IONOS Group SE
XETRA:IOS
Q3-2025 Earnings Call
AI Summary
Earnings Call on Nov 11, 2025
Momentum AI Launch: IONOS announced the launch of Momentum, a new AI ecosystem for SMBs, including AI agents like a phone receptionist, marking a major strategic step.
AdTech Divestment: The company has put its AdTech business up for sale to focus fully on its core Web Presence & Productivity and Cloud Solutions segments.
Revenue Growth: Q3 revenue reached EUR 324.2 million, up 4.6% YoY, and 9-month revenue was EUR 980.2 million, up 6.2% YoY, with external customer growth stronger at 6.9% FX-adjusted.
Margin Expansion: Adjusted EBITDA margin for Q3 rose to 40.6% (up over 5 percentage points YoY), with 9-month adjusted EBITDA margin at 37.6%, up from 33% last year.
Guidance Maintained: Full-year 2025 guidance remains largely unchanged: around 8% revenue growth and 35% adjusted EBITDA margin, with CapEx guidance lowered to EUR 60–70 million.
Customer Growth: Net customer additions accelerated to 210,000 in the first 9 months (vs. 110,000 last year), indicating strong demand, though ARPU was diluted by new customer discounts and product mix.
AdTech Slowdown: Q3 AdTech revenue dropped to EUR 28 million and FY AdTech revenue is now expected to come in below the previously guided EUR 400 million.
CFO Transition: Britta Schmidt announced her departure as CFO, with her successor Patrik Heider set to ensure a smooth transition.
IONOS detailed the launch of its Momentum AI ecosystem, designed to make AI accessible and valuable for small and medium businesses. This includes a sovereign cloud platform, no-code/low-code development tools, and deployable AI agents like a virtual phone receptionist. The company sees significant revenue potential from selling multiple AI agents per customer, with new features and agents planned for continuous rollout.
The company is divesting its AdTech business to sharpen focus on its core segments. AdTech has shifted away from core activities toward digital advertising, and Q3 revenue in this segment fell notably. Management expects AdTech revenue for the year to fall below prior guidance. The sale process has begun, with several interested parties, and proceeds may be used for M&A or shareholder returns.
Q3 and 9-month revenues showed steady growth, with strong margin improvement driven by operational leverage and disciplined cost management. The adjusted EBITDA margin reached over 40% in Q3. The company remains confident in maintaining mid-30% margins for the full year and sees continued strength in its business model despite AdTech being classified as discontinued.
IONOS added 210,000 net customers in the first 9 months, nearly doubling last year's pace. However, ARPU in Q3 was slightly down sequentially due to seasonality, product mix changes, and new customer discounts. Management expects the introduction of AI agents to drive ARPU higher in the future, especially as customers adopt multiple agents.
Cloud Solutions revenue grew 6.5% in Q3, with public cloud growing fastest at 18%, and private and managed cloud showing modest gains. The company is focusing on digital sovereignty, security, and addressing SMB needs rather than matching hyperscalers on breadth. Price reductions for selected products were made to boost migration to sovereign cloud offerings.
CapEx for the year has been revised down to EUR 60–70 million due to disciplined investment and higher revenues. M&A in Web Presence & Productivity remains a priority, but absent suitable deals, share buybacks are favored over dividends for shareholder returns. Free cash flow generation remains strong and predictable.
There are significant synergies between Web Presence & Productivity and Cloud Solutions, with core products running on IONOS cloud. The company does not plan to split out the cloud business, highlighting the importance of integration for delivering a sovereign, comprehensive product stack, especially with the new AI initiatives.
CFO Britta Schmidt is stepping down and will support the transition to her successor, Patrik Heider, through the year-end. This leadership change comes as the company enters a new phase with its AI strategy and organizational focus.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's Conference Call of IONOS' 9-Month 2025 Results. I'm Sarah, your operator for today. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] We are looking forward to the presentation.
And with this, I hand over to Stephan Gramkow from Investor Relations.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the IONOS Analyst and Investor Call for Q3 2025. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. My name is Stephan Gramkow, and I'm responsible for Investor Relations at IONOS.
Here's what we will cover today. As we today have some exciting product news to share, I'm very happy that our Chief Product Officer, Andreas Nauerz, will provide you with a product update. Next, Britta Schmidt, CFO of IONOS, will walk you through the 9 months and Q3 financials. She will also cover our outlook. Britta and Andreas will then be happy to answer any open questions after the presentation.
I would now like to hand over to Andreas. The floor is yours.
Yes. Thank you very much, Stephan, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to our conference call today. I'm Andreas Nauerz, CPO of IONOS.
Let's talk about AI, the topic of the time. And I think it's an undeniable fact that AI is the most powerful force of our time, and we are probably in the middle of a massive transformation. The main reason for this is that today 2 key ingredients have come together, right, maybe for the first time in IT history. First, we have access to more data than ever before, and that's, of course, the foundation of every AI model. And the second, we have access to more compute power than ever before, the foundation of which this data is being processed. And both are accelerating the pace of innovation and the impact of AI.
Especially with generative AI, we now see AI systems that do not only understand content but can even generate it themselves and, in the quality, often indistinguishable from human created output which is fascinating. Hence, we meanwhile even see AI systems performing tasks just as well or even better than humans. For example, when summarizing complex texts or when doing image recognition. At the same time, we are currently also witnessing a massive democratization of this technology. That means the underlying technical complexity is being abstracted away, making it accessible to a much broader audience, which in turn accelerates adoption.
In the past, you needed AI experts, millions of training data points and a massive compute power. Today, to put it very simple, all you need is a base model and some frameworks. But still, when looking at our customers, the following holds true. Especially our SMB customers do not want to deal with the technology itself, even though the access has become easier. They don't want to set up their own development pipelines. What they want to do is they want to book and at most customize ready-to-use solutions that provide immediate value by solving their concrete business problems. That's what they are interested in. And even our larger customers want access to the right sovereign and secure infrastructure and a comprehensive tooling system to develop their own solutions in the most efficient way. And in both areas, this is exactly where we come into play, something we will take a look -- closer look later.
So just to recap, the benefit of AI mainly relates to automating manual and repetitive tasks and a better user experience when interacting with AI systems in general as these become now controllable through natural language. So given all these opportunities, the challenge lies in scaling AI in the way that it truly creates value, right? That's why we do business here. And of course, implementation must remain, at the same time, secure, sovereign and free of dependencies, and this is something where we, as IONOS, can play our strengths again.
And because, as mentioned, access to AI itself has been democratized, it is now all about who can translate it into real value fastest, right? So the winners of tomorrow won't be those with the largest models, but those who operationalize AI the fastest. So the -- in other words, the hurdle, or the real hurdle, is no longer technical, it's organizational and cultural. So what will separate winners from losers is courage.
Courage to take responsibility, courage to do things differently and courage especially by leadership, to truly embed AI deeply into the DNA of the company. But right now, most small- and medium-sized business are not using AI efficiently, or in other words, to its full extent. So even though the development in the field of AI has been impressive, right, we are by far not at the end of this journey, right? And we can expect further significant improvements in the years ahead.
So let's dive a little bit deeper. Looking at the model landscape, for example, we see more and more powerful models with better reasoning capabilities, with longer context windows, so these models can remember things for a longer time. We see the focus on multimodality continuing, so models can understand and generate not only text, but also images, audio and video simultaneously. We see a move from -- and that's surprising if you compare to the past, but we see a move from proprietary models towards also open-source models, like, for example, Llama, Mistral and others. And these models are being hosted on our AI Model Hub already, right? So this is once again where we can provide value.
And we see entirely new architectures beyond these famous transformer-based ones being smaller and more energy efficient so they can run even on small resource limited devices. Just as an example, such a model is, for example, NXAI's xLSTM model which we have recently made available via our AI Model Hub, which is probably one of the strongest leading time series models currently available on planet Earth. Furthermore, there is a clear trend towards -- and that's very impressive, hyper personalized systems that are really capable of understanding individual uses and a specific context in which they operate. As a result, future system responses will be tailored based on accumulated interactions leading to a differentiated output for each user, meaning you may get a different answer than I get, right, because the system has learned about you and about me.
Building on this foundation, AI companions and copilots are evolving beyond traditional tools. They are more than tools. They are becoming real digital colleagues, right, that support you. So there's also massive potential from agentic AI. So when I look at the innovations of, let's say, recent years, this is actually one of the greatest revenue potentials and a real game changer to our entire product portfolio. And I'm not exaggerating, agent-based AI is introducing autonomous, adaptive, what I usually call mini AIs that operate, automatized, collaborative and proactive, providing real value to our SMBs.
And last but not least, the Model Context Protocol, which you may have already heard of, establish a standardized framework for communication among these agents, ensuring that diverse AI systems can exchange information efficiently and collaborative seamlessly. So it's like the language AI tools are using to talk to each other to jointly solve even more complex problems. With this rapid progress comes something else, responsibility. So sovereignty, security and trust are key in a more and more AI-driven world. Customers need control over data. It's their IP. They need control over models. They need control over the infrastructure, making sure there's no information outflow. And all of that without vendor lock-in.
You also need transparency and traceability and something we as IONOS can clearly help us looking at our sovereign technology stack. Well, as simple as this may sound, all of it represents a particularly difficult challenge for our SMBs because the world of AI and the working environment of SMBs are changing rapidly, right? And both the market and the products are extremely fragmented, and this won't get better soon, right, because there's so much development going on.
So the obvious question after this intro on the state of the AI union is, what exactly can we offer in this context? And I personally think, and my team thinks as well, we, as IONOS, are perfectly positioned to guide our SMBs on their journey through this complex and rapidly changing world of AI. We help them to master their AI transformation, making it easy to get started, reducing operational effort and driving targeted growth with AI, so making them benefit from this potential.
In short, we offer 3 building blocks to make that happen. First, a robust, scalable and secure infrastructure that ensures full control and independence from hyperscalers. Don't get locked in. A comprehensive AI development tool suite for every skill level, from no-code and low-code to full code, enabling you as a customer to develop AI solutions tailored exactly to your needs. And last but not least, rapidly deployable customizable AI services that allow you to get started immediately. We will have a closer look at all of this later.
But to be a little bit more concrete, we have and are continuing in all these fields, significantly our AI stack in expanding it. So with respect to the already mentioned AI Model Hub, we are adding more and more models to build upon like the NXAI model I mentioned before. With our AI Model Studio, we enable customers to fine-tune their own specialized models so that these models are then precisely tailored to their use case to benefit in the most possible way. And the good part of this is, this is a service where you don't even need high programming skills. So we abstract all complexity away, even in this field. And on the hardware side of things, we will offer dedicated, isolated resources optimized for deep learning and generative AI with the introduction of our IONOS Cloud GPUs.
So when we look at our product portfolio, AI, of course, is already an integral part of all our products, whether as a feature in onboarding or administration or as a stand-alone product. And in this period, we are currently expanding many products in our portfolio with AI capabilities. It's just one simple example. The way we interact with website editors is significantly changing. It is no longer about just doing classical drag and drop, right, to model your website. It's more like the system now understanding natural language. So this means you simply describe what you want to create, and the AI helps bringing your website to life. And this is not just the case in the area of Web Presence & Productivity. We also added, as already mentioned, some interesting LLM, so large language models, to our AI Model Hub, and we have also added a new already mentioned fine-tuning service to our cloud stack. So a lot of new introductions.
But now we are taking another major step forward. Today, and I'm very, very happy to be able to do this now, we introduce IONOS Momentum, which is the new AI ecosystem. And even so access to AI is being democratized, as I've described, the market is fragmented. And from our customers' point of view or at least many of them, there are too many tools and even more and more coming to market, there's too much complexity. And our SMBs, they lack the resources and the time and the integration know-how. So true productivity is locked behind silos, right? And they need guidance.
And IONOS Momentum creates a new category, a unified, sovereign AI ecosystem designed exactly for these customers, for small and medium businesses. And our promise is to provide AI products made simple, secure and scalable, built for everyday business and not for tech giants, right? So now, I'm pleased to share a brief preview of IONOS Momentum with you through a video that we have prepared. Enjoy watching.
[Presentation]
I love this video. So IONOS Momentum is, of course, more than just another tech stack, right? It is a full stack ecosystem for SMBs to drive digital operations end-to-end. And our AI environment bundles existing offerings with a wide range of new services and will be continuously expanded in the coming weeks and months. So what you see today is definitely not the end, it's the beginning.
So the individual components of IONOS Momentum are Momentum Cloud, Momentum Studio and Momentum Team, and they are built logically one and another. We are creating an understandable, intuitive world of AI that enables users, from small businesses to IT experts, to easily leverage solutions without constantly having to familiarize themselves with new AI tools or even orchestrate them in a complex way, which is not their core business, right?
So IONOS Momentum leverages Momentum Cloud, especially the already mentioned IONOS sovereign European cloud infrastructure, which meets the highest standards when it comes to GDPR compliance and guarantees maximum security and control over company data, your holy grail, right? Building on the Momentum Cloud is the Momentum Studio, which offers a wide range of AI models. And this includes the already mentioned AI Model Hub that we launched last year as well as the new fine-tuning service, the AI Model Studio, which I even mentioned earlier during this call.
With Momentum Team, users will soon have access to a suite of intelligent AI agents designed for seamless automation of everyday business processes, especially the tedious ones. From customer service and marketing to appointment scheduling and e-mail management, these digital agents act as virtual employees, creating new freedom, increasing efficiency and allowing companies to focus on what really matters to them, strategic priorities.
As said before, one of the most exciting developments in AI is the rise of intelligent virtual agents, which we believe will fundamentally transform how SMBs operate. So Momentum Team is a modular, interoperable ecosystem forming what I call a digital workforce. And this workforce of AI agents is able to proactively anticipate customer needs, automate repetitive tasks and deliver personalized real-time support, enabling our SMB customers to improve efficiency, to improve satisfaction to their customers and to increase productivity and competitiveness, right? Momentum Team will include a broad range of specialized agents for relevant use cases which are just ready to use.
All agents will be connected to what we call the knowledge hub, a centralized repository to store, if you permit, all business relevant information. The agents will be deeply integrated, of course, into the IONOS product ecosystem to be able to interact and orchestrate different workflows and leverage the data being stored there. But we will also provide a seamless integration to a range of relevant external tools. So agents bring a number of fundamental advantages to the table, especially when compared to us as human beings, right? They are always available, they are never sick, they never forget, and they can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they can speak any language. And they can work across multiple channels like instant messaging, phone, mail and so forth simultaneously. And this makes them ideal for automating repetitive, time-consuming and low-level tasks across a business, freeing up valuable time for business owners to really look at strategic topics.
And in this context, IONOS is uniquely positioned. We serve a large and loyal SMB customer base, have decades of experience building digital solutions, offer excellent personal support and have the technical platform and development capacity to integrate AI deeply into real business workflows so they can turn into real value. In the 6 months webcast in August, we promised to launch the first AI agents until the end of the year in beta. And today, I'm very, very proud that we have achieved our goal earlier than expected and just launched the AI phone receptionist in Germany.
What is this about? So the AI phone receptionist is a virtual employee, part of the already mentioned digital workforce that answers and manages business calls automatically in natural human-like speech. It handles customer communication and organizational processes, optimizes key administrative tasks while using the website and knowledge from the company brain that I mentioned before to respond accurately, consistently and on-brand.
The receptionist comes with different natural voices in more than 20 languages, and it can schedule appointments, record leads, open support tickets, take orders or log messages and it connects with calendars, booking tools, CRMs and support systems or is even able to forward calls. The AI receptionist is the first AI employee in our Momentum Team. Over the coming weeks, we will continuously add a range of AI agents and new features and integrations to a wide range of platforms and applications. While we still start Momentum Team in Germany, we will soon start to roll it out to other markets as well.
The next important step will be the extended tool integration which will allow AI agents to connect seamlessly with both the internal ecosystem and essential third-party applications. And this capability enables them to perform concrete actions and embed themselves into daily business workflows, which is crucial for delivering maximum value. The advanced knowledge hub will be supplemented with additional customer information, if you permit, from your products and business systems. In addition, it will be possible to add knowledge generated or made explicit in conversations.
Agents will continuously improve their capabilities by mastering new skills via tool integration and the knowledge hub itself. So concurrently, this ongoing interaction and feedback loop is essential for the agent to deeply learn and adapt to the customer-specific needs and implicit preferences. There will also be agentic-specific apps such as the social media agents, event calendar and much more, and this will make collaboration with the Momentum Team more intuitive and even easier. With the agent and teamwork mode, agents will collaborate together on a common plan and even hand over tasks to achieve complex goals. For example, the social media agent could write a social media post about a new offer that the business development agent created for a specific product before, right? So they work hand-in-hand.
In the first half 2026, we will include improved agent proactivity. So proactive AI agents move beyond being purely reactive by taking initiative. They can unpromptedly response or propose ideas, ask clarifying questions and identify insights or knowledge gaps. This capability adds a layer of perceived intelligence, shifting the agent from a, well, let's say, simple tool to a more strategic assistant. And while we will start with a free plan to allow for easy testing for most of the agents, we will also introduce paid plans with the additional features in a couple of weeks. And well, while traditional website products generate EUR 10 to EUR 20 in ARPU, virtual assistants are expected to start in the EUR 20 to EUR 50 range per agent. And over time, the use of multiple task-specific agents per customer opens up entirely new revenue layers for us.
Today, SMBs typically buy only one website, but they can deploy, of course, several AI agents across their business in the future and this significantly expands the addressable revenue per customer. Furthermore, AI is becoming increasingly integrated deeply into our product interfaces. So while generative AI has primarily supported the initial creation of text and content and ideas, we are now seeing the rise of interactive dialogue-based communication with AI, right, and this allows users to directly implement changes and improve results similar to the experience you may already know from what is being referred to as vibe coding tools, right?
So with our enhanced WordPress AI assistant, just to give you an example, we combine now the best of both worlds. On one hand, the AI assistant enables direct interaction with immediate results and all changes can be made directly from the chat, right, ranging from price adjustments in the shop or text and layout modifications to the installation of full WordPress plug-ins.
So on the other hand, we are using native WordPress process elements as well. We will shortly add vibe coding like experience to our website site builder as well, allowing customers to easily customize everything by natural language only, right? So we relieve them from the old-fashioned way of doing this drag and drop. So we are combining the best of 2 worlds. On the one hand, WordPress continues to serve as the technical foundation for these products, offering the advantage of full access to the WordPress ecosystem and in particular the robust security standards of WordPress, fully supportable due to established standards.
On the other hand, we provide a very simple and easy to maintain vibe coding like chat interface to build websites and allow seamless publishing. In addition, essential products like domain and e-mail are already included. I hope you found this an exciting first glimpse into what we are doing from a product point of view. But at this point, I would like to hand over to my wonderful colleague, our CFO, Britta Schmidt, to talk about our financials before we then start our Q&A session.
Britta, the floor is yours.
Thanks very much, Andreas. As Andreas pointed out, our mission at IONOS is unchanged. We empower small- and medium-sized businesses to succeed in the digital area and this more than ever. With the latest developments in AI, this is really important. We strongly believe that every business, regardless of size, should have access to the same technologies and expertise as large enterprises. With the launch of IONOS Momentum and the new products set to enter the market in the coming weeks and months, we are not only intensifying our efforts but also positioning ourselves to benefit even more strongly from this growing market.
As you might have seen in our Q3 reporting, we have decided to put our AdTech business up for sale in order to fully focus on the core business areas of Web Presence & Productivity and Cloud Solutions. The AdTech business has, over the last couple of months and years, increasingly shifted from a secondary market centered around monetization and trading of domains towards a platform for traffic monetization, thereby moving further away from our core business to a more or less pure digital advertising business. The transition has already been reflected in the name of the segment when we changed it from aftermarket to AdTech.
This shift opens up numerous opportunities for AdTech, which will need to be pursued with dedicated focus and expertise. Given the huge opportunities we are seeing in our core business, as pointed out by Andreas and the launch of Momentum, we want to fully focus on this business. As a consequence, AdTech according to IFRS 5 has to be reported as discontinued operations and will not be reported in our revenue and EBITDA numbers going forward.
In the first 9 months of '25, we delivered a solid performance. Revenue amounted to EUR 980.2 million, representing an increase of 6.2% year-over-year. Excluding FX effect, revenue would have increased by 6.5% year-over-year. Total revenue growth is slightly distorted given lower revenue from hosting services provided to United Internet in Q3 2025. Revenue with external customers grew by 6.9% on FX-adjusted basis. Adjusted EBITDA rose by 20.8% to EUR 368.4 million, resulting in a 37.6% adjusted EBITDA margin compared to 33% in the first 9 months of '24, again underlying the strong operational leverage of our business model. This development underscores the continued operational strength of this business model. Marketing expenses in the first 9 months were slightly higher than last year due to the expansion of the business. Adjusted for higher marketing expenses, adjusted EBITDA would have been EUR 380 million. Overall, the results for the first 9 months reflect the stable business development and the disciplined cost management.
Looking at the third quarter, revenues have increased 4.6% to EUR 324.2 million. Excluding FX, revenues increased by 5.8%. Adjusted EBITDA rose by 20.6% (sic) [ 20.9% ] to EUR 131.5 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin increased by more than 5 percentage points to 40.6% compared to the previous year. As mentioned before, the revenue growth was impacted by lower revenue from hosting services provided to United Internet, mainly due to lower energy expenses which are passed on. Revenue to external customers on an FX-adjusted basis grew by 6.2% year-on-year. Marketing investments were marginally lower compared to Q3 last year. Adjusted for those expenses, EBITDA would have been slightly lower accordingly.
Let's have a look at the performance of the different business areas in the third quarter. In Web Presence & Productivity, revenue reached EUR 267.9 million, representing a growth of 4.8% or 5.9% at constant currency. In Cloud Solutions, revenue in Q3 amounted to EUR 45.7 million, up from EUR 43 million the previous year. This corresponds to a growth of 6.5% or 7.9% excluding foreign exchange effects. The development was influenced by price reduction for selected products aimed to accelerating the migration to a digital sovereign cloud.
We successfully added 60,000 net new customers in the third quarter, bringing our total net additions in the first 9 months to 210,000. This represents a significant improvement compared to the 110,000 net additions in the first 9 months last year, underscoring the strong alignment between our product offerings and customer needs. As in previous years, customer growth in the third quarter and generally during the summer and autumn months was lower due to seasonal effects. The first and fourth quarter remain our strongest periods for customer acquisition.
ARPU in the third quarter was EUR 16.10, which is slightly lower than the previous quarter. This is, as previously discussed, partially a seasonal effect as a significant number of the main renewals typically occur in the first half of the year, requiring revenue recognition for 12 months upon renewal. We are also observing changes in our product mix driven in part by targeted price reductions in selected areas and given that we are seeing good inflow in smaller cloud customers which is also diluting ARPU and which we will develop further. Not to forget, we are adding a lot of new customers which come in with starting discounts.
Let me provide you an update on our cloud business for the third quarter of '25. Cloud Solutions revenue reached, as mentioned before, EUR 45.7 million in Q3, representing a 6.5% increase compared to the EUR 43 million in the prior year quarter. Looking at individual product areas, public cloud grew by 18% to EUR 13 million. Private cloud revenue was stable at EUR 25 million, reflecting a 2% increase, while managed cloud revenue rose by 5% to EUR 7 million.
As a reminder, the majority of revenue from ITZBund is recognized progressively, aligned with the deployment of hardware blocks in the data centers. We have finished setup and commissioning of our cloud in the ITZ owned data centers followed by an intensive test phase for the first hardware blocks. After the technical signoff was granted by ITZ last quarter, we are implementing the project with strength and expect the next hardware blocks to be built in the fourth quarter.
We continue, as mentioned before, to see very strong inflow from smaller and SMB customers. While these customers typically generate lower initial ARPU and require additional support, our ability to address their specific needs distinguishes us from hyperscalers. Our strategic focus continues to be on converting this high demand into sustainable growth, supporting our long-term objectives in the cloud segment.
Turning to capital expenditures. Total CapEx for the first 9 months of '25 amounted to EUR 40.5 million, representing 4.1% of total revenue. This is a notable decrease compared to EUR 56.3 million or 6.1% of total revenue in the prior year period. CapEx as a percentage of revenue no longer includes AdTech revenues. Therefore, the value slightly increased as AdTech had nearly no CapEx. The previous year's figures have also been adjusted accordingly. Growth CapEx accounted for EUR 32.9 million or 3.4% of total revenue, primarily driven by continued investments in the expansion of our Cloud Solutions capabilities.
Maintenance CapEx remained low and predictable at EUR 7.6 million or 0.8% of total revenue. The reduction in CapEx over time reflects both disciplined investment and the positive effect of higher revenues. We are slightly updating our guidance for full year '25 CapEx from EUR 80 million to EUR 60 million to EUR 70 million or approximately 5% of expected revenue. This approach ensures we continue to support innovation, growth and operational scalability while maintaining a well-invested asset base.
Let me now walk you through the free cash flow development for the first 9 months of 2025. Starting with adjusted EBITDA of EUR 386 million (sic) [ EUR 368 million ], we deduct EUR 15 million in adjustments mainly related to stand-alone and LTI cost. A particular feature in the new reporting period is a treatment of AdTech, which is now classified as asset held for sale in accordance with IFRS standards. As a result, the EBITDA contribution of EUR 32 million from AdTech is shown separately.
After deducting CapEx of EUR 41 million and tax payments of EUR 51 million and including EUR 5 million from LTI or share appreciation rights which is noncash as well as a payout of EUR 16 million related to LTI obligations. We further account for working capital outflow of EUR 28 million which is due to the cutoff date. We generally expect a balanced working capital. This results in a free cash flow before leasing of EUR 245 million (sic) [ EUR 254 million ]. After deducting lease payments of EUR 11 million, free cash flow after leasing stands at EUR 243 million compared to EUR 219 million free cash flow after leasing in the same period last year.
Interest payments amounted to EUR 38 million, and we executed share buybacks totaling EUR 27 million (sic) [ EUR 37 million ]. After factoring in these items, comparable free cash flow for the period amounts to EUR 169 million. Overall, our free cash flow generation remains strong and highly predictable, reflecting the resilience of our business model and the disciplined financial management.
At the end of the third quarter 2025, net debt stood at EUR 741 million. This figure includes all external bank debt, and I would like to highlight that the shareholder loan from United Internet has now been fully repaid. The weighted average annual interest rate has improved accordingly to 4.7%, representing our external bank loan. A particular point to note that this quarter is the impact of the planned AdTech divestment. While AdTech itself did not carry significant financial liabilities, its adjusted EBITDA is included in the leverage calculation. Including AdTech EBITDA, our leverage ratio stands at 1.4 net debt to adjusted EBITDA. Excluding AdTech, reflecting the future structure of our business, the leverage ratio is at 1.6 at the end of Q3. On this slide, the calculation, excluding AdTech EBITDA is shown retrospectively in gray fields for transparency.
This improved debt profile, combined with the elimination of refinancing risks through fixed interest debt continues to support our financial stability and provides us with flexibility for the future. Our guidance remains more or less unchanged and now includes the previous guidance for the Digital Solutions & Cloud segment which we had guided separately. Revenues are expected to grow by around 8%, with Web Presence & Productivity growing at around 7% to 8% and Cloud Solutions growing by around 10%. We remain confident about the midterm growth opportunities in Cloud Solutions and expect our public cloud to get to a 20% growth over the next quarters. Adjusted EBITDA margin is still expected to be around 35%, up from 32.9% in 2024. Adjusted EBITDA in the remaining core business is expected to increase by approximately 17% to around about EUR 480 million, for comparison, 2024 was EUR 410.4 million.
As you might have seen in yesterday's press release, this is my last webcast for IONOS, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your cooperation over the past few years. Together with my successor, Patrik Heider, we will ensure a smooth transition, and we will jointly participate in a number of capital markets events before the end of the year. Thanks very much.
That concludes our presentation for today. Hopefully, we provided you with a comprehensive overview, especially on our new product launch. We will continue to work hard for our customers, improve our products even further and strengthen our market position.
With this, I would like to hand back to the operator to open the webcast for any open questions.
[Operator Instructions] And we already received the first virtual hand from Sarah Roberts. So you should be able to speak now, Ms. Roberts. Ms. Roberts, unfortunately, we cannot hear you.
Perfect. I had a few technical difficulties. Just a couple of follow-ups on the AdTech business, if I may. So you've obviously held it as for sale, but can you help us understand what the contribution was to revenue and adjusted EBITDA in Q3 from the segment? And as a follow-up, you'd previously been guiding to EUR 400 million revenues for the full year in the AdTech business. Is this still the case? I know that RSOC in particular has been a little soft recently. So that's my first question.
And then secondly, can you give us an indication on how soon in the process the held for sale is? Are you in early conversations with any potential buyers? Any confidence that you can sell the business? That would be helpful. And then very quickly, my final question, can you give us a sense of how you plan to deploy the cash received from the sale of the business?
Let me start with the last question, so deploying the cash and that maybe leads as well to our -- so how -- what are we doing with the cash anyhow? So let answer it in a broader context. So as mentioned before, we are looking for M&A definitely in the field of Web Presence & Productivity, very focused on Europe, currently exploring the market and we believe strengthening our market leadership in some of the geographies we are in or are in but not very strong will be helpful for the future. So really investing into future growth. This is still highly on the agenda. We will and are currently discussion to mix -- in discussion to mix in, maybe a little bit of share buyback, et cetera, depending on the M&A pipeline. So maybe that helps a bit to understand overall.
Then on this, how do we see the AdTech business to be sold? We actually do think there are a couple of people who would be interested in the business, and we do see first good results during the process. I will not share a lot of details today, but there's definitely a little bit to be expected. So in terms of the contribution of AdTech in the third quarter, we -- I mentioned the EBITDA contribution during the cash flow commentary and revenue was roughly EUR 28 million in Q3, so significantly down compared to the first 2 quarters which we have guided before so that we should see a drop. That is largely driven by AfD now slowly going down, so deteriorating over time, but RSOC slowly now kicking in.
And overall, we do see this business now stabilizing on a higher level and slightly growing. So depending for the EUR 400 million, I do not believe we will reach the EUR 400 million. However, the business should be roughly stable compared year-over-year. I hope that helps. And maybe just one comment on the EUR 400 million. I think we have seen that very strong Q1 and Q2 revenue contribution which drove confidence. However, then a couple of things changed in the market, more or less.
So then we had a virtual hand from Florian Treisch. I think I give you the permission to unmute yourself, but it seems, yes. Mr. Treisch, can you say something? All right. So maybe you have the wrong device.
In the meantime, we will forward with St phane Beyazian. So now, you can unmute yourself, St phane. I guess there are a couple of clicks.
Can you hear me?
St phane, yes, we can hear you.
Yes. Sorry about that, not familiar with the system -- with this system. Anyway, just one question I have regarding the ARPU. I noticed that the ARPU, if I'm not mistaken is down quarter-on-quarter. At least there is a slowdown in your ARPU momentum. So I was just wondering whether you can give us some color. I mean, obviously we're lapping the price increases that you've done, although I think you were still doing some [ smooth price action ] at the beginning of the year. So just help us to understand what's happening there and if there is any customers trading down perhaps on some plans. That would be my first question.
And my second question is regarding the AI. I mean that was a very compelling and interesting presentation, but I can't help notice that at the same time, your cloud revenues are relatively slow today and underperforming what the hyperscalers are doing. So I'm just wondering whether all your customers, which are auto entrepreneurs, are totally eligible to those products, first of all. And how fast and how strong you think that can kick in your revenue streams?
Yes. Let me start with the first question on ARPU and Web Presence & Productivity revenue and then Andreas will comment a little bit on AI and cloud. So as mentioned before, especially in ARPU, what we do see is definitely a very strong new customer inflow, which is great, by the way. But keep in mind, they are coming with discounts, starting discounts, usually for 12 months. So this is diluting ARPU in a significant way. Additionally, and you mentioned it before, St phane, we do have phasing from price adjustments, especially out of last year. So that's basically the reason. We do see a very strong underlying performance of Web Presence & Productivity and remain, obviously, going forward, especially really confident with AI features coming in additionally besides the agentic AI just into our core Web Presence & Productivity.
Yes. Commenting on the second part of your questions and if I got it right, you made a comparison to the -- our broader ecosystem that you currently see from the bigger hyperscalers. Well, when we look at our customers, to be very, very clear here, and especially in the cloud field of the midsized customers, I personally doubt that we -- that the mission must be to be on par with every single service, right? We need to provide our customers with exactly what they need. And this is really building on the 3 major building blocks that I've mentioned, right? They, of course, want the sovereign infrastructure that give them full control over the data, and that's something where I would say we can really make or where we can really distinguish, right.
The second thing is that we really provide them with all the tools that these particular customers need will be from no-code, if they are not so technical [ afield ] up to low-code and up to full code. And last but not least, having really these extensions around the AI Model Hub which is built on a sovereign platform where you really have to -- the option to pick from plurality of different models and we are continuously adding models as we go. And even fine-tuning tools that abstract again technical complexity away, exactly what our customers are asking us for so that they can do fine-tuning without even having programming skills, right?
And I think the good part is that we on the front-end side have these 3 main pillars which distinguishes us and puts us in a very strong position when it comes to sovereignty, security and control over data. And we can build, of course, on the entire ecosystem that we have. So for example, the solutions that are described when I talked about the Momentum efforts, they are also built on our own cloud stack. So the cloud stack is not only of interest for our customers in the different ways that I just described it, it's even the fundament that we now leverage for building the Momentum solutions on top, which makes it a very powerful stack and ensuring that even the Momentum solutions obey to the sovereignty aspects and security aspects that play a key role for our customers.
So I think it's not the mission to be on par with everything in service, it's the mission on providing exactly the tools that our customers need and playing our strengths in the field of sovereignty, security, control over data and continuing to abstract technical complexity away as good as we can for the customers choosing us. I hope this helps a little bit answering your question.
Okay. And congrats, Britta, again for all the achievements done at IONOS over the past couple of years.
So we come back to Mr. Treisch. I already give you the permission. Mr. Treisch, can you say something? It seems that it's the wrong device. So maybe you can check on that.
But let's move forward to participants who've dialed in via phone. So we go back to Dhruva and then to Nizla. So Dhruva, I unmuted you on the phone, so you can ask your questions. Dhruva?
Okay. But let's go back because Dhruva sent me his questions prior. So then I will read his questions out.
So what's driving the slowdown in WP&P, customer growth continues to be strong, but the ARPU growth rate has notable slowdown. Is there any seasonality in the business or is this the start of a new trend?
Yes. I commented on that with the answer to St phane's question already and as well during the webcast before. So basically, no, it's not a start of a new trend. It's more the outcome of what we see in new customer inflow, what we see in price adjustment phasings over the last 12 months. So we remain confident about ARPU growth going forward.
Yes. And if I may extend, I mean, I already commented on that during my pitch, but especially with what we are now or what we have announced today, right, with Momentum, and given that we will build up this digital workforce, as we called it, and have all these virtual agents there, we clearly expect ARPU going up significantly. And why am I thinking that? I mean if you look currently, let's pick again, this hotel receptionist, for example, right? We know it's very difficult for people in this business currently to find even people. But second, it's very easy to do a calculation saying, okay, let me try and let me try buying an agent costing me in the range of EUR 30 to EUR 50, and let's see if that works properly because then the savings that you can make are immediately measurable.
So we expect many people to try that out. And since this is at a very -- compared to our previous business, at a very higher level of how we charge, we expect this will drive ARPU to a totally different level in the next couple of months, especially when we go beyond the receptionist that we already launched and when we add more and more agents. And as I've said before, we expect customers when they made their first experience that they will buy not only one agent but maybe a couple of them or even a bundle which we will offer as well. So there is a good reason why we are very optimistic looking forward with the new AI-based extensions that we have been talking about today.
So Dhruva has 2 further questions.
Now that you're considering splitting out the AdTech business, would you also look at potentially splitting out the cloud business or are there too many synergies between WP&P and cloud? Could you give us a rough quantum of the WP&P intersegment revenues for cloud?
So there is a significant synergy as we are running a couple of our core products on Cloud Solutions, and we do -- so if we would have excluded it's a double-digit amount of revenues which cloud is doing with -- so with Web Presence & Productivity. This is not included in the figures you are seeing as we are not only including external revenues, just to be precise here. So we do see a lot of synergies and we do not intend to split out Cloud Solutions or put it up for sale just to be precise here. It might be that at one point in time given we as well might consider to changing how we look into the different segments on an EBITDA level, that we split them out on a segment level, so we do a segmentation. But this is not done yet, and we are still considering the cost base in total currently, given what I mentioned before, the synergies which we are seeing. And I think Andreas as well pointed it out during his speech that this is a whole set as well of products we are providing between Web Presence & Productivity and Cloud Solutions with AI Momentum.
Yes. And that's very crucial also to guarantee what I mentioned before to really have a full-blown stack that is what we would consider sovereign, right, and under our control, just to make this minor addition here.
Dhruva's last question.
What differentiates the IONOS agentic AI offering versus the likes of Zendesk, Salesforce or others? Do you compete on price or product breadth or is there something else that's the differentiating factor? Are you concerned about potential hyperscaler competition in this space?
No, absolutely not. And I think the main power of what I've been talking about and we just had one answer to this already, right? We have the full stack under our control. We have a Model Hub that we can build on -- where we can continuously add models that we can build upon. But I think the most powerful thing is the deep integration in our full ecosystem and that's something not so many of our competitors can build upon. So I already gave you an example during my pitch.
If you want to have the best performing agent that you can think of that really, really answers in the best possible way the customers using your agents can get. And let's pick the receptionist that I've been talking about again as an example. What you need is -- I mean what makes an AI agent an expert? The wisdom or the knowledge you feed it with. And that's something where we are really, really strong because we can build on our base of 6.5 million customers and we can really learn from all the products this customer is already using, no matter if it's a website and so forth, right? So we have a very powerful knowledge base that we can use to give high-quality answers when these agents are being used.
The second point is, I think we are very, very good in abstracting technical complexity away and we are targeting a different group here. And as I've said before, I mean, it's -- essentially, it's a 3-step process to set up one of these agents up, which means, especially for our customers, it's -- which, as I've said, is also mainly SMB customers, they do not want to deal with setting up what maybe bigger hyperscalers provide, right?
A RAG pipeline or want to do all of this stuff. What they really want is they want to book such an agent from shelf, then they want -- that we ask, can we use the information we already have from you to make this the most powerful agent you can think of. And then we even allow to upload additional information like, for example, coming back to the hotel example, PDFs and additional information that gives information about the menu you offer in the restaurant and so forth. So I think we have on the one hand side this full stack under control. We have control over data and sovereignty, but we also provide it tailored to our customers by abstracting away the technical complexity, which I think makes us -- puts us in a position to offer in a perfectly tailored way to what our customers are demanding.
And then we have the next virtual hand from Gustav Froberg. So Mr. Froberg, I already give you the permission to unmute yourself, so please ask your questions. Seems similar to...
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
It works. Great. Sorry about the technical mess up. I have a couple, please. Starting on ARPU. I just wanted to drill into this ARPU development a little bit more, if I may. You've talked about some new customers joining on discounts, which is fine, as well as some price reductions on the cloud side. But if I strip out those 2 effects, I want to ask about the ARPU evolution for the core part of your business or, let's say, existing customers using Web Presence & Productivity, how has ARPU evolved there? And maybe we can use some of that information to extrapolate what the trend should be in the future. I'll start there and then pause for the other questions.
Yes. So we are not looking into ARPU separately for Web Presence & Productivity. We are looking at it in different product lines, obviously, but overall we are not looking into it decoupled from Cloud Solutions given as well that some of our customers do have a slight overlap. But let me maybe come back to what still holds true, that if we target for roughly 9% revenue growth, which we are doing for Web Presence & Productivity in future, so 9% to 10%, 1/3 should be coming from price adjustments and another 1/3 should be coming from cross and upsell, which means, in total, 2/3 should be coming from ARPU overall, whereas another 1/3 should be added by new customers joining us. And this still holds true despite some quarterly distortions which you might see.
So look overall at the -- how is ARPU trading? And this is definitely doing well and will continue to do well in Q4. And therefore, I do understand the questions around ARPU development, but we really remain confident about ARPU growth going forward, looking at historical trends and as well looking at what we have in the product pipeline going forward, offering even more opportunities for cross and upsell to the existing customer base. So really fundamenting the 1/3 I mentioned which comes from cross and upsell.
So there's a bunch of opportunities in this area and not looking into what Andreas mentioned before, the agentic AI which will come in with a higher ARPU, just separating it for a moment. So there is a strong underlying ARPU development if we look as well into the different product lines. So we do see some growing faster, obviously driven by price adjustments, et cetera. But overall, there's a strong development of our underlying business, yes. Additionally, there's a lot of opportunities coming in with agentic AI and AI Momentum. I hope that helps a bit.
Yes. Great. And then a question on AdTech disposing of the business, I think very positive news because it will allow for a bit of a smoother set of results going forward, but the Q3 result is perhaps very low. And you mentioned that something changed after H1 that potentially resulted in this and makes you move away from that EUR 400 million goal. So firstly, what was that change? And also why is now a good time to sell the AdTech business given that it is at its lows?
Yes. So if you look underlying into the business, so first of all, what has changed? Google, which is a provider of the RSOC business, had introduced a couple of quality measures for this RSOC product which caused the market to pause a bit, I would say. And additionally, which was basically expected was that the AfD business will phase out. This is now slightly accelerated by Google. And if we look into H1, we had a very strong AfD business, as we mentioned before, additionally to a very strong RSOC business and both of them have been slightly distorted in the first months of Q3.
However, RSOC is back on track, and we do see it growing. So overall, it has stabilized, and we do see a very good trading overall. So this is why we believe -- if we look into the business, this is now a right time to focus on the opportunities which we do see in this AdTech business. There's a lot of opportunities coming up with all of the product changes which now are more and more digested by the market and the business is on a good way. So there's a lot of opportunities.
We are given all the opportunities which we have in Web Presence & Productivity and Cloud Solutions, not -- are not able to provide enough focus for those opportunities. So we really want the AdTech business to be enhanced which can help with all those opportunities. So this is basically why we believe that it's the right time. It's stabilized, there's a lot of opportunities which a potential buyer can exploit, and it needs a certain focus to exploit those opportunities. So there's -- we believe there's a lot of value in the business actually.
Okay, great. And then the last one is just on guidance for Q4 kind of implies a revenue acceleration for the remaining business in Q4. Without referencing historical trends, why specifically do you think we should see an uptick in revenue growth in the fourth quarter, maybe also absent ITZBund? And then similarly, on margins, you've performed very strongly on the EBITDA margin at 9 months. But for the full year that means Q4 is looking like it will be a little bit below the 9-month level. Why should that occur?
Yes. So I think the question on revenue, yes, there's a chunk of this coming from ITZBund. As I mentioned before, we expect a building block to be delivered and built so that will help in accelerating the revenue growth. On EBITDA, and I think we mentioned -- implicitly mentioned it as well, as you know, Q1 and Q4 are our strongest month in terms of customer acquisition. So we would expect a couple -- a little bit more marketing to be spent in Q4 than we spent in Q3, which will deteriorate EBITDA a little bit.
And then we will move on with the questions from Mollie. So Mollie, you can unmute yourself now. I guess it takes a bit of time. But Mollie, we will cover it with the questions from Nizla.
We got a question here. I can read it out. On vibe coding products, you've previously spoken about what you see as limited risk from vibe coding platforms. Have you introduced new vibe coding products because this risk is proving more significant than originally anticipated?
My first answer would be, Andreas, no. But of course we want to exploit the opportunities vibe coding offers.
Absolutely. I couldn't have phrased it any better. We also have to see how -- where our customers stand. And especially when looking at SMB customers, I think the smartest approach that we can go is not changing gears from today to tomorrow. But of course we also anticipate what is happening in the future, and we want to be prepared. And we want to take, as I've said before, our customers on that journey. So of course, we see the future coming.
That's exactly why we decided not to now shut down what we have and go full blown into vibe coding, but going step by step and taking our customers by hand on this journey to make them successful, which means I think it's absolutely right that we stick to, for example, the site builder that we have that we now iteratively extended with vibe coding capabilities so that our customers still have the chance, right, and introducing them also slowly into this new world in using natural language in the already known site builder to let the site develop and then ultimately go in the future world when everybody has made its first experience in a system where you probably can do in an iterative fashion, build your entire website by using natural language only. So it's not a technical problem.
It's also looking where our customers stand, the feedback that we get and then doing along a time line, a transition that allows our customers to follow, right? That's also why we don't want to shut down the one thing and then add something new. But as I've said, iteratively add features, also making our own learnings together with our customers, how the adoption is being and then coming into this new world moving forward. So I think this is not -- this is the true answer, right?
Yes. And keep in mind, if you use vibe coding platforms, you are set with a website, with a static. With us, you have a fully working WordPress website which is not static. It's secure. It's reliable. It's sustainable. And as Andreas mentioned, our customers are not as tech savvy as you might think they are.
Yes. So what we do is actually we give them the best of both worlds at the moment, right? I think that puts it quite to the spot. And also when we see the agencies we are working with, also they are looking still for having those opportunities. I think that's very important. And last but not least, I mean I'm a very technical person, as you may have seen, I've been a CTO before. You also have to be very, very realistic where we stand with the vibe coding capabilities, right? For simple static sites, many of these things are good enough.
But if you start doing more complex things, if you start refining your website in an iterative way due to the limited context windows that you sometimes have, it can very quickly happen that you make a fourth and fifth change in an iterative process and then what you have built before is being kind of messed up, right? This is something where we want to protect our customers from, right? So we go here step-by-step, taking our customers where they stand, but also looking at how powerful is this technology already, where can we really use it and offer it to our customers and give them a good experience. The future is very clear, but we have to go in a speed that is reasonable from all these angles that we have just commented on.
So I do see a couple of questions around vibe coding anyhow. So first of all, any incremental investments and how we plan in terms of growth and margin expansion. So if I look into 2026, it's a bit early to say details, but nevertheless we stick more or less to our slightly now adjusted midterm guidance, adjusted for the reason AdTech is no longer included. So we believe overall revenue growth in the midterm should be around 10%.
And obviously, looking at the strong margin which we see in the digital solutions and cloud, which is our total business, by now, we would target a 40% margin in the midterm, yes, and any investments which we do, we are partnering with a lot of providers in that case. So we do not see a significant amount of incremental investments which we cannot fund by operational leverage, efficiencies which come from the internal use of AI, et cetera, et cetera. So not a large drag down in profitability to be expected.
So -- and then I think I already answered a little bit on the vibe coding partnering. Yes, we are as well partnering with vibe coding. We mentioned our partnership with Entri before. This is still in there. And the customers are -- our customers, and this is actually what's the good thing about this partnership because we are able to cross and upsell them and those customers are really prone to cross and upsell.
Yes, maybe to extend a little bit. I mean, there's also this question of -- I just read it out again. Are you already partner with vibe coding, no-code builders to host their websites? How many customers did you get from these partnerships and so forth?
I mean, you know that, right. I mean, IONOS has partnering and building a partner ecosystem very deep in its DNA. This has a couple of advantages because it helps us to gain speed, of course, right, but it also helps us to benefit from the domain knowledge. So if you go with a particular partner that is defining a very specialized or building very specialized solution, think of restaurant booking system, think of whatever else, then we benefit in 2 ways, speed and we benefit from the domain knowledge, right, which is why we are, of course, working with partners.
To be a little bit more concrete when it comes to vibe coding or building also agentic solutions. And we made announcements, you may have seen it, if not, I recommend to do so. You may have seen it during the IONOS Summit that took place last week, Tuesday in Berlin, where I gave one of the opening keynotes. And there I made a couple of announcements, particularly on partners that we are working with. So there's one particular slide that lists almost all the partners being relevant in the AI space.
I just pick 1 or 2 examples that you get a feeling. So at the moment, we are very, very strongly working together with Blockbrain, which is one of the award-winning companies in Germany recently, allowing you to build agents and knowledge bots, so -- and especially using their technology, we will add more and more agents, as I said during my pitch, beyond the receptionist that we have. So things that will come are SEO optimization agents, analytical agents, social marketing agents and so forth, but not because we build everything on our own, we also rely on partners.
Another one is, of course, because you also have been asking on no-code, low-code tooling. We also have our first images available for n8n. And I think everybody out there knows n8n. It's a wonderful tool for building workflows where the single points in the workflow can make use of AI to automate things. So this is also something that we are currently looking into, and this goes actually through the entire stack, right? It's not only for vibe coding. We do also partnering, for example, when it comes to the model layer with NXAI, as I mentioned.
We even have partnerships with companies that do testing and validation in a very systematic level for building your AI solutions to make sure the AI solution that you are building is really doing what it is supposed to do. That's a technology we also use internally to test our AI solutions, partners being called [ Resaro ] also being mentioned during the summit last week. So long story short, a plurality of partners we are working with bringing us speed, bringing us domain knowledge and making sure we can launch all the more agents in the upcoming weeks. I hope this answers this question as well.
So then we have 2 further questions. One's from Mollie.
If no M&A is identified in the short term, has anything changed with how you are thinking about shareholder remuneration now that AdTech is up for sale? More generally, do you think you would be more likely to prioritize dividends over buybacks? Would you consider further small buybacks in the meanwhile?
As I mentioned before, M&A is the prio. And yes, if we do not -- are able to be quick enough or find something appropriate in the short to, let's say, 12 to 24 months, we definitely will look into other means of shareholder remuneration. This includes share buybacks, I think, as a prio compared to dividends, but nothing decided there. So just my personal view by now.
All right. And I guess the other...
That's already answered.
You already covered it, yes. All right. Then it seems we have no further questions and no virtual hands.
Yes. Maybe just one last comment. So this is my last webcast for IONOS. I mentioned it throughout my speech. Thanks very much, everybody, for your continuous support. A special thanks goes to Andreas who stepped in for Achim who is not able to join for personal reasons. And obviously, it was a super fit given that we have just launched AI Momentum. So good to have you on board. I think the team will rock it as well going forward. I'm still around until end of this year to ensure a smooth transition. So thanks very much. And Sarah, now back to you.
Maybe I can add just one word. We have been working together now for 8 weeks. I already did know that I will miss you very much and thank you very much for having been a good partner for these weeks and giving me a good and warm welcome and introduction and also helping me through this today for the first time.
Thanks much, Andreas.
Thank you so much for that kind word. I have nothing more to add, and that's why I would like to turn the conference back over to Stephan Gramkow for some closing remarks.
Thank you, Sarah, and thank you all for joining today's call. Please feel free to reach out with any follow-up questions. Have a great day. Stay safe, and goodbye.