Ströer SE & Co. KGaA (ETR:SAX) reported modest organic growth and improved adjusted earnings in the first quarter of 2026, with management pointing to continued strength in its core out-of-home advertising business despite a weaker consumer environment and uncertainty in the broader economy.
Chief Executive Officer Udo Müller said first-quarter revenue rose to EUR 495.6 million from EUR 475.5 million a year earlier. Reported revenue increased 4%, while organic growth was 1.1%. Adjusted EBITDA was EUR 119.3 million, compared with EUR 117.4 million in the prior-year period, while adjusted EBIT increased 5% to EUR 41.7 million from EUR 39.7 million. Adjusted net income rose 9% to EUR 17.6 million, from EUR 16.2 million.
“All in all, Q1 2026 demonstrates a stable and resilient financial performance,” Müller said, citing positive organic revenue growth, protected profitability, improved net income and a significant improvement in free cash flow.
Out-of-Home Remains the Main Growth Driver
Müller said Ströer’s out-of-home business continued to outperform the broader German advertising market. He noted that Nielsen gross rate card data showed out-of-home performing better than all media categories except desktop/mobile, while the overall net advertising market was down about 5% to 6% in the quarter. Ströer’s total out-of-home business, by contrast, grew by more than 5%.
Digital out-of-home, or DOOH, increased 12%, with programmatic DOOH growing at the same rate. Chief Financial Officer Henning Gieseke said the out-of-home media segment increased revenue by 5.4%, from EUR 210 million to EUR 229 million. Adjusted EBITDA in the segment rose 12% to EUR 97 million, and the adjusted EBITDA margin improved from 41% to nearly 44%.
Gieseke said DOOH growth was supported by the launch of “The Whale,” the company’s flagship billboard at Hamburg’s main station. In response to an analyst question, Müller said the 12% DOOH growth was mainly driven by national customers and that management expects the trend to continue through the year.
Gieseke said strong out-of-home performance came particularly from national sales, with above-average growth in categories including fast-moving consumer goods, retail, food retail, telecommunications and services.
Digital & Dialog Media Grows, While Data and E-Commerce Decline
The Digital & Dialog Media segment posted a 12% revenue increase, rising from EUR 206 million to EUR 231 million. Gieseke said the Dialog division delivered organic revenue growth of more than 8%, while the acquisition of AMEVIDA helped lift Dialog revenue by 26% to EUR 136 million. Digital segment revenue was EUR 95 million, as programmatic public video growth did not fully offset lower online media revenue.
Management said online media was affected by a difficult comparison with the first quarter of 2025, when both the U.S. election and German elections drove traffic. Müller said the company remains optimistic about its own online inventory, including t-online, but acknowledged pressure on third-party special interest websites amid changes in search and traffic patterns related to large language models.
The Data as a Service and E-Commerce segment declined, with total revenue falling from EUR 91 million to EUR 79 million. Gieseke said e-commerce was affected by a weak consumer environment and the migration of asambeauty’s online business to a new platform. E-commerce revenue was EUR 42 million, down 14% year over year.
Data as a Service was affected by the sale of Statista’s strategy and consulting business and a weaker U.S. dollar. Excluding scope and currency effects, the segment declined organically by 9.4%. Adjusted EBITDA for the segment was EUR 6 million, compared with EUR 11 million a year earlier.
Cash Flow Improves as Working Capital Drag Eases
Adjusted free cash flow improved to a negative EUR 9.7 million from a negative EUR 35.1 million in the first quarter of 2025. Gieseke said working capital was the main driver, with a seasonal outflow of EUR 12 million that was EUR 26 million better than the prior-year period.
Capital expenditures before mergers and acquisitions were EUR 16.5 million, down 8% from EUR 17.9 million. Müller said the level reflected “disciplined capital allocation” while maintaining operational flexibility.
Net debt rose sequentially by about EUR 10 million to EUR 881 million, in line with the quarter’s adjusted free cash flow. Year over year, net debt increased by EUR 17 million. The leverage ratio rose to 2.33 times from 2.18 times in the prior-year quarter.
Gieseke said exceptional items totaled EUR 9.2 million in the quarter, compared with EUR 2.5 million a year earlier, mainly because of restructuring measures. In the Q&A session, he said more than half of the quarter’s exceptional items related to management board changes, with the remainder tied to restructuring in areas including Dialog and Statista. He said the current full-year forecast for exceptional items stands at EUR 20 million to EUR 25 million.
Management Addresses Rumors, AI and Statista Strategy
Asked by Julien Roch of Barclays about recent media reports of a EUR 2.5 billion bid for the company, Müller declined to comment on rumors. “I’m the CEO of the company, and I have no intention to change that in the foreseeable future,” he said.
Müller also discussed the company’s planned June 17 transformation webinar, saying it would be more strategic than focused on financial targets. He said Ströer is working to bring its operations closer together as “one unified media company,” while acknowledging that restructuring costs already reflect parts of that transformation.
On Statista, Müller said the business is undergoing a significant transformation from a seat-based model toward data- and volume-based offerings, including Statista Connect. He said the company is in discussions with major clients globally and expects it will need about six more months to show the positive development on a broader and more reliable basis. Müller said the key question for Statista’s future valuation is whether it can prove that company-specific AI systems perform better when using Statista’s trusted data.
Second-Quarter Outlook Remains Cautious
For the second quarter, Müller said Ströer expects “solid performance” at the group level and across segments. He said revenue growth in out-of-home is expected to be around the first-quarter level, with similar trends in Digital & Dialog Media. For Data as a Service and E-Commerce, management expects a significant improvement from the first quarter, though still a single-digit percentage decline compared with the same period in 2025.
Müller declined to change the company’s broader outlook, citing macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical risks. Asked about the impact of conflict in the Middle East, he said the company has seen some effect in areas such as BlowUP, including lost travel campaign orders from the region, but said the overall trading momentum remained satisfactory in light of current uncertainty. He added that energy costs are not expected to have a significant impact on Ströer in the current year because the company has secured energy costs for a mid-term period.
About Ströer SE & Co. KGaA (ETR:SAX)
Ströer SE & Co KGaA provides out-of-home (OOH) media and online advertising solutions in Germany and internationally. It operates through three segments: Out-of-Home Media, Digital & Dialog Media, and Data As A Service (DaaS) & E-Commerce. The company offers various OOH advertising media services, such as traditional posters media and advertisements at bus and tram shelters and on public transport; and digital advertising services. It also operates t-online.de, which publishes news, analyses, reports and interviews through digital channels; information services for digital natives through special interest portals, such as giga.de, kino.de, desired, familie.de, spieletipps.de, and SpielAffe.de; and call centers focus on customer experience and sales for telecommunications, energy, retail, financial services, and medica sectors.
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