We start hot with Verve Group and Ingo Middelmenne, Head of European Investor Relations. He's already with us. Ingo, can you hear me and see me?
Yes, I can see you, Matthias.
Awesome. Now we need to see you as well. Start the camera.
Awesome. Perfect.
Great. It works.
Perfect. Thank you, Mario. Thank you, Matthias, for the nice introduction. Yeah, my name is Ingo Middelmenne. I'm the Head of Investor Relations of Verve Group . We're a Swedish-listed company that has also been elevated to the General Standard in Germany and was just recently taken into SDAX by fast entry. We're now also an index member in Germany. I will introduce the company to you. Let me share my presentation with you.
Perfect. The stage is yours. You have five minutes, maybe five more minutes for questions afterwards. Everyone is welcome to post questions through the chat or the Q&A function. Ingo, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Matthias. I'll try to use the time. The presentation is actually longer, but we'll just run it through as far as we get. A general overview of the advertising industry is important to understand where this company stands and what opportunities offer for Verve. Here you see the maturity curve of the advertising industry on the right side. In the middle, you see more mature channels. On the very right side, television, radio, in the middle, social media, email marketing. It's important to understand, these two parts of the industry, in contrast to the emerging channels, most of these advertising channels are basically locked. That means if you want to participate as a service provider or advertiser in this industry, there is hardly any chance to get into those channels. That's why Verve concentrates on new emerging channels.
Those are channels that emerged over the last years from new technologies and became mature enough that advertising in these channels makes sense. The channels you see here, mobile advertising, connected TV, retail media, digital out-of-home, and podcast advertising, those are examples for those channels. Verve is positioning itself as an active player in this area, but most dominantly in the mobile advertising channel. If you look at the advertising industry overall, that's $1,100 billion in global ad spend. From this part, so-called global programmatic advertising, the advertising industry that is not being steered by humans anymore, but by software, holds around 50% of this market, $600 billion. The mobile advertising industry of that is around $225 billion. 50% of that market is based in the U.S. In general, those programmatic advertising channels are really interesting from a CAGR side. Mobile has an underlying growth of 10% per year.
CTV, meaning IPTV or television via apps like Netflix and Co., is way smaller from the advertising side, but is growing faster. In comparison to this, you see desktop advertising. It's a mature channel, only growing 3%. We're not active in this channel. It's just for comparison for you. What do we do in general? We connect the publisher, so the owner of an app, with the advertiser via our integrated software platform. Now it gets a little more complicated. Just imagine you open up an ad and scroll through the ad. In this case, as an example, the BBC ad.
In the moment you enter the ad, we either have a cookie or we take our own technology to combine everything that you leave as information on your cell phone to draw a rough picture of yourself, and then take this information and go over to the demand side, the advertiser, and tell them, for example, hey, we have a 45-year-old to 50-year-old male from Bavaria in Germany, and he seems to be an outdoor fan. In this second or in this moment, because it's not seconds, for example, Adidas says, this is just the individual user that we want to advertise to, and they offer a bid of $1 to display an ad. With this information, we go over to the publisher side again and auction as well, saying, we've got an advertiser who bids $1.
If we have the highest bid on both sides, then we display the ad. It is a bidding, an auction process on both sides of our platform, and we enrich the signals that we get from a mobile via our own additional information. Important for you to understand, this whole process only takes about 0.1 seconds. It is an extremely short period of time that we have to organize the display of an ad and make sure the outcome for the advertiser is as best as possible. If it's as best as possible, they place a higher bid. With this, the publisher, the owner of the app, earns more money.
To make sure we can facilitate this auction process in 0.5 seconds, we are connected to the app via a small piece of software, a so-called SDK, a software development kit that's just a couple of kilobytes big, and it's integrated into the app. That is why on both sides of these advertising platforms, only about six to eight bidders are allowed in the industry. Overall, we have around 100 competitors in the market, but as well as on the supply side, as well as on the advertiser side, only six to eight companies are allowed to be on the bidding tables. You have to have a leading technology. You have to have a stable technology. The ad owner, the app owner, chooses you as your technology partner.
On the other side, the advertiser wants to see that you have a vast number of apps connected to your platform, and then you're interested for them to serve as a display company for their ads, so to say. As Verve, we are integrated into more than 65,000 apps. That's quite a number, and that's a huge differentiator that we have in the market. To be connected into that many apps takes many years of customer relationships and many years of a leading technology. Verve itself is predominantly, as you see here, active in the North American market. The U.S. and Canada take the U.S. itself. It's the biggest advertising market in the world. Speaking about the advertisement or the app landscape, you will know that this is split between the iOS system, so the Apple system, and the Google system called Android. They split the market about 50/50.
In the Android list market, as well as in the iOS market, we are by far number one, the leading company in the market. We are this because our technology is leading and because we have many apps integrated. We have more than 200 million TV screens integrated. We reach more than 2.5 billion consumers. With this, we display more than 1 trillion ads a year. How does the revenue model work? If a brand wants to advertise, they either do it directly or they do it via an agency. If they spend $100 on advertising as a rough number, then about 20% is being taken from the demand-side platform. This is the side where we auction the profile to the advertiser. About $10 goes to the overall marketplace. Around $20, again, is taken for the auction on the supply side, so on the app side.
The publisher, the app owner, in the end, gets around $50. If you were now talking to Google instead of me, then on the right side, you would read about $20. That is about the take rates that are normal in the advertising market. $50 take rate for the owner of the app from the $100 the advertiser pays is a completely normal outcome for the industry. We, as Verve, take up to 50% of this, depending on which part of the auction process we facilitate at this moment. Very often, we facilitate the whole process, meaning demand-side platform, marketplace, and supply-side platform. It could also be the case that we auction on supply-side platforms of third parties, or we take advertisement from demand-side platforms from other companies, from third parties. Overall, we end up with an EBITDA margin of roughly 30%.
Do you see an outline of our customer base? The logos you see here are just vanity chosen. It's way more companies that we work with, of course. The important figures here to have a look at are our cluster risks. There is none. We have the biggest clients of ours on the publisher as well as on the advertiser side with a maximum of 6% of revenues. I'm often asked, so which company is the biggest one? This always depends on the market you're in. In some markets, there are more retail-focused times when retailers place the highest bids. Sometimes that could be automotive companies. You can imagine at the moment this is not the case. It could also be companies from the technology side, whatever you can imagine. Nowadays, everybody advertises on mobile apps.
This is, again, what I just said. Verve is by far the biggest advertiser or the biggest technology provider in the U.S. here. That means we take, as an idea, a decisively double-digit percentage number of the market, whereas the number two only ranges at around a mid-single-digit percentage level. Our underlying markets, as I said before, grow by around 10%. This gives us enough room to grow in our whole market, the U.S. As you've seen before, 80% of our business is the U.S., and there is a lot of room for us to grow in Europe. That is where we just recently announced acquisitions to further improve our growth outside of North America. How did we end up having such a great technology and developing that far and being the leading technology provider in the U.S. market?
This company actually started in 2014 when the founder of the company, Remco Westermann, bought a gaming asset in a distressed moment and restructured the company. He was then actually intending to sell this to the Proceeding Media Group, but ended up buying up a lot of gaming assets from them as well, restructuring them, meaning cutting out all new game ventures that they were starting and fully concentrating on running games or on existing games that have a good cash flow profile. We still own these games to today. Whereas until 2020 started, this was the major part of our business. Nowadays, the gaming business is way less than 10%. Around the 2020 time, that was the time when we started focusing on advertising because we figured out that the gaming assets we held actually were hard to monetize correctly from our point of view.
We figured out that in between the advertiser and us as the owner of an app, there were up to 18 parties taking money from these $100 that I talked about earlier. We figured out we should be a company combining this whole advertising market into one integrated platform and really make this whole industry more transparent. This fully worked. In the years following this move, the company showed rapid growth. Of course, we did a lot of acquisitions. Overall, we acquired 16 companies to build this technology stack that we hold today and to make us the leading company. Today, we make a revenue CAGR that is always clearly double-digit. We always take market share each quarter. That's our approach.
If the underlying market, as currently, is a bit weaker, growing by, let's say, around 9%, we still say we grow at least double-digit and overall intend to grow way stronger in the years to come. At the same time, our EBITDA margin in a normal environment is around 30%. This year, we're going out for around 28%. The reason for that is all the platforms that we acquired in the past have been integrated into one platform on the DSP side, on the advertiser side, and one platform on the SSP side, on the app side. This step was undertaken in Q2. It was basically a unification step that combined 85% of our total revenue, meaning that was a very decisive move for us. Honestly, it didn't go along without challenges. That's why the unification step took longer than we expected, around six weeks longer.
We wanted to be fully unified by the beginning of July. It took us till mid-August till we reached this step. I'll come later that this is to the point that this is the reason why we had a guidance revision mid-August, which was clearly only representing this bubble event of the unification. Today, we're a fully integrated platform, and all major unification steps have been done in this year. There are no further unification steps necessary of a decisive level, only minor steps that always occur. A very important differentiator for our company is privacy. As you see here, over the past years, first Apple as an environment provider for the iOS ecosystem, and then several states in the U.S. and court rulings decided that every consumer should be capable of deciding what happens with their own information.
Since this happened in the 2021 area, we clearly focused on making this our prime effort to ensure that a user that uses an app always can decide what happens with their personal information. If you have an iPhone, then you will have noticed that you're being asked if you want to be tracked on your cell phone. 80% of the users say they do not want to be tracked. On the Android ecosystem, that's about 20% of the users who do not want to be tracked, who do not want to be tracked. This percentage number is lower here because Google doesn't enforce it as strongly as Apple does. At the same time, 80% of the users say they would be interested in tailor-made apps and being shown apps that are interesting for them.
That's why we delivered a technology or developed a technology that lets us outline a clear picture of the person we have in front of us without disturbing their privacy rights. With the technology we invented called ATOM, Anonymous Tracking on Mobile, we invented a technology four years ago that takes several signals from your cell phone and combines those in the small SDK that we have in the app and then selects you into one of 200 available cohorts that are interesting for the advertising industry. We outline a picture of you as a user without stating your name and where you exactly live. You get more relevant for the advertiser, and the app owner makes more money with you as a user, and you can enjoy free content on your cell phone using the app. That is not only interesting for the user.
This is also very interesting for the advertiser itself because a user that is not trackable, that has not a cookie involved, that is completely anonymous on the internet, an advertising space being shown to a person like this is about 36% cheaper than a cookie-based advertising place. At the same time, the technology we invented is, in the meantime, almost as accurate as 90% as a cookie. Even more so, we've figured out in the past quarters that cookies aren't always 100% correct, but we state them as a correctness of around 92%- 95%. Meaning the level of or the possibility that our assumption of the outline of the user is almost at the level of the old-fashioned cookie-based advertisement way.
At the same time, with the performance and the lower price of an advertising space, we offer an efficiency gain to the advertising industry of around 30%, making it way more valuable. The interesting thing here overall is that we have installed this privacy-conformed advertisement in our DNA. It took us four years to invent this technology and lead it to the place it is. It's an AI-based technology. In contrast to a machine learning, to a large language model that you know from ChatGPT, for example, our model is pure machine learning. You can only teach your model once you're sitting on the auction table. As you just heard, only six to eight competitors are being allowed to sit on the auction table.
Having a technology like ours will be a main differentiator to the whole industry in the quarters to come when privacy laws get harder and harder enforced. There are frequently more news coming out from competitors of us that get accused of illegal fingerprinting, meaning you see a stronger enforcement of privacy rules, and we are benefiting a lot from this. At the same time, if you would be interested to enter the market with a technology like this, you wouldn't be able to create a technology like this fast enough because it took us four years to create it. You cannot teach it if you're not sitting on the auction table. We have 1 trillion transactions per year training our AI. Let me sum up again, what are the underlying growth triggers to our company? We have a strong underlying market growth, which is, as a CAGR, double-digit.
We have enough room to expand our customer share, meaning we can add new advertisers, we can add new publishers, and we can add new geographical areas. We bring new products into the market. ATOM is not the only AI we invented. We also have Helix and different other technologies that are absolute cutting-edge technology level, also driving our growth. We have strong network effects from our platform. Now let's take a look at our guidance. Originally, we planned for EUR 530 million- EUR 565 million in revenues with an EBITDA of around EUR 155 million- EUR 175 million. We revised our guidance mid-August, and we only revised it purely by the effects of our platform unification. During this time, we couldn't onboard clients fast enough on the new platform, meaning we missed out on revenue we could have actually made.
At the same time, with the longer transition time, we had higher costs for testing our new platform, so higher technology costs. As the dollar went decisively down versus the euro, we also adjusted our guidance for those EUR 9 million effects that we see from the decline of the dollar. For the future, to make sure that our investors know which dollar rate we calculated with, we stated here, and this is the rate we calculated forward with. The underlying operational business was basically fully intact. It was solely and purely a problem with a delayed end of our unification process. Maybe it's good to come to an end now, but let me give you an idea of the midterm growth perspective of Verve.
By the year 2028, 2029, we want to reach the EUR 1 billion revenue level with an EBITDA of EUR 330 million+ , meaning we want to increase our EBITDA margin from the current normal level of around 30% to around 33%. This growth that we anticipate, so let's say this roughly EUR 500 million, will come to 20% from M&A. We're acquiring about EUR 100 million of revenues. We just did two acquisitions two weeks ago and acquired around, I think it was EUR 56 million in revenue. As you see, we have a strong growth track in front of us, and we are planning to decisively increase our margin. At the same time, this means our leverage will stay at a high level. Before the two acquisitions, we had a leverage of 2.5. The acquisitions increased it to about 2.8, 2.9.
By natural deleveraging, this should deliver in the next two to three quarters back to the level of 2.5. I'd say till we get it down to 1.5, it will most likely take another two to three years, but that's the clear target. In the current state of the market, where it's easy for us to buy competitors that are way smaller with interesting technology, but that purely lack size and lack critical mass, it is an interesting opportunity for us to buy them at low EBITDA multiples. We bought acardo and Captify for EBITDA multiples of around 5x and 6x . That's very interesting levels. Years ago, we would have paid decisively higher multiples. We're definitely benefiting from the current market consolidation. After this, the financials would follow. I'd say we jump into a quick Q&A.
Yes, thank you so much. Great presentation. The lookout also looks really good. We have a few questions in the chat already. There were challenges with SSP and DSP, and are these solved? What's the timeline?
Yes, that's exactly a very good question because that's the platform unification issues we talked about. The platform unification process was very important. There were five platforms on the DSP side and five platforms on the SSP side. Now we shrunk this all down to one platform on each side. We shrunk down three data lakes, five data lakes to one data lake. We shrunk down five SDKs that we had to currently two, and we'll shrink it further down to one SDK. This is so important because if we develop new features on our platforms and on our software integrations, we then only have to develop it in one platform or one SDK and not have to develop it on all of these platforms. 85% of the business is now unified.
Only smaller parts of the business, for example, CTV, which only accounts for 4% of our revenues, have to be combined. Way smaller parts of revenues mean even way smaller parts of potential problems. We're not afraid that any problems should occur in this unification process. We can say since mid-August, the issues from unification processes are over.
Okay, excellent. You had some technical issues, as you said, with the unification. How will you make sure that it won't happen again in the future?
Basically, simply by the fact that the major steps of M&A have been done in the past. As we showed to you, there will only be smaller M&A cases in the years to come. We only acquire around EUR 100 million. That's what we said. We just acquired EUR 56 million in revenues in two acquisitions. Those two acquisitions do not have any integration risks. It's basically just data streams we connect and salespeople we integrate in our team. There's no technology integration needed. 85% of the business has now been integrated. Honestly, smaller integration processes, you can really plan decisively till the smallest part of the integration. A huge integration like this, you cannot, in a way, anticipate what happens. The sheer size of this unification we did was going beyond everything that is plannable. That's why issues occurred. We solved those. We successfully solved those. They are solved now.
It took six weeks longer. We told the market exactly how much revenue we missed on that, how much extra cost we had on that. We're trying to be as transparent as possible. We do not see, and that's really take my word here, we do not see any further risk on this side.
Excellent. Regarding the 2025-2026 guidance, there's some U.S. economic uncertainty. How do you factor that into the current guidance?
Yes. Of course, in the current guidance, this is already included. The 2025 guidance stated that on the low level of the bandwidth, we have, let's say, a pretty strong impact of economic decline, which we currently do not see. We currently see a soft market, but we don't see a bad market or negative market. Meaning all the potential market environments that we see in the remaining three quarters, three months of the year are part of our guidance. We do not see any risks of missing our guidance here. We feel very confident with our current guidance. For the next year, we see improvements in the market versus 2025, but still not a very strong bull market. The overall economy is a bit weakish, but not weak.
To give the market the best possible transparency, we're planning a way more transparent guidance process for the next year with a clear breakdown of our anticipated growth from underlying markets, from economic factors, from technology drivers. Every investor can clearly build their own opinion if the assumptions we made here are in a way what he thinks about the market as well, or if he wants to, in a way, take this lower or take this a bit higher. We are currently planning to come out with our new guidance with the release of preliminary figures potentially in February. Meaning way earlier than this year. This year, we came out with our guidance in May. That's also when I came on board. We're doing everything to prepone this, to make this come out with this earlier and to give more transparency of how we calculate our guidance.
Okay, Ingo, thank you so much. We are already a bit over our time. Great presentation.
Thank you very much, Matthias.