Hello, partners. How are you? Welcome to our results call. I hope you received them and you enjoyed our results today. I'm quite excited to what we shared today. At the same time, we could share a little more about our growth, not only that we are growing 20%, but even more important that our ecosystem thesis is working. I enjoyed very much to share the numbers of Despegar. It's not only 5% of Despegar revenue coming from the iFood ecosystem, but we share the data week by week. You can see a very strong growth. I'm quite confident we'll get to 10%, 15% in the short term. This is the base of our thesis, our ecosystem thesis. We are growing very fast in iFood, but we are pushing Despegar to grow together.
At the same time, we could share a little of our numbers in terms of results. You saw we grew 70% to $530 million. I think it's great to share this number with you. One year ago, I told you I expect us to have more profit than the 10 cents dividends, and I expect us to get to multiple billion dollars of profit. Many people said, "I can't see Prashanth doing that." I hope you can see Prashanth doing that today. We are going to get between $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion in profit this year, excluding JET and La Centrale. We can expect $1.2, $3, $4 billion of EBITDA this year, and for sure, a couple of billion dollars of profit in the next few years. I am quite excited about our numbers in terms of results. We keep the discipline.
We sold $1.2 billion, but we are on track to sell at least $2 billion this year of our assets. We keep our buyback. Now we bought back more than $40 billion, generating more than $60 billion in results. I think we keep the discipline. We keep the growth. I want to reinforce all of that is the foundation to how we are going to build a much bigger company. Innovation is growing amazingly well at Prosus. I wanted to do a bigger session on innovation now, but because of the timing, we decided to focus on numbers today. In a few weeks, by December 15, maybe January 15, we are going to make a much longer presentation on how AI is changing our lives in terms of life commerce models, in terms of assistance. You saw we had 20,000 assistants already.
I could talk a lot about innovation. Hope you make questions about that. It's quite exciting. Our moment now is execution, execution, execution. We have some discipline also in M&As. A few M&As are focused in growth. For example, the Indian ones, Swiggy and Rapido, they are growing. Rapido is growing more than 120% year- over- year. We are very excited about that. A few M&As are increasing our profitability, like La Centrale, JET, and Despegar. I think the company is doing good. I'm excited about the results. Hope you have many exciting questions for us today. My priority now is to execute, go to those few billion dollars in results. We are just getting started. We really want to build at least $100 billion outside of Tencent and one of the best tech companies in the world. Let's talk more about that today.
Let's go for our questions. Mr. Eoin, guide us.
Speaking of just getting started, let's get started on the Q&A, shall we? Katherine, why don't you, if you could, remind the audience how to ask a question, please? I will start off with a quick question. Please, Katherine.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our Q&A session. If you have a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Once called upon, please unmute your audio to ask your question. If you have joined via a phone line, please press star nine to enter the queue and star six to unmute once called upon. For those of you watching on the webcast, if you would like to submit a written question, please type it in the Ask a Question tab to the right-hand side of the player. I will now hand back to your host, Eoin Ryan, to take your questions.
That's great, Katherine. Thanks very much. It's great to be here today. It's good to hear from you guys. As you said, Fabricio, I think we're following through on our commitments. One such commitment was investment in our ecosystems. The biggest investment to date has been JET, and I think it's on the minds of most of investors. Can you give us a little update? We're a few days in since the delisting of JET. What's the future look like?
Let's talk about JET a little. First, we closed the JET transaction completely a few weeks ago, but just last Monday or Tuesday, we changed the management, the supervisory board. Now I and a few other people from Prosus are part of the supervisory board of JET for the last six days. What I can tell you, we are very, very confident. As you saw, we shared lots of data on Despegar, how it's growing, how we are working on the ecosystem. On JET, we had just six days, so it would not be appropriate to share today. What I can tell you, first, we are this week working a lot with JET on a key set of culture to enable the company to think big, move faster, and grow a lot. JET is not growing over the last few years, as you know.
Obviously, we know that's true. I'm very, very confident that together we deliver a company that grows faster and is much better. The first big thing is on culture. It's happening right now, the replanning of JET. That's why I couldn't add the numbers, because we need a few more weeks to have project for JET. At the same time, our focus besides culture, and again, you saw me here last week on Prosus, the results we have today is because of the change of culture one year ago. Besides culture, technology and product are the three big areas of energy of our efforts. On technology, we need again to move faster and to make sure JET becomes a more tech-first company with first-class technology in the world, using AI to take all its decisions.
On products, we have to make sure that a few areas that JET is a little, I say, behind, we move faster. For example, launch a program that is core in Latin America, but it's not ready here in Europe. We are going to push those three things. We expect to push it in November and December. Hopefully, in January, we have a few results to share. Today is still too soon. I can tell you that JET is not performing well. We all know that. The level of confidence I have that we will have a company growing again and competing very well is very, very high. Probably you know I like some letters from the CEO. Maybe we share a letter from the CEO, but we can share more info on JET. You have more specific questions I can answer today.
It's the holiday season for letter writing, so maybe you can write one or two messages thereafter.
Christmas letters on JET. Okay.
Okay. Thanks for that. I'm sure there'll be some follow-up questions on that throughout the call. Let's open it up to the audience. I think the first question is coming from Will Packer of BNP . Will, your line's open. Make sure you're on mute.
Hi there. Many thanks for taking my questions. Two from me, please. Firstly, Fabricio, you talked to optimizing the buyback in your prepared remarks video. Could you help us think through the implications of that optimizing? Is it the current buyback run rate of $6 billion-$7 billion as the new normal for FY2026, 2027, and beyond? Should we think of you cutting the buyback? It sounds like it's fair to assume that there's going to be some flexibility of funding, perhaps away from Tencent towards Meituan and free cash flow. In terms of my second question, the global online classified share prices have sold off sharply in recent weeks following the OpenAI Developer Day and Rightmove's AI profit warning. For Fabricio specifically, GenAI is central to your vision for the group.
How are you thinking about the risk and opportunity for classifieds in terms of GenAI? Does this recent selloff make the sector an increasingly attractive potential use of your M&A firepower, or would you rather see the dust settle first? Thank you.
Thank you, Will. Thank you for the questions. First, you asked about optimizing the buyback. You have lots of good numbers there. I do not need to repeat all of them. In general, as you said, the buyback is more or less $6 billion-$7 billion this year. We have an open buyback. We are going to keep an open buyback the way it is. I like buybacks because I think we are, if our company is cheap, we should be investing in our own company and increasing the value of the shareholders that want to stay. We are going to keep doing that. On the other side, I think the company we have today is a very different Prosus than it was two, three years ago. Remember again, one year ago, I said we are going to get to multiple billion dollars of profits.
Many shareholders did not see it coming. It is coming. Hopefully, you can see that in the numbers that we are sharing today. So Prosus is on a different moment. The discount is on a different moment. Tencent is on a different moment. I am a big fan of Tencent. I think Tencent is going to be a big winner in the AI race. Tencent is positioned for that in China. If you compare the multiples of Tencent versus everything else in the US, there is a lot of space for Tencent to keep growing. It is exactly what I said. It is optimizing the buyback. We are going to keep the open buyback as we have, but I am not going to say names of other companies. People ask me not to name other companies.
I can tell you that there are other companies in our portfolio that we believe have smaller growth potential than Tencent, growth and strategic potential than Tencent. Yes, we are going to sell these companies and use this money also to keep a buyback. What we are going to see is optimizing exactly that. Eventually, the buyback is, I don't know, $1 billion maybe. $500 million is for Tencent. $500 million is for other companies that we can sell and use the cash to, I think the right word, the word I'd use, to make a better capital allocation. With the number one company in China growing fast, well-positioned to win in the AI race, it's not the best decision to me to sell Tencent, even if we increase the value per share.
If I can optimize it, selling other things and increasing our participation, that's what we intend to do. We expect it to sell at least $2 billion this year. How can I say? You can expect that we are going to do buybacks using other sources that are not Tencent.
Just to.
Yes, please.
Just to remind you, we're selling Tencent on a per-share basis. We've actually increased our exposure to Tencent. By meaning the share buyback of the other proceeds from other divestments. I will further enhance on a per-share basis the exposure to Tencent compared to continuing on the current path. I think that is a critical way of how we can further enhance the share buyback.
For example, there are other companies that we believe have less focus today than they should. We could sell companies that we believe have less focus and invest more or sell less of companies that we believe are performing well, have less focus, and we believe are going to win in the Chinese market. That is what I mean by optimizing.
Those companies are the companies you're talking about as the additional $2 billion, right? That's just to be clear.
At least $2 billion.
We already sold $1.2 billion. We've sold at least $40 million.
Okay.
Can we use this money to offset, let's say, sell $1 billion to Tencent and $1 billion for other companies, or two?
Yes.
That's not something we've seen from the group in many years, a more active portfolio management.
Yeah, the buyback was 100% automatic. That's what I don't like. We should sell more or less than what's happening, and we should select better what we sell to keep the buyback.
Right. To the second question.
Yes, the second question was on AI and classifieds, you said. Many people sometimes ask me if I think, you're not the first one this week, if I think AI could have an impact on classifieds. My answer is it's much bigger than that. I think AI is going to have an impact in classifieds or e-commerce and food delivery, in investing, in analysts' reports from banks. AI is going to have an impact everywhere. Obviously, as you know, the markets today are a little too happy, so everyone looks like an AI winner. There will be AI winners that will create trillions of dollars of value, not only trillions of dollars of cost, but trillions of dollars of value. It is going to happen. How I see that on classifieds? The point here is not if AI is going to hit your industry or not.
Because if you think AI is not going to hit your industry, you are wrong. It will hit all industries. The point is how we play our game on that industry. I think what we are doing here in Prosus is very, very good. We are not like, you said some other company, or you said some classifieds went down. You said some share that. Look, without saying their names again, other classifieds companies, they have been much more conservative in technology, and they invested much less to be. Classifieds was a business that many people were, how can I say, surfing the high profitability without investing enough in technology. That's not our approach. Prosus as a group is investing in large commerce model to understand the customers better than itself and use data to improve our companies. We're investing a lot on agents.
We have more than 20,000 agents doing everything, including many things on classifieds. We are investing a lot in ventures. The only focus of ventures from Prosus now is not to be a venture capitalist investing in everything. It is to invest in companies that can make our ecosystem run better or in companies that can run better because of our ecosystem. These three areas have profound impacts in our classified business. We are using the large commerce model to run better classified business and ads. On agents, we are running lots of our services through agents, for example, taking care of customers, taking care of retailers. Remember, our classified is less horizontal, more focused on real estate and jobs and.
Autos.
Autos. Thank you. We are taking care of the autos, retailers, and our partners. Third, we are investing in early-stage AI companies that are betting in growing in classifieds. We can make these companies grow faster, and we can also make our classifieds not only keep growing, but disrupt other classifieds companies. Yes, AI will have impact. I think Prosus is very well positioned about that because everything we are doing, we could talk about that for one hour, but part of our positive results, not because we are lucky or because our markets just grow, is because we are selling better, we are reducing the cost of ads, we are increasing the efficiency of the company, we are reducing the requirement for hiring people because our agents expand our working capacity. We are doing a lot of classifieds. For example, just remember one thing.
We just invested in one company that is automating through agents the relationship between real estate and their customers. We are doing that by ourselves, and we invest in a company that is growing like 300%, doing the same thing. Our classifieds are very well positioned to use AI as a competitive advantage. That is how I see AI in Prosus.
Okay. Great. All right. The next question is going to come from Andrew.
Thank you.
Thanks, Will.
Hi, guys. Can you hear me okay?
Yep.
Perfect. Good afternoon. I've got two, please. First one is to follow up on Will's question on optimization of the buyback and to understand how it relates to where the discount is at a given period of time. It's been observable that the cadence of buybacks has slowed down in the last few months as the discount has stayed in that kind of high 20s to 30% zone, depending on your definition of the NAV. Should we kind of see that as a signal that the company feels there's less attractive opportunities in buying its own shares relative to the rest of the NAV at these levels, and should we expect the buyback to move up or down depending on where the discount is? That's the first question. The second one is to follow up on the opening remarks on JET.
Appreciate it's going to be hard to give guidance today, but if you could give us a flavor of the level of investment that you'd like to put into JET, that would be very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew. On the buyback, Prosus was treating the JET. You want more information on?
Whether it's a function of the discount coming down, the buyback coming down.
What I said is what I do not like is to have a completely automatic thing. It is a function of many things: how well we are doing, how fast we are growing, how profitable we are, how our discount is. You said the discount was around 26%, 27% of the last few, one month, two months. I am an optimistic founder, so you can discount my optimistic opinion, but I will also, one year and a half later, remind you that we are delivering everything that we promised one year ago. We are delivering the growth, the profitability, the discipline, the complete reset on culture, and the innovation.
My optimistic vision is the discount will go down more because if the Tencent is very valuable and we have $1, $2, $3, $4 billion in profits in our core that is playing well, innovating, et cetera, I will call you later and ask, "So why the reason you have this level of discount at 26 or 7 or 8, etc. , that it was?" Considering all of that, the buyback is going to be more aggressive or less aggressive. My point on optimization now specifically is if we can keep buying back, but not only from Tencent, but from Tencent and other assets that we are selling, this is much better for us all. That is what we are trying to implement now. You made another question or did you?
Yeah, it was on the level of investment for JET.
Yes, the level of investment for JET. This is not the problem, to be honest, Andrew. Not the problem today. How I see that? First, would I invest more in JET? Yes. My problem today is not to invest more in JET, that we became operators of the company six days ago. Today, we are having the full week of meeting to plan the next three or four months. The company does not even have a plan for the next three or four months because their budget stops in December. We are doing today, tomorrow, tomorrow, the planning for the next three or four months. We had this discussion last week. Should we do in one day a proposal? The answer is no. You have our guidance without JET. We will give more information on the guidance with JET as soon as we have it.
I want to reinforce first, the problem is not the level of investment to me. The problem is the efficiency. Two things. First, JET is under delivering what they promised. Their current guidance, what they are delivering is less than their current guidance. Second, the efficiency of the investment in JET has to improve before any other movement. I'm not going to increase investment directly in JET if I don't think we are making the I could put $100 million in JET. If it's not very well invested, it will not be worthwhile. Right now, we are trying to rebalance return on investments and help technology improve return on investments.
That's why the guidance for the next two, three, four months, they are not very valuable because if we think we can improve it a lot in 45 days, I have to run it first and see the results, then do a new guidance. That's why we need 45 days to have a better view on JET numbers. I just want to reinforce, Basil wants to complement, to reinforce our level of confidence that we can run JET better in terms of growth and profitability is very, very high. We will share in details more about that when we share more data on JET.
I would remind you just to comment on Fabricio's saying that JET did not perform well. It was a listed company until last week. Last time it came to the market, you would have seen that order graph was - 77%. Company guided at that stage, given their own internal metrics in euro terms, reported in euros, an EBITDA of about EUR 360 million for the calendar year FY2025, which is December 2025. Now, I can say to you that some of those trends have continued during Q3, where we've seen further reduction in some of the order graph, and that will cause another impact in terms of their original guidance. Our expectations will not measure against that, is that they will materially miss the EUR 360 million.
Anyway, my confidence on JET growing faster and improving results is very high. Since we have six days, you need to update you the numbers on JET in the next call.
I think the important thing to point out here is that the acquisition was not made on the results of this year. The acquisition was made on the expectations for turnover multi-years, which is what you're talking about as planning has just begun on that.
Yeah. As I said, on these six days, we think the numbers are bad because of this reduction of 6%. I believe that in 45 days, with a strong reset in culture and moving faster in tech, we'll have good news to share. We can do that today because it's true.
Yes. Thank you, Andrew. The next question we'll take from Cesar at Bank of America.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the presentation and the opportunity to ask questions. I just want to focus on M&A, so I have a couple of questions on it. The first one, do I understand correctly that the available firepower for M&A is still around $8 billion? That's the first one. The second one, should we expect you to pause a little bit M&A as you focus on integrating all these assets and focusing on the ecosystems, or should we expect any large transactions in the next couple of months? The third one, it seems to me that you've been talking a lot more about India recently. Should we understand that this is back as a focus area for you? I felt you talked a little bit more about it than at the Capital Markets Day, for example.
Let me take the first one. Cesar, thank you for the question. At the end of September, from a total group perspective, we had $20 billion of cash on the balance sheet, but $18 billion of that related to our central corporate cost, our corporate cash position. Subsequent to September, we have settled, of course, the JET acquisition as well as last summer. That was about $7 billion that were spent on that. On a pro forma basis, that leaves us with about $11 billion of cash at the center. Obviously, we need some liquidity buffer against that. What is available for M&A is, I would say, at least $8 billion and more from a peer balance sheet perspective. That said, our priority is not to spend the $8 billion or more on bigger positions right now.
My big priority by far, I think I want to highlight one thing. First, our fund execution has been very, very good. We talk more about iFood on those meetings, but OLX is doing very good, very profitable, growing well. So we have good expectations with La Centrale synergies. Second, again, when we announced that JET acquisition, many people said, "But it's expensive." I really don't believe. I think we are paying $4 billion- $5 billion in something that should be $15 billion. That's what we have to build. My biggest priority by far is how we make sure JET gets back growing with the best technology and products in the world and really win in Europe. That's our biggest priority by now. As a curiosity, I read in the newspapers other two or three rumors.
Prosus intends to expend $5 billion-$10 billion on those things. I can tell you that we read on the newspapers these rumors. We are quite much focusing in delivering right now. I think now I have some reputation inside Prosus. We deliver the numbers we promised. I always talk about transparency. We will give transparency on JET just after a few more weeks or a month or more.
It is like you said in your opening remarks, it is focus on execution, execution, execution, right? The other question that Cesar had was on India, whether it is a bigger focus right now.
Yeah, we talked a lot about India the last few days. I met Prime Minister Modi just three days ago. It was all in the news that we are talking about in JET. Really great, to be honest. I'm always complaining Europe has to move faster and talk about creating big tech companies. Meeting Prime Minister Modi was how we move faster. He asked me, "Let's do more." It was a very inspiring conversation. I think what we've done in India is very good. We are the biggest FDI, international investor in India. Many of our companies have more value to unlock. We promised you a few IPOs in the last 12 months. Most of them happened. We still have expectations that there will be another very big IPO, and it's going to be big and good of an amazing company.
Our returns on investment in India are quite positive. We invested in the last one month, I think, in two companies that are growing very fast. Rapido is growing 120%. It's the number one company in mobility in Jake's book. It's growing very fast. I don't remember now, maybe 70%, something around that. And they are very good online travel agents and travel and mobility too. I think we are keeping the consistency in the areas we want to invest. We are keeping the idea of ecosystem synergies. I expect a lot more good news from India, not only like spending a lot of money, but we put that in the presentations. PayU, for years, including you, our analysts complaining that PayU has to perform better. PayU is profitable.
Finally, after many years, the profitability of PayU is growing quarter- by- quarter and quite well, month by month, even better. PayU is helping other companies to grow faster, and the other companies are helping PayU to grow faster. Hapus and Ixigor getting closer to our ecosystem will create a lot of positive impacts. We are excited that we are going to build more many billions of dollars in value in India.
Yeah, thank you. It is clear you can see the operational improvement in the owned and operated PayU, but you are also seeing that increasing connectedness of all of the individual pieces within the ecosystem working together a little bit more now.
Yes. You see, this time we shared lots of data in Latin America. Probably you saw that Shark, WeFiFood, and the loyalty in the center, and many businesses around benefit from these customers. We even shared some data. We are doing the same thing in India. The results are good. We are going to share more data with that in the next few months. We do not expect to spend $8 billion in India right now, but to keep having good results in terms of ecosystem building in India. I think the latest investments were very good companies.
Yeah. With PayU now profitable, we could say that all of our main businesses are indeed profitable, which is something we've never been able to say. You think about millions to a billion and then to multiple billions, that's certainly a necessary thing.
What you just said? All the businesses profitable.
All of the businesses profitable.
You heard it here.
Have you heard that?
Broken news. Yeah, we are in delivery.
All right, Cesar, thanks very much for the questions. We'll move to Michael . Hello, Michael.
Hi. Hi, can you hear me clearly?
Yes.
Perfect. First of all, thank you for letting us ask the questions and for the presentation. The first one is actually in iFood. With Keeta and Didi now ramping up their presence in the Brazilian food delivery market, what are your thoughts and what have you seen since October? How do you think this is going to impact iFood's growth trajectory over the next year to two years? Maybe just touching on India. You mentioned that there is a lot more collaboration between yourselves and the different companies that JET minority stakes in. How do you think about monetizing that going forward? Is that largely given from yourselves, or are they providing data back at a higher rate?
You understand the end of the question by yourself, what?
It's a connection between the companies in India and particularly the minority trust companies and whether there's how do we facilitate data sharing to improve the outbreak.
First on iFood, I think many of you were in Brazil in a visit in Brazil one or two months ago. The people that were there, they could see iFood is more than one business that is doing the same thing for the last five, seven years. The reason iFood is growing so fast, we just got through, including all the business, 160 million orders. Just to remind you, last time we met, I think we celebrated 100 million orders. Now we're celebrating 160 million orders. It's because it's a company innovating and rethinking how we offer business and offer the best technology and produce for our customers. Obviously, we have competition now, more competition. That is Didi and Rappi. Meituan is also entering Brazil, just entered. Those two companies entering a few cities, I think two or three.
They are spending a lot of money per order. They have discounts of 20%, 50%, 60%, sometimes 70% in an order. My advice to you, just check later how much they are paying to be there competing. Look, if you give a free meal to someone, people will eat for free. It will happen. Is it sustainable to have the best service, best offer over time? Remember, this is in the core. That is the food delivery. iFood today has, besides the core, a big loyalty program that gives free delivery plus discount on Despegar, plus discount on, I think, 1,000 other companies. We have fintech. We have dining. We have POS machines in the restaurants where we take transactions. We have kiosks where we put orders in the restaurants.
We have a credit card, called Meal Voucher credit card, with 1 million people buying food with a credit card, paying to iFood. We have the business of ads that is going super well. We invest in two companies. We bought one company, Advogo. We invested in CRM Bonus, great company in terms of loyalty. We have the classifieds integration. The integration with Despegar is a big success. Everybody that buys in iFood, they get free points to use on Despegar. We have a company for entertainment at the Simba. We are launching now, just now, we launched one city today, this week, iFood plus Uber. Uber has tens of millions of customers that are not iFood customers, and iFood has tens of millions of customers that are not Uber customers.
I guarantee you that we are going to see a lot of cross-sell in the two best companies in the region. Some companies are investing a lot to have the offer that we had six years ago. We welcome competition. This makes everyone run faster, but it's much more than let's make an Excel of a business and cash call this business. It is, can we be the best, creating new business, innovating, moving faster? iFood is doing that. If you study around the core food delivery, you see many businesses. Interesting thing for you, because I know you like the numbers and more than my things on innovation. Fintech, we spent two, three years saying fintech is the future for iFood. Fintech numbers are growing very fast, and profitability in fintech is growing very fast.
Our profitability keeps growing because a few businesses we were investing one, two years ago, I'll tell you true, fintech, groceries, and selling through WhatsApp, AnotAI, we were losing money the last two, three years. Now we are making money. My point to you is iFood is a good business, and there will be competition, and let's fight for offering the best service for our customers. I want to remind you, we are very focused in iFood to win there. Some of our competitors are distracted all around the world. Even in their home markets, there is a lot of, how can I say, pressure to compete against other players. We are confident, but we will compete.
Michael, you also asked in terms of given the competitive environment, how do we see in terms of what the impacts of that might be?
Look, in terms of the high growth rates that iFood is going, we're very confident that for the second half of this year, we will continue to sort of stay at those levels. We also reiterated our confidence in the overall guidance. iFood is also investing not only in new products, but also against some of the competitors. We've built a lot of that into our existing processes. We are sort of reevaluating various other projects and elements to utilize and free up funding so that we can actually fight against the competitors without changing the sort of trajectory that iFood's on for this financial year.
I think another important point, though, is the concept of competition for iFood is certainly not new. Over the years where they've actually had the most competition are the periods where you see the most growth. One of the things that Diego often says is, you know, when you focus on price, it's the race to the bottom, but you build a real moat through product. What you've just described there is an ecosystem that is iFood within an ecosystem that is Latam. I think you've highlighted, I think there's tremendous hidden value in that power business that we should and will do more to bring to you guys in the future. Now, how about we touch on the India ecosystem? The question there was how you can really build the LCM and the connectivity between those businesses without connecting data.
Any less about minority companies also.
Yes, exactly.
Look, my mind doesn't work like that. I remember the last results call, someone made the same question. If you are a minority, then you can't cooperate between the companies. I disagree. I absolutely disagree. I think we can cooperate with minority companies. We do it. We don't do it because I call there and say, I'm your boss, do what I'm saying. We do it because we call a company and say, that's how we run fine-tuning our AI models. That's how we run customer support using AI. That's our KPIs on optimizing our partners' relationship with agents. When we show all of that to a good company, the company say, I want it. I'm going to get this data. I want to run my company just like that. With other companies, another story. We show all of that to Mishu. Mishu liked it.
Mishu showed how they are doing, I think, was multi-language customer support. We said, oh my God, this is very good. We want to use it. We want to learn more from that. The point is not being majority or minority. If you need to be majority to do something good, it's because there's something wrong. Or you are not selling well, or the guy there is not the right guy. We can work with the minorities because we're saying this company can grow faster. These are the data and the technology that gets there. We are cooperating well on that. One example, PayU is giving credit and working with customer profiles, with users, companies that we are minority investors. The companies are growing faster because of PayU. That's why we are here.
Yeah, the other thing to take into account is the LLM, so the LCM that we're testing now in Latam, and we're getting some of the results already in the deck. That's something that we can also bring to bear in the other ecosystems.
Today we have an event with 80 people from all around the world being trained. We launched Amsterdam AI House two weeks ago, where we have now a center of learning and knowledge of AI that everyone is traveling there to participate in the events. We are running today an event with 80 people inside Prosus on fine-tuning large language models to optimize e-commerce transactions. Everything that we did in Latin America is now, like really today, going to India and Europe. We do not need to be majority to do that. We are quite confident we have a lot of growth. A curiosity, I intended to use a lot of the time of the meeting today morning to talk only about tech and innovation, but it was too much information. We said, let's focus on numbers today.
We will get back soon, as soon as Eoin wants. If you want to do it, it's fun to talk to him. I want to do it in two weeks. We are going to share why we are more confident than ever that we are one of the best players in AI e-commerce in the world. We will talk more about that.
You brought up the AI hash, so we'll get to your questions again. I think this is an important thing to pause on because this is something that is kind of inherent in the new culture. It's not something you would expect one, two years ago. Can you talk a little bit about the AI hash, why you've opened it, what you're hoping to achieve? It certainly is certainly a little different.
I want to make Amsterdam the center of AI in Europe. Amsterdam has a lot of knowledge, but not the vibrant community. If you go to Silicon Valley, every day you go there, there is hackathons and meetings. We create a big space in Amsterdam where every day we have a hackathon, a meeting, a course. It is open for two weeks. We are having every day a big event with hundreds of people. We are helping the ecosystem, and we are helping ourselves too, but we are contributing to make Netherlands a center in Europe AI. We also hosted last week, the AI House official opening was last week, two weeks ago. We hosted the Illuminate, an event in Europe talking about putting regulators and founders together to reinforce that. Mario Draghi was one of the speakers there and Mr. President Barroso.
We are talking about Europe needs to move faster. Europe needs to play to win. There are many things in the European regulation, including the AI Act. Congratulations, Europe, because we did a big change this week, including the Digicom that we think should be taking more risks to create leaders. Prosus is taking a much more aggressive or preeminent position to say, let's lead in terms of technology and regulator to create a big European tech leader. We are very confident on our actions. I'll tell you more every time.
That's great. Yeah, please don't.
We are answering too slow. I think we have to do one minute answer.
Don't kill my email now. We'd love to have some more investors, malice at the AI hash, so we can match up certain events with your travel buddies. Please reach out to IR. Let's move on. Thank you, Michael. We'll move on to Luke at Morgan Stanley. Hi, Luke.
Yeah, hi, good afternoon, everyone. I just wondered if I could pick up on this thread of more competition in food delivery. You signaled more investment in JET. Obviously, we heard from Delivery Hero and Talabat also pointed to more investment, Dash as well, being a big theme over the last month. If we just map that through then for iFood, how can we see that progressing into Q2 FY2027? Is that kind of the trajectory that you see there? Just particularly in the context that you may need to, do you feel like there needs to be more investment into dark stores or more 1P logistics? I'll just be interested to hear your thoughts there. Finally, I appreciate you might not be able to say anything, but the Delivery Hero situation, obviously you've got till mid-August to sell down to single digits.
Is there anything that you can comment on in regards to that? Thank you.
Okay, on competition, on Talabat, we have no access to different view on Talabat. iFood made a projection for the year that included competitors. We are going to deliver on our projection and our growth and everything else. We are doing quite good. I can't talk today on the numbers for the next year, but as I told you, many of the businesses that we started one year or two years ago, or three years or four years ago, they are becoming mature now. iFood is more than the food delivery. One example is the iFood Pago. You remember me about that. Remember that Mercado Libre has half of its profits from Mercado Pago? iFood Pago is an important part of iFood already, and it's growing. I really don't have any number today to share on the next year.
I can tell you that what to plan for this year, we have delivered, and we are happy with that. We have to do the budget for next year in one or two months. On Delivery Hero, I'm sorry, I don't have any updates on that. We have an agreement. The agreement is for 12 months. We are going to deliver in the agreement that we made. Sometimes I talk in the press that I believe that this agreement is not the best thing for Europe, as if Europe would be better as a continent if we have global tech champions. That said, we have an agreement. We are going to do the agreement according to the terms of the agreement, nothing to share. However, we are selling assets of companies that have lower. We are selling assets of companies.
When I say we are going to sell $2 billion this year, it does not include Delivery Hero. Maybe we are going to sell more than $2 billion. Maybe we are going to sell next year. We just do not have any updates on that.
Let me just add to that. A lot of the investments that we're making in iFood, the drive of business forward, regardless of the competition, are exactly the same areas that we now need to do even better because of the competition. For instance, optimizing the delivery aspects of the business, cheaper food elements, the loyalty program elements, all of those things we have been doing. We're just accelerating and improving even more in those spaces. Now we have the AI elements that we can add to enhance that efficiency.
To complement Nico's point on some of the investments we did on iFood over the last five years that are quite big, we can replicate that in JET starting this week because only now we are the management of JET. There are lots of upsides inside the ecosystem. That is what I'm selling for one year to you. I think Google and Microsoft and Meta and Tencent are winning, not only because they have one key product, but because they have a scale inside an ecosystem that enables cross-sell AI technology. We have that, and we will have benefits on that on JET and on iFood.
I think one of the things that iFood has done a fantastic job of in the past is areas that required investment to scale then do not need all of that investment going forward. You take some of that from area A and deploy it into area B. It is not incremental investment always in the asset. I think one of the questions that we get underneath this perhaps is, what does this mean for kind of your future year guidance? Is this a kind of retrenchment or a return to kind of an investment cycle? I think you were very clear at the beginning of the call that you expect to go from the 1 point something billion today, 1, 2, even 3, you said, to more than that. That includes investment in the other parts of the business and food.
I ask you the credibility to think that first time you talk about $2 billion, everyone said, oh my God, I don't see how they can do it. We will get to $2 billion. And we are confident we are going to keep increasing our margins.
I think they probably said the same thing on 160 million orders of iFood. Thanks very much for that, Luke. We will go to Robert at Kepler. Hello, Robert.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you very much. Yeah, first question on the impact of agentic consumer applications on marketplaces. If you look at these agentic applications, people are using it for more and more tasks. In the case of Prosus, I think you saw the first impact at Stack Overflow, where people found coding suggestions of agentic applications better than browsing on the forum. Increasingly, it could be the case that purchasing decisions could also move towards these consumer agentic applications like ChatGPT. I'm wondering, how do you plan to integrate your marketplaces inside of these applications? As user behavior shifts towards consumer agentic applications, could some marketplaces like classifieds lose distribution leverage and the data advantage? How will you address this to stay ahead? Yeah, maybe a second question on the IRRs.
I think in the past, you targeted a 20% IRR target with a higher hold rule for startups and lower for high-quality, more mature businesses. Yeah, if I look at, for example, La Centrale, which you're buying for around EUR 1 billion, clearly a high-quality business, it's growing at a CAGR of 13% EBITDA. You expect that market growth to continue. I think it's challenging maybe to get the 20% IRR. I'm wondering, what is kind of your lower hurdle in terms of larger investments in terms of IRR? What is your minimum hurdle to make these deals?
I'll try to respond quickly just because of the time. On the first one, what you just asked, AI agents are going to compete against us? Yes. I told you in the beginning, I want to talk one hour about our strategy there. It's exactly about that. What we are going to tell you soon is we are doing large commerce model. We are doing agents focusing our internal and partners. We are doing live agents, sorry, live assistance, where we deliver this kind of service to our customers. I think we will be very well positioned because of our ecosystem and how to operate there better than any other player outside. I could talk about that for one hour, but I need you to wait a little more. I agree with you, Robert. It's a risk. Yes, it's an opportunity too.
We are moving fast to lead on that, including on many investments we made exactly on this area. We are bullish and excited about what we can do in what we call life assistance. Next chapter to know more about that. The second is on IRR. We expect a yes, 20% IRR on La Centrale. Remember, La Centrale is a small company operating more isolated. We think that putting it together with everything we are doing outside, we are going to get good levels of growth, increasing profitability. We expect it to get more than 20% in La Centrale.
Okay, thank you.
Great, thanks. It looks like, Will, you're back in the line.
I'm good.
Unmute your line.
I was very fast with Robert. If you have more time, I can get back to Robert fresh. Let's see what else you have.
Will, are you there?
You left us.
I think it's in.
Sorry, I was just unmuting. Just wanted to come back. Thank you for your comments earlier, very useful. It's pretty clear the $6 billion-$7 billion is the right kind of framing for the FY2026 buyback. When we think about FY2027 beyond, is that the kind of level we should be thinking, or is it just you're going to have optionality and decide depending on the relative appeal of different uses of capital? Thanks.
Most companies, they do a buyback very specific. I'm going to buy back $5 billion. We are doing an open buyback. We are not exactly not saying this is the number for the next one to three years. We do not have any number for next year. As I told you before, what I do not like is to have an automatic thing. We have to analyze what we have, opportunities, what we have, what is happening in the world. I'll give you one thing to think. I think Prosus is a ridiculous shit bargain, oh my God, why we can have a company that is creating $1.5 billion, close to that, in profits and still have a discount. The world is not like that today. We have many companies valued at 100x revenues. Having our cash position, maybe the world is going to change. That is my point.
There is a lot of change ahead. I think Prosus is very well positioned. If the world changes, we are going to become even a more attractive company because we are doing innovation, AI, we are generating cash, and we have investment capacity. I for sure, since I have an open-ended buyback, I do not need to think how it is going to work next year, one year in advance. I have to keep playing well with discipline, with good capital allocation. That is what you asked me one year ago. What I am telling you now, one year after, we deliver the discipline. One year after, selling less Tencent and more other companies is good capital allocation because we believe much more in the growth of Tencent. What I commit to you is we are going to keep executing well, but we do not have a guidance for next year yet.
We simply don't have it. In six months, maybe we can share it more. Again, I'm confident we are going to keep executing well what we have in terms of innovation and delivery. To me, I think next year is much more a year of opportunity for us than a year of, oh my God, risk, how we are going to handle not delivering what we promised.
Okay, thank you, Will. We have four minutes left. Let's begin it. Thanks, Will. We'll try to get two in. Nadeem from SVG, you're on. Please unmute.
Good afternoon. Yes, just two very quick ones from me. We noticed that the likes of Rightmove and others are investing at quite a high rate in AI. This has the impact of going down on their profitability. I just like to understand how Prosus have done it so that you have, because we haven't really seen that impact on profitability with these substantial investments in AI and LCM. Just on top of that, just how much of a differentiator is it when you're looking to acquire businesses like La Centrale, the ability to bring these capabilities to the acquisition post still?
I should have half.
The first question was, how has OLX been able to do so well and expand margins meaningfully while investing in AI, whereas other companies, I won't repeat their name, have now had to kind of reset expectations because they're investing. It's been a long journey with OLX investing in AI.
Yeah, so I think it all started one year ago on culture, focusing results, innovating more. I think OLX is really delivering and operating well, but also it has the support of an ecosystem. So many of the things OLX is setting up right now, they are also learning and sharing from inside the ecosystem. Large commerce model, for example, the investment was in the holding in iFood. And now that it is ready, we are pushing it through OLX and through India. I think that's the central story or thesis of Prosus. We can have one classified company on La Centrale, operating by itself, or, and that's my thesis, together a bigger group that knows how to operate classifieds and AI, we can make their performance better. The first big company operating that is Despegar.
The number of Despegar does not look that big because April, May, and June were bad. I looked at Despegar month by month. It is increasing every month for six months. That is the thesis. OLX benefits from that. I think, and I am quite sure La Centrale is going to benefit from that too.
Right. The overall benefit of being part of the group. Nadeem, thanks very much. We have to move to the last question. I think we're going to land this. Maddie, take us home, please.
Yes, thanks a lot for taking my question. Just two quick ones from my side.
The best question.
Given your recent positive trip to India and the meeting with Prime Minister Modi, would you say your CMD ambitions for India were too conservative in hindsight? I mean, with just about 1.3x revenues from FY2025- FY2028 and just above 5% margins, that's what your CMD guidance was. I am wondering whether that changes at all post the meeting with the Prime Minister. The second one, on the asset monetization opportunities outside of Tencent and Meituan, is there any major opportunities you can talk about? Thank you.
Opportunities for LCM.
To trim the portfolio.
Okay. First, it was inspiring to meet the Prime Minister Modi. It was really inspiring. You said many numbers, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5. I did not connect those numbers super well. This is for you.
Yeah, look at things in numbers. He's referring to essentially the long-term ambition that you shared at the CMD for India. At that point, those are the controlled businesses with the dispatches by India. Obviously, the ecosystem around that is much bigger. It really depends how the controlled positions evolve over the next few years. It could be substantially different depending on how we have it.
Yeah, makes total sense. That's why I didn't recognize it because you are looking just to PayU, basically. Our expectations are bigger than that. That's the way it is. You have one possibility. This is really important on that. After talking with the Prime Minister, if something changes, I'll tell you, yes, I'll tell you one thing. We did all the—we moved faster in innovation in Brazil and Europe. That's the two things that we're really running on AI. I think we are leaving this big thinking. India has to lead. India cannot be one day behind Brazil and Europe. Expect more moves from us, making sure we have the best AI possible in India. You made another question. I forgot the other question.
Yeah, look, we've got $2 billion that we're aiming for this financial year. There are other assets that we can consider, but we're not going to sort of pre-announce any of that at this stage.
Yeah, there is some recommendation. We just say we are selling this company. Maybe probably you can understand why. Our portfolio is much more than Meituan and Tencent. There are many others. Some of the others, we talked about it here today. There are many others, about five or ten. There are many more billions we could sell, but we're not going to say exactly what. I can guarantee you this year we sell $2 billion. Probably in the next six months, we are going to announce how many billions we are going to sell the next year. At least a few more billions.
All right. Thank you for that, Maddie. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us. Are there a couple of words you want to leave us with?
Do you want to say a few final words? I have to say something at first. A few final words. Today, the focus was on numbers. I am happy. I think we are moving in the right direction on numbers. We will get $2 billion in profits. There is much more to talk on execution of JET, not for today. Much more to talk on innovation, specifically the question that someone asked me today. I will talk exactly about that. I am always unsure that we should be doing more and moving faster. I think we are moving well, just getting started. Our thesis one year ago is we are going to be a strong, tech-focused operating company. We are getting there. I am excited with the results. Hope you enjoyed them too.
I hope you're going to keep sharing good news with you in the future. Thanks for coming. Thanks for being partners. Let's keep building the future together. Thank you.
Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, guys. There are a couple of questions here that I will follow up. If you have follow-ups, please reach out directly to your friendly IR team. We will see you very soon. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.