Smartbroker Holding AG presents H1 2022 financials: Slight increase in turnover and positive net income despite challenging market situation

• Revenue in the first half-year increased to €27.7 million
• Net income for the period after tax of €1.2 million
• Assets under custody slightly down to €8.6 billion
• 23,000 new brokerage accounts opened in the first half of the year

Berlin, 16 September 2022

Smartbroker Holding AG (ISIN: DE000A2GS609, FSE: SB1, the “Company”), one of Germany’s leading online broker operators by assets under custody and by far the largest publisher-independent financial portal operator in German-speaking Europe, today published its financials for the first half of 2022, confirming the preliminary figures communicated on 24 August 2022.

The group generated revenues of €27.7 million. Operating EBITDA before customer acquisition costs amounted to €7.9 million in the first half of 2022 - due to the development work for the Smartbroker 2.0 project, the figure was 13% lower than the pro forma figures from the same period last year.

The reduced marketing efforts to acquire new customers led to an operating EBITDA after customer acquisitions costs of € 4.7 million in the first half of 2022 (H1 2021: € 1.1 million). Net income after tax amounted to €1.2 million. Despite a challenging market environment (including the war in Ukraine, rising inflation, energy prices and key interest rates), the results are overall in line with the Company’s expectations.

Average brokerage account volume remains significantly higher than competitors'

For the full year, the Smartbroker Group expects revenues between €54 million and €57 million, customer acquisition costs of approximately €4 million and an operating EBITDA after these costs of between €10 million and €12 million.

Assets under custody amounted to more than €8.6 billion as of 30 June 2022 (compared to €8.8 billion as of 31 December 2021). The number of custody accounts increased by 23,000 during the first six months of 2022, which represents an increase of 9% compared to year-end 2021. As of the reporting date, around 269,000 brokerage accounts had been opened, compared to 246,000 at the end of 2021. The increase was mainly driven by new account openings at the award-winning^[1] Smartbroker. With approx. €33,000, the average account volume continued to be significantly above the average typical for neobrokers. Based on the data for the first half of 2022, the annualised number of trades per account amounts to 22 transactions.

Own trading platform "Smartbroker 2.0" to be launched in mid-2023

Until the market launch of its own trading platform Smartbroker 2.0, the Company is focusing on the further development of its product. Expenditures on new customer acquisitions have therefore been reduced as planned. As announced on 24 August 2022, the relaunch of Smartbroker 2.0 will be delayed to mid-2023, as internal tests have shown the requirement for further development needs. Shortly before, the Company had reported that the founder and Supervisory Board chairman André Kolbinger would once again take over as the Company’s CEO.

The uncertainties in the capital markets also affected Smartbroker Holding AG's media business: the average number of monthly page views decreased from 376 million (H1 2021) to 250 million (H1 2022). Revenue declined by 4%. The segment generated revenues of €17 million between January and June 2022.

Defined strategy unchanged - implementation continues

André Kolbinger on the H1 2022 figures: "The challenging market environment caused uncertainty among investors, advertising customers and other partners in the past months. Nevertheless, the Smartbroker Group was able to build on its successful year 2021 and generated revenues of €27.7 million in the first half of 2022. We are particularly proud of our positive net profit for the period.

We are laser-focused on completing our own trading platform Smartbroker 2.0. We want to offer our clients a top product from day one and have therefore decided to invest further time into its development - even if this means that we can only once again ramp up new client acquisition at a later date. I would like to highlight that a whole series of sub-projects have already been completed and that there is no change in our overall strategy or vision.

We are continuing to work on further integrating our two business areas, information and transaction. We are creating a comprehensive financial platform - to serve our clients by enabling them to make well-informed investment decisions, and to implement these across every asset class and on their chosen trading venue in the most transparent and cost-efficient way. I look forward to realising these goals together with our team and accept the challenge of developing Smartbroker into Germany's leading next generation broker, even in a changed market situation."

About the Smartbroker Group

The Smartbroker Group operates the Smartbroker – a multiple award-winning online broker, which is the only provider in Germany to combine the extensive product range of traditional brokers with the extremely favourable conditions of neo brokers. In addition, the Group operates four high-reach stock market portals (wallstreet-online.de, boersenNews.de, FinanzNachrichten.de and ARIVA.de). With several hundred million monthly page impressions, the Group is the by far largest publisher-independent financial portal operator in German-speaking countries, and also hosts the region’s largest finance community.

Press contact:

Felix Rentzsch
Head of Communications
Phone: +49 (0)176 4165 0721
Mail: f.rentzsch@smartbroker-holding.de

Investor Relations contact:

Sabrina Kassmannhuber
Investor Relations Manager
Phone: +49 (0)30 20 456 500
Mail: ir@smartbroker-holding.de

^[1] Handelsblatt on 2 May 2022, „These are the best online brokers”