Europe is being forced to care where its data lives, and IONOS is the only listed pure-play that already owns the answer: German-domiciled, EU-operated cloud infrastructure outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act.
It is already serving the German federal government through ITZBund, with an AI layer, being sold directly into 6.8 million European SMBs who are never going to build this themselves. Management expects AI to drive roughly half of incremental revenue this year and 80% by 2028, and public cloud grew 16% in Q1 against a market that had written the segment off.
The financials, in one line: \~€1.4bn revenue growing 7%, \~€530m EBITDA at 37-38% margins, sub-1% monthly churn on 6.8m customers, 20x LTV/CAC, 1.3x leverage heading to net cash by 2028, at \~€30.5 a share.
At \~9-10x EV/EBITDA it trades roughly in line with OVH and Hetzner and at a \~35% discount to GoDaddy, which runs a comparable SMB hosting model without the sovereign cloud asset or the government contracts. Couple interesting Substack articles to get started on this stock:
[https://open.substack.com/pub/somethings0ff/p/nobodys-buying-this-ionos-group-se?r=rc0eo&utm\_medium=ios](https://open.substack.com/pub/somethings0ff/p/nobodys-buying-this-ionos-group-se?r=rc0eo&utm_medium=ios)
[https://hightechinvesting.substack.com/p/ionos-is-this-one-of-europes-most](https://hightechinvesting.substack.com/p/ionos-is-this-one-of-europes-most)
