Allegro.eu S.A. (ALE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Allegro.eu Q4 2020 Results Call. We have with us today our CEO, and François Nuyts; and our CFO, Jon Eastick. My name is Michal Kuzawinski, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. A few points before we begin. Firstly, you can download the slides that you're going to see today from our IR website on allegro.eu. Please read the disclaimer on Slide 2, in particular, the comments on forward-looking statements. [Operator Instructions] And finally, we are being recorded today. And the recording of this call will be available for a replay on our IR website. Enough introductions. François, over to you.

Thank you, Michal. And hello to you all. Great talking to you again. We have a solid set of results to share with you. And equally importantly, quite exciting plans for the year and years ahead. But first, I think it's -- in the current environment, especially important to recognize our teams. This has been for all of us and all of us who are on this call to one disruptive year. And to say that our first priority was for the safety first of our employees. We're still the setup where we were over 95% work from home. And as this has been quite successful in doing our contribution to containing the epidemic. This is about the first time in 13 weeks, you were saying that we actually get to sit together with Jon.

Pleasure. It's good to see you.

Exactly. And it is really the dedication of the employees, the dedication to not only keeping the store working well for consumers, for sellers. So we keep it at full throttle at this awkward period. But also the dedication to continued innovation from hiring to developing the tech that sets us up for the success we had in 2020, but also for the road ahead in 2021. To -- yes, please project the material, please. Thank you. So if we go to Slide 3, I think yes. So here, I'll cover the highlights. Jon will take over for the financial results. I'll cover the development plans and I'll cover the -- Jon will cover the financial outlook. We'll have ample time, as Michal said for Q&A. And if you ask the questions in the Q&A part, Michal will help us facilitate. Now looking -- if you move to the next slide, looking at Q4 2020 and the full year 2020. I think here the team's hard work and innovation, as I said, to provide consumers through retail basics, continued focus on improving the selection, improving the price, improving the delivery, convincing more customers to be smart led to the financial results, and Jon will take us more in detail. But let's say, in terms of from the top and more consumers shopped with us than over 13 million, up 14% year-on-year. They shop for more of their spend with us, up 36%. And the fact that we managed to do this with a world-class NPS means that we're confident that they'll keep on shopping with us past and as soon as the epidemic drops and we go back to normal as soon as possible. This sets up well for -- in terms of continued momentum for our growth in 2021 and beyond. And we expect back to normal as soon as possible about H2 2021. And you'll see our guidance, and Jon will cover in a minute. That is, obviously, despite a couple of uncertainties. The first one is the lapping of COVID, which is very hard to forecast. And the second one is new competition showing up -- or increasing their presence in Poland, namely Amazon, which we're sure will have seen as launched earlier this week. And you may have questions during the Q&A, and we'll be happy to cover. So here, I'm not intending Page 5 to cover our lens. This is, as usual, a 1 page where you have the key financial metrics and input metrics for you to have in one place to access. Moving to Slide 6. This is a slide that is of core importance to us in the sense of who we are as a company. It's quite clear that no companies in Ireland and during COVID, we saw a tailwind to our business. We were out of the -- I don't like that word, but fortunate companies, in a way, that's a tailwind. So it was extremely obvious to us that we needed to find ways to contribute positively to the overall stakeholders, whether they're the more direct stakeholders, the consumers, the merchants or the more indirect stakeholders, which is the overall society and economy. Anyhow, as I said, the first priority was keeping our employees safe. Second, was to make sure that consumers were treated even better during the pandemic than ever. So giving them funding selection, giving them free benefits such as SMART! Making delivery contactless for more and more the delivery options to keep them in turns safe was our second priority. The third one was keeping, I would call it, merchants sustainable what I mean by that is merchants reflect the Polish online and off-line economy, right? You can expect that the Polish economy is 90% offline, 10% online. So our merchants -- so the epidemic meant that for a lot of them, their natural route to the consumer offline are just closed for periods of time. It was very important for us to help them sustain by extending them credit, break on fees and all kind of other types of initiatives to make sure that they remain with us, they remain healthy and so they stick with us in the long term and contribute to the selection and to the offer to consumers. Next, in terms of society, as I said, the main contribution, obviously, is the access to the choice of product from bare essentials too much needed entertainment but also safety and contactless deliveries. And then what I was very not surprised because we knew we have -- the employees and our culture is such. But the speed at which the employees have pivoted to finding ways to help the wider economy be it at the very beginning of the epidemic, finding ways to help the health care system, source core products or volunteering their own time to find all kind of different ways to help. All in, we contributed about PLN 0.5 billion to the fight to COVID and about PLN 20 million in charitable and social initiatives. Now hopefully, this is the last slide on COVID itself, and we'll go back to normal, as I said, we hope that it's H2. Poland weathered the first wave reasonably well. And so in February, a bit of an uptick as some unblocking of the economy and reopening of malls and shopping happened. We're still very early, like the rest of Europe in terms of vaccination rate as any large scale, how do you say, institutional program. It's not surprising that it starts slow, but we're hoping that it accelerates. We're at the moment at 5.6% of population first vaccinated, 3.1% second vaccinated. We remain in a work-from-home mode across the company, and it's working as well as expected. And we have a number of initiatives internally how to keep employees, not only safe, but also engaged. For example, we have a virtual town hall tomorrow, right? In terms of key business development during Q4. As I said, the core focus on retail basic continues, so we achieved double-digit year-on-year growth in the number of merchants, which in turn lead to normally increase choice, over 200 million offers, and also improved price. This -- a key component of this is something we talked about over the last year, which is the acceleration of the international seller acquisition. So making it easier and seamless for international sellers wherever where they are to sell, to Polish consumers. On price, we continue the rollout of all the natural features that are mostly seller directed to be price competitive, which is obviously always even more relevant with new competition. This is not an area we'll talk at length because it's obviously, how do you say, of interest also to different competitors, whether they're local or international. In terms of delivery, we keep on focusing on improving delivery, notably the speed. So whether we launched Saturday deliveries to lockers, still very happy with the way our network fulfillment -- third-party network fulfillment performs during both the Q2 COVID peak and Q4, we maintained a very high share, both 1- and 2-day delivery and of predictability. And the acquisition of Opennet, which is the leading technology and software solution for lockers in Poland, sets us well for some of the developments we announced. On SMART!, we're very happy with the continued progress with SMART! in terms of not only the number of subscribers that joined the program. But also the core offer and the way it makes -- it incentivize or convinces more SMART! customers to shop more with us. The core launch here in Q4 was the launch of students. Allegro Pay, we talked about it last time how we were piloting the program and its benefits in Q4. Really, the scaling up exceeded our expectations, both on the customer side. So the design of the product, the seamlessness, we'll talk a bit about it later. And the overall output NPS, so how consumer appreciate is very encouraging. And so it's obviously the other part of your question, the credit risk performance. So this sets us up well to scale up this, and we'll talk about it in future development. One last thing, we don't often talk about C2C, but as you know, we relaunched last year, our Lokalnie, which is a C2C side of the platform, and the continued uptick here is very encouraging. We're already and the #2 C2C portal in Poland. And that has specific importance because C2C shoppers tend to spend more with us overall. It's a very sticky experience. Jon, if you can...

Thank you very much, François. Okay. So good morning, everybody, and very happy to be with you as well today to take you through the fourth quarter and also the outlook for 2021 and beyond. As usual, I'll start from the key KPIs, the active buyers and the GMV per active buyer. As you've heard from François, especially on that last slide, I mean, the business is not standing still. We're growing on many of our key input levers focusing on retail basics, expanding the SMART! base, et cetera, et cetera. But in the fourth quarter, as you saw on the COVID slide, we did have an unwelcomed additional tailwind again from the second wave of COVID, which hit us initially in October, then it resulted in a closure. Not a closure of off line, not as severe as it was in Q2. It only touched covered shopping malls in November. And then they were all allowed to reopen for the real Christmas peak in the few weeks before Christmas in December. But it did create an additional tailwind . When you put all that together, it's not surprising, therefore, that these 2 KPIs accelerated again from the levels that we had in Q3. So we had 3.4% growth for the quarter in active buyers, finished the year on 13 million. And as you see, 9.5% growth in GMV spend per buyer, we're up to PLN 2,700 now in terms of annual spend per active buyer. So putting all that together, obviously, we get to our GMV performance. Our first ever quarter above PLN 10 billion at almost PLN 11 billion, PLN 10.9 billion of GMV, 57.5% GMV growth. Though the December, in particular, was much stronger than we were planning for. As I said, or as I was sharing with you when we talked at the end of November about Q3, we were somewhat worried that the retail spend would be much weaker because of the damage to the economy from the pandemic in the Christmas season. That didn't really materialize. Retail sales were roughly flat for December. We were also worried that merchants wouldn't spend as much on advertising and discretionary parts of take rate as they have done in previous years, again, to save money. Again, that didn't materialize. In fact, the opposite happened. They spent even more online than they would have done and probably in a normal season. So all of that grow through to really strong GMV performance and then had follow-on impacts in the P&L, which I'll show you in a moment. It's also worth mentioning that we only achieved those results because operationally, the execution from the team was really excellent. We had no problems whatsoever with delivery. Everything worked very well over the Christmas period. So it's a really strong finish to the year. So how did that then feed through into revenue? That 58% GMV growth delivered 61.2% revenue growth. So in line with our strategy that the -- the revenue should be growing slightly faster than GMV. Firmly reestablished as we manage the same in Q3. PLN 1.3 billion of revenue for the fourth quarter and almost PLN 4 billion of revenue for the full year, 54% growth in revenues for the year as a whole, in line with full year GMV growth. Let's zero in a little bit on where that revenue growth is coming from, particularly in the fourth quarter. And you can see that the marketplace grew 62.4%, and it was supported by take rate increases, which I'll talk about in a second. But also strong contributions from advertising and also from our 1P particularly being used, as we told you many times, to support the marketplace. We also use it for helping with our shopping holidays. And Black Week was extremely successful, so also quite strong growth there. The advertising performance, 65.7% growth, very strong EBITDA driver for us as you know very well. In terms of take rates, an unusual pattern this year. Normally, the take rate in the fourth quarter is lower than in the earlier quarters of the year because the extra volume, the extra demand that we get during the Christmas season, the merchants usually take some of that for granted. They don't spend as much money proportionately on discretionary elements of take rate, in particular, around promoting their offers as they do in the rest of the year. That didn't really happen in the fourth quarter. We didn't see that drop in the share of promotion within the take rate that we normally do. That was the unexpected part of the result there. But in addition, first full year of cofinancing for Korea on a much, much bigger base of SMART! customers, also made a positive contribution. And another important element was that we introduced success fees on actually paid delivery, which obviously is outside of SMART! since the middle of the year. And that obviously also contributed something to the take rate. We introduced that because we wanted to give the merchants yet another push towards signing up for SMART!, improving their quality to become SMART! suppliers and get the benefit of the free delivery. So 9.44% take rate, actually better than Q3 and 30 basis points higher than it was a year ago. On the cost side, it really is only a story about cost of -- net cost of delivery. All other elements of costs were either flat or showing operational leverage compared to earlier periods. Obviously, the cost of delivery at 21%, up 2 points from third quarter and up from 12% a year ago. That's being driven by the significant increase in the number of SMART! subscribers that we've seen over the course of 2020. That will continue into 2021. But the rate of that growth we expect will start to slow down over time. On the SG&A, as I said, it's basically a story of increased operating leverage. We're continuing to spend well on marketing. We're still investing around 13% of revenue into marketing. This is because we're running many innovations and many improvements into our programs to keep the ROIs very satisfying, very high and it's contributing to our GMV growth. So we're continuing with that. Another important number to call out is our staff cost at 9% of revenue. It's as high as 9% because we are investing very heavily in our team, in particular, in our tech teams. And the reason for that is that we need tech resources to be able to run as many of the innovations that we'll be talking about in parallel over time. The business is 50% bigger now than it was a year ago. If we want to continue to grow as our ambition is to over 20% annually on the GMV level, we need to have the resources to bring the innovations to the flywheel to drive the business at that speed. So big investments in employment. So putting all of that together, obviously, the strong retail revenue performance on the back of very high GMV and the only drag on our costs being the delivery expenses, that translates obviously into a very good EBITDA performance, 39% growth in the fourth quarter to PLN 533.5 million. For the full year, PLN 1.750 billion, 31% growth. So performance that we're satisfied with. Looking below adjusted EBITDA as I said back in the third quarter, we were expecting things to be much quiet and much more typical. That's what you see here. I won't go through in detail. Taxes are back down to the more normal level of around about the 19%, 20% rate that we pay in Poland. Financing costs are also down now that we have a smaller loan and net indebtedness and with lower cost of financing. Very few adjustments to EBITDA. Most of them previously were related to the IPO. When it comes to capital investments, again, very much business as usual. We had 5% of revenue invested in the fourth quarter, 5.8% of revenue for the year as a whole. We were originally expecting to make some fulfillment investments, or fulfillment service-related investments in the fourth quarter in our old fulfillment facility that hitherto has been used for 1P only. We decided in the end that we would make those investments in the new fulfillment center that we're opening this year. And so that piece of spending has actually moved into 2021, which is why we're at the bottom end of our range for 2020 CapEx. But otherwise, development expenses, a little bit of a little bit of CapEx to support the platform, very much a standard result. So with that, I'll go -- one more slide, sorry. Final thing, just to show you where we are on leverage. A very strong quarter. We delevered by 0.4 points of leverage to 2.5x. A very comfortable level for us and giving us a lot of flexibility going forward. So with that, I'm going to hand it back to François, and he's going to take you through our plans for 2021 and beyond.

Thank you, Jon. So let's move to Slide 19. This is a slide that will, how do you say, look familiar to most of you. And to the left, I mean the thing to -- on the core basics of the flywheel, I think as Jon raised, there is very strong execution across the flywheel levers. But there is still, whether it's selection, delivery, number of SMART! customers, share of advertising, they -- still significant headroom, and this is reflected notably in the scalable investment we're making in tech and in teams across to double down on the pace of growth in those areas . To the right, the thing we used to call, incubate and maximize future levers. There are a number of things there that are actually more -- that are moving closer to being part of the core flywheel. When you look at things such as international sellers, consumer fintech, B2B. Those are things that are now launched and that we're looking to add to scale. So to cover in a little bit more detail on the next slide. So obviously, on retail basics, we'll continue to invest to attract more and more sellers. To grow selection, so we offer more everyday choice. The consumer things they want and things they don't even know they could possibly want. We have 200 million offers, but we'll keep on growing very fast. We'll keep on developing the tools for our sellers, ultimately using 1P to manage price on the few occasions where we cannot nudge incentivize sellers to be competitive on price. On delivery and Allegro Pay, I'll cover in a minute on a specific slide. SMART! is at the very early stage still in terms of number of polls that our SMART! customers. So we'll keep on investing in SMART! to make it more and more interesting for consumers. The latest iteration, which you may have seen this week, is the launch of SMART! na start, SMART! to start?

SMART! to start.

Your Polish is...

Your English is getting great.

Yes. Only a couple of words. But SMART! na start. And the whole idea here is if you're not a frequent shopper on Allegro, how we help you discover SMART!? So this is a program for 1 year, you've got 5 free shipments. And the whole idea that we know is if you try SMART!, the propensity as a consumer to stick with it is very high. So that's the whole idea. In B2B, we launched on February 11, the B2B platform, and here, as you know, we have a sizable existing B2B business, but we were doing very little especially for them. So now they have a specific point of entry. And we're rolling out specific offers in terms of credit, invoicing, delivery to grow that business faster. In terms of international. So the first point of international is this merchant acquisition. So because this gets multiplied by the 13 million customers we have. But we're also, in parallel, completing the part of our technology infrastructure and to be able to offer the 200 million offers to international customers. And also looking at value-accretive cross-border acquisition to get a head start in customers to whom, again, we can offer our peculiar tech and selection. Maybe a little bit of a deep dive on our stepping up investment in delivery experience. So in terms of fulfillment, as Jon covered, we'll launch a second fulfillment center that will cover third-party and 1P. And here, the key launch, obviously, is the third-party offering. The whole idea here is to help sellers, store, ship and obviously, faster to consumers. So it's GMV and revenue incremental. We're also working to delay the injection into the last-mile network. To put it simply, if you're looking at it as a consumer, it's how late can our order on a given day and still be delivered the following day. So those are things that we're doing with our network of carriers and parkers. In terms of pilot lockers acceleration, so here, you'll see the -- we talked about it in the past, we are a little bit more specific here. We launched 1,500 lockers this year. And the whole idea here is to be able to have more R&D on this core delivery components to deliver more predictably faster to consumers and obviously, control the cost. But still work with other partners on providing the wireless network to consumers. On merchant delivery incentives, this is the core of our marketplace. Instead of incentivizing sellers to perform, to optimize consumer-facing metrics, here, obviously, what we're trying to do is increase the next-day delivery share, and it's working quite well. We launched this recently in January 2021. All of those initiatives are targeted to drive higher GMV and revenue. And as we learn through fulfillment, through lockers, through delivery incentive through the marketplace, we'll continue to decide how we scale up those investments depending on the ROI. Here on Allegro Pay. So really the core idea of the product worked very well in Q4. So in terms of it being mass scale, so where most Allegro buyers are actually eligible to it, and they love to see that message, one click, and please use Allegro Pay. It's very easy to activate, under 15 seconds, 1 click versus the up to 15 clicks field of the previous products. And once you activate it, it's again, 1 click to use it. All in all, both the NPS and the nonperforming loans are well within -- well better from our initial business plan, which sets us up well to scale this project up. And the first priority, as I said before, is the consumer side, where we expect to land about PLN 1 billion in sales, and a loan book of about PLN 500 million that we'll look to securitize over time. And again, we focus on that product, but there are a number of other innovations, both on the consumer side and the seller side that this great Allegro Pay team is looking to launch. This is back to Jon.

Yes. Thank you very much, François. Okay. So the obvious place to start looking forward is with the capital investment, as we've just been talking about some of the programs that we'll be running over the next couple of years. The general profile of the capital investment is very similar to the guidance we were providing back at the time of the IPO that over about a 3-year period, we would be increasing our investment, in particular, in order to support investments in delivery experience. The quantum has moved up somewhat in this guidance, as I'm sure you would have observed. And there's a few different reasons for that. One of the main ones is, as I already mentioned -- well, one of the smaller ones, the delay of that fulfillment spending from 2020 into 2021. The fulfillment spending that is included in here is very much the plan that we outlined previously, which is this year, one, we opened what will be our main central fulfillment center for the country. If that all goes well, included in the CapEx plan is some additional satellite, smaller facilities that we would use to enhance next-day delivery in other -- in geographies near the borders of Poland into the future. The next element on the DEX side is the locker program. In stepping back 6 months or so, we always have the intention that we would do a pilot for lockers in order to learn the competencies that we needed to roll out a network and to integrate it fully with our platform. Over the last few months, our plans have taken shape, and we've decided that we want to accelerate that pilot project. We've expanded it to actually be at least 3,000 sites, of which about 1,500 we're hoping that we'll manage to roll out even in 2021. And we're also in this plan, allowing for the successful follow-up to that initial project. We are expecting very good returns on investment and very good improvements to our delivery experience from those lockers. And we're expecting that we'll be able to continue to roll out beyond that initial 3,000. The third element here that's worth -- or important to mention is the capsulization of the tech team expenditures. I was already talking about how we grow that team. But proportion of that cost ends up on the balance sheet every year as we invest in new innovations. And then finally, just a bit of a one-off really in 2021 and 2020. We are going through a cycle of office upgrades. We'll be moving offices in Poznan and in Warsaw over the next 18 months. So there's quite a lot of fit-out CapEx. In the 2021 and 2022 numbers as well. So that's CapEx. So let's move on to the guidance. Won't cover this one in any detail. 2020, that's gone. We did beat our expectations at the end of Q3 across the board. Much more interesting, obviously, is what we're thinking about 2021 and the medium term. So let's kick off with the GMV. We're expecting -- we are moving up our 2021 guidance compared to where we were back at the time of the prospectus. As you've heard, momentum is actually quite a bit stronger than we were originally expecting coming out of 2020. We're now adding in Allegro Pay contribution to the GMV growth, plus all these many other projects that we're running for 2021. So as a result, we are moving up the GMV guidance. For the full year, we're expecting high teens year-on-year growth. We are trying to look through the situation with COVID. As François mentioned, second half of the year, we're hoping that vaccinations will have gone far enough that most of the restrictions won't reappear, and we'll be a bit more or less back to the normal situation. For the medium term, the amount of new projects we have running and the amount of resources we're putting to work in terms of growing the team is really exciting. And based on that, we actually think we can aim for a mid-20s GMV growth rate going forward, slightly higher than what we were guiding previously. Lower down the P&L in terms of revenue, very similar outlook to previously. We're expecting a strong overperformance on revenue relative to GMV in 2021. We're now guiding for high 20s performance. Take rate increases, particularly from cofinancing, strong performance from advertising are going to be the main drivers behind that overperformance. In the longer term, we continue to aim that the revenue growth will be marginally ahead of GMV, in particular, because of advertising. There will also be contributions from Allegro Pay and from fulfillment which are growing over time. When it comes to EBITDA, we're being a little bit more conservative. As you've heard from François and as you know very well, Amazon intensifying their activity in Poland just starting in the past week. So from that perspective, we're not really lifting the absolute level of our EBITDA guidance. We're guiding for the mid-teens year-on-year growth in 2021, just to take account of that intensified competition risk. In the longer term, we continue to see advertising revenue offsetting the drag that will become less and less visible from the SMART! rollout. And eventually that we will therefore keep GMV growth and EBITDA growth broadly in line with each other. CapEx I already covered. So -- and that therefore brings us the end of the formal part of the presentation. Thank you very much for listening, and we're going to be here and ready to take your questions.

Michal, it looked like you had some tech issue. Does it work now?

Yes, it's -- we sorted it. Thank you. Thank you, François. So we are ready to take questions. [Operator Instructions] And to kick off, let's start with the question from [ Adrian Skodovsky ] from PKO. He's asking for the drivers behind our GMV growth increase in the guidance in the midterm.

I'll start if you want. I think as Jon covered the exit rate in 2020 was above our expectations. So obviously, we carried this through in '21. More specifically, the number of customers that shop with us, the size of the selection that we have, the number of sellers that we have and the pace of, you say, improvement on the overall innovation engine is what we take into 2021.

Right, exactly. And yes, I mean, in terms of both 2021 and the medium term, the main differences, as I mentioned, are, first of all, we're starting to factor in the consequence of the successful pilot that we ran on Allegro Pay. So we're now seeing that Allegro Pay will drive some incremental GMV, quite significant incremental GMV for each incremental loan that they write. So that is contributing quite significantly. There's a whole range of projects that we're running around user experience, around customer value management, et cetera, et cetera. Many, many different projects that the tech team expansion that we're ramping up this year will contribute going into 2022, 2023 and beyond. And then also the contributions from fulfillment, which also will drive incremental GMV. We're basically feeling more confident about all of these things. But what's underpinning it is that successful Allegro Pay, and the extra resources that we're bringing on board so that we can do more concurrently.

All right. And the next -- we have quite a few questions about the lockers, as you may imagine, mainly from Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs and Andy Ross from Barclays. So the question is how many lockers we are trying to roll out this year? What's the end target by 2023? What is going to cost us to build those lockers -- the locker? And what of the lockers rollout program is included in our financial guidance, if at all, both from the cost and the revenue perspective?

Yes. Okay. Thank you for that question. So as I mentioned, we're starting with actually quite an ambitious pilot project. We are expecting in the next few weeks to sign a contract to buy our first 3,000 lockers from 1 particular supplier who will then deliver those over a 2-year period. That could get, therefore, upgraded. We do think that this will be a very successful investment for us. And so we have included in the -- in those CapEx guidance upgrades from that original 3,000. I don't want to give a specific number about exactly how many lockers that we have in that plan. But it is considerably more than the 3,000 in that original contract. I think that's probably -- was there another part to that question, Michal?

CapEx per locker, yes, as well.

Yes. I mean yes, the CapEx per locker is in the PLN 50,000, PLN 60,000 range. Obviously, we need to actually roll a few out to give a really firm number. But it's in that range, we think, at this point in time.

We also have a question on lockers, how we're going to deliver to lockers, whether that's going to be through a third-party model? Or are we planning to build capacities on the delivery side?

You want to take it or me?

No, you can take it.

Okay. Mostly using third party which is kind of the standard, but in a way that it's transparent to the consumer. At the end of the day, whether we own the locker or other companies own the locker, what we're trying to do is to deliver faster, more predictably and integrate better in terms of UX. Notably on mobile UX and that, we currently do. And in some cases, we'll need to own more part of the experience to deliver that. I expect in a number of occasions, we'll be able to rely on others to do it, and that's totally fine and part of our existing flywheel. And that's why also, Jon is rightly keeping some flexibility in terms of the speed of the rollout. Obviously, what the other core component is our ability to control the cost of delivery over time, not only as we want to keep on expanding 3-year faster delivery to customers because it ultimately drives increased GMV and revenue.

And finally, on lockers. Are we going to deliver only our own merchants packages or also packages from other e-commerce players? And do we have any specific plans on fresh and frozen capability?

I love the question but I don't want to answer that question. As you know, we try to keep customer-facing features launched to when we actually have something to say to consumers because otherwise, competitors are the ones that benefit the most from that information.

Okay. Then we have a question about some detail what drives the CapEx update, in particular, for the years '22 and '23. Is there anything beyond on the Allegro fulfillment relative to the plans at IPO? Like what's the intended share of GMV and orders in 3 to 5 years' time? And if we can give some specifics what drives that midterm CapEx outlook in terms of the particular drivers?

Okay. Thank you. I think I covered quite a lot of that in the presentation itself. But just to recap on some of those elements. So the rollout of the main fulfillment center and its expansion is covered. The potential and probable rollout of some satellites, smaller fulfillment centers to expand our next-day capacity into the corners of the country, is also included. The locker rollout that we just talked about. And the other item that's quite significant in 2021 and 2022, the fit-out costs for the new offices that we'll be moving into in Warsaw and Poznan.

Then we have questions on Allegro Pay. Lisa Yang is asking to confirm if the PLN 1 billion loan sales target is the GMV target. How does it translate to revenue and EBITDA? And what are the barriers to scaling Allegro Pay faster? And what's the end game in terms of percentage of GMV in the midterm?

Okay. Yes. So the loans written figure, so the PLN 1 billion, this is the gross value of transactions that will be financed by Allegro Pay. We're aiming to do at least PLN 1 billion out of our GMV target this year through Allegro Pay. Of that amount, a component of that would be incremental, similar is the case with SMART!. Tends to drive people's demand. They will tend to spend more. We're already monitoring that very carefully month-to-month as we did with SMART!, but it's probably too early to really share a specific figure. What generally happens is that on interest-bearing installment loans, where the customer is clearly taking the loan because they need that financing, they tend to be very highly incremental in terms of GMV. As you move towards a pay-later solution, it becomes more of a convenience play. And there is a lot of incrementality, but it's more a play on the turnover of the loan book that gives you the nice result in terms of return on investment. So it's a combination of the 2. In the longer term, we would obviously be expecting to keep building the share of GMV over time. And very important is securing a financing partner or partners who will help us take some of that debt off of our balance sheet providing dedicated securitized solutions. And we're starting to have discussions with banks on that topic. We are hopeful that by the end of this year, we'll have something up and running.

There was a sub part of the question which was around constrained to go faster. The constraints are very similar to the rest of our business. Our ability to recruit tech as we have a long road map of improvements we want to do with the product. The second one is obviously managing the credit risk is due through machine learning algorithm. And obviously, you need to -- as you expand and test new cohorts of customers, you need to give a bit of time for those engines to learn and give you outputs that we're moving in the right direction. So it's why we're doing it in a sequential step. So I would say the 2 main ones is ramping up the team to deliver on the large product road map that we have. And second, a bit of time of cohort sequencing, for lack of a better word for the machine learning tools to learn, check the outputs and then keep on scaling to the next cohort. But the team is really doing tests, both the road map, the recruitment and the learning at a speed, which is really impressive.

Thank you. And we have now a couple of questions from Cesar Tiron from BofA. Firstly, if the increase in the GMV growth reflects Allegro's faster growth in the market -- faster growth than the market or essentially growth of the overall market. And then the second question is on the midterm CapEx outlook, whether we would definitely go back to 5% to 6% of revenue in the midterm.

Maybe I'll take the first one. You take the second one. There is always maybe a delta on what we call the market. Across the world, it's the same. And in Poland, it's ever more true. 90% is off-line. So it's very important to look at total retail. And yes, we expect to grow faster than total retail. That's not a surprise. Online is still early in the penetration in Poland, and it continues to grow very fast even in countries and regions where the penetration is quite a bit higher. Which goes back to the reasons why we focused on core investments, both on the core retail levers and the innovations that we've talked about because we believe that as we improve the service that we can accelerate the number of consumers and how much is shopped with us.

Okay. And the second part of the question was about what's the outlook for the medium term? So the way we framed the guidance is that for the projects that we have on our road map on our radar screen, in particular around delivery experience. The heavy lifting in terms of investment we think will be finished in that 3-year period. And therefore, the CapEx would drop back in terms of maintenance CapEx on that network to this 5% to 6% level that we're flagging. So that would allow us to keep growing the tech teams that drive the business and to capitalize more costs as the business grows, and we'd stay within that 5% to 6% range. Now we are saying, obviously, that we might find other projects that would have a great return for us that would help us drive the flywheel, give a better experience to consumers and to merchants. And if we do that, and we think that's a better -- investing CapEx is a better solution than what we can do using software-based solutions as is the case with these delivery experience investments, we may well go and launch such projects here. But until those projects start to take a concrete shape, you can't really guide for that.

The next question comes from Alexey Philippov from JPMorgan. Alexey is asking about the take rate increase expected in the midterm. Is it going to be mainly driven by the cofinancing of delivery or does it embed also some increases in the success fee?

Yes, that's another -- that's a really great question. There is still some room to increase the basic success fees in certain categories. But as we've told you previously, we're very careful with doing that. We're very measured and very analytical in deciding where -- which categories may bear a slightly higher take rate. So that we would expect to have a relatively marginal impact. There's also mix effects in that electronics historically has been the biggest category, it's also very competitive and has the lowest take rates. Other categories are growing much more quickly. And the take rates in those categories are generally above the average. So that can also bring the rates up a little bit. The cofinancing, particularly this year, where it's being introduced for the first time on lockers is going to be quite an important component in take rates. It's also, though, important to remember that pricing is really crucial to us. We take that very seriously as one of the retail basics. One of the ways that we influence pricing is to give some discounts on take rates. And therefore, that will cause some compression moving in the other direction. But overall, this year will be quite a significant increase in take rate. And in the longer term, we think it's more marginal.

And to complete the questions on the take rates, Lisa Yang is asking, when are we going to start to see the impact of the take rate increase this year?

You -- because we introduced the cofinancing changes for lockers right at the beginning of January, you should already start to see some impacts coming through right from the beginning of the year.

And the next question from JPMorgan, which categories have most upside. And what will drive that upside in particular, what's the percentage of GMV from food in 2020.

GMV I guess.

In -- I guess. Yes.

Yes. I mean, the -- if you look at -- it's very similar in Poland and the rest of the world, right? The categories that tend to be under-penetrated online, I mean, to some extent, even more so in Poland are softlines, so apparel, fashion and food. And to a slightly lower extent, what we call kind of other hardlines, so things such as sport, home and garden. We're well underway in terms of growth in terms of home and garden. And we keep on investing in softlines to improve the experience. I mean, it's mostly reaching out to brands and making sure we can build more brands to join the platform both locally and internationally. We'll keep on innovating in delivery experience. Notably SMART! but not only. In food, as you well know, we talked about this in the last iteration. A huge growth in terms of shelf-stable food. Notably in some specific categories that are hard to shop offline, whether it's functional foods, if you're a celiac. Ethnic foods from all across the world, Europe or not. But at this stage, in terms of a large part often of that question refers to fresh and frozen, there is nothing to say at this stage because we have so many innovation on the rest of the levers that we'd rather focus on this first.

Yes. We don't give specific information on particular categories. I mean on the supermarket category overall, if you went back 18 months or so, it was pretty much the smallest category. Growth rates have been exceptional, and it's no longer the smallest. And it's growing the fastest of all categories. That much we can tell you.

Now we have quite a few questions about international growth, both organic and inorganic. So Miriam from Morgan Stanley is asking us what progress we have made with international sellers onboarding since IPO. And then we have a number of questions about how we are thinking about international expansion, outbound, both organic and inorganic.

So -- and here, you'll need -- Jon, you'll need to keep me within the numbers we're sharing. So in terms of international inbound, so our ability to attract and make it easy for international sellers to list on the platform. Here, really, we have invested over the last couple of years in sequential mostly tech improvements to make it easier. So how do you list the product or you will go through KYC and anti -- KYC and anti-money laundering hurdles. If you recall at the time of IPO, we were talking, hey, between the time you start to the time you finish before we started that work, we were in single-digit and conversion in terms of sellers that started to sellers that actually managed. We're not quite at parity with local but it's much closer. If you look, all of you can go to the seller platform today, in English and go through the steps, and you'll see it's incredibly intuitive to do. And the steps continue to be easier and easier, notably working on the selection upload. And we'll continue to do so to make it seamless and seamless, and we see the impact it has. In terms of sellers, we see a very high uptick in the number of sellers that join, and we see the number of offers closely follows. And sales follow but with a lag. Obviously, as this selection needs to be indexed in search, in external search, get traffic and eventually convert. And here, the next step is to invest, as Jon said, in part of the fulfillment services, both networks and owned to make it more predictable and faster for foreign selection delivery. So that's kind of the international sellers inbound. In terms of, let's say, organic and reaching out to more consumers. Again, here, if you look today to the platform and let's say, even within Europe, which is the simpler. So let's say, you're sitting in Germany, in Spain, and you try to shop Allegro, even if you're willing to engage in Polish, you'll start shopping, you'll find the product and then when you go to delivery, you'll very quickly see a bit of a dead end where it's not possible to deliver to you. So well, first work on making that selection that is already discoverable, shippable. And then I don't want to go too much into details on what are the next steps. But they're reasonably intuitive in the way of making it easier to use your own currency, different delivery method, different languages over time. But we obviously started with international inbound because that selection is also readily exportable easily. I think there was a third...

Yes. With the M&A route, the expansion.

The M&A route. Obviously, there is -- always in M&A. It's not something that we're very willing to comment until we have...

Something concrete.

Something concrete. But we do see across the region that a similar picture than in Poland, which is a very growing economy across the region, which translate into a very significant size of retail spending and underspending in online. So we strongly believe that our ability to leverage our teams' current process, technology to scale up and make a difference to these consumers is significant. And obviously, the increase in GMV that it would entail.

Now to transition smoothly to another -- a big block of questions as you may imagine. Does Amazon launch make it more important to strengthen Allegro's presence outside of Poland?

No. I mean, obviously, we're the #1 brand and [ loan ] brand in Poland. We're going to focus most of our efforts in continuing to improve the retail basics, the price, the selection the delivery Allegro Pay fulfillment as we have. And if we do something outside of Poland, it's in addition to -- it's definitely not a way to...

It's not -- yes, instead of Poland. [indiscernible]

Instead of Poland. Yes. That would be -- I don't think that would be right in any kind of shape or form.

It's good to start the analyst questions from the local perspective. Diego [indiscernible] from Wood is asking Amazon -- sorry, from Trigon. Amazon didn't decide to introduce a strong promotional offer for both shoppers and merchants after launching Polish platform. Do you agree? Do you think it can change in the near future? Do you compare pricing level between this competitor? And does it change competitive landscape for now?

The first part is obviously not for me. Jon or any of the teams on Allegro to agree. Amazon has its strategy and need to ask Amazon to comment on that strategy. In terms of pricing competitiveness, here, our strategy doesn't change, right? We want consumers to come to Allegro and feel secure that they find the best price. This is of utmost importance overall. And even more important when they're SMART! customers because we want them to come to us not feel like they have to shop around because they always find the best deal on Allegro. And we'll continue to relentlessly focus on this. And as we have new entrants, either local or international, which was included into -- humbly, into our benchmarking, and we then make sure that customers are whole with us.

And Annick Maas from Exane BNP is asking if we can comment on the merchant churn that we might have seen since Amazon launched its Polish website.

I mean it's not a metric that we share. But...

No, I mean we haven't noticed anything significant at this point.

Yes. As you know, we're very competitive to sellers, not only in the take rate, but a series of benefits and scale that we give to them. We also have this strategy that we don't compete with them. So this is more about developing their sales. And we only use 1P in the very few exceptions with the platform is not competitive to make sure again that our competitors remain whole. So the NPS of our customers is very high and keeps on improving. And that's, again, a great indication that they are -- they tend to stick with us. But we'll keep on improving the service for them, so that we remain their best, how do you say?

Option.

Option and funnel to the customer. And that's why, again, as Jon said, we'll keep on investing and developing the services for them, so they grow their business, which is what they care about.

Now from Tomasz Sokolowski, Santander. Could you provide any indication of digital tax impact if signed into law?

Yes, sure. I mean we've got some disclosures there in the management report that you can go and take a more detailed look at. The law as originally drafted, obviously, very clearly, would result in a 5% tax on advertising revenues. There is some room for interpretation over whether or not the promotional offers that I was talking about during the presentation, where the merchants pay additional money to promote their offers, would also get caught by this tax. This is something that we're looking at. Something that we're talking to the government and giving feedback on. We don't think that should be caught. On the advertising side, if that law was to come in, we've estimated it's about PLN 30 million annually to pay that tax. There's been massive amount of pushback. As you know, as you probably know, it's not only advertising tax for internet-based companies, but it's also touching the terrestrial or more traditional advertising businesses such as television. And we have quite serious concerns that we communicated to the government that their ability to collect from foreign competitors is very unclear, and that this is something that they really should take into consideration. As of now, there hasn't really been a step forward in moving to bring it into law. And we continue to work through various business associations to communicate our perspective.

And Catherine O'Neill from Citi is asking for an update on other regulatory reviews and matters in Poland.

You can.

Sure. I mean, usually, that's talking about OCCP -- the points here are the same, right? We continue to collaborate with OCCP, notably on the 1P investigation. Recall that our share of 1P is...

1% of GMV.

1%, 2% of GMV is minute. We use it to the benefit of the total platform and the consumers, which, in turn drive traffic, which benefits merchants. There are, as expected, which is absolutely the role of the local regulator, a number of other questions that they we currently do on our business and we continue to fully collaborate. We've done because at the end of the day, whereas we may sometimes disagree with the question, we share the same value of driving consumer value and benefits and seller value and benefits as a 98-plus percent marketplace.

And the final question for the sake of time, please, can you clarify the offer that consumers get under Start to SMART!?

Sure. So what we launched beginning of the week is it's directed to consumers that are not yet SMART! and that do not yet make frequent purchases on Allegro, which is still the overwhelming size of Poland. So there is a huge potential to share with them a point of entry into the platform, so they start to discover it. As we've seen in the past, if they do, they stick with us. So very simply, the program, you come to the website, you'll see SMART! na Start, which is 5 free deliveries that you can spend for lack of a better word, over a 1-year period. You just click and you can start using it. You don't need to upload any card. You don't need to commit to subscribing to SMART! in the future and [indiscernible]. At the end of -- if you spend your first 5 in the month, which you're obviously highly welcome to, you can choose to -- if you like the experience, you can choose to upgrade to either monthly or yearly SMART!.

Thank you, François, and thank you. Go ahead.

No, I was just going to add on one important detail is it's a one shop for a customer. They get 1 opportunity to use that package of 5 free deliveries. After which, if they want to use SMART!, then they'll need to buy the sponsorship.

For detail it's -- at the moment, it's a promotion that I think is -- we're running for 3 months. As anything we do in kind of promotion, pilot test, we'll assess the benefits and consider what we do next.

Thank you. And with that, we conclude the Q&A session. Thanks for all your questions. If you have any more questions or follow-ups, please call or e-mail us. François, over to you for concluding remarks.

Remarks, no. But maybe thank you, Michal for coordinating.

Coordinating.

Thank you. And to all of you for joining us, have a healthy and fulfilling year and quarter. See you in a few months.

Thank you for joining us. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye.