JDC Group AG (JDC) Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call for the JDC Group following the publication of the half year figures of 2025. The CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier; and CFO, Ralph Konrad, will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your question. With this being said, I'm happy to hand over to you, Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you very much, Ingmar. A warm welcome from our side to the earnings call first half year 2025. You can see whoever of you already had a look in the figures. We could define Liberation Day trends, and I think we have quite solid and positive numbers to show you today. My name is Sebastian, I'm Co-Founder and CEO of JDC Group, responsible for Strategy Products, Investor Public Relations, together with my partner, Ralph.

Yes. My name is Ralph. I'm responsible for IT, all M&A issues, and, of course, finance.

Thank you very much. So just on the next slide, very short introduction of our business. We are now a typical platform business. You all know this chart. And so we take in all the data of all the insurance groups that's more than 220 insurance companies doing business with brokers in Germany. All the asset management platforms, all other alternative products, the mortgaging banks. We standardize the data, process it and then we make it visible in our own visualizing systems to all kinds of individual brokers and agents, but also more and more to insurance companies, the banks, Salesforce, other intertech companies and also via our smartphone applications to more than 200,000 clients. So right now, we have 6.2 million data sets on the platforms for 2.4 million customers, and we are one of the leading tech stacks for the processing of insurance contracts in the German market. Yes. So you see that we're showing resilient growth and margin expansion in the last 10 years. So after our buyout in 2013, you could see that we are growing year-over-year-over-year with new records basically every year. You can see our revenue CAGR annual growth rate is more than 12%. And also, and that's very pleasing for us as shareholders, is that the EBITDA CAGR is much higher, more than 30%. And you can see year-over-year-over-year, we show you higher earnings. And if we do not take in 2025, you can see already that this is a very positive development, and we will show you with the acquisition of FMK, this will be improving much more in the next year. So EBITDA margin expansion also is a very good trend coming from 2% in 2015, we now guide you at 8% in the year 2025, having reached 7% in 2024. And that's also -- it's up 5.2% year-over-year, also a very positive development. Why are we telling you this? Because you can see and we show you in a slide later that there is crisis all over the world, and there was one in Q2, especially amongst the background of Liberation Day and we are happy that we can present you a stable positive growth with stable rates. So we could grow the turnover with 13.9% and EBITDA by 23.5%. So that's very satisfying. And with more than EUR 120 million, again, in the first half year 2025 is a new record high in turnover in the first half year, and against a very, very good first half year 2024, yes, we could grow almost 14%. And you will see later that second quarter, especially in 2024 was historically good, and now we are back to a quite normal second year -- second quarter in 2025. But also, you can see with an EBITDA at EUR 8.5 million, with a growth of almost 24%. We're happy and, again, a record high for the first half year ever. Yes. And one thing is very important. We told you in the last call on the quarter already, we reorganized our business segments. So we have a movement from Advisortech to the Advisory. And the good thing is that saves us money. We have cost savings of more than EUR 250,000 by integrating and aligning our banking licenses, that's what's called a liability umbrella business, where we take over the liability for a huge number of tied agents. This was distributed among three companies, FiNUM.Private Finance in Advisory segment, but then also Jung DMS Austria in the Advisortech segment and Top Ten Austria that we bought 2 years ago was also in the Advisortech segment. This is what we merged now. We have now only one legal entity, and it's FiNUM.Private Finance, Germany, and this is why the business of Jung DMS Austria and Top Ten Austria now goes over to FiNUM.Private Finance. So it's just a technical development. And so if you're wondering why there is a lot of pro forma reporting. We just show you the growth rates just according to how would it have been if this move had been in the past already. So the good news is now we are down to one banking license, and this is all going through Berlin, FiNUM.Private Finance, and all the liability umbrella business is now united in one segment, and that's Advisory. Yes. And here, we come to the figures in detail. You could see it's a positive development. Revenues are up 11.2% in the second quarter, and this comes to 13.9% over the first half year, and also earnings and that's important, are up even more at 23.5% as we reported to EUR 8.5 million. And here you can see the difference Advisortech did not only grow by 8%, but in reality of 14.7%, which I think is a good rate. And then Advisory did not grow 43.6% in reality, just by the new reporting standard in the segment, but actually by 10.7%, which is quite exactly the range that we give you our growth. So organically, we want to grow Advisory by 10% plus, and we would grow Advisortech by 15% plus. And after a challenging quarter, we are very happy with these figures. So then you can choose your figure. Obviously, EBIT is up even more and then earnings are up even more, but you can see this yourself in the schedule. We are very happy that all the growth comes from all the product groups again. We can see that the capital markets started very strong, but then there was a sharp decline right after April 2 Liberation Day, you could see that the capital markets went down quite significantly. And what's happening at the actual consumer satisfaction levels is that also the new business in investment just goes down. So that's a little bit counterproductive. But as we know, people are only buying stock when they're going up and they're not buying stock when they are low. So we saw a strong decline also in the new business of investment, and this goes further in the insurance sector as there's a lot of unit-linked business. That means wrappers -- so insurance wrappers around asset management products, and that was also quite weak in Q2, but you can see it's still up 12% investment and financing, almost EUR 5 million plus, insurance is up normal, let's say, 16% up, despite of this little decline in unit-linked and the others are up as the real estate markets are starting to grow. And still -- German banks are still reluctant to give up mortgages. This is improving slightly time over time. But still, the real estate markets are still hindered by reluctant German banks. But all over, we're happy of EUR 120.9 million in turnover in the first half year. So here you can see the distribution among the sales channels. You can see that the IFA business is the stable backbone of our business. It's up 12% pro forma. And again, the missing 9%, it's the liability umbrella business, which went from the Advisortech side to the Advisory side, but the green figures is closer to reality. Major customers, do not have any liability umbrella business. So it's up -- sales up 25%, very satisfying, but also Advisory is almost up 11%. And so you can see now the distribution is that major customers now make about 30% of our turnover, and almost 70% is our IFA business in the breadth of 16,000 IFAs that we have. So as we said, these growth rates are impacted by the restructuring. But otherwise, the IFA business, very solid backbone of our business.

Okay. Then let's go into the comparison by quarter, ladies and gentlemen. If we look at this situation, we have seen a very dynamic development after the impact of the Ukraine crisis, JDC has grown double digits and '25 was the first year in the company's history where we started with the Q1 of more than EUR 60 million of turnover. So best first quarter in history. The good news is the second quarter is also the best second quarter in history. But you can see that the volume is a little bit below the first quarter. There's a very normal seasonality, as Sebastian mentioned. We have a strong first quarter. We have a weaker second quarter, a weaker third quarter and a strong fourth quarter. And if you look at the year 2024, the second quarter was almost as strong as the first quarter in 2024. And thus, the quarter-on-quarter growth rate with 11%, seems to be a little bit smaller. But keep in mind, the main reason was exceptionally good second quarter 2024. And of course, as Sebastian also mentioned, we see some effects resulting from the economic slowdown in Germany and the ongoing tariff discussion for example, we have a little bit higher cancellation rates for existing contracts and some reluctance to purchase new contracts. People are uncertain, and this is -- and reflect this in their purchasing behavior, but on the other hand, we have seen such situations many times before and have always without any exception seen a catch-up effect afterwards in the reluctance to buy. And this is because financial products are not like a watch or a second car. They bought because you need them. You do not decide to buy one at all. You need these products for risk protection or retirement provision, and so you buy them later or maybe in a smaller amount, but you don't cancel the transaction. Having said this, let's go into the segment numbers. Due to group reorganization, as Sebastian told you, the segment report also shows pro forma figures for the year 2024 for both segments, Advisory and Advisortech. And the blue columns 2024 show the adjusted figures as the reorganization had already been effective from the 1st of January 2024. Yes, to compare apples with apples, I will focus on the adjusted numbers in the following slides. Revenues were up 11.2%. Gross profit was up only by 2.1%. That has two reasons. The first is that the revenue growth was driven by bigger partners with higher payouts. That's a smaller part of the explanations. But the main part is that, as mentioned, we had increased cancellation ratios in April and May, and cancellation always reduced the gross margin. And we think that this development, the obvious is somehow related to Liberation Day because if you look within the quarter, then you can see that June was already very strong again, and June provided more than EUR 1.6 million of the EUR 3 million segment EBITDA in the second quarter. So we think we are in a good way. And of course, we saw some effects in the second quarter because please keep in mind, we compare extraordinary strong Q4 of 2024, with the Q2 '25 and the middle of the market's turmoil. Yes. If we look at the first half year as a whole, the picture is more positive. Revenues are up 14.7%. Gross profit increased by 6%, and due to good cost management, the total costs declined despite the increased volume, especially in the other operating expenses. And as a result, EBITDA increased by 14.9% from EUR 6.9 million to EUR 8 million, which is an increase of 15%. Let's go into the Advisory segment. The Advisory division has had a really strong development, although revenues only grew by 3.3%, the gross profit increased amazingly by 14%. This was, to be honest, a little bit surprising, but we double and triple checked this development and the figures are right. The main reason is that we have a big increase in high-margin business, real estate or other asset classes where we just have higher gross margin, and this grew faster than the rest. And as the cost bases remain stable, this increase in gross profit showed a big impact in EBITDA. EBITDA increased by 45% to EUR 1.3 million, which is a very good development in our point of view. And it's the same with the first half year as a whole. That's also very convincing. The revenues went up by 10.7%. Gross margin even stronger by 12.6%. And this led to a very convincing EBITDA growth of approximately 50% to EUR 2.5 million in the first 6 months. So best regards to our FiNUM colleagues in the line, excellent work. Thank you very much. Yes. Let's come to the cash flow statement. We started the year with cash and cash equivalents of EUR 24.6 million. We had a cash flow from operating activities of EUR 6.5 million, which was slightly below the previous year. I will explain this in a minute. The cash flow from investment activities amounted to EUR 2.5 million -- minus EUR 2.5 million better than the previous year because we only had some capital calls from Summitas and no other payouts for any other participations. We had a small negative cash flow from financing activities driven by interest rates of minus EUR 1.2 million. And so we ended up with a EUR 27.2 million cash on hand at the end of the quarter. And as always, the very actual figure, cash on hand is EUR 35.2 million. Yes. Why can an operating cash flow decline when the operating income increases that made the question that some of you have, and we didn't want to leave this obvious question unanswered. So the answer or the reason is our negative net working capital profile. At JDC, we always received commission before we have to pay them out. So we have two cases. The one is the growth case in the green box, and the other is the case when turnover declines in the red box. And if the turnover increases, then we have a higher cash flow from operating activities because we have today's high commission inflow, and we have the payout for the smaller business to the brokers of the past period. So that's clear. Then the operative cash flow is very strong. And if the turnover decreases from one period to another for first quarter to second quarter, for instance, then the operating cash flow is smaller because we have the lower commission inflow in this period and we have the higher payouts of the prior period. So that's the reason. And the green box is very normal, for instance, for fourth quarter, which is very strong compared to the third quarter, and the red box is very normal for a second quarter where we have a smaller turnover than in the first quarter. That's just to explain the situation. Here, we have a very nice development in the share price. You have seen this after the announcement of the FMK transaction. Market cap is now above EUR 400 million. We are very happy about this. And the reason is that we were able to finance this transaction 100% debt base. So very value accretive, no dilution for you, shareholders and for us as shareholders as well. The shareholder structure, thus is unchanged and also no change in the bond. Yes, let's come to the spotlights. For the investors who could not attend our latest call last week regarding the FMK transaction, we will give you a summary on this. We will show some figures regarding the platform activity. And in addition, we would like to share some general thoughts about the environment and the resilience of JDC and the growth of JDC. Yes, what's FMK? FMK is a data-driven specialist in digital lead generation. but they do not only generate leads, they generate business transactions, mainly in the area of personal finance, and that means FMK gets paid by its customers. When the FMK customer, for instance, a credit card company earns money, and the company earns money when the consumer signed the contract. So FMK not only generates leads, but takes the conversion risk, and this is very convenient for FMK customers. They have roughly 100 customers. And this is the reason why customers since inception, constantly increased the revenue with FMK. And that's what you can see on the slide here. Very impressive development. The company was founded in 2021. After 4 years with a revenue CAGR of almost 180%, FMK ended up at approximately EUR 40 million of turnover, a very high-margin business with a 35% EBITDA margin and only 12 employees. So the company is very, very digital and has a very scalable business model. We always tell you that the JDC platform is scalable. Yes, it is scalable, but FMK is even more scalable. We would love to have this revenue per employee figure in the total group, but we don't have. Yes, you can see in the pie chart that the revenue comes from personal finance mainly. We will not touch this segment. We are happy with the development. The segment should grow. And in our work together with FMK, we will touch the insurance segment, which is now less than 1% of turnover. And in our, let's say, future strategy in some years, the revenue, FMK revenue in the insurance segment will be as high as in the personal finance area. How does the business work at FMK? If the consumer searches for an online product, then he sees the paid marketing campaign of FMK, and Google or Bing or social media or the GenAI tools. And by clicking on these campaigns, he ends up at an FMK landing page or a comparison portal. They have several of this portals. And if the customer then chooses a product, he checks out to the product partner website, where does the deal. And it's special at FMK, because we do not only sell the leads or the business to the partners, but we get back a lot of data, did the customer really convert, does he use the credit card in which amount. So all this data are used in a very automized way to optimize the campaigns and to optimize this cycle. So every sale improves the next in a very automated feedback loop, and that's the sort of the secret sauce why the company is so successful. And yes, why is FMK so exciting for us? Why not only become a customer instead of buying the company. I would like to explain this to -- with the usage of a metaphor. If JDC was, let's say, very powerful hi-fi system, then until now, others have always had the control over the volume control. We were dependent on how much revenues others brought to the platform. And with FMK, we will take more control of the volume control ourselves by generating customer leads, and either converting them with our in-house brokers, which is very profitable or passing them on to our affiliate advisors, especially to our exclusive advisors. So FMK gives us at the end, more control, and it's a little bit like the missing piece on our JDC platform. And in the future, we will not only provide technology, what we do today, best-in-class technology, but we will also provide consumer or customer access to our brokers. And that can bring really huge synergies and makes the platform much more attractive to brokers. And especially to younger brokers, who don't have a lot of customers. So in addition, FMK is growing very dynamically and will generate relevant profits for us. So we really believe that this transaction will take JDC on to another level. Yes, and that's why we told you with the announcement that the EBITDA '26 of JDC will definitely be above EUR 35 million. Then we were asked whether this was more or less a hidden profit warning since we already achieved that figure today on a pro forma basis, if you had FMK and JDC, very funny, but a good question. No, it isn't. We just wanted to show the investors that JDC is now reaching a new level of profitability without setting the expectations too high, and we hope for your understanding. The 2026 guidance will be published with the preliminary figures for 2025. So stay tuned, and we all can be excited. Here are some more details on the transaction. We bought 60%, the purchaser is Jung, DMS & Cie., which is our subsidiary in the Advisortech segment, so FMK will be part of the Advisory business. We paid an entry multiple of 8x. This is expected to decline below 7x. And the reason is that we have earn-out structure where we pay on EBITDA improvements from 2025 to 2027, but with sharply decreasing factors. So the more profitable the company gets, the better is our multiple. We've negotiated a downside protection based on the entry multiple. So if the company would not be as profitable as in 2024, then we would get back our money up to a certain amount. And also very important, after 5 years, we have a call option on the rest of the shares, on the 40% of the shares that's still are with the founders right now. And this is a very good situation because they are relevant for the company, and we are happy that we have them on board. But after 5 years, it's our plan to own 100% of this company and fully integrated into the JDC platform. The figures on the left side shows you how the company would have been if the transaction would have taken place at the 1st of January 2024. So pro forma 2024, you could see that the combined EBITDA would have already been EUR 28.5 million. So how to finance such a transaction? We decided to finance this transaction on a 100% debt basis because that's very value accretive for equity holders. And this was possible for several reasons. The first is from a net debt perspective, we are still unlevered. We have a EUR 20 million bond, but we have EUR 30 million plus cash on hand. We have a very stable business with a very high portion of recurring revenue. The customer base is very diversified. We have only 25% of turnover that are provided by our top 10 customers, and we only have 7 customers that provide more than 1% of total turnover. So it's extremely diversified and thus very secure. And we have a very good cash conversion from EBITDA to cash flow. And this is -- these are the reasons why it was possible to finance this transaction on 100% debt basis. We are in the process of placing this bond. And what I can tell you is that we have, from our point of view, overwhelming demand much higher than we've expected. The initial volume that we place will be EUR 70 million, 7-0, out of a framework of EUR 160 million. This is the maximum we could issue, and it's not needed, but it's for us like a financing reserve. The tenor of the bond is 4 years. The interest rate will be paid quarterly and is expected to be around Euribor plus 475 or 500 basis points, and the bond will be listed Frankfurt Open Market and in the Nordic ABM. So a professional Nordic Bond with professional institutional investors. I think we will be able to close the placement within the next, I don't know, 10 days, 15 days. Yes, last slide from my side. As you see this every 3 months, our KPIs on platform activities. The number of orders are below the previous year, 3% like in the first quarter. Nevertheless, we have a higher volume -- higher contract volume and thus higher commission volume from new orders. The number of contracts transfer grew by 35% on a very high number of more than 350,000, 360,000 pieces in half year. So we will end up at more than 700,000, which is an amazing number. The assets under management in the last 12 months increased by 10.2%, and the annual net premium increased by 16% in the last 12 months, which is also an amazing number. Sebastian?

Yes. Thank you, Ralph. Just to give you a throwback to our last earnings call slides. This is what's happened after a Liberation Day. You could see that the MSCI World, which is basically the amount -- or the index, which our assets are trading. As you might know, we have almost EUR 8 billion in assets, EUR 2 billion are in managed accounts and about EUR 6 billion in standardized funds. And this is what's happening. So from its high, the MSCI World dropped from 3,900 points down to 3,300 points. And now, as you know, it went up to 4,170 points again. So basically, it went down more than 10% quarter-over-quarter average and now it went up 10% quarter-over-quarter average. And as about 1/3 of our business is investment. Basically, our investment income goes down by 10%, goes up by 10% overall. That's a 3% change just in trailer fees that come in and go out. So the primary effects are quite minimal. And -- but then we have secondary effects as consumer confidence. And this also when you follow this in German data, then you could see that consumer confidence, right, in April, in May were at the lowest levels quite ever after COVID. And now it's going up again, as obviously, there is no much harm done. As you all know, there is an agreement on tariffs among the -- between the European Union and the U.S. of 15% standard, might do some harm to manufacturing and especially the car industry, but not overall in the German economy. So we see that our figures are quite resilient. Capital markets go down and up, and there's almost now, maybe 2%, 3% in our growth rates. That's the effect on of this Liberation Day market turmoil. And if you go on the next page, we give you a little mountain chart of what is happening a crisis over crisis over crisis with our turnover. As you can see, over the last 10 years, we could show you increasing turnover rates and commission rates and you can see year-over-year-over-year, we can grow, no matter what's happening in the market. Yes, COVID hit us strongly as well. If advisors cannot go out to the customers, that was quite distressing. But also the energy crisis after the Ukraine-Russia war that hit heavy in two quarters in '22, especially the third and fourth quarter, but then you could see a rebound in '23, so you can see that no matter what's happening in the world, we have a very resilient business model. And yes, so we will show you more growth and not only growth but also growing growth rates. We see that by now '25. And then '26, what you showed you after the FMK transaction, we will have a rising growth rate and, therefore, much more growth to come. And this is also a good, very good sign. As we're becoming more efficient. This will also increase the earning space and then also the growth rate of earnings. So just to come back to our guidance. As you could see in our last call last week and also in our press releases and corporate news, we could add up to our guidance. So the old guidance of EUR 245 million to EUR 265 million in turnover, we increased to EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million, conservatively, taking into account the additional turnover of FMK. And also EBITDA, we raised this EBITDA targets for the year '25 from EUR 18.5 million to EUR 20.5 million, up to EUR 20.5 million to EUR 22.5 million by the acquisition of FMK, so up EUR 2 million. What you could see is very conservative, what Ralph showed you. So this will also happen if we can just consolidate the last 3 months of the year. So obviously, 2026 will be the first year where we can consolidate a full year with FMK, and this is what we also gave you as a mid-term guidance at '26, we expect then more than EUR 35 million in the EBITDA already. This is also an outlook that we gave you last year, our vision, if you may say so, we said that we see the platform becoming more profitable quite fast, and that was our 2030 goals, that with a turnover of EUR 450 million to EUR 500 million, we will come to an EBITDA of EUR 40 million to EUR 50 million. And this is the very good news that we will reach EUR 40 million as it looks now 2027 at the latest. So FMK gives us 3 years in like a turbo speed to speed up the growth levels. And yes, so we have -- we're excited to look in a very profitable 2026 and also in a very profitable 2027. And driven by the market trends, digitization, where we're one of the players in the market, demography where we see that our brokers become older every year, and every 4 years, the broker base becomes older by 3.7 years, and that's also one of the strong arguments for FMK that now we go to younger customer groups, more digital-oriented customers. And as Ralph said, we have the lever in our own hand. We're not as dependent on B2B business because we can -- if the leads cannot be transacted by our brokers, we can also go to the directors -- to the clients direct. So also consolidation is one of the topics. FMK, is a very good example. It's not done yet in Germany, but it's gaining drive and speed, and also regulation, is one of the reasons why the smaller market players just do not have any chance to come up with their IT tech stacks to grow and change them as to a regulation that's implemented faster and faster. So very happy with the development that we can give you good news that this long-term guidance will be achieved much faster than we ever thought. So thank you very much for your attention until now. We're happy to take any questions you might have. Ingmar?

[Operator Instructions] Please note that management team has another meeting right after this. And therefore, we unfortunately cannot exceed the time set for this meeting. So if there are any questions by raising their hands, I'll wait for the participants. Otherwise, I'll read out questions sent to us while you have the presentation. So I read it out, when will the first insurance policies brokered by FMK be transferred to the JDC platform?

Ralph, you want to take this question?

Sorry, sorry, I just was -- I'm organizing my desk with a pencil and with a piece of paper. So please, could you please...

Yes, Ingmar. The first insurance policy very soon. So we hope to implement -- have the interfaces done with FMK, very fast, October or November already. So the first little, little, little turnover as we expect already this year.

Yes, definitely. Maybe some more light on this. FMK is already selling insurance. They sold the leads for EUR 80 on average. And then they saw that it's much more profitable to sell these insurance policies themselves. So they founded a little broker, very tiny broker. And within the first year with no effort, this broker generated an EBITDA of EUR 0.25 million. So this is a very profitable business, and we will start with this very soon. At first, we have to pay, unfortunately, the efforts -- at first we have to pay the purchase price. But our kickoff meeting is already at the beginning of September, so first effects visible in 2025.

And there's one participant raising his hand. You are able to ask your question, Mr. Jong, I think.

A couple of questions on the large clients again, always a favorite subject. But you see it increasing quite a lot. Could you give a little bit more color on the composition of the EUR 30 million that's in the large clients? That will be the first.

Edwin, we didn't really understand the question right acoustically.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

So I was looking at the large clients, EUR 30 million turnover, so growing quite nicely. And I was wondering about the composition. So which part is cooperative banks, which part is savings bank, which part is Allianz, for instance, or a little bit of color on that.

From your question was the development of turnover, what of this turnover is contributed by the bigger partners of JDC, right?

That was initiated. Can you talk about the composition?

That was 30%, right? Edwin, 30% of our turnover we said is major customers, right? And you want to say what customers contribute at what level? It's very heterogenic. So there's some corporate clients that are not growing, but some are really growing fast. And same goes for the savings banks, especially the Provinzial Savings Bank. We're very happy about this business development. And some other savings banks insurers are trailing after the development of Provinzial. So It's very individual among these around 25 major partners. And obviously, we are under our NDA rules, we are not publishing individual results. But it has nothing to do with segments. It's more individual development of individual partners.

Okay, clear. And then in the last results, I always saw the follow-up commissions. I missed that in this report. Am I right about that, or?

Yes, we had these slides, which we were very surprised because the partner we are placing the bond with Pareto, like gave us some quite insight -- interesting insight in our own business. And especially they added because we always said there's more than 60% of our business recurring, which I think is very big factor for a stable business. But then if we add up the reoccurring business, that means the business with partners that are already there, but it's reoccurring every year, that's basically technically new business. But as for example, every year, there's new employees with Lufthansa. And obviously, there is a new pension scheme for these partners. So this part of recurring business makes another almost 25%. So we can say that 85% of all of our business is recurring -- or reoccurring. I think that's a very good news also for bond owners that this is a very stable business base that we know at January 1, basically, that all our costs are borne, and it's only the factor how high is our own earnings. So that's -- so thank you for the question because yes, we have this slide in the FMK deck last week. I don't know why we didn't include it here because I don't know, we didn't want to do too much advertising, I guess.

Okay. And finally, so June was quite nice. So the development in June. Can you elaborate a little bit on how it's going in July and August so far?

We'll be very happy. Obviously, the capital markets are back, right? So you could see record highs, especially in U.S. indices, but also in European indices. So from where we started, 3,900 points that was the high in Q1. Now we had 4,170 points. So we are up considerably. So we can see that this alone gives us 3 to 4 percentage points in growth in the third quarter over the second. And then also the consumer sentiment slowly becomes better. But obviously, as Ralph showed you, and we expect still the Q3 being the summer quarter, so not too much expectations there, but a very good base for a very strong Q4. So yes, there is a rebound, and it's very visible from June on.

And maybe a question short to answer. Has the placement of the bond at Pareto already begun?

The answer is yes, this morning, [ 8 05 ] was the sales briefing for the Pareto guys. So they are on the phone right now.