Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear analysts, let me welcome you to our call on our Q4 and preliminary and unaudited full-year results for 2025. We start the call with a short overview of the key numbers and our key strategic achievements in the context of the current market dynamics.

Then I will talk about the real game changer for Ströer, as recent technological developments enable us to convert Ströer from an advertising space marketer into an AI-driven platform business, something I had in my mind for years. This will be followed by an update on t-online and Statista.

Henning will then guide you through the figures of fiscal 2025 and Q4. I will close the presentation with the outlook for 2026 and open the call for Q&A.

Our total revenues rose slightly, increasing by 1% year-over-year from €2.05 billion to €2.08 billion, in line with our expectations and our guidance. OOH revenue were up by 4% to €989 million, digital out-of-home by around 8% to €398 million, and programmatic digital out-of-home by 12% to €151 million.

EBITDA adjusted ended the year basically unchanged at €626 million. EBIT adjusted declined by 4% to €307 million.

Net income adjusted was just above €165 million. Free cash flow adjusted coming at roughly €107 million.

Our capital expenditures remained stable at around €93 million, virtually unchanged from last year. Adjusted earnings per share came in at €2.70.

Let's change gears here and look forward. On the next chart, I would like to present you the next logical strategic step for Ströer.

This step will take Ströer to the next level and mark a decisive milestone in the company's history. It is a path we began over a decade ago with the digitization of our portfolio and with strategic acquisitions, such as RegioHelden and local display, video, and native ad reach such as t-online, whose significance is only now becoming fully apparent, especially in combination with AI tools.

This also answers the question, why now? The answer is obvious.

Because only now, with a comprehensive set of AI tools which developed in the last 12 months, we are in the position to transform Ströer from a marketer of advertising space into an AI-driven platform business. What we describe here is the way our business works perfectly well, as we all know, until present day.

It's still primarily manual, silo-based sales model. Customers have traditionally selected predefined advertising space packages and use them as building blocks for their campaigns.

They are buying contacts and reach, but the system of the time are offering only limited visibility into the real impact of those campaigns. Our different product worlds—out-of-home, digital out-of-home, and digital ads—developed with strong expertise in each area, but they evolved for some extent on separate technical and organizational tracks.

Because of that history, they are marketed primarily independently, and our teams worked extensively across these worlds to coordinate offers, scheduling, and delivery. Much of that work was done through hands-on collaboration, with campaign development and follow-up managed directly by our people.

In the present setup, automation is limited, and that is true for good reason. Our business grew quickly, and our teams built tailored solution for thousands of customers.

That model served us well and created strong customer relationships, but as volume increased, the processes remained highly people-driven. Every new campaign required detailed coordination, and impact measurement often relied on data that came from different systems and timelines.

The foundation we built our success on, a model powered by expertise, personal service, and deep market knowledge, and it also shows why the next step in our evolution is so important. By bringing these product worlds together and introducing integrated, automated AI support systems, we can keep strengths that got us here while unlocking new levels of speed, transparency, and scalability for the future.

This chart illustrates the next step we initiated to move from primarily a manual-driven advertising space marketer to a fully integrated AI-powered platform. At the center of this evolution will be the Ströer Ad Manager, a system that dynamically generates individualized products for each customer instead of predefined packages.

The platform creates tailored solutions automatically based on budget, occasion, product, industry, and location. The booking experience changes just as significantly.

What used to require multiple steps and coordination loops will move to a one-click workflow that controls the entire campaign process from start to finish. This will be powered by an AI offer engine that bring all components together—quotation, configuration, and delivery—in a unified sequence.

Alongside the Ad Manager, our PublicMind analytics tool will become the intelligence layer of the system. It predicts and monitors the impact of campaigns and continuously improves them as the platform keeps learning.

For the first time, we can manage campaigns not only by reach, but the expected and measured effectiveness. With the system optimizing itself over time, the economic benefits of this transformation are equally clear.

Faster cycles, lower marginal cost, and stronger margins emerged naturally from AI-driven model. We gained the ability to introduce true yield management across our inventory and to scale our business without scaling our headcount.

The system can generate and evaluate an unlimited number of offer variants, which means we can serve both large national advertisers and local SMEs with equal efficiency. What this chart ultimately shows is a shift from selling advertising space to delivering complete customer solutions—automated, data-driven, and impact-oriented.

It marks the next step in transforming our company into a platform business that grows faster, operates smarter, and strengthens customer relationships with every campaign. With this chart, I'll give you a short introduction to the first pillar of our transformation, the Ströer Ad Manager.

It will be the engine that will automate all our transaction processes and fundamentally change how we serve customers. The platform generates personalized offers at scale, something that, in a traditional setup, would require extensive manual work.

Instead, the Ad Manager does this automatically, combining data, rules, and context signals to produce proposals that are tailored to each customer's budget, location, and objectives. The workflows themselves—review, booking, delivery, and billing—also become fully automated.

What used to require multiple handoffs will be controlled end-to-end by the system. This reduces errors, increases speed, and lowers processing costs.

It will make the entire transaction chain faster. One of the most important elements shown on the slide will be dynamic pricing.

A yield and rules engine will continuously optimize prices and bidding logic so that our inventory will be used as efficiently as possible. This ensures better utilization and creates measurable economic benefits for our business.

Because the system is AI-driven, it can process an unlimited number of bookings in parallel without increasing headcount. That scalability is essential as we expand our reach to many more local and regional advertisers.

The Ad Manager is a key strategic feature that enables us to multiply the numbers of customers we can serve, both locally and nationally, without adding proportional costs. As US performance players, whose offering are complementary to Ströer's product portfolio, have already made self-booking the standard in a digital performance business, AI will enable Ströer to use its extensive digital infrastructure to make customer-specific and target-oriented products easily bookable in a self-service as well.

Let me briefly share our milestone plan for the development and implementation of the Ströer Ad Manager. The plan shows how we'll take the Ströer Ad Manager from concept to rollout with roughly 1.5 year.

We are now starting with the MVP, minimum viable product, concept phase, where we define the architecture, the infrastructure blueprint, the data catalog, and all required systems checks. That works lays the foundation for everything that follows.

Between the second and fourth quarter of 2026, we build the deep data pipelines that power the platform. This includes all ETL connections, extract, transform, load pipeline, to our delivery systems, data clean-up, the warehouse scheme, our product catalog, and the price engine, ensuring we can run the platform on clean, consistent data from day one.

From the third quarter of 2026 to the second quarter of 2027, we add the agentic AI layer. All six to seven agents become fully functional, guardrails go live, and we implement evaluation frameworks and prompt regressing tests.

This is what gives the system the intelligence to recommend, optimize, and execute at scale. During the overlapping period, Q2 2026 to Q3 2027, we build the sales interface and reporting environment: the back office UI, the sales copilot interface, CRM synchronization, and all dashboards and reporting tools.

This ensures the platform integrates clearly into our commercial workflow and is intuitive for every team that uses it. Finally, from Q3 2026 through Q4 2027, we conduct testing and rollout.

Internal pilots, feedback loops, change management measures, and performance tuning lead directly to the go-live. This final step ensures not just readiness of the system, but readiness of the organization to work with it at scale.

Our second pillar for our transformation is PublicMind, our AI-based predictive intelligence layer. Its purpose is simple but powerful: for the first time, the impact out-of-home campaigns becomes predictable, measurable, and fully plannable.

The system uses large volumes of mobility and behavioral data to generate precise predictions of how a campaign will perform, and it feeds those predictions directly into planning and pricing decisions. This slide also shows how PublicMind forms a learning cycle with the Ad Manager.

Every campaign generates new booking, delivery, and performance signals. PublicMind interprets those signals, improves the model, and sends optimized guidance back into planning, pricing, and delivery.

The more the system runs, the smarter it becomes, continuously raising effectiveness across the portfolio. Another important point here is the shift from pure performance metric contacts and reach to impact transparency.

Customers increasingly want to understand the real effect of their spend, not just how many people they reach. PublicMind calculates and optimizes that impact, which strengthens customer confidence and loyalty.

It turns what used to be an estimate into a managed variable that can be improved in real time. Our ambition is clear: we want to form an industry-wide standard.

Let me briefly walk you through the PublicMind development timeline. In the third and fourth quarter of '26, we complete our proof of concept, validating the core QPIs, quality and impact indicators, with selected partners to ensure the impact signals we generate are accurate and reliable in real-world settings.

From the first to second quarter of '27, we build the MVP with five core QPIs, quality and impact indicators: PDI, Presence Density Index; BCS, Bottleneck Coverage Share; 3L, Lag Location Lift; CHL, Carry-Over Half-Life; and IROS, Incremental Return on Ad Spend. These QPIs form the analytic backbone that allows us to quantify campaigns' impact with precision.

In the third and fourth quarter of '27, we shift into multi-partner MVP testing and scientific validation. This phase confirms that PublicMind performs consistently across different industries and campaign types before we scale the system.

Beginning in 2028, we move into full enterprise rollout, including international expansion. At that point, PublicMind becomes the predictive intelligence layer of our platform, guiding, planning, pricing, and delivery across all markets we serve.

To wrap up this chapter, let me repeat the key message: Ströer Ad Manager is transaction engine; PublicMind is intelligence layer. Together, they transform manual ad space sales into a scalable, automated platform business.

AI is becoming the operating system of Ströer, automating the entire value chain from planning to booking, delivery, and impact measurement. The Ströer Ad Manager now acts as our transaction engine, taking over operational steps and enabling scale well beyond manual processes.

PublicMind adds the intelligence layer, turning campaign impact into a measurable and continuously optimized variable. Together, they shift us from a manual ad space business to automated platform.

The automated cycle includes data feedback and self-learning optimization. It drives faster decisions, more accurate pricing, stronger yield management, and better outcomes for our clients, building long-term loyalty and more resilient revenue.

All of this is anchored in our four-layer business model: first, our public infrastructure layer; second, our transaction layer, the Ad Manager; third, our intelligence layer, PublicMind; and fourth, our trusted content layer, t-online. Ströer transforms into a unique AI-driven, real-world media platform.

With t-online as our trusted content layer, we amplify the impact of our nationwide advertising network and increase attractiveness for the German public. Let me now give you an update on where we stand with t-online and Statista.

Let's start with t-online. Over the last 10 years, we have formed t-online into undisputed number one news platform in the market.

The data points on this slide make that unmistakably clear. In terms of net household income, we are reaching the most economically relevant users.

The demographic spread data on the chart underscores t-online's strength. The platform is truly strong across all age groups.

In addition, the gender distribution is very balanced, with 50 million male unique users and 40 million female unique users, together forming one of the largest and most diverse digital news audiences in the German market. What made t-online what it is today throughout the past decade: we are the sole player that combined highly quality journalism with three fully developed distribution channels—desktop, mobile, and public video.

That multichannel approach has allowed us to reach audiences wherever they are and has been central to establishing t-online as Germany's number one news and advice portal. Today across all channels, t-online reaches 47 million unique users.

That scale is matched by a level of trust that has become increasingly important in the age of AI, where reliable information is one of the most valuable currencies. More and more users not only consume our content, but actively prefer our brand over major competitors.

The strength of this model comes from consistency: 10 years of open access without a paywall, 10 years of investment in distribution technology, and 10 years of building a brand that people choose for both news and guidance. When we compare reach amongst German-speaking adults, t-online achieves 43%, outperforming the major news brand in the category.

The most important indicator for advertisers, household managers, shows an even clearer picture. In this segment, t-online delivers a 42% reach, or up to 110% advantage to our key competitors.

Both depth and quality of our reach are key. T-online not only leads in overall audience, it leads where it matters most for brands: among key decision-makers with strong buying power.

This leadership translates directly into higher campaign relevance, stronger advertiser demand, and a clear competitive edge in the digital news and information market. The next chart underscores a simple but decisive point for advertisers: trust drives effectiveness.

The data shows a clear and positive correlation of 0.85 between media brand trust and advertising systems acceptance. In other words, the more a user trusts a platform, the more open they are to advertising and the lower the likelihood of ad avoidance.

Within this framework, t-online stands out with a trust score of 50, significantly above the 32-point score of another major outlet shown in the chart. That 18-point gap is not just a statistical difference; it directly translates into higher acceptance, stronger campaign performance, and better ROI for advertisers who choose our platform.

In times of exploding amount of synthetic content, trust will be one of the most valuable currencies in the digital media, and t-online's leadership in this metric gives us a meaningful competitive advantage in an environment where brand safety, quality, and credibility matter more than ever. When AI-based search and summaries, known as Google Zero, rolled out broadly in early 2025, many in the industry expected online platforms to lose reach and relevance, but our numbers show a very different picture.

A year later, t-online's audience is stable and, over time, clearly growing. Page views in January '26 were up 10% versus '24, and in February '26, based on reported data, page views were up 13% compared with '24.

A key factor in our strong share of direct traffic, what reduces our dependency on external referrals and underscores the strength of the t-online brand. The platform continues to draw large, loyal audiences, supporting advertising relevance and strengthening the long-term quality of our revenue.

The data makes it clear: even in an AI-shaped landscape, t-online remains a destination with stable reach and strong impact. With that, over to Statista to give you a follow-up to our deep dive in H1 2025.

AI and large language models now permeate almost all areas of business, from research and analysis to strategic decision-making, but the quality of the output is only as good as the data behind it. When AI systems access unverified or erroneous data, they produce so-called hallucinations, content that sounds plausible but is factually incorrect.

The figures on this slide speak for themselves: according to McKinsey, the global economic damage caused by AI hallucinations amounted to $67.4 billion in '24 alone. According to Deloitte, almost half of all enterprise users have already made important decisions based on hallucinated information.

Boston Consulting Group estimates efficiency loss due to manual verification of AI outputs at 22%. These are not abstract risks.

A prominent example from last year illustrates this impressively. In October '25, it was revealed that Deloitte Australia had produced a $290,000 report for the Australian government with the help of AI.

The report was full of fabricated sources: non-existent academic publications, fictitious book quotes. Deloitte had to reimburse part of the costs.

This shows that without reliable, verified, and curated data, companies risk not only poor reports, but also fundamental misjudgments with legal, financial, and reputational consequences. This is exactly where Statista comes in as a trustworthy, verified data source for AI-supported workflows.

What makes Statista unique as a data source: first of all, the sheer breadth and depth of our data—over 1.3 million statistics, 80,000 reports, 30,000 infographics, 10,000 topic pages, and around 3 million consumer interviews. About 85% of our data is proprietary or exclusive third-party data, meaning it is created exclusively by Statista.

In addition, we have exclusive partnerships with third-party providers, and crucially, all data is trusted, verified, and editorially classified. What is now changing fundamentally is that this data is no longer only available via statista.com.

We bring it directly to where our customers work, into their own workflows and applications. We do this via our own MCP server for AI agents, via representational state transfer APIs, and via various technical integration solution that companies can integrate in their own applications.

Particularly important, our data is now also integrated directly into the applications of major partners: Perplexity, Canvas, and Microsoft Copilot. This dramatically expands the user base.

It is no longer just power users and analysts who benefit, but effectively the entire company. Usage become more accessible because it takes place directly where people already work, in their everyday applications.

The shift to AI first and the connections to AI application requires a consistent change in two dimensions: product and sales. On the product side, this means first and foremost that we are integrating our data technically into partner applications such as Microsoft Copilot, in other words, co-product development with our partners.

AI is also fundamentally changing how customers search for data with us, keyword: guided search. In addition, AI enables completely new data formats that can be searched in real time.

Here, we are investing heavily in products such as synthetic populations, which allow market research and analysis in real time. To solve customer-specific problems, we specifically address use cases in various industries, for example, media planning.

On the sales side, this results in a new go-to-market approach. Since solutions that are integrated into customer applications and AI systems are significantly more complex, a more solution-based and consulting-based sales approach is needed.

The first step is primarily about convincing customers of the new applications and driving up usage through close integration of sales and customer teams. This also results in new customer segmentation.

Small customers are served in self-service with integrated standard solutions, while for large customers, we jointly develop tailor-made solutions that are embedded in their application and processes. Finally, we expect the pricing model to evolve from a purely seat-based approach to more consumption-based model.

Far my remarks, with that, I hand over to Henning.

Thank you, Udo, and a very good morning, everybody. Udo already elaborated on the key financials for 2025, but please allow me just to add a few remarks.

In what, after a strong start, turned out to be a very challenging year, we delivered, all in all, a very robust performance. After a decline in the first nine months, EBITDA adjusted for the full year was stable, supported by an improvement in the fourth quarter.

Exceptional items for the year amounted to €25 million and included costs for our stock options program €2.5 million, restructuring costs mainly at Statista and expenses for ERP transformation of all together close to €17 million, and costs for the assessment of potential changes of the group's portfolio of roughly €4 million. With that, reported EBITDA amounted to €601 million after €605 million in the prior year.

Depreciation and amortization increased by 5% to €334 million and included roughly €10 million from the acquisition of RBL Media in 2024. Thus, the underlying increase in D&A was somewhat lower.

EBIT for the full fiscal year was €268 million, and thus 7% lower than in '24. At the same time, the financial result improved by 13% and amounted to €67 million.

The improvement reflects lower rates and some positive currency effects from intragroup debt denominated in US dollar, more than offsetting higher net debt. Earnings before taxes were €201 million and €9 million below previous year's level.

Applying a broadly stable tax rate, net income for '25 was €140 million, leading also to an improved equity position in the balance sheet. Adjustments were slightly higher, following the above-mentioned exceptional items, and with that, net income adjusted came in at €165 million, just a few million euros short against the prior year.

While organic growth in Q4 was flat as in the first nine months, sales growth was 3%, supported mainly by an acquisition in our call center business. The corresponding effect on revenue amounted to round about €20 million.

EBITDA adjusted improved by €7 million, mainly driven by the contributions from the just described acquisition, around €3 million, and improved earnings from out-of-home media as well as Digital & Dialog Media segments. Reported EBITDA came in broadly stable.

Higher D&A and thus a lower EBIT was compensated for by an improved financial result, leading to stable earnings before taxes. Taking into account the higher adjustments, net income adjusted even improved to €79 million for the fourth quarter.

Let us now discuss the cash flow development for the full fiscal year and the fourth quarter. While it is obvious that the full year's development was not in line with our initial expectations at the beginning of last year, Q4 cash flow is characterized by improved cash conversion based on tight expense and CapEx control.

With a stable EBITDA in Q4, lower interest and tax payments could compensate for a lower, but still positive working capital contribution. Working capital included roughly €10 million outflows required to finance the activities acquired in the call center area.

Excluding that, the working capital contribution to cash flow in Q4 was roughly on the prior year level. With that, the operating cash flow in Q4 was on prior year's level, representing a considerable improvement compared to the development of the first nine months.

Lower cash out for investments and slightly lower cash out for lease liability repayments even led to improved free cash flow adjusted in the fourth quarter, in line with the guidance that we have provided in our Q3 call. Let us now analyze the net debt development.

Net debt year-over-year was up by €33 million, including our free cash flow adjusted of plus €107 million, dividends to Ströer shareholders of minus €128 million, dividend payments to minority shareholders of minus €13 million, M&A and transaction costs of around minus €3 million, and the remainder of around plus €4 million lower financial liabilities recognized from profit transfer agreements at companies with minority interests. Sequentially, from the end of Q3 to the end of Q4, net debt was reduced by €74 million, including free cash flow adjusted of plus €88 million, M&A expenses of minus €1 million, and quite like in Q4 '24, minus €9 million arising from increased customer overpayments.

With that, our leverage ratio amounted to 2.3 times by the end of fiscal year '25 after 2.1 times last year. Compared to the end of Q3, however, and based on good Q4 cash flow generation, our leverage ratio improved by roughly 0.2 times, giving us reasonable headroom.

Let us now have a look into the performance of our out-of-home media segment. I trust many of you are aware of the challenges IFRS lease accounting implies for the significance of EBITDA.

In order to increase transparency here, we would like to share with you the same chart we have discussed already in the last couple of years, now extended for the values of fiscal year 2025. Looking at the average growth since '22, we see revenue up by close to 8%, supported on the one hand by the acquisition of RBL last year, contributing a sales delta of around €19 million, and on the other hand, however, more than compensated for by an exceptionally challenging market environment in '25.

EBITDA adjusted, which includes effects from IFRS 16 accounting in the same period, showed a slightly higher average growth rate. You also see that IFRS 16 effects increased a little more in '25 compared to the two years before, again partly deriving from the acquisition of RBL.

Now looking at the EBITDA excluding IFRS 16 effects, the cash EBITDA, which certainly is a much better cash flow proxy, we see average growth of more than 10% in the period since '22, the main drivers here being the sales outperformance of our high-margin digital products and above-average growth for our large national account business. Including a CapEx to sales ratio declining into 2024 and stabilizing in '25, cash contribution on average improved considerably by more than 25% on average in the period.

If we now focus more on the development in '25 compared to '24, we see that the EBITDA adjusted margin is improving slightly, while the cash EBITDA margin is flat at 25.5%, the main reason for this being the slightly higher fixed rent exposure compared to the prior year from RBL of roughly €5 million and some €4 million from new contracts at Ströer Polska. Total lease expenses before IFRS 16 amounted to €303 million in '25.

In percent of sales, 30.6%, reflecting a slight increase against the prior year due to a sales mix shifting to slightly more expensive inventory and a lower differential between the sales performance of classic and digital than in the previous year. Delivering a stable cash EBITDA margin at a slightly higher lease to sales ratio shows also good cost and expense control that we intensified after the ad market was going south in spring last year.

For the current fiscal year 2026, we currently expect declining effects from IFRS 16 after several contracts, such as in the cities of Bremen, Frankfurt, and Bielefeld, have been renewed and will now foresee a significantly lower fixed rent component. Let us now have a look at the performance of our different segments with a particular focus on the Q4 development.

Out-of-home media sales in the fourth quarter grew by almost 2% in a very challenging market, which was characterized by declining TV sales. With that, the performance was in line with the projection provided in our Q3 call.

Both our classic and digital products showed moderate growth. EBITDA adjusted was up by roughly €10 million, almost one-third of this coming from an exceptionally strong year-end performance of our activities in Poland and also supported by higher IFRS 16 effects mentioned earlier.

On top of that, our services business, where we supply non-media services to, in particular, smaller clients, improved earnings by around €2 million. The remainder of the improvement also includes continuously tight cost control.

All together, the performance in fiscal year '25, with around 4% growth at a stable cash EBITDA margin, demonstrates resilience under extreme market conditions. Supported by our acquisition in the call center space that is recognized in our financials since the beginning of October last year, our segment Digital & Dialog Media showed a strong increase in Q4 revenues of 9%.

Organic growth for the segment was 0.7% and thus also improved compared to the development of the first nine months. Let me take a moment to repeat the key rationale behind the call center transaction.

The acquired assets relate to Amevida, which was an established provider in the field of dialog marketing with a strong focus on sales and sales-related services. We acquired the business in the course of insolvency proceedings for a negligible purchase price.

As part of the integration, the acquired business is now operated largely from our existing overhead infrastructure. On top of that, we optimized the existing portfolio of locations and renegotiated existing lease contracts, so that all together, we will be able to operate Amevida profitably from day one.

In terms of customer structure, we will strengthen our position by helping mostly already existing clients in their sales process. As opposed to a pure service-related business, this will offer a higher margin potential going forward.

For the full fiscal year '26, we shall have, on average, more than 1,200 additional FTEs, generating more than €70 million in revenue with an expected high single-digit million euro contribution to EBITDA on top of the roughly €3 million recognized in Q4. Our digital media sales somewhat stabilized towards the end of the year.

Revenues of our high-quality owned content portfolio increased and largely compensated for a decline in our third-party portfolio. Q4 EBITDA was up €4 million, largely deriving from the already mentioned transaction and a positive earnings development in digital, which all together more than compensated for a decline of our door-to-door activities, which delivered strong earnings improvement in Q4 of 2024.

Segment revenue in our Data as a Service and E-Commerce segment were down by 4%. Sales at Statista were up 3.5% organically, excluding currency effects, and thus a little bit better than the development in the first nine months.

On the platform side, inbound sales expectedly remained under pressure, while outbound and the ranking business hold up well. By the end of the year, we disposed of a small non-core business unit of Statista, which focused on customized strategic consulting projects.

This unit generated roughly €8 million sales in '25 with no relevant earnings contribution. At Asam, Q4 was challenging for two reasons: firstly, the consumer environment remains under pressure, including a sluggish Christmas business impacting our online channel; secondly, we faced some teething issues after migrating our outdated web shop infrastructure to a new provider.

Initially, insufficient controls led to fraudulent purchase orders in which a large number of guest accounts were used, which finally triggered an extraordinary write-off in receivables of around €2.5 million recognized in our EBITDA adjusted. With that, let me hand you over back to Udo for the outlook and closing remarks.

Provided that the already significant trade policy and geopolitical uncertainties do not increase further, we are optimistic about the 2026 financial year. Based on the assumptions we see today, we anticipate organic revenue growth in the low to mid-single-digit range.

For the cash EBITDA, the EBITDA before IFRS 16, we expect a development in line with sales growth. For adjusted free cash flow before M&A, we see a positive development.

For EBITDA adjusted after IFRS 16, we are expecting a largely stable development compared to the previous year, including lower IFRS 16 effects due to better economic parameters in recently renewed contracts with a shift from fixed to variable rents. A negative accounting impact on EBITDA adjusted on the one hand and declining fixed lease obligations on the other hand.

Looking into Q1 2026, out-of-home media sales should come in slightly above last year's level, even against a strong prior-year growth of 15.3%, which included the impact from the federal elections in Germany. In Digital & Dialog Media, we expect sales growth broadly in line with the momentum of the fourth quarter of 2025, which stood at plus 9%.

For DaaS and E-Commerce, we expect a decline of roughly €9 million, including the disposal of the Statista strategy and consulting unit. Let me now close the presentation with a short look into our financial calendar for 2026.

The annual report for 2025 will be published on March 23, 2026. On May 12, our Q1 numbers will be released.

The half-year figures will be presented on August 13, and our Q3 figures will be published on November 12. In order to do justice to the significance and complexity of our strategic transformation, we are planning a webinar in April 2026, during which we will discuss the topics presented in detail with you and explore them in greater depth.

We will send you an invitation to the webinar in good time. As always, updates, reports, and roadshow presentations can be found on our IR website.

Thank you, everyone. We are now happy to take your questions.

Good morning. My first question is about your AI Ad Manager.

Can you just tell us how much investment is needed to develop this platform over the next years? My second one is on the dialog business.

Can you just isolate again, I think it was a bit too quickly earlier, of how much of the growth is due to M&A, how much of the growth was coming from Ranger in the dialog segment, that would be great. Then on Statista, I think you've already alluded to the usage-based model at the last results.

Can you tell us, has this materialized already in some revenues coming from this new model or are we still in a full transition? I'll just add one more: can you just comment on why your fixed rent payment in the renegotiation has gone down, just to explain us a bit more about that?

Thank you.

Thank you, Annick. Let's start with the last question.

We are benefiting here from the consolidation of the German market, huh? We said that already in the last calls one or the other time.

Generally, the rents are shrinking. That is the result here.

We could improve the rents in a couple of contracts in the last year, which were actually signed 15 years ago, when we had three, sometimes four competitors. Now we have a duopolistic situation here with WallDecaux and us, and WallDecaux is mainly focused on large cities.

That's why we have a let's say very supportive situation which we already saw in the last years, huh? We see shrinking rents, and that is the result here.

IFRS EBITDA is shrinking when we take fixed rents out, huh? The variable rents don't impact that solution, but if the fixed rents are growing, EBITDA IFRS is rising, and when the fixed rents are shrinking, the EBITDA goes down.

This is a bit weird if you look on the first view, because obviously they have lower EBITDA because we have a more favorable rent conditions, huh? First question, the Ad Manager, due to the recent technological developments, huh, it's much cheaper.

We expect maximum around €2 million here in CapEx, is negligible actually, huh? The Ad Manager is clearly something what is our platform, huh?

You can compare it a little bit with whatever Google, for example, doing with Google Ad Manager. This is 10 times more complex and a global thing, etc., but at the end here, the big advantage is that we are able to produce automated offers locally and nationally, huh?

This will be a big help, for example, especially also in the local market, no? Because today we have 30,000 local customers, and average ticket here is like €7,500, and the processing costs and also the sales costs are enormous, huh, because we have no possibility today for self-booking, for example, for local customers, while self-booking became the standard now in local sales really, huh?

Google and Amazon, they do like €13 billion turnover in Germany, and almost everything there is self-booking, huh? Up to now, we have no self-booking capability, and you can only buy, obviously we're selling actually products, huh, we don't sell solutions.

For example, you have whatever 1,000 local Sparkassen banks in Germany. With the Ad Manager, we are able to produce offers for 1,000 banks in two minutes where you have a completely tailored offering across our different advertising platforms, with out-of-home as a key offering, huh?

This can be done by our sales force as a managed service or can be done by the customers or agencies, small agencies which are working for the customer by themselves in a self-booking, huh? That's why we strongly believe that we are able to multiply the number of local customers through the Ad Manager, huh, because we have these completely tailor-made products for every customer, for every opportunity, and for every strategic focus they have, huh?

PublicMind is a bit different. As we are in talks with all key industry players here, because the target is here the intelligence layer, and the development costs are also around €2 million to get it live.

This will be actually an initiative by the association at the end, huh? We are developing it right now, and we are almost finished with the first phase.

Here in the future, we can show the impact of the campaign based on this QPIs about which I was talking before, huh? This will be also a game changer clearly, because impact is key in the future for the acceptance of our media, for any other media, huh?

That's why the combination of the Ad Manager, which is the Ströer development, and PublicMind, which will become a industry-wide initiative, is going to change the acceptance and also how people look at our media completely.

Annick, on your question regarding dialog sales in Q4, you see on slide 30 that sales are growing by around €23 million. Roughly €20 million of this is coming from the acquisition.

The underlying growth in the call centers was I would say around €5 million, and sales at Ranger were roughly down by €2 million. I think that explains.

However, Ranger was quite strong in moving from '23 into '24, there's a bit of a base effect, and also Ranger developed better than we anticipated like 12 weeks ago in the fourth quarter.

On Statista, Annick, we clearly see consumption or usage going up through the changing model, but what we also see is that we have very different results for various clients, it's not like a home run coming from itself. We have customers like, for instance, Shopify, who have integrated Statista data via their LLM Claude, which is implemented in their internal work process, and they had 25x times the credits now that they originally had planned.

You see that the data-based model works very well for specific clients, but there are other customers like in the advertising space Omnicom Group, where you see the changing model in itself has not really driven consumption up so far. You need to work with the clients on the activation of the new model, but we clearly see that consumption or usage in general goes up, but still a very diversified profile across all customers.

You see the customers where it works, you see consumption almost exploding. We're working on finding out where are the levers for the success cases and then implement it in an activation program across all customers that go for Statista Connect.

Thank you.

Hey, thank you and good morning. It's James Tate from Goldman.

I've got three questions, please. Firstly, on the cadence of out-of-home growth through 2026, you mentioned the slight growth in Q1 against a tough comp.

Could you give some color on what you're baking in for the rest of the year as part of your group guidance? Should we expect an acceleration to mid-single-digit growth for sort of Q2 to Q4?

I guess secondly related, have you seen the escalation in the Middle East conflict impact sentiment or forward bookings amongst advertisers, is it in any way similar to the impact that you've flagged around the trade war last year? I guess finally, from a more strategic viewpoint, it was helpful to understand more about Ströer Ad Manager.

Will this also help you become more closely integrated with some of the advertising agencies and grow your share of their direct budgets? You describe the Ad Manager as a game changer.

Could you help quantify how you're thinking about the contribution to out-of-home revenue growth over time? Thank you.

Thank you, James. Maybe starting with the cadence of out-of-home, I think it's probably fair to say that we expect say somewhat of an acceleration as far as we move down the year.

Q1, as we all know, actually was very strong last year with more than 15%, we're quite positive that there's a good chance that we will see quite a bit of a tick-up. I think unchanged, again let us point out that we feel structurally there's no limit that out-of-home should grow close to 10%, let's say our mid-term guidance for the business is unchanged.

Yeah.

The Ad Manager clearly is something which is also let's say asked by the agencies, huh, and the customers, because this will allow us we look today, we all the out-of-home business in the world, they are selling actually the boards and they're selling reach, huh, and they're selling contacts. This is complete game changer, because the customers are asking for impact, huh, not for contacts.

We can buy a lot of contacts, but you need to know what is the outcome from that, huh? Look, we have, for example, today we have a national sales force from 750 people, huh?

That is a big sales force, and they're only like 100 people are working with clients, and the rest is in back office, huh? To transform the business in a platform business is a complete game changer, and I'm 100% convinced that the whole out-of-home industry is going to make this move, huh?

I'm we see that we are here ahead of the development, but the reason and we're also ahead in introducing programmatic technologies to our business because of our strong digital business. We are much deeper in this technological developments, huh, but if you we just got a big study from from one of the big consulting companies last week by chance, and they and we saw that they go exactly the same route for the industry, huh?

The industry will change. AI is a transition transforming power for the out-of-home industry, huh?

You see the future will be clearly you see the big American performance companies, and you see out-of-home growing, and all the other stuff will suffer, huh? Print, TV, radio, the market is changing, and the question is really is AI, is that driving your development on a new level, huh, and and that what we see here, huh?

We are able first time to really report impact, and we are able to automate our processes, which are super complex, huh, because if you have 100,000s of of billboards and street furniture pieces around the country, it's a super complex operation, huh, from from from marketing it, from building product until the maintenance on the street, huh? This is AI is here a complete game changer, and that's you will see in in in the latest 12 to 24 months, the whole industry is going to change in this direction.

Iran, okay, Iran was the question. Right now we don't see an impact, but it depends obviously how it develops, huh?

Nobody can see that. We saw look, last year, I think if if you look at the market development, the market, I think, was in reality high single digit down.

I think we delivered an excellent result for that, but it would look completely different without all this tariffs war and stuff, huh? We are in a situation where consumer confidence and also corporate confidence is is not very high.

For this background, if you look at the numbers, I think we delivered really strong numbers in our core business, especially if you look on digital growth and and digital out-of-home growth and programmatic out-of-home growth. I think this is really surprisingly stable, huh?

Q1 is much better than I expected, huh, because I always look on three years' average growth rates, huh? Last year was an exceptional year in Q1, not only the elections, but also you might remember that the big some of the big German retailers, they kicked these paper leaflets out, huh, and they shifted a lot of money in in advertising for for digital solutions and apps and stuff like that.

This gave also a unusual strong Q1. I expected a slightly negative development in Q1, but we see we we see growth.

I think that's a very good very good signal into the year. Let's see.

I think the second half will be better, huh? That's my expectation growth-wise, because we are progressing here in in in sales, and the market, let's say, is stable, huh?

We the overall advertising market, I think, is not going to change, huh? It is it is a year with a lot of insecureness, huh, and I think TV will be under pressure unchanged, and and print as well.

I I think we see pretty much similarly advertising markets than last year, because the circumstances didn't change, huh? Now we have this new war on top.

Let's see how this if it's finished in four weeks, what we all hope, huh, then I don't see you see an impact, huh? If it goes on for the next six months, then clearly we see globally an impact, huh.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions.

I'll start with top-line guidance: low to mid-single-digit organic. How do we translate that into absolute revenue?

Is there any FX, any M&A? How much does programmatic gross reduce the gross?

That's my first question. The second one is coming on your Ad Manager saying AI is completely transforming the business because we were selling basically number of people and now we're going to sell an audience.

I'm not sure why AI is making the difference. Selling an audience means you need to understand who goes in front of your billboard, which is more like a measurement.

Why is AI allowing you to transform a contact into an impact, as you said? Then last question for Henning on free cash flow: can we get some help and indications maybe, one, cash interest; two, cash tax; three, CapEx; and four, lease repayment?

Thank you.

I think there's a misunderstanding. We don't sell audience, huh?

Look, if you look at these QPIs which I was talking before, like the KPIs, huh, the PublicMind is defining KPIs and we track the efficiency of the campaign against these KPIs. For example, mental availability index, huh?

Because the idea behind that is look, if you compare with a football team, huh, if Bayern Munich wins 3-0 and Harry Kane makes three goals, then Google says, okay, last cookie wins, huh? The whole cash goes to Harry Kane.

You would think, okay, let's hire 10 Harry Kanes, you win 30-0 instead of 3-0, huh? Everybody knows that's not happening.

You need a midfield, and the midfield is actually preparing the conversion, huh? If you have a strong midfield or if you have a stronger brand, then it's much cheaper what you have to spend in performance, huh?

Harry Kane will make more goals if you have a strong midfield. If there is no midfield, he will make maybe zero goals.

In the midfield, you have different KPIs in football. It's not about making goals, but maybe how good your tackling, how accurate are your passes, how much you're running.

We have different KPIs to measure the impact of the midfield, and that's what we are doing here, huh? We don't sell obviously, audience and contacts will be still one point, huh, but people want to know what is the outcome.

We developed here in the first level these five QPIs which I disclosed before, and we are disclosing the impact of the campaigns based on these five KPIs. This is, by the way, exactly what Google or Amazon is doing today.

The other day, I spoke with a guy from the cosmetic industry. He says, yeah, if I add what Google and Amazon are telling me how many units they're selling, I have to sell 30% more than I'm selling in reality, but they deliver impact in relation to self-defined KPIs.

That is the next step, huh? The next step is going from audience to impact, and that is what we achieve here through AI technology.

Without AI, it's impossible to deliver that, huh? Also look, also the Ad Manager, this was actually a concept, a target which I already followed 10 years ago, huh?

That's why we acquired local display, video, and native ad reach. That's why we acquired also RegioHelden, huh?

RegioHelden is a reseller for US player performance products, huh, because my vision was always the moment when the local newspaper companies are disappearing, and this we've been knowing five to six years from what I'm hearing, and five to six years will be out of business, there's no other local sales force anymore. We realized if you don't have a technology and a platform which is combining automatically the different products in a customer-specific product, huh, then it becomes very difficult, because we have then silos next to silos, and it is quite expensive also to sell €7,500 tickets in average with a people-driven sales force, huh?

That through the technical development the last 12 months, we can now actually realize what was my vision already 10 years ago, huh? This will be a big change, because you can even put a prompt in saying, look, I'm a Sparkasse in Cologne.

I have €5,000 or €10,000. I want to make a campaign for winning new customers, huh?

My location is here, and the system will give you directly a tailored product for winning new customers, saying, for example, okay, you invest 50% in outdoor, 20% in local display reach, and 30% in Google Search, and then if pushing the button, you can directly book it, huh, and also pay it, huh? This week actually, we're launching our first test platform for cultural advertising, huh, because this is really small tickets, really expensive in processing, huh?

This one is based on actually Shopify technology, and as a local cultural event company, huh, you book your campaign and you campaign with PayPal or credit card immediately, huh? Very exciting times, and we see that the tests were really promising, and we go live in this week here in the first city in Germany.

Your question, Julien, on sort of breaking down the sales guidance, as I said in the speech, if you ask ourselves what are, let's say, the non-organic effects in the sales of 2026, most important thing for sure is the acquisition in the call center space. I said in the speech we expect more than €70 million sales compared to the €20 million already recognized.

I would say probably €50 million, €60 million additional sales from that in the full fiscal year of 2026. We have to consider minus €8 million from the disposed small strategy consulting unit at Statista.

I think these are the major components you need to understand sort of to break down the guidance a little bit. On free cash flow, just walking you a little bit through the drivers, currently we expect, let's say, lower exceptionals for fiscal year of 2026, so that should a little bit support free cash flow generation in 2026.

In terms of interest, I would say at this point, probably we expect rather stable cash out for interest payments. Tax will probably go up a little bit.

I think we expect a major change in working capital. As which last year has been quite a burden, that turned around a little bit in Q4, and we hope to see also that we will not once again see such a substantiated outflow as we have seen in 2025.

If you ask me now, probably a target at this point in time is that '26 cash flow should be somewhere between '25 and '24 level, right? Maybe just to add, in terms of CapEx, we expect broadly stable CapEx, maybe a little bit increase in out-of-home, which is offset by a little lower CapEx at Statista.

One last remark to Ad Manager and PublicMind, this is not a cost initiative, huh? Obviously, we expect the processing costs to shrink massively, because every order today goes through four, five, or six hands, huh?

This is in the future, it's going to be reduced on one, maximum two, but this is, let's say, a side effect, huh? We don't speak about cost-cutting strategy here.

That is really a side effect. We speak about transforming, and that's what I said before.

The whole industry will transform in the next four to eight quarters. Let's say, four quarters will start to transform in the next four quarters, and I'm convinced that it will transform in the next, let's say, two or three years completely.

Danke.

Bitte.

Hi, everyone. Can you hear me?

Yes, sir.

Perfect. Two questions.

Udo, can you comment a little bit more how this thought of new model and your approach will impact how the agencies will sell outdoor? We obviously understand that there's structural shift here, but do you see now given this move there's an accelerated shift, would be interesting to hear sort of how much longer you think the agencies can still push their sort of own TV and print inventory, and how is that going to change?

Then secondly, we briefly touched on this, the question is indeed also on cost savings due to AI. I fully understand that it's much more exciting on the top line, but nevertheless, the question is, yeah, what can be expect in terms of potential changes, yeah?

Because nearly every company in our space talks about more efficiencies, talks therefore about margin expansion. We don't see this really coming through yet at Ströer.

The question is, is that going to change, yeah, conceptually at least from '27 onwards, or how shall we think about AI also again on the cost side of things? Again, I understand it's more about the top line, but would be very interesting to hear.

As you all know, the most of the initiatives where people try to introduce AI and lower the costs are not really successful up to now, at least you don't see many successful cases. As I said, that's not a cost-saving activity, but we believe that in the next five years, we can save up to €50 million costs if you compare the costs in five years with the costs we're going to have driven by AI.

It's a significant impact, but I don't think that in the next two years, you see here big effects, huh? That's all over the place.

It's not only in our company. I also believe that there are many people doing mistakes now, because if you introduce AI as really a transformational power in your company, you have to be aware that this change everything, and that change also your processes, your workflows, and it makes no sense Like it made no sense when the internet came up and digitization started Many people tried to do the same in a digital way what they did before in a non-digital way, and I think now many people make the same mistake again, huh?

This is a game changer, this technology, and I think for many companies like we, who are operating a very complex setup of products and processes, all over the place if you don't fuck it up, there will be a lot of impact on costs and profitability in the next five years, huh? I would guess to achieve the full potential, it will take four, maybe four, maybe five years.

Difficult to say right now, as the technology is developing so fast that we were discussing now for whatever three months that I said, look, we need in this lead-to-offer-to-order process in national sales, huh, we need a tool for our national sales people so that it actually takes over the strategic work in delivering tailor-made strategic planning solutions for our national customers, because at the end, customers want to see how we solve their problems. They don't want us to sell our products.

Now two days ago, suddenly we introduced a new technology, and everybody's totally flabbergasted, because nobody expected four weeks ago that would be possible now in the next 12 months, and now it's actually alive since 24 hours. Things are changing very quickly, and that's also why we hired a CTO now, which we announced also today first time, that we have a group CTO who is focused on the main business, on the core business, and this is one of the first results of that.

I deeply believe we are completely at the forefront here of the technical development, and so up to €50 million next five years. Can be also quicker, is difficult to say from today's point of view, because the technological development is much faster than everybody can foresee that right now, huh?

On the agency side, look, that's very simple. The agencies are under pressure, because in the past they made money with reselling TV actually, and now TV is going down faster than anybody expected, huh?

There's a still mid-high single digit of billion of euros in print and TV, which are going either to us or to the Americans, huh? If it goes to the Americans for the agencies, that means zero income.

That is something where I expect in the next two or three years that we see support, huh? What we're doing right now that we develop joint business plans, midterm joint business plans with the agencies.

That is one of the reasons why I'm quite optimistic in midterm, huh? I still think that '26, war, this and that, blah blah blah, will be similarly like '25, but midterm, this is one of the reasons why we are very optimistic here for our core business, because the agencies, we are a natural strategic partner for them.

They're also saying, look, we need to report impact to our customers. Look, what we have today, we have to convince customers they do outdoor, and then after the campaign was running, they see it's working, and but we're not able to predict impact.

This at the same time, look like Google and Co., they made it very smart, because they developed from the beginning their own set of KPIs, and they're reporting success in relation to this KPIs they developed on their own. This is not real at the end.

That's why I said before this cosmetic example. If you add what Amazon and Google is selling for you, you end up with 130% from what you are selling.

People want to see impact, even if they know it's not 100% correct, huh, because nobody, even not Google, is able to show 100% real reality, huh? This is something which is clearly a key demand.

The agencies say, look, we want to do more outdoor, because it's also for us more profitable to do outdoor than the money goes to the US, but we need to report impact, we need to predict impact, we need to plan impact, huh? Prediction, report, and the learning layer, huh?

This is actually what also Americans made it as a market standard today, huh? That is self-booking is a market standard for local clients, became more and more market standard, and impact, prediction, reporting, and uplift, huh?

That's what we're doing right now here, huh? We move to the digitization of our infrastructure.

We became a part of the future, huh, but now we make the second step, huh? We make the second step in how we sell it, how we prove transparency of what is the impact, how we produce our products with a clear customer benefit, huh?

That's actually, I think, these are the keys of what we see in the upcoming quarters, huh, and what I already said, I take every bet that the industry not even in three or four quarters, the whole industry talks about the same stuff.

Perfect. When do you think you would be in a position to give a bit more sort of on the potential of incremental revenues at the end of the day, yeah?

Because obviously these changes, yeah, sound intuitively makes a lot of sense. Personally, I find it quite hard to really see what the add-on at the end of the day on revenues will be, and when do you think you will be in a situation to help, I guess, the market to understand it better in terms of also the financial impact?

We gave a first hint what is easier in local markets, huh? We have 3 million SMEs in Germany, 30,000 our customers, huh?

I'm convinced, and we do €200 million. Our midterm target, huh, when the system is in place up and running, I'm convinced we can serve 100,000 customers instead of 30,000, huh?

I think this is much more easy to calculate in regional-wide, because there are no agencies, huh, there's no other sales force, we are the only one visiting customers. There's no competitor at the end, and today and the local clients, they don't have a defined strategy, huh?

It depends also how's convincing your offering. In national, it's more complex, because the customers have a lot of specialists here, they have their own strategies, the agency has a strategy, the agency has financial ties with background from kickback deals, etc.

That goes slower. But 30,000 customers is what we're serving now with a low profitability, huh, because €7,500 a ticket, you can imagine that there is something where you see low profitability.

When you increase that from 30,000 to 100,000 and let's say 40% of them do it in a self-service, this will be one of our KPIs in the future which we're going to report, how much of the turnover is going to be in self-service or not, but then the profitability will obviously explode, then you go from if you have five times if you go, for example, to 100,000 customer, you go to €1 billion instead of €200 million turnover, and with a very happy profitability.

Yeah. Super.

Thank you.

We will offer this webinar in April where whoever is interested, we walk you more in detail about what we're doing there and what we believe what's going to happen.

Perfect, yeah. Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, thank you. I just have two more questions.

Just diving into your 2026 outlook in a bit more detail, you are guiding for organic revenue growth, but stable adjusted EBITDA. Where are we seeing some margin pressure in the business if that were to happen?

Could you maybe give us some color by segment as to where you think margins could improve versus not? Also connected to that, this is the organic EBITDA, I'm assuming, that you're guiding towards, what should be expected for reported EBITDA once the EBITDA from the inorganic businesses or the acquisitions that you've done are included?

Some color there would be great. Second, on the AI Ad Manager, Udo, just to confirm, the €2 million in CapEx you mentioned, is that already in this year's outlook for 2026 or is it the whole sort of project?

Is there anything in OpEx that you've also included, do you need to hire more tech people to ensure those layers are created? Some color there would be great.

Thank you.

Let me take the last one first. No, this is a total cost up to now, but this cost reflects also the technological development, huh?

I don't want to say you can buy it off the shelf, but you're not far away from that, huh? Programming becomes so much cheaper, and so much power, brain power worldwide on this technology, this is helping here a lot.

I have to say I was also surprised when I got the numbers from the team, especially if you look at the impact which is going to have, a major transformation of the whole industry at the end. We don't think we need to hire more people.

We have 100 programmers here which are working on our SSP, which comes not to an end, but where we see less expenses going forward. For now, we are pretty much convinced that we have enough people on board to realize that, huh?

Because what I said already some minutes ago, what we call L-to-O, lead to offer to order, that is let's say the strategic planning work which our sales people are doing with the national clients, huh? This is something where we did everything by hand until three weeks ago.

The sales guy visited a client, the client gave some briefing, then the sales went back to the back office, gives them a briefing, then the back office started to think what we could offer and how we could argue, then it was three, four feedback circuits until we had something. Today it looks like 18th century, huh?

With the new tool which we introduced just some days ago, this goes in a minute in a different completely quality and speed than it happened up to now, huh? The costs were zero, because it was a product from the shelf.

Nizla, on your question understanding better what is the sort of organic outlook for EBITDA going forward, I think we walked you through already the technical effects that will arise from lower IFRS 16 effects. Just looking at the underlying cash EBITDA, we believe that should develop in line with sales more or less.

We are positive on the margin outlook for the full year on out-of-home, but it's also fair to assume that at this point in time, we're still cautious on digital as a service and in e-commerce. In our guidance for Q1, we already said we expect sales decline by around €9 million, right?

The major positive contribution to EBITDA anorganically, if you will, will come from the call center acquisition, and here I would say round about €5 million to €7 million will be the additional EBITDA from that acquisition that we expect in the current fiscal year. I hope that answers your question.

Yes, very helpful. Thank you.

Yes, good morning. Thank you very much for all the information provided.

It's very interesting. A few questions from my side.

First, quite easy, if we can touch a bit on the one-offs. I understood the one-offs in 2025.

What are expectations for 2026? Are there any more restructuring that are required at Statista or at other divisions, and with the project developments that you are looking at?

There is CapEx. Should we get more OpEx as well?

I didn't get that. Also, do you need then to retrain and to upskill your employees if that is also something that you already expected in your guidance for the EBITDA or it's one-offs that you will consider?

Another question on contract renegotiations that took place now with the impact on the EBITDA. Do you see any further contracts upcoming for the renegotiation where we can see the similar things?

Then the last question is on your projects: with whom are you developing? Is it all internal or do you work with some external providers?

With the amount of just €2 million, that really comes as a very efficient product, to say. Against whom are you competing here, because other people could also come up with a similar product?

Are you targeting with those products the agencies or the clients, or what's the idea here? Who do you think will be the major user?

Then you said that you can allocate the marketing budget across different media, it can go to the out-of-home, to the online, to your website, but also to Google Search, etc. How are you going to do this?

Are you going to work directly with Google, are you going to then work via agencies who will sell the Google platforms? How that is going to look like?

Thank you.

Let me take the last one first. No, this Google stuff is only for local customers, and national sales obviously we only sell our products, huh?

On local sales, we bought a company many years ago called RegioHelden, who's doing exactly that, because the idea was always Look, in the past in local newspaper companies, they were actually serving something between an agency or a media house, because they were selling newspaper ads, radio, and whatever, a couple of local products, exhibitions, leaflets, and whatever. Now is the question, who is the central source actually, who is serving these local clients, huh?

There's obviously a gap. That's why we develop the local sales force, that's why we acquired RegioHelden, because we wanted to discuss with the local client a solution where we can take over 100% of the budget managing the budget in reality.

That means we can influence that we are able to distribute it in the channels where we have the highest profitability, huh? That is the idea behind that.

That means either we sell outdoor or local video, display, or native ad reach. That what we have in our portfolio today with t-online in the core, huh?

Is this clear? Is this the answer?

Yes. Yes.

Then in terms of the local clients, you're talking about their brand owners, you're talking also about the small local agencies with whom you can work together?

No, no, absolutely. Self-service does not mean only that the customer is booking it.

There are small local agencies, but today it's quite complicated, huh, because you cannot book it in self-service. You have to talk with our sales first, huh?

There's no platform where you can buy something, huh? You have to ask our sales people to come in the agency, huh, then they show them pictures about billboards and this and that, and then you write an offer, huh, and then you get an order different, then you have to adjust the order, then the sales give it to a sales support, then sales support give it to the back office, then the back office give it to operations.

We did it as efficient we could do it in the past, huh, but this is a very complex process with a lot of handovers and many people involved, and we're talking about small tickets. There is mission-critical in the future that the local agency can go on Ströer Ad Manager, and they see everything what they need actually for local sales, and they can even prompt in by voice what they want to have, and the system gives them an offer, and they can press a button and the whole thing is done, huh?

Ideally, nobody's touching it anymore on our side. This will be the last evolution level, but this is I think easy to understand that this is a complete game changer, especially in local sales where you have small tickets and very complex portfolio, huh?

That's what we see now in this first test with this cultural advertising, we were surprised on ourselves, but it's how easy that goes, yeah? Also these cultural managers are trained more by Google.

This is the advantage here. Google trained these people to use Google products in self-service.

For them, it's normal now that they book a campaign on the mobile phone. Until whatever two weeks ago, we are still sending papers back and forth and that was super complex and expensive.

There was another question here. Who is using the tool?

The tool is used first by our sales locally and nationally, the Ad Manager and also the PublicMind. Why?

Because at the end, we have to develop a product which solves the problems of our customer. I saw a lot of customers in the last month, and they said, look, guys, you sell your products to us, but we want solutions, not products, huh?

We want you to explain us how you can help us to achieve our targets. Not every sales guy is so super smart that he really develops a tailor-made fantastic solution which is for the customer super convincing, because for that he had to digest and process so many details about the customer, what he's doing, what he did in the past, what is the target, what is the budget, what's the location, where are the shops, and all of this stuff.

By the way, you can do it even if you have a ChatGPT account today. If you train it for two weeks and you don't need to invest one penny, you get better strategic planning and results than if somebody does it manually.

Because the technology is able to process so many details, which is very difficult for human, huh? Media planning is very complex.

You have to process a lot of different data: historical data, target data, whatever consumer data, etc., etc., etc. Even with a standard GPT account, you get much better offers than anybody in our company or any other company is able to produce as a single human person, huh?

That is why it's looks so cheap in comparison to what we achieve, because LLM technology is what we say with Statista, it's like a race car, but it depends what kind of fuel you put in. If you have the right data, that is Statista, then it makes the results much better, but the technology is developed, huh?

The heart of the thing is the LLM itself, and what we develop now are use cases based on this technology. We don't develop the technology, huh?

That is a big difference. In the past, whatever when we programmed our Ströer sales SSP, sell-side platform, we invested whatever over time €50 million, €60 million, huh, because there was no technology what you could use.

You had to program everything on your own, huh? Now we have this LLM technology, and the only thing you have to do, you have to put the use case on top, and the costs are a fraction of what we, for example, spent for developing the Ströer SSP.

In local sales, people will work a lot in self-service, huh, but in national sales, the agencies will work with PublicMind, huh, because the agencies, they have a natural interest to keep as much money as possible in the country, because they make more money with that, but they need to prove impact. Without impact, it's very difficult to move money from A to B, huh, and that's why we made a roadshow now in the last months, big roadshow, we saw all the agencies, and the feedback was, okay, this was more than needed, this was more than necessary, and why you didn't do it earlier?

We couldn't do it earlier, because the technology was not there.

Anna Patrice, on your question on adjustments in 2026, I think it's probably fair to say that the impacts we had here from restructuring at Statista and also from the project that was relating to potential sale of the core business, here these stuff is behind us, so that should actually let you lower adjustments going forward. On the other hand, based on what Udo explained about Ad Manager and PublicMind, it's probably fair to say that adjustment from transformation costs in terms of systems will rise a little bit.

Net-net, we would anticipate lower adjustments for fiscal year 2026 at this stage.

That means that there's still some restructuring to do and hence adjustments?

I think it's important to say that the things that are qualified as exceptionals have to relate to a clearly predefined catalog that is also aligned with the auditors. In terms of restructuring, I think in general, we always keep some flexibility.

When we see there's a measure which potentially lead to a very strong or short payback, strong return, we will always consider. What we do doesn't depend on the question whether we can adjust or not.

What we do depends on what makes sense economically, and we are prepared if we see potential, then we also prepare to implement the corresponding restructuring. As part of the adjustments budget for the current fiscal year, there's also, I'd say, smaller restructuring measures in some of our content publications units is included already, but from today's perspective, not much included is for, let's say, a larger reduction of the workforce, if you refer to that.

Understood. Sorry, maybe last question to Udo: why do you think they will not use the Google Ads, the platform for what you describe, which is kind of similar now?

If they want to understand their marketing budget, how they want to spend it, etc., why would they use already existing platforms?

I think they will go on using Google platform for self-booking, search and performance marketing, but those clients are so trained on user experience-friendly self-booking tools that they would book by far more out-of-home directly if there was the same access to inventory and outcome-oriented tools as in the search area from Google.

I think it's just opening up opportunities where the user experience or the simplicity of approaching the available inventory or the available marketing purpose is comparable to what they are used to in the Google Ad Manager space, and I think that's just we try to catch up with the best-in-class standard, and AI technology and more data just opens up new opportunities here.

To make it clear, this Google stuff is not a business model for us, huh? It's just a service in case a small client wants us to handle it, we do it, huh?

It's just to underline our approach that we say, we solve your problems, and if you want, we also handle this Google stuff for you, but this will be peanuts, huh? That is not important for our business.

This is just, let's say, a marketing move. We show the customers, look, you can book everything out of one hand, but let's say 99% of the customers for sure will book Google like today separately, and they use our platform, Google platform, and maybe also Amazon's platform, huh?

That will be a reality. It's just, let's say, a marketing move, and what we are also doing today, huh?

RegioHelden is a small business, I don't know what's the turnover of RegioHelden.

It's

€25 million or something, huh? It's a service wherever wants to use the service, huh?

It's a pure marketing stuff.

Understood. Thank you.

We don't want to resell anything, huh, to make it clear. We want to sell our own products.

As a reseller, it's always not interesting really. That's why it's a pure service offering for the customers in case we believe that it gives us an advantage to do that, huh?

Thank you.

Yes, good morning, guys. Obviously, most of my questions have been answered in the meantime, but first of all, just to be clear, I guess at this webinar in April, I assume you will walk us through some very clear examples on just exactly how the impact of the out-of-home ad campaigns are generated?

That'd be my first question, and I have two other quick questions.

Yes.

Yes.

Showing the logic, showing the plan, showing the desired outcome by means of what's the range of business impact midterm.

Also make transparent again what is the difference to where we're standing today, huh, to give you a better idea what is the outcome of that, huh? This obviously partly deep in operations, huh, but I think it's easier to understand if you compare status quo with what we are going to achieve.

Okay. Second question is just, do you have any major concession contract renewals coming up that we should be aware of?

In particular, I'm thinking about the Deutsche Bahn contract, and also as these roll over, and I think the previous colleague was starting to ask this question as well, is whether we might expect more structural changes also in the nature of these contracts, i.e., with a lower fixed component and a higher variable component for the IFRS 16 lease costs. Also just in a broader perspective, are there major contract renewals we should be aware of?

Thank you.

No, no, no, Deutsche Bahn is running for a long time, until the 2030s, we are beyond that. We have no significant contracts, there's every month's a tender, it's an ongoing process.

The biggest one which come up is Hamburg. This is clearly an upside, huh, because we lost a lot of money in this contract, because there was time where we have still three players in Germany with Wall, Decaux, and us, huh, that was before Decaux took over Wall, and it was a fierce battle in these days.

That is something pretty positive, but doesn't impact the P&L, huh? There is nothing what we see, and by the way, the reduction of fixed rent here doesn't mean we pay more variable rent, huh?

We lowered the fixed rent and the variable rent in each of these cases, because now the tenders are coming now are 15 years old, and this was a different market situation 15 years ago, huh, where we had much more competition in Germany.

If I understand that correctly, then gradually over time as these contracts are renewed, and presumably successfully from your perspective, we can expect the rents to be coming down,

i.e.

it might optically look less negative for the operational EBITDA, but from a cash perspective, perhaps be quite positive, and hence the focus should probably reshift back to the traditional EBITDA on a cash basis, I would assume. Correct?

Yes.

Okay. My final question is just to get back to the CapEx.

Henning, if I understood you correctly, I think you were saying in out-of-home you thought it might even be a little bit higher this year, and just a little surprised. I thought actually we might see that coming down a bit because of the digital out-of-home national network being now largely already installed.

If you can maybe be a little more specific on what you're kind of expecting on CapEx, that'd be helpful. Thank you.

Craig, as we usually don't provide breakdown of the group CapEx. When I say out-of-home, we expect it to rise a little bit, you should not think that this is €10 million or so.

I say it's a moderate increase that we foresee at this point in time, and on the other hand, we will have decreasing in other parts of the group. There's no change to the general idea that the CapEx to sales ratio for out-of-home is clearly going down over time, because largely the digital portfolio is built.

Still, we have things to do, right? You have seen the fantastic whale that we launched in

December.

I can only invite everybody to have a look. Obviously, that doesn't come for free, and needs also to be accommodated for in the CapEx budget.

In general, the story is completely unchanged.

Okay. All right.

Thank you.

Yes. Could you elaborate a little bit more, please, on your digital business?

You touched base on the t-online, highlighting how important the content is there, that the numbers are not declining. What about the other portfolio of your websites that you own and that you manage?

Do you also see in your own sites stable traffic or do you see a declining, and what are your expectations for mid- to long-term developments here? Thank you.

The key is t-online, huh? This is also from the profitability side.

We have some smaller also special interest portals where we see everywhere impact on traffic, huh, but commercially this is not really impacting the whole thing. T-online is for us the asset which is key for growth and profitability.

All over the place, I think clearly depends what the courts are going to decide, huh, but I think that the special interest portals, which are mostly quite small, also the third-party bunch which we are selling, I think that they lose traffic clearly, not only to Google, but also to LLMs, huh, because many of them are also used for checking specific information, huh? We are very happy about the development of t-online, because obviously when the whole thing started and everybody discusses Google Zero fear, we didn't know what's going to happen.

If you look at the reach now, development from t-online is I think strong proof for the stability of the brand and our concept also. Don't forget, t-online is the only worldwide news portal which is desktop, mobile, and on digital out-of-home, and this also gives us a strong stability for direct traffic, huh, because if you count it as advertising spend, what we do on digital out-of-home where we show branded content, t-online content every day, if you would pay it, it's 100s of millions of advertising for the t-online brand every year, huh?

This is clearly also one of the reasons why t-online is developing even after Google rolled out these AI stuff in last year May was finished. I think there was a lot of questions also last year about that, also from investors, I think this is a very encouraging data point.

All right. If I look at the EBITDA of the Digital & Dialog, roughly €150 million, I thought that probably round about €80 million would be from the Digital and the rest, €70 million from Dialog.

That out of the Digital, only maybe one-third are from t-online, no? Or how important is the EBITDA contribution of t-online versus the rest?

Because if the rest go down, what is the risk? What is the overall risk?

Anna Patrice, I think as we all know, I think the margin in our t-online business is probably one of the best margins we have all across the group. You can think about margin in terms of being 50%.

As Udo explained, it's absolutely key that we do everything we can to keep that stable or even have that growing slightly. The margins that we generate from selling third-party inventories, if you will as a wholesaler, are very tiny, right?

That even if sales are going down there, that is not too much of an issue. As we're not providing these numbers individually as part of our constant reporting, we would leave the comments there,

please. Thank you.

Thank you very much, everybody. I hope we could transfer some interesting information, very interesting times.

We are very excited here, and I hope we could excite you also a little bit. Thank you very much, and have a nice day.

Thank you. Bye.