CDON AB (CDON) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
November 16, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Nicklas Fhärm
analystGood afternoon, everybody, and very welcome to Stockholm for those of you that are in the room and in the city this mid-November day for the Capital Markets Day of CDON Group. We'd also like to welcome everybody listening in on the web call, and there will be a possibility to ask questions later down the road. But today is basically a deep dive into CDON, into the vision and the strategy of the group. And of course, we will also be having the opportunity to listen on sort of the marketplace industry outlook and the fundamentals. For those of you that haven't met me before, I'm an equity analyst with SEB equities since long, and I'm responsible for our coverage of CDON. I've been mainly focusing on the retail and similar consumer sector industries over the past 20 to 25 years. It's a great pleasure to have been invited here to moderate this CMD today. Today's speakers will be a very, very interesting part of the group management team. Of course, we have the CEO, the Chief Executive Officer, Fredrik Norberg that will present during today. He is the cofounder of Fyndiq, which is a recent acquisition by CDON Group and now a very important part of future prospects. We'll also be able to listen to Carl Andersson, the Chief Commercial Officer. And he joined as an integration manager in earlier this year and was promoted to the CCO in June of this year. We also have Kattis Astrom in the room. She's the Experience officer, the CEO in another sense. She was previously CXO at Fyndiq and also a strategist at Adlibris, the main online book retailer. And we'll also be able to listen to Mark Nidefelt who's the Chief Supply Officer and also previously from Fyndiq and most importantly, also ex-senior buyer at group on. Just for the record, unfortunately, the CFO, the Chief Financial Officer, will not be participating in the room today for personal reasons. I'm sure we'll be able to listen to him later on, but not today, unfortunately. All right. I think we should briefly go through the agenda and the ambition with this afternoon. So to start, we will listen to the vision and mission and the segments by Fredrik, the CEO. After that, we will have a call presenting us a market overview. And then we'll also have a very interesting interview with Erik Segerborg on the title "What Great Looks Like." after that, we'll have a short, say, 10- to 15-minute coffee break. And when we meet back again, we will listen to Fredrik on sort of the strategic foundation of the group and the company going forward. After that, we will have 2 deep dives. The first deep dive would be on the supply side, how to increase and strategically plan for an increase in the future. The second deep dive will be on the customer experience, of course, by the CXO Kattis. And then we will come back and end the day before the Q&A and concluding remarks with some financials and more specifically, the attractiveness of the marketplace business and CDON in particular. And to end everything, everybody in the room on the conference call and through the mail sort of format or the web format, there will be an opportunity to raise any questions you may have. So with those short words as an introduction to this afternoon, I would like to welcome to the stage, the CDON Group CEO, Fredrik Norberg. Thank you.
Fredrik Norberg
executiveThank you, Nicklas. We will start with the first part, which we have called Great Potential, and we have the blueprint to realize it. I will start with the CDON Group's vision, mission and the segments. CDON Group's vision is to unleash the power of the marketplace to give the best shopping experience in the Nordics. Here, we see a great potential, and this is quite something extra that we have in front of us. The way of shopping online for the rest of the world is through marketplaces dominantly. If we're looking in Europe, 30% to 50% of the online shopping is done through a marketplace. Looking to U.S., we are nearing 45% and if we're looking into China, plus 90% of the online shopping is done through a marketplace. If we look at Nordics, we have 5%. And here, we have this huge anomaly, where we are doing something really differently as consumers compared to the rest of the world. And this is really something that you could compare it to a grocery store. 100 years ago, you went to the butcher and then you went to the milkman, and then you went to a clothing store. Today, you go to Walmart or you go to ICA Maxi and you shop everything at one place. And this is what we really strongly believe that here, we have the opportunity for this company. But first up, the definition. A marketplace is a platform that facilitates the buying and selling of goods, services or information between multiple parties. And why customers around the world love this way of shopping is that there is an enormous assortment. Due to this, there are really competitive prices as well. You get the competition between the merchants, which are pushing down the prices. And then you really have the convenience of a one-stop shop. You don't have to go to the butcher and the milkman and the fashion store and so on. You go to one place. Why merchants use marketplaces is to really add sales. It's about the money for the merchants. But it's also a new way of entering into new markets with really low investments. And last but not least, you don't need any marketing or tech skills or money whatsoever to start sell. You just need to be sure that you find products that people like at good prices and then sell them with a margin. CDON Group doesn't only have one marketplace, we have 2 marketplaces since acquisition of Fyndiq in April. And the nice thing here is that we have 2 really separate marketplaces. We have CDON, who's focused on quality products, and we have Fyndiq, who's focused on discount products. And during these times of economy also we can see that they are countercyclical to each other. During these times, we can see that Fyndiq is really nurturing and have a really boom when times are tough from an economic perspective. I want to walk through a little bit about the logic behind the acquisition of Fyndiq. So first up, marketplace needs volume. We will come back to this later on, but we really have a high scaling effect in the business model. With this high scalability, we need volumes. And with Fyndiq and CDON together, we now have these volumes. We also have the organizational synergies. We don't need 2 of everything. We can have one centralized organization operating 2 marketplaces. We have one technology platform. Later on, we will have a video from an interview I did with the CEO of Cdiscount, France's largest e-commerce player and marketplace. And he really emphasizes the importance of the tech platform. And here, we are really at the top. We have a solely purpose-built platform in-house. This is the second generation now that we launched just a couple of years ago. And now we are migrating the CDON platform into this combined platform for both Fyndiq and CDON. We also will have a lower customer and merchant competition. We don't have to fight about the same customers and merchants. And then last but not least, we have really the opposite brand positions. The cannibalization between the 2 marketplaces are really low. Of course, we have overlaps in the customer base, but the 2 marketplaces really serve different purposes of what to buy and when you buy it. And there, we see that we are not competing with each other. At CDON, you will find the best of the most. CDON's mission is to offer our customers the best selection of quality products in a reliable and convenient way. Here, you will find the greatest or the latest. You will find the latest PlayStation 5, you will find the latest air pods, the Samsung, and you will find your new hot makeup mirror. Here, you will find a vast assortment of products that you -- from brands that you know and with great quality. If you're about to buy a gift for your spouse, then you're going to CDON and buy it. At CDON -- sorry, at Fyndiq, you will always strike a bargain. Fyndiq's mission is to offer value-conscious consumers unbeatable bargains with a best-in-class shopping experience. Here, we really have the latest trending products. Everything you see on TikTok, you will find at Fyndiq at really good prices. You can find this Reflex Vest which is very popular now in the dark places that we live in now. We have the mobile covers, and we have this super trending TikTok product, the Galaxy lamp that, of course, every kid and teenager want in their room. And down to the left, we don't have LEGO, but we have magnetic tiles, which is a really popular products among kids. And here, you come and find the latest trends at really low prices. But the perception of a retailer is very much defined of the supply of the products that you present. And if you think about it, if you go to a physical retail store, you really have the same. You have 4 walls and a ceiling and the floor and then you have the products. So the products are really the thing that mainly defines the perception of that retailer. And this is extra important when it comes in online, because you don't have this physical sensors. So what you get displayed with is really what gives you the sense of that brand. If you go into a dollar store, you really get the feeling that this is a dollar store because of the products that are displayed to you. And here is just one example where we, on CDON, have and will have Oral B toothbrushes and toothbrush heads, the original. On Fyndiq, we will have the Oral B compatible toothbrush heads at much lower price points. Here is -- to left is actually this is a classic model called a Flywheel or the Amazon Virtuous Circle. This is actually a printed copy of Jeff Bezos' handwritten model on a napkin, he allegedly did drew in 2001. And this is still the foundation of each and every marketplace that now we're operating. You need to have -- we start to the bottom left, you have the sellers. You need to start with the sellers, to get sellers to upload supply. From that, you get a selection of products. On top of that, you need to create a customer experience where you can find the products, you have a customer service that's good enough and you can ship the products in time. If you do that good, you will generate more traffic. And with more traffic, you will get more merchants and the existing merchants will upload more products. And with more products, you will get a better selection and so on. And there you get the flywheel effect of it. And as the whole marketplace grow, you get a lower cost structure as well. You get lower operating expenses per unit sold. And by doing that, you can become more efficient. You don't have to charge the merchants as much, which are pushing down the prices and also the prices are really pushed with the competition between the merchants. So this is the whole flywheel you need to fuel. And we are focusing on 2 parts of this. It's the selection part, which we call for the supply and also the customer experience part, which creates really customer happiness. I'm going to give you an example, and we have quite a few examples like this of the strength in the marketplace platform and also that we can really catch fast trends without getting caught with excess inventory. This is in a -- this is by the end of 2019. No one of us were aware of what was waiting around the corner, the corona. On both marketplaces, we had a few merchants selling face masks. No one bought face masks at this time, except some nail salons or et cetera, like that. What happened then was that we got the corona outbreak in January 2020. And what happens then, and this happens every time, is that these few merchants really get increased sales. And when they fast get increased sales, they do restocking. They do fast restocking because they have an efficient supply chain. So they get really fast new supply. And what they do then is that they keep up the prices because they have no competition. So they make a lot of money, and we can really get a big supply. But then the marketplace model kicks in because only 1 or 2 weeks after that, we get plus 100 merchants buying these face masks. And all of a sudden, we have 10,000 face masks. We have the biggest assortment of face masks, both online and offline, and we have the lowest prices, because what then happens is that the merchant competition kicks in. So the merchant start to compete with each other, and the only or the best way to do that is to push down the prices. We get up to really high peak. And then after that peak, we had a low in the corona outbreak. We still had the largest assortment of face masks but we had no cost in inventory, no cost in warehouses or anything, but still had the biggest assortment of face masks until next outbreak came, the second corona outbreak came. And we could really catch all the demand that came out in the market. When demand goes to zero, we have no cost in inventory, no overstock at all, and we can really start to move over our focus and marketing costs to the next trending category or product. And this is, of course -- I mean, this doesn't happen every month. Usually, this blockbuster trend happens usually once a year, something like that. It could be a fidget spinner, it could be face mask or something similar. Dancing cactuses were a couple of years ago also. But what we can see though, is that this is happening each and every week in a smaller scale. So we have these super small trends coming up in smaller categories, in products that happens every time and we are at A. We have few merchants, and then they get sales, we get more merchants. And then when that trend pans out, we have no overstock and no cost whatsoever. So this is what the marketplace model really is about to fuel this and make sure that we get this trend catching as many times as possible. And with that said, we are going to do a deep dive in the market overview, and I'm going to hand over to Karl, our CCO.
Unknown Executive
executiveThanks a lot. Over the next couple of pages, we will dive into the markets that we operate in, explain why we believe that the Nordic marketplace is that anomaly you were talking about, Fredrik. And lastly, why we believe that the time for the marketplace is now. So the Nordic market -- e-commerce market is valued at around SEK 400 billion at the moment with a similar online spending pattern across the countries, we see population being the main determinant of the size of those markets. Sweden, doing roughly 2x of those neighboring countries that we are addressing. The largest categories are home electronics, accounting for roughly 20%, is a standardized common product, which is well suited for online sales. Groceries, Pharma grew rapidly during the pandemic, another 20%. Followed by fashion, 15% roughly. At CDON, we addressed around half of that market with the assortment that we currently have and the product that we are addressing -- the categories that we are addressing. We are strong in electronics, but we focus on Home & Garden, Sports and Outdoor, Media, Health and Beauty, to mention a few. And in those categories, we also work with dedicated category managers, who manage our assortment on a daily basis. Looking at the distribution of our GMV, we note a slight difference between the left and right. Sweden is our main market at the moment. And this also tells me that there is an underexplored Nordic potential out there. We will go into this in more detail later with Mark. But historically, there has been a challenge to attract local supply in those markets. But with the combination of aggregators and qualitative Chinese supply, we believe we have a clear way forward on how to address those markets. With our size, we have a rough 1% market share of that addressable market, but in Sweden, we are definitely stronger. The Nordic is an anomaly, and we need and want to change that perception. We spoke about the plus 50% globally, the adoption, but only 5% in Sweden. The competitive landscape is different. There is no Amazon as a massive force as in the U.S. or Germany, for example. But we have stronger retailers and e-tailers who are out there. We have [ Zalando ], the likes of [ El Gigante and El Shop ] and a few other but we make up roughly 5% of the total e-commerce landscape. What's also interesting to observe, if we go across the pond and look in France, Germany or the Netherlands, for example, there is always a local player, Cdiscount, [ Autopool ] as well as Amazon. And even the most extreme example, I guess, is in Poland, where Allegro almost dominates the market despite Amazon's best efforts to get in there. When Amazon entered the Swedish market in 2020, I guess many of us were expecting a rapid shift to and adopting the marketplace. At the same time, I guess, all of us were left surprised by the lukewarm response and the slower adoption than we were all expecting. And I think the reason is the truly unique Nordic e-commerce environment. We have the strong presence of local retailers with well-established brands and also e-commerce capabilities. We have high digital maturity among the population, and we're early to adopt e-commerce in Sweden and in the neighboring countries. And we also have a relatively efficient delivery network. The strong benefit of fulfillment by Amazon, for example, was that they were solving the customer pain points of instant deliveries, and that is less of an issue fundamentally in the Nordics. So I think those are a couple of the reasons for why the Nordics look differently than the rest of the world. Establishing a leading marketplace takes time, like growing any other business, but we are at the beginning of an exciting journey. Cdiscount, France's largest marketplace and one of the larger e-commerce players, as an example, we're looking at the 2012 to '22 GMV development. When Casino Group, who owns Cdiscount, acquired the company in beginning of the millennium. They were -- Cdiscount was an online CD and media reseller. They grew into adjacent categories, into home electronics, household appliances. Recognize that story at all? Sounds pretty much like CDON, right? Or Amazon for that matter. It's a common way of growing the marketplace and growing as an e-commerce player. In late 2011, 2012, Cdiscount launched their third-party marketplace. And since then, they have grown with a CAGR of roughly 15% year-over-year until the pandemic hit. We all know what the pandemic did to e-commerce with rapid growth during 2020 and '21, with a setback in 2022. This, despite being a factor X to the current turnover or GMV of CDON, we believe this acts as a source of inspiration for us on the journey that we are heading out on. We also see an increasing appetite for value-oriented shopping. Current economic climate definitely fuels that, right? But we also see higher adoption of marketplaces among younger generations. We believe this adds to the potential and are very optimistic about our opportunity to educate the market further and increase the marketplace adoption. But more about how we're going to do that in the next couple of sections. Let's take a look at What Great Looks Like. We have Erik Segerborg as mentioned, our Board member and Deputy Chairman, who will talk to us online. Let's take a look.
Erik Segerborg
executiveHi, everyone. I hope you're enjoying this so far. My name is Erik. I'm a part of the CDON board, and I was asked by Fredrik to share a few insights from my experiences at other marketplaces. I'm a fairly recent addition to the CDON Board. Very happy to join in connection with the Fyndiq acquisition earlier this year. I'm a full-time investor working with -- investing mostly in private marketplaces, and I'm a Board member of several other marketplaces in different fields. I worked previously at 2 great marketplaces that I will talk more about shortly. Most recently at Hemnet where I had a few different positions, including CMO and CPO. Before that, I worked at Avito, a Russian marketplace that I will talk more about. I had a few different positions there as well. And I founded a property portal called [indiscernible] So as I said, Fredrik asked me to share a few insights from these 2 journeys that I've been on. And I was happy that it did so because it allowed me to reflect a bit on those years. Today, in this short talk, I will go through some basics about Avito and Hemnet. And then I will reflect on my takeaways and also the relevance for CDON. To begin with, Avito is the biggest classified in Russia, you could claim the world. And it covers basically every vertical; with vertical you mean, for example, a category like cars or real estate or services or jobs, and also across this whole huge country of Russia. It was founded by 2 Swedish guys called Jonas and Filip. And Christopher, who is the Chairman of CDON joined a year before me. He was the COO of Avito and instrumental in a lot of the changes and developments that we did. I pulled out some numbers here about Avito that are publicly shared. So back in 2013, when I joined, the revenues were around RUB 2 billion and the last publicly known figure for 2021, they were up to almost RUB 43 billion, that's a 43% CAGR over that time period. Pretty amazing. And on top of that, you can also add that the EBITDA margin in 2018 was 65%. So basically, this is a fast-growing, extremely profitable company. It was sold to Prosus or Naspers back in 2019. Moving on to Hemnet. Hemnet is the Zillow or the Rightmove of Sweden. Basically, it's a property portal focused on -- exclusively on selling and buying homes, apartments and houses. It's a key market leader in Sweden. Here as well, it's been a nice development. In 2017, when I joined the company, it had around SEK 300 million in revenues and in 2022, this was up to almost SEK 900 million. It's also become more profitable over time. I think another testament to this great marketplace model. Profitability or EBITDA margin was 33% in 2017, and now it's up to 52% in the last quarterly report. And here, we have great numbers because Hemnet was IPO-ed on the Swedish Stock Exchange in 2021 and today has about SEK 20 billion in market cap. And an interesting fact here that I called out from the last quarter report is that we introduced a new product called the premium product back in 2018. And in the last quarter, it's still growing by more than 100% year-on-year. Trying to summarize these 2 experiences in a few bullet points. They, in some ways, they can appear quite similar because they're both marketplaces. They both had strong growth and high profitability. But for me, personally, they were quite different. Avito was a unicorn story, a startup, very strong founders and extreme growth in everything. We had to hire hundreds and hundreds of people. We had extremely strong competition in every vertical, every region of Russia, we had someone trying to eat our lunch. And that meant that we had to be very aggressive in terms of competing on product development, in sales, in marketing, everything. And for us, it came down to basically, in many ways, policing the platform, realizing that you can't obey the demands of either buyers or sellers completely, because then you end up with a mess of the platform. But you have to make sure that you are enabling the good actors, the good buyers and sellers to do their business while stopping the platform -- stopping access to the platform for the bad actors. And we had a lot of bad actors in Russia trying to use our platform to make money, either through spamming our customers or in some cases, even fraud. And it came down to how do you continue fostering the network effects while also making more money? How can you extract value whilst continue to create value? Hemnet, that was a very different story. Here, the company was already a market leader. There was almost no competition, but the platform had, in some ways, been mismanaged and didn't live up to the potential. So this was more about change management, changing how we work, the product portfolio, the tech infrastructure, taking each part of the company and changing it bit by bit. And to enable increased monetization, we had to release a number of new products while also making sure that we kept the network effects and we kept the strong position. So all in all, it comes down to the same. That's why the bullet -- last bullet point on both of these is the same. It came down to how do you increase monetization while making sure that you are not losing network effects or even enhancing them. There is always this kind of balancing act of managing the marketplace. Diving a bit deeper into 3 main takeaways that I have. First of all, it's all about the flywheel. We've been talking about this previously in the CMD, but I think it's fair to reiterate again. The real hero, as I see it in the marketplace, is not the product that you build, it's how you enable buyers and sellers to meet. You need to kind of get through all the noise and find what kind of action that you are doing will drive the flywheel to spin faster and give benefits to the business, enable more buyers and sellers to meet. Maybe not tomorrow, but in a year or in 2 years or in 3 years. So once you find this and that could, for example, be attracting more sellers as it was in Avito. When you do that, you need to just continue repeating it month after month, year after year, and that will give you the benefits over time. Second thing, I think user experience for a marketplace when I think back, is so much about police in the platform. It's about making sure that it's fair, that it's transparent and that you are enabling both buyers and sellers to have a good experience. A lot of marketplaces that head in the wrong direction according to me, they think too much about one of the sites. Once you have people transacting in a fair way, then you can look at a lot of other ways to remove friction in that transaction. Lastly, about monetization, and I know a lot of investors care deeply about this. I believe that in the beginning, when you are building up your position, you need to be very careful about monetization. You need to make sure that you're not blocking your growth by monetizing too early or in the wrong way. As a good example, in Avito, we introduced listing fees after a few years. This was led by Christopher, who is the Chair of CDON, as I mentioned. And that only happened after a number of years because we realized that the most important thing for us was to get more sellers and keeping the barrier to entry low of the sellers meant having free listings. We were still able to make money and even be profitable without the listing fees because there was so high competition on the platform. But enabling listing fees, of course, was a huge monetization driver. So once you are at scale, I think there are so many opportunities to monetize in various ways. But it only comes once you are up to scale because before that, you are not important enough for your buyers and sellers to create the kind of incentive to compete in a better way. Then I took away some best practices in working within these marketplaces. And I think they are quite valid for other marketplaces and in general and probably CDON in particularly. First of all, is that you need to just believe in the flywheel. Sometimes you call it snowball or network effects, but you need to make sure that you continue doing what will drive your long-term growth quarter after quarter. And you're not tempted to do things that might give you short-term benefits, for example, increasing revenue if they are messing with your long-term growth. Second thing, and I think this is so important, it's a borrow with pride. So the marketplace model is widespread. There are marketplaces in so many different countries. Almost, no matter which industry you're in, there is another marketplace doing very similar things in a different country. And sometimes, they're extremely similar to you. So before you do any big changes, you just should look around, talk to other marketplaces, look at their sites and see what they have done. Then build on that. It doesn't mean that you're copying their exact features. But it means that you are being inspired and building on their innovation. That allows you to progress a lot faster. And thirdly, as I said, I think the biggest value that you create in the marketplace is enabling buyers and sellers to meet. But as byproduct of that, you also generate a lot of interesting data, and which can be used for just both making your marketplace better, but also sharing with different stakeholders. I think pricing is an amazing lever to use in marketplaces. And usually, you can have one product but 1,000 prices for that product, and that will enable your growth. I also think that the data that you generate is very valuable for other stakeholders. In Hemnet, we used it a lot for PR. The housing market is an important part of the economy, and it's really interesting for everyone to use. But if you are in a more niche marketplace, you can definitely share that data with certain groups that are super interested in understanding the insights. I also think it's really important to use the data to share with your customers. They need insights to drive their business, and you are probably one of the biggest and best sources for that. And I would like to conclude with, just looking at CDON, through the lens of what I experienced at Avito and Hemnet. First of all, I am completely aligned with strategy and plans that Fredrik and his team have put together. For me, it goes back to basics. It's a focus on feeding the flywheel, building the marketplace fundamentals by adding a lot more quality supply, meaning more customers can find what they're looking for. Meaning, more sales for all the merchants. And it's about, again, going back to what I said, policing the platform. If you have a good user experience, meaning you get what you have ordered, you get it on time and you get good quality, and you know what kind of quality you should expect based on reviews and ratings, then you have removed a lot of the friction and people will come back and feed the flywheel. Secondly, I think I'm a very long-term believer in CDON. I believe that the improvements that we're doing now will compound over time. There are very few silver bullets that you can do to improve the business from one day to another. It's about making thousands of small improvements, adding them together and again, watching the flywheel spin faster. Thirdly, I believe that we're doing a lot of great things in terms of monetization, but I believe the big unlock will be when there's a bigger scale, and you can implement more parts of the monetization playbook. Going back to what I saw on Avito and Hemnet, there are really infinite possibilities once you get to a strong position. With that, I would like to conclude and say thanks again for letting me be a part of the CMD and I hope you enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystAll right. Thank you very much for that presentation, Erik Segerborg, Board member, and for sharing that experience with us. Now it's time for a 15-minute coffee break, a leg stretcher. And according to my clock, we're supposed to meet back here at 3:00 sharp. So you don't want to miss the second part of the day, starting with the CEO Fredrik Norberg. Don't miss it, 3:00. Thank you. [Break]
Fredrik Norberg
executiveHello, and welcome back. I hope you had some refreshing coffee or water or whatever. We will continue now with the strategic foundation. And I will come back. This is the second part now, and we are executing along a clear path to realize the great potential that we have showcased. I will come back to this flywheel again. This is really the foundation of everything that we're doing. I mean, to be honest, it is not rocket science, what we are doing. You need to provide with a lot of products that people like at competitive prices and make sure that they have a good experience. That's it. And this is why we are now focusing on the selection part and the customer experience part. The selection part is really to massively increase the supply. It's all about to have this enormous selection. But if you get bad merchants and bad products in, you will have a bad customer experience. So you need to make sure to get rid of the bad products and bad merchants. That's the part that Erik was talking about, policing the marketplace platform. That's really important. And you could compare it a little bit with gold mining. It's about getting -- of course, being at the right spot, I guess, but then also get so much dirt or soil as possible that you then can filter and pan so you find the golden nuggets. And this is quite similar to the marketplace model. You want to shove as much merchants and supply as possible, but really make sure that you filter away the bad merchants and bad supply and do that as fast as possible. I have, during the summer, been talking with some peers in these industries, CEOs and executives of Allegro, Bol and Cdiscount. And later on, we will see an interview I did with the CEO of Cdiscount. And one of these marketplaces, they told me that they have 1,000 new merchants every month, and they get rid of 800 merchants every month. That is the velocity that you sometimes need to really make sure that you fuel the flywheel with new supply, but get rid of the bad ones. We also need to really improve the customer happiness. We have had problems with this, especially on the CDON side. But we really feel that we have the recipe for it. We have managed to have really high customer happiness rates when it comes to Fyndiq, even though Fyndiq has this really low price of supply. And we really now are focusing on making sure that everything we're doing is at the customers' best. Everything comes down to happy customers. To have the customers coming back again and again. Especially now, you can fool the customers once but never twice when it comes to online business. And this is a good segue, speaking of supply, where I will invite Mark, who will do a deep dive about our strategy concerning the massively increased supply.
Unknown Executive
executiveMy name is Mark Nidefelt, Chief Supply Officer, and I'm going to talk about how we are massively increasing supply and why that is important. Looking at other marketplaces in Europe, Allegro in Poland, Bol in the Netherlands and Cdiscount in France. They have one thing in common. They are not competitors, and they have one competitor, that is Amazon, and that's the same for us. So we're talking to these marketplaces, and we meet with them and we exchange knowledge and insights. They are also as big or bigger than Amazon in their markets. Looking at the amount of merchants and products, we can see they have thousands of merchants and millions of products. And compared to CDON and Fyndiq, we're a little bit low there. But we intend to really massively increase supply at CDON and Fyndiq to come up to similar levels as these marketplaces. Looking at products per merchant. We have a little bit more products per merchant compared to these marketplaces. But we also intend to decrease, to curate, to refine the assortment on each and every merchant. So we basically get more merchants, and we want to have more products as well. But merchant competition is very important. And talking about merchant competition. It's very important in the marketplace that we have a lot of merchants competing on the same products. So the products -- you can grow products in different ways and you can now buy a box and so on, but you need to have a lot of merchants competing on the same product, winning the sales, winning the customers. By competing, basically one means you need to have the best pricing, short delivery time, product quality, rating and reviews, product cart quality, how things are lined up in the product cart as well. So given looking at other marketplaces and these numbers, we believe that we have a huge potential in massively increasing supply and come up to similar levels with the supply as these other marketplaces are on. The supply foundation in this model that we're looking at here, it's built up by API aggregators. An API aggregator is basically a software company that have hundreds and thousands of merchants. So the foundation is built up by merchants from these aggregators. I would say that each country in Europe has about 1 or 2 really strong aggregators that have maybe 1,000 merchant each. CDON are connected to about 5 really strong ones, and Fyndiq is connected also to 5, but they're a little bit different. When looking at this foundation, you will find a lot of merchants with a lot of different and millions of articles products. There will be international brands that we know about, but it will also be local brands. Local brands from each and every country where the merchant is coming from. So we will put in brands from Germany, brands from Portugal, brands from France into the Nordic region where Nordic customers haven't seen these products before. So we're adding up new supply to the Nordic region. When we have a really good and wide foundation of merchants and millions of products, we start to attract the next level. And this is the international merchants, as we call it. And that is basically really big companies that have a lot of different assortment. One international merchant can have 1 million products. And they're trading for export, but they're trading also A brands. And this is really interesting because now they are trading A brands and they're selling A brands on the marketplace, and now it starts to come up to the top level of the pyramid, the supply pyramid. And this is the local A brands. All the A brands have an agency that is locally in that region. And these agents, these local A brands, they start to find interest in selling on the marketplace as well. So they also want to join the marketplace. Because they see that there's a lot of other merchants selling their products on the marketplace. So then they also come in. Obviously, you have a lot of categories, you have thousands of categories, and you need to fill up everything in this pyramid. But when you have filled up the pyramid with these 3 levels, you are in a mature phase when it's all about to just growth. So the foundation is key and the rest will follow. Here, we have a clear case of how we since January increased massively supply with Chinese merchants. And every month, we onboarded about 100 -- 1 million more of our products. And every month, we also increased sales. So we just continue increased products because we feel that the sales were following. So we had about 2 million products from Chinese merchants, and we added 15 million more. And we had 200 merchants, and we added 200 merchants more in all categories and from Chinese aggregators. We're connected to 3 really good Chinese aggregators since a couple of years. And when we say that we would like to have more, they supply more. So more supply, more sales. Continuing on Fyndiq. We have massively increased supply with its 15 million products, and worth to say this is mostly nonbrands. It's nonbranded products from China as we know it, but also unknown brands. There's a lot of brands we never heard about, but nonbrands and unknown brands from China. What we so that -- let's put it like this. For 10 months, we increased supply, and we sold a lot as well. But there always comes a point when you see that like you need to start to regroup or you want to know what you have done and so on. So we sort of said that, let's refine the assortment right now. Let's make sure that we group things, let's make sure that we filter and sort things so we make sure that the customer finds what we're looking for -- what they are looking for. And then we will -- when we have refined the assortment, then we will massively increase again, but in a qualitative way. At the CDON side, we are in the process of massively increasing supply, and we're doing it primarily with aggregators, as we're working very closely with, and they're partnering up with us in a sense that we're working towards a direction that we see it together, and it's a very nice cooperation that we have. And these supply that we're onboarding on CDON is mainly or mostly branded products. It can be A brands, they can be B brands, C brands and so on, but it should be branded at CDON. We also have 2 new international merchants, as I spoke about before, the ones with the A brands and a lot of supply. So we have quite a few international merchants already. And now we're onboarding 2 more. They together have 1.5 million articles, products. And we're looking into onboarding more international merchants. What we've seen, though, when we have onboarded a lot of merchants on CDON since about June, we have a little bit of a bottleneck because we acquire more merchants than we can onboard. So we need to redo the onboarding process. It's about agreement signing and KYC checks mainly. So we're trying to automize that as we speak, so we can sort of as fast as the merchants comes in, in acquisition, we can onboard them as fast. We also are looking into 1P, buying and selling our own products in own stock. And that's going to be basically those products that we can't get a hold of just together with our 3P merchants. So it will be -- function as a gap filling for A brands. So we really have the full assortment that we want at CDON.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystThank you, Mark. That was quite interesting, I have to say for outlining sort of the base pyramid as a base for future growth. And I was just going to ask you about the aggregators, could you perhaps just give everybody a quick rundown on how this supply side landscape has actually changed or evolved over time, please?
Unknown Executive
executiveThat's a good question. I would say that, first of all, the aggregator play a really important part in the marketplace business. And I would say that these aggregators started to show are about 10 years ago. And before 10 years ago, merchants were basically uploading by manually or CSV sometimes via API as well, but that's tech dependent and a little bit tricky. And today, most merchants have an aggregator that they're connected to. Otherwise, they cannot sell on the marketplaces. And one aggregator makes them sell on many different marketplaces. So these aggregators have really developed over time. And today, it's very efficient, and they work together with the marketplace as well in increasing supply from marketplaces. And I will also add to that, actually, compared to Amazon, let's put back time about 20 years where these aggregators didn't exist. Merchant uploading products at Amazon at that time were most likely manually uploading them or by CSV file bulk uploading, and maybe sometimes via API. But I think that the time for Amazon to upload a lot of millions massively increasing supply for them has taken a lot of time, a lot of years. And today, it goes a bit faster because the development really speeded up regarding that.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystExcellent, Mark, thank you for this deep dive into the supply side of the business. Which brings us to eventually at the second deep dive. But before we go there, we're going to watch a video interview as Fredrik alluded to with CEO of Cdiscount. So let's roll that film, please.
Thomas Metivier
executiveI'm Thomas Metivier. I'm the CEO of Cdiscount and Cnova. I've joint the e-commerce revolution 7 years ago by joining Cdiscount, and I've been in charge now for 5 years of our marketplace development, first only for Cdiscount and we've accelerated in terms of merchants' recruitment and our fulfillment, we've launched our advertising services for merchants and then by launching Octopia which is our B2B activity, which provides marketplace technologies and merchants to other retailers in France, in Europe and in all over the world. And for now 1 year, I'm the CEO of Cdiscount, which is our model company with both our B2C activities, Cdiscount.com and our B2B activities, notably Octopia and C-logistics. So I say Cnova is our holding company, which grouped all our activities. We have 2 main areas of activity. The first one is our B2C e-commerce website, Cdiscount.com which is the French leader in e-commerce. And our second area of activity is our B2B activities. Most -- the 2 bigger ones are Octopia, which is our company providing marketplace software and operations to other retailers and C-logistics, which is our logistics subsidiary, which is also providing logistics for third-party. So there is those 2 activities. And overall, we have been generating EUR 3.5 billion GMV last year. And we are one of the leading e-commerce player in France. We have more than 15,000 sellers that have been doing sales this year, more than 80 million products on our website and with up to 23 million unique visitors every month on cdiscount.com, which really puts us, I would say, at the forefront in terms of activity for -- on the French market. And it's really, I would say, unique situation in Europe, because we are the only market where Amazon has been launched now for, I would say, more than 20 years in the market, where there is a strong local player, really competing with them, and we've been able to do so by adapting ourselves. We have launched our marketplace 12 years ago. We've launched our fulfillment services. We've launched our advertising services. And so we've been able to stay in contact and stay in the competition with them and to stay in the market and being a prominent actor in the e-commerce department. So in our markets, we have been able to keep our position, our #1 French player in the market by really focusing on what we offer to our customers. We are very strong on the equipment categories. For example, on big home appliances in [indiscernible], in high-tech goods. And there are categories where we are stronger and bigger than Amazon in the French market. Amazon is more focused on daily products and small value items. We have an average basket over EUR 100, where Amazon is close up to EUR 30. So we really have a different position in the market. And we have also a very strong position on promotions. We have a strong commercial DNA with lots of commercial operations. We've built them first on our 1P cell, and now we are building them also with our merchants. And this commercial dynamism, the fact that we can come every day and [indiscernible]find another operation, another deal, another [indiscernible] really create some excitement with our customers and which put us apart from Amazon, which is more on the kind of pure efficient website, but not that much on the excitement of the good opportunity where we are fairly strong at. And our third lever is really to be very strong in payment facilities. We have more than 40% of our activity, which is done with 4 installment payments, which really is a strong differentiator with our competitors. And we do that thanks to the big investment we've made in AI now for years, because we are able to score every customer to make sure that they will reimburse, and so which allowed us to be very open, I would say, to provide those facilities to our customers. You need to be strong at what the customer likes in your company. You don't want to do the average marketplace, the kind of usual marketplace everyone can do just by taking a lot of merchants and putting everything in bulk. You need to have a clear identity and to build meaningful links with your merchants to bring them to your G&A and to activate them as you want regarding your G&A. You need to have a lot of merchants, lots of products. You need to have a very strong tech. But at the end of the day, it's what is your value proposals. And it is a bit the same as when you are in 1P. When you are in 1P, you have suppliers, everyone is selling LEGOs, for example, when you are at Christmas, but everyone will try to execute it a bit differently to build this DNA to build this edge for their consumers. And it's what we are doing, and we are very strong at doing that in the marketplace well. I think for the -- to be a strong marketplace, you need to have a strong tech. Marketplace is about technology. It's about AI. It's about dealing with huge volumes of merchants, huge volumes of products. It's being able to validate products to order them to affect the right category and to make sure that when the consumer is coming to a website by typing 2 or 3 words, you will find and you will be able to show him the best products. So really, really marketplace is about technology. And you need to have an efficient technology to manage the volumes, to provide the best experience for our customers and to provide the best experience for your merchants. Then if you have the right technology, you need to fight for supply. You have never enough merchants and products on marketplace. You need every day to recruit new merchants. To find the best merchants, and we are studying all the marketplaces in Europe, to identify the merchants, to score them and then to recruit them. We've scored more than 1 million different merchants since the launch of our marketplace. And we have recruited more than 100,000 merchants from the start of our marketplace. We keep at least 15,000 of them because you need to fight and to find the best merchants and to make sure that they want to join our marketplace. And to do that, we need to seduce them. They are very cautious when they join the marketplace because they know that they will have a lot of costs. They will need to adapt to your taxonomy, to adapt to your specificity, to adapt to your legal constraints in your country. And so you need to make sure if you want to have foreign merchants, which is what are the key drivers of performance. Today, 2/3 of our merchants are coming from abroad, not from France. And so you need to make sure that you have those merchants and you make the allies as easy as possible and you need to convince them to join you. And then when they've joined you, you need to make sure that it's very easy for them to create a product, to adapt a catalog to our specificities, to adapt them to your language, et cetera. And so you need to put a lot of energy to recruit them and to help them to [ block ] their catalog. And for me, that's the second main success factor. And the third one is all the work you need to do to provide them the right services. Because merchants want to have the power to push their offer and to support their commercial development. When you give them some fulfillment, when you give them some addressing services, when you give them the support to develop their catalog, you are, in fact, giving them the tools to boost their products to make more business and to strengthen efficiently on your platform. And so that's why when you think about your marketplace in the way to accelerate it, you always need to think of what are the key sites they need to offer to my merchants. And it's clear, for example, that fulfillment is no-brainer. If you want to be a big market, you need to have fulfillment facilities. If you want to be a strong market, then you need to offer advertising. First, it will give you a lot of reviews. And second, because it will give merchants choose to push their offer to promote their new products. And so at the end of the day, it's good for the merchant, and it's good for you. We don't need to put lots of marketing investment. We invest in technology where we can maximize all the scale effect because what we are doing to go in your country that is technology, 80% can be reused to go everywhere in Europe and abroad. And so that's clearly a far better solution for us than, I would say, putting the cdiscount.com flag everywhere.
Unknown Executive
executiveThank you so much, Thomas for doing that.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystAll right. That was quite fascinating as well. Very interesting to hear. So we've gone through a lot of stuff so far this afternoon, strategic supply chain and everything. Now it's time to listen to the customer experience part of the equation on the marketplace. I would like to introduce to you the CXO Kattis Astrom, who will now perform a deep dive into the customer experience part of the business. You were recruited from Adlibris, which is the Nordic market-leading online book store. But first up Kattis, why don't you tell us what a CXO actually does?
Kattis Astrom
executiveI think, you would actually ask that, Nicklas. Yes. So I mean my job is really to ensure that we listen to our customers, that we know their needs, their preferences and their behaviors. That way we can turn that into a vision and strategy that we all in the company can carry out. Without having the customer in the center, it's really hard to know where we are heading. So that's what they do. Yes. And you did mention that I have experienced from Adlibris. That also means I have a previous experience of having a brand and customer transformation going on. So I'll start. I would actually share some of my key learnings and some reflections on that from past couple of years. Starting very simple that your brand position is pretty worthless if you haven't implemented it throughout entire journey. We can use the saying that the book you have is not going to get any better if you just put on a fancy cover. And the same goes for rebranding project. Unfortunately, at Adlibris we tried -- we launched a very nice inspirational brand marketing campaign, but we didn't improve the customer experience at the same time. So when the customer comes with an intention and expectation and it doesn't match what they receive, you're not going to get that improved sales from it, unfortunately. The next one is really no secret either, that if you target your current customers and you make them happier, they will come back. And hopefully, they'll come back over and over again. At Adlibris, we took that strategy and said, okay, we need to turn our once-a-year customers into twice-a-year customers. And that really works well when you have a large customer base and have a lot to leverage on. The same goes for both CDON and Fyndiq. We have 2 really large customer bases on both our marketplaces. And if we provide a little bit better experience bit by bit, we will have them come back over and over again. The last one, and I turn back to Mark's presentation about massively increase our supply. That we have a huge assortment is important, but it's not the key factor for the customer. The key factor for the customer is that you have that one thing I'm looking for today. And if you take Adlibris, it also has 15 million books. That's a prerequisite. Otherwise, they wouldn't have that book every time I come and look for it but again, it's not the unique selling point for the customer to say, we have 15 million books. It's the one that I want, that is important. So to succeed here, the key for a marketplace or for a merchant with such a large assortment is really to be relevant and to be personal. That way, you will also find what you're looking for. So at Adlibris, we did quite a few trial and errors. I will admit that. That's what you learn from, but also improved the customer experience and the brand experience and it paid off. After 1 year, with these things in place, we managed to actually have an uplift of 9% on the GMV, and we managed to also have an uplift of 30% on average order value. In 2 years, this was one of the key factors we had when we turned around from a deficit of SEK 292 million to a surplus of SEK 84 million 2 years later. So I'll bring that with me and will instead of course, take a look on our situation at CDON Group. We have, as Fredrik presented, 2 consumer brands, and then we have the CDON group mission as well. And from a customer view, we need to make sure now that our experience really matches these brands positions. If you come to us, we will take full responsibility for you as a customer. And that is a statement we have as a CDON group. We will have the wide assortment, and it will be from curated merchants. We will have a valuable customer service. We need to have reliable delivery. And you should never wonder as a customer, if this is a good place to go and shop at. When we look at CDON, we need to match this quality products with an even better experience. Here, we need to really present the products and our sites, the best way possible, so that you do find these things and that you can compare them with each other and that you can make really good purchases. We need to have flawless deliveries. If you buy a quality product, you expect that experience to [ lead, if will, ] all the way until you have the package at your door. And we need to have really excellent customer service if something goes wrong. On Fyndiq, we need to make sure that these products we have are indeed real margins. We need to curate and we need to showcase these merchants and going to have to have a higher rating so that the customer can trust us that we are the guarantee that you'll get a satisfied purchase. And if we take this and we look at our -- the current perceptions of our 2 consumer brands, we will notice that we have quite opposite challenges, and we need to use different tactics to strengthen each brand's position. Starting with CDON. Here, we enjoy a very strong brand awareness already. It's over 90% when we asked people around in Sweden if they are aware of the brand CDON. Unfortunately, though, we lack a bit of a positive brand perception from these people, and that's really something we have to work on. We're not yet associated with the aspect that we really want to be strong at as a brand. So our key action here is that we need to drastically improve the customer experience. And we need to make sure that we exceed the expectations when you come and shop at a marketplace so that you also is part of changing the perception of our brand from others. For Fyndiq, we actually have a very known brand as well. And we have a high level of associations with really positive brand aspects from our own customers. Unfortunately, the public perception of our brand is that we do deliver a pretty poor customer experience. So here instead, we need to really focus on changing the public perception of our brand. And we need to use the current very happy and satisfied customer to do so by using their reviews, rating, and we need to add brand marketing as well. So we are going to unleash the potential in the marketplaces that really means that we need to deliver a consistently high customer experience. And we do have the blueprint on how to do that. Fredrik mentioned earlier today that we have seen a decline in the customer satisfaction on CDON for the past couple of years. While on the Fyndiq side, we have seen the opposite, an increase in the customer satisfaction. And if you didn't know, much more than that, you're probably surprised that high-quality products has a declining and the less quality and known product has increased. But we'll use what we've learned on the Fyndiq and actually start to implement more of these factors on CDON. Starting from, I would say, the bottom was probably at the center. We need to quickly turn this and put the customer in the center of our business and our priorities. It's easy to say that you are customer-centric, but we really need to prove that day by day in the decisions we take and the focus that we have. And sometimes you have to decide that sale or the happy customer. I'm not going to say that the customer should win every time, but quite often, the customer needs to win that. And so we need to turn from having the merchant-centric and is that be a customer-centric approach. We also need to really take control and set rules for our merchants so that we, as the company at CDON can take full responsibilities for our customers. Running the marketplace and being responsible of the customer experience is quite challenging that way because you don't own the entire experience yourself. We drive the traffic. We have the marketplace at the site and we sell the products, and then the merchants take over in delivering this product to the customer. But the customer shops from us. So we need to be in charge of the whole journey, and we'll need to do that together with the merchants, but also then have really clear mandates and rule in place so that we can put expectations and that we can act on it. And the final part, we need to be much more data-driven in the entire company. And it's anything from the customer insights and the knowledge we have around them, combining that with sales data and what products are currently popular and trending, and we need to make sure we use that when we decide what are the things that we should improve, what are the things that we should develop and what the next features that we are missing. That way, we're not different from any other tech company. You need to make sure that the product you built is actually responding to the needs of those who are going to use it. Going back to our massive supply, this really means that if we're going to have these millions and millions and millions of products, we need to help our customers to find what they are looking for. Otherwise, we're going to have a great assortment, but no one will be there and find it to buy it. So to sum this up, we know from experience that we will earn the trust and the preferences from our customers by providing an excellent customer experience. And this really goes from -- when you visit the site all the way until your package is delivered at your door or you picked it up at ECA. And like you said, we are pretty confident that we do have a blueprint on how to do that. And I can also say, well, we also have some results on that, and we know that we are well on our way. For Fyndiq, we can already see that higher rating customers are returning with a 17% higher retention to our site to do a second shop, and our recurring customers have a much higher average order value than the first-time buyers. So we know that if we give a good experience, you will come back and you will do more of the purchases at our place. As for CDON, we have started, of course, and we are well on our way to implement in changing the things that are needed to be implemented and changed and get to know the customers much better than we did before, and it really starts to show the signs. We know that the customer satisfaction is moving the right direction. We can see and follow, they have reviews that we get that. We do reduce them. And especially, we reduced the ones that are -- where the criticism is something that shouldn't be there. It should not have been a problem in the starting place. So I think we are on the right track. We need to keep pushing and we need to continue to listen to the customers on the way forward as well. Things are changing. So what we know today may not be the exact same things that we need to address in the future. With that, I'll give it back to Fredrik to talk about the financial attractiveness of this business.
Fredrik Norberg
executiveThank you so much, Kattis. It actually reminds me when I was sitting now, an old story I've heard for many years from [ Kinnevik ]. It said that during Board meetings and management meetings, they always leave 1 seat open. And when someone asked who's sitting in that seat, they said, it's the customer, to always have the customer present in the room. At CDON, we have that person in flesh and blood, and you just met her. So let's go into the numbers now, and we will talk about first up. These are our main KPIs. We start with the GMV, the gross merchandise value, actually what really goes through our checkout. This is defined by the attractiveness of our proposition to consumers. Actually, how many customers can transact at CDON, the willingness of opening up the wallet to us. The second KPI is the GPAM, gross profit after marketing. This really shows the operational efficiency of our business. It's quite easy to sell something at no margin or to put a lot of marketing spend on that product. But to actually make money after you have put your marketing money on it and have some margin, that is what shows in the GPAM. This is what this game is really about. And this is our main KPI, and I've been talking about this since April, and this is still our main focus for the business to do everything to grow the gross profit after marketing. And the last one is the EBITDA, of course, shows the operational efficiency of the company. These are really 3 main KPIs that we steer our business on. A quick Q3 review. This is the last 3 quarters and the EBITDA of the business. We have continue to have a focus on the profitable marketing and really improving the GPAM. We have done restructuring in the OpEx space. And we also grew the supply, as Mark mentioned, during the summer, which really enabled higher sales on Fyndiq. These aspects together have really enabled a positive growth in the EBITDA. This is the first time in many, many years that we have 3 consecutive quarters with positive EBITDA. And we have a really backloaded also seasonality into the Christmas, as you can see the previous years as well. We also are looking forward to continue maximizing the GPAM and profitable growth and to increase the supply as we're talking many times about. But also 1 really important thing here is to really conclude the migration of the platform. This is supposed to happen by the end of next year. And we have said to the market that we will, by that, realize about SEK 40 million in cost reductions. And what will happen is that we will increase our operational efficiency, and we will also increase the velocity of the functions that we really can release for both marketplaces, having 1 platform. Also with that, we have a very positive cash flow situation now being EBITDA positive. And all this stressful time with the thin cash flow margin, we have that behind us now, and we can really look forward instead. All right. To continue to grow the EBITDA, we see -- we are focusing on 3 levers. We are focusing on GMV growth, GPAM margin increase and OpEx efficiency. These are just illustrative figures, but I'm going to walk you through them. If we start to the left, here is an example of if we just increase the GMV, everything else is fixed. No margin increase or OpEx decrease or so, we just increased the GMV. We will have an increase of the gross profit after marketing. If we go to the middle one, we have the gross profit after marketing, and that is derived from increased GMV or increased take rate and marketing efficiency. Marketing efficiency is, of course, not spending wrong marketing on wrong products, and this is something that we have had a really high focus on the last couple of months, and Carl is going to showcase a little bit numbers from that later on. But what we also can see is that the take rate, we have a potential to increase that as well. That is not only from the commissions from the merchants, but also from value-added services such as fulfillment services and merchant adds, as Thomas was talking about earlier on. And the right-hand side is, of course, the OpEx efficiency. To lower the OpEx, everything else the same, will impact the EBITDA in a positive way. So what we will do now is that we will go through the status of each and every lever and also what we're doing to improve that because they combined, will really push the EBITDA in the right direction, but they also can do it separately. And now we are focusing parallel on all 3 levers.
Carl Andersson
executiveStarting out with our GMV. Quick recap and just put that into perspective before going into the future. Overall challenging macro environment, I guess, comes to no surprise to none of us really. The Swedish Trade Association, Svensk Hande, estimated the effect on the e-commerce industry year-to-date in September to minus 6, with September as bad as almost minus 20 year-over-year. Of course, we can't hide behind that, but it's a fact and something that we are facing. That said, year-to-date, we are down 18% in the CDON segment, following that focus on profitable sales, well-performing merchant base and so on. Fyndiq is down 5% year-to-date, primarily due to poor Q1, where we were heavily affected by Chinese COVID-19-related lockdowns, where basically our merchant base in China closed down. No products will leave in the country for a period of time. However, we can see that Q2 and Q3 definitely is coming back for Fyndiq, and we have massively increased supply. We see the results of it. The Nordic expansion that we are experiencing has contributed to a stronger Q2 and Q3. Going into the future, there is profitable GMV growth potential out there. We know the recipe. We will focus on the core of the marketplace model. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, it is about massively increasing supply. It is about the pyramid that Mark was talking about, leveraging the aggregators, working with qualitative China supply, attracting the A brands to crown our marketplace. It is about happy customers, improving the customer experience, and providing a personalized site experience, and we're also looking into ways on how to increase loyalty or introduce a loyalty concept where we strengthen retention and the return frequency of our customers. To add to these previously mentioned points, marketing efficiency, that can in itself drive additional sales. By becoming more data-driven in our customer acquisition, targeting new sales effectively in our marketing. We are looking to grow GMV. Most notably in how we work with our paid traffic, primarily through Google. We are also looking into way somehow to drive our organic traffic and to how to strengthen our brand awareness, a much more cost-efficient way of driving traffic to our site. Ongoing work in the space of [ SCO ], in particular in the CDON segment where we have faced a declining trend over the last months. That, in combination with some brand marketing would do wonder to the organic traffic of our sites. This is how we plan to grow GMV over the next years. GPAM margin increase, our core KPI that we are focusing on in our daily operations. There has been substantial improvements to that. And despite a 16% lower GMV year-to-date, we have grown GPAM by 13% in absolute terms. We have gone from unprofitable sales to much more profitable sales, and we are now on the path forward that we want to be. For CDON, we now see steady GPAM levels of around 8%, driven mainly by a commission increase in Q1 that took effect. On Fyndiq, we have had a stable performance around that 16% mark with an increase in Q3, driven by an increase to our shipping fee. We now charge SEK 29 to each order in a shipping fee or an equivalent in the other Nordic markets. Worth noting, Q3 for Fyndiq is a record high third quarter and almost a record all-time high record quarter by all means, beating any of our previous Q4s. As you were mentioning, GPAM can increase by GMV previously mentioned. Marketing efficiency, let's take a look on the next slide, but also in driving our take rate, and that we'll do next after that. Our marketing efficiency could be measured in our profit on ad spend. Basically, the gross profit over advertising spend gives us our POAS or profit on a spend. In 2022, we could see the CDON segment operating at just over 200% with some monthly variations. But in November, December and in 2023, that level has now increased by over 25% to around 260%, 270%. That is a massive achievement and a significant contributor to our improved GPAM. To realize the shift, we have done several technical improvements to enable simpler upload of products to our partners in our paid traffic acquisition, and also shifted to Performance Max, a campaign format that we work on with Google. Next up, take rates. And also that has increased, and I guess you recognize the pattern on our quarterly take rate compared to that of the GPAM. They are highly correlated, and what drives the take rate is primarily the commission, the largest part of what we get whenever a customer purchased an article on site. POAS is slightly more volatile. There is seasonality to that. There are campaigns, et cetera, but the take rate remains fairly steady. There's little variation. The merchant wants visibility and understanding about the cost of selling on our marketplace, and that's why we don't really move that around. It can be done, of course, as we will talk about on the next page. First, we moved around for strategic reasons or during a campaign period, but there's always sort of a quid pro quo to that movement. The current commission setup on our 2 segments differs a bit, and we are looking to optimize, simplify it, to better support the wanted position of our brands, and ultimately to drive profits in our company. This is an example of our electronics category. For CDON, we have a standard commission, but we also have subcategory commissions. For example, for mobile phones, the commission is lower than that of mobile accessories, which is part of electronics. For Fyndiq, we have a flat fee of 12.5% across categories. And in addition to this, we also charge a fixed category or selling fee. Peers and other larger marketplaces tend to use a more CDON-like approach with the standard and then subcategory commissions. However, we have noticed the unnecessary granularity in our subcategorization on CDON. It requires particular agreements with our merchants. And it also requires accurate categorization of the products that we charge the right commission, and we allow the merchant to sell at the right commission with those products that they want to sell. At the same time, on Fyndiq, one can argue that there is insufficient granularity and that a flat feel like this would hinder us in certain product categories, where one would expect a lower commission to realize that sale. That's why we can see that we have a deviation between our standard or sort of list price and the actual commission realized where it deviates largely in the CDON segment, where Fyndiq remains fairly close to that of the standard commission. For peers, that is, of course, quite sensitive information, which they might not disclose even in our private conversations, but it tends to be more stringently applied. Hence, the standard commission and the actual commission correlates highly. As I said, we are looking to update that commission model. We want to make it simpler. I want to make it simpler for our merchants and how they approach our categories. There should be full transparency towards the merchant. And this, in the end, will drive -- we believe, will drive improved prices for our customers. With the right commission, that was at the most competitive price, hence, the customer will experience the best price. We want commission levels to better match our wanted position in this segment. You could, for example, lower the commission in certain segments on respective sites if you want to make a bet -- or sort of gross bet into certain segments. And we also want to apply our commission model more stringently to really foster the on-site competition, which ultimately drives lower prices to our customers. We fully acknowledge that simply increasing commission would be a nice way to improve our take rate and profitability, but that cannot be done without risking increased prices towards our customers. No sale, no profitability at all. We need to balance that and find the right commission level for our market basis. So we need to be careful and look for alternative ways on how to grow our take rate without risking a negative effect to our customers. As Thomas was mentioning in the video, merchant ads is, for example, 1 way of doing that. And really, in all its simplicity, merchant ads is, to a very large extent, sponsored products on our page, in our search and listing. Illustrated it here with sort of box in the green products or laptops, you can have a separate banners, bills or integrated in the organic result. We currently do this on CDON to some extent, but not on Fyndiq. It's something that we are definitely interested in exploring and something we are looking into at this moment. It is a very common practice among marketplaces and our merchants that our marketplace sellers are very used to it. It offers a revenue potential to us, as a marketplace operator with very low cost of sale. And I also believe it improves the customer experience with simpler product discovery where merchants tend to promote or lift products that they want sold. Hopefully, quality products at a competitive price at that point in time. Leading marketplaces such as Amazon, are able to realize up to 6% of GMV through advertising sales with very high profitability. CDON currently generates slightly below 0.5%. The potential here is enormous, and we will be looking into this over the next year. So to sum up, the GPAM margin improvement, I guess, we can look at our take-rate summary and walk through that. We noticed the difference between commissions on our 2 sites. We noticed the shipping fee difference on Fyndiq, where we apply this on top of that purchase price. It gives us 2 different starting positions. Looking at our peers. Obviously, each marketplace will be different, and we have -- we need to be careful when we compare the potential to the peers with the actual marketplaces that we are operating. The commission will vary. The commission could look high for a marketplace where a fixed category, for example, in the case of Fyndiq is included and will, of course, push up that take rate a bit. We noticed the merchant adds difference. And of course, the shipping fee, which each marketplace tends to manage a bit differently. However, there are also other customer revenue streams that we could be looking into and exploring further. That could be insurance, customer services such as installation or removal of your old product, if we talk about white goods, for example. It can also be financial commission and how we work with our partners in that area. Fulfillment is perhaps a bit of a special case. And like Thomas was talking about, it is an enabler of sales for marketplaces. I guess it's really only Amazon, who have been able to monetize profitably on their fulfillment service. Many others almost subsidize or see this as a cost-neutral offering to our customers, ultimately driving GMV in the first place, which makes it a good investment to the marketplace. To conclude, there is potential out there. We have an opportunity to increase take rate. If we do it in the right way, it will not have an adverse effect or a negative effect on our customers, but it will improve our profitability. The third point on how to grow our EBITDA is the reduction of OpEx. We have, as previously communicated, a target of minus SEK 40 million OpEx run rate by the end of 2024 as part of our plans. That stems from the integration of Fyndiq and CDON. Work is ongoing with that, and it's progressing well. We currently have a higher OpEx than we did in April when the transaction was completed. Despite us doing several cost savings actions, such as terminating employees, marketing consultants, terminating other external deals related to software or services, that is not yet fully visible in the run rate at the moment. We have taken on external support to complete the integration. We do have duplication in some systems and we also see some notice period in the salary as of September this year. Over the course of 2024, where July simply serves as an illustrative point, we'll realize the minus 40% -- minus SEK 40 million potential that we have previously communicated. The platform migration is the main enabler of that cost saving and cash flows -- cost reduction, sorry. We will also save on software and maintenance costs when we move to one really. And we are legally awaiting the other additional benefits of having 1 technical platform. So what will this look like if we add it all together, Fredrik?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveYes. Good segue. Thank you. And what we're doing now is trying to illustrate if we combine all of these 3 levers. If we start with only GMV growth, and we have added a GMV increase here of 15%, which is in line with CDiscount's CAGR over 2012 to 2019, and also the growth of the Swedish e-commerce industry for many, many years now. If we just add that, everything else fixed, we're going to have a CAGR on EBITDA of 55% in 5 years. If we instead look at the GPAM and we increased those 2 margins. We have the take rate, as Carl just mentioned, which is partly the commission and partly the marketing inefficiency. If we just increased that by 5% annually, and then we also add the marketing cost efficiency, sorry. If we have 5% each, the CAGR over 5 years is going to be 41%. Here, we really can see the extreme scale effects that we have in the marketplace model. If we look at the GPAM margin also, for the CDON Group, it would be 14% year 3 and 16% year 5, and we have today, currently, a margin of 10%. If we combine this, we combine the 15% annual growth and then the GPAM margin increase of 5% and then we consider an OpEx increase of 5%. We will, over 5 years, have a CAGR of 74%. And of course, there are some underlying cost pressure that we need to take into consideration here with a plus 5% the OpEx. We also should note here that you cannot see the minus SEK 40 million OpEx reduction for next year in this base. So this will even increase the base substantially. And at year 5, we would end up on an EBITDA margin of 10%, which is pretty much in line with the rest of the leading marketplaces. This is just an illustration, and the base of SEK 29 million is actually the base that SEB and Nicklas have set in the latest report, just to have some kind of base that we can use as numbers for this year. So I think everything ends up into this slide that we have enormous effect in the scalability if we succeed in these 3 different levers. And we have really clear plans on how to improve all of these 3 areas. And when we're talking about this blueprint, we have the blueprint, we have Allegro, we have Bol, we have Amazon to be -- and CDiscount, of course, to be inspired by. They have done this. They can tell us what to do and not to do. And they have a lot of information publicly. So let's not reinvent wheel, but instead really utilize this in the best possible way. And to end with some concluding investment highlights: number one, we see a very underpenetrated market in the Nordics, which provides a great opportunity. We have 2 different marketplaces twice as good to have 2 than 1. Two different marketplaces with distinct separate positions. And we have a highly scalable business model. With volume, this is going to scale massively. And the foundation now is really laid for, we have all the machinery to also enable profitable growth for the coming years. Of course, we're going to start growing with this company as well, but it's going to be profitable growth. And to end, again, once again, this is really not rocket science. Fee the flywheel with products that people really like at competitive prices and transact them in a way that leaves them with a good experience, and we have the blueprint for this. Thank you, everybody, for your attention. And now we will hand over to Nicklas and the Q&A session.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystExcellent. Thank you, Fredrik. Welcome the rest of the management team up to the stage, please. So thank you for a great presentation. It's now time for the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] I would like to start, however, since I'm in the room moderating the session. So I think it's fairly clear now the 3 main sort of drivers for the coming at least 4 to 5 years. What they are, what they could become? But I still like to start by an overall top-down question, in terms of what are the actual underlying assumptions for sort of online retail penetration versus marketplace market share of that online retail spend? Could you just wrap it up, so we understand sort of the main market assumptions for the coming, say, 3 to 5 years, please?
Carl Andersson
executiveSo following the pandemic, we've seen a setback in terms of e-commerce. We do expect that over time to return to that growth rate that we saw pre-COVID. And we do expect a steadiness or a slightly positive increase in the online or e-commerce penetration of your consumption. High-level answer to that question. Top of mind, continue an exact percentage point of what we're assuming. But fundamentally, e-commerce is here to stay. E-commerce will grow over time. We see increasing interest in the marketplace as your shopping destination.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystWould it be fair to conclude that the main driver would be increased share of online spend at marketplaces rather than retailers?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveI mean still in Sweden, there are about 17% of the total retail shopping is done online. It's really crazy. 83% is still in a physical store. I cannot understand who is doing all this shopping in physical stores. But there, we have a huge market that still can move over to the e-commerce penetration. We have that fundamental movement. And on top of that, we also have the movement from classic e-commerce to marketplace e-commerce system.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystYes. Very clear. Another thought I had currently about not even 1/3 of your total GMV is being generated outside of Sweden, which kind of gets me thinking that a lot of the potential going forward is probably outside of Sweden as well. Why is it that you -- why is that this share of total GMV is not higher to start with? And what are your plans for Norway, Finland and perhaps Denmark going forward as well, please?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveIt's a good question. For now, to rephrase Kattis a bit, it's a little bit going back to the basics and to make sure that we have products that people like and get a good experience when they buy them. And we are really focused now on doing this for Sweden. And before we have that in place, we will not start pushing down the throttle. We are, however, we see a huge potential in the rest of the countries in Nordics and we see that we will increase that penetration in the coming years as well.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystBefore I ask the floor for the question, just another high-level question for me. If you look at, sort of -- I mean, as Kattis said, the brand awareness is like everywhere, right? And in terms of active customers, you have more than 2 million of them, which makes you kind of very large, in terms of market share that way. But either way, in the future, where do you think -- what would be sort of -- can you elaborate a bit on the levers for growth in terms of changes to average order value, conversion rates, number of active customers? Any sort of decent marketplace KPI that you can think of? What would sort of bring -- what would be the main drivers for growth at CDON specifically?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveI see that you want me to build your model -- business model for you, but it's okay. So we strongly believe that when it comes to average order value, for instance, it will probably be about the same for both Fyndiq and CDON. CDON being much higher, 2 to 3x higher than Fyndiq. When it comes to conversion rate, we really believe that there we have some improvements to do, both on the Fyndiq side and on CDON side. especially when it comes to finding the right products. Already now with 40 million products or so, it's starting to become kind of hard to get the right search results and so on. So we see that we have a good potential in that area. The big thing will though be traffic. To get new customers to try this out and to get existing customers to come back more and more often. And this is -- the loyalty part of it is something that Kattis and her team is really focusing on now. We are doing some data-driven initiatives around this. But really to get each and every customer to do 1 extra buy every year, that's going to move our top line hugely.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystMakes a lot of sense. All right. Let's take the first question from the room, please?
Unknown Attendee
attendeeI'm [ Roger Smith ]. I must confess that I know close to nothing about your business, so I came here to educate myself. I have a question. It seems that you don't hold an inventory in CDON. So all the goods are somewhere else, still owned by the sellers until you sell them. Is that it?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveThat's correct. In physical terms, you are totally correct. We don't have any warehouse for the 3Ps. We have fulfillment services, though. But model-wise, you are correct. It's all the different merchants, and they have them in their different warehouses, and they ship them directly to the end consumer. Who owns them is a little bit differently. In Fyndiq's case, actually, in the flash of a second, when you buy something, Fyndiq owns that product. In CDON's case, it's not like that. But you can still really see that as we, as a marketplace, still take 100% responsibility for you as a consumer that we own that experience and that product to you who are buying it.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeOkay. Next question is about pricing. There seems to be a fixed price set by the seller. So the only possibility that you have is to change the commission size to all the price. Is that correct?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveYes. But the biggest pusher for lowering prices is really, as Mark mentioned before, get more merchants with the same products, and that will enable the competition that pushes down the prices. That is really the main pusher for lowering the prices. So when we see that we only have 1 product or a few merchants, we have high prices. When we, in the face mask case, get hundreds of merchants with the same product, they start competing and the margin profit goes close to 0.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeAnd the last question from me is with all these hundreds of thousands or even millions of products. I mean, there are a lot of legal requirements as to electricity, safety and chemicals and what have you. Who actually handles this?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveYes. Mark, do you want to answer?
Mark Nidefelt
executiveYes, sure. That's me and my team in the supply department. So we -- you're talking about product compliance. And we are taking product compliance very seriously. And I would say that -- I mean we have a product compliance department and a really good product compliance manager. And we've been working with product compliance for several years and trying to be on top of in top of the league as a marketplace to really understand what could happen with product compliance if something is not compliant, and try to proactively in a way, understand all the rules and regulations and so on in every different category and also where the products actually are coming from. It's a complete different thing. If it comes from a Swedish merchants from a Swedish stock or if it comes from another country outside Europe, it's completely different. So we have invested a lot of time and money to understand what we need to do to be compliant as a marketplace. So I would say that we're confident that we're doing as much as we can in a proactive way to meet the requirements that is expected of us.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystThank you. Let's move on. We have another question from the room.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeI think I'm the only American in the room here. Maybe my partner here is also an American, but I'm an avid user of Amazon, and I was in a meeting yesterday actually with someone else who is here, and we were talking about looking through my orders on Amazon and a very, very large percentage of our orders were consumables, like baby diapers, shampoo. I know you guys sell Swedish Match tobacco, but I look at the percentage of my orders, it's things that I'm buying pretty regularly, and I can actually subscribe to have me -- having you keep sending it. You sort of matched the TAM at about $400 billion. I assume that's just the categories that you're selling in right now, primarily, not fashion, not food, not pharma, stuff like that. I would think that the TAM is actually more like $1 trillion. I mean, or $800 billion, whatever a much larger TAM when you include all the other categories. And as you talk about building that relationship with the customer and getting organic traffic directly to the site and not just through Google and the price sites, how do you think about, a, getting into these other categories, which are more than double itself, the TAM that you've addressed? And, b, getting it so the customer is interacting with your website periodically, so they're showing up, right, because there's no marketing costs associated with going directly to the website? So if you could talk a little bit about your plans around that, that would be great and then I have a second question.
Carl Andersson
executiveCool Thanks. Let me answer into 2 -- well, 3 parts. First of all, I love it. It's a great idea. The subscription model definitely adds value to our customers, and that value to us as a company. Secondly, about the market size. We based that on external sources, valuing the market -- Swedish e-commerce market alone at SEK 140 billion, including groceries, pharma, et cetera. The e-commerce market in Sweden is not bigger than that. As you were saying earlier, Fredrik, we do have a journey to get customers online to do even more of their grocery or diaper shopping online. And thirdly, those are definitely categories we could be looking into. If we can carry that through our marketplace model, which I certainly believe we can because there are existing merchants out there offering it. And given the scalability of our business, it's something we could be looking into in the future.
Fredrik Norberg
executiveI agree. Now it's just a matter of focus and prioritization. We have more important categories to prioritize at the moment, especially electronics, given the time we're going into now. But there is no hinders at all to go that way as well.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeOkay. And then my second question is really around the sort of the financial model. You talked about the $29 million based on Nicklas. It appears that doesn't include the $40 million, but it really almost looks like $50 million because you had to increase cost a little bit through September '23. So from this point where we are, we would expect about $50 million -- $40 million -- some number greater than $40 million, but $50 million of cost on top of that as a starting point, which was helpful for me. But on sort of the GMV side, again, I'm not Swedish, so I don't know, but I just read the same stuff you read on the Internet. I think e-commerce has grown roughly 10% to 15% CAGR. And obviously, we're coming off of a trough here the last 2 years, so I would think that you'd get a little bit of a catch-up to get back. But I mean sort of the normal growth vector for the market would be 10% to 15%. So when I think about winning market share of total e-commerce from 1P, I think -- I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's sort of fair to assume that if you want to get to 10% market share and the market itself grows 10% to 15%, and you're just modeling 15% GMV growth, and you're not really winning market share. So is 15% a pretty conservative estimate because I would think that the GMV CAGR would be higher if you're approaching 10% market share of total Nordic e-commerce?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveYes. I mean, this is no guidance for our future growth. So this was just illustrative numbers that we were showcasing and we thought that 15% is a good level, given that CDiscount have had that CAGR for many years. And also, as you pointed out, that the Swedish e-com market have grown with around 15% for many years now. Besides that, we don't really want to comment on the future growth plans, to be honest. But of course, we have a potential that's greater than that if we're doing things right.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeRight. Well, if you're winning market share, presumably, your growth has to be higher. That's just the math, right?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveThat's true.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeJust want to establish that.
Fredrik Norberg
executiveYou're right. Yes.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystAll right. Excellent. So we have received a question on the iPad here from the ongoing web call as well. And it's in Swedish, so I will try to translate as we go. It says, so Fyndiq and CDON has different suppliers of payment services. And they note that Qliro is known to share a part of their revenue back to merchants and could potentially be an additional revenue stream for you? Would -- is there any plans to consolidate Fyndiq's and CDON's different suppliers of payment services?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveYes. I mean that's obviously some logic behind that. Also, we have a quite good bargain power going into that type of negotiations. So without going into details, yes, that's a quite logic path for us, just to walk.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystExcellent. And just to remind everybody [Operator Instructions] All right. Let's focus on development of sort of your marketplace business. So where are we on mobile shopping?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveSorry?
Nicklas Fhärm
analystMobile shopping. Mobile app store shopping, where are we on that target?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveTo create an app?
Nicklas Fhärm
analystYes.
Fredrik Norberg
executiveOkay. I got it. That's a hard question. I mean, I guess, as an American, it sounds kind of wrong to not focus on that, but it's also a prioritization. For now, we will not create an app. We have had an app that was focused on refurbished products, which we actually put out our business just a couple of months ago. It is a split focus. I've done this previously before at Fyndiq to have both web and app. It requires different organization, different focus and so on. And for now, we're going to focus on the web and do that as good as it gets and then we'll see in the future.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystObviously, as you pointed out, there looks to be an abundant potential from sort of proliferating different services on your marketplace such as advertising, and there's a few others that were mentioned on that same slide. Just for the record, where are you now in terms of advertising as a percentage of GMV? And you mentioned some of your peers would be closer to 5%, 6%. Where do you think is an appropriate level for a marketplace like CDON over the years?
Carl Andersson
executiveThe obvious answer to that, of course, is as high as possible. We are currently trading at just shy of 0.5 percentage point of our GMV on CDON and 0 on Fyndiq, where we don't offer that service at the moment. It's something we are looking into, and there will, of course, be technical implementation work to be done to get that on the Fyndiq side, and that is really what we're focusing on to make sure that we can implement it in the best possible way under the constraints at the moment with the migration to 1 platform. We don't have a clear or at least not going to communicate the target for where we're heading, but I think it's fair to say that it's north of where we are, and I guess in the shorter term south of where our peers are without going to more details.
Fredrik Norberg
executiveAnd sorry, this is also an interesting area, quite same as we were talking about the aggregators. We can utilize here that, that market is really becoming more and more mature now. 10 years ago, aggregators didn't exist. Today, you can find this merchant advertising services as a third party. If we just go back 5, 7 years, you had to develop everything in-house. Now we can pick and choose from several suppliers, and this is something that will enable us to really get a head start or move into this area quite fast.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystAnd just for the record, what are sort of the financials behind your decision to grow the advertising products? Is it a particularly high margin or high return on investment or why would you do that?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveThe numbers that the other marketplaces are showcasing is 3%, 5% to 6% of the GMV that is added on top of it. And that GMV on average, has an 85% gross margin. So it's highly profitable.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystYes. All right. Let's -- yes, soon, we have 1 more question in the room. As a mic is being passed, let me just ask 1 follow-up question. Now you have been purchasing a few merchants over the past -- over the past months this year, basically, sort of focusing on GPAM, et cetera. Where are we in terms of timing here looking into 2024? When -- are we nearing the inflection point where you think you have sort of rightsized CDON's marketplace in terms of merchants and whatever drivers there are?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveI would say so. Yes. Short answer, yes. We are really, really close to that inflection point. And we need to come through a Christmas sales now and make sure that everything past the purchase works as it should. And then after that, we are quite ready to push on all these levers, yes.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystAll right. Follow-up question from the room, please.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeYes. I forget whose section it was. It might have been in Erik Segerborg's section, but one of the things that you highlighted is that marketplace businesses or have no inventory and can achieve extremely high margins. Avito at 65%, Hemnet at 50%, Rightmove at 70%. These are very, very high free cash flow conversion businesses. As you look towards next year, obviously, you want to get through Christmas, but you have $50 million of EBITDA effectively coming back to you from the platform and presumably, GMV hopefully grows next year because e-commerce won't go down forever. And you're looking at a business that's 9 figures of EBITDA next year. You're -- obviously, the company has merged and you sort of went public in a wonky way, so to speak, the combined companies. But the market valuation is materially dislocated relative to sort of what I would consider our "peers". You are not BHG, you're not other sort of 1P key e-commerce companies. I mean Hemnet is relatively mature. It trades at almost 40x next year's EBITDA. If you guys are trading at sort of a low double-digit multiple based on conservative EBITDA estimates. How do you think about sort of narrowing that dislocation? Hemnet has been engaged in a share repurchase. And now that you guys are sort of confidently profitable and you have cash on the balance sheet. Are there opportunities as you roll into next year to start reallocating capital to share repurchase, so we can sort of get our cost of capital in line and stuff like that? I mean are those things that you would be considering?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveOn that specific question, we cannot do that. We are listed on First North, so we cannot repurchase shares on First North. So we have to relist to the main market, if that should be possible.
Unknown Attendee
attendeeFor the U.S.
Unknown Executive
executiveSorry?
Unknown Attendee
attendeeFor the U.S. market. Were they understand marketplace and it trades at 40x EBITDA?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveBut I think to your point, I think it's a good point, [ Adam ], that a marketplace should never be compared to a traditional retailer. Marketplace should be compared to other marketplaces. In our case, compare us with Allegro and MercadoLibre, maybe not Amazon because they are so huge, they are something else. But at least Allegro and MercadoLibre. And so I think you have a good point there.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystJust actually a follow-up question here from the webcast. And the question is, is the plan actually to continue to list on First North or to actually change venue?
Fredrik Norberg
executiveEven if I knew that answer, I'm not sure if I can or should answer that. Of course, that's an opportunity. Right now, we're so focused on the operations. We are focused on the coming Christmas sales and making sure to oil the machinery to enable growth next year.
Nicklas Fhärm
analystOkay. I think we passed the time, actually. So I think I would like to hand back the word to you, Fredrik, and your team. On my behalf, thank you very much for inviting me. And it's been a great, great afternoon. A lot of things to ponder going into 2024 and hopefully enjoying Christmas trading as well, meanwhile. With those words, thank you very much for attending the Capital Markets Day on my behalf and the word is back to you, Fredrik.
Fredrik Norberg
executiveThank you so much. And I want to say the same. Thank you so much, Nicklas, for a good moderation. And thank you, everybody, here online for your attention and great questions. Take care.
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