Hello. Good afternoon and good morning and good evening to our international participants.

Welcome to the AUTO1 Group fourth quarter and full-year 2025 financial results presentation. I'm Philip Reicherstorfer, Group Treasurer.

I'm joined today by Christian Bertermann, our Co-Founder and CEO, as well as by Christian Wallentin, our new CFO. We will start as always with a presentation followed by questions and answers.

If you would like to ask a question, please raise it via the usual Zoom Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. We will then call on you to ask your question directly after the presentation.

Before I hand over, I must make you aware of the safe harbor provisions at the beginning of this presentation. These will apply to any forward-looking statements made by management today.

Now over to you, Christian.

Thank you, Philip. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to the AUTO1 Group Q4 and full-year '25 earnings call. 2025 was a fantastic year for us.

We accelerated growth rates across both the Merchant and Retail segment, and we achieved the highest EBITDA margin in our 14-year history. These outstanding results are a testament of the value-first strategy that governs our strategic thinking and decision-making.

We have been investing for more than a decade to build a leading vertically integrated pan-European used car platform with the goal to maximize value for everyone in this market. We focused our investments on various areas, notably our AI-powered pricing technology, our unique logistics network, our dense drop-off and pick-up network, our production center network, and our financing facilities.

In each of these areas, we are the leader in the European used car market. While we continue building our infrastructure, we are now leveraging it.

We delivered record volumes and record profitability simultaneously, benefiting significantly from the powerful structural advantages of our unique vertically integrated business model. These advantages are increasing with further scale, forming an undeniable flywheel of improving product value and unit economics in parallel.

Group unit sales reached a new all-time high of 842,000 vehicles last year. This is an increase of 22%.

Total gross profit surged by 37% year on year to €991 million, and group gross profit per unit also increased significantly, climbing 12% year on year to €1,172, up from €1,049 in '24. We delivered our best-ever full-year adjusted EBITDA of €198 million.

This is 81% more than last year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 70 basis points to 2.4%, demonstrating the substantial operating leverage within our business.

Our vertically integrated business model has inherent structural advantages compared to the traditional brick-and-mortar approach in used car trading. These advantages directly translate into increased value for our customers.

We are, for instance, able to generate higher selling prices for our selling customers as we aggregate more demand faster, enabled by our pricing and platform technology. We are also able to process transactions at lower unit costs as logistics costs and miles decrease and residual operating costs per unit decline with higher utilization.

Similarly, we are increasing value in other categories enabled by vertical integration. We can increase selection and convenience faster as our demand scales.

We're able to offer lower buying prices for our buying customers helped by lower unit costs and the vast reach of our physical networks, and we're able to offer competitive financing rates enabled by our unique financing backbone. We are increasing trust enabled by our rigorous car quality standards and our highly motivated staff, and all of this together means higher value for our customers.

That, in turn, translates into more demand for our products and services. Now to one of the market's favorite topics, AI.

Let me take a moment to focus on the question: how can AI be effectively applied to the used car market? Let's start with the obvious.

Any AI model starts with data. In the used car market, the most important data you can own is pricing data.

In contrast to openly available sources like the public internet or open-source code hosting facilities like GitHub, used car pricing data is private. Obtaining this data isn't straightforward.

In order to generate, you have to start trading. Even classified platforms that serve as market aggregators do not own the final transaction price data.

They only store asking prices, and they lack detailed information on a car's condition. We, AUTO1, own the largest and most comprehensive pricing data set for the European used car market, and that has always been a key priority from the very beginning.

After gathering trading data for 5 years since foundation, since 2012, we started to build our first data science teams tasked to develop machine learning-based pricing models roughly '17, '18 with the goal to leverage our proprietary transaction data. Today, these pricing algorithms are one of the strongest elements of our competitive moat.

They cannot be replicated without being us or going through the same history of trades. Data alone isn't enough.

With price quotes only, you cannot grow and grab share in this market. You need to back them up with real pricing power, or, in other words, you require sufficient supply and demand in order to create the same real-time trade system that sits at the heart of AUTO1.

We operate the largest European vehicle drop-off and delivery network seamlessly connected to the biggest logistics infrastructure for used cars. With a weight of 1 to 2 metric tonnes, our goods require a unique logistics chain.

The combination of our AI pricing models with our physical network infrastructure enables us to efficiently aggregate supply and demand, always focusing to maximize value for all of our customers. In short, we own physical networks that form a very strong moat and cannot be conquered by an AI prompt.

You also need to be an outstanding trader in our business, and that requires a sufficient balance sheet and smart management of capital. The sheer size of our balance sheet and the efficient management of it through our real-time trade system is another rock-solid element of our competitive moat that simply cannot be replicated by AI software only.

One thought becomes more and more clear. If you set out to apply state-of-the-art AI technology to the used car market with the goal to become the long-term market leader, you will create a company like AUTO1.

You can think of AUTO1 as an AI-enabled Amazon for the used car market. We are not a company where AI is being put on top of legacy systems.

Rather, AI is rooted deeply in our DNA for over a decade. As I just mentioned, we started AI pricing in 2016, '17.

We are a company that leverages this homegrown technology to connect our proprietary pricing intelligence with our unique physical transaction network to handle the complexity of the used car market in the most efficient way. Okay.

Let's continue with a look at the Merchant segment and its performance last year. Merchant, our largest business, performed very strongly last year, achieving new records across all key metrics.

Full-year unit sales increased by 20% year on year to a record 741,000 vehicles. Breaking through the 20% growth level is a strong confirmation of our outstanding execution and the value-first strategy we pursue, particularly given that Merchant is our largest business segment that we started 14 years ago.

In Q4 alone, we sold 190,000 units to our partners, representing an increase of 17% year on year. We also achieved our highest-ever Merchant gross profit of €723 million for the year.

This is €160 million, or 28%, more than in the year before. Growth in the fourth quarter was also very strong, with gross profit landing at €188 million, up 23% from Q4 '24.

Merchant GPU was €976 for '25, representing an increase of 7% year on year, a result of the steady progress of our pricing algorithms and trading systems, higher Merchant average selling prices, and strong Merchant finance execution. Merchant GPU in Q4 was €986.

This is €44 more compared to the same period in '24. In 2025, we achieved a new record number of dealers purchasing on AUTO1.com.

For the ninth consecutive quarter, our network of active partners grew, reaching 33,700 in Q4, an increase of 23% over Q4 '24. For the full year, a record 54,400 partners purchased from us, up 22% compared to the year before.

The average basket is roughly flat year on year, driven by the strong growth of new dealers. We also continued our branch network buildout at a high pace with the aim to increase supply capacities fast enough to meet our growing Merchant and Retail demand.

We added 178 branches last year, a 32.5% increase year on year, bringing our total branch count to 725. We purchased 809,000 cars from consumers, with around 16% of our cars purchased for Retail.

By the end of last year, we operated a quarterly capacity of around 300,000 units, an increase of 38% year on year. We supported our growing dealer base strongly with logistics as well.

Our network processed 29% more transports to dealers last year at improved speed, building out our physical capacities further and further. The overall transport share in the Merchant segment increased by 7% to 48% year on year, while the transport share of all cars sold cross-border increased even more, by 11% to 60%.

We are now operating the largest used car logistics network in Europe, with more than 1.5 million transports last year and over 170 logistics compounds across the continent. We are also very happy with the progress of our Merchant financing product in '25.

We extended Merchant financing to Poland and Sweden last year, and it is now available in eight markets in total. More than 4,400 dealers used our financing product last year, an increase of 47%.

Overall, we increased Merchant sales financed by €580 million, up 74% year on year, and we increased financing attach rate by 41% to a new level of 17% overall. We believe that we can increase the Merchant financing attach rate to a level of 50% in the long term.

The number of vehicles financed grew to 124,000 units for the full year, a 73% increase compared to 2024. Merchant finance in its current form is a great product for our customers as it combines faster transaction speed with maximum buying comfort and increases the capital base of our dealers, letting them grow together with us.

However, we believe our current product offerings only the first step. We aim to add more geographies later in the year, and we're obsessed with the question on how we can support our vast dealer base with additional financial products going forward.

Let's now look at Retail results. Our long-term unit and gross profit track record in Retail is a strong confirmation of our vertically integrated retail business strategy and the structural advantages that play out more and more as we increase scale.

No other public auto retailer in the EU grew faster last year than us. While our retail market share grew strongly, by 36.35% with 0.44% of the total market, we have an almost infinitely long runway ahead of us.

However, our new scale already drives vertical advantages in a variety of areas from pricing models and inventory algorithms to delivery time, warranty attach rates, production center efficiencies, logistics speed and cost, and the strength of the Autohero brand. We continue to be absolutely thrilled by the long-term opportunity we have with Autohero.

For the full year, Autohero delivered excellent results. We made outstanding progress across units sold, gross profit, and GPU.

Our Retail segment achieved a major milestone last year, delivering a record 101,500 units and surpassing the 100,000 unit mark for the first time in Autohero's history. This represents a 36% year-on-year increase compared to 74,400 units in '24.

In the fourth quarter, Retail continued its strong momentum, growing 40% with 28,700 units sold versus 20,600 in Q4 of the year before. Retail gross profit also reached a new all-time high of €268 million for the full year, a significant 65% increase year on year.

Retail GPU climbed to €2,605 for the full year, up 20% year on year, and it set a new quarterly record of €2,632 in Q4. These great results strengthen our confidence in reaching our long-term retail GPU target of €3,000.

We are also laser-focused on our goal to make Autohero the leading European used car brand. Our brand awareness grew strongly last year, especially from the second to the fourth quarter when we stepped up investments.

By the end of last year, aided brand awareness was 33% across all markets. This is an increase of 7 percentage points compared to the beginning of '24.

Our strong NPS of around 70 helps us to build more scale faster as our existing customer base serves as a future demand multiplier. We also continue to set new standards for efficiency and transparency through our proprietary AI-powered damage detection technology.

In Q4 of last year, we successfully scaled our in-house AUTO1 CarAudit technology to five major production centers across Germany, Spain, France, and Italy. Our CarAudit AI technology leverages deep learning models trained exclusively on our proprietary data set of real and diverse car images to deliver highly accurate and detailed inspections for each vehicle.

Delivering seamless fulfillment remains a top priority for us as it's an important component of our superior customer experience. In the fourth quarter, we achieved a delivery time of 10 days.

This is 13% faster than in Q4 '24. This result was driven by the expansion of our European fulfillment network, which allows customers to choose between convenient car pick-up or home delivery.

We are now offering 153 pick-up locations across Europe, of which 42% are designed as Express Hubs, ensuring cars are ready for our customers within just 72 hours. In the second half of '25, we accelerated our network expansion by leveraging more of our existing purchasing branches as combined pick-up and drop-off locations.

This strategic move allows us to bring our brands and services closer together, delivering enhanced overall customer experience. We still need to learn much in this area, however, especially how to best optimize the trade-offs between branch space, logistics speed and cost, combined with increased retail purchase conversion.

Let me now finish with a fresh view on our long-term ambition. We continued our strong growth trajectory last year, achieving a record market share of 3.1% in Europe, a 50 basis points increase over the last year, and an important next step on the road to our 10% long-term market share target.

With 27.5 million used car transactions across the European market, our growth outpaced the overall market growth by far, growing nearly 14 times the rate of total used car transactions. This exceptional performance underscores the strength of our vertically integrated business model and our increasingly strong market position.

Despite this important next step towards our long-term market share target, we are still barely scratching the surface of our immense opportunity within the €700 billion European used car market. Also on margin, we made meaningful progress last year, reaching a new record for adjusted EBITDA margin with 2.4%, a 70 basis points improvement compared to 2024, well-placed for a long-term adjusted EBITDA margin of 5% to 9%.

To sum up, 2025 was a great year for AUTO1 and beat 2024 on all metrics: new records for units sold in both segments, for revenue and gross profit, for Retail and Merchant GPUs, for adjusted EBITDA margin and absolute EBITDA, and, consequently, also net income. Beyond these results stands a very talented and experienced team, execution experts with a relentless drive and ambition to always build our business, our platform, our network bigger and better.

We continue to be thrilled by the long-term opportunity in both Merchant and Retail in this gigantic market, an opportunity that we continue to seize through our vertically integrated strategy every single year with increasing traction. With that, I'll hand it over to Christian, who will provide further insights into our financial results.

Thank you, Christian, and a warm hello to everyone joining us today. It's a real pleasure to walk you through our Q4 and full-year '25 results and also share in the end how we think about the path ahead for '26.

'25, as Christian mentioned, was an exceptional year for AUTO1. We delivered record results across all our key metrics, and we grew market share, further underscoring the scalability and the strength of our model.

If we look at the numbers, for the full-year '25, we delivered more than 842,000 unit group group units. It's compromised of 7 741,000 Merchant units and over 100,000 of Autohero units, representing a year-on-year growth of 22% at the group level.

The Merchant units were up 20%, and Autohero Autohero units increased by 36%. During the year, our average selling price climbed by around 7% year over year.

Looking at gross profit profit, it grew to €991 million, up 37%, while adjusted EBITDA reached €198 million, growing by 81%. This considerable profit expansion, well ahead of unit and top-line growth, is a clear testament to our operating leverage.

As the platform scales, incremental volume continues to drive outsized earnings, validating the investments and the strategic decisions that we have made over the recent years. Focusing on on Q4, which is typically our softest trading quarter, we grew group units by 20% year over year, even as December trading conditions slowed down over the holidays, consistent with the normal industry pattern as both dealers and consumers tend to transact less during this period.

We closed the year with Q a Q4 adjusted EBITDA of roughly €45 million. This is a strong result, especially considering our ongoing investments into the Autohero brand, our inventory selection, and our expanded purchasing capabilities.

These investments into our inventory and organization are funding are foundational for the next phase of our growth, ensuring we stay ahead of market trends and continue to enhance our leadership position. In '25, we grew gross profit by €266 million.

Almost 60% of this growth was volume-driven, showing the market's appreciation of our platform and model. The remaining 40% came from advances in gross profit per unit, demonstrating the increasing attractiveness of our customer offering we're building and the continuous improvements in the business.

Looking at the core OpEx, we made major investments into our brands and team capacity, particularly towards the end of the year, to fuel our continued strong growth in preparation for 2026. Internal logistics expenses reflect volume growth across Merchant and Retail.

In summary, driven by 22% growth in units and profitability improvements, gross profit grew 37% and adjusted EBITDA grew by 81% to the record level of €198 million. We're pleased to see the strong '25 adjusted EBITDA growth reflecting both the positive scale effects that we see and the strong the strategic investments we're making into the brands and our organization to support future growth.

Moving on to the balance sheet. We continued maintaining a strong balance sheet with stable cash levels around €600 million and no corporate debt.

We continued to build inventory to support our growth with roughly €1 billion at the end of Q4. We funded the growth in inventory through our inventory ABS and also positive trading cash flow during the year.

Inventory ABS loan-to-value was 83% at the end of the year. Our captive financing products continued to scale with our overall growth, supporting profitability and our objective to deepen our relationships with our customers and also achieve a higher share of wallet to increase the lifetime value of each customer.

The captive finance business volumes grew almost 50% year over year and is increasingly becoming a strong contributor to the current and future profitability. At the moment, consumer finance contributes €500 of GPU in Germany and Austria, and we expect ongoing growth towards our long-term GPU targets.

The GPU contribution of Merchant finance is less pronounced, but we see it as an important demand driver with overall attractive risk-adjusted returns profile, which also contributes to customer stickiness, as Christian mentioned, for the qualified dealers. Overall Overall, with my background in financial services, I'm spending a lot of time with the team developing our captive finance strategy going forward.

We will continue to build this area to drive further profitability across the Merchant and consumer businesses. Now to guidance.

For the full-year 2026, we guide 940,000 to 1 million group units, compromising of 815,000 to 865,000 Merchant units and 125,000 to 135,000 Autohero units. We expect a gross profit of €1.1 to €1.2 billion and an adjusted EBITDA of €250 to €275 million.

At the top of the end of our guidance range, we set the important milestone of 1 million units traded for 2026. We expect that the €50 to €75 million year-over-year EBITDA improvement to be fueled by unit growth driving absolute gross profit expansion, with Merchant and Retail GPUs broadly flat compared to 2025 to drive growth at pace.

Overall, we're expecting further operating leverage as adjusted EBITDA growth outpaces unit growth. We are absolutely thrilled by the opportunity in front of us and continue to build scale now, expanding our leadership position.

A brief word on quarterly trends. We expect adjusted EBITDA distribution between the quarters to be closer to the 2024 precedent, which means that adjusted EBITDA for the second half of the year will be significantly higher than for the first half of '26.

As in '25, we expect AUTO1 trading cash flows to be positive in 2026, reflecting the profitability of our model and also reinforcing our ability to self-fund our growth. We expect CapEx to continue to be moderate at around 25 basis points of revenue.

In summary to round up things, 2025 was a fantastic year for AUTO1 Group, a year in which our model proven itself further, delivering record growth, record profitability, and a significant market share gains. As we look to 2026, we believe our model is becoming increasingly powerful.

The flywheel is working. A stronger brand drives more customers, more customers enable better inventory selection and pricing, and greater scale drives lower unit costs, improved logistics and fulfillment.

We are growing from a position of strength, our balance sheet is robust, and we are geared for continued expansion. We look forward to updating you on the progress as the year progresses.

With that, I'd now like to open up for questions.

Before we begin the Q&A portion of today's call, I would like to go over a few brief technical points. If you haven't already, please feel free to submit your question using the Q&A tool located at the bottom of your Zoom screen.

Philip will call on participants in turns. Once your name is announced, I will unmute your line and hand the floor over to you.

Kindly ensure that your microphone is enabled and that you're ready to speak when prompted. Our first question comes from Nizla Naizer.

Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Nizla, are you there?

Can you hear me?

Now we can.

Excellent. Thanks.

I have a few questions. The first, if you can kindly give us some color on how Q1 is progressing in terms of growth, keeping in mind that you've got a range of growth for the full year, where does Q1 sort of sit in that range?

Some color that would be great. Is there a phasing of investments in 2026 we need to be aware of?

You did say that EBITDA in the second half would be higher, but sort of where are the investments going into over the course of the year would be great to know. My next question is on the average used car price.

Now it was down slightly in 2025 from what we see, but your ASPs were up quite nicely by 7% for the group. Can you take us through your ability to grow your ASP and your expectations for 2026, both in terms of prices in the market and your own ASP?

I'll leave it there for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Nizla. Your first question was on growth, because you're saying like, okay, we're operating a unit growth corridor here for Q1 and how Q1 is going.

We had a, I would say, good start into the year, and we are, from a unit point of view, not expecting to change anything in our growth trajectory for now. There was a little bit of headwind at the beginning, I think, with the winter conditions, but yeah, growth-wise, yeah, I would say we'll continue the latest trends.

Phasing of investments, Christian, you want to take that one?

Absolutely. The two different kind of investments.

We have invested a lot into Q4, brand and operational capacity. We see that we will run on those investments, getting utilization higher on the OpEx side.

We will grow into the OpEx that we see from Q4 and go into, as I mentioned implicitly, the OpEx per unit. We'll see that trending down from Q4 into the 2026.

Then in terms of investments, CapEx is marginal for us, we guide on 25 basis points, so that's to 20 let's say that around €20 million or so historically. We have grown quite a lot in investments across '25, expanded production and retail fulfillment capacity.

We invested into the Autohero brand and will continue to do. We will not see as quick investment into branches, etc., in the beginning of the year at the very least.

We're using the capacity there, it will be more towards if we see that we're tracking on the growth path that we're in, then we will continue when utilization is slightly higher towards mid-year. We will evaluate this during the year.

On the

We have ASP as well. Do you want to take that, or should I?

You can also take that.

Yep. The ASP, I think there's a few trends in this.

One is that if you look back historically, we've always gradually increased the ASPs. We were trading more older cars historically.

We're trading newer and newer cars, so that's one thing. Then we also look when we look into the future, our cars are, let's say, 5, 6, 7 years older than the new car prices.

We're trading the bucket that we are trading. We see that there's a push upwards in ASP for that particular segment of the market when we're moving to also amplified by we're moving to slightly newer cars as well.

We see, from our point of view, a higher ASP going forward as well, and we saw that in '25 it was a 7% increase in the ASPs for us. Maybe

to add to that, the overall group ASP is on the one hand pushed by higher Autohero share, right? Autohero units are or yeah, almost double the ASP than what we trade in the Merchant segment.

Then also, what Christian referenced, the overall basket that we are trading, for instance, on Merchant, like yeah, it's roughly 10 years and for Autohero, it's younger. This basket is having a distribution of different years, right?

Some of the 2000 let's call it '15, we have 2015 average price. Then there's new cars in there from 2024, few only, and there's old cars from 2008.

As we are progressing through every single year, then we're moving up 1 year in kind of the new registration age of the car. However, when we are tracking the new car prices of the incoming, the newer, the fresher cars that are coming this year, when we track the new car prices along each and every single year that we're trading, we're seeing that the new car price has strongly evolved, or simply put, from 2015 to now, yeah?

New cars have become very much more expensive over the course of the last 10 years, and those more expensive units, assuming stable residual value, are then, as a basket effect, increasing also the ASPs that we are trading, yeah? We are not depending on 1 year of new car price movement, but we're trading the basket and the basket is moving up, assuming stable residual value, with every single year, which gives us a tailwind on ASPs.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Next question comes from James Tate. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Good afternoon, it's James Tate from Goldman Sachs. I've just got a few questions, please.

I guess firstly on AI and I think you touched upon well in the presentation about your right to win as AI technology develops with your unique data sets in the presentation. I guess, have you started to see any changes in the competitive landscape or any new entrants into the market looking to compete with your business, whether on the sourcing or retail side?

Secondly, the continued investments into Autohero marketing and a broader logistics buildout will somewhat weigh on EBITDA margin expansion in 2026. Is it fair to assume that EBITDA margin expansion will accelerate and improve in '27?

I guess essentially can you help us understand the operating leverage of the business as it scales over the next 1 to 2 years and give us confidence there's a path to your long-term EBITDA margin targets? Lastly, you touched upon some of the headwinds at the start of the year from winter conditions.

I guess what is your assumption for broader market volume growth that you embed in your full-year unit sell guidance?

Yeah. Thank you, James.

On the AI, it's it's very simple. No, we have not seen any new entrants.

Again, yeah, this I mean we are at the core a dealer. As a dealer, you have to move goods, you have to buy them, you have to sell them, you have to have balance sheet.

I think the area that is being attacked by AI, also especially like the the yeah, the very distributed large language models with Open Open AI and and Grok, but then also with Google Gemini. There on the let's say first touch point with the market, customers searching for a car, customers selling interested in selling their car, I think it's might naturally be shifting a a portion of the traffic to those yeah, to those AI companies and a little bit away from the classifieds, which is also a similar trend that we have seen with, for instance, Google vehicle ads in the in the last couple of quarters.

For us, this does not pose any threat at all because we are the cars that we're buying, the cars that we are selling, we're selling them because they have great prices, yeah? When we are and because we have a fantastic brand out there and a fantastic service.

It's just the way how the customer finds us unless they go direct to our brands, which is obviously the the best way, direct customer acquisition through through branding, when we are in the paid advertising space, that might change a a little bit, but that would yeah, for us not change a lot because we are a present in those in those spaces as well because of the strength of our brand. Then on the other hand, they will at some point in the next yeah, probably months or quarters, OpenAI OpenAI and already announced that they will go into advertising, have competitive systems to yeah, to be able to pay for that traffic as well.

In other words, for us, I think those will develop as an advertising channel, some of that, which does not pose a threat to us. For the yeah, incumbents, the matchmaking incumbents, namely the classifieds, which are enjoying a a strong organic traffic at the moment.

We're neither seeing any competitive entrants somewhere, and yeah, we are our own competition by now, yeah? It's our ambition that is the competition and it's all the all the small and bigger dealers out there where we want to do the best possible job in retail, and we're not competing with we're not competing with AI prompts.

At the moment, even more so, we are owning the pricing technology that is vital for this market as illustrated in all of the argumentation. Maybe I take the third question as well, which is the market, what kind what do we assume with the market.

Market has calmed down in in January because of the slow start, is catching up in February. Overall, we are But that is a weather effect.

Nobody can change that. Overall, we are assuming stable volumes or slight growth.

We've seen like in the in the latest full-year numbers a little bit more than 1% growth, we assume in our forecast stable volumes. Then Christian, maybe you can go and tackle the investment EBITDA margin going forward, long-term pass question.

Absolutely. I think stepping a little bit back on that question, James, we see the market opportunity ahead of us, and we believe we absolutely have the right model to capture that opportunity.

We clearly want to expand our leadership position and to grow market share in sync with growing profits clearly. We're preparing the organization to really grow, right, and doing that in sync with growing profitability.

With that said, we think the right priority this year in 2026 is to scale the business decisively, grow the adjusted EBITDA absolute level while doing so, which is reflected in the guidance. We absolutely continue to target our long-term EBITDA margin, and we believe that these investments in Autohero scale brings us closer to that target faster.

I don't want to comment particularly on 2027, but you could look at the last few years historically. We are expanding the margin as well as the units clearly.

Both of those are equally important, and for the '26 guidance, we are finding the right trade-off being pushing that profit expansion with units and then implying stable GPUs as well.

Understood. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Marcus Diebel. Please unmute your line, ask your question.

Hi everyone. Just questions left from my side.

Free cash flow for '26, how shall we think about free cash flow developments given that we have the EBITDA guidance? Second question, if you can just tell us a bit more about what you see as a weather impact in January.

We understand obviously we have a full-year guidance and clearly the weather has been impacted, but there was a discussion obviously this morning. If you could just tell us what you think the sort of impact on volumes, i.e., in percentage terms roughly, you have seen in January just to get to understand that.

Then maybe thirdly, if you can tell us a bit more again on your assumptions on merchant volume growth in '26, what makes you confident in those volumes, what are the underlying assumptions? That would be very helpful to just get a little bit more detail how you get to merchant guidance for '26.

Thank you.

Should I do the free cash flow, Christian?

Absolutely.

Yes. We did grow with profitable or a positive cash flow on the trading cash flow, as we call it.

This is then assuming that we will continue to use ABS structures to fund the inventory, the working capital of our business and equally using the ABS to fund the consumer Merchant receivables from our financing. With those assumptions explicitly, we see that we continue to have free trading operating cash flow in '26 as well.

We're self-funding the growth.

That's the Any sort of numbers? Is it sort of similar to EBITDA growth or how shall we think about this, just to get a better understanding sort of what absolute number we should see?

We're not guiding on it. We're growing into the financing business.

We're seeing that the cash has been stable the last few years around the €600-plus level. We see that that will continue.

It's one of the variables that goes into the growth equation, to speak.

Maybe on the merchant volumes, Marcus. We're confident in our merchant volume growth assumptions.

Definitely, if we look at unit guidance and you've also heard Christian that we have invested into an increase in capacity, especially in Q4, we want to utilize that capacity and that means that our aim internally is absolutely go to the high end of the unit guidance and that's also then subsequently true for the merchant volume part of the guidance. The weather impact of Q1 that we've been briefly touching about, I think it roughly lasted 10 days, especially in the first 10 days, it was a slow start to the year because of that.

However, these effects are baked into our guidance at this point, huh? I think that's everything we can say to that.

Is it so critical not to give a number on the effect? Because I think it would be just helpful if we can sort of see as an impact.

The first quarter is a running quarter, right? Then we don't know how much of that will be caught up.

I would say it's 10 days with, let's say, a 30% impact on the units.

Yeah.

10 days out of 90 10 days out of 90 days.

Yeah.

That would be my gut feeling, but I don't have a weather calculator at the moment.

Marcus, as we said this morning, the January performance, in any case, is baked into the guidance.

Yeah.

I don't think you should view this as a major driver coming out.

Okay. Thank you.

With that, over to Jo Barnet-Lamb from UBS. Joe?

Yep. Hey, can you hear me, guys?

Yes, we can now.

Excellent. A few from me.

First one, I think you guided to sort of broadly flat OpEx per car back at 3Q last year. I think at the midpoint of your guidance, it now implies a few percent reduction.

Is this slightly improved guide now due to better volumes? When we consider your OpEx more broadly, what proportion of your OpEx is actually volume-driven versus how much is fixed or set separately?

That'd be the first area of questioning. Second area of questioning is just a bit around GPU.

Obviously, we've seen a lot of GPU expansion in recent years, and your guidance for the coming year is effectively for that to cease for the current year. Reading between the lines of what you're saying, it's effectively that you're sort of deliberately holding GPU at the current level in order to fuel top-line growth.

Is that the correct interpretation? Can you just confirm, therefore, that GPU hasn't hit a ceiling, it's effectively being held where it is for growth purposes?

Then the third and final question, I think reported GPU in Autohero is not equal to gross profit divided by the number of cars sold. I think this is the effects of inventory changes due to capitalization of internal refurbishment costs.

In 4Q '25, that was quite a large impact. It was about €71 million.

Could you just talk a little bit about how we should think about that factor going forwards? Thank you.

Maybe Christian, you take the first and the third question, and I take the GPU expansion question.

Cool.

Let's go for it. Yeah?

Yeah.

The OpEx, we guided for 940 in Q3. We invested into the growth of the inventory, which has some implications on the OpEx, and also invested into operation capacity to then now increase utilization into 2026.

Therefore we see that the OpEx per unit will go down in the next few quarters. With regards to variable versus fixed, I think it's in the long run, everything is variable, right?

If you really scale, then you need to add increments as well. We do see that of the costs that we added, a lot of that is variable clearly.

We see that the operating leverage is coming through. It's a super tactical business, as you know.

The operating leverage is coming from all these small line items, and we see it particularly in the profit growth where we really accelerate the revenue growth in the unit growth of the profit level. We'll make sure that that will continue.

That said, I think keeping the OpEx per unit flat to encourage growth, that's to some degree true, because we think that in order to grow, you need to spend some money to do that as well. We're not optimizing the cost base in the short term.

Second question on GPU expansion, yeah, we think these GPU levels that we have reached roughly last year, they are optimal for our growth. We are also able to hit our EBITDA targets also in the high end with it.

While we think there's definitely longer-term continued upside on the GPU, especially on Retail, in line with our €3,000 target, yeah, we think that this is a proper reflection of what we think they are at the high-growth and at the high-pace that we are going through at the moment. Obviously, yeah, there could be upside if we're able to combine the high-volume growth with GPUs that are higher, so that's not a potential that I would rule out.

It's not something that we are assuming in the current guidance neither at the low nor at the high end. I think the third question, Christian?

Yes, on the inventory, the capitalized part of the inventory, this is coming from Autohero, the value add that we add to the cars in the refurbishment process of those cars. That will continue to be there clearly, and to which extent it will be, we invested a lot into the inventory in Q4, it will be there.

Then we don't have any guidance on exactly how that will be, but it's that part of the value add in the refurbishment process that's reflected in those 71.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Andrew Ross. Please unmute your line, ask your question.

Hi, guys. My two questions are about the retail unit economics.

In the shareholder letter, you talk about retail EBITDA being positive pre-marketing costs. I was hoping you could be more specific and tell us what was the retail EBITDA per car in Q4 or a range?

Then second question is, can we be completely clear that loss of retail EBITDA per car has peaked in Q4 and will get better each quarter from here as you start to scale across marketing and other OpEx? If you could give us a sense as to how the retail EBITDA per car might look exiting this year embedded within your guidance, that would be very helpful.

Thank you.

When we wrote in the letter that retail unit economics on a segment-allocated basis for the full year of 2025 are positive before marketing, then that's exactly what we mean, yeah? Without allocating the marketing spend, and we consider vast majority of the marketing spend an investment especially into our brand.

We also see that cohort-wise, yeah, we roughly get 30%, 40% of the spend directly and 50%, 60% are distributed as a return to later periods, then yeah, then that is exactly what we mean by that. EBITDA par positive ex-marketing, I would say, slightly positive while we're not giving out the exact numbers.

On top of that, there's roughly a €400 basket of cost items that need to be carried by the current deliveries given the growth rate that we have seen exit growth rate in Q4 of last year. If you sum the two together, then yeah, you're well north of, let's say, €400 on an EBITDA segment-allocated basis.

Nevertheless, we continue to grow because we think this can be a 1 million unit business one day. That's why we continue to grow, and we are configuring the growth in a way that we are constantly Q-on-Q improving the unit economics, sometimes with a slight volatility in there depending on the growth rate, but that we overall are constantly progressing, and we expect those improvements also throughout this year, especially towards the end of the year.

Then as we continue to grow depending on the growth rates, the growth drag on the per-delivered unit economics are higher or lower. Over the long run, we are expecting marketing to come down substantially, yeah?

If you look at the marketing per unit values that we have in the C2B business, then we're talking currently probably about 5x in Retail, and we have seen similar improvements in C2B over the years as our brand grows stronger, and we also expect that growth drag from the investment into inventories and also in production, similar to the other question that was asked, to come down over time.

That's helpful. Just to be clear, having had a couple of quarters of deleverage on an EBITDA-per-car basis in retail, as you've been investing into brand marketing and production and inventory, that has now stopped in Q4 and we should expect leverage in the next few quarters from here in retail?

I would have said if there was deleverage, then there was very slight deleverage from Q1 to Q2, and then maybe very slight deleverage then Q3 to Q4. Now we expect it to go the other way around.

The overall track, you zoom a bit out, is a track of constant improvements.

Great. That's very helpful.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Wolfgang Specht. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Yes, hello. Good afternoon.

Three additional ones from my side. First on the inventory side, can you give us an idea how the split of units between a retail channel and merchant channel is roughly?

Then on the financing side, you mentioned that the consumer attach rate moved towards 39%. Where do you see, let's say, a limit before you touch, let's say, or you come close to subprime?

I leave it here. The other question has been answered already.

Wolfgang, what did you say on the attachment rates? Do you see the limit of attachment rates before you

Attachment rate for consumer financing.

Okay. I think across markets, depending on which market you're, because you have different attachment levels depending on that, 40% to 60%, I would say.

It's reasonable to, on average, let's say, 40% to 50%. There's some ways we can say that that's a reasonable average across markets.

Then, gradually, we want to have more and more internal financing of that clearly.

I think the other question was on the inventory split,

Wolfgang. Right.

Yeah. Inventory is in line with kind of, on the one hand, the size of Autohero versus the merchant business.

Then, on the other hand, also, Autohero has a much higher share because of the turnover. The longer turnover that retail has versus merchant.

At the moment, I would say roughly 1/3 of the cars that we own are for retail and 2/3 are for merchant.

Thanks a lot.

Wolfgang, obviously the split between the segments will actually be published in the full-year financials coming out in March.

Okay.

Otherwise, thank you very much, everybody, for attending the call. I hope it was helpful.

We obviously have a number of calls lined up. I think Christian and I will also be in New York in 2 weeks' time, meeting a lot of you.

Thank you very much, and otherwise talk to you on the Q1 numbers in May. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, everyone. Bye.