Earnings call transcript: Verve Group reports Q2 2025 growth, stock jumps 10.3%

Verve Group SE’s Q2 2025 earnings call revealed a 10% revenue growth, reaching €106 million, despite organic growth challenges. The stock surged 10.3% following the announcement, driven by strategic advancements and a positive market outlook. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains a "GOOD" overall financial health score of 2.72, with particularly strong performance in profit and relative value metrics.

Key Takeaways

Revenue grew by 10% to €106 million in Q2 2025.Stock price increased by 10.3% post-earnings announcement.Launched new products targeting privacy-first advertising solutions.Revised full-year revenue guidance to €485-515 million.Plans for significant expansion in sales and geographical reach.

Company Performance

Verve Group SE demonstrated solid performance in Q2 2025 with a revenue increase of 10%, reaching €106 million. The company’s strategic focus on privacy-first solutions and technological innovation played a crucial role in this growth. The company faced a slight decline in organic growth, attributed to platform unification challenges and technology costs. Despite these hurdles, Verve Group maintained a strong EBITDA margin of 28%, with last twelve months EBITDA reaching €118.59 million. Based on InvestingPro Fair Value analysis, the stock currently appears undervalued.

Financial Highlights

Revenue: €106 million, up 10% year-over-year.Adjusted EBITDA: €29.5 million, marginally higher than the previous year.EBITDA Margin: 28%.

Market Reaction

Verve Group’s stock experienced a notable 10.3% increase after the earnings call, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s strategic direction and growth prospects. The stock’s performance is particularly significant given its 52-week range, with the latest price movement pushing it closer to its year-high of €4.184.

Outlook & Guidance

The company revised its full-year revenue guidance to a range of €485-515 million and projects an adjusted EBITDA between €125-140 million. Analysts maintain a strong "Buy" consensus with a significant upside potential, according to InvestingPro data. Verve Group aims to reach €1 billion in revenues within the next 3-5 years, focusing on organic growth and technological advancements. The company is also expanding its sales team and geographical presence, targeting markets in the UK, Scandinavia, Brazil, and Mexico. Current revenue growth forecasts for FY2025 stand at 17%.

Executive Commentary

CEO Remco Westermann emphasized the company’s tech-driven approach, stating, "We are a tech company with a tech platform that matches advertisers with publishers." He also highlighted the growing importance of privacy, noting, "Privacy is becoming more and more important."

Risks and Challenges

Platform unification challenges could impact operational efficiency.Technology costs may affect profitability.Market saturation in digital advertising poses a competitive threat.Macroeconomic pressures could influence consumer spending and advertising budgets.Regulatory changes in data privacy laws may require strategic adjustments.

Q&A

During the Q&A session, analysts focused on the challenges of platform unification and the company’s confidence in market recovery for Q3 and Q4. Executives also discussed the potential of AI-driven efficiency improvements and the expansion of their SDK reach and ATOM integration.

Full transcript - Verve Group SE (VRV) Q2 2025:

Ingo Mittelmanen, Head of European Investor Relations, Verve Group: So good morning, everybody. Thanks for finding your way to Stockholm today or joining online. My name is Ingo Mittelmanen. And as the Head of European Investor Relations of WORF, I’d like

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Ingo Mittelmanen, Head of European Investor Relations, Verve Group: cordially welcome you to this year’s Capital Markets Day of our company. After intense weeks of planning, our whole team and me are really thrilled to finally have you here as our guests today. As usual, we’ve prepared some sophisticated deep dives into the most recent developments at WORF from an operational and financial perspective as well as valuable industry insight and sessions with high level tech experts from our group. First up, let me present today’s speakers to you. From our company’s executive team, you will meet today Remco Westermann, our CEO Christian Doos, our CFO Michel Alain, our CBO and Paul Hayton, the CTO of our subsidiary, Dataseet.

And then we’re very proud to have an international guest speaker with deep industry insight. Eric Soyford is going to do today’s keynote. He’s a media strategist, quantitative marketer and author, and I’m really looking forward to his speech. He came all the way from The U. S.

Today. What can you expect from Wirth today on this Capital Markets Day? The day will be split into two parts. So we have two sessions basically. The first is going to be the business update that’s going to be run by Remco and Christian with the commercial update and a financial update.

After this, we’ll have an extensive Q and A session, which can also be followed online. Then after the lunch break, we’re coming up with our expert sessions, the keynote I just mentioned, but as well as deep dives into idealist advertising and AI in advertising. And now I’m handing you over to Remco Westermann, the CEO of Wurf Group, who will lead you through the first part of today’s Capital Markets Day. Remco, the stage is all yours.

Remco Westermann, CEO, Verve Group: Thank you. Good morning, everybody. People here in the room, but also online. Yes, would like to take you through the business update and starting with our equity story. Most here in the room and also many online know the company.

So for some, it will be a bit repetitive. But I think it’s good always to realize what are we aiming for, where are we, and what’s our story. Starting with the market. Advertising is very diverse, very crowded, I would even say, market. And it’s becoming more and more complex, where advertising started with a few newspapers, at a certain point, radio, then a few TV stations, the diversity has become enormous.

We still have radio. We still have television, but there’s a lot of social, different channels that have come up. And here, you see basically the life cycle of advertising. A lot of those channels go down. Traditional television, why should you send one ad to everybody if you can send it on a digital TV, connected TV individually per household?

So you see that, let’s say, some channels are going down, some channels are still in a growth phase, and we have the emerging channels. Emerging channels is that what we are focusing on. The advantage of the emerging channels is market positions are not yet taken or at least are pretty young and the markets are growing. And working in a growth market, of course, is much more exciting than working in a market that’s declining. So the channels that we’re talking about, mobile, the personal device connected TV, so the old TV set but now digitalized retail media coming up a lot Amazon came up, I mean, making losses over many years and now being, let’s say, the gigantic online retailer, but also traditional retailers, Walmart, Circle K and many, many others are really getting into this space.

Why not make money from the customer contacts that you have? Why not help the CPGs, so the consumer good producers, to bring people into the store or to decide or to help them make a different decision on their product choice. Then digital out of home, the screens outside, it was also previously, it was somebody going around and sticking those things, and now it is really digital, getting more digital and a digital audio podcast, for example, also getting in. So those are the channels that we’re concentrating on. A bit about the market.

We talk about a huge market, advertising, dollars 1,100,000,000.0 spent worldwide per year. In The U. S, over $1,200 spent per head per year on advertising. 600,000,000 of that is digital, So there is still a part that is traditional, television especially. And in the digital part, you see a very big part is mobile.

Mobile, as you see, is a growth sector. It’s growing nicely. The most personal device, as already said, and it’s 96% of our revenues. So mobile is really where we are focusing on. And then within mobile, it’s mostly in app, but we also do mobile app.

Then Connected TV, also a large segment, still smaller. And if you compare to linear, still small compared to linear. And that means also in the future, there will be a lot more Connected TV happening. And then desktop, that’s already more in the, what we say, the mature segments. So that’s also what we’re not concentrating on.

We can do it because sometimes you need it to fulfill a campaign for an agency, but it’s a small part of our revenues. And that’s where Google and many others have taken strong positions. Talking about our main market, The U. S. U.

S. Is almost 80% of our revenues, 79% to be exact. So important market. Why are we so big in The U. S?

It has a bit to do with how we started via acquisitions in the advertising part, but has also to do in The U. S. Its scaling is much easier. In Europe, you really have to go country by country. Language, rules, agencies, everything is much more local.

And the same counts for Asia where often the CPMs or the prices per ETH are lower and also for LATAM where we have the same, where the countries are maybe bigger, but let’s say the revenues overall per country is smaller. So U. S. Is a super interesting market for us. It’s growing.

You see here mobile expectation growing 10% per year. I’ll get to market growth later in the presentation because there’s always some hiccups also in growth even though there is a continuous growth there. And in The U. S, we’re super proud that we have been able to build a strong position. IOS, Apple’s ecosystem, in app, we’re seen as the number one market share wise.

That doesn’t say that we have 20% or 30% market share. There’s still a lot of players there and we have, let’s say, overall market shares are not huge, but we are number one. That helps us to open a lot of doors. On the trust index, last presentation, were one, now we’re number three. So it’s also I mean, measuring is not always easy in those things, but I’m super happy that we are seen as one of the top recognized trusted parties in the market.

That helps a lot. Advertising is about trust. There’s a lot of fraud, a lot of, let’s say, intransparency. And in that sense, it makes a lot of sense to be trusted and to be helped because of that. To our business model, we are a tech company.

We are running a tech platform. We match the advertiser with the publisher. I talk about digital channels, so all the matching is digital. And it’s much more complex than this picture, but we want to show basically what we try to do is get the best result for the advertiser, often working with this agency, and then the best result for the publisher, which means highest price per ad, which means good fill rate. And for the advertiser, it’s really reaching the right target group in the best efficient way.

A bit more complex. So what’s happening? If you open a page, there is an ad on that page or there’s an ad spot on that page. And while you open the page, we get the information that this ad is for sale. We technically connect it to the publisher.

We have a contract. So this information comes to us. The ad request comes to us. We enrich it with data and we make it available to the demand side. That’s our supply side platform is doing that.

On the demand side, you have a demand side platform where you have several advertisers or the agencies putting in, I want to reach a certain target group, a certain price per ad, certain how to say other targets, viewability, attention rate, those kind of things. That’s what they put in the system and then there’s a bidding between the two. The highest bidder wins. The ad of the highest bidder is being rendered. So in this case, it would be Adidas and the Adidas ad is winning.

Talking about prices per thousand ads, CPM is the kind of term. This all has to happen in less than one hundred milliseconds because during the time that the page is loading, we have to do this auction process and to make sure that the ad is shown before the page is fully loaded. Otherwise, you have an empty ad spot, and that’s a waste of money for everybody. It’s not only fast, we also do a big volume. We serve 2,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 ads per day.

And that’s what’s all happening there in the heart, in the technology. And I’ll come to our migration project a bit later on the slides, but we have really started with buying some companies, we brought them together, we’re integrating those to a single platform and that single platform is doing all of this, supply side platform and demand side platform, we just specify. Value chain. So we say we want to do everything between advertiser and publisher, which means that we have the full technology stack. So we have the DSP, we have an SSP and we have the marketplace and the bidding part in the middle.

If you look at the financial part of it, it’s the advertiser that pays, the agency that pays the money then for the ads and sometimes they do a markup towards the advertiser, of course, mostly. And from $100 that’s paid, roughly 20% goes to the DSP, roughly 20% goes to the SSP and roughly 10% for data, bidding, matching, etcetera. So 50% is taken by the chain and 50% goes to the publisher. That’s not a lot, you would say. If you then look, for example, at the Department of Justice files for the Google investigation, you see that Google takes 80% of margin on external volume.

So this sector is still not very margin efficient, I would say. And there’s a lot of point solutions, parties that only do DSP or only do SSP. If you do the whole chain, you can become more efficient, you can make more margin, but you can also give to the publisher and to the advertiser. So that’s an important point. It’s a market that is not cost sensitive at the moment.

The market is really looking at best matches at selling the ads. There’s still a lot of unsold ad inventory and there’s still a lot of bad targeting. So that’s more important even than the margins, but also margins, of course, play a role. That’s what we’re doing. When we entered this market, we were looking, hey, there’s many parties here, but there’s also many inefficiencies.

But what’s really changing in this market? And what’s changing is privacy. Privacy is becoming more and more important. Being a European based company, Stockholm based, Sweden based, we very early became already aware of GDPR. And GDPR in Europe made a lot of, how to say it, emotions.

And if you ask a consumer, do you give consent that your data are being used? 80% says no. And there’s differences between countries, but that’s a rough number. But the majority by far, the majority says no. That means that the advertising market is being disrupted, is changing.

The advertising market was the digital advertising market was used to targeting with cookies. If I have a cookie, I can build a profile because I see this cookie all the time coming back. Can say this person is interested in sports. This person has a certain profile. And I know when an ad from a phone, for example, of this person comes that I have to send this ad to maybe Adidas or somebody else who is going for sports goods.

That changes. If there’s no consent, if there’s no identifier, I need to do targeting differently. We saw that as a disruption of the market. And when we started getting into advertising, we said that’s really the big opportunity to go for. Later today, Michel and Paul will go more in-depth.

But idealist targeting, so targeting without IDs, is something that we’re really focused on and that has given us a strong market position. It differentiates us. And you see here, iOS, Apple, we have really been able you saw the market share before, but we have also been able to really grow our revenues in this part. We have developed ATOM, a solution for this. It’s one of our ideal solutions.

But we also see that Android is moving in that direction and also mobile web, etcetera, we see already movements in that direction. So ideal is becoming more important, and that’s where we really focus on and differentiate. A bit about, yes, the mix, what are we doing? I said mobile is very strong, 65,000 apps where we integrated. Mobile is 96% of our revenues.

Connected TV, we have a lot of direct supply. We have reached 200,000,000 connected TV screens. There’s not a lot of differentiation in connected TV. That’s not only a problem for us but for most parties. And we are working on that because we also want to extend our mobile share.

It’s now 4%, but we want to get it bigger, which means we need to work more on competitive advantages there, especially our strong data position that we get for mobile. Based on IP addresses, we can use those same data towards the households. So that’s what we’re working on to also grow our CTV, our Connected TV. We reach over 2,500,000,000 consumers. We have nine fifty four software clients by the end of large software clients by the end of Q2.

Christian will cover that later in his presentation, customer numbers. And we do 1,000,000,000,000 ad impressions in we did 1,000,000,000,000 ad impressions in the last twelve months. Demandsupply, we started more supply focused. Supply is where the data are. Supply is where the publishers where you get the ad.

But we would like, as I showed before, have equality between the two, demand and supply, because if you really get every dollar that comes on the demand side or your own demand side or your own supply, you’re most efficient. I showed the efficiencies before. We’re not there yet. Last year with June Group, we did a big move forward on the demand side. Also organically, we’re growing faster.

But it’s 25% demand side, 75% supply. Ideally, we would get to fifty-fifty. U. S, I mentioned already, 79% U. S.

Market, 9% Europe, 12% rest of the world and mobile, I mentioned already. The other channels, they’re there. You don’t see them. They’re still very small, digital out of home, retail media and audio digital audio. But they are also growing and also we’re building positions there.

A bit of history. We started as a publisher, a games publisher. Started this almost thirteen years ago. We have been growing every year. We have been growing our revenues.

We have been growing our EBITDA. We transitioned from a publisher, which is a very difficult position to grow organically, towards an advertising company. With that, we renamed the company from Gamigo to Media and Games Invest and to Verve. With Verve now, we are an advertising company even though we have still a bit of games, but it’s under 10%, so we are really focused on advertising company. Last year, 36% revenue growth, 30% EBITDA margin, and we’re here to further grow.

That was a bit of our equity story, how we go. Now the commercial update. Coming to the commercial update for Q2. I’ll cover the numbers and headlines, and then Christian will go more in detail. And normally, at Capital Markets Day, we, let’s say, come here with all the numbers as the surprise or let’s say, show them first time, we already went out on Thursday night with new guidance and on Friday morning with our Q2 numbers.

Coming to that a bit in a minute. But we had more issues on our platform unification than we expected. And it lasted longer, it cost a bit more revenue and that also brought us to the conclusion that we have to change our guidance for this year. Not happy with that, but yes, it’s running a company and it’s not always a straight line, but the company is stronger than before. Unification is now done.

I’ll come through that later in the presentation. But that’s the reason that the numbers were already out. But nevertheless, we did 10% revenue growth, 1% adjusted EBITDA growth. We reached 28% EBITDA margin, leverage at 2.5%, so on the high side of where we want to be, 22% software clients growth, that’s overall growth, the large clients didn’t grow that fast, and 98% retention rate. So our customers did less revenues, but they stayed, and that’s very important.

So very good retention rate. Christian, as mentioned, will cover that later in the presentation. What are the main highlights? And I mentioned already before. I would start with number three, platform unification.

We are a tech company, and a tech company has a tech platform. And actually, when we started this, we did acquisitions and we had several tech platforms. And our biggest part of business, as I showed before, is mobile, it’s in app and it’s our supply side. And we have been integrating supply side platforms into two platforms before of the acquisitions that we did, and those two big platforms were being integrated in Q2. And that was not without pain, as you see on the slide.

It lasted longer and the issues were a bit more. I’ll go further into detail later in the presentation, but it hurt us. And that means that we had less revenues and that we had more costs, and that is what you see in the numbers. So that is basically one point. The good thing there is that that unification is now done and that we are growing with a single platform, single in app platform much more efficient than we did before.

And we have always said, if you do acquisitions, and we already said that when we did gaming acquisitions, you need to integrate those companies. If you keep it independently, if you keep the platforms, the technology independently, it’s very inefficient and it becomes more and more difficult to manage at a certain point. So I’m super happy that we did it. I’m super happy that we’re out of it, but it really hurt. Then Liberation Day impact, number one.

Yes, the market is a bit softer. The market is not like, wow, it’s all great. And if you look at the guidances or also at the reports from our competitors and from people in the sector, you see that market is not strong. But I’m not here to blame the market for our Q2. We had a onetime effect.

And in this market, even though it’s weaker, we can grow. Yes, we had some weaker customers. On the other hand, you can compensate it by new customers, by other customers. So market is a bit weaker. It’s not wow, but it’s still okay.

Then as mentioned already, growing our customer base, 22% increase in overall number of customers, 10% organic. And that’s maybe also important to mention, our demand side grew, so we had the issues on the supply side. 98% retention rate, I mentioned that already before. So we have customers that are super happy that stay. And a company that has a very, let’s say, stable customer base, of course, is much easier to grow than if you also lose a lot of customers.

So we have a solid base to further grow. Then integration of Joon. Jan Michel is here, he will present later. We acquired June Group in July or let’s say, actually, per August 1. The team is now integrated.

We have we see the cost and the revenue synergies, and we’re preparing now also the rebranding. The Verve brand is strong, and it’s stronger if everything is under the Verve brand. But also the June brand, of course, it was yes, it is known to all the agencies that they work with. So this is a process that also takes some time, that is well needs to be well prepared, and we’re now working on doing the rebranding and finishing it also this year. Sales team expansion.

We have a good product. It’s B2B. There’s 4,000 agencies, over 4,000 agencies in The U. S. And if you want to sell it, you need to go to those agencies.

We have 35 sellers at the moment in The U. S. With 35 sellers or for a certain 35 hunters, so we have also account managers and other people behind that. But with 35 hunters, you don’t have enough people to cover 4,000 agencies. And then we also have the holdcoes, the big agencies, the WPs, etcetera.

They have also hundreds of thousands of people. So you need to have a bigger staff or bigger number of sellers to really address those. We have started in Q2 with hiring. That’s painful because it means a lot of interviews. It also means that if you hire a seller, the seller is not always good, but you normally don’t find out the first week.

But it takes half a year and then the sellers should really start making money. And by the end of the year, you know it for sure, But that means also that some hires are not good and you have to redo that. So that’s a painful process, but it has to happen. So we want to add 100 sellers or we want to go to 150 sellers actually in The U. S.

By end of next year from the 35 that we are now. Regional adoption of sales strategy. If you have more people, you can go more regional. U. S.

Is very regional. You need an office in Chicago. You need an office in the West Coast or in San Francisco, in L. A, etcetera. So also there, you’re closer to your customers, so that makes life also easier.

Segment focus, another important point, I’ll cover that a bit later. But the industry you have different industries, different industries have different experts and also for advertising, there’s differences. And then capital market focus, I’ll quickly go through and Christian will cover it in more detail. Our uplisting, strengths is IR, happy to have Ingo on board, bond placement and our capital increase, but Christian will go more in detail. So those were our highlights and challenges.

Normally, I put highlights first on the slides and challenges second. But this case, because of unification, we put the challenges first and then the highlights second. A bit about the market because there’s a lot of talking about the market is weak, the market is not weak, etcetera. What you see here is the price index, and the price index goes with demand and supply. So if it goes down, there is less demand.

If it goes up, there’s more demand. And what we see here is that there’s different that advertising is not a straight line from a development point. And we have seen different, let’s say, down phases, economy is not working so well, inflation is going up, uncertainty is a factor there. I mean, there’s some named here. What we see now is that it’s not going up so fast as we’ve mostly seen before.

But still, as said before, this is not a reason to not grow. So there are market dynamics. Programmatic advertising is growing faster than the other parts of the market. We have the ability to further gain market share, and we’re doing that. We have a high level of customer satisfaction, 98% retention rate.

We also had 94%, 96% in the past, but we have a very high retention rate. And technology, we see and we further believe that our idealist targeting is really very strong and giving us more market share and giving us more opportunity. What are our growth drivers? Why are we growing? First of all, market growth.

Yes, there’s hiccups, but there is market growth. And having acting in a market with tailwinds is, of course, much easier than if the market goes down, emerging channels, as I started with in the presentation. Customer expansion, B2B, mentioned that before. Add more customers, add more agencies, add more brands, add more publishers, add more verticals, add more geos, and have enough account management and a good product to really scale those customers, typical B2B. Then differentiation.

There’s a ton of companies in this market. New products, innovation idealists, I mentioned that a few times, but also new ad formats, full screen, video ads, those things, partly things that our platforms didn’t have, partly things where we really innovate, where we give new formats. Having an SDK, so software integrated in an app gives us the possibility to really show new formats to do things. And new channels, audio, podcasts is really something where we’re now focusing on and where we see a lot of things. A lot of podcasters don’t get enough viewers on their listeners, listeners on their podcast.

And we help them with that. We help them to generate traffic for that. So that’s an interesting market. And then platform synergies, it’s technology. Scaling makes sense.

The more you scale, the more efficient you get. The bigger you get, the more efficient. That’s also the reason for unifying the platforms because otherwise, that doesn’t work like that. But also more size gives you more data and the possibility to invest more in AI. And the combination of AI and data, and Paul will especially go into that later, is super important.

That’s where you can also differentiate the company. That’s where you can gain more, become more efficient, be more relevant. So those are the four growth drivers, market growth, customer expansion, new products, platform synergies. That drives us. What’s our strategic rationale?

Verticalization by industry. So we really go more deep in the industry, and I’ll cover these points in more detail. Multichannel approach. We want to do a full customer journey. So yes, we are very strong in in app, but it makes a lot of sense to also do CTV, digital audio, digital out of home, retail media.

We want to follow the customer, the consumer where he is and also, at the right time, show the right ad to get the most effective outcome. And then very important mentioned already, privacy first, high quality standards. There’s a lot of fraud still in this market, made for advertising pages, so pages that are really there to just lure people in to show them ads. A lot of, let’s say, bad traffic, that’s what people don’t like. If you are a brand, you want to show your ad in a good environment.

And the privacy thing, you don’t want to upset the consumer also. It’s not only that there’s less data available, but also as an advertiser, as a brand, you want to work with the preference of an ad and not go against it. Verticalization. Here, some examples, and the examples are coming back later in the presentation. So one of our segments where we’re strong and which we’re really strongly focusing on is digital brands.

Those can be brands like Apple and different other ones, but we have OTTO here as an example. It’s the third largest German digital retailer where we showed good results. And if we really understand the segment, we can use our standard tools, we can tailor them, we can really bring to the sector, we can really bring sector expertise in there. So that makes a lot of sense. CPG, very important, fast moving consumer goods.

CPG is more The U. S. Term. Also, they are driving incremental sales, making sure that people sell their products. Add to cart, for example, is something that we do.

MiddleCon Health, another example, really making sure that we help Pfizer in this effect to sell their product, reducing the cost to reach customers patients, sorry, and providers. So that’s really important. And with size, we have the possibility to specialize. We have the possibility to hire experts of those segments. And if you have the expert, it’s easier to talk to the agency that sometimes doesn’t even have the expertise and it’s easier to talk to the customer who comes from that part.

So very important with scaling our sales force, with scaling our team, we have the possibility to go into segments. Channels. Mobile, I mentioned already before, that’s our strongest, very strong direct supply base. There’s a lot of intermediating in this business where there’s indirect supply. We have the direct.

We are integrated in apps. We have direct integrations to serve the ads. Premium supply, you want to be in a good environment if you show your ad, also very important. So that’s what we have been focusing at, and that’s the biggest part of our business now. Connected TV, we have a strong position on the supply side.

So we reach already 60% of The U. S. Households with direct CTV. But as mentioned before, we are working on further getting our sales story, getting our USPs in that part. It’s still a very fragmented market.

And if you look at the other players, nobody really has a competitive advantage. So there’s a big opportunity that we see and that we’re working on. The retail media, a lot of our customers are already from the CPG area or CPG part or even also on the retail side. But we didn’t very much specialize on it. We are now.

And retail media basically means that you want to do the full chain. You want to reach the customer outside of the store or in the digital store, but you also want to be able to even transplant that into the store. More and more stores are getting media in the store. So also making those available, making sure that you target the right people and that you influence the choice in the store because that’s where a lot of decisions are taken. Somebody drinks normally Pepsi Coke.

Coca Cola would like to get this person to drink Coca Cola. That’s something that you can easily do in the store. Ditch out of home, mentioned before, more and more screens and not only the big ones that you all think about, but also for example, in Ubers now, you get Ubers get in The U. S, you have all the screens that you see with ads. So there’s more and more spaces with ads on airports, everywhere.

The digital, also there it’s important to really reach people in the right way. And audio podcast, another channel, very important, growing, still totally under monetized, not a lot of ads yet. And a lot of podcasters, for example, that also don’t have enough reach on their channels. So a lot of opportunity there to also go in. Also here, because we are becoming bigger, we have the possibility to specialize in those things and to really go in.

But we don’t do everything at the same time. We’re talking here about our three to five years and beyond. And this is the channels that we really want to serve. But the opportunity is now and we need to start working where we see really the opportunities. Privacy first, quality standards.

Yes, a lot is happening in that respect. Apple introduced in 2021, ATT, which is really banning or, let’s say, making targeting much more difficult, no cookies, no identifier from Apple anymore. Then the IEB meta, we have a lot of, let’s say, things that are happening in the privacy space. But the trend, the tendency is towards more and more privacy, less and less signals that an advertiser can rely on. So idealist targeting is becoming standard.

And it takes time. We see that with agencies. They’re sometimes very slow adopters. You rather stick to what you know, you rather stick to what you have. But at a certain point, if the targeting is less, you have to change, and we see that happening now.

First party data. We also see that it’s more and more important to be close to the publisher, to be where the data are or to really build a direct bridge to consumers. Loyalty apps, for example. Also, there’s a lot of data, first party data. Then AI powered programmatic optimization, you cannot do this manually.

This is all too complex. You need AI to do this. So AI is super important. We’re covering that later. And then also, the good thing is if you do it properly, you have a much better result.

People like to see ads that are relevant for them. And what we have, it’s the cookie apocalypse. Also cookies are not great. If you have a mobile phone and you use it and the cookie is building a certain profile and you have a kid that borrows your phone and is doing totally different things, your cookie is totally, yeah, abused, misused, whatever. Sorry.

I was looking for the right words. There’s a first mover we have a first mover advantage in ID less targeting. ID less targeting is really changing this market. And of course, contextual targeting, you can show an ad in the car ads on the car app. That’s easy.

But then you don’t have enough reach. So it’s much more complex, as I just showed. So privacy compliance is a competitive advantage. That’s what we’re working on. And products, get to cover that later.

Atom, we’ve talked about it for many years. It’s at scale now. We really see the advantage of it. It’s helping us, but we have many more things, solutions on the idea side. Then strategic road map, platform unification for efficiency and scaling.

We wanted to really show you what we are doing in that front to go more into detail because it’s easy to say, hey, we had issues with platform unification, but we want to go more in detail here. We acquired 16 companies, one-six, to start our ad tech business. Actually, 15 we acquired in the beginning and then June Group last year was the sixteenth. All those companies, almost all those companies had technology. They all had a team, required 16 teams, required five supply side platforms, three demand side platforms, five SDKs, so SDKs are the ones that are integrated in the apps, five data lakes and five plus infrastructures, some had a bit more, some a bit less.

But so this is what we had to unify. So the target, one team, one supply side platform, one demand side platform, one SDK, one data lake, one infrastructure. And all of those connected to each other and communicating with each other. We have done a lot of that already. So from the five supply side platforms, we were back to two.

And those two big ones, we integrated, and that’s where the majority of our business is, in app supply side platform. And examples of hiccups that we had, a load balancer didn’t function well. We do almost 1,000,000,000,000 biddings per day on the platform, on the combined platform. It’s so huge, and that’s where things that we were not able to test at scale before we did the unification. So there was a lot of preparation.

More than a year, our engineers and product people had been preparing this migration. But there are some things that you cannot test. Site load, cannot test before. And if you have a hiccup in the platform or if you have an issue in the platform, even if it’s a small one. On the other side, there’s an AI system.

So if that AI system, the bid is not accepted or let’s say their request is not accepted, that means that it stops and only starts slowly testing at a certain point again. So there is with all these electronics that we’re working with, all the software, there are things that just take longer to ramp up again. Issues were more than we expected. They took a bit longer. But the good thing is this in app unification is done now.

We still have to do CTV and web. Those are being prepared, but there the volumes are a lot lower. And we have seen also before with other platform migrations, we didn’t have these kind of issues. This is a onetime and we have solved it. We still have to do the SDKs further.

So you see the how to say it’s the accomplished points there. So what’s still open on the unification, we still have to further unify our SDKs. That can be done step by step. So that’s not one big thing where we have to do everything at the same time. And the, as mentioned, web and the CTV platform.

Smaller things where we don’t expect issues. The big one was this in app unification. The good thing now, with a unified platform, we are more efficient, we can further scale it, we can concentrate on building features for one platform instead of for several platforms. So the company is really fit for the future with this. Coming to the next strategic growth point, investment into sales and geo expansion.

I mentioned it already before. U. S, our main market, 97% of our revenues. We have 35 people, hunters, that go to agencies to get new customers. As mentioned before, that’s not enough.

We want to go to 150. So U. S. Is our biggest market, and we want to really grow strongly there. But also, we want to internationalize.

With all the product we have and all the sector expertise, it makes sense to go into other markets. This year, we’re going into U. K, Scandinavia, Brazil and Mexico, which means also we had already some things there, but we’re really focusing on it now. It means on the supply and on the demand side and rebuilding it. And for next year, we want to add a few markets to that.

So that will be done in the next years. We will each year, we want to add some markets and, of course, to scale the other ones. M and A. We have done M and A in the past. The market is consolidating.

We see a lot of potential. There is a lot of companies that want to sell. And if you look at the ad tech market, there’s over 100 SSPs, over 100 DSPs, over 200 data partners, over 4,000 agencies. So it’s a very crowded market. Customer demands companies that do more channels, one stop shops basically.

And as such, there’s a natural tendency to this. Also the ability to scale, larger company can invest more in AI, in technology, all the things. So it makes sense that companies grow. We can grow organically. That’s our main focus and to make that very clear.

But there might be, and that’s the reason we have it here, opportunities to really scale faster, which can be really more acquihire, getting extra sales teams. And Joom Group is a very nice example of really getting a lot of agency relations, salespeople on board, which we did, and revenues, of course. But also for regional access, building up a new market is not always easy. So sometimes, it makes sense to rather do a small acquisition. We will be very disciplined.

I think that’s very important to say because M and A is only the add on and should be the exception. Then our team, strengthening the core team. We continuously working on getting a better team, making sure that we have a super motivated team, that we have a very high performing team. And we did also change in the core team Christian, CFO and myself and Samir and Alex were already in, but we added Michel, Prasanna and David to really get a few more shoulders to carry the business on and to also get a bit more focus in the teams. Our overall size, so 97% of the revenues is in The U.

S, three fifty out of eight fifty employees are there. We have a quite large employee base in Europe, and we are building a larger base in Asia. We have a big development center in Bangalore in India. And just as an idea and development, that’s a rough number, cost maybe £300,000 salary per year in The U. S, pounds 150,000 in Europe and a £75,000 in India.

So we also look at keeping our personnel costs down or, let’s say, efficient, very important. Yes, evolving from publisher to ad tech platform, I showed the slide already before. The summary slide. So we’re coming a long way, and we have a lot of potential for the future. And that’s this slide.

So we stick to our midterm guidance, 25% to 30% revenue CAGR. This company can grow. This company is very strong, equipped to grow. I hope that I was able to show that. With a strong EBITDA margin, 30% to 35%, yes, there’s some seasonality.

And yes, in Q2, we were 28%, a bit under it. But this company will be doing 30% to 35% EBITDA, 20% to 25% EBIT margin and our net leverage between 1.52.5%. We’re on the higher side now. We want to bring that down. And with more cash flow generation, we will do that.

So the target is to get the next, how to say it, point in the future. We want to get over €1,000,000,000 revenues. We want to get over €330,000,000 of EBITDA and the growth should majority wise be organic. That brings me to the end of my part, and I would ask Christian to continue with the financial part. Thanks.

Christian Doos, CFO, Verve Group: Thank you very much, Remco. Good to meet you all here today. My name is Christian Doos. And for those I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting before, I joined as CFO from January 1 this year. I’ll go through the performance of Q2.

But before I dig into the numbers, allow me just to summarize what I think has been a very productive first half of the year in terms of capital market transactions or capital market milestones and achievements. Starting in chronological order. You’ll note that we had a bond refinancing in April. We placed a 500,000,000 bond unstructured, refinancing our existing bonds. And we did that at, I would believe, quite attractive terms in the sense of three months EUROBOR plus 4% credit margin.

That means today, we with a two percentage roughly two percentage points on Eurobor plus a 4%, we pay 6% on our bond debt. This is going to lower our cash interest expenses through the year as we move forward with an estimated impact of 12,500,000.0 and will help our free cash flows. It obviously also gives us a stability in terms of our financing and our capital structure for the coming years. It’s a four year duration and a big achievement. Secondly, we uplifted to the general standard in Frankfurt from the scale segment to the regulated part.

This is a key achievement we’re very proud of, especially also the inclusion in the SDACs, which has a lot of benefits, both in terms of credibility and awareness in the broader European investor spectrum, but certainly also because of being in the SDAX, you’re then automatically included in various funds that mirror the index. So that was a major achievement for the year. It was a lot of preparation but with a very successful outcome. And thirdly, we had a directed capital raise here in June, $360,000,000, from EUR 32,000,000, well subscribed amongst institutional investors. And this gives us a good structure between debt and equity for the time going forward also to have proceeds to fund growth, whether they be more organic investments or on more inorganic investments.

So all in all, a very successful and very active first half of the year for me coming on board, also with the closing of the 2024 annual report. But I’m very happy to be here today and can show these milestones. What is not on this slide is we are also, with the addition of Ingo Middlmanner, we are expanding and bringing a very seasoned person in our Investor Relations team. And I think it will be evident over the six coming six months, probably especially for the analysts that are here today, that we are seeking to lift our Investor Relations communication and practices. Now I’ll move into the actual performance of Q2.

Just focusing here on the highlights. We grew as a group 10% on top line, 10% revenue growth versus last year. This is, however, a mix of developments in that we had a supply side of the business, the SSP part of the business, which declined 3%. This is because of the unification technology issues, and I’ll come back to go more into that. On the other hand, we had 82% growth in our demand side activities.

So it’s a mix of different things that are going on in the business. And we had a very strong growth contribution from our DSP side. And that also, I just want to clarify, means that the revenue challenges that we had in Q2 is purely from the SSP side and specifically from the marketplace activities. The performance of the SSP side and especially the market activities was obviously not up to our expectations. It’s very clear, and I’ll come back to what we look at for the rest of the year.

Despite the revenue gap that emerged out of this compared to our expectations, we delivered adjusted EBITDA, which is marginally higher compared to the same period last year at EUR 29,500,000.0. And this is, of course, also helped by the consolidation effect of June Group compared to this period last year. We continue to invest. We continue to keep our plans to invest in the platform and in our sales capacity. Redkul already referenced that.

And that’s also potentially why you don’t see a higher lift in our adjusted EBITDA. Good. Let me then dig down a little bit in the business KPIs and how is our business KPIs developing. There’s a lot on this slide, so let me try to break it down and just say, overall, we continue to grow the AdTech business year on year. This is evidenced here in the right hand corner with a 15% uptake on ad impressions.

That’s how much volume that flows through our systems. It’s up 15% versus same period last year. And also in the total number of customers that you see here on the top hand line, where we grew 22%. We actually added five sixty one customers versus same point last year on total number of customers. So the business is growing from that perspective.

We, however, also observed that we were handling less budget from our existing customers. You can see that in the net dollar expansion rate here on the bottom corner, which was 92%. That essentially means that we handle 8% less volume from our existing customers if you compare one year back in time. And the big effect there comes actually from us being able to not scale our customers sufficiently and also from not onboarding customers due to some of these technical issues that we had. We simply do not want to onboard new customers when the platform is not stable.

You make a very bad impression. The silver lining and the positive news is we did not lose customers. We actually had a client retention rate of 98% for the customers, the software clients that are above 100,000. We you can see here that we they spent less. And for the customers that are above 100,000, some of them spent less to the degree where they went over the under the threshold of 100,000 gross per year.

But they didn’t leave us. We have customer retention of 98%, which is 2% churn. That’s pretty solid even for a tech company by my standards. So net net, we’re growing. Our customers used us less in Q2 because of the situation of the technical setbacks, but we haven’t lost them.

It just fell under the threshold of how we define a large software client, which is 100,000 growth. I think the KPIs reflects and pretty much reflects the situation that we’ve gone through in Q2. Nothing surprising in that front. And we do expect the KPIs to improve and this being a temporary impact on the KPIs. The KPIs will improve through Q3 and Q4.

You may then ask me after the session by how much and how quickly, and this is difficult to assess. We have to take into factor in that we did have a sustained impact into July and just the August. We expect improvements later in the quarter, but then you also have to weigh it with seasonality because not every month is the same weight. And therefore, it’s actually a difficult question to assess. But I’m confident that we will see an improvement in these business KPIs as we move through the year.

That’s a little bit about how the business is moving under the motor of the business. If I then go to actual performance and the key highlights of financial performance for Q2, we see that total revenues grew by 10%. As referenced by Remco, it’s up from DKK 97,000,000 to DKK 106,000,000. We had organic growth adjusted for acquisition, June Group mainly, and also for currency effects, which was minus 4%. We did have currency headwinds, euro to dollar to euro for this quarter.

And all those adjustments altogether means that our organic growth was minus 4%. Net net, while our revenue is disappointed, we see personnel cost in line with our plan actually below what we intended to deploy for the year. So those are in check. We did have an effect, and I’ll come back to that, of extra technology costs for Q2. Overall, we achieved a 28% adjusted EBITA margin, slightly up from comparable period last year, and we achieved a 21% EBIT margin.

When we look at the technology costs that hit us in Q2. It’s roughly CHF 4,000,000, I’ll come back to you. That translates into a 3.7 percentage points effect for Q2. And then you can do the math yourself. Still very decent profitability for a company, even for a tech company.

And we, of course, we expect the operational margin, as it was impacted in Q2 by these effects, to improve over the year. Cash flow generation was EUR 5,000,000 positive in totality. Before net working effects, it was actually EUR 15,000,000, but then there was a negative effect from cash flow from net working capital. So all in total, it is plus 5,000,000, again impacted by lower revenues for the quarter. And we continue to invest.

We had investments of 9,400,000.0 in total. If I take a step back, Q2 and put Q2 into the context of a longer time series, just to put it into perspective. Here, we illustrate this with the LTM basis of June 2025 on both revenue growth and EBITDA. I think we can see that we continue a track of revenue growth and EBITDA growth despite this lower uptick in performance in Q2 than we had anticipated. I think by all means, you can see we have a strong track record of converting investments, organic and inorganic, into revenue growth and attractive margins.

And I see no reason why we cannot overcome this temporary setback for Q2 and prove that again. It might just take a little bit more time, but I think the track record of this company is there and proves it. Moving into operating cash flow and CapEx development. I’ll just preface here that now comes a very dense slide, but I’ll try to break it up into its different components. If we look at operating cash flow development here for on an LTM basis, June 2025, you can see the operating cash flow generation in the dark blue bars here on the chart.

And we moved to 115,000,000, down from CHF 137,000,000 on a full year basis for 2024. This is again because of the effects of the top line in Q2, and therefore, it’s not following quite the normal seasonality effect of cash flows through the quarters as you normally see. Normally, Q1 is our lowest quarter, and Q4 is our strongest quarter, and it increases over time. And therefore, we also expect an uplift in cash flow generation for the year as a whole, picking up in Q4 in particular, which is the biggest quarter for this type of business. You will note a first positive effect on cash interest expenses here in gray.

We moved from GBP 45,000,000 to a GBP 43,000,000 on an LTM basis. So you see the first effects of lower interest rate costs. And of course, as we move out the LTM number, you will see that the old levels of interest flush out, and you achieve the new levels. So it’s very positive. We see that we achieved net net 64,000,000 in free cash flow after interest, is still at a healthy level.

Note, when you look at the LTM number also, we did have one off expenses one off payouts in Q1 and Q2. We had fees around the bond. We had a prepayment on one earn out. We had several things that also kind of throws off the normal run rate of the business. Moving to CapEx development.

We’ve shown this slide a number of times. If you focus here on the blue and the dark blue, which is really our CapEx investments for maintenance and expansion development, we are at L2M basis, respectively, 35,000,000 and 8,000,000. We have communicated that we would end the we expect this year to invest somewhere between EUR 40,000,000 to 45,000,000 as CapEx. We are tracking closer to the 40,000,000 than to the CHF 45,000,000, but otherwise unchanged views on what this business needs of investments going forward. That was operating cash flow and CapEx development.

And I now move to net leverage ratio, interest coverage ratio. We largely maintained our ratios into Q2. You see a marginal worsening from 2024 to a 2.5x net leverage ratio to 2.5x now on an LTM basis. Again, this is the operating cash flows that effect. On the other hand, you saw a marginal improvement in the interest rate coverage here from 3.3 to 3.4 if you compare again LCM with where we ended the year.

And this is the positive effect of the interest savings on or the reduced levels of interest rates. Deleverage remains a key point for us, a key focus point for us. Albeit Q2 probably slowed a little bit us in that regard, Our midterm target is to achieve a net leverage ratio closer to 2x. And I just want to make sure that this remains a focus for us, and it’s clearly understood. That kind of concludes my financial part as it concerns Q2 in particular.

Now I’ll move to guidance because this is probably also what you’ve been interested in hearing about. You will have noted we changed our guidance Thursday. We lowered and revised our guidance for the full year. Let me try to break down the components and contributing factors here. And this here, we use a bridge to bridge from our midpoint guidance, our initial midpoint guidance of EUR 165,000,000 to the midpoint guidance of our the revised guidance here, given the August 15 of EUR 132 and just try to break it down in components.

I think in the big picture, unification challenges technical challenge on the unification accounts for twothree. This is illustrated by the gray area. There was a direct impact during Q2 but also in July and just the first days of trading in August, which altogether, when you calculate it through, is CHF 19,000,000. We then also had additional costs during that time on two fronts. One, of course, we used all our powers, and we had mitigation costs to address the technical issues.

And as Remco was explaining, we also had some problems with the role balances, which meant we had extra hosting cost. And that altogether is GBP 4,000,000. So that all relates as onetime effects. And then another thing that has happened is that our expectations, and we can see where we are on the dollar to euro translation, is outside the range that we expected when we gave the initial guidance. We communicated when we gave our initial guidance that we would expect changes in euro to dollar to have an effect of plusminus two percentage points on the total impact.

We see now that we are outside that guidance, and we have revised the assumption planning assumptions to be on a constant currency basis using a U. Dollar to euro rate of 0.855. And that altogether would have an impact, when you look at it full year, of GBP 9,000,000. So that’s basically the components: twothree from the unification challenges, onethree from translation pure currency translation effects for the full year. We acknowledge that Q2 fell short of expectations, certainly also our expectations.

Trading levels are now at the same level stabilized, same level as comparable period last year for the marketplace activities specifically I’m talking about here, and that makes us confident in a sustained pickup for the remainder of the year. When you pull all that together in numbers, I show here our revised guidance compared to the guidance we gave initially on the May 28. Our new guidance is SEK $485,000,000 to SEK $515,000,000. That represents a 10% downward revision. At the same time, we’re narrowing our guidance by EUR 5,000,000.

Respectively, on adjusted EBITDA, we are guiding EUR 125,000,000 to 140,000,000, representing a 20% revision downwards of our initial guidance. And also, there, narrowing the guidance by GBP 5,000,000. We have good confidence in our revised guidance given the pickup we’re seeing in trading and experiencing here in August. We have four roughly four point five months to go. I remind you that Q4 is the biggest quarter for this type of business.

So we have some things to do here for the remainder of the year, but we are fully comfortable with this guidance. Important for those that look at currency translation effects, we are giving this guidance with a on a constant FX basis. We continue to be exposed we are quite exposed on the top line towards U. S. Dollars with roughly 90 actually, 89% exposure to The U.

S. Dollar. And therefore, please keep that in mind as we see for the remainder of the year how the U. S. Dollar translates into euros.

That basically concludes the update on the financial performance. Background for our revised guidance. And I hope also it provides some insights on what exactly has impacted the business KPIs for this period. And with that, I think I hand back to Ingo.

Ingo Mittelmanen, Head of European Investor Relations, Verve Group: I’m coming. I’m coming.

Remco Westermann, CEO, Verve Group: Thank

Ingo Mittelmanen, Head of European Investor Relations, Verve Group: you so much, Christian, for the color on financials.

Christian Doos, CFO, Verve Group: You enjoyed it.

Ingo Mittelmanen, Head of European Investor Relations, Verve Group: I enjoyed it. That’s good. I enjoyed it. So you can stay right up here because now it’s time for our first Q and A session. How we’re going to do this here in the room?

If you have a question, please raise your hand so a team member of us can bring a microphone over. But I think until we have the first microphone transferred to the first question, I’ll start with some questions from the online chat. So to sum it up, we still see uncertainty in the market on our release from Thursday night, which is very understandable. The platform unification has caused a share price decline of roughly 22%. Yesterday, we increased by 6%.

This morning, I saw we are plus 10%. So we are regaining confidence in the market. But to sum this up and a couple of questions here, Christian and Remco, we highlighted that the effects from the unification will be around €4,000,000 on revenues and €19,000,000 on EBITDA. And the question we’re having here is now, is that really it for the rest of the year? Is everything in Q2 and Q3 now in these numbers?

And are there going to be any further unification steps in the further course of the year?

Christian Doos, CFO, Verve Group: Maybe I can take the first part, and then So you can take the unification yes, the total effects of what our expectation for the year is included in this guidance. We have obviously tried to model various scenarios for the year. And the CHF 34,000,000 on top and CHF 19,000,000 is included in those numbers.

Ingo Mittelmanen, Head of European Investor Relations, Verve Group: And on the integration steps, Remco, maybe you?

Remco Westermann, CEO, Verve Group: Yes. I had it in my presentation. So integration is done. That’s important. We finished it by July.

Of course, the effects are, let’s say, a little bit going into August, but we see that we are back on track. Platform runs, numbers coming up and onboarding continue or, let’s say, starting again. So in that sense, well in time for the very important Q4 and also end of Q3 because from basically September onwards, advertising is the strongest, let’s say, period or it’s the strongest period for advertising. So happy that we finished this before even though it took longer.

Ingo Mittelmanen, Head of European Investor Relations, Verve Group: Thank you. Great. So maybe the first question from the room here, from the audience.

: Vincent Diodon from Pareto Securities. First off, I would like to ask a question based on the updated guidance. You showcased a bridge here explaining the financial impact of the issues that you faced here in Q2 and Q3. But how are you taking into account the softer market that you’re also experiencing and mentioning here in the presentation?

Remco Westermann, CEO, Verve Group: Should I? Yes. Discussed or let’s say, I showed that the market is a bit softer, at least if you look at the statistics in the market. But as also mentioned, we don’t see that as a reason to not perform or not to perform. And yes, a bit of softness is there, but we have a strong product with Idealist.

We have a strong position in the channels that grow most because that was average numbers for the whole advertising market, so the channels where we are, let’s say, outlying that part. So it’s not a market where we say, hey, wow, we have great tailwinds from everything is growing like hell. That’s not the case. But it’s also not a reason to see any issues there unless, of course, and that’s something we don’t have a crystal ball, but if something really explodes, I don’t know, China goes into Taiwan or something, that’s not in. But for the current market conditions, which we expect to go around the same, we see the possibility further to grow and to not be bothered too much about a bit softer market.

Christian Doos, CFO, Verve Group: And can I just add on the CHF 34,000,000 top line effect? We consider in a scenario where there is a tail end of how fast those customers that were affected will grow and scale, which is included in the 34,000,000. So there’s a tail end effect in that number, not material, but that’s how we try to gauge it for a full year consideration.

: Okay. Thank you. That’s very clear. And also now, we’re in August 25. It’s been just shy of a year since you announced the acquisition of June Group.

How would you evaluate the performance so far of June Group as being part of Verb?

Remco Westermann, CEO, Verve Group: I would almost say Michel come on stage, but he’s not wired up with a microphone. So he can say maybe a few words later on. Now we are super happy with the acquisition. There were a few aspects, let’s say, f