{"id":31334,"date":"2026-09-07T13:53:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T11:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/normanrentrop.de\/?page_id=31334"},"modified":"2026-09-10T11:11:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T09:11:10","slug":"vis-2026-norman-rentrop-pitches-a-mispricedmicro-cap-gem-hidden-in-plain-sight","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/normanrentrop.de\/en\/press\/vis-2026-norman-rentrop-pitches-a-mispricedmicro-cap-gem-hidden-in-plain-sight\/","title":{"rendered":"VIS 2026 \u2013 Norman Rentrop Pitches A MispricedMicro-Cap Gem Hidden In Plain Sight"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Jacob Wolinsky; 2026 Value Investing Seminar – Hedge Fund Alpha<\/a> <\/em>(Thursday, July 9, 2026)<\/em><\/p>\n

Few regulars at the 2026 Value Investing Seminar in Trani carry more institutional memory than Norman Rentrop. Having attended nearly every edition of the conference since its founding, the Bonn-based family investor arrived this July having literally taken the train from Germany to southern Italy – a deliberate choice that tells you something about the man. Rentrop, who bought his first stock at age ten, built a very successful publishing business before channeling the proceeds into a long-term equity portfolio and eventually founding TGV, a family investment office that manages capital for his family and hundreds of other business-owning families across the world. A Berkshire Hathaway shareholder since 1992 and an Omaha regular since 1997, Rentrop operates with a stated time horizon of next-generation-plus – thirty years or more. At this year’s seminar he used his slot to walk the room through a micro-cap idea he believes the market has almost entirely missed: .a Nuremberg-based digital marketing and price-comparison group trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.<\/p>\n

Why Old Businesses Die and New Ones Take Their Place<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before turning to the stock, Rentrop talked about business obsolescence. He asked the room how many attendees had used a printed telephone directory in the past twelve months. Almost no hands went up. That image – a subscription-based directory business that once seemed unassailable and then simply ceased to matter, is the analytical lens he applies to every investment. He then went further back in time, describing a wealthy family of whaling merchants whose grandfather and great-grandfather had built their fortune supplying oil from whale catches to power the new industrial machines of their era. When petroleum was discovered and drilled, the whale-oil business was finished. The lesson Rentrop drew was not pessimistic: it was to identify businesses whose competitive position is strengthening, not eroding, and to hold them for as long as the thesis remains intact.<\/p>\n

ad pepper media – A Micro-Cap with Two Distinct Engines<\/strong><\/p>\n

The stock Rentrop presented is ad pepper media International N.V. (ETR: APM), a company founded in Nuremberg in 1999 and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange’s Prime Standard since October 9, 2000. As he described it, the business has two distinct and complementary engines. The first is performance marketing, operated through the Webgains platform, which functions as a network connecting advertisers to digital publishers on a commission basis. The second, and the one Rentrop considers the more interesting growth driver, is price comparison, operated through the solute subsidiary and its portfolio of consumer-facing brands.<\/p>\n

The price comparison platform includes billiger.de and sparwelt.de, as well as shopping.de and PricePretzel, covering a range of consumer comparison and coupon use cases across German-speaking markets. Rentrop noted that automotive parts retailer Autodoc – with roughly two million items listed – is among the merchants active on billiger.de, illustrating the scale of inventory flowing through the platform. The valuation, as shown on his slides, stands at a market cap of approximately EUR 64 million, an enterprise value of roughly EUR 47 million, and an EV\/EBITDA multiple of around 7x on 2026 estimates. Rentrop’s framing: this is the kind of micro-cap that institutional investors cannot buy and that most private investors ignore.<\/p>\n

A History of Deliberate Portfolio Reshaping<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rentrop walked through the corporate history to show that management has been active and rational in reshaping the portfolio. The company acquired Webgains in May 2006, expanding into affiliate marketing. It took a 60% majority stake in ad agents in 2007, expanding into search and performance marketing services. The more recent moves are what Rentrop finds most compelling. Between October 2023 and July 2025, ad pepper invested in solute and built up to a 60% majority stake, paying 2.4x EBITDA – a price Rentrop described as extremely attractive. Within that transaction, solute acquired Checkout Charlie, a coupon platform, from RTL for 3x EBITDA. Then, in December 2025, the company sold its 60% stake in ad agents for 11x EBITDA, crystallizing a multiple nearly five times what it had paid and allowing it to concentrate resources on the Webgains and solute platforms.<\/p>\n

Rentrop characterized the Checkout Charlie acquisition as a particularly impressive example of capital allocation. When a consumer completes an online purchase, the checkout moment is a high-intent interaction – knowing that the buyer just transacted and is a demonstrated customer creates a natural opportunity to present coupons and related offers. Acquiring that asset at 3x EBITDA from a large broadcaster like RTL reflects both solute’s operational savvy and the broader indifference of large media groups to businesses that don’t move the needle for them but are transformative for smaller buyers.<\/p>\n

Management Continuity and the Ownership Structure<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rentrop placed considerable weight on management tenure, repeating the Buffett formulation that his preferred holding period is forever and noting that TGV thinks in terms of the next generation. He pointed out that Dr. Jens Korner has been with ad pepper since 2006, giving him two decades of institutional continuity at the group level. Bernd Vermaaten has led solute since 2018. Both executives have backgrounds as CFOs, which Rentrop views as a positive signal for capital discipline. Long-tenured, financially literate leadership is precisely what he looks for when assessing whether a company will still lead its category a decade from now. On the shareholder structure, Rentrop’s slides showed that CEO Michael Oschmann holds approximately 40.2% of the company, with Rentrop himself listed as holding around 7.0% and treasury shares accounting for roughly 4.6% of total shares outstanding, leaving a free float of approximately 48.2%. The slide carried an important conclusion: potential stock overhang is all but removed. With the two largest blocks held by a long-tenured operator and a committed long-term family investor, and treasury shares reducing the effective float further, the structure limits the kind of forced selling that can depress micro-cap valuations for years.<\/p>\n

The Stock Has Not Caught Up to the Business<\/strong><\/p>\n

The stock price does not yet reflect favorable acquisitions. Rentrop presented a long-term price and volume chart alongside Q1 revenue and EBITDA data for the ad pepper Group, showing a business that has improved its underlying economics – through the solute build-up, the Checkout Charlie acquisition, and the high-multiple exit from ad agents – while the equity has not responded. His argument was that the market, particularly in Germany’s shrunken listed-company universe, has been slow to price in the transformation. He noted that German regulators once instructed insurance companies to treat equities as risky, triggering broad institutional selling of German equities that hit the smaller end of the market hardest, and that the universe of publicly listed German companies has contracted sharply over the decades as private equity absorbed many businesses that might otherwise have remained public.<\/p>\n

The Investment Philosophy Behind the Idea<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the Q&A, an audience member asked whether Rentrop’s strategy is to begin research with products and services he and his family actually use – essentially a Peter Lynch-style approach. Rentrop confirmed it: his starting point is observing what he is buying, what his wife is buying, and what their children are buying. He also addressed how he thinks about engagement with management. Over the years he has experimented with different approaches, from activism to passive observation, but concluded that in the German two-tier board system – with its supervisory board and management board structures – the more productive path is building trust with management over time and influencing through ongoing dialogue rather than through board seats or public pressure. Measurement, in the end, comes down to returns on money invested across a multi-decade horizon.<\/p>\n

Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Price comparison and performance marketing are not whale-oil businesses. They sit at the intersection of consumer frugality – the German mentality of walking an extra mile to save ten cents, he said – and the structural growth of e-commerce. Management has been in place for nearly twenty years. The shareholder base is concentrated and stable. Recent acquisitions were made at single-digit EBITDA multiples, and the high-multiple sale of ad agents demonstrated the value that has been built. The current market valuation has not absorbed any of this. Rentrop argued the stock offers a setup he finds difficult to ignore – hopefully becoming another billiger? cheaper idea: a micro-cap that rewards patience and punishes haste.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jacob Wolinsky; 2026 Value Investing Seminar – Hedge Fund Alpha (Thursday, July 9, 2026) Few regulars at the 2026 Value Investing Seminar in Trani carry more institutional memory than Norman Rentrop. Having attended nearly every edition of the conference since its founding, the Bonn-based family investor arrived this July having literally taken the train […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"parent":276,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-31334","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nVIS 2026 \u2013 Norman Rentrop Pitches A MispricedMicro-Cap Gem Hidden In Plain Sight<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/normanrentrop.de\/en\/press\/vis-2026-norman-rentrop-pitches-a-mispricedmicro-cap-gem-hidden-in-plain-sight\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"VIS 2026 \u2013 Norman Rentrop Pitches A MispricedMicro-Cap Gem Hidden In Plain Sight\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by Jacob Wolinsky; 2026 Value Investing Seminar – Hedge Fund Alpha (Thursday, July 9, 2026) Few regulars at the 2026 Value Investing Seminar in Trani carry more institutional memory than Norman Rentrop. 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