Hi, I'm Mike Harris, Transitional Head of Investor Relations at InPost. Welcome to InPost Q1 2022 results call. Today, we will have comments on our clear last mile differentiation and operational performance in Q1 from our CEO, Rafał Brzoska. Michael Rouse, our Head of International, will run us through our progress towards bringing automation to Europe's last mile, and Adam Aleksandrowicz will, as always, guide us through the financials. A quick disclaimer, today's call includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and it is possible that actual results may differ materially. The call is also being recorded. Rafał, over to you.
Thank you, Mike, and good morning to everybody. First, I just want to remind everyone of our main mission. We seek to do nothing less than just transform the consumer experience, merchant economic sustainability of Europe's e-commerce last mile. In Poland, alongside to our merchant partners, already two of every five parcels delivered goes through our highly productive APMs. That's, of course, not a cultural specifics. This literally reflects the reality that when you make lockers convenient for consumers with best-in-class service, consumers love both the standardized, efficient experience and naturally, their full control over the collection times. Clearly, in a world where e-commerce business is focused on reducing delivery costs and improving sustainability, efficiency and automations are a key part of our story resolving those problems.
First and foremost, we are about consumer convenience, which drives both loyalty to our machines and more business for all our e-commerce merchants. On the next page, you see three charts that demonstrate why we should not just have a role in the markets we are tackling. We believe we have a rightful claim to win in these markets. As mentioned before, when lockers are convenient, consumers love the predictable, high quality experience. Of course, they love to control their collection times. As you can see, our locker NPS in Poland, which is already in another league versus our door-to-door competitors, remained at a very high 75 points in our just completed survey. What that drives. A satisfied consumer is job one for merchants, and as our NPS indicates, we elevate the consumer e-commerce experience.
By the way, this consumer satisfaction comes with clear economic benefits for merchants as we use. Of course, depending on the size of the city or deliveries, but about a quarter the fuel and a fifth the labor per parcel versus traditional door-to-door deliveries, and that's just in a non-peak time. Because there are even more benefits in peak times as we deliver more parcels per courier then. Another valid point, while inflation impacts us all, our automation leaves us, of course, less exposed to these pressures, meaning our cost gap versus door-to-door peers will only rise in 2022. Crucially, everyone on our planet and in our communities benefits from the reduced need for vehicles with lockers versus door-to-door deliveries. Society gets all the benefits of less congestion and a dramatically reduced carbon footprint per parcel. It's around 75% carbon footprint reduction per every single parcel.
Why I believe we are in front of another tailwind for us? In current geopolitical situation, as we see, European Union want to completely diversify away from Russian oil, and that will elevate cost of fuel to a level we never seen before. Merchants will be under huge cost pressure, cost of logistics, and we saw that already looking at their recent financial reports. The pressure may go away only if they switch from door-to-door to out-of-home. InPost, being the largest pan-European player in out-of-home deliveries, will definitely benefit from that shift. On the next page, quick reminder, the drivers of the flywheel, that reflects the truly unique and transformational last mile solution we've created. As we increase the density of lockers and decrease proximity to households, no one can offer a better service for consumers. It's simply very close.
That statement embraces literally every angle, from delivery speed, quality, standardization, ease of use, controlling pick-up times, and at the end of the day, again, sustainability and getting more convenience for the consumer that drives their increased usage and adoption of merchants, the pool effect. This is not just because we have industry-leading economics for merchants. It's not about price. It is because consumers, once exposed, they integrated their neighborhood locker into their lifestyle. This growing consumer stickiness and widening merchant adoption creates significant economies of scale for automated lockers. As mentioned, automation of the last mile requires significantly less fuel and labor and of course, has lower variable costs than to-door. Our higher fixed cost base drives meaningful operational leverage that widens the gap versus to-door as we grow.
Cyclically, higher costs are a challenge for us like they are for much of the world, and this was clear in our lower Q1 margins, which was expected as the spike in oil in particular impacted cost, while we didn't begin to adjust prices until April the 1st. The simple reality is higher inflation in a still structurally growing market creates a competitive advantage for us as our contracts roll and our inflation mechanism kick in in those contracts. We expect it will become obvious that we are a business with pricing power. Adam will discuss this in more detail later in the presentation. Let's jump into the next page. Our flywheel helped contribute to market share gains in each of our markets in Q1.
Even with the rising uncertainty and inflation pressures on consumer wallets, we grew volumes a solid 19% in like-for-like markets, while Mondial volumes grew 10%, and this translates to more than 50% two-year volume CAGR in Poland and 27% in France. As you will see on the next slide, we had market share gains in all core markets, including Poland, and I will show an excellent chart later that also demonstrates the resilience of our lockers with nearby competition deployed already. With high levels of consumer satisfaction, you remember the NPS, and the regularity of use, we added another 400,000 active app users in Q1, which is another 1% of Polish population using our app.
This now bringing us to 9.6 million active app users and that's, you know, the best app in terms of quality as well. Across all our markets, we continue to roll our machines. In Poland, we are entrenching our consumer proximity and mode, and in France, we also advanced the automation of Mondial Relay's existing out-of-home network without shutting down the PUDO points. We continue to add on top of them, up to 3,000 machines this year. Also in the UK, our rollout aligns with high-profile supermarket storefronts, with Sainsbury's as our most recent addition. In all our markets, we are enjoying significant merchant wins, as you saw on e-commerce. Being an e-commerce enabler, we added more than 3,000 merchants of all sizes in Q1 in Poland only.
In the UK, we have had good progress with return-heavy fashion merchants and the younger generation, with ASOS being a big win in Q1. Michael will give more details later on. Next page, please. Here we are. This is the very high, you know, based on the very high Q1 of 2020 to 2021 base. We showed strong and market-beating volume performance across all our key markets. Here we show InPost outperformance in each of those markets. In Poland, these gains came despite the competition trying to win something. But our overall market share gains make it clear that the core of the Polish consumer acceptance of lockers is driven by consumer choice, not by price. Moreover, consumers get the quality and convenience of their most preferred InPost option. As a side effect, merchants benefit of lower cost and the more active consumers.
Michael will later talk about international markets, but as you see, we dramatically outperformed the French market. In the UK, we enjoyed triple-digit growth as we continue to sign up merchants to our differentiated returns proposition, especially in the fashion industry, while we were highly successful as well, signing and deploying around high-traffic supermarket storefronts. Next page, please. We are extremely proud that, you know, to have this last mile e-commerce service that is head and shoulders more sustainable than traditional door-to-door delivery. Beyond having a best-in-class ESG product, we have also significantly enhanced the importance of the ESG across our entire business, which is reflected in the comprehensive ESG report we recently published.
I'm pleased to say that our supplier network is also very aligned with us from an ESG perspective, and motivated as we are not just by our significant number of Ukrainian employees, but our heartfelt sadness at the tragedy unfolding on our eastern border. Together, we have been able to harness that motivation to provide a kind of relief as the refugee crisis exploded in this past quarter. Like many Polish companies, we, as InPost, donated directly, but also did the same, our suppliers, and we are proud to have a kind of coordinated, meaningful response from the wider InPost family and our subsidiaries. As we continue to remain focused on our business mission, we also want to say, we will continue to leverage our network to provide support for our Ukrainian friends. Now let's jump into, to the business update. Page twelve.
Here we can see some of the most recent advances in our flywheel. Some of them I already mentioned, but a kind of summary. You know, it starts with the improved consumer experience in all our markets. We really show progress from the number of active app users in Poland. The elevation of Mondial Relay's delivery times in France, where we are accelerating the delivery speed, but also rising Trustpilot scores in the UK. The consumer traction leads to rising merchant adoption with more than 3,000 more merchants added to our Polish business, and UK and France gaining meaningful merchant partners at the same time.
These rising volumes drive our operating leverage as a part of the flywheel, which definitely, you know, was kind of masked by rising inflation, but should resume as we adjust our prices, which we are well positioned to do. As our flywheel continues to spin in inflationary and deflationary environments alike, we continue to deploy machines with meaningful scale in all our markets. In Poland, we ended the quarter with over 70,000 machines. It's not just a physical expansion. Recall the data we've shown with the full year presentation that demonstrated the consumer tendency to purchase more the closer they are to one of our machines. We are pretty confident that the current pace of machine deployment is proper to volumes for that year, and the scope for margin improvement is there as pricing kicks in.
On the next page, my favorite chart that demonstrates the resilience of our consumer loyalty that's driven the competitive moat. Let me explain the chart. We track the performance of all our machines from the moment a competing machine is introduced, deployed nearby. While all the trends for all the catchment distances are similar, here we are showing last Q2 performance for all the machines that have a competitor within less than 100 meters. Our machines' volumes are indexed relative to all other APMs that don't have any neighboring competitor. You can compare. You see that InPost lockers that are attracting competition, they were the best one, naturally allocated in the highest performing locations, hence their index starts a little bit above 100 points.
While gaining share is much more complicated, and we know that, than just deploying physical lockers, physical metal boxes. Even we are somehow surprised because the relative performance of our lockers facing competition nearby has actually improved. We see a kind of halo effect. At its core, our consumers are highly satisfied with our service. We know that. They see. They completely don't look at pricing, and they tend to visit our lockers on a frequent basis as a habit, as mentioned before. We are best in class on services and literally miles ahead on proximity. We don't take the threat of competition lightly. That's clear. We are firm believers that if we continue to spin our flywheel, adding more and more added services on top of it, we are and will remain the best proposition for both merchants and consumers in Poland.
This data has shown that already. One of our key points on the next page in differentiation is our app, mobile app user base, which is now the most powerful in Poland. In Q1, all the new functionalities we added on top that included quick returns, Google Pay, but also we launched a Ukrainian version already downloaded by more than 100,000 new consumers. We saw active app usage rise from 9.2 to 9.6 just in the quarter. This is on top of our current base, additional 1% of the Polish population. We increased a total number of APM users, so all, not only the app users. It has grown from 14.8 to 15.3 just in Q1.
Within this user base, the overall percentage of what we classify as hard and super hard users rose from 39%-40%, which means more and more ordering more parcels per week, per month than before. Now, I will hand over to Michael, our head of international, who will highlight our gains in our newer markets. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Rafał, and good morning, everyone. As you can see on the left-hand side of this chart, we've really made notable strides in our both the integration and the investment into the Mondial Relay business as we continue the transformation to really create what we believe will be France's leading consumer-centric offer within the delivery field. As Rafał's already touched upon, we've had also tremendous outperformance of the French market in Q1 with an 8% volume growth versus an estimated 16% decline in the overall market. Really, the foundations of that growth in Q1 was cemented with the post-acquisition signing of a 5-year cross-border agreement, as well as our continued existing strong performance in the overall C2C category.
Our main strategy with Mondial is the automation of the out-of-home experience, and this really can be demonstrated what we can see in the middle chart and on the right-hand side. We've continued to make really good progress, doubling the number of APMs, as you can see, to 651. What is even more important as we track the performance of those APMs and the benchmark we're using is 2017 in Poland, we continue at pace to really outperform what we saw in Poland in that period of time. One other further data point that is not on the slide, but I shared with you the last time, and I actually wanted to give you a further indication, is really how do we track both the consumer usage and the consumer voting power to choose the APM ahead of the PUDO.
Really the important data point that we track there is the dwell time, and we continue to see that our dwell time is nearly 50% less than a PUDO at 0.7 a day. You can really confidently opting from the consumer to choose the APM as we continue to build the network. Now going into sort of Q2 and beyond, we continue to be very focused on the pillars and transformation of the consumer experience, but principally to improve the speed of delivery, which the consumers have tended to forgive in exchange for Mondial's economic pricing.
As we execute the transition to next day delivery, which will be transformative for the French market, we expect to see clear gains in the B2C market share as we go forward. Coupled with the margins having normalized after COVID windfalls, we expect this will provide a strong base from which spinning the Mondial's flywheel will increasingly materialize. Let's now move on to the UK. Here, we don't have the pre-existing benefit of a strong established locker culture as in Poland or a strong out-of-home customer base as Mondial's has.
Here we instead taking a very surgical approach to their returns and spend, working with C2C partners such as Vinted and eBay to address the first mile, which is a market of hundreds of millions of packages, and provide a significantly superior customer experience to the broken services of what exists in the market and can already be seen in our Trustpilot scores, which Rafał touched upon earlier. In the case of returns, we solve a problem for retailers and shoppers alike. Our market expertise with label-less returns now means we've now launched with a key marquee brand, ASOS, in Q1, and already after eight weeks is our largest returns partner.
Coupled with both the C2C marketplaces that we're working with, we continue to expand and our growth in Q1 was in excess of peak volumes, which demonstrates both the share of checkout consumer pickup and cohort maturity development is starting to resonate with the UK shopper. Finally, this now means in the UK we have meaningful relationships with the top UK fashion retailers. 45 out of the top 50 are either now live or signed, and their continued focus to find a sustainable, cost-effective last-mile alternative only becomes more relevant with the current inflationary pressures and with the pending launch of our logistics model in the second half to provide us a great platform to attack what effectively is the UK's biggest prize. To go after the UK's 1 billion-plus parcel market within the last mile, we need to control our own logistics.
This is a transition we've now started, which is ahead of plan, but our success will also lead to removal of a pre-existing, profitable but strategically less valuable rental of our lockers. As we now focus our efforts on logistics control, our deployment is now more heavily focused on fewer but larger machines in high traffic dense locations, as I've already mentioned, such as supermarkets or major transport hubs. In Q1, as you can see in the middle chart, we grew our locker compartment rate faster than APM locations. Actually grew at a rate of 17% thanks to the higher demand at supermarket and chain locations, where our focus is about deploying larger and bigger machines. With the signing of Sainsbury's in Q1, we've now got all the top U.K. supermarkets really under our stable, with the only real last holdouts being Asda and Aldi.
With the already penetrated TfL and the density of network that we've already been building in London, Manchester and Birmingham, we feel super confident that we're now present in the everyday trip of a sizable number of UK consumers in a post-COVID world. Thank you, and let me hand over to Adam to take you through the financials.
Thanks, Michael. Again, good morning everyone. Starting with the summary of our financial performance for the quarter. We've grown our revenues by 94% on a reported basis and 19% like for like, excluding the impact of Mondial Relay acquisition. In Poland, we reported 17% revenue growth, and in the UK off a low base, we grew 167%, lifting the overall group revenue growth, excluding Mondial Relay to 19% year on year. With the sharp rise of inflation of about 10% year on year across Q1, added losses in the UK and the surge in fuel price reimbursement for our couriers, we saw a rise in costs that drove margins down.
While our consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin fell over 1,500 basis points on a reported basis, a good portion of that, of course, reflected consolidation of lower margin business of Mondial Relay. On a like for like basis, the margin was down by 660 basis points, with Poland adjusted EBITDA margin down just above 340 basis points to 41.3%. Reported EBITDA was up by 23% to PLN 409 million, and like for like, EBITDA was flat with Poland adjusted EBITDA growing by 8%, just under half of the revenue growth rate. CapEx as percent of revenue remained unchanged at 20% with the Mondial Relay consolidation.
Big year-on-year step up in nominal CapEx spent in Q1 was mainly driven by international, where the number of manufactured APMs was roughly up by 3 times versus previous year. Polish APM CapEx is more front-loaded this year to Q1 and Q2 as we build inventory of production components, given continued tough landscape of the global supply chain. Net leverage was at 3.3x on the reported basis. However, factoring the full-year impact from Mondial Relay acquisition, the figure would fall to 3.1x on a pro forma basis, so just slightly up from the full year of 2.9x. Moving on to page 19 and Polish market.
Off a very high base of Q1 2021, which was really challenging, Poland has seen 16% volume growth. Bringing a two-year volume CAGR to 51% year-on-year. We are quite satisfied with this outcome when taken in the context of the overall macro situation, and particularly the start of the war in the neighboring Ukraine. Volumes in Poland, as we mentioned already, took an initial hit immediately post-war outbreak as the shock of Russia's attack and the flow of refugees impacted consumer sentiment in Poland. We have seen quite swift recovery here. While we are not seeing a renewed deterioration in demand yet, going forward, we are sensitive to the likelihood that the inflationary pressure caused by the war-associated sanctions and fuel supply issues will put pressure on consumer purchasing power in Poland in the later part of the year.
As you look on revenue, you will notice some marginal positive pricing impact in Q1. This was mostly driven by positive customer mix, as we see higher price point customer channels grow faster in our volume mix. I have mentioned already the EBITDA margin erosion driven by cost pressure. That will be even more pronounced in Q2. At the same time, as Rafał Brzoska noted, we have seen already two price increases in April and May on some portion of our volume. While cost pressures will have a full quarter impact only in Q2, both seasonality of volumes and obviously stronger seasonality towards the second half of the year and the impact of the price rises should partially counterbalance the full quarter impact of the cost inflation in Q2. At this stage, we remain comfortable with our previous full-year margin communication.
Moving on to page 20. Mondial Relay performance. As mentioned already, we had a strong 10% growth in Mondial Relay with 8% growth in France, which given the situation of the French market, an estimated 16% e-commerce decline in the quarter year on year was quite exceptional. Much of this volume outperformance was driven by our strength in the C2C channel. Accordingly, pricing was lower on a per parcel basis, driven by the channel mix, but also impacted by Vinted contract price adjustment from 2021 that we already mentioned a couple of times. As anticipated, adjusted EBITDA margin fell from 19.1% to 12.8%. While this was partially driven by pricing, the main impact here was normalization of the inflated Q1 2021 margins, heavily driven by the COVID productivity peak.
During COVID, Mondial had the ability to sweat PUDO capacity more than a typical environment. As expected, and as we mentioned a couple of times, with the reopening capacity utilization has moderated, it had to come down and margins have normalized towards the level that we initially expected. The margins are now much more in line and consistent with the pre-COVID levels and what would be normal for this type of the business. Very important to mention, they come more on the top end of our full-year guidance and our expectations for the year. Moving to page 21, international. We have seen both very strong volume growth internationally and meaningful reduction in SG&A cost per parcel. At the same time, the U.K. losses have increased year-on-year, reflecting negative unit economics driven by the logistics third-party costs.
EBITDA losses hit in excess of PLN 44 million in Q1, but this includes significant one-off element associated with our strategic logistics transition and exit from the current contract framework. As we move to a new arrangement, we expect logistics cost per unit to reduce starting second half of Q2 this year. This should allow us to start generating economies of scale on the back of growing parcel volumes. With a continued fall of per parcel cost and our volume leverage, we remain confident that the trajectory of EBITDA will be more favorable in subsequent quarters. Onto page 22. Here you see a bridge from adjusted EBITDA to net profit and a few points to call out. First of all, operating EBITDA, that was up by 53% year-on-year, at 26.2% EBITDA margin.
Second point, obviously, depreciation and amortization has increased, quite significantly, driven by the scale of asset rollout, both on property, plant and equipment, as well as IFRS 16 component. There was some impact of Mondial Relay acquisition, especially on the intangibles as a result of purchase price allocation accounting. Net financial costs, which have obviously increased very materially, but driven by two key things. First one is 65% of the absolute cost increase for that line was driven by the unrealized foreign exchange losses, driven by the balance sheet valuation of our CapEx payables and receivables. Of the remainder of that absolute cost increase, vast majority, roughly Q3 , was driven by the increased debt quantum arising from Mondial Relay acquisition financing that we incurred effectively, end of June, early July last year.
Obviously not being part of the Q1 2021 results. Only small part of the increased cost, around 15% of the nominal increase, was driven by the interest rate increase, although of course this element will be more visible in Q2. Moving to page 23. Here we include a bridge from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow as we did for the full year results. Our EBITDA conversion in the quarter was 52% pre-CapEx and 50% post-maintenance CapEx. While growth CapEx resulted in negative PLN 93 million free cash outflow, the combination of volume seasonality and rising prices, as mentioned before, should mean that we should move towards free cash flow neutral post growth CapEx in the later part of this year.
The reason for this, as I mentioned earlier, our CapEx this year, especially for Poland, but not only, is front-loaded towards first half of the year as we scheduled the production to build inventory and address continued squeeze in the supply chain on the critical production components. That is all on the financial performance. Thank you very much. We're, I think, open for Q&A now.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you can do so now by pressing star one on your telephones. That's star one if you'd like to ask a question.
Operator, I will.
We will now take our first question.
Operator, just before we take the first question, I just wanted to say that, you know, we recognize that because of COVID, even many of our IPO investors have not had a chance to kick the tires on our lockers in Poland, or our operations. Additionally, we have yet to provide a format beyond these calls to fully introduce the workings of an opportunity for Mondial Relay. We are soon hosting a number of investors in Poland, some of which are being organized by our covering brokers. We will also be attending a number of upcoming conferences in May and June. In due course, we also intend to announce an event to help provide more on-the-ground understanding of our differentiated APM proposition. Thank you, operator. If we can move over to questions, that would be great.
Thank you. We'll now take our first question from Sathish Sivakumar from Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks again. Thanks for the presentation. I've got three questions to start off with. Firstly on Poland actually. If I wanted to get an understanding on the volumes, what was the exit rate in Q1 that you saw in Poland? How does the Q2 trend so far compare with what you have seen in March? On the utilization rate across Poland and even in Mondial Relay, particularly on the APM utilization in Poland as well as in France would be highly helpful. Third one, again, on Poland, if you could actually shed the color on the revenue growth in APMs and of the gross profit margin that you know achieved. One would be helpful. Thank you.
Let me maybe start with the last one. Essentially, if we speak growth rates for Poland in Q1 across the two main channels, APM and two-door, APM continued to be the main growth driver for the business. The growth rate for the quarter was 17% higher than the average. While two-door was 12% year-on-year growth for the quarter in Poland. In terms of gross profitability, as you can imagine, it's the decline in profitability in general being driven mostly by the fuel cost in Q1 or second half of the Q1 was much stronger pronounced in the two-door delivery. The proportional loss in profitability in the two-door franchise was much stronger than in APM.
Overall, if you look at the gross basically gross profit erosion in terms of basis points, the scale of that was actually comparable to the EBITDA decline year-on-year for the quarter. Pretty much, you know, all of the margin dilution was driven by the operating costs. That is growth rates and profitability. In terms of exit rates, actually, you know, I think, you know, when we speaking, you know, the growth dynamics what we've seen end of March and then continuing in April are very similar growth rates, and they continue still to hold.
Actually, when we think about our comment in the presentation, in general around the consumer resilience or consumer demand resilience still continues to be the case. I think, you know, those absolute exit rates still hold across April and early May. Then utilization in France, I think, is, as we continue to deploy, obviously the average utilization is still continuing to be flattish. Actually, if you split the utilization into cohorts or vintage cohorts and you take into account the fact that we have doubled the estate across the quarter, or sorry, more than doubled across the quarter, actually, that flat utilization rate actually tells you that there is a very strong underlying performance of the old cohort versus new cohort.
That essentially tells us that, you know, the consumer adoption is strong, and actually we continue to be very encouraged by what we see in there in terms of utilization rates.
Thank you. Just a follow-up on the gross profit margin. If I look at, say, you did like 41% in Poland overall on EBITDA.
Yeah.
If you compare that, say, versus one, it's like 200 basis points lower. Is it fair to assume that actually what two-door is in a similar reduction in gross profit margin, whereas APM kind of been slightly resilient?
Sorry, Satish. I'm not sure I get the question. Was your question whether?
No, on the gross profit margin. Yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
On the gross profit margin, right, between the APM and two-door, you said that it'll be similar to what we have seen drop in EBITDA. Would that similar drop in percentage, right, when you went from 44% to 41% on EBITDA margin, would it be a similar downward trend across APM and two-door, or do you think slightly less-
No, my point was. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
-hard?
No. My point was the consolidated gross margin would be similar level, whereas, you know, the drop in two-door profitability would be probably, you know, anywhere between 1.5-2 times higher in terms of basis points margin erosion. Does it make sense?
Okay. Got it. Thank you. Yeah, that's very clear.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Othman Bricha from BofA. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Good morning. Firstly, I just had a clarification on this previous question around the exit rate. You said that. Did you say that the exit rate was similar to the number for the first quarter? I didn't quite catch that. If you could clarify that please for Poland. And then a similar question for France actually on the exit rate and the performance in 2Q so far. And then on net finance costs, what should we expect for the full year? And can you just remind us how much of your debt is fixed versus floating rate?
On Mondial Relay on slide 15, can you talk about the expansion of the depot network in France, kind of where you are with that right now and what to expect for the rest of the year? Just a housekeeping question. You've provided full financials for the Q1 . Will you be providing kind of quarterly full financials going forward, and what's driven the change in disclosure? Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. Clarifying the exit rates, that's exactly what I was trying to say, which was April exit rates were very much, you know, at the level of March. For Poland, Mondial Relay performed better than in March. That's the first one. Expansion of Mondial Relay, I think we're planning, you know, to add something like 8 depots in France across the year, with the new sorting hub, you know, being operational end of Q4 or launch end of Q4, but really getting full into operations and, you know, taking on volume from the previous locations and ramping up its operations across Q1 of this year and Q2 of this year. In terms of capacity, we'll be stepping up with capacity quite significantly.
Given the lead times that you have in the market for both, you know, physical locations, but also, you know, equipment and automation, you know, most of this is expected to come into operation or be transferred to operations Q3, Q4 of this year. In terms of debt, I think we were indicating that roughly 60% of our debt is PLN denominated, and that's floating rate versus the remaining 40%, which is fixed rate.
What can we expect for the full year for the net finance cost?
I think we are not giving any specific number here. I think, you know, the math to be done is pretty straightforward. You know, the currency split of the debt and the fact, as we said, we are not really expecting to add any gross debt other than any debt that will be driven by the increase in IFRS 16 lease liabilities, which will be more expansion driven. In terms of, you know, financial debt per se, loans and borrowings, we don't plan to add anything on a gross debt level. Basically pretty much the opening balance and the currency split, and therefore fixed versus floating rate for the debt should be stable across the year.
I think that's pretty straightforward exercise to be done.
Thank you. Just on disclosure, if you could just clarify kind of what has driven that and is that what we should expect going forward?
We'll continue to provide full disclosure across the year at the quarter end.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Good morning. I have a few questions, please as well. The first one is on Poland. I'm just wondering why your outperformance versus the total market volume seems to have reduced to only 1 percentage point in Q1.
I think last year was like 1.7 times. So just wondered, like, to what extent this is due to maybe some share shift to other local providers or what's the impact of the reduction of MOV by Allegro, and what sort of like outperformance do you expect going forward? Yeah, that was the main surprise to me, the level of outperformance in Q1 at which has sort of reduced. The second question is on your EBITDA margin for Poland. So given all the sort of price increase you're putting through and the impact of cost inflation, what was your expectations for margins in Q2 for Poland? Do you think it could be weaker than Q1 or was Q1 the trough at 41%?
Any color on that would be helpful. The third question is on the price increase that you put through in Poland from April, like 8th April, another five cents in May. Can you comment on what percentage of your customers have actually seen that price increase, so we can basically model the impact of the price increase more appropriately? I think you previously said some customers are seeing lower price increase than others because you have accepted a higher volume commitment. Just wondered if you could give a bit more color. Also, have you seen churn from any customers following this sort of price increase?
Finally, a sort of follow-up question. You said Poland volumes in line with March, but what was the March number? 'Cause I think March was also impacted by the war. Wondering whether March was lower than the Q1 number. Thank you.
Maybe I'll hand over to Rafał for the commentary on pricing in general. Before I do that, just let me comment on the first two questions. First one was around the market outperformance, and why only 1% ahead of the market. I think two elements. First one is if you go back to Q1 2021, and you take into account in that quarter we have grown year-on-year by 99% in the APM business, which was more than double of the market growth. You know, that just shows you how challenging that comp was.
I think, you know, we've been really, you know, comparing ourselves to a super stretched target, and I think, you know, growing on top of that is really a great achievement, whereas you've had the market basically, you know, being stretched from a much less challenging comp would be probably one observation. A second one, as I mentioned, 16% total volume growth. If you split it into APM and door, APM has grown by 17%, so actually two percentage points ahead the market. Obviously, you know, as mentioned, Q1 was the most challenging quarter. We think, you know, into the year, at least from the comp base, comp perspective, you know, the reference base is much less challenging.
Therefore, I think we're quite confident reiterating, you know, our guidance for the year, to grow ahead of the market by 3-4 percentage points. That's point number one. In terms of profitability, I would expect Q2 and Q3 actually be a bit diluted compared to Q1. The reason for that, again, as I mentioned, you know, during the presentation, I mean, first of all, we'll have a full quarter effect of the macro disruption that we have from the Ukrainian war and the impact on the general CPI, but also on the fuel prices even more. Obviously, there are, you know, price increases. Rafał will comment on that, but they will not fully compensate. Only in Q4 we'll actually see a meaningful step-up in average pricing.
Therefore, the trajectory of EBITDA profitability for Poland, I think we expect Q2 and Q3 to be slightly weaker and then see a very solid rebound in Q4, driven by, A, pricing dynamics and the timing of those pricing dynamics driven by the contractual provisions, and then secondly, obviously by the volume seasonality, as is the case every year. I think this is the case. I'm handing over to Rafał for the commentary on price increases.
Yeah. Thank you, Adam. Happy to comment. Maybe one on top of Adam's comments. You know, in Q1 we continued our much faster growth in non-Allegro channel as well, which gives you a kind of feeling, you know, that we continue being an agnostic enablers for also for the new entrants and for Polish verticals that are growing literally faster than the market on average. In terms of the repricing, a quick reminder, that's something that we discussed months ago. We have three groups of clients. Group number one, our partners, our friends from Allegro, and here, you know, November, that's the moment where the repricing kicks in. Then we have a group of big strategic players with whom we signed our framework agreements.
Few of them, like OLX, Vinted, Shopee, and others that decided to create a kind of framework agreement for a few years with price indexation mechanism in the contract and strong volume commitments. Those players, in exchange for that framework agreements, most of them we signed and negotiated end of last year. We already agreed that 2022 the pricing is set.
In the first repricing window is January 2023, and this is around 15% of our volume. The rest, the 35%, this is exactly, you know, the group of clients that we repriced first of April, and part of them we repriced as well with in May. Some of them we offered a kind of less aggressive repricing in exchange for volume commitments that were set on a level much above our expectations of the market growth for 2022. We are creating win-win scenarios for the merchants that want to be even more sticky with InPost.
That's why, you know, the full repricing you will see in January 2023, across the board, all the groups of clients we reprice.
Is that half of the 35% which you're seeing that price increase or more?
You know, it depends. It definitely, you know, first of April was 8%, 5% was probably on a group of 20% of clients. 20% of clients were affected by 13% price increase. What's the level, you know, for the next repricing? You know, it's not something what we may even estimate because that will be driven mostly by the CPI and fuel cost and labor cost of inflation. We'll see end of the year.
Great. Could you also comment on the repricing strategies by other players? Have you seen any changes by some of your competitors?
Yes.
Like, you know, to door, and local players? Yeah.
Yeah. Many of them already repriced, and they repriced massively. For instance, our average fuel surcharge level was 7 percentage points, and we added those extra 5, so we ended up with around 12% fuel surcharge, whereas the other players went up from 15% on average to 25% on average. This gives you a kind of feeling that the gap between door-to-door delivery and APM delivery is simply increasing. That's, you know, why we have this conviction that the more expensive the fuel is, the more expensive the whole logistics for e-commerce becomes.
That's pretty visible in recently revealed financial reports of most of the e-com players, where all of them stated that logistics cost, that's the main challenge for them. Here with our out-of-home proposition in nine markets, we see visible acceleration of the discussion with the merchants that were so far reluctant even to consider integration of our InPost lockers, and now they are chasing us to do it as quickly as possible. That's a very remarkable sign that we already observed.
I also have a question on the March growth. Could you maybe comment on that as well?
I think, Lisa, we would not want to go month-by-month, right? I mean, essentially, March was not too far away from the average quarterly dynamics year-on-year. As I said, April very much in line. I guess, you know, that's probably the answer.
Great. That's very helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Stefano. Stefano from ABN AMRO, please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Excuse me. A few questions on my side. Just to be very specific and also just to, you know, have a very tight model, could you just maybe exactly state the parcel volumes split between APM and to door for Poland? You mentioned the percentages, but, you know, just to be very precise. And if you can add also on average the number of lockers in Poland at the end of the quarter, that would be very helpful. Another question that I have is exactly on something that you stated during the last question. You mentioned visible increases in the discussions with clients that previously even did not want to consider an APMs. Can you maybe tell us more about that?
Because that's exactly, I think, the bottom line of the investment case over the next year or so during this inflationary period. How fast do you think these discussions will be moving? When do you think we might see a very clear impact on volumes based on this one? I know it's very crystal ball type of situation, but it's obviously very important over the next couple of quarters. That's from my side.
I'd be happy to answer the second question, and then I will hand over to Adam regarding the split of APMs and door-to-door. This is all about priorities, and most of the merchants, they are very busy on their IT. This is where we see the real bottleneck. People do understand that out-of-home lockers and PUDO points, this is a very important, a very valid tool they have to offer in the checkout. Still so far, most of them, they had DNA door-to-door oriented. I will give you a few examples, but let's take Amazon, for instance. Amazon has for the first time in their history, they applied surcharge for the deliveries.
Moreover, Amazon in the UK today is encouraging people to shift from door-to-door, which was purely 100% DNA of Amazon, and they give them vouchers to use Amazon lockers. This process has started, and we see that as a tailwind for us because we are the only player in out-of-home that may offer a framework agreement for every merchant, giving visibility on SLA, pricing, long-term agreement, and capacity, which was always an issue, especially in peak times. By the way, we are more and more cheaper than door-to-door. On top of this, more and more important sustainability ESG angle that we are offering to them.
To give you a sense of acceleration in this adoption among the merchants, just in recent 2 quarters, out of top 25 fashion retailers in the U.K., Michael, correct me if I'm wrong, but we are lacking 2 or 3 not yet in discussion or not yet in integration or not yet already deployed and launched. We see that across the board that merchants are shifting because they realized that it's not only cheaper, but by the way, by using lockers, they get best in class customer experience, which makes the end users even more sticky to their websites and mobile apps. That's exactly, you know, something what we are already like disclosing during our IPO. Some of the investors ask us question, where we see the market in 10 years from our IPO?
I was saying majority of the volume will go to out-of-home. Not 10%, not 20%, majority. Today, we are living in a completely different environment, and I'm more and more in a camp that within 5-6 years from now, we will see door-to-door as a premium service, very expensive, very polluting to the environment, and it will be less than 30%.
Yeah. Regarding the first question, the exact volume split was we've delivered in Q1 this year 112 million parcels in Poland, out of which 18.7 million was actually to door parcels, and 93.3 million was APM parcels. In terms of number of lockers, we've had 2.6 million operating lockers as of end of quarter. Thank you.
Sorry, the 2.6 is overall or Poland only?
No, that's Poland only.
I don't know if you can provide the split.
That's Poland only. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Henk Slotboom from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got one question left, and that's concerning the rollout of APMs. Given the fact that you enjoy so much popularity from the side of merchants now, as well, so that it is not only a consumer pool, but in a way also a merchant push type of growth driven model. In relation to the rollout plans you have for the APMs. A couple of months ago when you presented the full year results, you said that you might trim down the rollout speed of APMs in England, and you might not do the same number as you had initially in mind in France.
If I look at the Q1 , then it looks as if the rollout speed is continuing at a fairly high speed. Could you perhaps allude what your plans are for the rest of the year? How does the plans look like for the end of the year in the UK and France and in Poland, the three main markets? Thank you.
Yeah. I can take this one. Good morning. Relative to the UK, I think our ambition, clearly we articulated the last time, was we were slowing down the number of locations, but we were increasing the size of the machine. Actually the number of compartments that we're targeting is still the same. The main focus is really the transition that we have pulled forward in our plan to accelerate our logistics offering and take control of our logistics. That really was also a factor of the demand that we were starting to see from the market, mainly the merchants, at the end of Q4 going into the beginning of Q1, that really gave us the confidence to pull forward that plan.
Really, that transition is well underway, and, as Adam articulated, we expect that to be completed by the end of Q2.
Our forecast really in the UK per the last call remains similar with the total number of compartments actually really in line with what we previously guided upon. In France, we continue to target between 2-3 thousand as our ambition for this year and still remain confident in that rollout plan. We continue to accelerate really to capture the market opportunity and the automation of the out-of-home offering in France. Maybe Adam, you want to comment on Poland?
Yeah. I think we did mention we would be slowing down in Poland this year for obvious reasons, given the scale and density that's always been the plan. At the same time, I would again refer to my comment I've made around, you know, the free cash flows for the quarter, where I mentioned our CapEx was quite front-loaded for this year for tactical reasons. Also if we think about how it's linked to the pace of deployment in Poland, the pace of deployment in Poland also is front-loaded to first half of the year. Q1 not necessarily being a representative, you know, as a run rate for the rest of the year.
We would actually expect to have, you know, completed vast majority of our deployments for Poland in the first half of the year.
Can I perhaps squeeze in a second question? That's particularly regarding Mondial Relay. I realize that you can't perform miracles overnight. You can only do so much at a time. In the past, you've said the focus initially is very much on France. What can you do to benefit from the development in the shift towards out-of-home in the other countries where you are active in the Benelux and in Spain? Will the focus remain on adding PUDOs initially and the APMs at a later stage?
Yeah. Henk, I think two points to that. One, the focus will remain on PUDOs as we keep an asset-light strategy in those markets predominantly, and we'll continue to service and operate. The second element is really working with our pan-European merchants, as we really build out that offering with France being the core focus market. Clearly the cross-border opportunity, mainly on C2C and point-to-point, with those partners really gives us the opportunity to accelerate and bring volume to those markets while building out the network with an asset-light strategy. Clearly from a landlord point of view as opportunities arise in those markets, we will be opportunistic potentially for APMs, but again, similar to all the markets that we've entered in a very concentrated urban way if we look at deployment in that capacity.
Again, our focus is really asset-light and really working with pan-European partners to develop those markets, with France being the center of that focus.
Okay. That's very clear. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now take our final question from David Kerstens from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Please go ahead. The line is open.
Hi. Excuse me. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can, David.
Oh. Okay. Sorry about that. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two remaining. First of all, on the APM deployment by the competition, do you see that momentum changing in the current inflationary environment? Great to see the new step that you provided that APMs with competition nearby are doing better. Were you saying that that is mainly because they are in better locations or what's driving that? Do you see the competitive activity picking up in the current environment? The second question is regarding market growth. We've seen quite a bit of pressure on parcel markets in Western Europe, and you highlighted the UK and France.
What's driving the continued strong growth in Poland in the Q1 relative to the other parcel markets that we're seeing? I saw you said you translated the mobile app into Ukrainian. Has that had a material impact in the Q1 on parcel volumes in Poland?
Thank you, David. Maybe I'll answer the first question and the last one. In terms of the locations, I mean, it's pretty obvious that if the newcomers want to get some traction, they should deploy machines close by our best machines. Our best machines also are pretty visible. I mean, they are the largest machines that we deploy. I think we'll provide more and more color on quarterly basis or during our reporting, showing the traction of those locations. We were a little bit surprised literally because seems that those machines are not only, I mean, our machines in those locations are not only like under pressure, it's completely opposite.
Seems that they are performing better and better. Hard to explain. I think it's just Q2 . I must say that after Q1, we remain at the same place where we've been month ago. We don't see any material traction. The competitors' machines that are nearby also visibly nothing has changed here. Hard to say how it evolve in the future. As we always said, we are fully focused on deploying best in class service for the end users, and it has nothing to do with physical machines.
It's much more complex, and we want to build more value-added services even this year to create even more sticky product offering for the end users, literally keeping them so close to our chest that no one else or not may not win them, but the winning of every single client will cost tons of money. That's the strategy here, and it has nothing to do with just the physical presence of the machines. The question about the downloads, we started measuring that. The fact is not yet visible in Q1 as we launched our Ukrainian version end of March.
Probably for Q2, we will see already how those new clients are behaving in comparison to our soft, hard, and super hard users, how to position them among those clients. I strongly believe that a big part of Ukrainian population that we are hosting right now will stay, becoming a pure consumers of the e-commerce as well.
Thanks. What is, in your view, the reason for the strong performance in Poland relative to the pressure on parcel markets in Western Europe? Is that the level of e-commerce penetration still being relatively lower?
Yes. Yes. I think this is one element. Second, very important also that some of the big verticals in Poland. Let's take an example of LPP. So, their eastern markets were shut down, and they put a lot of emphasis on the online channel to compensate that drop of volume. We have the newcomers on the market, so Amazon, Shopee, but also international players really trying to win as much as possible on Polish market, given that saturation that is not, you know, yet comparable to French, German or UK one. I think that Polish market will not go into the decrease, overall decrease, on quarterly basis.
It might go down to single digit growth rates, but we remain positive as a market. Polish market will perform stronger than the other more mature markets that we observe.
Thanks, Rafał.
Thank you. I will now turn the call back to your host for closing remarks.
Thank you, operator. Actually, we have one question from the floor I'd like to pass on for Adam. Of the PLN 1.43 billion of goodwill, the question is that all from the Mondial acquisition?
Yes. The short answer is yes, the entirety of that amount is driven by Mondial acquisition.
Thank you. Operator, with that, I would like to close. I'd like to thank everyone for being on the call, and thank you for your interest. If you do have any follow-up, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. Many thanks and good day.