The Platform Group - Stay Hungry

Exhibit: a black “THE PLATFORM GROUP” baseball cap and a copy of the CEO’s book “Stay Hungry” – a recent acquisition.

A cap and a management book: the standard merchandise of the German growth story. The book is Stay Hungry – Was bei der Karriere im Mittelstand zählt by Dr. Dominik Benner, chief executive of The Platform Group, a career guide for ambitious Mittelstand managers, half novel and half advice. The cap needs no explanation. Caps never do.

The company began life on the stock exchange under another name. fashionette AG, a Düsseldorf online shop for luxury handbags and accessories, floated on 29 October 2020, in the lockdown boom for anything with a checkout button. The shares peaked at €39.75 a few months later. Then the boom ended. By 2022 they traded in single digits, and Benner’s The Platform Group, which had taken a stake that year, merged into fashionette in 2023 and took over the listing and the name. The ticker became TPG, and the company has since been converted into an SE & Co. KGaA – a German structure that tends to leave the general partner firmly in charge.

The pitch was buy-and-build: acquire small, profitable niche platforms – optics and hearing aids, furniture, beverage machinery, freight goods – plug them into shared software and logistics, repeat. It ran at a remarkable pace. For 2025 TPG reported revenue of €728 million, up 39%, adjusted EBITDA of €55 million, eleven acquisitions agreed or initiated and a leverage ratio of 2.1. The deals were paid for with bank loans, a Nordic bond increased to €70 million, and new shares. In January 2026 came the big one: the intended purchase of the pharma wholesaler AEP, with more than €1 billion of revenue, which on a pro-forma basis would have doubled the group. To help pay for it, two million new shares were placed at about €4.90 each.

What the shareholders did not get was a dividend. Not for 2023, 2024 or 2025, and the 2026 annual general meeting had no vote on profit distribution on its agenda – only new authorised capital and a mandate for convertible bonds. Which brings us to the heart of this exhibit. At an annual general meeting, the speaker for the shareholder association SdK (Schutzgemeinschaft der Kapitalanleger) observed that the book’s title was well chosen: the shareholders, after all, would stay hungry, because a dividend was never coming.

The market had already reached a similar conclusion. The shares slid from about €9 in autumn 2025 to below €3 in spring 2026, as the AEP closing kept being postponed. In June 2026 a critical magazine report about the group's financing sent them from roughly €2.90 to €1.20 in less than three weeks. The company rejected the report point by point, stated that there was no threat of insolvency, and took legal action against the publisher, as it had already done successfully over earlier articles. The museum takes no view on who is right; it merely notes that the share price did not wait for the verdict.

The rest of the summer brought a €5 million bond buyback, a ransomware gang claiming stolen e-mails, and acquisition financing of up to €80 million, part of it from a company affiliated with the main shareholder. In August the half-year report showed revenue up 23%, confirmed guidance – and an AEP deal that still had not closed. In October TPG sold its stake in the beverage machinery platform. The shares trade at around €0.90, a market value of about €24 million for a group expecting adjusted EBITDA of €70–80 million this year. Either the market is very wrong or it has stopped reading the guidance.

Museum note: the cap still fits. The shareholders, as promised in the title, are hungrier than ever.

Further reading

• The Platform Group – Refutation of the manager magazin report of 12 June 2026 (2026)
• The Platform Group – Intended acquisition of the AEP pharma group (2026)
• The Platform Group – Half-year report 2026 (2026)
• ms-aktuell – Warum starke Zahlen die The Platform Group Aktie nicht stützen (2026)
• ForwardVerlag – Dominik Benner: Stay Hungry (book)