Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the trivago's Q3 Earnings Call 2019. I must advise you the call is being recorded today. That's Tuesday, the 5th of November 2019. We are pleased to be joined on the call today by Rolf Schrömgens, trivago's CEO and Managing Director, and Axel Hefer, trivago's CFO and Managing Director. The following discussions include responses to your questions, reflects management's views as of today, November 5, 2019 only. trivago does not undertake any obligations to update or revise this information. As always, some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking, typically preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate or similar statements. Please refer to today's press release and the company filings with the SEC for information about factors which could cause trivago's actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. You will find reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures discussed today in trivago's earnings release, which is posted on the company's IR website at ir.trivago.com. You are encouraged to periodically visit trivago's Investor Relations site for important content, including today's earnings release. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons on this call will be against results for the comparable period of 2018. With that, let me turn the call over to Rolf. Rolf Schrömgens: Good morning and welcome everybody. Many thanks for joining our third quarter 2019 earnings call. Overall, this quarter brought mixed results, but some developments make us hopeful for the long-term future. Q3 was the first quarter since we started our marketing optimization in which we have reinvested again into growth. At the same time, it marks the fifth consecutive quarter with nice profitability. We were able to improve our revenue growth compared to the second quarter, but less than we expected. On the one hand, one can clearly see that, in the Americas, the segment where we raised our advertising spend, our investment paid out. We were able to reach profitability growth close to 20%, which we believe is fairly above market growth. This gives us confidence that we are able to grow our market share in a relatively stable environment. On the other hand, the softness in the business in developed Europe and rest of the world generally and the volatility in our marketplace, specifically, had a direct negative impact and we did not foresee the magnitude of this. We continue to invest into learning and progress. The removal of the relevance assessment and the introduction of bid modifiers led to a adaption process that increased the volatility in our marketplace. For some of our advertisers, it takes longer to adapt to the new environment. And as they adapt, this can have a negative impact on competition. Nevertheless, we are confident that our investment into increased flexibility is the right step and will benefit our advertisers and trivago in the long term. Besides the roll out of bid modifiers, which are live in all markets now, we have invested this quarter into several long-term projects and see promising first results. We have made significant progress on integrating alternative accommodations into our search and are running large scale tests with key players in the market. We ran several successful product tests and have a full roadmap of features helping our customers to better understand the meta aspect of our product. The goal is to focus on our key user value proposition to provide more transparency, by making prices more comparable. We included mobile rates for our largest advertisers and added additional reward rates. We focused a lot on creative development and qualification this quarter. While our Mr. trivago concept has helped us to create a well-known brand, we want to develop further and create new creative themes that are more efficient, give us more flexibility and further opportunity to optimize. We see now for the first time spots that beat the Mr. trivago concept. In the fourth quarter, we plan to decrease our marketing spend, along with the seasonality, as usual, but we are very excited about the opportunity to roll out new concepts next year globally. Now, let's look at our third quarter financial performance on page 5 of our presentation. As said, in the third quarter, we continued to focus on profitability, while we selectively invested into segments and channels where we saw opportunities, like in the Americas. Our total revenue was coming down slightly from €253.7 billion in Q3 2018 to €250.3 million this quarter. With about 1% decrease year-over-year, we improved to Q1 where we decreased 20% and Q2 where we decreased 5%. This brings the overall year-to-date number to minus 9%. Our adjusted EBITDA was €10.9 million, which brings the year-to-date number €50.3 million, while our net income is at €40 million. Due to the increase in investment, mainly in the Americas market, our advertising spend grew by 9% in Q3 year-over-year. This led to a decrease in return on advertising spend of 13 percentage points, while the total number of the year so far is still up 12 percentage points. Looking at page 6, we see that our advertiser mix over the last three years stayed relatively stable. Expedia Group and Booking Holdings did not gain additional share, and in contrary, the share increase of small advertisers that we have seen in the third quarter 2018 is confirmed again this year. That might suggest that advertiser consideration is lessening, but it could be also a side effect of the increased volatility in the marketplace that we have seen last quarter due to the roll out of bid modifiers. While there were inefficiency in the adjustment phase, going forward, we believe that the increased flexibility will help our advertisers to optimize for conversion and improve the overall user experience. Looking at the next page of our presentation. We continued to make progress on integrating alternative accommodations into our platform. As of September 30, we had more than 2.3 million units on our platform compared to 1 million a year ago and 250,000 two years ago. Not included in these numbers are large scale multi-market tests that we are concurrently running with the key players in the market. Besides the integration of more inventory, we are continuously improving the amount of content of alternative accommodations that we offer in our search. Additionally, we continue to invest into better algorithms to feature alternative accommodations whenever they can substitute a hotel for user. We also work hard on how we display alternative accommodations and provide a true comparison to hotels. It is a gradual process and there's a lot more work to be done, but we are very happy with the progress that we have made over the last one-and-a-half-years . Now, let's move over to Axel to have a look at the detailed financials.