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 a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your question. With this being said, I'm happy to hand over to you, Sebastian.
Thank you very much, Ingmar. Warm welcome from our side to the earnings call first half year 2025. You can see whoever of you already had a look in the figures. We could define liberation day trends, and I think we have quite solid and positive numbers to show you today. My name is Sebastian, I'm Co-Founder and CEO of JDC Group, responsible for strategy, products, investor, and public relations, together with my partner Ralph.
Yeah, my name is Ralph. I'm responsible for IT, all M&A issues, and of course Finance.
Thank you very much. On the next slide, a very short introduction of our business. We are now a typical platform business. You all know this chart. We take in all the data of all the insurance groups. That's more than 220 insurance companies doing business with brokers in Germany, all the asset management platforms, all other alternative products, the mortgaging banks. We standardize the data, process it, and then we make it visible in our own visualizing systems to all kinds of individual brokers and agents, but also more and more to insurance companies, the banks, Salesforce, other insurtech companies, and also via our smartphone applications to more than 200,000 direct clients. Right now we have 6.2 million data sets on the platforms for 2.4 million customers, and we are one of the leading tech stacks for the processing of insurance contracts in the German market.
You see that we're showing resilient growth and margin expansion in the last 10 years. After our buyout in 2013, you could see that we are growing year-over-year with new records basically every year. You can see our revenue CAGR, annual growth rate, is more than 12%. Also, and that's very pleasing for us as shareholders, is that the EBITDA CAGR is much higher, more than 30%. You can see year-over-year, we show you higher earnings. If we do not take in 2025, you can see already that this is a very positive development. We will show you with the acquisition of FMK , this will be improving much more in the next year. EBITDA margin expansion also is in a very good trend coming from 2% in 2015.
We now guide you at 8% in the year 2025, having reached 7% in 2024. That's also up 5.2% year-over-year. Also a very positive development. Why are we telling you this? You can see, and we show you in a slide later, that there is crisis all over the world. There was one in Q2, especially amongst the background of Liberation Day. We are very happy that we can present you a stable, positive growth with stable rates. We could grow the turnover with 13.9% and EBITDA by 23.5%. That's very satisfying. With more than EUR 120 million, again, the first half year 2025, it's a new record high in turnover in the first half year. Against a very, very good first half year 2024, we could grow almost 14%. You will see later that the second quarter, especially in 2024, was historically good.
We are back to a quite normal second quarter in 2025. You can see with an EBITDA at EUR 8.5 million with a growth of almost 24%, we were happy. Again, a record high for the first half year ever. One thing is very important. We told you in the last call on the quarter already, we reorganize our business segments. We have a movement from advisor tech to advisory. The good thing is that saves us money. We have cost savings of more than EUR 250,000 by integrating and aligning our banking licenses. That's what's called a liability umbrella business, where we take over the liability for a huge number of the entitled agents. That was distributed among three companies: FinUM Private Finance in the advisory segment, but then also Jung, DMS & Cie. Austria was in the advisor tech segment.
Top Ten Austria that we bought two years ago was also in the advisor tech segment. This is what we merged now. We have now only one legal entity, and that's FinUM Private Finance Germany. This is why the business of Jung, DMS & Cie. Austria and Top Ten Austria now goes over to FinUM Private Finance. It's just a technical development. If you're wondering why there is a lot of pro forma reporting, we just show you the growth rates just according to how it would have been if this move had been in the past already. The good news is now we are down to one banking license, and this is all going through Berlin, FinUM Private Finance, and all the liability umbrella business is now united in one segment, and that's advisory. Here we come to the figures in detail. You could see it's a positive development.
Revenues are up 11.2% in the second quarter, and this comes to 13.9% over the first half year. Also earnings, and that's important, are up even more at 23.5% as we reported to EUR 8.5 million. Here you can see the difference. Advisor tech did not only grow by 8%, but in reality of 14.7%, which I think is a good rate. Advisory did not grow 43.6% in reality, just by the new reporting standard in the segment, but actually by 10.7%, which is quite exactly the range that we give you for our growth. Organically, we would want to grow advisory by 10%+ , and we would grow advisor tech by 15%+ . After a challenging quarter, we are very happy with these figures. You can choose your figure.
Obviously, EBIT is up even more, and then earnings are up even more, but you can see this yourself in the schedule. We are very happy that all the growth comes from all the product groups again. We can see that the capital markets started very strong, but then there was a sharp decline right after April 2nd, the Liberation Day. You could see that the capital markets went down quite significantly, and what's happening at the actual consumer satisfaction levels is that also the new business in investment just goes down. That's a little bit counterproductive. As we know, people are only buying stock when they're going up, and they're not buying stock when they're low. We saw a strong decline also in the new business of investment, and this goes farther in the insurance sector as there's a lot of unit-linked business.
That means wrappers, so insurance wrappers around asset management products. That was also quite weak in Q2. You can see it's still up 12% investment and financing, almost EUR 5+ million insurance up. Normal, let's say 16% up, despite this little decline in unit-linked, and the others are up as the real estate markets are starting to grow. Still, German banks are still reluctant to give up mortgages. This is improving slightly time over time, but still, the real estate markets are still hindered by reluctant German banks. All over, we're happy of EUR 120.9 million in turnover in the first half year. Here you can see the distribution among the sales channels. You can see that the IFA business is the stable backbone of our business. It's up 12% performer. The missing 9%, it's the liability umbrella business, which went from the advisor tech side to the advisory side.
The green figures are closer to reality. Major customers, they do not have any liability umbrella business. It stays up 25%, very satisfying. Also advisory is almost up 11%. You can see now the distribution is that major customers now make about 30% of our turnover, and almost 70% is our IFA business in the breadth of 16,000 IFAs that we have. As we said, these growth rates are impacted by the restructuring, but otherwise, the IFA business is a very solid backbone of our business.
Okay, let's go into the comparison by quarter, ladies and gentlemen. If we look at this situation, we have seen a very dynamic development. After the impact of the Ukraine crisis, JDC has grown double digits, and 2025 was the first year in the company's history where we started with a Q1 of more than EUR 60 million of turnover.
Best first quarter in history. The good news is the second quarter is also the best second quarter in history. You can see that the volume is a little bit below the first quarter. There is a very normal seasonality, as Sebastian mentioned. We have a strong first quarter, a weaker second quarter, a weaker third quarter, and a strong fourth quarter. If you look at the year 2024, the second quarter was almost as strong as the first quarter in 2024. Thus, the quarter-on-quarter growth rate with 11% seems to be a little bit smaller, but keep in mind the main reason was an exceptionally good second quarter 2024. As Sebastian also mentioned, we see some effects resulting from the economic slowdown in Germany and the ongoing tariff discussion. For example, we have a little bit higher cancellation rates for existing contracts and some reluctance to purchase new contracts.
People are uncertain, and this reflects in their purchasing behavior. On the other hand, we have seen such situations many times before and have always, without any exception, seen a catch-up effect afterwards in the reluctance to buy. This is because financial products are not like a watch or a second car. They are bought because you need them. You do not decide to buy one at all. You need these products for risk protection or retirement provision, so you buy them later or maybe in a smaller amount, but you do not cancel the transaction. Having said this, let's go into the segment numbers. Due to the group's reorganization, as Sebastian told you, the segment report also shows pro forma figures for the year 2024 for both segments, advisory and advisor tech.
The blue columns 2024 show the adjusted figures as if reorganization had already been effective from January 1, 2024. To compare apples with apples, I will focus on the adjusted numbers in the following slides. Revenues were up 11.2%. Gross profit was up only by 2.1%. That has two reasons. The first is that the revenue growth was driven by bigger partners with higher payouts. That is a smaller part of the explanation. The main part is that, as mentioned, we had increased cancellation ratios in April and May. Cancellation always reduces the gross margin. We think that this development, the obvious, is somehow related to Liberation Day. If you look within the quarter, you can see that June was already very strong again. June provided more than EUR 1.6 million of the EUR 3 million segment EBITDA in the second quarter. We think we are on a good way.
Of course, we saw some effects in the second quarter because please keep in mind, we compare an extraordinarily strong Q4 2024 with a Q2 2025 in the middle of the market's turmoil. If we look at the first half year as a whole, the picture is more positive. Revenues are up 14.7%. Gross profit increased by 6%. Due to good cost management, the total costs declined despite the increased volume, especially in the other operating expenses. As a result, EBITDA increased by 14.9% from EUR 6.9 million to EUR 8 million, which is an increase of 15%. Let's go into the advisory segment. The advisory division had a really strong development, although revenues only grew by 3.3%. The gross profit increased amazingly by 14%. This was, to be honest, a little bit surprising. We double and triple-checked this development, and the figures are right.
The main reason is that we have a big increase in high margin business, real estate, or other asset classes where we just have higher gross margin, and this grew faster than the rest. As the cost basis remains stable, this increase in gross profit showed a big impact in EBITDA. EBITDA increased by 45% to EUR 1.3 million, which is a very good development in our point of view. It's the same with the first half year as a whole. That's also very convincing. The revenues went up by 10.7%. Gross margin even stronger by 12.6%. This led to a very convincing EBITDA growth of approximately 50% to EUR 2.5 million in the first six months. Best regards to our FinUM colleagues in the line. Excellent work. Thank you very much. Let's come to the cash flow statement.
We started the year with cash and cash equivalents of EUR 24.6 million. We had a cash flow from operating activities of EUR 6.5 million, which was slightly below the previous year. I will explain this in a minute. The cash flow from investment activities amounted to EUR -2.5 million, better than the previous year because we only had some capital calls from [Zumitas] and no other payouts for any other participations. We had a small negative cash flow from financing activities driven by interest rates of EUR -1.2 million. We ended up with EUR 27.2 million cash on hand at the end of the quarter. As always, the very actual figure cash on hand is EUR 35.2 million. Yes. Why can an operating cash flow decline when the operating income increases? That may be the question that some of you have. We didn't want to leave this obvious question unanswered.
The answer or the reason is our negative net working capital profile. At JDC , we always receive commission before we have to pay them out. We have two cases. One is the growth case in the green box, and the other is the case when turnover declines in the red box. If the turnover increases, then we have a higher cash flow from operating activities because we have today's high commission inflow, and we have the payouts for the smaller business to the brokers of the past period. That's clear. The operating cash flow is very strong. If the turnover decreases from one period to another, for first quarter to second quarter, for instance, then the operating cash flow is smaller because we have the lower commission inflow in this period, and we have the higher payouts of the prior period. That's the reason.
The green box is very normal, for instance, for a fourth quarter, which is very strong compared to the third quarter. The red box is very normal for a second quarter where we have a smaller turnover than in the first quarter. That's just to explain this situation. We have a very nice development in the share price. You have seen this after the announcement of the FMK . Market cap is now above EUR 400 million. We are very happy about this. The reason is that we were able to finance this transaction 100% debt-based. Very value accretive, no dilution for you shareholders and for us as shareholders as well. The shareholder structure thus is unchanged and also no change in the bond. Let's come to the spotlights.
For the investors who could not attend our latest call last week regarding the FMK , we will give you a summary on this. We will show some figures regarding the platform activity. In addition, we would like to share some general thoughts about the environment and the resilience of JDC and the growth of JDC. What's FMK ? FMK is a data-driven specialist in digital lead generation. They do not only generate leads, they generate business transactions, mainly in the area of personal finance. That means FMK gets paid by its customers when the FMK customer, for instance, a credit card company, earns money. The company earns money when the consumer signs the contract. FMK not only generates leads, but takes over the conversion risk. This is very convenient for FMK customers. They have roughly 100 customers.
This is the reason why customers, since inception, constantly increase the revenue with FMK. That's what you can see on the slide here. Very impressive development. The company was founded in 2021. After four years with a revenue CAGR of almost 180%, FMK ended up at approximately EUR 40 million of turnover. A very high margin business with a 35% EBITDA margin and only 12 employees. The company is very, very digital and has a very scalable business model. We always tell you that the JDC platform is scalable. Yes, it is scalable, but FMK is even more scalable. We would love to have this revenue per employee figure in the total group, but we don't have. You can see in the pie chart that the revenue comes from personal finance mainly. We will not touch this segment. We are happy with the development. The segment should grow.
In our work together with FMK, we will touch the insurance segment, which is now less than 1% of turnover. In our, let's say, future strategy in some years, the FMK revenue in the insurance segment will be as high as in the personal finance area. How does the business work at FMK? If the consumer searches for an online product, then he sees the paid marketing campaign of FMK in Google or Bing or social media or the GenAI tools. By clicking on these campaigns, he ends up at an FMK landing page or a comparison portal. They have several of these portals. If the customer then chooses a product, he checks out to the product partner website where he does the deal. It's special at FMK because we do not only sell the leads or the business to the partners, but we get back a lot of data.
Did the customer really convert? Does he use the credit card in which amount? All this data is used in a very automized way to optimize the campaigns and to optimize this cycle. Every sale improves the next in a very automated feedback loop. That's the sort of the secret sauce why the company is so successful. Why is FMK so exciting for us? Why not only become a customer instead of buying the company? I would like to explain this with the usage of a metaphor. If JDC was a, let's say, very powerful hi-fi system, until now, others have always had the control over the volume control. We were dependent on how much revenues others brought to the platform.
With FMK, we will take more control of the volume control ourselves by generating customer leads and either converting them with our in-house brokers, which is very profitable, or passing them on to our affiliate advisors, especially to our exclusive advisors. FMK gives us, at the end, more control. It's a little bit like the missing piece on our JDC platform. In the future, we will not only provide technology, what we do today, best-in-class technology, but we will also provide consumer or customer access to our brokers. That can bring really huge synergies and makes the platform much more attractive to brokers, especially to younger brokers who don't have a lot of customers. In addition, FMK is growing very dynamically and will generate relevant profits for us. We really believe that this transaction will take JDC onto another level.
That's why we told you with the announcement that the EBITDA 2026 of JDC will definitely be above EUR 35 million. We were asked whether this was more or less a hidden profit warning since we already achieved that figure today on a pro forma basis if you add FMK and JDC. Very funny, but good question. No, it isn't. We just wanted to show your investors that JDC is now reaching a new level of profitability without setting the expectations too high. We hope for your understanding. The 2026 guidance will be published with the preliminary figures for 2025. Stay tuned and we all can be excited. Some more details on the transaction. We bought 60%. The purchaser is Jung, DMS & Cie. Austria, which is our subsidiary in the advisor tech segment. FMK will be part of the advisory business. We paid an entry multiple of 8x.
This is expected to decline below 7x. The reason is that we have an earnout structure where we pay on EBITDA improvements from 2025 to 2027, but with sharply decreasing factors. The more profitable the company gets, the better is our multiple. We've negotiated a downside protection based on the entry multiple. If the company would not be as profitable as in 2024, then we would get back our money up to a certain amount. Also very important, after five years, we have a call option on the rest of the shares, on the 40% of the shares that still are with the founders right now. This is a very good situation because they are relevant for the company and we are happy that we have them on board. After five years, it's our plan to own 100% of this company and fully integrate it into the JDC platform.
The figures on the left side show you how the company would have been if the transaction would have taken place at 1st January, 2024. Pro forma 2024, you could see that the combined EBITDA would have already been EUR 28.5 million. How to finance such a transaction? We decided to finance this transaction on a 100% debt basis because that's very value accretive for equity holders. This was possible for several reasons. The first is from a net debt perspective, we are still unlevered. We have a EUR 20 million bond, but we have EUR 30 million plus cash on hand. We have a very stable business with a very high portion of recurring revenue. The customer base is very diversified. We have only 25% of turnover that is provided by our top 10 customers. We only have seven customers that provide more than 1% of total turnover.
It's extremely diversified and thus very secure. We have a very good cash conversion from EBITDA to cash flow. These are the reasons why it was possible to finance this transaction on a 100% debt basis. We are in the process of placing this bond. What I can tell you is that we have, from our point of view, overwhelming demand, much higher than we have expected. The initial volume that we place will be EUR 70 million, seven zero, out of a framework of EUR 160 million. This is the maximum we could issue. It's not needed, but it's for us like a financing reserve. The tenor of the bond is four years. The interest rate will be paid quarterly and is expected to be around Euribor + 475 or 500 basis points. The bond will be listed at Frankfurt Open Market and in the Nordic ABM.
A professional Nordic bond with professional institutional investors. I think we will be able to close the placement within the next, I don't know, 10 days, 15 days. Last slide from my side. As you see this every three months, our KPIs on platform activities, the number of orders are below the previous year, 3% like in the first quarter. Nevertheless, we have a higher volume, higher contract volume, and thus higher commission volume from new orders. The number of contracts transferred grew by 35% on a very high number of more than 350,000, 360,000 pieces in half a year. We will end up at more than 700,000, which is an amazing number. The assets under management in the last 12 months increased by 10.2%. The annual net premium increased by 16% in the last 12 months, which is also an amazing number. Sebastian.
Yeah, thank you very much, Ralph.
Just to give you a throwback to our last earnings call slides, this is what's happened after Liberation Day. You could see that the MSCI World, which is basically the amount or the index which our assets are trailing. As you might know, we have almost EUR 8 billion in assets, EUR 2 billion are in managed accounts and about EUR 6 billion in standardized funds. This is what's happening. From its high, the MSCI World dropped from 3,900 points down to 3,300 points. Now, as you know, it went up to 4,170 points again. Basically, it went down more than 10% quarter over quarter average, and now it went up 10% quarter over quarter average. As about a third of our business is investment, basically our investment income goes down by 10%, goes up by 10% overall. That's a 3% change just in trailer fees that come in and go out.
The primary effects are quite minimal, but then we have secondary effects as consumer confidence. When you follow this in German data, you could see that consumer confidence right in April and May were at the lowest levels quite ever after COVID. Now it's going up again, as obviously there is not much harm done. As you all know, there is an agreement on tariffs among the people between the European Union and the U.S. of 15% standard. It might do some harm to manufacturing and especially the car industry, but not overall in the German economy. You see that our figures are quite resilient. Capital markets go down and up, and there's almost no, maybe 2%-3% in our growth rates. That's the effect on this Liberation Day market turmoil.
If you go on the next page, we give you a little mountain chart of what is happening, a crisis over crisis over crisis with our turnover. As you can see, over the last 10 years, we could show you increasing turnover rates and commission rates. You can see year-over-year we can grow no matter what's happening in the markets. Yes, COVID that hit us strongly as well. If advisors cannot go out to the customers, that was quite distressing. Also the energy crisis after the Ukraine-Russia war that hit heavy in two quarters in 2022, especially the third and fourth quarter. Then you could see a rebound in 2023. You can see that no matter what's happening in the world, we have a very resilient business model. Yeah, we will show you more growth and not only growth, but also growing growth rates.
We'll see that by now 2025 and then 2026, what you showed you after the FMK transaction, we will have a rising growth rate and therefore much more growth to come. This is also a very good sign. As we are becoming more efficient, this will also increase the earnings space and then also the growth rates of earnings. Just to come back to our guidance, as you could see in our last call last week and also in our press releases and corporate news, we could add up to our guidance. The old guidance of EUR 245 EUR 265 million in turnover, we increased to EUR 260 to EUR 280 million conservatively, taking into account the additional turnover of FMK and also EBITDA. We raised these EBITDA targets for the year 2025 from EUR 18.5 million to EUR 20.5 million band up to EUR 20.5 million to EUR 22.5 million by the acquisition of FMK.
Up EUR 2 million, what you could see, it's very conservative, what Ralph showed you. This will also happen if we can just consolidate the last three months of the year. Obviously, 2026 will be the first year where we can consolidate a full year with FMK. This is what we also gave you as a midterm guidance at 2026. We expect then more than EUR 35 million in EBITDA already. This is also our outlook that we gave you last year, our vision, if you may say so. We said that we see the platform becoming more profitable quite fast. That was our 2030 goals, that with a turnover of EUR 450million - EUR 500 million, we will come to an EBITDA of EUR 40 million- EUR 50 million. This is the very good news that we will reach EUR 40 million as it looks now, 2027 at the latest.
FMK gives us three years in like a turbo speed to speed up the growth levels. Yeah, we're excited to look in a very profitable 2026 and also in a very profitable 2027. Driven by the market trends, digitization, where we're one of the players in the market, demography, where we see that our brokers become older every year. Every four years, the broker base becomes older by 3.7 years. That's also one of the strong arguments for FMK that now we go to younger customer groups, more digital-oriented customers. As Ralph said, we have the lever in our own hand. We're not as dependent on B2B business because we can, if the leads cannot be transacted by our brokers, we can also go to the directors, to the clients direct. Also, consolidation is one of the topics. FMK is a very good example.
It's not done yet in Germany, but it's gaining drive and speed. Also, regulation is one of the reasons why the smaller market players just do not have any chance to come up with their IT tech stacks to grow and change them as to a regulation that's implemented faster and faster. We're happy with the development that we can give you good news that this long-term guidance will be achieved much faster than we ever thought. Thank you very much for your attention until now. We're happy to take any questions you might have. Ingmar.
Y es, thank you for the 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 the audio line. To do so, please click on the Raise Your Hand button.
If you have dialed in by phone, please use the key combination star nine followed by star six. If you have the opportunity to speak freely, you can also place your question in the chat box. Please note that the management team has another meeting right after this, and therefore, we unfortunately cannot exceed the time set for this meeting. If there are any questions by raising the hands, I'll wait for the participants. Otherwise, I'll read out questions sent to us while you have the presentation. I read it out. When will the first insurance policies brokered by FMK be transferred to the JDC platform?
Ralph, you want to take this question?
Sorry, I just was organizing my desk with a pencil and a piece of paper. Please, could you please?
Yeah, the first insurance policy is very soon. We hope to implement, have the interfaces done with FMK very fast, October, November already. The first little, little, little turnovers we expect already this year.
Yeah, definitely. Maybe some more light on this. FMK is already selling insurance. They sold the leads for EUR 80 on average, and then they saw that it's much more profitable to sell these insurance policies themselves. They founded a little broker, a very tiny broker, and within the first year, with no effort, this broker generated an EBITDA of a quarter of a million. This is a very profitable business, and we will start with this very soon. At first, we have to pay, unfortunately, at first, we have to pay the purchase price. Our kickoff meeting is already the beginning of September. First effects are visible in 2025.
Thank you very much. There's one participant raising his hand. You are able to ask your question, Mr. Young, I think.
I am sorry, yeah. I'm a little bit of a virtual here. Good afternoon, gentlemen. A couple of questions on the large clients again. Always a favorite subject. You see it increasing quite a lot. Could you give a little bit more color on the composition of the EUR 30 million that's in the large clients? That would be the first.
We didn't really understand the question right, acoustically.
Can you hear me now? Is that all right?
Yes.
Oh, I was looking at the large clients, EUR 30 million turnover. That's grown quite nicely. I was wondering about the composition. Which part is cooperative banks, which part is savings bank, which part is Allianz, for instance? A little bit of color on that.
Your question was the development of turnover. What of this turnover is contributed by the bigger partners of JDC , right?
That was in the sheet.
That was 30%, right?
You mean 30% of our turnover, you said, is major customers, right? You want to say what customers contribute at what level. It's very heterogeneic. There are some corporate clients that are not growing, but some are really growing fast. The same goes for the savings banks, especially the provincial savings banks. We're very happy about this business development. Some other savings bank insurers are trailing after the development of provincial. It's very individual among these around 25 major partners. Obviously, we are under our NDA rules. We are not publishing individual results. It has nothing to do with segments. It's more individual developments of individual partners.
Okay, clear. In the last results, I always saw the follow-up commissions. I missed that in this report. Am I right about that?
Yeah, we had these slides, which we were very surprised because the partner we are placing the bond with, Pareto, gave us some quite interesting insight in our own business. Especially, they added, because we always said there's more than 60% of our business recurring, which I think is a very big factor for a stable business. If we add up the recurring business, that means the business with partners that are already there, but it's recurring every year. That's basically technically new business. For example, every year there's new employees with Lufthansa, and obviously, there is a new pension scheme for these partners. This part of recurring business makes another almost 25%. We can say that 85% of all of our business is recurring or recurring.
I think that's very good news also for bond owners that this is a very stable business base, that we know at January 1st, basically, that all our costs are born. It's only the factor how high is our earnings or how high are our own earnings. Thank you for the question because, yeah, we had this slide in the FMK deck last week. I don't know why we didn't include it here because I don't know. We didn't want to do too much advertising, I guess.
Okay. Finally, June was quite nice. The development in June, can you elaborate a little bit on how it's going in July and August so far?
We are very happy. Obviously, the capital markets are back, right? You could see record highs, especially in U.S. indices, but also in European indices. From where we started, 3,900 points, I believe that was the high in Q1. Now we are at 4,170 points. We are up considerably. We can see that this alone gives us 3% - 4% in growth in the third quarter over the second. Also, the consumer sentiment slowly becomes better. Obviously, as Ralph showed you, we expect still the Q3 being the summer quarter, so not too much expectations there, but a very good base for a very strong Q4. Yes, there is a rebound and it's very visible from June on.
Okay, thank you.
Yes, thank you very much. Maybe a question short to answer. Has the placement of the bond at Pareto already begun?
The answer is yes. This morning, 8:05 A.M. was the sales briefing for the Pareto guys. They are on the phone right now.
Yeah, maybe Ralph, you might add that it's not too easy to get bond shares, right?
Yeah, it's a professional placement without a prospectus. Only institutional investors that are set up and KYC'd as professional investors at Pareto , who's the investment bank behind, are able to buy the bonds. If you are interested, then please let us know. Maybe we can arrange that through a platform, but minimum investment is EUR 100,000 because only professional investors.
You might want to add that already the guaranteed part that we did was highly oversubscribed. Just expect management expectations, it will be not easy, right?
You said we should not do so much marketing.
No, just expectation. Don't be disappointed if you don't get any bond shares because it was highly oversubscribed, and we expect it to be highly oversubscribed.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, great. Thank you. We move on to a participant who raised his hand. Tom Jacoby, you should be able to speak now and place your question.
Great. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes. Wonderful. I'd like to understand a little bit better the newest acquisition. You were talking a lot about EBITDA that is rising. It totally makes sense because of the positive effects taking place in EBITDA. After EBITDA, there is going to be interest payments, of course, and we can calculate them quite well. I wonder what happens about depreciation in HGB and IFRS. Maybe there are some immaterial numbers getting into the balance sheets. I have no clue what's going to happen there. It would be very nice to get some numbers there.
Yeah, very good question. I just can give you my opinion and the opinion of my finance team. At the end, we have to negotiate or discuss with the auditor. When you buy a company, then you have to do the so-called purchase price allocation, PPA. You decide what of the purchase price is allocated on, let's say, the real assets. What is the customer base? What is, for instance, immaterial assets, software, and so on? The rest is customer base. This has to be amortized over a couple of years. This is why D&A, depreciation, and amortization at JDC is very high. We have roughly EUR 6.5 million depreciation and amortization at JDC , but only EUR 2 million depreciation. The rest is amortization of the assets bought in the past.
As FMK doesn't really have a customer base because the customer has generated one time, then it's sold, there's nothing to depreciate. There's nothing to amortize. Our expectation would be that depreciation or amortization on this acquisition is rather very little, but has to be negotiated and approved by the auditor. That's our today's view.
Okay. Do you know when this will be crystal clear? Can you give an update at some point?
Crystal clear after negotiation with the auditor. Normally, this is done when the figures are audited. I understand your point. This is relevant for your investors, relevant for calculation, relevant for EPS. I will take this task with me and clear it at the latest until next earnings call.
All right. Thank you.
Welcome.
Thank you very much. We got a couple of questions in the chat box. I'll read this out. First of all, "Hello and congratulations to yet another successful quarter," which is pretty cool, actually. "Although the deal with FMK Group has yet to be formally closed, can you elaborate a bit on how we should think about their business momentum carrying into 2025 based on historical numbers? For example, are there any reasons for why the momentum shouldn't continue into 2025?" I guess it's 2026, right?
There's no reason. Of course, if we would have seen any reasoning, we wouldn't have bought the company. Of course, the growth, the turnover CAGR will come down because the higher the numbers, the smaller is the CAGR. We think this is a very scalable business and a growing business. We have, let's say, a base case from management, which is very favorable for us. As this would be insider information, we are not able to give you this information. We think that the company will keep on growing. Let's say it this way.
Okay. A follow-up question. "Can you help us understand how you are thinking about immediate versus medium-term revenue ramp up from the life insurance from FMK Group, considering their low ref base in insurance, but the potential in immediately connecting the customers to your broker network?
Yeah. Maybe I can elaborate on this. At first, you have to understand it's only a question of money. At the moment, they just invest only a little money in advertising to get leads for insurance products. Once this has changed, a lot of leads will be there. Maybe to give you a feeling, in 2024, this company generated 480,000 business transactions, meaning credit cards, cash accounts, depots, and so on. If we are only able, let's say, to convert 10,000 life insurance leads into customers, and then you know that a life insurance on average pays you an upfront commission of EUR 1,500, we are talking about EUR 15 million in additional commission. The synergies are really huge. We will work hard on generating a long-term cash flow by integrating this business onto the platform without destroying what they have achieved with their existing customers. This will be the journey.
Sebastian, maybe you can add some clever words.
We apologize for giving you just a very conservative outlook, right? This is a fast-growing company and will not break their growth path. Standalone, this will be very, very attractive for all of us. Obviously, we try to lift synergies as fast as we can. This is a lot of blue-sky operation. We're very happy with FMK as it is today. If it just contributes what they do today, it's still a very good acquisition. Obviously, there can be a lot more, and especially we expect a lot more synergies by using all these new clients as a base for upselling and cross-selling on the platform, right? Our plans are quite, quite big. We give you just the lowest rim as an expectation base because I think that's fantastic enough.
Thank you. A question in the chat box, which is by now the last one: "Do you plan to expand internationally in the next 5 -1 0 years, or do you view the opportunities in Germany large enough?
Yeah, obviously. Germany is low-hanging fruit, right? We're one of the market leaders, the tech stack's working. Obviously, the platform can be expanded in all countries. It definitely works in Austria. We had it in place, or some clients have it in place in Czech and Slovak language, so it works as well. What we need is a base where we have the ties with all the different product providers. Whenever we would find a team or a platform, like not so far away, we looked already at companies in the Netherlands or Italy. This might be a good start to expand into the European space. We had questions whether we could license it in Canada or Japan. We will not be distracted. We will concentrate on the German market as our market share is still quite low.
It depends what figures you look at, at a 0.6%, 0.7% market share in a fast-growing market. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit where we are. We can imagine to expand into normal platform levels to have not only 0.6%, but rather 1%, 2%, 3%, 5% market share. I think then it's the best way to look abroad. Until then, you will see us focusing on Germany and Austria.
Thank you. By now, we have not received any further questions. I'll wait a few moments if it will be the case. Yes, we therefore come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you for joining to all the participants. A big thank you to you, Sebastian and Ralph, for the 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. I wish you all a lovely week and a successful one as well. With this, I hand over to some famous last words to Sebastian.
I don't know whether they're as famous, but I think we could show you in Q2 that it's a very resilient business model, right? The turnover is hardly touched by all this turmoil we have in German customer-based markets. We see that the rebound is very fast. Also, now, end of June, July, August, we can see the capital markets up and also our trailer fees up. I think we're going in a very good year-end business. You can see by this transaction, FMK, there's a huge base for earnings improvement. We think that our outlook for 2026 is still conservative by adding up what's here already, not taking in account what is out there as a business opportunity. We will not stand still, but we will develop all of this.
I think we have a very, very good professional young team in FMK that are keen on really expanding and improving and also to earn money on the.
Younger than Sebastian and me.
Much younger. Yeah, they're 15 years younger, to be honest. There's fresh blood in the company and we're really looking forward to this journey that is exciting indeed. Thank you very much for your trust. Looking forward to seeing you in three months, the latest. Thank you.
Bye-bye.