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

I think that we should have all the participants by now. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Allegro Q2 '21 Results Call. We have with us today our CEO, François Nuyts.

Good morning.

And our CFO, Jon Eastick.

Good morning.

My name is Michal Kuzawinski, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. A few organizational announcements before we begin. Firstly, you can download our quarterly presentation discussed today from our IR website on Allegro.eu. Please read the disclaimer on Slide 2 of the presentation, in particular the comments about forward-looking statements. Secondly, you will have an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] And then finally, we are being recorded today, including the Q&A session, and the recording will be available for download from our IR website at Allegro.eu. Enough of introductions, over to you, François.

Thank you, Michal. Welcome, everybody. It's great to see you in our almost Polish summer. And in Q2 and now Q3, that looks a little bit more normal than last year, and hopefully, it continues that way. Normal in a sense that in Poland, everything is open, people go around on their normal business, can go shopping, offline, online, have a multiple of choices. You also see our eBilet business, our entertainment business is also back in. When we talk about Q2 result this year, you'll see a couple of themes that go through. First is the continued improvement across what we call core retail basics, whether it's a selection, the delivery, the number of smart users we see on the platform and also, obviously, take rate advertising. You'll see also some context in terms of expanding the lapping year-on-year. If you put ourselves back to last year at the same time, it was the peak of COVID closures. So not only retail offline was closed, but also a lot of the one key online stores couldn't scale up in terms of meeting demand. On the opposite end, on Allegro last year because our third-party model is so resilient in terms of accepting peak demand, we were able not only to scale up to that demand, but also do additional things. If you recall, we did things such as offering free shipping for all customers during that period and also extending a number of standard facing benefits to make sure they maximize their online presence during that period. The good thing when we look at the numbers this year, we're not only able to lap this, but we're able to keep a number of those consumers that join the platform, that joined smart to the platform and increase their engagement. And that's a lot of the things we're going to be talking about today. Without further ado, let me move on to the slides if the team can please project. So as usual, I'll cover the highlights. Jon will cover the financial results, I'll summarize and Michal will help us go through our Q&A. So moving to next slide. So as I said, right, Allegro in Q2 this year is growing at 10.6% versus the toughest comparative quarter in 2020. We look at the 2-year CAGR as a way to kind of smooth those kind of spikes, both when they were, let's say, market-driven and they were driven by Allegro, such as full extended free shipping last year. So a CAGR at 38%. We continue to see stronger progression in both revenue and EBITDA due to the growth, both the maintaining, maintaining is that an English word, of our take rate, which is not tapering off as expected and also the strong growth of our advertising business. All in all, it means that we're maintaining the raised guidance we did in Q1 with a slightly marginal lower CapEx. Moving on this slide. I will not cover. As usual, this is more a placeholder for you to have all the key financial numbers in one place in the presentation. But I will cover a little bit the underlying levers of the business. As per prior occurrences, I will not cover every single one of them, but I'll cover the single ones where there was strong progress or noticeable news in Q2. So let's start with retail basics, right? So retails basic starts with the choice, which we call selection we offer to consumers, which is sequentially continue to progress at 50% per annum, that's in terms of raw quantity, but also in quality with the addition of key retailers, Jula, in Polish pronunciation, CD Projekt RED Gear, Time Trend, Kontigo. And as I mentioned at the beginning, with a return to close to normal in Poland. We also see our eBilet business, which was obviously the most impacted during the lockdown starting to open again selling concept, which is great, both for our overall but also for people in country. Now past choice, we always look at being very competitive in terms of price, which is important both for smart and not smart consumers. Here, we continue to improve our price leadership by widening the coverage of competitors we include, including new entrants, but also by improving the way consumers discover it, that's what we call Allegro Ceny, which is how we qualify products and the number of sellers that participate keeps on growing because, obviously, it drives their sales. As choice past price, we keep on working on the convenience that consumers have when they use the platform, both online. And here, you see the continued progress in driving mobile app. Usage is very important because consumers that are both smart and mobile app users tend to be much more engaged in the platform, but also by simplifying and making it easier for them to interact. The first one, which is actually a post-sales process is improving the way they can resolve issues they have with us. So we simplified the Buyer Protection Program. It's very important because even when we get it wrong, which happens in very few occurrences, if we make the customer whole, those consumers actually tend to be much more engaged after if we resolve their issues well. We also made it much easier and faster for them to contact consumer service, notably through the use of bot for simple queries, where we see actually not only an improvement in speed, but also in quality because of the, again, the easiness to contact. Last but not least, we launched a program called Allegro Family on July 15. Allegro Family, just to describe it very briefly, allows a household. They don't have to optimally live in the same household, but to share, for example, their smart accounts, but also to do transactions together. Let me give an example, you're a kid on the platform, you don't have a card or you're below the legal transaction age, you can interact with the platform, select the product. And then you kind of push the transaction to your parents, for example, to approve it and pay for it. So the idea here is also to get better clarity on the true active user base. If you recall, with the launch of Smart, active users have tended to...

Amalgamate under one smart subscription...

Amalgamate, thank you, under one smart subscriptions. And we have an interest in getting a better understanding of the true active user base because we can target to them better. Moving on to delivery experience. We see sequential improvement on the speed at which we deliver and also the predictability to consumers. You see very strong improvement in 1- to 2-day deliveries. That's mostly driven by the Fast Delivery Subsidy program we offer to sellers if they ship fast and also at the visibility of this fast shipping offers. If it's more visible to the consumers, easier to choose, they tend to shop those offers more. And in turn, it provides flywheel effect on the sellers to adopt the program more than trust the incentive alone. We're progressing on Allegro fulfillment. So we completed the fit-out of the first phase, and we'll see the first shipments in autumn, the pilot phase in terms of selecting merchants and is encountering a slight delay as not unexpectedly for this type of large innovations as we have some slight delay in the third-party warehouse management system. But the more intensive capital fit-out will still occur in Q2 and is well underway to prepare for full-scale operations. Moving to last mile. So you may have seen our first APMs deployed in Q2. And we still will do the first deliveries this autumn. When you saw those APMS, you may have seen the great reception from the overall public and market in Poland. This is due to the time the team did team spent to really focusing on the ecofriendly, not on design, but also a number of features to make this really a leading proposition in country. We also launched our own pickup drop-off network in partnership with one of their largest -- what do you call this...

Press networks.

Press network. Press kiosk network in country. So moving on to smart. Obviously, in smart, we keep on growing the user base and also the GMV penetration. One of the key driver is this, we prolonged the Smart for Starters Program. If you remember, the Smart for Starters is for consumers that are initially low engaged. It's the 5 free shipment program. And what we saw is we had even better conversion to the paid smart program. So that's why we continue this program as a feeder program to the wider paid user base. Now we also keep on improving smart itself. If you recall, I covered in the last call, that we had a -- what I saw a product defect in the sense that if you were living away from a pickup network or from a locker, it was difficult for a consumer to benefit from smart. Only 50% of the offer is qualified for courier delivery. We changed this, obviously, the seller base, we now cover nearly 100%, and that means also that more consumers, notably further away from the cities can benefit from the great smart program. Lastly, as I said, we launched Allegro Family, which allows consumers to benefit from household smart but also the each individual, so we can target different programs to them individually. Talking about monetization. We see a continued take rate at 10.46%, not quite seeing yet taperization (sic) [ tapering down ]. Is that the words you use?

Yes. Tapering down.

Yes. The tapering down of takedown (sic) [ take rate ], and we see continued progress on our advertising business at 39.5% of revenue growth. Our marketplace take rate, very similar to last quarter, driven by the monetization of co-financing. But also we see continued robust demand from the promotion services during Q2. There is no major commission changes introduced in Q2. Moving on to advertising. Again, similar to last quarter, the strong results come from, let's say, 3 main points. First is the continued penetration of the seller base, more and more seller see the use of advertising and benefit from it. We're also better using AI to better monetize, which is important because it means those ads are more targeted to consumers. And as a result, drive more revenue both for the sellers and for ourselves and are more informative for the consumer. And lastly, we also see an increased ramp-up of our advertising network. If you recall, that's selling other advertisers such as Google sponsored link. The great thing at this. This is traffic that comes to the platform already paid and with the margin. So that's greatly contributed to the business across the Board. Now let's cover a little bit how we're doing on the seeds we're planting for future growth. Actually, a couple of those are more than seeds now. They're becoming significant. So let's start with Allegro Pay. Allegro Pay is continuing its great ramp up on plan, 95% quarter-on-quarter growth in terms of loans originated, mostly driven by the metric like the most is this NPS at 89. That NPS is just the top of the iceberg in terms of consumers loving the ultimate simplicity and convenience, the one click use, which is very different than banking products. Lastly, and this is driven by also sequential improvement in the road map, on track. In Q2, we launched card repayment, one click buy, and there's a lot coming up in the next quarters in terms of making this product more and more universal, not only to our own consumer base. Moving on to B2B. So B2B continued to outperform the overall marketplace growth since launch. You can see the B2B NPS at 75.8 continues to increase as we continue to launch features and continue to roll out the existing features through the base, mentioning one, which is the price discount specific to B2B, which more than doubled since the platform launch. Lastly, and a little bit earlier in the development phase, after helping international sellers sell to Polish consumers to Allegro.pl, we keep on making it easier for international shoppers to shop on the platform. So in Q2, we made it easier for shoppers and sellers to ship products across all EU through integrating a broker carrier for EU. Now with this, let me give the mic to Jon.

Okay. Thank you very much, François. Good morning, again, everyone. Really nice to be with you here today and take you through the key KPIs and the key financial performance indicators for the business. So as usual, let's start with the active buyer performance, 7.2% growth year-on-year from Q2 (sic) [ Q2 2020 ] to Q2 2021, with 13.2 million active buyers on the -- on the platform. You obviously have noticed that the growth was actually flat from Q1 to Q2. So I thought we would dive a little bit into what's behind that. You heard earlier in François opening remarks, a reminder about how much demand there was in Q2 last year because of the lockdowns, because of the free smart that we were offering. And that translated into a much higher increase in active buyers in that Q2 2020 cohort that we normally see, it was about 50% higher. The retention rate on those customers is about 2/3, which is actually historically a very good result. We've been focused quarter-to-quarter on improving how well we turn a new active buyer makes a first purchase into a recurring buyer on the platform, and we're getting better and better at it. But the 1/3 churn on that very high total number of active buyers, that unfortunately translates into something that offset some more normalized rate of new active buyers that we saw in Q2 this year. So net-net, that meant that we didn't grow the active buyer base. As we're getting now into quarters that look more normal in comparison to the previous year, we will expect to see the active buyer base growing again going forward. So the second key KPI that drives the GMV, obviously, is the spend per active buyer. And here, you can see more familiar trends, 29.4% growth for the year -- year-on-year comparison. We're almost PLN 3,000 of spend on an annual basis per active buyer. And this is really the sum total on the demand side of all the different projects that we've been running over the last 12 months, François has been mentioning many of them in the context of Q2 only. These many projects that we've been running to grow the business, to grow the platform and drive the flywheel faster. It all comes back into this GMV per buyer spend figure. And this is really the key reason why we've been able to lap this 72% growth we had last year and actually grow further this year in Q2. So before I go to the GMV, let's just have a quick look at the COVID situation. The big picture here is that Q2 is much more benign situation than the terrible situation we had in Poland in Q1. Infections right now are running at less than 200 a day on average. And as François mentioned, the economy has really totally opened up. Retail is fully opened since the 5th of May. And all other aspects of normal life have also reopened during the course of Q2. So we continue -- we're planning for the rest of the year on the assumption that lockdowns will not return, and we really hope that they won't come back in the autumn with the colder weather. But we do have the flexibility in our capacity that if something does happen, we'll be able to ramp up our operations and react to that situation. So the GMV performance, 10.6% growth in Q2, up to PLN 10.4 billion for the quarter. The important thing here is, first of all, that CAGR result, that 38% growth. It's only slightly lower than we had in Q1 when we reported 40% growth. Looking at it the other way, it means that the business in Q2 is 90% bigger than it was back in 2019. And that's, I think, a really impressive performance and a really impressive growth rate. Looking at our month-on-month growth. The low point was in April. We told you at the last Q1 call that the current trading for April was in the mid-single digits. It's been moving up progressively. And we -- as you see, we did 10.6% for the quarter as a whole and July has continued in the same frame. We're already printing mid-teen year-on-year GMV growth for July. So the expectation for the second half of the year is that the growth is going to move up significantly from what we just reported for Q2. So moving on to revenue. François already mentioned that the key drivers here are the higher take rate versus the prior year and also the advertising, which is growing at over 39% year-on-year. So that lifts the revenue by 28.4% for the quarter to PLN 1.3 billion and 42.3% for the half year. We're now over PLN 2.5 billion of total revenue. Looking a little bit closer at what happened on the take rate. If you remember, I was saying when we reported the 10.43% take rates for Q1, that we were expecting it would taper down over the rest of the year. In fact, it went up 3 basis points in Q2. We still expect that it will taper down in H2. What happened in Q1 was that with the reopening of the economy, the amount of discretionary spending that merchants were bringing to the platform was actually a lot higher than we were expecting. Some of that money goes into promotion of offers, and that in itself goes into the take rate. And that overperformance on that element offset the sequentially higher amounts of money that we're putting into pricing. François was describing the Allegro incentive program and how we're expanding the reach of that program. This was offset that effect. And therefore, we got the slight increase in the rate quarter-to-quarter. Okay. So cost of sales now. If you look at the reported numbers for cost of sales as a percentage of revenue, we've gone up from 23% of revenue in Q2 a year ago to 29% of revenue in Q2 2021. But we thought to make it easier to understand exactly what's going on in the business. We were put together a pro forma, which you see in the second column here on the left-hand side. Because if you recall, last year, in Q2, because of the lockdown, we offered smart for free to anyone who wanted to use it, where customers took us up on that offer, and there were literally millions who did so. The cost of those deliveries was actually booked as marketing expenditure because there was no incremental revenue either from the customer or from the merchant from that initiative. So under the accounting rules, it went into marketing spend. In total, that was about PLN 71 million of spend. If we classify that as net delivery cost, it would have increased the net delivery to 21% in 2020, which means, overall, it's only 1% higher in Q2 of 2021. Now in absolute amounts, because of the revenue growth, that's still 32% higher spending on delivery. And the main drivers of that are several. The first one is that we actually have more smart subscribers and more smart users than we had in Q2 a year ago. Secondly, those smart customers are actually doing more transactions. They're even more engaged now than they were a year ago. And thirdly, as François was saying, we've made a lot of advances around the courier proposition within smart, and that's increased courier within the mix of deliveries, and that's driving the unit cost higher somewhat on average. Okay. So quite a stability on the cost of sales side. Looking at the SG&A side, we've done the same thing in creating a pro forma taking out the delivery cost from the marketing. And you see that there on the left-hand side of the slide. And what that shows is that year-on-year, we've increased by 2 percentage points of revenue, our SG&A spending. Here, we're investing very strongly for the current and for the future of the business. We're spending more on marketing, particularly on PPC spending. We're getting very, very good ROIs that is helping to drive the GMV. But secondly, we're growing the team as fast as we can. We're growing -- we grew 29% the headcount year-on-year. So salary costs moving up. And really, we're investing across the board to be ready for -- or to be able to run as many initiatives in parallel as we can to innovate and keep growing the business as we move forward. So putting that all together and looking at EBITDA, we had just over -- just under rather PLN 560 million in the second quarter, 23.8% growth, just under PLN 1.1 billion for the half year, which is 35.6% growth. Most importantly, I think, is to look at the margins there. The adjusted EBITDA margin to GMV, comfortably above 5% throughout the period and significantly ahead of last year. And that's obviously primarily the monetization progress that we've made, both on take rate and on advertising. That's funding much of the investment in SG&A and in the smart program. So moving on to net profitability and everything below EBITDA. Nothing particularly new here in that as we're still a very low CapEx intensity business, our amortization and depreciation costs are only moving up about 10% year-on-year versus that 30-odd percent increase in EBITDA. Our financing costs are down about 40% year-on-year. Lower leverage after the IPO, lower interest rates in the market, producing that result. Our leverage -- I'll get to leverage in a moment on the next slide. Net profit as a result is almost doubled at 95% higher, PLN 565 million for the half year and 60% higher growth for Q2. Capital investment. As François was mentioning, the fulfillment program and the APM programs are both going well. We're expecting to get through the full CapEx plan consume it all during the course of H2 on those 2 key programs. There are certain small changes to our CapEx program. First of all, part of our IT spending, particularly around our [ server park ], we decided to use a leasing-based solution, which means it doesn't run through these CapEx numbers. Secondly, the 2 offices that we're fitting out in Poznan and Warsaw. They've both been handed over slightly later than we originally anticipated. So some of the fit-out spending is going to slip into next year before some of the staff move into those offices. Hopefully, if everything goes well with COVID. So CapEx pretty much on track. Going to leverage. Leverage is finished the half year at just under 2 for the group as a whole. As a result of that, we will be informing the bank group of lower leverage, and it will result in our interest rate payments going down by 30 -- sorry, by 50 basis points for the second half of the year. So that's going to help our bottom line by about PLN 11 million in cash terms. There'll also be a larger amortization of loan adjustment, which will be favorable about PLN 100 million, but that's a noncash item. We're continuing to work quite effectively on identifying a source of dedicated funding for Allegro Pay. We still haven't got a final announcement to bring to you, but we're hoping something will come in the second half of the year. And we're also starting to think about whether or not we should be tapping the Polish corporate bond market as a way to diversify our long-term financing going forward. At the moment, as you know, all our long-term funding is bank-based. So that brings me to our final slide on my side, which is obviously the guidance. The year is panning out very much as we expected with a tough comparative to deal with in Q2. From here, we expect the growth to start to tick up again on the GMV side. The revenue growth, the take rates will be, we think, ticking down slightly, but also, we're starting to lap initiatives on take rate that we introduced a year ago in the second half. So that won't be quite as strong a driver on revenue growth as it was in the second half of the year. We're ramping up on SG&A expenditure. We've also got some reserve here in case the competitive situation gets more intense than it's been up until now. So all of that results in us basically confirming the guidance that we already increased back in Q1. The CapEx for the 2 reasons I mentioned a couple of moments ago is ticking down slightly, but nothing significant. The big programs are still on track. So with that, I'll pass it back to François for the concluding remarks. So you go François.

Thank you, Jon. So just wrapping up. So 10.6% GMV growth versus comparative of last year's spike, both of e-commerce, but especially of Allegro due to the factor I explained earlier. We see continued take rate and growing advertising, which drives revenue and EBITDA grows faster than GMV at 28% and 24%. We're very happy with the continued ramp-up of our Allegro Pay scale up with so much innovation still ahead in the rest of the year. Delivery experience continues to progress also with a number of the investments that we're making starting to have an impact in H2, both in terms of fulfillment and last mile. We continue to see limited impact from the changes in competitive landscape. And then as a high-growth company, it continues to be very important to us to invest in our people. And both in the quality, notably in software development engineers, but not only and also at the top of the organization, we continue to ramp up the team to continue to scale fast and raise the bar. All in all, all those initiatives are progressing, as Jon said, it means that we maintain our guidance, and we expect accelerated growth in Q3. That's all in terms of presentation. I'll leave it to Michal to help us facilitate the Q&A. Thank you.

Thank you, François. [Operator Instructions] We received a number of questions from you. Firstly, from Cesar Tiron from Bank of America. Let me ask them one by one. How do you explain that GMV growth during 2Q '21 was slower than the market growth?

I'll take that one. Maybe -- so it depends what you call market, right? So I think if you call market in that definition, that's probably e-commerce as a segment, but I'll explain both. So when you look at total, which is normally what we do, right? We look at total retail, there is indeed a switch from last year when all offline retail was close to this year when it's all mostly open. And that's a good thing, right? There is -- it's not in the business model of Allegro to have -- consumer shop with Allegro because they have no choice. So it's great that they have choice again this year. And it's great that we're still growing with that lapping that period of no choice versus off-line. Then if you look at online, it goes back a little bit to the explanation I gave earlier, right? It's purely mechanical at the end of the day. We realized early on that the offset of COVID that our third party, let's say, disseminated logistics model was much more resilient into taking spike demand. So our growth was much higher. And we actually doubled down on this because our model was so resilient by doing things, things such as extended free shipping, doubling down on some marketing initiatives that grew that spike even more than, let's say, more supply chain constraint, 1P model. So what you see is, indeed, the lapping of that last year's spike, which is even globally, was reasonably unique to that extent to our model of third-party with a 1 pickup delivery...

Experience.

Experience. And then towards the rest of the year, as I said, we'll see those kind of odd mechanical effects resorb as hopefully, we're more into, let's say, normal comparison.

And the second question for Cesar, why did customers stop growing Q-on-Q? And what makes us comfortable that there will be back to growth in the second half? Cesar is also wondering why the customers Allegro acquired in 2Q '20 weighted until 2Q '21 to churn rather than dropped in first Q '21, for example. So it's a question about the definition.

Similar mechanical effect, but Jon, yes. Yes.

So I think, hopefully, Cesar, I already explained in the presentation what was causing the flat quarter-on-quarter active buyer number. So it was the very fact that we had so many new active buyers in Q2 last year that even though we did a good job on retaining them relative to the historical norms that we've been working hard to continuously improve, there were still so many churners that it offset the active buyer growth that was a much more normal level in Q2 this year. So that in a nutshell was what I said during the presentation. The second part of your question, I think, is actually more the nuance of the way that the KPIs work. The way that we are reporting active buyers is that anybody who performs one transaction at least during a 12-month period and has their own unique e-mail account that their user details are attached to, that is an active buyer, okay? So we've got, obviously, people that are doing hundreds of transactions per year within that active buyer account. We've also got some people that have only done the one transaction. If they get through to the end of the 12-month period without making a second transaction, then they churn off of our active buyer base, okay? So both that measure and the GMV per active buyer are both last 12-month measures. And that's one of the reasons why we also call out the last 12-month GMV figure because if you multiply those 2 drivers together, you'd see that 37% growth in last 12-month GMV, I think it's on the GMV slide there. I think it was about PLN 39 billion. You'd be able to reconcile where that growth is coming from across the active buyers and across the extra 29% of spend.

And then finally, from Cesar, he would like to discuss some of the regulations that we've mentioned on our guidance slide with regards -- well, the risk of regulations with regards to the digital taxes.

Yes. I mean that's an interesting one. When we met 3 months ago, the ruling party had a proposal that they put -- what they published for consultation, basically, where they were proposing a digital advertising tax. That one's fallen by the wayside, but there's now another proposal that is circulating in the parliament, slightly different proposed by the left alliance originally, but seems to be potentially going to be picked up by the government. In addition, at the EU level and at the OECD level, as we know, there are also discussions around, in particular, Internet-based companies and potentially charging them additional levies or taxes. So it's very, very difficult to predict if any of this will come to actual fruition. None of it has actually gone into first boats or anything like that at this point in time. But we're somewhat concerned that something could happen in the relatively short term, and that's why we're flagging it in the guidance.

Then we have a couple from Pawel Szpigiel from mBank. The first one we dealt with. The second one, if you could give some guidance on the number of active buyers in the mid-term and how we're going to win them?

Well, we're not -- we don't guide on active buyers. As I said in my comments, that one-off effect that we saw in Q2 should ameliorate over the rest of the year because in the rest of the year, the challenge that we get from the COVID impacts that were there last year is much, much smaller. So we should start to see some growth again in our active buyer base. The Allegro Family project that we issued -- that we announced 2 weeks ago is also something that should help us with active buyers in that it's bringing out multiple users who are using one e-mail account today. It will encourage them to have their own dedicated e-mail account under the one family, which will allow them to actually have their own dedicated purchasing history, their own dedicated recommendations coming from Allegro, where today, it's all sort of one big soup around the multiple users that are using that one account. So as that project gets traction, that will also have some positive impact on the number of active buyers and should feed through into engagement as well.

Thank you. Now we have -- next, we have Maxim Nekrasov from Goldman Sachs, asking for the key drivers behind the take rate improvement year-on-year and Q-on-Q? And what is the outlook for the future?

Sure. So year-on-year, it's very much the same story as a quarter ago. Starting in Q2 of last year, we started to monetize the investments we were making in smart by introducing co-financing. Originally, it was only on courier. Then 1st of January this year, we added co-financing for lockers, which is a big chunk of the mix. So that brought in quite a lot of additional revenue. From the 1st of July last year, if I recall correctly, we started also charging success fees, not only on the value of the goods, but also on the delivery that was actually charged to the customers. So merchants that were in the smart program and when we were paying for the delivery, they didn't have to pay anything extra. But those that we're choosing to stay out with a smart program had to start paying success fees on delivery. And obviously, that's another reason, another impetus to get them to move into the smart program. We did make some adjustments to the core success fees on particular categories during the course of the last 12 months, but most of that was in Q4 and Q1 of this year and wasn't nearly as material as the co-financing aspect. Going forward for the second half of this year, first of all, we'll start to lap those changes that I just mapped out. So the year-on-year improvement in the take rate will get smaller. And secondly, we're also expecting that the absolute value of the take rate, which is 10.46% for Q2 will taper down a little bit later in the year. We'll be putting more money into commercial initiatives, especially around competitive pricing. And generally speaking, in Q4, there's a seasonality effect that also takes down the take rate. So that's basically what you can expect to see for the rest of the year. A slight taper down in the absolute number and less year-on-year growth.

And Maxim also is asking for the trends we are seeing so far in Q3.

Okay. Yes. So we have mentioned that in the MD&A. There's a current trading section. We also alluded to the GMV performance in the presentation. We hit a low point in April, which was last year right in the middle of this massive lockdown with all the off-line closed. And it's been going up. The year-on-year -- sorry, yes, year-on-year monthly GMV growth rates have been going up sequentially since then. As of July, we are seeing mid-teens growth year-on-year. So we're expecting that will keep moving up for the time being. Towards the end of the year, there were lockdowns reintroduced last year, which will create a bit of a headwind, assuming our assumptions are correct, and there's no lockdown in Q4 this year.

Next, we have Elena Jouronova from JPMorgan. Elena is wondering what percentage of overall GMV can Allegro International become? And is it already part of the mid-term GMV guidance?

Take the first part. The short answer on the second part is it's not really included at this stage because the project is so early stage.

The first one is a harder question.

Right.

I think the way to look at it is more that if and when we start launching, let's say, organically, notably, dedicated website for other consumers. A lot of those initiatives will make this so much easier in terms of having the seller base, international, the shipping, international, those are sequential steps to making international user experience either on .pl or another much easier and become over time significant, but we're not at a stage where we have anything to announce or share.

Yes. The key competitive advantage that we have are these really low price points that they're in the Polish market and in particular, on Allegro. So that should fuel the demand once we launch the product.

And then sort of follow-up on this topic from Andrew Ross from Barclays, who is asking for an update on international M&A strategy?