Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the lastminute.com investor and media conference call and live webcast on the Q4 2024 and preliminary unaudited full year 2024. I'm Sandra, the call's co-operator. I would like to remind you that all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing via the relevant field. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Julia Weinhart. Please go ahead, madam.
Thank you very much, Sandra. Welcome everyone to lastminute.com investor and media conference call. I'm Julia Weinhart, the Head of Investor Relations at lastminute.com, and I will be hosting today's call. Today I have with me our CEO, Alessandro Petazzi, and our CFO, Diego Fiorentini. As you can see in the agenda today, we will start with an introduction from our CEO, and then our CFO will provide you with an update on the company's Q4 2024 and preliminary unaudited full year figures. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. With this, I hand over to our CEO, Alessandro.
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm happy to be with you for my first investor call as the CEO of lastminute.com. As you know, I joined the company on January the 1st. I'd like maybe to start with a brief introduction about myself, share a bit about my background before handing over to Diego, our CFO, to take you through last year's financial performance. I'd say that basically I'm an entrepreneur at heart in the travel tech ecosystem. The main credentials that I bring to the table in being now the CEO of the company is the fact that I was the co-founder and CEO of a company called Musement, which we started in 2013, active in the vertical of travel activities in the travel sector, one of the leading companies in the space.
We started with zero revenues in 2013, and we grew the company to over EUR 800 million of revenues and over EUR 60 million of EBITDA over a 10 years period. I think that's a testament to the fact that you can indeed combine growth with strong capital efficiency. We raised a total of EUR 15 million in venture capital money, which is a fraction of what some of the companies in the space raised. Still, we were able to grow and be currently one of the top three players in that space and be the most profitable company in that space. You will forgive me if I still sometimes say we regarding Musement because of that, you know, that was my baby, but that's different now. We're in a different chapter, of course.
I would say that I was always a type of entrepreneur that had to deal with investors with a very, I would say, complex corporate governance. We always had a Board, we always had external investors. It was never a one-man show or, you know, a company of just a few founders. It was always a pretty complex, pretty complex team. Obviously, we also integrated the company in the context of TUI Group, which acquired Musement in 2018. I would say there was also a significant experience at that point in integrating the company in a much larger organization. During my career and even before Musement, I had started a VOD company which was then acquired by Swisscom, the Swiss incumbent. In that context, I also had a chance to work already in Switzerland for some time.
Before that, I always worked with global teams in various countries. I worked in the U.S., in the U.K., in Italy, of course, but also in the Netherlands and lately in Germany, again, in the context of TUI Group. I would say the keywords here are, you know, businesses that are technology driven in the travel tech sector and with significant growth in a very capital efficient way. Now, coming to lastminute.com, the key focus of the first month and a half in the company, and I would say probably also the focus of the next few weeks, has been in assessing the core business trends and, of course, engaging, getting to know the teams, engaging with everyone in the company with our core partners, with stakeholders, and also working on continuing the strategy of growth, but also sustainable growth, right?
I think it's important to have a vision, to have clarity on what the strategic direction of the company is, but also to make sure that we have a consistent execution in which quarter after quarter we can deliver on our results. In that line, you've probably read already in our announcement that on March the 27th, together with the audited financial results for last year, we will also talk about the outlook for 2024, 2025, and a bit of a guidance for the current year. Also today, I'm already happy to, you know, start anticipating some of the key pillars of our strategy because, again, I see this more as an evolution rather than a revolution and a really strong focus on a flawless execution. We'll have a chance to talk about that later.
I would say that for now, let me hand over to Diego Fiorentini, our CFO, to discuss last year's results. Thank you.
Thank you, Alessandro. I'm now going to walk you through our preliminary unaudited fourth-quarter results, starting with a few key highlights. The company delivered a robust financial performance in Q4, which is traditionally considered a softer period in the industry, thanks to the growth of dynamic holiday packages, our core product. Let's have a look in more detail at the quarterly results. Revenue increased by 4% versus Q4 2023. Gross profit was up 6%, two percentage points more than the revenue, thanks to increased efficiency in variable cost. Adjusted EBITDA more than doubled compared to the previous year and reached EUR 5.4 million. Net result broke even in the last quarter compared to a loss of EUR 3.2 million in Q4 2023, fully reflecting the improvement at the adjusted EBITDA levels. We are now moving to slide 8, where we provide a more detailed overview of our profit and loss.
The three key messages here are the following. Revenues reached EUR 313.7 million for the year, in line with expectations and with an improving trend in the second half. We did meet the full year guidance with adjusted EBITDA up 4% compared to the previous year. Full year net result more than doubled compared to 2023, reaching EUR 15.7 million, the second highest net result in company history, completing a remarkable turnaround in the last two years. Slide 9 highlights the positive trends discussed before. After a soft first half, lastminute.com returned to growth in the second half of the year. Revenue increased 4% to EUR 62.5 million, driven by strong double-digit growth in dynamic packages and an improved take rate. Gross profit was EUR 26.1 million, a 6% increase versus Q4 2023. DP was again the biggest contribution with a 45% increase.
Moving to slide 10, you can see a quarter-by-quarter evolution of the contribution coming from dynamic packages. DP now accounts for 57% of the total group revenue, reflecting a 13 percentage points quarter-on-quarter increase in share. The lower percentage share seen in Q4 compared to previous quarters reflects the typical seasonality of DP revenue. If we look at the gross profit, dynamic packages are now contributing 62% of the group gross profit, a 17 percentage point increase compared to last year. The higher share compared to revenue is due to the higher profitability of DP compared to our other products. We are now at slide 11, bringing attention to revenue and gross profit in our two segments, B2B and B2C. The B2B segment continued the positive trend with revenue and gross profit accelerating in the second half of the year, mainly as a result of our strategic partnership with Booking.com.
On the other hand, B2C performance remains subdued as flights continue to suffer in a very competitive environment. Now looking at slide 12, I'm pleased to say that our cost base has adapted during the year to a challenging environment with a 3% year-on-year reduction. Marketing expenditure was down 11% in the year, but less than the 14% decrease in the gross travel value, reflecting higher unitary investments. Human resources cost remains stable with a slight 1% decrease versus 2023 and a 17% reduction versus Q4 2023, which was affected by efforts to overcome the Ryanair disruption. Operating cost increased 14% both quarter-over-quarter and year to date, following continuous investments in our market-leading tech infrastructure, highly regarded by our B2B partners.
Moving now to slide 13, you see that our net financial position decreased from EUR 27.8 million to EUR 19.0 million as cash flow from operating activities was largely offset by new investments and shareholders' remuneration. The positive cash generation from operating activities was fully driven by EBITDA. The increased adoption of our deferred payment solution was responsible for the change in the working capital. CapEx was mainly linked to capitalized human resource costs and other tech investments. Equity movements include dividend payments of EUR 6.6 million, cash outflows for acquiring additional minority interest of EUR 0.8 million, and share buybacks of EUR 0.5 million. On slide 14, you can see the seasonal evolution of our net financial position from December 2023 to December 2024. It is worth mentioning that during the year, we have significantly reduced our gross debt from EUR 72 million to EUR 48 million to `EUR 40.9 million, leading to a significant reduction in interest expenses.
I have now concluded the review of our positive fourth quarter results and would like to hand it over to Alessandro for some closing remarks.
Thank you, Diego. For all of you who follow the travel industry, it's pretty common that the October to December period is always the weakest from a seasonal point of view. That being said, I'm really pleased that lastminute.com closed 2024 on a strong profitable note and in line with the guidance provided. Now, let me share with you maybe a bit of color in terms of the main reasons that made me so excited to join the company when the opportunity arose. I think there are three pillars that we can build on to continue again on a path of profitable growth.
I would say that these pillars are the technology of the company, the brand, which is an iconic historical brand, and also, to be honest, the fact that our regulatory and legal framework is allowing us to be the only player in the space who can provide the dynamic packaging solution throughout the entirety of Europe, right? Basically, from a technological point of view, when I did a kind of a due diligence of the company from the outside, I was really impressed by the quality of the platform and the fact that it's a platform that not only can provide, especially on the dynamic packaging side, a combination of flights and hotels, but with some extra work, of course, also the possibility to potentially bundle other components of the travel journey, being it transfers, being it activities, being it city passes.
This is something that is definitely not so easy for other competitors in the space to replicate and something that we can definitely, I think, leverage for future growth. The second element, I said the brand that obviously is a very well-known brand, especially in the U.K. market, but a brand with a lot of opportunities also in other markets. Do not forget that lastminute.com brand is not only, sorry, lastminute.com group is not only the lastminute.com brand, but also a combination of other brands such as Vola Gratis for the Italian market, Orumbo, Bravo Fly, and Veg.de. A number of brands, each with their own identity and value proposition in other core European markets and, again, brands that we intend to leverage going forward. The third element is the fact that we currently have the possibility to sell our products across all European markets.
I would say that in some of these markets, clearly, we are, let's be honest, we're underscaled in terms of our size in those markets because we've only recently, very recently, started being active there and investing in growth in those markets. I see this definitely as a core opportunity for the future. I would say that, again, something that has been the complexity that we had to manage in order to be compliant from a regulatory point of view to offer our products in all of these markets can become a sustainable competitive advantage in terms of being quick and efficient in all these markets. I mean, if I take even a step back and I think about the travel industry as a whole, if you think about it, 30 years ago, we were mostly traveling with package holidays, right?
The traditional tour operators model had some intrinsic inefficiency in the sense that you had, there was a lot of manual work to create products and there was also a lot of prepayments going back and forth in terms of pre-buying rooms at the hotels, pre-buying capacity in airlines. Then progressively, the internet progressively disrupted that model by allowing people to book the specific components, booking flights and hotels separately and then apartments as well. Now, what went out of the door almost 30 years ago is now coming back through the window, we can say, by a new generation, again, of technology, which allows the possibility to create holiday packages and city breaks just with a much more efficient approach.
I would say that so far, we've been focusing on allowing our customers to benefit from that in terms of ease of booking and also in terms of giving them protection, acting as a tour operator for them. This is definitely something I would say we're still pretty early on in the journey for that. I think there is definitely an opportunity in owning even more the customer experience of our customers. Again, we talk a lot about dynamic pricing, but at the end of dynamic packaging, sorry, but at the end of the day, that is, I would say, the technical way in which we create something that is relevant to customers. Customers don't really care how we build our own products.
What they care is that they might want to go on a city break to Paris for the weekend, or they might want to go to Crete for a sand and beach holiday, or they might want to go on a long-haul journey to Mexico. That is what they care about. Our technology allows the efficient creation of all of these products in a lot of different, starting from a lot of different airports and with a lot of different destinations. I think that is definitely something we can build on for the future. That being said, today we focus more on Q4 results. As I anticipated, on March 27th, we will share a more precise outlook for this year alongside our full-year audited results. With that, I hand it over to Julia so that we can begin with the Q&A session. The floor is yours, Julia.
Thank you very much, Alessandro. We actually have received quite a number of questions in the webcast this morning. Therefore, please note we have consolidated these questions. You might have asked them in a different way or have written them down in a different way. We will make a start now. We start with the first question, which is for Diego. Please comment the cash flow evolution. Apparently, it seems that you are burning cash. How much EBITDA is converted into cash? Could you provide guidance on the group's net cash by the end of 2025?
Thank you, Julia. First of all, our business has a structural negative working capital as we usually collect money at the booking and pay later during the year, which means that considering the reduction of the gross travel value in 2024 of 14%, there was a negative contribution coming from the evolution of the working capital. That was especially very strong during Q4. Secondly, as mentioned during my presentation, there was a higher adoption of our deferred payment model, which allows customers to book and pay installments at a later date. This, of course, has an impact on the cash flow or a timing impact on the cash flow generated from the booking. Last but not least, in 2024, we had significant remuneration for shareholders, including both dividends, which was introduced for the first time in 2024, and share buyback.
Thank you, Diego. The next question we have received, are there any plans to further reduce freesellers' ownership in percentage? Can you please comment, Diego?
Not really because we do not have any information about our shareholders' intention. The information becomes visible on the SIX Swiss Exchange website when each investor goes above or below a certain threshold. We have not seen any notification yet.
Thank you, Diego. The next question we have received, could you please provide details on the substantial CapEx in 2025 and what should we think about the CapEx moving forward?
Yeah, thank you. The majority of the CapEx was related to capitalized internal development, which was done to improve our market-leading platform that is well regarded by our B2B partners. The amount was, in absolute terms, higher than the previous year because we had more investment during the year. Going forward, we expect the percentage to remain similar to the growth of the personnel cost and maybe reduce a little bit compared to the growth expected in revenues.
Thank you, Diego. The next question we have received is for our CEO, Alessandro. After your first five weeks, what is your first take on the status of the company?
Yeah, I think I already anticipated some of that in my closing remarks before we started the Q&A session. Let me add a bit more color. I will not repeat what I just said some time ago. I would say that clearly, not only technology, not only our legal situation, not only the brand, I have been meeting a highly talented team, to be honest. I think that the opportunities, again, are there in terms of growth, are also there in terms of improving certain things that probably do not often get discussed during investors' calls in the sense that there are details that are, let's say, let's call under the hood of how the company works. If you want another metaphor, we could say in the kitchen, right?
There are a lot of things which have to do with the nitty-gritty details of execution, which we can work on with the general idea of reducing some unnecessary complexity, improve the scalability of the business, automate certain processes that are still manual, and again, combine an efficiency in the way we work. That is the main thing with growth on the top line and in our bottom line. I think we are not in a mature sector in which the only way to grow your bottom line is by reducing cost. I think the opportunity here is really to grow with the market and also to increase our market share in certain verticals of the travel sector and by that improving both the top and the bottom line. That is the focus that we are going to have.
I would say, again, the first few weeks are pretty reassuring, to be honest, from that point of view because I see that the foundations are really there. It is just a matter of really focusing on delivering and on the execution.
Thank you, Alessandro. Now we're moving to the next question we have received. What is your target debt run rate and your target year-on-year cash level? Diego, could you please comment?
Thank you, Julia. We will definitely continue to run down our gross debt because we have now been able to better use our cash balances across the group. As you have seen during my presentation, our net financial position is positive all over the years with a spike during the summer months. We now expect this to continue in 2025 and even to become more skewed because DP is becoming more and more important compared to the other products that were previously sold. Of course, DP has a higher seasonality.
Thank you, Diego. Moving on to the next question. Please provide an update on your new partnership with Ryanair. What has changed? What works better? What are the disadvantages which you have to digest? Diego, could you please comment?
Thank you. As you all know, this has been a long saga during the year, during 2024 in particular. We finally signed a new three-year agreement at the beginning of July, which now allows us to offer the European low-cost carrier flights to package holidays and flight customers. This is quite a significant milestone for us because you might remember that starting from November 2023, we saw some disruption in the availability of the Ryanair offering, and we were not able to conclude our transactions. Initially, the integration with Ryanair was fully manual, but we worked day and night to implement a fully integrated solution, which now connects us to their inventory. This was concluded by the beginning of Q4, and we are already seeing the results.
Now, from the last few months of the year and from this year, we can see the full offering in real time of the Ryanair flights.
Thank you, Diego. The next question we have received is for myself, actually. Do you accept questions via the phone too? With the current setup, unfortunately, not. We are evaluating different solutions currently for the future. In any case, we'd be happy to take any questions offline after this call. The next question we have received is, which countries did perform well in Q4? Diego, could you kindly comment?
Yes, thank you, Julia. The majority of our core markets performed well in Q4. I would say the real bright spot came from tier two markets, especially the Nordics, with Norway and Denmark leading the growth.
Thank you, Diego. Moving to the next question we have received, adjusted EBITDA is more than double in Q4 and grew 4% year-on-year. What were the key cost levers, and can this margin expansion continue? Diego, could you please comment?
Thank you. Q4 2023 was affected by some additional cost, especially human resource costs that were taken by the group to handle the disruption coming from Ryanair. I would say that it was an easy comparison, Q4 versus Q3. For the long-term outlook, I would say that the story remains more or less the same. We will try to keep the cost goal under control, but we do not want to sacrifice growth by cutting cost.
Thank you, Diego. Moving forward to the next question we have received, can you specify the CapEx of EUR 25.1 million and what is the CapEx we can expect moving forward?
This is mainly investments into our technology platform. The vast majority is capitalized human resource cost, with the balance being external services and consultants. We expect the percentage of capitalization to remain stable going forward and reduce compared to the growth of the revenues.
Thank you, Diego. The next question is for our CEO, Alessandro. What can we expect from your white-label partnerships?
Yeah, that's obviously an important element in our strategy. Let me elaborate a bit on this clearly. We're continuously exploring new partnerships that can help us reach our targets and continue on a growth pattern. As you probably know, Booking.com is a major partner for our white-label offering for dynamic packaging. It's not the only one, clearly, but it's the biggest in the travel sector. We also are working with other travel brands such as Holiday Pirates, Play, Vibra Hotels. That's a part of the story. I would say that this fits into an overall, even broader, I would say, B2B2C distribution strategy, which is powered by our white-label solution, yes.
By the way, on this, let me tell you that that's another element that when I was evaluating the opportunity to join lastminute.com, really convinced me because at the end of the day, Booking.com is considered by most in the travel sector as, let's say, the North Star in our vertical. The fact that they have chosen lastminute.com as a partner for that after scouting the market is, I think, the best possible proof of the reliability and innovation brought by our platform. It is not only a white-label solution. White-label is one way to distribute our own products via third-party distribution partners. Other ways, for example, more recently, implied giving our APIs.
I don't want to get too technical on that, but for those of you who know what APIs are, it's basically a way to connect directly to our system by having an integration managed by the distribution partner rather than by us. This is something, for example, we've done with two fintech players, Scalapay and Zilch in the U.K. Basically, by connecting with our API, they were able to develop a front-end solution which could offer a travel solution to their own customers. I think that's another interesting avenue that we are definitely going to continue exploring. I would say it's an area that is definitely growing. The current partners are growing and new partners are coming on board either via the white-label that we provide or via API connectivity.
Thank you very much, Alessandro. Moving on to the next question, are you giving any guidance for 2025? If not now, when? Alessandro, could you kindly comment?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's an easy one because, as we anticipated, we will share an outlook for 2025 alongside the 2024 full-year results, which are scheduled for March 27, 2025. Stay tuned for that.
Thank you, Alessandro. Okay. Now we have no more questions left. With that, we would like to close our Q&A session for today. We thank all our participants for joining lastminute.com Investor Call. If you feel that something was left unanswered, just drop us an email or contact us after the call. I'll hand over now to Alessandro for the final words.
Yeah, thank you, Julia. I see that actually there is probably another question coming up in the tool, but I think it's something that I have already quite answered in a way because it's a question about some specifics in our deal with Booking.com and how that's influencing our business. I think I already answered that. Obviously, that's a key component of our business and it's a growth element. I would say that maybe the thing that I can add on top of my previous remarks about that is that the most interesting thing about the Booking.com situation is that it allows us to start testing some markets in which historically we didn't have a B2C presence with our own brands. Obviously, because of Booking.com ubiquity, we are starting to test the waters in these markets via the white-label solution that we provide to them.
When we see interesting opportunities in certain markets, that's when we also start investing in our own B2C brands. In that way, the white-label solution and our own B2C brands can actually grow together, I would say, rather than one cannibalizing the other. That's a very clear trend that we're seeing. It's not one substituting the other, but actually the tide raising for both distribution channels, if you want.
Thank you, Alessandro. With this, we will close our call for today. We thank all our participants. Thank you very much.
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