Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SMG Full Year 2025 analyst and investor conference call and live webcast. I am Moira, the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing via the relative 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 Christoph Tonini, CEO of the Swiss Marketplace Group. Please go ahead.
Hello, everybody. My name is Christoph Tonini, CEO of SMG. I'm today together with Boris Gussen, our CFO, and we warmly welcome you to today's webcast. Today is an important milestone for us. It's the first time that we make an earnings call as a listed company, and we are proud to report strong results 25, and that we can outline the foundation of our building sustainable growth also in the future for SMG. Let me express, before we start, my appreciation for employees mostly, but then also for our partners, the analysts, and especially also our investors who supported us during this first month as a listed company. Starting with an overview, and Boris will go deeper then. As we said, we are happy to report strong revenue growth, over 14% growth.
Like-for-like over 12%, up to CHF 332 million. Very important that we were able to translate nearly every growth into profit. The adjusted EBITDA grew by nearly 30% up to CHF 180 million in 2025. This reflects a margin improvement up to now 54.3%. This is also supported by strong KPI development. You see that both ARPA and RPD were increased significantly above 10%, and also on GMV in Ricardo, we have seen a very nice strong growth of 5.3%. What makes us also proud is that we were able to turn around the negative trend we have seen in the beginning of 2025 in the agent account.
You remember that we have to show a strong pre-IPO, and we are back into growth with more than 4,000 customers by December 2025. We are above the level December 2024, even though you see an average agency decline of 3.6%, for us it was very important that we are able to show now in the second half year this turnaround. Cash conversion went up by 4%, reaching 81%, and with this, the Board of Directors decided to suggest to the AGM that we're gonna pay out a dividend of CHF 80.5 million, slightly above the level which we announced at IPO. Boris will tell more. We are also happy that we can reconfirm the midterm guidance, both for revenue and for the margin improvement in the next years.
Let me pick out some highlights 2025, which are the basis for the continued growth in 2026. In real estate, starting with the biggest vertical, it was the preparation of the package relaunch. We are moving now into package bronze, silver, gold, which will bring us further monetization potential. We have, as you have seen, piloted successfully the Flex Offer end of last year. This will be rolled out now in 2026, which will bring further agent growth. We have introduced new tools and systems to increase the broker efficiency. On the private side, worth to mention that we launched at Flatfox also a Seeker subscription product with Flatfox Priority Plus.
In total, this contributed to a number of over 25,000 subscribers on the Seeker side with Real Estate SMG, and this is also a product which gonna continue a strong growth in 2026 and beyond. In automotive, we have launched a fourth premium package, giving us potential for further upsell. We improved price optimization and lead management tools for the dealers, and also their dealer branding was enhanced. On the private side, important to mention that for the first time full year, we have now AutoScout24 Direct as a second alternative option for private listers to sell their car. General Marketplace showed a very strong 2025.
It was important that we bring back the flywheel turning into the right direction, and that was successfully done on the one hand by notifying classified users to the anibis.ch, showing them that they can also sell and find stuff on Ricardo, which gives them a better experience, and for us, a higher monetization. In general, the product was improved, and we also incentivized Ricardo buyers through promotions. Very important, we have with AI limited the so-called off-platform transactions so that we can show to the users that they should conclude the transaction on the platform, which obviously for us is also important in terms of monetization. In general, we invested successfully into trust and safety, bringing down successful fraud attempts on tutti.ch and anibis.ch.
One can say that, this success is based on our very strong position we are having in Switzerland, both on the demand and on the supply side. Starting on the demand, you can see we have these trusted brands. They bring over 80 million monthly visits to our platforms. This traffic is highly organic and direct. We have, over the platforms, in every vertical, less than 1% of LLM traffic, and this on a stable base, and we have this clear traffic advantage towards the number two player. On the supply side, over 4,000 agents now growing again, over 6,000 car dealers, and over half a million private sellers on Ricardo and tutti.ch and anibis.ch, bringing us more than 6 million fresh new listings to our platforms every month.
This is what positions us so good in order now to have all the possibility in the hands to capture the opportunities which are coming with AI. We have the leadership in a fragmented market. We have this unique inventory and live marketplace data. We have proprietary market insights because we are seeing how long a car is standing on the place and how prices are developing. We have very deep workflow integrations with our systems and tools into the dealer and agent workflow every day. This together brings us to a uniquely positioned that we can deliver now in the future superior user experience and bring ourself now vertical specific agentic capabilities both to our customers and to our users. You remember that we are a very young company, just founded end of 2021.
In the beginning, obviously focusing on shaping the organizational structure and re-platforming within the verticals, bring all the platforms into the cloud. In the very early days already started to implement AI into the products. Ricardo was leading, bringing us the first platform, an AI assistant, where with the picture you can just create a listing, and then this was followed by AI-driven recommendation in real estate in the Inside Hub. We had a very early chatbot already live at AutoScout for electric vehicle and then automated listings descriptions first starting on professional side, now bringing it also to the private side and also the nurturing of our seller leads, which was supported with AI. We are doubling down.
We are bringing more AI into our products, focusing also 2026 heavily now to the consumer, to the user, and that's why we are bringing conversational search in this year to every single vertical. We have beta versions for a limited user base already at real estate and automotive, but we are since yesterday, and that's really fresh new fresh news, we are live on Ricardo for every locked-in users on the web to have conversational search. Myself, I tested it yesterday out looking for a new bicycle to come to work, and it's really an absolutely new experience that you get much faster the right results.
That's why we are very confident that this will enable us also to drive further up transactions on Ricardo and in the future then also to deliver better results to the user searchers on real estate and automotive. We will have new features also in the second half of the year and Q2. There will be room staging and furniture decluttering coming live. There will be AI-based recommendation on Ricardo in a social media format. All this to show to the user he has the best experience if he comes live to our platform and is not going to another channel. However, we said that there is more that we're gonna bring into the product.
As an outlook in real estate, we are bringing to our agent advisor in the Inside Hub that he will enable better recommendations to help the agents to make smarter data-driven decisions in order to increase his performance on the listing. We have also, on the B2B side, new increased features which we can bring into play with AI. Then there is a new landing page, a homeowner world for a dedicated space for property owners. We are offering also there some very valuable insights. We bring them valuation services, but also getting them information about the market trends. All these we will use to create then better sell leads which we can offer to our agents.
Last but not least, obviously also on the private side with the chatbot which is embedded, end of Q2, we will be able to make them capable to create better listings because better listings are creating a better performance. Automotive, just to mention a few of the new items. The one which we are sure will be a real efficiency increase is that we have an automated background removal, so the car dealer has not to worry where he takes the picture of the car. We will help him automatically with AI to remove the background. This will create, again, a better listing.
We are also with AI bringing him very accurate information about his listing, how he can influence the performance by changing the price, by making also some upgrade on our packages because having then more visibility. Last but not least, in general marketplace, the focus will remain to drive the flywheel up. Inventory growth is a key topic, and we will help. In this year, a new feature will come to the market without taking a picture to create the listing, but you can take a video of items you want to list, and it will be automated. Out of the video, several listings will be established and go live. We have a new Ricardo Plus offer where we bundle services for sellers, like MoneyGuard and also discounts on shipping labels.
Last but not least, we are also bringing such services now to our classifieds, tutti.ch and anibis.ch since this month. As a seller on tutti.ch or anibis.ch, I can also use shipping labels and make my life easier. With this, I hand over to Boris, giving you details from our financial results.
Thank you, Christoph. Let me quickly recap on some of the financials that you already mentioned. Strong revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin in 2025, primarily driven by stronger value creation and efficiencies. On the left side, you see our group revenue evolution, 14.1% growth, like for like, 12.4% without M&A and accounting changes for shipping labels in general marketplaces. That is historically the highest growth rate amounting to CHF 332 million for the year of 2025. Looking at the EBITDA evolution, we said it already, we landed at CHF 180 million in adjusted EBITDA. The margin went up to 54%, 54.3%. It would have been even a bit higher without IPO costs and M&A integration costs.
Year-over-year growth was 29.4%, which is also an acceleration. EBITDA drop-through rate was 99.6%. We talked in the past a lot about our scale and cost discipline being reflected here in these numbers as well. I won't go through all these details. You see on the left side the revenue per segment. The two verticals, real estate and automotive contribute three-fourths of the overall revenues. You see their growth rates underneath. Real estate, 12.5%. Automotive, 16.4%, beating guidance. Also GM, 15.8% year-over-year growth. That's historically the strongest and the highest we've seen so far at SMG.
In the midsection, you see our revenue mix across all of the verticals strongly dominated by professional classifieds growing 13.2%, mostly, of course, in real estate and automotive, our subscriptions. Also other classifieds, which is strong at SMG, historically strong, growing 15.5% and contributing well to the overall revenue mix. Transactional, that is mostly Ricardo, also growing nicely double-digit as well as services. These are some of the real estate adjacent businesses and real estate growing nicely. On the margin side, you see our year-over-year expansion that Christoph already mentioned with the contributions and growth rates per vertical. I'll talk about the margins per vertical in a minute. Here, this is a bit of a deep dive, if I may say, for real estate. We yield growth and strong operational leverage.
You see, 12.5% year-over-year growth. Above that, the ARPA increase of 14.7% for real estate amounting to CHF 2,018 for the full year. Overall revenue was CHF 164 million. That's clearly the highest growth we've seen so far. Next to the ARPA increase that you see, we also have a strong uptick in other classifieds in our PPA business driven by ARPO increases of 21.8%. Agent count, you mentioned it already. H2, we said last year in the course of the summer that we will stabilize our agent numbers in H2. This is what we did. In H1, we showed 4.7% churn. In H2, that number came down.
Overall, we had -3.7, and we were above 4,000 agents, which was an increase compared to end of June. Margin has gone up to 60.3% for Real Estate at a year-over-year growth of 30.6%, amounting to CHF 99 million, given our cost discipline. EBITDA drop-through was larger than 100%. We will talk about the cost savings across the Board in a minute. In addition to our cost, we also made huge efficiency gains driven by AI and customer care. Here is the same view for Automotive. Automotive showed a year-over-year growth. You see that on the left side of 16.4%, led by RPD growth of 15.8%. Also a strong growth in private listings.
ARPU went up by 19.3% to CHF 172 for the year of 2025. There was also contribution from AutoScout24 Direct, our C2B business, which ticked up nicely, and we complemented that by our asset deal, so we own the entire technology and drive that on our own. Maybe one word about H2. We expected, and it came in that way, a growth deceleration to 13.9% given phasing. So, that was clearly built into our guidance and, that is, we predicted that, and it came in. The margin has expanded to 66.5%, by 5.2 percentage points, at a growth of 26% amounting to CHF 54 million.
Also here, strong drop-through rate and cost discipline across the Board. Finally, GM. A very strong H2 led to an overall year-over-year growth of 15.8%, like-for-like 9.1, difference accounting treatment of shipping labels. In H2 only, GM grew by above than 20%. Also that GMV growth of 5.3% is solely based on our H2 momentum, resulting in revenues of CHF 76 million. On the EBITDA side, similar picture. Margin is at 46.5%. That is very high when I compare GM to some of the peers. Year-over-year growth went up by 28.9%. You saw we almost stagnated in the year 2024. Now there is a strong growth momentum leading to CHF 35 million of EBITDA for GM.
This shows a bit what I just talked about when I mentioned cost discipline. Adjusted personnel expenses are pretty much flat. The ratio as a percent of revenue comes down by 4.3 percentage points to 33.5%. Adjusted marketing is, in absolute terms, flat in percent, going down to 7.8%. The highest is GM here at 11.9%. Adjusted IT technology expenses down to CHF 16 million to 4.9%, given our cost discipline. Only adjusted other operating expense slightly up because of cost of sales for shipping labels. Without that, it would have been flat in absolute terms and also percentage numbers. Quick word about CapEx. Last year, we talked a bit about that. It has come down in percent of revenue from 11.1% to 10.2%.
Without M&A, it would have come down to 8.8% for the full year. The absolute numbers are flattish compared to previous year. When I talk about the guidance, you will see we will keep that level. That number was managed down in line with what we guided. On the cash conversion side, Chris has already mentioned that we're above 80% in the year of 2025. The leverage has also come nicely down, given our scale from 1.2 to 0.7. We currently see a loan, a bank loan of CHF 215.6 million at very low interest cost. This is our guidance for the year of 2026. For 2025, I mentioned it already, we accomplished our guidance across all key financial KPIs.
For 26, we're guiding 10%-12% revenue growth across SMG, facilitated by all our verticals and in line with our midterm guidance, which said that we will decelerate to low teens % area, which we do. A word about H1, H2. We expect H1 growth to be within, but on the lower end of that range, 10%-12%. H2, we will clearly see an acceleration given go-to-market activities phasing and the ramp of some of our growth drivers. On the margin side, I stand firm on that here, we see an expansion according to our margin expansion path. We're guiding to 56%-58%, as we promised last year when we talked about the midterm guidance.
The CapEx in percent will also come down to 8%-9% for the full year, as we promised before. This guidance covers all of our AI activities fully. It also covers the arrangements that we have met with the Price Surveillance Authority, and it covers furthermore all R&O net as risk and opportunities that we currently foresee. That's all in. I guess with that, I am happy to hand back to you.
Thanks a lot, Boris. Before we go into Q&A, let me wrap up. Number one, we can show strong financial results, 25% in line with our guidance at IPO. We improved the cash conversion, which is backed by operational leverage. We are happy to reaffirm our midterm ambition to reach low- to mid-60s% adjusted EBITDA margin. Number two, I think we have been able to show you that we have these great brands, this strong recurring core business and defensible data advantage. We made significant progress in embedding now AI capabilities and have a clear path to capture the AI opportunities out of this superior position we are having in Switzerland.
With our market leadership, with our proprietary data, and with now accelerating AI innovation, we are sure we are best positioned to create sustainable long-term value for users, customers, and last but not least, also for shareholders. The dividend is up to CHF 80.5 million suggested to the AGM, with a clear commitment, as we said at IPO, to drive dividend progressively in line with SMG's long-term earnings trajectory. With this, I hand over, and we are happy, Boris and myself, to take your questions. Thank you.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you've entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing by the relevant field. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Joe Barnet-Lamb from UBS. Please go ahead.
Excellent. Thank you very much for taking my question. Christoph, I think you said in your spiel that Flex would bring further agent growth. As such, is it fair to assume further sequential agency membership growth through FY 2026 from December levels? Maybe related to that, just while we're on real estate, the number of subscribers for Seeker products grew strongly in H2 2025 versus 1H 2025. I think there was a small decrease in December versus November. Is that December weakness just seasonal? How are you viewing Seeker through FY 2026? Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Joe. Starting on the Seeker product, we are sure that we are improving the Seeker product to make it more attractive, to bring really this unique listings into the subscription product, and therefore also because the environment doesn't change. There is still in the cities this very dry market. We are very optimistic and positive that there is during 2026 a continuous growth of TenantPlus, as we call the product. On the agent side, we are and Boris, I think, explained it. We are aware that with the monetization steps, we might see again until in the first half year a slight decline of the numbers.
Compared to previous year, we have the clear growth ambitions. Then by end of the year, we definitely want to be above the level which we have reported now at these 4,008 customers. There is a clear ambition to have a year-on-year growth, even though there is a certain seasonality within the development.
Joe, the dip in December, that's kind of natural in Switzerland because here by law, you cannot quit an apartment in December. This is why subscriptions went down in that month.
That's helpful. Thank you.
Thank you.
Next question comes from William Parker from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thanks for taking my question. Could we talk a little bit through the revenue growth guidance for 2026 and the midterm? The midpoint of revenue guidance for 2026 is 11%. The medium term is to decelerate to low double-digit. Is the right conclusion to draw that this means 10%-11% for the next three years or could growth re-accelerate? Or does this reflect post-price regulator agreement, it's lower for longer? Then perhaps expanding the question, ARPU growth slowed in H2 versus H1. Could you help us understand whether this is monetization maturity, cyclical dynamics, and can ARPU re-accelerate? Thank you.
Okay. The guidance is 10%-12%. As I said, with an uptick or with a higher acceleration towards H2. Number one, I think we still stand firm on our growth ambitions in our major verticals. We also see a growth in GM in line with what we had guided last year. We think other will come in softer led by F&I and we're conservative on that growth, in particular in H1. In H2, we should see some growth momentum. I guess we have not determined anything around 2027 or 2028 growth other than what we initially guided. Absolutely, I would say there is always room to move that up.
We are convinced to evolve and increase our ARP on RPD in a double-digit manner, and I think we see a lot of reasons to do that. You now hear that we're also committed to drive up too slowly but surely the numbers of agencies and dealers over time.
Maybe just to add on the ARPA slowdown. We always said with the Flex Offer we are mainly targeting our smallest agents to come back on the platform, and this by definition is having a slightly diluting impact on ARPA. In the past, it was the opposite. With the churn of the smallest one, the ARPA increase was also a bit inflated. I don't see any change, as Boris said, on our core verticals with what we said as our also midterm guidance. We see clear double-digit growth there. As Boris mentioned, we have had seen a weakening of finance and insurance, especially in the second half.
We are a bit prudent, therefore, with the guidance on 2026 bringing down, in average also a bit the guidance for SMG.
Thanks for the color.
Thank you.
Next question comes from the line of Andrew Ross from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Great. My question is following up though on Will's about the ARPU growth and hoping we could be more specific in terms of what you're expecting for ARPU growth, both in autos and in real estate for 2026. It sounds like we're talking double- digits, but not necessarily into the teens. Would that be a fair assessment? As part of answering the question, it would be really helpful to understand your thinking around price increases, which, as I understand it, go through in April in real estate and in June in autos. Tell us how you're thinking about those pricing events and any kind of new products that are running through to kind of give us confidence into those ARPU expectations. Thanks.
Our ARPA will increase as a result of some of the price adjustments in the last year. There is always a lag behind that. Of course, we're already implementing our go-to market and our price adjustments this year, which will then sort of kick in over time. Definitely a double-digit growth. I have to say about the ARPA, there is a couple of things. Number one, we have the ambition to drive up the number of agents, right? This year we will be a bit more careful on that. We also want to achieve significant upselling and upgrading activities. That is also why growth will come in a slightly different phasing fashion compared to last year, where we didn't see any upselling, upgrading.
It won't be huge, but that is our ambition at this point of time. It's a low double- digit number in ARPA increase that we'll see in this go-to-market activities. The phasing of the go-to-market or the timing will be similar to last year. We're currently rolling out the cohorts. It will be pretty much done in June, as we did that in the last year.
Okay. Low double digit increase in real estate, and how should we think about ARPU in the auto side?
ARPU?
RPD? Yes.
ARPU. Yeah.
Same. Will be clearly double-digit also on automotive. There is this one difference in automotive, there we have nearly every dealer, so there will. What you see in the RPD development is really the development for first on price adjustments and upselling. Whereas in ARPA, it will really be a bit of a dilutive impact because you remember we lost nearly 200 of the smallest agents. There is a clear goal over time, I'm not saying totally in 2026, but over time now in the next two years, to regain most of these small and smallest agents, and they are having a dilutive impact on the ARPA. On the existing clients, there is also this clear double-digit ARPA increase in real estate.
Just to be clear on this, I'm sorry to hold the line, but it's just, it's important, right? There's gonna be a double-digit increase in the go-to-market around pricing. There's going to be potentially some package upsell on top, but then you've got some dilutive impacts from smaller agents equals the way to think about it is the overall ARPA goes up low double- digits in 2026. Is that accurate in terms of how to think about it in real estate?
That's exactly. It's exactly like this.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thanks.
The next question comes from the line of Ed Young from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Slightly related to that. Could you talk a bit about the package relaunch you've got prepared for real estate in terms of what you're hoping to achieve or what new package framework will give you? I wonder within that, if you could comment on more generally how you think about prominence within the monetization structure. Thank you.
We have a repackaging, as I said, in which is mainly also semantic because we have learned that it's just easier for customers to understand this bronze, silver, gold one. We gonna remain with the starter package, which will be untouched. In all the three packages we are bringing really new values in, and that's why, I'm just repeating myself. There is no price increase of this package where you could compare now the silver package with the former package.
There is new value, and that's exactly why in all the three packages we are aiming this double- digit increase in terms of value we are extracting, but we are also bringing new values in this. That also explain again why the upselling part will not be as significant as you might see in it in I would call this more mature markets. We are mainly aiming to just get without churn now these price adjustments through all the three packages.
If there is a possibility to have an upsell, it's sometimes also with a bit of retention approach that we say, "Okay, you're not happy with the price adjustment, but we are offering for three months that you can already use the upper package," in order to show them that there is also more value in. It's important to say in all the three packages, quite with a good distribution there is this double-digit monetization step.
The next question comes from the line of Marcus Diebel from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, everyone. Just on the general marketplaces, could you maybe share with us a bit more your view on both volumes and pricing, on how we should think about 2026? Is there any major change in development, particularly on the volume side, sort of like conceptually, or is it really mostly driven by price? That would be my question. Thank you.
Yeah.
Clearly, it's not driven by pricing. There will be smaller adjustments in some of the categories, but we don't see a massive uptick in take rate. It's clearly a volume game. We've started well into 2026. We saw already a GMV expansion in H2 resulting in that growth that I just talked about, and we will continue to drive growth in GM. Still, we believe that growth rate that you have seen in H2, which was 20%, will not be repeated as a result of a very weak 2024 as well. We continue with a good momentum in GM.
We stay realistic on that growth, and we will build out categories in a good way to address a broad audience of sellers and buyers.
Yeah. Just to reconfirm. I mean, it's a volume play here. Clearly, we have a positive momentum now on the flywheel side, more listings, more transactions concluded. As I said, with now also these conversational search, we are very positive that the finished transactions will further increase. There is, on the other hand, some new discounts we are giving out of the agreement with the Price Surveillance Authority, which we are very optimistic it will further drive volume, but definitely not play into a take rate increase. I think it's a clear volume game, and we are very well set that this is continuing during the whole year, as Boris said, year-on-year comparison coming a bit down than in the second half.
Yeah, okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Next question is a written question from Roman Reshetnev from Goldman Sachs asking, "As you pivot toward becoming an AI-first organization with complex products like agentic AI and LLM integrations, how do you reconcile the push for lower cost offshore labor with the global scarcity and high cost of top-tier AI engineering talent?
Thank you for the question. This is something which we were just talking yesterday. It's clear that we see a need, but it's in a very limited amount to get some additional skills into our teams in order to be able to continuously deliver now these new AI features into our products. There is, on one hand side, we have a very young talent crowd, so we can ourself build up on these talents to upskill them, and we are obviously looking outside, where would some people who have already some experience in the field have the possibility to join us.
Always with the clear, I would say agreement with the teams that such new skills and functions have to be offset by efficiency gains, which are possible so that we can run. Here we are very convinced that we can run this evolution. We're coming just out of a tunnel. It's not a revolution. This AI evolution within SMG that we can run this and speed it up with the existing cost structure and therefore really keep the scalable momentum of SMG.
Another written question comes from José Luis Moreno from Twin Peaks Capital. "What were the reasons behind weakness at Other vertical? What are your expectations for the vertical in 2026?
The weakness became evident in H2 more than in H1. We had market headwinds, for instance, for consumer loans. We had to pivot our Partner Hub model that we had scaled pretty fast. We now in the process of re-ramping that again from a lower basis. That led to a stagnant or less growth in H2 than we hoped it would be. Market headwinds are still existing in the early 2026, so we are conservative on the H1 development. We will see definitely a growth acceleration in H2 for F&I for a number of reasons.
That was the last question for today. For time reasons, all other written questions will be replied via email.
Great. Thanks a lot, for your interest, for your time, and, for, also for your trust into the team and the future of SMG, and, looking forward to have further exchange in the near future. Thanks a lot. Goodbye.
Thank you.