Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's H1 2026 earnings call of The Platform Group. We are delighted to welcome the CEO, Dr.

Dominik Benner, and Ms. Nathalie Richert from Investor Relations, who will guide us through the presentation followed by a Q&A session.

We're looking forward to this presentation, and with that, I hand over to you, Dr. Benner.

Thank you, Ingmar, and warm welcome from my side. We just directly start into our H1 results for this year.

To give you a brief update and a brief summary of the highlights of this H1 result: We saw a positive development regarding the GMV and also regarding the revenue. Both increased by more than 20%, and so, overall, we can be quite happy on this result.

Also, beside the revenue and GMV growth, we saw that we have a good development regarding our EBITDA. EBITDA was increasing to €40.8 million, which is a growth of 23%.

The net profit is almost unchanged, we had a net profit of €33.5 million. The EPS is lower compared to last year; it is €1.34 for this first half-year.

What is, of course, relevant in our case is that we have definitely less PPA effects. Last year, 2025, we had in the first half-year €9.4 million, and due to our less acquisition activity in this half-year, we only had €3.3 million.

That means our net profit, of course, is lower because of these PPA effects, but in total it increased. We think that it is a good sign, and this is a pretty good development of our group.

What else do we see? We had a further decrease of our operational cost ratios, which is quite important for us, because if we have increasing revenues, but on the same level increasing costs for HR and logistics, it would not be good.

In our case, we can be happy with this development. The only negative thing was the lower gross margin.

We had a lower gross margin of 34.1%, which is more than 2% less compared to the previous half-year. Also, our M&A activity was less in 2026 so far.

We had two signings and one additional recent acquisition in this month, and we also plan two or one divestments in 2026. When we look on our segments, we saw a good development.

Four of all five segments were increasing with revenue. There was one segment which we were not happy about, and that was the freight good segment.

We had a decline here of 5% in the revenue, and also the EBITDA, the profit margin was decreasing. We were not happy on this development, on this one segment, and we also have chosen and taken actions and measures already.

Regarding the finance perspective, we presented you by end of June our new strategy of deleveraging, and we started it already. Our current leverage is 1.8, which is the lowest number in the last three years, and we expect a further decrease.

Additionally, we also signed a €80 million finance facility last month, and we made this finance facility for new acquisitions, this is a pure M&A focus, and so we have enough financial firepower to make further acquisitions in the next two years. All right.

I hand over to Nathalie.

Good morning, everybody, to our earnings call. Before we start with an update, let's get a short overview of TPG.

We are now seven C-level executives, each responsible for a different area, and together with CEO Dominik Benner, we jointly lead the company. When we look at the next page, we started our platform business in 2012, and today we are very happy to serve more than 80 million customers across our platforms, and our vision is to become Europe's leading platform group.

We see at the next page that we have a unique asset-light ecosystem, and we have now more than 17,700 partners and a diversified presence in 26 industries, and we serve both B2B and B2C customers. Our growth engine is our operational holding, which supports our portfolio companies, drives growth, reduces costs, and leverage synergies across the different areas.

Our software platform, TPG One, is unique. It connects more than 50 marketplaces across Europe.

We are now active in 26 industries that you see in the next page, and we aim to expand our presence further. We grow both organically and through acquisitions.

All right. Let's take a look on the financials and the current M&A update.

Nathalie, you also want to continue here?

Sure. During the reporting period, we successfully completed two add-on acquisitions.

That means we strengthen our existing segments. In August, we acquired Kooko Home to strengthen our freight good segment and reach new customer groups for the existing furniture platforms.

We also launched the B2B platform, Bauraum24. We have more than 100,000 products there, and it complements our offering platform We Connect Work, which provides B2B services.

When we look at AEP, we announced that at the beginning of the year. We are now in the proceeding as planned with the fulfillment of the closing conditions.

Last but not least, when we look at our partner development: two years ago, we have 52% of organic growth. We expect this year 90...

91% of our growth driven organically through our existing business. Now I hand over to Dominik for the financials.

Thank you, Nathalie. When we look on the financials for the first half-year, we saw this already mentioned development of a positive GMV growth and revenue growth.

The GMV was increased to €788 million compared to €642... €52 million last half-year.

Also on the same side, we saw the positive development on the revenue, we achieved a revenue of €421 million. The other revenue declined because we had less PPA effects, we made less M&A activity, this was a direct effect of that.

The gross margin decreased. We already mentioned that in the summary.

This has two reasons. We saw that we had more discount activities in this first half-year, and we also had in one segment a lower partner take rate.

That means in the segment of freight goods, we had lower partner take rates due to the situation there, for example in the bike industry, and so we decided to lower the partner take rate and to support the retail partners, and therefore we had a decrease in the gross margin of our group. This is not a long-term effect.

We think that this effect is only affecting us for, let's say, around six to nine months, but overall we see at least a stable gross margin now or an increasing gross margin in the future. The marketing cost ratio was 5.8%, which is lower compared to last year.

The distribution cost ratio, it was very successfully with 7.2%. Actually, this was better than our internal forecast because we saw higher AOVs, we had higher prices.

We saw that our central logistics hub has cost effects already for our subsidiaries. We also see that we have much more verticals where logistics cost ratio is much better, for example, optics and services and hearing, though they are distribution costs not really relevant in the P&L.

In general, we think that we want to have less dependency on our logistics costs, and we want to really make several measures to improve that, that in future we will become or we will achieve a number below 7%, and we are quite optimistic to achieve that. When we also look on the EBITDA, the adjusted EBITDA reached €40.8 million, which is an EBITDA margin of 9.7%.

The margin was on the same level as last year, and the reported EBITDA increased slightly to €45.4 million. When we look on the net profit, you see that it is almost unchanged, we had a slight increase of 1% here.

The minorities increased on to €2.7 million, which is a result of the acquired portfolio companies in the last year. The earnings per share declined, we achieved €1.34 per share, and this is due to the higher number of shares which are in the current year.

You can also see that in some graphs here: the GMV growth in H1, the revenue growth in H1, the EBITDA growth, and the net profit growth in H1. When we have a three-year perspective on that, you can see that we almost doubled our revenue in the last three years, we see this quite positive tendency also this year, and we also expect it for the future that we have this growth rate even with less M&A activity.

When we look on the split between organic and non-organic growth, this is also a figure which was always requested by a lot of investors. You can see that we achieved an organic growth which was dominant in the first half-year.

From the total revenue growth, 73% was organic, and only 27% was non-organic, and we define organic and non-organic growth for the last 12 months as most other companies do it in the same way. The reasons or the main reasons why we had a higher organic growth rate was that we have more partners selling on our platforms.

We have around 17,700 partners on our platforms, and due to that, our number of products also increased, we have more products, and with more products you attract more customers, and we also had a very positive retention on our core platforms regarding the customers. These are the main reasons why we think that we can be quite happy on this development, even in one segment it was not a good development.

When we look on the leverage perspective, you can see the development over time in this slide here. Currently, we have a leverage of 1.8.

Taking into account that we had a net debt of €130 million and an EBITDA LTM of more than €62 million, you can calculate the 1.8 resulting of these figures. As you already communicated by June this year, we started a deleverage strategy and focus on higher profitability, and that means that we really want to decrease this number, that we want to get better numbers in the leverage, and that we want a further decline here, and we're quite optimistic to reduce it also until the end of this year.

Let's have a look on the financials regarding the cash flow. The operational cash flow was €26.8 million, which was an increase compared to last year, and it was an increase by 16%.

We saw also from the investing activities that we have invested less because we made less M&A activity, and also the AI project which we started by end of last year, this had directly an effect regarding the software investments, we could reduce our software investments and made much more with AI. Regarding the finance activities, we had -€11 million, and that was because we made repayments to the loans, to the bank loans, and also we made repayments to lease liabilities.

To give you an overview on the assets and equity and liabilities, you can see the overview here. We have reached a total balance volume of more than €400 million.

If you have further questions, we would recommend to have look on the published H1 report, which you can find on our corporate page. We also calculated the return on equity and return on capital employed for you, and here you can see that we achieve quite positive numbers in the first half-year.

The return on equity for the first half-year was 28... 20%, and we saw return on capital employed of more than 17%.

Both numbers are in guidance of our internal forecast, and we are quite happy to also achieve this numbers. Let's have a look on the non-financial KPIs.

You saw that we had a slight increase of the average order value to €129. We saw that the active customers LTM was achieving 8.4 million, and the number of employees also increased to more than 1,500.

The number of partners, we mentioned it, was also increasing, and we saw more than 17,683 partners connected to our platforms. Nathalie, you take over.

Yes, let's take a look at our segment report. Our consumer goods segment grew significantly.

You see it in the revenue growth, and this was all in line with our internal forecast, and we have there further cost efficiency programs there, and we will close unprofitable units. As at next, as Dominik said, in the freight good segment, we were not happy, but we planned detailed measures there, on the one side, to increase the customer base, and marketing have been and planned implemented, and we will expect the outcome in the next 12 months.

When we take a look at the industrial goods segment, there we see an improved margin development. Next page, please.

The industrial goods segment is also in line with our forecast. What we see in the industrial goods segment that we have a good B2B customer outcome.

When we look at pharma and retail goods, that is also in line with our expectations, and we see there stagnating margins, and we want to optimize it in the next two years, this year and next year. Our last segment is the optics and hearing segment.

We started it at end of last year in the second half, and that's also the development in line with our forecast, and we see a positive outcome here.

Thank you for that. We announced that we make less acquisitions in this year, we presented you this forecast for this year, 2026.

We expect in total up to six signings this year, and I think we are good on track with that, and we also expect one or two divestments. Far, we did not communicate any divestment, but we expect to sell one or two companies this year, and we will give you further update when this is going to happen.

Very important is our AI first program because you already have seen that we use a lot of AI techniques in our different divisions, and we also implement them into our different departments. Currently, we really want to achieve our goal that 60% of all our company processes are AI changed and optimized, and we are also on a very good track with that.

You see the departments where we have the most and significant impact is software development, we can save a lot of money when we invest into software development, but we use AI techniques, we can reduce it. The next point is also online marketing, we use a lot of AI technique for optimizing online marketing and make sure that we attract more customers with less cost structures.

HR and finance, very important that we make a lot of HR work and payroll work already with AI. On the right side, you see the content creation, which was two two years ago a very manual process with models and photographers and so on, but this changed dramatically, we really reduced a lot of workforce there and can save a lot of costs with AI.

Let's have a look on the outlook of our group. You see our vision for 2030.

Currently, we announced and communicated an expected revenue of more than €3.2 billion. In this long-term perspective, we are optimistic that we can achieve double-digit margins regarding our EBITDA, and also we want to decrease our leverage to around 1.0 to 1.4.

Our total GMV is going to be expected to achieve more than €4.8 billion. Also on our partner side, which is the backbone of our group, we expect more than 40,000 partners connected to our different platforms.

Furthermore, we want to increase our footprint. Right now we have 26 different industries, and we want to achieve more than 50 different industries up to 2030.

Also, here you can see our strategic initiatives and goals. I don't want to repeat everything here because you have seen that in the last presentation, if you have further questions on that, just let us know.

Also, we have a guidance for 2026. Today, we also confirmed it that we want to achieve a revenue of at least €1 billion this year.

We also communicated that we want to achieve an EBITDA of €70 to €80 million and a leverage between 1.5 and 2.3. The GMV will be around €1.7 billion, and we expect to have more than 18,000 partners connected to our platform.

We confirm our guidance and do not change it. This is the same for our pro forma guidance.

In case of the AEP acquisition, we also confirm this guidance and have no change on that point. Nathalie, you are muted.

We are working further on the visibility on the capital markets, and we will join several conferences like the EKF in Frankfurt or events in Paris and Vienna, and we will also have selected roadshows in Europe. Dominik and I look forward to meet many of you in person there.

If you have questions, please also always reach out to me or Dominik for investor relations activities.

All right. Thank you, and now we can start with the Q&A.

We received a lot of Q&A when we didn't start the presentation, I was wondering why don't the people wait until we present everything. Anyway, let's start with the first question: "Please highlight when the AEP deal will be closed or will ever be happen?"

Yes, the answer is we are on the track with that, and we gave you already an update on that. Though the CPs in the contract, in the SPA, have to be fulfilled by both sides.

Seller and buyer are both working on the CPs. It takes longer time than we expected it, and also it takes longer time than the seller expected it, that's definitely true.

We are working on the CPs, and I think we are on a good track with that, and when we have an update for you, we will directly communicate that. Next question is about a crisis of confidence, Josef Müller asks on that point.

I don't know exactly what you mean here, maybe it is necessary that you make some more details what exactly you want to get as an information and what exactly you want to hear from that. Harald Hof asks about, "The Q2 top-line growth was negative year-over-year.

Could you please provide some more color on what drove the weakness in particular the freight goods segment? What measures have been taken or implemented to address that?"

Yes, thank you very much. Overall, we think that our guidance for this year is on a pretty good track with that, we have our increase in revenue and GMV, and we also think that we will achieve our guidance.

You are definitely right, we are not happy with the freight goods segment. Maybe you know that in this freight goods segment, we have industries like furniture or bicycles, and these industries have a huge decline in their revenues in the last years.

Usually, it does not affect us so much because when we have more products, we can also increase our customer base with that. In this case, we also decided to reduce a little bit the take rate for the partners, and also we see a very very low customer base here currently, and we did not increase the marketing.

Maybe this was a mistake from our side that we really were too much focusing on costs and not on the revenue side here. We took several measures to reinstate and to make sure that we have better results in the next 12 months here.

What exactly we did is different things. We initiated a program to attract more partners in the low price segment.

Currently, for example, we have a lot of high-cost bicycles above €4,000, but people look more for cheap bicycles in this current economic situation, and we changed a little bit our strategy here. Additionally, we initiated a program for more marketing and more differentiated marketing, that we do not so much rely on Google anymore and focus more on influencer marketing here.

Third, in our furniture division, we make some changes here. You have seen that we made an acquisition with Kooko Home.

We made an asset deal from them. We bought the assets and also took over the employees, and we will have an update here for you which shows how we can reduce the cost here and make sure that we have higher profitability, because we are on the same page like you that we are not happy with the freight goods segment here, and we have to change it with our system.

The next question is, "A decline of share price from IPO?" Actually, Mr.

Autze, we never had an IPO, we took over a company. It was a reverse merger in 2023, and yes, you are right, there is a decline of the share price, but I think your figures are from the former company, fashionette, not from us.

Next question is about the outstanding bonds and our repurchase program. We decided to give you an update when we achieve the €5 million, and we expect an achievement here in this half-year, we will directly communicate when we have achieved our goal here.

Next question was again the AEP acquisition. We already answered that.

Next point was about the auditor from Mr. Müller, the question.

The answer is that we will also make another AGM to go through that process, and then at the AGM we can decide with the shareholders on the auditor. "How many corporate actions have been increased the number of shares outstanding?

Are there any lock-ups for these shares?" Is it a question about the M&A activities and if the seller receive shares?

Yes, we make M&A activities where also shares are part of the compensation, and yes, they have lock-up periods for these shares. Usually, the lock-up periods are between one and three years, it's a little bit depending on each contract, but yes, we make every time a lock-up period here.

There's the next question regarding the new acquisition, Mrs. Freier is asking why we don't see an impact in EBITDA from this new acquisitions.

Basically, we communicated a range of the EBITDA guidance for this year, we expect €70 to €80 million. When we make an acquisition and this range is not changing because of this one acquisitions, we don't make an update of the forecast every time.

We only make updates when we see a more than 10% change in our guidance, and then we will directly do that, not before. Next question was about the bond buyback.

We already answered that. There's next question regarding the legal action against the Manager Magazin.

Yes, we have current court processes here in Germany. There's no decision because we have this Hauptverfahren.

I don't know exactly the current status, but it's still going on, and we have no update currently here. Next question is about the objective of net debt EBITDA below 2.0 by end of 2026.

Yes, we also expect a number below 2.0 even with the acquisition of AEP because AEP is by itself a profitable company, and so we do not expect a change in this ratio here. Next question is about our KGV and if we have any comments on that.

No, we don't have comments. We also see that our share is undervalued, but I cannot give you further comments on that.

Yes, we are positive that we in future have better numbers, but we cannot influence that. Next question is again the AEP acquisition, we already answered that.

There's the next question about, "Could any probability to perform quarterly audit of TPG?" No, we will not start quarterly audits.

I don't know any company in Germany who's doing quarterly audits, we will also not start that. All the other questions have been answered.

There's a next question about, "Why does the company have a pattern of generating negative working capital in H1? In H1, trade debtors increased while trade creditors reduced."

I would recommend that you have a look on the half-year report, and we don't see any negative development, to be honest. The development regarding the debtors and creditors are absolutely in line with our internal forecast.

When you look a little bit more detailed on the accounts receivables, there's no real change. It is almost the same level.

When you look on our liability side, the trade payables decreased a lot, we only had €20 million trade payables compared to €31 by end of last year. This is a quite positive development from our side.

I don't think we should give more commentary on that because, well, it's positive. Next question about the stock price, we already answered that, and we cannot speculate here, and so we gave you our numbers and present our results here.

The next question is about a bridge from EBITDA to operational cash flow. I think this goes too far for this discussion here, and so I really would recommend Mr.

Heiner to make a one-on-one on that, and to make also a more detail call here regarding the financials in our half-year report. "Would you share any guidance about interest rate of the new €80 million financing?"

Yes, sure. The €80 million financing for M&A activity, it is a finance structure in line with our current finance rates.

Our current finance rates are between 4% and 10%, and we also have this numbers in our new facility here, but it is in the upper end of this range. "Could you talk about the revenue trends in optics division?

Is it lower to the last year?" No, it's not lower.

It's just the seasonality. The optic division also have seasonalities in the yearly review, and so the first half-year results are absolutely in line, and we expect a further increase for the second half-year.

There are some questions regarding specific subsidiaries, we do not comment any specific subsidiary here. Please understand that we do not start communicating here on each company by itself.

Next question was about the weaker Q2 as a result of a strong Q1, or what do you attribute the 27% decline in revenue to? Actually, we saw that, yes, Q2 was a little bit lower on the total perspective, but we always have in line what we want to achieve for the full year.

Overall, we were quite happy with the development here and also with the EBITDA development. We don't see a weaker Q2 here, but, yes, you are right that Q1 was strong here definitely, in both ways: in revenue and also in profit.

There is a next question about why are the customer orders less than the total amount of active customers. The answer is very simple: active customers are last 12 months, it means we have to consider 12 months regarding the active customers, and the number of orders, it is always only in the period, in six months.

That is the reason why, of course, this number is different. There's a next question about again the Manager Magazin, the auditor.

We also answered that. About the finance facility...

There's a question if I will buy again shares. Yes, I also will buy again shares.

I always have to consider the timeline, I was not allowed to buy shares before the publication of such an half-year report, for example, but after such an event, I am allowed to buy shares. Next question is about the gross margin decline.

The question is what is the reason for that, and, yes, you are right, though there is a relevant change regarding the commission structure. The take rate was less in our freight good segment, and so we saw this effect also in our total P&L.

Additionally, we also saw that we have a pricing issue, and we had more discounts than we expected in some of our divisions, and so this lead to the situation that we had a negative development in the gross margin. Overall, we think that we are pretty good in line with our margin development, currently we have more than 34%, and on the full-year perspective, we see a slight increase here, but not too much because, as you might know, in the Q4 the margin is not very good, there are a lot of discounts in the Q4, the Q3 is very important to get a good number and the total year perspective.

"Which three single subsidiaries have the highest profit?" Again, we do not comment specific units or specific platforms, please understand that we have our segment report and that we operate with a segment report.

Okay. The next question is about the number of orders, same numbers.

I don't understand this question, Russell, to be honest. Maybe you give us feedback directly with email so we can understand what you mean here.

Okay. The last question was from Mr.

Heiner: "With leveraging training towards lower than 2.0 and a positive free cash flow, how is the management rating debt paydown against opportunistic share buybacks to address the current equity valuation discount?" The problem is we are not allowed to make share buybacks because as long as we have the bond, the bond prospectus says that we are not allowed to make share buybacks, we cannot make share buybacks until 2028, and so there is no other answer here.

There's a next question about the AEP deal. We already answered that, Mrs.

Freier, and we expect a closing in this year. Yes, we do.

Yes, I think these are the main questions. Mr.

Müller, you are commenting here with some other comments, and so maybe you can directly send an email to Nathalie Richert, and she can reply on that. There are no other open questions here.

Thank you very much from our side, and I wish you all a good working day and see you on the next conference.

Thank you. Bye.