Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the IONOS analyst investor call for FY 2025. Thank you for taking the time today to join us.

My name is Stephan Gramkow, and I'm responsible for investor relations at IONOS. Let's have a look at today's agenda.

Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS, will provide an update on the overall business and important strategic topics. Patrik Heider, CFO of IONOS, will then take you through the financial details of 2025 and Q4 in particular.

Patrik will then also talk about our outlook for 2026 and midterm targets. Achim and Patrik will then be happy to answer any open questions after the presentation.

I would now like to hand it over to Achim, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Stephan. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our conference call.

I'm Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS. The headline from 2025 is customer growth.

We nearly doubled net new customer additions from 160,000 in 2024 to 310,000 in 2025, lifting our total base to 6.63 million customers. For 2026, we [anticipate?]

anticipate even further acceleration in our new customer growth. The quality of customers remains excellent.

We grew revenue across all relevant product lines from web hosting to communication, back office, and domains. On the right-hand chart, you can see the rising share of AI in Web Presence and Productivity revenue.

In 2025, AI accounted for approximately 20% of additional revenue. We expect that to reach about 50% this year, further growing to 80% by 2028.

Momentum will be a significant contributor. The more AI we embed, the higher the revenue per customer, combining volume growth with product mix improvements.

AI is now embedded across our entire product ecosystem. In Web Presence Productivity, we are enhancing our core offerings whether as a feature in onboarding and administration or as a standalone product like the AI phone receptionist.

From domains and web hosting to e-commerce and back office solutions, all products now include intelligent features. In Cloud Solutions, we are delivering sovereign, trusted European infrastructure to both SMBs and enterprise clients.

Our portfolio extends from public and private cloud to specialized AI infrastructure, including the AI Model Hub, GPU servers, and model fine-tuning and app integration such as n8n on VPS. In November, we launched IONOS Momentum, which is a full stack ecosystem for SMBs to run digital operations end to end.

As part of Momentum, we introduced the AI phone receptionist in Germany and the US at the end of last year. It's essentially a virtual employee.

It answers and manages business calls in natural speech across more than 20 languages. Trained on a customer's own website and knowledge base, it handles inquiries, books appointments, captures leads around the clock, and delivers structured call transcripts to the business owner.

With almost no marketing investments, we have generated approximately 3,300 orders. 80% of these customers have completed the setup and are actively live, ahead of our internal targets.

In the early experience survey, 50% of respondents rated their satisfaction at an average of 4.5 out of 5. Here's an example.

One of our German customers is a mid-sized office planning consultancy, around 15 people. The consultants spend most of their time in on-site meetings, and nobody was able or available to answer incoming calls.

Leads were lost, follow-ups delayed. With the AI phone receptionist, all calls are now handled round the clock.

The AI captures the caller's intent, schedules appointments when needed, and sends structured summaries by email. The team focuses on their core work and follows up efficiently.

We see similar adoption in consulting and IT, shops and stores, and building services, segments where phone availability is business-critical, but often conflicts with the actual work. Across our early user base, customers report easy onboarding, 24/7 reachability, and time savings of up to 10 hours per week on average.

They particularly value the natural professional quality of the conversations and the structured call summaries that make every interaction immediately actionable. These are early results from a newly introduced product with very limited marketing.

The adoption curve and feedback confirm we are solving real problems. The AI phone receptionist is the first product within a broader vision.

IONOS Momentum is a fully integrated modular ecosystem. Each product connects to the next.

At the front sits the AI Frontdesk, the first point of contact between an SMB and its customers. It handles inbound communication across voice, chat, email, and messaging apps.

It manages appointments, prioritizes requests, and it generates data and feeds it into the rest of the system. The data flows into the smart AI CRM, which captures and classifies leads, stores interaction history, analyzes intent and sentiment, and suggests next best actions.

The AI Presence Suite turns customer knowledge outward, automating content creation, managing online presence, and handling marketing, reputation, including legal and security matters. The sovereign AI chatbot runs out the ecosystem, a fully EU-hosted GDPR-native AI front end running on sovereign European models.

It offers enterprise-grade AI at cost-efficient price points, a credible alternative to ChatGPT or Gemini with the data sovereignty our customers require. What ties everything together is the AI knowledge hub at the base, a shared intelligence layer combining company data from the website, customer documents, and interaction data enriched over time.

Each product feeds the other. The more a customer uses Momentum, the more the system learns.

This creates a platform embedded in daily operations, driving retention, expanding revenue per customer, and building switching costs over time. What does the roadmap look like?

Following the AI phone receptionist launch, we are rolling it out across additional countries and brands where we already have a customer base. The incremental investment is low.

In parallel, we are expanding the feature set. Key additions include the AI knowledge hub, third integrations, dedicated workflows with multiple agents, and multichannel capabilities covering voice, email, and chat.

The website remains the single most important digital asset an SMB owns: their own channel, their brand, their customer interface. With AI, this becomes even more critical.

Large language models pull information from the web just as search engines always have. An SMB without a well-maintained, authoritative website will not exist in AI-driven search and discovery.

A website is no longer just a marketing tool. It's infrastructure.

SMBs also want to own their customer relationship directly, not via third-party platforms or search engines. A website combined with a professional domain gives them exactly that.

IONOS delivers this as a complete integrated package: domains, hosting, e-commerce, email, security, and support from day one. This foundation creates a natural upsell path.

We see strong demand for high-value, high-margin AI-powered services on top of the web presence stack: GEO, generative engine optimization, as a successor of SEO, agentic AI tools, MCP services, and more. At the same time, AI is lowering the barrier of entry.

Our prompt-to-website capabilities bring customers directly into higher-value products, moving them from basic shared hosting to MyWebsite and beyond, which drives ARPU at scale. As we embed more AI into onboarding, editing, and daily workflows, product usage deepens and retention improves.

IONOS sits at the intersection of necessity and opportunity. Websites are becoming more strategic for SMBs, and AI drives enhanced revenue opportunities on top.

Let me address AI-powered website creation directly. Vibe coding, generating a website, an app, or digital presence by describing what you want in plain language, is a real and accelerating trend.

We are fully embracing it. The distinction is this: standalone AI builders generate a website.

Our customers get that plus a domain, hosting, e-commerce, email, security, and personal support, all connected from day one. This drives higher attach rates and higher ARPU from the first interaction.

For MyWebsite, we launched vibe onboarding in February. A customer describes their business in natural language, and our AI generates a complete, ready-to-use website connected to their domain and email, styled, structured, and live.

In Q2, we will add further prompt-to-editor capabilities so customers can continue refining their site through conversation. For WordPress, we have taken a slightly different approach.

Our WordPress customers tend to be more sophisticated, operating larger digital presences. Our WordPress AI assistant combines the extensibility of the world's leading CMS with AI-powered content generation, enhancing design controls and integrated site management.

It makes WordPress more accessible and more powerful. The shift toward AI-powered website creation is accelerating our business.

We embed these capabilities into our platform and capture the value of everything that follows. We are building IONOS into an AI-first business on two dimensions.

You have seen the external side: AI embedded across our products and deeply integrated in how our customers operate. There's also an internal dimension.

We are using AI to drive operational efficiency, automating workflows, reducing overhead, and making our teams more effective. This has direct impact on margins.

Our core customers, solo entrepreneurs and SMBs representing over 90% of our revenue, want AI that is simple, affordable, and delivers tangible results without a technical team. We're not selling AI for its own sake.

We're selling outcomes: more customers, lower costs, faster operations. We have a structural advantage that is hard to replicate: proprietary European cloud infrastructure with GDPR native guarantees built on a decade of trust.

AI strengthens our competitive position, expands the addressable market, and drives higher ARPU. The European cloud market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of roughly 15% in the coming years, driven by SaaS adoption, hybrid cloud solutions, AI integration, and increasing demand for digital sovereign infrastructure.

Our aim is to accelerate revenue growth, particularly in the SME, midmarket, and public sector. We are expanding our product portfolio with GPU servers and enhanced private cloud features.

We are also growing our partner network, adding new partners and leveraging existing global relationships. Now contract with ITZ Bund completed a successful ramp-up phase in 2025 and is now in continuous operation, confirming our capability to deliver sovereign cloud at the highest governmental levels.

At this point, I would like to hand over to Patrik to walk you through our financials before we open for Q&A.

Thank you, Achim. Good morning, everyone.

It is a pleasure to be with you for my first result presentation as CFO of IONOS. As a brief reminder, following the reclassification of our AdTech business as discontinued operations in November 2025, it is no longer reflected in our reporting structure.

This allows us for a clear focus on our core business areas. Looking at the structure, we generated €1.3 billion in revenue in 2025.

Web Presence and Productivity remains our cornerstone, accounting for 83% for nearly €1.1 billion, while Cloud Solution contributed 14%, reaching €187 million. On the bottom line, we delivered €485 million in adjusted EBITDA, representing a 36.8% margin.

This significant step-up clearly demonstrates the operating leverage embedded into the IONOS platform. We are converting revenue into profit more efficiently than ever before in our history.

This is the strong baseline we are building upon. Let's dive into the details.

Let's look at the financial performance for the full year 2025. Revenue amounted to €1.317 billion.

This represents a year-over-year growth of 5.5% or 6.1% at constant currency. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 18.5% to €485.2 million.

This corresponds to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 36.8%, a significant expansion of 4 percentage points compared to the previous year. It clearly demonstrates the massive operating leverage of our platform and our discipline in converting revenue into profit.

Marketing investments has been higher than last year. As a reminder, we are differentiating between brand investments and performance marketing.

While brand investments will stay at a level of around €65 to €70 million, we expect performance marketing to grow in line with revenue. Looking at the fourth quarter, revenue increased to €336.7 million.

This represents a growth of 3.6%. On a constant currency basis, revenue grew 5.2%.

Turning to profitability, we see a very strong development. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 11.9% to €116.8 million.

This results in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 34.7% compared to 32.1% last year. This margin expansion is even stronger when you consider the phasing of marketing investments.

In Q4 of the previous year, marketing spend was comparatively low. This phasing effect resulted in approximately €3 million higher marketing expenses compared to last year.

Adjusted for the different phasing, EBITDA would have been around €120 million, and an implied EBITDA growth of around 15% year over year. The key takeaway is clear: we are able to invest in our growth via brand while simultaneously expanding our margins significantly.

This is the definition of a scalable business model. Turning to the operational development of our business in the fourth quarter.

In Web Presence and Productivity, revenue increased to €274.3 million, representing a reported growth of 3.8%. Adjusted for currency effects, the underlying growth stood at 5.4%.

Turning to Cloud Solutions, revenue came in at €51 million, representing a currency-adjusted growth of 6%. External revenue, including Web Presence and Productivity and Cloud Solutions, grew by 3.8% year over year, or 5.5% at constant currency.

Looking at the fourth quarter, we achieved a record intake of 100,000 net new customers. This brings us to the total net additions for the full year of 2025 to 310,000.

To put this into a context, and as Achim already mentioned, we have nearly doubled our customer growth compared to the previous year. This confirms that our product portfolio is resonating strongly in the market and that the marketing investment I mentioned earlier are successfully converting.

After the dip in Q3, which was also driven by the dilution from the strong customer growth, our ARPU increased sequentially to €16.50 in the fourth quarter. Our monthly churn rate remains stable at around 1% per month.

Looking ahead, we see no signs of this momentum slowing down. The combination of strong customer acquisition and increasing ARPU dynamics provides a powerful engine for 2026.

Let me now move to Cloud Solutions. Revenue in the fourth quarter came in at €51 million, up from €49 million last year.

Currency-adjusted, this translates into a growth rate of 6%. For the full year, we generated €187 million in revenue compared to €177 million in 2024.

Our public cloud business remains our biggest growth driver, growing 11% year over year. Important to mention that we recognized less revenue from ITZ Bund in Q4 compared to the previous year, creating a small headwind for the fourth quarter 2025.

As Achim already pointed out, the project is on track, and we expect to see higher revenue contributions throughout the year. Turning into our capital expenditure.

The figures for 2025 demonstrate the high efficiency of our well-invested platform. Total CapEx for the full year came in at €65.2 million.

This corresponds to a CapEx ratio of 5% of revenue compared to 6.2% in the previous year. Breaking it down: maintenance CapEx accounted for the majority of around €49.8 million or 3.8% of the revenue.

This level remains low and predictable, confirming that our core infrastructure is robust and does not require heavy sustaining investments. Growth CapEx stood at around €15.4 million or 1.2% of revenue.

As you would expect, the vast majority of this growth investment was directed towards our Cloud Solutions segment to support the public cloud expansions and sovereign offerings. We are investing exactly where the future value lies.

Looking ahead to 2026, we expect total CapEx to be in the range of €75 to €85 million, which would bring us back to a ratio of approximately 6% of revenue. This remains a very healthy level that supports innovation and growth without compromising our strong cash generation.

Let's walk through our cash flow bridge on the next page. This slide demonstrate the cash-generative power of our business model.

We start with our adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations of €485 million. From this base, we deduct €21 million in adjustments, primarily related to long-term incentive programs and the billing carve-out.

Now we need to add back the EBITDA contribution from the AdTech business, which amounts €31 million. Even though it is classified as discontinued for reporting purposes, it is generating cash flow in our accounts.

Moving to the outflows: CapEx was €65 million, and taxes accounted for €81 million, reflecting higher earnings. Working capital was still slightly negative, but improved from the previous quarter.

In the longer run, working capital should be neutral. This results in a free cash flow before leasing of €327 million.

After deducting €19 million for lease payments, our free cash flow after leases stands at €308 million compared to €296 million in 2024. Finally, we paid €49 million in interest, a decrease compared to the previous year thanks to our deleveraging efforts.

Most importantly, we also returned capital to our shareholders, executing share buybacks totaling €57 million throughout the year. One metric worth highlighting: free EBITDA to cash conversion is well above 80%, underpinning the strong cash generation for our businesses.

The strong free cash flow generation translates directly into rapid deleveraging. At the end of 2025, net debt stood at €697 million.

This figure includes only external bank debt as shareholder loan from United Internet was fully repaid in 2025. The weighted average annual interest rate has improved accordingly to 4.7%.

While AdTech itself did not carry significant financial liability, its EBITDA is included in the leverage calculation. Including AdTech EBITDA, our leverage ratio stands at 1.3 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA.

Excluding AdTech, reflecting the future structure of the business, the leverage ratio is 1.4 times at the end of the year. This improved debt profile, combined with the elimination of refinancing risks throughout fixed interest debt, continue to support our financial stability and provides us with flexibility for the future.

Let me now turn to our outlook. At the top line, we are guiding for revenue growth of approximately 7% on a constant currency basis, an acceleration from the 6.1% we delivered in 2025.

Within that, Web Presence and Productivity is expected to grow at 7% to 8%, reflecting the continued momentum in customer additions, cross-selling, and upselling, prices increasing resulting in a successful ARPU expansion. Cloud Solution is expected to accelerate to approximately 10%.

Our public cloud business is the primary driver here, and we are increasingly confident in the growth path as the ITZ Bund contracts moves into full operations. We expect intercompany revenues in approximately €30 to €40 million in 2026.

The underlying external revenue growth is actually slightly stronger than the headline figure suggests, growing at approximately 8%. On profitability, we are guiding for an adjusted EBITDA of €530 million, leading to 37% to 38% EBITDA margin, a further step from the 36.8% we have delivered in 2025.

This continued margin expansion reflects two things: the natural operating leverage of the platform as revenue scales and our disciplined approach to cost management. We are investing in growth via strong marketing conversion, AI product development, and cloud business expansion while expanding margins.

The bottom right chart is worth a moment of attention. It shows the expected quarterly phasing of revenue growth throughout 2026, with revenue growth accelerating throughout the year.

As the ramp of customer additions from 2025 is feeding through into revenue over the course of the year. As new customers typically have a 6 to 12 months discount period, and given that the net customer growth nearly doubled in 2025, there's an increasing contribution from this new customers.

Important to keep in mind that this will result in revenue growth accelerating throughout the year, which is consistent what we have already communicated. Let me once again point out that the initial contribution from Momentum is not part of our guidance, and it is therefore on top.

To summarize the guidance: 8% external revenue growth, approximately €530 million in adjusted EBITDA, leading to 37% to 38% adjusted EBITDA margin. Before we move to Q&A, let me close with a look beyond 2026 because I want to leave you with a clear picture of where our business is heading over the medium term.

We are reaffirming our midterm targets. We are targeting double-digit revenue growth of 10% above the 10% on a group level.

That acceleration from where we are today reflects two converging forces: an acceleration of our Web Presence and Productivity business, strongly driven by AI, and Cloud Solution delivering higher than 20% of growth. On Web Presence and Productivity specifically, we are targeting high single-digit growth.

That step-up from our current growth rate is underpinned by three things: continued customer additions, ARPU expansion as AI-powered products drive higher value per customer, including the progressive revenue contribution from Momentum. On Cloud Solutions, the 20% CAGR targets reflect our conviction in the structural growth of the European sovereign cloud market combined with the product investments we are making today.

On profitability, we are targeting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 40% at the midterm, a further step up from the 37% to 38% we are guiding in 2026. This is not margin expansion for its own sake.

It is natural outcome of a platform business where revenue scales faster than the cost base and where AI is increasingly doing work that previously required human effort or manual processes. On CapEx side, we are comfortable at approximately 6% of revenue.

That concludes our presentation for today. Achim and I are now happy to take your questions.

Thank you.

Hi. Morning, Achim and Patrik.

I've got a few questions, please. I guess firstly, a welcome to you from my side, Patrik.

We've met in the past, and it's nice to be in a position to speak with you again as we go forward. Maybe that is my first question as well.

I'm kind of being curious on your impressions as you move into this IONOS seat, in particular are there any areas or internal processes you're looking to sharpen around? Secondly, maybe one for you, Achim.

Talking to those new customer additions, very strong in 2025. You mentioned expecting that momentum to continue in 2026.

What's been driving that from your perspective? We can obviously look at the brand marketing spend, and it was only slightly higher than 2024 in 2025.

To what extent has your partnership with Lovable been a driver in that mix? Then just lastly on the cloud business, the CapEx tick-up for 2026 to €75 to €85 million, to what extent is that number incorporating some of the memory price inflation that's happening in the market?

Thank you.

I might start with the question. Thank you.

It's also a pleasure to work with you in the future again together. As I came in as a CFO last December, I do see obviously a high potential business being together with an AI winner.

Internal processes also became large. What the midterm guidance of 40% already is translating that there's huge potential also from an internal perspective to bring AI into the business.

That's what I saw as well, and those are areas obviously me as a CFO working very hard on that. Those are the areas driving the margin expansion, but same time reallocation of business to drive more revenue because I do believe that IONOS needs to push on revenue.

I have a certain formula as you might know from my past that you need to drive EBITDA growth is bigger than revenue growth, but own revenue growth needs to be bigger than market growth. This is what I, together with Achim, obviously driving from my copilot seat.

Thank you very much, and then hand over to Achim.

Your question about customer inflow, it is strong to strong. Why do we grow even faster this year than last year?

It's the AI momentum, one side, more products and all the AI-driven enhancements we have in the existing products. We have the brand, which is paying out more and more over the years now.

We started brand investment, I think, in 2023, and we always said this is a long-term endeavor, and the results will not come in the first year. Now we're not in the first year anymore, the results are coming in.

Brand is getting stronger, and brand is now really paying off in additional customer flowing in. Then we have a lot of different improvements all over our daily business, improving business, taking down churn rate, improving existing customer base, features and so forth.

The combination of that is driving more and more customers towards us. Then, of course, the product fit, the Momentum, like we try to explain, is a real business fit.

This is really solving needs of our customers, and so that is a big driver. Then you ask about Lovable.

We don't have a direct partnership with Lovable. We do do some of their domain registrations through a different partner, though.

It's not like we're using their website builder or anything like that. We have our own product lines for this.

Is that helpful?

George, maybe on the last one, on the CapEx side, the price increases in hardware are already integrated that in our perspective of guidance. We are already working on mitigation on different things, and we are already considered within the guidance.

That's great. Maybe, Achim, if I can just come back on the kind of AI agent topic.

Could you talk a little bit about how you talk about very high scores in terms of early customer feedback. Is the average SMB understanding the AI receptionist out of the box, or is there a certain way you're having to market it to help them understand what it's offering and how they implement it in their business?

You have everything from/to, right? A lot of customers directly understand it because it's integrated well.

It's very easy to set up and use, and it's taking the data from your website. You don't have to really do much for this part.

If you want to have a deeper integration, we help you. We have teams in our support that really do the onboarding, help you, sit down with you, configure maybe the prompt or something to make it more specialized on your specific needs.

We have a broad selection. As I said, this is a very early entry now, and very successful already.

We now, of course, like we do with all the products, we keep on improving that, learning from customer responses and so forth and so on and so forth. It's extremely encouraging, and it is really nice to see that we really help to solve a new class of problems which we never tackled in the past, which was not possible, kind of virtual employees.

The receptionist is just the first one. That's why we are so confident, and that's why we are so excited to see this new technology is coming along in a combination with the web page and all the other data.

We are a hosting company. That does not mean we only host domains and a web page.

Many customers have a lot of additional data on their hosting platform in applications. Many customers use PHP on a server side.

You only need that if you have additional stuff, additional services, and that's coupled with data in most cases. We have a lot of information already to make these AI things work much better than any standalone application out there.

We have the email communication and so on. Moving that all together really we can build virtual employees, which are a fraction of the costs of a real employee.

They're there 24/7. They speak all languages.

They never be sick. They can scale at any time.

That's why we're so excited about this.

That's great. Thank you.

Good luck for the rest of the year.

Thank you.

Thank you.

morning. Thanks very much for taking the questions, and nice to meet virtually, Patrik.

I have three if that's okay. First is on capital allocation, with leverage now close to being less than 1 times, how do you think about capital allocation?

What would you say is your target leverage range, and what are your priorities? Historically, the company have talked about M&A in the European WP&P space being a priority.

If that's still the case, are you seeing any opportunities here? If not, would you consider shareholder returns, and within that, do you have a preference for dividends or buybacks, and any indication of potential timing there?

Second question is on WP&P and so the customer equation looks very promising. Then if I look at ARPUs, yes, there's a pick-up quarter on quarter, but if I look year on year, ARPUs are actually declining.

Can you talk through some of the impacts? We can see the FX impact, but then how much of this year-on-year decline is driven by the higher customer acquisition?

Could you give us any color on the quantum of how much of a drag that is with customers coming in at lower prices, and is there anything else to consider? The final question I had was actually on cloud.

If you could give us any color, firstly, on the phasing of ITZ Bund revenues expected over 2026, but also separately, if I rewind a couple quarters ago, yourselves and a number of peers were talking up how digital sovereignty is leading to a higher number of inquiries, but also that it was taking longer to monetize these contracts. Any update on that would be great.

Maybe just anything you could give in terms of confidence of reiterating your 20% midterm guidance because from memory, that was also issued at the time of the spinoff, and some could argue that now is midterm, but obviously cloud isn't yet growing at 20%. Any color on those three would be great.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for the questions. From the capital allocation side perspective, we are considering all options.

You could either grow into organic growth, investing what we are already doing into AI in our cloud business. Also from an inorganic perspective, we are considering different M&A options, obviously mainly to our core business, mainly into technology investments, and we are already scanning a huge pipeline of different options.

From a shareholder perspective, obviously buybacks as we already executed in 2025, we would consider also to continue this year a program. We would be ready from a shareholder perspective or from a board approval perspective to execute, and that what we would be prefer in order before we paying dividends.

On an ARPU side, we see already an improvement in Q4. We had a structural topic in Q3 reported, but that came out of the strong net adds from customer side first of all, and also from a currency impact.

Already with the guidance of 5% over the year, we are well on track. You also see in Web Presence and Productivity, also from a pricing perspective, we phased in pricing in the first half year, which then also normalized during the year, so that also had an impact.

We are not seeing any critical points for further ARPU development, even the opposite. We do see with AI also an acceleration in the ARPUs.

Pricing is completely different, and we do see huge potential also for the future. For the cloud business, as we do not guide on the ITZ Bund in or on a single contracts, but we obviously with the small headwind we had in quarter four 2025, we have a small, let's say, tailwind in 2026.

That continues. They are very happy with us, with the performance.

We will continue. Achim already talked about that.

During the year, we will face that around the 10% in growth for the cloud business. Maybe, Achim, you could help me for the last question?

The cloud was the last question. With

the sovereignty. Maybe you can repeat the question again on the sovereignty part?

Sure, sure, sure. It was just around a couple quarters ago quarters ago you're talking about digital sovereignty leading to a higher number of inquiries for cloud, but not necessarily flowing into the financials just yet because it was taking longer to monetize these contracts.

Just an update there as we have as we are, two quarters ahead now. Are you starting to see that flow into financials?

Is that leading to some confidence in both this year's guidance and long term?

Absolutely, that's the point where we just showed the numbers, said, okay, above 20% in growth in the public cloud. That's exactly the result of the last quarters, onboarding these customers and building up the cloud and the sovereignty discussions we had all over the place.

That's why we are 100% confident to be well above, actually, well above 20% in growth in the public cloud. Maybe a word for M&A as well, because you asked, we always mentioned that there are some European players coming to market.

We believe that all the signals we hear is that there is a bunch of opportunities coming along more or less this year. Of course, we cannot force them to sell, but we're looking into it as soon as it gets more tangible.

From everything we hear, there's opportunities, like we said, and then, from timing it's perfect, your leverage is very low, and targets are coming up which are noteworthy from a sizing perspective. Like we always said, we don't want to buy a small web hosting company with legacy technology, 50,000 customers or something, the integration effort would be too high.

Although with AI, it's getting more manageable, but still we're looking for larger targets. Yeah.

ARPU really maybe one last sentence is if you look at the web page, the AI-based products, the receptionist has a very different price point and does not have 12 months free. That in the web hosting industry, it was becoming common that you had a 6 to 12 months very low price points, but this is not happening in the AI space.

We see there's maybe one or maybe two months of a reduced price or onboarding phase or something, but not the 12 months we're used to from web hosting and domains and everything. The price points are much higher, as you can really see it on the web page.

You can expect the ARPU growing stronger since that customer base is increasing. More and more new customers, like we showed also, 50% already taking some form of AI, and with the whole Momentum coming along, that share will increase.

Thank you both. That's very, very helpful.

Great. Thank you.

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

Three for me, if that's okay. Firstly, just on the Entry partnership, I think before you mentioned that customers are coming in with a domain via Entry that you own, but you spoke before about opportunities to cross- and upsell these customers coming in, which could be accretive over time.

Just wanted to see if, appreciate it's early days, but of those customers that are coming in through that partnership, are you seeing any opportunity to upsell other IONOS products? Secondly, just a clarification point on the cloud midterm growth.

You've obviously reiterated the midterm target of 20%. You printed mid-single digits in '25, your guidance 10% in '26.

Understand your comments on your expectations for digital sovereignty and the market, but how much visibility do you have beyond this year into the cloud pipeline that gives you that confidence? Can you confirm how you're defining midterm, please?

Because that obviously implies a significant acceleration beyond FY 2026 in cloud. Then finally, on AdTech, do you have any update on how those sale conversations are going?

When do you expect to announce potentially selling that business? If you could give us any color around how AdTech performed in '25 on both revenue and EBITDA, that would be really helpful.

Maybe I start. Entry, yes, of course.

These are our customers first. This is just a partner directing traffic towards us and customers, and we do upsell and cross-sell.

It really depends on a partner. Entry has partners doing all kinds of businesses, and we are using these customers to upsell to products which these partners don't have.

We're using this actively, part of our customer growth is coming or ARPU growth is coming from these new customers plus then the up- and cross-sell. This is happening.

It's just normal business for us right now, there's nothing special on it. For the cloud confidence, yeah, we're absolutely confident because firstly, the sovereignty discussion will not go away anytime soon.

I think we all agree in Europe this will get more and more and stronger and stronger over the years now with all happening in geopolitics. There's no sign whatsoever that this discussion or this demand will decrease anytime soon.

The product is there, expanding the product lines, adding features, new data centers, or expanding the data centers we have, co-locations with the demand, getting GPU services, all these kind of things which are on demand into the cloud, and we see customer base is strong and growing by itself. More data coming in.

All the customers basically grow in themselves, and new customer pipeline is nice, and we get lots of opportunity in. I'm absolutely confident the 20+ percent is going to keep or is going to stay, and I predict even to accelerate this over time.

Then, maybe you want to...

Take

the third one.

For the AdTech business, I can confirm that we are in deep discussions with potential buyers of the business. You might expect in Q2 a message from us on that one that we're going to inform you about that one.

Second, what you asked for the performance in 2025, as already indicated, there was an EBITDA contribution of €31 million over the year. Obviously, there was a change in business model in Q3.

This is exactly why we announced IFRS 5 and put it on to discontinued operations. Obviously, from a performance revenue we contributed €25 million in Q4.

This is the actual situation we are, and this is the overall performance. We were going to inform you then in Q2, most probably.

Got it. Thanks so much.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for this.

Congrats for the strong prints. I just have three questions, actually.

The first one is about AI monetization. Can you elaborate on how the new agents will be priced and packaged, notably for existing customers?

Shall we expect a usage-based model, or kind of a hybrid model, particularly for agents that might have to run continuously? The second question is about sovereign cloud, kind of make sense that there's an uptick in inquiries, but it's potentially going to impact private cloud, hence the demand for dedicated servers.

From a CapEx or infrastructure level, wouldn't IONOS have to increase CapEx for this dedicated servers? My last question is only from a product perspective.

One of your slides cites n8n, partnership in the cloud business. Can you talk us more about what it entails exactly?

Thank you very much.

I'm not sure if I understood everything correctly because we had a little, what do you say, the sound quality was not so good. I think the first question was about AI pricing.

Look at the web page we have right now, but we're doing a lot of A/B testing. If you hit the web page five times, you might get three different offers.

That's our normal business, we're trying to find or we're finding out what's the elasticity on the market, what price points are people willing to pay, the whole product improves, and so on. This is our daily business, optimizing price points, price versus sales, and so on.

What's pretty clear is it's way more expensive in the end. The ARPU is much higher than on a web page because web page is essential for a company, but the prices are, it's not like super, how do I say, not a commodity these days, but everybody can have a web page very easily somewhere.

AI is very different because that's very much more technology and especially it has a much higher value for the customer perceived at least in sense of, "I can save 10 hours." You cannot go without a web page because that will, if you have a shop or whatever, that will completely ruin your revenue.

Perception from customers is, "I can save 10 hours. How much do I pay for 10 hours usually?"

If that AI costs only €29, this is such a bargain. That price elasticity is so much higher, and now it's our job, like always, to find out what's the sweet spot between take-up rates and price points.

There's a constant optimization now, and the products get better and better so we can charge more. There will be no fixed price for now.

This is in flux right now to understand market and demand and curves and stuff. The second question, you had the CapEx and dedicated servers.

I'm not quite sure what exact question

was. I was just wondering, how does sovereign cloud translate from an infrastructure perspective?

Because to me it means dedicated servers, naturally IONOS would have to increase CapEx for this, or can you

explain

more what does that entail from an infra perspective?

Dedicated service is one product offering. We call it BMC in the meantime, it's bare metal cloud.

The old stuff is the dedicated, which is really a server with more or less nothing. Then we have the BMC line of products, which is bare metal cloud, you have features in sense of software-defined networking, but still it's bare metal, and then everything else is cloud.

If you talk about sovereignty, most customers are these days tending rather to a full cloud setup because there's many, many more features than just a bare metal, and you don't have to administer it yourself. Cloud is everything taken care for you, the infrastructure as a service layer.

We manage everything, the platform layers, and so on, and you have unlimited scalability and pay by the minute. People are, if they talk about sovereign workloads moving into the cloud, they usually take the real IONOS Cloud public cloud offering.

Dedicated has some special purposes, if you need highest performance, you need to go down to the operating system level, do some stuff here, has a purpose and has some demand, but if you talk about sovereignty, it's rather the cloud business.

If I might, Achim, from a CapEx perspective, we are feeling confident with the 6% of revenues for the future, also sustainable moving forward, what Achim said.

Exactly. In our CapEx budget, it's all included.

This and we have, there's a big discussion or there is the big price increase in hardware these days. We we sourced a lot of them and have contracts in place for much of the year, for for a set price.

Then n8a n8n, this is a service, is actually open source for, private use, not so much for, commercial use, we have a partnership with them. N8n is a product where you can build workflows with AI-based steps in between.

You can really automate a lot of things very easily, and that's just one of the products we have.

Okay. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Good morning.

My first question is regarding the guidance and the midterm guidance. I was just wondering if you could remind me the starting base of that guidance, if that's still the same midterm or when is the midterm and what is the starting base?

I guess what I'm trying to understand is to what extent AI is really incremental since you are reaffirming the guidance. Now you're expecting 80% of revenue growth by 2028 to be coming from AI, I'm just trying to separate what is new and incremental versus what you were planning before the launch of AI agents.

That would be my first question. Thank you.

From

as Achim indicated on one of his first slide, the value add of newer generated revenues via AI is increasingly tremendously in the next years. You are asking for the guidance of this year, and I talked about in my last slide about the midterm guidance.

I would say the discrepancy is not as high as I would not propose it already coming in from the year of 2027. We are not yet here for giving a guidance of 2027, but we feel obviously there's not a big difference.

We accelerated year on year in our core segment, which is Web Presence and Productivity. We are doing on the right track in the cloud business.

We are having the AI, we're having the ARPU increases, etc., etc. That's my opinion on this one.

You got a feeling of, Patrik showed a slide where he said he's driving to 10% growth. The difference between where we are today and 10% is probably mostly AI-driven.

Yes.

The starting year for that midterm guidance, can you remind me which year is the starting base?

For the current guidance,

I need because I wasn't there, but it was obviously given in 2024.

Must be 2024. Sorry, yeah.

Yep. Does that help?

Yeah. I think it does.

I've got an additional question, which is regarding promotions. I could notice also and that there are quite some promotions to get customers at €1 and to try I guess to push volume.

Wouldn't you be expecting that to have a little bit of a dilutive impact into 2026 on ARPUs? That that's the

first of all, this €1, that that's the industry standards for, I'd say, 15 years now. You have these campaign pricings, which are very, very much discounted.

That that's going forward. That's what Patrik tried to explain a little bit, the more customers we make, the more dilutive it is in the first year, first year, for the overall ARPU.

Because these customers weigh more, coming in more and more of these customers weighing more in the in the average with a very low price point for the first year. This is one of the factors.

Then the second year, these customers or these cohorts are full pricing are priced fully, normal pricing, and will increase the ARPU again. We have always a little, the first the first basically every time we grow more than in the previous year, we have that little impact on on the ARPU one time.

That said, the 2025 cohort is translating into revenue in 2026.

Yeah.

That was the most successful year in net adds in customer, and this is why we are confident scaling the revenues throughout the years via the quarters.

Very good. Thank you.

Thank you.

Great. I hope you can hear me.

I have three remaining questions as well. The first one, could you remind us, Achim and Patrik, the exposure IONOS has to energy costs and what would the impact be if prices go up and have you accounted for that in the guidance that you've given us for 2026?

Second, thank you for the color on the AI virtual assistants. My question is the companies that you're working with that are using them now, have you seen them churn off or are they very happy with the products so they keep using it?

Just trying to get an understanding as to how valuable it is real-time to these customers that you're already working with. Some color on the churn dynamics would be great.

My last question, the 7% to 8% Web Presence and Productivity growth for 2026, if you could split that between customer growth versus ARPU growth to give us some color on how to think of those two dynamics for next year, that would be great. Thank you.

As I might start with the energy costs. The 2026, the good news is 2026 prices for energy are almost locked in, we have a minimal impact on 2026 guidance.

You would...

Yeah. ...add

doing the last one?

The phone assistant, the AI agent part of Momentum, yeah, the batch of customers we have, there's basically not much churn so far because, first, it's pretty new, and we said 80% are activating the product already. That's very high activation rate in the first weeks already.

What the conclusion is, once you have a product and it's activated, it's working well for you, you don't churn. We don't really have reliable churn numbers specifically for these products yet.

It's just too early. Next quarter we can probably see a bit or have more reliable data than today because basically today it's no churn.

Yeah. Then

the last one for Web Presence and Productivity, where does the mixture of revenue comes from? We keep on going with the story of 1/3 is coming from net customer adds, 1/3 is coming from cross- and upselling, and 1/3 is coming from pricing.

This is exactly the same story for 2026. As a reminder as well, that was a question as well, churn remains very clear best industry standard, we're returning or we're having around the 1% per month.

That is also from that perspective very healthy.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. The

Hi. Sorry, I just had one small follow-up to the extent you can comment, just with regards to the €800 million or so of debt that comes up to maturity in December.

Do you have any kind of early thoughts on how you'll go about refinancing that from a strategy or structuring or maybe even the rate versus the fixed 4.7% you're on today?

Yes, of course we have early thoughts, but we can't communicate yet. We will do that in time, most probably to mid to half year.

You're absolutely right, there needs to be a message because it ends in December, but not yet.

Very clear. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks very much. Just, yeah, a technical follow-up on the reported to adjusted EBITDA bridge.

In '25, I think you saw another €17 million of costs related to the establishment of IONOS as an independent group, but obviously we're now three three years on from being part of the group. Just, yeah, wanted to get an update in terms of what that should look like going forward.

Should it drop out relatively soon? Thanks very much.

Therefore, I think will be significant lower in 2027. I'm honest here, I need to jump into that detail.

I can afterwards inform you about that.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you. I've got two actually around AI agents, if that's possible.

The first one is, how many AI agents do you expect to have? Obviously, it will change over time, but right now how many do you think you will have and which one are the most exciting to you if you can release some color about that?

My second question is just regarding the margin. Can you just come back on the economics and what sort of margins are you expecting on those products?

I can see that you're more or less billing a call at around €1, and I was just wondering what is the cost attached to that? Thank you.

About the product roadmap, out of my head, how many agents are we going to have? Of course, it depends on the timescale we're looking at.

If we think about this year, we have a bunch of different product lines and agents specified. Out of my head, I'd say probably, agents has a big definition as well.

It could be some small helping agent in some of the product lines all the way to full-blown like the receptionist, which does a lot of things and has a lot of additional features on. I'd say maybe 10 on a rough calculation or rough out of my head, across all the product lines in this definition, being like real standalone agents.

Like we said, the Momentum is an ecosystem in the end. You have the base with all the knowledges in there and the knowledge agents.

Is that the separate agents or not? It's a bit hard to the definition here.

In the end, from the product lines, we had dozens of products over the next two to three one to two one, two, two years will add dozens of different features and products if you want to call them agents or not. From a margin perspective, we obviously have a great contribution coming via increased ARPU and increased top line.

There is no specifics on the bottom line on the cost structure. It depends obviously if we are working also with partners or having own IP and own development, but from a general mixture, there is a nice contribution from that perspective as well.

One of the advantages we have is many of these agents or AI models are hosted in our own environments. We have in the cloud, we have Model Hub, we have these GPU cards and everything, the costs for us is much lower than for someone who has to buy it at Amazon.

For us, I think we have the highest margin possibilities out there.

Thank you. If I come back to the first question, could you tell us one or two agents that you also think could have a big market potential such as the receptionist?

Please understand I don't want to be too much into it because our competitors are listening to this call as well, I assume, yeah. I don't want to tip them off in what is going to be the next one.

On the slides, we said a few things, like for example, the CRM is the natural extension, and the CRM is not just a CRM on the web, is also agent-based, of course. Agents are doing the work on the CRM in the end.

These are things which we believe has very strong demand because we noticed already from the customers we have. One of their most requested features is now, "We need the next agent back there.

We need the CRM, which is human-readable one thing, but AI-readable on the other thing." The AI starts doing much more on the customer base, starting interactions and marketing and all these things, call backs, whatsoever.

That would be one which is released soon. The other ones I would try not to be too explicit right now to not tip off our competitors if that's okay for you.

Maybe we can do it in a closed call.

Oh, that's fair enough in a closed call anytime, obviously. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you, operator, for moderating the call today. Thank you all for joining today's call.

Please feel free to reach out for any follow-up questions. Have a great day, stay safe, and goodbye.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Thank you very much.