OHNE AKTIEN WIRD SCHWER - Tägliche Börsen-News · Noah Leidinger, OMR

„Scout24, Moltiply & Co. - KI-Opfer oder Kaufchance?“ - OAWS-Deep-Dive

·40 min·3 clips

Why might AI stop people from searching for apartments on ImmoScout and just ask ChatGPT instead?

1. OHNE AKTIEN WIRD SCHWER host Noah Leidinger and guest Laurens Malte-Liener discuss the investment case for European classified-ad portals including Scout24, Multiply, Baltic Classifieds Group, and Swiss Marketplace Group. 2. Laurens Malte-Liener is an independent investor who advises the Compound Interest fund through his firm LMN Capital and has previously appeared on OAWS episodes covering MTU and John Deere. 3. The episode's thesis is whether AI threatens the moat of local classified monopolies that have compounded at low-double-digit growth for two decades. 4. Laurens traces the sector from newspaper classified goldmines — where ads represented up to half of publisher revenues — through their migration online in the 1990s, with Scout24 and Craigslist both launching in 1996. 5. Five verticals define the sector: general classifieds (Kleinanzeigen, Idealo), real estate, jobs, autos, and finance and energy — each country typically has one dominant player and a distant second. 6. Local monopoly dynamics are reinforced by inventory concentration: sellers list where buyers search, creating a flywheel that has repelled Google, Facebook, and broker-led challengers across the UK and Norway. 7. Portals sustain revenue growth through pricing escalation — Scout24's premium tiers progressed from Plus to Gold to Platinum — plus add-on services like Flowfact CRM (acquired 2014) and Sprengnetter valuation data (acquired 2024). 8. Scout24's Spain acquisition cost approximately €150M for assets generating €60M revenue and €11M EBITDA (14x), with an 18% EBITDA margin — well below the group's 60%-plus average — leaving margin expansion as the investment thesis. 9. Multiply, formerly Gruppo MutuiOnline, was founded in 2000 by Marco and Alessandro, listed in 2008, and has compounded at 20% annually including acquisitions for over two decades. 10. Beyond broking, Multiply operates a Business Process Outsourcing division handling mortgage and insurance claim processing for Italian banks, with operations partly based in Romania and Sicily to exploit wage differentials. 11. Multiply's 2024 acquisition of Verivox for over €200M (approximately 9x) opens Germany as a new market, though it raised net leverage to around 2x. 12. Multiply has a pending lawsuit against Alphabet claiming damages similar to Idealista's €400M award in its Google Shopping antitrust case, an outcome Laurens describes as unpriced optionality. 13. AI disintermediation is assessed through direct management conversations: Multiply's CEO told Laurens in Italy that over 90% of portal traffic arrives via direct website, with no measurable ChatGPT-driven diversion visible yet. 14. Laurens argues that portals with high brand awareness and deep inventory concentration are more resilient than newspapers were, though he concedes no one can predict the five-year outcome. 15. For BPO specifically, Multiply's processes involve multi-step regulated sequences — injury valuation, policy coverage, workshop cost verification — where error rates must stay below 0.1%, raising the barrier for AI-first competitors. 16. Multiply is building modular AI tooling allowing open-source or proprietary models (OpenAI, Claude) to be swapped into individual process steps, positioning itself to absorb AI efficiency gains rather than be displaced. 17. The episode is conducted in conversational interview format, switching between German and English, with Laurens providing figures from direct investor visits to Multiply in Italy and Swiss Marketplace Group in Zurich. 18. Discussion is relatively fast-paced, moving from sector history to valuation to specific acquisition analysis to AI risk mitigation within a single flow. 19. Long-term equity investors who analyze European digital platforms and want a detailed investment thesis on Multiply would benefit most from this episode. 20. Listeners who prefer shorter episodes or those uncomfortable with German-language financial content may find the pace and language mix challenging.

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