Topic: ASW announced the acquisition of first and business class booking engine JetBeds.com (JetBeds GmbH, Germany), which is closing an open gap in ASW’s modular product offering.

All assets of JetBeds are acquired by ASW including the valuable booking engine as well as other important intangible assets like the customer base. JetBeds offers a unique USP to travel sassy customers, by finding attractive deals for first and business class flights of renowned airlines. While its flight booking engine combines non-cooperating and cooperating airlines, the company also negotiates exclusive discount deals for their customers.

With the social network of paying, luxury- and travel-sassy members in its core, ASW now extends its broad monetization opportunities (see p.2). The addition of JetBeds completes ASW’s product offering in the travel booking offering, as members can now also book a flight via ASW next to to hotel booking (ASW Collection) and bespoke travel services (First Class and More & ASW Private).

However, the most important synergies should arise from a potential combination of flight booking and mile optimization but also a potential technological integration into the hotel-booking engine “ASW Collection” providing customers a full services for a luxury journey. Moreover, the sensible acquisition should lift notable cross selling opportunities, once fully integrated into ASW (eNuW: not before H2’24e) while turning ASW more and more into a one-stop shop for luxury travel-sassy customers.

While these new scalable monetization expansions should not impact FY'23e, we expect notable growth of top and bottom line in FY'24e thanks to a growing member base coupled with increasing average revenues per user thanks to the continuous expansion of offered services, which serve a niche of currently 67k high income members.

With shares currently trading at 7.3x EV/EBITDA FY'24e (vs. 15x average EV/EBITDA FY'20-'22), current levels offer an attractive entry oppurtunity. Hence, we reiterate our BUY recommendation with unchanged PT of CHF 4.90, based on DCF.