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

All right. Sort of a little early, but I think everyone is here, and we can kick off. There we go, 8:30. So reason why waiting for 8:30 because we're going to be joined by some people who are watching us on the screen, so I want it to be timely for them. But welcome, everybody. It's great to see here. It's great to be in New York. And to do this Capital Markets Day in real life. I think the digital ones we did for a couple of years were fun and worked well, but can't beat this. And it's also good to sort of to be back in New York. I think we had a Capital Markets Day here, but it's like in 2005, '06, so it was really time. We have some large shareholders here, and we hope to have more shareholders here. So it's good to be here. It's also good -- you know times are volatile. They're a little uncertain. As you'll see, I think we are very enthusiastic about our portfolio. But I think it's also where we we're trading at this large discount and everything. So it's good to be here. I think when times are uncertain and not only when they are like victory laps to run. And so to come from our desk in Stockholm to be here and talk about the opportunities, but also the issues around the different things in the portfolio. So today, we got an agenda that looks like this. So these are 5 of our largest holdings. And I think a common theme, as you will see, is that it's about moving people or moving things. And then we've got Ali and his guys who run Babylon, who is not at all about moving things, but keep people where they are when they're 6 and so a digital doctor can come to them. But I think the -- since most of the companies are around mobility, the panel that we'll have at the end of the day, will focus around on that. So one of our Board members, Keith Richman, he will run that panel, and I hope you'll stay and join us for that because that will be fun. Some logistics for the day is that we -- you saw there's coffee and stuff outside. So we haven't really planned any coffee breaks. But when we switch speakers or that's a good time to go and get coffee and come in and out. So we'll just keep on going and then try to get as much into these hours that we have together as possible. Yes. Also for the panel, we're going to be joined by a company that's not in our portfolio, a company called JOKR, which is in quick commerce. So Aspa Lekka is the COO of that company and they're friends of friends and in an interesting area. So we thought we'd get sort of perspective also from outside the portfolio. More -- one logistic point is that when we do -- so each of these speakers will have like 20 minutes to 15 to 20 minutes to sort of do a short presentation, and then we'll do a 10-minute sort of Q&A session. When we do that, you've got to speak into the microphone because all the people who are back in home in Sweden and elsewhere can hear what -- your question basically. I think that's all for logistics. There's -- in the afternoon, there's some one-on-ones. I think most of you have booked yourself for one-on-ones for the portfolio companies. If you haven't, my colleague, Dennis here, will sneak you in to an open slot. So that's for intro. A few words about VNV before I hand over to Fredrik to go forward on this. So all of you, you're here because you know us, so this is not going to be a long winding sort of introduction, but in very, very brief terms, what we endeavor to do is to invest in businesses with network effects, who operate in very large markets with very strong founders. That's the -- that's sort of the -- those boxes have to be ticked for us to do the work and then eventually it's sort of to invest. We found ourselves in a few different areas of marketplaces, digital health, but also mobility and you'll meet some of those companies during the day today. It's about an $850 million NAV as of end of June. That moves around from quarter-to-quarter, as you know. Our next quarterly is obviously at the end of September, it's out in mid-October, and I'll come back to that. But when we measured our NAV at the end of June, we came up with a 22% IRR over the past 10 years. 22% IRR is -- we aim higher. We get paid as management. If we go above 20%. So this is just barely making that. But we aim higher and in fact, our largest sort of exits have also been at higher IRRs and decent sort of returns on money invested. So Tinkoff, Avito and Hemnet all sort of our exits that we -- that sort of we did under our exit strategy of selling on the founders sell and sort of return sort of the return profile that we're essentially looking at. The portfolio is actually 70 names right now about 7 names make up 60% of the portfolio, common denominator amongst all these names is that they share this potential of very strong network effects, which gives you very high barriers to entry. And in some cases, winner-takes everything characteristics, which is something that we learned to love when we were shareholders and investors in Avito and then sort of have centered down discipline ourselves to only do that inspired by Avito. And all these companies sort of share that aspect. We are in these different sectors. If you should have divide up our portfolio into the different sectors or macro themes, if you will. You'll see that mobility is a large part of it, and then there's these marketplaces and also digital health and then there is some other stuff going on as well. But hand on the heart, which I typically sort of tell you when I meet is that we are not sort of -- we're not mobility investors, we're not digital health investors. We're not going to do some sort of hardware, which is good for digital health. We are invested in the network effect. So we love these themes. We love these macro trends. There -- we think they're very, very strong and they're very interesting and the way sort of people as you'll hear from Babylon today, the way people get treated by doctors changing profoundly. And that's a very, very interesting space to be in, but we are there because we found an opportunity around network effects not because of this macro trend. Also, sometimes we get sort of -- what's the expression? Remember, because we spend a lot of time in Russia and Eastern Europe, and we're often connected to emerging markets. But in fact, the portfolio that we have today is very much not emerging markets. This is Europe, U.K., Sweden, Israel, et cetera. We do have some investments in emerging markets. Russia and Ukraine now is, of course, we have 3, 4 investments there, they're marked to 0 here, but we have investments in places like Egypt, the Middle East, Africa as well. And -- but they make up a smaller part of the portfolio. I think -- we -- when we talk to U.S. investors, we have a lot to talk about. So we never really get around to talking about our next Avito, our next sort of Babylon our next Vois because all of those are already in the portfolio, I'm pretty certain. In the same way that Voi, Babylon, the companies you're seeing today, they were completely in the shadow of when we had Avito. Avito just overshadowed all them. We never talked about them. And in the same way that, Voi, for example, and these others now, they take up all the space for us to talk about. And we don't talk about all the stuff that's in the shadow of those. But here is a lot of stuff going on that I think will come out of the shadows eventually. And then there are 60 names all in all. And there, we've sort of here divided them up into different sort of capital raising stages. Some are early stuff with 2 examples is NoTraffic. NoTraffic it's a data play on reorganizing how traffic lights are managed. Israeli company, but with very, very clear focus on the U.S. market and revenues, which are growing very quickly here. Hume is an AI play around HR tech and how you recruit people. In the Series A, we've got 2 companies, Collectiv Food, which is a marketplace between the restaurants and food suppliers. And one of our favorites, Alva, Swedish company, which I typically often single out. That's maybe our next sort of big one. This is LinkedIn 2.0 to sort of find people and match people with a job on the basis of a CV is growing increasingly sort of antique and inefficient. And Alva has a product that sort of matched people much, much easier. And from that base, which is a SaaS business really develops into a marketplace where people find jobs and companies find people to work for them. In the slightly sort of more mature Series B, which is also in this sort of large portfolio, we've got Olio, which is a community which is a business based on a community around the macro theme of food waste. So this is a very, very -- it's a growing community. Network effect comes around this community. And then the early monetization is that they -- is that it's around large brands like Tesco, Kentucky Fried Chicken and PretaManchi, who employs this community to handle food waste. Flo is the world's largest period tracker for women and also becoming a digital clinic for women. HungryPanda and the Series C side is the Grubhub of our Chinese communities outside of China, which we own together with -- amongst others, but Kinnevik, our Swedish friends. And Bokadirekt is maybe best sort of classified as our next Hemnet. It comes from our friends who brought -- when it was 2015, '16 brought us the opportunity to invest into Hemnet and it's got similarities. It's a marketplace for booking beauty services. You have the same here in the U.S. The good thing and similar to Hemnet is that this company completely dominates this market in Sweden. And so this is perhaps the -- amongst the later-stage stuff that we have in this portfolio. But I just wanted to give you a sense of that, we all Swedes spend also all of today talking about Voi and Babylon, et cetera. There's a lot of stuff coming up here in the part approval that we don't talk about and those are going to be increasingly important. When we meet for our next CMD and certainly our next CMD, these are going to be the ones that do the presenting. And talked about that, going the wrong way. Yes. And then before I hand over to Fredrik, a few sort of points on our portfolio and how we see our portfolio. So this picture shows you the NAV over the years, quarter-by-quarter for the past 10 years. And the black line is where we -- is our share price. So as you can see here, our discount has just exploded up to nearly 70% where we're trading now compared to our NAV at the end of June. And so we'll report a new one in -- as of the end of September in a few weeks, but it's not too dissimilar. So a few things to say here is that this NAV now is built on -- the way we put together our NAV is that we take the last price if there is a transaction that's large and meaningful. It's not just any small transaction. If that doesn't exist, we move to a model and a model we take input from listed markets. And pretty much all our portfolio is either listed or is valued on the back of the model right now. And so my point is that as you can see also our NAV per share falling of this past period is a reflection of that listed markets have fallen, especially in our space. And so it's not something that's kept high on the back of sort of old stale prices. This is something that's very current and has a lot of input from the listed markets and those listed markets have fallen, as you know. Then the other point to make here is that the -- when we take -- when you buy a stock on the listed market, it's, of course, it's just an ordinary share. And when you invest in our world, you typically invest into preferred shares. Preferred shares come with debt characteristics on the downside and full equity characteristics on the upside. So those instruments, as you can sense, of course, carry a different sort of -- they come at a premium to just an ordinary shares, which has full downside or full upside. Some of our friends in the public space that sort of run NAVs like we do, they actually put a premium, they take the price from the listed markets and they put a premium on that because they own preferred shares and those come at a premium. We don't. We do it the other way around. We take the inputs from the listed markets. We apply that price to a preferred share. And then we take a 10% to 30% discount. So my point is that we feel good about this NAV. And in fact, we feel that our return profile of investing for 30%, 40% will happen from where we're trading, where our NAV is marked. So there's clearly something that's -- something odd going on here because we're trading at this enormous discount to the NAV. And one -- I mean -- and this is more valuing this and the reasons why behind this is probably more art than science. And -- but I think we'll all agree on that it comes down a lot these days to liquidity. Is there enough liquidity in our portfolio to sort of fund the companies we have et cetera? And I think one worry around that is that we also have debt at VNV Global. And I'd like to touch a little bit upon that. Sorry, I'm going the wrong way all the time. So we have -- so we have about $150 million of debt outstanding, which I think doesn't match -- I mean, compare that to an NAV of $850 million, and that's, again, that's an NAV, which takes -- is based on inputs from the listed world and with a discount rather than a premium despite it being preferred shares. So if you compare also that debt to our cash position, this is -- at the end of June, our pro forma cash -- pro forma, we say because we sold some assets just after that. So if you add that cash to the cash [indiscernible] we had end of June, we had about $170 million. That figure moves around a bit because we are investing and there's some small exits here and there. But still on a net debt level, it's -- we're in an okay position. And I feel maybe I don't -- maybe this doesn't get across enough because I can sense that you have people looking at our market cap, it's $300 million, but then they see that $150 million worth of debt. And how does this sort of hang together. But so if you dig a little bit deeper, I think this sort of situation is -- I mean, you can sort of sense that this is not over levered. And there is liquidity to handle actually both the debts. The debt, I should also say, matures in 2025 and runs with a 5% fixed coupon in Swedish crowns. So that's good. The $170 million, of course, there's some of that we will use to invest into the companies that we have that need money. And that -- and that we've been very clear about that. We've estimated that to be about $40 million. We wrote about that in our the last quarterly report. And so -- but even if you substract $40 million from that, there is still a good coverage for that debt, especially since it's not due for another couple of years. And investing that money into the portfolio, leaves the portfolio, which we are very enthusiastic about and in fact, we feel that for many of our companies, we're on the cusp of moving from -- into profitability. And if you allow yourself to look out a few years, we can't go into the models of our different companies. I mean the public ones like SWVL and Babylon, you have an idea because those companies will tell you. But all the others, like Voi, et cetera, they're private. They don't share how 2024 or '25 looks like for them. We know but we can't talk about each individual name. But -- so what we've done as an attempt to sort of get you a sense of our portfolio at large is that we've aggregated the portfolio and how we see the aggregated portfolio move from loss-making to profitability. I like to show you a couple of very simple slides, so bear with me. But in 2025, if you take the way we see our portfolio in 2025 and you compare that to our NAV and you take our base case, we're trading at a P/E of 18. If we get really conservative, that goes up to 26. Now I've been brought up in a world a long time ago now where P/E 5 was expensive. So from the old pair, this -- okay, this is good. This is earnings, but it still looks a little high. But if you factor in that in the years after 2025, we see this portfolio generating 65% earnings growth. So if you look in another couple of years out into 2027, you get to sort of pretty attractive P/E ratios, P/E ratios here. And then, of course, if you look at this and you compare it to our market cap, in our bare case, we're trading at a P/E of 8. If you look out another couple of years, Well, then you're down to P/E ratios where even the old pair would have thought it interesting. So I just thought that was good to leave you with as you will sort of meet these -- our portfolio companies during the afternoon -- or during the morning and the afternoon. And I think you'll get a sense of that they're on this sort of journey to become profitable in the not-too-distant future. That was my intro. For time, we're fairly good. So what I think we'll do is we will get ready for the next speaker. Dennis says that I should open up for Q&A. If there's -- sorry, right, right, right -- sorry. This -- I forgot about this, the logistics, all of you who are watching us in Stockholm and streaming. You can also post questions to us by punching them into -- what? The -- there's a line for questions, that'll be clear. So please use that. Those questions will be picked up on my colleague, Dennis. And in the Q&As, we will sort of -- we'll endeavor to answer those questions, some from the room and some from the Internet. Okay. Good. I think we'll get ready for Fredrik. Fredrik's here. Good. So, Fredrik is the founder of Voi. Well, I think it's -- we can say that we were very, very early investors into Voi, I guess, from pretty much day 0. And most -- many of you have perhaps met Fredrik before, but here it is again. All right. So the way this works is that you -- that is for [indiscernible].

I'll try it. And the mic -- so that I can use. Can you hear me? Probably -- I'll probably do this one. First of all, thank you for having me, Per. Thank you for having me VNV. I think I'll use this one [indiscernible]. Yes. So thank you for having me. I think it's my third or fourth CMD, second in person. The last one in person was in London, I think, in 2019 at the Babylon's office, if I remember it correctly. And as Per said, VNV has been an investor in Voi since day 1. And I know Per and VNV through my time at Avito in Russia back in the day. So it's close to 10 years from now. Or, yes, 7, 8 years back. Yes, I'm the founder of Voi Technology, and I am also the CEO founded the company together with 3 other cofounders. Some of you might have heard me talking at the CMD or other presentations. But today, I will talk a bit about what we have done over the last year where we're going. And as Per talked about as well, our recalibration from growth towards profitability. Let's kick it off. So I think, yes, the 3 most important things you have to remember about Voi and what you should take with you if it's only 3 things. It's one, that we've been one of the fastest-growing mobility companies in the world over the last couple of years. Two, yes, Voi is changing society for the better since day 1 we founded a company with this ambition of decarbonizing, electrifying urban transportation and continues to be core in our DNA core in our vision and the biggest reason why most of our employees are owning the company. Thirdly here, we have grown a lot, as I talked about over the last year, 1.5 years. We have recalibrated the company more towards profitability. Since day 1, we have had a heavy focus on unit economics, operational excellence, cost [indiscernible] or cost excellence, but has also -- have also grown really, really fast. So since 1 year, 1.5 years back, we is much, much more on profitability, and we're starting to see the benefits of fruit from that now. And as I said, yes, the vision for Voi and why I founded this company together with my co-founders, was really to help cities and help people living in cities to build cities made for living free from noise and pollution as we call it. And what is that about? It's about moving cities from the right-hand side there. This is a photo of Marseille, France's second biggest city. Heavy dependent on heavy traffic cars, more than 50% of the city space go to parking and other space for cars and heavy traffic to the left-hand side there. So lighter mobility, electric mobility, connected with public transportation, yes, interconnected with other forms of sustainable transportation. We have come some way now since we founded the company over the last 4 or 5 years, but let's -- as I used to say, as we see it, we're in minute 4, minute 5 in a 90-minute football game. So we're just warming up and getting started. But we're super happy to starting to see this change actually for real in many European cities, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, all are moving fast now from heavy traffic to lighter traffic. And on Voi for those of you who don't know it, so we started with shared electric scooters. So you download our app, you find the vehicles on a map. You are locked in with your phone, you ride away, you park them and then you leave the vehicle there. Since then, we have expanded into shared e-bikes as well in quite a few of our cities also rolled out refurbishment and resell program where we refurbished the vehicles after a couple of years and then resell them to give them a second life. Since we started 4 years ago, we have done more than 120 million rides all over Europe. 11 countries, mainly Western and Southern Europe, as you see, and we're having a #1 position in Europe in these markets. We have grown quickly. As I said, if you look at the left-hand side here, we came to market in 2018 in August 2018, where we did SEK 6 million, so divided by 10 approximately, and you get euros more now with dollars. 2018, SEK 6 million 2021. So last year, we did SEK 927 million, so around EUR 93 million. We have improved the margins every year since we started. From 2020 to 2021, we improved it from a negative 78% EBITDA margin to negative 43%, and we continue to improve it this year. Have added on a large user base over the last couple of years. If you look at 2021, on average, we have a bit above 700,000 users a month. When we look at the last month now in 2022, it's more than 1 million. as we continue to add on a lot of users. And what's been very, very encouraging to see is that initially, we saw that our main user group was men from the age of 18 to 35 as the product has matured, become more safe, sustainable, reliable and so on, we see that we get more and more older users and also more and more female users. On the right-hand side in our business, it's important also not only to win the consumers but also the cities. And that's something we have been focused on a lot since day 1. And when we look at the tendered market share, so it's about winning contracts with site. So how many -- yes, how many contracts with cities have we won? We see that -- yes, we are the leader in Europe with us at 30% of the tendered market share, but the #2 is close to 20%. We said from day 1 that we want to build this business together with cities and together with the communities we are operating in, and that has really paid off now over the last couple of years. So what we're looking at here is really a very, very quickly growing market. We see very strong tailwind now from -- for the micromobility market as cities are moving more and more to sustainable transportation they need to hit their climate plans for 2025, 2030. And in this market, we are the leader in Europe, and Europe is the most valuable market in the world as we see it today for micromobility. Infrastructure is more adapted a consumer mindset is more progressive and politicians are more eager to do this change compare, for example, U.S. cities and consumers and politicians. We think we understand the users and the cities really, really well now. And I think we've built, yes, quite strong products and continue to invest a lot in product and technology to build for the customers in the cities. We are starting to have this big user base now of users who are using the service more and more, and are improving unit economics every month, every year moving into profitability now over the next couple of years. So when we look at the market, we see a few things that really sticks out that kind of pushes this market forward. We see that consumers are becoming more and more conscious in the mobility behavior. We see the cities, as I talked about, are moving actively and really pushing forward with their plans to move to more sustainable, more sustainable mobility. We see that the technology when it comes to batteries, when it comes to IoT technology and other things are getting mature and cheap. And yes, we see this continued trend of urbanization. If you look at the trip distribution all over the world out there, you see that 60% of all trips are shorter than 8 kilometers. That's really the sweet spot for micro mobility. That's also a driver when you look at the right-hand side here to -- that e-scooters, since they were launched in -- yes, around 2018, we were the first company in Europe hit the 100 million trips faster than ride-hailing, faster than car sharing and faster than shared bikes. So the adoption over the last couple of years has been incredible. Yes, in this market in Europe, we are the leader. When you look at the 15 key cities or the biggest cities for charging scooters and new bikes currently in Europe. We're #1 in 10 of them. And if you look at the right-hand side here, if you kind of zoom out and aggregate market share in all the markets we're active. So Western and Southern Europe. We have around 23% market share. So clearly either in the Nordics and the U.K., #2 in Belgium, Germany and Spain. And then we have a few nascent markets in Switzerland, France and Italy, where we're catching up now to get to the #1 and #2 position. Also when we're looking at the market, we see that the market when we came live in 2018 was very unregulated. So there were no rules really around this. Over the years, we've seen more regulations coming into the market. So we've been very supportive of this. We have focused a lot on building products and processes for cities as well and see that in this world where cities are moving from unregulated markets to more regulated markets where we need a contract to that to play and compete in that market we have been the leading one. We have had a win rate in, yes, city contract or city competitions on 65%, so 141 of these competitions, and we have a market share idea of 28%, and we think this one is extremely important going forward as we see this trend continue. It's coming to Sweden, it's coming to Germany, it's coming to Finland and some of the other key markets. Yes, over the last couple of years now, we have learned a lot about the users and learned a lot about the cities. And what's interesting in this business, which makes it complex, which makes -- which creates defensibility and moats around it, is that we have 2 very clear stakeholders. We have the users, the customers, on the left-hand side, who care about availability, they care about quality, they care about price and sustainability. On the other -- on the other side, we have the cities that we're also working with. They care more about safety. They care about parking. They also care about sustainability and they care about working with trusted partners. So companies that they can trust for the long term. And how we are thinking about building the businesses that we try to understand these stakeholders very, very thoroughly and then build amazing products for them, hardware, software, connectivity products and starting with the hardware -- yes, starting with the hardware. Most of you might have seen, yes, the early generation is good is that we and others put out on the street early on. It was more consumer-grade products. Over the last couple of years, we have invested a lot in product development to build more commercial-grade products that are really built for purpose built for use for what we are using them for. The lifetime has increased from, say, half a year on the first models to 5, 6 years on the latest models, the robustness, resilience on the vehicles is something completely different today. As we are in mobility, safety is key, and we tend to think of ourselves as kind of the Volvo micromobility, so a heavy, heavy focus on safety. And here are just some examples of things we have done on the both hardware side and software side over the last couple of years to really improve the safety, both -- kind of the actual safety of the service and also the proceed safety. So it's everything from helmet selfies, you as a user get them and get discounts and credits if you take a selfie with a helmet, safety scoring in the app, drunk driving reaction tests on Friday and Saturday nights, we run this drunk-driving ration test where you as a user before you ride, have to do a drunk-driving test. We have -- we have built special tires, steering columns and lately also trying out computer vision to better detect and prevent pavement riding. On the software side, we have built everything in-house is day 1. There is a lot more than this, but some of the key things is, of course, the app, which is everything about creating the seamless user experience but also educating and, to some extent, using both a carrot and a stick to incentivize good user behavior, the IoT side, which is really the brain of the vehicle. So that's where we have the GPS, where we have full control of the vehicles where -- yes, that we've also built in-house. And then on the right-hand side here, the in-house fleet management tool, which is really a command and control center for all our operations out there, more than 100,000 vehicles that we have full control over to both do things such as fleet optimization, so demand prediction and make sure we have supply there to having just full control and full overview of all our more than 100,000 vehicles. On the operations side, we have also full control. So we believe in the circular operational model where we control everything from sourcing where we source the vehicle and IoTs both from Europe and Southeast Asia to fleet management, which is all the operations out on the street, where we either do it ourselves with our employees or logistics partners depending on the market. Fleet maintenance. So it's basically our warehouse operations. So we're running the operation centers and warehouses in all other countries we're operating, where we are running it fully in-house -- have built -- special built software and processes and so on to really optimize for efficiency. And then the last step here is the fleet resell. But we're after a couple of years where we see that the vehicles aren't really competitive out on the site, we refurbish and resell the vehicles. So the user base has grown a lot. In 2019, we did 15 million rides. In 2021, we did 64 million rides, so 4x over those 2 years. And what we're also seeing, which is very encouraging is that we see that our users ride more and more. If you look at the 2020 versus 2021 number there, you see the met the blue one. You see that our users took more rides, the users who became users in 2021 took more rides in -- used to became users in 2020, took more rides in 2021 than what they did in 2020 and we see that continue. And looking at the financial profile, we talked about the revenue side already. So grew to around 900 -- yes, SEK 927 million in 2021, continue to grow in 2022. When we look at the profitability side, what we call vehicle free cash flow, which is revenues minus payment fees, charging and logistics and repair costs. We sort of growing from SEK 102 million to SEK 282 million from 2020 to 2021. And when we look at the EBITDA margin, we saw that improving from 78 -- yes, negative 78% to 43%, and we continue to see that improving this year. So now Yes. The focus for us, yes, over the next years is really to bring this company to profitability. We will continue to go deep in cities and countries where we are rather than expanding all over. We will focus on both increasing the increasing the customer base, but mainly increasing ridership and increasing retention in our relatively big user base that we have out in the market today. We see consolidation coming up, and we will be opportunistic if we see the right opportunities there. And then eventually also -- what we are seeing is that the opportunity in micromobility, not only micromobility for people and shared micromobility, but broader micromobility, both for people, think about shared micromobility, I think D2C subscriptions, but also for things. I think micromobility for last mile delivery for years and so on. That opportunity is massive, and we want to tap into that opportunity now over the next couple of years yes, from this now quite big base, sustainable base, and we really catch that -- catch up demand and opportunity in Europe. So 3 things to take with you. One, we continue to grow very fast. Two, heavy, heavy focus on broader ESG kind of net positive and good in the societies we are acting. And the third one with scale and with improved products and the efficiency across the company that we're moving into profitability as well now over the next couple of years. With that said, thank you.

Thanks So now we go to Q&A for way ahead of schedule on a lot of time. So I think Dennis has one to keep us on.

Thank you. So as you said, you've initiated a cost-cutting initiative better this year. One, could you tell us a bit more about that? What you're targeting, how far that will get you. But then also, what about the revenue growth that you expect in the years to come despite doing this comeback now?

Yes. So first on the cost cutting or cost reduction question. So earlier this year in May, June, we announced that we a cost reduction program with the goal was and is to take down our overhead cost base with 25% on a run rate basis versus where we were in May, June towards December. And we're tracking well towards that. And so I feel confident that we will hit that goal. And your second question was around yes, where the growth will come from. And yes, to me, it's quite easy. We see that only in Europe, we believe there are 400, 450 attractive cities for our type of services. Currently, we are live in 100 of those. So there is a massive white space and most of these markets are really open yet due to regulatory reasons or other reasons, and we expect them to open up over the next couple of years, similar to what we have seen in many of the markets where we are today that wanted to open, let's say, 2, 3, 4 years ago. And so that's one thing. There are a lot of cities out there. And two, there is a massive opportunity also to grow, to go deeper in the markets we are both with our core business lines. So the shared e-scooters and the shared e-bikes. But also as I mentioned, some of the other business lines that we will look at over the foreseeable future.

Thank you for the presentation. Two questions, one which you can ignore and one which maybe you could answer. The one that I would like you to answer is just to drill a little bit deeper on the recalibration from growth to profitability and maybe define what you consider to be the right profitability metric? And then the question you could ignore is to explain to us vehicle free cash flow because I didn't quite understand that metric? Thank you.

Okay. Let's start with the first one. So profitability and what's the right metric to look at. And yes, the right metric to look at is, of course, net income eventually. What -- I mean, how -- we have been thinking about it since day 1 was the first, we need to figure out unit economics, so unit profitability, which we have done over the last couple of years then for us it's about city profitability. So kind of fully know that site profitability on an EBIT level, then country profitability than regional profitability and then that needs to cover for the overhead cost base we're running. So yes, it's really EBIT. Does that answer -- the answer to your question?

No. Okay. I guess my apology that would be, when do you expect a city to become -- to hit your city profitability metric?

Okay. Yes. Already last year, we had 4 countries that were fully loaded profitable on an EBIT level. And yes, we even better profitability margin levels this year compared to last year. And so we expect several countries and regions this year as well to be EBIT profitable.

Stefan Ward, Pareto Securities. I have a question regarding consumer behavior. Have you seen any sort of changes? I mean if we're going into a weaker economic climate as the consumer reacted or changed their sort of spending patterns on communication. Have you seen any sort of signs of that so far?

Not that we not that we can specifically pinpoint use the service and so on. We continue to see strong yes, strong usage going into the last couple of months and now going into fall as well. So we haven't really seen that at least yet. What we have seen and heard anecdotally though, is that yes, there is there's some kind of downstream move from taxi, Uber, both ride-hailing, which is by default, more expensive per kilometer, especially if you're 1 or 2 riders compared to micromobility.

One question that has come through the broadcast from several [indiscernible]. Is a bit around the competitive landscape and how you see that evolving for micromobility in the years to come? And I guess, more specifically, M&A, do you see that happening? And what type of performance with M&A?

Good question. No, I think -- I mean, it would be good for the market with some consolidation. I think in Europe, we see -- a couple of years ago, we saw probably 20 contenders for [indiscernible] in Europe. Now we're down to 4 or 5, something like that. We see a long tail of competitors, especially on a local and regional level in some markets. So we definitely expect some more consolidation, especially when our capital is becoming more tight than 1 to 3 years ago.

A couple of questions. So in terms of your funding, you talked about reaching profitability as a group in 2 to 3 years. Are you funded through to that period? Or do you need to raise more capital from what you see in terms of your growth opportunities at the moment?

So we raised capital at end of last year, in December last year. We -- one of the reasons or a big reason why we did the cost reduction early this year was to have a good run, will not be dependent on external capital. I think to really hit the intervision and the ambitious plan, we would raise capital again for sure. But we also want to be in control of our own destiny and not have to raise capital now over the foreseeable future as the markets that were shaking.

On another topic. Have you seen any European cities think again about micromobility, particularly with regards to scooters? I was reading the other day, a small city in the U.K. is going to terminate term e-scooters because of safety of people riding on sidewalks and whatnot, getting pedestrians hurt? Are you seeing any -- is that isolated? Or are you seeing any other cities rethink their adoption?

Which area was it?

Canterbury.

Canterbury.

Not one of your cities, but other operator -- Yes, yes. So I think small city just made me think about, is there a trend we need to watch carefully from a safety aspect.

I would say it's a trend we have watched very, very carefully since day 1. We -- I mean, one of the biggest risks for the business as we saw at [indiscernible], as this industry didn't really exist like shared e-scooters and shared e-bikes at scale didn't really exist. Will this be banned, would this be welcomed and so on. I think what we've learned now over the last couple of years is that cities -- yes, as long as we can control the things I mentioned there that cities care about, safety, parking, cluttering, good operational, sustainability and so on. So it is a very pro micromobility and see as a tool media to reach their climate plans as an important part in the mobility portfolio.

So they're prepared to tolerate some. I mean, obviously, there are accidents with all types of vehicles, but they're prepared to tolerate that as they pursue those larger aims is what you've seen?

Yes, that's what we're seeing when we look at the pan-European level and aggregators.

You have a strong market share in the U.K., but you guys didn't went in the London market. My question is, what did you learn from this experience? And how do you insurers that in future, large market tenders, you are in a stronger position. And also looking out towards the rest of this year and into 2023, what large markets in Europe would be up for tender and where do you expect to participate?

That's a good question. So for context there. So we have approximately 60% or something like that of the U.K. market. We don't have London currently . London is complicated and it's built up by 30 boroughs. It's difficult to get these boroughs to coordinate and so on. And unfortunately, around 2 years ago, we didn't win that contract license with London. We learned a lot from that one and really refined our offering when it comes to hyper-localizing debt service and the solution, they have to these bigger cities to these important cities. And since then, I would say we've had a very good wind peak so far this year, and we're one of the biggest ones. The most important one was Oslo in Norway, which a bit surprisingly is one of the world's best markets for micromobility. So as always, you win some, you lose some, but the most important thing in the longevity we did to kind of do a retro and learn as quickly as possible and then move on and implement that in the next bids, which I think we have done. When it comes to other large cities that are coming up now, we have Madrid, we have Rome we potentially have Stockholm, Milan and quite a few other really, really big European cities. So it's going to be an exciting next 6, 12 months.

George [indiscernible]. So 2 questions. The first will be on the market in Stockholm. How has that changed or the new limitations on parking and so on. And also, do you think that Stockholm is a good example of what other cities will move towards in terms of regulation, both the number of licenses handed out in terms of parking and in terms of the cap on the number of scooters you can put up on streets?

Thank you. So a bit Stockholm specific and the context here for Stockholm. So Stockholm went from being a completely free and regulated market to implementing some soft mandatory parkings are this year in September. And we also a cap of the number of vehicles per operator. At the same time, we didn't do competition, it didn't do a bit, but you split the numbers else evenly. And that's yes, that's not the way we're seeing bigger markets going. If you take Oslo, if you take Paris, if you take Rome, if you take Sevilla and Marseille and so on, and what we rather see there and what we are really encouraging as well is pick 1 to 3 players per city, dynamic caps on the number of vehicles. So as demand goes up, you should be able to increase the number of vehicles to kind of meet the demand and provide a good service. So that's really the path that we're seeing most of the bigger cities taking and where we see Stockholm going as well. It has been a bit slow and have some internal issues between national and municipal politicians to sort it out.

You touch on consolidation and competitive dynamics before, but can you talk specifically about how you differentiate from people like Bird and other companies?

Yes, of course. You mean Bird specifically or just overall?

Specifically.

Bird specifically, yes, I think we are much more efficient. We're winning more city licenses, and we're getting more rides than them on a city basis. That's the short answer. And I think what it goes back to is really what I showed here before. So if you understand the customers in the cities really well and you have an organization that's fully, fully focused on building world-class solutions for them. And then this is an execution and product market, which is there -- the market is growing, demand is out there. We need to execute better than your competitors in all these different verticals and different fields of the business, and that compounds up to a huge advantage. And I won't compare ourselves to Bird now we see that we have been significantly more efficient on capital for winning most of the city licenses I talked about and on a city-by-city basis, we're typically beating the more utilization and market share.

So last question, I guess, from the broadcast. The question more specific around hardware. And if you've had any issues with supply chains but maybe if we can brought on the question, you can talk about distinction between hardware and software in this industry and how you see Voi is positioned there?

So the short answer there is that over time, we see most hardware being commoditized. So it's very easy to copy. And copy and steal and paste hardware. So if we come up with something new on the hardware side, we know that in 6 or 9 months, a competitor or a factory will have copied this. On the software side, that's much, much more difficult to copy. So how we think about it is that we build this very scalable software and data platform upon we can add different modes of hardware. It could be schools, it could be -- it could be e-bikes connected with our IoT and it's really on the software and data side to build the competitive modes and the kind of the features and the secret sauce that's very difficult to copy. The hardware side will be commoditized over time is what we think.

One last question. Is the cost of electricity relevant? Is that a significant part of your cost of goods? Do you need to pass through these recent spikes?

Also a great question. And yes, it has been an insignificant part of yes, the cost of running the business is less than 1% of our costs and operational costs has been electric. It will, of course, be slightly higher now with increasing energy prices, but still not a significant part of the operation cost.

And this is the last question, promise. Would you consider going into services sooner, so that would be rentals or bid management or any other types of services rather than just around the and the long-term rent that you're doing today?

And what other type of [indiscernible].

For instance, longer-term rentals to -- for delivery companies, as you mentioned, it could be management for other operators broader in the mobility stack, but we're by would be the service provider and not have the actual scooters.

Yes, great question. I think as I mentioned during the presentation as well, we believe the opportunity in micromobility is massive, but we're also big believers in focus. So we're really doubling down and focusing on the core now for the remaining part of 2022 and 2023, and then we'll see where we are towards the end of 2023.

Thank you, Fredrik very much, and thanks for all the questions. We will now switch speakers and listen to Mustafa or Youssef or both, maybe who will talk about SWVL. And in this switch, if you want to grab a coffee, you can, but be quick because you don't want to miss this guy.

Perfect. Thank you so much for taking the time and being here really, really appreciated. So I'm Youssef, CFO SWVL. So great to have you here. So starting with just quick intro on SWVL, right. Sorry, I'm getting this working. So obviously, you've got car or [indiscernible] ride-hailing companies Uber, [indiscernible] OLA, Lyft et cetera. Around world making kind of mobility more reliable, more convenient. But making it so predominantly to the 1% of the population or can I share for right heading, right, or any form of private transport for that matter, right, whether it's owning your own car, whether it's taking a cab or ride-hailing. Especially emerging markets, right, if you're a doctor engineer making on average $100 a month if you need to spend $20 every day to go to work and come back, it's just simply unaffordable for the vast majority of the people. Similarly, on the supply side, you've got kind of ride-hailing companies solving the problem with only the 4 seater cars, freelance economy workers, guys will have cars looking to make a bit of extra income, but it doesn't solve the problem for the very large number of commercial drivers, right? All the bus companies and individual drivers who own mini vans, mini buses, 7 seaters, 9 seaters, 15 seaters big buses, we basically are not working on it and also suffered from a great underutilization of vehicle. You want a school bus. You take the kids pick them back at the end of the day, no other work during the day, no work in the week and to work in the summer. You work with a corporate to bring increase and take them back to work with a tour agency will accord in touristic cities. So basically, the idea is kind of what's creating kind of an Uber-like platform completely asset-light marketplace, but instead of having it basically for 4-seater cars for economy workers have engaged for high capacity vehicles. So for mini buses, mini vans and buses full commercial drivers work full time on these vehicles. And by doing that, we're basically able to offer the same experience. So our idea is, [indiscernible] conditions you can book it by the app, you can pay by cash cards, all the drivers are precleared et cetera, et cetera, but you basically end up paying 80% less than Uber, right? So basically the same 30-kilometer or 25 kilometers ride on Uber in emerging market that will cost $10 or does that cost $2 and sort of lines you can go to work and come back every day, even if you live 20, 30 km away $4 a day and hence, making it kind of very affordable for the vast majority of people. And then on the other hand, for basically for commercial drivers, allowing them to cater for all forms of the math on the same vehicle. That same vehicle can do 7 a.m. University, 3 to 9 pm corporate train at 12:00 p.m. shift for a call center and 5 p.m. going from one city to another. And hence, the vehicle is constantly utilized, makes much higher earnings and people are kind of paying significant fees. So basically, we tried to [indiscernible] 3 things, right? One is accessibility. So by making it 80% cheaper by effectively pooling people together. We're having the vast majority of people can afford it. In emerging markets, people are kind of generally kind of sandwiched in between private transit which are affordable and the public bus, which is often broken. There's a lot of miss schedule, et cetera, because obviously, governments and increasingly so in the times we live governments are very under budget, under constrained, et cetera, and hence, we're not able to invest in sufficient capacity, right? A place like Cairo capital of Egypt where we started. It's a city of 30 million people served by 3,000 public buses. It's one bus per 1,000 people. So you can imagine the level of congestion, the level of harassment that results in, et cetera. So by being able to have the private affordable service, we're able to make it access for everyone. Second is the liability. So what we do is 7 days in advance. We give people a commitment that they will be picked up from a specific location at a specific time and dropped off in a specific location at specific time. And that's basically where the [indiscernible] technology is right, is in that kind of demand estimation routing and planning to be able to offer people this liability, which otherwise predominant and emerging markets, people don't have. And lots of efficiency, right? We're able to run [indiscernible] and that 90% utilization average, which means on average, we're able to consistently pool 13, 14 people together, and that's where probably the end economics come from, right? In sort of every person paying $10 on a car being alone. You have 15 people think $2 each, they're paying 80% less, but the vehicle is making $26. So the vehicle is making more than 2.5x what the other vehicle is making on the same trip, and that's what allows the drivers to have higher economics and allows us to have higher margins as well. So I promise I'll get this right before the end of the presentation, which 1 has mentioned. So we started in Cairo 5 years ago. We're now the largest asset-light mass transit operator in the world. And so we moved 300,000 people every day and that translates into 120 million people and kind of annually kind of 120 million bookings annually coming on sub coming from 3 million direct-to-consumer customers as well as 400 enterprise customers, universities, airlines, factories, corporate, schools, et cetera, we basically kind of use our platform to move people around. These 100 million bookings translating to around $130 million kind of annual top line. We operate across kind of 20 countries, 10 countries where we have our own asset-light marketplace. We actually have supply, which is available for booking on the SWVL and these are predominantly across emerging markets and then 10 countries where we only license the software to basically other bus companies to governments to kind of make their own operations more demand responsive and more efficient, and that's kind of predominantly in developed countries. In terms of kind of the key focus for us, obviously, one is on the tech side. So basically, we've kind of -- in addition to being the largest in that space globally. We're basically the only player who has kind of an end-to-end routing for mass transit. So basically, we do fixed routing, that's the classic kind of government type system where basically there are fixed stops and fixed starts. And what we do it is just we basically optimize these. So rather than have the same fixed route being fixed for years and not changing. This fixed route can basically be different in the summer committing the winter school day, week, et cetera. So you still don't need an app to book. You can just have a station go there, but the stations themselves can be more optimized and become closer to. Second is the flexible dynamic [indiscernible], which is basically the virtual station model, which we use on our own kind of marketplace where basically, we have thousands of virtual stations across the city, every corner, every place, whether it's say for a vehicle to stop is a virtual station. And then only if a person basically is trying to book that, that virtuous station gets activated. And by doing that rather than the cost stopping basis where maybe there's no one at place which is far away depending on who are the actually 13 people who are going to be on that specific ride where they live, the vehicle will make a stop in the specific spots. And then the last is a completely on-demand, you can think of it as an Uber pool. But on a minivan again to make it basically even cheaper than what an Uber pool looks like. So that's kind of just summary of all of that. So in terms of kind of where we are today, so basically on a kind of on a quarterly basis, and that's kind of the numbers from our last quarter make around $30 million of top line quarterly that's coming to us from basically us making 24 million seats available on our marketplace, being able to get almost a 90% utilization of that with 23 million bookings were basically already the contribution margin positive across the entire all every country globally with almost at kind of EBITDA positive now across pretty much all the countries of operations. So for us, basically, what's left is recovering the central R&D and the central kind of CapEx that we spend just on technology makes the technology CapEx to be able to get to kind of full free cash flow generation. Just to give you a perspective on kind of our growth, we've been growing kind of an average between 3 and 4x year-on-year kind of in the last few quarters, and we basically stand at around 3x or kind of pre-COVID peak as well in terms of size. This is fit into around 70% of it is on the enterprise segment, which is basically want to find your contracts with institutions and then 30% of it is direct-to-consumer, again purchase subscription in [indiscernible]. This is kind of, again, a similar trend on the number of bookings that we make. But again, the growth is slightly higher. This year, we would had 25% kind of blended currency devaluations across the countries in which we operate. Obviously, we've been growing faster in terms of underlying bookings than in terms of the dollar revenue, just on a constant currency basis, the growth will become even much higher than the 3x. Again, in terms of capacity, we're obviously kind of growing our bookings higher capacity. So we continue to kind of improve utilization over time. This is our enterprise business. We have basically 370 unique customers. So this kind of range from everything from government so that [indiscernible] authority, the airport and [indiscernible], et cetera, to kind of bus companies, private bus companies, [indiscernible], HP and in Brazil to kind of get the biggest corporates have white collars. We have Amazon [indiscernible], Nestle, Unilever, et cetera. Some of the largest kind of blue collars like each of the biggest kind of factories in the country, Eastern tobacco and [indiscernible], et cetera, universities, schools, et cetera, and basically you can kind of see looking to 25% revenue retention on this. So basically, the way this works is they contract with us and then order [indiscernible] and students take in a subscription or a pass to basically be able to use the SWVL vehicles on the SWVL marketplace whether in dedicated tips just for that client or coming the trips between different clients or open loop kind of trips where basically just the employee has subscription, they can use any route that's available on the direct consumer path. We talked about -- we talk about profitability, so we can kind of skip a basically just kind of very quickly what you can see here is basically the ability to continue to grow kind of markets kind of double-digit month-on-month, while being able to improve profitability. And that's a function of calendar level of scale or now able to achieve. Just to give you that kind of a snapshot of how our presence looks like. So basically, organic you have expanded across -- but East Africa and South Asia. And then [indiscernible], we have consolidated 5 other players in the market, which you can see in the bottom across Germany, Spain, Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, we've done share swaps with the largest 5 players they have in the last few months, basically also getting that space globally becoming the largest in it and basically kind of the only player that's profiled. We took back of a snapshot of some of our kind of global clients, whether on the corporate side or all on the government side. This is just to give you a snapshot of kind of the type of post-merger integration we're able to do in the last few months on these 5 acquisitions, basically on all of the business we acquired, kind of top line is now kind of more than 2x and et cetera, because of being able to kind of integrate our technology and then basically and using their commercial presence and is 1 being able to significantly improve profitability of the back of the optimization we're able to bring on the routing side, which is our core technology. Just some snapshots late, et cetera. So the last G7 in Germany, the kind of the media shorter cars of 500 people were basically powered by SWVL in the back end. And then we continue to obviously engage with governments go with our basic using the super technology to power the operations. In the meantime, we continue both our organic expansions. Some of them are just pure SaaS expansions like in Kuwait, where we don't have any team on the cloud. We're able to just participate in global tenders kind of by government companies are being able to win contracts and hence, we're able to expand in a very high margin on a no presence for the donor cost as well as continuing kind of our M&A share swap-based program. That's a quick snapshot. I'll love to answer any questions you have.

Thank you, Youssef. Maybe to start a similar question to Pravin. You also announced cost optimization program back in my -- so maybe you could walk us through a little bit on that route where you are on that ambition hitting profitability earlier in 2023.

Definitely. So I think when we'll start in consumer business, right? That's direct consumer business when it started, it was really kind of an Uber for buses, right? And obviously, that requires a certain level of spend on customer acquisition on building scale, you guys know the story, kind of building our network effects and getting the level of utilization where you're basically able to kind of to turn profitable. Obviously, kind of -- we don't have the luxury of kind of taking 14 years to do it, right? So obviously, we need to do it within we needed to do it within 4 years from starting the site operation. Obviously, now we need to do it within kind of 9 months of where we stand today. And hence, what we're focusing more and more is the enterprise side of the business, right? We're basically saying the ultimate use case is the same. I want to move the person and they want them to be able to work and go to school reliably, efficiently and safely, but instead of basically targeting them directly targeting digitally, spending on customer acquisitions on promo codes will just target the institutions where they work and go to school, right? So we'll target there. The university, the pole corporate. We'll go and sign the footprint upside the count [indiscernible] and then let the employee have a subscription of the back of the book. And what that means is -- the customer acquisition posted really much more on the sales side, which is commission-driven, where it's basically much more absorbable vis-a-vis the digital and the promos and all of that. And it also kind of means that obviously, from a payment perspective, we have more attractive payment terms and a more attractive margins, et cetera, cetera. Obviously, it doesn't give you the same exponential growth that the consumer gives you, which is kind of on the consumer business, obviously, only as good as your technology and marketing, whereas on the enterprise side, there is actually a certain kind of sales cycle that we need to go through. So that's a business that typically grows 2 to 3x year-on-year as opposed to consumer, which goes 4 to 5x year on year. But obviously, it grows kind of very profitable and allow you to price these contracts and that cost us as. So basically what we've done at the end of May, given the overall capital environment is we've moved away from a 50-50 consumer enterprise balance into only a 30 consumer and 17 enterprise. So basically, what we're doing is we're focusing the consumer in places where we already have a lot of density and network effects, which are predominantly -- each of Mexico and Pakistan because these are our 3 largest markets. And then in all other 17, focusing just more on the enterprise and the SaaS because even at small scale, these businesses still can even be profitable as opposed to direct to consumer, which needs more scale. So that strategy was basically 2 legs. The first leg which happened from May until now and is also complete is using that to get all countries to basically local country with right? So as if you stop any burn inside the countries, and that leg is largely completed. And then the other kind of main leg ahead of us for the next 9 to 12 months is how do we get these countries to provide sufficient cash flow so the burn at the sent, which is preliminary on the R&D. But right so we have around 300 engineers, product data scientists, et cetera, who form the bulk of the R&D located in what's still a base it's a major cost plus obviously, order kind of corporate listing costs, et cetera. So this is around $2.5 million of monthly costs that we kind of have to incur from an R&D and point perspective. And now it's all about kind of adding $100,000 to $250,000 of monthly incremental EBITDA at the country level. So within 9 to 12 months, we have enough cash flows coming from the country to basically to be able to recover that central R&D and that central cost and get to kind of the full cash flow positive at the group consolidated level.

Thanks. So good. Thanks. And you already touched upon it a little bit, but the shift from B2C now to I guess the split is more 73rd now. Will you keep the B2C business alive and you think that you will push that in the future? Or is this a terminal shift towards B2B?

Yes. No, it's optimist burn. I mean, our DNA really and how well we started came from the B2C saga because the underlying, like the underlying mission is that whatever you are regardless of your income level, regardless of we work for you should be able to access kind of reliable for the combine transportation, right? And basically, the thesis is that should not be predicated on basically where you work or where you go to school being able to sign up with SWVL because you may be working for an SME or maybe a et work, you may be someone who just doesn't have enough like live in a place where the universals have an escape to move your exception. So the idea is not too limited to that. I think the limiting it to that is in the short term, more tactical because basically, we need to have enough scale to be able to kind of to make each contract and each operation, each at profit. And that's a business that we will obviously continue growing but the consumer itself in terms of slowing that down, limiting it to the existing mega cities in like Cairo, Pakistan, Cairo, Karachi, Mexico City, et cetera, is more tactical in the short term. One is basically with cash flow positive. The idea is to reinvest these cash flows in relaunching new B2C route. And then basically, this is where we see kind of growth starting to accelerate again from the estate store with 2x year-on-year, back to come 3 to 4x year-on-year as we're able to do that.

Any other questions for Youssef? No. Chris here. Youssef company [indiscernible] is listed here on NASDAQ.

Exactly as that NASDAQ as SWVL.

When did you listed?

31 March.

31st March. Like a lot of stuff, it's been a little way out the door, but yes, good prospects. We are very excited.

Thank you so much.

So much. I think that will allows us for a 10-minute coffee break before we listen to Nicholas from BlaBlaCar. So let's reconvene here at 10:00. Thanks. We'll reconvene with our next speaker, which is Nicholas Chandou, who is the CFO of BlaBlaCar. BlaBlaCar is our oldest investment of everyone who is presenting here today. So but it's going to go on for a lot longer, I think, in our portfolio. Anyway, without further due, over to you.

Thank you, Per. So it's the oldest investment, but I just joined BlaBlacar 6 months ago, so I am the newbie. And BlaBlaCar, if yes -- if I go back to the origins of the company, why we exist? Of course, there's the CO2 emissions topic. But the truth about the BlaBlaCar origins is a French strike. So 1 of our founders wanted to make a train ride, and there was a French strike. So he wanted to take a bus but there was a French strike. So we had to take the car, it didn't have a driving license, had to ask his sister to drive him for a 5-hour long drive. So the sister was a bit pissed off. And when you end up into the car, jammed traffic he witnessed that all of the cars were mostly filled with 1 driver and only empty seats. And it was like what -- it doesn't work like this. First, it's a nonsense from a carbon emission footprint standpoint. But more importantly, I was willing to pay, and I'm sure there must be people driving the car willing to receive some money. So that's how it started. It started with carpool. But we'll see that we've evolved from carpool to other means of transportation into multimodality. What's our vision? And I think it's important to state from the other mobility players, one of the key aspects of BlaBlacar is that we're aiming at bringing people together. It's a shared drive. You -- we've extended into buses, will extend into trains, but from carpool to bus to trains, you never travel alone. So it's all about bringing people together. It has some economical consequences to the business model of the company, especially on the carpool side. And of course, zero empty seats, fill seats or carbon savings and better economics for BlaBlaCar, so all good. So what we aim at becoming? We started with the long-distance carpool model that I've just briefly described. We are moving into a bus operator as a marketplace. We're into commuting, so shorter distance strips, but it's not micromobility. We're talking about roughly speaking, 30 to 50-kilometer drive and will get into train mostly in Western Europe by the end of next year. And so for all of that, those supplies, we've built a platform, which, for the time being, is the multi-modality platform, meaning you want to go from A to B, and we are offering either a couple ride or a bus ride and soon a train ride. What we aim at becoming from that technological platform is an intermodality player, meaning we interconnect means of transportation, so when you want to go from A to B, if there's not 1 single supply that can allow you to do the trip, we will interconnect several means of supplies. And if we manage to do so, within the short period of time, we will become a unique platform for the suppliers themselves, offering us a leverage on the take rate that we can take if we're talking about bus operators or train operators and of course, having the carpool motor through those bricks is what positions us as a unique player to achieve that intermodality model. So right now, we are -- and we'll get back to a few numbers, but we're present in 22 countries on 3 continents. We have 25 million yearly active users over the past 12 months and the past 12 month do not show the full recovery post-pandemic. And we are already in 6 countries, multimodel, at the time being, carpool, whether long or short distance and bus. In Western Europe will be multimodel with trains by the end of next year, and we're expanding the bus into emerging countries and I will get back to that. So the market size and market opportunity of where we are. I mean funnily enough presenting -- I mean, preparing for that presentation, the EUR 240 billion TAM for bus and Trains worldwide I saw a presentation from a company I won't name, they said EUR 1 trillion. So I'll go back to the team and tell them, guys, maybe we are underestimating the potential for us. What's also very interesting in that slide is that the 74% of cars that are used for long-distance trips are not valued into the TAM market today. So the capacity to share your ride, reduce the number of cars on the street or on the road, I should say, and have people sharing the cost is not valued into the TAM market. All in all, the potential is huge and it's for us to grab basically. Did I press the wrong button? There we are. And there we are. So usually, I don't like comparing with others here, it's not to say that they are bad. It's just to show what's unique about our platform. I mean, first of all, as the carpool solution, where the unique Carpool platform globally, you may found some small local players, but having someone which has the a global reach that we have is quite unique. First of all, we built those user bases, especially in Western Europe, at a time when the cost of acquisition was much lower than it is today. So the barriers to entry in Western Europe has increased tremendously for that carpool user base. And second, given the scale we've reached today, the barriers to entry to someone trying to copy us on the carpool side will be extremely, extremely high, not to mention potentially not even profitable in the long run. We focus mostly on long distance and the longer the distance, the bigger the unit economics for us. So having longer distance trips is one of the KPIs we start monitoring. We have a marketplace model. So we have no CapEx very -- I mean, stable -- fairly stable cost and we have a very low reliance on paid traffic. I'll get back to that, but it's mostly an organic audience that we have. So all in all, we have a very sound financial business model with a unique couple positioning to be able to extend into this multi-modality model. So why do we think we will win? So as I've just mentioned, only 5% of our traffic is paid. So 95% of the traffic on the BlaBlaCar platform is purely organic. Even as the CFO, sometimes, I think we pay too much for the 5% remaining because I'm not even sure that it can change the scale. And basically, sometimes by simple -- I mean, simple, easy to say, but by GR and public relations, we even have a better impact on the usage of our audience than by spending marketing. Second, Remember, I said it's about sharing. We have very high NPS, which is about 40 in 2021 from our customer base. And that NPS comes from the fact that it's sharing none of the -- if I take the capital model, the drivers, none of them are in for profits. They're in for cost sharing. Cost sharing is very important, but sharing is also, sharing the ride meaning is also very important for them. And we need to really keep that in mind, not to try to monetize too quickly. We improve short-term the profits, but potentially destroy the long-term value that would built with that sustainable user base and audience, which shows into the retention. So that's a GMV retention, not the user retention. So basically, and we use Airbnb as a benchmark because we think it's a very good company in that respect. All in all, what we're trying to say is on the right-hand side, you have the driver's car pool retention. The GMV is above 100% after 5 years. So basically, it's a very, very -- of course, we'll lose some drivers, but with the increase of frequency of the remaining drivers on the platform, we managed to have a GMV retention that is above 100% after 5 years. On the passenger side, we have a more natural decline, but 50% retention after year 5, used to come from the gaming industry and 50% of day 1 was a good KPI. Here, we have 50% of 5 years, which shows the extremely strong resilience of the even passenger side audience that we have. Today, we're like the alignment of stars for BlaBlaCar is fairly unique. The macro trends are for us. I mean they are not necessarily good signs, especially if I talk about the oil prices but they all benefit the business model. First of all, climate crisis is prompting governments and customers to act. So it's a match. It's a matter of having the right momentum on both sides of the audience, customer base, and the government. If I take the example of the French government, they are going to announce that they will subsidize quite significantly new drivers on carpooling in France. And funnily enough, coupling in France is actually BlaBlaCar. So they won't say BlaBlaCar, but they will pay people to carpool to create the incentivize, willingness to share assets has become mainstream. Oil prices, I said, they are not here for profit or drivers, but sharing cost is very important. And given the oil prices trend that we've witnessed, it has increased quite significantly the inbound of new drivers and therefore supply and of demand on the passenger side. And 1 point I didn't mention yet, on the bus side, the marketplace, we are more geared towards emerging markets in that respect because there is a shift from offline to online booking and the incumbent operators they are really off-line players, and they don't know how to make that shift. So there's a play today to online the booking of tickets on the bus side in emerging countries with a very strong penetration rate year-on-year. And that, combined with our carpooling platform creates a lot of synergies, which goes back to the organic traffic that we have as opposed to paid-for traffic. Now what are we going to implement over the next few years. I mean first of all, out of our PAX, so about close to 60 million PAX over the past 12 months, only half of them are monetized. We're a C2C model in carpool. So before we can monetize a country, we need to create the liquidity, enough liquidity that you have the supply and demand that match each other. So when we give it a few years for each country we enter into, and we don't take the fee from the platform. So people pay themselves on the platform, but we don't take the fee. And we let it grow until a level when we feel we can start monetizing. Today, half of the PAX are not monetized. Over the next 3 years, we will monetize that audience. So it's not an audience that has the same value as the first 30 million because it's emerging markets, so the unit economics are not as high. On the other hand, it's an audience that is growing at 2x, 3x, so very, very high growth rates. So next 3 years, we'll monetize Brazil, India and Mexico starting with Brazil early next year. Second, starting with carpool at the bottom where it's our product that we will build and implement in countries organically. We'll add the 2 supply buses or trains depending on the countries. And that we will do organically or through M&A, depending on the opportunities that arise with a few ongoing topics. We still need to go for the organic route because you never can bet only on M&A. But if we can accelerate our growth through an M&A in a specific country, let's say, buses in 1 emerging country, we will just save a few years in our growth plan. A few metrics about the recent development of the company, very few metrics. So first of all, we grew our unique yearly active user base from 7 million in 2015 to 25 million over the past 12 months. And once again, the past 12 months do not show the full recovery post-COVID. And more importantly, we've diversified that audience through the various continents. And Latam is growing very fast, Brazil and Mexico. So we hope to increase the share of Latam. And next time, I'll do the presentation. And few figures. We don't communicate. We're a private company. We don't communicate too much on P&L. What we can tell you is we've doubled revenues and gross margin in '22 versus '21, I mean we will. Profitability is here, meaning putting Q1 aside, we're profitable in '22 and will be profitable in '23. And we have a net cash balance of EUR 130 million. So given that we'll be in positive territory in terms of cash flows, that is the resources that we may use for the M&A I was talking about because being private, using shares for M&A is always tricky. So you need to have a portion of cash and especially in current environment, having cash available is a strong plus. In a nutshell, very short. This is what I could tell you on where we are.

Thank you so much, Nicolas. Let's open up for questions. And I think my colleague, Dennis has some.

Great. Many, many thanks. I guess starting a bit on -- you mentioned a bit around monetization. And I think it was in the what's to come section. So a question there is, to what degree have you actually started monetizing, if you look at the total opportunity, so to speak? And what impact are you seeing on the map as you start monetizing?

Okay. So in terms of audience, 50% of the audience that we have today is monetized that is EUR 30 million against the EUR 28 million. When we monetize, we lose a portion of the user base. So we have between 20% and 40% loss of volumes. This is also why we need to wait a certain time to implement so that the liquidity between supply and demand remains sufficient. And out of the existing countries we're in today, we will have monetized the entire portfolio within 3 years, 3 to 4 years. We don't monetize a country instantly, so we do it over a few quarters. Depending on the liquidity per regions or cities. So 3 to 5 years, bearing in mind that we're now about to monetize countries where the growth rate is about 200% to 300%. So the 28 million will increase. And more importantly, we will launch new countries starting next year, that will be the countries up for monetization in 5 years. So we haven't decided yet which countries. We have the usual suspect list, but we are working on it. But it's about always having about 5 years of growth ahead of you for that matter.

Great. Many thanks. I have more questions, but anyone in the audience?

I'll go ahead. So moving over to -- you mentioned M&A being 1 potential route for inorganic growth. So -- but if you if you could zoom out a bit to talk about what role do you think is in the industry at large and then more specific about what it means for at BlaBla. As you said, your cash balances, you're well lined up to do the M&A, but where do you see M&A adding value for BlaBlaCar and the industry?

So the M&A are not geared towards a competitor of BlaBlaCar. So not a platform that is in multimodality because we haven't found really one, the M&A is more adding up one supply, which is either bus or train. Train will move into more developed Western European type of countries, buses more in kind of emerging countries. And where we would do M&A is to acquire an existing platform, let's say, emerging country bus, a marketplace that has established itself only for buses in a specific country, gaining market shares and being ahead of in terms of volumes ahead of what we could build organically. So it's really adding up -- for us, it's saving 3 to 4 years in the development in a given country. It's not going to be a on carpooling because we don't see any carpooling opportunities. That being said, if we find one, we will not prevent ourselves from doing so. But what we're looking for is, if any, in the countries where currently present or aiming at developing -- if there's 1 platform for bus or for train that's what we're going to look at. So it's not about consolidating the industry we're in because we don't see any means of consolidation in that industry because we feel with the uniqueness of our carpooling global platform, we don't see any competitor in that field.

You talk a little bit about deciding to -- could you talk a little bit about deciding to include train into our multi model platform and what it would look like. You said that you're probably going to do it next year in Western Europe. And I think it's easier to understand M&A of bus platforms and maybe train platform. So maybe at a high level, if you could talk about how train is going to become part of your portfolio?

So first of all, I agree on your comments for M&A on train. So it's less logical. That being said, there are a few platforms that exist. So we don't want to prevent ourselves from looking at them, but I think it's going to be mostly organic. Now why do we implement train. If I take the example of France, which is the first country of BlaBlaCar in terms of unit economics, if you want to be multimodal in France, not having the train, you're missing a piece that is extremely important into your model. So the unit economics are not as good as carpooling or bus. But the thing is given the road map that we have to become intermodal being internal without the fast bit train in France is not possible. So we're adding it. And given our business model and the way we're structured, a team of 5 people can implement the train into our platform. So it's not at all a costly investment to implement. There will be a bit of marketing -- acquisition marketing to make people know about the fact that we offer it. But from the organic traffic that we already have, they will just go into the platform and see the train solution appearing. And it's mostly Western Europe. We don't foresee the train as a solution for multimodality in emerging countries because basically, most of the time, the transportation system is car and buses less so train.

One from the broadcast here. So if you could quantify the with COVID normalized metrics. And I think more specifically, that refers to, you mentioned that Q1 is not profitable but the full year '22 will be. But is there a seasonality there? Or is that just a national progression of the business?

It's a mixture of everything. We do have some seasonality and we're not enough in the South Hemisphere to compensate for the northern part of the world, seasonality. So July, August are a much bigger month. Now the comment I made about Q1 is Omicron was still there in January and February. So volumes were way lower at the beginning of the year, the situation has evolved tremendously, so we kind of forgot about that. But if you adjust for the low volume of January and February, that was the comment I was making. Now we'll be profitable Q2, 3 and 4 combined, not with Q1, a bit close to.

Thank you, Nick, for the presentation. A question about regulation. My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that carpooling is generally unregulated around the world. Is that true? Or is that changing? And you mentioned that France is going to subsidize carpooling, which sounds great. But is more government regulation and oversight good for BlaBlaCar or maybe not?

It depends on the regulation. So it is regulated from a tax point of view. So I think all of the countries we operate, a driver cannot make a profit. So that's the way of regulating carpooling, which is the subsidies that you get from carpooling, you don't declare them in your tax form because they are not for profit, it's about cost sharing. So that's about the only regulation that we are facing. And it's to avoid the other regulations because if you start making profits, then you're in the traditional for-profit transportation business model. So it's not, but interestingly enough, in all the countries we operate, the car insurance -- the private car insurance that the driver has does cover for carpooling trade. So you don't have to improve your insurance model to cover for the passengers because it's not for profit again, it's really sharing a ride. Now would we benefit from more regulations? Given that we already feel we have very high barriers to entry, we don't need more regulations. If we will have lower barrier to entries, it would be good for us because we're already the incumbent operator in most of the countries we operate in. And governments are not willing to fight against carpool. They are more willing to use carpool as a lever for solving some of their transportation issues. If I go to short distance, so the commuting, we are solving for regions, not cities, but we are solving big issue by providing a commuting solution. And actually, companies and local governments, they do subsidize those trips. So the passenger doesn't pay. And that's also why the business model is efficient for us because since it's a recurring trip, if it was not subsidized, people would find their way without us after the first 2 of 3 trips. Now it's -- thanks to that regulation, we are protected. If they start preventing carpool, then it would be an issue, but it's clearly not the path and the trend that we see in those countries, all of the countries we operate.

I think we have 2 more questions.

Just to come back to the TAM and it's a big market. And if you could just sort of give a description of how big you think BlaBla can become in your target markets without any specific regards to timing. You don't have to say 5 years or something, but that majority, I think this -- this has become in your view?

It's a fast question is because 22 countries is only the beginning. It's a replicable model that you can develop out of the existing user base that we have, we intend to grow 20% to 25% CAGR for the next 5 years after slightly more than doubling, I think, this year. Now in absolute terms, if you -- I don't give timing, it's over -- I mean, largely over EUR 1 billion revenues company and within the foreseeable future. So scale is -- but it's -- we don't see the limit. I don't know when we'll reach obviously per country, but we haven't reached even in our first country, which is France. We haven't reached the limit by far as of today. So without giving more numbers, it's hard to precisely answer your question but we expect to more than double the revenues before '25 organically.

I think we'll end with that question. And thank you very much, Nicolas. Great presentation. And we move on in the schedule. And next up is Daniel Yu who is yes, in the back. You can come up front. Daniel runs a company called Wasoko which is our newest investment.

Okay. Hi, everyone. Pleasure to be here today. I'm Daniel Yu, Founder and CEO of Wasoko. As Par mentioned, recently joined the VNV portfolio, my first time here, definitely an honor. Okay. So starting off, what is Wasoko? We're an e-commerce company that supplies and restocks mom-and-pop stores across Africa. Core mission is how can we help these communities get more for less, help the single mother was $1 to buy rice get 500 grams instead of 400 grams to feed family. And fundamentally, the -- and then yes, I got a great team behind us, some of the best folks in e-commerce, especially across emerging markets as well as great crew of existing investors as well. Most recently, a $100 million round closed earlier this year, led by Tiger and Avenir with significant participation from VNV as well as most of our existing investors. In terms of why Africa, what are we doing here? The underlying demographics and trends, some of you may be familiar with are just completely unparalleled versus anywhere else in the world. There will be more Africans born in the next 10 years than in China, India, Brazil and Mexico combined, average age of 19. You compare that and actually sub-sea Africa is even lower at 17. We pare that to median age in India is 27, median age in China is 37. It just completely off the charts. And even when you just look at the specific urban trend, urbanization is actually happening at a much faster rate in Africa than anywhere else. And you will have a larger urban population in Africa than any other region, China, India, Latam, you name it by 2040. So really figuring out how do we supply goods and services to urban Africans is of critical importance to the global economy in the coming decades. And specifically, when we look at our market, which is fast moving consumer goods, the vast majority of these are sold through mom-and-pop stores. These or corner Bodegas kiosk shops. Right now, it's about $850 billion sold across the continent of which $680 billion or so is in this informal mom-and-pop segment. And currently, $270 billion is in the urban segment. Of course, that's going to be growing very quickly with those trends I just outlined. And so specifically, the challenge that these mom-and-pop kind of hold the wall places face is in the restocking. So right now, you have someone like Maria, who runs this shop in Nairobi, when she sells out of rice or soap or toilet paper, she has to actually go physically herself to a wholesaler. So think about it like a little kind of garage downtown, where she has to buy the stock and bring it back herself. There's no kind of Frito-lay truck that rolls up every morning to restock the shelves for you, you have to go and get the goods yourself. And so it's a big challenge for the other 10 million or so of these shops who have to physically source own goods and who also don't have access to working capital, financing or other support services as well. So what Wasoko does is basically serves as the e-commerce on-demand, the fulfillment platform to get Maria and shops like her that rice, so toilet paper when those shopkeepers need it. So we source directly from the brands like Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Nestle, you name it. We then run the actual physical infrastructure. So we leased warehouses as well as have our own in-house logistics network. So we are a first-party e-commerce platform and then facilitate that free same-day delivery to the shop. So when they order for that rice, soap, toilet paper, they're able to get it and restock same day without having any out of stock and delays. On the back of that, we've also expanded to doing merchant financing. So this is specifically a pay-later product, whereby the shop is able to order today, get those goods delivered, but then pay for them later. This is a very short tenor facility. This is actually just a 7-day pay later product, which makes sense given the kind of high turnover of products on the shelf of the actual shop. What we see is that when a shopkeeper gets access to this, the purchase value increases dramatically. It's about 2.5x right now. And really, we see this as just the first stepping stone in a layer of a number of different value-added services that we believe our shops and the merchant network can offer as powered by Wasoko. So right now, we have a footprint in 7 countries. So Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire and Zambia. In total, we expect this year to do roughly $270 million in revenue. That's the first or operation, that's the same as our top line sales. This is up from last year. It's about $130 million and 2020 is about $30 million. So we've had a very fast kind of growth trajectory over the past couple of years. Key thing I would note is that we're actually very well diversified across these countries, which I think is very key when you're dealing with an overall kind of volatile region like the African continent. You don't want to have all your eggs in 1 basket given the individual country risk. But the opportunity is obviously massive, and I think pretty much anywhere that we look across these 54 countries there's multibillion-dollar markets to pursue as we continue to expand. And in terms of the underlying economics, this is a B2B e-commerce model. So we are kind of dealing with wholesale margins here. That being said, we've made kind of tremendous progress towards having profitable economics. And in fact, we expect to have profitable contribution margins. This is kind of profit per order after all the delivery and sales costs by the end of this year across our markets. And with that momentum, actually then take that to turn all of our country operations profitable by the end of next year. One of the other, I think, kind of standout areas of the business is same-store growth and GMV retention. So as far as the unit economics is concerned, on the acquisition cost side, acquisition costs are extremely low. We have a field force that basically goes out door-to-door, signs up shops. Of course, these field reps in the markets where we operate, labor costs are very low. And so we're able to sign up a shop on average for $2 to $3 but then the average order value per shop is something like $500 a month from us. And so that has very good economics over time, and we actually see that shops increase their order value with us, the longer they stay with the platform, and that's where we've seen these very positive kind of revenue retention numbers as we continue to grow and engage the customer base. So merchant financing, as I mentioned, is really kind of a core part of helping to grow the business as well. Right now, it drives about 10% of our total sales and volume. The repayment rate on this is pretty unparalleled for the kind of SME segment in the market. It's basically 98.5%, 99%. And given the huge volume increase that we see on this product definitely is a huge driver of the growth. We do, in fact, charge fees on this, in fact, about 1.5%. So on a kind of a stand-alone product basis. It's more or less breakeven. But as a contributor to increasing the overall lifetime value of customers definitely has a huge impact. So we see it as part of the overall kind of ecosystem grower and driver. And then really, for us, the long-term vision here is not just about how can we distribute and sell as many of these core products as possible, but how do we leverage this network of merchants, the 75,000 active shops that we have right now across these 7 countries to really become the on the ground last mile infrastructure, the kind of hyper local access points for whatever goods and services these communities need over time as they grow. And so right now, we've started by focusing on how do we optimize supply chains for those core products. But then over time, for us, it really becomes about layering in these additional goods and especially, I would say, digital goods as well to better serve the communities and use kind of our supply chain expertise as well. So a big part of what we're focusing on now is starting on the upstream side. So we're actually getting into private label. We have a whole line of products under a kind of in-house brand Smart PIC that we're about to launch. So this is going to be kind of like our Kirkland equivalent products that were contract manufacturing through a lot of the excess kind of factory capacity that is available locally in market, but is underutilized. And basically using that to drive better value SKUs in these core categories. So what we're seeing is products that give us triple the margins of the branded goods. And the reality is that the customer, the consumer segment that is ultimately buying these products is not particularly brand loyal. They have $3 a day of purchasing power, and so they're just looking for where they can get the best value. And so we can get them a toilet paper that gets the job done, but at a $0.05 cheaper price, they'll go for it. And I think we're very excited about how that's going to help drive the improved economics and the penetration of that over time. The other big product area is going to be, as I said, on these kind of digital services, both for the merchants and then also the opportunity to use the merchant network to expand into B2B2C services. So on the Merchant Services side, where building on the financing product, looking at where we can potentially partner in with other financial entities, banks, insurance companies that want to sell into this segment and do that more on a marketplace basis where we can take a cut commission of those services given the data and the relationships that we have with the shops, also looking at other tools that we can develop for the shops to better manage their operations. So this will be ledgers to manage either their inventory or their kind of lending that they're doing to consumers. On the B2B2C side, though, we definitely see a huge opportunity given that the average consumer lives in a place where they don't have a street address. They don't have even a kind of road name in most places, but pretty much everyone has 1 of these Bodega shops down at their corner. And so what that means is that if that shop is already a known delivery point to us, than being able to expand and extend filled by Amazon service to any number of third-party sellers who potentially wanted to be able to access the kind of last mile African urban consumer is something that we would be uniquely placed to be able to offer. And so I think that, combined with the ability to then also turn that shop keeper into an agent for digital services is also a huge opportunity. So on that side, this is things more like mobile money agents, basically human ATM services where people can come and do cash-in cash-outs through different mobile or kind of digital banking or wallet services, given that the actual physical infrastructure banks and ATM something only like 1 ATM for every 50,000 people or something right now. And so oftentimes, that could be miles away from where someone actually lives. So these types of human agent services can be super valuable in terms of extending that footprint. And once again, it's a partnership opportunity to leverage this infrastructure and this merchant network that we built out. So yes, in terms of our current objectives, as mentioned, we raised the $100 million round earlier this year, so we're not in any type of kind of current cash flow crunch. We -- currently with that, that's a runway for us until January 2025. So in a good position, I think, focus on a lot of these product growth and improvements in underlying profitability. And so as mentioned, core objectives right now are, number one, getting to profitability in all of those existing established countries; number two, rolling out the private goods and really seeing the penetration we can get there; Number three, building out this downstream ecosystem of services to really layer on to that merchant network that we have; and then number four, growing the overall volume to $1 billion plus. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. We'll open up the floor for questions. I think [indiscernible] is ready to kick us off.

Yes. So 1 question would be if you could just dig a little bit deeper on the SKU side and selection. So for these mom-and-pop shops, do you fulfill their entire restock need? Or is it more niche around certain number of SKUs? And how is that going to develop from the order point of view?

Sure. So right now, we focus on the dry goods, so the nonperishables in the shops, which account for about 60% of their turnover generally. Of that, we estimate that our wallet share is about 2/3 of that segment. So something like, say, 40%, 45% of the overall kind of shop spend. We are looking at the other categories as well that kind of make-up that remaining 40%, and those tend to be split between beverages, some of the fresh products, not necessarily produce but more things like bread or like kind of local snacks that are supplied day-to-day, milk actually on a like 5, 6 a.m. kind of delivery truck basis, which is outside of our current delivery windows. And so there are a few of these other categories that we're definitely looking into, just given some of the complexity around setting up those specific value chains. We're kind of still focused on the dry goods, but definitely over time, we want to get as high a share of the wall penetration as possible.

And then another question on your quite a few countries already. And would you say like the -- is there a playbook that works for all these countries? Or how similar or different are these different markets of mid-African?

Yes. So I think what we've seen is, by and large, the market structure is the same across these markets, right? So the actual reality and the challenges that the shopkeeper in Kenya faces is the same as the shop in Senegal, even though they're on opposite sides of the continent. Really, what gets kind of -- and then the -- so fundamentally, the operating playbook for serving them in terms of the ordering, the delivery, the logistics operates the same way across these countries and different parts of the continent. The big difference is that the upstream supplier side can change, in some cases, especially kind of going east to west, that's a different set of suppliers. But what we do see is that locally within the region. So for example, in East Africa, the 4 countries that we started with there, they do tend to be managed by the same central supplier team, you have the Unilever office out of Nairobi, Kenya, actually overseas Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda as well. And so we've been able to kind of build some of these regional hub relationships that have allowed us to expand across some of those nearby countries.

Garden, I don't know if there's questions in the room, we can...

Could you talk a little bit how you select markets what is your best market right now and why and any expansion plans for other markets and also how do we factor in end of country risk and general geopolitical risk in the return profile and your projections going forward?

Thank you. So in terms of country selection we have, I think, heavily indexed on this kind of regional grouping model, whereby when you have countries that are in some of these actual like economic unions between them, so the East African community, where we started in Kenya, also includes Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, they have a customs union between those 4 countries, which allows for the local movement, duty-free of locally manufactured goods. You also have these kind of supplier structural benefits where you have kind of 1 central office that will oversee multiple countries in the region. And so that's made it easy for us to expand across those different geographies. And we see the same thing in the newest countries that we launched in Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire, they're part of the UMO region, which actually has the same customs union. You have the same kind of centrally managed supplier teams for the most part, and they even actually have the same currency, which is pegged to the euro. So it's a very kind of stable region that's easy to kind of do business across the participating countries, and that's really helped kind of facilitate our expansion between them. As far as how we deal with the country risk in the region in general, I think what I'd say is how we've selected the countries has also kind of been backwards looking in terms of, okay, past 10 years, what has the economic performance, the stability of these places been and do we see kind of consistent year-on-year growth in all the countries that we're in right now, that's generally been the case. But you can never predict the future with certainty, especially in countries like these in Africa. And so our approach has been to also diversify and have this nice space where no 1 country is the majority of our business, even Kenya where we started, it's about 35%. I think Tanzania is like 28%. Uganda, Rwanda close to 20% each. So it's a good kind of diversified mix. So even if something unexpected does happen, that's not going to overall either the detriment of the business. And I think just given the overall tailwinds in the African consumer growth in general, having this kind of strategy where we're kind of indexed across the markets is the right 1 that's going to allow us to benefit from that over time.

And what is your best market and why right now?

Yes. So right now, interestingly, our best market, if you look at the kind of underlying customer behavior and economics is actually Rwanda. I was just curious because it's not obviously 1 of the larger markets that pops up. But I think there, what we've seen is a combination of the highest kind of wallet penetration. So on the kind of per shop basis, we have the highest amounts. We also have slightly higher margins there on the gross margin side for goods, which I think has to do with kind of less competitive supplier environment. There are fewer manufacturers there. So a lot of products do get imported from outside from maybe Kenya or Tanzania. And so as a result, that's combined to give us the best economics. I think especially when we look at now pushing our private label and stuff like that, we're actually planning to double down in that market to start because that's where we feel we can get the highest penetration of our own products to start as well.

So a question from the broadcast. Have you -- how do you manage your merchant financing risk. And have you seen any rise in bad debt that roughly where are those metrics?

Yes. So we've had the merchant financing product now for over 2 years. So actually, we started it, in fact, just before COVID. And obviously, that period was initially kind of quite interesting for us in that we didn't know what was going to happen with that portfolio. We elected to keep the service going, but to kind of stop the addition of new customers into the merchant financing. And actually, what we saw was complete stability in the performance. There was no kind of significant increase in bad debts in non-repayments. And so I think over time, we have built out quite a kind of robust relationships with our shops, which is basically where there are supplier products. And so if they elect to not repay, this is not just some app on your phone that you can ignore. This is your actual supplier of goods and a relationship that people value. And I think the fact that we actually do have that physical presence where -- it's a Wasoko-delivery driver, Wasoko-contracted driver who shows up and actually delivers the goods, they have that physical touch point that, hey, this is a real service, a real company that I don't want to upset the relationship with -- and I think that's why we've seen these kind of unparalleled kind of SME financing repayment rates at this kind of 98.5%, 99% in our markets so far.

Another question also from the live stream. Do you worry about any regional instability in the market where you operate?

I would say certainly in the markets that we're in now. I mean, we have made some very intentional choices in the markets that we picked, I mean, I think one question that comes up a lot is why aren't you in Nigeria, which often gets a lot of headlines, a lot of press in terms of being the largest country by population. And I would say that's exactly why we're not in Nigeria because I think there is a huge amount of instability there, basically any economic security, political, any sector you look at. And so I think that's why it's really important to actually go kind of beneath the headlines beneath the top line numbers to really understand the dynamics on the ground, what has the historical trend being across all of these kind of key pillars of society to ultimately derisk against any big issues. That being said, as I said, we don't have a crystal ball. There could be any number of things that happen in any 1 of our markets at some point. But I think given the diversification of the business, too, that's not something that really worries us day to day.

Yes, a lot of questions. So how is it to source talent? And where do you find that for a Wasoko?

Yes. So I think sourcing talent is something that we spend a lot of time on. I think what we found is a really good formula, especially for the more senior talent in the business is there is a very robust [indiscernible] population from the African continent, people who went to school, work abroad or the children of these kinds of folks who do actually have a very strong desire to come back, be part of Africa's future and contribute skills and development. I think -- and so we've got a great leadership of many of those folks. The other area that we found that's been quite effective on the talent development side is other emerging markets, e-commerce tech talent. So if you look at a lot of our recent hires we brought in -- we have a new Head of Logistics who actually came over from Lazada, moved from Singapore to Kenya. We have our new incoming CTO was VP of Tech and product at Coupon in Korea and is originally from India and is now moving over to East Africa as well. And so I think a lot of folks are seeing the Africa's effectively the final frontier when it comes to geographies that yet to really be inflected by tech. And so for folks that missed out on China, India, Southeast Asia, even Latam, I think the reality is it's the only mark with 1.5 billion people that doesn't have a $100 billion e-commerce company in play already. And I think that's the opportunity that we see in a lot of the talent that we talk to as well.

Any more questions from our room here. So, no? no, no problem. So it's all done now, thank you so much. Very interesting. And we have another -- the next -- Ali you are next up. We're a little bit ahead of schedule, but I think there will be lots of questions for you. So I think we just plow on. So. This -- it's down a competitive.

Thank you very much, Per. Thank you, everybody, and thanks for inviting us. Per said at the very beginning that we are the odd 1 out as we do not relate to mobility, and I thought of the mobility analogy, as I told of describing what it is that we do in Babylon. If you remember the old days, when I used to drive my car, I used to have a -- I used to drive it until it broke down, I took it to a mechanic, they fixed it, I drove it again until it broke down. That's what you do with your health care. We wait until things go wrong and sell -- and then we go to a doctor to fix it. This thing that we call really health care, it really isn't health care. It's sick care. It's reactive. It's episodic, it's physical, 1 size fits everybody. And we think that the true way to fix somebody to deal with this is to create a model of health care that is proactive, they continuously monitors people, that is there for them all the time as we do with our cars, that we've added so many sensors in our cars that they never almost break down anymore. There is really no reason why we cannot do that with health care. But to do that with health care, we need a fundamentally different infrastructure than what it exists today. We need to start by collecting everybody's data. We need to analyze that data in real time. We need to be able to identify from that data when is something going wrong and be able to intervene early and then intervene so 24/7 wherever people are virtually first and then bring them down to do so physically. And in doing that, we need to make sure because nobody can watch every human being data all the time, we need to make sure that we have created enough AI agents who can watch that data in real time. We do that with so many of our assets. We do it with the cars. We do it with every light in this building, but we do not do that with the most precious asset we have, the human body. We just wait for crisis for emergencies to happen in health care, and then we just throw a huge amount of money at it to fix it. So what we're doing in Babylon, in a nutshell is to build that infrastructure to build the ecosystem that is necessary to deliver that service. With that, we start with what we call a personal health craft for every individual. We take the data that you generate, whether it's from your watch or in your hospital or your clinical data and we collect it all in a single health graph. So everybody, including your doctors have access to that in real time. If I ask you now to show me all of your health data, any of you, I will be surprised if there is anyone in this room who has it immediately available. Any of you have got your health data immediately available? Not a single person. And remember, you are among the top 1% to 2% richest people on the planet, living in some of the richest countries on the planet. And we don't want to have something that's simple as that. But having that data alone is not enough. What we then need to do is stream that data in real time and create, as I said, agents, AI agents or non-AI agents, but agents who can watch that data. I did my PhD on interaction of waves and currents and how the change on that matters, the differential equations. We always looking at the differential equations in our data. So we need agents that can look at that data. That's what we're building. By the end of this year, we will have tens of these agents that can look at every variation in that data and we need to be able to then find out who are the 20% who usually are responsible for 80% of the costs and then find -- identify those 20% and then we monitor them continuously in order to be able to reward them if something goes wrong, but more importantly, alert them as the things are going back and intervene early when necessary. When we intervene, we give people a 24/7 health assistances that are available to them all the time, where those health assistance is when necessary, you can talk to a doctor or a specialist in real time on your mobile phone. And then when necessary, we'll send you to a local doctor who can see you physically, only 1 in 10 times that will become necessary. And then as we do that, if you need to be hospitalized, we have the capability of sending you to a hospital and bringing you back and help you to recover. We deliver your medications at home. And if you're seriously ill, we give you a care team that can look after you. And by doing that, we can manage all the complex and care situations across what we do. That's in a nutshell of what we do, and we try and do that in a most rational way possible. So we take your data. We cut the insights, we activate our people. We set goals for them. We then monitor them continuously with almost no human in the loop. All of that happens digitally with near 0 cost of human beings involved. If you need to talk to a doctor, we first try to get you a nonclinical person to deal with your problem, which is significantly cheaper than a clinician. We call this our pyramid of care. If you need to talk to a clinician, we first do so virtually, as I said, 9 out of 10 times all your clinical records happen on your mobile phone. And they're wonderful by the way, speaker before me, which I told has a brilliant , brilliant business, and he's a brilliant entrepreneur, I mentioned Rawanda being 1 of his key countries, we could do that in Rawanda. We now provide about 5,000 consultations in Rawanda as well as United States. So that model is so scalable that you could do it in one of the poorest countries per capita in the world as well as one of the richest countries in the world. And when we need to send you to a physical place, you almost lost the battle, but we don't send you to a physical place, too. We started that business in United Kingdom, and I'll come to that, but just briefly on how we make money. We make money by either licensing our technology to somebody or delivering services for a fee, or much more importantly, what we really like to do is to take the entire budget of the patient and take the savings of the wood because of the way we do. We believe that if we monitor you continuously and try and keep you at the peak of your health, we can avoid the expensive emergencies and crisis, and those are the places where all the costs are. We did that for the National Health Service in Britain, where what we saw is that for our cohorts of patients in a country as frugal as Britain, we can save up to 35% of the totality cost of a patient when you look -- compare our cohort versus the average cohort in the country that are the same as us, live in the same areas or same age, the same social economic background. So we took that model into United States where we could hold the whole budget of the patient. And when we entered the United States, we analyzed that what exists here. And what we saw is that the country has a lot of mom-and-pop shops in primary care, if you wish. These are single individual doctors. Then you have businesses that have gone in, [indiscernible] is a great example of it. It is now almost a $10 billion valuation business that have created almost a franchise model for these mom-and-pop shops where they joined them. Then you have businesses, Oak Street Health is a great model of it, which have created shops, which is kind of delivers the same model across the country. But we saw that there is almost nobody who is doing the Amazon, who is basically doing a digital-first primary care model that can manage population health at scale. And while many people and currently, especially with today's world, love the model of shops and clinics and doctors going and visit them in the place, I have the benefit of age, even though I look 75, I'm more like 55, so I've been around for a while. And I remember when back I was sitting on your chair when I was at Goldman Sachs, we usually loved companies like Bath, Bed and Beyond. We love these shops because we told the idea was that if you have one shop, you can have it in every neighborhood, until somebody came in and digitally cleaned that business and washed it away. And we are absolutely convinced that whoever builds the infrastructure of the new model of health care will do exactly the same in the health care section. So we came to United States, which is now our main market and what we saw that almost in January 2020, before the COVID broke down was the last summer I could come to United States. Then again, I could come again in January 2022. So in a space of 2 years, less than 2 years, entirely remotely, if you start even being able to visit the country, we've built over 4 million customers, like individuals that we serve. We -- much more importantly, where we take the entirety of the budget, we went from only 17,000 people in our first contract in October 2020 -- 2020 to now over 270,000 people whose entire budget behold. We went from $29 million in revenue to $228 million in United States alone in 2021. So when you speak of growth, this is a tenfold growth. And this year, we'll do around $1 billion of revenue in the U.S. And that's in 2 years, built in 2 years. And then throughout this incredible growth, we maintained 95% satisfaction and Net Promoter Score of over 70%. For any of you who've built businesses, growing is easy, holding a small group of people really happy is easy, but growing really fast and keeping your customers happy is super hard. So now I want to share numbers which you were before doing that, we have just recently announced that we were super lucky to have David Humphreys as our new CFO. So I want to introduce David to you. Not only he is significantly better, looking younger and more articulate, he's also been at PwC as a partner for about 20 years. He looked after companies like Facebook and Tesla, and he will be a good way of introducing him to you to take you through the numbers.

All right. So let's spend a few minutes here just on the numbers. Let me start with a little bit of an overview of what we reported out as a public company at Q2 and then talk a little bit about what's next for us and particularly where, from a financial standpoint, I think our core areas of strategic focus are. So as Ali said, our growth here has been spectacular, right? And we're looking on track for over $1 billion of revenue this year. But when I think about what's next for us and what we've really been focusing on, it's really making sure that's the right growth for us as a business and that we're really optimizing that growth from a profitability standpoint. So what do I mean by that? Well, one of the big areas of focus has been diversification of our revenue portfolio. So as Ali mentioned, a lot of our focus has been on this area where we're taking a population health under our value-based care arrangements or Babylon 360 arrangements. But those come in different flavors, I'll call it. We really started in the Medicaid space in the U.S. That's been a great sort of starting place for us to really build our reputation, execute upon our business model. But as we look out longer term, we're really keen to diversify our mix, particularly into what we would call the Medicare or commercial space in the U.S. That's where we see longer term as we look out a better fit for our business model and, frankly, some more upside from a profitability standpoint going forward. The next bit about how we optimize these populations and work with them is thinking about our level of engagement. As Ali said, our product and being digital-first is pivotal to our model. And what we're really focused on is optimizing the engagement of those members we take the health risk on with our application, getting them on board with our digital-first product, making sure that is the first step they're thinking about as they work through their health care journey. And we've really become a lot better at that. How have we done that? We've learned. We've been relatively new in this space. We've been learning quickly about how to, for example, get better data on our members ahead of entering into these arrangements. So we can really understand the membership we've taken on, really understand what the health care needs are going to be. And to Ali's point earlier, think about really focusing in on those 20% of our members that have the biggest health care needs and are carrying the biggest health care costs. What does that enable us to do? It really enables us to focus in on what we view as some of the key performance indicators, some of the early indicators of what's coming from a financial standpoint, things such as patient admissions and length of stay that our members are staying in hospital visits, key areas of indication of how our business model is operating. Why is that? Well, those are a couple of the areas where the biggest health care costs come through. The extent we can be proactive, get ahead of the need for our members to be admitted into hospital, manage them effectively if they do go in to reduce the number of stays in hospital, get them into after-care programs as soon as we can, that really not only benefits the member in terms of the quality of health care they're getting, but also is pivotal to us executing on the margin growth story here that we're seeing across our portfolio.

So can I just intervene for one second? I just to share some numbers in here because I think, David, it's super important for people to understand this. Just look at these numbers. What that shows you is that as we penetrate into our population and go and engage as little as only 25% to 30% of them, what you will see is that inpatient numbers, inpatient admissions, that is the people who go into a hospital, where all the costs are, fall from 120 to 80. That's a 40% reduction in hospitalization in our population. I mean that is huge, for those of you who understand health care. And then more importantly, those who also go to a hospital, what you will see is the number of nights stay in a hospital goes from 4 to 3 in average. That's a 25% reduction in that number, too. And if you equate the cost in a hospital is equal per night, what you see is a massive reduction of 40% on one hand and 25% in the other hand. And what you will see is that as a result of that, we could get to medical margins, that is savings from what insurance companies could do, of over 20% in our commercial deals and about 10% to 15% in our Medicare deals. So an insurance company has spent 20 years adjusting how much they spend on these things, making to reducing these numbers. And within the first year, we could manage to bring the prices down by 10% or so. Sorry, David, I just wanted to emphasize the numbers.

Yes. No, I think that's great. I mean -- and that's where, frankly, we're just seeing such momentum as we get better at this over time. And seeing the data coming through here, it's been huge for us as we continue to grow out, I say, the right revenue base. The other piece of the business model, though, is just thinking to Ali's point earlier around how scalable this is. We've seen the revenue growth. We've seen a significant increase in membership we're taking on. But we're also continuing to drive costs out of the business and really see that growth is positioning ourselves well for the next steps here towards profitability. Flashing up our Q2 numbers. I think we're very proud of the fact that we've been a public company now for -- coming up to 12 months, and we've been able to meet or exceed all of the sort of financial targets that we put out over that process. That includes revenue metrics, but also our adjusted EBITDA metric or a profitability metric that we've been working towards with investors and with the analyst community there. So how have we been able to do that? Well, we've talked about the revenue growth. We talked about that switch in terms of the portfolio mix on that revenue. And that's really helped us on the adjusted EBITDA piece, along with also that focus around the operating cost leverage. Let me pick up on that a little bit further because since Q2, we've also announced a very targeted initiative here looking at the cost base. As we say, we view this as being a very scalable business and really wanted to look hard at what extra we thought we could get out of the cost base, not least as we really focus in our business model. We've really narrowed in on the core areas of focus. We talked about the switch into commercial Medicare in the U.S., big focus there. We've had a look at what our other activities in the business are. Was there anything that we don't view to be core going forward that is an area of cost saving opportunity. We have some existing efficiencies we can really drive in terms of how we're contracting, how we're engaging ahead of our new value-based care contracts. A great example here is I talked about getting that better data and we're also laser-focused now on working with an actuarial team that we built up in-house. They give us the intel ahead of time to drive some contractual improvements, make sure we're able to execute on new contracts in a profitable and cash flow positive manner out the gate. We looked at some of the acquisitions we've done. We've done 4 acquisitions in the last 18 months, 2 years or so, really thinking about the synergies we can get out of them. Where are the cost savings? Where can we bring the digital-first platform into those businesses to really execute strongly around the margins? And we've also just looked at our geographical footprint a little bit as well, like many, thinking through the right balance remote versus physical, driving some cost savings initiatives through some reduction in some of our physical locations. We still think getting people together in person is a good part of our business going forward, but there were some cost savings opportunities we've identified there. So we're committed here to deliver around 100 million a year cost savings going forward and feeling good about the trajectory we're on since announcing this in July of this year. At this point around scaling is really key to our focus on profitability. All these pieces we're doing around our margin mix, our focus on driving the right behaviors around the high-risk members. Our focus on engaging them in a digital-first mindset when dealing with the health care; layering on some of the opportunities we see to optimize revenue streams relating to our digital platform, just through licensing arrangements, through new commercial partnership deals; and delivering that along with this real focus we've got on our OpEx base here going forward, we're feeling good about the path to profitability here, given the experience we've got in history of delivering this kind of growth scale in the business. So where does that leave us? As we look ahead, well, we've got great momentum in our value-based care business. I mentioned that a couple of times, but the growth is there. And more importantly, we feel it's the right growth. We're really focused on that engagement of our members, making sure they're really engaging with our digital-first platform. We see that diversification in the value-based care business really coming through. That is important to us. When I think about the deal pipeline here going forward, it's very heavily weighted towards that commercial Medicare space, where we feel there's a larger margin opportunity. And finally, related focus on the OpEx execution. We've announced that program, we're a long way down the path on executing it, typically around the people costs, and seeing those savings really come through and we'll see that certainly in our Q4, sorry, results. And that will really set us up well in terms of exit rates into '23 and continuing the excellent revenue growth that we've delivered so far. So with that, we're looking forward to what's ahead.

Fantastic. Thank you so much on the end, David. I think we have some questions from the floor. I know [indiscernible] start off, but maybe if you want to...

Sure. Trying to better understand the legal risks associated with value-based care, specifically for a digital operator versus a legacy operator. Is there anything you can comment on there?

We don't see a legal risk any different than any other group hospital businesses' legal risk. Very interestingly, as a business when we first wanted to come to the United States, everybody scared us of the legal challenges in United States and litigation. David, I'm right to say that in 2 years of operations in here, we're probably the only business I know of that has not been sued even once, right? Not a single legal case. And the reason for that is really simple. When you go and see a doctor, what happens between you and that doctor is in that room, is your say versus her say. When you run our platform, everything is recorded. The doctors know that, and you know that. So therefore, there is no room for things going wrong in a way. And if they do, they're recorded, so one can act on very quickly. It's a much better model of care because when you see a doctor, what they tell you is about their knowledge. With us, you will eventually what a doctor tells you is about the collective knowledge of humanity because the AI things is helping them to understand what is the best treatment and the best course of action for you every time.

I have a few questions. One is related to an earlier guidance that you have given about EBITDA losses on a monthly basis of was it 16 million on monthly basis? Is that correct?

So we're guiding towards at least -- we're guiding towards a minimum of 18 million as exit for December. But remember, not all of the savings coming in from the OpEx initiative that we announced will hit in December. There's a little bit of extra benefit we forecast coming through in '23. So we really view that as an exit rate with some upside going into '23 as we look out.

So further improvement in '23. Can we go back on some of the metrics that we have with the blended gross margin? This one, yes, exactly. So to interpret that is that you have the revenue numbers on top, like 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion? Then you have the gross margins on the side. So it looks like it could be profitable then some time somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion.

That's right. And it's important I would point out because we are trying to use the slides we used as part of Q2, that actually that operating cost line is prior to really factoring in all of the additional OpEx savings. So when we look to sort of refresh that with our minds in Q4 with the full benefit of our cost savings outlook, we expect that metric to look more favorable because we've really, as we said, really focused on those margin improvements and delivering those OpEx savings.

So the OpEx level will come down basically.

Correct.

Okay. And then I have also on the existing contracts that you have done and with the graph where you showed the margins on the commercial, Medicare and Medicaid, can you give an example? Is the contracts that you signed maybe this year, are they sort of, of higher quality or better structured than the earlier contracts?

So it's a really interesting thing. When we grew the way we did, being very frank, a lot of your peers in this country ask our U.S. competitors, how can these guys come from outside and can grow so fast? And then they start to think because they take bad contracts, right? And at the beginning, of course, we couldn't show it. But what we've now showed is that there isn't almost a single contract we've taken that in its very first year almost has been loss-making. So almost every one of our contracts, give or take, on aggregate, are profitable on year 1. When you compare that with the brick-and-mortar competitors we have in the United States, it also takes them 3 years before they can show profitability on every contract. And one of the reasons we achieved that is because actually we've been incredibly diligent on the contracts we take together with our partners because our message to our partners was, if this works, it's going to be a game changer for you because you could deploy population health digitally first across a very wide group of populations everywhere. You don't need to build clinics in every village, in every rural area. You could deliver this service widely. But we both have an interest in the early contracts toward. And the fact that our customers are now going -- starting from $15 million of contracts and are now giving us a run rate of $1 billion in contract shows that how successful these things are. None of our contracts, David, if I'm correct, with the exception of maybe one, is loss-making today, right?

I think the other thing I was going to say is also, we're really focused on the new contracts, to Ali's point, being incrementally better in year 1 than they were 12 months ago. So the focus we've got in that contracting phase with our partners, the focus we've got around getting more rigorous data ahead of time to really make sure those new contracts we layer on in the portfolio are incrementally profitable out of the gate as well, even more so than the sort of regional ones we took on 2 years ago.

So it sounds like you will be able to take on new contracts if they are profitable in that rapidly you will -- continue to take on the new contracts and maintain a high growth, maybe not as high as historically, but still decently high for the next few years? Or how do you look on that?

So we can certainly do that. Look, if you look at a very key growth area for us, which is year 4 to 8, which was our last 4 years. And those are what you call in the digital sector, you call them the scale-up areas. So at the beginning, you have a thing. At the scale-up period, we have a graph that we showed some time ago, Babylon's compounded growth was on par with very small number of companies in the world, and they were Spotify, Amazon, Google, and if you just look at those, at the scale up. So we kept that momentum. We can still keep that going. The reality is that you, the investment community, last year this time, all you wanted from us was growth. This year, you've kind of changed, flipped, and now you want from us profitability, will be a fool not to listen to this. So now there is no rewards for growth as such. So we will focus on profitability of the business. For me as a builder, as an operator, because at the end that's what I am about, for us, this is about building the infrastructure. Once you build the infrastructure and the factory, how many cars you put through it, how many contracts you put through it, really makes very little difference in operation. It's massively scalable. And we've shown that a scalability.

We've got a question at the back.

[indiscernible] share of Medicare revenue in the last quarters, what you think CapEx is going to be going forward or any near medium, long term? And how does that impact both the operation and financial?

So for those who are online, unfortunately, your thing is soft working, but your question was an excellent question. And that was that the mix of Medicare has increased significantly in the last couple of quarters, and do you see that going on? We absolutely do. In United States, in particular, Medicare is among the more profitable part of the revenue mix partly because the government is more generous in what it pays, the needs of the users are more and you have many operators in this country who only focus on Medicare. We believe that every part of humanity needs to be served. We don't think that if you're poor, you should not be served. And therefore, we started with Medicaid. We showed that an area that others didn't want to touch, we could do very well in. But we will actually -- we have to also be sustainable, so we will focus increasingly on Medicare, as you quite rightly suggest. But the most important thing for us today is that when we first came here, people told us no company has ever come from outside the United States and has built a health care services business in the United States. We proved that, that can be done. Now nobody is questioning our ability to stay. The question now is, can we make this profitable? So our focus is going to be much more on making sure that happens. Because when you have contracts that are profitable, cash flow profitable more importantly, then you could basically turn the tap on and scale as fast as you want really without any question. I mean there isn't an insurance company you will go to today or a payer that you could say that you have 2 choices. You could wait until your members get sick and just pay their bills or we can come in and manage them upfront proactively and reduce those bills and take your Net Promoter Score often from being negative to what it is now with Babylon. That sale is not a hard sale. Our question is that we should -- we need to generate cash as we grow.

Any other questions? There's a question from the broadcast?

So one from the broadcast. In your view, what do you think could be a catalyst that could help the stock or more specifically, I guess, do the market realize value? And how can you make that happen?

So I'm the last person to ask because if I knew anything about the markets, the very last thing I would have done was to bring it public at the time that I did -- we did. It is what it is. I -- somebody asked these questions recently to Jeff Bezos, how did he feel when his market cap fell 96% from $110 to $6 in 2001? And what he said was there was -- the performance of the company and the performance of his stock is not the same. The job of the management is to look at the performance of the company. And what he was looking at is that his metrics are improving year-on-year, quarter-by-quarter by staggering amount. And eventually, the market will come and see it. It cannot be that the markets were right a year ago when we were valued at $4 billion, then it's right today that we have valued at $200 million, whoever it is. As some stage, one of these 2 numbers or both of these 2 numbers need to be wrong. And I think it was Benjamin Graham who said that the market has its habit, but the job of investors is to sell to the optimist and buy from the pessimist and it's up to you to judge when pessimism has taken over, right? But our job is to make sure this company keeps doing it. And even in these markets on almost every metric, multiples of revenue, this and the other, we're at significant discount. Our job is to make sure that, that happens. It is also true that our company is not fully financed and people will look at that, of course, in a world in which you're not fully financed. I think the market is just -- sometimes I wonder whether they come see -- there's some very basic metrics on this. I'll give you an example. We have one asset publicly known, an IPA, which is a collection of our doctors. Those assets trade at 15 to 10x EBITDA. That asset alone will do anything between $20 million to $30 million of EBITDA next year. So that asset alone should be worth a significant amount, more than our own market, and that's a small part of ours.

On that note, we say thank you so much, Ali, David, for a great presentation, which brings us to our last -- last thing up here before lunch and one-on-ones, which is going to be led by Keith and a few of our previous speakers. I'll just care the furniture and hand over to Keith.

Good morning, everybody. Just to introduce myself briefly, [ Keith Richmond ], I'm a Board member here at VNV Global. We thought it would be interesting, given a lot of the themes, to gather a few of the portfolio companies as well as a special guest to talk about some things that are near and dear to our heart. Originally, the panel were going to be heavily focused on mobility and the notion of getting goods and people around. As we began to talk the number of other themes emerged which I think are also interesting and, at least from my perspective, were probably more interesting in a lot of ways than even what we initially started with. So we're going to take it a little sideways. Before anything else, I thought maybe everybody could just introduce themselves. I think you've heard from 3 of them, so maybe they'll keep it real brief, and I'll start with [ Asa ] to give a sense of who she is.

Hello, everyone. Thank you, Keith. Very nice. Thanks for being here, inviting me here and [indiscernible]. I run operations. [indiscernible] company now operating in Latin America. We've launched in March 2021, and we are currently operating about 200 stores. We do have presence in the U.S. and Europe but decided to focus in Latin America for multiple reasons, I think we'll discuss going forward. And that's it for me.

Just give 1 minute for people who came late.

Everyone, you heard from me earlier, [ Daniel Founder ] and CEO of [ Wisoco ], doing the B2B e-commerce restocking mom-and-pop stores across Africa.

Hi, everyone. Fredrik here, CEO of Voi. We're doing in micromobility, so [indiscernible] in Europe.

Hi. And Nicolas, CFO of BlaBlaCar, and we're doing multi-modality starting with Carpool in 3 continents and 22 countries.

So I think one of the things that struck me as I started talking to people, sorry, I'm going to stay in front of the podium here, is that we are very geographically represented here. And there's been a lot of movement in and around people's businesses and models since they started. So I thought maybe asked by I would just start with you, because you've gotten the least screen time today. But it would just be great to talk about, you started out by saying you're focused on Latin America. Why are you focused on Latin America? And what was the journey that got you there?

Yes. So in March 2021, when we started, we launched across Europe, U.S. and Latin America. We did run an extensive analysis on where are the interesting models and what is the biggest time opportunity alongside competition. But as we started operating the business, we realized 4 different elements that made Latin America the most attractive market for us to operate. So number one is Latin America, and you've heard it also from Daniel, has a very, very fragmented retail proposition. There is not a big retail player that captures the market. The supply chain also is very inefficient. So there was a huge opportunity to build an infrastructure there and also capture markets thereby establishing a quick commerce retail player. So that was the number one. Second part was the labor arbitrage. So in Latin America, the basket size in comparison to the hourly rate and the labor cost is significantly better than any other market. We anyway chose markets where that ratio made sense, but Latin America was 3, 4x better. And it's not only on the delivery cost, it also goes back to the supply chain. When you come to fresh, for example, lots of the fresh fruits and products is a very big part of our assortment and what we sell -- they are being produced and delivered by local people, and that also creates opportunity for higher product margins. Third one is the population, and Daniel mentioned it also for Africa, but we see an increasingly young population that starts getting into the online, and there is a very, very low online penetration. And then the fourth one was a lower competition. So all this together makes Latin America a very, very attractive market on that end. And it's not that we didn't know it from the beginning, we knew that Latin America would be our key market, but we did see a lot of demand and a lot of opportunity and economics that make sense across all other markets, Europe and the U.S., that were here. But with the macro environment shifting, then we decided to rather focus in the markets where there is both demand and opportunity to have high margins very, very quickly.

So Fred, just to contrast that, because I think scooters -- even though those market characteristics exist, scooters seem to have failed pretty measurably in Latin America. So given all that young population, technology, cheap labor, what happened there? Why does one work and the other just don't?

Great question. And I think it goes back to a few things. One, what's been important for us and why we have got so heavy in Europe is infrastructure. And infrastructure from micromobility is more around bike lanes and protect the bikes and safe ways to drive your bike, your scooter and so on. And Europe is clearly more advanced than the Latin America so far. I think the other big thing in our industry is that when we put up supply in Europe or LatAm, supply sort of the CapEx, the cost for a vehicle is the same in LatAm as in Berlin, as in Stockholm as in Oslo. While the willingness to pay in Oslo, Berlin or Stockholm is significantly higher than some of the LatAm markets. And that's something we saw because early on -- we had some peers who went to LatAm as well but they didn't really figure out the product market fit and how to scale the model in a financially sustainable way.

And you guys are operating in both, right? You're significantly in Latin America as well as in Europe?

Yes, we are.

You've made it work in both?

Yes. But we also failed some countries and we should have known. It was a product market fit issue and a timing issue. Like you intend to grow faster than what the real pace of growth can be in a given country, so you invest more trying that you -- thinking that you can increase that growth rate but you cannot. And then you start building an economical model that doesn't fly. So you have to get out, wait a few years, and then replant the seed, accepting what I was commenting, 3 to 5 years lead time between the moment you enter the country, the moment you can grow it up. And basically, because we are an old start-up. So we made that mistake in the past and that's why now we're not going to fail. But comparing the models, the product market fit works very well in Brazil and Mexico, less so in Argentina, for example. So we are looking at it, but it's also a question of geographical for BlaBlaCar, geographical footprint, the way the transportation model is structured and the way your [indiscernible]. But yes, it works on both continents for BlaBlaCar.

Got it. And then, Daniel, you talked a lot about this when you spoke about why Africa specifically, but are there other areas in the world where those characteristics similarly exist that you've looked at? Or just let that be somebody else's start-up?

We've definitely looked at pretty much all emerging markets, geographies in terms of the dynamics of our kind of B2B retail business. I think Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly attractive in the space because what you find is that the upstream distributors in more middle income countries, so if you look at in India or Indonesia or LatAm, those distributors actually tend to be quite powerful. They have presence. Unilever has been present in India for over 100 years. And so the distributors, these very large established family businesses who do hundreds of millions of turnover for just Unilever across some of these regions, they're very, very powerful. And so if you're trying to come in and disintermediate them in those markets, you tend to face a lot of opposition. I think this is what companies like Udon who pursued this model in India have faced and have found very challenging. Sub-Saharan Africa, the kind of middle mile place distributors and these wholesalers are actually very fragmented, very weak. And so even for us getting started, I'm a software developer by background, I grew up in California, I went out to Kenya in 2015, show up there with kind of my app and SMS system and Wrigley, the chewing gum company was like ready to give me a neighborhood to start distributing in like on the spot. So it just kind of shows how like poorly built out a lot of the distribution was at the time and still is. And I think that has really helped us in terms of being able to get greater kind of volume and kind of negotiating power over time, whereas I think that would have been more difficult to do in some of these more middle-income geographies.

And I guess just before -- one follow-up question for you and then I want to hear others. With the infrastructure project, you mentioned that in Europe versus LatAm, is the lack of infrastructure often in Africa a benefit to you because you're able to provide it and build it? Or is it something that has proved to be a stumbling block? Or is it just a non-factor?

I mean, absolutely, if you look at for the overall economy is the fact that there are not as many good roads and bridges and something like that. Is that a good? Obviously, it's fact. But I think that in the face and with the reality that, yes, you don't have the street names, you don't have the mockup stores and Google map doesn't really work, the fact that we have internally built out our own database to set with all the latitudes and longitudes of where our shops are and how to get around and our routing systems to serve them is a huge competitive advantage, right? And I think to the point of the long-term capabilities of being able to do a fulfilled to buy with Soco type of service, that's a unique capability that no one can come in to do because there isn't a UPS, there isn't a FedEx that you can just plug into, start delivering for your e-commerce company otherwise.

Got it. And Asa, has that been largely for you? I mean you had mentioned that you're building out a number of pieces of the value chain. Is that by necessity? Or is that by opportunity?

Primarily by opportunities. So it's not in -- Latin America is not similar to Africa. Things have been -- they are a lot more developed. However, they are more fragmenting and that creates for us a lot of opportunities to fully vertically integrate every part of the value chain. So we have connected with farmers, that is one example, to procure directly fresh because that's an opportunity to increase our margin significantly. We are building distribution centers, that can also leverage going forward to also supply protectors and smaller stores as an adjacent business model and growth opportunity to our model. So the infrastructure exists, but in a very like premature way, and that creates for us an opportunity to leverage in deals of this and create now an ecosystem when it comes to retail that consists of both physical infrastructure, but also technology. And I think the 2 of them do not exist, and that's our opportunity.

Got it. And then Megan and Fredrik, a separate question. Go back to the 2 of you in a second. But you both operate in a lot of different countries, so obviously the dynamics are different. What role, if any, does the government play? I mean, Fredrik, you mentioned a bit, but does a government play in how you operate, where you operate, are they sort of friend or foe?

Yes, I mean we're lightly regulated. So they don't play a heavy role. But we're in India, for example. And in India, the government is trying to regulate. And therefore, for us, the question is not to be assimilated with the Uber-like and be more on the government side because otherwise the regulation will make it not sustainable for the economical model. So we need to be very in close contact with them. But in the vast majority of countries we operate, it's more on the upside side because they can help us develop and we're a solution. So most of the countries we operate is light regulation and governments are willing to help so it's fairly easy.

You said something when we spoke earlier about how the drivers can't make too much money or else they'll be taxed. Is that something that is a regulation? Or is that country by country? Or how does that...

It's country by country, and it's a per kilometer system that we just plug into the platform so that the price cannot go above a certain threshold. So that even though for one single trip, it will be under the radar. We just want to avoid having people trying to build an economical model that will then be used an example of our platform not respecting the rules. But yes, it's a fair country. Not all the country but most of them.

Clearly, it matters to the cities.

Clearly, it matters. No, as we see, we have our 2 most important stakeholders: one, the customers that I've talked about; and two, the cities. Since we're using public space in cities and urban areas all over the world, yes, regulators will have an impact on the business. And that's also what we said from day 1, but let's try to build amazing products to work closely with cities, with politicians to shape the landscape and shape the environment format mobility.

And so switching gears just a bit. The -- I think, collectively, I'm going to round up. I think people on the panel have raised $1.5 billion maybe. I'm not sure if it's -- I'm right or wrong. But I would probably take you over, if I was betting. When you think about it, and now obviously we're entering a different time of the world, has the access to capital for the segment you're in been a problem for the industry. Has it been a benefit for the industry? And then for the particular company that you're at, has it been something that has helped or hurt you specifically? So I'll let anyone take that who's got an opinion.

I think I'll start. The most hated industry probably nowadays.

I mean how much money, just for context, went into the quick commerce?

Billion something in the last year. So I don't remember the exact number. We've raised 430 million in the course of 12 months. And it is an industry that does require capital to scale. It's a lot of infrastructure. You have to have a certain volume to be relevant. You need a certain volume to access the CPGs. So it is money to put in, but then also this investment does create a very big barrier to entry in a huge industry and a big opportunity to continue scaling and continue having a lot of benefits. The environment, the change in the economic environment, has not like -- has made us to take a decision to exit the U.S. and rather focus in Latin America, though we would have just run both countries at the same time. And as an opportunity has created also other opportunities, the fact that we have been well funded, that also gave us a big advantage compared to other players. So we did have the expertise. We were quick enough to put the infrastructure quickly. And now we have enough capital to continue scaling, while all of the rest of the competitors have rationalized, so we can continue growing the market. It's also for us an opportunity to start thinking on how we can make the model faster and more profitable. So I do find there's an opportunity. I think it would be great for more money to come in as it's a huge space. It's really not technologically advanced. And it's -- there's very, very few players I think who have capital to actually do this right and build whatever is needed for the future to scale be it on technology, be it on the supply chain infrastructure, be it in the management of the blue collar board there. So yes, I'm personally very excited, and I think it has created certain difficulties for the environment, but also opportunities to be about a lot more rational into how to grow the business more efficiently.

And then just one follow-up because one of the most interesting things that you started with was that you've kind of given up on New York. Has that largely happened in the industry where there's now players that are focused in specific geographies building the business? Or are there still people or entities that are trying to sort of take over the world?

I would say there are a few players who still remain like global and across multiple regions. We did find that focusing on a specific region that has a lot of similar characteristics, starting with the language, only Brazil is not speaking Spanish, there's a lot of cultural elements. We can leverage a lot of supplier relationships and opportunities around there. The same teams I think it just creates an opportunity for us to be more profitable and much faster. So it's more of a strategic, I would say, direction we've chosen versus the other players who may prefer to be present across multiple cities, but not heavily penetrating and creating the market share and leadership in these areas.

Got it. And then, [indiscernible], I know you're relatively new and BlaBlaCar was really early. But in the interim, there's been gazillion dollars thrown into some form of ridesharing, bussing, you name it. I mean how has that impacted where you are today?

Well, it's BlaBlaCar had its own cash issues but not in the same context as today. And that marked the whole company a few years ago. So now the anticipation of cash is way more in the mentalities of the whole organization. And by the way, the CEO could be CFO as well. So it's all about anticipating. But like as Stefan said, countries coming in having more cash is better. But when you have too much cash, you tend to think that you can do everything and then you lose efficiency. And sometimes being a bit constrained and focusing on what's my core product, what's my core market, was the real thing that I need to succeed and not trying to have too many bets on the table at the same time bring study as well. So it's a challenge, but it's also opportunities. So just to give a BlaBlaCar pandemic lockdown, it's 100% of your business that disappears. So it's like 0 revenue whatsoever, and your costs that don't change. So that also helps the company to grow basically. You're growing very fast in those moments. And when you're out of that system, you look at the world differently basically.

Yes. And Fredrik, I know similarly scooters are a well-funded industry.

Yes, definitely. And I can just second what said as well. And I think, especially early on in our industry, we had 2 American peers who were very, very well funded [indiscernible], hundreds of millions of dollars where we raised $10 million in our Series A and everyone said they will just -- they will crush you, they would buy you, you won't have a chance or so. But what you said there is that like access to capital doesn't equate disciplined with capital. Quite often the other way around. Our industry has been a good example of where we see that both Linenberg have fallen behind quite a few -- quite a few points, and we and our European tier, that we're much more capital-constrained that focus on the core, focus on efficiency, focus on discipline have taken over and showing better operational metrics and just better performance overall 4 or 5 years into this industry.

I mean I don't follow the venture capital world in Africa nearly as much, but is it well funded? Is there a lot of capital going there now?

What I would say is it's been a dramatic growth over the past couple of years. So if you look at 2016, I think it was -- total was $500 million that went into venture investing in Africa that year. Last year was over $5 billion. So order of magnitude improvement, I think still relative to the addressable market though, so nowhere close to what it should be. If you think about actually the -- both the population 1.6 billion and the GDP 3.2 trillion is actually the same of Africa and India. And yet India is over 50 billion. So there's still order of magnitude kind of difference in the funding lane, which suggests that there are good value opportunities even in an overall downward cycle in the market. And I think just like I reflect on us $100 million is the largest that a non-fintech company has raised in Africa. Still, like given the addressable market, there could be a dozen or so goes and that would not impact our performance, I believe, at all, because it's just very, very large existing segment, too. We're not like trying to create a new segment of customer behavior. It's like shops have been buying rice so for the paper for decades and we're just giving them an easier, cheaper, faster way to do that. So we're not making up some new categories, some new way of doing things, which I think is like a lot of the earlier, let's say, like the prior generation of companies, probably Jumia is the one that folks would be most familiar with, I think just totally missed the mark by coming in with this kind of outside copy, paste Amazon model. We're like, oh, B2C, like we can do this and just make it work napkins, if you just once again kind of go a little bit down beyond the top line demographics and you realize that like less than 10% of the population has more than $10 a day in purchasing power, it's very obvious that they're not going to use a traditional e-commerce experience to like buy random goods online on a regular basis. Vast majority of consumption is happening on these day-to-day consumable products. They're buying them from the local corner shop because they don't have cars to go drive the mall to buy a week's worth of goods. And if you look at that segment though, is that very -- all that fragmentation, all these middle men, and you can aggregate that person power and serve it with the VNV model and so bring that vast purchasing power together and use technology to drive value growth.

So as long as you're holding the mic still, the notion of last mile, I think people throw that word around a lot, but one of the interesting things that you had mentioned was you're not -- you're like mostly last mile because they walk down the block to you. Do you have -- is last mile actually important in what you're building and world is focused on getting it right to someone's hands and they're counterintuitive.

Totally, yes. So I think -- exactly, yes. Yes. There's the distinction between kind of last mile versus like, I guess, last 100 meters, right? And like I don't think the last 100 meters is important. Because, as I said, you have a consumer who has like, on average, like $3 to $5 a day, they're going to be going and buying a couple of dollars' worth of goods. Like coming up with some e-commerce proposition where you're trying to deliver it to their like home, shack or something, it's like not -- it's not adding value to them. In fact, it's like probably making it more difficult because they're going to have to spend a ton of time on a phone like trying to access some motorcycle driver to deliver their like 2 bars of silver, something, doesn't make sense. So they already have a shop that they go to. They have a relationship with. That's like right down the corner. That shop is aggregating for, say, 50 families in the neighborhood. And so collectively, it's selling, yes, $50 to $100 worth of goods a day. And You can serve them. And by doing so, reach on a B2B2C basis the entire community population. And I think that's fully sufficient. And because of the shopkeeper's relationship and the kind of personal knowledge that they have with these individuals, using them and giving them services on the digital side as potentially becoming like a human ATM to enable the cash and cash out for different mobile money services that do exist or being an on selling agent for any number of financial or, as I said, even the fiscal goods, too, when it comes to doing a click-and-collect type of model. I think it's definitely the way that services are going to develop across Africa, generally speaking.

And so by contrast, if you look at the quick commerce space, I mean is the need to get something so immediate, a by-product of the way that Amazon has trained us, sort of want something to show up even before we've ordered it? Or like why is the rest of the world so focused and why has so much money got into. I need it within the next 15 minutes or my head might explode.

My view into this is that it's not the 50-minute service that is the value here that you offer, but it's rather the infrastructure that actually has access to every consumer, especially the ones in the most affluent, the B minus, plus, that you do have access to them in 50 minutes. Whether you decide to execute on these or you decide to wait a bit longer, deliver the next day, deliver in 2 hours, that is something on the business model, on the project that we are delivering, it's more about building an infrastructure and a capability that allows you to do that. And then once you have this ready, I think this is a challenge to build, you can decide for which products at what price and in which areas you want to materialize it, execute on this or not. So it's not a requirement, but it's an opportunity to be positioned within 50 minutes of every customer in the key Latin America cities for us.

And a little -- I know you're in the food delivery space. And one of the interesting things that's happened it seems is a lot of those costs, which nobody ever charged, to get that last -- to get things faster, to go the last distance, are now starting to get passed along to consumers. Do you see that happening in the quick commerce space already where the subsidization is already going away?

So quick commerce actually and being vertically integrated gives us the opportunity to not pass this cost to the consumer and purely offer it as a service. If you think of a high-level basket for us in Latin America is about $20, there is an opportunity to make about 15% of extra margin with midyear revenue, which is a big outlet -- lots of CPGs companies are paying out of this money plus a 5%, let's say, delivery fee. I make easy percentages, but they are very close to reality. So that's already 120% of revenue starting with. Minus 60% on the COGS, which is a very average, I would say, opportunity for the COGS excludes like fresh that we do fully vertically integrated. That is already 60% profit margin. Because of the labor costs, our fulfillment cost when it comes to picking and delivery, is about 15%. So that is already a 45% product like contribution margin. And then if you remove something when it comes to fraud, contact center, payment costs, other extraordinary expenses, maybe there's another 15%, but it does go down to a 30%, 35% product margin. So there is -- you can only pass the consumer a 5% delivery fee if you want to or monetize it as a marketing tool, but there is no such -- there is enough opportunity from the basket, from the product margin by vertically integrating and leveraging the efficiencies they have to make enough profit for the business to work.

Got a Nico project, obviously, last mile means something very different in your business. How -- I mean, I'm curious, Nico, how important is it for you to find a pathway for the consumer to get the whole journey when they work with a BlaBlaCar?

It's actually a very, very good question. We don't suffer having street maps and addresses and everything works as well, quite well for BlaBlaCar. But at the end of the day, since it's a C2C, they find a way to define a meeting point. Now usually, those meeting points are not in the center of the city. They are where the driver is living from city. So we envisage micromobility partnerships, but it's too complex and given the unit economics it didn't fly. So what we're implementing next year is the capacity working through the tax issue of not making profits to ask for the driver to do a detour to pick up and therefore would premiumize the capital trip for the people using the service as a passenger because you can have -- and therefore, you're willing to be much higher unit economics. But for the moment, it's true that buses is a bus station, train will be a train station. Couple is more on the close suburb of the city, but not in the suburb, and we think there's a huge market opportunity for us to do the extra mile at an extra premium price.

Got it. And then ultimately, does that put you in competition with rideshare companies to some degree or not really yet?

No, because the unit economics we're talking about are still a few euros as opposed to Uber, where it's 10, 20, 30, we're never in that range for even that extra mile. So they can't compete. We've had some people trying to use our platform at the very beginning and try to highly rotate. And it didn't fly. We spot them first, but on top of it, it didn't fly.

And then Fredrik, obviously, Voi is ultimately the last mile. I mean you get something from somewhere. And so when you think about that and then you think about everybody in the world round, you mentioned that you tried a partnership it didn't work. Is Voi ultimately an enabler of the last mile for everybody who's in the space? Because you have devices, you have the knowledge, you understand the laws and the geographies of everything. Or does it ultimately become a competitor? Or where does that all sit given that skill set?

Yes. No. We have a very, very good understanding of how people move around, last mile and first mile, as well in cities, of course, in all the markets we're operating. And what we increasingly are seeing as well is that we are becoming some kind of glue between other forms of transportation in the city. So having taking say the next stock on 40%, 50% of the trips are going to or from a public transport station. So we're definitely increasingly becoming that kind of glue and the interconnector between public transportation, ride-hailing trains, buses, BlaBlaCars and other forms of transportation in the cities.

Got it. And so sort of a 50,000-foot question, as I personally reflect in the last sort of few years, 3 years ago, everyone was excited about flying cars and the world is going to change and we're all looking at these 20-year time horizons. The last 3 months, everyone is only looking about 5 days out, 90 days out, and like the whole world is going to change if we don't solve this. Like -- so if we just take a step back and realize that there's a lot of secular change going on in the world and we're in any one of something or maybe even 3 or something, I don't know, like when sort of you look at your view as to what sort of -- I'll start with [indiscernible] what the world looks like in Africa in 5 years or 7 years or 10 years for the distribution of products to the consumer? What does that look like?

I think it's fundamentally defined by having these hyper local points of access where within your community, within a few hundred meters, you can buy whatever you need, both from a physical goods perspective and the digital goods. And that's enabled by a human contact, a human agent who is using -- whose technology enabled to get you, fulfill you whatever those products and services might be.

And you don't think in sort of as the economy there improves and the GDP improves that somebody is going to say, "I don't want to walk that 100 meters, I want someone to get it -- get it to me." It's just not the way it's going to happen then?

No, it's not the way it's going to happen. I think the flip side also isn't going to happen, which is like you're not suddenly going to have an economic landscape where we build a bunch of supermarkets and malls and people have cars to go like do their shopping for the week, right? So I think the trend -- I think the leapfrog effect here is very real in the sense of like having the hyper local access point, the kind of Amazon Locker-style infrastructure where you can just go pick up whatever you need nearby, on your street corner when you need it, combined with the kind of leapfrog of, hey, labor is very cheap. So it's easier to have a kind of human ATM than to have like a physical machine ATM installed across all of these places is what's going to ultimately enable service delivery and distribution in Africa.

I mean just in the quick commerce world, many of us remember Cosmo in San Francisco in the late '90s. It's gone through so many iterations. What does it look like in 5 years? Like what should we expect to get at our houses instantly? And what sort of premium are we going to have to pay for that?

So in our view, our vision is to build an end-to-end vertically integrated retail platform and it starts in innovating and disrupting different stakeholders' experience. Number one is the consumer. So already today, there is a lot of personalization when it comes to different websites. But we are looking into the personalization, as we call it 2.0, which is about hour of the day and day of the week. So the app and the data we collect in what consumers are buying and, b, our company quick commerce, helps us actually collect a lot of more relevant information about the order somebody is placing. So we know about our user, what to show them and what type of content to show them on a Monday morning versus a Friday afternoon. So it's not just about curated to the specific user, it's curated for the user and for that specific time they are using the application. Then the second layer where we want to very, very differently operate is the whole supply chain infrastructure. So what products we carry are also relevant to what our users want for that specific time of the day. We do have the stores, we do have the infrastructure, we do have also the supply chain and the transportation going from the distribution centers to the stores. Then knowing what we expect to sell on a Monday morning versus on a Friday night also make it very, very different what we offer on a Monday morning in 50 minutes and what we offer on a Saturday night in 50 minutes. I think there may not be anybody going to the store on a Monday morning probably. So this is a very big area, and that also connects into when we procure from the suppliers, from the distributors, to which point of entry into our system, is it a distribution center? Is it our stores? And the last part is, how can we make -- you mentioned about last mile and increasing costs and how you pass it to the consumers. But our vision is how can we create all this data understand when the demand is coming in. What is the time it takes for task to complete and which tasks we need to actually run throughout the day or the week to run the business and then be very efficient in minimizing the idle time. And when you think about idle time, if you think of value riders, that if the moment they don't have a delivery can receive products or can do something else and we can very -- and we can optimize it and time it properly, that reduces our operating costs and then that's something that the consumer doesn't have to pay. So we view as an end-to-end ecosystem that runs across the customer, supply chain distributors and then the last mile fulfillment.

So I want to hear you guys. But just real quickly for both of you, since you've kind of said on the edges of it. Are you doing private label right now? Because if you have all the data people are doing, is that a key part of the model? Or is it now upside?

We already do private label for certain products that they have a lot of demand, and we are looking into expanding and having a lot more products in the private label.

Daniel, you guys are doing as well?

Yes. We're about to launch it.

Okay. So Fredrik, just moving in line. What does the city look like in X number of years and where the scooters fit in?

I hope more like Copenhagen and less like New York. No, our vision is, as I talked about before, to reduce dependency on private cars and heavy traffic in city centers. So I think in a couple of years, we will actually see that cities look much more like Copenhagen and Amsterdam than like New York, Moscow, which are still very, very heavily dependent on cars and heavy traffic. We believe we will see more scooters, more e-bikes, more share bikes, more other modes that we don't even see on the street today, but they are connected with public transit trains, buses, BlaBlaCars, as I talked about, and that we have this holistic customer proposal, yes, that makes it much easier for customers all over the world in all cities to make the decision and make the choice to not have their own car, but use all these different services, share ones, not share ones.

And I guess that mean, do you guys -- does success necessitate, there's a rising tide of lift all ships there in the sense of in a world where people aren't buying cars, they need a carpool more. They need to take scooters, like is that the vision?

No. But I think we're aligned. Less cars means more sharing cars. So for us, it works very well. So you divide the number of cars by 4, and then you force to be 4 in each car, then it's more carsharing. Same for flying cars. As long as you can share flying cars, it works for BlaBlaCar. And the way we see the future is cost of energy will increase because energy supply will be constrained. So we'll have to travel more efficiently. And that efficiency will come with the technological improvements, right? But on top of it, will come from sharing or different form of mobilities. Whether it's micromobility or long distance, the consequences will be the same, unless you find a way to transport yourself or something. Until then, we're fine.

Again, I know I'm the last thing standing between everyone and food, but I do want to leave 5 minutes for questions if anyone has any questions for panelists? I do not see any. As I said, because I'm standing between -- then I'll ask my final question in my 5 minutes I have remaining. If you guys were going to pick not your own company, but since everyone is deep into the space, but sort of a company that's in and around your space that you would bet on that's not yourselves who would you pick? So I'll start with Daniel shaking his head, so I'll start with you.

I would propose a company called mPharma, which is very similar to our company, but in the pharmaceutical supply chain focused in Africa. So dealing with a lot of very similar issues. But even, I think, yes, more challenging in some ways, but obviously bigger opportunity as I figure it out as well.

Got it. mPharma?

mPharma.

Probably I think of a company -- I think it's Swedish, it's called [ RELX ]. We are working with them already, and it's a lot about planning, optimization and digitizing and making opportunities into how more effectively plan and procure anything more and more. We will rely on data to make business and different decisions more efficient. And I think it's a great opportunity.

What's it called, [indiscernible]?

RELX.

RELX. Okay.

An obvious one. So all of you can get this research after this. Now a company we have worked with like called Zoba, Z-O-B-A, which is a Boston-based data machine learning company. They're building models for how to optimize movements in cities. So we worked a bit with them on how to optimize -- how to understand and predict demand and how to optimize to get your supply there. So ZOBA, Z-O-B-A.

That's a very difficult question. Given that we don't see really a competitor of reacquiring the way we have a platform, in our industry, there is a company I'm thinking of, but it's a target, and we're talking to them, so I can't give you the name. And in terms of marketplace...

Just us. I promise, we'll keep it between ourselves and the live stream. [indiscernible] or Airbnb business model applied to mobility for BlaBlaCar would be a good benchmark of what we were trying to achieve in terms of C2C approach. But now in mobility, I don't -- I'm short of names.

Okay. All right. Well, thanks, everyone. Enjoy. And thank you, Per.

Thank you, everyone. And thanks, panel, especially [ Asta ] because we haven't invested in you yet, but we're shareholders and everyone else. So I hope that whole day has given you more insight into our portfolio specifically, so can help you sort of see where there's value. But also my feeling from this panel -- thanks, Keith, for running it so well. It's also the sense that there is when one follows the stock market and all the volatility, there's -- one sometimes feels like is there any good private companies out there? But I think this sort of -- you'll agree with me that they're so good companies in the private space that are out there, selling good products in a thoughtful way, so super big markets. So that's also a good sort of thing to take with you to lunch. Because now there's lunch, just outside. And after that, there's one-on-ones. And then, yes, well, thank you for coming. And thank you, Jefferies, if there's anyone here for hosting us in this nice building. Thanks.