Features
CTS Eventim Breaks Billion-Euro Revenue Mark In 2017
Germany’s live entertainment giant CTS Eventim published record numbers for its fiscal year 2017, exceeding revenues of one billion euros for the first time in the company’s history.
Alda – New Horizons Festival 2017
Armin van Buuren live on stage
Group revenues grew 24.6 percent from €829.9 million ($1.02 billion) in 2016 to €1.034 billion ($1.3 billion) in 2017, thanks to both the live entertainment and ticketing segments. Normalized group EBITDA also reached its highest value so far, growing 5.3 percent to €204.7 million ($252 million) in 2017.
Isolating both company segments shows that live entertainment revenues grew 42.7 percent year-on-year to €626.7 million ($770 million), thanks in particular to FKP Scorpio’s strong tour and festival performance. CTS Eventim had reacquired its majority stake in FKP in 2016.
A successful inaugural edition of New Horizons festival at Nürburgring also contributed to the growth, as did the strategic acquisitions of three promoters in Italy: Vertigo, Friends & Partners and D’Alessandro e Galli.
Establishing new festival brands such as New Horizons, which is promoted by Alda Events in a JV with Eventim’s Medusa Music Group, and relaunching existing formats caused start-up losses of around €10 million ($12.3 million), leading to a four-percent drop of the normalized EBIDTA in the live entertainment segment to €26.1 million ($32 million).
Ticketing remains the most dynamic growth segment for CTS Eventim, with revenues increasing by 5.9 percent to €418.8 million ($514.5 million), and normalized EBITDA climbing 6.8 percent to €178.6 million ($219 million).
The company sold 48.9 million tickets through its digital and mobile sales channels in 2017, which marks an increase of 11.9 percent. It attributes this growth to its core markets in Europe as well as new operations in Brazil and Scandinavia. Eventim owns Venuepoint, one of Scandinavia’s most used ticket agencies, in a JV with Nordisk Film. What is more, FKP Scorpio expanded into Norway by founding a new company with Oslo-based promoter Goldstar AS.
Adding all systems operated by CTS Eventim, more than 250 million tickets were sold, including 100 million cinema tickets and 150 million tickets for more than 240,000 live events of all kinds.
– CTS Eventim
CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg
CTS Eventim’s CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg said, “CTS Eventim generated more than a billion Euro in revenues in 2017, for the first time ever. We are absolutely delighted that this record is accompanied by a whole string of other positive developments. These include the growth of our online operations, our international expansion and the creation of new event formats like the ‘New Horizons’ festival, for example.”
Earlier this year, CTS Eventim’s shares reached their highest value since the company went public in 2000. At their height on Friday, Jan. 26, Eventim shares were worth almost €42 ($52), evaluating the entire company at more than €4 billion ($5 billion). Also in January, the company launched its fan-to-fan ticket resale offer, called Fansale, in the UK.
Speaking to Germany’s Handelsblatt last year, Schulenberg said: “To be honest, I consider this black market to be an unspeakable development. If I had my way, the one showing up first at the box office – online or at the counter – should get the best ticket.” He said, Eventim was doing “everything humanly possible” to curb the practice. “We’re fighting bots and have a dedicated department that scans all orders to detect salience.”
Eventim’s Italian ticketing operation TicketOne just received a court verdict attesting that the company was doing everything in its power to curb the commercial reselling of tickets.
In Germany, CTS Eventim seems to have peaked: in November, the country’s anti-trust authority denied a merger with Four Artists, a month later it concluded that some of Eventim’s contract clauses constituted an “abuse of market power under competition law,” demanding that CTS Eventim amend its contracts within four months.