Allegro.eu SA
WSE:ALE
Earnings Call Analysis
Q4-2023 Analysis
Allegro.eu SA
In the fourth quarter leading up to Christmas, the consumer sentiment was subdued, which required aggressive marketing strategies to meet sales targets. Despite challenging economic conditions marked by reduced discretionary spending, declining average product prices, and inflationary pressures, the company sustained growth, outpacing its competitors. This build-up introduced a new key performance indicator (KPI) to reflect items sold, indicating a 13.9% growth in physical transactions despite an 8.5% growth in gross merchandise volume (GMV), highlighting a significant drop in the average price point of products.
The revenue increase for Q4 was 18.4%, equating to PLN 2.4 billion, largely driven by take rate increases reaching 11.68%. The growth mix comprised marketplace GMV growth of 16.4%, advertising revenue surge of 31.2%, and a whopping 226% leap in Allegro Pay and logistics stemming from notable gains on loan origination and sale. The adjusted EBITDA saw a 28% increment, with margins improving by 90 basis points to 5.8% compared to the previous year, largely resulting from GMV monetization and burgeoning margins in advertising and Allegro Pay.
Operational efficiency was maintained with a controlled increase in net cost of delivery. The Smart customer base expansion contributed positively with adjusted subscription rates leading to increased revenue, despite additional marketing costs to stimulate consumer demand. Capital expenditures in the Polish market reflected a 23% reduction compared to last year, which is in line with cost-reduction measures under the Fit to Grow initiative.
The allegro.cz marketplace in the Czech Republic reported significant strides with a 110% GMV growth and improvements in active buyers, traffic, and conversion rates. The company expressed confidence in their international ventures, expecting to reach breakeven within 3-4 years from each new market's launch. Allegro.cz's adjusted EBITDA recorded a start-up investment loss of PLN 109 million for the quarter, a slight improvement from Q3. Overall, the group faced challenges in the international segment, with a planned intense drive to transform and shrink the loss-making systems.
With a set of long-term business objectives in place, including solidifying marketplace fundamentals, building new engines, and international expansion, Allegro aims to secure its position as the preferred regional and potentially European marketplace. Financial aspirations for growth and profitability trend towards a low double-digit GMV CAGR in Poland, supported by international business growth. The intended margin progression points towards sustaining the recently achieved 5% level with a possibility of further improvement.
Up to 20% of Polish EBITDA will be allocated to international operations funding, with further investments in Polish CapEx focusing on growth-driving or cost-reducing projects. As for Q1 2024, an expected GMV growth of 9-10% in Poland, 18-20% rise in revenues, and a 28-31% increase in Polish EBITDA is projected, while the international segment may face a 3-5% year-on-year GMV decline. For the international segment, the anticipated Q1 loss ranges from PLN 120 million to PLN 140 million, including the initiation of operations in Slovakia. Software development will be the main beneficiary of the planned CapEx of PLN 20 million to PLN 30 million.
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Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Jota, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining Allegro Group earnings call and live webcast to present and discuss the results of the fourth quarter of 2023. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tomasz Pozniak, Investor Relations Director. Mr. Pozniak, you may now proceed.
Thank you, Jota, and welcome to everybody on our call. It is my pleasure to have with us today Roy Perticucci, the CEO of Allegro, who will guide you through the business highlights of the fourth quarter; and Jon Eastick, our CFO, who will elaborate on financials, medium-term aspirations and the outlook for the first quarter.Our results presentation is available for download from our allegro.eu website. You also may download it from the link available on the webcast screen.As a reminder, today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from the plans expressed in such statements. Please make sure you review the full disclaimer on Slide #2. Please note also that this presentation and the Q&A session are being recorded and will be available for a reply on the website at allegro.eu.With this, I would like to hand over to Roy.
Thank you very much, Tomasz. It's my pleasure to be with you a seventh time now as Allegro's Chief Executive. I'll be sharing with you today the Q3 results for 2023, as well as the results for the full financial year.And before I sort of step through some of the details and some of the elements of our strategy over the last year and quarter, I'd like to sort of also present to you an overview of how we're doing as a group.I think it's fair to say that we have righted the ship. 94% of our GMV is generated in our home Polish market. And I think we are in a much stronger financial footing in our Polish base than we have for a number of years, and I'll go through that in a number of different areas.First off, for the group, GMV has grown to PLN 58.4 billion. That's 11.2% up year-on-year, and that reflects the strong growth of the Polish business of 11%, despite the fact that consumer demand was highly variable and often quite weak throughout the year, especially in December.That, overall, relatively strong growth in Poland was also supplemented by our allegro.cz marketplace, which was launched in effectively the third quarter of last year and grew from Q3 to Q4, up by 110%.Revenue grew even faster than GMV. We reached PLN 10.3 billion, that's 13.8% up year-on-year, and that's reflected in, firstly, by about 66 bps worth of take rate improvement for Polish operations. Most of that was related to co-financing for Smart! deliveries, but was also complemented by 3 other revenue streams, advertising, fintech and logistics, all of which grew faster than the overall GMV.EBITDA also came in with, I think, in noticeably strong result. We have a GMV margin of about 4.35% for the group and 5.4% for Poland. That's 18% up year-on-year. The total was PLN 2.5 billion. And that reflects not only some changes -- some of the changes to our delivery arrangements with various suppliers, but also our continuing work on Fit to Grow, which for the year delivered about PLN 250 million of benefits. Some of those things include sort of the MOV changes, which we lapped the co-financing I mentioned earlier.I think we've reached an inflection point in terms of capital expense. I've mentioned in other presentations that we now have a rigorous set of approvals processes for any new investment, either in people in terms of software development, in particular, or in capital. And we've been focusing on a very solid return of investment on both these kinds of investments. Not to mention that we've also been working very hard to improve the utilization of investments that we've made already, and I'll take in more on that.I think emblematic of that change is it cost us roughly PLN 30 million in software development to launch the allegro.cz marketplace. Subsequently, it cost us only PLN 3 million of investments to ready the marketplace to enter in Slovakia, which we did at the very end of February, a soft launch. It's running extremely well. And hard launch is now scheduled in a matter of weeks.So not only are we cheaper, but we're also faster. We had roughly about a 6-month interval between soft and hard launch in Czech, a little bit less than that, frankly. But the -- we have roughly only 6 weeks between soft and hard launch in Slovakia. So good all around.There are, I think, 2 broad themes or maybe 3 themes that I'd like to share with you. I think the theme that you're familiar with us over decades now is continuous innovation and adjustment to customer needs. You see that also in the rapid evolution of our website and the services that we offer.To that, particularly as we have a growing impact in Poland, but we're also realizing now also in the international expansions. It's not just good enough to recruit new customers, but what we really care about more and more is that those customers, once they shop with these ones return to us with ever-increasing frequency. And you see some of that in the numbers.First of all, active buyers continues to grow in Poland, up by 4.2% to 14.6 million. And for the group, it's now 19.6 million, which reflects additional customer accretion in addition to our legacy sites also to our new marketplaces.GMV per active buyer, a true reflection of that ever-increasing intensity of our relationship with customers grew by a 6.4% in Poland to PLN 3,700 and PLN 3,000 as an average for the group. That translates to GMV growth in Poland that outpaced the total retail market growth by 3.3x. So not only buyers recruitment, but again, ever-increasing shopping frequency is, I think, a very important thing for us. GMV growth for the group was 6.8% and for Poland it was 8.5%.Now there are other additional revenue streams in addition to just the GMV, noticeably take rate, which in Poland improved by 77 basis points to 11.7%, and advertising, which grew by a remarkable 31% to 1.7% of GMV. So that translates in a Polish total revenue growth of 18.4%.Now unfortunately, the group performance is -- in terms of revenue growth is disappointing, because it reflects the declining revenues of the legacy estate outside of Poland, and I'll cover that more later. But rest assured, this is a problem that we're very, very much aware of.Like I said, we have brought the Polish business on to a very solid financial footing. And now we are -- now that we've captured that territory and held it, we're dedicating a vast amount of attention and management time to also sort out our legacy operations outside Poland.Another theme was this theme about operational excellence. Again, rather like loyalty, it's something we've always known, but now we're doubling down on. Again, this reflects, I think, particularly in the EBITDA performance, particularly in the Polish business.EBITDA for Poland reached PLN 906 million for Q4. And in terms of GMV margin, it moved to 5.8%. You see EBITDA for the group was up -- sorry, group was up 12.5%, 28% up for EBITDA. Cash conversion also improved markedly up by 8 percentage points.And combined with this low point in CapEx, we've brought our leverage down from a rather difficult 2.9x in Q4 of '22 to our current 1.8x. And I wouldn't be surprised if we can also continue to improve that slightly.So the deleveraging and cash generation is, if you will, our war chest for the careful investments in future growth, both within Poland and beyond.I think overall, we've done pretty well. You've been familiar since I took the helm to talk to you about our 7 priorities. I introduced them to you in September of 2022. And I think we're getting to a point where we'll shift gears. But sort of quickly in overview, I'd like to take you through where I think we are on our scorecard.I think the performance in Poland has been remarkably strong, perhaps even exceptional, given the very difficult trading conditions in terms of consumers, even in the most festive part of the year being very careful about what they spend.I think Allegro Pay has gone from strength to strength, you'll see that later on in my review. And I think the Czech launch has gone quite well, a little bit behind in Slovakia. Again, one of our tactics. Our strategy actually was to develop a robust playbook so that we can do subsequent launch as much more effectively. And I think we're beginning to demonstrate that in Slovakia.Smart! and delivery economics, we presented as 2 -- a single topic where, I think, increasingly, you were convinced these are 2 different topics. Smart! is all about a collective program to make customers increasingly loyal with us, and delivery economics is about cost, particularly unit cost efficiency and reliability. And we'll talk about those, I think, more in those terms in the future.I do think we've held a reasonably good line where costs for all of us have been increasing, negotiate particularly with InPost sell, something that was something less than what was contractually agreed to for 2024. And we've also, of course, made great strides in utilizing our own resources.In terms is Fit to Grow, we've spoken about at length. You can see this is also the result of EBITDA. And people and culture is not what I normally talk about in earnings calls, but I think it's also an area of competitive advantage. We've done some very basic work, I think, in terms of HR processes.We've defined and launched the leadership principles for managers in the business, which we call the Allegro Way and aligned a lot of the basic performance management and promotions processes, not to mention recruitment to reflect those values that we hold to be very important.Clearly, the largest single disappointment in our whole scorecard is a highly unsatisfactory performance of the 1P legacy businesses. But I would say that given the strength in the rest of the score card, we have both the resources and also the management capacity to attack this one much more robustly during this year.So let me just touch a few other points going forward. You've heard about the flywheel many, many times since we first introduced it, I believe, that was at IPO. I think there are just a few highlights I'd like to call out.First of all, I think the Smart! program is actually moved to a very different place. Only 5% of Smart! memberships are not related with some sort of -- 95% are fee paying, which reflects, I think, the broad acceptance of customers that they actually see value of belonging to Smart!, and we will continue to do things to strengthen that program as we go on.In terms of merchants, we've implemented the rate card not once but twice. We used to have something around 140 or actually 240 different fee elements of what we charge customers, SME merchants, the list. We've reduced that now to 47. So simplicity while keeping attractive rates, I think, is one very important thing to help merchants in this case, understand what they're actually paying for.Selection has grown by 72% year-on-year. That's 500 million offers or about 140 million products. And we're very proud of our best price guarantee, which in Poland covers 600,000 products, but costs us only about one basis point of GMV.Loyalty, that topic I introduced a couple of slides ago, super important. I talked about the Smart! program, but we're also increasingly using the app as a very sticky way of incorporating our relationships with customers into their daily lives. And app share in the visit mix grew by 3.6 percentage points year-on-year. So overall, I think strong flywheel. This flywheel continues to turn as we continue to reinforce all aspects of it.Advertising, I don't think there's too much more to say at this point other than we're about 3.5x in terms of growth of the GMV growth as a whole.The Allegro Pay, on the other hand, really continues to grow steadily at above 40% year-on-year. The origination portion of the business is up 43% and is now covering about PLN 2.6 billion in Q4, whereas the other secondary driver, I would say, of the business, which is the GMV support has now moved to 13.3% of GMV.And again, here, this topic of loyalty is important. We've introduced -- and we're testing currently a new backing product called Allegro Cash, which is effectively a cashback program. It's in pilot, but it fundamentally says, "The more you shop, the more you save with us." And that's something we'll work on.Allegro.cz, our first step in the international expansion, moving into the first of the 5 countries within the legacy mall catchment area, now has 1.6 million active buyers. That's not bad, I think, in a country of 10.5 million people. And 60% of those were new to the group.So not only its large and growing, but new group people to a site that's only been in the country for a better part of what 7 months, 8 months. So also, what I think we're quite pleased to see is that the share of returning customers is increasing as is conversion.Smart! key to our loyalty program, not just in Poland but everywhere has reached over 500,000 or 0.5 million customers, and that's up 70% quarter-on-quarter.Merchants, critical, to driving selection, have increased by 10% on the quarter to 30,000, and we're also strengthening the presence of our own merchants, namely mall.cz and CZC and allegro.cz plan, and they are up to a 14% share of GMV for Q4.Best Price, something that's, I think, also helped our leadership in growth in the Czech Republic, now covers 70,000 products, reinforcing that already well-recognized price perception and price strength. And many of the features that we're developing for Poland are immediately moved to the other regions where we have a marketplace.We're now the second largest e-commerce player in Czech, as a standalone entity, not counting also the legacy sites, just the marketplace on its own. And we have -- we're enjoying a growing share of free traffic, which is 3 percentage points above our expectations. And in part, it's driven by that very great app that we have, up 10% quarter-on-quarter.I can't say too much more about Fit to Grow. I think the numbers speak for themselves. And I think the thing we should say, though, it's shifting now markedly, not just from being a project, but the way we want to work. Of course, the more efficient we are, not only do we reduce the risk of disappointing customers when we make a promise, but it also means that we have more cash to invest in growth.I would say, though, that I'm excited with some of the developments in delivery experience. The APM network in Poland reached 3,500 machines and utilization was up 3x in the year. Obviously, much more to do there. And we're doing it Christmas peak passed with record late cut-offs, and we hit our Christmas pharmacies 99.94%, which I think is what [ 5 Sigma ].Also, I thanks to our friends at InPost, we were able to agree a volume discount variation to the 7-year framework agreement with InPost, at least for 2024.So the last thing I'll talk about is, unfortunately, I think -- well, 2 things, let's say. First of all, Fit to Grow, and I think you see we're very much focused on achieving better operational leverage. And we've reduced headcount by about just under 5% year-on-year in the quarter 4, driven by a 20.5% decrease in the Mall segment.And that brings me to Mall, which I say myself say is, even though we've been able to hold losses constant for the year in quantum terms and we have been able to reduce inventory proportional to the decrease in turnover, overall, we have quite a bit of work still to do, and we are doing it.We've -- to close before I hand over to Jon, I'd just like to say we put some more structure into our ESG components. We describe it as the [ 3P plus G ]. The 3P are people, planet and prosperity. You see the metrics that we are most likely to put into our headlines in future communications with you as well, of course, is anything that's relevant in terms of good governance.And with that, I'm going to hand over to Jon for the financial results.
Thank you very much, Roy. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to take you through the Q4 financial results around our Polish and international operations and then also through our management outlook information towards the end of the presentation.As usual, I'll start with Polish operations and you have the key KPIs for Q4 and the whole of 2023 laid out on Slide 16. I'll start my detailed remarks on the following slide, where we have set out our active buyer and spend per active buyer key growth KPIs.And as you heard from Roy already, the trading performance in Poland has actually been very resilient in the face of headwinds from the cost of living crisis that we've been facing during the course of 2023. And you can see that resilience in these numbers.596,000 active buyers added, which 4.2% over the 12-month period. We've landed on 14.6 million active buyers in the Polish market for the full -- as at the end of 2023.Also in terms of spend per active buyer, we've managed to increase that in the face of avoidance of discretionary spending and trading down on the part of the customers. We've managed to grow it due to additional volume. And overall, it's gone up by 6.4%, landing at PLN 3,739 for a 12-month period for the average customer as of Q4.So putting that together, and I'll move on then to the next slide and look at the GMV. As you've heard, GMV in Poland, up by 8.5% in the fourth quarter. That's PLN 15.7 billion of GMV. For the full year, we moved on to PLN 54.8 billion, and that's a 10.9% year-on-year increase overall.As you've heard, the run-up to Christmas was pretty weak in terms of the consumer sentiment. We had to hustle a lot and spend a lot of marketing to deliver our numbers. But overall, we think we did pretty well in the circumstances.Now, we decided that we would add a new KPI, which you see on this slide for the first time, which is items sold. We wanted to give you a physical measure of the supply side of the GMV, and we came up with this metric, which quite a few other issuers use. And you can see here, 13.9% growth in items sold in the fourth quarter, so much higher than the 8.5% of GMV growth, which effectively means that the average price point on what we're selling has dropped significantly in Q4.And if you look back to Q1, you can see exactly the opposite dynamic. So there was still a lot of inflation in our growth back at the beginning of the year, yes. So you can see the overall trends at work regarding trading down, lack of discretionary spending, falling inflation. And through all of that, we've managed to keep growing the business and outpacing most of the other players.So moving on, let's look at revenue. As you've heard already, 18.4% revenue growth for the fourth quarter, that's PLN 2.4 billion of revenue. A key driver obviously was the take rate increases. For the fourth quarter, we've landed on 11.68% total take rate, and that is 0.77% or 1% higher than the fourth quarter of last year.Far and away, the biggest contributor to the growth has been the July increase in the rate card, and in particular, in the co-financing rates that we changed at that moment. Other than that, the rates have been largely stable throughout the year.Looking at the different elements of revenue growth. Therefore, the marketplace GMV plus take rate contributes 16.4% growth. Advertising has moved on to 1.66% of GMV with a 31.2% revenue growth rates.And the other category that we report here includes other revenue and the operating income, which is now being split out separately with effect from Q4 due to the materiality now of the trading gains or gains on sale, I should say, that come from Allegro Pay's loan origination and sale of their loans to our financing partners. I'm happy to take questions on that later if you want some more detail. But that's 226% growth overall across Allegro Pay and logistics, in particular, in the other category.So then moving on to adjusted EBITDA. And as you've heard, 28% adjusted EBITDA growth, that means PLN 906 million of EBITDA for the fourth quarter, and that means that the margin on GMV for Poland has moved up to 5.8 percentage points, which is a 90 basis point improvement on the situation for Q4 a year ago.Now a lot of that growth is, obviously, coming from the GMV and monetization. It's also coming from the very high margins that we enjoy on our advertising business and also increasingly on our Allegro Pay origination business and fee and interest that we earn on the loan portfolio. You see that on the left-hand side of the slide.We've also continued to do very well at controlling our net cost of delivery increase, as the Smart! business or the Smart! customer base continues to expand. PLN 107 million drag on our EBITDA compares to about PLN 115 million for the prior quarter.And this is coming from a couple of sources in terms of cost control. First of all, the Smart! customers pay more than they did a year ago. The subscriptions went up in November of 2022. Now all the customers are paying higher commissions -- sorry, subscriptions. And more of the Smart! users are actually now subscription payers as opposed to free users. Almost everyone now is paying subscription fees. So that's one contributor.And the second one is the changes we made to MOV that have resulted in a shift away from Korea of 8 percentage points in the mix for the fourth quarter, which obviously reduces the average price that we're paying. Offset by, obviously, delivery cost price increases, including the InPost increase for Q4 that kicks in November. But, overall, that's going very well.We did spend more on marketing in the fourth quarter, given the relatively weak consumer demand that we were seeing, especially in December. And other SG&A, to Roy's comments around the impact of Fit to Grow projects, in particular, phenomenally only grew by PLN 4.4 million compared to the fourth quarter of last year.If I move on to capital expenditure on the Polish business, continues to be down compared to the prior year. This time, 23% below the fourth quarter of last year, which was already being impacted by the Fit to Grow measures that we started taking at the end of the third quarter. Overall, the reasons for the declines are the same themes, as previously, so I won't go over them one more time. So that concludes on the Polish business.Now let me move on to the international part of our operation. And as you've heard from Roy, we've now been running more or less 10 months, but 7 months of 2023, the allegro.cz marketplace business. So we've now got some history that we can share with you.And that's enabled us to actually meaningfully separate the way we're presenting the financials for the Mall segment and also for the Marketplace segment. So I'll start with the Mall segment, so what we've also referred to as the legacy business that we acquired in 2022.And you have key numbers presented on Slide 22, but let me focus on 23 and the 2 bridges that you see here. So first of all, I think the big picture comment here is that the fourth quarter looks very similar to the third quarter picture that we had in terms of GMV decline on the one hand, but a very stable adjusted EBITDA loss on the other.And the reason for that is that we continue to dial back on marketing spend where we don't see a positive ROI on the expenditure. We're also trying to get out of products that don't have positive margin taking into account all downstream costs. That's been contributing to the reduction in the inventory that Roy mentioned. And so quite a significant release of working capital that has helped to fund the losses that we've been having to bear.So we're continuing to downsize the business on the one hand. We're making cost savings on the other. Unfortunately, so far, it's only been enough to tread water in terms of the size of the loss. We registered a PLN 40.7 million loss in Q4. And as Roy was saying, we're really going to be doubling down on our efforts now to continue and finish the transformation effort to make Mall a very effective and lean merchant operating on the marketplaces around the region and to cut down these losses really significantly.So that's Mall. Let's move on to our new baby and allegro.cz in the international marketplace. Summaries are on Slide 24. And here, we're giving you on Slide 25, some detail on some of the key revenue drivers or GMV drivers, I should say. Roy already talked about the 1.6 million active buyers that we had at the end of Q4, 107% up on Q3.Traffic was up 78%. There was a lot of competition for traffic in the Czech market in Q4. But our items sold was up to 5.2 million, a 127% growth sequentially from Q3, which implies, of course, that the conversion rate was also much better than in Q3.It's actually reaching a level which we start to recognize now, it's up to half the level that we see in the Polish business. And that's really impressive after just what, half a year of operation.Loyalty metrics are also building very nicely, both in terms of customers returning after the first purchase and then also subsequently going on to their additional purchase -- multiple purchases and increasing their loyalty and their habit of shopping with allegro.cz.So that all combined resulted in the PLN 411 million of GMV that we produced, 110% growth, in line with the ambitious guidance that we set a quarter ago to more than double the GMV Q-on-Q for the fourth quarter. It also -- this was also achieved in the face of the appreciation of the Polish zloty, which created a headwind of approximately another 7% on the result. On a constant currency basis, we'd have grown more like 120% taking that into consideration.Looking at the adjusted EBITDA, and what I would term at this point in the development of the business, a start-up investment loss, we had PLN 109 million loss for the fourth quarter, and this was slightly better in terms of percentage of GMV than we saw in Q3, 26.6%.And I'm pleased to say that before -- that we are now starting to see a direct contribution before the fixed cost that we carry for running for the team that will ultimately run all the marketplaces across the region. And also, obviously, before the marketing costs that we're using to fuel the growth and to build the loyalty of the customers. So allegro.cz really firing on all cylinders.So then let me move on to comments on the total group. And as usual, I'll limit these really to focusing on how we're doing in terms of group leverage. As you've already heard, we're down to 1.83x multiple of our adjusted EBITDA, which is an improvement of over 1 turn during the course of the last 12 months.In the last quarter, this has been particularly supported by cash generation coming from our move to switch merchants from receiving an invoice for their commission at the end of the month to having their fees netted on the day of the transaction.That's contributed PLN 345 million of cash and PLN 345 million less receivables on our balance sheet at the end of December. And the good news is we're only halfway through that project. In Q1, we're doing the remaining half of the merchants, mainly the bigger merchants, and that's been proceeding very effectively and will lead to a further improvement in cash on hand and a further reduction in receivables.So that all together gives us a lot of confidence that leverage is going to keep going down during the course of 2024. And as you'll recall, we've also extended the term of our loans by 2 years out to 2027, so we now have a massive amount of financial flexibility built into our balance sheet. So that's it for the financials.Let me now move on to the management outlook, which is really the result of the hard work that we've all been doing within the Allegro team on our financial planning process for 2023/2024. And I'm going to start with, first of all, a slide entitled, "Medium term business objectives."As Roy mentioned, we've stabilized the ship, and the 7 priorities, which really were short-term priorities are now being gradually morphed into a set of business objectives that we expect to be valid for a longer period of time for multiple years to help the team manage the business going forward. And these are all set with a view to delivering on our long-term vision, which is to make Allegro the most loved marketplace, first across the CEE region, but also across Europe in the fullness of time.And if you look at the -- this slide, there's basically 4 categories of business objectives. The 2 in the middle business -- build new engines and expand internationally. You'll see maybe slightly different words, but essentially the same themes that appeared in some of the priorities. 5 points that sit there.If you look at the one to the left, the grow core marketplace, this has largely replaced the perspective of strong in Poland. And here, we're calling out 2 themes which really we believe will unlock continued growth in the marketplace over multiple years. One is the ease and convenience and safety of shopping and making it simple to sell. And the second one is all about continuing to relentlessly increase the loyalty of our customers.On the right-hand side, you have solid -- ensuring solid business fundamentals. And this reflects one of the original priorities, the people and culture, but it also covers our ESG agenda, and it covers especially as we move to be a multinational business, having group-wide systems architecture and software and also -- that will underpin our operations and also excellence in our software development processes to make sure we're picking the right projects to drive our growth and cost reduction. So those are the business objectives.Now, I'm going to move on and talk about an update to our medium-term aspirations, so the financial perspective. And here, I'm basically building on the medium-term aspirations that we originally announced at this time last year. And on -- and basically, we split them into 2 categories, and you'll see that there's a lot more detail this year than we were able to provide a year ago.On the left-hand side, I'm dealing with growth and profitability. So how fast we're growing and what kind of margins that we can expect to generate cash flows. And on the right-hand side, what we're going to do with those cash flows, the capital allocation model for the next few years.So let me start on the left-hand side with growth and profitability. And beginning with Polish GMV, this very much looks as it did last year. We're expecting low double-digit GMV CAGR over the coming years, which implies some acceleration in the coming years from all our efforts to continue growing the business at pace.That's going to be supported by an accelerating factor from the international business. The marketplaces will, in due time, overwhelm the contraction in the legacy business in terms of GMV and start to contribute to the top line GMV growth to a material extent.A year ago, we also told you in Poland, we will be looking to get our margins back to a 5% level. And I'm pleased to say that we managed to do that and then some, as you've heard, 5.4% for the full year of 2023.We're going to try and sustain that level. We're going to try and maintain what we've achieved through all the efficiency initiatives that we did during 2023. And we even see a path to move up somewhat from there, maybe even up to a level like 5.7% in the course of time over the next couple of years.We've also now got enough information regarding our international business that we can now confidently start to give you a prediction about how long it's going to take to get to a breakeven point on our marketplace launches. We're estimating that it's going to take between 3 and 4 years from launch for each new market.So in the case of allegro.cz, which was up and running already in May last year, this means 2026, 2027, in that time frame, we'd be looking to get to breakeven. The other markets, obviously, will follow in due course.Then the other key point, and we mentioned it a number of times, the critical imperative really right now is to complete the transformation of the Mall segment into a lean merchant that is contributing to the performance of the marketplace. And we're giving ourselves 2 years to finish this, and we're just finding finishing it is getting to the point where it's no longer being a drag on our cash flow in the overall group. So that's the growth and profitability.Now let me look at the capital allocation, and in particular, what does it mean for how we spend some of the money that we generate from the Polish business with its prodigious cash flows?So the first key point is that we're going to allocate up to 20% of the Polish EBITDA to fund the investments in the international operations. That means in the short run, it will have to cover the losses that we're incurring as we turn around the Mall business and the start-up investments that we're making to get through to breakeven on the new marketplaces, also the capital investments.Over time, as we get towards breakeven, we'll need less and less funding, obviously. So really, you should look at this as a peak funding requirement over the next few years.The second allocation of our free cash flow from Poland would be relating to our Polish CapEx program, and this is again up to 20%, so quite a bit more than we've been spending in recent times for funding Polish CapEx investments. And these would be projects that really drive growth or reduce costs and in particular, reducing delivery costs, yes. So we may spend more over time to develop the our own proprietary delivery capabilities.And then the final point, obviously, that's accounting for 40% of the cash flow from Poland. Of the 60% that remains, we have to pay our interest on our net debt, and we have to pay tax. So what's left will go to reducing our leverage even further. And we're targeting for the time being, a 1x net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage level.And we want to keep enough liquidity and backup facilities available to maintain financial flexibility, so that we're ready both for grasping any opportunities that come along, but also to deal with any challenges that may come our way. So that's the medium-term aspirations, sets out where we're going for the next 5 years or so.Now let me just deal with the next quarter, the final slide that deals with the Q1 2024 outlook. So as we said in our trading update, we've been seeing after that low point of the demand situation back end of November and in December in the run-up to Christmas.In Q1, we've actually been seeing a steady acceleration in year-on-year growth from January through to March. It's now getting towards a double-digit type of level, but there is the huge Easter holiday coming at the very end of Q1, normally, it falls in Q2, and that will take the growth rate down a little bit. So we're expecting 9% to 10% as the GMV growth for the first quarter in the Polish business.We've also announced and just implemented our co-financing increases for 2024. They kicked in on the 29th of February. So that is going to produce a take rate increase, which, together with our other drivers of advertising and Allegro Pay will result in, we think, between 18% and 20% year-on-year growth in revenues.And that together with the work we're doing on cost and efficiency should feed through into something like 28% to 31% increase in Polish EBITDA for Q1. CapEx, similar sort of levels than in the previous quarters, between PLN 110 billion to PLN 120 million for the quarter.Now if we talk about international, the marketplace is growing and is gradually starting to offset the size of the declines that we're getting on the Mall business. We're expecting somewhere between a 3% and 5% year-on-year GMV decline for the first quarter.That translates into a much faster revenue decline, obviously, because we're swapping 1P retail revenue in the Mall business for high-margin commission revenue that we earn on the GMV generated in the marketplace business. So that means the headline revenue number drops quite quickly. We're expecting 29% to 32% decline.Adjusted EBITDA better than in Q4, something between PLN 120 million and PLN 140 million of loss across both the Mall segment and the allegro.cz business and covering the first steps of the Slovakian marketplace.CapEx, PLN 20 million to PLN 30 million, most of which is going to be related to the software development that goes into the marketplace businesses.So that's that for the -- for the Q1 outlook, and that's my final slide. So thank you very much for listening. I'm going to hand it back to Tomasz to organize question-and-answer session.
Thank you, Jon. And Jota, we are ready to take questions.
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Ross Andrew with Barclays.
I've got 3 questions about today. First one, thank you for disclosing the mix of volume and basket size within the Polish GMV. Can you just give us a sense as to how you expect that to trend in Q1 and then through this year when we're kind of thinking about our modeling? That's the first question.Second question is about your balance sheet. I guess, we're going to see a reduction in net debt end of Q1 as you get the final benefit of the low receivables. You're likely to be towards that 1x, I guess, end of this year. So kind of beyond that, but rather it's not quite a bit of flexibility. Can you talk about how you think about how to use that flexibility and how we should think about shareholder returns over time?And then third question is on Polish CapEx, which you kind of alluded to potentially stepping up as you invest more into delivery capability. Can you just talk a bit about what that means? So more details about lockers and any other kind of delivery capability you're thinking about would be helpful.
Andrew, thank you very much for the questions. I'll take the first 2, and Roy will deal with the CapEx. Yes, what we're expecting this year in terms of the Polish consumer is for a gradual improvement in sentiment, which seems to be what is happening during the first quarter.That should, over time, translate into a gradual move towards more interest in discretionary items, maybe slightly bigger ticket purchases. So in other words, an unwinding of the effect that we saw in the prior year, except for the fact that we do continue to see health and beauty, and grocery, in particular, as areas that we're going to outperform in terms of growth, and they are relatively low ticket categories.So apart from that mix effect, we should start to see some reinflation in the metrics around the inflation component, if you want, of GMV growth. But we're not there yet. It's still lower than a year ago. That, hopefully, will answer that question.Then the second one regarding the net debt position and the leverage. Yes, we will be gradually reducing the leverage during the course of this year. I mean, there is line of sight to get to that target level of 1x. As I said, we do want to keep some financial flexibility to deal with various opportunities and risks that we see out there. But beyond that, we do anticipate having discussions during the course of this year with the Board about what we may do with any excess cash that we might be throwing off within the next 18 months onwards sort of time frame. Roy, do you want...
Right. So Polish investment. I think really implicit in this question is, are we going to invest in further more in delivery assets? But I would approach this in a different way, which is, when we had leverage as high as it was, or the constraints to decision-making were fairly high, and our investments can be in all sorts of things. And typically, quite a lot of our investment has been in software. And I don't actually think that, that will change.In terms of physical assets, particularly logistics assets, we're a networked business. We, overall, have built a very strong business through the power of the network of having tens, actually hundreds of thousands of merchants who are making highly independent decisions. And I think that same rule also applies with working with suppliers. So for us, we're not interested in creating a monolithical solution where we're fully vertically integrated from beginning to end, because that's not just us.What we do need to have is the ability to have sufficient influence over the overall process that every year, we have improvements in speed, reliability and costs. And we will invest in our own assets in as much as we need to generate options that we can't find in the market.So I think we have a rather nice and rather small network of APMs at the moment. We've got a bit of middle-mile capability. But I would say probably the biggest success we had in logistics last year was actually what is referred to as the InPost, the injection or hybrid deal that we did with InPost mid-last year, which took a day off delivery times and also enabled us to run a law of physics network that circumvented cabotage. So took a day and probably about a year per parcel off a delivery from a Polish merchant to the Czech Republic.So as long as we can continue to work with our supplier base to do that, we don't need to do anything. It's all about choice and having options. And I would say, particularly when you're interested in going in new markets, the fact that you have that attitude that you're most interested in making friends, if you will, with suppliers in new countries is an added strength that you should respect very carefully. Provided that you're interests and our interests are aligned, and that is predominantly on unit cost improvements every year, so productivity improvements every year, and reliability and speed.
The next question comes from the line of Holbrook Luke with Morgan Stanley.
My question is just to clarify the investment that you're placing from the core Polish business into the International segment. Is that 20% of investment effectively implying the international losses this year on the EBITDA side could be, let's say, up to PLN 700 million?And then when you just talk about the 3 years to 4 years to breakeven in some of these markets, are we expecting this year to be the high point, obviously, the Q1 run rate implies more like PLN 500 million losses in the International segment? So just interested here to think about how it then falls over the next few years?
I think there's just one thing in terms of the way we talk about Allegro as a whole. I think it's very important. We don't really have an International segment. We have -- first of all, we have 6 countries that increasingly we want to treat as a single catchment area, because our country -- the countries we work in are all relatively small. Poland is about the same size as Spain and every other country we serve within it is even smaller. So you have to treat it as a contiguous catchment area.And within that catchment area, we have 2 main businesses, a Legacy 1P business in a Marketplace. And so when we talk about these things as a whole, we should not overlap and assume these are the same thing. There's a marketplace, which is the Allegro model that you're familiar with [Technical Difficulty] and then a 1P business, which is complementary potentially to the rest, but we should look at that separately. Over to you, Jon.
Yes. Okay. So Luke, in terms of the medium-term aspirations, the way to look at that is really a potential peak funding requirement at some point over this medium-term period. So what we said is that we anticipate the worst-case scenario is that we'd need 20% of the adjusted EBITDA of Poland, which is obviously a number that we're projecting will be growing over -- from year-to-year to fund those 3 areas of development, right?One of which is running the marketplaces through to breakeven. Another one is CapEx that supports those investments. And the third one is what we need to do to transform Mall and get it through to a point where it's making a positive contribution to the group, yes.So the PLN 700 million figure that you mentioned, I mean, that would be kind of a worst-case scenario type of number that would meet that 20% in a short-term timeframe. But we're obviously leaving ourselves some margin for error with these metrics that we're introducing. So it wouldn't be as bad as PLN 700 million, not this year.
So the next question is from the line of Yang Lisa with Goldman Sachs.
Maybe the first one just on the -- your logistics network. So I saw your number of APMs grew to 3,500 last year from 2,500 the year before. You've been now operating that space for a while. So what have been the key learnings? Like are you able to share now how utilization rate have improved, the relative cost benefit of using your own lockers versus using your third-party partners? And what are there still the bottlenecks or challenges in running that network and expanding further? That's the first question.The second one is on the margin guide. I mean, you're already at 5.4% in '23. So in that mid-term target range, I think in Q1, the guidance implies 5.7%. And you mentioned you're going to get to 5.7% over the next couple of years. Should we expect margin to come down later in the year? Was there any sort of phasing of cost we should be aware of?And basically, why can't you do better actually that the 5.3% to 5.7% over time given the contribution from advertising, fintech, logistics, et cetera? It sounds a bit conservative, are you basically plan to reinvest maybe in marketing? That's the second question.The third one is just really quickly, if you can give an update on the competitive landscape? Is Temu having any impact so far? Where you guys are in terms of like product overlap? And yes, anything you can share would be helpful.
So in terms of logistics, look, I mean, in Poland, in particular, I don't think there is a single larger source of parcel generation -- generation of parcel demand than Allegro in Poland, so we -- because of the orders we take, we generate a very large number of parcels. And it's just a question of how they get directed. And we've got excellent coverage of our own network as with all other suppliers with our merchants. So lots of great connections there.And again, it's simply a matter of speed, reliably and cost and frankly, also customer preference. If customers are used to using a particular locker, that's fabulous. We have plenty of other parcels we can send another way.So as always in logistics, it's all about volume. We are the largest single generator of parcel volume in the country. you can talk about how much it is, but it's a large share. And therefore, it's just a matter of how it goes. The denominator -- when you're dealing with unit cost, the denominator is important as the overall spend, and that's where I think we have quite a bit of choice.And like I said before, it's not something we feel passionate about, provided we're able to continue to build the law of physics network that takes out time, lapse time that it takes to get things from merchants to customers.
Okay. And let me take the second question regarding the margins. [Technical Difficulty] So yes, regarding the margin, it's relatively easy to gradually drive up the margin. But in a business like ours, that is really generally going to result in some kind of trade-off in the rate of growth. And our aspiration is really to maintain our very, very strong position in the Polish business and to do what it takes in terms of growth delivery.So one of your suggestions there, Lisa, was is it marketing? It could well be marketing that we'll need to find room for in order to keep growing the top line fast enough. Because with every passing year, the amount you need to grow to do the low single -- the low double-digit growth is growing every year, right? So we may well need to spend more on marketing over time. We may need to be careful on how much further we go with take rate increases. They're one of our competitive advantages at the moment. If we just keep going up with those, they -- eventually they wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore.So we're much more focused on looking after our operating expenses and delivering operating leverage. Some of the projects we're working on have got the potential to have positive impacts on our unit costs in different areas like delivery, which might mean our margins will surprise to the upside at some point. But what we're trying to do here is give you a number that we feel really confident that we can maintain over a longer period of time, and that's why we gave that range. You want to talk to that?[Technical Difficulty]
So I think, overall, probably because of our focus on customers in our history of innovation, we've maintained a very strong position, particularly here in Poland, and the customers have continued to enjoy shopping with us. No matter whoever else appears from outside of Poland on the home front.I think we've seen a number of different cycles of both American and Asian competitors coming into the market. And now we see a new wave of competitors arriving. I think what's admirable about them is, one, they have, I think, a very efficient model, similar really to the operating philosophy that we have of leveraging the software and the other capabilities that they have in a very disciplined operational model. And I think both in terms of how they execute and in the way they also are actually using marketing, there are all sorts of things that we can learn in study.So I think they are I think competitors that deserve respect and from which I think we can learn quite a bit. And I think both of those things are as much opportunities for us to up our game as it is anything else. I do think we still offer a fabulous offering not only to customers in terms of selection at extremely good prices, guaranteed in many cases, but also a very good and low-cost service to connect merchants with those customers. And I don't think that is likely to change anytime anywhere we are.I'd say in closing, the key thing is, however, this is Europe. And in Europe, we also take trading rules quite seriously, and we'd hope that anyone who comes into the European market respects all of the many rules and regulations that we hear at Allegro follow quite carefully. And so that's what also I would add to that.And I think, frankly, the fact that we do follow to the best of our ability, the letter of the law and frankly, also the spirit of the law is another competitive advantage for us because customers by and large, I think, feel strongly that they can trust us, and we want to not do anything to damage that.
I'll just add one additional remark. Obviously, we are watching very closely to see what kind of impact we can see from Temu. And we're triangulating various sources of information to do that as we've done when Amazon arrived or when Shopee arrived in the past.The most useful source that we have are our own company surveys that we do on a -- really on a monthly basis to assess what's happening in terms of segment share around the market. And we're starting to get readings that show that Temu is in the picture. But when we triangulate all that information, we're coming out with very low single-digit segment share in their case at the moment.Now having said that, we don't yet have enough readings from enough months to give you any kind of description of how fast it might be increasing or whether it's stabilizing too soon to say. But at the moment, it's a very low number, which looks dramatically different. So obviously, things like app downloads and these types of metrics, traffic metrics that you see. Their business model works in a very different way to ours, and we'll see in the fullness of time how they do here in the Polish market.
The next question comes from the line of Lopaciuk Piotr with PKO Bank of Poland.
Just one left. So could you please explain in the report you mentioned the other revenue line? And in the description, you say it's related to sales, but also revaluation of loans sold. So how -- I mean, what's the separation between these 2 elements? I'm thinking how repeatable this line can be in the future or whether it had some inflection in 4Q? What should we expect going forward here?
Piotr, thank you very much for that question. It gives me a great opportunity to explain one of the niceties of the accounting rules. Basically, what has happened is that there is a category of revenue or I shouldn't call it revenue, of income, in the Allegro Pay business model, which under revenue accounting and international accounting standards should not be treated as revenue -- not called revenue, but called other operating income.And historically, while the business was small, we basically ignored that topic because it wasn't material. But eventually, we sat with our auditor and decided that we need to start showing some of this income not as revenue, but as other operating income in accordance with the accounting standard. And we made that change in the fourth quarter. In a second, I'll explain what it is.But we decided, just for consistency perspective in these presentations, we continue to talk about revenues, including both all other sources of revenue, other revenue and also this other operating income.Now what does that actually mean in terms of Allegro Pay? Other operating income relates to the sales of the loans, which, as you know, has been part of their business model now for about 2 years, right? So they originate loans with the consumers and then they sell those loans and take them off balance sheet with no recourse to our funding partner, which at the moment is at Aion Bank.The bigger the amount of loans being sold in a period, the bigger those profits tend to be. And especially, obviously, in the fourth quarter, there is seasonality as well in demand for Allegro Pay. So that origination is even bigger, yes. So all that's happened in the fourth quarter was a reclassification between what we previously classified as other revenue into other income. And the number is big simply because it's seasonally the fourth quarter.We're happy to take it offline if you want to get into even more detail on that. And the same goes obviously for any of the other analysts.
The next question comes from the line of Potyra Michal with UBS.
I have 2 questions, please. So the first one, if you could provide more color on the contract with InPost, which assumes a declining unit price and volume growth? I mean, firstly, I just would like to understand how does it work and also how you would be recognizing the cost through time over the quarters? So that's the first question.The second question, kind of coming back to the competition on the market. I mean there is some kind of market data, which suggests your monthly average user number is slightly declining, whereas your active buyers are growing. So if you perhaps can comment on that discrepancy, please?
Thank you for those questions. Let me start with the one regarding InPost. Basically, we've made an arrangement with InPost that supersedes the 7-year contract for calendar 2024 and essentially the higher the volume growth that InPost receives from Allegro, the bigger discount we will receive on the 12.8% index increase that is due under the base contract because of inflation in Poland in the previous indexation period, which ran from November '22 to October '23.So the 12.8% I mentioned in the presentation relates to the 2 months, November and December. From January to the end of this year, basically, what we're doing is estimating what overall growth we will be sending to InPost in terms of parcels for them to deliver. And based on that, we'll be estimating what final price will end up paying InPost through the settlement mechanism that we've agreed with them. So that's basically how it's working. But as long as we're providing them some growth, then we'll be paying less in 2024 than we were paying in November and December for each parcel.The second question was about active users, if I understood versus active buyers, yes. Active user is an estimation of how many different individuals go on to our website during a period of time. And this is prepared by one of the external data monitoring -- Internet data monitoring services that operates here in Poland.It isn't a number that we actually try and track with our own methodologies internally. So it's kind of something we don't particularly focus on. And I would -- haven't really got a very strong feeling one way or the other on what's happening with that number.What I would say is that what we do religiously look at is traffic that's coming in and active buyers, which is anyone who's made -- at least one transaction during the last 12 months. Those numbers are super solid. These active user estimates that are done from the outside are probably done with a lot less accuracy.Some of the competitors in the e-commerce space have business models which try and encourage consumers to spend a lot of time on their site without necessarily pushing them to transact. That includes the type of businesses that use gamification and things like that to try and generate business. That might be something that you're seeing in those numbers, certainly in terms of share.But that isn't part of our core proposition, right? Our core proposition is a very rational place where you go to find the widest selection, fantastic prices, reliable merchants backstopped by Allegro's promise, and you go because you want to buy something and you have a very high probability of finding what you're looking for. So it's a different model altogether.
The next question comes from the line of [ Philip Alex ] with JPMorgan.
My first question is on advertising revenue. What growth do you expect from this line? And what are your plans about new functionality to be introduced on the platform to support this revenue growth?And my second question, maybe can I follow up on Temu. Are you concerned that Temu is also expanding in your international markets? And those markets, you have both new entrance and arguably don't have that competitive advantage of all incumbent with high network effects in Poland.
Thank you, 2 questions. The sound quality was not great on that first question. I didn't catch which -- I think you were talking about a revenue line, but I didn't catch which one.
Any new functionality that you would plan?
Well, we do have various things in the pipeline as we do in any year, but we don't -- we always try to avoid preannouncing anything, which is really a product for our customers, either consumers or merchants. But they do have a pipeline of topics that they're working on to keep that line ticking over in terms of growth, both in percentage terms and also as a percentage of GMV. And Temu question about the international one.
Yes. I think this is true. Whenever you go into a new market, you've got incumbent players. And I think we're lucky that in most of the catchment area of our 6 countries, no one has a huge share of the market of the online segment. And then you also have other players that are coming in and facing many of the same challenges as you do. And I think it does mean that competition for the attention of Czech or so of our customers is increasing all these new players, including ourselves, are coming in. But I think we've reiterated at length about what we think some of strengths are.And of course, I think probably the most immediate effect is, of course, it means that PPC, pay-per-click advertising costs are higher. The Chinese seem to have perhaps a bottomless amount of money to spend on marketing. But I think we've seen that game played before, and that's regardless is not on -- even if you have bottomless funds, it's not where you can sort of spend huge amounts of marketing in an uninterrupted way. So I think that's the place where we see it most just advertising costs are higher in these markets than they might have been, and they were already higher than they were in Poland.
There are no further audio questions. I hand back to Mr. Tomasz Pozniak for any further remarks.
Thank you, Jota. We have a few questions outstanding, which came on the webcast. We covered the majority of them referring to the medium-term aspirations.One which is outstanding is about how many countries -- that comes from Cesar Tiron from BofA. How many countries we will launch this year and which quarter? So Slovakia, we have Q1 already.
We tend to launch right about the time where we are going to do a soft launch. So I think what we've learned so far in our playbook is, first of all, I think I've participated in many international expansions in e-commerce. And I think truly, I think that in terms of technical flowlessness is a word. Technical smoothness, our launches have been -- the 2 that we've done so far has been remarkably well executed. And what we've also said is we're also shortening the amount of time between running in the technical solution before we sort of open up and start doing active communication to reduce that to a number of weeks.So I'm sure there will be other -- in fact, I know that there'll be other openings this year, I'm expecting them to be both faster and cheaper. But I wouldn't want to say how many are this year or when this year for obvious reasons.
Thank you, Roy. The other questions, which are on the merits, we have covered. We have a couple of technical which we'll take off line. So that will be it for today. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks for being on our call. And please follow up with us if you have anything burning outside of this event. Thank you.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a good day.