A quick note before you dive in: This piece originally ran as a guest post I wrote for The Dutch Investors, whose patient, quality-focused approach lines up closely with my own. I'm republishing it here in full in case you missed it over there, because I think it delivers real value and I don’t want any of my subscribers to miss out. It's a condensed look at three businesses I've already covered in full-length deep dives for paying subscribers – Germany's CTS Eventim, Singapore's Grab, and the US holding company Boston Omaha – distilled down to the high-level overview and the things I'd most want you to know about each: what the business does, where its edge comes from, why the stock is down, and how I think about valuation.
One housekeeping point: I wrote this a little while back (about 12-14 days ago), so share prices and a few figures may have potentially moved slightly since. Grab in particular is up some 15% since and also reported its latest quarter this week – I thought the results were fantastic fwiw – so keep in mind that the numbers in that section predate the print.
With that, enjoy.
Disclaimer:
As of the date of publication the author owns shares in Grab Holdings but not in the other two companies (Boston Omaha and CTS Eventim); but that may change. The analysis presented in this blog may be flawed and/or critical information may have been overlooked. The content provided should be considered an educational resource and should not be construed as individualized investment advice, nor as a recommendation to buy or sell specific securities. I may own some of the securities discussed. The stocks, funds, and assets discussed are examples only and may not be appropriate for your individual circumstances. It is the responsibility of the reader to do their own due diligence before investing in any index fund, ETF, asset, or stock mentioned or before making any sell decisions. Also double-check if the comments made are accurate. You should always consult with a financial advisor before purchasing a specific stock and making decisions regarding your portfolio.
Germany: CTS Eventim ($EVD.DE) – A Digital Tollbooth on Sale?
Let me start close to home. CTS Eventim is the undisputed heavyweight of European live entertainment and the second-largest ticketing provider on the planet, trailing only Live Nation.
Billionaire founder Klaus-Peter Schulenberg took the reins of a distressed 83-person Munich software firm back in 1996, relocated it to Bremen, and rebuilt it around a proprietary technology platform.
Since the IPO in February 2000, the stock has returned a staggering 2,350%, roughly 13% a year for more than two decades. And yet pull up the chart today and you meet a very different mood. The shares have been dead money for five years, and they sit around €56, down close to 50% from the peak they touched in May last year. So what happened to the tune?
How Eventim Makes Money
Eventim runs two segments that look like one entertainment powerhouse on paper but behave very differently underneath. The first, Ticketing, is the crown jewel. It contributes only about a third of group revenue yet throws off more than 77% of adjusted EBITDA and roughly 83% of operating profit.
Think of it as a digital tollbooth. For every ticket sold, the company collects a fee worth something like 10% to 15% of the face value, and because the infrastructure is already built, each additional transaction costs almost nothing to process.
The economics of a 100€ concert ticket could look roughly like this:
In 2025, that meant close to €9 billion in gross transaction value across nearly 178 million retail tickets, at an effective take-rate near 11%. Margins in this segment have topped 40% at the EBIT line for years.
The second segment, Live Entertainment, is the operational counterweight. Here Eventim acts as the principal risk-taker: through its Eventim Live network of nearly 40 promoters, it books artists, funds tours, and stages the shows.
This side carries much thinner margins and roughly 70% of group revenue, but it feeds the machine. The promoters route their high-profile tours exclusively through Eventim’s own software, self-sourcing the very inventory that the high-margin tollbooth then processes.
Add the physical venues the group manages or owns – the LANXESS Arena in Cologne, the Eventim Apollo in London, the new Unipol Dome in Milan – and you get a company that captures a margin at nearly every touchpoint, from promoter fee to venue rental to ticketing commission to the beer sold at the concession stand. Group revenue hit a record €3.1 billion in 2025.
Why It’s So Hard to Dislodge
Eventim’s grip on its core markets is the thing bears consistently underestimate. Estimates vary, but the company holds something like a 50% to 60%-plus share of primary ticketing across Germany, Italy, and Austria. In its home market that figure runs even higher; the German Federal Cartel Office itself established, in its 2017 abuse-of-dominance proceedings, that Eventim controlled 60% to 70% of ticketing system services for promoters. That dominance has only grown since. If you want to see a major touring act in Central Europe, you have virtually no route to your seat that doesn’t clear through Eventim’s portal.
That moat rests on a few reinforcing pillars. There’s the vertically integrated flywheel I described above, where owning promoters and venues forces high-margin volume through proprietary channels.
“Being vertically integrated enables Eventim to produce more concerts, which in turn drives high-margin ticketing revenue. More revenue in the industry drives artists to tour more, which further feeds the flywheel. Eventim’s revenue has grown at a low-double digit rate for many years with attractive margins and returns on capital. The business is asset-light, has a net cash balance sheet, and generates a lot of free cash flow. We are pleased to be shareholders and to be able to own this outstanding business with a substantial margin of safety.“ - Vulcan Value Partners
There’s the technology: EVENTIM.Net can absorb more than a million concurrent users during a stadium on-sale for the likes of Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran without buckling, a feat regional rivals can’t match, and building that industrial hardening in-house is cost-prohibitive for any single promoter.
There’s the data, over 260 million user profiles that let promoters target buyers with a precision smaller players can only envy. And there’s the demand itself, which is stubbornly price-inelastic. A live concert can’t be digitized, simulated, or streamed into the same thing. During the 2008–2009 financial crisis, while industrial sectors were being flattened, Eventim’s ticketing revenues actually rose 29%. Fans guard their concert budgets even when times are tight.
One more signal worth weighing. Schulenberg already controls roughly 38.8% of the company through his family vehicle, and as the stock cratered in early 2026 he deployed about €20 million of personal capital into two open-market purchases, at €54.37 and then €50.85. Insiders sell for all sorts of reasons; they generally buy for only one.
What Went Wrong
If the business is this good, why is the stock cut in half? A few anxieties are doing the work. The loudest is venue execution. When Eventim signed up to build the Milan arena for the 2026 Winter Olympics, the budget was pencilled in at €180 million. Global inflation, energy prices, supply-chain snarls, and design changes ballooned the final bill to nearly €400 million. Free cash flow took a visible hit, and the market began re-rating the company from an asset-light digital compounder into a lower-return, capital-heavy real estate operator. A new 20,000-seat arena committed in Vienna only sharpened that fear, though management insists venue ownership isn’t the primary objective and that it intends to keep only a minority stake in the property vehicle under a PropCo/OpCo structure.
Then came a cautious 2026 outlook in late March, guiding for roughly flat profit growth against analyst hopes for double digits, which knocked the stock down as much as 21% in a session. Part of that guidance reflected a structural change in the long-standing Stage Entertainment contract, which looks like Stage Entertainment insourcing its backend software. The relationship wasn’t lost entirely; the retail ticketing partnership was extended across four countries in April, protecting the high-margin point-of-sale volumes. There’s also a genuine margin-mix effect, since the lower-margin Live Entertainment segment has been growing faster than Ticketing, plus integration costs from the See Tickets and France Billet deals.
I won’t wave away the longer-term worries either. Regulation is a live risk: the Cartel Office already forced promoters to be able to distribute at least 20% of volume through third parties, and further fee interventions could follow. A well-argued short thesis frames the 2022–2023 boom as a post-COVID sugar high that should normalize. And Spotify, sitting on the music discovery funnel, could in theory disintermediate primary ticketing over time.
I happen to think Eventim’s vertical integration and the sheer localness of the business keep it defensible, and it’s telling that Q1 2026 came in strong – group revenue up 23%, EPS up 38%, like-for-like ticketing up 6% once you strip out the Stage accounting artifact. But these are the cracks worth pressure-testing.
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