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Research study (Initial Coverage) english - naoo AG - 03.09.25

naoo AG (naoo) operates a self-developed next-generation social media plat-form that connects people based on their interests and preferences. It offers a unique user experience through gamification and personalised content. With its innovative points and rewards system, naoo encourages user engagement and enables users to benefit directly from their activity on the platform. With this year's acquisition of Kingfluencers, Switzerland's largest influencer agency, the company has taken a significant leap forward in its growth and significantly expanded its ecosystem. The acquisition enables naoo to tap into significant synergies in the areas of social media, influencer marketing and content creation.

Due to the monetisation of the business model, which only began in the last financial year 2024, only minor revenue (service revenue including capitalised de-velopment costs) was generated in this financial period from the operation of the social media platform. Specifically, revenue generated from various services pro-vided (including capitalised development costs for platform development) amounted to 0.43 million CHF in the past financial period, which was below the previous year's level (VJ: 1.02 million CHF) due to lower capitalised development services (capitalised internal development costs in 2024: 0.31 million CHF vs. 2023: 0.98 million CHF) below the previous year's level (PY: 1.02 million CHF). Purely digitally driven service revenues (revenues from digital advertising and IT consulting), on the other hand, increased significantly compared to the previous year to 0.11 million CHF (PY: 0.04 million CHF).

Due to the necessary start-up and ramp-up investments in the digitally-driven business model and the further development of the social media platform, as well as the monetisation of the naoo platform, which only began in the past financial year, a negative operating result (EBITDA) of -1.11 million CHF was achieved in the past 2024 financial year. This is almost at the same level as the previous year (PY: -1.00 million CHF).

With the announcement of the Kingfluencers acquisition on 17 March 2025, naoo's management published its revenue guidance for the 2025 financial year and expects consolidated revenue of around 10.0 million CHF for the current fi-nancial period. This is expected to result primarily from the Kingfluencers M&A (expected consolidation from March 2025). With regard to the Kingfluencers sub-sidiary, naoo expects further revenue growth for the current 2025 financial year and, adjusted for one-off integration expenses, also a positive operating result (EBIT).

In line with the company outlook, we expect revenue for the current 2025 finan-cial year to jump to 9.17 million CHF (PY: 0.43 million CHF), mainly due to the expected inorganic growth effect (Kingfluencers M&A). Based on the dynamic in-crease in the number of platform users expected in the following financial years as a result of the various marketing and growth levers (new app version, AI use, leveraging our own influencer network for user advertising, etc.), the associated digital advertising revenues (from monetising the naoo platform) should cause the naoo Group's revenues to rise rapidly in future financial periods. Accordingly, we expect a significant increase in revenue to 18.85 million CHF for the 2026 financial year. In the following years 2027 and 2028, these growth initiatives should have a much stronger impact and consequently enable revenue to grow even more dy-namically to 48.28 million CHF and 100.59 million CHF, respectively.