CTS Eventim Valued At $5 Billion

– CTS Eventim
CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg

CTS Eventim’s shares have reached their highest value since the company went public in 2000, Jan. 26.

At their height on Friday, Eventim shares were worth almost €42 ($52), evaluating the entire company at more than €4 billion ($5 billion). The German live entertainment giant’s stock has been increasing in value ever since its IPO in 2000. In the past five years alone, the value of its shares increased by 225 percent, according to the German stock exchange in Frankfurt.

The main reason for this growth is the company’s ticketing segment, where sales have been booming in the past fiscal years. Eventim’s latest numbers, pertaining to the nine months between Jan. 1 – Sept. 30, 2017, show a ticket revenue growth of 10.7 percent to €265.9 million ($331 million) compared to the year before ($299 million). It’s the same trend that became obvious in the company’s most recent half-year results.

Analysts believe CTS Eventim’s shares are slowly but surely reaching its maximum price level, which they estimate at €44,50 ($55). The company is starting to face obstacles to further growth put in place by Germany’s anti trust authorities, the Bundeskartellamt. The watch dog first denied the take over of German promoter Four Artists by Eventim in November, and banned the practice of signing exclusivity deals for ticketing with promoters a month later.

While the decision on the exclusivity contracts was made in December, the Bundeskartellamt only published it today. Promoters entering into two-year-plus or indefinite agreements with Eventim will be allowed to allocate 20 percent of their yearly ticket contingent to systems not owned by Eventim. The company is required to adjust or terminate existing contracts that do not allow this.

Pollstar reached out to CTS Eventim to find out whether its stance towards the watchdog’s decision has changed at all, since it was first announced in December, but it has not. The company had appealed the decision that same month.

It maintains, that “the decision of the Federal Cartel Office ignores the fierce competition in the market for ticket services, which is constantly increasing as a result of frequent market entries by digital providers from Germany and abroad. Against this background, we have to assume that the Cartel Office has gone into this procedure with a preconceived notion that does not adequately reflect this development. All the investigations in the three-year proceedings were apparently aimed at confirming this belief.”

The company’s representatives believe that the investigation would have taken a different turn, had the Bundeskartellamt taken their counter-arguments into account, which are supported by current studies and economic expert reports, according to an Eventim statement.