Sedo Holding AG just issued its Annual Report for 2013 and revenues overall were up by 5.5% to €140.0 million (previous year: €132.7 million).
But the growth was driven by the Affiliate Marketing segment, “although it performed significantly more weakly than expected”.
The Domain Marketing segment continued to face the challenges presented by the falling domain parking market accompanied by strong competition from aggressively-priced providers, which is why the drop in sales revenues continued, as expected.
A total of €27.7 million of sales revenues was generated in the year down 12.6% compared with the previous year‘s €31.7 million.
The number of domains tradable on the platform increased to 16.5 million as of December 31, 2013, following 14.9 million as of December 31, 2012.
In the performance-based domain parking area, around 3.7 million domains were available for marketing as of the balance sheet date (December 31, 2012: 3.8 million).
The drop in sales revenue in Domain Marketing is primarily driven by the falling sales revenue trend in the domain parking market.
In contrast to this, the Domain Trading area achieved good sales revenue growth.
Here, international activities were further expanded, and sales activities were further optimized, as announced.
In the Affiliate Marketing segment, sales revenues were up by 11.2% to € 112.3 million in the 2013 fiscal year, compared with €101.0 million in the previous year.
Reporting this growth, affiliate significantly outstripped the growth of the overall affiliate market (5-7%).
The number of partner programs increased by more than 16.8% to 3,356 over the same period, and the number of participating websites by 7.0% to 600,000
Overall, the Group reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and writedowns on domains (EBITDA) of € 6.0 million in the 2013 fiscal year, after € 5.0 million in the previous year.
Correspondingly, earnings before taxes (EBT) increased from € 3.7 million in the prior-year period (excluding € -60.3 million of one-offs arising from impairment losses) to € 4.6 million excluding € -0.3 million of one-offs arising from impairment losses). Earnings per share (EPS) amounted to € 0.07 in the year compared with € -1.93 of EPS in the previous-year period, which was impacted by the aforementioned impairment losses.
For the 2014 fiscal year, the Management Board expects sales revenue to grow by around 10% compared with the 2013 fiscal year (2013 sales revenue: € 140.0 million), driven primarily by growth in the Affiliate Marketing segment.
As more is to be invested in marketing in the 2014 fiscal year, and the personnel base is to be expanded, earnings before taxes of around € 4.0 million are anticipated.
