Ladies and gentlemen, please hold the line. The conference will begin shortly. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Ströer Preliminary Figures Q4 2025 conference call. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been listed in read-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Udo Müller, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.
Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear analysts, let me welcome you to our call on our Q4 and preliminary and unaudited full year results for 2025. We start the call with a short overview of the key numbers and our key strategic achievements in the context of the current market dynamics. I will talk about the real game changer for Ströer, as recent technologic developments enable us to convert Ströer from advertising space marketer into an AI-driven platform business, something I had in my mind for years. This will be followed by an update on the online and Statista. Henning will guide you through the figures of fiscal 2025 and Q4. I will close the presentation with the outlook for 2026 and open the call for Q&A.
Our total revenues rose slightly, increasing by 1% year-over-year from 205 to EUR 208 billion , in line with our expectations and our guidance. Overall revenue were up by 4% to EUR 989 million , digital out-of-home by around 8% to EUR 398 million , and programmatic digital out-of-home by 12% to EUR 151 million . EBITDA adjusted ended the year essentially basically unchanged at EUR 626 million . EBIT adjusted declined by 4% to EUR 307 million . Net income adjusted were just above EUR 165 million . Free cash flow adjusted come in at roughly EUR 107 million . Our capital expenditures remained stable at around EUR 93 million , virtually unchanged from last year. Adjusted earnings per share came in at EUR 2.70. Let's change gears here and look forward.
On the next chart, I would like to present you the next logical strategic step for Ströer. This step will take Ströer to the next level, a market decisive milestone in the company's history. It is a path we began over a decade ago with the digitalization of our portfolio and with strategic acquisitions, such as RegioHelden and local display video and native ad reach, such as T- Online, whose significance is only now becoming fully apparent, especially in combination with AI tools.
This also answers the question, why now? The answer is obvious. Only now with a comprehensive set of AI tools which developed in the last 12 months, we are in the position of transform Ströer from a marketer of advertising space into an AI-driven platform business. What we describe here is the way our business works perfectly well.
As you all know, until present day, it's still primarily manual silo-based sales model. Customers have traditionally selected predefined advertising space packages and used them as building blocks for their campaigns. They are buying contacts and reach, the system of the time are offering only limited visibility into the real impact of those campaigns. Our different product worlds, out-of-home, digital out-of-home, and digital ads developed with strong expertise in each area, but they evolved for some extent on separate technical and organizational tracks.
Because of that history, they were marketed primarily independently, and our teams worked extensively across these worlds to coordinate offers, scheduling, and delivery. Much of that work was done through hands-on collaboration with campaign development and follow-up managed directly by our people. In the present setup, automation is limited, and that is true for a good reason.
Our business grew quickly. Our teams built tailored solutions for thousands of customers. That model served us well and created strong customer relationships. As volume increased, the processes remained highly people-driven. Every new campaign required detailed coordination. Impact measurement often relied on data that came from different systems and timelines. The foundation we built our success on, a model powered by expertise, personal service, and deep market knowledge. It also shows why the next step in our evolution is so important.
By bringing these product worlds together and introducing integrated, automated AI support systems, we can keep strengths that got us here while unlocking new levels of speed, transparency, and scalability for the future. This chart illustrates the next step we initiated to move from primarily a manual-driven advertising space marketer to a fully integrated AI-powered platform.
At the center of this evolution will be the Ströer Ad Manager, a system that dynamically generates individualized products for each customer instead of predefined packages. The platform creates tailored solutions automatically based on budget, location, product, industry, and location. The booking experience changes just as significantly. What used to require multiple steps and coordination loops will move to a one-click workflow that controls the entire campaign process from start to finish.
This will be powered by an AI offer engine that bring all components together: quotation, configuration, and delivery in a unified sequence. Alongside the Ad Manager, our Public Mind analytics tool, it become the intelligence layer of the system. It predicts and monitors the impact of campaigns and continuously improves them as the platform keeps learning. For the first time, we can manage campaigns not only by reach but by expected and measured effectiveness.
With the system optimizing itself over time, the economic benefits of this transformation are equally clear. Faster cycles, lower marginal costs, and stronger margins emerge naturally from AI-driven model. We gain the ability to introduce true yield management across our inventory and to scale our business without scaling our headcount. The system can generate and evaluate an unlimited number of offer variants, which means we can serve both large national advertisers and local SMEs with equal efficiency.
What this chart ultimately shows is a shift from selling advertising space to delivering complete customer solutions: automated, data-driven, and impact-oriented. It marks the next step in transforming our company into a platform business that grows faster, operates smarter, and strengthens customer relationships with every campaign. With this chart, I give you a short introduction to the first pillar of our transformation, the Ströer Ad Manager.
It will be the engine that will automate all our transactional processes and fundamentally change how we serve customers. The platform generates personalized offers at scale, something that in a traditional setup would require extensive manual work. Instead, the Ad Manager does this automatically, combining data, rules, and context signals to produce proposals that are tailored to each customer's budget, location, and objectives.
The workflows themselves, review, booking, delivery, and billing, also become fully automated. What used to require multiple handoffs will be controlled end to end by the system. This reduces errors, increases speed, and lowers processing costs. It will make the entire transaction chain faster. One of the most important elements shown on the slide will be dynamic pricing. A yield and rules engine will continuously optimize prices and bidding logic so that our inventory will be used as efficiently as possible.
This ensures better utilization and creates measurable economic benefits for our business. Because the system is AI-driven, it can process an unlimited number of bookings in parallel without increasing headcount. That scalability is essential as we expand our reach to many more local and regional advertisers. That manager is a key strategic feature that enables us to multiply the numbers of customers we can serve, both locally and nationally, without adding proportional costs.
As U.S. performance players whose offering are complementary to Ströer's product portfolio have already made self-booking the standard in the digital performance business, AI will enable Ströer to use its extensive digital infrastructure to make customer-specific and target-oriented products easily bookable in a self-service as well. Let me briefly share our milestone plan for the development and implementation of the Ströer Ad Manager.
The plan shows how we will take the Ströer Ad Manager from concept to rollout with roughly 1.5 years. We are now starting this MVP, minimum viable product, concept phase, where we define the architecture, the infrastructure blueprint, the data catalog, and all required system checks. That work lays the foundation for everything that follows. Between the 2nd and 4th quarter of 2026, we built the deep data pipelines that power the platform.
This includes all ETL connections, extract, transform, load pipeline, to our delivery system, data cleanup, the warehouse schema, our product catalog, and the price engine, ensuring we can run the platform on clean, consistent data from day one. From the 3rd quarter of 2026 to the 2nd quarter of 2027, we add the agentic AI layer.
All six to seven agents become fully functional, guardrails go live, and we implement evaluation frameworks and prompt regressing tests. This is what gives the system the intelligence to recommend, optimize, and execute at scale. During the overlapping period Q2 2026 to Q3 2027, we built the sales interface and reporting environment, the back office UI, the sales co-pilot interface, CRM synchronization, and all dashboards and reporting tools.
This ensures the platform integrates clearly into our commercial workflow and is intuitive for every team that uses it. Finally, from Q3 2026 through Q4 2027, we conduct testing and rollout. Internal pilots, feedback loops, change manag ement measures, and performance tuning lead directly to the go live. This final step ensures not just red lines, readiness of the system, but readiness of the organization to work with it at scale.
Our second pillar for our transformation is Public Mind, our AI-based predictive intelligence layer. Its purpose is simple but powerful. For the first time, the impact out-of-home campaigns becomes predictable, measurable, and fully plannable. The system uses large volumes of mobility and behavioral data to generate precise predictions of how a campaign will perform, and it feeds those predictions directly into planning and pricing decisions.
This slide also shows how Public Mind forms a learning cycle with the Ad Manager. Every campaign generates new booking, delivery, and performance signals. Public Mind interprets those signals, improves the model, and sends optimized guidance back into planning, pricing, and delivery. The more the system runs, the smarter it becomes, continuously raising effectiveness across the portfolio. Another important point here is the shift from pure performance metric context and reach to impact transparency.
Customers increasingly want to understand the real effect of their spend, not just how many people they reach. Public Mind calculates and optimizes that impact, which strengthens customer confidence and loyalty. It turns what used to be an estimate into a managed variable that can be improved in real time. Our ambition is clear.
We want to form an industry-wide standard. Let me briefly walk you through the Public Mind development timeline. In the third and fourth quarter of 2026, we complete our proof of concept, validating the core QPIs, quality and impact indicators, with selected partners to ensure the impact signals we generate are accurate and reliable in real-world settings. From the first to second quarter of 2027, we build the MVP with five pure QPIs, quality and impact indicators.
PDI, presence density index, PCS, bottleneck coverage share, 3L, lagged location lift, CHA, carry over half-life, and IROS, incremental return on ad spend. These QPIs form the analytic backbone that allows us to quantify a campaign's impact with precision. In the third and fourth quarter of 2027, we shift into multi-partner MVP testing and scientific validation. This phase confirms that Public Mind performs consistently across different industries and campaign types before we scale the system.
Beginning in 2028, we move into full enterprise rollout, including international expansion. At that point, Public Mind becomes a predictive intelligence layer of our platform, guiding, planning, pricing, and delivery across all markets we serve. To wrap up this chapter, let me repeat the key message. Ad Manager is a transaction engine. Public Mind is intelligence layer. Together, they transform manual ad space sales into a scalable automated platform business.
AI is becoming the operating system of Ströer, automating the entire value chain from planning to booking, delivery, and impact measurement. The Ströer Ad Manager now acts as our transaction engine, taking over operational steps and enabling scale way beyond manual processes. Public Mind adds intelligence layer, turning campaigns impact into a measurable and continuously optimized variable. Together, they shift us from a manual ad space business to automated platform.
The automated cycle includes data feedback and self-learning optimization, drives faster decisions, more accurate pricing, stronger yield management, and better outcomes for our clients. Building long-term loyalty and more resilient revenue. All of this is anchored in our four-layer business model. First, our public infrastructure layer. Second, our transaction layer, the Ad Manager. Third, our intelligence layer, Public Mind. Fourth, our trusted content layer, T-Online. Ströer transforms into a unique AI-driven real-world media platform.
With t-online as our trusted content layer, they amplify the impact of our nationwide advertising network and increase attractiveness for the German public. Let me now give you an update on where we stand with t-online and Statista. Let's start with t-online. Over the last 10 years, we have formed t-online into undisputed number one news platform in the market. The data points on this slide make that unmistakably clear.
In terms of net household income, we are reaching the most economically relevant users. The demographic span, spread data on the chart underscores t-online's strength. The platform is really strong across all age groups. In addition, the gender distribution is well balanced, with 50 million male unique users and 14 million female unique users. Together, forming one of the largest and most diverse digital news audiences in the German market.
What made t-online what is today throughout the past decade, we are the sole player that combined highly quality journalism with three fully developed distribution channels: desktop, mobile, and public video. That multi-channel approach has allowed us to reach audiences wherever they are and has been central to establishing t-online as Germany's number one news and advice portal. Today, across all channels, t-online reaches 47 million unique users. That scale is matched by a level of trust that has become increasingly important. In the age of AI, where reliable information is one of the most valuable currencies. More and more users not only consume our content, but actively prefer our brand over major competitors. The strength of this model comes from consistency.
10 year of open access without a paywall, 10 years of investment in distribution technology, 10 years of building a brand that people choose for both news and guidance. When we compare reach amongst German-speaking adults, t-online achieves 43%, outperforming the major news brand in the category. The most important indicator of advertisers, household managers, shows an even clearer picture. In this segment, t-online delivers a 42% reach or up to 110% advantage to our key competitors.
T he depth and quality of our reach are key. t-online not only leads in overall audience, it leads where it matters most for brands among key decision-makers with strong buying power. This leadership translate directly into a higher campaign relevance, stronger advertiser demand, and a clear competitive edge in the digital news and information market. The next chart underscores a simple but decisive point for advertisers.
Trust drives effectiveness. The data shows a clear and positive correlation of 0.85 between media brand trust and advertising systems acceptance. In other words, the more a user trusts a platform, the more open they are to advertising and the lower the likelihood of ad avoidance. Within this framework, t-online stands out with a trust score of 50, significantly above the 32 point score of another major outlet shown in the chart. That 18-point gap is not just a statistical difference.
It directly translate into a higher acceptance, stronger campaign performance, and better ROI for advertisers who choose our platform. In times of exploding amount of synthetic content, trust will be one of the most valuable currencies in the digital media, and t-online's leadership in this metric gives us a meaningful competitive advantage in an environment where brand safety, quality, and credibility matter more than ever.
An AI-based search and summaries known as Google Zero rolled out broadly in early 2025. Many in the industry expected online platforms to lose reach and relevance, Our numbers show a very different picture. A year later, t-online's audience is stable and over time, clearly growing. Page views in January 2026 were up 10% rather than 2024, and in February 2026, based on reported data, page views were up 13% compared with 2024.
A key factor on our strong share of direct traffic where reduces our dependency on external referrals and underscores the strength of the t-online brand. The platform continues to draw large, loyal audiences, supporting advertising relevance and strengthening the long-term quality of our revenue. The data makes it clear, even in the AI-shaped landscape, the online remains the destination with stable reach and strong impact.
With that, over to Statista to give you a follow-up to our deep dive in H1, 2025. AI and large language models now permanent almost all areas of business, from research and analysis to strategic decision making. The quality of the output is only as good as the data behind it. When AI systems access unverified or erroneous data, they produce so-called hallucinations, content that sounds plausible but is factually incorrect.
The figures on this slide speak for themselves. According to McKinsey, the global economic damage caused by AI hallucinations amounted to EUR 67.4 billion in 2024 alone. According to Deloitte, almost half of all enterprise users have already made important decision based on hallucinated information. Boston Consulting Group estimates efficiency loss due to manual verification of AI outputs at 22%. These are not abstract risks. A prominent example from last year illustrates this impressively.
In October 25, it was revealed that Deloitte Australia had produced a $290,000 report for the Australian government with the help of AI. The report was full of fabricated sources, non-existent academic publications, fictional book quotes. Deloitte had to reimburse part of the cost. This shows that without real level, verified, and curated data, companies risk not only poor reports, but also fundamental misjudgments with legal, financial, and reputational consequences.
This is exactly where Statista comes in as a trustworthy, verified data source for AI-supported workflows. What makes Statista unique as a data source? First of all, the sheer breadth and depth of our data. Over 1.3 million statistics, 80,000 reports, 30,000 infographics, 10,000 topic pages, and around 3 million consumer interviews.
About 85% of our data is proprietary or exclusive third-party data, meaning it is created exclusively by Statista. In addition, we have exclusive partnerships with third-party providers, and crucially, our data is trusted, verified, and editorially classified. What is now changing fundamentally is that this data is no longer only available via statista.com. We bring it directly to where our customers work, into their own workflows and applications.
We do this via our own MCP server for AI agents via Representational State Transfer, APIs, and via various technical integration solution that companies can integrate in their own applications. Particularly important, our data is now also integrated directly into the applications of major partners, Perplexity, Canvas, and Microsoft Copilot. This dramatically expands the user base. It is no longer just power users and analysts who benefit, but effectively the entire company.
Usage become more accessible, because it takes place directly where people already work in the everyday applications. The shift to AI first and the connections to AI application requires a consistent change in two dimensions, product and sales. On the product side, this means first and foremost that we are integrating our data technically into partner applications such as Microsoft Copilot. In other words, co-product development with our partners.
AI is also fundamentally changing how customers search for data with us. Keyword, guided search. In addition, AI enables completely new data formats that can be searched in real time. Here, we are investing heavily in products such as synthetic populations, which allow market research and analysis in real time. To solve customer-specific problems, we specifically address use cases in various industry. For example, media planning. On the sales side, this results a new go-to-market approach.
Since solutions that are integrated into customer applications and AI systems are significantly more complex, a more solution-based and consulting-based sales approach is needed. The first step is primarily about convincing customers of the new applications and driving up usage through close integrations of sales and customer teams. This also results in new customer segmentation. Small customers are served in self-service with integrated standard solutions, but for large customers, we jointly develop tailor-made solutions that's embedded in their application and processes. Finally, we expect the pricing model to evolve from a purely seat-based approach to more consumption-based model. Far, my remarks. With that, I hand over to Henning.
Thank you, Udo, and a very good morning, everybody. Udo already elaborated on the key financials for 2025, but please allow me just to add a few remarks. In what, after a strong start turned out to be a very challenging year, we delivered all in all a very robust performance. After a decline in the first nine months, EBITDA adjusted for the full year was stable, supported by an improvement in the fourth quarter.
Exceptional items for the year amounted to EUR 25 million and included costs for our stock options program of EUR two and a half million, restructuring costs mainly at Statista and expenses for ERP transformation of altogether close to EUR 17 million, and costs for the assessment of potential changes of the group's portfolio of roughly EUR 4 million.
Reported EBITDA amounted to EUR 601 million, up to EUR 605 million in the prior year. Depreciation and Amortization increased by 5% to EUR 334 million and included roughly EUR 10 million from the acquisition of RBL Media in 2024. The underlying increase in D&A was somewhat lower. EBIT for the full fiscal year was EUR 268 million and 7% lower than in 2024. At the same time, the financial result improved by 13% and amounted to EUR 67 million. The improvement reflects lower rates and some positive currency effects from intra-group debt denominated in US dollar, more than offsetting higher net debt. Earnings before taxes were EUR 201 million and EUR 9 million below previous year's level.
Applying a broadly stable tax rate, net income for 25 was EUR 140 million, leading also to an improved equity position in the balance sheet. Adjustments were slightly higher following the above-mentioned exceptional items, and with that, net income adjusted came in at EUR 165 million, so just a few million euro short against the prior year.
While organic growth in Q4 was flat as in the first nine months, sales growth was 3%, supported mainly by an acquisition our call center business. The corresponding effect on revenue amounted to EUR 20 million. EBITDA adjusted improved by EUR 7 million, mainly driven by the contribution from the just described acquisition, EUR 3 million, and improved earnings from out-of-home media as well as Digital & Dialog Media segments. Reported EBITDA came in broadly stable.
Higher D&A and thus a lower EBIT was compensated for by an improved financial result, leading to stable earnings before taxes. Taken into account the higher adjustments, net income adjusted even improved to EUR 79 million for the fourth quarter. Let us now discuss the cash flow development for the full fiscal year and the fourth quarter.
While it is obvious that the full year's development was not in line with our initial expectations at the beginning of last year, Q4 cash flow is characterized by improved cash conversion based on tight expense and CapEx control. With a stable EBITDA in Q4, lower interest and tax payments could compensate for a lower but still positive working capital contribution. Working capital included roughly EUR 10 million outflows required to finance the activities acquired in the call center area.
Excluding that, the working capital contribution to cash flow in Q4 was roughly on the prior-year level. With that, the operating cash flow in Q4 was on prior year's level, representing a considerable improvement compared to the development of the first nine months. Lower cash out for investments and slightly lower cash out for lease liability repayments even led to improved free cash flow adjusted in the fourth quarter, in line with the guidance that we have provided in our Q3 call. Let us now analyze the net debt development.
Net debt year-over-year was up by EUR 33 million, including our free cash flow adjusted of +107 million EUR, dividends to Ströer shareholders of -128 million EUR, dividend payments to minority shareholders of -13 million EUR, M&A and transaction costs of around -3 million EUR, and the remainder of around +4 million EUR, lower financial liabilities recognized from profit transfer agreements at companies with minority interests. Sequentially, so from the end of Q3 to the end of Q4, net debt was reduced by EUR 74 million, including free cash flow adjusted of +88 million EUR, M&A expenses of -1 million EUR, and quite like in Q4 2024, -9 million EUR arising from increased customer overpayments.
With that, our leverage ratio amounted to 2.3 x by the end of fiscal year 2025 after 2.1 x last year. Compared to the end of Q3, however, Based on good Q4 cash flow generation, our leverage ratio improved by roughly 0.2x , giving us reasonable headroom. Let us now have a look into the performance of our out-of-home media segment. I trust many of you are aware of the challenges IFRS lease accounting implies for the significance of EBITDA. In order to increase transparency here, we would like to share with you the same chart we have discussed already in the last couple of years, now extended for the values of fiscal year 2025.
Looking at the average growth since 2022, we see revenue up by close to 8%, supported on the one hand by the acquisition of RBL last year, contributing a sales delta of around EUR 19 million. On the other hand, however, more than compensated for by an exceptionally challenging market environment in 2025.
EBITDA adjusted, which includes effects from IFRS 16 accounting in the same period, showed a slightly higher average growth rate. You also see that IFRS 16 effects increased a little more in 2025 compared to the two years before. Again, partly deriving from the acquisition of RBL. Looking at the EBITDA excluding IFRS 16 effects, so the cash EBITDA, which certainly is a much better cash flow proxy, we see average growth of more than 10% in the period since 2022.
The main drivers here being the sales outperformance of our high-margin digital products and above-average growth for our large national account business. Including a CapEx to sales ratio declining into 2024 and stabilizing in 25, cash contribution on average improved considerably by more than 25% on average in the period. We now focus more on the development in 25 compared to 24, we see that the EBITDA adjusted margin is improving slightly, while the cash EBITDA margin is flat at 25.5%.
The main reason for this being the slightly higher fixed rent exposure compared to the prior year from RBL of roughly EUR 5 million and some EUR 4 million from new contracts at Ströer Polska. Total lease expenses before IFRS 16 amounted to EUR 303 million in 25.
In % of sales, 30.6%, reflecting a slight increase against the prior year due to a sales mix shifting to slightly more expensive inventory and a lower differential between the sales performance of Classic and Digital than in the previous year. Delivering a stable cash EBITDA margin at a slightly higher lease to sales ratio shows also good cost and expense control that we intensified after the ad market was going south in spring last year. For the current fiscal year, 2026, we currently expect declining effects from IFRS 16 after several contracts, such as in the cities of Bremen, Frankfurt, and Bielefeld, have been renewed and will now foresee a significantly lower fixed rent component. Let us now have a look at the performance of our different segments with a particular focus on the Q4 development.
Out-of-home media sales in the fourth quarter grew by almost 2% in a very challenging market, which was characterized by declining TV sales. With that, the performance was in line with the projection provided on our Q3 call. Both our Classic and Digital products showed moderate growth. EBITDA adjusted was up by roughly EUR 10 million, almost one-third of this coming from an exceptionally strong year end performance of our activities in Poland, and also supported by higher IFRS 16 effects mentioned earlier.
On top of that, our services business, where we supply non-media services to, in particular, smaller clients, improved earnings by around EUR 2 million. The remainder of the improvement also includes continuously tight cost control. Altogether, the performance in fiscal year 2025 with around 4% growth at a stable cash EBITDA margin demonstrates resilience under extreme market conditions.
Supported by our acquisition in the call center space that is recognized in our financials since the beginning of October last year, our segment Digital & Dialog Media showed a strong increase in Q4 revenues of 9%. Organic growth of the segment was 0.7% and thus also improved compared to the development of the first nine months. Let me take a moment to repeat the key rationale behind the call center transaction. The acquired assets relate to AMEVIDA, which was an established provider in the field of dialog marketing with a strong focus on sales and sales-related services. We acquired the business in the course of insolvency proceedings for a negligible purchase price. As part of the integration, the acquired business is now operated largely from our existing overhead infrastructure.
On top of that, we optimized the existing portfolio of locations and renegotiated existing lease contracts, so that altogether we will be able to operate AMEVIDA profitably from day one. In terms of customer structure, we will strengthen our position by helping mostly already existing clients in their sales process. As opposed to a pure service-related business, this will offer a higher margin potential going forward.
For the full fiscal year 2026, we shall have on average more than 1,200 additional FTEs, generating more than EUR 70 million in revenue with an expected high single-digit EUR million contribution to EBITDA on top of the roughly EUR 3 million recognized in Q4. Our Digital Media sales somewhat stabilized towards the end of the year. Revenues of our high-quality owned content portfolio increased and largely compensated for a decline in our third-party portfolio.
Q4 EBITDA was up EUR 4 million, largely deriving from the already mentioned transaction and a positive earnings development in Digital, which altogether more than compensated for a decline at our door-to-door activities, which delivered strong earnings improvement in Q4 of 2024. Segment revenue in our Data as a Service and eCommerce segment was down by 4%. Sales in Statista were up 3.5% organically, excluding currency effects, and thus a little bit better than the development in the first nine months.
On the platform side, inbound sales expectedly will remain under pressure, while outbound and the ranking business hold up well. By the end of the year, we disposed of a small non-core business unit of Statista which focused on customized strategic consulting projects. This unit generated roughly EUR 8 million sales in 2025 with no relevant earnings contribution.
At asam, Q4 was challenging for two reasons. The consumer environment remains under pressure, including a sluggish Christmas business impacting our online channel. We faced some teething issues after migrating our outdated webshop infrastructure to a new provider. Insufficient controls led to fraudulent purchase orders in which a large number of guest accounts were used, which finally triggered an exceptional, an extraordinary write-off in receivables of around EUR 2.5 million recognized in our EBITDA adjusted. Let me hand you over back to Udo Müller for the outlook and closing remarks.
Provided that the already significant trade policy and geopolitical uncertainties do not increase further, we are optimistic about the 2026 financial year. Based on the assumptions we see today, we anticipate organic revenue growth in the low to mid single digit range. For the cash EBITDA, so the EBITDA before IFRS 16, we expect a development in line with sales growth. For adjusted free cash flow before M&A, we see a positive development.
For EBITDA adjusted after IFRS 16, we are expecting a largely stable development compared to the previous year, including lower IFRS 16 effects. Due to better economic parameters and recently renewed contracts. With a shift from fixed to variable rents. A negative accounting impact on EBITDA adjusted on the one hand, and declining fixed lease obligations on the other hand.
Looking to Q1 2026, out-of-home media sales should come in slightly above last year's level, even against a strong prior year growth of 15.3%, which included the impact from the federal elections in Germany. In Digital & Dialog Media, we expect sales growth broadly in line with the momentum of the fourth quarter of 2025, which stood at +9%. For DACH & eCommerce, we expect a decline of roughly EUR 9 million, including the disposal of the Statista strategy and consulting unit.
Let me now close the presentation with a short look into our financial calendar for 2026. The annual report for 2025 will be published on March 23, 2026. On May 12, our Q1 numbers will be released. The half-year figures will be presented on August 13, and our Q3 figures will be published on November 12.
In order to do justice to the significance and complexity of our strategic transformation, we are planning a webinar in April 2026, during which we will discuss the topics presented in detail, review and explore them in greater depth. We will send you an invitation to this webinar in good time. As always, updates, reports and road shows presentations can be found on our IR website. Thank you, everyone. We are now happy to take your questions.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. Our first question comes from Annick Maas from Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Good morning. My first question is about your AI Ad Manager. Can you just tell us how much investment is needed to develop this platform over the next years? My second one is on the dialog business. Can you just isolate again, I think it was a bit too quickly earlier, of how much of the growth is due to M&A, how much of the growth was coming from Ranger in the dialog and segment?
That would be great. On Statista, I think you've already alluded to the usage-based model at the last results. Can you know, tell us, has this materialized already in some revenues coming from this new model, or are we still in a full transition? I'll just add one more. Can you just comment on why your fixed rent payment in the renegotiation has gone down? Just to explain a little bit more around that. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Annik. Let's start with the last question. We are benefiting here from the consolidation of the German market. We said that already in the last calls, one or the other time. Generally, the rents are shrinking. That is a result here. We could improve the rents in a couple of contracts in the last year, which were actually signed 15 years ago when we had three, sometimes four competitors. Now we have a duopolistic situation. We have Deco and us. Deco is mainly focused on large cities. That's why we have, let's say a very supportive situation, which we already saw in the last years. We see shrinking rents, and that is a result here.
IFRS EBITDA is shrinking when we take fixed rents out. The variable rents don't impact that solution. If the fixed rents are growing, EBITDA IFRS is rising. I mean, the fixed rents are shrinking, so EBITDA goes down. This is a bit weird if you look on the first view, because obviously we have lower EBITDA because we have more favorable rent conditions. First question, the Ad Manager. I mean, due to the recent technological developments, it's much cheaper, so we expect maximum around EUR 2 million here in CapEx. It's negligible, actually. It's not the same also for... Ad Manager is clearly something what is our platform.
You can compare it a little bit with whatever Google, for example, are doing with Google Ad Manager. Theirs is 10 times more complex and a global thing, et cetera. At the end here, the big advantage is that we are able to produce automated offers locally and nationally. This will be a big help, for example, especially also in the local market, because today we have 30,000 local customers. The average ticket here is like EUR 7,500. The processing cost and also the sales costs are enormous, because we have no possibility today for self-booking, for example, for local customers. While self-booking became the standard now in local sales, really.
I mean, Google and Amazon, they do like EUR 13 billion turnover in Germany. Almost everything there is self-booking. Up to now, we have no self-booking capability. You can only buy or we're selling actually products, we don't sell solutions. For example, you have whatever, 1,000 local Sparkassen banks in Germany. With the Ad Manager, we are able to produce offers for 1,000 banks in two minutes, where you have a completely tailored offering across our different advertising platforms, with out-of-home as a key offering.
This can be done by our sales force as a managed service, or it can be done by the customers or agencies, small agencies which are working for the customer by themselves in a self-booking, so that's why we strongly believe that we are able to multiply the number of local customers through the Ad Manager because we have these completely tailor-made products for every customer, for every opportunity and for every strategic focus they have. Public Mind is a bit different as we are in talks with all key industry players here because the targets here and the intelligence layer and the development costs are also around EUR 2 million to get it live. This will be actually initiative by the association at the end.
We are developing it right now, and we are almost finished with the first phase. Here in the future, we can show the impact of the campaign based on these QPIs which what Virgil was talking before. This will be also a game changer, clearly because impact is key in the future for the acceptance of our media, for any other media. That's why the combination of the Ad Manager, which is the Ströer development and Public Mind, which is which will become an industry-wide initiative, is going to change the acceptance and also how people look at our media completely.
Annick, on your, on your question, reconciling dialog sales in Q4, you see on slide 30 that sales have grown, growing by around EUR 23 million. Roughly EUR 20 million of this is coming from the acquisition. The underlying growth in the, in the call centers was, I would say around EUR 5 million. Resales at Ranger were roughly down by EUR 2 million. I think that explains. However, Ranger was quite strong in, moving from 2023 into 2024, so there's a bit of a base effect. Also Ranger developed better than we anticipated, like 12 weeks ago in the, in the fourth quarter.
On Statista, Annick, we clearly see consumption or usage going up through the changing model. What we also see is that we have very different results for various clients, so it's not like a home run coming from itself. We have customers like for instance, Shopify, who have integrated Statista data via their LLM cloud, which is implemented in their internal work process, and they had like 25x the credits now that they originally had planned.
You see that the database model works very well for specific clients, but there are other customers like in the advertising space, Omnicom Group, where you see the changing model in itself has not really driven consumption up so far. You need to work with the clients on the activation of the new model.
We clearly see that consumption or usage in general goes up. Still a very diversified profile across all customers. You see like the customers where it works, you see consumption almost exploding. We're working on finding out where the levers are for the success cases and then implement it in an activation program across all customers that go for Statista Connect.
Thank you.
The next question comes from James Tate from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hey, thank you and good morning. It's James Tate from Goldman. I've got three questions, please. Firstly, on the cadence of out-of-home growth through 2026, you mentioned the slight growth in Q1 against a tough comp. Could you give some color on what you're baking in for the rest of the year as part of your group guidance?
Should we expect an acceleration to mid-single digit growth for sort of Q2 to Q4? I guess secondly related, have you seen the escalation in the Middle East conflict impact sentiment or forward bookings amongst advertisers? Is it in any way similar to the impact that you flagged around the trade war last year? I guess finally, from a more strategic viewpoint, it was helpful to understand more about Ströer Ad Manager.
Will this also help you become more closely integrated with some of the advertising agencies and grow your share of their direct budgets? You described the Ad Manager as a game changer. Could you help quantify how you're thinking about the contribution to out-of-home revenue growth over time? Thank you.
Thank you, James. Maybe starting with the cadence of out-of-home, I think it's probably fair to say that we expect somewhat of an acceleration as far as we move down the year. Q1, as we all know, actually, was very strong last year with more than 15%. We are quite positive that there's a good chance that we will see quite a bit of a tick up. I think unchanged, again, let us point out that we feel structurally there's no limit that out-of-home should grow close to 10%. Let's say our midterm guidance for the business is unchanged.
The Ad Manager clearly is something which is also, let's say, asked by the agencies and the customers because this will allow us, you know. Look, today all the outdoor business in the world, they are selling actually the boards, and they are selling reach, and they are selling contacts. This is a complete game changer because the customers are asking for impact, not for contacts.
We can buy a lot of contacts, you need to know what is the outcome from that, huh? Look, we have, for example, today, we have a national sales force from 750 people, that is a big sales force, and there are only like 100 people are working with clients and the rest is in back office.
To transform the business in a platform business is a complete game changer, and I'm 100% convinced that the whole out-of-home industry is going to make this move. We see that we are here ahead of the development. The reason that we were also ahead in introducing programmatic technologies to our business because of our strong digital business, we are much deeper in this technological development. We just got a big study from one of the big consulting companies last week by chance, and we saw that they go exactly the same route for the industry. The industry will change. AI is a transition transforming power for the out-of-home industry.
You see the future will be clearly, you see the big American, performance companies, and you see, out-of-home growing, and all the other stuff will suffer. Print, TV, radio, the market is changing. The question is really is AI, is this, driving your development on a new level, and, and that what we see here, huh? We are able first time to really, report impact, and we are able to automate our processes, which are super complex, huh, because if you have hundreds of thousands of billboards and street furniture pieces around the country, it's a super complex operation, from marketing it, from building products and to the, maintenance, on the street. This is AI is here a complete game changer.
That's, you will see in the latest 12 months to 24 months, the whole industry is going to change in this direction. Eoin. Eoin was a question. Right now, we don't see an impact, but it depends obviously how it develops, so nobody can see that. Look, last year, I think, if you look at the market development, the market, I think, was in reality high single-digit down. I think we delivered an excellent result for that. It would look completely different without all this terrorist war and stuff, huh? We are in a situation where consumer confidence and also corporate confidence is not very high.
For this background, if you look at the numbers, I think we delivered really strong numbers in our core business, especially if you look on digital growth and digital out-of-home growth and programmatic out-of-home growth. I think this is really surprisingly stable. Q1 is much better than I expected because I always look on three years average growth rates. Last year was exceptional year in Q1, not only the elections, but also you might remember that the big, some of the big German retailers, they kicked these paper leaflets out and they shifted a lot of money in advertising for digital solutions and apps and stuff like that. This gave also a unusual strong Q1.
I expected a slightly negative development in Q1. We see growth. I think that's a very good signal into the year. Let's see. I think the second half will be better. That's my expectation, growth wise, because we are progressing here in sales and the market, let's say, is stable. When the overall advertising market, I think is not going to change. It is a year with a lot of insecureness, and I think TV will be under pressure unchanged and print as well. I think we see pretty much similarly in the advertising market than last year because the circumstances didn't change, huh? Now we have the new war on top.
Let's see how this is. If it's finished in four weeks, what we all hope, then, I don't see you see an impact, if it goes on for the next six months. Clearly we see globally an impact.
Got it. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Julien Roch from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I'll start with top line guidance, low to mid single digit organic. How do we translate that into absolute revenue? Is there any effects in the M&A? How much does programmatic growth reduce the growth? That's my first question.
The second one is coming on your Ströer Ad Manager saying, you know, AI is completely transforming the business. Because we were selling basically number of people and now we're gonna sell an audience. I'm not sure why AI is making the difference. Selling an audience means you need to understand who goes in front of your billboard, which is more like a measurement. Why is AI allowing you to transform a contact into an impact, as you said?
Our last question for Henning, on free cash flow, can we get some help and indications, maybe, one, cash interest, two, cash tax, three, CapEx, and four, lease repayment? Thank you.
Yeah. I think there's a misunderstanding. We don't sell audience. If you look at these QPIs which I was talking before, let's say KPIs, Public Mind is defining KPIs, and we track the efficiency of the campaign against these KPIs. For example, mental availability index, because the idea behind that is, look, if you compare the... Let me compare with the football team? If Bayern Munich wins 3-0 and Harry Kane makes three goals, Google says, "Okay, last cookie wins," so the whole cash goes to Harry Kane. You would think, "Okay, let's hire 10 Harry Kanes." You win 30-0 instead of 3-0, but everybody knows that's not happening.
You need a midfield. The midfield is actually preparing the conversion? If you have a strong midfield or if you have stronger brand, then it's much cheaper what you have to spend in performance. Harry Kane will make more goals if you have a strong midfield. If there's no midfield, he will make maybe zero goals. In the midfield you have different KPIs in football.
It's not about making goals, but maybe how good you are tackling, how good were you, how accurate are your passes, how much you are running. We have different KPIs to measure the impact of the midfield, and that's what we are doing here? We develop. We don't sell, obviously, audience and context will be still 1 point, but people want to know what is the outcome.
We developed here in the first level these five QPIs, which I disclosed before, and we are disclosing the impact of the campaigns based on these five KPIs. That is. This is, by the way, exactly what Google or Amazon is doing today. The other day I spoke with a guy from the cosmetic industry. He says, "If I add what Google and Facebook are telling me, Google and Amazon are telling me how many units they're selling, I have to sell 30% more than I'm selling in reality because at the end..." But they deliver impact in relation to self-defined KPIs. That is the next step. The next step is going from audience to impact, and that is what we achieve here through AI technology.
Without AI, it's impossible to deliver that. Also, look, also the Ad Manager is only... This was actually a concept at Target which I already followed like 10 years ago. That's why we acquired a local, display video and native ad reach. That's why we acquired, also RegioHelden. RegioHelden is a reseller for U.S. player performance products. My vision was always a moment when the local newspaper companies are disappearing, and this will be now in five years to six years from what I'm hearing. In five years to six years, we'll be out of business. There's no other local sales force anymore.
We realize if you don't have a technology and a platform which is combining automatically the different products in a customer-specific product, then it becomes very difficult because you have at the end, silos next to silos, and it is quite expensive also to sell EUR 7,500 tickets on average with a people-driven sales force. Through the technical development in the last 12 months, we can now actually realize what was my vision already 10 years ago, and this will be a big change because whatever you can. You can even put a prompt in saying, "Look, I want to. I'm a Sparkasse in Cologne. I have EUR 5,000 or EUR 10. I want to make a campaign for winning new customers.
My location is here." The system will give you directly a tailored product for winning new customers saying, for example, "Okay, you invest 50% in outdoor, 20% in local display reach, and 30% in Google search." Then you can, if pushing the button, you can directly book it, and also pay it. We are launching now, this week actually, we're launching our first test platform for cultural advertising, because this is really small tickets, really expensive in processing. This one is based on actually Shopify technology.
As a local cultural event company, you book your campaign and you can pay it with PayPal or a credit card immediately. Very exciting times and we see that the tests were really promising and we go live in this week here in the 1st city in Germany.
Your question, Julian, on sort of breaking down the sales guidance. As I said in the speech, if you ask ourselves what are, let's say, the non-organic effects in the sales of 2026, most important thing for sure is the acquisition of in the call center space. I said in the speech, we expect more than EUR 70 million sales compared to the EUR 20 million already recognized. I would say probably EUR 50 million-EUR 60 million additional sales from that in the full fiscal year of 2026. We have to consider minus EUR 8 million from the disposed small strategy consulting unit at Statista. I think these are the major components you need to understand sort of to break down the guidance a little bit.
On free cash flow, just, you know, walking you a little bit through the drivers. Currently we expect, let's say, lower exceptionals for fiscal year of 2026, so that should a little bit support free cash flow generation in 2026. In terms of interest, I would say at this point, probably we expect rather stable cash out for interest payments. Tax will probably go up a little bit. I think we expect a major change in working capital. As you know, with which last year has been quite a burden. That turned around a little bit in Q4, and we hope to see also that we will not once again see such a substantiated outflow as we have seen in 2025.
If you ask me now, probably a target at this point in time is that 2026 cash flow should be somewhere between EUR 25 and EUR 24 level, right?
Yeah.
Maybe just to add, in terms of CapEx, we expect broadly stable CapEx, maybe a little bit increase in out-of-home, which is offset by the lower CapEx at Statista.
One last remark to Ad Manager and Public Mind. I mean, this is not a cost initiative, huh? Obviously we expect the processing costs to shrink massively because every order today goes to four, five or six hands, huh? This is in the future, it's going to be reduced on one, maximum two. This is, let's say, a side effect, huh? I mean, we don't speak about a cost-cutting strategy here. That is really a side effect. We speak about transforming, and that what I said before, the whole industry will transform in the next four to eight quarters.
Let's say four quarter will start to transform in the next four quarters and I'm convinced that it will transform in the next, let's say two years or three years completely.
Danke.
Bitte.
The next question comes from Marcus Diebel from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Perfect. Yeah, two questions. Udo, can you comment a little bit more how the sort of like new model and new approach will impact how the agencies will sell outdoor? I mean, we obviously understand that there's structural shift here. Do you see now, given this move and there's an accelerated shift, would be interesting to hear sort of like how much longer you think the agencies can still push their sort of like old model of selling their sort of like own TV and even print inventory, and how is that going to change? Secondly, we briefly touched on this. The question is indeed also on cost savings due to AI.
I fully understand that it's much more exciting on the top line, but nevertheless, the question is, yeah, what can we expect in terms of like potential changes? Nearly every company in our space talks about more efficiencies, talks therefore about margin expansion. We don't see this really coming through yet at Ströer. The question is that going to change, yeah, conceptually at least from 2027 onwards? Or how shall we think about AI also again on the cost side of things? Again, I understand it's more about the top line, but would be very interesting to hear.
As you all know that most of the initiatives that people try to introduce AI and lower the costs are not really successful up to now. At least you don't see many successful cases. As I said, there's not a cost saving activity. We believe that in the next five years, we can save up to EUR 50 million costs if you compare the cost in five years with the cost we're going to have driven by AI. It's a significant impact. I don't think that in the next two years you'll see here big effects. That's all over the place. It's not only in our company.
I also believe that there are many people doing mistakes now because if you introduce AI as really a transformational power in your company, you have to be aware that this change everything, and they change also your processes, your workflows, and it makes no sense. Like it made no sense when the internet came up and digitalization started to do the same. Many people tried to do the same in a digital way what they did before in a non-digital way. I think now maybe people make the same mistake again, huh? This is a game changer, this technology. I mean, I think for many companies like we're operating a very complex setup of products and processes that will be all over the place , huh?
There will be a lot of impact on cost and profitability in the next five years. I would guess, if you to achieve the full potential, it would take four, maybe five years. Difficult to say right now is the technology developing so fast that we were discussing now for whatever, three months that I said, "Look, we need in this lead-to-offer-to-order process a national sales, huh? We need a tool for our national sales people so that actually takes over the strategic work in delivering tailor-made strategic planning solutions for our national customers." At the end, customers want to see how we solve their problems. They don't want us to sell our products.
Now two days ago, suddenly we introduce a new technology, and everybody's totally flabbergasted because nobody expected four weeks ago it would be possible now in the next 12 months. Now it's actually alive since 24 hours. Things are changing very quickly, and that's also why we hired a CTO now, which we announced also today first time that we have a group CTO who's focused on the main business, on the core business, and this is one of the first results of that. I deeply believe we are completely at the forefront here of the technical development. Up to EUR 50 million in the next five years can be also quicker.
It's difficult to say from today's point of view because the technology, the technological development is much faster than everybody can foresee that right now. On the agency side, look, that is very simple. The agencies are under pressure because in the past they made money with reselling TV actually, now TV is going down faster than anybody expected. There's still mid to high single digit EUR billion in print and TV which are going either to us or to the Americans, huh? If it goes to the Americans for the agencies, that means zero income. That is something where I expect in the next two years or three years that we will receive support, we are...
What we're doing right now that we develop joint business plans, midterm joint business plans with agencies. That is one of the reasons why I'm quite optimistic in midterm. I still think that 2026, more this and that and blah will be similarly like 2025. On midterm I'm, this is one of the reasons why we are very optimistic here for our core business because agencies, we are a natural strategic partner for them. They're also saying, "Look, we need to report impact to our customers." The time is over, or time is not over, but time is...
Look what we have today, we have to convince customers they do Outdoor, and then after the campaign was running, they see it's working, but we're not able to predict impact. This at the same time it look like Google and Co., they made it very smart because they developed from the beginning their own set of KPIs, and they're reporting success in relation to the KPIs they developed on their own. I mean, this is not real at the end. That's why I said before this cosmetic example, huh? If you add what Amazon and Google is selling for you end up with 130% from what you are selling.
But people want to see impact even if they know it's not 100% correct, because nobody, even not Google, is able to show 100% real reality, but this is something which is clearly a key demand. The agencies say, "Look, we want to do more outdoor, because it's also for us more profitable to go outdoor than the money goes to the U.S. But we need to report impact. We need to predict impact. We need to plan impact," so prediction, report, and the learning layer, these are the...
This is actually what also made, the Americans made it as a market standard today. Self-booking is a market standard for local clients, became more and more a market standard and impact prediction, reporting, and uplift. That's what we're doing right now here, we move. The digitalization or infrastructure, it became a part of the future, now we make the second step.
We make the second step in how we sell it, how we prove transparency of what is the impact, how we produce our products with a clear customer benefit, so that's actually as I think these are the keys of what we, what we see in the upcoming quarters, and what I already said, I take every bet that the industry not even in three or four quarters, the whole industry talks about the same stuff.
Perfect. When do you think you would be in a position to give a bit more sort of like on the potential of incremental revenues at the end of the day, yeah? Because obviously these changes, you know, sound intuitively make a lot of sense. Personally, I find it quite hard to really see what the add on at the end of the day on revenues will be, yeah? When do you think you will be in a situation to help, I guess, the market to understand it better in terms of also the financial impact?
You know that's, we gave a first hint, but it's easier in local markets. We have 3 million SMEs in Germany, 30,000 our customers. I'm convinced and we do EUR 200 million. Our midterm target, when the system is in place up and running, I'm convinced we can serve 100,000 customers instead of 30,000. I think this is much more easy to calculate in region. Why? Because there are no agencies, there's no other sales force. We are the only one visiting customers. There's no competitor at the end. Today, and the local clients, they don't have a defined strategy, it depends also how it's convincing your offering.
National is more complex because the customers have a lot of specialists here. They have their own strategies. The agency has a strategy. The agency has financial ties and background from kickback deals, et cetera. There is a that goes lower. I'm 30,000 customers at what we are serving now with a low profitability because EUR 7,500 a ticket, you can imagine that this is something where you see low profitability. When you increase that from 30,000 to 100,000 and let's say 40% of them do it in a self-service, it will be one of our KPIs in the future, which we're going to report how much of the turnover is going to be in self-service or not. Then the profitability will obviously explode.
You go from, if you have five times, if you go for example to 100,000 customer, you go to EUR 1 billion instead of EUR 200 million turnover, and with a very healthy profitability.
Yeah. Super. Thank you.
We will offer this webinar in April where whoever's interested, we walk you more detail about what we are doing there and what we believe what's going to happen.
Perfect. Yeah. Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. I just have two more questions. Just diving into your 2026 outlook in a bit more detail. You are guiding for organic revenue growth, but stable adjusted EBITDA. Where are we seeing some margin pressure in the business if that were to happen?
Could you maybe give us some color by segment as to where you think margins could improve versus not? Also connected to that, this is the organic EBITDA I'm assuming that you're guiding towards. What should we expect for reported EBITDA once, you know, the EBITDA from the inorganic businesses or the acquisitions that you've done are included? Some color there would be great.
Second, on the AI Ad Manager, Udo just to confirm the EUR 2 million in CapEx you mentioned, is that already in this year's outlook for 2026, or is it the whole sort of project? Is there anything in OpEx that you've also included? Like do you need to hire more tech people to ensure those layers are created? Some color there would be great. Thank you.
Let me take the last one first. This is a total cost up to now. That is, this cost reflects also the technological development. I don't wanna say you can buy it off the shelf, you're not far away from that. Programming becomes so much cheaper, and there's so much power, brain power worldwide on this technology. This is helping you a lot. I have to say I was also surprised when I got the numbers from the team, especially if you look at the impact which is going to have a major transformation of the whole industry at the end. We don't think we need to hire more people.
We have, we have 100 programmers here, which are working on our SSP, which comes not to an end, but we see less expenses going forward. For now, we are pretty much convinced that we have enough people on board to realize that. Because what I said already some minutes ago, this what we call L-L to O, lead-to-offer-to-order, that is let's say the strategic planning work which our salespeople are doing with the national clients. This is something where we did everything by hand until three weeks ago. The sales guy visited the client, and the client gave some briefing. The sales went back to the back office, give them a briefing.
The back office started to think what we could offer and how we could argue. It was three feedback, four feedback circles until they have something. Today it looks like 18th century. I mean, there's a new tool which we introduced just some days ago. This goes in a minute in a different completely quality and speed than it happened up to now. The costs were zero because it was a product from the shelf.
This, on your question, understanding better, like what is the sort of organic outlook for ABDA going forward? I think we walked you through already, like the technical effects that will arise from lower IFRS 16 effects.
Just looking at the underlying cash EBITDA, we believe that should develop in line with sales more or less. We are positive on the margin outlook for the full year on out-of-home. It's also fair to assume that at this point in time, we're still cautious on digital as a service and e-commerce. I mean, in our guidance for Q1, we already said we expect sales decline by around EUR 9 million, right? The major positive contribution to EBITDA anorganically, if you will come from the call center acquisition. Here I would say around about EUR 5 million-EUR 7 million will be the additional EBITDA from that acquisition that we expect in the current fiscal year. I hope that answers your question.
Yes, very helpful. Thank you.
The next question comes from Anna Patrice from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thank you very much for all the information provided. Very interesting. A few questions from my side. First, quite easy. If we can touch a bit on the one-offs. I understood the one-offs in 2025. What expectations for 2026? Are there any more restructuring that requires Statista or other divisions? With the project development that you are looking at, okay, there is CapEx. Should we get more OpEx as well? I didn't get that. Also, do you need then to retrain and to upskill your employees if that is also something that you already expected in your guidance for the EBITDA, or it's one-offs that you will consider? Another question on contract renegotiations that took place now with the input on the EBITDA.
Do you see any further contract, upcoming further negotiation where we can see the similar things? The last question is on your projects. With whom are you developing? Is it all internal, or do you work with some external providers? The amount of just EUR 2 million, that really comes as a very efficient product, so to say. Against whom are you competing here? Because other people could also come up with similar products. Are you targeting with those products the agencies or the clients, or what's the idea here? Whom do you think will be the major user? You said that you can allocate the marketing budget across different medias.
You can go to the out-of-home, to the online, I assume you can go also to your website, but also to Google Search, et cetera. How are you going to do this? Are you going to work directly with Google? Are you going to then direct the agencies who will sell the Google platforms? How that is going to look like? Thank you.
Yeah. Let me take the last one first. No, this Google stuff's only for local customers. And national sales, obviously we only sell our products, huh? On local sales, we bought a company many years ago called RegioHelden, who's doing exactly that, because the idea was always, look in the past and local newspaper companies, they were actually serving something between an agency or a media house, huh? Because we're selling newspaper ads, radio, and whatever, a couple of local products, exhibitions, and leaflets and whatever. Now it's a question, who is the central source actually? Who is serving these local clients, huh? There's obviously a gap. That's why we developed this local sales force.
That's why we acquired RegioHelden, because we wanted to, we want to discuss with a local client a solution where we can take over 100% of the edging the budget. In reality, that means we can influence, that we are able to distribute it in the channels where we have the highest profitability? That is the idea behind that. That means we have the either, we sell outdoor or local video display or native ad reach? That what we have in our portfolio today with the online in the core? Is this clear? Is this the answer?
Yes. Yes. In terms of the local clients, you're talking about the brand owners, or you're talking also about the smaller local agencies with whom you can work together?
No, no, absolutely. Self-service does not mean only that the customer is booking it, huh? There are small local agencies, huh? Today it's quite complicated, huh? Because if you want to, you cannot book it in self-service. You have to talk with our sales first, huh? There's no platform where you can buy something, huh?
You have to ask our sales people to come in the agency, huh? They show them pictures about billboards and this and that, and then you write an offer, huh? You get an order different. You have to adjust the order. The sales give it to a sales support. Sales support give it to the back office. The back office give it to operation. That is very complex.
We did it as efficient we could do it in the past. This is a very complex process with a lot of handovers and many people involved, and we're relatively small ticket. There is mission critical in the future that the local agency can go on the Ströer Manager, and they see everything what they need actually for local sales. They can even prompt in by voice what they want to have, and the system gives them offer, and they can press a button, and the whole thing is done. I mean, this will be the last evolution level, but this is I think easy to understand that this is a complete game changer, especially in local sales.
They have small tickets and very complex portfolio. That's what we see now in this first test with this cultural advertising. We were surprised ourselves, but it's how easy that goes. Also these cultural managers are trained now by google. There's advantage. Google trained these people to use Google products and self-service. For them it's normal now that they book a campaign on the mobile phone. Until whatever, two weeks ago, we are still sending papers back and forth and this was super complex and expensive.
I put this on the-
There was another question here. Who's using the tour? I mean, the tour is used first by ourselves, locally and nationally. The Ad Manager and also the Public Mind. Why? Because at the end, we have to develop a product which solves the problems of our customer. I saw a lot of customers in the last month, and they said, "Look, guys, you sell your products to us, but we want solutions, not products. We want you to explain us how you can solve, help us to achieve our targets." And this is, intellectually, not every sales guy is so super smart that he really develops a tailor-made fantastic solution, which is, for the customer, super convincing.
For that, he had to digest and process so many details about the customer, what he's doing, what he did in the past, what is the target, what is the budget, what's the location, where are the shops, and all of this stuff. If you, I mean, by the way, you can do it even if you have a GPT ChatGPT account today. If you train it for two weeks, and you don't need to invest one penny, you get better strategic planning and results than if somebody does it manually. Because the technology is able to process so many details, which is very difficult for human. This, I mean, media planning and is very complex.
It is you have to process a lot of different data, historical data, target data, whatever, consumer data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Even if a standard GPT account, you get much better offers than anybody in our company or any other company is able to produce as a single human person. That is why it looks so cheap in comparison to what we achieve, because it's a little bit...
LLM technology is like, you know what we say with Statista is like a race car, but depends what kind of fuel you put in. If you have the right data, that is Statista, then it makes the results much better. The technology is developed. The heart of the thing is the LLM itself. What we develop now are use cases based on this technology.
We don't develop the technology. That is a big difference. In the past, when we, when we programmed our Ströer sales SSP sales side platform, we invested over time, EUR 50 million-EUR 60 million, because you had to. There was no technology what you could use. You had to program everything on your own. Now we have this LLM technology, and the only thing you have to do, you have to put the use case on top, and the costs are a fraction of what we, for example, spent for developing the Ströer SSP. Our, the agencies clearly we work, we work not with...
Let's say in local sales, people will work a lot of in self-service, but the national sales agencies will work with Public Mind because the agencies, they have a natural interest to keep as much money as possible in the country because they make more money with that, but they need to prove impact. Without impact, it's very difficult to move money from A to B. That's why the agencies are actually. We made a roadshow now in the last months, big roadshow. We saw all the agencies, and the feedback was, "Okay, this was more than needed. This was more than necessary, and why you didn't do it earlier?" We couldn't do it earlier because the technology was not there.
I put this on your question on adjustments in 2026. I think it's probably fair to say that the impacts we had here from restructuring Statista and also from the project that was relating to potential sale of the core business, this stuff is behind us. That should actually lead to lower adjustments going forward. On the other hand, based on what Udo explained about Ad Manager and Public Mind, it's probably fair to say that adjustment from transformation costs in terms of systems will rise a little bit. Net-net, we would anticipate lower adjustments for fiscal year 2026 at this stage.
It means that there is still some restructuring to do and hence adjustment?
Well, you know, first of all, I think, Sven, it's important to say that the things that are qualified as exceptionals have to relate to a clearly predefined catalog that is also aligned with the auditors. In terms of restructuring, I think in general, we always keep some flexibility when we see there's a measure which would potentially lead to a very strong or short payback, strong return. We will always consider. What we do doesn't depend on the question whether we can adjust or not. What we do depends on what makes sense economically, and we are prepared if we see potential, then we also prepare to implement the corresponding restructuring.
As part of the adjustments budget for the current fiscal year, there's also, I'd say, smaller restructuring measures in some of our content, publications units is included already. From today's perspective, not much included is for, let's say, a larger reduction of the workforce if you refer to that.
Okay, understood. Sorry, my last question to Udo. Why do you think the local, they will not use the Google Ads, the platform for what you described, which is kind of similar now. If they want to understand their marketing budgets, how they want to spend it, et cetera, why would they use already existing platforms?
I think they will go on using Google platform for self-booking, search and performance marketing. Those clients are so trained on user experience-friendly self-booking tools that they would book by far more out-of-home directly if there was the same access to inventory and outcome-oriented tools as in the search area from Google.
I think it's just opening up opportunities where the user experience or the simplicity of approaching the available inventory or the available marketing purpose is comparable to what they are used to in the Google Ad Manager space. I think that's just we try to catch up with the best-in-class standard. AI technology and more data just opens up new opportunities here.
To make it clear, this Google stuff is not a business model for us, it's just a service in case a small client want us to handle it, we do it. It's just to underline our approach that we say we solve your problems. If you want, we also handle this Google stuff for you, but this will be peanuts. This is not important for our business.
This is just, let's say, a marketing move. We show the customers, "Look, you can book everything out of one hand." Let's say 99% of the customers for sure will book Google like today separately, and they use our platform, Google platform, and maybe also Amazon's platform. That will be reality. It's just a, let's say, a marketing move. What we're also doing today, but it's, RegioHelden is a small business. We... I don't remember the turnover of RegioHelden.
Twenty-five.
EUR 35 million or something, huh? It is a service whoever wants to use the service. It's a pure marketing stuff.
Okay, understood. Thank you.
We don't want to resell anything. To make it clear, we want to sell our own products. As a reseller, it's always not interesting really. That's why it's a pure service offering for the customers in case we believe that it gives us an advantage to do that.
Thank you.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star followed by 1. The next question comes from Craig Abbott from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, guys. Obviously, most of my questions have been answered in the meantime. First of all, just to be clear, I mean, I guess at this webinar in April, I assume you will walk us through some very clear examples on just exactly how the impact of the out-of-home ad campaigns are generated. That'd be my first question. I have two other quick questions.
what were
Yes.
Yes. Yeah.
Showing the logics, showing the plan.
Mm.
-showing the desired outcome by means of what's their range of business impact midterm.
Also, make transparent again, what is the difference to where we're standing today, to give you a better idea of what is, what is the outcome of that. This obviously, partly deep in operations, but I think it's easier to understand if you compare status quo with what we are going to achieve.
Okay. Yeah, second question is just do you have any major concession contract renewals coming up that we should be aware of? In particular, I'm thinking about the Deutsche Bahn contract. And also as these roll over, and I think the previous colleague was starting to ask this question as well, is whether we might expect more structural changes also in the nature of these contracts, i.e. with a lower fixed component and a higher variable component for the IFRS 16 lease costs. Also just in a broader perspective, are there major contract renewals we should be aware of? Thank you.
No, no. Deutsche Bahn is running for a long time, until the 2030s. We are beyond that. You know, we have no significant contracts which are impacting, there's every month a tender, so it's ongoing process. The biggest one which come up is Hamburg. This is clearly an upside, because we lost a lot of money in this contract, because there was time where we had still like three players in Germany with Wall, Deco and us, huh? That was before Deco took over Wall. It was a fierce battle in these days. That is something really positive but doesn't impact the P&L. There's nothing what we see. By the way, the reduction of fixed rent here doesn't mean we pay more variable rent.
We lowered the fixed rent and the variable rent in each of these cases, because now the tenants are coming now are 15 years old. This was a different market situation 15 years ago, where we had much more competition in Germany.
Okay. I mean, if I understand that correctly, as these gradually over time, as these contracts are renewed and presumably successfully from your perspective, we can expect the rents to be coming down.
Right. Yeah.
It might optically look less negative positive for the operational EBITDA, but from a cash perspective, perhaps, you know, be quite positive. Hence, the focus should probably reshift back to the traditional EBITDA on a cash basis, I would assume. Correct?
Yes.
Okay. My final question, just get back to the CapEx. I have, Henning, if I understood you correctly, I think you were saying in out-of-home, you thought it might even be a little bit higher this year. Just a little surprised. I thought actually we might see that coming down a bit because of the digital out-of-home national network being now largely already installed. If you could maybe be a little more specific on what you're kind of expecting on CapEx, that'd be helpful. Thank you.
Well, Craig, as you know, we usually don't provide breakdown of the group CapEx. When I said out-of-home, we expect it to rise a little bit. You should not think like that is EUR 10 million or so. I say there's a moderate increase that we foresee at this point in time. On the other hand, we will have de-decreasing in other parts of the group, that there's no change to the general idea that the CapEx to sales ratio for out-of-home is clearly going down over time because largely the digital portfolio is built.
Mm-hmm.
Still, we have things to do, right? I mean, you have seen the fantastic whale that we launched in-
Yeah. Yeah.
November. I can only invite everybody to have a look. Obviously, that doesn't come for free, and needs also to be accommodated for like in the CapEx budget. In general, the story here is completely unchanged.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
We have a follow-up question from Anna Patrice from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yes. Could you elaborate a bit, little bit more please on your digital business? You touched base on the t-online, highlighting how important the content is there that the numbers are not declining. What about the other portfolio of your websites that you own and that you manage to also see in your own site stable traffic or do you see it declining? What are your expectations for mid to long-term development here? Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, the key is t-online. This is also from the profitability side. I mean, we have some smaller, also special interest portals there. We see everywhere impact on traffic, but commercially, this is not really impacting the whole thing. t-online is for us the asset which is key for growth and profitability. All over the place, I think that, you're clearly depends what the courts are going to decide.
I think that the special interest portals is which are mostly quite small, also the third party bunch which we are selling. I think that they lose traffic clearly not only to Google but also to LLMs, because many of them are also used for checking specific information.
I mean, we are very happy about the development of T-Online because obviously when the whole thing started and everybody discusses Google Zero fear, we didn't know what was going to happen. If you look at the reach now development from T-Online is, I think a strong proof for the stability of the brand and our concept also.
Don't forget, T-Online is the only worldwide news portal, which is desktop, mobile, and on digital out-of-home. This also gives us a strong stability for our direct traffic, because if you count it as advertising spend, what we do on digital out-of-home, where we show branded content, T-Online content every day. If you would pay it's hundred of millions of euros of advertising for the T-Online brand every year.
This is clearly also one of the reasons why T-Online is developing, even after Google rolled out this AI stuff, in last year, May it was finished. There was a lot of questions also last year about that, also from investors. I think this is a very encouraging data point.
Okay. If, if I look at the EBITDA of the digital and dialogue, roughly EUR 150 million, I thought that probably round about EUR 80 million would be from the digital and the rest kind of EUR 70 million from dialogue. That out of the digital, only maybe two thirds are from t-online, no? Or like, how important is the EBITDA contribution of t-online versus the rest? Because if the rest were down, what is the risk? What is overall risk?
Well, Ana Patrice, I think as we all know, the margin in our, in our t-online business is probably one of the best margins we have all across the group.
Yeah.
You can think about margin in terms of like being 50%.
Yeah.
As Udo explained, it's absolutely key that we do everything we can to keep that stable or even have that growing slightly. The margins that we generate from selling third party inventories, if you will, as a wholesaler, are very tiny, right? That even if sales are going down there, that is not too much of an issue.
Okay.
As you know, we're not providing these numbers individually as part of our constant reporting. We would leave the comments there.
Okay. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Udo Müller for any closing remarks.
Yeah, thank you very much, everybody. I hope we could transfer some interesting information. Very interesting times. We are very excited here, and I hope we could excite you also a little bit. Thank you very much and have a nice day.
Thank you. Bye.
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