VNV Global AB (publ) (VNV.ST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] have Capital Markets Day has gotten a bit on. My name is Per and I'll say a few things. I mean my colleagues here, [indiscernible] Alex get things going. Alex is like the Master of Ceremonies, [indiscernible] will help moderate the different sessions. So that's what I introduced. This is the agenda by the way. I'll talk a little bit and then we got kind of large companies, and they will present what's going on and then there's an opportunity for questions, and we'll moderate a few things to get and I think we will be good. So I just sort of to kick us off with a few slides on what's going on at VNV. So we've obviously been super big sales going to say over summer. We have 1.5 years to maybe 2 years to delever the portfolio, sell stuff to pay down the debt. And we're super happy that we're finally [Audio Gap]. What we want to stress and typically stress again and again is that we sort of have the impression that a lot of people when you look from a far at what we do, it seems like we run a portfolio that's burning through cash. But when you look closer, that's not the case. In fact, about 80% of the portfolio is EBITDA positive, which is important, and we want to stress and stress that again because, again, we think there's a misperception out there. So end of Q2, 81% of the portfolio was EBITDA positive. Now pro forma post selling Gett, that goes down a little bit because Gett was very profitable. So -- but we're still at like 77% of the portfolio EBITDA positive. When we talk about EBITDA positive here, we have our dear company, Voi, as EBIT positive because Voi, I think, is the only company in portfolio where -- which owns and depreciates assets. And hence, we should talk about EBIT, not EBITDA. But that's already adjusted in here. What we have typically done on these CMDs is also to give you a picture of growth. So this is -- this picture shows you our 6 top portfolio companies, the 6 largest ones. And what's important to note here is that how revenue is -- this is our pro rata share of these companies' financials. So '23, that was about $90 million. And important to note here is that revenue growth is really accelerating. And so from 17% now to 42%. And what we've shown -- what we show down here is the profitability margin, which has gone from being sort of net loss-making in '23 to positive in '24, and that sort of profitability is increasing here in 2025. Now this is 3%. So it may not look much. But in this portfolio, there's a wide range. Some are profitable to the order of 25% and some less. But on average, it's 3%. And again, we -- here, we keep Voi at the EBIT level. All the other ones is EBITDA. They don't have assets. So if you put Voi at the EBITDA level, this goes up to about 7%. And so what we see going forward is revenue keep on growing, but also -- and more importantly, earnings growing faster. So we haven't sort of mapped that out here. But if you allow yourself to sort of look through to 2027 and you take our pro rata earnings of these 6 companies that -- and you relate that to the entire market cap of VNV today, we're trading at like a [indiscernible] to earnings -- [indiscernible] to EBITDA of about 10. So just to give you a sense that this will keep on growing here. And of course, that's not counting the -- what is it, 50 companies. We have 60 companies in the portfolio. So that's just counting these 6. And then we've got all these others, all these 54. And in these 4, there's a bunch of stuff that well, I like to call the next Avitos. I'm pretty certain that in our portfolio outside of these, there are companies there that will, at some point, sort of grow up and become large contributors to the NAV performance. So these are just a couple. Dift is a marketplace for corporate gifting. Medoma is a software business to take this huge trend now in healthcare where you take the hospital to the home, Alva is next-generation HR, LinkedIn 2.0. Yuv digitalizes hair color, Flo, OURA and Borzo are large brand names. I think you know them. They're all in the healthcare space. OLIO is a marketplace for food waste and NOTRAFFIC is a software business for traffic lights, to run traffic lights more efficient. So all of these companies are raising money. They're close to profitability and have real value. So when I talk about a [indiscernible] 10, 2 years out, that's putting all these things at 0. And I can guarantee you that they're not 0. So some will have different performances. But it's -- I'm really excited. I hope that shows through. The other way we have in the past, but I think increasingly forward, present our portfolio is by sort of putting the different companies to different themes. So we invest into network effects. That's the common denominator. We love these sort of high barriers to entry that network effects will give rise to and inspired by classifieds, but that's really what we look for in the portfolio. But there are other sort of themes that in themselves are very strong and interesting to invest into and are disrupting sort of old ways of doing things. And sometimes, I think it's important to sort of show the portfolio in that way, too. So mobility, obviously, with BlaBlaCar and Voi, which will both present. That's a big chunk of our portfolio. But there's also marketplaces and then emerging markets, which is maybe our historical home turf, less of that today, but maybe increasingly going forward. And so there's emerging markets and there's also early stage. I think that's the sort of bulk of what I thought I'd introduce, but leaving you, of course, that we still trade with this big discount. Our stock has moved up somewhat since we sold Gett and have started sort of buying back our stock, redeeming the bond, getting the house in order, but there's still a 44% discount to an NAV, which we think has a lot of upside, I think you can tell. That's what I thought I'd introduce this day with. And what will happen now is that I will flip page and hand over to Alex. Alex is my colleague and who will sort of run the...

Thanks, Per, for the introduction. Can you see me? So thanks, Per, for introduction. Our first speaker is Fredrik Hjelm, the Founder -- Co-Founder and CEO of Voi Technologies. As you probably know, VNV invested in Voi in 2018, the time when the company was created. At the moment, on a fully diluted basis, we own around 20.9% of Voi, which is our second largest holding. And we are very excited about Voi's ability to redefine urban transport and create sustainable efficient cities for everyone. So please welcome Fredrik Hjlm.

Yes. So my name is Fredrik Hjelm. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Voi. And I think it's the seventh time now, Per, I'm standing here, either in the room or virtually during COVID. And as Alex said, VNV and Per was our first big believer. And I think without VNV, there wouldn't be any Voi. And Per and the team have been super, super supportive over the years, and we're very, very grateful for that. And of course, indirectly all the LPs to VNV as well. And we just celebrated 7 years live as a company. We started with a few scrappy e-scooters in Stockholm, August 25, 2018. And now year 8 live as a business, I have never felt more excited and confident that micromobility is here to stay. Micromobility is really reshaping how people move around. You had tube strikes here in London last week. I think you have tube strikes in Paris this week. Throughout the spring, you had the tube and metro bus strikes in Germany. You see situations like that. Micromobility is filling the gap. And you also see that micromobility is a positive factor in making cities cleaner, less congested, less noise pollution. And in that, we feel very, very good about where we are at Voi. The team is super strong. We have come a long way on the products. We have become profitable on EBITDA and EBIT level, which is amazing. Competition has come down and regulatory tailwinds are with us. So overall, we are very, very excited starting year 8 and looking forward to the next 7 years. So with Voi since day 1, a lot of things have changed, but one thing hasn't changed, our vision. So the vision was to create cities made for living and be part of a solution moving cities away from heavy, heavy car-centric individual passenger is one car, look out here now, looks so stupid. And we don't think micromobility is the only solution to that, but it's a very important part of the solution. We have gone from those few scrappy e-scooters in Stockholm in 2018 to 150,000 vehicles all over Europe. You see that the European map is full with blue dots, which are markets where we are live. We have gone from being an only e-scooter company to over the last years, become an e-bike company as well, delivering on that vision of building a vehicle-agnostic micromobility platform. We have expanded into more than 100 cities. You see Northern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe mainly. We still see so much room to grow over the coming years in Europe, outside of Europe. We grew a lot over the first years, 2018 to 2021. I think we went from 0 to EUR 90 million revenues or something like that. We also lost a lot of money in 2021. So over the last years, we have really turned around the ship, continue to grow, but now growing with great margins and bottom line profitability as well, which feels very, very good. We are having DACH, so the German-speaking region in Europe as our largest region, then is the Nordics, U.K., we call it rest of Europe here. France is quickly becoming our largest growth market. I'll talk a bit more about that. In 3 weeks, we're going live in Paris again, which will be the largest launch and largest contract we've ever won. So very excited about that, but a lot of logistical work to do now over the next coming weeks, but we will make it. So overall, what we are focused on now the last year and really the last 3 years are these 3 things. On the left-hand side here, I say sticky user base. So we have tried to transform our user base from being more transactional pay per ride into subscription products, recurring revenues, retention. And what we see now is that around 90% of our revenues are coming from users that over the year are taking more than 3 rides per month. So we're definitely moving in the right direction. In the second column here, we call it superior vehicles. So the first vehicles in Stockholm in 2018, they were definitely not superior. They were scrappy and not really built for purpose, but over the 7 years, I think we've iterated we are on our eighth or ninth hardware generation of e-scooters and on our fourth generation e-bike. And we see that we have taken the lifetime of the vehicles from a couple of months in the early days to the latest generations having an estimated lifetime of more than 10 years. We see that out on the streets now, we're having vehicles that we put on the streets in 2020. We depreciated them over 2 years. It was still early and so on. Now they have been on the street for 5 years. So we see that over time with great hardware design, supply chain management, QA and then, of course, operation and maintenance, we get these vehicles to last really, really long. The first years as well on the regulatory side, it was a bit bumpy. The market was completely free, no licenses, no tenders or anything like that. No one really knew how should we regulate this, how do we combine it with public transportation with trains and so on. The market has matured a lot moving into tendered market dynamic where, for example, in Paris now, we have won 1 of 3 slots. Over the last couple of weeks, we announced that we won an exclusive contract in Edinburgh in Scotland and also in Glasgow. So the regulatory side have really matured, and we feel really good about where we are with cities today. It's gone from, in the beginning, being quite contentious in some situations to now being a very constructive dialogue, how can we build urban mobility together and include micromobility in that. We have focused a lot on cost, both efficiency, unit economics, gross margins and so on, improved that a lot. But since end of '21, early 2022, we have also reduced our overhead cost by a lot, more than 40%. And I think the people who are here from Voi agree with me that we're better now than we were a couple of years ago despite almost half the overhead size. So we really managed to keep, yes, top talent at the company. They've been around for a long time. They know each other. They know the ups and downs in the industry. And that is, of course, a super, super power in the company. So as I said, we went from hyper growth to focusing on efficiency, turning the company profitable. We went out a year ago and raised a public bond in Stockholm, which is, I think, some kind of a testament to that we're growing up as a company. We managed to convince the debt investors that this is a good asset class. We are a great company and the future is bright. So we raised a bond on EUR 50 million that's trading now in Stockholm. So we are on our third, fourth quarterly report. So we're upping the standards on reporting on governance and compliance and so on as well. And there was a framework of EUR 125 million, 4 years non-amortizing coupon on 3-month Euribor plus 6.75. We see that the bond has traded up quite a lot. So it seems like the market is liking what we have done over the last years with the quarterly reports and so on. And I think for us, of course, as a company, it was a great way to finance growth CapEx for this year. But also for us as a company and for the industry, it's, yes, one of the steps that we are growing up, the industry is growing up, people start to understand the asset class. And I think also us being public now with standardized quarterly reports further accelerates that. So what we do now over the coming months and what we have done this year, we, for the first year in many years, have expanded quite a lot to new cities and also new countries, Scotland, as I mentioned. The biggest win this year was Paris, of course. We were live in Paris up until 2020, 2021. We lost the tender in Paris back then for e-scooters. Paris eventually banned e-scooters, but it's all in on e-bikes. So we also went all in to win that contract. And earlier this year, we won it. So in 3 weeks from now, you can ride Voi again in Paris. We're launching 6,600 e-bikes, our latest generation. So it would be a big scheme, our biggest launch ever. And we have this contract now until 2030, once again, an example of how these contracts are getting longer, more predictable and so on. So rolled out a lot of vehicles, focused a lot on e-bikes, focused a lot this year on the rider side of things as well. We see over the last couple of months, we have millions of riders every month, grown the rider base with around 30% year-over-year. And then as soon as we feel good about Paris, we will go more heavy into London as well. We're live in London with e-scooters. We have 1 or 2 slots [indiscernible]. We're live with some e-bikes as well in London, but 2026 will definitely be a London year for us. And then towards the end of 2026, we should be the clear, clear leader, both in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Oslo. So that's very exciting. And this [indiscernible] London and Paris have, of course, mega mega potential. Looking a bit at numbers. We have continued to grow and what you see in the staples is 2021 to 2024 and then LTM for Q2 2025. So we see that growth is picking up again this year. And the investments we have done in fleet, given our business model will, of course, have a bit of a lagging effect on the top line. You will really start to see the full effect from 2026, which is a quite nice position to be in. We're also in a position now where very, very few competitors can invest in the same way. Vehicle profit margins, which is our revenues minus direct charging costs, maintenance and so on, have improved a lot. You see from 2021 to 2024, we -- or to 2025, we're almost doubling the vehicle profit margin. At the same time, as I mentioned before, as we have decreased overhead costs, both on market level and on central level. So we're starting to see great operational leverage in the business and more to come. So EUR 25 million in EBITDA last 12 months up until Q2, EBIT positive as well. So overall, as you probably hear on me, we feel good about the trajectory at the moment. Big thing this year, as it was the first year we have been able to invest in new CapEx really since 2022. We have rolled out 3 new vehicle models, the Voyager 8, which is our latest generation e-scooter, around 35,000 new Voyager 8, I think, this year, all over Europe. It's really, really great to see that despite our older vehicle cohorts, the ones from 2020, '21, '22, yes, we can operate them profitably. What we see now with Voyager 8 and the bikes here is that we have another leapfrog, both on the rider side, rider retention and rider feedback and so on, but also on the operational side when we look at like important input metrics for us like rides per repair, rides per task, which eventually turns into EBIT, EBITDA and full company profitability. We are testing 2 e-bikes here in London now. One is the one in the middle, which over the last 2 years have been our flagship bike. It's slightly larger. It's very robust. It's stable, great unit economics. But what we also have found out developing so much hardware over the last couple of years in the quest for robustness and longevity, we think that we're starting to tilt towards slightly too heavy vehicles. And we see that especially when we're talking to users, female users, smaller users. So we're also experimenting now with lighter form factors such as the [ Explorer Light ] there to the right. France, we were -- it was almost game over in France 2 years ago. We were down to one city, Marseille only. Marseille has been an amazing city for us since 2019. But we -- yes, we have lost our foothold there. We invested now over the last 1.5 years in the city relationships and really understanding what the cities look for, what the users look for and so on and have seen almost like a magical comeback in the market where we have won pretty much all important markets now in France over the last year that have been up for grabs. Grenoble, Le Havre, the Paris metropolitan area and eventually Paris as well. What we're also seeing there is that, yes, for the first time since Voi started, we're also able to win these really big e-bike contracts, Paris, of course, again, being the largest. So France is quickly becoming our fastest growth market, and it will be a top 3 market next year on top line, on hopefully, profitability as well. So we're very, very excited about Voi in France. I am also very, very excited about AI as probably some others are as well. And I feel that we, at Voi, are at such a unique position where we're not a native AI company. We're a mobility company, but we have a lot of amazing people. We have built the tech stack in-house, the software stack, the data stack and a lot of the hardware stack as well. And I think that some of the biggest beneficiaries of AI are companies like us who can apply AI. Of course, we shouldn't think that much about like how do you build large language models and so on, but we should be best in the world within mobility to apply it. So we're working a lot with that as well. And at Voi, it means embedding AI savviness in all roles, all teams on a group level, train our employees to become good at applying AI in their respective field. And then, of course, use the strengths and leverage the strengths of LLMs when it comes to speed, when it comes to content generation, but then aggressively mitigate the weaknesses, hallucinations and so on and then use that and embed LLMs and AI in products where it makes sense, not where it doesn't make sense, in operations, in our rider experience and across the business. And we're starting to see great, great effects from that already. I have a lot of funky examples with voice and video and so on, but I was advised to not do it, but I'll just give you one small example. So Voi doing millions of rides every week. Tens of thousands of feedbacks from customers every week. Historically, that was something that our customer support agents went through one by one. Of course, they missed a lot. They tried to tag it and so on. How one can use LLMs now is so exciting when you have big data mass and data volumes. So this is an example that we call LLM my feedback instead of customer support agents going through and tagging and so on, we have infused LLMs and embedded LLMs. This is an example from Marseille, where we see a spike here, an anomaly in refund requests. So this is just one example of how you can use LLMs as a company like us. And then, of course, that should feed into the city manager in Marseille, the product team and so on, so we can take quick actions rather than waiting for weeks as it was before when customer support agents had to go through the data. So we try to be on the forefront. We try to take everyone with us in the company and more to come from Voi on AI over the coming months and coming years. So what's happening in 2027 now? So we're building from a solid base. We continue to see that, yes, we are in a situation where regulators are rather coming to us and cities coming to us asking about micromobility, how they should implement it, how they should regulate it and so on, which will be a tailwind in 2027 as well. We have seen that competitive pressure has been reduced quite significantly. I think when we applied for Paris the first time in 2020, there were 20 or 22 competitors. Now even in the very high-value markets, we're down to a few and perhaps 1 or 2 that are for real competitive threat to us. So we think that will continue, which is great. We will continue to build out the platform. So we're still heavy e-scooters, some e-bikes. Next year and going forward, you will see a more multimodal voice stack to basically meet the cities and the consumers where they are with the form factor they want. And finally, we'll continue to be very disciplined around how we spend money, how we improve operating margins and vehicle profit margins and so on and yes, build a much larger company with a relatively fixed cost base. Thank you.

Thank you, Fredrik, for an update. We will now open the floor for Q&A, and my colleague, Dennis will lead.

So Mathias Hermansson is the CFO and Deputy CEO of Voi. My name is Dennis. I'm an investment manager at VNV. I thought I'll kick off the Q&A with a couple of questions from me, but then opening it up for questions from the audience. I think taking a step back and looking at the last, especially 2 years, I think we're all positively surprised or at least very happy about the growth acceleration. You're growing almost 30% year-over-year right now, and you're at the same time, generating significant cash flows from operations. What's your view? What has been the most important driver in that shift over the past years? You talked about a lot of the data points, but some general reflections would be nice to hear.

All right. We tried to get Dennis to send the questions in advance, but he refused. So we haven't rehearsed you should take the answer. But no, I think as I think we said at one Board meeting, imagine a company that over the last 2 years, improved profits as much as they grow top line. And that's very rare. And I think what we actually managed to achieve is we doubled the profits on -- more than revenue growth. And I think -- so it's like almost unheard of, I think. And the driver behind that to your question, I think, is relentless focus on operational efficiency out in the field. I think we have close to 150,000 vehicles that needs to be served and swap batteries. And through a lot of -- probably not over the last 2 years, but a lot of -- it's not so much AI, it's basically automation and algorithm-driven, we call it, task generation. So the tasks that should be done out of the field in the streets. That's all automated now. I think that's one of the reasons. And I think the second, I think, reason was what Fredrik just mentioned. I think we dare to reduce the overall overheads earlier than anyone in the industry. And by that, growing the gross margins while reducing the cost, and then that's default.

And anything to add, Fredrik?

No, to Mathias' point, Voi is a massive optimization play. And I mean, one of the moats is also that it is a massive optimization play, but you don't only have to optimize online. You have to do the massive optimization play offline as well and getting it out through fleet specialists, mechanics, winning cities and so on, which makes it very, very difficult to compete with at the stage we are now. So...

Amazing. I'll do one more for me and then open up. You obviously mentioned the bond, we don't have to get into specifics, but just thinking about the impact that it does mean to a semipublic company. You're reporting on a quarterly basis, your books are open. How has that impacted you? And what's the significance of that, would you say?

I mean I touched upon it. It was funny before we raised the bond in our Board. Some of our investors, not Per, because he knows a lot about bonds. Some of the other investors were more skeptical like a company like you shouldn't have your numbers out there every quarter, competitors can take actions and outcompete you and so on. But eventually now -- I mean, now we have had 3 good quarters as well. But it's up the bar for reporting, how to measure things in the business, how to talk about the business and yes, implemented for the first time really, like standardized metrics in the micromobility world because no other of our peers have been reporting in this way since they are still private or yes, not done it. So I think it's been great.

I think as well -- I mean, first of all, everyone keeps saying we're semi public because we are public. You cannot be fragment either but also we adhere to all the MR rules and what have you, so -- and do the reports. I think the big shift, I think, was mentally because I think perception of our industry has not always been fantastic, particularly in the financial markets, having some Bird and some of the other players go bankrupt. I think what we felt last year was I think someone needs to take the kind of flag and plant it and show the world that micromobility can be profitable and we can get a high return on our investments and capital. So I think we said let's try to change the world, financial perception of the world, at least for our world. And so far, as Fredrik said, no one [indiscernible] ever done it. There are rumors that someone else is about to go public, hopefully, towards the end of the year, and we hope that's going to be the case because then everyone can start looking at this as a real industry.

Thank you. Now a question for the fully public company.

George here from Pareto. So my first question is on the bigger fleet that you have now with the bond deployed. Has this bigger fleet impacted the utilization at all? Or has the market been able to sort of digest the increased fleet?

So far, it has digested it well. I mean in Q2, when we started to deploy the fleet, there are always some teething issues and it takes some time and so on to get everything up and running. But so far, it's digested it well.

Yes. And when we look ahead, is it continued growth in existing markets and expanding that fleet in existing markets or more into new markets?

I mean we're open to both as long as we can do it with high confidence and conviction that we will be -- become profitable in that new market relatively soon. So over the last couple of years, expansion into new markets, new countries have mainly been winning first then we invest. Scotland was an example of that, where we first won Edinburgh and Glasgow. Now we're putting real resources behind it rather than going completely blind to new countries.

And just my other question is on the financing here. So obviously, this bond gave you the opportunity to expand with growth CapEx. But how far are you willing to stretch balance sheet and leverage to continue to grow with debt? So that's the first part of that question. And the second one is if -- let's just start there.

Something for me probably. No, I think -- I mean, the first thing you have to remember is that even though we raised the EUR 50 million that the greater Bank [ Pareto ] was part of helping us. We -- I mean, today, at end of Q2, we had 1x leverage, net debt to EBITDA. So it's very rapid cash flow generation from the new CapEx that we have. So I think you will always see the seasonal spikes when you buy vehicles, then it goes up and then it comes down pretty quickly. I think overall, a business like this, I mean, there are much more brilliant financial minds here, but it feels like the volatility of the industry is pretty high still, generally speaking, if you compare to many other industries. So we would probably rather want to keep it on the lower financial risk side. So probably 2x maybe or something like that. But that kind of -- that could change over time probably, but I'd rather be a little bit careful on the financial leverage.

Sure. Thanks for the words on Pareto. And just a final question for me. Other than growth CapEx into the fleet, what's the most important leverage here for growth? Is it utilization or price mix? Or you can touch on that.

Maybe I start and then Fredrik -- the way we look on the European kind of part of the world now, not taking into consideration growth outside Europe for a second, there's a huge amount of untapped demand, both because there are bikes that we're rolling out at scale right now. I think we are only about around 10%, a little bit more probably on bike penetration of the entire fleet. So you have a huge untapped potential in new consumers that don't drive these filers. So that's one thing. And the other part is if you look at the overall penetration in key cities in Europe, how many people are actually using micromobility compared to the size of the population, you see huge discrepancies there as well. So for us, the real growth driver is not to buy 100,000 more vehicles. It's basically to have more people, more active users and more penetration in cities like Berlin, cities like -- across entire Europe. If all -- I think we -- someone tried to do that exercise. If all cities in Europe had the same penetration as Oslo has, we will probably triple the revenues with the same fleet. So there's huge potential in that way. So penetrating cities more -- getting more access to bigger user bases within existing cities is by far the best way to go.

Thank you. Any other questions from the audience? [indiscernible].

Well, you're mostly a scooter company. Well, France banned them. What's your view on sort of the regulatory vision? Will other European cities ban scooters? Do you see yourself that you will have 50% bikes, 50% scooters 3 years from now? How the sort of unit economics changes? Well, it's different between bikes and scooters? That's the first question. And the second which is related to this is like I haven't seen your kind of capacity utilization metrics, like where you are ideal, where you're not ideal, what's -- like what's the target, where you're lagging behind? Like a network effect company. So the more scooters you have, the more users who use because they can see them everywhere. But there are limitations on this. You don't want to have a used fleet. So do you monitor this and how far away from your target?

I can start. No. So I've always seen us and continue to see us as a mobility company that operate light electric vehicles. We started with e-scooters because we saw great demand and so on. We also are big believers in focus, which is why we didn't go into a lot of other modes like year 2, year 3, year 4, but waited to nail down the e-scooter business, then now over the last couple of years, added on the bikes as well. And this year, 2025 is really the breakout year for bikes at Voi, and that will continue. And a few words on the regulatory side. I think the future, say, fast forward 3 years from now, it's clear now that all cities will have micromobility in some shape and form. Most cities, I think, will have both e-bikes and e-scooters and perhaps some other ones as well. Some cities will only have e-bikes, some cities will only have e-scooters, like Oslo is an example, where we are pretty much only e-scooters now, Paris, only e-bikes. So we'll see this mix. But yes, micromobility will be around at scale in all cities. Your second question was around payback unit economics and...

[indiscernible].

It's a good question. We have that question when the Board members are on us all the time to -- on that question. The way to think about it, I think, right now is that for us scaling the e-bike fleet right now, you've seen largely similar gross profit per vehicle per day for bikes as you do for scooters, largely. More revenues per ride because they tend to be longer and slightly less utilization. I think if you pair that with the CapEx cost, it's still dilutive in terms of ROI because they're more expensive to buy the bikes, but that's when you look at it from a micro perspective. If you take a bigger view on this, I mean, London is the best micromobility city in the world -- in Europe -- for Lime in Europe. So Lime is probably one of the best in the world for that and they only run bikes. So bike has enormous potential if you expand the...

My question will then be, how do we make the [indiscernible] moment to take place in other locations as well? What do you do like in and how do you cooperate with the local governments like to increase utilization...

I mean the funny thing, if you take a city like London, London has had -- it's kind of Oslo moment, but on the e-bike side, where you see that the bike usage over the last couple of years have just skyrocketed. You see that it's a combination of infrastructure and bike lanes and protected bike lanes are very important for uptake. And they are very important for uptake because users feel safer and so on, and we tap into other user groups that feel unsafe riding out here next to cars. The second part is, of course, on the product side. We see that with the improved products over the years, we have increased the total addressable market and the type of user groups we can tap into. And then thirdly, it's around operational excellence. I mean, the better we become operationally, the lower production cost per ride we can have. We can, of course, give that back to users and increase the TAM through subscriptions and things like that. So those 3 things, it's infrastructure, it's product, it's operational excellence, of course.

Any more questions from the audience?

Before that, I realized another important thing is, of course, where we see that demand and numbers are really, really strong. Those cities often have some kind of -- they are made it difficult or expensive to have your own car through road tolls, through taking away space that naturally, of course, moves consumers to other modes of transport. Stockholm is another example of that.

Yes. So I have a question on growth as well. So how big of a share has been coming from kind of increasing the vehicle size and how much has been kind of increasing the ride per vehicle? And where do you see this trending in the coming years?

It's a little bit linked to the previous question we got here earlier as well. I think generally speaking, I think this year, given that we scale the fleet so fast, I think most of the revenue growth is coming from vehicle fleet size growth. But that leads you sometimes to think about, okay, so you have to just buy more and more vehicles. But the thing is this year is a little bit special grow so much. So we actually started to put the old the V3X from 2020 in Tier 3 cities as well. So you start seeing a mix effect of all of that as well. That's why -- so the revenues per vehicle per day is largely flat to slightly up.

And then a question on subscriptions. How big of a share of your revenue is coming from subscriptions and...

Sorry, I have to jump in, sorry. But if you look at the number of active users, they're up much more than the fleet size. That's what we have been focused on this.

Yes. No, a question on subscriptions. How big of a share of your revenue is currently coming from that? And is this something you aim to increase over time?

I should probably know this. But I think around 30% is coming from subscription type products, passes. I think as Fredrik mentioned, I think -- we think about us a little bit like -- not one-to-one, but a little bit like Amazon. If you drive down costs massively, then you could afford to give away more rides on passes that are more expensive to do. So the quicker we can drive down cost per ride the quicker we can expand that share as well. So over the next few years, there should be no reason why it's only 50% plus.

Thank you. It looks like that's it from the audience. One final question for me, which I'll probably ask up here and management teams. You obviously track several KPIs in your day to day job, right? In 1 year's time, we meet again, what's the one KPI that's going to be on top of mind during the period from now until then? And where do you want it to be by next time cash flow?

If you ask since Jake is here, EBIT growth. But I think -- I said it before, I think user focus has been a big shift for us this year. So rides per user, revenue per user, engagement, those kind of things, earlier we were a lot more vehicle focused.

Excellent. Thank you so much for your presentation for the...

Thank you, gentlemen. Now from Europe, we turn to Egypt. Please join me in welcoming the Co-Founder and CEO of Breadfast, Mostafa Amin. VNV owns 7.9% of the company and first invested in 2021. Breadfast is the leading online grocery brand in Egypt, and we are thrilled to back Mostafa and his team on this journey. Mostafa, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Alex. And yes, very happy to be back to the VNV Capital Market Day this time in London. I think last year was our first time. We enjoyed it, and we learned a lot. Many familiar faces this time and also new faces that I am very, very looking forward to learning from throughout the day. Thanks to the VNV team. Thanks to Per, Bjorn, Alex, Dennis, Katarina and everyone else. Thank you for hosting us, and thank you for your trust. Before I start, I'm very proud and super grateful that I'm presenting the hard work of our team back in Cairo to you today. My name is Mostafa. I go by Mos. So feel free to call me Mos. I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Breadfast. What's Breadfast and what are we trying to do? We are on a mission to build the most sophisticated consumer supply chain engine for Middle East and Africa. We started -- yes, I apologize. I think there's something with the font on the PDF, but yes. So we started baking and delivering fresh bread to customers' doorsteps at 5 a.m. in the morning in Cairo, which is one of the most popular cities in the world. That was 8 years ago, and we used to deliver bake and deliver the bread at 5:00 a.m. in the morning. Today, 8 years fast forward, Breadfast is the largest online grocery platform out of Egypt. We are building customized selection for MENA. When we started baking the bread, the thesis was, let's start from the hardest part of the consumer supply chain. 1-day shelf life product, not B2B, but B2C, to customers' doorsteps. And we knew that we're going to build a nightmare of operations to make sure that we're starting from the hardest part of the consumer supply chain. Again, 1-day shelf life product, fresh to customers' doorsteps. Many people ask, how is it for Egyptians actually to get their grocery shopping done? First of all, grocery in Egypt is a $100 billion market, $100 billion. Second, 72% of the market is actually unorganized. As a company, we love broken supply chains. And that's why we started baking the bread ourselves. And the thesis also was if we're going to aggregate and only build the technology, if you're aggregating from a broken supply chain, the result is going to be broken customer experience. And that's why we took the very, very bold step by building the whole supply chain ourselves. But again, how is it for Egyptians to actually get their grocery shopping done? We have to go for our weekly grocery shopping by visiting at least 5 different destinations. I have to go and visit the fruits and veg guy. I have to go and visit the butcher, I have to go and visit the poultry guy. I have to go and look for the corner store, the pop and mom shop to go and get my long shelf life dried products and more, right? It depends on the grocery basket. What breakfast is trying to do is to bring the fresh and the non-fresh, right? It's a real one-stop shop to customers' doorsteps. So we're trying actually to save all the time for the customer to make sure that we are building the full supply chain for them to get the bakeries, the pastries, the poultry, the meat and all the long shelf life products to customers' doorsteps. Just wanted to elaborate the problem that we are trying to solve for the customer. And guess what, everything is fully digitized by technology. At the very beginning of the slide, these are my co-founders. There are 3 of us actually coming from tech background. We used to build in machine learning and deep tech and all these crazy stuff. And after years of building this in a major market, we realized that we actually were not building the product market fit for our customers because we have always been influenced by everything coming and should be in the cloud. And after years of failures, I personally failed 4 times trying to build in tech. I start to try all the mistakes of the failures that I've made in the past until I realized that actually we were not solving any of the customers' pain and that we really have to go and take bold steps to solve the real problem for the customer. So since we started, we were trying to find the intersection between technology and the real world, right? Because there is big life that's happening every single day. But how can we intersect and link between the 2 worlds, I think this has been the challenge for us. AI for us is not a new thing. Actually, the first use case that we started to develop, that was almost 5 years ago, so even before the hype. But again, because the whole background of the founding team is coming from technology. At the same time, these crazy guys are baking bread, right? How to link between both worlds has been the idea from day 1. I'm super proud today that we really implement a lot of in-house machine learning in the supply chain engine that we built from day 1. As an example for this, when it comes to supply chain, we started to build our own demand forecasting models, right? And by the way, fresh is very, very tough. You will see the numbers, but for a company like Breadfast that's growing year-over-year in 3-digits manner, 50% of the operations actually is on the fresh side and 50% of the non-fresh is -- 50% of the operations is on the non-fresh side. And guess what is our blended waste. It's sub-2%. This is thanks to 2 things: one, the technology that we've built in-house and also the hard work of the team that's actually monitoring these technologies. As you see on the supply chain side, it almost led to 45% improvement in demand forecasting, 4% revenue uplift, 12% gain in the FPE capacity utilization. And as I mentioned, when it comes to waste, it's sub-2%. Fraud detection recommendations, and we have unlimited use cases that we use every day in our machine learning engine. I'm also super proud that today, we process almost 4.5 quadrillion bytes a month of data. This is basically so massive. Why? Because we own the whole supply chain. We own the first mile logistics, the mid-mile logistics and the last mile logistics. Our vision is from bread to everything, from the hardest part of the consumer supply chain one day to literally bring everything that's needed by the household to their customers, to their doorstep. On the very left side, it's Breadfast supermarket. This is our core. And 8 years ago, we started from like offering 3 SKUs only from the bakery category. Today, we deliver more than 7,500 SKUs to customers' doorsteps. We promise our customers 60 minutes delivery, 24/7. Our organic average delivery time is around 30 minutes. Breadfast Coffee. We actually deliver hot coffee from our fulfillment centers to our customers' doorsteps, but we also ventured into consumer-facing outlets. Very proud that a couple of weeks ago, Breadfast coffee alone as a vertical became larger than the most famous global coffee brand in Egypt, just as a vertical in terms of revenue. So we have our consumer-facing outlets. We also deliver coffee from our own fulfillment centers to customers' doorsteps very, very hot. Breadfast Care, we started to venture into personal care and cosmetics products. This is a vertical that's massively growing month-over-month. We introduced it almost 7 months ago, and we're super excited about it, very healthy margins and also very, very important for our main persona, which is the household mom. Breadfast Kitchen. From the same fulfillment center, we don't only deliver hot coffee or watermelons or bread or fruits or veggies. We actually started to deliver hot food from the same fulfillment center. So it's still in pilot, but all the initial indicators are giving us very, very strong confidence that we should actually go and build on this front more and more. And then Breadfast Shops and then Breadfast Pay. A few weeks ago, we received the final approval from the Central Bank of Egypt to start operating Breadfast Pay. What's Breadfast Pay? Our first product in the product road map is open loop prepaid card. If you go and look into the Egyptian consumer behavior when it comes to banking, still a big part of the Egyptians day-to-day is on the cash side of things. Breadfast actually is the only player in the market that has built very strong frequency, retention, trust and consumer logistics. So the idea behind this is actually to start opening bank accounts for our customers at 0 customer acquisition cost because we already have the user base. And we're super lucky that our main customer is the household mom. And the household mom basically controls somewhere between 60% to 70% of the consumer wallet spend every month. And guess what, most of the household moms, they don't have a bank account yet. This is still one of my very favorite charts. That was -- it was a tweet by Paul Graham, one of the best venture capitalists in the world. And I call it the emerging market tweet. I read it last year, and I will read it again. Paul Graham, he tweeted and said this revenue graph illustrates the 2 dimensions in which startups are spreading into more domains than traditional tech and into more countries. This is Breadfast, which delivers bread and other household essentials in Egypt. And yes, this -- actually the tweet was actually in end of 2021, that was in February 2022. And when you compare this tweet of Paul Graham a few years ago to the revenue scale that we were able to achieve, people thought that this is actually an inflection point. I still tell everyone, Breadfast has not experienced the real inflection point yet, and I'm going to provide the reasons for this. So we're actually still warming up. Last time when we met, these were the numbers. Egypt was hit by a couple of devaluation over the past few years. I'm super like thankful that now Egypt has been stable recently. And like we know that over the coming few years, it looks super strong on the macro level. We can also provide more reasons on this. But that was last time when we met. And today, when it comes to the annual run rate of revenue, we're presenting it in GTV, but actually, we own the inventory, so it's revenue. So not -- the difference between GTV and revenue is only the VAT. $190 million in revenue run rate. This is a 98% year-over-year since we've met last year. Today, we perform close to 1.3 million orders a month, native transactions. We're getting close to 400,000 monthly active households. We are currently running 47 fulfillment points, 35 omnichannel coffee locations and Breadfast employees more than 7,500 employees, given the nature of the end-to-end supply chain, as I mentioned, the first mile logistics, the mid-mile logistics and the last mile logistics. And yes, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, this is really for us still the very, very beginning of the story of Breadfast. Today, the grocery market is at $106 billion, expecting to be north of $140 billion by 2027. And one of the actually references that we enjoy reading is the Goldman Sachs Economic Research and expected for Egypt to be among the world's largest economies by 2075, massive growth, and we want to make sure that Breadfast is going to represent a very decent part of this story. Another exciting fact, Egypt has 120 million people today. 50% of the population is under 25 years old. So imagine the opportunity of the gross consumption, building a super local, super customized brand that's going to be part of the journey of every day getting things done for the household. Another metric that we feel very, very proud of, our private label penetration of revenue. We believe today, breakfast is the leading private label penetration of revenue operator in the online grocery sector globally. We're getting close to 40% of private label penetration of revenue. And if this tells you one thing, it tells you the trust and the relationship that we've built with our customers that they come to us for our exclusive selection and our unique products. In the traditional world, brands like Costco or Carrefour, you can actually find, yes, 30% penetration, 40% penetration. But when you move this to the online world, you cannot find these numbers as private label penetration of revenue. Another favorite story, our long-term GMV dollar retention. From Cairo, from Egypt, we are leading the global curve when it comes to the long-term GMV dollar retention. It tells you that we have a real product market threat that's not built on promo codes or discounts. It actually has been built on trust. More than 107% long-term GMV dollar retention after 24 months since the customers joined the platform. Last year, when we met on the fulfillment point store EBITDA, our blended CM3 was actually at 3%. A year later, it's not only a growth of revenue story, it's actually also a story of much, much, much stronger profitability on the store level. Today, we are super proud that we are representing the best unit economics in the world when it comes to this sector at 10% store level EBITDA. Yes, in conclusion, an actual year-over-year growth, 73%. The team is working very, very hard to make it 3 digits for this year as well. And 107% in long-term GMV dollar retention, 37% in private label penetration and 10% on the fulfillment point EBITDA. Lots of exciting stuff. This is still the beginning from bread to everything. Thank you so much.

Wow, what a story. Thanks, Mostafa. Let's open up the floor of some Q&A. Bjorn, would you like to [indiscernible].

Thank you, Alex. I'm Bjorn, I'm CFO at VNV, and also board member at Breadfast. Per is the Breadfast CEO. Thanks again for a good presentation on a very, very [indiscernible] revenue figures since we invested especially in local currency or constant currency. Unfortunately, we don't took it it's still impressive, we're sort of 5x revenue growth since we invested in dollar terms. Could you elaborate a little bit on how it's been operating in sort of all the markets type of environment with the devaluation that has occurred historically sort of high inflationary environment and sort of a little bit more of the -- and sort of -- now more hopefully stable backlog hopefully still looking ahead?

For the support first, and thank you also for the questions. Actually, just to give you an idea of the devaluation impact, today as of this month also, we're going to exceed actually -- very, very good target on the revenue. Let's call it $200 million for now. Actually, those would have been, if we remove the devaluation factor, $500 million in revenue. Sometimes it feels like negative, but to be honest, we are super positive about it. For one reason. This has been a very, very strong resilience in the company. Lots of companies when macro like goes into the wrong direction. They actually take some decisions, right? And many of these companies, they might say, oh things won't look good. Actually, in these environments, we take the opposite direction. We have doubled down and tripled down on our execution. And that's why the profile we are presenting today on the revenue on the profitability side is super encouraging. And this has built a very strong immune system in the company. I call it the emerging markets, the vaccine. So Breadfast now has a very, very strong emerging market vaccine that whatever will happen, we will continue doubling down and tripling down on this but also super lucky that we're actually selling bread, fruits, veggies. Things -- actually that when things are a bit tough people actually consume more, right? We are not doing any luxurious like services. We're doing what our customers need every day. Egypt has 120 million consumers, think of it close to 27 million households. Our market share at the moment is close to 4.2%. So we're still scratching the surface, right? And this company is going to generate real multibillion dollars in revenue over the coming 2 years.

And so maybe a question on the floor. As we showed also a slide there offshore or private label penetration in the basket. One of the key drivers of were very healthy unit economics, could you elaborate a little bit on sort of how much better gross margin do you have on the private label assortment versus value and also how you typically work and that's sort of okay to [indiscernible].

Thanks for the question. So private label business we see that portion [indiscernible] we see that there is a lot of opportunity in our market and the region [indiscernible] for local grants that adjust the kind of value added to a local consumer use that data. And so do you continue to identify the areas where in consumer service channels market please check that back that. The exciting thing for us as well. We've done very, very well. Our team has done a great job [indiscernible] small media historic struggle [indiscernible] space like traditional shop retailers, which means that we'll actually have very [indiscernible] not to this too much, but thinking about this essentially the margins that we get on the margins that we traditional possibility as you look at some of these and as you know a large part of the story is [indiscernible] profitability as much [indiscernible] areas what much we have over the last...

Any questions from the audience?

Thank you. So just one simple question. On the difference at the store level EBITDA and group?

So store level EBITDA, obviously, product margins all very [indiscernible] compare others like in costs and very cost all bus fixed store cost on the resilience and management level. And so as we showed currently making sure that there is certainly upside to theirs, especially on that our best locations. So especially on the -- and then we got below contribution margin expenses. We are excited that as products like to get more allocation to get you can start closing the gap on EBITDA side closely, you can touchwood will be happening for the next [indiscernible].

And on the road ahead about growth from EBIT growth. So keep the growth [indiscernible] that's the fantastic part of the story [indiscernible]. We are still very much supply. We build very much [indiscernible]. We actually opened this because of the amount of demand that's on our business. It's -- actually our path to that even actually was actually driven by the top [indiscernible]. So we have a certain amount of investment we've put in the kind of build out on the good on the totality. That's what we actually can has investment in our technology, which we have been investing in the last 2 years, but as we wind forward in the business, that's all about top line revenue. The path to breakeven actually gets accelerated. We're happy to share some leverage [indiscernible] but you have a big pot that you post forward.

And my other question is similar. What's [indiscernible]?

So it has been unfortunate for other players in the West for a couple of reasons. One, if you look at U.S. and Europe, the market is already very organized. So for any online player to come and compete with very well-established brands this is very, very tough. This is one. Two, labor cost per hour is very, very tricky. And when you look at the AOV and the labor cost ratio, Breadfast today actually globally is the healthiest. We have a very, very healthy ratio between the AOV and the labor cost per hour. So by the way, this is not only related to Egypt. Egypt, maybe is the best, but across MENA, each household, there is a consolidation when it comes to the purchasing power. Each household has 3 and 4 people left together. So the AOV is actually consolidated on the household level. At the same time, when it comes to labor cost, is very, very affordable. That's why we are super fortunate that we are actually correcting the supply chain. And as a result for this, we have a very, very healthy unit economics. Again, in the West labor cost per hour is very, very challenging. AOV is not consolidated on the household level. And at the same time, it's super competitive when it comes to the organized supply chain.

Yes. I would add in Egypt, right, we do have food aggregators that compete with us. What these food aggregators to have, similar to actually aggregators in London worldwide. The exclusivity in the products and the manufacturing side of the business, and that will continue to be a moat. Mostafa shared about the immense work in private label that we are doing. That is the #1 acquisition driver in the business. That's the #1 retention driver in our business. And I think if people are familiar with aggregators around the world, like that exclusivity of supply is critical. And that's certainly something that we are head and shoulders above -- relative to competitors market. No one in Egypt comes close. So that's sort of -- to having that sort of moat, we feel super confident that we'll just continue to win share.

And to quickly go back to the previous question, we are in investment and growth mode at the moment. We're very happy recently, we were joined by EBRD, Novastar as part of the [ P ] Series C. So there is a very strong momentum at the moment in the business. And like these growth rates will continue like to be seen in the business for the coming few years. And as you mentioned, like big part of the driver here is the scale that we are building.

Thank you Question in the back.

Sorry, we couldn't get any bread today from Egypt. But we'll work hard with Per maybe next time to fly some bread from Egypt.

Look forward to the next event. Can you talk a bit about how much from Egypt you cover today? How much of fulfillment center costs you got good coverage and also the compensation for the drivers or the delivery people? How does that work in Egypt?

Yes. I believe we can talk about the payback. And also, I mean, right now, on the grocery side, we only have 0.2% of the market share, right? We talk about $100 billion market. We're now at $200 million like revenue run rate. So give or take, it's 0.2%. This is on the market share side. And yes, for our payback on the fulfillment points, we're talking now 6 months payback, which is very, very healthy when it comes to CapEx and payback. As Eugene earlier mentioned, we actually now open our fulfillment points at profitability. Yes. [indiscernible] if you want to add.

Yes, it's something that's very unique to the Egyptian market. We talked about $100 billion TAM, unlike Europe that -- like 70% of that is actually concentrated in the current footprint. So today, we are operating in Cairo, Giza, Alexandria and Cairo, Giza, Alexandria and Mansoura. Those 4 cities are actually covering $70 billion of the market at 70% of population, 70% of retail spend. And so it's actually unparalleled globally, right, where you have so much concentration around the Nile Delta. It's a large country. But for a logistics company, it makes it much more efficient for us to serve. And what it really makes it -- it's very favorable for the company where -- when we talk about footprint expansion, that footprint expansion is actually 95% all in existing areas. And so as we open more locations in existing areas, you obviously are shortening distances that your drivers have to deliver, you're actually able to better curate the selection to the consumers in a smaller location. And by the way, you have excellent visibility, right, into what that demand looks like ahead of time. And so the risk to opening these locations is a lot less. It's a very unique part of like operating in Egypt, but it's actually allowing us to have a lot of confidence in footprint expansion because it is actually like serving mostly existing areas that we cover today.

Could you talk about what EBIT margins in Egypt grocery industry overall are? And do you happen to know what statistic on blended was as a percentage of revenue for the industry?

We don't have Egyptian EBIT off hand, but we can probably look into it like historically, I think globally, you typically looking in like the 5% to 6% which is obviously quite a thin margin business. And sorry, Andrew, on the second part of your question?

The blended waste percent of revenue.

Yes. So the disclosures like worldwide that you'll see at the retail typically in the high single digits, but that is going to be at the retail level. I think the very exciting part of our business is we are sub-2% waste, but that's not just at the retail. That's at the mid-mile that's at the warehouse, but also including the manufacturing. And so that for us is especially, that's the reason why we use technology and ultimately, how we can actually get lower customer cost.

What fraction of fulfillment centers do you think would you have 25%?

Over time, certainly all of them we, right. And when we look into the footprint today, like what are the drivers of upside from where we are. A lot of that is scale of the existing locations, right? So how do you move from, call it, 800 orders per day towards kind of 1,400 orders per day. That's one chunk. We know that retailers in Egypt from our team, their product margins are kind of north of 30%, which is significantly higher than what we achieved today with like fast-moving consumer goods companies. So that's a significant step. On the discounts, we are still onboarding a significant amounts of new customers on a daily basis. We see that as our customers evolve and mature over time, the discounting value is required to keep them on platform is significantly less, right? And so as the cohorts mature, you start seeing less discounting. So that is another step from where we are today. And then finally, on the delivery expense, as we open more locations, we densify the areas that we're operating in. We shortened the distance that drivers need to travel. And that actually increases the efficiency and the drops per hour that the delivery associates can do. And that essentially allows you again to make a step. We've chosen to share a lot of these savings with customers to date because we are trying to become the lowest cost operator in the market. We're getting close to price parity now with the biggest retailers. As we kind of break through that mark, then we start accruing more of those savings to our P&L. And I think that's kind of where we get confidence that north of 20% EBITDA per allocation is very real.

How do you acquire new customers? And also like what's advertising as a percent of your CapEx spending? And also like -- well, basically Cairo for Egypt is huge, right? So in some areas, you cover properly, like anybody can download your app, right? But it doesn't mean that you [indiscernible] fast. So when you open a new fulfillment center, do you do some local posters on the streets? What's your basically customer acquisition cost? How important it is in the overall CapEx and spending? How do your customers know that you opened the fulfillment center and now they can get [indiscernible] fast while 2 blocks away they can't probably or I don't know.

Yes. So majority of our acquisitions actually are organic. It's close to 70% organic acquisition. So actually, we've been supply constrained. Until now we're super supply constrained. One of the most famous like things about us is that we are always out of stock for this reason is that people actually try to come to us because we have super unique selection, either on the bakery side or on the pastry side or on the whole overall private label stuff that we come up with in the market. So these products actually go very, very viral, and people then go and download the app, try to find these products, right? And then if they find it, this is great. If you don't find it, then people complain, which is, of course, something bad and good. So this is on the customer acquisition. And then we have several traditional customer acquisition. No. I mean online, of course, we have online paid ads like performance like marketing engine. But locally, I mean, in the neighborhoods, like we don't have this yet. We used to have some field marketing activities, right, but not nationwide, not yet because if we do this, I think demand will increase heavily, and we don't want to be in a position to be more supply constrained. So we try to mix between growing organically in a very good manner. And at the same time, also, of course, spending like money to identify the customer acquisition and the payback and all these metrics that help us like smartly invest and deploy resources.

In terms of your existing app users, can you share with us your key statistics like retention and things like that?

Yes. I'll quickly just go back on the acquisition point. It's unique in our business. But we don't think about demand -- really about demand generation in our business. All of the work that we do and all of the drivers that we see in driving top line growth is actually always on the supply side. So if you correlate the expansion -- speed of expansion, the speed of locations opening, we -- the faster we get the locations open, the demand kind of falls in because as we mentioned earlier, most of that is actually going and serving existing customers, but just serving them better. When we think about what drives like demand to those locations, it's actually always around product. And so very few companies have this private business. We always lead with product. We have discounts in the past. We find that they are much worse in terms of like cohort acquisition, cohort retention. When we lead with products, the latest kind of [ mille feuille ], the latest desert, the latest bread, the latest bakery. Now recently launched salads and sandwiches ranges, have been incredible drivers of the business. That's actually what drives acquisition retention. And so it's a little bit different to your typical e-commerce business. Rom a consumer perspective, the average consumer is ordering 3.5, almost 4 times a month. So essentially, once a week, those AOVs now are at $11, they're kind of increasing to $12. The interesting thing is as you look through the cohorts, right, and you kind of isolate the new from the existing users, Mostafa showed you the chart on the GMV retention, and that is actually telling you is frequency and spend increases over time as you build more trust with the consumer. They spend more time on your platform exploring what else you have, right? And that's one of the major disadvantages we have with an offline retailer. We have to work harder on discoverability. That's the fact when your retail space is a phone screen. But as people spend more time with us, they find more. We push more product to them, and we're able to kind of win more wallet share at time.

We're running out of time, Boris, we have to take a question in the break. On to the next company. Thanks a lot, Mos and Eugene.

Thank you gentlemen. Our next speaker is Niklas Grawe, the CEO of Bokadirekt. Bokadirekt is Sweden's go-to marketplace for beauty and health services with over 13,000 merchants and 2 million customers per month, and we are very excited to continue backing this fantastic company. Niklas, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. Thanks for the introduction, and thank you for the support. Yes. So my name is Niklas. I'm CEO of Bokadirekt. Let's see if I get the right button here, then. No. So Bokadirekt is Sweden's largest booking system. Being a booking system means that we have a 2-sided business model. On the one hand side, we are the main SaaS ERP provider for over 14,000 merchants in Sweden. On the other hand, we are the consumer marketplace for consumers to explore, discover, book and pay for beauty and health care in Sweden. And we, every month, have 2.5 million active users on our platform, unique active users, which I'd like to put in perspective considering that Sweden is a small country with a population of 10 million. So it's actually 1/4 of the population. But I think it gets even more exciting if you consider that the majority of our active users are women. And then you divide 10 by 2, you get 5. So you take away the nonconsuming parts of the women population, we have almost every women. We have a positive relationship with every Swedish women and they love us. We have an NPS of 68 and an unaided brand awareness of 39, meaning that if you ask a Swedish person, what can you use to book or find beauty in health care in Sweden, they will answer Bokadirekt. And I think that's a super powerful position to build on going forward. Head office in Stockholm. We also have an office up in the Arctic, where we do sales and customer success. And we are backed as mentioned by VNV Global and Sprints. Before looking at the present and looking in the future, let's have a look in the rearview mirror. So as you saw on the previous slide, we were founded in 2009, 2019 were acquired by Hitta.se, which is a Swedish yellow pages platform. And then the Sprints became the majority shareholder. After that, Bokadirekt saw some really good growth, both organic, but also through -- I see the headline is a bit shifted, but also through selected M&As, where we focused on buying platforms that we're focused or SaaS platforms that we're focused on [ HERE ]. The reason for [ HERE ] is it is a relatively high speed and high value booking segment. At the same time, building the app and building the marketplace. After that was done, we took in an additional of EUR 30 million from VNV and Sprints. And the focus now has been to merger the platforms into one to find those synergies. Also to ensure that we're getting a close relationship with both the consumer and the merchant through payments, making sure that we control that paying relationship. And looking forward now, again, building on the fact that we have almost every Swedish woman on our platform that use us on a daily basis, but use us for beauty and health care. That is where we see the value that we want to bring to our merchants and consumers and to ourselves going forward. Yes. So looking at our product then. As I mentioned, we're a 2-sided marketplace, where we're -- on one hand side, we're an integrated part of every merchant. We're the classic one-stop shop, essentially all you need is a pair of scissors and accounting system, and you can start your business, which means that we support development of local business. We support women businesses throughout the country, which is actually a powerful thing for us. And what do we bring to the table? So we bring a staff and calendar management system. We bring payments. We bring medical journals if that's required for your type of business, and we do also marketing. So it is truly a one-stop shop. And we now support that customer base with a dedicated customer success team ensuring that every right customer has the right experience depending on the size and the needs of that customer. On the other hand, we also have the consumer side, again, being an integrated part where women use us for all health and beauty. They do their nails, they do their hair, they do their makeup, skin care and so on. And they use us not only to book, but also to explore and to find to book and to pay. And that's the relationship that we want to strengthen even further going forward. So where we are today? We are -- well, undisputedly #1, we are much bigger than all our competitors combined. And we have a market share of around 35% and still room to grow. There is still an off-line market where people use pen and paper. And there are still customer segments where we can build in. This is very focused on volume. We now like to try to focus on also not only volume, but actually what customers do we bring in, what value or GMV do we bring into the customer base? And I think it's worth to mention as well. Actually, I can do this -- I'll do that on this slide. So naturally, we do have competitors, and we do have churn. But through the strength of the marketplace, we know that quite frequently, we let our users -- our merchants churn. They get to try another platform, but we know that they will come back to us because when they leave, they will lose customers because customers want to book through Bokadirekt. And I think that's the strongest proof of value creation that we can give to our merchants that we actually have a benefit. We actually generate revenue, we're not a cost. So looking a bit at the financials. 2025 has been a year where we have invested in ensuring that we will have future high growth. We've been investing in volume. So the growth in 2025 is solely built on volume, while as growth previously has been the majority on pricing. We've also invested in AI marketing automation, automation in general. And I think we talked about earlier what you can use AI for. And naturally, we use it for customer success co-pilots content creation. But what I think is even more exciting is that we also will make it available for the merchants. So a single hairdresser in Northern Sweden will be able to start using AI. And at that point Hitta -- Bokadirekt is actually a data company. So we have consumed data on the consumption patterns of every Swedish women that we can make available to a merchant. What are they willing to pay? What should the price be? When do they want to pay? How do they want to pay? What do they want in terms of long hair, short hair? What's trending at the moment? Is it volume? Is it not volume? That's a lot of data that we can put in the hands of every single merchant throughout the country. Yes, so looking forward, the plan hasn't changed. We are looking down a number of trajectories that we are working with. But I think if we were to make one point about focus here, it is utilizing the power of our marketplace, utilizing the relationship with Swedish women, and utilizing that to drive revenue and to drive value creation for our merchants, for our consumers and for ourselves. A few examples of what that could be is solving problems like late cancellations, which is a huge problem within the beauty industry, where the merchants lose a lot of money. We have the marketplace with their potential customers and can help them to actually make money even with the late cancellation as an example.

Thank you, Niklas. Happy to hear about the progress so far. Bjorn, do you want to lead the Q&A? Let's do a quick one.

I will. Thanks a lot, Niklas. And we also have Bjorn, another Bjorn coming up as the CFO of Bokadirekt. I'll start off with a question for you, Niklas. So you joined as CEO essentially a year ago, a little bit more, maybe 13 months. Give me sort of your -- you've been here a year. You've seen the challenges and opportunities. What's your sort of top 3 takeaways and what you're excited for, for the next sort of leg of this journey?

Yes. No, it's been -- I mean, always coming to a new company, it's always interesting to dig down into the facts of that company. And I think what struck me was what I've mentioned here, the huge potential of having a positive relationship with such a homogenic target group that has pretty much absolute penetration of that market. And I think the growth opportunities from that is mind blowing for me. That's one side. The other thing I take with me is that while the team is amazing, it's a true love of the product, pride of the product. And I think continue to build on that is loads of fun.

Super. And as you alluded to, I mean, this year has been a year of investing. We're still doing sort of close to 25% EBITDA margins. We think there's a lot of room to grow there. We had a Strategy Day just the other week where we divided where the sort of maturity will end up. So maybe if you can discuss a little bit where you think that sort of margin potential is in a few years out.

Yes, I think the journey we've been through since VNV invested has been from. We had those numbers last year as some of you might remember that when we started with a negative double-digit margins and really building scale. I mean that's what we proved over 2023, 2024 and 2025. I think we reached a level now where we know that our unit economics work. We know that we acquire at good rates. We know that we can grow the volumes. That's what we've invested in during the year, and we know we have several drivers of revenues going forward. And I think if we play our cards right and maintain our strong marketplace position, there is no reason why we should not be able to generate the type of margins that strong SaaS companies and strong marketplace providers do, which is closer to 15% or 20%.

Thank you. Any questions from the audience at this point? [indiscernible]?

Just a couple of questions for me. One is around the current pricing or the commission model. How -- what is that exactly? And how has it trended in the past? Because you said that pricing was one of the main drivers. In the future, what would be the drivers of your growth? Is it going to be pricing or acquisitions or anything else?

Yes. I think focus -- I'll start with going forward, and I'll let Bjorn talk about the price changes historically. So going forward, it will be a combination of pricing and volume. What we've done this year when we're investing in volume is to make sure that we have a very tight funnel for every customer type, making sure that we have a funnel for small businesses, for big businesses. We know exactly what [indiscernible] and we can invest for each specific customer and making sure that runs like a growth monster. And that's what we're doing currently. And that will continue and increase. So that's a clear expectation. In terms of pricing, Bokadirekt hasn't changed pricing for 3 years almost now. So that is something naturally that we're looking at. So that will be a route going forward. But I think the main one is volume and driving growth through customer acquisition. In terms of M&A, I mean, we don't close the doors, but at the moment, we see that by investing smart in customer -- in merchant acquisition, we are slowly crushing competition. And that's cheaper than buying them.

And your first question was on the revenue model, where the revenue comes from. So essentially, we're standing on 3 legs. It's our SaaS business, it's our marketplace business, and it's our payments business, and it's all integrated. But starting with the SaaS business, that's subscription-based, pretty traditional SaaS model. where the company comes from being a calendar management tool. And with our module offering that just keeps growing, we naturally grow our MRR on our user base, but that's recurring monthly, takes pretty traditional SaaS model. The 2 other parts is the marketplace model and the payments part of the business. Those are the 2 legs that have been growing a lot over the past years. So on payments, we know that all our merchants have payments, sometimes through another provider, sometimes through us. Here, for us, this is about capturing part of the customer's wallet. And essentially, what we do is we provide online payments, we provide in-store payments. We provide an integrated solution for the market, for the merchants, and that's like any payments business margin-driven yield on the traffic. And this is a place we have a huge room to grow. We currently process around 15% of the total GMV going through the marketplace. The third leg is our marketplace model, and this is actually 2-sided. So this is an opportunity for our merchants to advertise themselves on the marketplace. So essentially -- yes, classifieds business, if you will. You can buy more exposure, but it's also transaction-based somehow where you can market services at discount rates, commissions. And this is a part of the business we've grown or we've actually strengthened the fundamentals of the business a lot over the past year with higher user retention and more users on the marketplace and where we see that we have a pretty strong market on the marketplace models that we have launched, and this is an area we think we can develop a lot in the future.

Thank you, Niklas and Bjorn. And with that, we're going to break. They will be here so for questions afterwards, but we'll go to break and resume for the viewers at home in 10 to 15 minutes. Thanks a lot. [Break]

Welcome back, everyone. Please take your seats. Ladies and gentlemen, Okay. Welcome back. Hopefully, normal fire alarms. Let me introduce our next speaker, Nicolas Brusson, the Founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar. VNV invested in BlaBlaCar in 2015 and currently owns about 13.7%. We are very excited as BlaBlaCar continues to lead the global long-distance carpooling market with over 2 million members present with -- presence in 22 countries. Nicolas, please, the floor is yours.

Thank you, and thank you, Per, for inviting us again. It's been almost 10 years, a bit more than 10 years. In fact, you're right. So we'll both present. I'll give a quick intro, then Pierre-Antoine, who's the Chief Strategy Officer. He's going to tell you what we do essentially. I think most of people probably know what we do, about where we at, how the company is going. And I'll come back essentially at the end to tell you where we're going, that's going to lead to Q&A, I guess. So one of the slides I'd like to start with, which is -- I think it's been the same slide or some version of the same slide for many years now, is do to remind us what we're trying to solve, like why we exist. And fundamentally, it's good to remind ourselves that mobility in general, not just cars, but mobility is roughly 1/3 of global emission. And if you look at within mobility, you realize that private cars is essentially like the biggest emitter of CO2. So it's the most poorly used asset, if you think of it, with 1.9 people on average per car in Europe. That's more or less the same or worse in the U.S. or in other markets. So that's why we started the company fundamentally. We thought that's kind of interesting. But if you think of that car of those empty seats as adding value, not just from an environmental standpoint, but from a financial standpoint, you can create potentially a very large network based on those empty seats in those cars traveling around anyway. So today, we have like a pretty strong impact, not just by offering car pooling on the platform, but offering other means of shared transport on the platform. So today, if you look at out of the 100-plus million members using BlaBlaCar, we have like an average of 3.2% core occupancy and we lower CO2 emission. So with that, I'll pass the mic to Pierre-Antoine, who's going to go through part of the presentation. I'll just come back, as I said a bit later.

Thank you. Hello, Pierre-Antoine, Strategy, M&A BlaBlaCar. Quickly tell you what we do today, BlaBlaCar is basically a company that matches what we call supply and demand for our markets. Supply is both C2C and B2C. On the C2C side is really people like you and me taking your car to go somewhere for a weekend or whatever for usually quite a long distance, let's say, 300 kilometers or 400 kilometers. And you can publish your trip on our platform to have more people in your car and to reduce your costs. So this is really a C2C play. This is a starting point of the company, as Niklas just mentioned. And then we expanded to a B2C play whereby we are aggregating some bus operators and now train operators on our platform to allow our passengers or the demand to select what they prefer for a particular trip. It can be a car pooling, it can be a bus or a train, can be a mix of both. So this is what we call the supply. And then on the other side of the spectrum, we have the passengers and our community that we built is mostly people who would like to call sort of a cheerful type of community quite on a price-sensitive end who are looking for an affordable and environmentally friendly way to go from A to B, as I said, for sort of a long-distance trip. And we are in the middle and our main competitive advantage is really the tech more than half of our staff cost today is people working on the product and technology. So not really so much a commercial type of company, but more of a tech at heart. Today, we have mostly 2 main brands, the one that was created when it was -- when we started the company about a decade ago, BlaBlaCar, which is really famous in countries like France, Spain or Brazil or India today. And we also acquired a company called Obilet last year, and we're keeping the brand and the tech because it's the market-leading OTA, as we call it, online travel agency in Turkey. So this is the company that people use to buy a bus ticket, flight ticket, now even a hotel room in Turkey, and they own about 90% market share on the bus market. So this is really a brand that everybody knows in Turkey. To summarize a little bit where the vision is for us, we aim to become the category leader of what we call the intercity segment. You know that for city transport, Uber is the market leader; for hotels Booking.com; for shared accommodations, Airbnb. I should have put Voi for micromobility. You can trust me, I'll do that next year. But for the intercity transport, it's hard to think of a global leader today because -- of course, there are local competitors in all the markets that I've mentioned. There is no company having just 1 global tech-enabled passengers to book train car pool or a bus globally, and we aim to take that spot. There are a few macro trends. I'll go quickly on that. That are sort of tailwinds for BlaBlaCar. One of them is the fact that for the bus and the train market, those are huge markets where we today have a really small market share. The second is that the car pool business, it is something that is really unique. Many companies try to do that. There's only one that is doing that at scale. It is BlaBlaCar. Also, when it comes to buses and trains, it is becoming more and more deregulated with more competition, especially, you can see that in Western Europe, where there used to be only one train operator per country and now there are more and more in all the countries. And this gives more space for middleman for platforms that can help consumers compare prices, compare the options and find the best one. And this is also one of the things that is a boost for BlaBlaCar. And finally, because we are one of the few companies in the transport business that helps reduce CO2 emissions, not increase it, it can also help us back some -- or find some help from governments in different countries. We had one collapse that we had in France that we might talk about a little bit later. But actually, we also had, at the same time, a new scheme in Spain which allows us to generate some revenues, as you call them, some green revenues. And we also will be able to generate some CO2 credits and sell them in Brazil and India and Mexico. That's the plan. So indeed, we do see that because car pooling mostly is a mode of transport, which allows to reduce CO2 emissions, we are also able to generate revenues from that. Telling you a little bit more what carpooling is and how it works because it's not so easy for people who have never used the product. It is really a C2C play, whereby somebody like you and me if you want to go for a weekend or if you want to see your family, you're able to publish your trip on the platform, on the app. And then the app will find you some passengers that can go and either do the same way or do half of the way and then you can take them along the trip. And the idea is for the drivers to reduce the costs by sharing the cost of -- the depreciation of the car, the gas and the toll and stuff like that. Without making any money from it, and that's why it's C2C and not B2C. We are making sure that the driver cannot make the profit from such trip which allows us to have no issues when it comes to taxes or insurances because it's not a business, this is really just on a cost-sharing basis. The business model simply put is, if I'm a driver and I'm asking for, let's say, EUR 20 per seat, we might sell that ticket or that seat for EUR 25, there's EUR 5 for BlaBlaCar and EUR 20 for the driver, which allows the driver to share costs, as I said. One of the main assets, which really surprised me actually when I joined the company because I used to work for Booking.com before in Amsterdam, is the fact that because this product is so unique and because there is no competition or at least direct competition in the car pool business, we are able to create a sort of captive demand where we don't need to put a lot of money into marketing to acquire users, especially passengers. Today, as you can see on the car pool side of the business, around 5% of our traffic of our bookings come from marketing, which is really low. I cannot share numbers for booking because I don't think that's public information, but it's a lot more than 5% that I can share. And even for Airbnb, which -- so to speak as sort of more personal brand than Booking.com, it is a lot more than 5% as well. So this is something that is really unique and that ultimately translate into financials as well because you don't have to repay a lot the customers that we are onboarding on the platform. A snapshot of where we are today before 2019, before any acquisitions in the bus space, we were 100% carpool business by definition. And today, we are more or less 50-50 between buses and car pool, including the acquisition of Obilet, which I mentioned earlier. So we diversified a lot our portfolio, allowing customers to choose more and more in different countries. And so we did acquisitions in Eastern Europe, and we also launched organically our bus marketplace in Brazil, knowing that Brazil is a huge bus market, a lot more than what you can think of in Western Europe. And our growth in Brazil is quite phenomenal. I think there's on that later leading today to, as I said, a spot where our business is more or less split 50-50 between bus and carpool. Finally, on my side, with the impact of BlaBlaCar, which we are quite proud of. Auditors validated their approach to estimate that around 2.5 million of CO2 emissions were saved, thanks to BlaBlaCar in 2024. And I've looked at other companies who claim to have such impact and 2.5 million is a lot that I can say with confidence. On top of that, we are enabling our drivers to save some costs. As I mentioned, it was a bit more than EUR 500 million last year. We are also proud to say that we are creating some human connections. Usually, if you take a flight or a bus, you would not talk too much to your neighbors or maybe you do, but it's not so obvious. If you take a carpool, that's how it works. You have to talk to the person before you actually take the carpool to agree on the mining point or just to agree on where to go. And then if you take a 5-hour drive with your driver or passenger, if you don't talk, it might be a little bit long. And that's why you have lots of stories of people who actually met and got married, thanks to BlaBlaCar and it's quite incredible. We also have stories of people who admit that they have shared their secrets to the person they have coupled with, things that they have never said before. Or the fact that people say they trust more their carpool drivers or passengers than their own neighbors or stuff like that. But it's sort of funny to say, but it also means really something. That's also why we have a captive demand, as I mentioned, the fact that we don't have to pull marketing to have people on board. And that's also why we have a huge NPS, Net Promoter Score, it's around 65 today. So although it's sort of a niche market, just the carpool, not bus and train, but carpool is sort of a niche market, but people who use the product really, really love it. They see the value of it when it comes to the environment, when it comes to the savings they do and also when it comes to the human connections that this entails. And this is also something that we are proud of. Last point, and then I'll leave you there. I didn't mention that, but if you think of bus and trains, it is quite efficient, especially for trains for , as we call them, top axes. So if you go from a city to a city, especially if it's a fast train like in Western Europe, nothing beats that. But if you want to go from a village to a city or village to a village, you don't have any bus and you don't have any trains, and this is really where a carpool can thrive. And what we aim to do is to have a platform where the passengers can compare the different options between trains, buses and carpool. And depending on what they need on what makes sense at a given time, they can choose between carpooling, bus and train or even combine them. And this is something that no other company can do. Thank you. I'll leave you with Nico for the strategic vision.

All right. Thank you. It's good to be on the other side of that presentation from time to time. So thanks for that. I'll finish pretty quickly on where we're going from that, the next step and the next few years for the company. I guess the good news is it's more of the same. It's a continuity to what we've been doing and, I guess, saying for the last few years. And the way we think of it, it's essentially we have 3 blocks today. We have the carpool block, so essentially like continue to develop and monetize carpooling, which is the core business and what we started with. Expand on the transportation vertical, which means mostly like adding buses and trains. And then once you have that, essentially, you've built a pretty wide audience and then you can do what I call the next-gen OTA, which is essentially all the other services you typically find in an OTA, accommodation being one of them. So if you look at that, it's also interesting because you have 3 different characteristics as businesses. If I look at carpool alone, if we were to isolate purely what we do with carpool, today, it's highly profitable, right? So today, that's kind of the EBITDA and the cash flow generator for the company, and it's fairly mature. So it looks like stand-alone, it would look like a private equity deal that you could leverage. And essentially, what we do today, it's 2 things. It's really sort of like growing the existing monetized markets. And in emerging markets like India and Brazil, we're still building the audience that we're just starting to monetize in some of the markets. But today, I would say, on this one, the risk of execution moving forward, -- it's pretty low because we have like a pretty established playbook. We already have like a pretty large audience. So it's really about like pace of monetization of that audience, and we pace that not to break essentially the C2C marketplace dynamic. Then what we've been really investing on in the last sort of 4, 5 years now with a bit of a parenthesis with COVID is how do we build on top of that the B2C layer that Pierre-Antoine was describing, which is connecting buses, connecting train for the same audience. So today, we started with Western Europe. We've done that also in Eastern Europe. We're now doing that in Brazil. But the point is really, as Pierre was describing, to leverage the fact that we have free traffic essentially on the platform. So once we've built the brand with carpooling in countries like, again, France, Spain, Brazil and so on, we have like a huge competitive advantage compared to a local OTA, which is the fact that we don't pay for the audience, and we have very strong repeat of users on carpooling. And those users are essentially the same guys also booking buses and trains and other type of transport. So today, that's a faster growth vertical within the company. That's something we invest in. So we pull more marketing into that, than we do into carpool because we are accelerating. And I would say the same thing, it's more of the growth play of the company. Maybe to visualize that, we have 2 countries that are pretty important for us. So it's Brazil and India. What you see here, so in light blue, I don't know if you can read the numbers, but I'll describe them. Light blue is the number of passengers booking carpooling trips in Brazil. Same thing for India at the bottom, right? So you can see that pre-COVID Brazil, we had roughly 5 million passengers on the platform booking carpool trips. In 2024, we had 16. This year should be 18 points something. And we started to build buses in 2022 in Brazil. And that's the dark blue you see growing on top, and that's going to double again, roughly speaking, this year. So that's kind of the speed of carpooling being deployed, and then we add buses on top of that. The revenue generated today by Brazil, when we talk about P&L numbers, today, it's close to 0 because we're just starting to monetize carpooling. So to some extent, like the cost is already built into the company, but the revenue is yet to come. Even more impressive right now is India. So in India this year and 2025, which is not on the chart, we'll do about 20 million passengers, and we're still growing above like, around 50% year-on-year. So we feel like India is probably like a massive market for us, and we have not yet started to build the bus layer. So a big part of like the future growth of the company, but also future EBITDA as we monetize the light blue is on this chart. It's not just those 2 countries, by the way. It's the same story for Mexico at a slightly lower scale, but also a country like Serbia, Croatia are not yet monetized. So to give you a sense, we have roughly about 270 million of GMV unmonetized today, growing still pretty fast that we can monetize in the future. And then I would say the last stage of growth, which we are already exploring in France and to some extent in Turkey is once you have all of that essentially and you have this sort of captive audience, then you can start to build like a larger OTA play, which comes from like combining trips together and also exploring things like accommodation, which we're doing, for example, in Turkey, where we have like a pretty fast-growing accommodation business. So here, you more the venture side of the company, I would say. Those are pretty small today. They don't impact the P&L all that much, but it's pretty high growth. Those are like the 2024 numbers in a nutshell, and then we can dive into maybe more numbers during the Q&A. So essentially, it's close to EUR 2 billion, EUR 1.8 billion of GMV being transacted on the platform, 135 million passengers should be a bit above 150 million this year. Company has been profitable since 2023. And maybe important as well, it's close to 40 million active users, so active people generating those trips. So sort of the audience we work on is pretty sizable. And then again, like for us, we see that as the pool of audience we can sort of cross-sell to in the future. So that's it for us. I think we have Q&A, but thanks.

Perfect. Great. Thanks for that. Thanks for that, Nico and Pierre-Antoine. I'll start off with a couple of questions from me and then open up for Q&A from the audience. I'll start off on the point where you kind of ended or the second to last point around a large share of the GMV not being monetized. You mentioned the EUR 270 million GMV figure. I guess the majority of that will be Brazil, India, to a certain degree, Mexico. Where do you see that -- how do you see that figure kind of evolving in the next, say, 5 years? And what share of that will be monetized when we meet for VNV Capital Markets Day 2030?

Yes. So no, that's a good question. I think you -- I mean, when you look at the dynamic we see in LatAm and specifically in India, I think that number is going to be a lot larger. I'm not going to venture and give you a number, but it's going to be a lot larger in 5 years. And to some extent, I hope that I'll be able to say that not everything is monetized yet. I'll explain why. It sounds scary, but maybe it's not. The reason why is those should be monetized in 5 years. But if we look at that today, we had like a pretty strong product market fit in emerging markets. So if you look at sort of the hit ratio of launching carpooling, it worked in most markets. You have a few exceptions. But generally, it worked pretty well. And today, there are a lot of markets we have not tapped into. Rest of LatAm, we should do pretty easy. Mexico works, Brazil works, we should do the rest of those countries. And there are lots of places we have not yet explored like Southeast Asia, so like Thailand, Indonesia and so on, where essentially, if you look at like the transport layer in those markets, the size of the population, the car ownership, I mean, any irrational metrics, you would think those countries should have like a pretty good product market fit. So to some extent, we should replicate the playbook. And I hope that in 5 years, we have sort of like those new cohort of markets growing and essentially, India and Brazil are more into the phase of now it's monetized and we have buses and we're thinking maybe about, as I said, like what's the third phase of growth on accommodation and other things we can do. So -- but clearly, like if you -- maybe a different way to answer the question, clearly, we do see very high potential in those emerging markets. And if we pose on India, I didn't say that, but India, we spent 0 marketing. We don't even have like anyone on the ground. We don't even have a subsidiary. So we get to a point where you have 20 million passengers using the product in India. We don't make money from yet, not making an effort just having localized the platform in India. And you get to the point in India where it's part of like the discussion and so on. So it feels like 20 million in India is where we were when in France, we had 1 million in terms of like awareness in the country. So that's pretty interesting. So we see where it goes.

Very exciting. I guess we'll see by 2030. Another question that we have -- or a topic that we've written about a lot in the past year in our quarterly reports at VNV, you alluded to it a bit, Pierre-Antoine, is around energy certificates. There's a simultaneously almost there was a backlash in France and there's a win in Spain. Maybe just in your own words, can you explain, first of all, what these energy saving certificates are or maybe just broadly speaking, this green revenue, as you mentioned, a bit what happened, but also how you're thinking about it today and moving forward?

Yes, maybe I'll take that as well. But -- so essentially like this green revenue that take 2 different forms, if you think of it. One is this energy certificate, which is a European directive. So it's kind of a byproduct for CO2 credit, but it's measured as energy saved and not CO2 saved. It's roughly the same at the end of the day, but that's the way it's been implemented in most European countries. And in countries outside of Europe, we play with something different, which is our CO2 credit. At the end of the day, it's kind of, again, measuring the same thing. So for a long time, France was a pioneer in that, and we had sort of like essentially built like a scheme that has been running for almost -- well, more than 10 years. We started that in 2012, actually. And we have this sort of constant revenue in France from these energy certificates, which really grew in 2023 because the government back then was still in the spending mode. And they thought like, okay, we need to build like a carpool plan and push out in France. Now for those watching the news, the government in France, that's changing every other month, is not in spending mode. It's more in cost-cutting mode. And the environmental measures get cut, right? So essentially, this thing went pretty brutally from being like a good source of revenue to going up to crushing to 0. And it's a bit paradoxical in the sense that at the same time, we have many wins in other markets, meaning Spain has launched it. So now we have something live with energy certificates in Spain. And we are in the process, we've been approved as a -- I mean, essentially, it's a CO2 credit framework that's been approved around carpooling, and now we're going to deploy that in other markets. So I think the way those green revenue will look like in taking the same time frame, like 2030 is we'll have maybe that in like 3 to 6, 7, 8 different markets, but maybe with like more resilient lines of revenue and not a single point of failure. So that's what happened. So clearly, if you look at the financial profile, it did like a bit of like up and down with EBITDA, which I think is going to sort of normalize over time.

Thank you. Any questions from the audience? [indiscernible] from Cantor.

Just a couple of questions for me. One is around this unmonetized GBV that you mentioned. Have you tried monetizing it at all in either Brazil or India? And has it led to, let's say, a lower number of rides or lower number of users? And then secondly, on the TAM opportunity, have you -- how do you think about that? Like how would you suggest that we think about it? And have you had a formal kind of survey done to calculate the TAM? I'm speaking for the carpooling business.

Thank you. On your first question regarding the monetization of carpooling, you mentioned 2 important markets for us, Brazil and India. So far, we have not monetized those countries. And generally speaking, first, we realized that it takes a lot of time to create what we call liquidity. So the idea to have enough supply and enough demand to match such supply and demand. That takes a lot of time. And what we've seen even in the first country that we launched carpool in, which was France, it took us years to be able to have enough critical mass before actually monetizing. If you monetize too early, you might just break the liquidity and your business just might die. That's why we believe that as long as there is high growth, we're happy to see it continue to grow before actually monetizing. Today is the day where growth in Brazil is not so high in a way that we believe this is the right time to start monetizing. Growth was about 20% year-on-year in Brazil when it comes to the capital business. And this is when we believe this is the sweet spot to start monetizing because we are working on that right now. But it's just the initial phase, not much more I can say about this today. Whereas for India, growth this year is around 55%. It was around 70% last year. We're happy to see it grow. I mean if we were -- if we had like a cash issue and we needed the cash and we need more EBITDA, we could actually monetize almost overnight. But we believe that waiting a few more years before growth taps off will create more revenue long term and more value for the company overall. That's for your first question, if it helps. On your second one regarding the TAM, that's actually one of the questions that I asked when I joined the company, what is the TAM of carpooling? And I think the answer that Nico gave me was, I don't know. And in a way, it's an easy but fair answer in the sense that there's only one company doing that in the world that is at scale, it's BlaBlaCar. So you could say, oh, the TAM is our GBV, but it doesn't really make sense because it's growing and it's still a niche market. So another way to think about it is look how many cars they are on the road. This is sort of the TAM because what we do is enable people like you and me to share seats in your own car. So we know the potential is huge. That's true. But to go from a potential to real market, you need to educate people and to make them try, which is hard. And that's why it's -- I would be a bit -- maybe this is not really a fulfilling answer, but it's quite hard to think about the TAM. Maybe last thing I want to say is that when combining -- when combined, sorry, with the bus and train offering, which we are doing now, you immediately expand your TAM by quite a lot because these are markets where you have lots of players globally, and this is really where you can take your carpool audience and monetize it more by offering them other mode of transport.

Sure. Just a quick follow-up. In terms of the train business. The commissions there, if I'm not wrong, are like low single digits. Is that like also -- does that also mean lower margins compared to the other businesses? And do you expect then, therefore, margin dilution in the future when it grows?

Can I take that? So good question. And indeed, on a stand-alone basis, the train market, especially in Western Europe, is not so interesting in terms of margins. So you would think, yes, it could dilute the overall margins. But the thesis for us is that it is a pool of demand that then can fuel other businesses, mostly the carpool business, which is highly profitable with very high margins. So we don't really think of it as a stand-alone business at all, and we would not have started with that if we wanted to just be -- if we just wanted to have a, let's say, interesting business because it's not really interesting stand-alone. But if it creates synergies with our carpool market, if we can see that by offering train options, we have more people on the platform and some of it convert also to carpool, then it can create a really profitable business for us. We are still quite early stage for the train because we only started connecting Spain operators last year, and we connected SNCF in France only this year. So it's still quite early for us. But the thesis is really the idea to combine train and carpool, knowing that many people use train in Western Europe, a lot more than the carpool. It's a much bigger business. And combined, it can be a really profitable business for us.

[indiscernible]?

Yes. So a couple of boring questions maybe, but VNV has spoken about 20% to 25% PAX growth last year and that the year-to-date figure in terms of budget is ahead of budget. So if you could just add some more color there, maybe what are we talking about in terms of pro forma growth this year or in '24? And then the second question, you obviously hinted about the future IPO in the coming years. Is that still on the table? And can you say anything about the timing?

I'll take the first question, the boring one, as you mentioned. When you -- so first, year-to-date overall, I mean, there are 2 ways we look at it. One is versus budget, and we are above budget on almost all metrics, especially on profitability. And then when you look at year-on-year growth, I think today, we are around plus 15% in terms of PAX and plus 25% in terms of gross margin, which is the main metric that we look at internally. So that's quickly a few numbers on the numbers. Maybe I can let you take the question on IPO.

Yes. No, we don't have the IPO date yet. And we -- I mean, it's not really on the agenda short term to do that. I think we still need to do -- I mean, if you think of it, I think the business we need to be a bit more predictable and maybe a bit more monetized. And maybe like we need to be able to demonstrate that the EBITDA margin is maybe a bit more stable in some geos. So for me, we may be -- I don't know how to quantify that in terms of time, but maybe a couple of years away from that. And again, like you also have these questions like going back to the question on market size, which is sort of linked to that, like how do you project? That's the tricky part with some of the emerging markets. So it would be good to see like how far we go in Brazil, how far we go in India. Because to tell you the story of India, we started that 10 years ago. 10 years ago, we had a local team. We've done some marketing, and we struggled to get to even below 1 million passengers. We decided to shut down the local team, give the product, not spend any marketing. This year, like in the month of August, we've done 2 million passengers in 1 month. So more in a month essentially than, I mean, 3x more than what we were doing 10 years ago. So to go back to the time of question, like 9, 10 years ago in India, it was apparently pretty small. Now it's apparently a lot bigger because car ownership has increased, online penetration has increased, road infrastructure has improved and so on. So I think part of the equity story is also linked to that. So I think we need maybe like a bit more of proof of penetration in those markets. And then as you launch new markets, whether it's LatAm, Southeast Asia and so on a new vertical, I think the story becomes a bit more predictable to some extent in terms of growth, which is more appealing, I guess, for public investors. So I would say a couple of years away from that sort of like confidence in the model to some extent.

Mike Calvey from Baring Ventures. What metrics do you track to try to understand how many of your carpooling customers are using the other products and services? And what do you consider to be your target in that respect? If you want to be an OTA, you're going to end up having to have people think of you as a multimodal. So what do the metrics show?

Yes. So essentially, and maybe Pierre-Antoine can double-click on this one, but that's a really good question because the all this is the fact that -- I mean, what sounds pretty intuitive is someone looking for a carpool between Rio and Sao Paulo is, in fact, not looking for a carpool, -- they're looking for a solution to go from A to B. And what they probably express is they're looking for some cheap and cheerful, so it's sort of the low-cost segment of transport. And hence, if you offer everything else, they should recognize your platform as the platform to book that. So essentially, what we measure over time is the progress of like within cohorts, how many people start booking other means of transport. And we look at that from, okay, what -- how did they enter into the platform? Did they enter as a carpool user or as a bus user? Obviously, in the early days, mostly as a carpool user because that's the key metric. But we see how many essentially transition to that. And the other way to think of it, it's purely a CAC to LTV game, right? So you acquired that carpool user passenger for the most part with a pretty low CAC. And the question is, as you start monetizing carpooling and as you start offering buses, do you increase the frequency of that user? Do you increase the LTV over time? So those are the metrics we look at. And the markets which may be the most at scale are either Eastern Europe or France. So I don't know if you want to maybe double-click on that, but that's the key essentially like to demonstrate that we do increase that CAC LTV and that LTV becomes a multimodal.

Yes. Maybe to give you one concrete example, because we are doing really that today in Brazil. So Brazil, this year, we'll do around 18 million, 19 million of seats just in carpool. And when we survey such our users, do you actually take buses as well in the year? Most 100% of them say, yes, we also take buses from time to time, depending on what they want to do. But they never use buses with us because we didn't offer buses. So now what we want to do and what we want to measure is how many users are doing both in a given year, both carpooling and buses. And we are starting from 0. And we know that ultimately, the goal could be 100% because they all do both. Every person who does a carpool also does a bus trip in a given year. And we are only in the -- quite early in this curve because we launched the business not just 3 years ago really in Brazil, the bus business. But there's a huge potential because we know that our users use both. And the idea or at least the economic thesis is that we'll only have one marketing budget for both. So we have sort of economies of scale, whereas our competitors do need to spend marketing because they don't have any demand through the carpool business, which is our core advantage. which is our core advantage.

Question up here from [indiscernible].

You partially answered the question I wanted to ask, but can you be a little bit more specific? Like if we take France or Europe as a monetized developed market, what's the difference in margin between carpooling and sort of train/bus like the margin here and the margin there? That's question number one. And number two, like you said that you want to be like a new type of OTA. But in a way, OTA is not -- is not a very good lucrative business like if your value is really in pooling, then maybe instead of sort of thinking about doing these strains and other things, you should do Indonesia, Thailand or whatever and spend your money on doing something which is really making money and shareholders' value.

Maybe I'll answer the second part, and I'll let you go on the more maybe analytical first part. But I tend to disagree on the second part because if you look at like a lot of C2C marketplaces, take Airbnb, it's just more blended, but Airbnb started with like a C2C marketplace. Today, Airbnb is a mix of C2C probably composing, I don't know, if people have the numbers, but 10% of the 20% of the GMV, and they became like a very powerful short-term distribution rental because what they do as B2C. That's fundamentally an OTA play. And on that sector, they're both doing pretty well. So I think OTA stand-alone on a non -- I mean, a sophisticated concentrated asset like train that was mentioned is a terrible business. I think if you look at an OTA combined with C2C, where you have like very strong inbound traffic, very low CAC and so on, I think it becomes a pretty strong business. So if we look at our business in Turkey on buses, the metrics are just very, very good and the profit margin is very, very good and you end up with a dominant position. So I think combining the 2 is pretty powerful because you get -- you need to find the right equilibrium, but I think you get the best of profitability and scale and you end up being mainstream. So I do think combining is not new. It's not that creative. It's what's been done essentially in many of these marketplaces before. And to some extent, we could -- you're right, we could say, let's just be a pure-play carpooling. I think it's just harder long-term to define that as a category though, right? So to some extent, like being public and so on, I think you need to broaden your category a bit. So it helps essentially broadening the category to travel. And then you have lots of peers and not, again, in OTAs, you have good and bad peers. Booking is a pretty good peer and Airbnb is a pretty good peer.

And if I may continue on that thread, Nico mentioned really large companies which are obviously successful like Airbnb and Booking. But even if you think of smaller OTAs, which you might not know such as Obilet, which we acquired or even ClickBus, which is the Obilet of Brazil, so the platform that people use to buy bus tickets, those companies are growing and very profitable. So they are actually creating a lot of shareholder value. And we see that, although they are much smaller companies than Airbnb or Booking.com. And on your first question, if I answer really quickly on the numbers, generally speaking, one way to look at the margins is to think of the take rate. So out of the price that passengers pay, the GBV or the GMV, how much gets to BlaBlaCar? In carpooling, it's roughly, let's say, 20% in Western Europe. For bus, Western Europe, it's around 10%, 10% to 15%. And for train, I believe on a stand-alone basis, it's around 3%. So indeed, it is very small. And as Nico summarized it, it's not a really exciting business, unless it creates synergies with the rest of the business. That said, to be clear, although we have mentioned a lot of train in the presentation and in through your questions, it is today quite small for us. It's a team of less than 10 people, and we don't invest in marketing because the idea is to use the carpool audience to sell other things as well there. So I would not emphasize it too much because it is not really the core of what we are building right now.

I'm sorry, [indiscernible] we won't have time. We can do that offline, sorry. But one final question, [indiscernible] because he raised his hand and then I think we need to move on already.

So linking a little bit back to the old question, carpooling and trains and buses, that makes sense. But going down to accommodation and hotels, I mean, for me as an investor, it feels like a sleeper slope. Why not focusing on what you're really good at and leave the rest to someone else because you're spending money on something now that might be profitable in 3, 4, 5 years, while we as investors would like to see more of where you're good where you and carpooling is so big and you have just scratched the surface. Why annoy management and the Board by something maybe of less interest?

Yes. I mean, first, today, like as I described, accommodation is more like a forward-looking thing on the horizon. So today, we're not burning money on that or not yet investing on that. But I think we had the same questions like 5 years ago on buses and train and now we demonstrated that, that business is to scale and it has grown and the economics are pretty good. So I think it's a fair question. I mean the thing that's interesting is if you look at what we're building, I think we are really, really good at building like a very large audience in terms of like number of people and number of users, but they don't transact all that much on the platform. And if you look at most platforms that have done that in the past, OTAs have done that for sure. When you get this sort of like high NPS, high customer brand and so on, you do have the temptation to go for a higher ticket price and higher ticket price is an accommodation. That's why Booking.com won the space, by the way, because they moved to accommodation through an M&A, but they moved to accommodation pretty early on. So I think there is value in doing that without burning money. So if it's -- and again, to me, it's just like aggregate some of that on the platform and leverage your audience, think of that almost as advertising. And if they don't buy the stuff, they don't buy the stuff. But I don't think there is so much to be built essentially to create actually incremental revenue and incremental EBITDA through these additional products. Demonstration of that today is like what we do -- the only place where we do accommodation to be clear, is Obilet, who is like at scale in Turkey. Obilet through Bus Booking essentially is the biggest brand in Turkey. aggregating now flights, hotels and so on. Those businesses are very rational. Like if you look at the growth metrics of those 2 verticals, they're very good and the investment compared to growth is super-efficient. So can we replicate that in other geos? We'll find out, but it's kind of interesting to think about that. So today, I would say we're not in that sort of betting the farm on the next big thing. It's more like incremental profitability over time.

Yes. And we're long time, just final question for me, which is you're already alluding to on M&A because Obilet has been a very successful acquisition. It's almost wrong not to talk about it more than we are. So you're thinking about building organically versus acquiring. And maybe just a word on Obilet, the audience actually gets a sense of that business that you acquired about a year ago now. In short, I'm sorry.

No. But super short, I mean, we acquired Obilet because they were the leader in Turkey and Turkey was sort of missing on the map. We had carpooling, but essentially, it allows you to get leadership. And essentially, they have like this very strong brand on which you can build. So today, maybe going back to your question on OTA, they have very good profitability and very good metrics because they're #1. So that's also like to me, like you can only get to that multimodal play that we described when you have like very strong brand presence, very strong sort of traffic on the platform. If you have small traffic, your CAC to LTV becomes like pretty bad essentially. So Obilet has been a good M&A because, I mean, maybe in a nutshell, because we also acquired that in 2022. And I've known the company since the beginning. I met the guys when they started the company in Turkey 10 years ago. And the company was in that sort of like post-COVID recovery. And I think we sort of priced it at the right time. essentially. So it was a good move.

Excellent. Thank you, Nico and Pierre-Antoine and yes [indiscernible].

All right. Finally, to close out the day, we have Numan represented by the Co-Founder and the CEO, Sokratis Papafloratos. VNV has been a supporter of Numan for many years since 2018, currently owns 13.5% stake. Please welcome Sokratis.

Thank you. Is this -- sorry about that. Very nice to see you -- many of you again, and thanks for inviting me. So quite a lot has changed since the last time I shared the stage with the other portfolio companies. But I'll start again from the beginning, the mission, what we're trying to achieve with Numan, what we're building, and that is to help you maximize life. We want to help every single one of our patients to lead a happier, healthier, longer life, and we want to do that at scale on a global basis. We've been working together now since 2018, which feels like, yes, a very long time that has gone by pretty quickly as well. A reminder for those of you who don't know Numan, what we do and who we are, we are an integrated holistic health platform operating in the U.K. We are a registered health care provider. We work with CQC, the Care Quality Commission. We employ our own doctors, pharmacists, nurses. We work with the GPHC. We own and operate our own pharmacy. We are even registered with the MHRA when it comes to procuring and manufacture medication as well. Since launching in the U.K. in 2019, we've treated more than 700,000 patients to date, and that number is growing fast every single year. Numan today operates at scale with very scalable positive unit economics. We're now -- we've been growing at triple-digit revenue growth over the last couple of years. We've been profitable since December 2023. We operate with an LTV to CAC that is higher than 4, and we also have a very, very quick payback of the market investment we put into that growth. We expect those numbers to continue as we scale into 2025 and 2026. The big transformation for the business has been the arrival of GLP-1 medications and the treatment -- for the treatment of obesity. We've been working very closely with the 2 key manufacturers in this area. It's an area we've invested from day 1 before the medications even launched in the U.K., an area that I'm going to talk about in a second, how we're different and how we treat patients. But just to put at scale, the number of patients that we've treated since launch, we've now exceeded. These numbers are a little bit old actually, more than 100,000 people with help in the U.K. achieve a healthy weight, you would more than fill [indiscernible] actually with all those people. And crucially, the people that come to us come to us with an average BMI of 34. These are people that are obese. The scale of the problem, by the way, is pretty immense. Obesity in the U.K. right now affects about 30% of the population. That number used to be 13% in the 13 in the early '90s. And it's on track globally to reach about 50% by 2050 if we don't do anything about it. It is a devastating problem. It has a number of downstream effects and comorbidities related to it. It's linked to cancer. Obviously, it's linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease. So the people that come to us come to us because they've been suffering with this problem pretty much for their whole lives. And for the first time, they have a reliable way to not only lose weight, but to become healthier as well. So you see some of the numbers of the people that come to us what the results are that we help them achieve. This is nothing short of transformational. At the moment, there are about 2 million patients in the U.K. on an active GLP-1 prescription and human has actually treated a significant number of them. We've also started to measure the impact that we're having beyond what we just do as a business, but also how we contribute to the wider health ecosystem. And we've estimated that last year alone, we saved the NHS about GBP 100 million because these are people that would have otherwise required support, required treatment. And that's probably a number we're underestimating when you really properly calculate the health economics for the long term. People that come to us, they might come to us for obesity, they might come to us for a number of other areas, but we're becoming increasingly better at understanding their health in a much more holistic complete way. And what we see unsurprisingly are people with a number of areas where they're either leading a suboptimal, let's say, quality of life or they are at risk of premature morbidity for reasons that are entirely preventable. And directionally, this is where we're going. This is what we want to be helping every single person that comes to Numan. What we're focusing right now is these core pillars of health. We're helping people with obesity. We're helping men and women. By the way, I skipped pretty quickly at a really important point in the previous slide. that we are now treating about 50% -- almost 50% men and women. And if you recall, Numan started as a men's health business. We are now a Unisex brand. A lot of our growth has come from actually treating women that come to us with obesity or overweight. And of course, now we're going deeper into hormonal support around testosterone deficiency and menopause. We're helping people increasingly understand their health and help them with prevention. And of course, we're supporting them not just with medication, but with nutritional support and supplementation as well. Those are the core pillars of health, including, of course, our origins around sexual health and reproductive health as well, where we're going to stay focused for the foreseeable future, but these are not the areas of health that we're going to stop. The thing that lets us -- what sets Numan apart from some of the other providers in the market, let's say, popular online pharmacies is that from pretty much day 1 when we started treating patients with obesity, we followed a holistic care model. We provide access to medication, the right medication for the right person at the right time. We combine that with a diagnostic proposition that helps them establish a baseline of health and understand risk. We complement that with supplementation, especially people that are deficient in nutrients or with people that need supplementation and nutritional support as they're going through their weight loss journey. And we combine that with continuous clinical care and coaching. What we mean by continuous, every Numan patient gets access to dedicated mobile app that -- where a clinical team has full visibility of their health and where they can reach out for support, both customer care support, but also clinical support. And each journey that every patient comes through Numan is personalized. There is no one-size-fits-all all. Of course, we do follow guidelines, but within those guidelines, there's a lot of nuance as to what dosage you should be using, what side effects you're experiencing, what is the journey that you need to follow to achieve optimal results for you. And we started in the last couple of years offering also coaching. And the exciting thing is that when you look at kind of -- we started from a lot of those things out of best practice and with a hypothesis that it would also lead to superior results when it comes to retention and adherence and health outcomes, and we're finding that to be the case. We don't charge separately for this set of services. It all comes under one subscription price, which is reflected according to the treatment plan that you own, but it more than pays for itself because the people that are following this program achieve superior weight loss, superior health outcomes and, of course, retain better as well. This is some of the numbers that we're most proud of. market-leading NPS of 68. That's a significant uplift from where we were a couple of years ago, consistent rating as excellent on Trustpilot and an increasing volume of word-of-mouth and referrals that results in new patients coming organically through people that they know that have seen success at Numan. What's also very encouraging and a lot better is that losing weight is such a visible result that you want to talk about where some of the more stigmatized internal issues that we used to help with are not so easy to talk about, and that's kind of where we had started from. I'm going to go through now some of the core capabilities, both technical hard capabilities, but also some of the, if you like, softer ones that have enabled us to get to this place. First of all, we take pride in the fact that we are one of the leading voices in the U.K. when it comes to changing perceptions around obesity. It's still a condition that is very much stigmatized. People that live with obesity or overweight incur discrimination. It's one of the last areas where it used to be okay to actually shame somebody. So we put a lot of emphasis. There's also a lot of still resistance in people accepting that using medications strategically to lose weight is not only accepted, but it's the way that you should be approaching the problem. So we've done a lot of work that is creative and if you like, arresting -- we're also doing a lot of work in being thought leaders in this space on promoting this new way of being healthy. So that is a capability that we're investing. Some new areas of -- for us are also starting to engage with policymakers to really start helping educate what we can do as a private health care provider in solving this crisis. Of course, from day 1, we've been building the Numan platform, which now, what is it, 6 years in, you can really start see coming to focus that original vision of what it would take to bring together all those different parts of the care journey into one approach. So with Numan with lead first with a digitally led consultation, that means that people can provide us information asynchronously through a questionnaire. People can speak to a clinician. People can have a video call with a clinician where that is appropriate as well. We put together the tools that lets us manage complex cases at scale. It's one thing prescribing a very simple piece of medication that somebody can take by themselves and then let them get on with it, which is the online pharmacy model. It is very different to be able to treat hundreds of thousands of patients with multiple combinations of medication with a number of different side effects with a different degree of personalization. So that's something we've been investing in and also it's something that you absolutely have to do as a business when you reach that scale when it comes to also managing risk, which is something that we do on a daily basis. So we personalize the journey using the data that we have for you. We are investing in the platform in being able to scale and at some point in the future, automate some of that work. And also, when it comes to combining the pharmacotherapy with behavioral change, we have one of the leading teams that can help you build healthy habits, help you set the right goals and then guide you with the right combination of triggers, coaching, behaviors, education and ongoing intervention to help you use the medication. At some point, the conversation is switching already to what happens after you use the medication. And our goal is for you to be a patient and a member of Numan whether you happen to be paying us for a specific drug or not. We're moving to making that digital-led approach the leading part of the proposition, not the supporting part of the proposition. If I was to pick 2 of the big catalysts in our space globally over the last few years, the arrival of GLP-1s has been one of them. The other one has been the arrival and the applicability of generative AI within the healthcare setting. We -- I believe that in the next few years, the way we understand and we act and we experience health and health care will be unrecognized to the way we experienced it 5 years ago. And AI will play a key role in that is already playing a key role in that, but not only in the back office where there are some obvious efficiencies and cost savings and augmentation of our human clinical team, but also the patient engagement layer. Now when you step into that space, though, it is imperative that you act responsibly. It's imperative that you ensure safety. And we're still all learning collectively as an industry. Numan has been at the forefront of investing in safety and scalability. A lot of the tools that we needed to do that did not exist, so we had to build them. And when we track the numbers around safety, efficacy, donor voice and results, every single metric that we've been building from has been orders of magnitude better than when we started. This is proprietary. This is building on the data that we have for the patient, the data that we have from our coaches, everything that we've been working on over the last 24 months. Also, one of the ways that we can create the experience for the patient that we deliver is driven from the fact that we are vertically integrated. This is our facility in Cardiff. That facility now has grown to -- I think we have -- what is it? It's not 20,000 square feet. It's about 35,000 now because we've been expanding. It's a site that is both a registered MHRA wholesale distribution center. We are licensed to not only procure but distribute medication from there as well, but also a site where we dispense our medication from on -- of course, on a multiple times per day basis, a site that operates on a 7-day rotation as well. Now when you put all that together and when you step back, our conviction is that the businesses that are going to achieve the biggest success here because we know that the market is there. We know that the problem is there are the ones that are going to be able to break through to the patient, the ones that can also prove that they can deliver better outcomes. So now we're investing in research that actually proves that. It's -- for the first time, we have papers submitting in some of the leading journals that deal with obesity and prevention. You're going to see some of that becoming public over the next 12 months. It's something that takes time, but we are working towards being able to prove that Numan is the best place for you to come to be healthier, and we can actually have the data to show to you why that is the case. This was a very quick update on what we do and who we are. I'm going to go a little bit now into the numbers around the business since our last presentation. So we've spoken before about how we've been consistently growing on a triple-digit revenue rate now. We are -- we were predicting that we're going to grow about 130% this year compared to last year, and we've been public about what last year's revenue was, which was $90 million. We're actually ahead of plan. We're now 175% year-on-year growth since last year. And crucially, we've been managing to do that while still growing profitably. We've not sacrificed in that. We are when it comes to getting the balance between investing for the future and maximizing profitability, we still see a huge opportunity to grow. So we're not maximizing for profitability, but we're also not going back from it. We raised a round this summer. It's a mix of cash and equity. We raised a total of $60 million. We've done that with Big Pi and Endeavor Catalyst as new investors. We also had participation from some of our existing investors with, White Star and Novator coming into the round. And also, we brought on board HSBC Innovation Bank as our new banking partner, and we have a fantastic revolving credit facility that we can use for growth or for other things that we want to pursue as well. And you can see why we did that, even though we didn't have to, it's because we believe there's a huge opportunity in front of us and we want to be in the best possible position to pursue it. So we're now a few months away from closing 2025. When we look at the next 3 years, we see a huge room to grow consistently from where we are today. We see the business more than doubling over the next 3 years in the U.K. alone. We see revenue growing. We see profitability expanding, and we see Numan really becoming that platform that defines what virtual care means globally. We want to be one of the people that writes the playbook there because it still hasn't been written. We want to make a positive impact into millions of people in the U.K. and beyond. And we want to do that while building an amazing team, company and business at the same time. That's what I had to share today. Thanks for listening.

Okay. I think you know the format by now. I'll ask a couple of questions and open up for Q&A. Thank you, Sokratis for that presentation. Your growth in the past couple of years is nothing short of amazing. It's triple-digit growth a couple of years in a row. A couple of years in a row. Just a couple of months ago, you announced a new funding round, which you mentioned. Talk us through the considerations there, the pros and cons of raising a round when you're growing a lot and already profitable and what ended up being the reason for the raise?

So this was a difficult decision because up until this point, the decision wasn't really a question of if we had to. Once the world changed after 2021, '22 and we set the course to profitability and then we achieved that, it became a much more deliberate, if you like, decision and a much more difficult plan to put in place and getting that balance right. We had a good conversation on the Board about whether we should -- if we should raise and when we should raise. The reason why we brought in additional equity and debt, and I believe we got the mix around that right as well is because we still see a massive opportunity not just to grow the business, but also invest in the product, invest in the platform and invest in things that we believe the growth lies ahead of us rather than behind it. We can use debt and we can use the RCF very carefully and wisely building on data that we can extrapolate from. But some of the things that we want to do around the platform, around AI, around the product, we need the equity. We also want to be in a position where we can be opportunistic when it comes to M&A. We understand -- we know we see a bunch of opportunities, both in terms of tuck-in acquisitions that can solidify the business here. We see opportunities internationally as well. We're going to stay though still quite focused with what we're doing. It's -- every year that goes by, the business seems to -- needs to transform, maybe not at the same rate, but maybe actually arguably at a faster rate, but in different vectors of growth.

Right. Please raise your hand if I have a question one more for me. So you mentioned M&A on a slide, you're mentioning it or alluding to it now. Could you provide some color as to what you're looking for in an attractive M&A target, I guess? Are you looking for product expansion or diversification, if you will? Is it the geographical element? How do you think about that at Numan?

It's all of those things that you mentioned. First and foremost, we're looking for teams and people that we want to work with. It's -- I believe we're still at the stage where the M&A that we're going to do is going to be strategic and it's going to be most likely incremental. I have to admit it's not a muscle that the company has fully developed. So we're going to walk there before we run. So let's see when we have that conversation in the next CMD, what we've done by then.

Very exciting. Looking forward to that. I'll go with one more. So obviously, weight loss is a huge vertical for Numan today, and it's grown just tremendously over the past couple of years. Outside of weight loss, what excites you? What verticals do you kind of envision contributing to growth? Obviously, it's difficult to kind of grow in relation to weight loss since it's become so big, but where is the next horizon of growth coming from, do you think?

So first of all, I think we have -- there is weight loss and then there's treating obesity and then there's helping people be healthier by achieving a better weight, a healthier weight for them. And the last couple of years have been very much about that number and about dropping that number. But now you see it in the data, you see it also in the stories that you hear from people and you see it in the engagement and the metrics that we have on the product that amongst those 2 million people right now that are in active GLP-1 prescription, what excites me the most is figuring out what proportion of those people are actually not just in market to lose weight, but in market to understand their health, where they're starting from. They're in market to become healthier and their weight is just one number and one factor there. So delivering a product and a platform that can help them along that journey is the most important thing for us. And then when you see the -- what we talked about earlier, hormonal health for men and women, testosterone and menopause are huge unsolved problems still. And then bringing all that together in a platform that can help you genuinely do prevention, but in a way that is actionable and is driven by the use of the right combination of pharmacotherapy and behavioral change, that is a thing that we are starting to see becoming the supply, i.e., can we build it and the demand being at the best possible time for us to build it.

Very exciting. We have one question up here in the front.

Obviously, we've seen that competition among GLP-1 producers has been increasing and availability of the product has also significantly improved over the last few months. How does this increasing competition affect you in terms of margins or relationship with suppliers, et cetera?

It's good. We went from a place where there was one supplier in the market to a place where you had 2 of the largest pharma companies in the world competing and they are soon going to be joined by a number of other players there. At the moment, there's about 120 different anti-obesity medications in the pipeline being developed in multiple formats, orals, injectables, multiple strengths, multiple results. different frequency of application. We went from these medications being once-a-day injections or twice-a-day pills to weekly injections. At some point, not in the too distant future, we're going to have once-a-month use products. And in that world, we believe that what's going to be most important is understanding the patient and being able to provide a treatment that's personalized to them and having an ongoing relationship. So we're really excited about that. We also see, at some point, generics coming into the market over the next few years. We're going to have to wait and see the impact of that and what it will be. It will expand the market. And what will that mean is that you're going to have a number of different medications at different price points for different needs for different people, according to what it is that they can afford and what it is that they need. And that exactly plays to the strength of the platform and what we're building.

Thanks. Just a quick one for me. Have you considered in the past or in the future, working with NHS given they're still constrained for resources. Maybe that could be a way to acquire new customers and grow as a referral program and a new source of revenue as...

Yes, absolutely. That's a great idea. And again, I spent part of my time. I didn't spend any of my time. But now I do spend part of my time. We have people on the team that are doing work to actually make that argument. There are 16 million people in the U.K. that suffer -- that live with obesity right now. The NHS simply cannot afford to treat that population. And it's not just because of the cost of the medication. There's not enough -- you're never supposed to just give this medication to somebody. You need to supervise them and then you need to also offer wraparound services. The NHS doesn't have the capacity. The U.K. doesn't have clinicians enough clinical professionals to be able to do that. So our position and what we're advocating for is for the private sector, a number of select approved providers and Numan would be one of them to be able to take some of that burden because that's what the market is doing right now, but do it in a way that is a lot more interoperable. We don't speak very well amongst different parts of the ecosystem right now. We believe that needs to change. It has to change. And I don't see any other way that we can solve these problems other than that. So yes, 100%.

Excellent. I think with that, thank you so much, Sokratis. Congrats for all that you have achieved so far, and thanks for being with us here today.

Well, thank you. Wrapping up for me then. I don't know if you see it, but I really brim with pride because both Numan and Voi has been so great. We've been part of them since day 1 since 2018, both of them. And they're both platform businesses with about GBP 150 million in revenue and really starting to accelerate. So that's -- that's great. And I think it speaks to why I like the kind of VNV structure so much. It's a permanent capital vehicle. So those companies were part from day 0 essentially. I think Bokadirekt and BlaBla both started in 2009. We got involved way later. So opportunity there, and those are also exciting. And of course, Breadfast. Breadfast, I don't know if we can make the CMD in Cairo next year. Bjorn is going next week, but I'd encourage you to come along with us and go to Cairo, not only for Breadfast, but it's an exciting company. But yes, I hope that gives you an insight update from last year into these companies. And I think you can sense that we're super excited. And yes, that's it, folks. Thank you.