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

Great. Well, thanks for having me. So what I can do is to go through -- I have a pretty short presentation, about 10 slides, at pretty high level. I'll try to take like 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes on that. And then we can, I guess, open to Q&A. So I think most people actually know BlaBlaCar, but we started as a long-distance carpooling app, so essentially like allowing drivers to share their car when they drive alone, and passengers can book those empty seats in those cars, just like they book seat in a plane or a train or in a bus. And I'll jump to the next slide. Over the next 3 years -- or 2 years, I should say, since really 2018, we started to diversify into like a broader offering, which goes beyond this core use case and the unique use case of carpooling that we've created over the years and to tap into the larger mobility market, or at least long-distance mobility market, which made us go into buses, which will make us go eventually into offering trains as well on the platform. So most of the presentation is actually focused on that maybe like the last couple of years and the future, so I won't go back to sort of the root and the exciting story of BlaBlaCar in the early days, but really about the transformation we've done over the last, really, 2 years from becoming just a carpooling community to becoming more of a multimodal platform for travel. So if you look at where we are in that, I would say, transformation, we're still obviously dominated by carpooling. So carpooling, as I described, is fundamentally a C2C marketplace, so it's drivers offering empty seats in their car, passengers booking the seats. So it's a fantastic business in a sense that it has 0 inventory risk. So essentially, we don't prepurchase those cars. We don't obviously buy the cars. We don't employ the drivers. They just happen to be like math teachers or students driving across the country with empty seats in their cars. And interestingly, there is also no inventory risk for the drivers, right? So it's not just like you're putting the inventory risk elsewhere. There is just no inventory risk in this business. Essentially, you're just like filling up seats that are empty in cars. The business model is a transaction business model on carpooling. So essentially, we have like a commission on every transaction. And fundamentally, it's a very high gross margin business at 90%. Now the way we entered into becoming like a broader multimodal play was by offering buses. So we've done that in 2 different ways, and we've done that in 2 different ways because the European market is fundamentally different from the rest of the world when it comes to buses. So if you look at Europe, it's a market that actually liberalized -- that is Continental Europe, I should say, is a market that actually liberalized quite recently in 2015 and '16, and it was a market where people were not taking long-distance coach. They were only taking either trains or carpooling to some extent, and that market get consolidated pretty quickly. So today, essentially, you end up with mostly 2, maybe 3 actors in Continental Europe. So we decided to launch through the acquisition of Ouibus, what I would call, the virtual operator where, essentially, we contract bus companies that own fleet that they either deploy for school or local transport or events or corporate events or whatnot. And essentially, we contract them to run specific lines. So we do, in that business, take an indirect inventory risk in the sense that, essentially, you sort of prepay specific lines with bus operators. But you have essentially a contract, so you don't own the bus, you don't employ the bus driver, and you end up with a very flexible network and ability to reshape your network. Yet, it is a fairly low gross margin business model because, essentially, you prepurchased, to some extent, the seats that you resell. So you do take some indirect inventory risk, even though you don't own the buses. Outside of Europe, the way we went about buses is a slightly different game, where essentially those at very large bus markets, highly fragmented, very unsophisticated and mostly offline. So today, they're like 80%, 90% still offline. So it's a typical off-line-to-online place essentially, where you go in, you build technology. So in our case, we built like a GDS ala Amadeus, the cyber for the airline industry and an OTA layer. And essentially, we digitalized this sort of like old school bus industry in Russia, in Ukraine, in Brazil and, in the future, in every emerging market. So it's really an OTA play, which is very high gross margin as well, so it's 80% gross margin. You don't have inventory risk. Obviously, the carriers do. But essentially, you sell, I would say, a few seats in plenty of buses, just like a Booking.com in the hotel industry. Now the beauty of all of that, so I just highlighted the 3 legs, I would say, of the business we operate. For end user, all of that is aggregated within one app, right? So essentially, as a passenger, you just go on by the car, you see all this inventory of car and buses, will add train at some point, and you're just like one click away, one booking away from booking a seat in a car or a bus. So that's a brief summary. I'm assuming you see the slides, by the way. I don't know if it works on this. Okay. Great. I bet you want to go back into that, maybe just highlight a few things about the difference between those different business legs or business model. I think what's interesting is also to think about the market itself. If you look at the market of carpooling, it's a market where, today, I would say, we created that market and we're very dominant, like we don't have direct competition on carpooling, wherever it's in Brazil or in Russia or in France or in Spain. And it's purely about market creation. So if you ask me like what's the market size for carpooling, frankly, I don't know because it's about like you're building a better experience and a better matching algorithm, so that you can match drivers and passengers. But the amount of cars and empty seats in cars is just humongous. So the challenge here is not like offline to online. It's not like looking at transport data. It's really about building a great product experience, and it's about market creation. It's also very much driven by product and tech. So over time, we went from, I would say, a pretty simple sort of classified-type product, where drivers will go on the platform, create a profile and, let's say, I'm driving from Paris to Lyon and I'd like to get EUR 25 per seat; to something that's a lot more powered by machine learning, where, today, essentially, we get -- or we are getting to a point where essentially the driver doesn't put a price, puts just a starting point and an endpoint, and we match the driver in time, in price and in location. And we define that stops along the way, so that the driver can pick up and drop off passengers along the way. And we optimize the price of every sub-leg. So today, it's 25%, 30% of the matching between passenger and driver, is actually generated by machine learning. And so we define the pickup and drop-off point and the price of every subsegment. And long term, as you fast forward, probably 80%, if not 100%, of carpooling stops and prices will be defined by machine learning and not defined by a driver. That's important because, as you do that, you clearly bring the concept of dynamic pricing into carpooling. You also create like a multitude of pickup and drop-off stations or virtual stations, if you like, than just create a better network. So that's the challenge on carpooling. BlaBlaBus is an interesting business because it's really a European thing, so far. So it's really like the way the bus industry shaped in Europe with today essentially 2 actors. We have FlixBus out of Germany, and you have us. We acquired a company called Ouibus to accelerate our presence in this market. So it's actually borne out of deregulation in Europe. It's a sizable market, but it's actually fundamentally capped by trains because most of the markets in Europe have good and highly subsidized train networks, the like of SNCF and Deutsche Bahn and so on. So it's -- there is like a pretty large market in the middle, but it's nowhere close to emerging markets. And then if you look at the -- what I call the bus marketplace segment, the last one on the right, again, it's a marketplace OTA-type business model. It's a very large market, so very large market in countries like, again, Russia, Ukraine, all of LATAM, India, Mexico. And you're talking about tens of billions of dollars actually of GMV generated by the bus industry in those countries. And it's interesting here because it's one of these rare, maybe one of the unique almost, I would say, asset class in transport that has not gone online in those markets. So people, strangely enough, still buy 90% of their bus ticket in Brazil, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Mexico offline at the station. Obviously, it's evolving fast. It's changing. The technology to crack that problem is actually not just building like a nice sort of, I would say, top-user layer, but it's actually building all the technology stack, enabling actually those SMEs, so it's sort of tiny Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian bus business, to actually digitalize the entire inventory and manage the entire inventory online. So the key, I would say, product and tech block we're building here is actually a GDS, so it's a global distribution system that allows us to do online distribution on BlaBlaCar. So you have like the Eden part of the iceberg is actually below BlaBlaCar, and that's the GDS layer. That partially came out of the acquisition of Busfor in Ukraine and Russia because we had built that fantastic technology to crack that problem in the region. And we combined that with our own technology, and that's how we are entering the Brazilian market today. So starting from the supply side, again, like we have these 3 legs, obviously, the 2 new ones are the bus ones. If you look at the third one, that's by far -- so the bus marketplace is by far the most scalable because the same technology we deploy around buses can be applied to trains, shuttle. Essentially, once you built a coherent GDS, I mean, IMS, GDS and OTA layer, you can start to connect like essentially thousands of operators on the platform. So today, essentially, our goal is to connect as many operators as possible in as many countries as possible and combine that with carpooling to have like a highly differentiated offer. So now I talked a lot about the supply side, but I guess, if we look at the passenger journey and why going multimodal for us is interesting, it first comes from the belief, and a pretty simple one, that most people would agree with that as you create -- or as you enrich your offer, you attract more demand, right? So we went from just being a carpooling app to combining carpooling in buses. And long term, the end vision is really to start combining all of that. And it's interesting, when you own a very granular network with carpooling to combine that with other means of transport because the car remains the universal connector. So if you think of most of the journeys you take by train, by plane, there is very often like a car at the beginning, a car at the end, so the car remains the universal point-to-point connector for most of us. So the end vision is not just to put carpool and buses and trains side by side, but it's really to start combining those mode of transport together. And by doing so, you end up having like very unique offer on your app, not just by carpooling, but by combining those journeys. So that's the -- I would say, the unicity of USP of BlaBlaCar is to be combining carpooling with this different mean of transport. Now probably for you to visualize what we mean when we talk about complementarity and granularity of the network, I think that slide is pretty interesting where, essentially, we show on one side the number of bus stations or the cities we connect with BlaBlaBus in France and the number of pickup and drop-off points mostly generated by machine learning on carpooling. And I think when you see that, you realize that, actually, you're building 2 very complete different network. Like the topology of the carpooling network is highly granular, so in other way, carpooling is not very good at doing center of Paris to center of Brussels. Buses and trains agree to that. Carpooling is good to go from some like suburb of Paris to a small town in Britain. That's really good at that because the alternative is either you drive your own car or you take a train and a bus and another train and taxi to get there. So by combining those 2, essentially, we tend to respond to 2 slightly different use cases on a very similar audience, which is a pretty young, price-sensitive audience. Now the other thing that's interesting here, and going more into financial or unit economics topics, the beauty of carpooling is because we have this unique inventory. We have like a very strong captive audience and very high-quality user profile. So when you use carpooling, you need to sign up, you need to give us a mobile number, you need obviously to pay online, you verify your ID, you give us your license plate of your car and so on and so on. So we created it because we need to create trust in carpooling. We created like a very rich community. And essentially, the consequence of that is we don't buy traffic, right? The main thing on carpooling is carpooling brings free traffic for free. So if we look at most of the markets, we actually don't spend much in marketing, and that's what you see with the bar chart on the left. Actually, 87% of the traffic on BlaBlaCar and the passengers booking a carpooling on BlaBlaCar are not paid, right? So it's quite unique to a normal OTA. Like normal OTA do depend a lot on paid marketing and SCA. And essentially, you end up spending a lot of money on Google to attract traffic. We don't. So the beauty is, as we start to add actually other mean of transport, starting with buses, as I just described, actually, they don't change your CAC all that much because you benefit from this very wide audience that, historically, was only booking carpooling, and then you start to increase your share of wallet within this audience. And they tend to come back even more because they see that you have more than carpooling. So essentially, you have like a very interesting phenomenon, where your LTV is improving because you increase your share of wallet per user and, in fact, even your CAC, and that's what we show here all of the time. We don't show the exact number because we want to keep that confidential, but you see the relative drop of the cost of acquisition per new passenger is dropping because, essentially, you're better at responding at any demand because you start to aggregate the entire market, which, for us, is the case in countries like France, Russia, increasingly in Ukraine as well, increasingly in Brazil. I talked about -- a bit about that, on carpooling specifically. As you can tell, I mean, the old story sort of, to some extent, rely on having carpooling as an element in the equation. So people often ask us like, "Why don't you launch the pure bus business in some countries where you don't have carpooling?" I think all the magic in terms of, whether it's CAC to LTV or having all these granular trips comes from carpooling and the fact that we created like a very strong community on carpooling. Again, the future of carpooling is also very much around technology. So over the last 2 years, and I mentioned that a bit earlier, we've been building great technology to move from, I would say, a classified business on which you bolt on a transaction-based model, which was BlaBlaCar like 3, 4 years ago, to more a machine learning play, where essentially you create another barrier to entry beyond liquidity of the marketplace; around like being smart, essentially like finding pickup and drop off along the way for drivers; and being smart about optimizing the price point at which you can -- you'll find a match between a driver and a passenger. And I believe that's pretty fundamental because as we do that, essentially, it becomes extremely hard to replicate a business like that, extremely hard because you need millions of people with a trusted profile, which is like the first element of matching. You need to know who is in the car and feel comfortable with who you're going to share the car with. And what's something else that's powered by volume and data, which is like what are the good pickup and drop-off area in a country and what's the right price to match supply and demand. And again, today, we slowly transformed -- and it's really transparent to users. That's the beauty of it. The complexity is really integrated. But today, like 25 -- it's even more now than 25% of carpooling matches are purely generated by machine learning, so meaning like drivers did not plan to do this detour or pick up or drop off people in those specific location, and they did not choose the price. It's been purely computed as -- by a matching algorithm. So we believe that's the future of carpooling. And as we do that, we'd increase usage of carpooling. And as we do that, essentially, you get this fundamental advantage or if you have any other transports, such as buses initially and probably more as we go along. So I guess, this day is no presentation is complete without a COVID update. So obviously, the current crisis has been bad for transport, bad for tourism. Like it's been a pretty rough ride in Q2 2020. Having said that, we've seen like a pretty remarkable rebound starting in June. And still, today, by the way, the curve is still going up. So we are right now at like minus 15%, minus 20% versus 2019 in terms of passengers transported on BlaBlaCar. It keeps on slowly going up. And to compare that to other mean of transport, actually, buses are still on. We know that because we operate BlaBlaBus in Europe. Buses tend to be 50% to 60% down on 2019. Train seem to be 30% plus to 40% down, depending on countries. And obviously, air travel is like 70%, 80% down. So surprisingly, or not surprisingly, carpooling has rebounded extremely well out of this crisis. And still -- I mean, it's still essentially sustaining those level right now in October for several reasons. One, you don't need to think about the network. So as I said earlier, it's community-based. So in June or July, when things reopened, when every company struggled thinking like, "Well, should we put a bus line or a train line? Or should we fly planes here and there?" and you don't know because the demand is unpredictable, essentially, we had a lazy job. Like we did nothing. Drivers came back. Passengers came back, and they started to book again. Like within a few weeks, we were like 60%, 70% of the network was back up, actually within a very short period of time. We've also seen that on the passenger side, there was a clear preference in many markets for carpooling within this audience because you minimize the number of contacts. So you have lots of passengers thinking that, "Well, if I need to choose between a bus or a train or a carpool, I'd rather be with 3 people in a car than 40 people or hundreds of people in a bus or train." So funnily enough, actually, the biggest challenge we have right now is actually making sure we can get the drivers back and get like new drivers on board, but we have too much demand, actually. So the last -- to give you a sense in same -- well, in several markets, but I'll take France as an example. In France, actually, we are at 15% higher demand year-on-year versus 2019. If you are in France right now, it seems surreal. It seems surreal because trains are completely empty. The countries have shut down. But that's the point, essentially the fact that the other mean of transport are being depleted. Actually, carpool becomes like the alternative. So we see like a model shift toward carpooling from buses. So we see like bus network are like, of course, are shutdown. Trains networks -- train networks are operating but at lower scale. So you see a transfer toward carpooling. So it's interesting for us because, a, it's very sustainable. We don't have fixed cost in the business. So we do operate at lower volume than expected, obviously, which is not great, but it's highly resilient. And as it's going to bounce back, I mean, we all hope it's going to bounce back, I don't know when, maybe spring '21, maybe earlier, essentially, we gain market share, and we gained essentially more customers in the customer mix. So it also enables us to think a bit more like midterm and long term to 2021 and beyond and not burn too much cash along the way while you're being relevant for users. So today, we're one of the most relevant on this like young, low-cost segment, I would say. We're one of the most relevant transport network in countries like France and Spain and Russia and Ukraine and Brazil. So to some extent, I would say the length of the crisis is not such a bad thing for us because it's really -- I mean, the differential pain, I would say, between what we suffer and what competition is suffering is going in the right direction for us. So that's COVID. Maybe to give you a sense of where we come from and the impact of COVID. So back -- I was saying at that the -- earlier in the presentation, but the run rate of the last 3 months, actually, pre COVID was around 85 million passengers, growing roughly at 55% year-on-year. So late '19 and '20 was actually -- and early '20 was actually an acceleration for us. Obviously, that acceleration went down with COVID. We anticipate we'll do around 50 million passengers in 2020. Obviously, down on 2019. We expect -- and then frankly, it's crystal ball in term of demand, but that model assumes partial recovery in H1 and 90% recovery of overall demand in H2. And remember, like the fact we grow in 2021 is not a function of market growing. It's a function of like offline to online migration accelerating in emerging market, which we see now actually during the COVID phase. And the fact that, inherently, we've built actually larger market share during 2020. So the drop of 71% to 50% is not the drop you see in -- for bus companies or even train companies and never mind airlines. So we believe, actually, because we've built a bigger relative market share during the crisis, as it comes back, actually, we should be able to partially maintain in most markets that market share. So last but not least, and getting out of the COVID topic for a minute, it's always been important for us to also do something that makes sense, I mean, for us, for the employees, for the users. So as a reminder, actually, the activity in 2019 saved 1.6 million tons of CO2, sorry. And that's something that's not been like a back-on-the-envelope calculation. We've done that with like a consulting firm actually that came and analyzed all the model shift actually that carpooling is creating, and it has a massive positive impact, which is good in many ways. I mean, it's obviously good in the current environment. It's also like a very strong sense of purpose for many of our drivers. So if you look at the carpooling drivers, they're not professional. They're just people sharing their private space. And of course, they do that for financial reasons, but not just that, right? They also do that for a deeper sense of purpose around the social benefit of meeting people and the environmental benefit of not driving alone. And that enables -- I would say, all the economics I talked about are also powered by the pretty strong brand image we created. And maybe a good proxy of that is the NPS, Net Promoter Score, of BlaBlaCar in every market is anywhere between 45 and 70 actually, which for transport is extremely high and higher than any other mean of transport. And again, that translates that sense of purpose, the fact that people feel they're doing something that makes sense for the future and the fact that a fantastic experience does translate into those economics and is better as a sort of unique economic side I described on the free traffic. So I'll end on that note with slightly outdated numbers, actually not quite. They're quite good. So 22 countries, we're close to 100 million members signed up. And the run rate pre-COVID was 85 million passengers on the platform. So maybe I'll stop there on the presentation, if that's okay. So I chose to talk a bit about the business model initially, which is -- which I think is interesting to understand like what's under the hood, but I can take questions.

Fantastic. Yes. Thank you, Nico. [Operator Instructions] But I think Björn has a question to kick off with.

Yes. Maybe we could start with a different mix of modalities. As of now, of course, as bus is very new to the business, carpooling is the vast majority of -- in that mix. How do you see that more long term? Will it be more of an even mix between the different modalities? Or -- yes, what do you think?

No, no. It's -- I mean it's clearly going to go with -- over time, like the share of buses is going to increase. So if you look at the pie chart I was showing at the beginning, that's been built in the last 12, 18 months. Essentially, it was 0 18 months ago on the platform. The BlaBlaBus business in Europe, well, has been growing pretty fast. It's more capital-intensive to grow, more operationally intensive to grow because you need to contract bus operators and set up lines and so on. Again, even though it's highly flexible and you don't pay for buses, you would still a more incremental job. The bus marketplace, the business was growing like over 100% year-on-year pre-COVID. And even now, it's positive growth actually on a year-on-year basis even during COVID. So that segment, the -- I would say, the non-European bus play has the potential to be -- as big or bigger than carpooling in a pretty short time horizon of, I don't know, 2, 3 years, if it's a giant market. And the thing to understand, actually, and if you take markets like, again, like Russia, Ukraine, Brazil and then you can extend that to other markets where we operate at Mexico, India, to some extent, there is not much online distribution actually. So in a strange way, by creating our own asset with carpooling, we were the only player having like 100% online distribution of trips. So today, in some of these markets, we -- I mean, most of the -- all of the markets, in fact, I named, Ukraine, Russia and Brazil, specifically, BlaBlaCar is a bigger online portal than any other bus online OTA essentially. So when we start plugging buses, we -- it becomes -- I mean, I would say, much easier for us to fill up those buses with demand. And we have much better economics in terms of CAC to LTV to a simple bus OTA. So that's the play. I think in those countries, we can actually grab a disproportionate market share of the online distribution of buses because it's nonexistent. Like if you look at competition, it's not -- I mean, every time you have like a few local companies, but it's not that big. And that's part of the story, by the way, with Busfor. Busfor had done a phenomenal job on the supply side. They had built a great technology connecting -- you're building that GDS layer, this IMS layer, connecting to this very fragmented world of operators. What we really bring in is we accelerate that because we were also working on that, but we've also brought in demand. And so I think if we inject the BlaBlaCar demand on those thousands of operators that have been connected online, you just -- like you tap into a market that's like -- well, in Russia, it's like maybe $4 billion to $5 billion of -- I mean, Russia and Ukraine, it's maybe $4 billion to $5 billion of bus market that's still 90% offline. And last but not least, the part of the -- I would say, the bad story, of course, is less people travel right now. The good story of COVID in that sense is more and more people book online. So today, the reason we see, it's still like positive growth in markets like Russia and Ukraine. It's not because people travel more. It's because people book more online. And essentially, that whole -- at least from what we see on the platform, the offline to online effect is greater than the reduction in the temporary reduction of travel. So I'm very bullish actually on these markets because it's pretty rare that you have like a large asset class, like buses in those markets, that have not migrated offline to online. And clearly, it's bound to happen. And we ended up with carpooling to build like free demand traffic for exactly those trips, except people do it with carpooling on BlaBlaCar. And as you add other mean of transport, of course, the tech buses. Like in Brazil, like that's the only way you can travel. Essentially, like there are no trains. So when you start plugging buses onto BlaBlaCar, those are the same -- there's the same audience. Essentially, you're just increasing your share of wallet on that audience. So long story short is, yes, I would anticipate that. And it's hard to predict, but I would anticipate that within a few years, you'll see as many, if not more, bus bookings than carpool bookings. The only slight caveat on that is as we integrate more supply onto the platform, it's interesting what's happening because we start to attract what -- I mean, what I would call like initially bus-only demand or if you had train, it would be train-only demand. And when they discover carpooling, actually, they switch and they use carpooling. So in fact, actually, they tend to feed each other. So the fact that you have more and more supply and you attract more demand into the platform, it has the tendency to grow carpooling as well actually. So in terms, you have the sort of like future cycle going on.

Thanks. Great, great answer. And so we have a question from the audience on the monetization and sort of monetizing new countries. And you obviously generate new revenue without raising cost much. And can you cover which countries now are strong -- are monetizing now and which one are beginning to monetize or about to monetize? And what's the threshold of monetization in terms of scale or...

Yes. So there is no, I would say, good timing to start monetizing. In that sense, it's very much like a classified-type play, where you spend several years essentially building a C2C marketplace, making sure you -- essentially, you are dominant as a C2C marketplace. And then over time, you start monetizing. Today, we are monetizing most of Europe, so most of the key markets. I mean, I would say, if you relate that to volume rather than countries, actually, 70% of Europe is monetized. And as of a few months ago, 0% outside of Europe was monetized, even though we have more than half of the GMV outside of Europe. Now the reason we haven't done that actually was the growth and the scale, actually, we were reaching without monetizing in most of this market. It was great, and it felt like essentially a better model to spend less marketing and not monetizing than monetizing early and spending more marketing. So essentially, think of that as your -- no monetization. It's just a marketing tool to build -- to some extent, to build dominance in those markets. We started to monetize Russia just literally like couple of months ago. I mean, it was -- the plan was to actually do that in April. But when it was technically ready in April, the country was shut down for transport. So we are starting to monetize those markets outside of Europe, and that's going to be the story over the next 12, 18 months. Essentially, between now and end of '21, we will start monetizing most of that GMV and, again, progressively in those countries. And it gets pretty interesting because as you do that, you have like a mechanical sort of EBIT uplift because, essentially, in these markets, all the cost is already there. Like essentially, like all the teams, the marketing, the platform, I mean, all of that is already there. So as we start monetizing, we have like a massive EBIT uplift in those market that we can easily reinvest into, well, either other markets. Or interestingly, we are defining that playbook between how fast you grow bus versus how quickly you monetize carpooling. And there is like a nice equation to -- multimodal equation to find between carpool monetization, how aggressive you want to be in buses and how, I would say, you want to monetize the bus traffic. So we're playing with that in Russia, and there is a nice equilibrium where -- that you can find, where it's all about monetizing everything as fast as you can. It's about finding the right equilibrium on monetizing carpool, monetizing buses, which are monetized from day 1, by the way, in all the markets. And then you can tune like the right equation of growth and monetization in those markets. So that's what we're getting into right now, as -- essentially as we speak. We are deploying those models in Russia. And after that, we'll deploy that in Ukraine and in Brazil.

Thanks. I think on a slight follow-up on that revenue. I think we -- at VNV, we have sort of -- we've put out there like a long-term target that BlaBla should be able to generate like EUR 5 per passenger or member per year. And there's a question here on that and then that you think that's realistic.

Yes. I think it is. I mean, it's -- I mean, today, it's higher than that in markets like France, right? So if you look at the revenue of gross margin per passenger in France, it's much higher than EUR 5 already, right? So I mean, if you think of it in a single booking, in France, we tend to make EUR 3 on average in carpooling, even more actually, so it's between EUR 3 and EUR 4. Now the ticket size in emerging market is lower, so you tend to make more. Because the trips tend to be around $10, you take like you -- even as you monetize, you tend to take like $1, $1.5 per booking of gross margin, which is more or less the same as revenue. It's 80%, 90% gross margin in this model. Now as you add buses and you get more frequency, you should be able, I think, in all these markets, to get to around the EUR 5 market. So I would say, globally, yes, it's very achievable. I would say, almost without multimodality, but even more so as you get multimodal to get like above EUR 5 average revenue per user per year on your active user base.

Great. And there's many questions here, but -- so one is about the economics of connecting trains to the BlaBla platform or app.

Yes. So it's a very good question. The -- essentially, the commission you get or the take rate you get on train is pretty bad, right? So as the thing to think about, like you tend to take a few percent points that you get on trains. So if you look at that like standalone, you're aggregating trains and getting, like, 2%, 3%, 4% take rate on train. You need to sell a lot of trains to create a business, when on carpool, we take 22%, 23%, actually take rate on something that's, on average, EUR 20. The reason it's interesting is, a, it comes for free. Because if you take like European markets, essentially, like everyone takes the train. So essentially, it's something we're not offering the audience that they're booking anyway. And b, where it gets very interesting for us. And the way we think of train is combining journeys. So it's creating this unique experiences where you combine a train and a carpool, and people do that. Like when we survey, are you -- I mean, people do that because, a, when we survey every user, they tell us. But we don't even need to survey a user. Actually, we know that 15% to 20% of our meeting points in France are train stations, which means people naturally combine those trips or they try to combine those trips. As you do so, essentially, we start selling -- I mean, essentially, we'll attract more demand on the platform because we have trains, but mostly because they know they can find some unique combo of train plus carpool. And then you end up selling more carpooling on the back end or the front end of a train journey. So you think of that as if you go from Paris to Cassis in the French Riviera or some city like that, the best journey might be actually a high-speed rail going to Marseille and then a carpool for the last 100-or-so kilometer. You never think of that on your own. So the platform is going to find that for you with the smart stops and the machine learning on carpooling. And by doing that, actually, that last segment is something where a driver could easily get like EUR 15 or whatever, like EUR 20 on the last leg, and we take 25%. So most of the value is going to be created by, what we call, intermodal trips, where we combine train with other mean of transport. But train standalone, those European market is tricky.

Like what proportion roughly today is intermodal, where someone uses first a bus and then a carpool or train or carpool?

Yes. As I said, it's about like -- I mean, we see that -- I have to check exactly the data, but it's around like 15% to 20% of BlaBlaCar journey actually originate or end at a train station. So assuming they don't leave in the train station, they probably take a train or came from a train. And then like what type of train journey? Is it just like a short leg or long leg? Like we don't have all this information. But again, today, people naturally do that, but we're not creating even the opportunity to think of that, right? So -- whereas if you start combining with means of transport -- and again, it just -- I guess, if you take a step back, it just makes sense. Like what do you see when you arrive at a train station? Cars. I mean it's just full of cars. It's just like that's how people do the last part of the journey essentially. And so combining the 2 makes a lot of sense. Combining bus and carpool would make sense. It's less logical because a train is -- a bus is essentially slower than a car, so you don't have like that speed element in the bus. I would say, we do people -- I mean, we see people do that, but it's a lot, a lot less interesting than train. So again, like, going back to train, like the -- it's really about combining trips at the end. And at a very basic level, well, you grab that share of wallet from passengers on your platform, and you still make like 3%, 4%, 5%, depending on the operators on that GMV, which you will not make otherwise.

Has -- are we -- are you monetizing BlaBlaLines? And has that sort of product line earned its raison d'être? Or is it COVID-related? Can you talk about that?

So today, we're growing that. So BlaBlaLines is the -- just to take a step back, it's the commuting app, so it's carpooling for your regular daily journeys, so going from work to your home. So BlaBlaLines was taking off like extremely well actually pre-COVID. Now it's restarting, so it's coming back on. We don't do any marketing, so it's like something that's community-based, so people just come back. It's pretty new, so it's hard to look at year-on-year. If you look at year-on-year, they look good, but it was very tiny actually a year ago. So it's restarting. It's a bit slower to restart than BlaBlaCar right now because I think you still have a lot of people working from home right now. So it's still like the main trend is not good to work. In fact, I'm at the office today and I'm alone. It's an empty office for me actually right now. So -- and the -- today, we're focusing on France, and it turns out that because of -- and I won't get into all the detail, but because of some regulations that passed actually last year in France, actually, you get a lot of subsidies from regions around short-distance carpooling. So for us, the activity today is monetized by that. So we -- in France, it's actually profitable. Standalone, it's pretty much breakeven/profitable as it grows. So that's kind of the beauty of it. It's not necessarily the model we deploy in every country, but it makes like a fantastic playground, where, essentially, we're being subsidized to create this great high-frequency product. And now, we need to decide, probably for next year, to start launching that in another market. And then like, we need to define what's the monetization model of BlaBlaLines. But before even talking about the monetization of lines, the beauty of it, if you take a step back, is to say, if you get like really tens of millions of users we have on BlaBlaCar to actually use a product not like once a quarter or 5, 6 times a year, which is roughly the frequency we see today for active users on BlaBlaCar, but you get them to use a product like 4 times a week. So the frequency we see on BlaBlaCar is like 4 times a week. We do like roughly between 15 and 20 trips per month actually on lines. You have fantastic engagement of the community. So even as a product, even if you were to only lightly monetize that usage, essentially, you create like an incredible captive audience. And then you can -- you -- if you don't monetize what's sort of like repeat trips from home to work, you can actually monetize anything else. So today, what we see is that we have 2 type of audience on lines. One is like the true carpoolers that when you repeat the same pattern over and over again. And then we see passengers booking what we call the one shot or a one-off trip actually on a BlaBlaLines journey. So essentially, like your home to work or a leg of your -- or a portion, I should say, of your home to work might become a better Uber for someone else. And that's super interesting because we realized that those subsegment of BlaBlaLines journeys, you create like a massive network of commuters. And by doing so, actually, you're just creating like a phenomenal network. And some subset of the network becomes highly valuable as a short-distance journey that you can highly monetized. So we're playing with that in France, and we realize that part of this journey is highly monetizable. Some other journeys that you repeat all the time are less monetizable, but they create the massive frequency.

So there is like a follow-up question on that, that is the long-term idea to create like a BlaBla super app with -- will you add on other services? You've done a venture with Voi, testing that and your payments and there's lot -- yes, like a super app phenomenon.

Yes. I would say, yes, and the super app is actually BlaBlaCar. So we've been -- in a sense that today, that's where we aggregate buses. And even though we created an independent app for commuting, so that we have the technical agility and the product agility redefine a slightly different product paradigm for commuting, actually, everything is built, so that everything can be connected through API. And all the BlaBlaLines trips can and will, and we're already playing with that, will be connected to BlaBlaCar. So essentially, like BlaBlaLines, it's really going to focus itself on the repeat use case of commuting, which is mostly monetized today through all kind of government schemes. There are some very strong one in France, but not only. There are many markets actually subsidizing some of that. We're helping some of that because they see that as every transport. I mean, it's really like a substitute to public transport in a way. But then, essentially, if you connect all these trips to BlaBlaCar, you have more of a, I would say, one-off demand that would see those trips as, hey, it's a fantastic like 40-kilometer journey or whatever to go from x suburb to the city center or whatnot. And the willingness to pay for this one-off journey is extremely high. So essentially, like BlaBlaCar is built to receive every third party, I mean, today, like trains and buses from all these emerging markets, including BlaBlaLines. So we see that, at some point, it's going to become like another supply feeder onto BlaBlaCar. And yes, we've been experimenting with Voi, but that's the same idea. It's like fundamentally -- and that's very experimental with Voi because the booking model of e-scooter is very different from what we do traditionally. But whenever it's something you prebook slightly in advance, you can put that on the BlaBlaCar platform. So we're rebuilding that policy by introduction, I guess. I mean, we went from a carpooling community to building around that community, like a much larger GDS and OTA layer when you can connect actually all type of supply.

Great. I know we started a little late, but hopefully, we'll have time for maybe one more question. And I think -- or there are several questions around geographical expansion beyond the countries you are today and especially with an emphasis on China and why we're not there and then maybe the U.S. also. And then most importantly, why you're not in Sweden.

So maybe, I mean, like a broad answer on that, the -- we -- I mean, we had like a big phase of geo expansion, where we went from like essentially 1 to 22 countries between 2012 and essentially 2016. As you can tell from the presentation and the discussion, the focus right now is mostly on product expansion and building that multimodal play. So I would say, we want to demonstrate that at scale in several markets. So I mean, Europe and France is obviously a great playground for us, but also Russia, Ukraine, Brazil. I think once we add that, it would make tons of sense actually to go back. So I don't know if it's like a year or down the road or 2, but it's not -- hopefully, it's not like 5 or 10. Then you have this new playbook of, okay, you can enter a market with carpooling plus buses. And then, yes, you would think of Asia. You would think about, well, the rest of LATAM. You would think about some countries in Africa. After that, specifically on the 2 giants there -- or the 3 giants there, Sweden, China and the U.S., the -- but in terms of big markets, I mean China, we never really looked at China. I mean, I'd love to get some intelligence on that, but it feels pretty hard to create a business like that in China when you looked at how the like of Uber and many other pure C2C or B2C marketplaces have struggled existing in China. To some extent, DiDi is doing or was trying to do more or less what we do. So it feels the competitive landscape in China is a bit scary, right? And the amount of effort and capital we need to put to exist in China, it feels like, today, at our scale, probably an unreasonable risk. It doesn't mean there is no market. I mean, there is probably a market. It's feels pretty hard for us to crack, and I think we have like offer -- I mean, we demonstrated there are lots of other larger markets where we can build BlaBlaCar and the bus marketplace business with a lot less competition. U.S. is different in a sense that the model of carpooling as we do it has never taken off, I mean, for all kind of reasons ranging from cost of motoring is very low. The car insurance framework is complex. And essentially, like if you take a passenger that pays for a journey, even if you don't make a profit, you could have some issue if you have an insurance with you. A lot is protected than in most European countries. And last but not least, there is no good public transport. So it means like finding the right -- or I should say, the level of liquidity you need in the marketplace, so that your pickup and drop-off point are relevant for users because they cannot take like a tube or a tram or anything to get to the meeting point would be enormous. So it's been tried. Company like Lyft actually started as Zimride, which is the BlaBlaCar of the U.S. I've always talked to John and Logan, actually, the founders of Lyft, and again, before that Zimride, and that was the analysis as well, that it was really tricky to crack the liquidity problem in a country like the U.S., where you have no first-mile and last-mile solution without a car because you ask the drivers to become taxi driver, and it's really tricky in that model. So today, I guess, we've been proven right, to some extent, not to go there, I mean, because no one has done it. And I think it's hard to crack still today as a market. So there might be an opportunity in the Northeast area, where I think the density and -- probably, it makes more sense. Maybe we do that one day. I would say right now, it's not top of the list in terms of things to do for the next couple years.

Great. Well, thank you. I think we have lots of other questions, but I think we've taken so much of your time. And thank you for being so generous with it and answer them...

Well, thank you.

Candidly on all these questions. And with the questions that we have an answer, we'll try to follow up ourselves with that. But everyone, thank you so much. And Nico, especially, a big thanks to you.

Thank you. Thanks. Bye.

Bye.

Bye.