After two years of development and € 30m

spent, SMARTBROKER+ the long-awaited launch happened just Wednesday. With a best-in-class product offering at a very attractive pricing, combined with the new, intuitive state-of-the-art UI/UX and a brand refresh, SMARTBROKER+ has developed into the go-to broker in the German retail-brokerage space.

Thanks to the leaner backend infrastructure of the new partner Baader Bank and the internalization of the middle ware, cost per transaction should decrease significantly from € 2.50 to € 1.50 (both eNuW), once SMARTBROKER+ is up and running. Since revenues per transaction should remain rather stable (c. € 3.70, eNuW), gross margins are seen at industry leading 60% (eNuW).

Fueled by the reach of its leading German finance portals (wallstreet:online, ariva, boersennews.de and finanznachrichten.de) with 220m monthly page impressions, the number of new SMARTBROKER+ customer should elevate to 0.58m by FY25e (0.27m in FY22), which in turn is expected to drive number of transactions to 12.3m by FY25e (4.6m in FY22). Importantly and thanks to the reach of the portals, CAC are seen at < € 80, significantly below the industry average of c. € 100.

The portals of the Media segment on the other hand, should benefit from the expected customer inflow of SMARTBROKER+, since most of the new customers are expected to use the portals of the Group as primary source of information and should therefore increase the traffic on which. In turn this should increase the attractiveness for advertisers and ultimately the revenues of the Media segment.

In numbers, we expect Group sales to grow by 19% p.a. to 89.3m by FY25e (transaction segment: 37% p.a. to € 48m sales; Media segment: 7% p.a. to € 41.3m), driven by (1) the expected customer inflows after the launch of SMARTBROKER+ that should materialize from 2024 onwards and (2) favorable growth trends in the digital adverting market. Thanks to scale effects and synergies between both segments, the steady-state EBITDA margin is seen at >30% (vs 17% in FY22).

In this note, we take a closer look at the quality and growth aspects of (1) SMARTBROKER+ and (2) the Media segment.

We reinitiate with BUY and a new PT of € 16, based on DCF.                                                 –continued–