The software provider Teamviewer has taken the loud criticism from investors to heart and negotiated an exit option from the expensive main sponsorship contract with the English football club Manchester United.
After confidential talks over the past few months, the companies have agreed that Manchester United can buy back the rights to the main shirt sponsorship and look for a new main sponsor, Teamviewer announced late Thursday evening.
After hours on the Lang & Schwarz trading platform, the Teamviewer share rose by almost 10 percent compared to the Xetra close.
The agreement goes hand in hand with the expectation that the people from Göppingen will step down from their role as the main shirt sponsor as soon as possible, according to the MDax company.
This should reduce the cost burden from the Man United sponsorship at the specialist for remote maintenance software to a single-digit million US dollar amount and thus significantly increase profitability.
With an adjusted scope of the partnership, Teamviewer is still able to build its brand awareness using Manchester United's reach.
Teamviewer bought into the British as a sponsor in March 2021 and paid dearly for it: Because of the high advertising costs, the company lowered its earnings forecast at the time, shocking its own investors, who dropped the share significantly.
Teamviewer did not give specific figures, but according to media reports, the place of the company logo on the shirt chest of the English Premier League team cost a good 50 million euros a year.
For comparison: Teamviewer made a good 501 million euros in sales in 2021 - around a tenth of the proceeds went to sports sponsorship.
The fall of the share also had personnel consequences, CFO Stefan Gaiser ultimately had to leave the company.
Investors such as the Petrus Advisers fund recently publicly called for the contract with Manchester and the Mercedes Formula 1 team to be withdrawn.
It was not enough for the sponsors that Teamviewer had already ruled out an extension of the five-year Manchester sponsorship in August.
When the corona pandemic broke out, Teamviewer experienced a special demand boom for its video conferencing solutions, the share rushed from record to record - by mid-2020 it had climbed to its record high of almost 55 euros.
After that, things went down, also because growth from the pandemic peak phase quickly petered out.
In October 2021, Teamviewer lost its medium-term goals, which caused the price to collapse again.
To this day he has not recovered from it.