Allegro.eu S.A. ($ALE)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and I would like to welcome you to Allegro's Q4 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] So without further ado, I will now pass the line to Tomasz Pozniak, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, [ Rafael, ] and welcome to all participants of our call. Let me introduce the presenters of today. Mr. Marcin Kusmierz, the CEO of Allegro Group, will provide you with the highlights of Allegro performance in Q4 and full year 2025 with a summary of key takeaways towards the end of our presentation. And Mr. Jon Eastick, our CFO, who will guide you through the financials, update of medium-term aspirations and the outlook for the full year 2026. As usual, our results presentation is available for download from our Investors web page at allegro.eu. You may also download these slides 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 expectations expressed in such statements. Please make sure you review the full disclaimer on Slide #2. Also, please note that the presentation and the Q&A session are being recorded and will be available for a replay on our website at allegro.eu. And with this, I would like to hand over to our CEO. Marcin, the floor is yours.

Good morning. Thank you, Tomasz, for the introduction. Today, Jon Eastick and I are pleased to meet with you and present and discuss the results for Q4 and for the entire year 2025. Let's move on to the presentation. We are delighted to present the successful year and the results we achieved in relation to updated guidance. We delivered them in all areas. Our international operations even have exceeded our expectations and plans. And this is a very good sign for 2026, especially since we have a lot of great projects and initiatives in the pipeline that are focused on accelerating the growth of the company. Moving on to the annual summary of results, we show the enormous scale that Allegro has achieved and how various financial indicators contribute to strengthening its financial profile. Group GMV is nearing the PLN 70 billion mark achieving a 9% growth rate. Our consolidated group revenue reached PLN 12 billion, a robust 11% increase, while the group adjusted EBITDA rose over 15% year-over-year to PLN 3.5 billion. Total group CapEx was around PLN 940 million, showing around 52% year-over-year growth and finishing in line with expectations. A significant achievement this year was our profitable growth in Poland, where we reached a full year GMV margin at 6%. This marks the second straight year we have exceeded our midterm margin aspirations in our home market. Our Polish revenue growth specifically reflects rising take rates, higher advertising penetration and the successful expansion of our fintech and logistics engines. To understand our current momentum, we turn to the fourth quarter top line results. We demonstrate Allegro's continued leadership in the Polish market, where we are constantly growing faster than the broader economy. In Q4, Polish GMV grew by 8.6% year-over-year, steadily outpacing the domestic nominal retail growth of 4.4% for the same period. We saw our group active buyers base advanced to 21 million, which is -- which over 15 million in Poland. Crucially, average annual spend for the group accelerated to 8% growth, while in Poland, the average spend reached over PLN 4,000 per year, up over 7.3% year-over-year. Financial discipline and balance sheet strength are the focus for the group. We successfully reduced our leverage showing good progress quarter after quarter. This strong position was maintained even after funding a share buyback PLN 1.4 billion. In Poland, our adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin remained stable year-over-year at 5.59% for Q4. Group CapEx for the quarter was nearly PLN 300 million, up 60% year-over-year as we accelerated investment in our logistics rollout and new platform functionalities. Looking ahead, we are refining the strategic focus to ensure solid fundamentals for the future. We show our evolution from simply growing the Core to supercharging through AI automation and high-value services. Our revised priorities include transforming our international expansion model into one that is low capital intensive and replicable. We are also focused on externalizing our assets by offering wider change of logistics, advertising, financial services to our partners to improve unit economics and build deeper loyalty. Our ambition -- and first of all, the plan we have is to speed up the growth of the company and grow faster than in the previous years. Allegro is technology-native organization, and we use artificial intelligence as a primary driver of internal efficiency. We are currently running almost 100 specific AI projects across the whole organization. We are targeting a 20% to 25% productivity increase in 2026 by integrating AI across full product development cycle. Our goal is to have AI embedded in around 40% of our tech portfolio by year-end 2026, aiming for 33% performance gains in our processes by the end of 2028. To make AI tangible for our users, we are rolling out specific customer-facing products. We've introduced our newest AI tools based on conversations designed to simplify journey for both buyers and merchants. For buyers, our AI assistant offers a new way of discovering products through natural language search. For selling partners, we are testing Ally, a new all-new AI assistant that provides instant sales support and step-by-step guidance for seller center tools, helping them to manage daily operations much more effectively. It is worth emphasizing that we treat AI as a booster for our growth. Increasing work efficiency is one very important dimension. The second is ability to acquire new customer groups, have an attractive sales channel and generate traffic. We work with all leading providers of this technology so that customers in Central and Eastern Europe have access to the latest and best AI-based solutions. Our core marketplace remains our greatest competitive value. We are expanding selection and technology to ensure Allegro remains the first choice for consumers. Our best price guarantee badge reached a record 1.7 million products in Poland. We continuously onboard major brands like Bestseller Group or FC-MOTO. Additionally, we deployed semantic search for our markets in Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, allowing buyers to find products using natural descriptions instead just keywords. Customer loyalty is cornerstone for our long-term value. Last year, we showed the significant progress of our Allegro Smart! program and strategic changes ensuring its continued growth. We have reached 7.5 million Smart! users in Poland with nearly 90% of them on paid subscriptions. To use more often Smart! in daily life, we also launched a multi-area exclusive partnership with Zabka last December. We also announced that starting March 2026, the minimum order value for Smart! renewals will move to PLN 49. In practice, this means that we have equalized MOV deliveries for APMs and Kurier, significantly expanding the group of customers who can benefit from door-to-door deliveries. Advertising is our fastest-growing high-margin revenue stream. This segment is transforming Allegro into a powerful retail media platform. Advertising revenue grew 24% year-over-year in Q4, reaching 2.24% of GMV. Our flagship sponsored offers produced PLN 1.2 billion in annual revenue, driven by advanced algorithm development and bidding optimization. Furthermore, our Off-Allegro network advertising grew by an impressive 70% year-over-year, supplying additional traffic to drive the marketplace flywheel. We see significant headroom for further growth in advertising. Here, we see our road map for 2026 and beyond, focusing on reaching customers earlier in their journey. As revenue growth is expected to continue outpacing GMV over the medium term. In 2026, we will accelerate investment in upper funnel advertising solutions to help brands build awareness and consideration. Machine learning-enabled improvements have already increased ad relevance, driving 10% higher click-through rates. FinTech has shifted to a major financial pillar to the group. This slide tracks the growth of Allegro Pay and its role in financing marketplace volume. Loan origination reached closely PLN 14 billion for the full year, a 26% increase year-over-year. We reached over PLN 10 billion in total GMV finance in 2025, which represents 20% growth. Our innovation in fintech will accelerate in 2026. We plan to move Allegro Pay beyond our platform and deepen integration with daily banking flows. We will scale Allegro KliK and externalize Allegro Pay card to extend credit origination beyond Allegro. For selling partners, we are increasing Allegro Kapital fixed term loan limits with PKO BP up to PLN 500,000. We're also developing our first merchants credit product for release in 2026. Control over the delivery experience is central to our strategy. We showed the rapid shift towards Allegro managed volumes, allowing us to guarantee quality and manage costs. Allegro managed volume share grew by 17 percentage points during 2025, reaching 41% in Q4. Over 90% of parcels are delivered within 2 days with the majority arriving next day. We successfully managed peak demand using Allegro delivery alone to service extended times on December 24. This shift in volume is a major tailwind for our margins. Diversified delivery partnerships and our own infrastructure allow us to manage unit cost effectively. All Allegro delivery partners are currently cheaper than the highest priced supplier in the market. Continued growth in our One Box network is driving unit cost down and total Allegro One volumes, including One Box one, One Kurier were up 80% year-over-year. To support our volume goals, we have built the most accessible pickup network in Poland. Here, we see the scale of APM's infrastructure. Our network reached over 36,000 APMs and 37,000 PUDO points by year-end 2025. We do it together with DPD, DHL and Orlen Paczka. Customer satisfied [ its Elite ] with NPS of nearly 80 points for Q4. We also plan to extend One Box network by another up to 4,000 units in 2026, alongside additional investment in sorting facilities. Data shows that convenience is driven by proximity is quickly closing the gap with competitors. Nearly 55% of buyers already have Allegro Delivery IPM as their closest or equal distance pickup option. Closely 70% of buyers on Allegro machine is closer or no further than 200 meters away from the highest price supplier. We are moving rapidly to cover remaining gaps to ensure that we are most convenient choice for every Polish consumer. Turning our international presence, we present highlights of the strong performance of new marketplaces. Allegro international marketplaces, specifically in Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, saw very strong top line growth with full year GMV up to 60% year-over-year. This has been achieved alongside significant optimization of cost lines, resulting a major improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin since 2023. To understand our international scale, let's look at how our customer base is evolving in Central Eastern Europe. We present the rapid adoption of our new marketplaces and the deepening engagement of international shoppers as we successfully replicate our Polish flywheel across the region. In 2025, our international marketplaces reached a major milestone with 4.6 million active customers, representing nearly 40% increase year-over-year. This growth is being driven by the expansion of our footprint in CEE markets, including the launches of Allegro Slovakia in February and Allegro Hungary in October 2024. We're seeing strong signs of increasing trust. For example, NPS in Czechia has climbed to nearly 60 points, trending towards Polish levels. Customer engagement is also stepping up with an 80% increase in highly engaged buyer, making 10 or more purchases annually. Moving on to Mall turnaround. This slide details the successful completion of the transformation. This was a critical strategic objective to move away from heavy asset legacy models towards a lean marketplace-centric approach that aligns with our core strength. We have officially transitioned the Mall and CZC brands to lean merchant model, integrated them into Allegro marketplace environment. To further sharpen our focus on the core business, we divested the Mall South segment in Slovenia and Croatia with the sale concluding in February 2026. Our logistic capabilities were also streamlined with WE|DO integrated into technological staff and rebranded as One Kurier. Beyond financial metrics, our success is built on a foundation of strong culture and corporate responsibility. We present industry-leading performance as a top employer and deep commitment to ESG. We are proud to be ranked as the #1 employer in the retail category and #12 overall among Poland's top employer for 2025. Allegro remains committed to equality, having been certified by the Equal Salary Foundation for paying women equally for equal work. Our social impact is tangible. Allegro Charity raised over PLN 70 million in 2025, a 25% increase year-over-year.

Thanks very much, Marcin, and good morning, everybody. I'm really pleased to be with you to take you through the financial aspects of our Q4 results and then later in the presentation, the outlook for 2026. Before I start, as usually, with Poland, let me just quickly explain why you'll notice on most of these slides, we have pro forma marked on them. As you probably heard, we divested a couple of weeks ago, our Mall South subsidiary, which -- or segment, I should call it, which was the Slovenian and Croatian business. And this was the result of a strategic review we did as part of the Mall turnaround during the course of 2025. That culminated in December with us making a final decision that the best option for this business was to dispose of it and sell it. And that resulted in a change to our definition of continuing operations, and we moved Mall South into discontinued operations. Now making that change means that all the as-reported numbers in our financial statements effectively exclude Mall South, both for 2025 and for 2024. And that causes a bit of a conundrum because obviously, the last 3 quarters, we've been explaining the results, including Mall South and also the guidance was set up, including Mall South. So we decided the best way to tackle that is to use pro forma numbers, including Mall South to maintain consistency. So the following 2 slides, which I'm not going through in any detail, should convince you that these differences are very marginal. The one thing worth noting for the full year perspective, this means in as reported numbers, PLN 0.6 billion less GMV, PLN 0.4 billion less revenue because most of that was retail revenue. And most importantly, a PLN 23 million higher profit because it was a loss-making business. So that's why it's pro formas. Let's move on and take a good look at Poland. As usual, the key stats are laid out on the summary slide. Let's go and look at the KPIs. So nothing much new here. Our key growth lever remains the tremendous loyalty of our customer base who spend year-over-year more and more on the Allegro platform. Q4 was no different. 7.3% advance on a year-on-year basis in the fourth quarter to PLN 4,327 of average spend per active buyer on an annual basis, which is a really, really strong performance. Active buyers has also done pretty well in the fourth quarter. We had 0.8% increase in the quarter alone and 1.9% for the full 12-month period. So we had 15,350,000 active buyers in Poland at the end of 2025. So putting those 2 levers together, you get a GMV result of 8.6% year-on-year growth for Q4, which lands us on PLN 18.9 billion for the quarter. The results, if you recall, we were a little bit worried about in the first half of November when we met to discuss Q3 because the first half of November was moving slowly. The second part of Black Week and then the Christmas demand was way stronger, and we executed extremely well in the second part of the quarter. We were also supported by the cold weather finally arriving, and that all made for a really strong December and a good overall finish with 8.6% for the quarter. High-frequency categories continue to move ahead faster than the average, 2x faster in this quarter. And it's also worth noting that when you do a mix-adjusted view of the categories, we had the highest result in terms of average selling price we've seen for quite a long time, 1.6% category-by-category average growth in selling price. So let's move on and look at revenues. And as usual, revenue is moving well ahead of GMV growth. For Q4, it was 16.4% year-on-year growth landing on PLN 3.238 billion for the quarter. And as usual, that additional growth is coming from the growth engines primarily. Advertising, as you heard from Marcin, 24% up in the quarter year-on-year. Logistics, as we move more and more business into our Allegro Delivery operation, up 161% year-on-year. And within the other revenue, you have mainly fintech growth, which added PLN 41 million, 72.8% on a year-on-year basis. Looking at the take rate, which obviously also supported marketplace revenue growth. Q4 was 0.25 percentage points higher year-on-year. That was all down to the co-financing increases that we made back in March. When you look at it seasonally or look at it Q-on-Q, the typical fourth quarter seasonality was visible with a drop down to 12.26% that will then rebound in the first quarter. This comes from a couple of reasons. One is that merchants spend less on promotion because demand is there anyway. And secondly, this year, we leaned more on the pricing lever, which we fund by sharing take rate with our merchants and a bit less on the marketing lever than we did in the prior year. So the take rate came down a bit. You'll see later marketing costs didn't grow as fast as last year. So let's look at adjusted EBITDA. It's lower seasonally in terms of margin at 5.6%, but it's flat on a year-on-year basis, 5.6% adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin. That translates into an 8.2% rise in adjusted EBITDA for Poland year-on-year, PLN 1.055 billion of adjusted EBITDA generated in just the 1 quarter. When you look at the bridge, the revenue drivers and their contribution are clear on the left-hand side of that bridge. As usual, let's focus in on the cost of delivery, which was up by 24.7% year-on-year. So the difference being PLN 194 million higher cost than a year earlier. That splits out 9% from volume growth and from increased penetration of the smart services on the one hand. 10% is purely accounting because as we move into greater use of Allegro Delivery within the delivery mix, we have to report the cost growth, and we recognize the revenues gross as well because we're actually the principal in the transaction rather than subcontracting when the accounting is done on a net basis. So that's 10% and that leaves from a unit cost perspective, a 5.6% increase in the average unit cost per parcel. And again, Allegro Delivery contributes here. That would have been over 10% if we hadn't had that mix shift away from the highest cost supplier. Marketing costs, 17% up year-on-year. much, much slower growth than we had a year ago. Instead of PLN 67 million growth year-on-year; last year, it was about PLN 120 million of increase. So that's adjusted EBITDA. CapEx. Our year-to-date Polish CapEx came in at 22.3% of our Polish adjusted EBITDA, which means we were comfortably with inside of our guide rail of up to 25%. Looking at the quarter alone, we had 77.6% increase Q4 to Q4 to PLN 286 million of CapEx. You can see clearly the biggest driver is the other or physical CapEx of 155% growth, and that's mainly coming from the investments that we're making in logistics across APMs, middle mile and the sorting center. Capitalized development cost is also up, but much more moderately at 19% growth, bigger tech team, higher salary costs, but also a bigger share of spending on new initiatives that get capitalized. So that concludes the Polish review. Now let's move on and take a look at international, which, as you already heard from Marcin, had an excellent fourth quarter. So let's start with the marketplace perspective. And I start with this because, obviously, the strategically important activity in our international business is to build these 3 marketplaces into large and profitable businesses over time. So let's look at how this has been going. In the fourth quarter, we had almost 49% year-on-year growth in the marketplace. And bear in mind, this is the first quarter where the baseline actually included the activity of all 3 of the geographies at the same time. We lapped the Hungarian launch right at the beginning of the fourth quarter. So 49% was a result we were really happy with, and it also beat our guidance. And what this is really reflecting is that increasing enthusiasm and engagement of the customers. As you saw on the slide that Marcin presented earlier, all the metrics are starting to move quickly in terms of their trust in Allegro, brand recognition, you name it, it's starting to move really positively. And that is then reflected here on this slide where you've got some of the funnel metrics. Traffic, for example, we only needed to grow the traffic by 16.6%, buying a lot less free traffic because we had a lot more -- sorry, buying a lot less paid traffic in proportion to the free traffic, which has been exploding. And that 16.6% was enough to generate the GMV growth of 49%. So also conversion rates going up very quickly. It also, therefore, translated into active buyer growth, which is up very strongly, 37.3% to 4.6 million customers. And when we look at spend per buyer, it's now starting to move, 15.1% growth on a year-on-year basis to PLN 584. That metric for Q3 was 10%, okay? So it's really starting to move very positively. So we're really happy with the marketplace. Now let's look at the segment view, which is called the Allegro International segment. And just as a reminder, this is including the legacy Mall North business. So that includes the legacy e-shops, which we shut down at the beginning of -- sorry, at the end of Q1 of 2025 and also the WE|DO logistics business. So that's blended in with the marketplace numbers that I was just showing previously. And that blending means that a lot of these growth trends are a little bit hidden, and I'll go through that in a second. But that is going to drop out of the baseline numbers during the first or second quarter of '26, just leaving that growth story that I went through on the previous slide. So let me just run through that and illustrate how that works on the next couple of slides. For example, on active buyers, there's the 4.6 million marketplace buyers for the fourth quarter that I just discussed, 37.3% growth. But overall, we're minus 1.2% growth because of the legacy customers who are now dormant and gradually running out of the last 12-month metric on the top of the slide. So 1.2% down in terms of active buyers in total. Similar trend going on in spend. The 15% growth to PLN 584 averages out to PLN 544 of spend and 3.4% growth when you include the Mall legacy. Applying the same to the GMV and the Allegro International segment. You can see on the left-hand side of the slide there in the gray, the legacy retail revenues that are still going to be in the baseline until the second quarter. And that means that the 48.8% growth that we had in the 3P marketplace nets out to 21.5% growth in the blended view. Retail, you see an even stronger effect because obviously, the retail revenue of the legacy business over-indexes with the 3P marketplace where we only own commission. So in this case, the revenue is down 30%. But by the time we get to Q2, that's all behind us, and you'll be seeing positive revenue growth. So to wrap up this section, let's look at the adjusted EBITDA loss, which is, I think, much more interesting. The loss has been cut on a year-on-year basis for Q4 by PLN 13 million or 7% year-on-year. But you see here clearly the mall turnaround effect where the PLN 42 million loss we had a year ago has been cut drastically to a PLN 12 million loss in the fourth quarter. And that's because of all the transformation we've done. What's left now essentially is just the mall lean merchant model selling over the marketplace. We reinvested some of that saving into growing the international marketplace faster, essentially into additional marketing. So the loss was slightly higher at PLN 159 million for the fourth quarter. But as you can see, we're really getting good GMV growth in exchange. And overall, the margin has come down from minus 21.8% to minus 16.7% for the year as a whole. Okay. And then just for the record, the Mall South segment, which is essentially what we divested to Mutares at the end of February. Those numbers are there on Slide 41. So total international operations is also there for your convenience. And moving on to the consolidated group. And here, as usual, I'll just limit my comments to leverage, which is laid out on Slide 45. And let's start with the end of year leverage position. We finished the year with 0.81 of a turn of leverage, so last 12-month adjusted EBITDA compared to the net debt position. And this is comfortably within the capital allocation policy where our target is 1 plus or minus 0.5 turn. And we managed to do that or keep -- essentially keep the leverage steady compared to Q4 a year earlier despite giving PLN 1.4 billion back to our shareholders in the form of a stock buyback that we executed in the middle of the year. When it comes to financing, we had a busy fourth quarter. We've actually replaced the financing facility, the senior debt financing facility we had in Luxembourg, which was for PLN 5 billion with a PLN 6 billion facility, which is borrowed at the level of Allegro in Poland. And this facility is cheaper. It has a lower margin, and it also has no security. And the maturity has been extended from 2027 to 2030. So this is a great improvement in terms of our financing cost. But also very importantly, PLN 3 billion of the PLN 6 billion is in RCF form, which allows us to borrow in order to do these buybacks and then pay it back as the free cash flow comes in during the course of the year. Last comment would be regarding the cash balance then. There's PLN 2.8 billion of cash at the end of the fourth quarter, plus PLN 2 billion of those RCF is undrawn. So that's tremendous financial flexibility for developing the business moving forward. Okay. So that's the financial tour of the fourth quarter completed. It's time now to look at the outlook, the management outlook for 2026 and for the midterm. And as usual, at this time of year, we finished our planning process and discussions with the Board, and we can share with you our perspectives. Let's start with the medium-term aspirations, which, as a reminder, is essentially a 5-year perspective on where we think the business is going to go. And let's start with growth and profitability. So first of all, the core business as it is now, we're expecting in Poland to grow at least 10% GMV CAGR over this 5-year period. The first key objective, just to underline, is that we grow faster this year than the 9.4% we just delivered for the previous year, and we're going to do everything in our power to make that happen. As we layer in new products and service categories and some of the new ideas that Marcin was going through earlier, these numbers might start to move up over time year after year as we do further planning rounds. But based on the current footprint, this is what we have. Sustaining Polish adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin at between 5.7% and 6% range. This is a little bit higher than we were saying last year. We just completed 2025, again with a 6% margin. We are prepared to reinvest some of that to accelerate the business, but we're still very confident that we can stay in that 5.7% to 6% range. Now the international business, which I was talking about earlier, is going to be a key driver to accelerate the group GMV growth over and above the Polish GMV growth in the coming years as we drive those and scale those marketplaces in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. As you've heard, we're really encouraged by the progress and the improvements that we've seen over the prior 12 months. It's giving us the confidence that we need to keep investing and building an even bigger international business than previously assumed. That means we'll run it at a loss for a bit longer to 2029. But as you'll see, those losses are relatively small relative to the overall cash generation in Poland. And let's talk about that now, looking at the guide rails, which are on the right-hand side of this slide. So obviously, the cash generation of the business is coming from the Polish adjusted EBITDA. And we're setting guidelines -- guardrails as to how we are going to reinvest that money. Up to 25% will go into funding the Polish CapEx, and that's going to include 3 more years of accelerated logistics project spending as we try to reduce the delivery costs that we would otherwise be facing and also to diversify the number of partners that we're working with. When it comes to international, we're expecting at the beginning of this 5-year period to be investing roughly 12% of the Polish adjusted EBITDA. And as we drive that business towards breakeven, that figure will obviously come down to a 0% figure by 2029. That means for the first year for 2026, essentially 63% of the Polish adjusted EBITDA would drop through to fund interest and tax and the balance will be left to be managed via our capital allocation policy. And that capital allocation policy -- that capital allocation policy is actually continuing unchanged. We've agreed -- management and Board have agreed we're going to run with exactly the same policy going forward for 2026. You can see key principles on the left-hand side of the cash flow waterfall unchanged. And similarly, leverage and liquidity targets on the right-hand side also unchanged. So the key one being a leverage ratio of net debt to adjusted EBITDA of 1x, plus or minus 0.5 as we go through the course of the year. And that means for this year, we've calculated that we can afford to return PLN 1.6 billion to our shareholders. The Board took that decision yesterday. And in due course, we'll be providing you more information for the shareholder vote to authorize such a buyback. That shareholder meeting is in June 2026. Okay. Now outlook for 2026, the expectations, starting with GMV. As I just -- as I said a moment ago, our real objective here is we want to grow faster than last year, but it still needs to obviously have a range from an outlook perspective. So our range is similar to last year, 9% to 11%. For international, we're targeting 35% to 40% year-on-year growth. So very strong progress on 2026. And that's going to, obviously, therefore, result in the group GMV growing faster than Poland. We're looking at 10% to 12% GMV growth for the year as a whole. For revenue, we're targeting 11% to 14% year-on-year growth. We are not planning to make significant increases in our take rates in 2026, which means that the growth engines will provide that uplift over the GMV growth, the advertising, the delivery and the fintech. In International, the marketplaces that we're expecting to deliver the 20% to 30% revenue growth, still with some of that legacy retail revenue in the Q1 baseline. So therefore, 12% to 15% growth in revenue for the group for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA in Poland, given that little bit of reinvestment of margin, we're looking for 7% to 10% year-on-year growth. For international, another 7% to 12% improvement to between PLN 450 million and PLN 480 million of investment in driving the business. And that means a significantly higher 9% to 13% year-on-year growth rate for the group EBITDA. When it comes to CapEx, we're expecting it to be between 12% and 22% higher between just over PLN 1 billion and PLN 1.15 billion. So to finish up, my last slide before I hand back to Marcin. The current trading is looking pretty strong. Q1 quarter-to-date, so essentially to the end of February, the group GMV was growing 10% versus the 9.2% that we had in -- we just reported for Q4. In Poland, we're growing ahead of the 8.6% we delivered in the fourth quarter. We're seeing high single-digit GMV growth. In Allegro International, the marketplaces are delivering 55% GMV growth on a quarter-to-date basis, which is faster than the 49% we did in Q4. So more evidence of increasing momentum. The legacy Mall or the Mall North GMV is down 75% because we were still running those legacy stores in Q1 of last year. And net-net, that means the International segment is growing GMV quarter-to-date at about 30%, which is better than the 21% we just delivered for Q4. So that's it from my side. Back to Marcin.

Thank you, John. To wrap up today's presentation, let's summarize the year and look at the path forward. 2025 was a year of exceptional delivery, and we are entering 2026 with a clear plan to accelerate our growth while remaining disciplined in our capital allocation. So trying to sum up the previous very good year in a few sentences. We successfully met our 2025 outlook across the board with international GMV results beating our expectations. For 2026, we are raising our goals, aiming for group GMV growth acceleration to 10% to 12% range. Our strategy remains focused on supercharging the core marketplace through investments in AI, new product categories, entering the services market and further development in logistics infrastructure and development of Allegro Delivery program. Finally, we remain committed to returning value to our shareholders with a proposed share buyback for 2026 up to PLN 1.6 billion. So thank you for listening to our presentation. And now we invite you to participate in Q&A session.

Okay. Thank you very much for the presentation. We are now going into the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Our first voice question comes from Cesar Tiron from Bank of America.

Congratulations on your very strong results. I have 4 questions. I'm very sorry, but they're very easy. The first one, Marcin, can you please help us understand what factors will drive a potential acceleration of GMV in Poland in 2026? The second one, I understand from the current presentation that the increase in the take rate is likely to be less material in 2026. Is that correct? The third one, logistics. If I exclude any potential impact on higher inflation from the current geopolitical issues, do you think that the unit cost can further improve at Allegro One in 2027? So I said 2027 because in the presentation, you are showing an improvement in 2026. And then the last question, I promise, in absolute zloty terms, our peak losses in international behind us?

So thank you for your questions. Maybe I will start trying to cover the question related to the growth because this is, I guess, the most exciting thing. We do invest a lot to find some new opportunities to sell more, thanks to adding new product categories, extending portfolio of products we have right now in the marketplace. adding services, of course, investing, as mentioned before, in AI heavily because we do believe that this is the solution. This is the technology supporting our growth and giving us opportunity to have access to a new group of customers and generate additional traffic, thanks to new sources of traffic to our marketplace. So we cover several initiatives. We opened several projects. We are excited about that because we see so many new opportunities. And of course, the core marketplace is in -- as a main priority, and we're adding new functionality to the platform as well. But we do invest to discover some new places on the market to gain new group of customers and then, of course, to boost sales on our side.

Cesar, thanks for the questions. So let me take the take rate one first. We announced the annual take rate changes back in the end of January, I think, and they're actually taking hold in the last few days, so the beginning of March. Long story short, we made very little change this year. We have increased the co-financing, but only by 3 percentage points on the nominal numbers that we charge per parcel. So in essence, we only increased it by inflation. When it comes to the most expensive supplier, the indexation is that they're able to apply is a little bit above that percentage. And we've decided that strategically, we don't want to pass that on to the merchants. And we want to give a really stable platform for the merchants to keep engaging, keep investing and support that growth that we're trying to generate, as Marcin was just describing. I'll come back to your index question because I didn't totally get it. So I'll come back in one second. When it comes to the international, I think we can unequivocally say that on an annual basis, we've gone through the peak loss that we're going to see. The objective now will be to keep driving that GMV growth, gradually bringing down the percentage margin versus GMV as we go. And eventually, we'll get to that 0%. We think at the moment, that's 2029. It means it's going to be a much bigger business than it would have been if we'd have moved into monetization mode in the Czech market already this year, which essentially would have been necessary if we stuck with the 2027 objective. The business is really exciting us the way it's starting to build momentum at the moment. The unit cost question, if I understood correctly, you asked me about unit cost. Could you rephrase the question or explain a bit more?

Absolutely. I'll try without the French accent. So on Slide 16, you are showing the year-on-year change in unit cost of parcel delivery to APM. In 2026, it's minus 8%, assuming no inflationary shock from the current geopolitical events in the Middle East. what would be the number in 2027? Would it be even lower? Can that number keep on going lower?

Thank you. Now I've got the question. Okay. Right. So your question was actually on the Allegro One component of our unit cost because the total unit cost where we're taking all suppliers into account is a bit higher than in the prior year because of indexation. But we managed to reduce that loss significant or that increase significantly because of the mix effects that we drove. So that's one point. Coming to your question then. In general, yes, there's going to be a strong downward trend on Allegro One as we add volume. As you heard, we added 80% of volume last year, and we would expect similar things going on this year. In the short run, we will be putting more lockers into areas where currently we don't operate because most of the lockers in Allegro Delivery are in the bigger cities. In the short run, that has a unit cost negative impact because you have longer Kurier routes and when they first open fairly empty lockers until you build the demand. So that might cause a little bit of a bump for 18 months or so. But long term, the trend continues to be strongly downwards. And hopefully, that's clear for you. And the reason for it being strongly downward is the core network and the middle mile will obviously respond very positively to additional volume going through it.

Our next voice question comes from Roman Reshetnev from Goldman Sachs.

Congratulations on strong results. I also have 3 questions. The first one is a follow-up on your Poland GMV growth. I just wanted to ask what underlying e-commerce market growth assumptions do you use in your approach? And do you assume that you will gain overall market share going forward? Secondly, on AI, I see you flag that you have nearly 100 specific AI projects currently running. So I'm just wondering how much of the projected 2026 group CapEx do you specifically target for AI and machine learning infrastructure and how is it looking versus traditional software development? And the last one on externalization of Allegro Pay because you mentioned extending credit origination beyond the Allegro platform, the Allegro Pay card. So I just wanted to ask what is the time line for this externalization? And how will you manage the increased credit risk profile of platform spending?

Thanks for the questions, Roman. I'll take the first one and pass over to Marcin on the second and third. When it comes to the GMV growth, we're expecting obviously a reasonably robust retail sales backdrop to the growth by making changes like not increasing significantly take rates and making improvements to things like the MOV that Marcin was commenting for Smart!, where Kurier deliveries are going to be more accessible than they were previously. These things we think will be like high-level positive levers to help. Then obviously, the work we're doing around improving the UX around categories and this type of project that Marcin was going through, we also expect to be supportive. Share-wise, we're not trying to -- or expecting to grow the share in any significant way. But our major objective is to hold on to what we have. And more or less, that's what we would expect to do. The Chinese are still there in the market. But they -- although they grow fast, they are working from a very low base, and we do believe they're a bit of a niche that will eventually reach its ceiling and stop being such a factor.

So as mentioned before, we heavily invest in AI because we see high potential, not only because of higher efficiency, for example, production of software, but also to boost our GMV. So we split the key directions of our investment in AI into 2 areas. The first one, as I said before, is related to improving efficiency, but not only in the tech departments, it's across the whole organization, and we see huge impact implementing AI and helping our team just to be more efficient. But this is investment we continue. We started last year, and we see constant growth and the rising efficiency. And the second layer, even more important one is, of course, related to the growth and development of the platform and development of additional functionalities related to the platform. As you know, we started to provide functionality called AI Assistant, of course, driven by our technology and driven by technology developed by our partners. This is something helping us to boost GMV because we see that this is something supporting our customers to find products perfectly fitted to their expectations, to their needs and especially in some more sophisticated categories or products, this is really something helping. So we see that this is technology having or allowing us to earn more and giving us opportunity to present the better return on this investment. Of course, we do cooperate with all major players from this industry. So we have benefited because of our position on the Polish market in the region that we have access to the newest functionalities of AI provided by them. So we want to stay as a very rational and cost-efficient company, combining the expertise from Allegro, but also having access to external platforms.

Maybe I'll answer the question regarding the Allegro Pay externalization. As you rightly said, yes, we have the credit card product already up and running. It was in tests last year, and we moved it into more general commercial release a couple of months back. We expect to scale it probably up to 350,000 to maybe 500,000 cards this year. Consumers love it. They're really happy with the card. The NPS score is very high. And it also means that our essentially extremely profitable model where we really do know very deeply who we're lending to, and we have very strong control over the amount of bad debt risk that we're taking means that we're very confident that we can make good money from this product. And what's interesting for us is that a lot of the money gets spent on areas which are actually not competitive to Allegro. I mean 2 of the biggest buckets are people buying their weekly grocery shop which obviously includes a lot of fresh food, which we don't sell or buying or filling their car tank. We don't sell gasoline, unfortunately, on the -- over the Internet. So it's a very interesting product. And as I said, the most important thing, the customers really love it. So we're scaling it up.

Our next voice question comes from Michal Potyra from UBS Securities.

The first, like a very technical question. Do you anticipate any changes to how the buyback will be executed compared with last year? So that's the first question. The second question is, could you please comment on the expected impact from the surcharges on parcels coming from Asia, potentially making life a little bit more difficult for your competitors? And the last question, if I may. I noticed -- I believe this is the first quarter since you began disclosing the details when the item growth came below the GMV growth. Can you perhaps walk us through what drove the divergence? And is it a new normal going forward?

I will take the first and the last question. Maybe I'll do them one after the other. So the first question, thank you for it was about the buyback. We're in discussion with our brokers about exactly what would be the best way to return that capital to the shareholders. As with last year, our time line really is to finish those discussions and make those decisions ahead really by May ahead of the Board meeting so that we can give you some concrete information on what we're planning to do so that when you vote, you're able to -- or when the shareholders vote, they know what they're voting for. But we're still at the discussion stage at the moment. So I don't want to speculate on exactly how we're going to go about it. The second question, yes, very good spot regarding the items sold versus the GMV growth. It actually was a bit of a one-off impact. If you go back to 2024, we were -- we had a deal with the biggest APM supplier that we would get volume discounts for additional volume over the course of 2024. And as we reach the end of the year, we could see that there was an opportunity to collect bigger discounts. As a result, we ran a promotion in Q4 last year, bringing the MOV for Smart! down to PLN 30, and we ran that for about a month. And that brought in a lot of additional low-priced parcels or low GMV parcels and obviously also helped us to collect those discounts, which were applicable for the whole year. So we got discounts which applied to all the parcels that we bought during the year, and we booked those discounts in the fourth quarter. So it was a bit of a one-off, and I would expect us to go back to the normal trend of the high-frequency categories that grow considerably quicker than the overall marketplace, gradually resulting in item growth being slightly ahead of GMV growth. That was that and you take the other question, Marcin?

So of course, we are happy that finally, the European Commission decided to implement the first fees creating the European e-commerce market more competitive, but also securing against unfair competition. So starting from July, we expect to see EUR 3 fee per parcel, something what will be helping local merchants to be much more competitive and winning the battle against unfair competition. Of course, for many of them, it will be tailwind and for us as well. And what we expect also is that some additional fee will be implemented in Q4 this year, called handling fee, it should be additional EUR 2 or EUR 3 per parcel. So in total, it should be this year EUR 5 or even EUR 6. And this is for sure helping European companies because today, we observed that million parcels coming from China without paying local taxes and creating some unfair advantage.

Our next voice question comes from [ Nicolas ] from BNP Paribas.

A couple from my side, if that's right. Firstly, a clarification one. So does your guidance for FY '26 include any assumptions at all about events unfolding in the Middle East and the knock-on impact on the European consumer? That's my first one. And then secondly, I've got a couple of niche questions, if that's okay. Interest expense stepped up in Q4. How should we think about this? I know you mentioned some of the reasons behind that on the call, but how should we think about these going forward? And then another niche one as well about the tax rate as well. I know you've got some benefits from R&D tax relief in the current financial year. Again, how should we think about the normalized tax rate in the new financial year?

Okay. Thank you for those questions. So the second one was interest rate. The first one was yes. Yes, the Middle East, exactly. How could I overlook that? Yes. So the short answer is that we haven't tried to make any assumptions regarding what's going to happen in the Middle East. I think it would be a false game to do that. It's obviously a very serious situation with the potential to cause issues. But for the time being, we see absolutely zero impact in trading. And we need to wait and see. With the volatility on fuel prices and things like this, obviously, there are risks, but they haven't come to fruition as yet or an established pattern hasn't come to fruition yet. So it's a bit too early to try and take anything into account. What I would say is that if there is some kind of inflationary shock, we live through that back in '23, '22, '23, very similar. Allegro, because of its incredibly wide selection is the place where you can get just about whatever you want. So if the consumer purchasing patterns change, if they become much less interested in discretionary spending, much more interested in every day, they still shop with us. And that's been stress tested, as I said, back in 2023. So as long as supply, given that so much of manufacturing comes from China, as long as the supply chains hold together, and obviously, a lot of the supply arrives to Europe comes up by ship and not through the Middle East. As long as supply stays available, the marketplace should do just fine. Second question was interest rates. Yes, it's a good question. There's actually a noncash item in the Q4 financial expenses, if I'm addressing your question correctly. If you look at total financial expense, it's about PLN 100 million charge, if I recall, from basically redoing the amortized cost calculation, the amount of money that gets allocated over the life of the loan. All of that needed to be written off because we stopped -- we basically closed the existing loan, which was borrowed through the Luxembourg entity and replaced it with a brand-new loan. So there was no basis to carry that over. Interest rates generally ought to be on a year-on-year basis going down. You just also need to remember, we did have hedges that were highly in the money, but those are dropping out of the baseline as we go along. The final question was about the tax. Yes, we had a one-off PLN 250 million tax credit in respect to claims for R&D relief in respect to prior years. We collected -- or we haven't collected yet. We're in the process of collecting the money, but we had to in accordance with the accounting standards, we booked the gain in the tax line ahead of getting the refund. We collect it for '21 to '24, which means a further R&D relief claim will probably go in for 2025 during the course of this year, but it won't be as big as that PLN 250 million because it's only for 1 year, if that's clear. So overall, collecting these R&D reliefs should reduce our effective tax rate a little bit, but don't assume that, that 2025 result is going to be projected forward indefinitely.

Thank you very much. This is the end of the voice questions. So I'm going to pass the line to Tomasz Pozniak for the text questions.

Thank you, Rafael. And unfortunately, as we are running out of time allocated to this call, we will address your written questions calling back or just replying to the e-mails. So please expect us reaching out to you still today on the written questions. With this, we are concluding this call. Thank you, Marcin. Thank you, Jon. Thank you, Rafael, and thank you to all participants.

Thank you. We are now closing all the lines.