Stroeer SE & Co KgaA
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Stroeer SE & Co KgaA
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Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining our Q1 results call today. As in the previous calls, I will talk about the recent developments in the first quarter of 2022 and give you a strategic update. Henning will then present the financials for the first -- Henning will then present the financials for the first quarter '22 before we give you a short outlook of what we expect for the second quarter and the coming months. Following our presentation, we will be available for Q&A.
Despite the quite challenging setting in Q1, moving from the COVID-19 pandemic virtually seamlessly into the next challenges, we were able to deliver a landmark performance, especially when it comes to revenue. We were able to achieve the highest first quarter sales in the company's history.
In total, reported group revenues for the first quarter were up by remarkable 23% from EUR 312 million to EUR 385 million, spot on with our expectations. As in the previous quarters, organic revenue was at a comparable level with 24%, up 39 percentage points versus prior year. The adjusted EBITDA increased over proportionally by 29% to EUR 95 million, mainly driven by the strong performance of out-of-home, and when having a deeper look into the segment, by the continued high-margin digital out-of-home business. Adjustments remained low and came in at EUR 3 million in Q1 2022.
Our adjusted EBIT reflects the strong performance of the quarter, but also taking into account the comparably weak prior year basis due to the COVID lockdown by rising by more than 100% to EUR 31 million. Same applies for adjusted net income, which grew from EUR 1 million to EUR 19 million. Operating cash flow for the first quarter developed pretty much in line with revenue and adjusted EBITDA performance despite the fact that it includes a one-off effect for bonus payments for our PLUS businesses and was up by 18%, improved from EUR 27 million to EUR 32 million.
As already explained at our prelims presentation, we will continue to invest into profitable growth and especially the rollout and accelerated expansion of our digital out-of-home portfolio. Consequently, CapEx spend more than doubled from EUR 14 million to EUR 34 million.
To be prepared to roll out our accelerated expansion for digital out-of-home, in all circumstances, we already secured all hardware components to implement our plan. Nevertheless, we have the flexibility to react on short notice and to adjust our expansion plans.
In the current situation, the heterogeneous client structure makes our out-of-home business by far more resilient than most of our competition. About 60% of our revenues come from, in total, roughly 58,000 clients and we approach them with in total 1,000 in and outbound salespeople and specialist teams on a local and regional level. In particular, the local customers signed multiyear contracts, and also 58,000 clients sound like a lot, there are more than 600,000 SMEs on our general target list.
The addressable market is huge. And just last week, we had the highest order intake ever with almost EUR 4 million in only 1 week from local customers. And both across regional, local as well as national advertisers, our clients are spread in a very balanced way across all industries. Accordingly, there is no specific exposure. And if one customer segment suffers, another one might develop in the opposite direction. We are already working on compensating the most challenged national branding budgets via local and regional customers.
Under rougher economic conditions, advertisers tend to shift slightly more money to performance marketing and activities that directly convert into sales. Our out-of-home PLUS model gives us the flexibility with Digital and Dialog Media to keep overall budgets inside our group, even when advertisers push the focus to the lower end of their marketing funnel.
At our Capital Markets Day, half a year ago, we talked in detail about our strategy. Our focus areas are still unchanged and have also been the key drivers in the first 3 months of 2022. First of all, the digitization of our out-of-home infrastructure, especially with more digital roadside inventory to strengthen our profitable public video proposition. Secondly, the continued optimization of the synergy potential and network effects of out-of-home and Digital and Dialog Media, i.e., in the areas of content, tech, data and customer access. And finally, there is the unlocked value crystallization potential of Asam and especially Statista, and both have shown excellent growth and performance in the last weeks and months despite some headwinds through the war in the Ukraine.
Despite valuation multiples declined since the peak around year-end 2021, we received quite attractive offers, especially for Statista in a range of EUR 1 billion to EUR 1.5 billion, which we declined. To unveil the true value of Statista as of now, we believe a spinoff and listing in Statista's large market in the U.S. maximizes shareholder value.
Let's have again a closer look at our digitization road map for out-of-home and where we are versus our midterm targets. We stick to our midterm plan with a CAGR of 500 roadside screens and 300 incremental premium indoor screens per year until 2026 but decided at the beginning of this year to pull some of our investments forward and accelerate the momentum in 2022. We planned 750 to 800 roadside screens instead of the midterm benchmark of 500 in the coming 12 months. And Q1 has already brought almost 200 on top. We plan 400 instead of 300 premium indoor screens on top with a clear focus on the top 10 cities in Germany. In Q1, we have installed almost 100. And the long-term portfolio will be optimized, especially towards high-traffic point-of-sale locations. No material opportunities occurred year-to-date so far.
The situation in the Ukraine has not changed our rollout plan so far, neither in Q1 nor for Q2. And we try to invest as much as possible in our long-term potential. But just in case the situation gets really bad, pausing the rollout would generate significant CapEx savings in the second half of the year. But we still try to convert every approval for new screens as quickly as possible.
Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Essen have been focused cities year for large-format roadside screens beyond 10 square meter of size in Q1, i.e., in Berlin, Hanover, Duisburg and Kassel, we've been strengthening our roadside proposition with a standard 9 square meter product. And in cities like Hamburg, Hanover, the Rhine-Main area and Kassel, we have installed both smaller 2 square meters screens in the city centers as well as digitized columns, our so-called public video city towers.
Especially our growing digital out-of-home portfolio clearly helps deepening our relationships with advertisers like the food retailer REWE, a campaign that just won the German Media Award for the best out-of-home campaign a couple of days ago; Lufthansa leading the recovery of the travel sector; or Sky, representative for media and streaming services.
Both classic out-of-home and digital out-of-home benefit from Ströer have a larger share of client advertising wallet via online and Dialog solutions. And new customers or temporarily nonactive advertisers are finding their way to out-of-home. Stellantis, the merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA was one of the few automotive clients that was really present in out-of-home as the dominant lead medium, taking 95% of the total media budget. But also Scalable Capital and IKEA invested far beyond 80% of their above-the-line budget in out-of-home media in Q1.
A further door opener to our clients' budget is definitely T-Online. Most advertisers use our 2 key platforms, the #1 digital out-of-home network in combination with the #1 news platform by means of reach. And in the past years, T-Online also grows website and app visits in 2022 so far. Just 2 weeks ago, we have launched a new design, including a completely new underlying technological backbone headless CMS, cloud-based AWS microservices and architecture. The new T-Online is now fully responsive and currently the fastest loading publisher website in Germany. There have been often discussions where that business is going to die, but the truth is it was never stronger than today, and the most recent investments will fully pay off over the next couple of years.
And Q1 was also a good quarter for our noncore businesses, especially Statista. Our first mover advantage and market making pays off in a 48% top line growth in Q1 which speaks for itself. And we constantly work on our road map to look into a potential value crystallization of the asset beginning of 2024.
We have broadened the management team and constantly optimize the organizational structure to catch up with the group, we have worked on defining the right KPIs to manage the business but also drive value, ARR growth, gross margin, net revenue retention and gross retention, and we will start working on some formal and hygiene factors like changing the legal firm into an incorporation in Germany from GmbH to an AG and establishing an Advisory Board to separate the company more and more from our group.
It's fair to say that our attempt to unlock the value of our noncore assets with a new segmentation and more transparency, especially around Statista has failed when we look unemotionally at the current status. If we take for Statista and Asam, the lower end of external valuations and offers, we get to EUR 1.5 billion. Our group market cap early this week was EUR 2.8 billion. So we talk about EUR 1.3 billion for our core advertising business. Based on our guidance, the current market consensus for our group EBITDA is around EUR 555 million. Deducting around EUR 180 million for IFRS 16 effects and another EUR 25 million EBITDA for Asam and Statista, takes us to roughly EUR 350 million EBITDA ex-IFRS 16 for our core out-of-home and advertising business versus the EUR 1.3 billion, saw an EBITDA multiple somewhere between 3.5 and 4.
But anyway, the subscription business of Statista is running on rails and the midterm target of EUR 250 million sales in 2025 is unchanged. In other words, nothing new. Statista simply performs.
Despite some headwinds due to the increased raw material prices, some challenging and longer discussions with retailers at the beginning of the year and thus, some revenue shifts into Q2, Asam delivered double-digit growth in Q1. Due to phasing effects in the retail business, Q2 is expected beyond 30% growth. And just as a reminder, in Q1 last year, we had a hard lockdown and quite some favorable environment for the e-commerce part of Asam and therefore, more than 40% growth in Q1 last year. So we have been running against comps this year that includes special effects of at least 10 percentage points. Later in the year, we will evaluate our schedule, sometime in Q4, to see if the potential exit makes sense considering the macroeconomic environment at that time.
Operational and formal requirements like Tech DD or vendor due diligence work streams are already on the way, and we stick to our commitment to crystallize the value of noncore assets. But just to be clear, valuation is more important than timing. We will see what's possible end of the year for Asam, but we also have no pressure to do anything.
We have all seen the developments at the stock market especially around cyclical...
Dear ladies and gentlemen, we lost the connection, but we will be back in a second. Thank you.
Sorry, once again. I think we had some technical issues. So let me start again running you through the Q1 '22 financials. Group -- on a group level, sales growth accelerated as expected to 23% in the first quarter, right in the middle of our Q1 guidance of 20% to 25% group revenue growth. Sales came in at EUR 385 million compared to EUR 312 million in Q1 '21. With that, we achieved the highest Q1 sales in the Ströer history and this, as mentioned before, in the context of rising macroeconomic headwinds.
Due to the very strong performance, especially of our high-margin digital out-of-home business, which delivered a revenue increase of around 140%, adjusted EBITDA increased disproportionately compared to sales with 29% and came in at EUR 95 million for the quarter. Exceptional items stood at minus EUR 3.3 million, including restructuring expenses of EUR 2 million and EUR 1 million of other minor items and continued thus to remain on a very low level.
As in previous quarters, depreciation and amortization continued to decline and were down to EUR 71 million in the quarter, mainly due to the declining D&A from capitalized purchase price allocation. As mentioned earlier, PPA will decline further going forward due to the terminal write-down of the underlying assets.
The financial result improved slightly from EUR 7 million to EUR 6 million due to lower interest on lease liabilities and more favorable exchange rates. Taxes developed mainly in line with business performance.
Looking at the adjusted net income, the increase is pretty much in line with the improved business performance when compared with the prior year period and taking the effects described before into account. In total, net income adjusted increased from EUR 1 million to EUR 19 million in Q1 '22.
Moving over to cash flow. Altogether, we again see a quite decent cash flow, especially when considering our significant investments into the accelerated buildup of our digital out-of-home portfolio. Operating cash flow went up from EUR 27 million to EUR 32 million, a development which underlines our strong cash conversion capabilities even in challenging times. Working capital development follow seasonality, so the decrease will be normally reversed in the next quarter. In addition, working capital in Q1 '21 was supported by reverse factoring, which now volumes to 0. The position others declined to minus EUR 11 million. The reason here is utilization of a provision for long-term incentives in our Data as a Service and E-Commerce segment.
Cash flow from non-M&A investments more than doubled compared to Q1 '21, an increase from EUR 14 million to EUR 34 million, reflecting mainly the accelerated ramp-up of our digital roadside portfolio, as Christian described earlier. Due to these investments, free cash flow before M&A was down from EUR 13 million to minus EUR 2 million in Q1 '22. Leasing repayments declined by EUR 5 million from EUR 47 million to EUR 42 million, which is mainly the result of postponed payments by the end of the heavily COVID affected year 2020. Free cash flow adjusted came in at minus EUR 44 million just EUR 10 million short of Q1 '21.
With this development, financial net debt was at EUR 653 million for the end of Q1 '22 and thus EUR 10 million below the same period in '21. Our leverage ratio, however, improved significantly to 1.96 compared to a level of close to 3x a year ago. Sequentially, the leverage ratio remained stable.
Let us now change perspective and focus on segment performance, starting with out-of-home media. In total, out-of-home benefited from the overall positive market dynamics in the first quarter '22, compared with the prior year period, which was heavily affected by COVID-19 restrictions. In total, out-of-home segment revenue increased by EUR 55 million from EUR 98 million to EUR 152 million, and thus came in at the lower end of the forecasted corridor. Rising geopolitical uncertainty led to softer demand from national accounts, in particular, for our classical products.
Adjusted for tobacco advertising sales, however, growth amounted to 59%. With this Q1 '22 achieved an index level of roughly 93% compared to the pre-COVID Q1 of 2019. In detail, sales in classical out-of-home increased by 36% to EUR 96 million. This was outpaced significantly by the development of digital out-of-home, which more than doubled in revenues and rose by 141% to EUR 42 million, a clear sign that customers appreciate reach and flexibility of this product category, especially during times where economic visibility is impaired. Out-of-home services increased pretty much on a comparable level with classic.
These performance trends were also reflected in the development of EBITDA adjusted, which increased disproportionately by 63% from EUR 36 million to EUR 59 million in the first quarter '22, especially driven by the strong performance of digital out-of-home as described before. Accordingly, the margin went up from 37% to 39%. Please bear in mind that Q1 '21 still benefited from government short-time allowances.
Our Digital and Dialog Media segment continued to deliver a sound performance. Revenues increased by around 6% from EUR 161 million in Q1 '21 to EUR 170 million in the Q1 of the reporting period. Revenues in online advertising and content publishing was up 4% from EUR 86 million to EUR 89 million, fueled by high traffic on Ströer's own content platforms in particular, T-Online. Some changes in the publisher portfolio were more than compensated in the period under review.
The businesses grouped under Dialog Media continued to perform robustly. Sales increased by 9% from EUR 75 million to EUR 82 million in Q1 '22. However, performance showed diverse business dynamics in detail. Direct sales in the energy sector in France and Italy had to prove themselves in a challenging context. Call centers in Germany had to cope with higher COVID-induced absentee rates, while the German door-to-door business developed very strongly and more than compensated for that. Taking the aforementioned into account, all in adjusted EBITDA of the segment in Q1 '22 was with EUR 37 million, pretty much on par with the same period in '21.
Yet another quarter of strong growth, especially for Statista in total, our Data as a Service and E-Commerce segment was up by 26% to EUR 71 million from EUR 56 million in the prior year period. With an increase of 48% growth in the first quarter, Data as a Service, Statista continued to show strong performance and achieved sales of EUR 34 million or EUR 11 million up against the same period of '21.
Against a very favorable environment for E-Commerce and TV shopping in the prior year period, Asam performed very solidly in particular in context of other German e-commerce players in Q1 '22. Sales were up by 11% to EUR 37 million.
Due to increasing investments and accelerated growth and the expansion of our international business and higher raw material prices at Asam, adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 8% for the segment. Adjusted EBITDA was EUR 6 million in Q1 '22, EUR 800,000 short of Q1 '21. Adjusted for start-up costs for Asam, adjusted EBITDA in Q1 will be slightly above the prior year level.
Let me now hand you over back to Christian for some closing remarks and our outlook for the current year.
Let's have a look at the coming months. Already in Q1, our advertising segments, i.e., out-of-home and online, have been performing well. And apart from our current order book, the Nielsen forecast for the rest of the year look still okay-ish. We are clearly facing more headwind, but it also doesn't look like we are getting in massive turbulences, at least based on the data points we have today. On that basis, and without significant next COVID wave in autumn or massive further escalation of the Ukraine situation and its domino effects for the economy, we expect for the second quarter 2022 organic group revenue up by 12% to 15% and out-of-home plus 20% to 30% and group EBITDA margin broadly stable. For the first half of 2022, we thus expect group organic growth of 17% to 19% and out-of-home up by 33% to 39% and group EBITDA margin on or above 2021 level.
For the full year, we expect unchanged group organic growth of 10% to 14%, out-of-home, up by 16% to 20% and group EBITDA margin above 2021 level.
As of today, we also still feel very comfortable with our midterm plans until 2026. The noncore businesses grow fast, Digital and Dialog Media show consistent and robust performance, and out-of-home to date and in H1 will create a running start for our 5-year goal.
And just as a recap, because it's not the first time that we had to operate in rough conditions, Google entered the ad market and changed the game. We had a financial crisis, Facebook and Amazon took advertising dollars. We had the pandemic and lockdown hits public life in our audience, but we have been always relatively strong in tough times and on the long run, we have been growing our business.
Before we close the presentation, let me briefly hand over to Christian Baier for some personal comments.
Thank you, Christian. Let me express a few sentences on my own behalf. I decided to leave Ströer in the summer due to family reasons. As some of you know, I have 3 kids and left my family in Berlin. My wife and I decided that moving to Cologne was no option and that continuing the commute between the 2 cities isn't the right way forward either. It simply is my turn now to take over more responsibility in our daily family lives by being present as a dad.
I'm very grateful for the last 3 years, which has been quite challenging for our business due to the pandemic and now the war in Eastern Europe. Still, I'm certain that we have made significant progress in many areas, specifically the digitization of out-of-home and that we are now stronger as a business than ever before.
Let me take this opportunity to say thank you to you, our investors and analysts, for the professional collaboration throughout the years. Many thanks, and see you around. Over to you, Christian.
Thank you. Let me close the presentation with looking at our financial calendar for the coming months and further in-depth information we plan to provide.
For the summer, we plan to give you a deep dive on our ESG initiatives as part of the release of our next year's report. Our AGM is planned for June 2022, and the invitation released yesterday includes the dividend proposal for 2021. We will probably use the AGM or Q3 numbers to update our capital allocation strategy given the fact that our leverage is declining month-over-month. And we plan the next Capital Markets Day, end of September or early October and the focused topics will be Digital, out-of-home and Statista. Further dates can be found on our financial calendar on our newly designed website.
Thank you, everyone, and we are now happy to take your questions.
[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Julien Roch.
First one is on Statista. Can you tell us when approximately you receive the offers and whether you got 1, 2 or 3 offers?
Second question is what is the visibility on Q2? If trends go down dramatically all of a sudden, say, next week, what's the minimum you can get to versus your 20% to 30% guidance? I mean kind of question on visibility.
And then coming back on something you said about a minute ago on capital allocation, where you might revisit that because you're starting to be unlevered. Is -- are you thinking about special dividend or share buyback? If you do share buyback, the shares are not that liquid. So would the founders sell to stay where they are? Or would they bleed themselves? These are my 3 questions.
Julien, thanks for your question. On Statista, I think the last offer that we got in was 10 days ago, following -- well, I would almost say a small [ dip ] because someone asked us for -- was very serious about the asset, asked us for additional information, which we shared after an NDA. The first one that we got that was, I think, a serious one in the kind of range that I described between EUR 1 billion and EUR 1.5 billion went back to January this year. And I think we had, at least, 3 or 4 more indicative offers where we just didn't follow up in real detail because we didn't feel like it's the right time for that. But I think that's ongoing on quite concrete interest in the assets, and that's why we just wanted to keep everyone updated here.
On Q2, well, when it comes to the worst, short term, we wouldn't expect any immediate impact on the segments 2 and 3 that have an impact on our guidance. And I think knowing the lead times for out-of-home, in general, for the classic business as well as the general lead times in the regional and local markets, I would say the guidance that we've given, the lower end that we provided already includes the kind of risks for the coming, let's say, 3 or 4 weeks, that would anyway be the only weeks that have an impact on the Q2 results because week-over-week, the share of Q2 in our order intake is going downwards. That's why I think today, we feel quite comfortable with the Q2 guidance also for out-of-home on -- even on the basis that there might be short term, some more negative news from the Ukraine.
Whatever happens in the second half of the year is very difficult to predict. Order book basis at the moment looks very reasonable. There's nothing where we would say you see clear tendencies. Everything looks okay. But you're absolutely right. I think at the moment, it makes more sense to look at stuff quarter by quarter because that's the kind of thing where you have a feeling for.
And on your third question, I think as of now, we can only say we want to do a really general review and look at everything unbiased without already indicating anything. We just want to have a look at our current dividend policy, at our updated CapEx needs. We just want to double check what -- where the leverage is and how that leverage develops under different macro scenarios, that we feel like it's the right moment to double check whatever we have done in the last 2 or 3 years is right or if we need to change something. But as I said, unbiased means we look at every possible opportunity and would also take all assumptions from the [ partner ] aside to be open in general to execute whatever the analysis might bring.
And the next question comes from Annick Maas.
So first question, so you gave now a 2022 board guidance or I think you want to install [ 1,200 ] new boards this year. And did I get it right, you installed already 100 in Q1? I guess that's my first question. Linked to that, actually, my main question would be, how much of the CapEx linked to these boards is already committed? Basically, what is your CapEx variability in the second half of the year if things get worse?
Secondly, on Statista, maybe can you tell us which type of buyers you're talking to? And then so just in Dialog, I'm keen to understand which ones of the assets actually did well here. Is it Ranger? Or is it the call centers?
And then finally, can you just confirm that you have still not seen any budget cuts, that we are still only speaking about budget shifts in the outdoor business?
Maybe, Annick, on CapEx. I mean I think you are probably reflecting the numbers. The basic message is that we're trying to redraw some of the midterm expansion plans and do as much as we can on the shorter end.
In terms of flexibility, I think it's fair to say that if we were to stop at least, let's say, at any point in time before the first half, there's still significant room to reduce the budget in a vicinity of, let's say, EUR 10 million to EUR 20 million. Of course, building those screens is a long-term process, so you cannot go from like 100 index to 50 within 2 days. But I think there's firm flexibility.
And also looking at all the things the company has achieved during COVID challenges, I think we are very optimistic that whatever the environment will be, we have a lot of levers to react properly on CapEx and on cost as well.
Maybe just to clarify that on the numbers. If we look a roadside screen, we say that over the next 5 years, we want to do, on average, 500 on top per year. At the beginning of this year, we said year 1 will be definitely a stronger year with 750 to 800, and not defining already if that means that the extra comes in general on top or if we do a little bit less in the following years, we will see that. And in the first quarter, we've done roughly 200 roadside screens. So a little bit more than 1/4 of what we planned for this year, which is already a higher number than the average across the 5 years.
And that is on top of the indoor portfolio, so that is traditional public video product in train stations, shopping malls, public transportation systems. And we said at the Capital Markets Day, we want to do 300 per year. So for this year, we just said we do want to do a little bit more 400 instead of 300, and we've done, I think, 98 or 99, something like that. So a little bit less than 1/4 of what we to do as an upgraded number.
The potential -- the interest at the moment regarding Statista clearly comes from financial investors, both private equity as specialized -- as well as specialized funds into those areas that invest in information services data but also SaaS businesses maybe also come rather from the U.S. or our Globe players than being originally European investors. I think strategic investors have not talked to us in a way that we felt like the offer is in a range where financial investors are at the moment.
And on the budget cut question. At the moment, we work on the basis of the same annual agreements and commitments with all the national advertisers. That's the ones where I think it's worthwhile looking at what is budget shift, what is budget cut. And at least at the moment, we don't see that anyone already renegotiate deals. So they are shifting money back and forth. And I think as Henning described in the segment financials, the digital out-of-home business is running almost a little bit better than expected. And the shifts that we currently see are rather happening on national broadcasting brand campaigns, where advertisers normally tend to allocate a little bit more money, but book at least 4, 6, 8 weeks in advance and -- including all the production, at least 2 weeks before the campaign, you normally cannot change too much.
And I think obviously, the area where I think it's just natural that advertisers shift a little bit money because if they book it today and then produce the stuff in 4 weeks' time and then are on-air on 6 weeks, they need to know today what exactly the environment for branding is. And I think that's, at the moment, the key obstacle. But back to your question, we don't see cuts yet. All we see is that advertisers shuffling money a little bit back and forth. I think we've missed one question on the Dialog segment, I think, that you had?
Yes, yes. And just keen to understand which one of the assets within Dialog was the driver here? .
Clearly, the door-to-door business.
And the next question comes from Craig Abbott.
Just one really quick one here. On your slide regarding the Digital sales, which were sluggish in Q1. You mentioned 2 things. One, challenging monetization and news environment. And then you mentioned that you were able to compensate for changes in the publisher portfolio. I was -- could you maybe elaborate on -- a little bit more on both of these points and how you see those trends potentially developing in the coming quarters?
Well, I think the first one is a little bit like the combination of positive and negative aspects of such a crisis and the underlying situation of a news media. If you look at the online, the traffic there is one more time at a historic all-time high because, of course, after the pandemic, traffic went a little bit down to more normal levels, but with Ukraine crisis, people are interested in understanding what's going on. So I think that's the best times for any kind of news media. And you probably get an extra tailwind of 5%, 10%, maybe sometimes 15% of traffic because of that interest in news in general.
That said, if you're landing page or starting page is dominated by news around war and so on, it makes it a little bit less attractive for advertisers. So you need to find the right balance, on the one hand, you have to benefit from the traffic uplift, on the other hand, to make sure that you maybe keep a couple of news pieces free of advertising and give advertisers space somewhere else.
At the moment, the net effect is still positive, but it's fair to say that traffic goes up because of the news around the war. And for advertisers, more traffic in general is good, but they also don't want to see most of their advertising in that kind of environment. Specific brands are a bit more concerned about those connotations, but that's okay and hand level.
And on the publisher portfolio, we have one larger publisher that is doing parts of the inventory on their own. That's a sports website. And they want to combine it with other portfolio that they have in other media. And that has an impact on revenue structure that doesn't change the cooperation in general, but there's a little bit less traffic that goes through our monetization on the background of that.
Okay. But your core portfolio of -- I don't know the exact number at the moment, but with these hundreds of third-party contracts, publishers, that remains stable?
Yes, yes. It's just if you have one of your top 10 publishers decides to take 10% of the inventory to monetize it directly, and it's a high-margin publisher, then it has an impact of at least 2 or 3 percentage points on the -- at least on the top line, not on the bottom line. And if you would take that into account, and your growth rate would be another 2 or 3 percentage points higher. That's the point that we wanted to make. This means that the online business, let's call it online or digital, just to be clear and not confusing anyone, is really performing very well, also including or excluding those aspects.
And the next question comes from Christopher Johnen.
So first, coming back to the guidance, I think 20% to 30% in the out-of-home is quite strong related to comp. It wasn't that easy. You talked about macro, which hasn't been helpful either. I'm just curious, is it possible to get a bit more granularity on, let's say, digital versus classic just so we have a bit of an idea of some of the shifts that you've outlined before with respect to the numbers in the current quarter?
Second question on Asam. I looked at the -- on the slide last year, which suggested that 2022 revenue could be around EUR 190 million, that would sort of imply still more than 35% growth. I get the point on a lot of your E-Commerce comps being weaker or having a weaker start to the year. So I understand 11% growth in that context, but it still kind of looks challenging looking at the full year. So I'm just curious whether it's possible for you to give a bit of an update on what kind of growth rate you're comfortable with for Asam for the year, even if it's a range or something like that, that would be helpful?
And then just trying to understand like a nonvalue crystallization question on Statista. I'm just curious, obviously, a strong quarter. Is there any more color you can [indiscernible] that? And maybe also whether it had a positive impact on profitability. So just get a bit of an update on where we stand here.
Let's start with Asam. I think -- you're right, as said we -- about a year ago, we said we can get up to EUR 190 million. I think our budget for this year, ultimately, the mid-170s. So we've calculated with up to 25% growth for the full year. And on the basis of what we see at the moment for H1, we expect being above 20%. And I think we are still, despite the headwind that we see through raw material prices, the less momentum for E-Commerce, we feel like until mid of the year, we are on track for our plan.
There's a little bit of shift between Q1 and Q2 because of the retail business. And for the first time, I think also with Asam, we've seen that there was suddenly discussion...
Ladies and gentlemen, we lost the connection to the speakers again. Just wait a second, we will be right back.
Sorry. I think we've been falling out again, but we should be reconnected. So I think just summing up the last question, up to 25% growth as we historically had with the asset, taking us from EUR 140 million into the mid-170s, revenue-wise, is what we see at the moment on the basis of the first half of the year.
And some color on Statista. First of all, I would say, extremely strong performance also better than we anticipated in the first quarter. Honestly, also, to some extent, reflecting very strong billing business towards the end of last year. So as you know, we accrue the respective turnover over the years. So some of this overachievement was actually still due to the heavy and strong performance, the sales teams in Statista that have delivered last year. Also on the profitability side, you can be sure that also here, based on the sales trends, we saw some progress.
And on your outlook question for out-of-home for Q2, if we got it right, I think at the moment, what we see is that the classic business is in the range, probably including services that they normally tend to develop in parallel, somewhere between 15% or around 15%. And digital out-of-home is again also, we had seen a quite nice uptake last year in Q2, if you remember from May onwards already. At the moment, I would say we are able to double the digital out-of-home volume in Q2 again.
And I think that's also the kind of -- I don't know where our -- I wouldn't say confident, but we feel comfortable with the substance and the performance of the business, especially also the out-of-home business because we see when the macro environment is unclear and advertisers need flexibility and they want to react short term and maybe they are happy with the booking, but want to change the copy of the creative short term then digital out-of-home is an ideal medium already for that.
So I wouldn't say that the crisis has almost accelerated again, the digital out-of-home development, but you clearly see that if there are challenges, then it's more of a long-term bookable classic stuff for branding and digital out-of-home is performing quite nicely. So first half of 2022 will be definitely more than doubled, digital out-of-home revenues.
Okay, so at the moment, we have no further questions. [Operator Instructions]
Good. Then I would say thank you much for your time, for your questions. And stay healthy, stay safe, and we hope to see you soon. Take care.
Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
Bye-bye. .