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📘 Marktkapitalisierung
📈 Was ist das?
Die Marktkapitalisierung zeigt, wie viel ein Unternehmen laut Börse aktuell wert ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie hilft Unternehmen in Größenklassen (Large, Mid, Small Cap) einzuordnen und gibt Hinweise auf Marktmacht und Stabilität.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Große Unternehmen gelten als stabiler, zahlen oft Dividenden, wachsen aber langsamer.
- Kleine Firmen können stärker wachsen, sind aber schwankungsanfälliger.
- Die Marktkapitalisierung ist ein guter Indikator für Unternehmensgröße, aber kein Maß für Unter- oder Überbewertung.
📘 Enterprise Value (Unternehmenswert)
📈 Was ist das?
Der Enterprise Value (EV) zeigt, was ein Unternehmen tatsächlich kostet, wenn man es komplett übernehmen würde – inklusive Schulden und abzüglich Cash.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
(= Marktkapitalisierung + Nettoverschuldung)
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der EV ist eine realistischere Bewertungsbasis als die Marktkapitalisierung, da er die Kapitalstruktur berücksichtigt. Er ist Grundlage für Kennzahlen wie EV/FCF oder EV/Sales.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Der Enterprise Value zeigt, was ein Unternehmen tatsächlich wert ist – unabhängig davon, wie es finanziert ist.
- Er ist besonders wichtig für professionelle Investoren, da er eine objektivere Grundlage für Bewertungsvergleiche bietet als die Marktkapitalisierung allein.
- Ein Unternehmen mit hoher Verschuldung erscheint im EV teurer, eines mit viel Cash günstiger – auch wenn sie an der Börse gleich viel wert sind.
📘 Nettoverschuldung
📈 Was ist das?
Die Nettoverschuldung zeigt, wie viele Schulden nach Abzug des verfügbaren Cashs tatsächlich verbleiben.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie zeigt, wie stark ein Unternehmen von Fremdkapital abhängig ist – und wie gut es in der Lage ist, seine Schulden kurzfristig zu bedienen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine niedrige oder negative Nettoverschuldung bedeutet hohe finanzielle Stabilität.
- Unternehmen mit viel Cash und geringer Verschuldung sind besser gerüstet für Krisen.
- Eine hohe Nettoverschuldung erhöht das Risiko – besonders bei steigenden Zinsen oder konjunkturellen Schwächen.
📘 Cash
📈 Was ist das?
Der Cashbestand zeigt, wie viele liquide Mittel einem Unternehmen sofort zur Verfügung stehen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Er gibt Auskunft über die finanzielle Flexibilität: Ein hoher Cashbestand ermöglicht Investitionen, Rückkäufe oder Krisenresistenz.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Cashbestand zeigt finanzielle Stärke und Handlungsspielraum.
- Cash kann für Investitionen, Schuldentilgung oder Aktienrückkäufe genutzt werden.
- Allerdings: Zu viel ungenutztes Kapital kann auch auf mangelnde Investitionsideen hinweisen.
📘 Anzahl ausstehender Aktien
📈 Was ist das?
Die Anzahl ausstehender Aktien gibt an, wie viele Aktien eines Unternehmens aktuell im Umlauf sind und von Investoren gehalten werden.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie ist die Grundlage für viele Kennzahlen wie Gewinn je Aktie (EPS), Marktkapitalisierung oder KGV.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Je weniger Aktien im Umlauf sind, desto höher fällt z. B. der Gewinn je Aktie aus – wichtig für Bewertung und Dividendenrendite.
- Aktienrückkäufe verringern die Anzahl ausstehender Aktien – und steigern den Wert je Aktie.
- Kapitalerhöhungen haben den gegenteiligen Effekt: mehr Aktien → Verwässerung der bestehenden Anteile.
📘 Kurs-Gewinn-Verhältnis (KGV)
📈 Was ist das?
Das KGV zeigt, wie oft der Gewinn pro Aktie im aktuellen Aktienkurs enthalten ist – also wie „teuer“ eine Aktie im Verhältnis zum Gewinn ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das KGV gehört zu den bekanntesten Bewertungskennzahlen. Es hilft Anlegern einzuschätzen, ob eine Aktie im Vergleich zu ihrem Gewinn eher günstig oder teuer erscheint.
🧮 Berechnung
📊 KGV (TTM) = bezogen auf den Gewinn der letzten 12 Monate (Trailing Twelve Months):🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriges KGV kann auf eine günstige Bewertung hindeuten – oder auf Probleme im Geschäftsmodell.
- Ein hohes KGV kann Wachstumserwartungen widerspiegeln – oder eine überbewertete Aktie.
📘 Kurs-Umsatz-Verhältnis (KUV)
📈 Was ist das?
Das KUV zeigt, wie viel Anleger für 1 € Umsatz eines Unternehmens zahlen – unabhängig vom Gewinn.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das KUV ist besonders bei wachstumsstarken oder noch nicht profitablen Unternehmen hilfreich. Es zeigt, wie hoch der Umsatz an der Börse bewertet wird.
🧮 Berechnung
Marktkapitalisierung = 826,20 Mio. $ | Umsatz (TTM) = 2,83 Mrd. $
Marktkapitalisierung = 826,20 Mio. $ | Umsatz erwartet = 2,94 Mrd. $
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriges KUV kann auf Unterbewertung hindeuten – oder auf schwache Margen.
- Ein hohes KUV kann hohe Erwartungen widerspiegeln – oder übermäßigen Optimismus.
- Besonders sinnvoll bei Wachstumsunternehmen, bei denen der Gewinn oder Free Cashflow (noch) keine Aussagekraft hat.
📘 Unternehmenswert zu Umsatz (EV/Sales)
📈 Was ist das?
EV/Sales zeigt, wie viel Anleger für 1 € Umsatz eines Unternehmens zahlen, wenn man auch Schulden und Cash berücksichtigt – es ist eine kapitalstrukturbereinigte Version des KUV.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Diese Kennzahl eignet sich besonders für den Vergleich von Unternehmen mit unterschiedlicher Verschuldung – sie zeigt, wie teuer ein Unternehmen tatsächlich im Verhältnis zum Umsatz ist.
🧮 Berechnung
Enterprise Value = 4,45 Mrd. $ | Umsatz (TTM) = 2,83 Mrd. $
Enterprise Value = 4,45 Mrd. $ | Umsatz erwartet = 2,94 Mrd. $
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- EV/Sales ist neutral gegenüber der Kapitalstruktur und eignet sich gut für Unternehmensvergleiche.
- Ein niedriges Verhältnis kann auf eine günstig bewertete Aktie hindeuten – ein hohes Verhältnis auf hohe Erwartungen oder Überbewertung.
- Besonders nützlich bei wachstumsstarken, noch nicht profitablen Firmen.
📘 Unternehmenswert zu Free Cashflow (EV/FCF)
📈 Was ist das?
EV/FCF zeigt, wie viele Jahre es dauern würde, bis ein Unternehmen seinen Unternehmenswert durch freien Cashflow „zurückverdient”.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Diese Kennzahl hilft, Unternehmen auf Basis ihrer tatsächlichen Cash-Erträge zu bewerten – unabhängig von Bilanzierungsregeln oder buchhalterischem Gewinn.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriges EV/FCF deutet auf eine günstige Bewertung bei starker Cashgenerierung hin.
- Ein hohes EV/FCF kann entweder auf Optimismus oder auf temporär schwachen Cashflow hindeuten.
- Besonders hilfreich bei reifen, profitablen Unternehmen mit stabilen Cashflows.
📘 Kurs-Buchwert-Verhältnis (KBV)
📈 Was ist das?
Das KBV zeigt, wie hoch der Marktwert eines Unternehmens im Verhältnis zu seinem bilanziellen Eigenkapital ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das KBV ist besonders bei Substanzwerten (z. B. Banken, Industrie) relevant. Es hilft Anlegern zu erkennen, ob ein Unternehmen unter oder über seinem buchhalterischen Vermögen bewertet ist.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein KBV unter 1 kann auf Unterbewertung oder schwache Rentabilität hindeuten.
- Ein KBV über 1 zeigt, dass der Markt dem Unternehmen Mehrwert über den Buchwert hinaus zuschreibt (z. B. Marken, Patente, Wachstum).
- Das KBV eignet sich besonders gut für Unternehmen mit stabilen, materiellen Vermögenswerten.
📘 Dividende je Aktie
📈 Was ist das?
Die Dividende je Aktie zeigt, wie viel Geld ein Unternehmen pro Aktie an seine Aktionäre ausschüttet – typischerweise jährlich oder quartalsweise.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie ist die absolute Größe der Auszahlung je Aktie – wichtig für alle, die regelmäßige Erträge suchen oder Dividendenstrategien verfolgen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine stabile oder wachsende Dividende je Aktie ist oft ein Zeichen für ein solides Geschäftsmodell.
- Die Dividende je Aktie allein sagt aber nichts über die Rendite – dafür ist auch der Aktienkurs relevant (→ Dividendenrendite).
- Langfristig steigende Dividenden sind oft ein sehr gutes Merkmal (z. B. Dividenden-Aristokraten).
📘 Dividendenrendite
📈 Was ist das?
Die Dividendenrendite zeigt, wie hoch die Dividende eines Unternehmens im Verhältnis zum Aktienkurs ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie hilft dabei, Dividendenaktien vergleichbar zu machen – unabhängig vom absoluten Auszahlungsbetrag.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine stabile Dividendenrendite kann auf verlässliche Ausschüttungen hinweisen.
- Ein Vergleich der 1J- und 5J-Rendite hilft zu erkennen, ob das Dividendenwachstum mit dem Kurswachstum Schritt hält.
- Eine niedrige Rendite ist nicht zwingend negativ – sie kann auf starkes Kurswachstum hindeuten.
📘 Dividendenwachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Dividendenwachstum zeigt, wie stark ein Unternehmen seine Dividende je Aktie über die Zeit gesteigert hat.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
5J: durchschnittliche jährliche Wachstumsrate (CAGR)
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Stetig steigende Dividenden gelten als Zeichen für finanzielle Stärke und Aktionärsorientierung – besonders interessant für langfristige Investoren.
🧮 Berechnung
Dividendenwachstum 5J (CAGR)🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein stabiles Dividendenwachstum ist ein Zeichen nachhaltiger Ertragskraft.
- Ein hohes Dividendenwachstum kann ein erheblicher Hebel deiner Rendite sein:
- Wenn ein Unternehmen z. B. 1 € Dividende zahlt und diese über 5 Jahre jährlich um 15 % erhöht, bekommst du im 5. Jahr bereits 2 € je Aktie – doppelt so viel wie zu Beginn!
📘 Ausschüttungsquote (Payout)
📈 Was ist das?
Die Ausschüttungsquote zeigt, wie viel Prozent des Unternehmensgewinns (pro Aktie) als Dividende an die Aktionäre ausgeschüttet wird.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Quote hilft einzuschätzen, ob eine Dividende auf Dauer tragfähig ist – besonders im Verhältnis zum erzielten Gewinn.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine niedrige Ausschüttungsquote bedeutet: Das Unternehmen behält einen größeren Teil des Gewinns für Investitionen – typisch für Wachstumsunternehmen.
- Eine moderate Quote (z. B. 25–50 %) steht oft für ein gesundes Gleichgewicht zwischen Ausschüttung und Zukunftsinvestitionen.
- Hohe Ausschüttungsquoten können attraktiv wirken, sind aber riskanter, wenn die Gewinne schwanken oder sinken.
📘 Dividendensteigerungen in Folge (Erhöhungen)
📈 Was ist das?
Diese Kennzahl zeigt, wie viele Jahre in Folge ein Unternehmen seine Dividende pro Aktie erhöht hat – ohne Kürzung oder Aussetzung.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Ein langer Track Record kontinuierlicher Erhöhungen spricht für Verlässlichkeit, solide Finanzen und aktionärsfreundliche Unternehmenspolitik.
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein langer Zeitraum mit Dividendensteigerungen stärkt das Vertrauen – besonders in Krisenzeiten.
- Solche Unternehmen gelten als verlässlich und planbar für Einkommensinvestoren.
- Je länger die Serie, desto stärker das Commitment gegenüber den Aktionären.
📘 Umsatz
📈 Was ist das?
Der Umsatz zeigt, wie viel ein Unternehmen insgesamt mit seinen Produkten und Dienstleistungen verdient – also den Bruttoerlös vor Abzug von Kosten.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der Umsatz ist eine der zentralen Kennzahlen zur Einschätzung der Unternehmensgröße, Marktstellung und Wachstumskraft.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein wachsender Umsatz zeigt eine steigende Nachfrage und kann ein guter Frühindikator für Gewinnsteigerungen sein.
- Vergleiche von aktuellem und erwartetem Umsatz geben Hinweise auf das Marktumfeld und Analystenerwartungen.
- Wichtig: Starker Umsatz allein genügt nicht – auch Margen und Profitabilität zählen.
📘 EBITDA
📈 Was ist das?
EBITDA steht für „Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization“ – also Gewinn vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen. Es zeigt das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens, bereinigt um bilanztechnische und finanzierungsbedingte Effekte.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
EBITDA ist eine verbreitete Kennzahl zur Beurteilung der operativen Leistungsfähigkeit – insbesondere bei kapitalintensiven Unternehmen oder im internationalen Vergleich.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hohes oder wachsendes EBITDA spricht für starke operative Erträge – unabhängig von Bilanzierung oder Steuerlast.
- EBITDA ist besonders nützlich, um Unternehmen branchenübergreifend zu vergleichen.
- Wichtig: EBITDA ist keine offizielle Gewinnkennzahl – Abschreibungen und Finanzierungskosten werden ausgeklammert.
📘 EBIT
📈 Was ist das?
EBIT steht für „Earnings Before Interest and Taxes“ – also Gewinn vor Zinsen und Steuern. Es zeigt das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens nach Abschreibungen, aber vor Finanzierungs- und Steueraufwand.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
EBIT ist eine zentrale Kennzahl zur Beurteilung der Profitabilität aus dem Kerngeschäft – unabhängig von Kapitalstruktur oder Steuersystem.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hohes EBIT deutet auf ein profitables Kerngeschäft hin – vor Zinslasten oder steuerlichen Effekten.
- Es erlaubt objektivere Vergleiche zwischen Unternehmen mit unterschiedlicher Finanzierung.
- Im Vergleich mit EBITDA zeigt EBIT bereits den Einfluss von Abschreibungen auf das operative Ergebnis.
📘 Nettogewinn
📈 Was ist das?
Der Nettogewinn ist der verbleibende Jahresüberschuss (oder -fehlbetrag) eines Unternehmens – nach Abzug aller Kosten, Steuern, Zinsen und Abschreibungen
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der Nettogewinn ist die zentrale Erfolgskennzahl – er zeigt, wie profitabel ein Unternehmen nach allen Kosten tatsächlich arbeitet.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein steigender Nettogewinn zeigt, dass das Unternehmen effizient wirtschaftet – trotz aller Kosten.
- Die Entwicklung des Gewinns beeinflusst z. B. direkt das KGV und weitere Kennzahlen.
- Im Zeitverlauf lässt sich ablesen, wie stabil und profitabel ein Geschäftsmodell wirklich ist.
📘 Free Cashflow (FCF)
📈 Was ist das?
Der Free Cashflow gibt Aufschluss über die echte finanzielle Stärke eines Unternehmens – unabhängig von Bilanzierungsregeln. Er zeigt, wie viel Spielraum für Dividenden, Aktienrückkäufe oder Schuldenabbau besteht.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
FCF reflects a company’s real financial strength – regardless of accounting profits. It shows how much flexibility a company has for dividends, share buybacks, or debt reduction.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Free Cashflow bedeutet, dass ein Unternehmen echte Finanzkraft besitzt – unabhängig vom bilanzierten Gewinn.
- Er ist oft die solideste Grundlage für nachhaltige Dividenden und Aktienrückkäufe.
- Sinkender FCF kann ein Warnsignal sein – auch wenn der Gewinn stabil aussieht.
📘 Umsatzwachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Umsatzwachstum zeigt, wie stark sich die Erlöse eines Unternehmens im Vergleich zum Vorjahr verändert haben – tatsächlich (TTM) und auf Prognosebasis (erwartet).
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (Umsatz erwartet ÷ Umsatz Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Erwartetes Wachstum basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Ein wachsender Umsatz ist ein zentrales Signal für steigende Nachfrage, Geschäftsausweitung und Marktanteilsgewinne – besonders bei Wachstumsunternehmen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Wachstum ist der Motor langfristiger Wertsteigerung – besonders bei Technologie- und Wachstumsaktien.
- Wichtig ist nicht nur das aktuelle Wachstum, sondern auch dessen Nachhaltigkeit.
- Prognosen zeigen, ob Analysten weiteres Potenzial erwarten – oder eine Verlangsamung.
📘 EBITDA-Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das EBITDA-Wachstum zeigt, wie stark das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen im Vergleich zum Vorjahr gestiegen oder gesunken ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (erwartetes EBITDA ÷ EBITDA Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Erwartetes Wachstum basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Ein steigendes EBITDA ist ein Zeichen für verbesserte operative Ertragskraft – unabhängig von Finanzierungsstruktur oder Abschreibungen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Starkes EBITDA-Wachstum signalisiert operative Effizienz und Skalierung – besonders relevant in Wachstumsphasen.
- EBITDA-Wachstum ist ein Frühindikator für Margen- und Gewinnentwicklung – sollte aber stets im Zusammenhang mit Umsatz und EBIT betrachtet werden.
📘 EBIT Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das EBIT-Wachstum zeigt, wie stark das operative Ergebnis eines Unternehmens (nach Abschreibungen, aber vor Zinsen und Steuern) im Vergleich zum Vorjahr gewachsen ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (erwartetes EBIT ÷ EBIT Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Erwartetes Wachstum basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Das EBIT-Wachstum ist ein direkter Indikator für die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des operativen Geschäfts – unter Berücksichtigung der Kapitalintensität (Abschreibungen).
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Steigendes EBIT signalisiert wachsende operative Rentabilität – auch unter Berücksichtigung von Abschreibungen.
- Das EBIT-Wachstum ist ein wichtiges Maß zur Beurteilung von Geschäftsmodellen mit hohen Investitionskosten.
- Im Zusammenspiel mit Umsatz- und EBITDA-Wachstum ergibt sich ein umfassendes Bild zur operativen Entwicklung.
📘 Nettogewinn-Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Nettogewinn-Wachstum zeigt, wie stark der Jahresüberschuss eines Unternehmens gegenüber dem Vorjahr gestiegen oder gesunken ist – sowohl tatsächlich (TTM) als auch auf Basis von Prognosen (erwartet).
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Erwartet = (erwarteter Nettogewinn ÷ Nettogewinn Vorjahr − 1) × 100
Der erwartete Wert basiert auf Analystenschätzungen für das laufende Geschäftsjahr.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der Gewinn ist die entscheidende Ergebnisgröße für ein Unternehmen. Ein wachsender Nettogewinn deutet auf steigende Effizienz, stabile Kostenkontrolle und nachhaltige Ertragskraft hin.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Wachsender Nettogewinn stärkt die Bewertung, Dividendenfähigkeit und Kursfantasie.
- Stagnierender oder rückläufiger Gewinn trotz Umsatzwachstum kann auf Margendruck hinweisen.
📘 Free Cashflow-Wachstum
📈 Was ist das?
Das Free-Cashflow-Wachstum zeigt, wie sich der freie Mittelzufluss eines Unternehmens im Vergleich zum Vorjahr verändert hat – also der Betrag, der nach allen operativen Ausgaben und Investitionen übrig bleibt.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Free Cashflow ist der echte, verfügbare Geldzufluss. Wachstum in diesem Bereich ist ein Zeichen für finanzielle Stärke und steigende Flexibilität bei Dividenden, Rückkäufen oder Investitionen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Sinkender Free Cashflow kann auf steigende Investitionen, höhere Kosten oder stagnierende operative Erträge hindeuten.
- Besonders bei Dividendenwerten ist das FCF-Wachstum wichtig – denn Dividenden werden letztlich aus dem verfügbaren Cash gezahlt.
- Ein negativer Trend sollte genauer analysiert werden – er ist nicht zwangsläufig schlecht, aber potenziell ein Warnsignal.
📘 Bruttomarge
📈 Was ist das?
Die Bruttomarge zeigt, wie viel vom Umsatz nach Abzug der direkten Herstellungskosten (Material, Produktion) als Bruttogewinn übrig bleibt – also der „Rohgewinn“ eines Unternehmens.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Auch: Bruttomarge = Bruttogewinn ÷ Umsatz × 100
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Bruttomarge gibt Aufschluss über die Profitabilität eines Produkts oder Geschäftsmodells vor Fixkosten, Steuern und Zinsen. Sie zeigt, wie effizient ein Unternehmen produzieren oder einkaufen kann.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Bruttomarge deutet auf starke Preissetzungsmacht und effiziente Herstellung hin.
- Sinkende Bruttomargen können auf Kostensteigerungen oder Preisdruck hindeuten.
- Besonders im Vergleich zu Wettbewerbern liefert die Bruttomarge wertvolle Einblicke in die Geschäftsqualität.
📘 EBITDA-Marge
📈 Was ist das?
Die EBITDA-Marge zeigt, wie viel vom Umsatz als operativer Gewinn vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen (EBITDA) übrig bleibt. Sie misst die operative Effizienz – ohne Verzerrungen durch Finanzierung oder Buchwerte.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die EBITDA-Marge hilft zu verstehen, wie viel operativer Gewinn ein Unternehmen aus jedem Euro Umsatz erzielt – unabhängig von Kapitalstruktur oder steuerlichem Umfeld.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe EBITDA-Marge zeigt starke operative Ertragskraft – unabhängig von Bilanzierungseffekten.
- Die Marge ermöglicht gute Vergleiche zwischen Unternehmen und Branchen.
- Ein stabiler oder wachsender Wert kann auf effiziente Kostenkontrolle und Skalierbarkeit hindeuten.
📘 EBIT-Marge
📈 Was ist das?
Die EBIT-Marge zeigt, wie viel Prozent des Umsatzes als operativer Gewinn nach Abschreibungen, aber vor Zinsen und Steuern übrig bleiben.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die EBIT-Marge misst die operative Ertragskraft eines Unternehmens unter Berücksichtigung der Kapitalintensität (z. B. Maschinen, Anlagen). Sie eignet sich gut zum Vergleich von Geschäftsmodellen mit unterschiedlich hohen Abschreibungen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe EBIT-Marge zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen auch nach Abschreibungen effizient arbeitet.
- Sie ist besonders relevant in kapitalintensiven Branchen.
- Langfristig stabile oder steigende Margen sind ein Zeichen wirtschaftlicher Stärke und Preissetzungsmacht.
📘 Nettomarge
📈 Was ist das?
Die Nettomarge zeigt, wie viel vom Umsatz am Ende als „Reingewinn“ übrig bleibt – also nach Abzug aller Kosten, Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Nettomarge gibt an, wie effizient ein Unternehmen über alle Stufen hinweg wirtschaftet. Sie zeigt, wie viel Gewinn tatsächlich je Euro Umsatz übrig bleibt.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Nettomarge zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen nicht nur operativ stark ist, sondern auch seine Finanzierung und Steuerbelastung im Griff hat.
- Vergleiche mit Wettbewerbern geben Einblicke in die wirtschaftliche Qualität.
- Sinkende Nettomargen trotz Umsatzwachstum können ein Warnsignal sein – etwa für steigende Kosten oder sinkende Effizienz.
📘 Free Cashflow Marge
📈 Was ist das?
Die Free-Cashflow-Marge zeigt, wie viel vom Umsatz nach Abzug aller operativen Ausgaben und Investitionen tatsächlich als freier Mittelzufluss übrig bleibt.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Diese Marge misst die echte Liquidität, die ein Unternehmen erwirtschaftet – unabhängig von Bilanzierungsregeln oder Abschreibungen. Sie ist besonders relevant für Dividenden, Rückkäufe und Investitionen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Free-Cashflow-Marge zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen nachhaltig liquide Mittel erwirtschaftet.
- Sie ist ein starkes Signal für finanzielle Stabilität und Ausschüttungspotenzial.
- Wichtig ist der langfristige Trend – sinkende Werte können auf steigende Investitionen oder rückläufige operative Effizienz hindeuten.
📘 Eigenkapitalquote
📈 Was ist das?
Die Eigenkapitalquote zeigt, wie hoch der Anteil des Eigenkapitals an der Bilanzsumme eines Unternehmens ist – also wie stark es sich aus eigenen Mitteln finanziert.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Eine hohe Eigenkapitalquote steht für finanzielle Stabilität, Krisenfestigkeit und gute Bonität. Sie ist besonders relevant bei der Beurteilung der Verschuldung.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Eigenkapitalquote signalisiert finanzielle Stabilität – besonders in Krisenzeiten.
- Ein niedriger Wert kann auf ein höheres Risiko oder eine aggressive Verschuldung hinweisen.
- Wichtig: Die Eigenkapitalquote sollte immer gemeinsam mit der Eigenkapitalrendite betrachtet werden. Nur so lässt sich beurteilen, ob ein Unternehmen nicht nur solide, sondern auch effizient wirtschaftet.
📘 Eigenkapitalrendite (ROE)
📈 Was ist das?
Die Eigenkapitalrendite zeigt, wie effizient ein Unternehmen mit dem Kapital seiner Aktionäre arbeitet – also wie viel Gewinn es pro Euro Eigenkapital erwirtschaftet.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Eigenkapitalrendite ist eine zentrale Rentabilitätskennzahl. Sie hilft Anlegern zu erkennen, ob das Unternehmen eine attraktive Verzinsung auf das eingesetzte Eigenkapital erwirtschaftet.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Eine hohe Eigenkapitalrendite spricht für ein starkes, effizientes Geschäftsmodell.
- Besonders interessant ist sie bei kapitalintensiven Firmen oder solchen mit hoher Eigenkapitalquote.
- Wichtig: Ein sehr hoher ROE kann auch auf hohe Schulden hinweisen – daher sollte sie immer im Kontext mit der Eigenkapitalquote betrachtet werden.
📘 Return on Capital Employed (ROCE)
📈 Was ist das?
ROCE misst die Gesamtrentabilität eines Unternehmens – also wie effizient es das eingesetzte Kapital (Eigen- und Fremdkapital) zur Gewinnerzielung nutzt.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Das eingesetzte Kapital ist das gesamte betriebsnotwendige Kapital, unabhängig von der Finanzierungsquelle.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
ROCE eignet sich besonders gut für den Vergleich unterschiedlich finanzierter Unternehmen. Es zeigt, wie effektiv ein Unternehmen Kapital investiert – unabhängig von der Kapitalstruktur.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher ROCE zeigt, dass ein Unternehmen sein Kapital effizient einsetzt – unabhängig davon, ob es durch Eigen- oder Fremdkapital finanziert ist.
- Je höher der ROCE im Vergleich zu ähnlichen Unternehmen, desto mehr Wert schafft das Unternehmen mit seinem investierten Kapital.
- Besonders wichtig ist der ROCE bei Firmen mit hohen Investitionen – z. B. in Industrie, Energie oder Infrastruktur.
📘 Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
📈 Was ist das?
ROIC zeigt, wie effizient ein Unternehmen das Kapital investiert, das langfristig im operativen Geschäft gebunden ist – unabhängig davon, ob es aus Eigen- oder Fremdkapital stammt.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
- NOPAT = „Net Operating Profit After Taxes“
- Investiertes Kapital = operatives Vermögen abzüglich nicht-verzinster Schulden
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
ROIC ist eine der präzisesten Kennzahlen zur Bewertung der Kapitalrendite – besonders im Vergleich zur Eigenkapitalrendite, weil es Verzerrungen durch Schulden vermeidet. Er zeigt, ob ein Unternehmen Mehrwert für alle Kapitalgeber schafft.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher ROIC zeigt, wie gut ein Unternehmen mit dem tatsächlich investierten (betriebsnotwendigen) Kapital wirtschaftet.
- Im Unterschied zu ROCE wird nur Kapital betrachtet, das wirklich zur Finanzierung operativer Aktivitäten dient – und verzinst werden muss.
- Besonders hilfreich, um die Kapitalrendite von Unternehmen mit viel „überschüssigem“ Kapital oder zinsfreien Verbindlichkeiten realistisch zu vergleichen.
📘 Verschuldungsgrad (Leverage Ratio)
📈 Was ist das?
Der Verschuldungsgrad zeigt, wie stark ein Unternehmen durch verzinsliche Schulden (z. B. Kredite und Anleihen) im Verhältnis zum Eigenkapital finanziert ist.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Die Kennzahl hilft, das finanzielle Risiko und die Abhängigkeit von Fremdkapital zu beurteilen. Ein hoher Verschuldungsgrad kann die Eigenkapitalrendite steigern – birgt aber auch erhöhte Risiken bei Zinsanstiegen oder Liquiditätsengpässen.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriger Verschuldungsgrad steht für finanzielle Stabilität und Unabhängigkeit.
- Ein hoher Wert kann auf erhöhte Risiken hinweisen – insbesondere bei schwankenden Zinsen oder konjunkturellen Schwächen.
- Wichtig: Immer im Kontext zur Branche und Kapitalintensität bewerten.
📘 Ergebnis je Aktie (EPS)
📈 Was ist das?
Das Ergebnis je Aktie (EPS) zeigt, wie viel Gewinn auf eine einzelne Aktie entfällt – und ist eine der wichtigsten Kennzahlen zur Bewertung von Unternehmen.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Die verwässerte Aktienanzahl berücksichtigt auch potenzielle neue Aktien, etwa durch Optionen, Wandelanleihen oder andere Umtauschrechte.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
EPS bildet die Basis für viele Bewertungskennzahlen wie KGV, PEG oder Payout Ratio. Es macht den Gewinn für Aktionäre vergleichbar – unabhängig von der Unternehmensgröße.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- EPS hilft, die Profitabilität pro Aktie zu erfassen – und ist besonders wichtig im Zeitvergleich oder im Vergleich mit Analystenschätzungen.
- Steigendes EPS kann ein Zeichen für stabiles Wachstum oder Aktienrückkäufe sein.
- Wichtig: Verwende verwässertes EPS für realistische Bewertungen – besonders bei stark aktienbasierten Vergütungssystemen.
📘 Free Cashflow je Aktie (FCF je Aktie)
📈 Was ist das?
Der Free Cashflow je Aktie zeigt, wie viel freier Mittelzufluss einem Unternehmen pro Aktie zur Verfügung steht – nach Investitionen, aber vor Dividenden oder Schuldentilgung.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Der FCF je Aktie zeigt, wie viel liquide Mittel pro Aktie tatsächlich im Unternehmen verbleiben – wichtig für Dividenden, Aktienrückkäufe oder Schuldentilgung. Im Gegensatz zum Gewinn ist er schwerer manipulierbar und daher besonders aussagekräftig.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Free Cashflow je Aktie ist ein Zeichen für hohe finanzielle Flexibilität.
- Er zeigt, wie viel Kapital ein Unternehmen effektiv einsetzen oder ausschütten kann.
- Besonders relevant für dividendenstarke Unternehmen oder solche mit starker Kapitalrendite.
📘 Short Interest
📈 Was ist das?
Short Interest zeigt, wie viele Aktien eines Unternehmens aktuell leerverkauft wurden – also von Investoren geliehen und verkauft, in der Erwartung fallender Kurse.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Der Wert zeigt den Anteil der Aktien, der aktuell auf fallende Kurse spekuliert wird.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Short Interest dient als Stimmungsindikator: Ein hoher Wert deutet auf Skepsis oder negative Erwartungen gegenüber dem Unternehmen hin – kann aber auch zu einem „Short Squeeze“ führen, wenn der Kurs plötzlich steigt.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein niedriger Short Interest deutet auf Vertrauen in das Unternehmen hin.
- Ein hoher Wert kann ein Warnsignal sein – oder eine Chance, wenn sich die Stimmung dreht.
- Besonders spannend in volatilen Märkten oder vor wichtigen Quartalszahlen.
📘 Employees
📈 Was ist das?
Die Mitarbeiteranzahl zeigt, wie viele Personen ein Unternehmen weltweit beschäftigt – ein Indikator für Größe, Struktur und Geschäftsmodell.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Sie hilft bei der Einschätzung von Skaleneffekten, Effizienz und Personalkosten. Zusammen mit Umsatz und Gewinn lassen sich Kennzahlen wie Produktivität je Mitarbeiter ableiten.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Viele Mitarbeiter bedeuten große operative Komplexität – aber auch hohes Umsatzpotenzial.
- Produktivität je Mitarbeiter ist ein wichtiger Indikator für Effizienz.
- Besonders spannend bei stark wachsenden Tech- oder Industrieunternehmen.
📘 Umsatz je Mitarbeiter
📈 Was ist das?
Der Umsatz je Mitarbeiter zeigt, wie viel Erlös ein Unternehmen durchschnittlich pro Beschäftigtem erwirtschaftet – eine Kennzahl für Effizienz und Produktivität.
🧮 Wie wird es berechnet?
Die Mitarbeiterzahl stammt in der Regel aus dem letzten verfügbaren Jahresbericht.
🏛️ Wofür ist es wichtig?
Diese Kennzahl hilft, Geschäftsmodelle zu vergleichen – insbesondere zwischen arbeitsintensiven und technologiegetriebenen Unternehmen. Ein hoher Wert deutet auf Automatisierung, Effizienz oder hohen Wertschöpfungsanteil hin.
🧮 Berechnung
🎯 Was bedeutet das für Anleger?
- Ein hoher Umsatz je Mitarbeiter spricht für ein skalierbares und margenstarkes Geschäftsmodell.
- Ein niedriger Wert kann auf arbeitsintensive Prozesse oder geringere Wertschöpfung hinweisen.
- Besonders hilfreich beim Vergleich von Tech- vs. Industrieunternehmen.
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aktien.guide Basis
Sabre — Bank of America Global Research C-Suite TMT Conference
1. Question Answer
Let's get started. So I'm Victor Cheng, working in Bank of America covering most of European software and focus a bit more on travel tech. And -- good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I'm very delighted today to have Kurt Ekert, CEO of Sabre; and Mike Randolfi, CFO of Sabre today with us. We have a lot of questions to go through. So I'll get started, but let's see if we have some time for Q&As either in person or on the call.
So let's get started. Maybe can you tell us a bit more -- can you give us some color on what you're seeing with the current travel capacity, supply and demand given ongoing Middle East disruption? I think IATA just recently lowered their forecast from 4.9% growth this year to 2.1%. Any view since, I guess, results?
Yes. Well, thanks for the question, Victor. And so I think it's important to start with what our base planning assumption was when we originally built our plans and our expectations for 2026. And as part of that, we had originally guided to air distribution bookings up in the mid-single digits. And what's important about that is that assumption is predicated -- has been predicated upon not that there's a point of view on the industry, but a planning assumption that the GDS industry from an air distribution bookings perspective would be relatively flat. Now that's -- in February, that was despite the expectation that airline capacity would be up roughly 5%, 6%. And we would expect that the industry from a GDS booking standpoint should largely correlate with that capacity growth.
Now coming through the back part of last year into this year, we saw very, very strong overall bookings growth to the tune of around 9%. A lot of strength in North America and in the Americas in general, North America and Latin America in the double digits. and solid growth in EMEA and in APAC. And then obviously, you had the Middle East conflict ensue starting in March. And since then, we had seen bookings roughly flat with North America and South America largely offsetting declines in the Middle East, EMEA and APAC driven by the Middle East. A matter of fact, to quantify that, for us, around 11% of our bookings go to through or from the Middle East. And with the decline as a result of the Middle East conflict, it created a roughly 7-point headwind, which is what drives us to the flat bookings. And that continued into April, which is the point we referenced on our earnings call.
Now when we updated our guide for this year, we updated our guide for the year from mid-single-digit bookings growth to low to mid-single-digit bookings growth. And we had stronger growth in the first quarter than we originally expected. And with that, the second quarter, based on how we exited the first quarter, we telegraphed roughly flat bookings growth. And then even in the third and fourth quarter, we tempered -- if you look what's implied, we tempered our underlying expectations. So I said, if you look at the third quarter and what's implied in our guide, it probably implies something like low single-digit growth and maybe a little bit better than that in the fourth quarter.
So what I would overall say is, if you look at that, you start -- we still have bookings growth up 3 -- I would call it, low to mid-single digits, all predicated upon our own growth trajectory. And overall, if you look at how -- if you look at why we didn't have a bigger impact, it really goes back to our original planning assumption of flat industry growth. So overall, we felt pretty good about our guide, where we see bookings and capacity. And we haven't updated anything since our earnings call. But overall, I'd say the environment overall is pretty still consistent with how we created our initial -- our current projections for our bookings growth and earnings.
And then just 2 quick adds to that. One is that corporate and TMC volumes have been fairly resilient. The question will be the elasticity of the consumer with respect to airlines passing on price increases to offset the impact of fuel, and there's some uncertainty there in terms of what the impact will be going forward. The second thing is, while our core assumption is that the war, and we could be wrong in this, abates in the near term, the impact of fuel from a logistics standpoint and the impact of fuel price and jet fuel is that that's going to persist through the calendar year. Our hope and expectation is that normalizes by the end of the year, but that doesn't basically turn around overnight. So that's going to have a resultant impact on airline pricing yield and perhaps demand impact as well.
What's buffering the impact to us is if you look leading -- coming out of last year into this year, in terms of our GDS bookings at Sabre, we've been outperforming the industry by about 500 to 600 basis points, and that has buffered us in this turbulent time.
Very clear and good color. And then maybe then if I jump into AI, well, first of all on the distribution space. We actually talked about this 6 months ago in the fireside chat about like what has happened, what you're doing at the time. Maybe can you give us an update on what has changed since then, what worked and what doesn't? How do you see kind of the distribution space in travel evolving with regards to AI?
Yes. I think the broad theme is that there's going to be an inherent mandate for consumer-grade conversational commerce interfaces, whether you're an OTA or a TMC or a supplier or your new Agentic platform. And so one of the cool things that's happened more recently is we launched a new relationship with Paypal and MindTrip. We are now live in production with MindTrip, where they're the LLM player. They're using Sabre for search book, servicing changes, full live production today. You can do all of that through talking to or typing in a freeform spirit into MindTrip. So go to mindtrip.ai. Hotel will go live with that very quickly. So that's built basically. We have new MCP server capabilities, new Agentic API capabilities. That's all built on the top of Sabre's normal data and infrastructure.
So the beauty of this is it's simply a distribution extension of what we are doing. One of the key things we've seen or one of the questions is, I believe that the Agentic platforms will emerge as a new distribution channel in the way the online travel agents emerged in the 1990s. And I think that's going to happen rapidly. Now one of the learnings will be in traditional e-commerce interface today, you enter defined parameters when you try to search for air or hotel travel. In a freeform text, when you say, I want to go to the South Pacific in summer, and we have 6 billion airfares stored plus we go source all the NDC stuff, how do you return relevant content?
So the great news is we have 17,000 shops per second against our system. We've got the data. We've got the caching to do that intelligently. But what the LLMs are going to have to figure out is how do you take this natural language search, how do you drive better parameters in order to have a more responsive query to the traveler because if it's too open-ended, you're not going to give them the response they're looking for. So I think that's something that as we speak to LLMs, there's no question about.
The other is most of the large agentic players are hyper focused on monetization. They're focused first on e-commerce retail because it's such a large category and sneakers are presumably easier to sell than air travel. I think they're going to turn their attention to travel starting in the second half of this year. What they all articulate they want, and this includes Google Gemini is a captive end-to-end user experience where the consumer never leaves their portal. That's very different, for example, than Google Flight Search. It's more common to an OTA. So the way I think about it is -- it will be the next generation of what an OTA looks like with a conversation on the front end of it. Clearly, the OTAs are going to do that. Suppliers are going to try to do that. But I think these agentic players are going to get big into that as well.
Right. And then you mentioned Google. If I think about Google, they have continued to push with more AI offerings on travel planning, travel booking. And while they are not looking to become an OTA themselves, does it not risk shifting the top of the funnel to direct bookings? How should we think about the funnel and the distribution mix changing in the context of AI?
Google is very interesting. So think about Google Hotel as very discrete from Google Flight Search. Google Hotel is an open marketplace. OTAs, metasearch and hoteliers compete for that inventory, highly profitable, high-margin channel for Google, but it's an ad model. Google Flight Search, since they bought ITA software in 2014, similar in that it's metasearch. If you choose to book, they'll take you to the supplier, but it's not a true open marketplace. They generally restrict the ability of metasearch or OTA to compete there, and they largely don't charge the airlines. I think that's for antitrust concerns. And so the airlines are getting a severe amount of what they consider direct traffic from Google Flight Search that they're largely not paying for, and that's transacting in the airline.com environment.
If you think about a future state where Google says, I may shift the funnel from Google Flight Search or Google Hotel into Gemini. If they go with what we're hearing from everybody else, which is they want a captive end-to-end user experience. On the hotel world, that means they're taking this incredibly lucrative business and they're converting it to where they're effectively acting as the fulfillment arm. And the question is how would they monetize that versus what they do on Google Hotel? I think that's a big open question. On the air side, if they were, for example, to say, I'm going to take all that volume because they have massive volume coming into Google Flight Search and they shifted that to Gemini. What would happen is each airline may get their fair share of bookings. But instead of transacting in the airline.com environment, the transaction will now occur in Gemini. And presumably, they're going to look to monetize that from the supplier. So not only does the airline lose the control of the booking, but they would pay for it as well.
So I don't think that necessarily means a change in the top of the funnel. What it means is a change in where the transaction occurs and then the question of the economics. So the most impacted here presumably would be the airline or if the OTA or the hotelier are getting bookings from Google Flight and Google Hotel, that's now transacting in, let's say, Google Gemini, that could be very different as well. But I do think that there will be some level of channel shift toward the agentic players, whether it's Gemini or Anthropic, whoever wins at this, again, similar to way the OTA dynamic worked in the 1990s.
Very clear. If I then think -- I'm going to shift gears a bit to TMCs, corporate travel. I see a lot of movement in the corporate space, GBT, and GBT going private, partnership with SAP and then Navan very focused on AI efforts. How do you think PMC will adapt to AI? Does that mean they rely on you less for solutions? Or if we think about a long tail of TMCs as well, can they be competitive in that world? How -- can you kind of talk a bit about that space?
I think if you look at Navan and you look at GBT going private with one of the sponsors is an AI company, there's 3 applications for AI that are pretty inherent. One is productivity. So TMCs today have a, let's call it, a 60% gross margin. Part of that is because it's very labor-intensive, very manual. If you could theoretically AI half of that work, you could drive up the gross margin of the TMC dramatically where it looks much more like a SaaS company. I would assume that's job #1, for example, in the GBT pending acquisition. #2 is the TMC model is shifting and looking more like a retailer or an OTA, subject to the confines of their customer contracts to where -- if you look historically, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, 60% to 70% of the revenues for TMC were derived from their corporate customers. The inverse is true today, where the majority of revenue is derived from suppliers. And it's about product placement and the ability to move share, et cetera. And I would assume you're going to deploy AI there to drive meaningful share to merchandise better, just as OTAs and retailers do.
#3 is while I don't think TMCs are at risk of disintermediation from AI because the corporation, for example, BofA use TMCX, you're dictated by procurement or HR, you will book in this TMC or that online booking tool. the consumer, the traveler, the employee is going to mandate that they have a consumer-grade conversational experience like they would have in the next generation of OTA or the next generation of an AI agent. What that's going to do is accelerate the technology arms race and perhaps accelerate consolidation for TMCs. Now we have -- as we look at the TMC landscape, we've got dozens of TMCs and agencies using our Agentic APIs already, really to help them solve against all 3 of those challenges. I think the other part of your question, Victor, is, will the TMC try to disintermediate what we as the GDS deal. I would argue that what we do is highly complex. The sexy way I speak about the business is we're the technical plumbing of the travel industry. And that's just the data and the underlying complexity that we have is severe.
So we have 17,000 shop -- air shops against Sabre every single second. So when we extend into the agentic world and we provide a relevant search response and caching, we don't have the data just from MindTrip or the next LLM, but we combine that with everything else and the relevance of search response, the ability to do caching at scale is fundamental. For all the work we do, our take rate with a hotel or an airline is about 1.5% of their revenue. That's a very thin revenue for what we do in almost any industry, certainly in travel. And so for all the complexity we do to go after a 1.5% revenue stream when the profit pools around payments or merchant hotel are much larger, doesn't seem the best allocation of resource, especially when, by the way, with agencies, we share a portion of our gross revenue with them. They're capturing, call it, half that margin without having to do any other work.
So I think it's unlikely that they're going to go down that path. The other one I would mention is Navan, which [indiscernible] direct connect profile is a key customer of ours, and we're growing quite well with them. So we're going to be supportive of customers whatever they want to do. But we think that in an agentic world where look at books are going to explode, the utility provided by Sabre is only going to improve.
Very clear. And maybe -- I got a couple more questions on distribution, but maybe last one for now before we come back if we have more time. But if I were to put it this way, in the age of AI or Agentic AI, who will be the biggest winners, potential winners and losers in the shift in world of distribution?
Yes. So I think that there's 2 ways to look at it, which are technology companies that have engineering prowess, for example, the large OTAs are likely to become good as LLM players, folks that are infrastructure and data players like us and like our largest competitor in Spain are likely to be winners. But I think the key question in Agentic AI is, as the distribution landscape changes, how will the funnel of eyeballs change? And my thesis on this is fairly straightforward. When you look at supplier.com, you have loyal customers of the hotel of the airline, you have credit card customers, they're not going to modify their behavior. The itinerary shopper who goes to an airline.com once a year and is largely indifferent as to which airline they're flying, if they're getting a better user experience in the next generation of OTA or the next Agentic layer, they may shift share away from supplier.com.
The airline and the hotel may still get that booking, but it will not occur in their captive environment, and they may have to pay for it tomorrow or they don't pay for it yesterday. When you look at intermediary travel, I'll break it down into leisure and corporate. On the leisure side, you have metasearch, Google Flight Search, Trivago, Kayak and Skyscanner, et cetera. They provide a great utility and providing price arbitrage to the consumer. The user experience is a little bit achy in terms of being a link-off model, not great servicing if you have a change, et cetera. And again, to the extent that I used to buy books on Amazon, now I buy groceries, if tomorrow on Anthropic or Perplexity or whomever, you choose to buy your travel, it may be that, that user experience supersedes and takes some share away from metasearch.
When you look further at leisure travel, OTAs, I think the large OTAs at scale are going to continue to do very well. They're going to develop good conversational commerce layers. It's just an extension of what they do already. Scale will be important here to play this game. And when you look at sort of offline leisure or brick-and-mortar, the folks that are specialists around complex travel, I don't think they're a great risk. If you're selling a point-to-point easy solution, though, that probably is subject to disintermediation. When you go to corporate travel, again, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think managed corporate travel is subject to disintermediation, but perhaps a more of a technology arms race and consolidation. Unmanaged corporate travel, which is the Wild West, which accrues to supplier.com, to the OTA, to the TMC, I think that's going to continue to fragment. And certainly, there's going to be some channel leakage to the new agentic players.
The beauty for Sabre is that when you speak about the first categories of risk, which are supplier.com and metasearch, we derive little or no bookings from those channels. When you look at OTAs, that's about 25% of our turnover. We are the most heavily concentrated with TMC and corporate, it's 45% of our distribution. It's about 25% to 30% for the GDSs overall. And so there's a slight amount of disintermediation risk. But when we look at, for example, what we've done with MindTrip and the way we're leaning into potential partnership opportunities with the large agentic players, we think there is a step function growth opportunity for Sabre, not reflected in our current projections and numbers, and this could change the revenue trajectory for our company. So we're really excited about where this is going.
Very clear. And then maybe now let's jump to airline software, airline IT. Maybe [indiscernible] elephant in the room for a lot of investors in the last couple of weeks. I think you made some public comments about Amadeus maybe being a bit more monopolistic in the space. Can you elaborate a bit on that, what you're seeing in that and kind of how you can maybe break that mode?
Yes, sure. So a quick backdrop, airline IT, if you think about PSS or passenger service system, Amadeus with Altéa and Nabitarans 50% to 60% of the global market. Sabre is about 17% of the market. If you go back in time to 2015 to sort of the midst of COVID, Sabre was a net loser. Amadeus was a net winner in that we were selling an older platform against Altéa, and we were losing. And what has changed since then is in the middle of 2024, we introduced a new platform for offer and order called Sabre Mosaic. It's a cloud-native modular AI-infused platform. It is agnostic to underlying platform, meaning it can sit on top of SabreSonic, Altéa, it can sit on an airline's proprietary technology. And the beauty of it is we can sell individual modules. We don't require the monolithic binary change of an airline from one PSS to another. That's exactly in line with the -- with what the airlines are trying to achieve, which is modularity and not being reliant on a single vendor.
What we understand Amadeus has developed with Nevio, which is their equivalent, which, by the way, they have less in production than we do on offer in order, is it's modular on top of Amadeus Altéa. What we understand is if you're an airline that's not an Altéa, that is not available for you. You have to first migrate to Altéa, one legacy PSS to another, then upgrade to that. So that's not -- we think what we have is a truly modular solution. We understand that they do not. If you spoke to leading industry consultants, they would back that. My comments about Amadeus' anticompetitive behavior are as follows. We've had in the last year, 4 instances where Amadeus Altéa customers were ready to adopt one or more of our Sabre Mosaic modules on the offer side. Ultimately, Amadeus did 3 things to impede that.
#1 is despite asserting that they are an open platform, they said either we don't have APIs for that piece of technology, which we trace at or they said we will not make that API available to Sabre. #2 is they engaged in foot drag tactics to say things that should take weeks, would take 9 months to a year. #3 is they went back to the airlines and imposed dramatically high fees that made it commercially untenable for them to adopt the Sabre solutions. We've engaged with Amadeus, but we believe that what's going on here is Amadeus is using its position, its dominant monopoly position with PSS to block the ability of others like Sabre to compete for those airlines business for the new offer and order solutions. So they're using one dominant position to block the new technology. And what we want is a fair marketplace in which we can compete.
Very, very clear. But if I think about then challenging that status quo, do you think there's a chance that you can win share from that base in the maybe, let's say, medium term? And if so, how -- what needs to happen for that to play out?
We -- right now, we're growing in the Airline IT business in the mid-single digits. It's turned from a negative to a positive business for us. For the medium to long term, and I'll say 2 years out, we believe that inclusive of the Amadeus market position, this will be a double-digit CAGR business for Sabre. We're very confident about that. We need -- I would say what Amadeus is doing is logical. It's simply not legal. And we need them to -- we want to compete on the basis of the quality of our technology. But right now, the addressable market there is very challenging for us.
Understood. And then if I think about, obviously, in the Airline IT space moving to offer an order is a big topic. But if I hear that on top of AI as well, how do you see AI impacting the shift to offer order? Is it accelerating that trend? Or are airlines exploring other alternatives? Obviously, we have anecdotal examples of, for example, Air India working with Anthropic, Ryanair talking about Ryanair Labs, albeit they're not Sabre customers.
So there's 2 different things. One is airlines are looking at distribution, which is how do they sell. I think that's totally discrete from the airline technology or the base hosting conversation. On the hosting side, the -- one is modularity enables a more deliberate shift from legacy PSS world to the new offer and order world that you don't have to make a binary change. And otherwise, you basically need like-for-like on day 1 for everything. This way, you can say we're going to implement pricing first, then revenue management and then you see. Tomorrow, we'll do a inventory solution. Later, we'll do a new departure control. That's what modularity enables. And you can choose best-of-breed software, and that's where the market goes.
What AI does is a lot of the -- with an existing PSS and a network carrier, you'll typically have hundreds of applications or technologies that hang off of the PSS. So we can shop tomorrow and say, "hey, we've got the whole new offer and order bread basket take it all." For a large airline, that could be a $0.5 billion plus change effort and introduce a lot of operating risk to their business. Nobody wants that. If they can phase that over 3, 5, 7 years, they can do that in a more deliberate fashion. That's what they want to do.
And part of the challenge is a lot of their legacy technologies are still mainframe TPF-based. They may not have a lot of the -- all the code written. What AI can do is AI can reverse engineer the code and they can basically say, here's what you're moving off of, and this is what we're going to lose when we move. They can make that change effort much simpler than it was in the old world. And so the ability for airlines to make offer an order real and mitigate the operating risk to me is the best benefit that they're going to get from AI.
Very clear. Then if I think about the opportunities there, obviously, the Sabre Mosaic, there's opportunities to upsell many of those modules as well. How should we think about the potential uplift on revenue per PB? I think some industry consultants put it at 15%, although that number can kind of widely -- has a pretty wide range. So how should I think about it maybe like into next year and then there's a longer-term potential with it?
I'll be a bit esoteric in terms of how I answer this. So the first thing is the PB construct for software is a weird one, charging per passenger instead of charging a license fee, we're trying to move with Sabre Mosaic more to a gain share or a license fee model. Some airlines are going to be wed to the PB construct and that, therefore, is going to persist long term. What we've talked about is overall for our business, Victor, is our average booking fee, we expect over the -- this year and next year to stay relatively constant and our margin to be in the range of 57% overall for our combined business. We've not broken out margin or that sort of thing beyond those levels. So I'm not going to do that today. But I do think that is there an opportunity to -- for accretion in the unit revenue in Airline IT with new solutions? Absolutely.
Can you explain a bit -- sorry, on the gain share model, how does that work?
Yes, gain share model would say, let's say, we introduce something our Ancillary IQ product, which helps airlines better merchandise and sell ancillaries than they could do in the old world. And we think there's a 2% to 3% yield uplift, for example, when you do that. You take your baseline, however, we and the airline determine the baseline is measured. And we say any gains from that, we would take a component of that in pre-agreed methodology based on metrics, where if we don't deliver, we don't get paid. If we do deliver, we probably get paid more than we would in the license fee model. But we think we're confident in our technology. All of Sabre Mosaic is built on top of Google's Vertex AI are now Gemini. It is the smartest technology that's out there, but that's what the gain share looks like. Again, some airlines love that. Some airlines want to know exactly what their cost is regardless, and they don't like that structure.
Very clear. And then conscious of time, maybe last question on Air IT. I think you also mentioned on the call that you have more AI modules live or maybe rolled out to customers compared to Amadeus. Can you share some examples of where you see kind of most demand in terms of the AI solutions that you have?
The entire offer suite within Sabre Mosaic is all AI infused. So everything we're doing from pricing, revenue management, all our IQ products, those are all built on Gemini. So they all have that learning and that smarts in them. So it's -- I don't know what Amadeus' capabilities are. But these were built cloud-native, AI first, starting a couple of years ago, even before the big conversation about agentic. If -- and again, if you speak to the airlines, they love what we've done from a technology standpoint. Now if you're an Altéa customer, you're frustrated because it's not feasible for you to turn these on commercially yet, but we think that's going to change.
Very clear. And then if I change gears to talk a bit about maybe Constellation, has anything changed operationally or strategically since Constellation's involvement, have they contributed so far? And do they have more plans down the road to do more maybe?
Yes. So the Constellation now owns 12.7% of Sabre with our cooperation agreement, they can take that up to 15%. Beyond that, they would need the consent of the company. They have -- Damian McKay is one of their division leaders at Board, very engaged. They've been very supportive. The one thing I would say is this is only the second minority investment they've ever made. I think in the 20-year history, they've only sold one investment they've ever made. So they're long-term holders of the business. They believe the business is intrinsically dramatically undervalued. They do look at the balance sheet. They think that we have more debt. It's more expensive than we would like, and we agree with that. And they have a desire to put more capital to work with Sabre, finding the intersection point that works for Constellation and its shareholders and Sabre and its shareholders is something that we're talking about, and I'm hopeful that there'll be a solution over time where they can contribute and help. But so far, so good.
That's good to hear. And maybe a quick question on financials. Can you walk us through how you get to positive free cash flow in 2027? And how should we think about that evolution going into outer years as well?
Yes. No, thank you for the question. First, if you look at as a starting point, 2026, for this year, our last guide as of the last earnings call was $585 million of adjusted EBITDA and negative $70 million of free cash flow. Of that negative $70 million of free cash flow, about $60 million is attributable to restructuring costs associated with our inflation offset program. So excluding that, we're near breakeven free cash flow for 2026. Now as we move from 2026 to 2027, I would start with the P&L. So if you look at our top line, we expect air distribution bookings to be up somewhere in the mid-single digits. We've also indicated that we would expect the booking fee to be largely in the range of where it is today. So therefore, we would expect revenue to be up roughly in the mid-single digits as we go to next year.
We've also indicated that, as Kurt just mentioned, we would expect the gross margin to be roughly in the same range of where it is now at 57%. So I would expect gross income dollars to largely grow in kind with that mid-single-digit growth in revenue. At the same time, with the onset of our inflation offset program, we are intentionally targeting keeping our cost structure relatively flat, except for volume-related hosting costs. And so with that, as gross income dollars grow, we would expect a large contribution -- a large proportion of that to flow down to adjusted EBITDA. And similarly, we would expect a large portion of that adjusted EBITDA to translate to free cash flow, and that will get you to a substantially higher positive free cash flow in 2027.
Now as we look beyond that, what I'd point you to is as we look at our top line and our growth strategies, all of our growth strategies have significant legs to them. We continue to take share. We're continuing to take the long tail of LCC airlines where we generate more bookings. Hotel B2B over the long term, we would expect to grow at least at the rate of air distribution bookings. As Kurt has highlighted and mentioned, we see the Air IT business translating into kind of a mid single-digit revenue grower. At the same time, as we go forward beyond 2027, as we have been, you should expect us to be really strong cost managers. So the point is, as we grow revenue, the goal will be to have as much of that revenue translate into gross income, as much of that gross income to translate into higher EBITDA year-over-year and for that to translate into free cash flow.
Very clear. We don't have a lot of time left, but operator or if anyone have any questions on the web, maybe you can flag the operator, and I will check again shortly before the call ends. But maybe continuing on what you said and when I think about AI, now shifting gears a bit, can you elaborate kind of maybe how AI has been adopted internally -- are you using -- I would assume you're using a lot of Google tools. Do you see scope for maybe further cost optimization with the use of AI as well into this year and next?
Yes. So if you look this year, for example, we enacted our inflation offset program. There's really 3 components that really have driven that. Some is what I'd call continue to leverage best-in-class cost locations. The other is where third parties could do something more efficiently, we intentionally are taking advantage of that. But thirdly, AI is really being pushed through the organization as a productivity driver. So in our drive to keep our cost structure, I would say, roughly flat over the next couple of years, AI is a big component of that. And what I would say is if there's continued advancements in AI, you should expect that we will take advantage of those to increase the productivity of the team. And on things like product and development, you should look -- we should look for us to increase the throughput of technology advancement.
Very clear. Operator, are there any questions on the web? Maybe you can hear me. Whilst we wait maybe for that, I do have a couple more questions back to distribution. Obviously, you have launched the LCC multisource product earlier this year. Can you talk a bit about how meaningful it is right now? Are you taking share of Travelfusion? And how does the economics work there?
Yes. So we are preceding the launch of the new platform. We had 150-plus low-cost carriers in Sabre, accounting for about 9% of our total distribution bookings. We launched that platform in January, which is the inclusion of a long tail of LCCs that do not participate in the GDS otherwise and Travelfusion being the proxy for who was winning in that space. The difference versus Travelfusion is we've got the same content or better and full integration into all of our workflows and our shopping. And so from an aging perspective, drives much better productivity and user experience than Travelfusion. And we're seeing -- if we've added 50-plus new low-cost carriers with that. Overall, versus a year ago, LCCs represent about 150 basis points higher of our total air distribution versus what they did, again, at this point a year ago. So it's contributing to the air distribution growth.
One of the interesting parts about this is typically, an agency has one or potentially more than one GDS and they'll use one source for that long tail of LCC content, Travelfusion or there's some others. They're not going to put Sabre and say, well, I use Sabre for these carriers and Travelfusion for those. It's more of a binary decision to displace Travelfusion. So we are seeing agencies begin to do that, but they've built routines around Travelfusion or again, it's proxies. And over time, we think this is going to be a very strong growth vehicle for us over the next couple of years, but the quality of the offering is resonating very well.
Very clear. And I guess maybe last question from my end. I probably addressing the other elephant in the room that we haven't talked much about. We may not talk much about throughout the entire session is about NDC. How should we -- I guess, NDC is scaling a bit on your end. How should we expect revenue per booking to trend over time as you scale NDC? I think there are some debates about maybe lower revenue per booking, but on the EBITDA level is the same. Is it still the same? Has expectation changed there? Can you tell us a bit more?
So 2 sides of NDC. One is NDC IT, which is on the airline side of the API where we were late to the game. We're now winning and implementing customers in terms of their NDC IT solution. But Victor, you asked about NDC distribution, which is how do you pull from the API. We closed last year with about 4% of air distribution bookings being NDC. That's growing at about a 50% rate year-on-year. And so I think you'll see that trend continue. When you look at the economics of NDC, outside of Europe, the revenue per booking is basically a very nominal dilution versus an EDIFACT booking. The margin is a very nominal dilution versus EDIFACT booking, but de minimis. European point of sale is quite different. EDIFACT booking fees here are nearly double what they are in the rest of the world. Perhaps that's because of Amadeus' dominant position or something I don't know. But there wasn't a pricing reset here the way there was in the rest of the market over the last 25 years.
So with NDC, there is a more material both revenue and unit margin dilution for European point of sale. For Sabre, only about 16% of our air bookings derived in Europe. So we have relatively less exposure than our 2 GDS competitors there. When you look at that overall and you look at that globally, you would say revenue and unit margin are both dilutive for NDC versus EDIFACT, not in any sort of catastrophic sense. But when you look at that NDC growing at a 50% rate, and we've asserted and we've reaffirmed that we expect average booking fee to stay relatively constant through this year and next year, and we expect margin to stay relatively constant. You have the negative effect of NDC.
On LCC, you have lower unit revenue, but you're very high gross margin. And then you have the impact of non-air products that we're selling, hotels, payments, for example, which are high yield, high margin. And those basically offset the impact of NDC. So on the whole, again, we expect that both our average booking fee and our margin are going to stay relatively constant despite what we think is going to be strong growth in NDC.
Well, very clear. Unfortunately, we are running out of time. So thanks, Kurt and Mike, for joining us today. Thanks, everyone, for joining, and I hope everyone has a good day.
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Sabre — Bank of America Global Research C-Suite TMT Conference
Sabre — Q1 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good morning, and welcome to Sabre's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Siobhan and I will be your operator. As a reminder, please note, today's call is being recorded.
I will now turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Jim Mathias. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings call. This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.sabre.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available during this call on the Sabre Investor Relations web page. A replay of today's call will be available on our website later this morning.
We advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including results of our growth strategies, our AI offerings and AI-related developments in the industry, transactions and bookings growth, expectations regarding the Middle East conflict and recovery, commercial and strategic arrangements, the impact of geopolitical events, our financial guidance, outlook and expectations, pro forma financial information, free cash flow and liquidity, among others.
All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning and our SEC filings, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026.
Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. References during today's call to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, normalized adjusted EBITDA, normalized adjusted EBITDA margin and adjusted technology and adjusted SG&A expenses have been adjusted to exclude certain items. The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors.sabre.com.
Normalized amounts have been adjusted for estimated costs historically allocated to our Hospitality Solutions business, which was sold on July 3, 2025. We are also presenting certain financial information on a pro forma basis to give effect to the sale of the Hospitality Solutions business. Unless otherwise noted, results presented are based on continuing operations. Effective this quarter, we have updated the terminology used to describe our revenue to better reflect our evolving brand identity and market positioning. Historically referred to as distribution and IT solutions, these revenue streams have been renamed to marketplace and airline technology, respectively. The specific revenue from products, services and underlying solutions offered within each category remain unchanged.
Participating with me today are Kurt Ekert, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mike Randolfi, Chief Financial Officer; Garry Wiseman, President, Product and Engineering, will be available for Q&A. With that, I will turn the call over to Kurt.
Thanks, Jim. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased with our first quarter performance as we delivered strong operating and financial results. Revenue grew 8% and normalized adjusted EBITDA grew 21% year-on-year to $169 million, significantly exceeding our expectations. We also achieved our highest rate of air distribution bookings growth in more than 2 years of 6%. And our data shows that this growth materially outpaced the industry. We are encouraged by the continued momentum we are seeing from our growth strategies. Despite impacts from the conflict in the Middle East, and higher fuel prices affecting Sabre and the broader travel industry, we performed well in the first quarter and remain confident in our ability to produce sustained growth.
Looking more closely at the Middle East. Approximately 11% of Sabre's air distribution bookings either originate in or transit through the Middle East region. In March, these bookings declined by approximately 600 basis points. More specifically, flights that fly from to or through the region were down approximately 50%, while flights originating out of the Middle East declined approximately 70%. Additionally, we believe fuel supply and price dynamics, coupled with softening leisure travel demand, drove a roughly negative 100 basis point impact during the month. Taken together, we believe the combination of these impacts resulted in an approximate 7 percentage point headwind to total air distribution bookings in the month of March. Importantly, offsetting these headwinds and we saw strong performance in other regions.
In March, the Americas delivered approximately 7% growth and corporate volumes demonstrated steady performance and resilience throughout the first quarter. Overall, air distribution bookings in March were roughly flat, reflecting the combined headwinds of the Middle East conflict and higher fuel prices, largely offset by solid performance in the Americas and the growth in corporate travel. The trends we saw in March continued through April. Looking ahead, while the geopolitical and macroeconomic environment remains dynamic. Our base assumption is that the conflict in the Middle East subsides during the second quarter with fuel prices gradually normalizing through the summer and fall.
Based on these assumptions, we expect second quarter air distribution bookings to be near flat followed by a phased improvement with conditions returning to a more normalized environment by the fourth quarter. Accordingly, we anticipate positive air distribution bookings growth for the second half of 2026, though at a slightly more modest pace than we had previously expected. Consistent with this view and aligned with recent airline commentary around capacity reductions, we now anticipate full year 2026 air distribution bookings and revenue to grow in the low to mid-single-digit range.
Given our outperformance in the first quarter and our outlook for the remainder of the year, we are reaffirming our full year 2026 guidance for pro forma adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. In summary, we are off to a strong start to the year, solid execution, continued share gains and our foundational role in enabling a genic AI-powered travel solutions should position us well to deliver sustained long-term growth.
Now turning to Slide 5 and our strategic priorities. We delivered strong quarterly revenue with growth in both marketplace or distribution and airline technology. Revenue growth, combined with strong cost performance, resulted in quarterly normalized adjusted EBITDA that exceeded our expectations. In addition to reaffirming our outlook for both full year pro forma adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow, we are confident in our ability to continue to drive solid top and bottom line growth and generate positive free cash flow in 2027. Our financial performance, combined with no large debt maturities for approximately 3 years, provides us with a foundation to continue investing in innovation, driving growth and capitalizing on our leadership position in the emerging Agentic-AI channel.
Turning to the right side of the slide. Our technology investments are driving positive results. Our marketplace delivers multisource travel content at incredible scale and we generated strong air distribution bookings growth in the quarter. AI has been a core systemic part of the Sabre technology stack for several years, and we continue to lean into that advantage, which I will discuss in more detail shortly. Both our payment suite and lodging expansion continue to grow, with lodging expansion recording the 13th consecutive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth. And finally, on NDC, we exited 2025 with NDC bookings representing 4% of total bookings. We saw growth during the first quarter and expect NDC bookings to continue to accelerate during 2026.
Moving to Slide 6 and a review of first quarter results, which were positive across the board. Revenue grew 8% year-on-year. Normalized adjusted EBITDA increased 21% year-on-year and margin improved 235 basis points to 22%. Driving these strong results, total marketplace bookings grew 5% year-on-year and air distribution bookings growth increased 6% year-on-year. Hotel distribution bookings increased by over 5% in the quarter to approximately $11 million. Our payment suite is one of the fastest-growing areas of Sabre. In the first quarter, revenue increased by over 25% year-on-year to $13 million. In Airline Technology, passengers boarded grew 3% year-on-year to $170 million. and we are pleased to have recently executed a seamless migration of bringing Hawaiian Airlines back onto our platform.
Moving to Slide 7. Sabre is a cloud-native platform and is a true super aggregator, providing the travel industry with a critical infrastructure necessary to shop, book and service travel, built on decades of industry technology leadership, and supported by sustained investment of approximately 10% of revenue in product development and R&D, we believe we are well positioned to extend that leadership position into the rapidly emerging Agentic AI travel channel. Our AI solutions help our customers compete and win in this emerging AI ecosystem. And with continued innovation, we intend to extend our leadership position. Sabre provides the foundational layer that is required for AI to transact in the complex environment of travel. Chatbots can generate itineraries, but to book and service travel at scale, requires access to sophisticated continuously evolving logic, and that is where Sabre plays a critical role.
Our modular platform enables partners to integrate seamlessly, wherever travel is sold. We aggregate and normalize real-time flight content across hundreds of sources in subsecond response times, solving a significant technical challenge. This capability is a key reason why partners are building on us not around us. We have recently gone live with our ChatGPT OpenAI plug-in for Virgin Australia. This all-in-one generative AI chat solution puts both search and flight shopping into a widely used AI interface and is available to all of our travel supply partners globally. We also recently launched the first phase of our mine trip and PayPal partnership with Sabre providing the core air booking layer.
Sabre is bringing conversational commerce for flights to market for the first time and we look forward to introducing additional enhancements over the next few quarters. Demand for our Agentic APIs and MCP server is strong with well over 30 potential partners in various stages of pilot or production. Additionally, we are working with airlines to deploy an AI assistant that will sit on top of our network planning and optimization product. Taken together, these are further proof points that the infrastructure for genetic travel is being built on Sabre.
Moving to Airline technology. We offer a growing suite of modular AI-driven solutions that meet customer demand and drive growth for Sabre. Building on the revenue growth we saw in the first quarter, we continue to expect positive airline technology revenue growth for 2026. Our marketplace provides a simple and single connection to industry-leading scaled content. Air expansion growth has been driven by execution of our growth strategies, including continued share gains and growth in NDC and LCC bookings. We saw meaningful year-on-year acceleration in our distribution bookings growth in Q1 and expect positive air distribution bookings growth for the full year. Lodging expansion continues to scale driven by a compelling value proposition in a large addressable market.
Total hotel-related revenue increased 10% to over $80 million in the quarter with annualized gross booking value of hotel bookings exceeding $20 billion. Our hotel attach rate is consistently above 30%. And with more modernized connectivity, we see additional opportunity for expansion. Media revenue also grew at a double-digit rate year-on-year. In Payment Suite, demand remains strong for solutions to simplify operations increased payment flexibility and automate risk and fraud management. First quarter gross spend on the platform reached nearly $6 billion, up more than 40%, while revenue grew over 25%. We are confident in our ability to continue to deliver strong performance in payments. We are executing well against our strategic priorities and delivering strong financial performance even in a dynamic operating environment.
With that, I'll now hand the call over to Mike, who will discuss our first quarter results and our outlook in greater detail.
Thanks, Kurt, good morning, everyone. Please turn to Slide 9. Our first quarter financial results were solid and came in ahead of the guidance we provided on our fourth quarter call. The momentum we saw exiting the fourth quarter carried through the first 2 months of the year. As Kurt referenced, beginning in March, the conflict in the Middle East and the increase in fuel prices impacted air distribution bookings, and those pressures continue in April. Overall, first quarter performance reflects strong commercial execution and continued progress on our growth initiatives. Importantly, we are reaffirming our full year guidance for pro forma adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow.
Turning to the financials. Total revenue was $760 million, an increase of 8% year-on-year, exceeding our expectations of mid-single-digit growth. Marketplace revenue grew $49 million, an increase of 9% and due to an approximate 5% increase in distribution bookings and an approximate 3% increase in average booking fee. Airline Technology revenue came in at $142 million, up 7% year-on-year and within the range of expectations we shared on our fourth quarter earnings call. We continue to expect full year 2026 airline technology revenue growth. Gross margin of 56.4% came in above our expectations due primarily to higher average booking fees attributable to a favorable mix of bookings.
First quarter 2026 operating income of $116 million increased 27% year-on-year with operating margin expanding 220 basis points to 15%. Normalized adjusted EBITDA was $169 million representing a 21% increase year-on-year with margin expanding 235 basis points to 22.2%. This growth was driven primarily by an increase in distribution bookings higher average booking fee and lower-than-expected operating expense. Free cash flow was negative $155 million for the first quarter. This lower free cash flow generation as compared to negative $81 million from the first quarter of 2025 was driven by $67 million of additional interest payments in the first quarter of 2026. $19 million in severance related to our inflation offset program, $4 million of additional CapEx and other items related to working capital timing.
Importantly, our expectation for full year free cash flow remains the same at approximately negative $70 million, which is driven almost entirely by restructuring costs associated with our inflation offset program. If not for those restructuring costs, we would expect near breakeven free cash flow this year. We ended the quarter with a cash balance of $665 million.
Moving to Slide 10. Comparing our first quarter results to the guidance we outlined on our fourth quarter earnings call air distribution bookings growth of 6% was in line with our expectations of mid-single-digit year-on-year growth. Revenue growth of 8% exceeded our guidance for mid-single-digit year-on-year growth. Our normalized adjusted EBITDA result of $169 million was favorable to our guide of approximately $130 million by $39 million. This outperformance was driven by $10 million of higher gross income attributable to higher gross margin from a favorable mix of bookings. Expenses were lower than expected by $29 million, split roughly evenly between adjusted technology and adjusted SG&A expense. Our expectation for the total benefit related to our inflation offset program has not changed for the full year. In the first quarter, we realized some expense favorability earlier than previously expected. We also had a $6 million favorable impact from the repeal of the Canadian digital service tax. All in, we are very pleased with this quarter's results.
Turning to Slide 11. Moving to our balance sheet. Last year, we successfully completed 2 refinancings. The result of these refinancings is that we now have no large debt maturities until the spring of 2029 and over 90% of our debt matures in 2029 or later. As a reminder, within the website financials available on our Investor Relations website, we provide a quarterly interest walk. This schedule provides our expected quarterly cash interest payments and shows we have higher cash interest payments in the first and third quarters of the year when compared to the second and fourth quarter.
Moving to Slide 12 and our outlook for 2026. We are reaffirming our full year 2026 guidance for both pro forma adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. While we now expect slightly lower air distribution bookings and revenue growth for the year, we expect our 2026 gross margin to be towards the higher end of our previous guidance range of 56% to 57% and due to favorable mix trends. We expect this to result in similar expected gross income as compared to our February guidance. This gross income expectation, coupled with our operating expense outlook, which is consistent with our previous guidance, supports our expectation of approximately $585 million of pro forma adjusted EBITDA and approximately negative $70 million of free cash flow.
On to Slide 13 and our expectations for the second quarter. We anticipate second quarter year-on-year revenue growth to be flat to nominal. This revenue guidance assumes air distribution bookings growth to be near flat year-on-year, consistent with March trends that continued through April. We expect second quarter gross margin to be at the higher end of our expected annual range of 56% to 57%, primarily due to the favorable mix of bookings we mentioned previously. We anticipate adjusted technology and adjusted SG&A expenses to be roughly flat on a sequential basis throughout the remainder of the year.
Overall, we expect second quarter pro forma adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $130 million. We reported strong results this quarter, highlighted by pro forma adjusted EBITDA outperformance and the highest rate of air distribution bookings growth in over 2 years. We are encouraged by the momentum in the business and believe through continued execution of our growth strategies as the operating environment normalizes, Sabre is well positioned to achieve higher revenue growth going forward. And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.
[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Josh Baer of Morgan Stanley.
2. Question Answer
Congrats on the strong results. Just want to kind of triangulate some of the assumptions in air distribution bookings for the rest of the year. You're highlighting record growth in Q1 and that came in a period where there's conflict in the Middle East and fuel prices, a pretty good result. And then full year, we're looking for low to mid-single-digit growth. So could you review some of the assumptions and why wouldn't growth be higher, coupled with all the market share wins as well.
Yes. No, thank you for the question. First, that I would highlight as you go through the first quarter, what you saw in general was that we generally exceeded the industry by around 500 to 600 basis points our overall viewpoint is that's going to likely continue. And what we've seen, though, in the short run is strength in the Americas offsetting lower distribution bookings, particularly driven by the Middle East conflict and higher fuel. As we've looked at the second quarter, we've essentially extrapolated the trends we've seen from March into April.
Our underlying assumption is that the geopolitical and macro environment start to smooth out at some point during the second quarter. And then with that, we see increased bookings growth in the third quarter, but more muted from our initial expectations, but still well above the industry. And then we see ourselves getting back to -- closer to our original assumption, closer to mid-single digits by the fourth quarter.
Okay. That's helpful. And then on free cash flow, I appreciate the details on what impacted the quarter's free cash flow versus last Q1. Just wondering like versus your own expectations, if there was any puts or takes in the quarter to call out?
No, it was very consistent with our expectations.
And our next question comes from the line of Jack Halpert of Cantor Fitzgerald.
Just 2, please. So just one follow-up on the macro. I know you guys mentioned your assumption is for sort of the disruption system side in 2Q. Are you seeing that happen already? Sort of what are the kind of underlying assumptions that you have behind that? And then secondly, on the payments, it's nice to see the revenue disclosure this quarter. Can you just talk about the key growth drivers of the payments business again? And where do you think it can go in the kind of medium to long term? And how much of a contributor to overall revenue growth it could be?
Thanks, Jack. With respect to macro, so we spoke about the March trend. Basically, we saw the first 2 months of the year up 9% from a booking standpoint. March was, as we indicated, near flat. In April, we saw similar trending to what we saw in March, although it was slightly positive. The Middle East pattern improved a bit. As we go forward, as we think about Q2, again, it's our expectation that the hostility is ceased by the end of the quarter and then you get back to our normalcy. Clearly, the fuel impact on price and supply is probably going to be a bit longer in duration.
It's our hope and our expectation that, that unwinds through the balance of this calendar year. What we did see is very strong leisure performance early in the year. Leisure has been more impacted relatively than other parts during March and April, but still holding up relatively well. Corporate has actually been very positive all year, very strong trends here in the last 2 months included. And so overall, we think there's a very good backdrop notwithstanding the challenge of what's happening in the Middle East and the result flows with that. With respect to payments, we're really excited about the business. As we've spoken about, there are 2 elements to this. One is the confirma virtual payments business that we own, which Mastercard is a minority shareholder of the second is what we call Sabre Direct Pay which is a fintech marketplace that we have within Sabre.
Think of what we do is mainly an orchestration layer for the payments industry with value-added services and products that we're beginning to put on top. As we've indicated, we are growing basically the volume of payments by -- in the neighborhood of 35% to 40% consistently. Now we grew revenue by 25% this past quarter. I would note that we pivoted away from providing professional services or consulting which was a minority portion of the revenue there. We're basically focused on those development resources, which we're doing that work, doing more platform-oriented stuff that will drive, we think, better benefit long term.
So it's our belief that we can continue to grow the payments business at a very aggressive rate for the long term. We think this can become a much more meaningful part of the business, and we're very well positioned, both with the agency and then our supplier customer community to drive much further penetration.
Our next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer.
Great. Just a quick question. We've been seeing some chatter, I guess, over in Europe, about like the potential impact of jet fuel supply shocks. Can you talk about that, how you kind of adjusted for it in your guidance, what we should be looking for just any help around that around potential supply shocks?
Yes. Thanks, Jed. We've watched very carefully airline commentary in the U.S. and Europe globally with respect to capacity. And so generally, what you've seen on a global level is capacity reductions from planned capacity growth of several hundred basis points, about 3%, 4% globally. So that's not generally a reduction from current capacity. It's a reduction from planned capacity growth. That's very important. So the global market, which 3 months ago, was expected to grow 6% on a capacity basis. I think now it's going to grow 2% to 3%.
Obviously, that has more acute impact in Europe because of a lot of the Middle East flying as well as some of the Asian markets. we have strong global penetration. So I think we're factoring in basically what we're seeing from an airline commentary standpoint and saying, what will the capacity reductions, what would the consequence be?
The second piece is obviously higher fuel prices to the extent that it's passed on the consumer, that may have a bit of a negative effect on demand from a leisure and a corporate perspective, we're probably more so leisure. We haven't seen that yet but we expect that, that will come in a bit. I think the airlines are factoring that into capacity. So again, we're iterating through this and looking at the market. There's a lot of uncertainty out there, but we feel like given the market commentary, we feel good about the guide that we provided today.
Yes. The only thing I would add in Herington, our distribution bookings guide for the second quarter, it does assume, if you look at the underlying trends in both Europe and APAC that those do have year-over-year impacts primarily from fuel and other impacts, and it's largely offset by strength in the Americas. So we've taken that into account in our air distribution bookings.
Got it. And then one of the large corporate travel agencies in a deal to go private, assuming they're trying to implement more AI around that. we've seen some other companies with decent AI capabilities, gain a lot of share. Can you just talk about how if you have more corporate travel agencies enhancing their AI capabilities how that impacts Sabre or what we should be looking for?
Yes, that's a great question. So what we've seen so far with the agencies we've been working with in terms of AI is that they're predominantly leveraging it for productivity. So in terms of their own age of productivity by providing agents with chatbots that can assist in terms of travel booking and servicing. And then on top of that also with automation. So a lot of the workflow automation that happens in their back-end systems. So really, they're focusing on making sure that their current workforce is as productive as possible. And of course, they're also starting to explore making sure that they provide Agentic experiences to their customers. So to their managed customers that they're currently dealing with through e-mail, phone and other methods to have chatbots that are also available to them.
Yes, it's very legit. One point to make on this is when we look at what we're doing from a genetic standpoint, we are not the B2C LLM layer that will face the consumer. We are that infrastructure and data layer that sits behind that enables search, bookings, servicing. We provide that for our airline and hotel supply customers. We offer that for all of our agency customers and as we talked about, we think that the new Agentic AI technology platforms will emerge as a large channel. We think we're very well positioned to grow with them as well.
Our next question comes from the line of Victor Cheng from Bank of America.
Congrats on the solid results. Maybe just one for me on -- can we think a bit deeper into the trends that you saw in March and April? I know you've talked quite a bit about it, but it sounds like overall bookings growth is similar but what are the puts and takes within that for each month? I would imagine there will be more cancellations in March, are we seeing cancellation in April as well? And then in March, I would imagine there will be some pull forward bookings as well in corporate and U.S. So I would imagine that might be a bit lower in April. So if you can expand a bit on that, please. And then I actually have a follow-up on Mindtrip.
Yes. So very briefly, yes, there was some level of cancellation activity in March. When you go forward to April, as I mentioned, April is slightly better on a macro level than March was for us. Corporate is very strong. To the extent that there was any pull forward that would have occurred more in March than April, we think that, that was transitory if it occurred. It's difficult to see that discretely. But we're very encouraged by the trends we see effectively we see an acute impact of things that touch or originate in the Middle East as we spoke about. That trend improved from March to April.
Second is the impact of fuel price and supply. Very difficult to get at exactly what that is. Again, we think that was about 100 basis points in March, similar impact in globally similar impact in April. So we're encouraged by what we're seeing despite the acuteness of the world.
Understood. And maybe on Mindtrip, obviously, you're enabling Agentic AI, a trouble booking now, a couple of PayPal as well. How should we think about unit economics for that or any kind of early interest and how that can scale going forward?
Yes. Thank you. We haven't broken out the commercials for that, Victor. We talked about that in detail. But if you think about from the standpoint of what is the cost of revenue to an airline or a hotelier for the services we provide in our Marketplace business. The cost average is about 1.5% of the value of the ticket or the hotels booked, which is by almost any measure in this industry and any other industry, a very, very efficient cost of sale within a genetic travel, obviously, there's the ability to provide both traditional as well as more modern NDC content. And so it enables strong merchandising and retailing by our supply partners.
So I think there's very strong interest from one of the airline and hotel community and how we're going to promulgate this. We're not intending to be an OTA. And then two, with respect to these large language models or the agentive players, I think they're very intrigued by our model, which is we can plug in our MCP server and Agentic APIs and literally from day 1, and this is proven with what we're doing with the Mindtrip application. They're live with search, booking and full servicing within their platform. We think that is a first for the industry, and it's a testament to where the industry is going to go.
Our next question comes from the line of Dan Wasiolek of Morningstar.
Just a clarification. I wanted to make sure I heard it right. The impact in March to total air bookings from the Middle East surrounding area. Did you say that, that was about 7 percentage points. And then kind of looking beyond this year, I know you had some initial revenue growth targets for 2027. Wondering if you have any color on the breakdown between the contribution of Marketplace and airline technology maybe on the airline technology like how conversations are going or the pipeline shaping up with carriers considering going from in-house solutions to outsourcing?
Yes. On the impacts of Middle East, it's approximately 6 points, as Kurt mentioned in his prepared remarks, directly attributable to the Middle East. That's flights that fly to, from, or through the Middle East and it's about another 100 basis points that's tied to fuel associated with the knock-on impacts, obviously, the Middle East conflict.
And then with respect to '27, while we haven't -- we're not here talking about the guidance any further. We feel good about the trajectory that we're on and the execution of our strategies. I say the pipeline is rich both within marketplace as well as for airline technology. The one thing I would mention with respect to airline technology is that as we look at the addressable market for the offer order settlement and delivery capabilities or OSD. We believe that our offering, which is cloud native, modular and AI infused is the best in the marketplace.
We have more modules in production than we believe than any other technology provider in the world. One of the questions will be our ability to penetrate the Amadeus Altea PSS base. We believe Amadeus is using PSS. And basically, they have a dominant monopoly position, and they're basically making it very difficult for airlines to choose anybody, but Amadeus for the new offer and order solutions. So we're working on approaches to that from a regulatory and a legal standpoint. We believe we crack that code that this can be a double-digit CAGR revenue business for the long term.
Our last question comes from Alex Irving at Bernstein.
I want to come back on the capacity question, please, and the phasing of that through the course of the year, what you're assuming gets put into the sky by the airlines. Clear how you're thinking about Q2. The schedules are there. You're following airlines comments you see probably some visibility, but what assumptions are you making about the winter? But airlines being less money than usual, jet forward curve is still up a lot versus mid-February. Are you still baking on air travel growth in Q4? Or are you baking in some conservatism for the possibility of airlines cutting capacity into the winter to support their own margins?
Thanks, Alex. As we indicated, we've seen projections for 2026, airline capacity growth reduced globally from about 6% to between 2% and 3%. And so there's still capacity growth -- in Q4 of this year, there's still positive capacity growth that is projected in the system. That underlies the assumptions that we have. Again, most of the capacity reductions are from planned capacity increases. So airlines are basically going to hold the line more than they expected to early in the year, but that's what's factored into our guidance.
Yes. One thing I would just add on that, when we originally set our expectations for air distribution bookings, our baseline assumption for industry air distribution bookings growth was flat year-over-year. That's still below the current expectation for capacity growth for the industry. The industry is still expected to grow even with capacity reductions, somewhere around 2.5%. So overall, we feel pretty good about our forecast pending obviously, macroeconomics and geopolitical.
I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn it back to Kurt Ekert for any closing remarks.
Thank you, Siobhan. Thank you, everybody, for the participation and the great questions today, and we look forward to continuing to update you in future quarters and executing against our strategy. Thank you.
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.
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Sabre — Q1 2026 Earnings Call
Sabre — Q1 2026 Earnings Call
Solides Q1 mit Umsatz‑ und Margin‑Upside, Guidance bestätigt; Air‑Bookings für 2026 nun jedoch nur noch im niedrigen bis mittleren einstelligen Bereich.
📊 Quartal auf einen Blick
- Umsatz: $760M (+8% YoY)
- Adj. EBITDA: $169M (+21% YoY)
- Adj. EBITDA‑Marge: 22.2% (+235 Basispunkte)
- Air‑Bookings: +6% YoY (Marketplace insgesamt +5%)
- Free Cash Flow: -$155M (vs -$81M YoY); Cashbestand $665M
🎯 Was das Management sagt
- KI‑Infrastruktur: Fokus auf Agentic‑künstliche Intelligenz (KI); Sabre positioniert sich als Infrastruktur‑Layer für Suche, Buchung und Service (z.B. ChatGPT‑Plugin, Mindtrip, PayPal‑Pilot).
- Plattformstrategie: Cloud‑native, multisource Marketplace und modulare Airline‑Technology; fortgesetzte Investitionen (~10% des Umsatzes) in Produkt/R&D.
- Adjacencies: Zahlungen (Payment Suite) und Lodging‑Expansion als skalierende Wachstumsbereiche; NDC (New Distribution Capability) nimmt zu.
🔭 Ausblick & Guidance
- Gesamtjahr: Pro‑forma Adj. EBITDA ~ $585M bestätigt; Free Cash Flow ~ -$70M bestätigt (Restrukturierungseinflüsse).
- Air‑Prognose: 2026 Air‑Bookings/Revenue nun erwartet im niedrigen bis mittleren einstelligen Bereich; Q2 Air‑Bookings nahe Null, Q2 Revenue flach bis nominal.
- Q2‑Zahlen: Erwartetes pro‑forma Adj. EBITDA ~ $130M; Bruttomarge am oberen Ende der 56–57% Range.
❓ Fragen der Analysten
- Bookings‑Annahmen: Analysten hinterfragten die Annahme, dass der Konflikt im Nahen Osten im Q2 abklingt; Management stützt Guidance auf diese Normalisierung und erwartete Kapazitätsphasen.
- Payments & Mindtrip: Erwartungen an starkes Wachstum bestätigt; konkrete Unit‑Economics für Mindtrip/Agentic‑Integrationen wurden nicht offengelegt.
- Kraftstoff & Kapazität: Fragen zu Jet‑Fuel‑Supply/Shocks und Airlines' Capacity‑Cuts; Management rechnet mit reduzierter, aber noch positiver Kapazitätsentwicklung (global ~2–3%).
⚡ Bottom Line
Q1 übertraf die eigene Guidance: Umsatzwachstum, starke Margen und Buchungs‑Momentum. Management bestätigt Jahresziele für EBITDA und FCF, schränkt aber Air‑Wachstum für 2026 wegen Nahost‑Konflikt und Treibstoff ein. Langfristig stützen KI‑Infrastruktur, Payments und Lodging das Upside; kurzfristig bleiben geopolitische Risiken und Cash‑Auswirkungen aus Zinszahlungen und Restrukturierung zu beobachten.
Sabre — Shareholder/Analyst Call - Sabre Corporation
1. Management Discussion
Good morning. Thank you for being with us today. And welcome to the Sabre Corporation's 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I'm Gail Mandel, Sabre's Chair of the Board and Chair of today's meeting. With me are Kurt Ekert, Sabre's Chief Executive Officer and President; and Steve Milton, Sabre's Corporate Secretary and Secretary of today's meeting. Also attending today's meeting are the members of our Board of Directors. In addition to Kurt and myself, these directors are George Bravante, Hervé Couturier, Eric Kelly, Damian McKay, Phyllis Newhouse, Elaine Paul, John Scott and Ashan Willy.
You should have found on your chairs a copy of today's agenda and a few rules for this meeting. As you will see from the agenda, we will first cover the legal requirements for the meeting, and then we will address the proposals included in the proxy statement. After that, Kurt will provide a brief business review. Finally, we will have a report on the results of the voting on the proxy statement proposals.
The items properly submitted for consideration at this meeting are the proposal for the election of the 10 directors named in Sabre's proxy, ratification of the appointment of our independent auditors, approval of our 2026 Omnibus Incentive Compensation Plan, approval of our 2026 Director Equity Compensation Plan and approval of our advisory, non-binding vote on the compensation of our executive named officers.
Now Steve, please give us your report as to the call of the meeting, the inspector's report as to the presence of the quorum and the rules of the meeting.
We provided the following materials to each stockholder of record as of the record date, which was March 2, 2026. Proper notice of this meeting and access to the copies of the 2026 proxy statement and 2025 annual report. More than 79% of the company's common stock is represented at this meeting, either in-person or by proxy. As a result, this meeting is properly convened and a quorum is present. Affidavits confirming these matters as well as a certified list of stockholders are available for examination. The materials will also be filed with the records of this meeting. The following inspector of election has been appointed: Rex Morgana of BetaNXT.
As Gail mentioned, the ground rules for today's meetings are included with the agenda placed on your chairs. In order to provide a fair and informative meeting, we have established these rules and procedures, and we appreciate your cooperation. We'll introduce each of the 5 proposals set forth in the proxy statement and identified on the agenda. After all the proposals have been presented, we will open the floor for discussion and general comments and questions. We will then vote on all proposals at the same time.
If you are a stockholder and you wish to speak on a matter on the agenda, please raise your hand once the floor has been opened for discussion and wait to be recognized. When you are recognized, a microphone will be brought to you. And please identify yourself, the number of shares that you represent and the proposal on which you wish to speak.
As described in the rules, individuals recognized to speak on any matter will be limited to 3 minutes. If you gave us your proxy or voted by telephone or the Internet, your shares will be voted by the proxy committee as you have directed. If you have not voted your shares yet or if you wish to change your vote on any matter, please raise your hand and a ballot will be brought to you. We will collect the ballots later during the meeting when the polls are declared open.
Finally, during today's meeting, we will make forward-looking statements based on management's expectations of future events, and actual results may differ materially from the forward-looking statements. For more information about the risks that could cause this to happen, please refer to the risk factors and the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements sections in our 2025 Form 10-K as well as our other filings with the SEC. In addition, we will be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations are available in the presentation appendix as well as in our earnings releases and other documents that are posted on our website at investors.sabre.com.
And now I'll turn it over to Kurt.
Thank you. We will first consider and vote on the proposals in our proxy statement. I will then provide a few comments on our 2025 business performance. And finally, Steve will report on the results of today's vote.
Each of the 5 proposals on the ballot today has been described in detail in our 2026 proxy statement. The first proposal in the proxy statement is the election of George Bravante, Hervé Couturier, Kurt Ekert, Eric Kelly, Gail Mandel, Damian McKay, Phyllis Newhouse, Elaine Paul, John Scott and Ashan Willy. I thank each of our incumbent directors for their significant contributions to the Board, including collectively attending 28 Board and committee meetings in 2025 with an average attendance of 99%.
In addition, please note that Wendi Sturgis is not standing for reelection today. On behalf of the Board and the management team, a deep thanks to Wendi for her service, and we wish her well. On behalf of the Board and its Nominating and Governance Committee, I declare that each of these 10 individuals has been properly nominated for a 1-year term expiring at the 2027 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
The next order of business is proposal 2, ratification of the Audit Committee selection of Ernst & Young as the company's independent registered public accounting firm to audit the company's 2026 financial statements. Gabe Stagner and Neil Rabroker from Ernst & Young are with us today.
The next order of business is proposal 3, approval of the company's 2026 Omnibus Incentive Compensation Plan.
The next order of business is proposal 4, approval of the company's 2026 Director Equity Compensation Plan.
The next order of business is proposal 5, approval of the advisory, non-binding vote on the compensation of our named executive officers.
We will now open the floor for general discussion. If you wish to ask a question, please raise your hand and wait to be recognized. Once recognized, please wait for a microphone, then state your name, the number of shares you own or represent and the proposal on which you will comment. Also, please remember to limit your comments to 3 minutes each to ensure others have an opportunity to speak. Is there any discussion on any of the proposals or any other questions or comments?
There being no other questions, I declare that the polls are now open. Please raise your hand if you would like to cast a ballot from the floor and someone will come and collect it from you.
[Voting]
I now declare that the polls are closed.
While the Inspector of Election completes the vote tabulations, I will comment briefly on our business performance for 2025.
For 2025, we recorded double-digit year-on-year growth in normalized adjusted EBITDA and generated positive pro forma free cash flow. A key focus for us has been further strengthening our balance sheet, and we made significant progress in 2025 by paying off over $1 billion in debt, which when combined with growth in pro forma adjusted EBITDA, reduced our pro forma net leverage by approximately 25% compared to year-end 2024. We continue to be proactive in managing our long-term capital structure. Through two successful refinancings in 2025, we have no large maturities until 2029 and over 90% of our debt now matures in 2029 or later. We also ended 2025 with a strong cash balance of $910 million, which includes $98 million of restricted cash for debt repayments in the first quarter of 2026.
In 2025, we seized the first mover position in our industry with our introduction of agentic APIs and a proprietary MCP server designed for the travel industry. These agentic solutions help AI agents better understand and operate within the complexity of travel content and workflows. We also launched several industry-first AI solutions and partnerships.
Sabre Payments was one of our fastest-growing businesses in 2025, with gross spend on the platform increasing more than 35% year-on-year and producing strong revenue growth. Our Travel Marketplace continued to deliver multisource travel content on an unprecedented scale and drove agency wins and expansions during 2025. Finally, we extended our leadership position in NDC by adding 15 live integrations during 2025, bringing our total to 42 at the end of the year.
In closing, our strategy remains focused on generating free cash flow and delevering our balance sheet and driving sustainable growth through innovation. We made significant progress against these priorities in 2025 and are excited for 2026. Thank you so much for your participation today.
I'll now turn it over to Steve to report on the voting results.
Thank you, Kurt. First, let me say that the results I'm about to announce are preliminary. We will file the final results with the SEC on a Form 8-K within 4 business days. The Inspector of Election has advised me that each of the 10 nominees for director was elected for a 1-year term. The selection of Ernst & Young as the company's independent registered public accounting firm was ratified. The company's 2026 Omnibus Incentive Compensation Plan was approved. The company's 2026 Director Equity Compensation Plan was approved and the advisory, non-binding vote on the compensation of our named executive officers was approved.
With that, I'll turn it over to Gail to adjourn the meeting.
On behalf of the Board of Directors and the entire management team, I'd like to thank you for your attendance today and the continued support of Sabre. The meeting is adjourned.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the program. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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Sabre — Shareholder/Analyst Call - Sabre Corporation
Sabre — Morgan Stanley Technology
1. Question Answer
All right. Before we begin, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. And if you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representatives. My name is Josh Baer, software analyst at Morgan Stanley. Thrilled to have the Sabre leadership team here with us today, Kurt Ekert, CEO; and Mike Randolfi, CFO. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks, Josh. Our pleasure.
Great to see you. Maybe let's kick it off with the exciting news around shareholder rights before we get into AI in the business. Can you give some background on the recent shareholder rights plan with regard to Constellation? What does it entail? What is it in response to?
Yes. So you saw the press release we issued on Sunday evening, and there were other disclosures we issued as well. That was in response to a significant accumulation of shares by Constellation, a Sabre shareholder. And we took this action to protect the company as well as the shareholders. So beyond that, we're not going to comment publicly today. But we believe this -- we have spoken to a number of investors and analysts and generally, we received a favorable response and folks understand why we've done this.
Okay. We saw the market response as well. So Kurt, from your perspective, to kick it off, what were some of the most important Sabre accomplishments over the last year? And what are your priorities as we head into 2026?
Yes. We articulate our strategy with 2 key elements. One is delevering. Last year, we paid down $1 billion of debt, dramatically improved our leverage ratio. And so we're dramatically improving the balance sheet quality of the business. And then two is its growth through innovation. So last year, some of the key accomplishments were the introduction of MCP server and agentic AI. As you saw earlier this year, we've announced a number of key partnerships with agentic, great innovation with respect to the SabreMosaic Airline IT platform, and we're seeing great traction, especially on the offer side of the portfolio there.
And then within distribution, significant conversion of one new business, the expansion of our air distribution marketplace and then very strong growth with both with hotel distribution as well as our payments portfolio. So a really good year, both from a balance sheet and an innovation perspective.
Excellent. And you've put out 2026 and 2027 kind of growth commentary, looking for mid-single-digit volume and revenue growth in each of those years. So I'm wondering with the transactional business model, some volatility that we have seen historically in this end market, what gives you the line of sight to put out that growth target for '27?
Sure. So a few things. First, as we looked at 2026, let me just start by saying our underlying baseline assumption, which we think is hopefully conservative is a flat industry. It's not our assessment of the industry, that's a planning assumption. So when we talk mid-single digits, that's based on our internal growth strategies. And it's comprised of a few things.
One is we've talked about our push into the LCC part of our multisource platform and really extending the tail of those carriers. We see that we launched a lot of our new tools that we expected to launch in the summer of last year that was launched this year. That's going to be very additive to our growth. As we've articulated, we expect to continue to take share as we've done in the last year, we continue to expect to take that this year. And we expect to continue to grow NDC.
Now with that, what I would say is leading into this year, up to our call, if I look at the 10, 12 weeks leading up to our call, what I would say is we saw consistent with our guide for the quarter and the year, what I would describe as the most consistent bookings, both geographically and across customer mix leading up to the call. So when we look at it, we think the guidance of mid-single digits for this year we feel really good about that. And as we look at 2027 and we see the continued growth in our growth strategies, we feel really good about that as well.
And then the second piece is, obviously, with the inflation offset program, our gross profit improvement should fall to the bottom line and accrete both at the EBITDA and the free cash flow level. So we feel like we're doing the right thing from a growth and a balance sheet standpoint. But as Mike said, the market backdrop that we're experiencing, Middle East war notwithstanding, is frankly the best that we've seen in a number of years.
Excellent. And we'll dig into a lot of those growth areas. But first, I want to start with what's maybe most topical front of mind, key debate, agentic AI. Is it an opportunity or a threat? I mean, you've positioned it as a huge opportunity. So I want to unpack that. And directly, does agentic travel shopping increase or decrease Sabre's relevance? And how does your data and your content breadth? Does it help support and enhance the moat?
So let me just speak about it from an ecosystem standpoint. If you think about -- it's all about where the funnel of eyeballs and traffic will derive. And so if you think about our business today with managed corporate travel, where procurement or HR are directing employees where to go to shop for and book their travel, I don't see that changing with AI. You saw the safety and security of the traveler, corporate negotiated rates, company policy. There is going to be an inherent mandate for the TMC or the booking layer to have a consumer-grade conversational commerce capability. And that may drive a technology arms race or consolidation there, but we think we're very well positioned in that part of the market. That's about 45% of our air distribution portfolio.
On the leisure side, very different story. Obviously, where you have the Airline or Hotel.coms and you have the loyal traveler or the credit card customer of those platforms, they're going to continue to be very sticky. Likewise, I think you're going to see online travel agents or build very good conversational commerce layers. And you're going to see traditional travel agents, let's say, brick-and-mortar who have niche offerings like cruise or tour, they're going to continue to do what they do.
I think there's 3 areas where you're going to see behavior change. One is for the nonloyal customer of the supplier.com, the customer that goes there once a year, if they're offered a better user experience by some other intermediary or a player, it's likely that, that transaction is going to happen not in the airline or hotel.coms, but let's say, in this new agentic commerce intermediary place. Number two is metasearch. Metasearch basically has had such success because they price arbitrage on behalf of the consumer. But the user experience is not good post decision because you get launched into a different ecosystem for the fulfillment and the servicing of your travel. And so a good end-to-end agentic experience may supersede that. And then the third is for the OTAs who derive significant traffic from metasearch, they may see that traffic at risk.
And so the key is think about for all the existing players is how do you build a consumer-grade conversational commerce layer because customers will go where there's a better UX or they have better confidence. And so I think some of the new platforms, the new emerging platforms are going to succeed there, and they're going to take share away from the other channels. If you're one of these new players, for example, we just announced a partnership with PayPal and Mindtrip, Mindtrip being the LLM, PayPal bringing its payment network or its consumer base to the flow, we're the back end. We're the search, booking, servicing, fulfillment layer behind there.
Why didn't Mindtrip just say we're going to go direct connect with everybody? Because there's -- doing a direct connect is fairly simplistic technology. All you're doing is you're writing to a supplier's API. But now the -- all the data that sits there and all the complexity of handling that traffic and doing that at scale, it scales exponentially or logarithmically from a complexity standpoint. And so unless you want to build a GDS or you want to build like the next version of the OTA, it doesn't make sense when you can plug into us -- and you can -- on day 1, for example, Mindtrip will go live in Q2 with a full end-to-end offering with servicing, et cetera. And that's going to be pretty compelling. What we hear from the large agentic players is they want to do likewise. They don't want a metasearch model. They want to own the customer from front to back, and we can provide that to all of them.
Now what's the -- is there -- will they try to disintermediate us because of margin? Well, we charge airlines and hoteliers on average about 1.5% of the value of what's booked with them, that's not a large profit pool opportunity for them. And we provide a lot of infrastructure and capability, and it's quite capital intensive to do that. Now on the other hand, if you're looking at the hotel world, where you might be paying a 15% cost of sale to an intermediary, that might be something that's attractive for an LLM to try to disintermediate because that's a significant profit pool.
So we think, one, the economic opportunity for somebody to disintermediate us is not that attractive. Number two is what we do is very complex, and we have massive data. And that data is very important because in a world where you're searching and you have to provide millisecond response time to provide a good user experience, you want to avoid all those hits to the supplier because otherwise, it's very difficult from a physics and a cost standpoint. We can do intelligent caching in front of that search for speed and for efficiency and the relevance of search is very important. You're not going to -- as a consumer and an LLM, you're not going to scroll through pages of response times. You're going to look, you're going to say, okay, there's 3 choices, what do I want to book, and it's going to be a very rapid, easy experience. The relevance of that response has to be right the first time.
So we think we're actually really well positioned. And again, we think that much of what we do, there's a pretty strong defensive moat. There's a little bit of risk, but the offensive opportunity here for us to become the rails for the agentic AI industry. We think we are in the leading position, and it's going to be a huge accelerant to Sabre.
I think that's really clear. What are you seeing then from the incumbents from a competitive perspective just around what they're doing around also trying to position as the back end or the rail.
Do you mean our competitors when you say that?
Yes.
I think that we and Amadeus have a distinct advantage over the other super aggregators in this marketplace in terms of the quality of our content, our data and our technology solutions. With what we've done with our agentic API specifically, the reason you've seen large announcements from us and not Amadeus, we believe, is that we have a distinct advantage, and we're told by large technology platforms that, that is the case. So no question, they'll lean into this space very aggressively, but we believe we have the lead position right now. We're going to try to lean into that very hard.
Great. And what's the update on the Google partnership? Are you still co-developing solutions? Is it...
So Google has been terrific. We are now -- 99-plus percent of our compute is in the Google Cloud environment. So from a resiliency, a scale, a security standpoint and an efficiency standpoint, it's the best place in the world to be, and they've been a fabulous partner there for Sabre. Separately, there's a development partnership, and so we do co-develop. And in fact, if you look at the SabreMosaic Airline Solutions, for example, that's all built on Google's Vertex and Gemini AI capabilities. So that remains very strong.
One of the key questions is when you look at Google Flight Search, which is a metasearch offering versus Gemini, if they want to replicate and do what other agentic players are saying they want to do, which is they want to host an end-to-end experience, what Google does not do is fulfillment and servicing. And so there's a key question about what that model will be going forward. But I would just say that we've got a great strategic partnership with Google. They've been a fabulous partner, and we would love to grow that partnership over time, and we'll see what happens.
Excellent. Let's shift gears and talk about air bookings and market share. Your air bookings has accelerated going from negative 3% growth, I believe, in Q1 to positive 4% by the end of the year. December was even higher at positive 7%. So can you unpack some of the drivers of that improvement throughout the year and also touch on what prevented you from reaching the original double-digit growth?
Yes. So last year was very turbulent and challenging as anyone who follows us knows. We realized 30 million air segments last year that came from converted business or won new business. The challenge for us, if we had a very bullish outlook at the start of last year because we knew that was coming online. Where we were wrong is that the underlying market was quite negative and challenging. So from the start of the year, basically, you start off with DOGE and tariffs basically hitting last February and March pretty aggressively. You go through the year, a lot of recession risk. Later in the year, the government shutdown. And those things dramatically hit us.
The other thing is corporate travel, which is about only between 20% and 30% of the GDS industry, but it's 45% for Sabre. Corporate travel on a unit basis was down 6% to 7% last year, 600 to 700 basis points. So while the GDS market was a bit negative last year, the impact of Sabre was much more severe. What you saw as the year -- as we went into December was that on a geographic and a line of business standpoint that normalizing, getting to 7% growth, as we articulated, as Mike said on the call, we saw that pattern persist through the first 6 weeks of the quarter. And I think what you're seeing is a much more stable backdrop. As Mike said, when you look at it geographically and you look at it by the type of customer, whether it's TMC or brick-and-mortar, OTA, basically consistent performance through all the different channels that we serve. And again, we believe the backdrop is very favorable.
So as Mike said, you're going to see 3 key drivers of air distribution growth this year. One is acceleration of NDC and the reintermediation of NDC volumes that were previously direct connected by OTAs. Number two is the realization of market share gains that we continue to take. Number three is we have 50-plus new low-cost carriers in the system today versus a year ago. We launched our new LCC platform that we've talked about previously. We think that will add a couple of points of growth as well. So we think it sets up very well. And that assumes a flattish GDS market. If in fact, you go back to normalcy and you have -- and the market is 2%, 3%, 4% positive, that would be additive or accretive to the expectations we've set.
Perfect. And to clarify, when you talk about 45% corporate travel, is government and military in that bucket?
No, government military is separate from that. Government -- the U.S. military and government, if you go back to 2024, was about 4% of our air distribution bookings. Overall last year, that was down about 25% through most of the year. It was down, for example, in November, down 90%. So we've assumed that will be more stable going forward.
Okay. Great. NDC was 4%, I believe, of total air distribution bookings exiting the year. You've got over 40 live integrations with NDC. What's the assumption for NDC looking ahead? And is that coming from like a small subset of carriers, different regions? What's driving that adoption and growth?
So we've got 42 carriers now where we have live implemented NDC connections. I think that's the leading intermediary position of any aggregator in the world. Number two is we've built significant capabilities for buyers or agencies to normalize workflows between EDIFACT or NDC. Otherwise, it's very inefficient, and it's degrading from a user experience standpoint. So the solution now is sort of primed for market.
The one important piece is those 42 carriers, while that's less than 10% of the carriers to whom we're connected, it accounts for nearly 80% of the total volumes we do. So it's most of the big guys now we have NDC in place. And you typically have both NDC and EDIFACT for the same carrier. I think you're going to see NDC continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate. Certain carriers do it. It's very important to them. Certain it's less strategically important. But it will -- let's say, it grew at between 50% and 100% last year in terms of its adoption. You'll see it continue to grow at that sort of rate going forward. So it will still be the minority portion of our bookings for the foreseeable future, but it's very important to the buyer or the agency, they should be relatively indifferent as to how we source that content. It doesn't matter -- it should not matter to them whether it was an EDIFACT API or an NDC API. We normalize all that on their behalf. The economics are relatively consistent. And so for them, it's about how do they run an efficient business, and we worry about that on the back end.
But I think it's going to become an increasingly important part. The other thing which I mentioned earlier is in COVID and especially Sabre was late to the game on NDC, as we've talked about previously, we've now caught up and surpassed most folks, but certain OTAs direct connected to large airlines. You saw Amadeus have some level of reintermediation of those segments over the last 2 years. You're going to see us begin to do the same with OTAs as well as OTAs realize that managing direct connects is quite complex and cost inefficient and not necessarily what drives traffic and margin for them, and they realize that we can do it better. So you're going to see that as part of the growth as well.
Great. You mentioned NDC economics are relatively similar. Were you talking about one travel buyers, suppliers? Is that for you as well? How does that impact your economics?
Yes. I mean the way I would think about NDC is through most of the globe, what I'd say is the incentive might be -- the booking fee might be slightly lower, the incentive slightly lower. Maybe the margin through most of the globe is flat to slightly lower. The exception is going to be in the EMEA region where average booking fees tend to be higher. But for us, that represents only 16% of our bookings. And so overall, as we look at it, we don't see significant impact on economics from NDC and actually view NDC more as an opportunity. And that's included in our guide that we provided is the expectation that NDC from where we are from the 4% we ended last year, will be growing more significantly now going forward than it has in the past.
And so connecting that, Mike, to revenue per booking, your average booking fee was over $6 for the year and finished the year at $6.31. How much of that increase is driven by mix versus other revenue streams when you do the calculation, think about payments? And is that level of booking fee sustainable? Or because of NDC, we should expect it to move lower?
Yes. So our guidance for this year for 2026 was for booking -- for air distribution bookings growth in the mid-single digits and revenue in the mid-single digits. So that kind of implies that booking fee is expected to be roughly flat year-over-year. So we do expect it to be roughly flat. So there's a combination of puts and takes. One is we have seen favorable mix trends. which do seem to be holding. NDC is slightly lower there. But then after that, certain of the products we sell, particularly hotel B2B through our GDS, that comes at a higher average booking fee and a higher average margin and then also payments. So all of that adds to our booking fee, coupled with a favorable mix. And so that's more than offsetting the impact on booking fee in NDC.
Yes. And 2 things just to cite within distribution, we disclosed in the last call that our land ground and CRO non-air distribution bookings, we did more than $20 billion of turnover and about $350 million of revenue last year. And then payments, we haven't broken out the revenue there, but we do $20-plus billion of turnover now on our payment solutions, and we'll likely begin to break that out from a revenue standpoint at some point this year. But those are becoming more meaningful contributors, too, to our business.
Great. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about some IT solutions. Maybe how you think about IT solutions versus distribution. I mean distribution now is like 80% of revenue and has been growing consistently. IT solutions, 20% and has been declining in the last few years. And so what's the strategic importance of each of these businesses?
Both are very important to us, and we think both have good long-term prospects. So -- in distribution, think about it this way, which is it's a fairly mature market for air distribution. It's, one, how do you take as much share as you can? How do you grow the addressable market, which we're doing through NDC and LCC? And then how do you attach other high-value items such as hotel and payments. And so that's really what underlies the strategy there.
On Airline IT, that's a very sticky business when you're in with the customer. Now Sabre until a couple of years ago was selling pretty old technology in its SabreSonic solution. That's a monolithic PSS. And as a consequence of that, we were competing against Amadeus Altéa, which was a legacy solution, but less legacy than SabreSonic. And so there was a consistent pattern pre-COVID and the early stages of COVID where we were losing head-to-head. We haven't lost a customer in 2.5 years. We're now -- what you saw in the P&L was still the effect of certain folks that have demigrated. We've built a new platform called SabreMosaic, which is a modular AI-infused sort of best-in-class platform for offer and order. We're getting tremendous feedback. We're selling the offer component of that very aggressively in the market. Not a lot of folks are going down the order route yet. That's more like an ERP. So you're displacing that. But we expect over time that, that's going to sell very well.
One of the key differences here is there's not going to be a lot of PSS migrations happening in the market. We're migrating Hawaiian back to Sabre's PSS starting in Q2, but I think that's going to be an anomaly. Folks now, if they transition, are going to transition on to the newer offer and order platforms. We have more modules in production than any other technology provider in the world, including Amadeus. The other benefit is -- it's very difficult to get somebody to say, I'm going to replace my entire monolithic ERP system. But when you say you can just implement the modules you want and our system is an OPI system, it's very easy for them to pick and choose that.
Now one of the key challenges we have is that our largest competitor in this space has a monopolistic position, and they behave in certain ways that we believe are anticompetitive. And so we've got to crack the code on that, which we're aiming to do. We think when we do that, we're going to unlock a significant amount of airline demand for the SabreMosaic solutions. We've indicated that, that business will grow at a mid-single-digit revenue growth this year. We think over time, that can become a high-growth part of the business, subject to unlocking that piece.
And then the last thing I'll say is for both pieces, agentic AI is a significant opportunity. In the airline IT world, you've seen us go to market with, for example, Virgin Australia embed capabilities within ChatGPT, that's Sabre technology that is available to every carrier in the world now. In the distribution business, I think what we've announced, for example, with PayPal and Mindtrip is a proxy for what you're going to see us do in the market with lots of other agentic technology platforms. We think that will be a significant growth opportunity for the company.
Does SabreMosaic make you more competitive for new -- potential new customers? Or is there also a motion to go back into your base and transition your existing customers onto the new platform?
It is very interesting. About 2.5 years ago, we made the decision that we were going to focus our development of SabreMosaic, first and foremost, on improving the relationships with our existing customers and taking them on that journey. So most of the sales and the engagement activity has been around our existing customer base. We've had pretty good success there. Now we're seeing a lot of inbound interest from non-Sabre IT customers, and the aim is to begin to grow that. But we needed a referenceable customer base in order to take this beyond the confines of Sabre, and that was really the approach.
And is there a financial impact when your existing customers move over from your legacy over to SabreMosaic? What's the economics?
Yes, the old model is largely a PB model. You're paying per booking or per passenger. It's a weird construct for a technology relationship. You're typically paying license fees or something different. We'd like to move that to more of a value-added or value sharing agreement. Some airlines are going to be wedded to the PB model. Some are going to be more open in terms of what that looks like. But on the offer side, especially, the solutions that we are building and that we have in market, which are, again, all infused with Google's Vertex and Gemini AI capabilities allow significant revenue uplift for the carriers. We'd like to be able to share in that. So we think there is the opportunity over time to improve the revenue per transaction or the revenue quality that we have with customers.
The other thing is how do we sell the broader spectrum of things that they're looking for versus an all-in approach is you sell componentized technology. So we do think on both a unit basis and a volume basis, there's a revenue uplift opportunity.
Yes. And as we talked about on our earnings call, as you look this year, we expect revenue per quarter for Air IT to be between the range of $140 million to $150 million. And as you get to the back part of the year for a couple of reasons, we expect to see that exhibiting nice trends of growth. One is in the second quarter, we do expect the transition of a lot of the Hawaiian PBs back onto the Alaska platform, but also the sell-through of the SabreMosaic AI offer products, which is incremental to our existing product offerings will be additive to our revenue base, particularly as we get through the back part of this year. And we've actually talked about for Air IT this year, which I think is the first year since Kurt and I know it is, we expect revenue growth in the mid-single digits for Air IT this year, which is a definitive turnaround from where we've been.
Excellent. I want to spend a minute talking about gross margins and some of the various pressures on gross margin, which I think guided to 56%, 57% for this year. Any way to break out how much is NDC? How much is FX? And then going back to agentic, how much is this higher look to book?
So a couple of things. The higher look to book, first of all, any of that is going to show up in your hosting line, and that's going to show up in the technology line. As I look at what's impacted margin, there's really a few things that have impacted margin. One is we have won significant enterprise business on the agency side. That's come with significant volumes, but some of it does come with a slightly lower margin. Second, the currency impact has had a very negative impact of the dollar depreciation from an FX standpoint.
And then the NDC component has actually been relatively small to date because it hasn't grown that significantly. It only ended this year at 4%, but we do expect it to grow more significantly. We don't break out the piece parts of it, but those are the contributors.
I think Mike has said that we expect to be able to hold that level of gross margin going forward -- for the foreseeable future.
Yes.
Let's talk about the inflation offset program that you mentioned, Kurt, earlier in your opening remarks. You've got this program basically to keep technology and SG&A flat over the next 2 to 3 years. And so what are the -- like how do you accomplish that? What are the sources of savings?
Sure. So a couple of things. Yes, as you mentioned, our goal is to keep it roughly flat with the obviously exception of volume-related hosting costs. And so the way we think about it, first and foremost, important to support our growth strategies and our push into our AI -- our agentic AI-related products and offerings. And so with that, as I think about -- think about what's the best way to answer this.
Well, there's -- the simple answer is we've said this publicly, we're doing 3 primary things. One is we're going to take advantage of best-in-class geographies from a cost standpoint. Two is we're leaning into development partnerships that we have. Three is we're dramatically leveraging AI capabilities to improve productivity and throughput of our employee base. One anecdote I will offer in doing this is there are certain places where we're reducing headcount is we've actually increased our engineering resources overall in the last year, and we're adding 400 to 500 engineers this year. You'll have more engineers a year from now than you do today for the enterprise because we have R&D relatively sacrosanct in terms of the impact of the business over time. Innovation is fundamental to our ability to grow. But we're reshaping this company for not the company we're proud of that we were, but the company we want to be going forward and making sure that we have a cost profile that enables us to invest at pace.
And so the consequence is we're going to get more throughput going forward from an engineering and tech standpoint tomorrow than we did yesterday. And then we basically, as we've said, while we're holding costs constant, you'll see SG&A basically go down a bit this year, but be flattish over the next couple of years. Technology will rise slightly, but that's all on account of our expectation of volume increases. Otherwise, technology can be relatively constant. And that allows our gross profit growth to flow right down, which we think is very important given our balance sheet.
Excellent. Let's talk about free cash flow, which you've guided to negative $70 million, but that includes $60 million of restructuring costs. And so sort of putting the pieces together, your top line is growing -- should expect it to grow mid-single digits over multiple years. Your costs we just talked about are going to be relatively flat, maybe some growth around hosting, but you put those pieces together, and so we should expect free cash flow to inflect in 2027. Like what's the message, particularly to investors that are looking at across your capital structure?
Yes. So that's exactly right. Our expectations based on our internal growth strategy is that bookings similar to this year is likely to grow mid-single digits in 2027. With that, we'd see revenue generally growing in concert with that. As we've articulated, we're targeting to keep our technology, except for hosting costs and SG&A roughly flat. So we expect really good flow-through from gross profit to adjusted EBITDA. And then we don't have the repeat of the restructuring costs this year. And so with a growing EBITDA, we would expect to generate more free cash flow, and we would expect it to be positive next year.
And then obviously, for us, that's very critical because the most important use of free cash flow for us is to ultimately delever our balance sheet. So we think this creates a really strong path to free cash flow generation in the future and further delevering on our balance sheet.
You've accomplished a lot from a liability management perspective. Your maturities are pushed out. What's left to do? Or is there anything left to do on your near-term to-do list?
Yes. So thank you for the question. I think we're actually fairly well positioned right now. So if we look at how we ended the year, we had $910 million of cash on our balance sheet. Of that $910 million, $98 million is basically to pay off some debt in the first quarter as a result of the last financing. So we really have $812 million of usable cash on our balance sheet. At the same time, as you just articulated, we have a clear path to positive free cash flow generation.
Our next large maturity is until June of 2029. So we think that the best focus right now for us as a company is really focus internally on our growth strategy, support our growth initiatives, focus on execution. And we think we're in a really good place right now at the moment and aren't compelled to do anything from a capital structure standpoint.
That's great. Any questions from the audience? Do we have a mic?
Yes, a couple of questions. First one is just around the dynamics on a potential bid for the company. Number one, are you guys going to sort of run a process now that you have this interest from Constellation other bidders. Number two, do you think antitrust prevents Travelport or [indiscernible] from getting involved here? And then number three, with respect to the capital structure, can roll over do...
Yes. I would -- as I said at the outset, I'm not going to comment on rumors or speculation. We're very focused on running the business. I think we articulated in the press release that we remain open to appointing Constellation to a seat on the Board, subject to reaching agreement with them. And I would just say, generally, we invite intelligent capital that makes sense for the company and for its shareholders. But that's something we'll consider only if we receive it. We're not running an active process today.
All right. We're just about out of time. So I want to thank you, Kurt. Thank you, Mike, for the conversation. Really appreciate it.
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Sabre — Morgan Stanley Technology
Sabre — Q4 2025 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good morning, and welcome to Sabre's Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Olivia and I will be your operator. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Senior Vice President, Finance, Roushan Zenooz. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, and welcome to our Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.sabre.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available during this call on the Sabre Investor Relations web page. A replay of today's call will be available on our website later this morning.
We advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including results of our growth strategies, our AI offerings and AI-related developments in the industry, transactions and bookings growth, commercial and strategic arrangements, our financial guidance, outlook and expectations, pro forma financial information, free cash flow, net leverage and liquidity, among others.
All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning, and our SEC filings, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025.
Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. References during today's call to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, normalized adjusted EBITDA and normalized adjusted EBITDA margin have been adjusted to exclude certain items. The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors.sabre.com.
Normalized amounts have been adjusted for estimated costs historically allocated to our Hospitality Solutions business, which was sold on July 3, 2025. We are also presenting certain financial information on a pro forma basis to give effect to the sale of the Hospitality Solutions business, and we have removed the impact of the $227 million payment-in-kind interest that was recorded in conjunction with the refinancing activity in the second quarter of 2025 from pro forma free cash flow. Unless otherwise noted, results presented are based on continuing operations.
Participating with me are Kurt Ekert, President and CEO; Mike Randolfi, CFO; and Garry Wiseman, President, Product and Engineering. With that, I will turn the call over to Kurt.
Thanks, Roushan. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. 2025 was a challenging and dynamic year in which exogenous events impacted our operational results. Despite these challenges, we remain focused on execution and met or exceeded our financial guidance in the fourth quarter and ended the year with positive momentum. Moving forward, I believe we are well positioned for strong, sustained performance.
Our growth outlook today is driven by several key catalysts: continued distribution share gains, the expansion of our multisource content platform, solid growth in both hotel distribution and our payments business as well as improving performance in our airline technology business. As I've discussed previously, our industry is evolving rapidly, and Sabre is evolving with it. We are in the midst of a fundamental transition, moving Sabre from a GDS-focused company to an AI-native technology leader.
Before reviewing 2025 performance, I have some thoughts on recent market sentiment around AI disintermediation risk, the concern that AI bots could bypass our marketplace and connect directly to suppliers. We strongly disagree. AI needs what Sabre has already built: vast, constantly evolving data, integrated content, and complex logic purpose-built to solve travel's uniquely challenging workflows. We provide the foundational transaction layer AI uses to shop, price, book and service travel. We expect this shift makes us more essential, not less. We believe agentic AI will reshape the technology landscape, and we are positioning Sabre to lead in this next phase. As AI-native companies enter the travel ecosystem, they need Sabre's strong foundation, which provides breadth of content, modern cloud-native platform, and AI-native APIs, which we believe positions us as the platform of choice.
While we are in the early stages of sizing the AI opportunity and have not included any of the potential significant upside in our forward outlook, we are taking deliberate actions to align our talent and investments with the strategy and position Sabre for long-term growth and value creation. As part of these actions, today, we announced a series of executive leadership changes effective tomorrow. Garry Wiseman is promoted to President, Product and Engineering, with his remit expanded to include leadership of innovation and agentic AI; Shawn Williams is appointed Chief Operating Officer, and will lead Sabre's revenue and commercial operations functions; Andy Finkelstein steps into the role of Chief Commercial Officer, Travel Marketplace; and Dave Medrano was promoted to Chief People Officer. Separately, Roshan Mendis, who has been a superb leader during his many years with Sabre, most recently as Chief Commercial Officer, has decided to pursue another opportunity. Roshan will transition to Senior Adviser before departing the company in May. We deeply appreciate his contributions and wish him continued success.
On today's call, I've invited Garry to share our progress on delivering agentic AI solutions to drive long-term growth and why that makes us a critical part of the evolving AI ecosystem.
Now turning to Slide 4. For the year, we recorded double-digit year-on-year growth in normalized adjusted EBITDA, and generated positive pro forma free cash flow. A key focus for us is further strengthening our balance sheet, and we made significant progress this year by paying off over $1 billion in debt, which, when combined with growth in pro forma adjusted EBITDA, reduced our pro forma net leverage by approximately 25% compared to year-end 2024.
We continue to be proactive in managing our long-term capital structure. Through 2 successful refinancings in 2025, we have no large maturities until 2029, and over 90% of our debt now matures in 2029 or later.
We also ended the year with a strong cash balance of $910 million, which includes $98 million of restricted cash for debt repayments in the first quarter of 2026. While we have more work to do to reach our long-term leverage goals, these actions provide us with significant room to continue to invest and further grow our business.
On the right side of the slide, our technology investments are driving positive measurable results. AI has been a core systemic part of the Sabre technology stack for years, and we continue to lean into that advantage. In 2025, we seized the first-mover position in our industry with our introduction of agentic APIs and a proprietary MCP server designed for the travel industry. These agentic solutions help AI agents better understand and operate within the complexity of travel content and workflows.
We also launched several industry-first AI solutions and partnerships, which Garry will touch on shortly.
Sabre Payments was one of our fastest-growing businesses in 2025, with gross spend on the platform increasing more than 35% year-on-year and producing strong revenue growth. Our travel marketplace continues to deliver multisource travel content on an unprecedented scale and drove agency wins and expansions during the year. In the fourth quarter, air distribution bookings grew 4%, which included the direct and indirect impacts from the U.S. government shutdown, and we ended the year with air bookings growth of 7% in December.
Finally, we extended our leadership position in NDC by adding 15 live integrations during the year, bringing our total to 42, and we are seeing adoption ramp. We exited 2025 with NDC representing approximately 4% of total air distribution bookings, and we expect our rate of NDC bookings to accelerate throughout 2026.
Moving to Slide 5 and details on full year 2025 results. Overall results were positive across the board. Total distribution bookings grew 1% year-on-year and full year air distribution bookings were also positive. Within the airline technology, passengers boarded grew 2% year-on-year. Hotel distribution bookings increased 5% year-on-year to $42 million the attachment rate to air bookings increased over 130 basis points year-on-year. Gross hotel booking value transacted through the platform now exceeds $20 billion annually.
These positive results drove full year revenue growth, and combined with ongoing expense management, normalized adjusted EBITDA grew 10%. Normalized adjusted EBITDA margin improved over 160 basis points to 19%.
Moving to Slide 6. Our cloud-native technology foundation is driving growth across our portfolio. Within airline technology, we are delivering a growing suite of modular AI-driven solutions, ranging from new tools that optimize revenue in real time to a growing suite of gen AI chat and servicing capabilities. As airlines transition to modular offer order-based systems, we believe Sabre is well positioned to be the vendor of choice for their transformation.
With our SabreMosaic airline technology gaining momentum, we expect to drive positive IT Solutions revenue growth for 2026. Our travel marketplace provides a single connection to what we believe is the widest breadth of travel content in the industry. Air expansion is the combination of our distribution expansion and multisource platform growth strategies.
Despite a challenging 2025, we ended the year with strong momentum, driven by continued share gains. Growth in NDC bookings and our new LCC solution, which is now fully launched as well as continued growth from the SabreMosaic marketplace, we expect to see a meaningful year-on-year acceleration in air bookings growth.
Overall, we expect annual volume growth for both 2026 and 2027 to be in the mid-single digits. Importantly, now 6 weeks into the quarter, the strength we saw in December has continued and is broad-based across all regions and also within corporate travel.
Lodging expansion continues to scale, delivering over $350 million in annual LGS revenue in 2025, and we expect continued solid revenue growth in 2026.
Finally, we believe that Payment Suite, our integrated fintech hub, is well positioned for sustained growth. It remains one of the fastest growing areas within Sabre, with strong demand for our solutions that simplify operations, increase payment flexibility and automate risk and fraud management.
I'll now hand the call over to Garry, who will discuss AI and Sabre's AI strategy in greater detail.
Thank you, Kurt. Moving to Slide 7. AI needs us to power results, and we believe it is a huge opportunity for us. Let me explain why from a technology perspective. We sit on over 50 petabytes of curated travel data, and we have the greatest depth and breadth of content in the travel space. We process 14,000 transactions per second and 11 billion shopping signals per month. These unparalleled demand signals don't exist anywhere in the public domain. However, we enable pure-play AI companies to participate in a complex space with a simple connection to these insights.
We believe we are also critical in an AI-first world because of our proprietary and constantly evolving logic. Travel is extraordinary complex. We house over 50 years of servicing workflows, travel policies and compliance logic across 200-plus countries and thousands of supplier-specific fare rules and partner network agreements, all built through billions of real transactions. In short, we believe we have solved for almost every single edge case that has ever existed in travel anywhere in the world. This logic is proprietary and cannot be scraped from the web or reverse engineered. AI engines cannot independently obtain and orchestrate this logic.
While chatbots can generate itineraries, they can't book or service them reliably at scale. For example, we aggregate and normalize real-time flight results in sub-seconds across hundreds of sources. This is a huge technical hurdle for most AI players today. And this is why Virgin Australia, PayPal and a growing pipeline are building on us, not around us.
And finally, we have a first-mover advantage in the industry. We launched the first agentic APIs and MCP server for travel almost 6 months ago. This was purpose-built for LLM consumption at enterprise scale. It is in production now while competitors have yet to unveil their agentic APIs. Our open modular platform plugs into wherever travel gets sold and wherever consumers go next, which we believe is conversational commerce.
In summary, we own the foundational layer AI needs to transact travel. We believe the shift to agentic makes us more essential than ever.
Moving to Slide 8, I'll discuss our 3 recent strategic partnerships, which serve to demonstrate our leadership position within AI infrastructure. We believe Sabre is becoming the essential AI infrastructure for travel, serving both established companies modernizing their stack, and AI native start-ups building next-generation experiences. Our 3 recent partnerships confirm this. PayPal and MindTrip are building with us a next-generation agentic experience, unifying discovery, planning, booking, payment and servicing in one conversational interface. MindTrip brings the consumer platform, PayPal brings flexible payments and agentic commerce and Sabre brings an enterprise travel platform and agentic AI expertise. The product launch is targeted for the second quarter of 2026.
BizTrip, a Silicon Valley-based AI-native TMC, is combining our agentic capabilities with their AI assistants to build corporate travel functionality, handling complex bookings, real-time itinerary management and intelligent policy automation through natural language interfaces. They're leveraging our travel marketplace, agentic APIs and global network. Virgin Australia is the first airline deploying our Concierge IQ solution. It handles layered questions, delivers accurate bookable results and goes beyond booking to managing rebooking, miles redemption, refunds and backtracking. Virgin Australia is seeing improved experience and higher satisfaction with Concierge IQ. Additionally, we're exposing this functionality via our new ChatGPT plug-in for Virgin Australia. This ChatGPT plug-in solution is available for all of our travel supply partners.
Our AI solutions help our customers compete and win in the emerging AI ecosystem. Further, we believe we are well positioned to win in the new channel of conversational travel commerce by providing comprehensive shopping, booking and servicing capabilities to any company that is developing an agentic travel experience. Thank you.
Now over to you, Mike.
Thanks, Garry, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to Slide 10. Fourth quarter financial results were solid and generally met the expectations we shared on our third quarter call. These results reflect the continued improvement in operating trends we saw at the end of the third quarter, partially offset by impacts related to the government shutdown during the quarter.
In the fourth quarter, total revenue grew by 3% year-on-year, consistent with our guidance of low single-digit year-on-year growth.
Distribution revenue grew $27 million, an increase of 5%, primarily due to an increase in air and hotel distribution bookings, favorable rate impacts and an increase in other revenue.
Air distribution bookings grew 4% year-on-year, below the guidance of 6% to 8% we provided on our third quarter earnings call. While our previous outlook accounted for the government and military travel reductions known at the time, the impacts were broader than expected due to lower inbound U.S. traffic and an increase in flight cancellations.
As Kurt mentioned, we ended the year with strong momentum, achieving 7% air distribution bookings growth in December, and we anticipate mid-single-digit air distribution bookings growth in the first quarter.
IT Solutions revenue of $140 million was within the range of expectations we shared on our third quarter call.
Gross margin of 58% was also in line with our expectations. The year-on-year decrease in gross margin was primarily due to revenue mix and FX impacts of a weaker U.S. dollar.
Fourth quarter 2025 normalized adjusted EBITDA of $119 million increased 10% year-on-year, with normalized adjusted EBITDA margin expanding by 107 basis points to 18%. Normalized adjusted EBITDA growth was driven by higher revenue and continued expense management.
Pro forma free cash flow was $116 million for the fourth quarter, a year-on-year increase of $45 million. And recall, our quarterly pro forma free cash flow includes the negative impact of $19 million of disbursements related to refinancing fees and interest paid earlier than previously expected.
Moving to Slide 11 and full year 2025 results. For the full year, Sabre reported revenue of $2.8 billion, up 1% year-on-year, driven primarily by growth in distribution revenue. Gross margin for the year was 57.2%, within our expectations.
Full year 2025 normalized adjusted EBITDA of $536 million increased 10% year-on-year, with normalized adjusted EBITDA margin expanding by 166 basis points to 19%. Pro forma free cash flow was $57 million. We ended the year with a strong cash balance of $910 million, which includes $98 million of restricted cash for debt payments in the first quarter of 2026.
Moving to Slide 12. Full year results were largely in line with the expectations we outlined on our third quarter earnings call. Revenue growth of 1% met our guidance for flat year-on-year growth. Normalized adjusted EBITDA of $536 million was above our guidance of approximately $530 million, driven by continued cost management.
Pro forma free cash flow of $57 million includes $19 million of disbursements related to refinancing fees and interest paid earlier than previously expected due to the refinancing activity in 2025.
Turning to Slide 13. In 2025, we made significant progress on our capital structure, lowering overall debt and extending our maturities. We paid off over $1 billion of debt using cash on the balance sheet and proceeds from the sale of Hospitality Solutions. Importantly, we have also extended our debt maturity profile. Following 2 successful refinancings in 2025, we have no large debt maturities until the spring of 2029, and over 90% of our debt matures in 2029 or later.
Through growth in pro forma adjusted EBITDA and the reduction of debt, combined with our strong year-end cash balance, we have reduced our pro forma net leverage ratio by approximately 25% versus year-end 2024. We remain focused on further delevering, and I'm proud of the work we have done this year.
Moving to Slide 14, and our outlook for 2026, including a walk from 2026 pro forma adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow. Consistent with our strategy, we are providing 2026 guidance as well as commentary on 2027 to demonstrate that we believe we are well positioned to generate sustainable, positive free cash flow over the long term.
Our outlook excludes the potential upside from agentic AI initiatives, which we believe could be meaningful, but it's too early to quantify.
For full year 2026, we expect mid-single-digit volume growth, driven by continued share gains, growth of NDC bookings and our recently launched LCC solution. We expect the growth in volumes will lead to year-on-year revenue growth of mid-single digits. We also expect IT Solutions revenue to grow in the mid-single digits for the year and to be in the range of $140 million to $150 million per quarter, with growth coming primarily in the back half of the year.
As mentioned, we do expect that a portion of 2026 revenue growth will be driven by increasing NDC and LCC volumes, which drive incremental gross profit at a slightly lower margin. In addition to the impact of these accelerating volumes, some additional expected changes in mix as well as FX pressure, we anticipate 2026 pro forma gross margin to be in the range of 56% to 57%.
We are targeting to keep pro forma adjusted technology and pro forma adjusted SG&A lines relatively flat over the next 2 to 3 years through an inflation offset program. The goal of this program is to offset normal inflationary pressures over the next 2 to 3 years. We anticipate the pro forma adjusted technology line will reflect a low single-digit percent increase due to increased technology costs from higher volumes. We expect pro forma adjusted SG&A will decrease by a low single-digit amount for the full year 2026.
Through keeping costs relatively flat, we expect strong flow-through from revenue growth to pro forma adjusted EBITDA, which is expected to be approximately $585 million in 2026. We do not expect any significant change to our annual CapEx spend of approximately $80 million.
Annual cash interest in 2026 is expected to be approximately $470 million. This represents a year-on-year increase of approximately $140 million. The increase is primarily due to Sabre no longer receiving the cash benefit from the paid-in-kind instrument Sabre had in place from June 2023 through May of 2025, which provided us with the option to defer cash interest.
As part of our inflation offset program, we estimate total restructuring cost will be around $65 million. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we recorded a $51 million restructuring charge related to this program. We expect approximately $60 million of cash outflows related to the program in 2026.
One item to note before discussing our free cash flow guidance, going forward, we will not be utilizing the pro forma free cash flow metric as there are no further adjustments to be made to free cash flow for the sale of Hospitality Solutions. We expect 2026 free cash flow to be negative $70 million, driven primarily by the impact of the $60 million in restructuring costs associated with our previously discussed inflation offset program.
Excluding the restructuring charge, free cash flow for 2026 would be near breakeven. Looking beyond 2026, with the continued execution of our growth strategies, we anticipate the positive growth trends we have guided to in 2026 will extend into 2027. Our current expectation is also for mid-single-digit revenue growth in 2027, driven by continued revenue growth and ongoing cost discipline. We expect sustained year-on-year adjusted EBITDA growth and importantly, positive free cash flow in 2027.
Looking at Slide 15, and our expectations for the first quarter. We expect solid growth in the first quarter, with volume and revenue growth in the mid-single digits. We anticipate our first quarter revenue growth will result in higher year-on-year gross income. We expect first quarter pro forma gross margin to be at the lower end of our expected annual range of 56% to 57%, primarily due to revenue mix and FX impacts of a weaker dollar. We expect gross margins for the remaining 3 quarters of 2026 to be higher versus the first quarter due to the impact of higher margin sales, including media as well as payments.
Additionally, in the first quarter, we expect pro forma adjusted technology expense will be higher on a year-on-year basis, primarily due to volume growth and typical wage inflation.
Moving to pro forma adjusted SG&A. We expect a year-on-year increase due to a combination of typical wage inflation and the impact of a sales tax refund benefit of $7 million in the prior year that is not expected to recur. For the remainder of '26, we expect that costs will generally trend down due to the impacts of our inflation offset program. Overall, we expect first quarter pro forma adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $130 million.
We expect quarterly free cash flow to follow historical seasonality, and expect the first and third quarters to reflect the majority of the full year increase to cash interest expense. For additional details, we've included a schedule of expected quarterly cash interest within our website financials available on our Investor Relations website.
Our strategy remains focused on generating free cash flow and delevering our balance sheet and driving sustainable growth through innovation. We made significant progress against these priorities in 2025. Building on the momentum we exited 2025 with, we are excited for the year ahead, and we are optimistic that Sabre is positioned to transition to a period of higher revenue growth going forward.
And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.
[Operator Instructions] And our first question coming from the line of Dan Wasiolek with Morningstar.
2. Question Answer
Probably a question here for Garry. So guys have obviously been hard at work with your AI tool development. I can see how that strengthens your network ecosystem. Just wondering kind of what still needs to be done in your view on the AI front? What should we be looking for? And then in the prepared comments, it was mentioned upside opportunities from AI. Just wondering if maybe you could provide some more color on what those might be?
Thank you for the question.
Go ahead, Garry, just jump right in.
Yes. So I think on the AI front and relative towards the travel use cases, for me, really what is going to be the next stage here is to generally show the end-to-end experience of conversational commerce in travel. And so that's what we're doing with the partnerships that you've seen with MindTrip and with PayPal, where, through the MindTrip app itself, you can have a great experience in terms of building an itinerary that's personalized, that's highly relevant towards your needs as you try and plan your next trip. We then come in, in terms of making sure that we provide you the greatest offers in terms of how to get there, where to stay? And then obviously, with PayPal, they then are able to help in terms of the payment, whether it's a single payment or actually payment over time through installments to make sure that you can actually afford that particular trip. So that's been one of the things for me that's been missing when it came to AI and a travel experience is that no one has really done that end-to-end yet from really the discovery, the planning, the booking, the payments and the servicing. So that's what I'm super excited to see as we go into the second quarter of 2026. Go ahead, Kurt.
Yes. I was just going to add, one of the interesting things that is unique about Sabre, as Garry alluded to in the prepared remarks is we already have the full breadth of data, content, intelligent shopping, servicing capabilities. Putting the front-end agentic layer on there, as Garry would articulate, is actually not that technically complex. It's just a matter of extending our capabilities into it as a new ecosystem of agentic travel.
And then anything, I guess, to -- that you're willing to remark on like upside opportunities that might evolve from AI in the years to come?
Yes. I think the best way to think about this in my eyes is, if you think back, if you're as old as I am, 30 years ago, you saw the emergence of online travel agents as a fundamentally new channel. And that had the impact of taking share away from both supplier direct and indirect channels at the time. I think what you're going to see with agentic travel, these are the agentic players as well as tech platforms, is that is going to emerge similar to the way OTAs emerged as a fundamentally new channel, probably happen even more rapidly than what you saw with the emergence of OTAs.
When you think about which channels are at risk, I think it's those that are subject to an Internet or electronic experience today. So less impacted should be corporate travel and brick-and-mortar travel agencies, more impacted would be supplier direct where you have nonloyal travelers, Metasearch, which is not an end-to-end experience because you're being linked off. And then third would be OTAs, obviously, OTAs are going to play in this very differently. So we think the offensive opportunity for Sabre is very substantial. Again, very hard to articulate how large that agentic sector is going to be and the pace at which it is going to play. But we believe we have a distinct market advantage in terms of speed to market today. So we're looking to plant flags very aggressively.
And our next question coming from the line of Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.
I think you did a great job addressing the topic of agentic and AI bots. I was hoping you'd do the same with just direct connects generally. One of the challenges of airlines or -- and OTAs, other travel buyers just building direct connects is the huge cost burden in establishing and also maintaining and supporting those connections from an R&D and a developer and infrastructure perspective. Does the introduction of gen AI change that economic equation at all? Just thinking about lower cost of coding, increasing productivity of a developer, yes, if you could weigh in there on that topic?
Yes, this is Kurt. Let me have Garry jump in first on the, what I'll call the physics of direct connect, and how that will emerge in an agentic world. And then I'll comment on the industry structure a bit.
Yes. Thank you, Kurt. So really, this comes down to what makes us a great partner for an AI company or only company to work with rather than attempt to really replicate what we do. So we have a highly scalable marketplace obviously, with that vast selection of travel content that we both have the contractual rights to aggregate, normalize and display at a speed that an AI agent could not do in a real-time fashion, which is due to our volumes, which means that we can predictably cash content in such a way that individual suppliers cannot. And hence, we can cope with that look-to-book ratio that is a severe tax on suppliers' infrastructure costs. So this is something, again, that whether it's in a general web search or any type of shopping scenario that could be AI or not is something that we excel at in terms of responding in sub-second times compared to what is today taking 8 to 9 seconds if you connect directly to supplier and shopping on their APIs independently? Kurt?
Yes. Thank you, Garry. And so think about direct connects generally, for folks who enable a direct connect, and Sabre is an amalgam of 500 airline direct connects and thousands of hotel direct connect, for example. When you have look-to-book coming inbound and you have massive complexity, that creates challenges, both for the supplier who's dealing with this inbound traffic, Number 2 is for the person doing the direct connect, very difficult to manage that environment. We've spoken previously about the opportunity for reintermediation of some of the direct connect traffic. I think you'll see that in some of our results going forward.
With agentic AI, that problem is going to be exacerbated for both the suppliers with inbound traffic and response times; and two, for folks who may have those direct connects in place like OTAs. So I actually think the utility that we provide tomorrow in an agentic world is actually going to be even more important than it was yesterday.
Okay. That's helpful. And then I was just hoping you could unpack this inflation offset program a little bit further. What exactly is inflating? Is that just wages? Is it other costs? And what exactly is offsetting?
Yes. As part of any cost to cost, you over time have some inflation, primarily wage inflation, but then you also have some contractual inflation, technology costs tend to go up. One of our goals is to keep our key line items of technology cost and SG&A roughly flat, except for some volume-related hosting costs. So we've embarked on a program basically to drive efficiency and effectiveness through our organization with the goal of over the next 2 to 3 years, keeping those cost items relatively flat such that as we grow bookings and revenue, we see strong flow-through to EBITDA and EBITDA margin accretion and ultimately greater free cash flow.
Okay. So that's layoffs and future restructurings?
The way I would think about it is I put it in 3 categories. One is leveraging best-in-class geographical location. Second, working with third parties who have certain expertise and efficiencies to a greater degree and then further embedding AI into our workforce and greater enabling our teams to be as productive as possible, and that's the focus.
And I would just say, in doing this, we hold 2 things relatively sacrosanct. One is operational delivery for our customers; and then two is research and development. And just anecdotally, we'll have more engineers working on Sabre a year from now than we do today. We're going to be ramping engineers through the year and doing that effectively through this program.
And our next question coming from the line of Jack Halpert with Cantor Fitzgerald.
Just another on the agentic AI stuff. So you have a relationship with Google for other parts of the business. Do you see any opportunity to deepen your relationship with Gemini on the agentic AI front? And are you having any conversations with other leading AI labs, OpenAI, et cetera?
And then just secondly, on capital allocation. I know you made a lot of progress in the debt paydown this year. Moving forward, can you talk about how you're thinking about capital allocation for 2026 and beyond? Is the debt profile still the #1 priority? Or do you feel like you're at a good level to start shifting investment more towards growth initiatives?
Thanks, Jack. I'll take the first question and then ask Mike to speak about capital allocation. So we've got a great relationship with Google. Our AI infrastructure is effectively built on Google's Vertex and now Gemini AI capabilities. I'd say what you've seen is the tip of the iceberg in terms of relationships and partnerships that are going to come in the market. We're in conversations with effectively all the meaningful large players out there, which is why we believe this is such a significant opportunity for Sabre. And let me turn it to Mike to speak about capital allocation.
Yes. First, I'll start with the back part of your question first. And I would say, we prioritize our investment in our growth initiatives, our growth strategies and our agentic AI push forward. So that's a priority, that's always been a priority. With regards to capital structure, we've been thoughtful and proactive with regards to our capital structure. We'll continue to do so. But I think we're actually in a pretty good place today. We ended the year with $910 million of cash in the balance sheet. Now $98 million of that's in escrow for some debt paydowns in March of 2026. So really, the usable cash is $812 million. We expect to ultimately be generating positive free cash flow over the long run. And if you look at our maturity ladder, I think we put ourselves in a pretty good place. We have no large maturities up until June of 2029, and we've done that pretty efficiently in terms of costs. So we think we're in a pretty good place at the moment.
[Operator Instructions] And our next question in queue coming from the line of Victor Cheng with Bank of America.
Good slides on the agentic AI initiatives. Maybe on the volume growth for this year, can you walk us through maybe the cadence of it? Obviously, you're guiding mid-single-digit for Q1 and full year. I think earlier this year, you're still analyzing some of the share gains that you have. So what is sustainable growth in H2? Is that related to the multisource low-cost carrier initiative? How is that working?
And then secondly, on NDC, you talked about that going up 4%. Can you talk a bit about where you're seeing that growth coming from? Are TMCs finally getting on board and maybe by region as well? And I will have a quick follow-up.
Victor, thank you, a multipart question as usual. Number 1 is with respect to distribution volume growth for this calendar year. As we indicated, we expect to see mid-single-digit distribution volume growth for 2026 and again for 2027. As we indicated in December, we saw 7% air distribution volume growth. We've seen a similar trend year-to-date so far. That's broad-based across all regions. It includes corporate travel, which we indicated was actually negative last year, so a much healthier market environment today.
When we look at this in a componentized fashion, first of all, we expect -- our assumption is that GDS market, which we said is largely flat from '25 to '26, so the growth that we're indicating is largely organic performance by Sabre. Number 1, we expect to continue to take share. That will be the realization of share takeaways that we implemented last year. We have other things that are being implemented, and we expect to continue to win at pace. Two is NDC, which reached 4% adoption at the end of last year. We expect that to continue to scale, and I'll speak about that further in a second. And then 3 is, we spoke last year about the integration of additional low-cost carrier inventory and the launch of our multisource platform and new low-cost carrier. That is all fully in production today. It's one of the key reasons we're winning, and we expect to pick up incremental bookings from those carriers as well.
With NDC more specifically, we're seeing it pretty broad-based in terms of adoption by OTA and TMC. And I'd say it varies by region, but it's very specific to carrier. So for example, you might have a large carrier in South America, which has broad NDC adoption. And if that's a top 2 or 3 carrier, that will drive adoption for the region in total. But I would say, generally, you're at a point now where, as we indicated, we have 42 carriers live within our NDC solution. We've done a significant amount of work on functionality to basically normalize workflow differences between EDIFACT and NDC for the travel agent, and that's mitigating any productivity or user experience impacts that they may have had previously. So again, we expect that to scale at pace as we go forward.
That makes sense. And maybe a quick follow-up on the restructuring. Should we expect the inflation offset program to continue? And kind of any cash flow impact for '27 as well potentially?
Sure. So we believe the total quantum of the restructuring will be around $65 million. As we talked about, we had a $51 million charge in the fourth quarter of 2025. The bulk of the cash flow impact will be during this year in 2026, and that's the $60 million you see in our guidance slide. So in 2027, any cash flow impacts we expect would be de minimis. Could be some, but I would expect it to be de minimis.
Our last question will come from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.
Great. Just on the free cash flow guidance, can you give us an update on how your discussion is going with sort of your debt holders and free cash flow being flat? Would love to hear an update there.
Yes. I mean, well, Jed, we just -- as you know, we just completed a significant refinancing of $1.8 billion. That refinancing went very, very well. We did that at an interest cost of [ 11.8% ]. And the free cash flow profile today is the same as when we conducted that refinancing. So overall, we are focused on generating positive free cash flow. We expect to generate positive free cash flow in 2027, and we have a strong cash balance.
Yes. And Jed, just keep in mind, as Mike indicated during the prepared remarks, free cash flow projection for this year includes the $60 million of impact from restructuring and about $130 million year-on-year difference from the PIK moving to cash. So there's no more PIK that we hold today.
And then I would love to hear your -- I guess I'm last, I will ask a couple. You said corporate travel is holding up pretty well. That's good to hear. Is that kind of a comp issue? Or what's going on there? And where are you seeing the strength? Is it coming more from the traditional travel agencies? Or is it coming from some of these new self-service players that we hear about?
I'd say corporate travel and TMC traffic, which was trailing the market last year. We're seeing positive signs in the first part of this year. That's fairly broad both with traditional or existing players as well as some of the new entrants, and we have good exposure to both parties.
Got it. And then I guess just my final one. I appreciate all the commentary around AI. Just -- and you've been in the travel industry for a while. When you hear all these direct connections and you can see the market is pretty excited about it, if you just look at the relative outperformance between Marriott, like a booking or any third-party travel agent, I guess just wondering, as we kind of see this evolve, how does this differ than search where I assume these direct connections were available for a while, but the suppliers never took advantage of search. And I guess, what makes this difference? Because I got to assume Google is not going to give away their search advertising business and OpenAI is going to need a pretty big auction advertising business to pay for all their compute requirements. So just wondering how you kind of see this evolving?
Yes. So what's interesting -- what's very different about -- let me compare this to Metasearch, which is Google Flight Search or Kayak, for example, where you get to compare, as a consumer, many different price points. And then you can launch into a different ecosystem to consummate your booking, into the supplier direct or into the OTA, for example. What we've heard from effectively every agentic player in the large tech platform that we've spoken to in recent months is they want to have an integrated end-to-end experience to include changes, servicing, et cetera, which doesn't sound like a Metasearch experience whatsoever. It sounds more like an agency experience. And so as Garry indicated, we think we're very well positioned to enable that. But when you think about this on a channel basis, and I talked earlier about supplier direct, let's say, nonloyal customers and Metasearch, we have a de minimis or almost no share impact from either of those 2 channels today.
So as an intermediary, to the extent that those channels are impacted, that will have no adverse effect on Sabre. If OTAs are adversely impacted, that's between 20% and 25% of our intermediary trading volumes. But we think the OTAs especially, folks like Priceline or Expedia are very well positioned to compete there. So we look at this and say, agentic and us backing the agentics is an offensive new opportunity to the extent there's downside risk, the downside risk to us given our ecosystem is relatively small.
Got it. And then nice announcement with MindTrip and PayPal, [indiscernible] MineTrop people, pretty interesting platform they're building. Can you just expound on that? And just -- I know you said it in your prepared remarks, but any additional color we can add for people on the call?
Yes. Garry has been the architect of that, so I'll ask him to separate in.
Yes. So as I mentioned earlier, in terms of the way we're working together here is that MindTrip is that front-end experience where they're using agentic capabilities in order to really allow discovery and trip planning. So let's say you want to go to Japan. You've got 2 teenagers, one's into Manga, you can tell it that, and it will start to suggest an [indiscernible] places to go, things to go and see. And then combined with that, it will start calling us for hotel information as it's planning the itinerary to map out what a good hotel would be near a particular attraction that might interest you. And eventually, it will start to call us for flights as it builds the full itinerary. And then from that point onwards, as you decide, okay, this is the trip I actually want to go for, that's where PayPal comes into mix. So PayPal, as I said earlier, they have the instant payment option, of course, but then also they provide installment payments as travel, these days, particularly international travel, can get quite expensive. So the ability to pay in, in installments is also, I think, a very critical part of this particular experience.
And then after that, we provide the booking and the servicing capabilities. So if during the trip you're running to issues, you need to reschedule things, rebook, et cetera, you can come back to the MindTrip app and simply tell it that you'd like to change your flight. So it's really -- it's an end-to-end experience for consumers as they look to discover, plan, book and then be serviced throughout the travel experience.
This ends the Q&A portion of the call. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Ekert, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Thank you, everybody, for the interest today. We are extremely optimistic and excited for the year and the years ahead, and look forward to sharing results with you in the next quarter and quarters ahead. Take care.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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Sabre — Q4 2025 Earnings Call
Sabre — Q3 2025 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good morning, and welcome to the Sabre Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Olivia, and I'll be your operator. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Senior Vice President of Finance, Roushan Zenooz. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, and welcome to our third quarter 2025 earnings call. This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.sabre.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available during this call on the Sabre Investor Relations web page.
A replay of today's call will be available on our website later this morning. We advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including results of our growth strategies, transactions and bookings growth, commercial and strategic arrangements, the effects of the sale of our Hospitality Solutions business and our financial guidance, outlook and expectations, pro forma financial information, free cash flow, net leverage and liquidity, among others.
All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning and our SEC filings, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2025. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. References during today's call to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, normalized adjusted EBITDA and normalized adjusted EBITDA margin have been adjusted to exclude certain items.
The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors.sabre.com. Normalized amounts have been adjusted for estimated costs historically allocated to our Hospitality Solutions business, which was sold on July 3, 2025. We are also presenting certain financial information on a pro forma basis to give effect to the sale of the Hospitality Solutions business and we have removed the impact of the $227 million payment in kind interest that was recorded in conjunction with the refinancing activity in the second quarter of 2025 from pro forma free cash flow.
Unless otherwise noted, results presented are based on continuing operations. Participating with me are Kurt Ekert, President and CEO; and Mike Randolfi, CFO. With that, I will turn the call over to Kurt.
Thanks, Roushan. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Earlier today, we reported third quarter results and provided an updated outlook for the remainder of the year. 2025 has been a dynamic year, and I'm encouraged by recent positive commentary from airlines and believe the broader travel environment is stabilizing compared to what we saw earlier this year. Third quarter operational results met our expectations as we focused on controlling what is within our control. I commend our team members for their continued progress against our strategic priorities, generating free cash flow and delevering the balance sheet and driving sustainable growth through innovation.
We delivered positive air distribution bookings growth in the third quarter, driven primarily by strong performance in September. Based on our progress around the implementation of new business and our outlook for the remainder of the year, we remain confident in our ability to continue to drive air distribution bookings growth going forward.
We have strengthened our balance sheet by growing adjusted EBITDA, generating free cash flow, extending debt maturities and proactively using cash to reduce debt. We have made significant progress over the last 2 years on our strategy for delevering, and we anticipate reducing our net leverage by approximately 50% by year-end 2025 compared to year-end 2023. While there is more work ahead to achieve our long-term leverage goal, we are proud of the progress we have made.
Innovation is key to Sabre strategy, and we have been leveraging AI to transform travel. This quarter, we announced two industry firsts, agentic APIs for travel, enabling a new era of AI-driven retailing and Continuous Revenue Optimizer, an offering within our modular AI-native SabreMosaic platform. Further, our payments business continues to see strong customer demand and is growing at a very healthy rate. We have extended our industry-leading position with 41 live NDC integrations.
New agency wins and renewals, first-mover product launches and continued innovation increase our confidence that we are well positioned competitively. Moving to Slide 5. I will provide some detail on our third quarter results. Overall, operational and financial results were positive. Total distribution bookings grew 3% year-on-year and air distribution bookings increased more than 2%. Consistent with broader airline commentary, we experienced softness in July air bookings and then saw improvement through the balance of the quarter. September finished strong, up 7% year-on-year. The acceleration in air bookings was primarily driven by contributions from newly converted business as a result of our growth strategies. In July, air distribution bookings from our growth strategies totaled $2.5 million. And in September, that grew to over $3 million. For the third quarter, air bookings from our growth strategies contributed 10 percentage points to total air bookings growth.
This growth was partially offset by two notable headwinds. First, GDS industry air distribution bookings declined approximately 1 percentage point year-on-year. Second, Sabre's air booking mix was a headwind in the third quarter. This reflected Sabre's higher exposure to U.S. government and military and corporate business as well as the impact of regional mix.
We continue to believe these headwinds are transitory, and we are encouraged with the improved performance of certain regions as we move into the fourth quarter. Hotel distribution bookings growth increased 6% in the quarter, and the attachment rate to air bookings increased over 100 basis points year-on-year. Within IT Solutions, passengers boarded grew 3% year-on-year. Solid operational execution resulted in third quarter revenue growth of 3%. Top line growth, combined with ongoing expense management resulted in normalized adjusted EBITDA growth of 23%.
Normalized adjusted EBITDA margin improved over 300 basis points to 21%. Moving to Slide 6. We are transforming our broader platform into a modern open travel marketplace that seamlessly integrates and normalizes content and capabilities from a wide range of sources. In multisource content, Sabre continues to demonstrate industry leadership. We are leading the industry with 41 live NDC connections, providing seamless shopping, booking and workflow integration.
We are also on track to launch our new low-cost carrier solution in the first quarter of 2026. Our distribution expansion strategy is progressing well. In addition to adding new agencies and significant conversion volumes, we recently announced that World Travel Inc. has expanded its strategic partnership with Sabre and is converting substantially all of their volumes onto the Sabre platform. This momentum further advances Sabre's position as a strategic technology partner to leading agencies around the world.
Hotel B2B distribution gross booking value transacted through the platform continues with an annualized turnover of over $20 billion, a 7% increase year-on-year. Our digital payments business also continues to scale rapidly, and I will provide a deeper look into this business on the next slide. We are also making considerable advances related to AI, which I will touch on shortly. Overall, we are making significant progress against our strategy and transforming the business to capture long-term value in the dynamic and evolving travel marketplace.
Moving to Slide 7. Sabre Payments is an integrated fintech hub. It is one of our fastest-growing businesses, processing over $20 billion in annual transactions and quarterly gross spend grew over 40% year-on-year. Payments provides travel-focused solutions that simplify operations, enable global payment flexibility and automate risk and fraud management for our customers. The fintech hub is comprised of two key components: Sabre Direct Pay and Conferma.
Sabre Direct Pay is our travel payment service that streamlines financial operations across the travel industry. Travel payments and automated chargeback management services run through a single integrated interface. This interface provides customers with greater efficiency, faster dispute resolution and improved win rates. Conferma is a virtual card and payment platform providing issuers, corporate buyers and suppliers with real-time control, enriched data and automated reconciliation.
This enables faster, safer, broader business payments. We are scaling this business quickly and seeing strong growth in digital wallets and virtual cards. By the end of this year, we expect to have approximately 100,000 connected hotels. Conferma is developing new API integrations that we expect could accelerate additional virtual card deployments and further adoption. We believe strong ongoing customer demand positions our payments business for continued robust growth.
On to Slide 8. AI represents an incredible opportunity for the travel industry and for Sabre provides a road map for future growth. We have leveraged our deep partnership with Google to embed AI within our platform in three ways: First, optimization AI, which delivers value today. Sabre IQ already powers live AI-driven products, which generate measurable ROI for airlines and agencies today. These include Lodging cross-sell, which intelligently recommends hotels with air bookings and e-mail parser, which automates traveler requests and agent actions and dynamic pricing, which optimizes fares and ancillaries in real time.
Next, generative AI, the current phase of acceleration. We have built digital assistants and chatbots to make travel planning and servicing more intuitive. As a trusted content provider, Sabre's Gen AI solutions help ensure accurate and contextual information across customer touch points. And finally, Agentic AI and consumer LLMs. This is our innovation horizon. Agentic AI anticipates traveler needs and takes actions on their behalf.
We believe this new conversational commerce will be how consumers search, shop and experience travel servicing in the near future. That is why we have taken a first-mover position with Agentic-ready APIs and a proprietary MCP server. These Agentic solutions make the language of travel understandable to any AI agent.
Google has spotlighted Sabre's latest AI innovations at its global events, drawing strong industry acclaim. On to Slide 9. Moving to our outlook for air distribution bookings for the fourth quarter and full year. The chart on the right shows reported quarterly air distribution bookings growth for the first 3 quarters of the year and our outlook for the fourth quarter. Our view for the fourth quarter is largely consistent with what we have said previously, excluding the anticipated impacts from the government shutdown.
We exited September with strength that carried into early October. However, the government shutdown impacted October air distribution bookings by approximately 3 percentage points, and we expect this impact to carry through the fourth quarter. As a result, we now anticipate fourth quarter year-on-year air distribution bookings growth of between 6% and 8%. The commentary around the broader travel industry is encouraging and could signal a normalization of trends going forward.
We continue to believe the challenges we have navigated during 2025 are largely transitory and as volumes from our growth strategies accelerate through the end of the year, we are well positioned for growth. Additionally, we are optimistic that our positive momentum as well as the launch of our LCC solution in early 2026, positions Sabre for mid-single-digit air bookings growth in 2026.
In summary, we are focused on controlling what we can control, namely delevering the balance sheet and driving sustainable growth through innovation. With continued execution, the development of our AI solutions and opportunities in adjacent spaces such as payments and hotels, we believe Sabre is well positioned for long-term growth. Thank you. And now over to Mike.
Thanks, Kurt, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to Slide 11. For the third quarter, Sabre reported revenue of $715 million, up 3% year-on-year, consistent with our guidance range of low to mid-single-digit growth. Distribution revenue grew $24 million, driven primarily by an increase in air and hotel distribution bookings as well as an increase in product revenue. IT Solutions revenue of $140 million was flat year-on-year as growth from passengers boarded was offset by a decrease in license fee revenue.
We continue to expect fourth quarter IT Solutions revenue to remain in a similar range of $140 million to $145 million. On a normalized basis, gross margin decreased 130 basis points in the third quarter versus the prior year. The decrease in gross margin is due primarily to two items: lower-than-expected revenue from certain higher-margin product sales and continued FX impacts of the weaker U.S. dollar, where Sabre generates revenue in dollars but pays some agency incentives in local currencies.
Looking forward, we expect these gross margin pressures to continue into the fourth quarter. Third quarter 2025 normalized adjusted EBITDA of $150 million increased 23% year-on-year with normalized adjusted EBITDA margin expanding by 340 basis points to 21%. Pro forma free cash flow was $13 million, and we ended the quarter with $683 million of cash on the balance sheet. Moving to Slide 12. As Kurt outlined, third quarter results were largely in line with the expectations we outlined on our second quarter earnings call.
Revenue growth of 3% met our guidance for low to mid-single-digit year-on-year growth. Normalized adjusted EBITDA of $150 million was at the high end of our expectations. Pro forma free cash flow of $13 million was below our expectations. The variance was driven approximately 1/3 by lower receipts and 2/3 by higher disbursements. Receipts were lower due to the cadence of the quarter. There is roughly a 30-day lag between bookings and receipts. July and August air distribution bookings were relatively flat year-on-year, which was lower than our forecast and virtually all bookings growth in the third quarter occurred in September, which did not benefit third quarter receipts.
Regarding higher disbursements, certain payments that were forecasted to be paid in the fourth quarter of 2025 and in 2026 were paid in September. Based on our updated working capital forecast, we now expect free cash flow for the full year 2025 to be approximately $70 million. Turning to Slide 13. Over the past 2 years, we have made significant progress on our capital structure, lowering overall debt and extending our maturities. This year, we have paid off over $1 billion of debt. As part of that, in the third quarter, we repaid approximately $825 million of debt from the proceeds of the Hospitality Solutions sale.
We have pushed out maturities as well with over 60% of our debt maturing in 2029 or later. With our current outlook, by the end of 2025, we expect our pro forma net leverage will be approximately 50% lower versus year-end 2023. We regularly look for opportunities to efficiently refinance our debt and extend our maturities. As we look to 2026 cash interest, we expect 2026 to reflect our projected 2025 full year interest expense of $441 million that is included in our GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation, plus the impact of any potential refinancings as well as any changes in the forward curve.
On to Slide 14 and our outlook for the rest of this year. We anticipate fourth quarter air distribution bookings growth of between 6% and 8% with a midpoint of 7%. This compares to our prior fourth quarter guide of 6% to 14% with a midpoint of 10%. The 3 percentage point reduction in the midpoint of our guide is driven primarily by the impact of the government shutdown. We expect low single-digit fourth quarter year-on-year revenue growth, and we expect pro forma adjusted EBITDA of approximately $110 million. Our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA guidance incorporates a $10 million to $12 million impact from the government shutdown.
We expect to generate pro forma free cash flow in the fourth quarter of approximately $130 million. As a reminder, the fourth quarter is typically our highest free cash flow quarter due to the seasonality of working capital. Our full year outlook for air distribution bookings growth is positive and is within the guidance range we shared on our second quarter call.
With our updated outlook for the fourth quarter, we expect full year air distribution bookings growth to be near the low end of our previously provided range of 0.5% to 3.5% -- we expect full year 2025 pro forma adjusted EBITDA to be approximately $530 million, representing year-on-year growth of 9%. We have not made any changes to our assumptions for either CapEx or cash interest.
We expect full year 2025 pro forma free cash flow of approximately $70 million and to end the year with a strong cash position of approximately $800 million. In closing, we are making progress on our strategy to generate free cash flow and delever the balance sheet and drive sustainable growth through innovation. We expect the anticipated acceleration of volumes in the fourth quarter will provide solid momentum into 2026.
And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.
[Operator Instructions]
Our first question coming from the line of Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.
2. Question Answer
I was hoping we could just run through the updated FY '25 guidance again and help bridge from what it was last quarter to this quarter. And really focusing on EBITDA and free cash flow. I know you called out some of the headwinds from government shutdown, but really just wondering why EBITDA is now $20 million lower from the midpoint and free cash flow $50 million. And I know you were talking through some of the receipts and disbursements. I would think some of that would sort of normalize or those September receipts come in, in Q4. And so why the bigger move in free cash flow versus EBITDA?
Yes. So I'll take that question. So if you go from the midpoint of our guide last time at $550 million to $530 million, the biggest component of that is going to be the $10 million to $12 million impact from the government shutdown. The other difference is, as you look from Q3 to Q4, as we highlighted in our prepared remarks, we did have lower margin from FX and lower high-margin product sales. We do expect that to continue into the fourth quarter.
And so that's essentially your difference between your $550 million and $530 million. If you recall, your -- what correlated in terms of free cash flow to $530 million of EBITDA was $100 million of free cash flow last quarter. And as I articulated this quarter, there was a difference between our expectations of around $27 million. We expected to come in around $40 million of free cash flow. Instead, we came in around $13 million.
And to be clear, about 1/3 of that was due to receipts, 2/3 was due to disbursements. On the receipts, the way to think about that is as we came through the third quarter, as we articulated, receipts are essentially determined by the prior couple of months in the quarter. And August, in particular, fell short. And we had a strong September, which would bode well for receipts in October. However, we had a step down in bookings that wasn't in our original projection because of the government shutdown.
So that gets offset in the fourth quarter. So when you get into early next year, because we would expect this quarter to be back-end loaded, we would expect to have slightly higher receipts than we would have otherwise, but it won't necessarily show up in the fourth quarter. On disbursements, essentially, there were elements there that were timing. So of the disbursements, the way I would think about it, is there's a portion of our disbursements that were made in September that we either contemplated in forecasted for Q4 or early 2025.
However, because of timing of work, because of timing of combination of invoices, commercial negotiations, disbursements were slightly different. For example, we had a $7.5 million disbursement in the September month that we originally had forecasted for Q1 of 2026, and it was tied to an agency commercial agreement. But because of what was best for the commercial agreement overall, the payment was made in September. So you don't necessarily get that back this year, and that's what drives you from the $100 million to the $70 million.
Okay. That's really helpful. And just to clarify on the government shutdown impacts, maybe everyone else knows this, but is this because of like staffing, airport and safety? Is it actual government travel spend that's impacted? Or is it more related to the impacts to the consumer and the macro when you quantify that?
Yes. Thanks, Josh. To date, the impact is almost entirely travel by government employees and/or U.S. military. We have a high concentration of the U.S. military and government as a component of our business. Just for clarity, for example, in 2024, U.S. military government represent about 4% of our global air distribution volumes.
That number is quite de minimis in terms of current trading volumes. To date, we've not seen a material impact in terms of the overall industry. But obviously, if you look at operating issues in airports with air traffic control, that is a risk going forward, but not something that's, again, material to date.
Our next question coming from the line of Victor Cheng with Bank of America.
This is Carla for Victor Cheng at Bank of America. Two questions from my side. The first one is what's the mix of your air bookings that is tied to the U.S. government travel? And how can we think about the impact of bookings in Q4 if the shutdown continues? And second question, do you have any updates on your current NDC mix? Is it still in the low single digits?
Yes. Thank you, Carla. For clarity, when you say what is the mix of U.S. military and government, can you clarify what you're asking there?
Yes. So just the mix of your air bookings that is tied to the U.S. government? And how can we kind of forecast our bookings estimates based on the shutdown?
Okay. We don't break out the details of our military and government if you're asking domestic versus long haul, for example. Again, if you go back to last year, that was about 4% of our air trading volume in the distribution business. That number is quite de minimis in terms of current trading right now.
NDC remains a low single-digit number for us. That's between 2% and 3% of our air distribution volumes. It is growing at a rapid rate. We do expect it to scale as we go forward. And I will emphasize, as we noted during our prepared remarks, we now have 41 live NDC connections. These are the same API connections that you would get if you were a direct connect or any other provider. We have leading functionality that is facing buyers and travel agencies. We feel we are very well positioned in this two-sided market as NDC scales to be a grower.
Our next question coming from the line of Jack Halpert with Cantor Fitzgerald.
Just two quick ones, please. So kind of coming back to the government travel piece of this. I think you're pretty clear about the headwinds for 4Q. But I guess, historically, when there's been government shutdowns and they kind of come to an end, like do you typically see like an immediate payback in demand? Or is there sort of a bit of a lagged recovery? That's kind of the first one.
And then second one, just quickly on payments. Obviously, growth there has been pretty solid the past couple of quarters, and you had the slide about it in the deck. But can you talk a little bit more about the strategy here and how incremental you think you can -- this can be to your business going forward? And then maybe talk about sort of the margin profile of the business as well.
Thanks, Jack. On the government, -- we don't know obviously when the shutdown will be resolved. We imagine it will happen in the fourth quarter, but who knows. We anticipate being back to normalcy in the first quarter, but it will probably phase its way between here and there. With respect to payments, the payments business, again, which is comprised of Sabre Direct Pay, which is a set of product capabilities that we have both in our distribution and our IT business as well as our Conferma Virtual Payments business.
That business is scaling at a 40% top line rate. Really, it's very compelling what we have there. We have not, at this point, broken out the revenue or the margin details of that business. That may be something that we do prospectively. But we think the value opportunity and the scale opportunity there is tremendous versus our current position.
[Operator Instructions] Our next question coming from the line of Alex Irving with Bernstein.
Two for me, please. First, on Agentic API. Could you please help us to understand how you intend to monetize this? Specifically, are airlines unable to do their own Agentic API to do the same thing essentially for free. So who's going to pay you and for what specifically?
Second, on booking growth for 2026, I think you mentioned earlier about being positioned for mid-single-digit bookings growth. What assumptions underpin that? If you could please break that down between, say, known new business migrations, specific headwinds lapping and your expectations for underlying industry growth?
Thank you, Alex. Let me deal first with the booking growth for 2026. As we indicated, we expect mid-single-digit bookings growth in 2026. That assumes a flattish GDS or distribution marketplace and then strong organic performance by Sabre with continued converted business as well as the implementation of our incremental low-cost carrier solution. With respect to Agentic AI, it is very early. I think you're going to see, number one, Agentic AI emerge as a new channel in and of itself, maybe similar to the way online travel agents emerged starting about 30 years ago.
And I think that will take share away from both intermediary and supplier direct channels. What we have developed in terms of our API solution is, we think, the leading intermediary API solution for the marketplace. This can sit directly behind an API, Agentic API agent and/or a large tech platform. And it's also fit for purpose that it can be used by our travel agency and our airline or hotel customers to help them power their Agentic AI profile going forward. In terms of what is the commercial model, obviously, we think the largest opportunity is for us to be an intermediary distribution player, but there may be an IT element to this as well. That will become more apparent in the quarters as we go forward.
And our next question coming from the line of Dan Wasiolek with Morningstar.
So two, if I may. The first, your booking fee looks like it was pretty strong and stable this quarter at -- I think, around $6.06. Just wondering how we should think about that as we look into 2026. And then wondering if you could maybe provide some more detail in your prepared comments, you kind of talked about a stabilization in the overall industry and industry demand, just the conversations maybe you're having with your partners and customers to kind of arrive at that?
I'll take the booking fee. If you look at the strength in our booking fee year-over-year, it was driven by significant nontransactional revenue that's benefiting us. So it's not necessarily tied to a specific booking. And we expect that to continue to be additive over time. With regards to 2026 booking fee, at this stage, we're not going to provide any other commentary beyond what was in our prepared remarks with 2026, but we'll give you a lot more context on that in the February call.
Thanks, Dan. With respect to industry demand, it's a bit of a mixed bag. What you're hearing and seeing from commentary from many different intermediaries and then supplier customers, and this is underpinned by a lot of private conversations that we've had with our clientele is leisure demand is positive year-on-year, fairly robust. Our corporate demand, what you're seeing is prices elevate or strong yield, and you've seen some improvement on a sequential basis in corporate demand, but it is still negative year-on-year on a unit basis. And so a lot of the commentary you hear from suppliers is around yield accretion or yield improvement relative to where we were 6 months. The volume environment has improved, but it's still -- when you look at the mix of corporate plus leisure is mixed.
It's not that positive. As we go forward, our expectation is typically, what you see in this industry is GDP growth and airline volumes tend to approximate one another. If that is the assumption next year, you're at low single-digit passenger growth in the United States and globally. The question will be what the mix is, and we're going to learn our way into that. But again, our expectation for our volume assumptions next year in distribution are that the intermediary industry is relatively flat and that we're growing share against that metric.
Our next question coming from the line of James Goodall with Ruschild. Rothschild & Co Redburn.
So firstly, just coming back to Slide 9 and focusing on the Q3 air booking growth of 2%. I think your original guide was 2% to 6%, which was based on a negative 9-point impact from mix in industry and plus 13 from growth strategies.
Just given that the industry improved to down 1% from down 4% through Q3, what caused Q3 to be at the bottom of the range despite the fact that industry got better through the quarter? Was it that plus 13% of new wins coming on more slowly?
And then -- in terms of my second question, just coming to the low-cost carrier launch for next year. Can you give us a flavor of how many incremental bookings you're expecting that to drive on an annual basis? And how many LTCs you currently have signed up or in the pipes to be signed up?
Yes. Thank you, James. When you look at Q3 volumes, what we saw was that both July and August were relatively flat in terms of our intermediary bookings. September was actually up 7%. The very good news there is that when you look at the quarter, there was positive 10 points of volume performance tied to the implementation of new business that was converted this calendar year. And in fact, that number was 12% in September, so that continues to ramp and accelerate. We indicated that was 3 million bookings during the month.
Why was that below the prior estimate? Despite the GDS, the improvement in the GDS number, it comes down to the mix of our business. Number one is we are adversely impacted as compared to the industry by our exposure to both the U.S. military and government. We have nearly a full share there. And two is a vast majority of corporate and TMC business globally goes through Sabre. And that was still down several percent year-on-year in the quarter and then the impact of regional mix as well.
With the launch of the low-cost carrier platform, there's two important components here. One is similar to if you're familiar with Travelfusion, which is a non-GDS aggregated solution in the market, and there are a number of these kind of solutions. What we are launching is a new platform that integrates 50-plus new low-cost carriers. That is with a bit of a different technical and commercial model. We will be in full production launch in the first quarter of next year. Separately, we've also signed up a significant number of new low-cost carriers that we did not have in our system previously that are participating in more traditional means, either [ EDIFACT ] or Direct Connect versus this new low-cost carrier solution. Long term, we expect this could contribute multiple tens of millions of transactions to our business. It will be a subset of that for next year as we ramp this up. We're not going to go into detail on the specific number.
And there are no further questions in the queue at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Ekert, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Thank you so much, everyone, for the continued interest. We look forward to sharing additional progress next quarter and in the years ahead. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.
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Sabre — Q3 2025 Earnings Call
Sabre — Q2 2025 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Good morning, and welcome to the Sabre Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Sean, and I will be your operator. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer, Brian Evans. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, and welcome to our Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.sabre.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks is also available during this call on the Sabre Investor Relations web page. A replay of today's call will be available on our website later this morning. We advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, timing and effects of the agreement to sell our Hospitality Solutions business, including pro forma financial information, results of our growth strategies, transactions and bookings growth, commercial and strategic arrangements and our financial guidance, outlook and expectations, free cash flow, net leverage, liquidity, among others.
All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning and our SEC filings, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2025. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. References during today's call to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, normalized adjusted EBITDA and normalized adjusted EBITDA margin have been adjusted to exclude certain items.
The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors.sabre.com. Normalized amounts have been adjusted for estimated costs historically allocated to our Hospitality Solutions business, which was sold on July 3, 2025. We are also presenting certain financial information on a pro forma basis to give effect to the sale of the Hospitality Solutions business, and we have removed the impact of the $227 million payment in kind interest that was recorded in conjunction with the refinancing activity in the second quarter of 2025 from pro forma free cash flow. Unless otherwise noted, results presented are based on continuing operations.
Participating with me are Kurt Ekert, President and CEO, and and Mike Randolfi, Chief Financial Officer. With that, I will turn the call over to Kurt.
Thanks, Brian. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Earlier today, we reported Second Quarter results and provide an updated outlook for the remainder of the year. In what has been a dynamic and at times challenging first half of the year, we have remained focused on executing our strategic priorities. These are first to generate free cash flow and delever the balance sheet; and second, to drive sustainable growth by delivering innovative technology solutions for our customers. Through the work of our team members, we believe Sabre is a stronger and better positioned company today versus a year ago.
Over the past year, we have taken meaningful steps to strengthen our balance sheet. We have grown adjusted EBITDA, extended debt maturities and paid down debt. Year-to-date, our normalized adjusted EBITDA has grown 4% year-on-year. We have significantly improved our debt maturity profile, extending nearly 60% of our debt to 2029 and beyond. And this year, we have reduced total debt by more than $1 billion or nearly 20%, using a combination of cash from our balance sheet and proceeds from the sale of Hospitality Solutions.
Taken together, we expect to reduce our year-end 2025 net leverage by approximately 50% versus year-end 2023. At the same time, our commitment to innovation is reshaping the travel landscape as we introduce new and enhanced solutions for our customers. We are making significant progress with the implementation of signed new business, which we expect to accelerate in the back half of 2025. Our solutions are resonating in the marketplace as evidenced by continued commercial momentum. The operating environment remains challenging and is pressuring air distribution bookings. As a result, the second quarter came in below expectations, and we are updating our outlook for the remainder of the year. Despite this near-term pressure, we are staying focused on executing and making steady progress against our strategy, which we believe best position Sabre for long-term growth.
Moving to Slide 5. I will provide some additional details on the second quarter. Air Distribution bookings declined 1% year-on-year, outperforming the broader GDS industry, but falling short of previous expectations, for low single-digit growth that we shared on our Q1 call. During the second quarter, our growth strategies added 8 points of growth to air distribution bookings compared to the prior year. However, this growth was offset by a combined 9-point decline in our base business, 4 points from the GDS industry and 5 points from Sabre mix, resulting in the 1% decrease in Air Distribution bookings for the quarter.
Regarding the GDS industry, the weakness of corporate bookings relative to leisure and the pullback of government and military travel, which almost exclusively booked through the GDS caused GDS volumes to underperform airline passenger growth. Relative to other GDS competitors, Sabre's mix has a higher exposure to both of these factors. We also have more share than our competitors in certain countries that had a disproportionate decline and less share in certain countries that performed better, driving further pressure. While we expected some industry stabilization during the quarter, incremental industry weakness emerged in June and continued into July, which was the driver of our Air Distribution bookings shortfall to expectations.
Volumes from our growth strategies are scaling largely as expected. These growth strategies contributed over $2 million of Air Distribution bookings in June and approximately $2.5 million in July, which represents approximately 10 points of growth year-on-year. This momentum supports our path to greater than 30 million incremental air distribution bookings from our growth strategies for full year 2025. Hotel distribution bookings growth continued, up 2% in the quarter, and the attachment rate to air bookings improved 100 basis points to 34%.
Within IT solutions, passengers boarded increased by 1% year-on-year. Importantly, we continue to stay focused on what is within our control, executing our growth strategies, realizing the benefits of our technology transformation and continued cost management. These actions helped drive Q2 2025 normalized adjusted EBITDA growth of 6% versus prior year and normalized adjusted EBITDA margin improvement of approximately 120 basis points to approximately 19%.
Moving to Slide 6. We are accelerating the transformation of our platform into a modern, open travel marketplace that seamlessly integrates content and capabilities from a wide range of sources. In multisource content, Sabre continues to demonstrate industry leadership with 38 live NDC connections now operational, among the most in the industry and seamless shopping, booking and workflow integration. Our distribution expansion strategy is progressing well. For example, Christopherson Business Travel recently selected Sabre as its primary distribution technology partner, building upon numerous wins in 2024 and 2025, and demonstrating continued commercial momentum.
Hotel B2B distribution gross booking value transacted through the platform continues with an annualized turnover of $20 billion, a 4% increase year-on-year. Our digital payments business also continues to scale rapidly with Q2 gross spend of $5 billion, up 44% year-on-year. We continue to see strong traction with the AI-powered offer management suite of IQ products, a cornerstone of SabreMosaic. These products are well timed to help airlines as they navigate today's shifting demand. During the quarter, we signed an agreement with Avelo Airlines, who will become the first low-cost carrier to adopt ancillary IQ. We now have 9 airlines that will be utilizing our SabreMosaic offer management products.
Overall, we are making significant progress against our strategy and transforming the business to capture long-term value in a dynamic and evolving travel marketplace. On to Slide 7. With the weakness we previously discussed in the first half of the year and uncertainty around GDS industry growth for the remainder of 2025, we have revised our outlook for the second half to range from 4% to 10% air distribution bookings growth. Similar to the first half, the drivers of this updated outlook are the GDS industry and Sabre mix as well as timing of growth strategy initiatives. I'll touch briefly on each of these.
First, with regard to our updated view of the GDS industry, we do not believe these trends are structural, and expect them to stabilize over time. However, we anticipate the lower mix of corporate bookings versus leisure to continue through the remainder of 2025. Second, looking at bookings mix in the second half of 2025, we expect to continue to be adversely impacted by our greater exposure to corporate travel, military and government travel and our higher share in certain countries that are seeing a disproportionate travel decline. However, we are encouraged by recent commentary from the U.S. airlines indicating their expectations for improving second half trends. Finally, the remainder is related to growth strategy timing due primarily to a temporary delay from technology and connectivity development in the launch of our new multi-source low-cost carrier solution.
This solution is designed to expand access to even more LCC content beyond the 150-plus low-cost carriers already available on our platform today. Our early adopter program is progressing well. connecting content from over 50 additional LCCs to approximately 500 agencies. We had previously expected this new product offering to be in full production launch this summer, driving approximately 5 points of air distribution bookings growth in the second half of 2025, but now anticipate a 6-month delay and early 2026 for launch.
Moving to the chart on the right, which represents our air distribution bookings guidance for the third and fourth quarter as well as the full year. We have broken out the drivers for year-on-year quarterly air distribution bookings growth for both actual results in the first half of the year and the expected acceleration in the second half. The black sections show the positive impacts of our growth strategies, driven primarily by the implementation of bookings from signed new business. This growth is being offset by the weakness previously discussed in the overall GDS industry and Sabre mix as displayed by the gray boxes shown in both the first and second quarter actuals.
For the third quarter, we expect 13 points of growth in air distribution bookings from growth strategies, namely the realization of implemented new business. We expect our July exit rate for new business to be greater than 10 points of growth and we have clear line of sight to the new business realization projections for the remainder of the year. We expect this growth will exceed the headwinds I discussed previously, resulting in quarterly air distribution bookings growth of 2% to 6%.
In the fourth quarter, we expect to benefit from our growth strategies to accelerate and result in 19 points of growth resulting in total air distribution bookings growth of 6% to 14%. In summary, we are navigating some near-term challenges that we believe are largely transitory, and we are encouraged with the continued scaling of our new business volumes. We remain focused on executing our 2 strategic priorities, generating free cash flow and delevering the balance sheet, and driving sustainable growth through innovation. Through the team's continued hard work, Sabre is a stronger, better positioned company today than it was a year ago.
Thank you, and now over to Mike.
Thanks, Kurt, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to Slide 9. For the second quarter, Sabre reported revenue of $687 million, down 1% year-on-year. Distribution revenue decreased by $5 million, driven primarily by the decrease in air distribution bookings, which was partly offset by an increase in hotel distribution bookings. IT Solutions revenue decreased 2% year-on-year, driven primarily by previously disclosed de-migrated carriers, partially offset by an increase in passengers boarded and license fee revenue. Looking forward to the second half for IT Solutions, we anticipate continued passenger boarded growth with quarterly revenue in the $140 million to $145 million range. On a normalized basis, gross margin decreased 110 basis points in the second quarter versus the prior year. The decrease in gross margin is partially related to the foreign exchange impact of a weaker U.S. dollar where Sabre generates revenue in dollars but pays agency incentives in local currency.
Gross margin was further impacted by a stronger mix of U.S. bookings, which have a lower margin profile relative to other regions. We expect some of this impact to be temporary with higher gross margins in the second half that are roughly in line with the second half of 2024 on a normalized basis. Q2 2025 normalized adjusted EBITDA increased 6% year-on-year with normalized adjusted EBITDA margin expanding by 120 basis points. Pro forma free cash flow was negative $2 million, and we ended the quarter with $447 million of cash on the balance sheet.
Notably, after the quarter ended, we closed on the sale of Hospitality Solutions on July 3, the proceeds were primarily used to pay down debt, and we added $135 million to the balance sheet that is not included in the Q2 cash position. At the end of July, our cash on the balance sheet exceeded $600 million. Moving to Slide 10. As Kurt outlined, second quarter results were impacted by lower-than-expected air distribution bookings, leading to financial performance below the expectations we outlined on May 7. Normalized adjusted EBITDA was $127 million in the quarter. Air Distribution bookings were expected to grow low single digits, but were down 1% year-on-year, resulting in a 3 to 4-point shortfall relative to our expectations.
Each point of Air Distribution bookings on a quarterly basis equates to approximately $3 million to $4 million of adjusted EBITDA. Based on the second quarter bookings shortfall, and lower gross margins, adjusted EBITDA was approximately $20 million lower than our expectations, which also impacted free cash flow. Free cash flow on a reported basis of negative $240 million includes a $227 million impact related to refinancing activity in the quarter. Upon refinancing the 2028 senior secured term loan, the payment in kind, capitalized interest over the prior 2 years flows through operating cash flow. We have removed this refinancing impact from our pro forma free cash flow calculations. Turning to Slide 11 and details about the progress we have made in strengthening our capital structure. During the quarter, we extended our debt maturities. In addition to the $1.6 billion of debt we extended late last year, we refinanced $1.325 billion in the second quarter. We now have nearly 60% of our debt maturing in 2029 and beyond. We also paid down debt in the second quarter, utilizing cash from the balance sheet to remain nearly $200 million of maturities. We Subsequent to quarter close, we utilized approximately $825 million from our sale of Hospitality Solutions to repay a portion of our Term Loan B senior secured facilities and accounts receivable securitization facility. This year, we have paid down over $1 billion of total debt, reducing our expected year-end pro forma net leverage by approximately 50% and as compared to 2023.
We will continue to be opportunistic in our efforts to further strengthen our balance sheet. On to Slide 12. Following the completion of the first half of the year, and an updated view on GDS industry growth, we have revised our 2025 outlook to incorporate our latest assumptions. We now expect full year Air Distribution bookings growth to be flat to low single digits. Our updated financial outlook reflects 3 potential scenarios based on varying levels of GDS industry bookings growth. While some recent airline commentary has been encouraging, uncertainty remains around the near-term trajectory of GDS industry volumes. Assuming second half 2025 Air Distribution bookings growth of 4%, 7% or 10%, we project full year 2025 Air Distribution volume growth of approximately 1.5%, 2% or 3.5%, respectively. On the slide, we have provided our view on revenue, pro forma adjusted EBITDA and pro forma free cash flow based on these 3 potential volume scenarios. As a reminder, our 2025 guidance treats revenue and pro forma adjusted EBITDA associated with the Hospitality Solutions business as discontinued operations for the full year and all prior periods beginning this quarter.
Full year 2025 revenue is expected to grow flat to low single digits, resulting in pro forma adjusted EBITDA in the range of approximately $530 million to approximately $570 million depending upon the underlying growth in Air Distribution bookings. We have not made any changes to our assumptions for either CapEx or cash interest. We expect pro forma free cash flow to range from approximately $100 million to approximately $140 million, and we expect to end the year with greater than $750 million in cash.
Moving to Slide 13 and the third quarter. Again, we are outlining 3 possible scenarios. These scenarios incorporate our expectations for accelerating bookings from our growth strategies through the remainder of 2025 offset by impacts related to the GDS industry and Sabre mix. For the third quarter, we forecast a range of Air Distribution bookings growth from 2% to 6% which would result in year-on-year revenue growth of low to mid-single digits. We expect pro forma adjusted EBITDA in the range of approximately $140 million to approximately $150 million.
We expect to generate positive free cash flow in the third quarter on a pro forma basis in a range of approximately $40 million to approximately $50 million. In closing, we are making progress on our strategy to generate free cash flow and delever the balance sheet and drive sustainable growth through renovation. We continue to anticipate an acceleration in volumes during the second half of the year with momentum into 2020.
And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.
[Operator Instructions]
First question comes from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.
2. Question Answer
If I'm looking on Slide 7, in Q1, I see the 4% headwind from Sabre mix and a 4% headwind from GDS industry. And if I look at Q2, it's pretty much the same. So I'm wondering, why was your prior guidance so optimistic as far as the rest of the year? It looks like sort of now just assuming those trends that you saw through the first 5 months continue, when that -- I would have thought would have been sort of the base case plus in May, we knew dose was impacting the government, you're calling out government and military, like we already knew that. We knew all the tariff uncertainty is impacting the macro and corporate travel.
So just having a hard time, like I see the reconciliation, but I'm having a hard time reconciling what happened like why last guidance was so optimistic and now maybe more realistic, if you can help give some commentary there.
Josh, thank you. Important to note that the impact of our growth strategies remains relatively constant to what we previously communicated. But notwithstanding the turbulence in the travel market, based on what we could see in May and before then, we were confident in our path towards achieving the prior full year 2025 outlook. .
Since that time, the market has continued to change. For example, airlines have pared back capacity. And ultimately, as we shared in our prepared comments today, we saw incremental industry weakness in June and into July. The current outlook or scenarios that we have provided today represent our view of where we believe the market is going for the balance of this year.
Okay. Got it. And so would you say as far as the way that you're -- I mean, I guess the guidance philosophy has changed just now we have like these different scenarios. But I mean, is the middle scenario sort of how you're thinking about like your base case or most likely in the middle? I'm guessing?
Josh, you have not provided a waiting on those three, we think that gives you a range of potential outcomes. The current trading environment would orient more towards the middle, we believe there's upside potential versus that.
Our next question comes from Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer & Company.
Just kind of circling back, is there anything that's changed with the -- I get the uncertainty around the macro. But -- is there anything like technology-wise, it's changed with the GDS rather impact from NDC or more direct bookings that's sort of causing industry bookings to be down? Is there anything you can share there? .
Thanks, Jed. You have to look at 2 components here. One is the GDS market at large. And as we indicated in our remarks, and I'll just hit back on that, you have a few factors. One is that corporate impact was relatively higher than leisure impact. Corporate books disproportionately through the GDS as compared to leisure, which books more so through airline direct. -- government military is down substantially. That impacts the GDS industry more so than it does for indirect -- or excuse me, direct distribution.
So I don't believe that those are structural issues. I think those are interim issues. And then Sabre is being disproportionately impacted by the GDS market changes, one, because we have very significant exposure to corporate and TMC to our exposure to government military. Then number three, unfortunately, on a year-to-date basis, markets where we have relatively stronger share have underperformed and markets where we have relatively lighter share have outperformed, and so that has worked against us. over time, that can go either way. That just happens to be going against us right now. I'll give you some examples. Markets where we have very significant share would include markets like Mexico, Australia, Korea, they're underperforming the global travel in GDS markets right now, markets where we have relatively lower share that are performing better, are markets like the U.K. or Greece or Norway, that will disproportionately benefit our competitors versus us for the time being, but we do not believe there's anything structural here, Jed.
Got it. And then as a follow-up, you're seeing some momentum with some of these call it, newer type travel agents, maybe more self-service that are seeing some good growth. However, a large percentage of their bookings are still done through the GDS. So is that an opportunity for you to claw some share back? Or is that a headwind? Can you just kind of help us how we should think about some of these newer types of travel management companies that are growing?
Yes. Jed, within the corporate space, we're seeing both A lot of well entrenched or more traditional TMCs are, in fact, performing well. I think GBT was out with results this week and had pretty good numbers. And then there's, as you indicate, new entrants we're well positioned with the new entrants and the predominant share bookings that they produce are through the GDS, and we're capturing our fair share of wallet there. So we believe that's a significant growth opportunity for the industry and for Sabre.
Got it. And then I know you -- I appreciate the back half guidance. As we kind of look throughout the next, call it, 18 months, can you talk about just any operating cost efficiencies you can get from AI or how we should be thinking about the cost structure over the next 18 months? .
Yes. Thanks for the question, Jed. And first, let me just highlight, if you look over the last 2 to 3 years. And you look at the cost reductions we've done, plus the combination of our tech transformation initiatives, collectively, that's reduced our annual run rate expenses by somewhere around the range of $400 million. What I would tell you is, going forward, we're going to be very mindful of expenses, as I look at our key expense lines, we talked about this on our last earnings call, as I look at technology expenses, for example, we have the benefit of our tech transformation initiative. We articulated this year, there'd be roughly $100 million benefit that wouldn't be the net benefit of the line because there's also some investment for growth strategies as well as higher hosting costs with the volumes. But net-net, technology costs still should be down pretty measurably for the year.
And I would just say, our original expectations on SG&A were that we'd be up slightly. I would say now it's more likely we're down slightly. We've been just very, very measured on incremental costs coming into the organization and actually would expect the cost to be -- start to bend a little lower in the third and fourth quarter. with that, as you think to 2026, look, we're going to continue to maintain very strong cost discipline. And our goal would be as we grow in distribution bookings and you can tell from the guidance, we expect to go into 2026 with good momentum, we'd look for a good portion of that gross profit to fall to the bottom line as a result of the cost discipline that we continue to have.
Our next question comes from Deepak Mathivanan with Cantor Fitzgerald.
This is Jack on for Deepak. I had a question on the multisource platform, the strategy there. Can you kind of talk about the progress you're seeing in signing more of these NDC agreements? I think the number was 38 live this quarter, just similar to last quarter. kind of what's the strategy to continue to bring supply online there? And then second, like kind of related, I think you mentioned a 6-month delay in the multisource LCC solution. Can you just talk a little bit more about what's driving that delay?
Thanks, Jack. First, with respect to NDC, I think among our competitive set, we have the most fulsome amount of NDC content in our portfolio. So we have 38 live NDC, we have a number of other signed agreements that are in the development pipeline, and we'll continue to meet the demand of carriers to bring that demand online. Importantly, when you look at our solution, it's not just connecting nodes to the network, we've built a lot of functionality that faces the buyer or the travel agency around shopping, cashing, workflow integration, to make it as seamless as possible regardless of the source of content, whether it's NDC or fact or different types of LCC connectivity.
I believe that our solution, which we call our multisource offering is the best in the marketplace today. It's one of the primary reasons we're having great success in signing and implementing new business on the agency side. Regarding the multisource opportunity, that's really thinking about the world beyond artifact and NDC while we have 150-plus low-cost carriers in the Sabre distribution system today, what we aim to do there, as I've talked about previously, is to add a long tail of LCC content that is not available in any of the GDS, the proxy for that would be Travelfusion, which is a Chinese company. And what we've done basically is develop a solution that seamlessly integrates that content with our defect and NDC content. We think it will be the most efficient way for agencies or buyers to access that type of inventory going forward.
The 6-month delay is simply an execution delay on our side from a tech standpoint. We're doing a lot of things to reinvent and transform this business. And I think overall, I'd give us a green light on our product execution. This is one where we're just a bit behind on what we anticipated 6 months or 3 months ago.
Our next question comes from Alex Irving with Bernstein.
You say you expect the reduction in bookings to be transitory for the underlying market. What gives you the confidence that it is transitory? And how much of that 9% underlying decline for GDS industry and your mix would you expect to reverse in 2026, please?
Yes. Thank you very much, Alex. And first of all, let me -- we have not provided 2026 guidance per se. We have very good line of sight to the ramp that we showed on Slide #7, which was the top or the black bar, which shows that we project the incremental impact of new business that we're bringing on to be 13 points in Q3, 19 points in Q4. Our exit rate coming out of July was above 10% or above 10 points. So we've got pretty good visibility and line of sight towards that outcome. What is more uncertain for the balance of the year is, as you referenced, the GDS marketplace and the relative impact to Sabre. Assuming a flattish GDS market beyond 2025, we would project our 2026 Air Distribution volume growth to be high single digit, simply based on the realization of what we're already executing against.
And coming back to your question with respect to the base business. The GDS market is down basically 300 to 400 basis points year-on-year. Again, that's largely attributable to the impact on what's down proportionately being on corporate travel and military and government travel. Those 2 sectors book almost entirely or exclusively through the GDS, whereas leisure books predominantly through supplier direct far less in the intermediary channel. And so I think what you have is an industry mix issue I do not believe that's structural. I think corporate travel is a healthy sector and will perform over time. And military and government is due to a lot of the turbulence you've seen year-to-date.
The Sabre impact specifically is because of our higher proportional exposure, again to corporate travel, where we have a significant majority portion of TMC bookings globally as well as military and government. And then as I mentioned, our relative geographic mix is working against us now. I don't believe that's structural. I think that's transitory based on what you're seeing around the world. If you look at the aviation industry, and we often track the health of the aviation industry, capacity growth is down very low single digit sort of nominal growth. The airlines have paired back capacity intelligently and their yield environment seems a bit more settled today than it was 90 days ago. Remember that we don't benefit from that. So when you hear the airlines saying things are improving, they're really improving relative to the prior yield expectations, volumes are roughly where they thought they would be whenever almost freak out maybe 90 days ago.
So I look at the fact that the GDS is down and Sabre is down in our base before the implementation of new business, I certainly don't like that, but I do not think that, that is structural in nature. I think it is based on the relative mix of channel and the relative geographic mix.
[Operator Instructions]
Our next question does come from Victor Cheng with Bank of America.
If I start with NDC, obviously, you have 38 live connections now. Why have we not seen a higher mix of NDC growth, I think some of your peers talk about very strong mix in there relative to maybe you -- so you can -- I know you have a higher corporate mix and all that, but still just trying to make sense of when should we expect NDC volumes to be growing a bit faster from your end?
Yes. Thank you very much, Victor. I'll take that. So first of all, NDC as a proportion of our distribution for us remains low single digit as a percentage. If you compare that against our largest competitor, and I think they're quoting a number than that, we believe that is almost entirely attributable to the reintermediation of certain former Direct Connect NDC volumes by certain large -- 1 or 2 large OTAs that have now put that volume through that competitor of ours.
When you normalize in, say, in the brick-and-mortar space and in the TMC space, we believe their NDC adoption is in the same range as ours. So we do expect going forward that NDC will scale and scale very well. It's not going to be the majority portion of our booking anytime in the near future, but it's becoming an ever more important part of the distribution landscape.
Got it. And if I look at the GDS industry, I think you said it's down 300 to 400 bps year-on-year in the first half. And if I look at what your peers are reporting as well, I struggle a bit to reconcile the numbers. I'm not sure what piece am I missing here if you can set some light on that as well?
Sure. As we've indicated before, our visibility to market does not include -- not all of our competitors disclose their NDC volumes. So when you look at effect and our assumption of NDC. That's where we get to being down 300 to 400 basis points on a year-to-date basis. Why did we trade where we traded at negative 1% versus, I think Amadeus came out slightly positive. Two things. One is they have, as I indicated, we believe the reintermediation of certain Expedia NDC direct connect volumes and perhaps one other OTA. And then number two, the geographic and the channel mix that I talked about, actually both would work in favor of Amadeus because they are disproportionately much higher leisure than corporate shop and their footprint benefits inversely to ours.
I got it. And if I can squeeze in my last question on revenue per booking, I think your peer seem to manage grow a bit stronger on renewals and pricing effects. Just wondering to what extent do you see that happening or the potential of that happening on your end as well as we go into H2?
Yes. What I would say is we look at our average booking fee, I would expect it to perform similarly as it has generally so far this year. I would expect -- if you look at booking fee in Q3, Q4, I would expect it to be pretty close to what it was in Q3 and Q4 last year. And if I take that a little further to gross margin, I talked a little bit about on the call, I would expect the gross margin to improve slightly in the second half of the year and being nearly in line with Q3 and Q4 last year.
And this concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Kurt Ekert for closing remarks.
Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for your participation today. We look forward to updating you in forward quarters, and we're focused on running a great business here at Sabre. Thank you. .
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.
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Sabre — Q2 2025 Earnings Call
Finanzdaten von Sabre
Umsatz
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Bruttoertrag
Der Bruttoertrag gibt an, wie viel vom Umsatz nach Abzug der direkten Herstellkosten im Unternehmen verbleibt. Berechnet man den prozentualen Anteil vom Umsatz, spricht man von der Bruttomarge (engl. Gross Margin).
Brutto Marge einfach erklärtVertriebs- und Verwaltungskosten
Die Vertriebs- & Verwaltungskosten (engl. Selling, General & Administrative expenses, kurz SG&A) beinhalten alle Aufwände für Marketing und den Verkauf sowie die allgemeine Verwaltung des Unternehmens.
Forschungs- und Entwicklungskosten
Die Forschungs- und Entwicklungskosten (engl. research & development costs, kurz R&D) geben Auskunft darüber, wie viel das Unternehmen in die Forschung und die Entwicklung seiner Produkte investiert. Vor allem prozentual vom Umsatz und im Vergleich zu direkten Wettbewerbern sind die Kosten interessant.
EBITDA
Das EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) ist der Gewinn des Unternehmens vor Zinsen, Steuern und Abschreibungen. Berechnet man den prozentualen Anteil vom Umsatz, spricht man von der EBITDA-Marge.
Abschreibungen
Abschreibungen stellen Wertminderungen von Vermögensgegenständen des Unternehmens dar (z.B. durch Abnutzung von Maschinen).
EBIT (Operatives Ergebnis)
Das EBIT (engl. Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) ist der Gewinn des Unternehmens vor Zinsen und Steuern, das auch als operatives Ergebnis bezeichnet wird. Berechnet man den prozentualen Anteil vom Umsatz, spricht man von
der EBIT-Marge.
Nettogewinn
Der Nettogewinn stellt den Gewinn oder Verlust nach Abzug aller Kosten dar.
Nettogewinn einfach erklärtaktien.guide Premium
| Mär '26 |
+/-
%
|
||
| Umsatz | 2.829 2.829 |
6 %
6 %
100 %
|
|
| - Direkte Kosten | 1.237 1.237 |
2 %
2 %
44 %
|
|
| Bruttoertrag | 1.593 1.593 |
9 %
9 %
56 %
|
|
| - Vertriebs- und Verwaltungskosten | 1.268 1.268 |
11 %
11 %
45 %
|
|
| - Forschungs- und Entwicklungskosten | - - |
-
-
|
|
| EBITDA | 427 427 |
5 %
5 %
15 %
|
|
| - Abschreibungen | 103 103 |
18 %
18 %
4 %
|
|
| EBIT (Operatives Ergebnis) EBIT | 324 324 |
0 %
0 %
11 %
|
|
| Nettogewinn | 497 497 |
389 %
389 %
18 %
|
|
Angaben in Millionen USD.
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Sabre Corp. ist ein Anbieter von Technologielösungen für die globale Reise- und Tourismusindustrie. Sie bietet datengesteuerte Business Intelligence-, Mobil-, Vertriebs- und Software-as-a-Service-Lösungen an. Das Unternehmen ist in den folgenden Segmenten tätig: Reise-Netzwerk, Airline-Lösungen und Hospitality-Lösungen. Das Segment Travel Network ist ein globaler B2B-Reisemarktplatz für Reiseanbieter und Reisekäufer. Das Segment Airline Solutions bietet ein Portfolio von Softwaretechnologie-Produkten und -Lösungen als Software-as-a-Service an. Das Segment Hospitality Solutions bietet Hoteliers auf der ganzen Welt Software und Lösungen über SaaS und ein gehostetes Bereitstellungsmodell an. Sabre wurde im Dezember 2006 gegründet und hat seinen Hauptsitz in Southlake, TX.
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| Hauptsitz | USA |
| CEO | Mr. Ekert |
| Mitarbeiter | 4.650 |
| Gegründet | 2006 |
| Webseite | investors.sabre.com |


