Welcome from our side. Today we would like to give you an overview of our current status and the Q1 figures. We have good Q1 figures, that's what I can also mention in advance of this call, and just to give you a brief update on our company before we do that. First of all, welcome from my side. As The Platform Group, we have a very strong growth this year regarding our partners, because as you know, the partners, the retail partners, and the manufacturers, they are the basis of our growth and they are the basis of our revenue. We have a very good development there. That means we have a stable growth rate here. Around 14,000 partners are working with us together, and they list all their products on our platforms.
With this, we have a good combination of new products, getting more customers, and we are almost covering 26 industries. This is a big difference for what, for example, we have been three years before. Three years before, we have been active in 14 different industries. Now it is 26. You can imagine how many partners we have more with this double number of industries and how many customers we can achieve with that. We can be quite happy about the stock development. I share the development since we acquired the former Fashionette AG, and since then we have a development of more than 170%. Compared with the DAX and MDAX, I think it is quite a good development.
When we have a short look on this year, we can see that we have almost 50% growth rate in our share, and we are quite optimistic that we also overachieve the other benchmarks like DAX and MDAX this year. The research coverage is quite positive. Currently we see a recommendation rate between EUR 16 and EUR 19 per share. You see there's quite a good uplift, which we can see as a good potential for the upcoming months. What happened the last four months? We acquired Fintus. Fintus is a SaaS company for banking technology. We had the closing just some days ago, by May 2025. We had great progress in the TPG payment project.
In the last call, our COO, Christoph Wilhelmy, showed you the development and how far we are already, and you will see this program live by October. We are right in time with the project, and we see a great potential behind that. On the right side, you can see that we acquired Joli Closet. That is our latest acquisition by last month. We expect a closing by June, so by next month. This is really a great luxury platform. They are only focusing on vintage products, and you know the big market for vintage luxury products like Louis Vuitton, Hermès, and so on. They are one of the market leaders there in France. Additionally, I would like to mention the Acquisitions Group. It's a company for outdoor. We've made the closing by March this year.
Also, Lyra Pet, this is a company for pets, pet food, and so on. It was also closed by March. On the right side, you see our latest development. You have seen the press release yesterday that we signed a contract and started our own facility unit. We have our own SPV, which is managing all our full service for logistics and for freight goods for our partners. This means if you are a partner and work together with us, you can directly deliver from our inventory hub, from our logistic hub in Gladbeck. That is in western Germany. We ramped it up already. It is fully active. I think it is one piece of a puzzle in our strategy to have more and more services for our partners and to cover all their needs when they do e-commerce with us.
You already know our TPG strategy, we want to become in Europe, and that means we have to cover more and more industries with our software and platform solutions. We always want to have a balanced growth rate between organic and inorganic growth. That means if we do not find good targets or if the valuations are too high, it is not for us, we will not buy. At the current time, under the current perspective, we see very good developments and we see very fair valuations. I think we are right on track. We made four acquisitions already this year, and we expect another four to five acquisitions until the end of this year. Here you can see our growth model, because I really want to mention this, because this is the backbone of how we work.
Most people do not understand our business model because we are not based on the consumer confidence, for example. We are really based on the partner development because a partner means a retailer. If we connect more retailers, we get more products. If we have more products, we immediately get more customers because we have new brands, we have better sortiments, we have better products. With more customers, we get, of course, more GMV and more revenue. This circle is very essential to understand how we grow and how we can also have extraordinary growth rates in stagnating markets. Here you can see the number, our backbone. This year we expect more than 16,000 partners working and connecting on our platforms. We have more than 4 million, 4.2 million additional SKUs. These are products compared to last year.
This is an uplift of more than 20%. You can imagine that this is a really high impact if you have 20% more products as a company and you get directly more customers because just of that. All right, let's go to the financials. From our perspective, definitely above our own expectations, and it outperformed the market expectations. Starting with the GMV, the GMV increased by 87% to EUR 356 million. The net revenue also increased by almost 50%. I will show you later what effects were relevant for that. The other revenues were very stable, though there is no big difference. The gross margin is lower, but this is automatically development because we acquired last year several companies which had very high GMV but very low revenues, like Avocados tore and Hood. They are both profitable. They are wonderful companies.
Through these acquisitions, we have just a statistical effect that the gross margin is a little bit lower because of these consolidations. Overall, the numbers are through the development very positive. When we have a look on the marketing side, we are happy that we reduced the marketing cost ratio. It was very effective, and we saw that some of the Asian competition or competitors reduced their marketing a little bit in Europe, and we see that the competition is not so high compared to last year. The distribution cost ratio, and this is one of our most important things because in the last eight quarters, every time it was raising, raising, and raising. This is the first quarter where we see no raising anymore. We see no increase here.
This is, I think, a very positive aspect because we see that our actions, which we have taken, they are working now. We see that the implementation of these actions have an effect on the distribution cost ratio. The HR cost, there is no change. It is around 4.6% overall, and this is our most important number. It is always the adjusted EBITDA. We have it achieved with EUR 15.9 million, which is, in terms of the percent margin, it is almost 10%. This is one of the highest values we have ever had in our group, and we are quite optimistic that we can have this good development also by the rest of this year. The reported EBITDA, it is EUR 19.6 million. This is just because we have some PPA effects which are diluting our EBITDA and are cleaning it out of the EBITDA.
The net profit achieved EUR 18.2 million. This is also the highest net profit we had in a quarter. We can be quite happy with that, and it achieved an increase of more than 41%. The earnings per share were also above our expectations. We had achieved an EPS of EUR 0.9, which is a very good and the highest number in a quarter which we've ever had. Maybe just to mention this here, you see that the net profit of continuing and non-continuing operations, there is no difference anymore in this year because we have no operations which are not continuing. All in all, we just have one stable business. There is nothing sold. There are not any operations which were closed or shut down. These numbers will not show again this year. We only have one net profit number.
Overall, we can make a short summary on that. We see in general that the consumer confidence, especially in a lot of European markets, is pretty good and that we have a very positive turnaround after this post-COVID decline. We also see that a lot of companies like Zalando, Meisterwiese, and so on, they increased their guidance and they are positive on the future development with their markets. We also see this tendency here. We've made profitability due to the good cost efficiency program from the last two years, and our cost structure is very stable and very scalable. Scalable is important because when you see that our revenues go up by 50%, you can imagine that we also have to make sure that our cost structure is not getting into the wrong direction and we are not hiring too many people. We are very conservative with that.
As I mentioned already, after eight quarters with increasing distribution costs, it is a first quarter where we have stable cost ratios here. It took us a lot of time and effort to do that, but after all, we are positive that we have now a stable, more or less stable cost development here. On the M&A side, we see a very good surrounding here. We have good conditions. We have excellent conditions here to get new companies for fair valuations, and we are positive to acquire them also this next year. You see the last point, all of our four segments are growing. None of the segments are stagnating. All of them are growing. The one segment which has last year not such a good margin, it was the industrial goods segment. Now they have also a positive margin development this year.
We can be quite positive about the forecast also regarding this segment. When you see it also in the graphs, you can see that our GMV has a good increase here. Also, the revenue growth was almost 50%. Here you can see the adjusted EBITDA compared to the reported one. All right, I would like to mention that we always have the conservative forecast. We already increased it by April this year, by last month. Here we just want to show you the lines from 2023, 2024, and the forecast for this year. You see that our growth rate is not going down. It is getting up. You can see this growth rate in the GMV and also in the net revenue, where we expect a net revenue up to EUR 700 million.
The adjusted EBITDA, we expect to have it with EUR 47-50 million. We currently see that we can confirm our outlook, our guidance from April 2025. This guidance, of course, is always from the current status. If we acquire more companies, we have to adjust that. Which I also would like to mention is our return on capital employed and the return on equity, because sometimes people ask us, if you have a bond with 8% or if you have interest rate like that, how can you earn money with that? This is also a very important number, which we added in the last annual report. You can see that we have a return on equity of more than 26% and a return on capital employed with almost 20%, so 19.8% last year.
We expect to have the same numbers, more or less 2% also this year. We think about making a guidance on these two figures for the full year by our next earnings call, because here you can see that all the capital which we invest in our new companies, in our software, it has a good return and we have a very good investment story with that. When we have a short look on our segment overview, we see a growth rate in all our segments. Here you can see some EBITDA figures. Overall, consumer goods is our biggest segment. We have an EBITDA level of more than 7-8%, and it has a very strong increase in the revenue last year and also in the Q1.
The segment which has the lowest EBITDA level is always the industrial goods segment because the competition is very high there. Here we see a positive development. Right now we have 3% EBITDA. We expect an increase up to 5% by the end of this year. We are very happy that now after two years, which is not such a good number, we see a good development to get higher earnings level here. On the right side, on the bottom, you see the service and retail segment, which is very stable. It's a very small segment, but you know that we acquired two companies here. First, we acquired Fintus, the SaaS group for banking software, and this will have a huge impact on these numbers. We expect Fintus to be consolidated now by May.
You can see all the full year figures from Fintus starting from June. Now you see the non-financial KPIs. The number of orders has pretty much increased to 1.5 million. This is really good development. In addition to that, our average order value also increased to EUR 125. The active customers reached an all-time high with 5.7 million. It is always LTM, last 12 months. We can be very happy about this development because in such times it's not so easy to always keep customers active and not to have them just a one-time pay and a one-time purchase. We are happy about this development. The number of employees also increased. In our headquarter, we did not hire more people. It is just because of consolidation effects. Here you can see the number of partners by the end of March.
We have more than 15,300 partners working on our platforms. Below you can see also here that our growth rate, so we take the full growth of the revenue, which was EUR 52.9 million. Then we divided it into non-organic and organic growth. This is one of the first orders after one and a half years, which has such a good organic growth rate. We see 59% of this growth by organic growth and 41% developing from new companies consolidated in our company. Our guidance is unchanged. We already raised our guidance by last month, and we are very optimistic that we will achieve that. Again, it is always from the current perspective. If we acquire more companies this year in the relevant number, we have to change and adapt our guidance.
Also, to make sure that you also understand our midterm guidance, we also give you always for the next year guidance for our group. Next year we want to achieve more than EUR 820 million. At the EBITDA level, it is the same like this year. We expect 7%-10%, which is very good. It is higher than last year. Our leverage will also be between 1.5-2.3 from the net leverage. All in all, you see a company with a very stable growth rate. You see a company which has a really long-term development of positive earnings. As a family business, we never made any negative earnings in a lot of decades now. I think this is quite an impressive development.
If you would have asked me five years before, we would not expect it like this, but we see just the beginning of our journey. We see really a very great potential to get this company to a much higher level. This is just the start of this journey. That is one of the last pages here. You see the debt situation. We also have a forecast on how it should look like at the end of this year. Of course, it cannot be precise, but we think an estimation is always useful for you as an investor. Totally, we see a net debt of around EUR 106 million by the end of this year and an EBITDA up to EUR 50 million. All in all, we have a leverage of 2.3 on this full year perspective. Our last page is covering our financial calendar.
You can meet us at the next investor conferences here in Germany and also in Paris and also London. We are happy to meet you there. Yeah, now we are open for questions.
Yes, thank you very much for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation, please use the audio line. To do so, just push the raise your hand button. If you are not freely to speak, then put your question in our chat box. We have already some participants with questions. Mr. Poynton, you should be able to speak now.
Good morning, Dominik. Congratulations on the result. A couple of questions, probably a bit less to do with the results, really. First of all, I am interested in the fulfillment center news yesterday.
I was just wondering if you could just talk about what that enables you to do now, what versus what you have had previously, and are there more requirements to do this type of thing in perhaps other countries as capacity builds? My second question is following on from the tariffs, really. We listen to lots of company calls, a lot of uncertainty. I am just wondering if you have seen any disruption in particular verticals, or is there more angst in certain verticals than others? Thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you for this. Our logistic hub is important because, as you have seen the press release from yesterday, you see that we have two reasons for that. First, we already have some decentralized small logistics solutions for our partners, but they are very cost-intensive and we had no scale effects.
Last year, we decided to consolidate everything into one logistic hub. That was the reason why we found this company, why we take a huge logistic hub in Gladbeck, and why we want to make sure that all our partners, if they want, I mean, it's their own decision to do that, but we want to make sure that all our partners can deliver their products to our logistic hub and can have the full service there. For example, returns, it is a big work and big effort to make all the return work. You have to check the products, you have to check the quality, and it takes a lot of time and it's very cost-intensive. If the people say, please do that for us, we don't want to make it on our side, then we have this full service approach.
It's not a new thing, to be honest. Of course, other companies like Amazon, Zalando, and so on, they also offer that. We are not unique with that. From our perspective, it was quite new to make it such in a big way that all our partners can work with it now together and that we also stopped all our decentralized logistics hubs. Your next question about the tariffs, to be honest, we are not affected by the tariffs from the U.S. because our U.S. export rate is very low. I think we want to change that. We see the U.S. market as a very good opportunity to ramp up business there. We see it as the biggest market in the world for our products. It is a disadvantage of our group that we are not active there.
Right now, you would say, well, it's great that we are not active there, but we think it's a disadvantage. We have to expand there. We have to set up our own headquarters there, a new headquarters just for the US corporates and the business there. We want to make sure that we have a good and stable business as a platform in the United States. Do we see any relevant tariff developments from our segments? No. We only see in one segment, it is the machine trade, where of course, we have a lot of US customers there. Of course, we see some effects. At the end, we just charge 20% additionally. The customer knows that it's higher because of the tariffs. There is not such a high discussion.
Dominik, might I just have a follow-up on the fulfillment center?
It's obviously going to be more efficient for you. Have you quantified or thought about what potential savings it opens up to the group?
Yes, definitely. Actually, we did not prepare a slide for that here because we just mentioned or announced it yesterday about this development. You can be sure that in the next presentation, we will show you the cost savings for this and for next year. This year, we only have half-year effect, but next year, we have full-year effect. We will transparently show you that. The effects will be around EUR 1.2 million-EUR 1.5 million by the full year. Right now, we have in six of our portfolio companies decentralized logistic hubs in the Netherlands, in Germany, and so on. We will centralize most of them, not everybody, but most of them to this new logistic hub.
This is an estimation about the potential cost savings. All in all, it is not big. We are not a logistics company. It is not so relevant, yes, but it is a part of our profitable strategy. Right.
Thanks for your answers, Dominik.
Yeah, sure.
Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Poynton. We have some participants in the audio line, but I will read some questions out of the chat box. The first is, the kept guidance for 2025 implies negative quarter-on-quarter sales and EBITDA growth. Should we expect a slowdown the rest of the year, or what is the reason for not raising guidance again?
Basically, we think that the first quarter last year, so the first quarter 2024, was not so high in the development. It was more an average quarter last year. This quarter is much better.
We do not expect a growth rate by 50% or more. This is not realistic. Right now, we see organic growth rates, which are quite impressive for us. All in all, we think that we always make a conservative guidance. We never want to, yeah, to make a bad guidance, which we will not achieve. Overall, yeah, we think that this is realistic now from a conservative perspective. Again, if we will acquire bigger targets, we have to adapt the forecast, the guidance again.
Thank you. There is another question in our chat box. What was the cash flow from operating activities in Q1 2024 and Q1 2025? For the same time or as of the position of March 31st, what was the receivables position in that time?
We did not have a slide here because in our Q1 reports, we always focus on the P&L. In the half-year report, you can see a detailed cash flow statement. To mention this, we had a cash flow in the first three months of an operational cash flow of more than EUR 16 billion. This is more than a number. I have to find out the last year comparables. I do not have it in mind right now. Sorry for that. As you can see in the half-year report, which will be published in two months, you can see all the years.
Okay, thank you. We move back to the audio line. Mr. Riehain, you can speak and please your question.
Hello. Thank you for your presentation, Dominik. Congratulations on the record results. I have just got a couple of financial questions.
For the net income and the adjusted EBITDA, how did you go from 19.6? Maybe if you could go back to the slide where you have the results. I sort of want to understand how you go from EUR 19.6 million in adjusted EBITDA to EUR 18.2 million in reported net income if you have about EUR 100 million of net debt, including lease liabilities at year end.
Yeah, I mean, the reported EBITDA is also including the PPA effects. That is basically the result. When you ask for the depreciation, the depreciation we expect this year in total of about EUR 11 million. If you divide this EUR 11 million by the quarters, you can estimate our figures for that. Basically, this is the same development which we had also in the last quarter.
In the last quarter, the PPA effects were a little bit higher compared to this. You can see here, we mentioned that marginal increase due to lower purchase price allocation effects in this quarter. The increase of the EBITDA was not so high as you can compare it with the last quarter in 2024.
If we've, thank you for the explanation, but if we've got EUR 19.6 million in reported EBITDA and the net profit at the bottom, I assume, is also not adjusted. It is the regular net profit. There is a EUR 1.2 million discrepancy roughly between the EBITDA and the net income.
Yes, definitely. If you want, I can give you later the information on that to give you a more, how should I say, a more detailed split on that. We had one amortization effect, which was relevant in this first quarter.
It was not so high. On the other side, we also have very low interest costs in the first quarter. There was not such a high interest cost. Overall, these two effects were not so big. In the second quarter, we usually have higher effect on that. That is the reason for this very small discrepancy. Yeah.
Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. Yeah, I would appreciate the information later. Regarding the fulfillment center, one more question on that as well. What were the costs associated with that?
Basically, we had no costs. Because one of the companies which we acquired, it was Habitus Group. It was all the furniture and so on, and the technique and the pick towers and so on, it was included in the company. The building, of course, we did not buy a building.
We do not want to have properties in our balance sheet. This is just a typical rent contract. We did not invest into that. We just have one-off costs when we consolidate now the other logistic hubs. This is what we have on additional costs, but we had no additional investments.
Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you. There is just one question in our chat box because that was not heard very properly. Can you repeat the operating cash flow in Q1, Dr. Benner? That was not very good to hear on the audio line.
If you want, maybe it is the easiest way. We will add one slide into the presentation so you can see our cash flow in the first quarter. We will do that with our financial department within the next three hours. Then you have it online.
It is transparent for everyone. Everybody can find it.
Great. Thank you very much. There is one other question in our chat box. Was your tax rate negative in Q1?
No, we had no negative tax rate. We had to pay in total tax. Yeah. In the first quarter, again, it is not so relevant. Usually, we have the highest taxes in quarter three and four. In the first quarter, it is not relevant. Overall, you know that we had in 2023 a negative tax rate because we acquired a lot of companies with loss carry forwards. This effect will someday end. Yeah. Every year, we have more and more tax effects that we have to pay taxes to the state.
Okay, thank you very much. Meanwhile, we did not receive any further questions. I will wait for some more seconds. There is Mr. Rüsker.
Yes, hello. I hope you can hear me. One question on the gross margin. You mentioned the reason for the weaker gross margin in Q1. How should we think about the gross margin in the coming quarters and what is the target for the full year?
We have no gross margin target. Because actually, just to make one example, if we would acquire a company with, let's say, EUR 30 million revenue, so not big, EUR 30 million is not so big in our company from a full-year perspective, but with EUR 1 billion GMV. Yeah. Just imagine if we would do that, what would happen? The GMV would jump up. The revenue would only increase by EUR 30 million. And the gross margin, which will result of that, it is just the payments to our partners on this platform.
The gross margin would also decline if we would do that, if we would buy this fictional company. Yeah. The gross margin actually is not relevant for us because we are not a producing company. We are not a retail company like Zalando and so on with own big inventory. This number is not so relevant. It is always the result between our net revenues from the company, which we acquired, and our own net revenue, and the difference what we pay to our partners. We have no estimation for the full year. In our own internal perspective, we think that it should be around 35%-36% on average for this and next year. Again, if we would buy a company with a big change in the gross margin, it could affect the gross margin in a negative way. It could do.
From our perspective, this is not negative at all because the total figures are important. We have to earn money in our total figures, in our EBITDA and in net profit. This is relevant.
Okay, that's very clear. Thank you. The second one is on M&A. Maybe you can share with us the amount you spent for the four acquisitions in the first months and probably also the budget for the M&A in 2025. You mentioned probably four or five more acquisitions this year.
In all, we expect a total investment for acquisition between EUR 30 million-EUR 50 million. This is more or less the same as what we also invested in the last two years. We really continue the strike always between EUR 30 million-EUR 50 million per year. I think this is very predictable. And yeah.
Okay, so that's the total amount including spending for the already made acquisitions, right?
Absolutely. No, no, no. This is the total amount for the full year. The total amount for the full year is EUR 30 million-EUR 50 million. It is not for the first quarter. In the first quarter, we have, I do not know exactly the number, but it should be something between, I think, around EUR 10 million, EUR 10 million or EUR 12 million. Yeah.
Okay, thank you. Maybe finally, if you want to add the slide of the cash flow, probably we can also add a slide with some balance sheet numbers in particular, cash, net debt, and so would be also helpful to have these numbers after the Q1.
We will publish a full balance sheet for the quarter.
We make it for the half year, but absolutely, we can give you also the liquidity for end of March. No problem. We will add this.
Yeah. Perfect. That's it. Thank you. Thank you.
All right. Thank you very much.
Yes, thanks for the question. There are no more questions on the audio line and in our chat box. I'll wait a few moments. If this is not the case, then we're all set. Thank you very much. We come to the end of today's earnings call of The Platform Group. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations. A big thank you to Dr. Benner for the presentation and your time to take all the answers, the questions, and answer them. I wish you all a lovely remaining week and a weekend. With this, I hand over to Dr.
Benner for some final remarks.
I have no final remarks. Thank you very much and have a good day. Bye.