received lower commissions. You will not see influence on the P&L. You will see positive influence on the P&L from this development.
The number of contract transfers continued to grow by 14%, significantly. Let me please mention from an already very high basis. Assets under administration, where some parts of them are assets under management in our own asset management division, increased by 6.5% to more than EUR 7.5 billion. The very convincing development is shown by the annual net premium of our insurance assets that grew by more than 15% in only one year and is now approaching the EUR 1.4 billion mark, which is a great development. To summarize, we see a further continuous development of our key operating figures and that since years. Please allow me to add that this development, it did not fall from the sky, but is a result of ongoing sales work over many years.
At this point, even if this is rather unusual for a CFO and especially for me, I would like to thank our sales colleagues. Good job, Marcus, to you and the sales team and also to all others who develop IT operations, HR, and all other important areas of the group. That's it from my side. Sebastian?
Yeah. Thank you, Ralph. There are just some words on Liberation Day. You could see that many of us were in shock when this, the beginning of April, these announcements were made. You could see that basically stock prices went down quite a bit. There's the good news. There is no primary effect at all on our business. We do not have any trade relationships. All the products we need is software with European contracts. We have no direct influx of or importance of any tariffs. The only little thing is that obviously if capital markets are concerned, our trailer fees basically trail with the capital markets. Again, here, DAX was at a record high this morning. In Europe, we are back on track. Also the U.S. is trailing just, I think it's 8%, 9%. There's hardly any primary effect.
Secondary, obviously we are dependent on consumer confidence. Obviously, in April, that was quite low. This means that, yeah, customers are buying less in funds and security, but interestingly, they're buying more in insurance. We don't have the April figures yet, but we can see that also here there might not be very big effects of this impact on the markets. Still, the share price showed a little bit different picture. Maybe Ralph on the next page. We can see that our share price took a hit, but this was not really, maybe let me close the window real quick as we are sitting here in the Equity F orum in a hotel in Frankfurt. Yes, thank you very much. You can see that it seemed to be that our share price took a hit by tariffs or discussion about that, but actually had a completely different reason.
There was one of our shareholders that was a long-term holder with about 200,000 shares who sold his fund company to a company that did not like small caps. After, we gave them a buyer, but obviously that was very hard to find a price in these volatile markets. They just sold it in smaller blocks and a lot over the public counter. You could see that share price went down almost to EUR 18. The good news is this block is bought. You can see there is the recovery. It is quite, yeah, quite the same as the actual V-shape. Good news is that the sellers are out and then there are more buyers again. This is always what makes markets right. Yeah, some words to guidance. I think, Ralph.
No, your turn.
You can see that, yeah, it's a good slide to comment. Actually, you can see that we gave the guidance out. Median is EUR 255 million with EUR 62.2 million turnover in Q1. We're well on track here. We see that that's a very feasible turnover number. And also EBITDA with EUR 5 million EBITDA in Q1 already, which is like the third time we could reach EUR 5 million in a quarter. We are well on track to reach our, like in the median, EUR 19.5 million. We are very confident that these guidance figures just look right to us. And also our sub goals, we are well on track with these. Yeah, we will report more ongoing in the year. I think our strategy to tell you what we're doing and then we're doing what we're telling, I think that's again a very good outlook for the year 2025.
We're very confident to reach our goals here. Outlook 2030, this slide was the first time shown after our full- year figures in March. Just to explain a little bit on this, if we just go on with our organic growth, 16%-17% on average year-over-year, you just come mathematically to a turnover of up to EUR 500 million. All we have to do is just execute on the existing contracts. This does not include an amount of new clients or new brokers and does not include any M&A transactions. We know when we reach turnover of EUR 450 million-EUR 500 million, then EBITDA will stand at EUR 40 million-EUR 50 million, with EUR 50 million at a normal platform multiple, and this is what we also gave you, we could envisage a valuation of a billion plus.
This is why Ralph and I, yeah, decided that it's worth working here. It's a good team spirit and you all fight for these goals. We want to give you these turnover and EBITDA figures and then it's up to you to give us the valuation on it. All right, thank you very much for your attention and we are happy to take any questions you might have.
Yes, thank you also very much for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation, we kindly ask you to ask questions in person via audio line. To do so, please click on the raise your hand button. If you dialed in by phone, please use the key combination star nine followed by star six. If you do not have the opportunity to speak freely, you can also place your questions in our chat box, which I can see some have already done. We will continue with the first callers. Okay, the first questions are going to be via text, which I will read now.
Oh, yeah. Cash level, Andreas.
First question is, you are close to record cash levels at EUR 30 million gross and plus EUR 10 million net and no dividend and or buyback ongoing. Are you confident in deploying this into M&A during the year since not returning it?
The answer is yes. Yes, Andreas, thank you for your question. We are very confident, but as always, right? Targets assigned when assigned, and we will just shut up until this moment.
Thank you very much. His second question is, with close to EUR 1.5 billion insurance assets, are you having more leverage with insurance companies to get better commission and increase your gross margin?
Yes, definitely. Yeah, Ralph.
Yeah. The answer is yes as well. That is a day-to-day work in our product management division where we talk to insurers and asset management platforms and discuss if the actual commission levels are the right ones. We are improving commissions not like one big step, but it is rather a thousand steps with all the insurers. You will definitely see this in the P&L in the future. Yeah.
Thank you very much. Andreas's third question is, there has not been any news out from Summitas this year and lower capital calls. Is it harder to get more deals done now?
I think there was two smaller news. Summitas bought another broker in January and also one just a week or two ago. You can all reckon that Summitas buys one broker every month. Obviously after this very big transaction in December, there is a lot of work ongoing post-merger integration, bringing all the finance in line. We are very confident that, let's say, the rest of the money back can be invested within the next 12 months. There is some of the debt or of the credit line left and also some of the equity. We as JDC think that we will spend the rest of the EUR 5 million outstanding, we'll be able to spend in the year 2025.
Thank you very much for answering that question. We will move on to the next person, Tobias Sinding, who also has about six questions. He says, congratulations on yet another successful quarter. The first question is, there's always a combination of factors that lead to outperformance, but what were the main drivers to the strong performance in Advisory?
Good question. I think we had harder times during the Ukraine crisis where it was not, where it was easy for our platform business to grow, but harder for the Advisory business because a lot of Advisory business is still in personal contact or done in personal contact. Now we have like the third year without any heavy influence from outside where people can concentrate on doing their business. We have done some operational efforts to improve the business environment. To be honest, there is no one magic reason. I think it is a result of three years' hard work in the right direction. Sebastian, would you?
Yeah. Maybe what we said before, the tailwind is on all business lines and especially real estate and mortgage is a higher part in Advisory than in Advisortech. So, they're now benefiting from these overall, yeah, good market factors.
Yeah, and the asset base is high due to the market development. Your second question is, I'll make it short. If the percentage of the Advisory business is increasing and the percentage of total business or total turnover, that's not what we think. We think that the Advisortech business is growing faster than the Advisory business because it's easier to put people on the platform with a non-binding contract where they are not exclusive. That's what we do in the platform business. In our Advisory business, people decide to work exclusively with JDC. Though this is harder, it will also show a double-digit growth.
Thank you very much for this. His second question is, how should we think about the higher percentage of Advisory commission going into 2025?
That's what I answered, this question. We can go to the next.
Okay, so those are two questions in one. Perfect. Third question is, there are salary increases of 21.6% year-over-year in HQ. Should we expect the current level to stay flat over the year or will there be more increases?
No. We will see increases, but as mentioned, the cost basis is more or less stable. We had a lot of increases due to inflation in Germany. We are trying to grow without hiring lots of people. We have some key hires that we will see in the next month. We think that the growth of the personal cost increase will decline.
I think HQ means headquarters, right? So, that's the holding. And the main factor.
Sorry.
I lost the headcount. Sorry.
It just and with us all of last year, that might be quite some of the increase, I guess, right? We can give you the precise answer.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the reason, of course. Four people cost more than three. Sorry for misreading your question.
Thank you very much for answering this one. The fourth question is, can you add some more color to the flattening in contract transfers compared to Q1 2024 that had 58% year-over-year in contract growth?
Yeah. So the main reason is that we pre-qualified the transfer of contract voters. We had the fact that many of these transfers had lower chances to go through because all kinds of contract transfers were sent to the insurance companies that do not like working for nothing. We reduce by having more processes in place. We reduce the number of outgoing contract transfers. I do not know, Ralph, whether we can quantify the effect, but in the end, for us, it is important that the overall number of contracts that are successful transfers is growing up and maybe we should change this KPI into successful transfers because it is more precise. Thank you for the question. It is a good way to think about it.
Thank you very much. Fifth question, how are you seeing the gap between Jung, DMS & Cie and Fonds Finanz developing in the past year? Is Jung, DMS & Cie tightening it?
From a technological point of view, I would say we are there since years, but Fonds Finanz is still a little bit bigger than JDC and also growing with impressive numbers. I would say, yes, we are tightening. The most important message is that the market is consolidating dramatically and the big ones to which we belong are growing much faster than the small ones. We will see very attractive growth rates from not only us, but all the big platforms.
I don't know whether I have the right figures in mind, but if I'm not mistaken, Fonds Finanz should have grown 16%-19%. I don't know whether they published figures, but that's hearsay. And we grew by 28%. Last year was a tightening year, but we count them in. They are one of our valuable competitors and will stay in a good sportsmanship. We'll be a factor in the market. We will have good sport here.
Thank you. Moving on to the last question of Tobias Sinding. The last question is, the cash conversion was very high in the quarter. How should we think about the cash flow going into the rest of 2025?
More or less with EBITDA. That is without any extraordinary effects. That is more or less how you should think about it. We will invest, depending on M&A activities, more or less money into M&A. There is no relevant change in the financing cash flow and the operative cash flow should be around EBITDA.
Thank you. Guillaume de Poche is asking, can you comment the evolution in the price contract ratio in Q1, which seems strongly improving? Is it linked to reporting changes or a gradual and structural improvement as leverage kicks in more and more?
To be honest, I don't know if I understood the question right, but what I can say is that we have no changes in reporting. There are no structural changes. If some of the ratios have improved, then the reason is an organic one. I think the number of contracts compared to turnover, that could be the question. Yes, it's an organic development.
I think for the comparable numbers that we showed, we are now at almost EUR 40 per contract in the P&C business, right? This goes up year over year over year with higher than inflation rates because the valuable pieces of insurance or policies are growing more than inflation, especially building insurance and car insurance. Ralph, maybe you have the last number was, I think you named me is EUR 39.6 or 39.8, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, near EUR 40. Yeah.
That was 35 two years ago. There is inflation priced in and that's what we always tell you, that we are running an inflation-protected model as our commission is a fixed percentage of the premium and this is growing more than inflation.
Thank you very much. We have another question from Mark Vestering. Has there been any meaningful tender activity of major prospects, clients, or to be expected in the short term?
Things are assigned when assigned. You can say that as we won all of the major tenders, but one, the big partners found or the big institutions basically have their partner already and that's in almost all cases, it's us. The overall number of tenders in the market goes down now.
Thank you. We now have a question via video. Edwin De Jong, you may unmute yourself.
All right. Can you hear me?
Yes.
All right. Great. Only two questions left. So, it's pretty clear so far. On the gross margin, it's come down a little bit from Q1 last year. We have had some competitive pressure, I can remember, but maybe could you add some color on what are the moving parts there?
Yes. The situation in the market is competitive as the consolidation pressure is increasing. That is good for growth. That is bad for gross margin. The portion of the business coming from our major customers is increasing. You can imagine that the payout ratios for the major customers is higher than the payout ratio for a, let's say, normal smaller broker. That is part of the reality. It feels like moving into the final phase of consolidation. The broker decides now where to transfer the contracts now or in the next months or years, where to transfer their contracts, where to bring their business. This is a phase of development where it might be not the best decision to optimize the gross margin. Growth is important.
As long as gross margin in total is increasing much faster than costs, as long as we are able to scale the platform, and that long it is also, we think, a good decision to be very active and aggressive in pricing.
Yeah. Very clear. Very clear. And then finally from my side, on the large clients, you were already touching upon that. Can you maybe give a little overview on where we are standing with Provinzial, VKB, RNV, et cetera? Allianz, what have we got?
Sebastian?
The partners that we started with Provinzial and savings banks, that's quite on track, right? We all hope for more speed in these transactions. We planned it conservatively and the results are as conservative as we planned them. Fine with the development of Provinzial, but as we often say, we could expect more of VKB and SV SparkassenVersicherung. There's really slow growth. Also RNV and the corporate banks, funny enough, these partners are really happy. They introduced us into their strategy 2030 and said, "What do you want?" We quadrupled the number of banks, but obviously that's still a small number as compared to the huge number of corporate banks out there. Yes, this could be faster, but again, it's always easier to take over existing business and books like what we did with Lufthansa, Albatross, or Bavaria.
When we start converting clients from scratch, there is more time until you see, yeah, real EUR figures in the positive. Also, Allianz is on track. We'll earn our first very nice euros this year. Again, right, it's a new model for all these agencies and this has to be introduced. We are content and actually we proceed as slow as we planned.
Okay. Very clear. Thank you.
We currently do not have any more questions. I'm waiting a few more seconds if there's any more questions coming. Doesn't seem so. As we have no further questions, we therefore come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining the dynamic conversation and all your questions. A big thank you also to Sebastian and Ralph for your presentation and the time you took to answer the questions. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations or us. I wish you all a lovely week. With this, I hand over again to you, Sebastian, for some final remarks.
Yeah. Thank you, Jana, again for being such a charming host. Thank you all for listening. We are here with JDC at Equity Forum for everybody who wants to come over in person or see us in person. Happy to answer all questions that might arise in Frankfurt. Yeah. It is now the seventh quarter in a row with very positive developments. What we said is that we are now quite knowing about our business model and we are quite precise in our guidance and giving you the right expectations. Always what you can see is that, yeah, we are executing on our plans and step by step by step we're getting where we wanted.
If we now take out this great vision, this is nothing we go to the hospital for, but on the contrary, we think it is very visible that this company really now is taking off and step by step going in a direction where we can also justify these huge expectations and also getting back to real platform multiples again. If you do the math where we are going to with our guidance and the actual valuation multiple-wise, that is not really demanding. We see that there are some good reasons to be invested in this stock. Thank you very much for listening and thank you for your trust.
Bye-bye.