Welcome everybody to our Q1 result call and our overview of the full year guidance for 2024. Just to give you a short background of our group, here you can see the person which are also in this call today. It's my person as a CEO. Laura Vogelsang is also since many years in the group, and Reinhard Hetkamp as the CFO. He's guiding through our financials today. Let me give you a short introduction and overview about the latest developments in the last three months. First, we acquired a company which is completely focused on the B2B sector. That means they make B2B platform businesses for retailers, for online retailers, and they run several platforms and B2B shops.
They are located in Germany, and they are a pretty strong company, a family business background, and we acquired them and expect to make the closing by August 2024. Additionally, as you might know, we also acquired in the Q1 Avocadostore. This is a company, a platform, which is focusing on sustainable products, so only sustainable products are available there, and they have more than 1,400 partners listed on their platform. And as you can see on the right side, we acquired Hood Media GmbH. This company is also located in Germany. They are a platform for consumer products. They have a lot of partners. As you can see here, they have more than 4,900 live partners connected to their platform.
As you can see, oh, we have a great increase of our partner numbers, from last year to this year. And very important, as you can see on the right side, we also gained more than 3 million products, SKUs, with these two acquisitions, and that's quite important for us because as you get more partners, usually you also have more products, and with more products, you make more revenue. What else happened? Here you can see that we also have a very successful path to reduce our minority shareholders.
That means when we acquire a company, we are always very risk-averse, and we try to focus always to acquire with 50.1% in a new co, new company, and after some time, and if we have a very positive development and we have enough self-confidence, then we increase our share there.
And as you can see here, we increased it this year for MöbelFirst. This is a luxury furniture platform, very successful. We are invested now for more than three years there. ViveLaCar, almost two years in our company, also successful. And on the right side, Lott Autoteile, they are also more than two years in our group, and we also increased our share to 100%. Also, we made a reduction of the minority shareholders for Aponow. Aponow is a pharmaceutical and drug platform. More than 40,000 stores are connected with them, and they also have more than 400 manufacturers for pharmacies. And this platform is a small platform, but very successful and very profitable. And we also increased it to now 80% of the group. On the right side, I would hand over to Laura.
Correct. Thank you so much. Yeah, and we did also some changes in our group structure as it was a bit complicated to understand from outside, in the last or in the past after The Platform Group took over the Fashionette AG. So as for now, we are having the Platform Group AG as a holding on top of everything. And under that, we have the Platform Group GmbH and Co. KG, where all our subsidiaries are located, as well as the Fashionette GmbH as an independent company and the Brandfield in the Netherlands, which was a daughter of the Fashionette AG in the past. We also hired there, so two new COOs for the different GmbH of the Platform Group and the Fashionette.
The new COO of The Platform Group KG in Wiesbaden is Christoph Wilhelmy, and the new COO of the Fashionette GmbH is now Stephanie Bach; all started in the last, in the past two months. Yeah, here you can see again our group structure where we are reported in. So we are reporting in four different sections or sectors. We are having the most share in the consumer goods. We have also a lot of subsidiaries in our Automotive segment, as well as in the industrial goods and the service and retail goods segment. Yeah, as we reported before, this is the structure we are reporting in our financials. Yeah, this is the structure where we put all our subsidiaries in.
All right. Let's continue with the financials. Reinhard, our CFO, will take over.
Yeah. Yeah, in the following I would like to give you an overview about the Q1 results, compared to the Q1 of the prior year based on the proforma calculation so that you can see very well the difference and the increases of the various sections, compared to last year. Most of you may know that traditionally Q1 is the lowest quarter in the fiscal year. So the business is starting. We are out of the Christmas time, and now the new year is starting up. Our GMV increased in the Q1 of 2024 up to EUR 190 million, which is an increase of 18.3% compared to the proforma calculation of the prior year's comparable quarter. The net revenue increased from EUR 84.2 million last year's Q1 , to EUR 107.9 million, this year.
So when you compare both figures, we can say that the GMV grows by 18% and the net, the revenue grows 28%. Both increases are much more higher than we have internally forecast so that our expectations were overtaken. When we now look to the, respective expenses, we can say that most of them were well calculated by us and they were, already forecasted, in that way as it, developed. Nevertheless, the distribution cost ratio is a little bit too high. By 7.9%, it is, over our internal forecast and our own target. That depends to an increase in the carrier cost Q1 of 2024. Nevertheless, we could result in, adjusted EBITDA by EUR 8.8 million, compared to EUR 6.8 million in the prior year.
And the reported EBITDA resulted in EUR 16.7 million compared to EUR 13.3 million prior year on pro forma basis. These EBITDA adjusted as well as the EBITDA reported, that is by 25%, respective 26%, higher than we have expected. And that shows very well that the effectiveness of the cost reduction program started in 2023 is now efficiently coming up and shows already its results. Last but not least, the net profit in 2024 Q1 resulted in EUR 12.9 million compared to EUR 9.7 million, comparable quarter of 2023. This resulted also by 34% or 34%, which is again above internal forecast and our own expectations in this.
Now breaking down these results to the earnings per share, you can see that, coming from the net profit continuing operations, we have some corrections regarding the non-continuing operations so that overall the net profit by EUR 11.4 million is again higher than the comparable quarter 2023. And if we calculate now the earnings per share, overall we can see that based on the continuing operations, the earnings results to 0.66 EUR, which is a growth by 33%. And this is again an increase or a higher result than we have internally forecasted in advance. Now here you see the graph which shows much more better the development of the strong GMV and the revenue growth.
So you see the first three months in 2024, we have an increase by 18% year-over-year, coming from EUR 161 million-EUR 190 million. The revenue growth results by 28% increase coming from EUR 84.2 million, resulting to EUR 107.9 million in 2024 Q1 . Coming out of these relations, the profitability yeah, next page. The profitability increased by 25% based on the adjusted EBITDA. The reported EBITDA has profitability increase by 26% so that we finally result, as an, adjusted EBITDA by EUR 8.5 million and a reported EBITDA by EUR 16.7 million in the Q1 of 2024. To show the bridge between adjusted and reported EBITDA, we have prepared this slide here. You can see the EUR 8.5 million adjusted EBITDA.
There are a few adjustments considered which do not belong to the continuing operations. Additionally, you can see the purchase price allocation results, coming out of the two acquisitions we have made in the Q1 of 2024. And, the respective deferred tax effects out of these considerations. We are coming to the EUR 16.7 million EBITDA reported so that you have here a proper overview of how to come from the adjusted figures to the finally reported figures in the Q1 of 2024.
Dominik, you're on mute.
All right. So as you can see here, we now switch to our non-financial KPIs. We increased the number of orders by we think a pretty good number from 750,000 to almost 940,000 in the Q1 each year. And additionally, the average order value increased to 115 EUR. And this is corresponding to our higher number of active customers. We always show the number of active customers for two twelve months perspective. And this number increased from 3.6 to 4.4 million active customers in this period. The number of employees, it decreased a little bit, and the decrease was a result of our cost reduction program and also two subsidiaries, where we reduced the staff in a total perspective.
The number of partners was for us the biggest success in our Q1 because not only because of 2 acquisitions, but also because of organic growth. We have a higher number there, and we are very happy about this development because this is a background how we can grow faster and how we can get better numbers in our financial results. When we go to the next slide, here you can see the revenues by segment. So in the Q1 , we have almost the same picture as you can see it in the full year report 2023. That means we have a total revenue in the consumer goods segment of EUR 61 million. And in the frag goods segment, we have EUR 70 million compared to industrial goods with almost EUR 21 million.
Our smaller segment, service and retail goods, it was a little bit more than EUR 8 million. So quite a small segment, but quite profitable. And we are very happy to have it. So having shown you all our financial figures and the Q1 results 2024, we also want to inform you that we have to increase our full-year guidance for 2024. And this has some reasons. So first, the Q1 results in 2024 were better than expected and were better than we internally forecasted it. So we had a pretty good development and, overall subsidiaries, we can be very happy about this development in the first three months. Additionally, our Cost Efficiency Program, which we started last year, led to higher profitability. And this is almost in all segments, so we can also be happy about this.
The only segment where we are not happy and where we want to get higher margins is the industrial goods segment. As you know, we also mentioned it in the full year presentation 2023. We did some actions to improve the cost efficiencies there. And I think we are on a pretty good track to manage it. But again, we really want to improve that also in the industrial goods segment. And on the positive side, we also see a very good development about the market tailwinds because when you look at B2B and B2C spending in our niche segments where we operate in, we see spending grow.
And we see that consumers and also B2B customers spend more. They are not affected by negative developments here in our small segments. And this is also a very important development here, which we want to communicate to our shareholders.
Last but not least, we have excellent conditions for making new acquisitions. That means, in the last year, we already had great, really good companies, and we acquired it for very fair values. The same we see in 2024. So the average price we pay is between three and five times EBIT. That will also result to badwill expectations. That means we see, in a lot of acquisitions not in all, but in a lot of acquisitions, resulting badwills. And this is a positive impact for our balance sheet because we do not build any goodwills. We do not have the risk of any goodwill corrections. And this is from our perspective a very good background how we can make more acquisitions in this year and how we can ramp up our path for our midterm goal.
The last point, we made three acquisitions in the first month. The latest acquisition was announced this week. All of these three acquisitions will boost our GMV, will boost our revenue, and also our EBITDA and net profit, in a positive way. This was the decision and the background why we as a management board said we have to increase our guidance for 2024. When we have a closer look on what we changed in our guidance, there you can see that we increased the GMV guidance for this year. Now we expect a GMV of more than EUR 840 million. We always make it with a range. As you can see here, we expect EUR 840 million-EUR 870 million. On the right side, you see the same for the revenue guidance.
You will see a range of a new guidance between EUR 480 million and EUR 500 million. As we go on, you see the EBITDA adjusted. So EBITDA adjusted means we expect a higher EBITDA around EUR 26 million-EUR 30 million. And also the numbers of our partners is getting up. So we expect around 1,000 more partners this year. And we think that we will achieve it by end of 2024. When you have a closer look on the long-term perspective, you see that, this is not a hockey stick case or something like this. TPG is growing every year.
We are not dramatically growing. We cannot grow by 100%. This is not possible. But we grow on a very good path. And I think with the new guidance, from today, we have a pretty good track record over the last years.
The same is for the revenue development. Our revenue development is quite successful. We think that we can achieve EUR 500 million this year. We are coming back from the Q1 results. We are very optimistic to have good tailwinds there. The EBITDA, as you know, our adjusted EBITDA is much lower than the reported EBITDA. And here you can see the development over time. Just to mention in 2021. You see the left chart, we combined fashionette and TPG. fashionette at this time, it was not part of our group, but we have to combine it in this graphic here. That is the result why it is so low. All right. Next point, we want to invite you to our Capital Markets Day because we really want to give you a deeper insight perspective in our group.
We want to show you in a much better understanding and a much more detailed way how we acquire companies, how we manage our software development and our software roadmap. We also want to show you some case studies, yeah, on how we make our value creation. We make our Capital Markets Day on June 11 here in Frankfurt. We also invite some of our management people, for example, our head of M&A and our CEO, and of course our CFO will also attend to this meeting. We will also make a deep dive in their own divisions and in their own developments here in the group. I just want to give you some examples of what we show at the Capital Markets Day.
First, we make some strategic developments and say how we can make value creation and what kind of M&A player we are and how we manage our M&A cases. Yeah. We also made a very empirical study, yeah, on what kind of M&A way is successful and what is not really successful. And I think it will be very interesting for you, what we found out there. We also make a comparison between private equity investors and acquisition-driven compounders and want to give you some insights how we think about these different points and how we create the value because we make a lot of things in a different way, and we are completely, the different, the difference to private equity players.
And I think this will also give you a better understanding how we manage all transactions here. And again, here you see our sources.
That means we show you how we make the capital allocation, how we make the decentralization management, and how we manage the people in the new companies which we acquire. And last but not least, you can see how we focus on our self software, how we expand our software roadmap, and how we also integrate our software when we acquire a new company. And we will give you three examples of how we manage our cases and on our new companies and show how they develop over the time. We will present you in the Capital Markets Day three different, specific case studies.
One of them is MöbelFirst. We acquired them, 2020. And in the last three years, it was a very successful platform. They are in the niche of luxury, luxury furniture, and they make a pretty good job there.
I think it's quite interesting for you how we show you the figures and how the numbers went up in this time and what we changed in the company. Okay. Last part, last hour of our presentation today is the outlook. The full year outlook, guidance by May 2024 is the revenue from EUR 480 million to EUR 500 million. We expect a GMV of at least EUR 840 million and an EBITDA adjusted by more than EUR 26 million. Our reported EBITDA will be higher. We do not make a guidance on that because it's very difficult to guide the reported EBITDA because of the PPA effects regarding our M&A acquisitions. In the midterm perspective, we did not make any changes. Our leverage structure will always be between 1.5 and 2.3 times EBITDA.
Also our EBITDA adjusted margin should be in the range between 7%-10%. Our midterm goal for next year will be EUR 1 billion GMV. We are more than optimistic to achieve this goal. Looking for our future strategy, we have four important things where we want to go on the strategic path for TPG. One is the leading position. So first, we want to become the number one platform in Europe. Means that we also grow organically in our market and get better and more market shares in our niche segments. Second, we all want to expand up to 30 industries by 2025. Right now, we are operating in 21 industries. We make 3-8 acquisitions per year. That means in this year, we also already made 3 acquisitions, and we expect another 5 acquisitions in the next month.
So we are also optimistic that we will achieve this goal. And very important, we never want to grow only by acquisition. We always have to grow in an organic path. And that means that our growth perspective should always be, relying on a very good organic growth. On the right side, we already mentioned in the further presentations, it is very important that we have a more non-European perspective because right now we are just focused on Western Europe, especially on Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria and Switzerland. And this is, we think this is not a very good perspective. We have to enter new markets.
But we enter these markets in a very cost efficient way. So we will not spend millions over millions and see what's gonna happen. We will really focus on very low and small steps. But we see it in the long-term perspective.
Maybe you can expect also some messages regarding the U.S. and Indian market entry, this and next year. All right. Thank you for the presentations and, looking forward for your questions.
All right. Thank you so much for your presentation. We will now move over to our Q&A session. As always, we would appreciate if you would ask your questions in person via audio line. To do so, please click on the "virtual raise hand" button. And if you have done it via phone, please use the key combination *9 followed by pressing *6. And if you're not able to speak freely today, you can also submit your questions in our chat. And we received the first "virtual" hand by Russell. So you should be able to unmute yourself now.
Good morning, Dominik.
Morning, Reinhard. A couple of questions.
First of all, could you just talk about trends in your relative revenue take versus GMV? The reason I ask is you had a very good increase Q1, versus Q1 last year. But those numbers are they're lower than the similar numbers you get for the annual numbers. So I guess there's some seasonality. I appreciate there's some difference in the relative take of GMV to revenue in the different four verticals you're in. So could you talk about what moved that in Q1? My second question is on staff costs. The ratio of staff cost to revenue is pretty stable, but you had a 28% increase in staff costs, I think, but number of staff was down.
So could you just talk about what's driving that? It's obviously higher cost per employee. Are you effectively gearing up staff ahead of greater revenue?
Is that one of the greater costs in the Q1 ? And the third one is probably a bit more difficult here, but could you give some idea of organic growth at revenue and EBITDA because obviously the acquisitions will affect that growth over the last year? Thank you.
Sure. Thank you for the question. So first, yes, you are right. When you look at the GMV and the net revenue, you see a relation which is not the same relation as you can see it in the full year perspective. But, as you can see here, it is always very similar in the Q1 because traditionally the Q1 is the lowest quarter in the full year perspective. The return rates are higher also because a lot of clients order things from December and some people always make it in January and return it and so on.
So there's a higher discrepancy between these two numbers. Your second question is HR costs. Yes, you are right. We have a little less total number, but, all in all, we have some increase. Our increase was 3.5, inflation, increase for our existing employees. And that is the reason why our HR cost ratio is more or less the same level. It's a little bit decreasing, yeah, from 4.8%-4.7%. But all in all, it is not going down completely. It is going less up than the revenue, but yes, it is higher than compared last quarter. And your third question, it is organic growth. As we've shown you on the last page, we think that organic growth is very important for us. We never want to rely only on M&A.
And that means for us that we have our own target of getting 50% of our growth rate by organic growth. And we do not report these numbers, but we can tell you in this conference call here that we achieved this goal. Goal is 50% organic growth of the total growth number in the Q1 . So we are quite happy about that. Next questions.
So Russell, are your questions answered by? Yeah.
Yeah, that's fine. Thank you.
All right. So then let's move over to the questions from Christian Hutz.
Yes. Hello. Hello, Sarah. Hello, Dominik. Hello, Laura and Reinhard. Thank you for the opportunity to raise some questions. So first of all, congratulations to your Q1 figures and also the increased guidance for the full year. And also thank you for giving us an appetizer for your CMD, which sounds quite promising.
I have some questions on the financing of your acquisitions. Do you pay them in cash or in equity, or have you—I mean, you showed us a lot of P&L figures and ratios and, but not really balance sheet, financial position and so on. I remember also that there are—I think there are—inventories in the cars you still have on your balance. So could you give us some flavor of how your financial profile developed in Q1?
Yeah, sure. So maybe I'll start with the first question: how we pay our acquisitions. So generally, we have three ways how to pay an acquisition, or we have four ways. So first, we pay by cash. In every acquisition we did in the last years, we made some cash payments either in the company or to the seller, but we made cash payments.
Second, we can make loans. Sometimes we make loans for acquisitions. For example, we make a finance round of 30%-50% of the enterprise value or equity value. And we make it with a classical bank loan. Third, we can make some share agreements with the seller. We not make it in any case, and we are very careful about that because as you might know, I'm also the majority shareholder and I don't want to dilute my own shares every time. So I'm happy that I can stay on a high level. Right now, I have 70% of the group. And, I really would appreciate if I can stay more or less on this level and participate on this good value creation.
Fourth, the fourth way how we pay our price for an acquisition is also our own service and our software because when you acquire a company and they have to make investments in future for software and for their IT, they have a CapEx plan. We say, you know what? You don't need this CapEx plan. We take our software. You get it for free. And this is part of the payment price for the acquisition. So almost in all of our contracts, you see our services, our people, and our software as a part of the M&A purchase price.
Your second question was about financial profile. Yeah, financial profile. So the balance sheet, fashionette always had it in a traditional way that for the quarter result, they do not show any balance sheets. They show it in a half year result.
We have no figures in the quarter presentations. But all in all, you can see that you asked for the car sales and the debt situation for the car sales. It is very much decreasing, because we sold all the cars in the last months and it was successful. So we reduced all the external liabilities there. And on the total debt level, we also think that we will achieve 2.3-2.5 this year on a leverage for the EBITDA. So we are exactly in the range which we focus on this year. And for the next year, we expect lower numbers, yeah, so 2.3 or less for 2025.
Thank you. All right.
Thank you for your questions, Christian. So let's now move over to the next to the questions from Robert-Jan. So you should be able to speak now.
Thanks for taking my question. So I have a question on the acquisition that you published a press release on yesterday. Could you just—I mean, as I understand it, it's wholesale and the product profile is kind of similar to what we saw in Avocadostore and Hood Media. And I think it also includes a B2C platform, Toroleo. So just is there—could you give me any thoughts on the strategic background? Do you see synergies between like a wholesale of like lower priced products with the acquisitions we already saw this year? What was your idea behind the acquisition? What made it interesting strategically?
Yes.
On our capital markets side, we will show you this example also why we acquired this company. And, this is Oligo Group is a platform which only is operating for B2B clients. Indeed, they have a I think a small subsidiary, where they also offer some products directly to customer, but I think it's 2% of the revenue. But all in all, it is a B2B platform. What is our strategic rationale behind it? So first, we will get a lot of partners because they have a lot of hundred partners, working together with them. They buy products from them and they have a very close relationship with them. And, these are all e-commerce partners. And, when you think on what we acquired also this year, it is Hood, the platform Hood. And Hood has a very similar product range.
A lot of the B2B partners from Oligo Group, they are also partner of Hood. Yeah, so 40%, are already cooperating together, but 60% of the partners of the new company of Oligo Group, they are not, for example, working with Hood together. And this is a great potential perspective because we can bring them together. We can merge these businesses from a sales perspective. And this has a big impact for the partners. So this is our strategic background why we did it. And, we also have a very attractive, price background here. And, we think that we can really create a value for them and grow with them together.
Oh, perfect. That's very helpful. Thanks. Just a quick follow-up on that. I think that, this company also has its own fulfillment center in the past.
You kind of usually got rid of the inventories of your acquisitions to get it close to your business model, which is basically no working capital. Is this different? Would you like to benefit also from like the logistics capabilities or is that something that you will also try to reuse as you did with acquisitions in the past?
Well, what you have to know about this company is that they have their logistics capacities mainly for their partners. Means, you can make your fulfillment there. You can put your own inventory there and they manage it for you. So it means that for our B2B partner, they can use the facilities and make it for a very affordable price in terms of logistics costs. And that is a very good background, yeah, why we can operate with them. Their own inventory is really low.
So we are already talking about very low numbers. I don't have a specific number, but it is around EUR 3, 4, 5 million. But all the returns we get also for the partners at this moment at the, for example, last day of December, you have to take it on your balance sheet. And the next week you put it to your partners. So this has some statistical effects in the balance sheet, but all in all, the inventory is very low and it's perfect for our strategy. Perfect.
Thanks.
All right. Thank you so much for your questions. So let's now move over to the questions from Olaf. So you should be able to unmute yourself. But let me retry. Otherwise, we will move over to our.
It's lovely. Hi. Can you hear me, you guys? Hi. Great. Thanks.
I'm glad to be able to pose a question here. I'm pretty new to the company. So I hope I don't bore anyone. Could you explain that DD purchase on the 25th of April? Because I mean, you had a stellar run now, which is, of course, excellent. But even then, the chart shows, the price of the share is like EUR 7.50-ish while the purchase of a hundred thousand share was rather, EUR 4.40-ish. And that kind of puts a question mark in my mind. So could you comment on that?
Well, I'm the major shareholder and, I buy at any time shares. So last year I bought shares. This year I also buy will buy shares. And, I also made these acquisitions. I always have to make it public, of course. And in this time, it was a special case.
There was one seller of new shares, which are not listed and which are not traded on the stock exchange because they are new shares and you have to wait until the next AGM is coming up. I think he asked several shareholders if they want to buy the shares in a very quick modus. So if he wants the money right now. I don't know the reason for this. I don't know what was the strategic background, but we said we will buy it and we took a direct payment for that. Okay. But they are not restricted or something like that. I mean, it's a pretty steep discount. Well, again, they are restricted now because these are new shares. Although these shares are not traded right now. These are not TPG shares right now. They are new shares.
And after the AGM, they become to regular shares. Yeah. And this is what you have to understand. Yeah. If you have an asset, which you cannot sell or which you cannot trade, maybe sometimes it has no worth for you because maybe you need the money at the right time. Yeah. And maybe this was the background, but I will not comment on this person, who got the shares and who sold it.
Yeah, there's something exciting to buy. I need to let it. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Very helpful.
Thank you so much for your question, Olaf. So let's now get a view into our chat box. So we have there a couple of questions as well. So one question is, Mr. Hetkamp, you said Q1 is seasonally the weakest quarter in the year. The adjusted EBITDA is already EUR 8.5 million.
Extrapolation would be EUR 34 million. Why is the guidance for adjusted EBITDA EUR 26 million-EUR 30 million far below the simple extrapolation?
Yeah. So, I see the question is coming from Johannes. So Johannes, nice to know that you are in the chat. As we pointed out, for sure, on the one hand, traditionally, Q1 is the lowest quarter. Nevertheless, we could really realize a very good result in the Q1 . But, as you also may understand, when we are giving our new guidance, we are not, let's say, increasing it that way that, the current situation, we will extrapolate completely over the whole year. So we have very good expectations what will come up in the next few months and the next quarters.
So therefore we made that increase of our guidance, but we will not, let's say, set up some targets which we will not not reach, at the end of the year. So therefore we made this guidance and we calculated that guidance on a very solid basis. For sure, maybe that we will jump over these targets that may happen. But nevertheless, as a guidance, we have really to consider all impacts and cannot say, okay, when the first Q3 were over or higher than our internal forecast, then we will extrapolate them directly through the whole year. So therefore, please understand we increase the guidance as we know what is is something what we will reach. That is currently the situation we are reporting. All right. Thank you so much. Let's now we have got the virtual hands.
So let's move over with the questions from Simon. So you should be able to speak now.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes. I'm back to taking my questions. I've got, just a couple. First of all, I'm just looking at your annual report from last year. I noticed you didn't pay any tax. I was wondering what the situation there is and when you might start to pay tax or even indeed if you even pay tax in Q1. Also, I was wondering what, what the I think you've got now got a 10% stake in Mister Spex. And, I was wondering what your intentions are there. That's it.
Right. So regarding the tax, of course, we pay tax. But when you make a consolidation of 26 subsidiaries, you have to know that some of them, have a Verlustvorträge in Germany.
And when you have Verlustvorträge, you have to make it also into the calculation as a sum. And as a sum, indeed, there was effective when you put all the numbers together, not a relevant tax payment, but some of the subsidiaries have to pay a lot of taxes. Yeah. Your second question for Mister Spex, we decided not to comment on this, because it is a minority shareholding from our side. It has not not a relevance in our balance sheet. We only have 10% there. And this is a very small number in our balance sheet as a group.
Okay. Just on the loss carry forwards, how large I mean, can you comment on how large the loss carry forwards are?
I don't have this number, you know. Sorry for this.
Okay. Thanks very much.
But if you want, you can come up for the capital markets day and Mr. Hetkamp can give you more details on that. It's not a problem.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you so much for your question, Simon. So now we have, again, the virtual hand from Christian. So you should be able to speak now.
Yes. Hello. Yeah. For the opportunity, thank you for the opportunity to raise some more questions. One of it, what is interesting in my point of view is the industrial segment where you said there you are not satisfied with the development. Is it more a cyclical nature of the problem or is it more a cyclical nature that B2B clients in this segment are hesitant or is it more an internal thing where you should streamline processes or other things?
Yes.
We also explained this issue in the last full year call. It is not a cyclical thing. When we go back to our portfolio, for industrial goods, you see, for example, Gindumac. Gindumac is a very successful and market-leading platform for used machine. And used machines, you can buy worldwide from this platform. In this sector, you have traditionally low margins. That means when we acquired this company, they had exactly zero margin. We ramped it up to 3% or 4% margin. But still, we want higher margins because when you take down all the costs, and look only on the EBIT and EBITDA level, we still think there's room for improvement.
And last year, we were not happy about the margin perspective. All in all, they make money and they make great money, but the percentage margin is not satisfying for us.
And that was the reason why we made some actions, starting from January on, for example, that we only take machines on our platform where we have at least, yeah, a 20,000 total price and where we can get enough margin also in a total number. Yeah. Because in history, they also got machines on the platform with 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 EUR. And after all the costs, these were not bringing any profit to them. And we changed the strategic path from them and focused more on a higher margin and higher price machines. And this is a big drive on that. Okay. And could I add a further question because I was a follow-up on some of the predecessors.
The new shares, that which will be generated after the AGM, could you give us a feeling of the number of shares which might be created then?
This is a public number. You can go on our page. You see the current number of shares, which is mentioned there. This is the total number after the AGM, and also right now. You can compare it with the number by end of 2023. So it's just a little bit more than 2 million shares. Mm-hmm. And, this is the number what you get from this difference.
Okay. Thanks.
All right. Thank you so much for your question. So let's now take another quick view in our chat box. So we have there some questions left. Why did you structure fashionette as a single entity? I thought the operations were integrated into your business like software platform and logistics.
Yes. Of course. It is integrated in the group and we put all the operations together. But we decided to make a legal entity, that because of the relevance and because of all the background, because they still have some inventory and they still have their own purchase department, we think it's necessary to have your own legal entity for this department. And it was always traditionally an own entity. And when we acquired fashionette, we always said we put them together, make the integration, but we will always leave it as an entity. And it took some time because when you make a new entity, you have to make your opening balance and your balance sheets and so on. And that means we had to wait until February 2024 to do it and to make this new structure.
Finally, we did it by end of March this year.
All right. Thank you so much. A further question. How many cars do you still have on your balance sheet?
Oh, I don't know the exact number, but it's not so much. We can communicate this number on the Capital Markets Day.
All right.
It's a low number. It's some hundred maybe. I don't know. Not much. They are almost sold all the time.
Okay. By now we have two questions in our chat box left. At this point, just a quick reminder. Is there still anything you would like to add?
Maybe to add one thing, because a lot of people are always asking us for this reason why we bought the cars last year, from the Cazoo Group, where basically we had two reasons for this.
First, we acquired these cars because we wanted the customers and put it through the ViveLaCar Group. And ViveLaCar Group is very successful and, they now have much more customers than before because we got all these customers from this, Cluno Group. And second, we get the cars for a great price. So when we sold the car, 90% of all the car sales made a profit for us and 10% was neutral or a little bit less than our purchase price. Though all in all, we made a profit out of that and we can be very happy about this development. Great. Thank you. So next question. Can you please give guidance for distribution costs? We have no guidance for distribution costs for public guidance here because we do not guide any cost ratios.
We can only tell you what our internal perspective is on that. And we think without giving guidance that 9.5-9.6 is good, but we don't have an internal perspective on that. It's really, it's between all these cars. Sometimes you have 10-15% because we need two-man handling and so on. Sometimes it's much less when you only have simple consumer goods. Yeah. So it's a very simple process and much lower cost ratios. So it really depends. But all in all, we think the range which I gave you, I think this is a good internal guidance for us internally. All right. So, the last question so far.
What other industries would you like to enter?
Well, in our full year call, we already mentioned some industries which we would like to enter.
I think we will also make an acquisition this year coming soon in the luxury sector because the luxury sector for us, it's a very successful way how to increase our numbers and how to get good customers with very high average orders. Secondly, we will also make some acquisition in the machinery sector. So with the platform like Gindumac and Bevmaq, they are very successful and we think we can grow there so much organically, but also with additional acquisitions. And I think this is one of our key industries we would like to enter. And third, we think that sport activity is quite attractive because there are some niche segments where we think they are good players in the market.
Some of these players are in a position where we think now we can get a majority by them and bring them to another level. And we expect a deal in the sport segment also in the next two months.
All right. Thank you so much. So in the meantime, we received a further question in the chat box. You hired two COOs, which I think is important as new acquisitions will need a lot of attention of your board members and further activities. So you run for a seat on Mister Spex's supervisory board will also take time. Do you think that your management team is sufficiently broad?
Yes. Laura, you want to take over?
Yes, I can do. Yeah, we think that we are a strong management team.
So as well as to integrate all our new subsidiaries or acquisitions, as well as doing operational activities, as Dominik, yeah, is involved in in many other things. But I think all of our subsidiaries, as well as the TPG KG, the Brandfield, and the fashionette, has a very, very strong and, yeah, experienced management team to, yeah, to get everything done. Great.
Thank you so much for answering. This seems to be the last question so far. And this means we will come to the end of today's earnings call. So thank you, everyone, for your shown interest in TPG. And just as Dominik said, we'll invite you for the CMD on June eleventh in Frankfurt. So maybe if you have further questions, you can ask them directly.
So, and a big thank you also to you, Dominik, Reinhard, and Laura, for your presentation and the time you took. So from my side, I wish you all a lovely remaining week. And hand over again to Dominik for some final remarks.
Thank you very much for attending the call. And, I'm very happy if I can see you here in the Capital Markets Day meeting in Frankfurt. We also decided to make a hybrid format. Means we also will make a live stream on that, yeah, especially for the discussions and for the presentations of our management staff. And last but not least, we are very happy and satisfied about the development in the Q1 .
I think we have a very strong background and why we think that 2024 will be a record year and that we will achieve pretty good numbers and make a very good development for our shareholders. Thank you very much.