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

The intro makes me nervous. But welcome to our Capital Markets Day, which we do for the annual event. And we -- it's not -- someone asked me, are you going to announce something big, and we're not really. It's more an opportunity for you guys to meet all our great portfolio companies. So that's really the agenda for the day which looks like this. So a bunch of different companies, which we're really proud of and really bullish on their prospects will present over this afternoon. Yes, this is not much to say about this. You'll hear from everyone and it will be great. By way of intro, which so many familiar faces in the room, actually, before I start, the there's one new addition to the VNV sort of team crowd, which is a new Chairman of the Board. And Lars-Åke Norling is right here. So for you who haven't met him here is, which -- welcome to the Board. And we'll -- you will be able to interact with him. He's the new boss. And so welcome. Yes, you'll be familiar with this portfolio. It's very, very similar to what you've seen over the years, common denominator amongst all these companies is that they have this potential to become monopoly. Some are in their current sort of markets and enjoy the benefits of that, which is really what we sort of strive for and some are still progressing towards that sort of holy grail of very high barriers to entry and the sort of the sequential sort of very high margins that you get from this beautiful sort of area of businesses with very strong network effects. That's the common denominator amongst all of these. The portfolio is profitable. This is something that we started updating for the CMDs. And so now we've included what we see. We're well ahead into 2026. So this is maybe overdue, but we think the portfolio, our pro rata of the top 6 holdings, only the top 6, leaving whatever or something like that out, which are all very good companies, some of which you will hear from today, but leaving those aside and only looking at the top 6 and [indiscernible] of those. You're looking at revenues to us of $150 million. And profitability here, which I think we air on being a little bit conservative on. And so we're excited about this sort of outlook or the growth that this portfolio has shown, but also that it's profitable. And this continues into the future, and we haven't put that out here. But if you take our market cap and you compare that to what we see from these 6 companies and our pro rata of those into next year. I think we're on like an earnings ratio of 12 and then that increases a lot over the coming couple of years. So we think this is an attractively sort of priced portfolio with a lot of potential. What we've been active on and it's really [ base ] with over the last couple of years, which you know is that we've sold a bunch of stuff around the NAV and generated sort of a stream of cash flows that have helped us really delever. So the balance sheet has gone from being in net debt to being now in net cash. It's not a lot of net cash, but we are -- we also have some more exits on the way. So we expect to sort of complete a couple of exits over the course of the remainder of 2026, which will add another [ 10 million ] or so and allow us to do all the things we do, buy back stock and -- not so much invest into the existing companies because, as you saw from the previous slide, they're profitable and not really sort of in demand of cash. There's the odd exception, but exception, but they're really -- that is really small. So I think this sort of -- this is what we've been busy with and that's sort of complete now, but we're still sort of -- there's still some stuff that's being sold because they're IPOing or this that and the other. And that's -- those like these 2, 3 that are left to do in the course of this year, maybe a little bit more, but there's 2 that are really advanced. We haven't announced them yet, but they're basically done. They're done at NAV or above NAV. So we think our NAV is good. Having said that, which had a big discount to NAV. And so that's just -- I mean, we Yes, it's the way we've learned to live and try to take the opportunity around that by buying back stock and sort of canceling those stock as we always do and capturing this thing because we see our NAV able to deliver very healthy double-digit sort of returns from the NAV level. And if we can buy that with the sort of closeness and transparency that we enjoy being big shareholders in all these companies, then that's, of course, a big, big kicker in it. So what I did talk about I had this slide up last year, and it's sort of -- what we sort of started sort of discussing them, if you will, is something that we have also worked on over the course of this year, and I wrote a little about it in our last sort of in the quarter report, the interest of the quarter report in that we've sort of set up a new business line, which is maybe better described in this way. So we call it [ B Global Asset Management ]. That's a -- that doesn't really exist. But the point of this slide is that we we're doing -- I mean, there's not much we can do apart from buying stock at the balance sheet level, at the VNV level. But we do see a large sort of deal flow around us that we think is very attractive. And we're looking now, basically, we're looking to set up sort of vehicles that allow us off balance sheet to capture the opportunities that are around us. And so these may come in funds. So we're currently working on setting up a fund that will capture opportunities in our -- in sort of the geographies that we use to hunt in before in emerging markets or to still do. And of course, we have a big bunch of the portfolio active in emerging markets, but that sort of -- that -- whatever it is now a 30-year history of hanging around emerging markets and doing stuff in them has led to sort of -- it still leads to a bunch of opportunities and deal flow. And those are being captured, like in a fund like that. We'll come back to you, hopefully, over the next couple of weeks or so that when we can properly announce that because as a fund that will be regulated and everything needs to be set up. So we got those kind of vehicles, but we also have vehicles that concentrate around specific sort of, for example, specific holdings in our portfolio where, I mean, big chunks of the portfolio is doing really well and as a shareholder in them, part of the cap table, you're sort of exposed to opportunities in the to sort of acquire more shares. Now we can't, again, for the same reasons, it's better for us to buy back our own stock, but we think we're a good partner to have, and we're looking to sort of set up SPVs where we raise money to sort of invest alongside us and partner with us in sort of in the big holdings in our portfolio. So this is something that you should expect us to sort of be quite active on. We are very active. This is a big part of this past year of what we've been doing. But -- and you should expect us to sort of talk more about this in the not-too-distant future. And we're super excited. So us as shareholders in VNV will enjoy the benefits of this because VNV Global and us lot working there will be sort of the managers of all these different vehicles. So the sort of any fees or profit shares and stuff like that will flow up to us as shareholders in VNV Global. That is my very short intro. And I -- so the real -- we move on to the sort of the real sort of show and dance of this afternoon. And that is to talk to portfolio companies and what is not a better portfolio company to start with and BlaBlaCar, which think is the first one out. And we've got [ Nico ] somewhere, there's [ Nico]. You require no introduction. So just over to you. I wonder --

I don't know if I'm connected already. Am I sounds like I am. Okay. All right. Thank you, Per. So as usual, I go through an update on BlaBlaCar and this time, maybe show you a bit more numbers around the business and deep dive in some aspect of the business, which we haven't done in the past presentation. So I'll start with the usual what we do. I think most of you in the room have been exposed to BlaBlaCar, and you know pretty much what we do. But as a reminder, we are really fundamentally a tech platform that connect inventory, mostly historically carpooling, which are private drivers actually sharing the car when they drive between cities, but also an increasingly other transporters like bus operators, and we have lots of new verticals being integrated from trains, flight, car rental, even hotels in some of the markets today. So we connect that to an audience and that audience is mostly casual and they look for something affordable, environmentally friendly and mostly, it's not written here, domestic right? So it's mostly about domestic travel, it's not about international travel. So that's what we do at the core, One thing I haven't shown essentially, which is a new content for you, but kind of interesting to keep in mind is the power of the brand and the distribution. And I'll use that for the rest of the presentation as a threat. But thanks to carpooling and because we touch millions or tens of millions of people, the brand and the capacity to distribute is very strong in some of the core markets where we operate, where here, we're showing the aided brand awareness, which is around like 90-plus percent in France and Spain. It's 94% in Ukraine, 68 in Brazil, around 90% in Turkey. And here, I'm not showing India because we have not measured India, but actually, we have more users in India than any of these markets today. So I don't know where the brand awareness is today, but it's probably getting to a significant number and many markets like Poland, Italy and so on, where we also have a pretty strong burn awareness. So to some extent, and then I'll dive into a bit more numbers and so on. We are really good at creating this brand and traffic. Having said that, people transact pretty small amount, right? So if you think of it, it's domestic, low-cost transport. So the basket size being transacted today on the platform is not that big, but we're really good at building volume, brand awareness around the activity. On the core, I would say the pillar of that of the special sauce is clearly the initial activity of carpooling because we create this supply. So it's purely like a captive owned supply which are these private cars that people are sharing when they drive between city. And to some extent, essentially, we build the brand and the brand love around that, and we build the volume and the traffic on the platform based on that. And that play is quite defensible in terms of barrier to entry because it's a very distributed marketplace where you have like millions of suppliers, essentially normal people sharing the car and millions of passengers booking seats in those cars. So it's pretty -- it's very much like a C2C marketplace. Pretty hard to disrupt for a new entrant because the barrier to entry is pretty high. And I'm showing here the NPS, but we have a very high NPS on this activity. So people love this product essentially. Now the byproduct of that, which is interesting, linking to my previous point, is that we need to kick start the marketplace. So it's very hard to get from 0 to 1 in a new market to create the supply and create the demand and get the matching. Once it flies, essentially, it goes on its own. So essentially grows by word of mouth for the most part, which means today, more than 95% of the traffic on BlaBlaCar does not depend on Google or LLM or anything it's brand traffic. So people know the brand, they come, they use the app directly. So we have kept supply and we have brand demand, which, in a world of potentially some of these marketplaces being disrupted by AI, LLM, where people are going to search, it's pretty powerful because people search on the BlaBlaCar we don't depend. We don't need to buy traffic. Traffic comes to us. Now over time, we -- as I said, we diversified the activity. So historically, it was 100% carpooling, which was the core and the called the special [ source ] but we've been building these other verticals, as I was saying at the beginning. And today, it's becoming a pretty diversified play where it's roughly 50-50 in terms of passengers between people booking a seat in a car and people booking a seat in another mean of transport, mostly buses today increasingly trained flights and even like in the 3%, you have like hotels and car rental and other activities we're developing. So the way to think of BlaBlaCar today, it's really a mix within the same product of a C2C model, which is very much like a classified type model, which is the carpooling activity, which would resemble if you were to look at like what type of companies resemble that. It's mostly classified. We've put like a bunch of peers. It's probably not comprehensive that would look like a BlaBlaCar in terms of like business dynamic. And it's also mixed with a more, I would say, classic B2C OTA-type business model where you distribute inventory that other people can distribute. So the main difference here is the -- I don't have a laser, but the [indiscernible]. We don't share that inventory with anyone. The rest of the supply, whether it's like buses, trains, hotels and so on. It's inventory that you can find in other platform, but it's actually we leverage the audience of carpool to fuel essentially the B2C segment. And you have a bit of a flywheel where people might come to find a train and actually they're going to book a BlaBlaCar or vice versa. And we see like a very positive flywheel in the business, thanks to the sort of dual model, which again have like slightly different business model and slightly different business dynamic in terms of profitability long term. Now taking a step back in '26 of the last few years, as I was saying this morning, we've been pretty unlucky in terms of external events. So we had 3 external events essentially putting quite a bit of headwind into the company. The first one, obviously, was COVID. So COVID and sharing cars was not mixing very well. So we had 2 pretty tough years in 2020, 2021, even early '22 when essentially the activity was completely stopped by the pandemic. We get out of the pandemic, as you all know, in early '22, essentially. So [indiscernible] was like Q1 '22, and then we could see the activity picking up again. But 2 of our key markets, Russia and Ukraine, obviously, you get into war, Russia invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which again put a bit of headwind into the company. And in 2024, we talked about it, I think, last year, we also lost a stream of revenue that was coming from these energy certificates generated in France. So it's actually like every other year, we had a problem. I hope the future and I hope the past is not a good predictor for the future and that we're not going to get sort of crisis all the time. In fact, maybe taking a step back, if we look at the current crisis or the current climate with the war in Iran, it's actually for the first time a tailwind for the business. Because we tend to be countercyclical high petrol price is actually more fueling usage to the platform than anything. So the wheel is turning. I would say, and I hope like the next 5 years, I'm not going to look like the last 5 from that standpoint. Despite all of that, and I think it speaks to the in the resilience of the company and the business model, we managed to keep it together. We managed not to do any down round, and we've been sort of pretty adaptable through this crisis to sort of like you regrow and make the company profitable and growing again. Now I wanted to zoom on 2026 and talk about like what we've done this year, now that it's, for the most part, public. We decided to exit 2 businesses that have been with BlaBlaCar for quite some time. The first one is the operating [ buzz ] business, which you see here on the left. And it's a business we acquired, as you might remember from [ SNCF], the train operator, back in 2019 where, fundamentally, we take the inventory risk. So such we prepurchase kilometers to bus carriers that we resell on BlaBlaCar. So it's not like a marketplace model, it's more of an e-commerce model, if you like, where we take inventory risk, and it's a lot less predictable as a business model than the [ Marketplace ] business. The reason we did that back then is that it was the only way for us to access the customer to essentially back then, we could not aggregate [ SCNF ] buses. We could not aggregate [indiscernible] buses. So essentially, we strategically wanted to get to that multimodel game and capture this bus intercity audience and that was the only way to do it. Now things have changed. Essentially, we have distribution agreement with essentially all the bus carriers in almost all of the countries, but specifically in Europe. So we do not need to operate and that business model is very specific. It requires specific skills within the company. It's not going to grow that much outside of Europe because we deploy like a marketplace model. So we decided to shut it down. It's been announced in May, and we are phasing down the network. So essentially by the end of the year, that part of the business will be stopped. But if you look at that from a customer perspective, we don't stop distributing buses essentially. We're going to distribute buses from other carriers, and we're not going to be an operator in the game. That also has a benefit of simplifying the overall business model of the company because you post that divestment, we're going to be 100% marketplace as a business. The other one is a business we sold, which was like a short distance carpooling business, but fundamentally, it was more of a B2B, B2G play, where we essentially sell coupling platform to companies or regions. It was pretty dependent from the energy certificate. Without energy certificate, it's not a bad business, but it's not going to grow all that much. And essentially, it's a different sport because you built like a white label platform for region. So we decided to sell that business. We found a buyer. It's been signed. It should close end of the month or end of October. We're not sure yet, but it's pretty much done essentially. So that's pretty transformational because essentially, it simplifies the company and it makes the company like 100% marketplace, C2B2C but very consistent business model and a lot more focused. So the result, if we resume and look at the company with the new perimeter, so the company without those 2 businesses, essentially, it would have done in 2025, EUR 182 million of revenue, and that revenue is like 92% or something like that gross margin. So it's almost like revenue and gross margin are now very similar and EUR 23 million of EBITDA, so still profitable. This year, we expect to be around EUR 20 million, maybe a bit more million of net revenue on the back of over EUR 2 billion of transactions, right? So that's really the net revenue, the take rate we make. And we should pretty much double -- almost double the EBITDA and be above EUR 40 million of EBITDA, again on the new perimeter. So that's good in 2 ways. That's good because we show that profitability is clearly increasing pretty rapidly. And the core business is actually growing, right? So we are roughly in the 15-ish percent top line growth and 20%-ish EBITDA margin, and it's bound to improve as we move forward. I'll go pretty quickly on that. It's just the historically how we manage sort of the big chapters of the company. So I would say we had one that was really about going global and opening new markets from 2014 to 2018. We have one which is essentially now, which was like adding more supply, so adding buses and train and so on. And now we're moving more and more into more verticals. So we're starting, I'll show that like in Turkey, specifically, to go from transport to travel, which means adding accommodation, adding like other services to the platform. With the same logic I described earlier, we have a massive audience. They come to the platform for free we should cross sell and essentially offer more to that demand because we don't pay for it. They come back. We have like very strong both brand awareness and repeat essentially, very little churn within the users. So we should build more services for this audience. How do we grow moving forward? Essentially, it's 3 things, and I'll double-click on each one of them pretty quickly. One is to monetize carpooling in emerging markets. So as you probably remember, like the model for us is always to launch new markets without monetizing. So people do transact, but we take 0% take rate on transaction initially, and we built liquidity in the market. And then over time, people pay either becoming a subscriber of the service, like members, paying members or we take a fee into transaction. We have both models. So that's going to be one of the big lever of growth because today, we have like a very large reservoir of usage and [ GMV ] that's not yet monetized. So that's one of the big lever for growth. The other one is adding new verticals. So in all of these markets, as I say, we start adding buses, train plans, car rental, hotels, accommodation in general. And we tend to see, and I'll show some examples that, that accelerates the revenue growth as well. And last but not least, we'll keep a pretty strict OpEx discipline, which we applied over the last 2 years. So I expect in the next few years we won't grow staffing costs. We won't grow OpEx at all or not that much, maybe a bit on marketing, but maybe not that much. So those are the 3 ingredients. If we zoom on the first one. First of all, it's something we started doing. So it's not like something that we kick the can down the road and say like we'll monetize in XYZ years. We started that. And here, we're looking at markets that were unmonetized in early 2022. So it's mostly Brazil, Ukraine and most of the market in Eastern Europe. So what you see on the top is the annualized number of bookings on the platform to analyze a number of passengers and it's on your quarterly sequence. So you can see that the usage sort of kept on increasing over time in all of these markets. again, mostly propelled by it's mostly Ukraine and Brazil, plus a few Eastern European countries in there and we monetize along the way. So it was 0 in early '22, end of '22, we had EUR 6 million revenue run rate, and we kept on improving the revenue. Today, we're not done with this cohort of countries. So Brazil is barely tapped. So to give you a sense, within those numbers, we have only 3% of the Brazilian GMV being transformed into revenue. when in other markets, we had 10% or 15% or up 20% in Western Europe. So there is still like usage growth potential in those markets, and there is still a lot of revenue growth potential in those markets. So the game is to continue in this quarter of country to grow usage and monetize. So you should see the dark blue growing faster than the light blue. Now the good news is after that, we have the next cohort of countries. So here, I'm showing India and Mexico, where today, we generate no revenue yet. But as you can see, we've been growing usage pretty dramatically. We'll end up the year above EUR 30 million passenger run rate in India and Mexico. And that does not generate any revenue yet. But obviously, we'll do the same. I don't know if I can go back. Here we go. We'll do the same. So essentially, like the equivalent of 2022 here is probably like early 2027 in this new cohort. So today, if I look at the confidence level that we can expand EBITDA and we can grow the top line, it's pretty high because it's not on the back of usage we need to create. We already have the usage, and we just need to progressively monetize the usage. So that's the biggest lever in terms of like revenue, at least, I would say, short midterm revenue and profitability growth of the business. And essentially, the game for us is to find the right pace of essentially keep on building dominance in those markets, like India, for example, is still growing very, very fast. So we don't want to slow down in India and monetize and create new verticals at the same time. Now the other thing we've been doing is introducing new verticals outside of transport, and we started that in Turkey under [indiscernible] brand. And essentially here, it's just like adding hotel bookings essentially into the platform. And you can see the same story in 2022, it was nowhere essentially, we were just connecting hotels to the platform. Now we're doing roughly 0.5 million booking per year run rate in Turkey, which compared to the audience we have, it's pretty small, right? Because like overall buyback hard to give you a sense, it's 150 million bookings per year run rate. So this thing is pretty tiny from a volume standpoint. But because the basket size is pretty high because it's hotels and it's 20x higher than the basket size of transport. We already make a significant revenue run rate on hotels in Turkey. We should end up the year close to EUR 10 million revenue run rate in Turkey. So that's clearly a playbook will apply to different markets like we need to introduce new verticals and accommodation based vertical to more and more markets in Europe outside of Europe because we do see that we convert the audience really well into accommodation. And because you have a much higher basket size, essentially, you generate like a pretty significant revenue uplift. So again, that's an example in Turkey, but the same logic would apply to different markets outside of Turkey. And last but not least, on OpEx. It gives you a sense also of the transformation of the company over the last few years. When we had the 2024 energy certificate crisis, we had roughly 720 people in the company post all this transformation and essentially being having more discipline essentially on OpEx and staffing in general, we end up at roughly 470 million. It's excluding [indiscernible] looking at the [indiscernible] Turkish business. So essentially, it's around like close to 250 staff reduction that we operated over time. I would say today, we probably are roughly rightsized for all the bets moving forward. So if I look at '27, '28, we do not anticipate to grow that number or that much. It's maybe going to stay more or less stable over time. So OpEx is going to stay more or less constant. We'll play a bit with marketing, if it's efficient. We have clearly the revenue and the EBITDA reservoir ahead of us. And now it's more about how do we create this sort of like future revenue levers, I would say, beyond '29. Like until '29, we have the growth levers. Beyond '29, we need to build those new verticals to build the story beyond '29. So that's it on the presentation. I don't know if we take questions or we -- yes. Should we sit down?

So by way of intro, I'm Dennis Mohammad investment manager [indiscernible] BlaBlaCar together with Per and [indiscernible]. I'll kick off with some Q&A from me, but then we'll open up for questions from the audience. So raise your hand and [indiscernible] will be running around the mic. So make sure to get the mic. But I'll start off. So as you alluded to in the presentation, 2026 is a truly transformational year for BlaBlaCar with the exits of both operated bus and short-distance carpooling. Walk us through a bit of the kind of detailed rationale behind it and reaching that decision. It's obviously a very big decision, but also kind of the sentiment of the company now. I mean you're partnered with north of 100, 130 employees this year -- what's the energy level BlaBlaCar for [indiscernible] and how has the process been going?

Yes. No, no, it's surprisingly well understood internally. It was one of my fears that when you go through like all of these changes, you sort of like you do it by sort of like paying a year or 2 of growth and profitability. And we don't, as you can see, like 2026 is going to be much better than what we described earlier this year. I was a bit more pessimistic that the transformation would cost us a bit more energy, revenue and profitability. It did not -- and I think it's because the rationale was pretty clear. Like on the bus side, people were not that surprised because they could see that all of the expansion was on a marketplace model that essentially Europe was becoming more and more of a marketplace model and that, that business was increasingly isolated or different from the rest. So it was not that big of a surprise and it made tons of sense in terms of like repositioning the company to what it does best, which is really sort of being what I described at the beginning, this sort of like technology platform with a strong brand, connecting demand on one side with suppliers that are not us as operator but essentially the entire market of from distance travel, whether it's cars and trains and buses. So that part was well understood. The short distance one was always a different business. because it was not even integrated into the BlaBlaCar product. So it was always operating as its own sort of team and village and now they're going to join another company. So it's going to merge selling the activity to another company. So it's less dramatic as a change. Now net-net, it is a massive relief to some extent because now it feels for me that the company is sort of like nimble, very focused, like it's very like the next few years are very clear in terms of execution, and it's good to get that out of the way, essentially, sort of you feel like now is sort of year 1 of a new journey to some extent.

Great to hear. One more from me. You talked about emerging market monetization and how you've already gotten started there. But walk us through the parameters that you look at, the decision-making process? Obviously, India is a big market coming up? Like when would you expect that to happen? And how do you balance growth of packs versus actual planet impact from getting revenues from those markets?

Yes. I think what's been pretty new is demonstrating how much we can generate from the BlaBlaCar usage with other products. So if you walk back a few years ago, it was very much theory and [ slideware], saying like, we're going to do buses. We're going to do this week going to do that. Now we're demonstrating that in several markets like Brazil, Ukraine, like many markets, essentially, where you do see that by keeping very high growth, very high NPLs, very strong brand love on carpooling, you do very effectively build other verticals, right? So actually, the hotels in Turkey and you can see like buses in Brazil and so on. So market by market, I think it's always going to be a trade-off of like -- what's the value of the audience for adjacent markets that you can build versus monetizing the audience. And there is no dogma essentially. So it's purely like being very rational. And if you can you monetize the audience by keeping the flywheel you do if you count and it has more value-generating side businesses or other businesses on the side, that's what we do. So to give you a sense, like Brazil went from no revenue to -- it's maybe going to end the year around like EUR 9 million or so of revenue. More than 2/3 of that is actually coming from the bus segment. And the BAS segment would have been impossible to build and grow at that speed without the audience and the platform we do from carpooling. We could have made another choice and just monetize carpooling a lot faster. I think if you fast forward, you're just building like a bigger business long term, I think like these different legs to your business. So that's going to be sort of the game. I would say the good news is now we have enough market and mature enough that essentially, it's more like you're pacing your growth versus your EBITDA margin essentially. Like if you translate that into financial sense, you could generate a lot of EBITDA if you wanted to in '27, but maybe at the expense of long-term growth, and we need to find the right pace essentially.

Great. Any questions from the audience? One down here. Linus.

Just wanted to ask how much has your outlook for say, this year and perhaps the next change as a consequence of, say, rising fuel prices.

Yes, it's been interesting and mostly positive for us to some extent because if you look at raising fuel prices, it has 2 consequences. One, on the corporate side of the business, it tends to create supply, right? Because essentially, like the economically it makes most sense to share your car. So we said the trigger point to say, "Oh, I'm going to share my car when I do a ride or when I travel between CTA and CTV," has increased. So we've seen sort of like supply increasing across markets, which is great. On the demand side, it's -- we didn't know if you destroy demand because at some point, people don't travel as much or if essentially demand is shifting toward the more like affordable low-cost segment, which is us. So today, clearly, we've seen increased demand to match that increased supply. So we have seen clearly the sort of a tailwind in the current context, both for carpool and in general for the bus segment because the bus segment is probably capturing some demand of people that don't want to drive anymore as well. Or people that don't want to fly a road or people that don't take the train because it's too expensive. So we've seen the bus segment across all of the markets, not suffering and mostly benefiting from the current context. So short answer is we tend to be a bit countercyclical clearly.

Thank you. Your [indiscernible].

So the first question relates to the previous one. And we know that you're tracking ahead of budget this year. Is that only because of the higher fuel prices, et cetera? Or is it other things also progressing better than you expected? And second question is just relating to AI, I mean, quite a lot of focus on AI for these aggregation type of businesses. How do you think that will change your business, both risks and opportunities?

Yes. On the first one, I would say it's 3 things that ended up making us above budget or beating budget. One is we have released quite a lot of new features, especially on caring that do pay off essentially. So we've seen incremental usage on people doing more detour more negotiation. And essentially, it has an effect of increasing volume, but increasing the price. So essentially, those sort of like negotiating detour feature. People pay up essentially. So it increases GMV and mechanically so you win on volume, but you also win on price to some extent on GMV. So that's been positive. Clearly, there is an element of environment, macroeconomics. How do you sort of unpeel that? It's almost impossible to be honest. And the third one, specific to this year is, as I said, like the transition were smoother than expected. So I think we had budgeted a bit of buffer thinking that, okay, as you do these sort of layoff and selling businesses, you would have expected, which did not happen and well managed, and I'm happy with that. We had no bumps essentially during the high season, for example, this summer in Europe. And we could have expected more bonds on the road. So it's a mix of all three. Frankly, like you quantifying exactly that market by market is almost impossible. And then AI, so you have 2 things, 2 stories for us on AI. And you have the story that everybody is living through, which is like how do you use AI internally and so on. I think the question was more on the consumer side. On the consumer side, as I said, like we don't buy that much traffic. So to some extent, the fact that we have our own inventory, especially with carpooling and you don't buy, you don't depend so much on buying traffic from Google or whoever else. I think the risk for us is fairly minimal in a sense that I think the risk is pretty high if you're pure yes, and you buy 40% of your traffic from Google today. You might ask yourself, okay, part of that traffic purchase is going to shift from SCA to maybe LLM to some extent? And what's going to be the cost of capturing my traffic on LLMs is going to be higher, lower than on Google. And no one knows today. And there's going to be a shift for us. We don't depend on that all that much, right? So it's only 5% of inbound traffic is actually both coming essentially both on different platforms. So I think we're quite immune from that standpoint, just by the power of the brand and the feed traffic. And the other thing is it's not like transport specifically, I think it's not that prone at least what we do to LLM because it's not something -- it's something you book pretty quickly on an app. And it's not something you would express. So it's different from a [indiscernible] package. I think today, if you're reselling holiday package as an OTA, yes, I'd be worried because if I look at my own behavior, I plan all my vacation on ChatGPT or some other LLM when you said like find hotel, with this, this and that and how to get to the hotel and then you have this package order. For us, it's more like people know those are like very short -- I mean, short distance domestic trips. So we are connected to ChatGPT. We have an app. We don't see that much traffic inbound today from LLM. So we are connected. We're one of the early adopters essentially of those connections. And today, the truth doesn't generate that much. It's good for PR, but it doesn't generate yet that much traffic.

Great. Any other questions from the audience? Okay. I'll do one final for me and then we can wrap it up. as you mentioned in the presentation, you're around 20% margin today with the new kind of business. But to get to at least 45% margin. I think that was a promise. What are the main drivers to get there? How will you get to 45% from the current levels? How much is reducing OpEx? How much is growth and where will that growth primarily come from if you just put it in buckets?

Yes, I think it comes from these buckets that we're showing on the screen. Like if you look at the usage we have today in market that are not yet monetized, the cost is already there. Meaning like the platform is there, the -- we have like millions of passengers, tens of millions of passengers that are not yet monetized. So for me, like if we wanted to jump very quickly at the expense of destroying demand like virtually, you could get to 40%, 45% EBITDA margin like within the year. Like now from a consumer perspective, it would be a vital change and you would break the growth. So my concern, like another way to answer your question, I'm not too concerned that you will reach 40%, 45% EBITDA margin. Today, it's more about like how do we have like enough verticals in the pipe and maybe increasing basket size, hence, hotels accommodation is a very interesting add-on essentially, so that we can still compound growth for the years to come. So that when we end up in peak a year like '29, '30 or in 2 or 3 years essentially, you don't want to end up like 40% EBITDA margin and single-digit top line growth. So the -- I would say the -- most of the effort in the next 2 years will be about like seeding future growth so that essentially, we can compound more growth on the top line. So -- but I think the profitability with the transformation we made on the business, with the monetization that I've shown, like again, like all this graph, and we're doing it, you can see like you do have like easily like EUR 20 million, EUR 30 million, EUR 40 million of additional net revenue for which the cost sales already in the bag. So to some extent, like you can do the math, like you quickly get to 40-plus percent EBITDA margin. So the question is more like growth post 29% right now, I would say.

Very clear. Thank you. Very excited to follow that in the years to come. With that, I think we hand it over to our next speaker. Maybe with a brief introduction from [ Sasha]. I'll introduce you. So yes, next second largest holding of the voice so presented by CEO and founder, Fredrik.

And perfect for a -- you hear me? Yes, great. And great to follow Nico and the BlaBlaCar. So if BlaBlaCar moves people between cities, [ Voi ] is moving people within cities. And it's always interesting when I mean these rooms [indiscernible] out of curiosity. How many people in this room have used Voi at some point the last year? Raise a hand. We have a lot of users. And the last month? Almost as many, which I think is a good example and proof point of where we are now as a business. It's nothing for you. So [indiscernible] now with Voi. We started the company in 2018. Time flies. And many of you have heard me here and in other situations and forums before. If I would summarize it, it was the first year, a lot of growth. And yes, also a lot of kind of chaos, how should this service, micromobility, [indiscernible], e-bikes and so on live in cities. Can you make it profitable? The 2 years after that was for us very much transformation years, turnaround years where we shifted focus completely from grow, grow, grow, into, okay, how do we make this company and business profitable, sustainable that can stand on its own legs. And now the last 2 years, we have picked up growth again. And we picked up growth while improving profitability and making money. So glad to stand here today after the last 2 years. I'll talk you through that, of course, also a bit where we're going and also where we see growth potential for the next coming years. And we like this illustration at Voi, which shows how most of the cities in the world and in Europe are designed. So we give most of the space in cities to cars, to roads, to parking spots and so on. And only a little piece of space and land to ourselves, us, humans and the people moving into cities to be close to each other and we partner some kind of sit the community. And key thing from Voi since day 1 has been a positive contributor in the shaping force in how we changed this. So moving people and cities from what you see on the right-hand side here, it is being heavily reliant on the private owned car to something that looks more like on the left-hand side here, where we living in cities have menu and the options, alternatives, how to get around, where we at Voi, focused on micro mobility, so light electric vehicles and then connecting that with other forms of transportation such as public transport, such as trains and so on. And it's finally standing here in Stockholm today, going out on the street. I love seeing people on voice, of course, and I also love to see how much CD Stockholm has changed the last 8 years, both people move much more on Voi. I think 10 million, 12 million rights this year only in Stockholm, but also that we see changes on infrastructure, more bike lanes, more protected bike lanes, which, of course, accelerates the usage of our type of services. And where are we today then? So we started in Stockholm 2018 with a very, very tiny fleet of e-scooters. It was August 25, 2018, fast forward to where we are today. We're now running a multimodal fleet, so both e-bikes and e-scooters. Around 200,000 vehicles in more than 130 cities, focused on Northern Europe, Western Europe and Southwestern Europe, where we see most of the growth the last year. Southwest coming from France, mainly, but now also Italy picking up. We have moved from an environment, the regulatory environment when we started this, that was very unregulated into a much more mature regulatory environment where we win tenders and licenses. So we win the right operate in a city like Paris, in a city like Stockholm, in a city like London and so on, which we have been pushing for since day 1. So how can we work together with the cities instead of against the cities. And that, of course, creates kind of regulatory moat also around our business, around the revenues and so on. And Voi now is the #1 when it comes to regulated and licensed and tendered market share in Europe. So around 200,000 vehicles in operation now. So that's a big fleet. Around 80% of that revenue comes from this protected tendered licensed markets. totally in the beginning, we're focused a lot on profitability over the last couple of years. And we see now we're both in an accelerated growth phase on top line. It's also falling down to bottom line EBITDA and EBIT. If you look at last 12 months, end of Q2, we were at EUR 39 million EBITDA. And yes, the biggest region is a [ DAC ] for us or the German-speaking countries, the Nordics, U.K. and now France, picking up quickly. Since we started this also, a lot of people have had a lot of views on micro mobility, especially side scooters. I would say that we have debunked many of the myths and misconceptions and critique over the year, starting up there from the left, can you make micromobility orderly when it comes to parking and behavior and so on. More and more so, yes, and good regulations is key that, but it's a key point in that, but also improved product, improved control on our side that the remaining players in this space behave more responsibly than perhaps what was the case over the first years. The lifetime of the vehicles have gone from very short, as you probably remember in the earlier a couple of months to now, we see the generation -- the [indiscernible] good generation we've had out on the street, the longest now comes from 2020. So that 6 years already, and we have most of the fleet still on the street. We expect the latest generations to last more than 10 years. So we have invested a lot in hardware design, how to make the vehicles more robust and really fit for purpose for what we are using them for and then, of course, improved our operations a lot as well, repairs, maintenance and so on. That leads to much better unit economics. If you look at the whole fleet, we pay back a vehicle in 1 year. We see that the latest generation this year, 8 months to pay back. which is great, of course. Down there to the left, some of you or some perhaps not some of you, but other people might say there are only teenagers, riding scores. That's not true. We see that with every year as we are improving product at a safety perception and so on is improving. The user group gets older and older. And talking about safety. We have 0 vision policy. There shouldn't be any bad incidents on voice. We see when we look at the data the data is strong on the safety side. You have yes, there are 6 labs around the globe between every severe incident on a boy, which stands up very well against the private loan bike, the privately owned e-scooter. And we also feel that the conversation overall around safety has also matured and it's more nuance now than a few years ago, where people, journalists and decision makers as well understand. And what we see is that most of the bad severe incidents are rather on privately owned trimmed scooters he had ones, which are much more robust, lower speed and so on. And last year, we replaced around 14 million cartrips, which is great, and we also see that more than 50% of our rights are true or from a public transportation train or bus. So really getting more and more interconnected with the broader transportation ecosystem. Voi is a complex business to run. We have several stakeholders that are demanding in different ways. We have the cities, of course. We have our riders. We also had the non-riders who are exposed to our vehicles in cities. We have our whole operations teams. So the approach we have taken there is take as much control as possible over the full value chain. So from the hardware side of things, as I mentioned, spent years and years and years to design the best possible e-scooters, to design the best possible is increase the recycled material rate for sustainability reasons, taking the IoT to the connectivity modules in-house to be able to treat the vehicles more and more sensors. And as mentioned before, a lot on safety as well. On the battery side, it's also been an interesting journey when we started by we operated vehicles with fixed batteries. We had to take the vehicles in and out pretty much every night to charge them. In 2020, we moved over completely to swap of the batteries instead, so higher, higher capacity swappable batteries, which means we can do most of our operations out on the street, swapping the batteries, doing repairs which is, of course, much more efficient. On the software and data platform, we I'm really thinking about it. Yes, we have a software and data platform, almost like an optimization engine where we generate SEK 120 million data things, data signals every hour. So that's a lot of data. And then we use that data, ingest it, analyze it, run our AI models for various different use cases. For example, optimizing where to put the vehicles in which order to do operational tasks, we do something like 12 million operational tasks this year, repairs battery swaps and so on. So it's a massive, massive data play. And what you see is the user application, but there is also similarly advanced or even more advanced on the optimization side application and tooling for the people working with our vehicles out on the street day in and day night out. And then this needs to be kind of materialized through operations out on the street. This is a business that's 24/7 on how do we make sure our fleets are available in good shape, in the right place and so on. So it's -- the complexity of all of this, plus the regulatory aspect create real moats around the business. And now we're starting to see that paying off. And what that looks like in numbers is something like this. So the dark red staple there is LTM Q2, so the other staples are full years '22 to '25. We had a few years there, as I mentioned, '22 to '24, where we focused on, okay, how do we make this business profitable and sustainable to then reignite growth again. As you see, growth has been reignited. So we did what we said and what we promised. What extra encouraging as well is that we have continued to maintain or improve our vehicle profit margin. So revenue minus direct operational cost, payment fees and so on and also being able to keep OpEx overhead flat more or less over the last couple of years. So we're starting to see real operating leverage, which is why you see both EBITDA and EBIT kicking up over the last 2 years. So that's on an annual basis. If we look at the last quarter, we see that trend even stronger. So what you see here is Q2 '22 to '26, so only the second quarter of the year. We see that over the last 2 years now from 2024, we're close to double top line on a quarterly basis. We have doubled vehicle profit. We have more than doubled market EBIT of the cash coming out from the market to pay for HQ and development central development costs and so on. We have tripled EBITDA and yes, 3x, 4x EBIT as well. So growth is accelerating now also with improved vehicle profit margins on a relatively stable overhead. So this is exactly what we wanted to see. And we see that we can continue on this trend for foreseeable future, which is very, very exciting. And it's not only that the last years we have added on quite a significant amount of vehicles. What we also have seen now is that we're able to utilize or we're able to get increased usage on the beacons we put out. even though we have close to double the fleet as well, so both on the usage side, but also on the revenue per vehicle per day side, which is not something we were 100% sure about when we started to increase the fleet so much. One, 2 years ago. So this has also been really, really positive. And last year, when we stood here, we made a few predictions. What will happen with Voi, what will happen with the industry over the next coming 2 years. So up until 2027. We said the regulatory landscape will stabilize further and there will be fewer and fewer players competing for the spots. What we see now is, yes, the regulatory landscape is maturing with these tenders and licenses and so on that overall are in format that we wanted, which is, of course, favoring us since we have invested and spent so much time also building the city suite of products and operations and offerings -- on the competitor side, yes, consolidation has continued. So there are fewer and fewer competitors. Now they're only a very few who can win the really large and really important and really valuable markets. we have turned a multimodal 2 years ago. I think our back proportion of the fleet was low single digits. Now it's 25%, 30% and increasing. And we see that the reception on the bike side, both from the users and from the cities is really, really strong. And this year, I would say, is the first year, we have a very strong e-bike product offering, including the one you see out here in Stockholm. And over the last year, we have also been able to allocate capital in a good way and continued to deliver on what you saw on the financial slides. So we are on track towards our predictions and are overall very excited of how the last year has been. But we also think it's very much day 1 for micromobility. We see -- this year, we will have, yes, a bit north of 1 million active users on a monthly basis. This is the peak season for micro mobility now over the summer and the fall, so now we're north of 2 million active users on a monthly basis. We know that there are approximately 150 million people knowing about Voi, but there are 600 million people living in Europe. So the potential is huge. And when we look at some of our key cities, Stockholm Berlin, Hamburg, [indiscernible], Marseille, we like to look at, okay, how much of the population in a city is using Voi on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis and how can we, over time, increase the both the ridership share and the wallet share or mobility users in a city. In the most penetrated cities, Stockholm and Oslo, we're close to 1/3 of the population using Voi on an annual basis. But we see we have a long way to go and so much potential in some of the really large cities such as Berlin, Hamburg Marseille, London, Paris. And on an EU average, the same number is around 10%, 11%. So there is a much, much more market to take. And also, over the last year, we have focused where it matters the most, the really big cities. So Paris, we won a license in Paris a year ago. We went live first of October, 1 year in Paris is now top 3 market for Voi. So we've been very successful in getting into Paris quite late and taking market share and delivering its only bikes in Paris, delivering both on market share on product quality, on user experience. The next big bet now is London and what these bubbles are supposed to supposed to illustrate is the bigger the bubble, the more potential in revenue for Voi over the next couple of years. So massive, massive opportunity in this mega cities mainly in Paris and London and Berlin over the coming years, and we were just started. And sometimes we get the question as well, like do you need to open up 200 more cities to grow over the next couple of years. Our answer is no. We definitely don't have to do that. If we can move cities over the next couple of years towards Oslo and Stockholm penetration, all cities would be in an Oslo level penetration when it comes to rides per capita when it comes to vehicles per capita on our existing city base, our top line would be 5x larger. It would take time, of course. But again, there is so much potential in existing cities at the same time as we see that there are so many new cities opening up. So overall, we -- we are happy with the results since the last CMD today is the best we've ever been, but it's also the worst we will ever be again. Thank you.

Great. Let's do some Q&A. We have Fredrik, obviously, but also Mathias Hermansson, CFO, Deputy CEO. Okay. Great. As before, I'll start off with a couple of questions from me and then open up for questions for you guys. Last time we met for [indiscernible] was actually on this stage 2 years ago and then you were growing around 10%, 15% top line and had just entered profitability. Last year at [ Arsen ] in London, you were growing around 30% year-over-year and were slightly more profitable. And this year, as you alluded to in your slides, you're growing 47% year-over-year in Q2 with EUR 40 million of EBITDA, LTM and EUR 10 million of EBIT LTM. Super impressive numbers. Like what are your general reflections of what has changed? How have you managed to kind of accelerate growth as much as you have? And how long is that sustainable for?

We're broadly feeling now is that the boy machine is really rolling and it's unstoppable at the moment, it is like -- and when we look at our stakeholders, again, riders, cities and operations, we see on the rider right side, we have much better products, both on the hardware side and on the software on the app side. So we see that in user experience feedback and so on. And in then that's yes, that's what's driving a lot of that. But in our business also to win the cities, to win the right to play for the riders, where we have been very successful over the last year, winning key landmark cities which comes as a consequence as a result of all the hard work that the teams have been doing, both on, okay, how do we understand the cities and what they want and how do we meet that with our product and overall offering. And then on the operations side, we are getting better and better every day in the small compounding like basis points improvements on a daily basis in how we do our operations and how we plan it and how we use data and so on, it's just compounding over time.

Any reflections from you, Mathias?

No, I think I mean, Fredrik mentioned they're [indiscernible] building now over the past few years in the industry. One of them was obviously the regulations. That's pretty clear to understand. But building on what Fredrik said, I think overall, the ambition for us is to be the most -- the world's most efficient [ micromobility ] operator and to be able to deliver the lowest cost per ride that we then can translate either to margin on our pocket or give it back to the users. And I think the current thinking is probably more -- let's give it back to the users to capture this huge penetration that's still to be captured. So -- and I think that is what you're seeing right now also compounding.

One more question from me, and then I'll open up from the audience. So as you talked about, [indiscernible] has grown a lot over the past 18 months. I think need bikes was sub-1% of the float beginning of last year, and now it's becoming a pretty significant part of the fit and the CapEx for this year and last -- and next year. Walk us through a bit of the rationale behind the expansion, what that does to kind of the demographic profile of the users and why you've done those bets, so to speak, but also high level, the difference in unit economics between the backend [indiscernible].

I think the short answer on the unit economic side is that it doesn't really matter for us. I think we have -- it's more a city-by-city profitability. Some sites are better than others. And yes, it's basically -- the way we allocate capital now when we do more CapEx orders, it's more around the opportunity we see in terms of which cities and the potential of growing rather than whether one is slightly better or worse in economics.

Yes. One -- or 2 things to add on that. An interesting thing we see now is we're starting to have a more multi-model fleet. Some cities that are only bikes, quite a few cities like Stockholm, that are both bikes and scooters. We see that when users have tried both of the form factors, both the bikes and the scooters, start to use the service much more -- so having a broader product suite seems to drive increased usage and retention because, yes, we just have a wider portfolio. And last point, not fully related to e-bikes, but another thing we're very excited about is this year is the first year, we've also started to add on new revenue streams where we have several what we consider to be very valuable assets. We have a large user base, we have a large fleet. We have operational network in all the cities. We have good city relationships. We have the brand and so on, where we started to say, for example, advertising deeper, broader partnerships with the likes like [ Klarna ] and [ Fedora ] and so on, more developed B2B offering. So over the next couple of years, there were so many benefits by having scale. Scale on, yes, network coverage in cities, scale on the user base and so on that we'll be able to use and monetize more in the coming years than what we did during the first year.

Great. Thank you. Questions from the audience? We have several. We can start maybe --

So you talked about improving operational efficiency and making the hardware much more durable. Do you think much of this kind of optimization journey is already done? Or do you think there's scope to improve efficiency further?

We're far from done. I mean the numbers are starting to look good now, but we, on the inside are looking very much on input metrics, and there are so many things we can improve. Both on the hardware side and on the -- and on the operational side. I mean imagine that's a bit out. But if you look at our COGS, our cost base, it's very manual, labor-intensive today. It's not far-fetched to think that in a couple of years, more of that will be done more robotically in various ways.

And you also mentioned that the revenue per vehicle per day has improved and is up year-on-year. Could you talk a little bit of the drivers behind this? Has it been about city mix or pricing or what?

A mix of all of them. I mean we've added some very strong cities like a city like Paris is driving it up. So it's a mix of the things, and it's really on a city level. Thank you.

I just wonder what crazy dreams you have about Voi where it would be in 5 yes, something what we are -- we are not doing right now. Something different? What's your 5-year vision?

If I start from yes, the division is a bit related on how I think transportation in cities will look like, which will be much more autonomous and really like point A to point B, also on the more heavy vehicle side. But Voi is on kind of in between public transportation but not fully public transportation, if we run the consumer apps and so on. I think Voi will be more much more prevalent and central part in what we today think about public transportation. And then we are figuring out what we will play in this move towards autonomous transportation.

Linus?

I have 2 fairly quick questions. So one, you obviously had a strong quarter in Q2. Have there been any sort of adverse weather effects or regulatory setbacks that would say diverge from normal seasonality patterns in Q3? And then the second question is just if you could share anything on the current progress in London?

So the first question is, it's -- have there been any adverse effects you should know of. Not that I know of all, and we can leave it by that. And in London, so context here, this is the first year we're really kind of pushing forward in London. We see more demand than what we budgeted and forecasted for. We also see that London is more complex to run at scale. It's [indiscernible] borrowers operating quite autonomously and so on. So it takes time, but we're on the right trajectory now given the encouraging user numbers will continue to build and grow London over the coming years.

Maybe just to add to London. I think we mentioned in the Q2 report as well. But I mean, the opportunity in London is by far the biggest opportunity we have ever seen. So the revenue for the London market itself is as big as the entire revenue base of Voi right now. So it's a huge opportunity. And I think we -- historically, as you see the development of our financials here. I think we have been historically extremely disciplined and try to be best in what we try to do before we move on to the next path. And the advertising and those commercial partnerships, that's been on the table for several years, but we kind of deliberately try to wait. And the push into London is also one of those things that we didn't have the capital, the bandwidth and so on. But now we see regulations start shaping. [ TFL ] will do pan London tender in a couple of years, hopefully or 18 months, is the best guess right now. And of course, we're doing these investments in London in this hugely complicated market. to position ourselves for that tender. That's the primary goal. But then we're obviously happy that the demand was stronger than we thought.

So maybe for Mathias. But if you look at -- first of all, I'm coming from Luxembourg and in public transport is free. And you see discussions going on, let's say, in Sweden, that public transfer should become much cheaper. Do you see there is a risk that the willingness to pay drops if, let's say, like a new call here too [indiscernible] or whatever you pay 1,200, if that drops to, let's say, 500.

But you also have a lot of cobblestones, I think that doesn't -- but I think -- I mean, in real time, we've actually seen exactly that here because the government lowered the public transit passes to cut the price in half and had 0 impact on our revenues and riders. I mean, just to take an example, I think in Stockholm here where we've been for a long, long time, I think our year-over-year growth is over 50% despite that effect, for example. So it's not something that bothers us that much. Probably more -- if that happens, more people will leave their cars and go on travel transit, and then we will be there as well to help them with the first and last mile.

Yes. [ Staffan]?

So I didn't feel that you properly answered Dennis, good question on unit economics for bikes. Since the -- if they grew from 1% to 30% over the last year or almost 30%, I would assume that you haven't really had them for that long. So what's the number of years that you advertise those on, which should be a great kind of different? I like that really changes the profitability, I guess.

It's a good question. I'll drill deeper. The bikes are roughly 20% more expensive than a scooter, give or take. What you see when we have a market with bikes and one with scooters is that people tend to use it longer. The price is normally is the same. The offers in market, but people using it for a longer distance a longer time. So the revenue per bike per day is normally higher. The payback in number of days for bikes -- and now it becomes a little bit city specific. But what we see in the aggregate is that it's shorter or at the same level as scooters. When it comes to depreciation and amortization of our assets, I think we depreciate our new vehicles now for 10 years. But remember as well then that all the batteries, which takes up a pretty big portion of the overall cost of the entire vehicle we depreciate over 4 years. So on average, it's like 7 years -- if that helps.

Great. [indiscernible], and then we have one more in the back.

I think -- 2 questions on the fleet. So I mean, fleet growth is obviously important to drive revenue growth. So I'm wondering, can you continue to grow the fleet without winning more tenders? Is there still room to run, so to speak? And second question relating to that, do you see any sort of macro trends where cities that find this service good or contributing to society -- have they started increasing the fleet allowance, if you want to call it that?

Yes. So yes, on your second question, the short answer is yes. And that's part of the driver in cities where we've been a very long time like Stockholm where it's working well. We get to expand over the years. Paris is another example where we've been allowed to expand the fleet over the last year. So that is also big, big reason why we're so excited about the potential in the existing cities as well, which relates to your first question as well. Now we have been positively surprised over the last 2 years how much more opportunities open up on the -- this is a good place to put vehicles, both existing ones and new cities as well.

I've got one final question from Fred. And then I was wondering, as you said, the high season is the summer season. How much of that revenue you see during the summer is contributed by foreign tourists coming into the cities versus the domestic residents. And do you see any difference in such case in spending habits?

Yes. And again, in our business, it's super city specific. Some tourist heavy cities take like Paris. We see, of course, that the tourist proportion of the rights is much higher than call it, university city like Oxford, Oxford and Cambridge. And on the spending side, yes, the tourists are less price sensitive than the daily commuters for understandable and natural reasons.

And last question. Maybe this is too far ahead in the future, but have you started even thinking about any opportunities to expanded the Southern Hemisphere just to achieve more recurring revenue? Or are there summers during our winter?

You mean like Australia?

Like Australia.

Yes. No, we're not looking at that part of the world at the moment.

Okay. I think that's it. Thank you very much. Looking forward to the next and where growth has accelerated even more and we're either more profitable. Infinity. [indiscernible] for oil. And now we welcome up housing anywhere presented by the -- well, not really new anymore, but since a year back, new CEO, [ Antonio Intime]. So super happy to have you. And floor is yours.

Thank you, Per and VNV team for having me. It's a real pleasure. I'll probably start with a quick introduction of myself. [indiscernible], CEO of [ Housing Anywhere]. Joined the company last year. Before then, I was working at [indiscernible] tort, the largest real estate classifieds in Italy, and I spend the rest of my career and digital tech space ranging from a launching start-up to navigating large corporates like Amazon. I think we haven't been presenting for the last 2, 3 years. So I'll probably go over who we are, current status of the business and recent changes that we brought clearly, where we're heading and our ambition for the future. So I can use the laptop as well. All right. So let's start with a snapshot on the group. Housing anywhere is a midterm rental platform, connecting tenants and -- which are primarily students and young professionals landlords listings, furnished room, students and apartment on our platform. We run 3 different complementary brands. HousingAnywhere is a transactional-based marketplace. So basically, tenants can booked directly place stays on our platform. We earn a fee from them and a commission from the landlord. It's present across Europe, focuses on international mobility and supply is coming from primarily property manager and to a lesser extent, also private landlord. [ Stood apart], similar business model as housing anywhere active in France and Belgium, where we have a solid and consolidated brand as the name suggests, focused on students mostly domestic and with a solid also position in the market on PBSA, purposely built student accommodation and private landlords. Finally, [ Cabernet], a more standard classifieds, where basically tenants pay a subscription to get access to landlords, active in the Netherlands, supplying straight market, hence the type of business model that we have skewed on domestic with a large majority from students and supplies coming from private lenders concentrated on rooms, active since early 2000s, also very strong and consolidated brands. I'll talk more about it later, but we are leveraging this complementarity across brands to build stronger value proposition, consistent high-quality experience for students into an integrated platform that combines basically the strength of the different brands. So with $39 million in revenue over the last 12 months, more than 60,000 net booking under our transactional model, so HousingAnywhere in [ studepart]. We are the leading midterm rental platform in Europe. We're present in more than 400 cities. -- across Europe, powered by more than 25,000 landlords. The largest countries are France and Belgium, primarily through [ Studopart]. The Netherlands through Cabernet and then Germany, Italy and Spain through HousingAnywhere. As I said, we earn a fee from the tenants and the commission from the lender, fairly similar contribution that add up to more than EUR 500 in net revenue per booking for an average of about 10% take rate. And the average stay is around 6 months. Now if you take a look at the user journey, the typical user journey, it resembles that of short-term rental more closely but with some specificity and additional complexity. So landlord list for free in our platform. They set availabilities. They set the pricing, typically monthly rent. Tenants can browse on our platform without a need for physical viewing. When they find something interesting, they can apply by verifying their ID and providing any other additional document that the landlord is requesting or engage in a conversation if you have any specific questions. Then landlord clearly screen the application. They accept or decline when they accept the booking is in, then the tenants pay the first month rent, the platform fee and the deposit. Then they have to sign a lease agreement, and this is another peculiarity of longer-term stay. While many stay with us until they successfully move in and verify that everything is as advertised or they get fully refunded and reprotected. Landlords also get the fair amount of protection, but I'll go over it a bit later. And so once the booking is in, basically, the -- yes, the booking is secured. And if you think about it, we and other platform have optimized over time, the part of the journey that goes from this covered to book, right? And this is the moment where we monetize. But what we believe is that a great opportunity is also what happens after booking, right? And if has been partially unaddressed so far because it's complex. It's hard to crack. But it's precisely because of that, that we believe is where we can build a strong real competitive advantage. In terms of financial, we've grown revenue over the last 3.5 years by 65%. But most importantly, we have turned profitable. Over the last 12 months, it was the biggest leap forward into this. We generated $5.6 million in adjusted EBITDA at a 14% margin primarily through cost optimization and efficiency gains. And we want to keep this disciplined approach moving forward. We'll continue to apply it to preserve our strong financial position while we continue making sustainable investment, while clearly, the main focus is now on accelerating growth moving forward. And in order to do that, at the end of last year, we have kind of revisited our strategic direction in order to make sure that we were on a big enough opportunity where also we had a sizable right to win. And international mobility, as I said at the beginning, was HousingAnywhere has been housing anywhere initial target and also where we had found the best product market fit. But if you think about it, the students and mature working professional completely different animals. And in the meantime, we had been growing our penetration into students a lot faster, especially after the integration and the acquisition of [indiscernible]. And this, along with the need of channeling our energy on fewer bets rather than spreading ourselves too thin across too many areas. That's led to this strategic refocus driven by primarily 2 main shifts. On one side, from targeting international mobility to student first. So international and domestic student alike. And from Tier 1 cities across Europe to all relevant CT in UF. So the 5 largest country for us, which are Germany, France, Italian, Spain and the Netherlands and which basically account for 80% of the market. And by taking into account all the suited inflow per city and 5, the need housing typical total contract value and our take rate, we end up with a EUR 1 billion opportunity in serviceable addressable market. This is real revenue pool available under our model. And if we consider that we are already at a 10% plus penetration in some cities, bringing the same penetration for 5 were already 3x our current revenue. But we also believe that our obtainable market is will grow much bigger than that. As rentals move more and more aligned, they become more managed, the market matures, and we also improve our overall value proposition. And in any case, we see this as a starting point as after consolidating Europe, we can move outside but we want to focus on Europe now and also extend into a young professional as we tap more and more into the domestic markets or into renewals as a natural extension than from students. So clearly, this strategic reshift has reshaped our priorities in 2026 and beyond. We've already been working this year on becoming a native rental platform. Clearly, we have fully integrated AI in our customer service with a very high case coverage and resolution rate. But then we have also built our own AI assistant to power and streamline our booking operations, so basically the interaction between tenants and landlords. And we've gone through already multiple iteration of it after having reached a solid performance in terms of coverage and customer satisfaction. The AI assistance has started to qualified tenants earlier in the funnel and pushing them down to landlords when high intent leads. Up to now, where the assistant is present in the chart with landlord. So basically combining speed, availability and consistency of AI with the human dutch of a lender. Also some early genetic features, like, for example, the ability to update listings autonomously with information that we found in the chat from the landlord, so that we can improve quality supply at scale and prevent tenants from asking the same question again and again. On top of that, by Q2 2027, we'll have HousingAnywhere in [ Sudopart ] integrated into a single seamless platform operated by one organization into a single operating model that combines of the platform. And the goal here, as I said before, is really to have solid, high-quality experience for students across Europe, streamline operation and build clearly a more scalable product foundation. But we also see this as a stepping stone towards building a real competitive advantage and possible M&A opportunities down the line. while our agenda, as I said, is squarely on accelerating organic growth, we think that we'll be in the best possible position if and when those opportunities will arise and make sense. Last but not least, clearly, we want to win students across G5. We have already started like repositioning our brand accordingly, working on supply. So both on expanding our approach in 5 going deeper in these countries, but also fine-tuning the supply acquisition doubling down on university partnership, clearly, and also sharpening our product proposition. While all this is underway, we continue to refine our long-term view to make sure that -- we accelerate our path towards becoming the go-to destination for students across Europe. And as I said, at the moment, we monetize one precise moment, which is the booking, but the experience that we enable spans across months. And the vision there is to go deeper into the rental cycle in order to build our potential right to win also in the tenancy phase. So whatever happens after the booking. And by doing so, we want to make it so good for tenants and landlords alike that may pointless to go off platform. And the reason for that is, of course, we want to tap more and more into recurring revenue, tap into renewals, and this will extend our LTV and build a stronger mode. The good thing about this vision is that perfectly aligns with what tenants and lounges are already asking and screaming at us. So a high share, for example, of negative tenant experience are linked to the deposit. -- too high. It's not returned, and I have a dispute with the landlord, while lenders want to feel more protected against damages and clearly unpaid rent. And that's exactly what we want to tackle. And as a stepping stone towards that direction, we have just launched quite recently a pilot of what we called a worry-free booking experience which basically offers tenants 0 deposits, removing, as a matter of fact, the biggest financial buyer that they have, while at the same time, protecting landlords against damages and any and paid rent we want to make real for landlords. So we also offer fast payout whenever there's a claim within 48 hours up to a certain threshold and also more visibility for these listings on our platform. So this is a truly unique proposition at the moment in the market, which is already showing very early promising results in terms of conversion uplift. And why we're doing this is also because I talk about this a lot. Trust is potentially one of our most important intangible KPI. And by on the full experience, make it consistent across the board instead of leaving it to the goodwill of landlord and tenants we believe will this is the single greatest opportunity that we have to build a stronger moving forward. But there's also another reason why we want to earn this trust and it's because we have also understood that -- we're kind of in a bigger mission than just helping students find the places -- and the good thing is that if students themselves acing those reasons back to us. So in their onwards, we are already perceived as an enabler of new unforgettable experiences of confidence through uncertainty, fresh stars, new chapter life, new connection, all allowing them to find a trusted play to stay so that they can get settled and go further.

Thank you. Great. Thank you, [ Antonio]. You know the format by now. I'll start off, and then we'll do some questions from the audience. It's been a bit over a year since you took over the helm at housing. Walk us through when you got the call or your thoughts post decision-making process living in mobile are and joining. And also a bit how is the first year been for you at the housing.

So I think the reason was clear. I saw an opportunity to build something big at a European level, and that was the kind of challenge that I want to get on at that time. And I think the realization a year in, 1.5 years in, is that I think the opportunity is even bigger than I thought. Also having the opportunity to go through the numbers, do the strategic review and get a firsthand real knowledge and but at the same time, the complexity I've spoken a little bit about it, the complexity and the challenges are also higher in this usually go hand in hand. So that was kind of expected. But I think in this, there's also the big opportunity, right? Because solving that complexity for the market will create a competitive advantage that we need -- that we're looking for basically. And in terms of how this year has been, I think it's been kind of a roller coaster. But I think I appreciate a lot the variety of things that I had to handle. Just to a quick summary, we went through like a review of the kind of mindset and way you're working in the company. And then, of course, on to building a stronger team, especially in the leadership -- after that, we did the strategic review, we changed the operating model. Clearly, as a consequence of that, last part of last year was dedicated to strengthen the financial position. And then I think we are in a position now where we went from the need for funding operation now to the opportunity to fund growth if and when opportunity is to up to now, where basically we need to build that machine that volume was also mentioning that delivers the liver delivers, right? And why we're not fully there yet, I think, I'm super happy about the -- how the team has been navigating these changes.

Very exciting. You alluded to this in your presentation. You said the serviceable addressable market is north of EUR 1 billion. Today, a large of that revenue doesn't happen on the marketplace model. So walk us through how those transactions happen and how you see that competition, if you will, or what you have to convert from [indiscernible].

Yes. I think there's a big difference between -- if we stay on students clearly, which is our target now. There's a big difference between international and domestic students. For international uses were kind of a lifeline. They don't have that many options. And as a consequence of that, our penetration in that market is much higher. But we also have a clear evidence, especially from [indiscernible] parts that has been focusing on student all along stood up part is generating already more bookings in the domestic market than international. And while the challenge there is clearly that there's a lot more optionality than your network, real estate agents, classifieds, local classifieds I think the idea is exactly what I was explaining at the end of the presentation. So we want to make our proposition so good that even that there are those optionalities, especially for domestic students. Imagine like, for example, you are ending on a personal content you have to pay your deposits. And still the landlord is exposed to risk on damages or unpaid rent. And so the idea is exactly that, right? So the domestic market is clearly more challenging than the international one. And -- but definitely, by improving our overall value proposition, I think this is the way to go to have a higher chance to penetrate it.

Great. Looking at the audience, opening up for questions [indiscernible].

So I would like to learn a bit more about students as core customers. It feels to me like they -- well, there's a large market, but they tend to go to the one who's offering the lowest price and they might even be willing to make the less convenient alternative if the price is lower. So what level of contribution margin can you have what level of EBIT can you have long term?

So we don't see that much of difference between, for example, students and young worker professional, honestly. And if you think about like supply like PBSA, the pricing point is not that low, right. It's true that there are definitely more aware. And -- but what we're trying to do is by introducing, for example, that the worry-free experiences lowered the barrier in things like the deposit. But at the end of the day, we don't see that much of a difference. And with the current unit economics that we have, even if we go 100% students, which is our goal, we don't see any impact in the unit economics moving forward, considering the money that we're spending to acquire students and how the operation that we have at the moment on the platform. And which concrete numbers should we then expect -- and you mean revenue per booking or --

No in total, just looking at the P&L.

Okay. So the P&L, I think, we're already at 14% EBITDA margin. We are projecting in the next 2, 3 years to improve that dramatically. This is going to be through continued marketing efficiency. Building a brand is a big topic that we have. We have clear evidence from [indiscernible] how this spans the wheels and reduce the dependency for example, from Google. University partnership is a big thing as well. A big portion of bookings generated on [ Studer part ] is coming from those university partnership which is basically free traffic for us. And we are replicating this best practice across the board and now that we're going to have an integrated platform. This is going to be one of the things that we're going to leverage also for the housing anywhere part of the business.

[indiscernible]?

Do you see any opportunity that customers of [ stud part ] then later convert to customers of HousingAnywhere when they graduate and become professionals? Are you tracking that? Have you seen any high conversion rates?

So renewals are very low at the moment, but that's exactly what we want to tap in stepping into the tenancy phase of the business. But if any, this will be more than welcome because then at the end of the day, we're going to run 2 different brands still. So we're not going to integrate the brands in this first phase because we believe that the major positive impact will come from integrating the platform, which is what we're doing right now. But moving forward, if there's going to be like a share of audience between the 2 is just more than welcome.

Your [indiscernible]?

So first, just on penetration. You said if your core cities reached at 10% penetration, you were 3x your revenues, how will you -- what's the strategy to drive that penetration starting? So that's the first question. Second question is on the no deposits, et cetera, these new initiatives, the economics behind that because I guess that leaves you at some financial risk and also the early results of those investments.

Sure. So in terms of penetrating the 5 largest countries that we're targeting right now, it's really about applying the playbook that we've developed in the bigger city, right? So bringing in supply. And of course, we're going to target more the supply that we know converts better with students. And again, best practice from [ Suda part ] are of paramount importance because we're going to target PBSA whenever in markets where this is a thing because it's not everywhere. And then private landlords at scale. So it's really about applying the same playbook also in Tier 2 and 3 series where also the competition is lower. And in terms of the investments and things like the worry free, so the investments pay back when -- with conversion uplift. We're already seeing a much higher. It's just early results. So I want to be cautious at the moment because it's a very -- it's a pilot that we've been -- that we launched just a few months ago and in a few cities. But the conversion uplift that we're seeing is much higher than the one that get us to breakeven. So yes, there's going to be an investment, but this is the kind of investments that we want to in case proposed to our investors rather than just funding operation. But the early results are already showing a much higher conversion than more than repay the investment.

And I guess, fair to say as one right, that risk is outsourced for you guys. It's not a risk on your --

Exactly. [indiscernible] we have a partnership with insurance that are developing this product with us kind of exclusively, and that's definitely on them.