Hypoport SE

XETRA:HYQ

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Operator]

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Webcast Half Year Results 2021 of Hypoport SE. At our customers' request, this conference will be recorded. [Operator Instructions] May I now hand you over to Ronald Slabke, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.

[Ronald Slabke, Co]

Yes. Welcome from my side as well to the presentation of the half year report of Hypoport. As you are aware, we are digitalizing the credit, the real estate and insurance industry here in Germany. And you may have seen our figures already, and you know that we did pretty well in the first half year, that we stayed on our growth track and have a double-digit growth record as well for the first half year. You can say all subsidiaries in the network, all platforms distributed to this growth. We have a new record in all 4 segments. The leader, as always, credit industry, and the credit platform is close to EUR 100 million in revenue, followed by private clients, there's EUR 70 million of revenue now. And our 2 youngsters, insurance platform and real estate platform, with around EUR 25 million each. So all 4 contributed and all 4 are growing above market and gaining market share at this -- in the current environment where not all markets are up at all. Total numbers, more than EUR 200 million in revenue, EUR 213 million to be exact, a new record for Hypoport, with close to EUR 22 million in EBIT as well a new record for Hypoport for the first half year. The surrounding market grew by, let's say, top, the mortgage market plus 5% in volume, followed by the insurance market with plus 1% still. And then we see corporate finance market where loan volume was down in the first half of the year, and the personal loan market, which were double-digit down first half of the year because of the environment. In this market circumstances, Hypoport delivered growth between 7% and 17% based on the segments, so we gained market share and outperformed the rest of the market significant. As a result, we stayed with our 2021 forecast of a revenue between EUR 430 million and EUR 460 million and as well as our predicted profitability of EUR 40 million to EUR 50 million -- EUR 45 million. So talking about market environment, as you are pretty sure aware, we have a pandemic here in Germany. First half of the year, we're still marked by some lockdown in the beginning and the normalization of our society in the second quarter. For our businesses, it means that, especially in the second quarter, for the first time, it was possible again to have physical contact or meet our clients and potential new clients. And especially in the B2B environment where we are in, this is important to create new relations and to bring certain types of projects for what ongoing business you can run pretty well, and you can even finish some projects, which you have started already. But to create new partnerships, you need a certain level of interaction with each other. This is much easier, and it was much easier in the second quarter compared to the previous quarters. So we saw a normalization of business relations, and this was good. It was enjoyable for our employees and our partners as well. So besides this general track, looking on the different industries, market environment was, let's say, depended a lot from special events in these different markets. So let's start with the mortgage market. Here, we saw a strong market share gain of our clients because of their outperformance compared with more traditional operating market participants. So you can say all of our clients were gaining market share. And thanks to this weaked market share in the end, the need for fully digitalized solutions, fully integrated solutions is obvious, thanks to the pandemic. So everyone who's running their business already on Europace profited from the intensity of automation that Europace offers. Besides this, the -- we saw some minor delays on the banking side regarding the processing of applications. So not all applications which were, let's say, arrived in banks, and there are mortgage loans were underwritten could be passed through fully, so there is a certain delay in this process as the... Beside mortgage business, second most important market for us in the meantime is corporate finance. You can say that the challenges, the corona pandemic faced to a lot of businesses, arrived in banks and in the rating system of banks. So the full year report of 2020 arrived, and for banks, it's challenging, this new situation regarding their risk appetite and their risk assessment based on their clients.And let's say, we see this, and we can say that it's getting more difficult for corporate clients to get credits here, so the need for advice. And REM CAPITAL, one of our subsidiaries, is a great adviser for corporates, is needed to help them to solve this issue of higher standards on the banking side, so more structured finance is needed and more advice is needed there. And this is actually a good environment for REM CAPITAL to grow. But the total market was down. So the total underwritten credit volume to corporates went down here in Germany first half year compared to last year. Similar to consumer finance, the demand from computer side -- from consumer side for credit is down because of, let's say, lots of savings made during the pandemic in the last 15 months, plus the need and the ability to spend money is still depressed. So the demand is lower than pre-corona crisis. And on the other side, banks are not too keen on underwriting personal loans because of the uncertainty of how fast we will leave this stressed environment from a consumer perspective. So demand and the supply is down. And from this market, it's double-digit down here in Germany for consumer finance. Okay. Looking a little bit more details in the long-term development of the housing here in Germany, it's pretty important to understand that, thanks to some general trends, the need for housing stays high. So pre-corona, we saw a net migration. Right now, we see a stable migration to Germany, expect to increase again as soon as the economy recovers. So demand from the side of migrations is high. Life expectation is up and will be -- will increase, thanks to the new invention on the medical side further. We have a trend here in Germany to one-person household on older people and younger people both. And what is new, thanks to corona, is a need for more space, especially in the middle class and upper class. The remote work created a need for 2 remote [ spaces ] at home. And even for children and their remote schooling, you need a solution. You want to offer your child as well as some activity space, so a balcony or a terrace is needed, and all this creates a huge demand from a middle class upwards to improve the housing situation here in Germany. And there's a lot of need there, which drives the pressure on the market. And so we keep seeing an exceeding demand of 1.9 million to 2 million units here in Germany. Thanks to our restriction and regulation of the building industry and the housing industry, we don't build a lot new, so prices are going up. And this is for the first half year. We saw a sharp price increase in housing. And all predictions looking forward for the next 12 months look similar, double-digit price increase in housing. So increasing demand, increasing prices leads to currently a stable amount of transactions in numbers, but an increasing transaction volume, which is good on our housing platform as well as in our mortgage business as well as in our private client business. So we are prospering in this current environment, and corona is adding just a fourth trend to 3 old megatrends, which we see already in the housing market. So -- and we switch to the real estate platform. Based on this outlook of the housing market, you can say first half year was a stable environment this -- in the perspective of numbers of transactions, plus increasing volume. In the residential property valuation business where we are in, you could say that the need for valuations increased, thanks to the increasing prices as well. Just the processing power of the banks have limited the amount of growth here for the market. In the social housing industry, where we offer IT solutions and financing as well, you can say that, in general, the impact is low. Still no default on rents or similar. On the other side, especially in the second quarter, this rising prices on the construction side and for building materials, they hit this industry. Their margins are low. Their projects are calculating the same margins, and rising prices leaded to delays in projects. Some projects are on hold, waiting for lower prices for the necessary construction material. We don't feel this in our -- directly in our businesses, but we can expect that in the near-term future, this will have an impact on the way how they calculate projects. And also we -- the whole industry is delivering not enough new housing space, so there is political initiatives needed to speed up and ramp up the whole construction process here in Germany. And this shortage of material is just adding up another pain in this -- on this side.So last industry, Insurance. In general, the need for digitalization is high -- stays high. Corona proves it. The ability to act is for most of the players are still limited because they are -- the organizations are not used to this environment. In the second quarter, we could finally talk with some of them again and, let's say, drive project forward. This was good, and we hope to see more of this in the second half of the year. Let's say, we feel a positive dynamic here already just from these 3 months of normalization. And we look forward and really hope that it's getting better in this industry and that we can help them to digitalize for the upcoming challenges, which is -- this industry faces as well. So how do this -- how do our 4 segments perform in this general market environment? As always, we start with the credit platform, in the center Europace. You are aware of this that Europace, with their product range of mortgages, personal loans and [indiscernible] products is the clear market leader here in Germany. Beside this, we started to develop funding for corporate loans and operate some additional businesses in these segments here to enable transactions on our lending marketplace here. Growth tech continues in the first half year of 2021 with an acceleration, you can say, in a long-term perspective, plus 25% growth rate, new record high transaction volume. Mortgage business up 28%, even in the 5% market environment. So we took a lot of market share in the first half year of 2021. Or you can say the market participants which used Europace took a lot of market share from the ones who are still not using Europace, which adds additional pressure to this, which still operate on a more traditional way. Building finance, Bausparen, up only 8%. Market is down. Reason is the interest environment. We still have a pretty long fixed interest rate period in the normal mortgage products of more than 13 years, and the Bauspar contract is typically used to secure even longer the interest rate. But there's such a low interest rate, which we see now here in Germany, which is typically below 1% right now. The need for long-term security is already compensated with higher repayment rates, and so the product building finance is not as needed as it was in previous years. Personal loans on Europace, up 12% compared with a double-digit decline in the market. We see here a strong market share gain, thanks to our approach that we enable B2B partner, especially banks, to underwrite with multiple lenders and aggregate multiple scoring system in their offering to make each need, each demand of a client and match this -- make it possible and match this on a certain credit offering -- sorry, sorry, good traction in all products above, you can say all target groups. And when we look on the target groups, you can see that we are profiting heavily from our long-term strong performance in the mortgage broker world, where we achieved a market share of above 55% now. They are growing. They are taking market share with -- powered by Europace. So one of the important growth tracks in this -- for Europace. Private banks as well outperformed the market if they were using Europace and gained market share from others and, you can say, the loses in the market as the cooperative bank and savings banks, which are not using Europace. That's why we see an accelerated migration path here and accelerated migration speed as well in the second quarter compared to the end of last year and beginning of this year. Total for our first half -- for the first half of 2021 in the cooperative banking sector, we were growing by 86% to a new record high and in the savings banks industry by 38% to EUR 4.8 billion, a record high as well. Both sectors still offer a lot of growth potential for us, especially when you see that all Europace users take market share from the cooperative and savings banks, which are still operating their mortgage business in a traditional way. This pressure is high from the competition. The pressure is high from interest rate margins, possibly in this low interest rate environment. And additionally, the pressure is high from the fee side. So the results from commissions and fees here in Germany are under additional pressure because of some high court rulings against banks, so that they need to find new sources of revenue, and to reduce your cost of operation is enormous in all banking -- in all banks here in Germany. And this is supporting our offering -- of our approach to digitalize, especially the regional banks, and drive the penetration in both sectors higher. So as a total result for the first half year, we saw new record figures on revenue and gross profit side, plus an outperformance on the profitability in Europace, and the surrounding business models have a high scaling effect in it, so the incremental margin is 100%. And in the current corona enviroment, we, as well, let's say, are not too aggressive in expanding our operations, our investment in new target groups and new products here. So we are focused on keeping our growth speed, but we are not in an acceleration right now. Plus, corona environment taught us well to save on some expenditures, which are linked to travel or events. So we save as well some money on this side. So that this strong outperformance on the profitability side is linked to the current environment and to the scalability of Europace. So next segment as well strong link and operating in the mortgage world, our franchise network where Dr. Klein is offering a brand and for consumers in -- a trusted brand and for consumers a franchise network of more than 200 branches here in Germany. Online lead generation, bringing clients from the Internet as fast as possible into the branches of our franchisees. They're operating on Europace plus voice -- sorry, video-based advice processes is a very powerful solution in the current environment, and Dr. Klein was able to take a lot of market share last year and as well in the first half of this year, operating in pretty modern, very meeting client demand and having a perfect solution in place and trained with all the advisers for remote advice process and presentation process for mortgages here in Germany. So new record high, plus 12%, slightly increased from the first quarter, and we're seeing a double-digit pace here as well for the second half of 2022 -- 2021. We are confident about this because the bottleneck pays the number of advisers in the branches of our franchisees, with a plus of 70% or 90 headcounts net in our adviser network. We said in the first half year as well the basis for future growth because each additional headcount means after a certain training period and optimization of the conversion rate for the new advisers that they are going to be productive after 6 -- after 3 to 6 months. And this productivity adds new transaction volume for the whole Dr. Klein network, so we expect further growth from this pretty high growth speed up, 17% plus on headcount on the adviser side. The additional transactions resulted as well in new regulatory revenue and gross profit for Dr. Klein. And thanks to the scalability of franchise system, plus savings on, again, cost for traveling and events, we see a new record on profitability as well with EUR 12.4 million in profits. So more than 50% EBIT margin. And to be honest, our long-term expectation is that EBIT margin for this business should be around 35% to 40%. We outperformed this right now, thanks to the circumstances. But competition will, in some moment, get better as well handling remote advice processes, and some costs will come back. So over the next couple of years, we don't expect to keep profit margin of above 50% here in this kind of business. But for now, it's performing pretty well, and we expect as well a very strong second half of the year for this segment. Now we come to the youngsters,, #1 real estate platform with their, let's say, 2 types of housing, which we are digitalizing. One is home ownership, where we have a strong position in the market with our mortgage platform, Europace. And the other one is the renting market, social housing, where we are -- and very, very old financier and mortgage broker in this world, adding -- digitalizing this process and adding a digital platform for housing associations to operate on -- to the industry. The cost for this segment is the home ownership side because here, we see a huge potential in leveraging our market position in the mortgage finance business and gaining market share on the purchase side and on the valuation side of properties. Why? From our perspective, it's one workflow, one consumer-driven process, which is, right now, too fragmented, not integrated, not digitalized as a whole. And using our position in mortgage business, we aim for a full digitalized approach for the whole transaction, including, let's say, the first contact, the purchasing process and the validation -- the valuation process as well. This all should be, at the end, from a perspective of a consumer a process without handover of documents or data between not integrated parties. So the risk of loss of information, this all needs to be fully integrated, and thanks to this trend, fully automated workflow, which takes only the consumer to make its decision and to consider it, but not to handle documents or data from participant to participant. In this value chain, with Europace, we have a market share of something around 30% already. And thanks to acquisitions and our organic growth speed in the last 1.5 years, you can say, we are now close to 10% market share on the property sales side and on the property valuation side. So each [ 1/10 ] of housing transaction in Germany is powered by the FIO solution. And each [ 1/10 ] of the valuation is done or supported by Value AG. You see that besides the fact that Europace growing, and this 30% is just the current status, there's a huge potential in both directions. We are talking about EUR 250 billion markets here, each of them in total transaction numbers. And this fair fee structure based on the added value that we deliver there is a huge chance in this market for Hypoport. That's why we are investing heavily and trying to improve the share of properties going through our sales platform or being valuated by us. Talking about sales platform, we are B2B. We use bank branches as leverage and deliver the underlying IT system for real estate brokerage and mortgages. And in the savings banks world, while there are still only 12% of the mortgage transaction are going through Europace, 88% of all banks use already FIO for the real estate agent network. And the efficiency gain in integration -- integrating the box solution, optimizing the whole consumer experience base of this integrated solution is huge. And thanks to this, our position in the savings banks throughout this year are very powerful. We are working on this to have a similar role in the cooperative banking world. We increased our share by 1% for -- to 11% now. It could be faster, the growth track here. The challenge is a little bit at GENOPACE is already very successful, a lot of attention. A lot of resources goes to the scaling of GENOPACE in the cooperative banking sector. This takes a toll on the speed in other projects. And so we are -- let's say, our organization, but as well the cooperative banking industry is still a little bit distracted from the importance of real estate brokerage here. But we see the potential, and we see that cooperative banks as well as savings banks needs the revenue from real estate agents. And they are still underperforming here and are not fully using their potential, so that there's a lot of need for advice and support from our side beside providing the platform. That's why it's not a part -- we see this -- let's say, we see that we are on track and just need to jointly reach step after step and bank after bank here and migrate them to our joint solution. As a result of the growth in both sectors, we see an organic growth of low double digits, roughly 10% here. Total numbers is down 3% because of some project business, which was still in the first quarter of 2021, diluting our growth track here. Now the whole business is fully transaction-based and de-curing. So this is -- it's a transformation as well, if you noticed already from our previous reports in the last quarters. Third product segment -- sorry, sorry, second product segment valuations. Strong growth on the partnership side, so more and more Europace partners use Value AG or start to use Value AG for the valuation. Revenue growth of 26%. Even then, we still see some lack in execution and the processing of applications on our partner side. We delivered this growth in 2021 based on gaining efficiency by digitalization -- by digitalizing the processes. While in 2020, we are still growing by increasing headcount. So this validation -- valuation platform is a heavy investment case for us because we first started to aggregate market power and market share using human labor. And now, step by step, we digitalize the work which is done, focusing our people more and more on the more sophisticated work, which can't be fully automated or is still not automated. So looking forward, we plan to keep this growth track here without adding additional headcount on the execution side. We may need more headcount on software engineering and data science here. But on the long term, this pace pretty well back. And step by step, we will take market share and, let's say, first, make this business profitable and later scale this with the similar profitability as we see it already in the credit platform business. Third product area, the rental market and daily housing association and our financing platform for them, a new record. There's more than EUR 1 billion transaction volume in the first half year, thanks to a certain level of volatility in the interest rate environment, plus, in general, low interest environment here in Germany. And still there's no support for our figures from the market growth, so still we -- in Germany, the new construction of social housing is on a, let's say, low level compared with the times where we already had huge migrations in the, let's say, last century still. So we still need to ramp this up here. We need billions of euros spent in new social housing to meet this demand to close the gap of this 1.9 million missing units. First half, you can say, stable, stable environment. We slightly increased our transaction volume. Product mix changed slightly, so that's why the revenue is down by 2 percentage here, not a major issue. For the whole segment, it means a growth track. And if you eliminate the project business, double-digit growth for the first half year. And then you compare second quarter of 2020 and second quarter of 2021, you see a 10% growth track already of organic growth in this segment here. And still, we are ramping it up here. We are still in a heavy investment case. This is hard core B2B business where we digitalize an industry to ramp this up. It stays a challenge, and it's pretty healthy and pretty good that we can use our strong position in the mortgage market here to accelerate the growth and to achieve some unfair advantages in the competition with the existing players in this market here. Okay. And last youngster, the insurance platform with SMART INSUR tech in the center, our approach to fully digitalize the German insurance sales side, so from consumer via agents to insurance companies bringing them all on a joint platform, bringing all the information, the data on a single platform to then enable high levels of automation in the exchange of information along the value chain and the life cycle of an insurance contract. The path to success for us this year, to more and more migrate the contractual data from our acquired on-premise software solutions to the centralized platform and then connect this information with the information in the core banking -- core insurance systems of the insurance company, which underwrote the insurance contract. On the migration side to the platform, we saw a plus of 8% in the first half year to now close to EUR 3 billion in premium volume. On the validation side, we increased from 16% to 18% in the second quarter. We expect that the speed of migration to this platform will slightly increase in the second half of the year, so double digit. Plus, we expect a high increase in the speed of validation, so to create these links to the insurance companies to enable further automation. We saw in the second quarter a lot of quality growth in the IT projects that we are running together with IT -- with insurance companies, so that we are pretty confident that this validation, the number of validated volume is sharp increasing in the second half of this year. On the long run, we stay in this, let's say, long-term approach of fully digitalizing this market and not trying to have some short-term effects on numbers by, let's say, manually executing or managing insurance contracts. We offer a fully digital solution, even when this solution means that the migration takes more time. And the integration with your current IT infrastructure, as I said, to organization takes some time. We see this central -- data point central in a platform as a core asset long term to achieve double-digit growth here in this market by being the hub where everyone needs to be connected with and where all data and information needs to go through to have an efficient information exchange between consumer agent and insurance company. For the first half year, this growth in transaction volume, plus some inorganic growth of the acquisition of a pension scheme platform delivered double-digit growth, plus 12% on the earning side, plus 16% also in the gross profit. We keep investing, so minus EUR 1 million in EBIT. We scale our IT teams to further develop our platform to develop the necessary interfaces and to create automation based on the validated data. So here, lots of investments ongoing in this platform to make sure that the increasing client demand for this automation is met by new features, which we provide. So total numbers for the group, double-digit growth. As always, first half year, we delivered again plus 12%, plus 13% on the top line side and between 21% and 35% on the profitability side. Last year, we had some deferred tax issues, so we had to pay some taxes from previous periods. That's why the outperformance. Otherwise, you would see roughly around 25% growth in all numbers. So we are still in line with our long-term growth record here. The last 7 years, we are scaling highly profitable, our business. And keep in mind that these profit numbers, especially the EUR 36 million in EBITDA, is linked to another EUR 40 million that we spent and passed through our P&L for investments in future growth in the credit platform, in real estate and in insurance. We are heavy spenders when you look on our future. We invest a lot in key account resources to acquire new clients and new transaction volume. And we are investing heavily in IT resources to expand our platforms from their value proposition they offer and from the future revenue they are able to generate. Shareholder structure, just a small change. BlackRock is now on board with more than 3%. Everything else is stable. Our long-term investment case stays stable. Each investor here invest in a double-digit growth tracks of company, which is doing this for 20 years now and plans to do this for the next 20 years. So for this year, we are pretty good on track with our guidance, and we expect to keep growing this way for the next 20 years. Now I hand back to our operator to moderate if there are any questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] As we have no questions, I would like to hand back to you, Mr. Slabke.

[Ronald Slabke, Co]

Yes. Thank you. Yes. Let's say next couple of months, we see a huge voting here in Germany for federal government and as well for some regional governments. We as Hypoport expect that the topic of housing is far on top of the -- any new government, regional and federal, because of the stress added to the society. We expect some impact -- some positive impact and impulses for homeownership, and we expect as well a lot of impact on the social housing side from this voting. So when we meet again at the beginning of November, we know how the new government looks like. And hopefully, we can give you an update already on what we may gain in the different markets from this new government structures. So after then, we are focusing on keeping this industry busy, this -- and digitalizing them and driving the IT projects forward and our revenue up. So hope to see you soon again. Bye-bye.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This conference has been concluded. You may disconnect.