Good morning to our guests joining from America, and a warm welcome as well to everybody joining us from Europe. My name is Ingo Middelmenne, Head of Investor Relations of Verve Group. I am pleased to welcome you to our Q1 2026 earnings call. As usual, our call format allows our private investors to join the session live in a listen-only mode. Our institutional investors and analysts will have the opportunity to ask questions live during the Q&A session later on. To do so, you can click the blue live Q&A button at any time, which will automatically put you in the queue for the Q&A later. As usual, we have prepared a presentation to provide you with some additional insight and transparency on our performance in the last quarter. After the presentation, we will of course take the time to answer your question.
Please note that the entire call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded and made available publicly on our website after the call. If you have already a question in mind, feel free to queue up at any time during the call by clicking the Q&A button. I'm handing you over to our CEO, Remco Westermann, to guide you through the first part of today's call. Remco, please go ahead.
Thank you, Ingo. Dear investors, analysts, and other stakeholders, I would like to welcome you to Verve's presentation of the first quarter of 2026. As usual, I will present the headlines and the latest developments, followed by Christian, our CFO, who will present the financials. Let me start with the presentation. Q1 was a good quarter, with solid organic growth, a smoothly running platform, and investments in further growth that are already starting to show positive results. I will now present our financial headlines, whereas Christian will cover this in more detail in his part of the presentation. Q1 had a like-for-like overall growth of 3.7%, reaching EUR 137.2 million. With underlying 6.4% organic growth and 6.9% non-organic growth, we showed good growth numbers. By far the majority of our revenues in US dollars, we had to overcome the foreign exchange headwinds with 9.6% in the first quarter.
Go to the second point. Looking into the underlying KPIs, our client base remained strong. Our net dollar retention rate was lower at 90%, showing that old customers base was overall spending less, based on amongst others impacts from customers of our latest acquisitions and optimizations of lower margin customers. That we were able to generate more revenues was based on a strong overall customer growth, adding 9% new customers. In number three, based on efficiency from our unified platform and the use of AI, we were able to show a continued improved gross margin at 41%. Number four, we continued our investments into adding additional sales force and sector focus. This led to higher cost and as a result, a 2.2% lower EBITDA.
Number five, after a weak cash generation in Q4, we had a very strong cash generation in Q1, with cash flow from operations reaching EUR 45 million. The last point on this slide, based on expansion of our business, efficiency uplifts from AI, organizational allocation optimizations, and yields of our investments, we confirm our full year 2026 guidance. Brings me to the next page. Getting to our position as a leading mobile AdTech company. Via our AdTech platform, we are connecting advertisers with publishers. Mobile represents 93% of our revenues. Out of that, in-app is approximately 95%. We remain heavily North America and especially U.S.-focused, with 74% of our revenues in that region. The advantage of that is, it's the largest advertising market worldwide, with a lot of scale opportunities.
There is, however, also a disadvantage: the US dollar versus our reporting in euros, which we'll later cover in the presentation. We work with well over 1,100 software clients. Those are clients with over $100,000 of revenues per year. We have over 65,000 app integrations. We serve over 2.5 billion consumers. We are one of the largest platforms in the market with 1.2 trillion ads delivered in the last 12 months. Coming to the next page. I'm getting into the headlines overview of our revenue growth margin and EBITDA development, and I'm covering headlines, Christian will do the details. Net revenue increase year-on-year, 4%, reaching EUR 137 million for Q1 2026. That taking into account, as I mentioned before already, the 9.6% year-on-year negative currency effect from much weaker US dollar.
We are happy with this number, especially taking into account that last year Q1 was also a very strong quarter. Our gross profit margin has structurally improved based on optimizations and improvements following our platform unification. While gross profit margin was up by 2.7%, our adjusted EBITDA was down by EUR 2 million, respectively 6% lower than last year, which is based on our increased cost base, based on our investments in our sales team buildup and the retail media area, as we mentioned. Also impacted by weaker U.S. dollar because more of our costs are in Euros and the majority, as mentioned already, of the revenues is in U.S. dollars. Coming to our main underlying KPIs. We were able to increase our ad impressions by 25% versus Q1 last year. We were even able to keep it at the same level as Q4 last year.
This, while Q4 seasonality-wise, is the strongest quarter, while Q1 is the weakest quarter normally. Our net dollar retention rate, the graph on the left bottom side, for the quarter is 90%. The net dollar retention rate shows how revenues of the customers from Q1 last year developed versus Q1 this year. The lower percentage versus previous year results largely from new acquisitions as well as from optimizations of low-margin customers. Our revenue growth came from adding new customers. As you can see on the upper right side, while the large over $100,000 per year customer number was stable, we were able to increase our total number of customers by 34%.
While we gain new customers, we are also showing a very good retention rate of 98%, also in line with previous quarters, which has shown the loyalty of our customers and a proof for delivering good results. Getting to a selection of some further key indicators. We continue to remain our strategic focus on engineering, product and AI. While in the past years, we focused on unifying our platforms, we now benefit from strong, stable and scalable platform. We are, however, still working on migrating the last bits of traffic. Related to CTV, we still have to do 2% of the migration, so 98% of our traffic now, of our revenues, have been migrated, up from 96% in end of Q4. We are further continuing our focus on growing and improving our ID-less solutions.
While Android is still relaxed on privacy, Apple, which has approximately 50% of the market in the U.S., has pursued the deprecation of its identifiers. We were able to grow our iOS revenues year on year by 24%. Also, we continue our strategic focus on commerce and market expansion. We have been growing our clients by 34%. On the supply side, we are connecting more and scaling our app to publishers, and on the demand side, which is becoming more substantial but still smaller than our supply side, we are further increasing the number of advertisers and ad agencies. There's a lot more growth potential in the U.S. market with over 4,000 agencies, big holdcos, and many direct customers. For this reason, we decided to increase our sales team, as communicated earlier. We were able to more than double our sales team, growing it by 117%.
There's a strong strategic focus on efficiency and financial, where we also are seeing good progress. Our gross margin improved by 2.7% and our interest coverage improved to 4.5 x. Coming to the next page. Go more into detail with regards to the main events on the commercial side. Starting with the first bullet point here, we accomplished a unified Verve for advertisers. All demand side offerings are now under one umbrella, uniting Jun Group, Captify, Verve Brand & Agency, as well as Dataseat DSP. The joint offering is strong and combining the strengths also makes us more efficient. Number two, we are making good progress with our improved marketplace. After unification, focus is now on optimizing margin management, data and AI-based targeting effectiveness, as well as pruning less efficient and low-margin supply. We are also focusing on further feature development of our SDK solutions.
As we released earlier in a press release, we are creating a strong moat with integrating LLM signals into our targeting. We are the first open market ad platform that is activating conversational intent from LLMs and combining it with other data such as Verve search intent, zero-party, and ID-less data. We're also further working on extending our leading privacy-first position. We're focusing on product development and proof of performance. As published earlier, LinkedIn validated Verve's privacy-first performance and was extremely happy with 38% lower CPIs and 39% lower cost per app activation. We're doubling down on retail media. Retail media and CPG already were a focus segment for Verve, we are now expanding our focus on this segment. We have been able to establish a Verve closed loop offering at scale in Germany.
We're linking mobile advertising with retail in-store advertising and with point-of-sale purchase data. We are now ready to expand our offering into other markets, including the U.S. In Q1, we also further focused on increasing organizational efficiency. On one hand, by focusing on our investments into the opportunities like sales and retail media, and on the other hand, by streamlining operations and creating efficiencies based on structural implementation of AI. A few words about the markets. We experienced a resilient U.S. market. While we see shorter agency booking cycles and some isolated Middle East and travel-related negative effects, the overall U.S. market is stable. On the margin side, we see stable in-app margins in line with user seasonality. However, CTV margins are under pressure. Coming to the next page. We are pursuing a relocation to Ireland that has been communicated earlier.
We see this as a strategic move to align Verve with our global tech peers. We think this is a big opportunity. Why are we doing this? What are the reasons for this? First of all, Ireland is an EU common law domicile. This enables Verve to align its constitutional framework with international technology and advertising peers, particularly in the U.S., while remaining within the European Union. Getting the best of both worlds. Ireland enables us to report in U.S. dollars instead of Euros. As I mentioned before, let's say the weak U.S. dollar is really showing our Euro revenues a lot lower than the effect we would have been able to show in U.S. dollars. Reporting in U.S. dollars better reflects the global nature of the digital advertising, improves comparability with peers, and could materially reduce our foreign exchange volatility and reported results.
We are currently evaluating this option. Ireland will also enable greater capital markets flexibility. It would increase our accessibility for international investors, but it also creates the optionality for Verve to do a future direct U.S. listing. This is currently under evaluation. No decision or timeline has been established so far. Important to mention, there will be no operational disruption. The relocation relates only to the registered office and the corporate domicile. Verve's operational footprint, existing listings, bonds, shares, remains unaffected. With our strong U.S. focus and the majority of our revenues in the U.S., we believe that a relocation to Ireland represents a big opportunity for Verve and its shareholders. For the re-domiciliation, we need approval from the AGM, which is planned for June 5th. I'm getting into the AI topic. A topic which is discussed everywhere at the moment. Consumer behavior is undergoing a structural change.
LLMs start eliminating the middle web and push into in-app traffic. There's a strong disruption in the market. AI overviews and search page results lead to a sharp decrease of click converts to the open web. Web owners see a lot less clicks on the pages. Also, traditional search volumes are dropping, being partly replaced by AI chatbots and virtual agents. In the meanwhile, we're seeing increased usage of special interest apps, amongst others, avoiding AI-generated noise. Open Web is losing its role as primary discovery layer. Traffic is heading into two distinct layers, we show them here. The AI answer layer, quick factual and information queries are resolved within the LLM. Zero click, basically. The special interest app layer, high intent, transactional, utility driven tasks, they mitigate to dedicated apps. Verve is well-positioned to profit from this disruption with our strong in-app position.
With our strong position, we can profit from in-app deep utility mode, as we show here. It's about tooling and integrating app functionality. It's about verified, branded environments. It's about proprietary, real-time data and live inventory signals that AI cannot crawl. It's about first-party data, community features that create high in-app customer retention. The changes based on AI are a big opportunity for Verve. I would like to also put focus on our receivable securitization program. We have shown part of this slide also before, and as mentioned earlier, one of our strategic priority is working capital management. For that, our receivable securitization program plays an important role to bridge the gap between typical 90-day advertiser payments to us, while we pay publishers after 45 days. While we did not optimally use this program in our last quarter, in Q1, we had strong focus on it.
We were able to return to the optimal levels and secure the maximum amount of EUR 100 million. Overall, this helped our strong cash flow momentum. In Q1, we generated an operational cash flow of EUR 45.2 million, which is significantly up from last year. That brings me to the point where I hand over to Christian for the next slides.
Thank you very much, Remco. Yes, coming to the financial performance of Q1, I think the three headlines of the performance is we see accelerating organic growth reaching 6.4%. This quarter was really a turning point in our operational cash flow generation, where we generated EUR 45.2 million. Whereas we saw also that EBITDA profits and margin are impacted by the planned strategic investment phase. I will now dig into some of the details of those headlines. On this slide, combining our key highlights for the quarter. If we first focus on revenue, you'll see we booked EUR 137 million in revenues for Q1. That should be compared to EUR 132 million for Q1 last year and resembles 3.7% like-for-like revenue growth. I think Q1, in terms of FX headwinds, was quite extraordinary. The depreciation of the US dollar meant that we had currency translation headwinds of 9.6 percentage points.
Of course, you need to isolate that factor out to see what is the actual organic growth, and we come to a number of 6.4% when we normalize for currency translation and for M&A. That's actually a slight acceleration from Q4, where we noted 5.3 percentage point and really marks a return to growth, if you go back and look at the Q2 and Q3 the past year, where we were more challenged on the top line. It's very comforting to see the acceleration continue. I also want to remind you that when you look at the quarter results for this quarter, keep in mind that Q1 last year was our strongest growth quarter with 16% growth, and therefore it's a bit of a more tough comparable. This will change a bit going into Q2. On the adjusted EBITDA, we booked EUR 28 million for the quarter.
That is, granted, EUR 1.9 million lower than we had in the comparable quarter last year. I want to mention here, there's a couple of dynamics going on. Firstly, we are actually looking quite a lot on our cost structure and our efficiencies and doing different initiatives to optimize our overall efficiency. We did that already from August last year and continued into Q1. We have also made a dedicated commitment to invest in the amount of EUR 10 million for expansion this year. That covers both, and by mainly sales force expansion in the U.S., but also some investments in retail media and AI. We're committed to do that, and therefore you will see a drag on our quarterly performance here in terms of profits and also our margin, which lands at 20.6%.
We should expect that we will continue to have a drag going into Q2 and then a reversal as we go into second half of the year. As I mentioned, one of the highlights of this quarter is the operating cash flow generation, which equated to EUR 45.2 million, and that compares to EUR 300,000 for the comparable quarter in 2025.
This was comprised of EUR 11.5 million of operating cash flow before net working capital, and then a contribution from net working capital of EUR 33.7 million. We continue to invest in our product and development at the level of EUR 10.2 million, which is roughly the level that we have seen in previous quarters. Turning now to gross profit margin, which is a key KPI and indicator for the business. We're very pleased to see that the structural lift we saw in gross profit margin in Q4 has carried into Q1.
You will see here in the dotted box all Q1 numbers, and we landed at 41% gross profit margin, which is 2.7 percentage points up compared to same quarter last year. We look at it, and should compare it within a quarter year-on-year, as there are significant seasonal effects that can influence the different quarters. That's why it's important to look at and compare quarters. The contributing factors were mainly the same as I mentioned, and it went through in some detail last time. We have clearly a better structural margin optimization possibilities with the unified platform, and we are also doing a better job in optimizing our infrastructure cost and cloud hosting cost.
The addition and new part is that we are actually using quite some effort to go through and look at our more low-margin inventory and ad requests, and look at the long tail and are there any of the ad requests and the inventory that we can kind of prune out to give us overall better profitability. We're using quite some effort to do that this quarter and also next quarter. Turning to operating cash flow, which really was a reversal of the situation that we saw in Q4 last year. Here on the left-hand side, you see the development in our operating cash flow. We had on an LTM basis for March, we had operating cash flow before net working capital of EUR 105 million and after net working capital of EUR 94 million.
This is actually good because the two bars are roughly equaling out, which means we are in a balanced situation. On a LTM basis, we therefore invested EUR 11 million in net working capital, compared to operating cash flow before net working capital. That is a good situation to be in. You will also see that it is in stark contrast to the balance that we saw end of 2025, and it is really a result of better utilization of our securitization, but primarily also all the money that we had built up from high season in Q4 that is coming in now in Q1. As we guided and referred to, we see the money coming in and it is very good picture for the cash flow development. In terms of CapEx, we have repeatedly said that we need roughly between EUR 40 million-EUR 45 million.
It's quite stable over the time for investment in our expansion and maintenance CapEx. We estimate that we will be using something in the same vicinity in 2026, which is the gray area here in the stacked bar. Then we have acquisition CapEx totaling EUR 34 million. Now, this is acquisition CapEx for existing M&A, so companies we've already bought, Jun Group, acardo, Viventor. We have EUR 34 million this year. EUR 23.8 million of those have already been paid out in the last deferred payment for Jun Group. What is remaining is deferred payments for acardo and Viventor in October, totaling EUR 9.9 million. All in all, that will sum up to around EUR 74 million-EUR 79 million as an estimate for the year. Slightly below what we saw in 2025, and significantly basically half of what we saw in 2024.
Digging a bit more into our cash position, because there is this number of dynamics going on, and I thought it would be helpful to show some of the key dynamics in our development, our cash position. You will note that we have improved our cash position quite significantly, between the EUR 89 million that we ended 2025 on, and also compared to where we ended Q1, which was EUR 147.2 million. EUR 58.2 million increase. I think most would also expect quite an increase because we did a further tap on the bond, nominal EUR 50 million in net proceeds. You can see here that it brought in EUR 48.2 million. We actually also worked quite hard to increase our utilization of our securitization program, which brought in EUR 17.8 million in funding.
We had interest payments on the bond totaling EUR 7.8, which is a minus, and then a deferred payment to Jun Group of EUR 23.8 million for the final payment, which leaves a change in operational cash position of EUR 23.8 million. A quite nice development, and again, we saw the money that we had built out in Q4 come in, and this is very helpful for the situation. We are now in a situation where we are utilizing the securitization vehicle almost fully. By that, we are therefore also correcting for the lack of utilization in Q3 and Q4 last year. I'm also happy to report that we have just received approval to add two operating units further to the securitization program. It takes a bit of time to migrate because customers need to pay into new bank accounts, and you have to get customers used to that.
That will help us also going forward as we grow some of these businesses. Then ending on the last slide on the financial update, touching on balance sheet structure for the company. You can see here adjusted leverage ratio, here on the left, largely unchanged from 3x to 3.1 x. We had a net interest-bearing debt of EUR 448 million. It is also largely unchanged since the end of 2025. We did, as I mentioned, have slightly lower adjusted EBITDA for the quarter compared to last year, and therefore you see a slight uptick in the net leverage ratio to 3.1x. Overall, being at the level of three or thereabouts is a result of mainly acquisition-driven debt that we have taken on board to do the acquisitions through 2025, and also back to 2024. It is encouraging to see that our interest coverage ratio is increasing.
It's increased from 4.3x to 4.5x, and this is because we refinanced the bond overall in better terms, and that is now getting a full-year effect as it rolls out. We did the bond Q1 last year, and therefore we're now getting the full effect of the better terms into our interest rate costs. For those that are interested in interest rate exposure, I can say that we do and might be thinking about if interest rates would increase. We actually have a hedge on EUR 300 million out of the EUR 550 million nominal value of the bond. EUR 300 million is fixed through an interest rate swap. Thereby, we think we have a balanced hedge versus any spikes in interest rate coverage. With the financial performance that we see, good uptick in growth on organic growth, but also a very encouraging level of gross profit margins.
With cash to fund our investments for the year, we're comfortably affirming our outlook for 2026. That means revenues in the range of EUR 680 million-EUR 730 million, and adjusted EBITDA from EUR 145 million-EUR 175 million. I should perhaps mention that we very recently announced the expansion of our retail media business, and that expansion is, so to say, not included in this guidance. We have not updated the guidance for any a significant expansion initiative in that sort. Because it's too early to include it in the formal guidance, but I just wanted to make that clear. With that, I hand over to Remco for the closing remarks.
Thank you, Christian. That brings me indeed to the last page of the presentation. Yeah, Verve has shown strong growth in the past years with revenue and EBITDA CAGRs consistently over 30%. We are now building the next phase of our scalable growth. Q1 confirms our strong platform foundation, targeted investment priorities, and disciplined execution. That brings me to the three pillars that we've shown here. First of all, to start with our scaled platform economics. Our unified platform keeps performing flawlessly, supporting scalable growth better than ever. We have managed to get a sustainable structural gross margin uplift, which confirms our improved operating leverage, and we are using the potential of AI to enhance our bidding and bring targeting and efficiency with data signal depth on a whole new level. We also continue to expand our commercial positions.
Expanding our sales team is well on its way and proceeding as planned. While ramping up takes time and requires a pre-invest, the expansions target future revenue conversion. Our sector focus on retail media adds a strong targeting and measuring mode. In the substantial CPG and retail advertising market, we achieved our proof of concept and are now ready for further growing our position. Furthermore, our focus on ID-less targeting gives us a strong mode, as well as our integrated tech stack with data and AI at scale. Last but not least, a strong focus on cash generation. We continue our organic growth path with improved margins. This delivers a strong basis despite FX headwinds. We are significantly improving our cash flow, with liquidity providing flexibility for future growth. Our H1 Salesforce and retail media investment phase will translate into increased revenues in the coming quarters.
Further positive effects will come from organizational focus and AI-based infrastructure and team cost savings. That brings me to the final sentence of the presentation. With our performant unified scalable platform, we are now opening the next growth chapter for Verve. Further focusing on building and extending our USPs such as ID-less and LLM-based targeting, our sector-focused offerings such as retail media and CPGs, and not to forget our strong position as one of the leading mobile in-app exchanges with proprietary data assets and an extensive network of demand and supply partners. I would hand back to Ingo for the questions.
Great. Thank you, Remco, and thanks to the both of you for your presentations. We will now move into the Q&A session. Remember, if you would like to join the Q&A line, please click on the blue live Q&A button on the left side of your screen. The first question now comes from Matt Kebel, our analyst from Canaccord Genuity. Matt, please go ahead.
Great. Thanks so much. Can you hear me?
Yes. Loud and clear.
Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate all the call this morning. I just wanted to ask about the new retail media offering. How should we think about the timing of bringing that to new markets? Then more specifically, sort of on the building blocks of bringing that to new markets, do they change materially based on sort of the composition of end retailers? Just thinking about, say, in the U.S. where you have several large kind of dominating big box retailers. Just any additional color you could provide there, and then I have a follow-up.
Yeah, I can take that question. Thank you, Matt, for your question. Good question. We built a position in Germany in 10 months' time, which was, let's say, faster than I ever expected. We hired a great manager for that, coming from one of the larger discount retailers, actually, in Germany, and started really building the network. We had several challenges because we didn't want to make it asset heavy, because that's not our business. For us, it's about data, it's for targeting, and it's of course for showing the ads, which we were able to do and build different building blocks. Let's say the two acquisitions were part, or there were two part acquisitions, part of that. One more with, let's say, in-screen retail and the other one with couponing, and the rest was built via partnerships organically, et cetera.
With that, we have really been showing good results for retailers, increasing their revenues as well as for CPGs, where we really are able to lift market shares, which is super important. We've been able to, and that was also in the press release, to build a quite extensive network of retailers in Germany with EDEKA, REWE, which are the two large quality retailers, but also Müller Drogerie, which is in kind of pharmacy, for example, and Kaufland. Really built a nice network and are seeing extremely good results, and it's very nice to see that we couple our mobile capabilities and really are able with the mobile to drive people to store and have already a lot of data, and then in-store are able to influence purchasing behaviors, and then are able to prove that it works on the point of sale level.
That's on the German market. That's what we now are starting to scale. We are, let's say, looking at U.S. market, of course, where we have strong position on mobile, which would be the obvious next market to go into. We are running tests there already, but it's too early to, let's say, to give results or to even to include it now in our numbers forecasts. U.S. is certainly one of the markets, also some European markets we're looking into. We still have enough to do else in Germany to really scale there. I hope that answers your question.
Got it. Yeah, it's very helpful. Thank you. Just on the guidance reiteration, just given some of the comments you provided around shorter agency booking cycles, are the underlying components of your guidance still, or assumptions I should say, still the same as last quarter in terms of high single-digit market growth and then at least five percentage points of share gains? Have those assumptions been updated at all?
Yeah, good question. We are still standing, as mentioned, with our guidance, so we don't see any reason to change things. Things have maybe changed in details, but not substantially. We are further sticking to our guidance.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Great. Thanks for your question, Matt. Are there any further questions? We don't charge extra for questions, be reminded. Yes. That was probably the thing I needed to mention. There is a question coming in from the chat now. Please, can you confirm the amount drawn on your receivable securitization facility at the end of 2025 and the end of Q1 2026? Thank you.
I think that's for Christian.
Christian, you need to unmute yourself. Yeah, now.
Sorry, I was on mute.
Yeah.
Yes. We have now drawn the securitization facility almost to the max. A couple of million EUR from the EUR 100 million, that is our total frame, is what we had drawn by end of Q1. I believe the draw was roughly, if you look at the bridge that I sent to you, we've drawn roughly EUR 17.8 million more than we had drawn at the point in time end of Q4.
Thank you, Christian. I think that answers the question. The next question is a live question coming from Olav Weiss from OK Consult. Olav, please go ahead.
Hey, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes, we can.
Thank you very much. Just one very simple question. I'm glad about the free cash flow, that after the suboptimal usage of the securitization, basically customers paid and the money is there. The question on hand for me following that is, I understand the leverage ratio prohibits you from buying back shares. The bond which you increased by EUR 50 million is at about 92%-93% ask. Are you going to use that cash that now has been on hand by customers just paying instead of securitization, to buy back that EUR 50 million at a discount which you increased before? I understood it's about 3.5% in costs by the issuance, but at the levels right now, that would at least be offset. To basically bring down the leverage ratio.
Yeah. Should I take that? We don't have any imminent plans of buyback of the bonds. It is a possibility, and we don't want to rule it out. On the other hand, we took on board the extra bond funding to have the financial means to really invest and also withstand should there be any troubles in the market. That's really what the money is planned for. No immediate plans in that direction, although I would not rule it out.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Olav. There is another question coming in from the chat from Bharat, from Cantor Fitzgerald. What's the structural EBITDA margin for the DSP segment once Captify, acardo are fully integrated and the Salesforce investment annualizes? Is the 20%-30% the right range for the full year 2027 and afterwards, or does the mix shift to lower margin data/retail media assets permanently reset DSP margins lower?
Happy to take it. Can you hear me? Yes.
Yes, we can.
Happy to take that. Thanks for the question. It's a good question, a little bit more difficult to answer. As we are, let's say, running as much DSP activities or as much demand activities, let me say it in that way, on our supply, we cannot talk about a separate, let's say, demand EBITDA and a separate supply EBITDA. If I look at overall EBITDA, or EBITDA margin, there are a few things that play a role there. First of all, of course, our investments. If we are investing in more salespeople that are not immediately, let's say, generating revenues or let alone margin. That is, of course, let's say, going against our EBITDA percentage. Everything basically that we ramp up, that counts for.
On the other hand, we have, let's say, Apart from, let's say, revenues coming with the investments, we have, of course, the possibility to further optimize costs, and we have some really good examples of that already. With AI, you can automate processes a lot better. As an example, media plans that are made on the demand side, they took one and a half, two days for a single person to do that. Now with WellTrade AI, I say it on purpose, you can do that with some outside feedback and optimization loops. You can do that in a few hours or less than two hours, actually. We see efficiencies that, first of all, enables us to grow without adding extra people for that. On the other hand, also allows us, of course, to do, again, efficiencies with that.
Same as, let's say, now with the unified platform, with improving our AI, we can save on infrastructure costs. There's a lot of things where we still have potential to decrease our costs. On the other hand, of course, by scaling itself, we also get better. Gross margin, as you have seen, is up, and we actually think that we have further room there. That means that, let's say, overall, we will get more profitable and that our EBITDA margin will go up. If you look historically, because we had to change our, how to say, revenue recognition because of the migration, it looks lower now, the EBITDA margin, than it was before, and of course, in lower revenue base. Overall, we are confident that we will further be able to increase our EBITDA percetage. Sorry, long answer, but I hope it answers your question.
Thanks, Remco. I think we got to come back to receivables questions. No, I think we answered that. That's fine. The next question comes from Vincent Edholm from Pareto Securities via the chat. "Reasonable to assume growth and gross margin gains in Q2 will be offset by OpEx investments, leaving EBITDA at similar levels as Q2 last year?
Yeah, I can answer that one. We're not giving individual guidances on quarters to just say that. What we expect, yes, we will further, how to say, invest in salespeople, et cetera. Of course, if you look at a normal development, the ones that we have hired in Q1 or already last year, of course, start to generate more and more money. Maybe to show the cycle, if you get a new seller, we hire experienced sellers who have done sales before. They are not always allowed to take their old customers, of course, but they can, let's say, bring new customers in, and it takes time with a new customer to scale the customer. In that sense, we expect Q2 to, how to say it, already start showing a bit of that, but the main effect of it will be in the second half year.
Q2 so far also has not as strong U.S. dollar to Euro negative effect for us. That also should help. Yeah, we are looking forward to, let's say, staying within our guidance for this year. I think that's the best I can say overall. There is a positive trend in the whole business.
Thank you, Remco.
If I could also just add to that question, I think it's better to think about Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 in the light of the guidance we have given that when you compare back in time to Q2 and Q3 last year, the business was impacted by the platform unification. I would recommend to more look around our guidance and how that would pace out through the quarters.
Thanks, Christian. The next question also comes via the chat from Axel Johanns and also from Pareto Securities and probably goes best to Remco on the market. "Ad volumes grew a lot in Q1, but revenue growth lagged somewhat behind. How do you currently view pricing CPM dynamics, and are you seeing any pricing pressure?
Thank you for the question. Yeah. As in the presentation, we see that CPMs in certain parts of the market, especially connected TV, but also in web, are under pressure. We don't see that effect on the, let's say, in-app side. I have to mention one important point, there is seasonality. CPMs are always lower in Q1 than in Q2 than in Q3, and Q4 is the highest. That has to do with the demands. There is more demands in Q4 than there is in the earlier quarters. As a result of that, it's a simple supply-demand mix type thing. If there's less demand and supply is similar, then of course you get lower CPMs. That explains maybe a bit of that effect. We're also working on some optimizations in it.
On top of it, as you saw, our Asia part has increased also as a percentage of our total revenues. Asia in general also works with a bit lower CPMs than the U.S. does. In the end, it's a mixed combination, I would say that. Observation is correct. Our ad delivery was increased faster than our revenue.
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