Marti Technologies, Inc. (MRT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Marti Technologies operates the largest mobility app in Turkey, providing ride-hailing services and operating a large fleet of rental e-mopeds, e-bikes and e-scooters. CEO, Alper Oktem, will be outlining the large opportunity and value as Turkey's leading mobility super app and the strong growth expected this year. It's Friday, March 21st. I'm Martin Gagel with Market Radius Research. Please remember this is neither a recommendation nor investment advice. We're here to learn about the company. Alper, thank you very much for joining us. It's morning time for me and definitely not morning time for you where you are. How is it going?

Fantastic, Martin. Thank you for asking. How are you?

I'm doing very well. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. This interesting story, not the most typical market. and offering that you guys offer. So please tell us about Marti Technologies.

First of all, thank you for having us and giving us the opportunity because Marti is the biggest secret nobody knows about. It's that type of company. We are the #1 mobility app in Turkey. We are a mobility super app. We offer six services. So we do car hailing, we do motorcycle hailing. We do taxi hailing, and we do e-bike, e-moped, e-scooter rentals. We are by far the #1 urban mobility app on both iOS and Android stores. We are #1 in the transportation category pretty much every week of the year. And as per a McKinsey -- a recent McKinsey study, the annual market potential in Turkey for urban mobility is $9 billion to $12 billion. That is because we have a population of 86 million people. That makes us the largest country in Europe, if you consider Turkey to be Europe. And we are located in the largest city in Europe, which is Istanbul, with around 15 million to 20 million people, depending how you measure it. And in the ride-hailing space, in the ride-hailing market, we are the only xScale operator. We have 1.6 million unique riders, and we have 255,000 drivers. That's 0.25 million of drivers that work for us, that drive for us for ride-hailing every day. And we have 5.5 million total app riders in our 7-year history. So 5.5 million people have used us and we have their data. And in October 2024, a few months ago, we shifted to a new world where we started monetizing our ride-hailing operations. Prior to that, we used to be an e-moped and e-scooter and e-bike rental company for the most part. But now ride-hailing is our main monetization tool. And since that, we have -- we are aiming to double our annual revenue and achieve positive EBITDA in 2025. So let me skip some of these slides. All right. Well, again, these are the numbers I mentioned. There's 97.3 million total rides in the history of the company. So we've reached that -- we're about to reach that 100 million trips benchmark, which is huge for a company our size. We have 5.5 million total unique riders, 0.25 million drivers. We are fairly, fairly large, and we're growing every day. So the transition to ride-hailing monetization marks an inflection point in the history of this company. Again, in 2025, we are going to be doubling our revenue and hopefully achieving positive EBITDA. We project a $25 million improvement, and this is with the low take rates in our ride-hailing business segment, and I will get to that in a little bit. I'm skipping the slides a little fast, so we can do maybe a longer Q&A. So...

Perfect.

In terms of the opportunity here, amongst the G20 economies, of which Turkey is one, Turkey, prior to Marti was the only country that didn't have a mobility super present, right? If you look at all around the world, countries similar to Turkey in terms of size and population have all very large mobility super apps present. There's Urban Lyft in North America. There's 99 Brazil. There's Gojek in Indonesia. There's Ola in India, there's DiDi in China, there's Bolt in Europe, there's Cabify in Spain. There's -- all these different leaders, Kakao in Korea, right, there's Grab. Every G20 economy has a very large mobility super app. Turkey didn't have one up until we sort of like walk into the scene. So there's a lot of significant untapped potential in Turkey because we are a late bloomer as a country in terms of tech-enabled urban mobility solutions. What makes Turkey very unique is -- can be explained in four different points. First of all, car ownership is incredibly, incredibly expensive in this country. You need 46 months of minimum wage to be able to afford the cheapest car, compare that to like 7 or 9 months in other European countries. So having a -- and buying a car is very expensive and sometimes unachievable for certain parts of the population. Number two, we have very low subway density in our major cities, especially Istanbul as well. We don't have enough subway systems, metro systems that carry people on the ground. Our public transportation infrastructure is not to the level it should be for a city this large. This again creates a huge opportunity for ride-hailing. We have also -- I'm going to say a horrible traffic sometimes in the city. We have high traffic congestion. We sometimes are #1, but sometimes are #2 or #3 after Sao Paulo or Jakarta or Mumbai sometimes. So Istanbul's traffic has gone pretty bad over the past few years. And we have very limited taxi penetration. there's one taxi per 1,000 people in the city of Istanbul compared to like 16 or 15 in other major European cities like Paris or London. So car ownership being very expensive, no metro subway availability to the tune that the city needs, high traffic and low taxi penetration create a perfect market opportunity for an operation like us. And this is reflected in the potential of the market. We foresee a $3 billion potential revenue in the Turkish ride-hailing market, and here is why. We benchmark ourselves against New York because New York is -- if you consider the -- well, there's a lot of data from New York. That's one. The second thing is the suburbs of New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester and the five boroughs in terms of a metropolitan area are similar to the size in Istanbul, around 20 million people. And there's a lot of data available. So we tend to benchmark ourselves against New York. So in New York, for example, after ride-hailing was introduced in the mid-2010s when Uber came to size, total number of trips increased by 63% over 10 years compared to what they were when only taxis were available. So by that projection, when we benchmark it, we see that there's going to be 1.3 million ride-hailing trips in the city of Istanbul when this market reaches saturation. And Istanbul is only 45% of Turkish taxi market. So there's going to be 2.9 million trips a day in the entire city, in the entire country when market saturates. At a $9.2 ticket size per trip, and you calculate the global benchmark take rate of 30%, you come to the magical figure of $3 billion. So when this market saturates and there's 2.9 million trips a day in the country at $9 a trip, there's going to be potentially $3 billion of commissions or revenue for ride-hailing companies. And this is a huge, huge market opportunity. As for our services, I'm going to -- we obviously -- I've spoken about our six service offerings. We have the ride-hailing side, and we have the 2-wheel electric vehicle rental side. But more exciting, more interesting part of the story is now ride-hailing. So I will be talking more about that. If people are interested, they can look at how we use AI to improve our efficiency in operations, both in micromobility and ride-hailing. There's a lot of stuff we do there, too. But let's talk about our footprint, our current footprint in the country. We have firmly established ourselves as a leading mobility app in the country, as I've said before, despite being the youngest player in the market. There are others in the market, but we are the #1 by a landslide. And we currently operate in four of the largest cities in Turkey that constitute around 50% of GDP, right? So we have Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya. And this is only 50% of GDP of this country. We're only in these cities. We're growing rapidly. And our growth potential, just looking at this map is huge when we start to roll our products on to other cities. The rapid growth of our ride-hailing platform continues to exceed even our own expectations. In December 2024, for example, we had 1.6 million unique riders and 255,000 ride-hailing drivers. Looking ahead, we're targeting by the end of Q1 of this year, 2025, 1.9 million unique riders with 290,000 registered drivers. This is because in October 2022, since then, we've invested approximately $26 million into ride-hailing. That's around $1.2 million per month. And we began monetizing only in October 2024. So our dynamic pricing model and improved efficiency of our services along with the fact that we're monetizing our ride-hailing platform now and with significant growth, this business segment is exceeding every target that we have. And it's been doing so consistently since we launched a few years back. So in the future, we look to do four things mainly. One, we want to expand our driver and rider network. We want to grow the numbers. We want to just have more and more drivers and more and more users on the platform that use it every day and make it a part of their daily lives. We are going to roll out new royalty, new loyalty and incentive programs for set users. We will be refining our pricing models. We will be using more AI-powered tools to offer better dynamic pricing. to make sure that the supply and demand forces of this 2-sided marketplace are always met and pricing is perfect. And we're going to be rolling out new cities. As I've showed you in the map, we're only in four cities currently. This is our -- again, more data about our 2-wheeled electric vehicle fleet and the story there, how we have done significant operational improvements, including reduction of staff, reduction of maintenance personnel and our spare parts efficiency programs, it's all in there. So anybody that's interested can ask me more questions or can take a look at the data. So I'm skipping these as well. So let's talk a little bit about who we are. So we are larger than our own little microcap, market cap suggests. And our Board is a prime example of that. It consists of seven great people. It's me, myself, and my co-founder, Cankut. We have Danny Freifeld. He has a lot of experience in the U.S. State Department, and he is running his own hedge fund called Callaway Capital with years of both government and private sector experience, he's providing a lot to the company. We have Mr. Alex Spiro on the Board. He is a famous lawyer, maybe people recognize them from the acquisition of Twitter with Elon Musk. He was in charge of that process. We have Kerry Healey. She was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. She's on the Board of Apollo, I think. She was the President of Babson College and she was the President of Milken Institute. We also have Douglas Lute. He was the U.S. ambassador to NATO, which is a fairly important post. And we have Agah Ugur, who is a local like me and Cankut. He was the CEO of Borusan, basically BMW Turkey, along with being a Board member of Coca-Cola MENAT. We are also backed by pretty significant investors. We have Callaway Capital and Gramercy, which are large emerging market hedge funds based out of the East Coast of the United States. We have New Holland Capital and BECO Capital. New Holland Capital is from New York. They are associated with the Dutch pension fund. BECO Capital is out of Dubai. They're famous for multiple deals they've been involved in, multibillion-dollar deals in the region. We have EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development that's backing us. That's been backing us for a while now. And we have Autotech Ventures. It's a mobility-focused VC out of Silicon Valley. In terms of what we will be doing our guidance. Again, we are at an inflection point in the history of this company because we just started our ride-hailing operations. We have just started monetizing our ride-hailing operations, which are growing rapidly, rapidly, rapidly. So this year, we are expecting a 2.1x growth in our revenues. It's because we just start -- again, we only had revenues from our rental e-mobility e-bike and e-scooter segments. Now we have revenues from ride-hailing monetization. And we are expecting an EBITDA improvement of around $25 million. That being said, our ride-hailing take rates are much, much, much lower than industry standards. The industry globally has around a 30% take rate or commission rate on ride-hailing rides. We currently do only single digits pretty much. So this is just the beginning. we're going to be growing our number of users. We're going to be growing our number of drivers. We will increase our daily trips significantly, and we will be charging higher take rates to increase our revenues going forward. So the future looks bright for us, and I'm glad to be able to present this to you and explain maybe talk a little bit about my company here in this format. So thank you. Do you have any questions, Martin, glad to...

All right. That was a nice tight presentation on the company. So right now, you have essentially two parts of the business where more traditional side where you've been renting e-mopeds and scooters and so forth. Just talking about that business a bit, do you own those? Is that sort of not asset heavy, but that's an asset-based business where you buy and own and rent them or -- and then rent them out? Or how is that structured?

We own and operate one of the largest 2-wheeled electrical vehicle fleets in the world. It is an asset-heavy business, as you mentioned. We, at our peak, had 40-something thousand vehicles on the streets. Now we have around 30,000. That makes us one of the largest fleets in the world. We are fairly effective and efficient in that business, and we have massive size compared to the rest of the world, too. What we have been doing there is just not increasing our scale or our size, but trying to clamp down, focus on our efficiency and improve our metrics there, right? That's been the focus. Our growth story comes from our ride-hailing operations, and we are trying to optimize and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our rental operations. So what we achieved this year, for example, is quite significant. We have done a 29% reduction in our field staff. We've done a 57% reduction in our repair and maintenance personnel, and we've done a 35% reduction in our logistics vehicle count. These are the vehicles that carry -- these are the large vans that carry these vehicles to the streets, swap their batteries, et cetera. We have implemented on the field repair and maintenance project. So 80% of our vehicles are now repaired and maintained on the field without being brought back to a charging station or a maintenance facility. This helps with efficiency and timing a lot. And we have established a refurbished spare parts program where we have produced a 57% year-on-year decrease in our spare part cost per vehicle. So we try to refurbish our vehicles by not buying new spare parts, but trying to fix them and them because man hours and labor is cheap here as opposed to materials in an asset-heavy business. So we have been doing a lot there. We're also, I think, maybe one of the best in the world in terms of our test demand record there. Only less than 0.1% of our fleet is stolen or vandalize every month. This is -- I believe this might be an industry record. So we are doing a lot there in that segment, but that is a stable business that are not -- that is not growing as you speak. What is growing, though, is our ride-hailing -- that is what we're focused on, and that is where the growth story will come for this business.

You talked about -- I think it's in the fall, you started monetizing. I think that's the term used. Were you providing ride-hailing services prior to that, but doing it, I don't know, free of -- you weren't taking any take rate on it? Or what changed in the fall that you started doing differently?

That is exactly correct, Martin. Turkey is playing catch-up in this industry, unfortunately, right? Like you've seen in the map, like this is kind of ridiculous actually, when you think about it. Like these companies in this presentation that you see on this map are decades old, right, at least a decade, right? Every one of them is established in their market and people could not fat them to live without the services of these companies. Imagine waking up one day in Canada and just not being able to take an Uber, right? How would that look like? That is what Turkey looked like prior to Marti. So our goal was to scale as fast as possible and have our services reach our constituents, our customers as fast as possible. That's why we didn't monetize. We didn't take a commission. We essentially subsidized our entire ride-hailing operation for 2 years for rapid growth because we want to be as big as possible as fast as possible. That's why for 2 years, we financed it, we subsidized it. and we didn't monetize it. We didn't charge a commission. We didn't charge anything from our riders or from our drivers. That changed in October. And that's why we're in an inflection point. Our take rate -- go ahead.

So prior to that, I'd call up my Marti car and then the driver would take me somewhere or would cost whatever dollar...

$9, $10. $10.

$10. And then I presume you would like -- and then basically, all of that money minus the finance fee, the credit card charge or whatever, would then go directly to the driver and you would provide the intermediary software fee for free, essentially. Is that how it would work?

That is exactly what it is. The take rate is basically the percentage of the ticket that you take for yourself, for your software services from the driver, right? That for us was effectively 0%. We did not charge the drivers a single dime to use the platform. It was free, right? So if you go to any global major city, you take a ride-hailing car, you step in, you ask the driver, what are you paying this company, right? Then I tell you it's 30%, 35%, sometimes 28%, right? New Year's Eve peak time, it's higher, sometimes lower, but the average take rate is 30%. We did it at 0% for 2 years just to incentivize people to use it more and come to size more. And that's why we grew so rapidly, right? And now obviously, we could charge the global 30%, but we don't, right? We want significant growth to continue. We want more people to download it and use it, and we want to onboard as many drivers as possible as early as possible. That's why we have 0.25 million drivers that are driving for us, right? Right now, our take rates are again in single digits. But we could just -- it's just me making a phone call and calling our CTO and saying our product guys and saying, hey, hike the take rates of 30%, we can triple our revenue pretty much. That's the logic of it, at least. But now we're trying to just keep the growth as fast as possible by monetizing as little as possible.

Well, I think that's largely the strategy that Uber and Lyft at the beginning years as well. Let's just become a habit. Oh, I need to go somewhere, let's pull out the app and call a car. Hey, I'll start driving and oh, look, I get to keep all this money and then the market stabilizes and finds out, okay, what's the appropriate take rate to get drivers coming out, charge a fair price, so everyone can kind of economically do this. Because Turkey is several years behind, you're just whatever, San Francisco 2011 kind of status or whatever the year was.

I think perfect, perfect. You eloquently put. It's just -- we're not geniuses here, Martin, right? We're good operators. We execute. That's why we're who we are, right? I'm not -- we're not innovating. We're not creating a new industry. We're not coming up with new business ideas in our ride-hailing segment, right? Like this is a globally established business. that is available, I believe, in 196 countries with the exception of the Congo, Eritrea, North Korea. I think Cuba has one already. So Cuba is out of that list. And maybe Mongolia, I'm not exactly sure. Turkey should not be on that list, clearly, right? And we are a very large country with a vibrant population that is young and that is tax savvy, credit card penetration is very high. Internet usage is very high. smartphone penetration is very high. Turkey should have this business, right? And what we're doing is we're not inventing a business model. We just -- there's global examples, and we are the local kids on the block that are executing this to the best of our abilities. And that's why we're winning essentially. So yes, or the fact that we are charging less take rates than we could, we're incentivizing, we're basically subsidizing. Those are all very well studied phenomenon that occurred in all these mature markets 10 years ago. We're just basically looking at history, and we have the opportunity to not make any mistakes because we can -- there's a lot of stuff we can learn from in terms of mistakes made by others.

The late entrance of Turkey into this, was this due to -- like I'm from Vancouver, and we got Uber very late because we had all sorts of municipal regulations protecting the cabs and so forth. Was that the sort of whatever various bureaucracy and local regulations, was that hindering the acceptance of it? And does that -- I guess, if that is the case, does that create a barrier for new entrants coming in who maybe want to pile into the market as well?

Very good question. That is exactly why. So unlike many other countries in the world, the taxi licenses in Turkey are owned and operated by individuals. So there is 20,000 taxis in the city of Istanbul, that's 20,000 individual taxi owners, right? And these people make their livelihoods from these taxis. Well, they used to. Now the system morphed into a horrible labor abusing type of behemoth where the licensed medallion owner who is now in the 60s or 70s is renting out this licensed car to drivers who then drive for 12 hours a day on two shifts. Pretty much 7 days a week and at minimum pay and it's -- the system is not working, people are really unhappy. Anybody who's visited, Istanbul was a tourist, knows about this, the taxi system just sucks, right? But what these people did, the 20,000 taxi drivers were -- have created a union and have put on tremendous pressure on the local and national government for the past decade to not allow ride-hailing to come. There are videos surfacing. There's videos all over the world from when ride-hailing was being first introduced, where taxes went on strikes. They contested on city hall. They sued these companies, these companies went to court, but eventually it resolved. The one thing with Turkey is that it is the last country to resolve this dispute. I mean the ride-hailing not being allowed in Turkey would be like not allowing e-commerce or color television in a country with 6 million people. It's not going to happen. It's just coming with a delay. So we are -- one of the main reasons why we're successful is Uber came into this country in, I believe, 2015. They burned through tens of millions of dollars, and they were kicked out in 2017, effectively left by 2018 in terms of ride-hailing. We are the local kids. If you look at this map, you tend to see that in all emerging markets, the size of Turkey, that has emerged a local champion that convinced the government, the courts, the public that ride-hailing is necessary and is tremendously beneficial to the people of those countries. That's why the local champions are always one. That's what's going to happen with Turkey. We believe in it, and we're working at it every day.

Following, let's say, Uber's playbook, they've added additional services from the ride-hailing. You can order meals off of it, the delivery services, all sorts of things. I presume that is on the road map for Marti technologies as well. And once people are using your app, maybe it turns into like a payments or a fintech app or you book a movie ticket on it, who knows what. But like can you talk about some of those road map functionality that you could potentially add on to the service?

You explained it as well as I could, right? I mean it stall out and you open, everybody does it, right? Like they're 20 examples in these 20 countries. What you do is -- what you could potentially do is, let me put it that way, you could launch fintech solutions, right, because you have so much -- such a large GMV that's being transferred on your wallets that at some point, you start to offer financial services, like peer-to-peer money transfers, for example, which we already do. You could do lending with fintech. That's also a huge market, micro lending, sometimes even a pretty hefty credit card solutions, debit card, prepaid card solutions, smart to wallet payment solutions, everything is possible. We're also exploring parcel and grocery delivery, along with restaurant food delivery, right? We also have potential international expansion opportunities. We could potentially buy some other operators outside of Turkey through M&A activity and just acquire not only increase our number of different services, but we could increase the number of countries we operate in. So growth looks very bright, and the playbook is laid out by who came before us and have pretty much built this business model. We're just -- again, we're just very good at executing it.

You had a map previously of Turkey itself where you're only in the three major -- I believe it's three major urban centers.

Four.

And obviously, that's the biggest population density and probably economic density, but there's still a lot more country out there to go into. Are there certain if it's low enough density rural, you're not going to bother -- or just to turn the lights on in one region and some guy in his car say, hey, I'll pick up some guy from the train station and drive them somewhere else. It doesn't seem to be that -- how hard is it for you to sort of open up in these other regions?

Martin, what city are you from in Germany?

Bremen, Northern Germany.

How big is Bremen?

Probably 0.5 million people or so.

Is there ride-hailing?

I believe so.

Yes. So there are more than 10 cities in Turkey with a population of more than 1 million, right? There's probably -- I don't know the exact number, but the number of cities that have more than 0.5 million should be more than 40 at least 30, right? Like the country is huge. And being a Germany yourself, there are much smaller cities in Germany in different federations that are lower than 0.5 million with maybe 100,000 people in them, they still have ride-hailing, right? And this business model, unless it is a small town of like a few thousand, right, you will need somebody driving you around. Car ownership is on the -- is decreasing. Shared transportation solutions are the way to go, right? As long as you have some type of urban setting, you are going to need somebody to drive around, right? As long as taxis exist, ride-hailing should be there. And in Turkey, there are probably 80 cities that are like that. Right now, we're in Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya and Izmir, that is only 50% of the country's GDP, right? Those cities are huge, Martin, huge. Istanbul is 20 million people. Ankara is maybe 5. Antalya is 5. Izmir is 5, right? And that's what the total of 35 million, 40 million people, that's half of this country. We haven't even -- and we just like we are not -- we haven't even come to scale, right? Like this is still a blue ocean for us. The future looks bright. It's just -- this business model is the low-hanging fruit in terms of tech-enabled business models out there in this country, right? It was just about a local champion coming and grabbing it and just expanding it and regulating it and finally reaching that hopefully multibillion-dollar valuations as other ride-hailing companies do in other parts of the world.

So when are you going to start turning on those different regions in Turkey? Does it take a lot to do that? Or are you going to start doing that this year? Or are you just trying to get scale in the major centers before you go into the smaller centers?

So let me clarify something a little bit. Marti is already a household name in this country, right? Like it is -- I hazard a guess and say 95% of the people that live here know what Marti is, right? It is the -- because the scooters have been out there, the mopeds, the e-mopeds, whatever have been out there for years and years, right? Like they've become a category name. In Turkey, you don't call a scooter a scooter, you call them Marti. It's like [ Crenex ]. So whenever you go to a new city, you don't have to do any advertising. people just know us. We just put out ads that say, we're here and people know what we're doing, right? They know our ride-hailing operations as well because taxi situation this time was so cancerous, so unbelievably broken that it is makes national news all the time, and we are on national news pretty much every other week. So rolling out these new cities, we don't have to introduce ourselves. We just knocked the door and they're like, oh, finally, you guys came to Ankara. Finally, you guys came to Bursa. Finally, you guys came to Kocaeli. Come on in, we'll use your cars. That's about -- the demand is insane. I've never seen anything like it.

How many territories do you expect to enter into this year? Or is that more of a next year thing?

We're running pilots all the time, right? It's not hard to tell, hard to say. But I mean, by the end of the year, we should probably cover somewhere between 50% -- well, we are already at 50% of GDP, but we should cover something -- I don't know. It's hard to say, but like 70%, 75% of GDP.

So this map is going to be a lot more lit up by the end of the year.

A lot, that is the goal. It's going to be a lot more lit up by the end of the year. Again, I don't want to talk about anything that's not publicly disclosed. I want to be very careful about that. So -- but the plan is to grow, baby, grow. That's the model here.

Like it sounds like you've got tons of opportunity within Turkey as well. But in terms of external growth, I guess you could maybe license out the technology so someone else uses the tech platform or you could buy a smaller operator and then sort of integrate that. I don't know, any thoughts on that? Or is it really just Turkey focused right now, nail this one down and then kind of worry about other external opportunities at a later point?

It's an opportunity cost issue. I think of this as a mine, right? Think of this as an oil well. Think of it as anything that you extract out of the ground. Some sites have the oil very close to the surface. So you tap it, it just bubbles out, right? You're going to have to -- there's not much cost in realizing that potential. Some sites are like it's way deeper, you have to put in a lot of effort. You have to do a lot of work to be able to extract those minerals or oil out of the ground. Turkey right now is a huge opportunity, right? A moment of my time, my team's time spent outside this country is a loss because with the same amount of effort, we could capture so much of the market here than we could do elsewhere, right? So right now, that's why we're only focused on this country. But that being said, we're open to finding good teams outside this country, right? There are other countries. There's, I don't know, maybe 0.5 billion Turks worldwide, right? Like you have Azerbaijan, you have Turkmanistan, you have Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, you have all these places, right? You have a lot of other countries out there that fit us culturally, that possibly potentially we could work with very fairly easily, language barrier is not an issue. There's a lot of -- I'm just sort of like brainstorming here. If you find good teams, we will surely look at acquiring them through M&A activity. But right now, it is an opportunity cost to think outside of Turkey. Right now, Turkey is such a huge opportunity for us that we should be just focusing solely on this beautiful Gorgeous country.

Is there any material internal competition at this point? Or are you just yet?

We're consistently #1 in urban transportation segment. We're #1 across iOS and Android stores in the transportation segment. Turkish Airlines is generally behind us as an app. I think that sort of gives you like Turkish Airlines. It's the largest -- it's the single most -- it's the airline with the single most flight destinations in the world, right, because Istanbul is in such a -- it's a great company. Istanbul is in such a great geopolitical location that you could fly anywhere from Istanbul. That's why Turkish Airlines is huge. It's run fairly successfully. And flies to more destinations than any other airline in the world, but Marti tends to be higher than Turkish Airlines on the App Store. So that gives you an idea of how big we are.

Got you. All right. We've got some questions here from the audience being largely North American here. A question here on the political environment in Turkey. I guess there's a bit of turbulence here recently or there recently. Just -- you've commented on the size of the economy, the size of the population. But just a quick primer on -- and I can't -- if I'm pronouncing his right name correctly, but Erdogan, I guess, the President. Just it's pretty stable generally or has been stable in that country?

Well, let me put it this way. First of all, as a CEO of a publicly traded company, it's not correct for me to comment on politics. It's like an internal -- it's an internal policy, right? But I can tell you this, Turkey is a very strong economy. The Republic has never defaulted ever on its loans ever, right? Unfortunately, the country has a history of mild but consistent political turmoil. It's just the nature of the country, right? Crisis come, crisis go. But the economy has been pretty strong for however many years. You have the largest population in Europe. You have the largest city in Europe, and we have the youngest population in Europe. It's 85 million people that are mercantile, that are hard working, that are tax savvy, that like to consume, they also like to produce. Our GDP is north of $1 trillion. We're the 17th largest economy in the world. And again, political turmoil comes, political turmoil goes, but ride-hailing is an absolute necessity, right? Like people, whatever happens, right? That's why this business model is great. Whatever happens in a country, right, people need to move from point A to point B, especially in a city of 20 million people. So I don't like to comment on politics. We are here to stay, and we know that our business model will be necessary whatever happens. But Turkey is a powerful, strong large country with a pretty tech-savvy population that love to use us.

There's a question here on your take rate. And are you able to comment on for every 1% increase in your take rate, how much does that change your revenues?

Yes. That's a good question. We tend to -- first of all, obviously, I'm a young CEO, right? I had a lot of lawyers brief me before we did the IPO. It's very important what you say and what you not say. You have to be thoughtful and careful about what you disclose, material nonpublic information is very important. So anybody that's interested in our key growth figures can look at our annual reports or our investor press releases on our website. You could follow what we released, but that is information I believe we do not disclose. But what I can say is this, global take rates are around 30% and we are probably on single-digit take rates as we speak. So we do this -- super -- we don't even charge commissions based on rides. We take a subscription from our drivers, just to incentivize people to put people to drive more, right? Obviously, a subscription package, once you buy it, your incentives are aligned so that you want to drive more. That's how we monetize it. It's primitive, if anything, right? It's just -- our focus is on growth, growth, growth. That's why low, low, low take rates.

Got you. There's a question here. How does traffic congestion help you? And given Istanbul's challenging traffic congestion.

Well, the person who asked this question probably has never been to Turkey. I'd love them to come and see the Istanbul for themselves, but transportation is a challenge in Istanbul. Having a car is very expensive. Getting on the subway doesn't get you where you want to go, right? There's generally very high traffic. So it's very hard to move around the city, and there's no taxis around. We not only offer ride-hailing services for cars, we have a fairly large motorcycle hailing service. And...

A motorcycle comes up and I hop on the back of the motorcycle.

Just like Bali, just like Thailand, just like Malaysia, just like Philippines, just like Indonesia, right? And Turkey has fairly great weather for 9 months a year. It's a great tourist destination because people love to come here, the weather is beautiful. And the number of motorcycles in the country have been increasing steadily over the past decade. I believe only 7% of all vehicles were motorcycles 10 years ago. Now that figure is 20%. So one out of every five vehicle in the registered in this country is a motorcycle, right? And there's high traffic congestion, guess what type of ridership goes up. People just want to on rush hour or people just want to top on the motorcycles. When traffic is high, it's next to impossible to find taxis. So ride-hailing becomes an even better opportunity or a better option. And just -- the fact that all these things make life such a -- make life so hard for people to move around. People just -- when they find a service that drives them around the city instead of them driving for 1.5 hours, people just want to use it, right? Trust me, if you live in Istanbul, you would be like, I'd rather be on the backseat of a car for 1.5 hours than driving the traffic for 1.5 hours, right? It's -- you have to be here to understand it.

Okay. All right. What is the optimal number of drivers? Would you like to have 1 million drivers? And do you have a goal for, let's say, this year of kind of how many drivers you have on the app?

The only thing I can say is, well, we have 255,000 as of December. And we hope by the end of Q1 this year, we're going to be reaching 290,000, I believe that was our goal. The ultimate level where we reach in terms of driver saturation is unknown. And here's why it's unknown. We don't know how part-time drivers versus full-time drivers are to be -- are going to consider. We don't know what percentage of our ultimate number of drivers are going to be full-time or part time, right? They change a lot of things. If you have more people doing this full time, then obviously, clearly, you need less number of drivers to service as many trip requests. But if you have a lot of people that are doing this part time and are working only a few hours a day, then you need more drivers. So the ultimate number of drivers could be -- the range is fairly large.

And obviously, it depends on what type of drivers, too. It's like having a few number of full-time drivers runs a lot more revenues than lots of.

That is very, very correct, yes. So it will all depend on -- go ahead.

Well, there's a question here, and I'm just going to dovetail my question as well. What is the biggest obstacle for driver recruitment? Do you help drivers overcome the high cost of ownership? And what does it take to become a driver? Do you have to take a special license or get a business license or kind of any bureaucratic friction?

Our main incentive is to get as many people as possible on board, right? You want to because you don't know if somebody making sign-ups as hassle-free as possible should be the ultimate goal of every ride-hailing company, right? Because you don't know. Somebody might just not want to try to do it if the bureaucratic process is too long. But if they tried it once, they'd be like, wow, this is amazing. I just -- I'm making a lot of extra cash on my off hours. They might not know that because it's such a hassle to sign up. So we try to make it as simple as possible to sign up. What we do is, first of all, you have to send us all your documents, right, your cars, your insurance, your registration license plate, your driver's license, right? And then you have to send us your selfies, right? We have an AI tool that matches -- obviously, everybody has this, but you face with your driver's license. And then you have to send us your criminal record. So if you have any type of criminal record, you're not allowed to drive on our platform, right? So the Turkish state actually has a very successful digital component. It's called e-state, e-devlet in Turkish. So every type of governmental thing you do in this country, say you want to renew your taxes, say you want to renew your identification, say you want to request a passport, anything that pertains involvement of the state for your citizenship rights, there's an app for it, right? So that app, you can also get your criminal record. You require people to download their criminal records from that app and then load it on to our platform, and then we double check it. And then we sometimes do a phone interview where we try to understand your means and motives. And then finally, we start your trial membership. After a certain number of rides, we review your -- the feedback from your first users, first customers. If everything is good, we let you drive for good. And then we certainly monitor as closely as possible, you have a certain level of service that you have to provide to be a driver on our platform. And as long as your star rating is high and your reviews are good, you can be a driver for good. That's why since sign-up is so easy and it takes only a few hours for us to get back to you and it only takes a few minutes for you to upload all these documents, we're growing our driver base pretty fast.

So okay. So it sounds like a pretty straightforward, easy process that you can get done.

It's become that way over the years, too, right? Like a decade ago and anywhere, like, say, Germany, say France, say, U.K., U.S., whatever, to be a ride-hailing driver, you have to go to a, let me say, a fulfillment center or like a sign-up.

Yes. That put a lot of...

You have to go there. You have to like fill up forms. You have to like apply. You had your pictures taken sometimes. You get an interview in person. They inspected your car. That was in the mid-'20 -- early 2010s. Technology has progressed pretty incredibly over the past decade. So launching a ride-hailing platform now is much easier than it used to be, right? For example, you don't need to do in-person interviews anymore. It's because you have facial recognition software, right? You can just talk to somebody on the phone, right, maybe have a conference call with them. And then every single time before somebody opens their app and becomes a driver, you ask them to take a selfie. That's how you know that the person that's driving for you is the person that has signed up. You can also check the quality of the vehicle, inspect it digitally as well, right? Every once in a while, they say, "Hey, send me the pictures of your car again, right? And just take pictures and upload on the platform. Before that, you have to go to a service center, have your car check. There's a lot of ins and outs of this, the sign-up process, the onboarding process, the maintenance of drivers situation. Now it's all digital. It's all easy, and we have pretty much eased it.

Alfred, we have to wrap things up here. So why don't we close it off? Just any final comments, what you want of viewers to sort of the key takeaways you want viewers to think about with Marti Technologies?

I'd like to say, Marti is the largest secret nobody knows about because it's a purely local play. Thank God, we're listed in New York Stock Exchange that allows for money outside the country to be able to come as an investment to us. We are the largest secret that is still unknown simply because we are a local player in a very large market that is catching up in ride-hailing. So if you thought, if you ever think, oh, I wish I invested in one of those ride-hailing companies in the early 2010s. I would have made a lot of money, gosh, barn, there is your opportunity, right? We are growing. We're in this country, and things are developing exactly as they have in 198 other countries. So if you thought you will sort of like miss the ride-hailing train in the early 2010s, you could just catch up now via Turkey.

Alper, thank you. That was really fun. I learned a lot and fun talking to you. Thank you. Have a great day, and maybe we'll get you back in a little while, and you can give us an update on how things are progressing. Have a great evening, and talk to you soon. Cheers.

Thank you, Martin. It was a pleasure. Thank you.