Thanks. Thanks, Travis. Morning, everyone, and welcome to the half one results conference call. Just before we start, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, and we're here in Melbourne, which is the home of the Wurundjeri people, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present. Also with me this morning, I've got Will Elliott, our CFO, Ajay Bhatia, who runs Carsales Australia, Paul Barlow, who runs Carsales International. Lori Stacy's on the call. Lori is the CEO of Trader Interactive in the United States. We've got Sangbeom Kim with us. He's the CEO of our South Korean business in Encar, and Kane Hocking, who's the head of investor relations.
As we usually do, we'll just run through the slide deck fairly quickly. I'll call out the slide numbers that we're on, and then hopefully we'll leave around 30 minutes for any questions that you might have. Maybe starting with slide 5, and we're really pleased with how the business has continued to respond over the last six months, you know, in executing against our strategic plans, while also managing the pandemic-related disruptions that we've all endured, here in Victoria and New South Wales, in particular with lockdowns for much of the first quarter. As we'll discuss in a moment, we've seen very strong half one growth in revenue and earnings, while also continuing to build on our long-term significant growth potential that we have.
Our momentum in our domestic Australian businesses is strong and we've executed well against our strategic priorities. A clear example of that is what, you know, in terms of what's working well for us is what we've seen with dynamic pricing in private, the private segment, which has made a significant contribution to the 38% revenue growth that we've seen in private in the first half. We're also making good inroads with the evolution of products like Instant Offer and SELECT. Our media strategy's seen strong execution over the last six months in diversifying our customer base and building on our product and insights capability with plenty more to come there. Internationally, businesses have performed very well with the acquisition of Trader Interactive.
It brings exposure to new large and attractive vertical markets that we have now and in the U.S., and we, you know, we feel the business in a great place coming into 2022. Encar continued its stellar performance and grew its market penetration across its, you know, key priorities in Guarantee, Dealer Direct and Encar Home. Brazil's also had a very strong six months of executing against its strategic priorities too, particularly with the regional expansion and the step change, some step change we've seen in CRM sales there.
As we mentioned in December at the Investor Day, you know, we are looking to become a carbon neutral business here in Australia, and we expect that we'll be in that position by the end of the financial year. Just finally looking at that slide, our people are our greatest asset as an organization, and we do try to go above and beyond being an employer of choice. You get the sense, I mean, many of you guys on the call have been around the organization for some time, and you can see that on the slide that you know, we value our people highly.
To keep people engaged and build a strong business culture, we also need to embrace difference and reduce barriers for people too. Being a family-friendly business is a key element to this and being an inclusive workplace. We're really pleased to receive that recognition from UNICEF and Parents At Work. If you just jump over to the next slide six. Just looking at our half financial highlights for the half and you know which now includes a look through perspective to demonstrate the contribution that Trader Interactive's making. No matter you know what view you take, these numbers are a very good set of numbers.
Strong revenue performance with growth across all major business lines, once again demonstrating our resilience and the diversity of performance drivers that we've got across various markets and geographies. Domestic revenue growth was highlighted by the exceptionally strong private seller segment and a second consecutive half of double-digit media revenue growth. In the international markets, we saw excellent revenue performances across our major investments in South Korea, the United States and Brazil. Earnings growth was also a solid outcome for us, particularly if you exclude the federal wage subsidy we received in H1 2021. Adjusted EBITDA then gets lifted to around 7% on PCP.
Just over to slide seven, and some of the key operating metrics here continue to reflect the value that we provide to our consumers and to our customers. You know, as we've all observed over the past six months, and slightly longer now, the automotive markets continue to trade very well with used car prices remaining at elevated levels. That continues to be driven by strong consumer demand and some of the supply challenges that we've spoken about in the past. We do think this trend is slowly beginning to stabilize with inventory remaining tightly held, but gradually rising, although still well below pre-pandemic levels. Time to sell has also risen slightly, but still considerably faster than pre-pandemic levels as well.
Both traffic and lead volume are up strongly on pre-pandemic levels too. Onto slide eight, just making some observations around the market and while we're just looking at things in that space more broadly. There are a few areas at present we'd like to just comment on briefly. Looking at macro factors, particularly around inflation and interest rates and how that tends to play out in the used car market. Our historical observation here is that is not a strong link between interest rate rises and car buying and selling activity, particularly at the sort of low interest rate levels that we're seeing today and we have observed in the past. Over...
One of the other things to mention here is just also around inflation at Carsales. You know, there are two costs that we have, being labor and marketing, and we manage them both well. With labor, we've seen inflation, particularly in the tech area, but we're managing this by compensating in other areas and looking at ways to augment our workforce with talent from other parts of the world, where that makes economic sense for us to do that. When it comes to marketing, we do tend to turn the tap on and off when we need to, based on our long-term strategic objectives and priorities.
As you can see, we've had no problem growing our core margin over the half too, and that's up, as you can see on the slide on the left. In relation to just supply chain, in the middle of the slide there, clearly there's some ongoing disruption and some markets and manufacturers tend to be impacted more so than others at the moment. Within the auto industry, the consensus here, just from talking to multiple manufacturers, is that supply levels won't normalize until the second half of the calendar year. What that means for us as a business is that we can expect to see probably used car prices remain high in the foreseeable term, at least.
Look, it's also looking at inventory levels as they sort of normalize. You know, there are still challenges in areas like trucks in the United States and cars in Mexico and Chile, where we've got subscription models, but we should be the beneficiaries of normalization as inventory returns. The final observation on the right-hand side has been just around consumer trends, largely caused by the pandemic and how they play out. The preference for car usage continues to remain above pre-pandemic levels with consumer demand for lifestyle assets such as RVs and bikes and boats remaining very strong. We see that trend continuing both here in Australia and in the United States at the moment.
They're positive trends for us here at Carsales as well. If you move to slide 10 and just looking at our group financial performance record over the last five years, it is really pleasing to see the story of healthy growth here continue, and with close to double-digit CAGR growth rates across all those major lines. As you'll see when we step through the deck, the business is clearly focused on our operational performance, but we're also seeing the benefits from the execution of our strategy and continuing to deliver excellent long-term shareholder value creation. Onto slide 11 and just looking at segments and EBITDA.
You'll note here the inclusion of a new segment that we talked to you about in December, which is carsales investments. That's there. That includes RedBook, Inspect, our tire businesses, and [Placee] as well. I guess overall, this slide continues to reflect the strength of our diversity and the multiple growth drivers that we have, along with the resilience that we've got when we've cycled through all the variability that we've seen with recent market dynamics. Maybe starting with our revenue segments. Overall, we're obviously well-placed and very pleased with the revenue growth that we've achieved of 16% on PCP growth. Or, if you look at for a like-for-like basis, it's 10% when you exclude the TyreConnect acquisition.
Now, we'll run through each of the segments in more detail in a few moments, but just a few things to call out here. Dealer revenue growth was pleasing, considering the lockdowns that we had in Victoria and New South Wales during the half and the strong comps that we had in H1 2021 that we're up against. As we saw in Core Private, which is private advertising and Instant Offer, that remains very strong, up 38%. That's been a combination of strong volume and yield growth. Similar to H2 last year, H1 this year, we've continued to see good double-digit growth in our media business, up 11% for the half, and improving media market conditions there.
Lower prior period comps and good execution of strategic priorities of the team have been the catalyst for that. Our Carsales investment performance is largely driven by TyreConnect. We're pleased with how that acquisition's going. Our international operations all delivered strong revenue growth. Asia driven by South Korea, which has had a really strong half with revenue up 19% on a constant currency basis, while our other small Latin American businesses continue to persevere through enduring stock shortages. Trader Interactive and Webmotors had great performances as well, and we'll go through them in a few minutes as treated as associates here and reported below EBITDA.
1% EBITDA adjusted growth to AUD 126.7 million was a good overall outcome. Without last year's wage subsidy, as I mentioned, it was up 7% growth on PCP. Onto slide 12 and just looking at our margin summary. Our overall margins were slightly lower on H1, but underlying margin remains very strong. Online advertising margin growth of 1% to 64% reflects a great revenue result in high margin product, combined with our tight cost control while still investing in future growth initiatives. In Asia, our margins were lower by around 1% as we again invested in marketing for Dealer Direct, which is our C2B business there in Korea, and that's delivering very strong performance outcomes there.
Without the marketing spend, margins would have increased by 1%. Carsales investments margin also lower by around 1% as we've begun slowly investing in building Placee awareness, along with the lockdown impact on tire volumes and how that flows to areas like supplier rebates. In Latin America, the focus has continued to be on cost management while market conditions, particularly in the new and used stock areas remain quite tight. We've also called out the overall EBITDA impact on margin as a result of the TyreConnect acquisition. Like I mentioned before, we've been happy with that, but it does come with a lower margin. Onto slide 13.
Just looking at adjusted NPAT and major movements below EBITDA. You can see that D&A is increased by about 19%, and that largely reflects the ongoing investment in further developing our future growth initiatives and the global tech platform that we have. Net finance costs continue to decline, down 24% and reflecting a reduction in interest rates due to the exit of an unfavorable Korean hedge that we had in place there. Profits from associates was up significantly and that's from the inclusion of Trader Interactive and the strong performance that we saw from Webmotors in Brazil.
Adjusted NPAT growth of 20%, that was stronger than adjusted EPS, as you can see there, and that was due to the 35 million shares that we issued for the Trader Interactive acquisition. The Board declared an interim dividend of AUD 0.255, and that reflects an 81% payout ratio for the half. Just looking at slide 14 and our look-through growth. While our Australian business is performing very well for us, there is a real step change in the picture here as you can see, and that's a result of the strong contribution of our offshore businesses, along with the inclusion for the first time of Trader Interactive, with our international markets now accounting for 33% of look-through revenue and 30% of look-through EBITDA.
Onto slide 15 and just looking at cash flow and our balance sheet. Starting with the top left of the chart, we all know we have a highly cash generative business and it was pleasing to see EBITDA conversion remaining at the 100% mark, and the team does an excellent job of managing cash flow and working capital for us. The 17% increase in underlying CapEx reflects the continued investment in technology to support our international markets and domestic product development. There's also an element of higher technology investment here and salaries in here to ensure that we're delivering on our strategic priorities in what's been a tight labor market.
As you can see there was a AUD 1.7 million incremental lease CapEx in South Korea, and we've developed an additional 3 branches there in the half. One of those was a particularly large branch in a mega complex that was, you know, several times larger than the normal complexes that we develop. That was probably the one that we had in the video on the Investor Day, I suspect as well. Looking at leverage, as you'll recall, when we announced the Trader transaction, we anticipate our leverage being at around about 2.1x within 12 months of the transaction.
Our current leverage is around 2.2, but we're well and truly on track to getting to 2.1x by 30 June. Over to slide 17. Just looking at our Australian revenue now and dealer and media. Dealer revenue growth of 1% was a pleasing outcome in what's been another eventful half for the extended lockdowns that we've seen. As restrictions eased, we did see conditions improve and continue to improve in what's been a good car market, with demand for new and used cars remaining robust throughout the half and setting us up for a stronger half two performance.
Revenue growth of 1%, like we normally talk about, primarily came from yield, while lead volume, despite challenging comps, were around the same, maybe slightly down, but and depth product was stable as well on PCP. We're also starting to get some traction with finance, and we've talked a bit about that over the last sort of 12, 18 months, and we now have about 13,000 dealer cars with a finance offer against them, and a lot more potential to realize here. Looking at the right-hand side of the slide, you know, the media performance, as I mentioned, it was great to see another half of double-digit growth year up 13%.
What's working for us here is our ability to diversify at both the customer and product level, which is paying dividends along with improving media advertising conditions. Now onto slide 18, looking at just private and data and research. As I mentioned, private had an excellent six months, growing at the fastest rate that we've seen in many years at 38% up on PCP. Private no longer includes tires and inspections, and they're now, as I mentioned before, part of the carsales investment segment.
The drivers for the strong market conditions for private sellers here at the moment are higher prices, which many of us have seen being achieved and a lower time to sell, which is going to support strong ad volume through the platform. In addition to private seller ad volume, strength in advertising price changes we made here with the launch of dynamic pricing led to yield increasing by around 20% on PCP. Alongside private seller Instant Offer is there as well. That's also performed well despite the lockdowns with growth in volume from growing consumer awareness and improving conversion as conditions ease, supporting strong double-digit revenue growth that we've seen there overall.
Looking at data research and services revenue, and again, that was similar to H1, and we felt that was a resilient effort, given the market conditions and RedBook up and some of our dealer services slightly down on the half. Just looking at slide 19 and carsales investments. So the reason why we have this and the business that we've chosen to put here is because they all stand alone pretty much from the rest of the Australian operations. We control them all. So, as you can see there on the right-hand side, they include tire sales, TyreConnect, RedBook Inspect and Placee.
The biggest contributor to that segment is the tyre business and with 120% revenue growth for the half, that was primarily driven by the inclusion of TyreConnect. But without TyreConnect, we still saw 18% PCP revenue growth there, which was excellent. The other thing here is the launch of new inspection products and some new facilities with RedBook Inspect, and we've seen a good volume pick up there, particularly around ridesharing recently. The integration of Ola onto the [Placee] platform and increasing registrations there month-on-month despite you know challenging market conditions for people using ride-hailing at the moment with lockdowns. Yeah, I mean, that's been good to see there too.
That is starting to get some traction. Onto slide 21, just looking at international and starting with Asia and Encar. They've again delivered strong financial performance outcomes while investing in long-term future growth opportunities. Revenue of 19% on a constant currency basis was underpinned by strong execution across their three key growth-driving products. In the case of Dealerd irect, the building of product awareness through increasing marketing, quality user experience improvements in user experience, increasing dealer penetration, all key contributors to the 100%+ year-on-year growth we saw there. Guarantee revenue growth of more than 30% was driven by branch network expansion and growing customer penetration within existing branches.
37% of Encar's vehicles on site are now, you know, inspected, which is great to see. We've also made changes to Encar, the Encar Home product, and we're seeing strong revenue growth there, along with the number of eligible cars on the platform now sitting at around 12,000 cars. Onto slide 22. Just looking at Trader Interactive, and they've had an excellent half too with revenue and earnings up 12% and 19% respectively on a constant currency basis, and EBITDA margins expanding through operating leverage from around 54% to 57%. All verticals grew, but RV, as you can see there, was the standout, with revenue growth of 25% year on year.
We also saw the same sort of growth here in Australia with our non-automotive verticals, and that, I guess, reflects the move of consumers into lifestyle assets like RVs, is a global trend, not just a trend in the United States. Also, high demand and supply chain issues mean that, like we've seen with cars, inventory continues to be somewhat of a challenge, and the market there. Although it's clear what happens is you can see on the slide when inventory starts to grow, and you can see that with RV and Powersports revenue growth as inventory rose as well throughout the half, which is pleasing. Overall business is well positioned for coming into half two.
We've got an average yield uplift coming of around the 7%-8% programmed, and inventory levels are continuing to normalize, which is going to support incremental revenue growth moving forward. Onto slide 23. Just looking at Webmotors, again, it's great and really pleasing to see how this business has performed here and continue to build on the resilience that it showed last year, finishing the half with revenue growth of 20% and EBITDA growth of 19% on PCP on a constant currency basis. Dealer revenue growth was strongly underpinned by new customer subs up 14% on PCP across the country. Yield growth are the result of an increase in lead fees and the sale of some premium dealer products such as CRM.
Our regional expansion that we've been talking about for some time that recommenced, and we're clearly seeing some big growth opportunities being driven there. Dealer subs, we're up about 1,200 on the platform, which was good on PCP. In relation to inventory, like we're seeing in Australia and other parts of the world, inventory levels are recovering. In Brazil, it was up 32% on December last year, but we're still at around 80% of pre-pandemic levels at the moment. Onto slide 24. It's been another challenging six months for our Chilean and Mexican businesses, dealing with COVID.
The teams in both countries have done an excellent job in working together and keeping costs under control and looking for growth opportunities as market conditions improve. Low inventory availability in these markets has been the biggest challenge that they've got. As you can see from the charts, there are things that will work in our favor as those inventory levels improve. We will certainly take advantage of the opportunities that we get as that inventory improves. Just looking at where we're at on strategy and starting with slide 26. Some of the growth opportunities that we've raised over the last year, looking at Australia first.
With digital retailing or Carsales SELECT, which is one of our highest priorities, we've been making solid progress since August and the launch there and seeing good outcomes for customers. We're only really scratching the surface of that product at the moment. Digital trade-ins, which also feeds into Carsales SELECT and products like Instant Offer and Appraisal Solutions, is critical for getting more stock in the hands of our dealers. It's an area of ongoing focus to develop consumer awareness, growing trade and quote volumes, product improvement and conversion. The result here we're seeing is good. You can see with Instant Offer quotes up 52% on PCP.
It's certainly heading in the right direction, but there is certainly a lot more that we'll be doing. Dynamic pricing, having launched that product in August, we've seen significant potential for private sellers being realized. We've made excellent progress here over the past six months, having just recently launched an upgrade to the sell funnel, I think it was last week or so. That's gonna facilitate phase two of dynamic pricing experience moving forward. We'll cover dynamic pricing a little bit more in a second.
Media, as we've been discussing, has been a good turnaround with two consecutive growth halves, more diversification in our customer base, with 25% contribution coming from non-car sources now, and new tech coming to improve capability and automation in the next months ahead. There's some opportunities for us to be chasing there as well. Dealer Finance, I mentioned that a minute ago, but we're really starting to get some traction here now, which is pleasing. We've now got 13,000 dealer cars with a finance offer on them, which is great. But again, you know, a lot more to do and looking forward to getting integration of finance into Carsales SELECT at some point too.
Just speaking of Carsales SELECT on slide 27, and you know, we've been discussing this over the last six months. We think the car buying and selling journey over time is gonna become more digitized. We know from our own research, in the right circumstances, around 37% of consumers are willing to purchase a used car online today. We also think that long term, this is gonna create a significant opportunity for ourselves, our customers and car buyers, car-buying consumers. With the launch of Carsales SELECT in August, our focus at the moment's been on getting the first phase out, which is now, and that's about growing inventory.
The trade customers using SELECT today tend to fall into a number of categories. There are those digital dealers or, you know, the digital-only dealers, the likes of say a Cars24, traditional dealers and what we call big box dealers that tend to operate out of a large industrial building. As you can see, published inventory here is now starting to get some real traction. It's gonna take some time for us to really get it to where we want it to be in terms of building that up, but very happy with the progress.
We're also seeing impressive performance results for SELECT with significantly higher page views and leads generated than standard listings, and with time to sell nearly twice as quick as a standard listing, which is a great start, too. As we've already talked about, digital trading is a really important component to SELECT, and we've been working through different phases of what that ultimate solution will look like here. We're also focused on finance integration, as I mentioned, and getting close to the offering of an integrated finance solution here. Onto slide 28, and dynamic pricing. Over the last five years, we've evolved our pricing strategy from
for private sellers, from the simple, you know, fixed price model that we had with the launch of a phased approach to dynamic pricing. It's helping us develop our pricing capability even further by looking at factors such as location, demand for a car or time of the year the car's being sold, for instance. We've been very happy with the impact that we've seen with the first phase of the product's development, which has helped us achieve that 38% growth that you've seen in the first half.
The first phase was location-based pricing for particular states where we're able to pass through a price rise in eastern seaboard states and a price decrease in other states, particularly WA, where our market share has traditionally been relatively weaker. In the eastern seaboard states, we haven't seen any impact to volume from the price rise. While in Western Australia, I mean, that state's now growing faster than any other state in the country. We're very pleased with the outcome that we're seeing.
Price bracketing is the next phase that we'll be introducing and using an algorithm to determine the price of a car and align it better with the car's value so that we can remove the current price brackets you can see there on the right-hand side of the slide, and that will make our pricing more efficient. The long game here, though, is dynamic pricing, an opportunity to continue to build yield, but through better targeting desired outcomes, so we can. We think there's a volume benefit to come, and there's also a yield benefit to come, as we're observing in the eastern seaboard states in particular at the moment. Onto slide 29 and Trader Interactive priorities and, you know, updates there.
We presented to the Investor Day in December, and there are a number of achievements just to quickly mention here. We've grown our market leadership in RV and closed the gap in trucks and equipment. The teams made good progress in building their lead attribution capability on top of increasing lead volumes per dealer, which is supporting improvements in dealer ROI, which you'll see on the next slide. Like Australia, Korea and Brazil businesses, the Trader businesses continue to make progress with digital retailing and looking to do a pilot for Powersports dealers first there. Our focus is on working with the Trader team to leverage yeah market expertise, tech and innovation and new product development to support the growth and development of their business.
Overall, we're very pleased with the progress that we're making and we're in a good place coming to 2022. Onto slide 30. Just looking at some of Trader's current business fundamentals. As I mentioned earlier, with a subscription-based revenue model, lower inventory can be challenging, but we're beginning to see that trend reverse in all verticals, with the exception of trucks, which is a very good sign. We're also seeing leads to dealers growing sharply against pre-pandemic lead volumes, which reflects strong consumer interest in lifestyle assets and equipment, as I mentioned earlier. That's all heading in the right direction.
Significantly higher lead volumes relative to cost to dealers, so growing their ROI and it means obviously dealers' investment in Trader is improving considerably, as you can see on the chart. While it may not be completely positively correlated to ROI for a dealer, we can see the very strong dealer satisfaction upturns in NPS scores across all verticals on pre-pandemic levels, which is excellent and shows that the team are doing a fantastic job in market. Just Encar now quickly and their priorities on slide 31.
We're all familiar with the strategic priorities that they've got, and they'll continue to be leading into the next sort of 12 months or so as we go on this end-to-end digital retailing experience we're trying to get to over time. With Guarantee, we're continuing to see more of our inventory being Guarantee cars now, up to 37%. We're gonna continue to open up new branches and increase customer penetration in existing branches. You'll see that percentage keep growing. We obviously wanna make Guarantee a real currency for buyers and sellers of cars in South Korea. Encar Home inventory is now around 12,000 cars, and transaction volumes have doubled in the past 12 months.
Priorities here will continue to be optimizing experience, minimizing dropout and increasing inventory penetration further. In Dealerd irect, we've nearly doubled transaction volume here and tripled dealer participation to over 2,300 dealers. Worked on improving product performance and competitive position against the market leader there. Our priorities here over the coming twelve months will be more of the same, effectively. On slide 32, just looking at trade-ins and then ramping that up and building out that a little bit more.
The opportunity that we have in Dealerd irect on the left side of the chart, we're repeating here some of the stuff that we had in the December investor deck relating to the TAM for Dealerd irect and the size of the prize. It's certainly worth reiterating that as we think that there's a material opportunity for growth, and we're beginning to see that materialize. The investment we're continuing to make in the product development, user experience, and building consumer awareness and education is getting traction and becoming a material part of the Encar business, which is an important strategic element of the path to that digital retailing which we're aiming for.
On to the last slide, which is the outlook statement, and I'm not gonna run through the individual trading observations there for each segment. But I will just say, you know, conditions across our domestic and international businesses remain favorable, as you can see from the comments. We've reiterated the guidance given at the October AGM last year and reaffirmed at the Investor Day in December. That is that we expect to deliver solid growth in group adjusted revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted NPAT for FY 2022, excluding acquisitions. Apologies, I've run a little bit over time, but happy to open up for questions now.
The first question comes from Entcho Raykovski from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Morning, Cam. Morning, team. I've got three questions. I might ask each of them in turn, which gives you just a chance to process. The first one, just on the outlook commentary, there is a slight change to the commentary on Encar and on Trader. On Encar, you're now guiding to good EBITDA growth. I think that was strong previously. And on Trader, you've now said you're expecting good revenue growth for FY 2022. I think that word was strong before. Can you perhaps just start off, just comment on what's driving some of those changes?
Yeah. I mean, overall, Entcho, I mean, the guidance for the whole business hasn't changed. I guess, you know, some of them, it's a little bit of a marginal call with the way we use words, as you can imagine, having followed the stock for a long time. You know, with Trader, it's a very marginal call around what word we would use. We want to err on the side of conservatism just given the truck market in terms of reestablishing inventory growth, which obviously is a key driver of their performance. It's probably more around that. With Encar, again, it would've been just around the edges, if there was indeed a change.
Yeah, that would probably be the way we'd answer that. What was the second question, Entcho?
Okay, second question on Instant Offer. I mean, you've called that out as a contributor to the private revenue growth, which was obviously excellent in the half. Can you give us an idea of what sort of monthly volumes you're seeing for the product? And I don't know if you can broadly comment on the expected revenue contribution from Instant Offer into the second half and the full year.
Yeah. Ajay?
Yeah. Thanks, Entcho. On Instant Offer, if you sort of take it more broadly, we had 38% growth overall in private. You know, more than half of that growth came from dynamic pricing, and the rest of growth was split between Instant Offer and volume. Instant Offer grew very nicely in the first half. If anything, I expect Instant Offer to grow faster than that in the second half. The first half was somehow impeded by these lockdowns. When dealerships are not operating, it's really hard for them to buy cars, and those conditions have significantly improved, and we're seeing that run rate.
We're not commenting on specific volumes, but I'm more bullish about Instant Offer in the second half than even the first half, even though first half performance was still relatively good.
Okay. That's great. Just the final one. I mean, if you say you've retained the full year guidance, you're talking about an expected improvement in dealer volumes into the second half, given the absence of lockdowns. Can you perhaps give us an idea of how much comfort you've got around that improvement and how dealer volumes have behaved over the December, January period that tends to generally be a slightly quieter period?
Yeah. No, thanks. Thanks, Entcho. On dealer volumes, we were obviously impacted by lockdowns and towards the end of December, a bit of Omicron as well. What we've seen, however, is more recently a significantly improved run rate on the first half. It's exactly what we expected, and we're seeing that through. I feel very comfortable in saying that the second half's gonna be significantly better than the first half on dealer volumes.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Eric Choi from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Hope you get some rest as well, Cam and Ajay. Well done. Three questions from me. The first one on TI. I'm just trying to reconcile what you reported versus Lori's comments at the Investor Day, that financials were improving month-on-month, every month. Maybe if you can give us a sense of at least the December quarter was actually meaningfully better than the September quarter of or if there's actually some seasonality we need to take into account. Second question, just on TI again. Just thinking about if that 12% revenue growth you guys just... You know, could that be a bit of a low water mark? And my reasoning is, that 44% inventory growth could be a leading indicator for paying subscribers, I guess.
You've called out another price increase, which is also a little bit earlier than the last one you did. Just wondering about the potential for that to accelerate. Just a last question, just to clarify guidance. I guess given the strength of the first half results, do your previous comments around financials being more heavily second half weighted than usual, do they still stand? Thanks very much.
Thanks, Eric. I'll deal with the last question and maybe the second question as well. I mean, just on guidance. Our guidance now is obviously for the full year. You know, we've now seen the H1 numbers. You know, as you've seen, guidance hasn't changed. It was the same between August, October and December. You know, how that skews H1, H2, clearly it skews to H2. Overall for the full year, our guidance is still the same. On the 12% revenue growth, I think you know, as a business, I mean, we target double-digit growth for Trader Interactive.
you know, that's where Lori's got her eye on the prize. you know, 12%, whether it's 12% or, you know, around that double-digit level is where we're continuing to target for the second half. Lori, I don't know if you're on the call. Do you wanna talk about seasonality?
You know, if we think about last year or at the end of last year, you know, we were trending positive month-over-month. We do see seasonality typically pick up around the Thanksgiving time in November through December through January, and then things start to pick up as we go into the spring. That is quite normal to see that. The second thing is that, you know, we just really haven't seen that truck inventory level pick up, so that coupled with the seasonality is really what's going into that right now.
Got it. Thanks, guys.
All right. Thank you. The next question comes from Kane Hannan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Just three from me as well, please. Just on TI, that 8% price rise you're talking about. I'm using the revenue composition you broke out sort of for CY 2020, just confirming that's still roughly ballpark in terms of trucks and RVs and the like. Then saying that would roughly imply sort of 4% revenue tailwind to TI overall.
Are you happy to deal with that one, Lori or Will, do you wanna take that?
Sure. Yes. The price increase, the 8% is in our verticals outside of truck. That's really where it nets out. It's slightly higher in some verticals, slightly lower, and it varies by customer segment. That's really where we expect it to net out. I think we've been a bit modest on the customer count growth and things like that because of trucks right now, as we're really hoping that those start to show some improvement, but very, you know, modest estimates based on what we're seeing there right now.
Okay. Perfect. That's net out at 8% for the TI overall. Sorry, I'm just a little bit confused by those comments.
Yeah, 8% overall in price lift, minus truck. We're really kind of holding off.
Yeah.
On that one. That one's really more mid-year. We're doing the price lift on RV, Powersports, and equipment, in that March-April timeframe. Those rate increases will net out to about that 8% lift.
Okay, perfect. I suppose on Private, you know, obviously a very strong yield performance in the half. Just interested, I suppose, relative to some of the previous comments you guys have made, you know, expecting to exceed the double-digit revenue growth you've historically done. Do I think about the introduction to dynamic pricing and, you know, these strong 2022 numbers a bit of a pull forward in that outperformance, and from here it's, you know, back to in line to sort of you know, historical averages? Do you still think you're gonna be able to outperform, you know, those historical numbers going forward?
Thanks, Kane. On Private, that 38%, you know, if you sort of peel it down, there's three growth drivers. There's volume growth, there's yield growth, and there's IO growth in there. IO's gonna continue, if anything accelerate, in my view. If you look at yield growth, and if you look at that, I think it was slide 26 or 28 or something on dynamic pricing, we are now introducing micro-bracketing. We haven't even done micro-bracketing yet. There's a lot to go in terms of alignment of demand and supply at that sort of more micro level. So there's a lot of optimization left. And the way I look at it, that gives me confidence that we can do double-digit growth for some time to come.
Exactly how much that double-digit growth will look like, I don't wanna talk in detail about that just at this point. It will be double-digit growth for some time to come.
Okay. Just lastly, carsales investments. I'm not sure if you commented anywhere in the deck, but just in terms of the losses that Placee is making, and I suppose the impact TyreConnect had on that earnings. Just trying to get a sense of, you know, what we think about Placee investment going forward.
Yep. Will?
Yeah, thanks, Kane. I think it'd be fair to say we're investing, you know, several million dollars into Placee at the moment. You know, low single digit millions. In terms of TyreConnect, I think you can see the contribution of revenue there is sort of around the AUD 12 million-AUD 13 million mark. We've called out that contribution. Limited positive impact on earnings to date, but we see good opportunity going forward. As we combine the tyre sales and TyreConnect businesses, you know, we see rebate upsides, volume upsides and some decent earnings upsides going forward, but limited in this financial year.
Perfect. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. The next question comes from Tom Beadle from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the opportunity to ask the questions and great result. I just had two questions, please. Just firstly, on the outlook. I'd just like to go into current trading observations in a bit more detail, a bit of a follow-up from Entcho's question. You've mentioned that underlying conditions in Australia are solid. You know, how are your volumes looking, whether it be, you know, leads in dealer or private listings? You know, how do they compare with pre-COVID levels? Are you still seeing volumes below what we may consider normal volumes just with the Omicron variant impacting people's movement patterns still? I guess the point is, you know, is there any sort of assumption in there that there could be a further pickup in activity or have volumes now normalized?
Just the second question is just around costs. I haven't seen any specific update for the outlook for domestic core costs. Apologies if I've missed it. I know in the past you've been talking about cost growth greater than revenue growth, obviously including JobKeeper. I realize there's some flex in there to deal with inflation or any other changes to the revenue outlook, but just wondering if you could talk about how we should think about that underlying cost growth excluding JobKeeper in your core domestic business in the second half. Thanks.
Do you wanna do the cost one?
Yep. Happy to take the cost question, Tom. I think. Look, we've done a pretty good job in the first half, as you can see. We look at cost across the different segments, and if you look at the core Australian business, which is online advertising and data research and services, we've expanded margin excluding the impact of the wage subsidies. You know, we think we're still gonna be in a pretty good position from a margin perspective in the second half. The only call-out to that is we did make a comment in the private section of the outlook statement that we're looking to invest some money in Instant Offer. Obviously, you can see, you know, we had a stellar private result and a part of that was Instant Offer really performing well.
We're gonna support that, continue to support that. That would be the only comment around that. You know, we're a business that has a strong ability to flex our cost base depending on the circumstances that we find ourselves in. We're always looking to grow margin and the inherent operating leverage of our business is very strong.
Just on your question around some of the metrics, and I'd probably start with saying, you know, if you look through the slide deck, you know, comments pretty much through the deck are inventory. Inventory is probably the area that's still not at pre-pandemic levels, but it's getting better and, you know, we can see that in Carsales, see that in Trader. Time to sell, you know, another metric that we monitor closely around, you know, consumer demand and how quickly inventory is going through the platform. You know, that's come up a little bit over the last sort of six months, but it's still well below pre-pandemic levels.
If you look at, you know, traffic or lead volumes across any of our countries pretty much, against pre-pandemic levels, traffic's up, lead volumes are up. So as a comp to pre-pandemic levels, you know, we've continued to grow nicely. You know, during the pandemic, there can be a little bit of noise, but against pre-pandemic numbers, we're doing quite well.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you. The next question comes from Roger Samuel from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. I've got two questions. First one just on South Korea. Just wondering if you will continue to invest in marketing in the second half and also in FY 2023. You know, when can we expect the margin to improve? Yeah, to improve from the current levels. Second question is, in your previous presentation slide, you mentioned that one of your strategic priority is to increase the recurring promo products in the dealer segment. Just wondering, how is that tracking in its result, given that you mentioned the time to sell is now slowing and do you see an increased take-up of this product?
Yeah. SK, do you wanna talk to-
Yeah, sure. Yeah. Regarding the Dealerd irect investment going forward, we continue to believe that we need to invest, given that.
Opening and the growth of this segment as well as competition. I mean, regarding the precise or correct size of investment, we continue to in discussion how much we will be continuing to invest, but we assume that pretty much the same with the first half going forward at this moment. Improving the margin improvement, we do believe, I mean, ROIC will be getting slowly improving over time as we accumulate our experiences in spending our marketing spending. On top of that, I mean, we began to spend our Dealerd irect investment beginning of last year, which is from January to June last year. In terms of the PCP growth, I mean, the second half of the FY 2022 will be better than the growth of the first half of FY 2022.
Go ahead, Ajay.
Thanks, Roger, for the question on recurring revenue. You're right, we've been focusing on recurring revenue for a number of years now, and I'm very pleased with how the team has done on recurring revenue over the years, but also in the second half. When I look behind the depth results, even though depth was flat year-on-year, underlying, we signed up a high single-digit number of more dealers than we had in the previous corresponding period on to our depth products. In normal circumstances, if yield would've either stayed the same or increased, that would've led to double-digit depth growth for us on PCP period because of how many dealers we've signed onto that platform. Unfortunately, in an environment when stock is limited, our yield on depth has been down.
Pleasingly, number of dealers paying us has gone up, high single digit.
Okay, that's great. Thanks a lot. We probably have time for one more question.
Thank you. The next question comes from Paul Mason from E&P. Please go ahead.
Hi. I have two if you've got time for both of them. The first one was just I was wondering if you could give us a bit of color around the SELECT product in terms of how dealers are interacting with it, whether at the moment you characterize it more as people are still experimenting or whether any dealers have actually sort of committed to the product and are putting, you know, a large percentage of their inventory through the product. The second one, if there's time, is just on the media business. If there's any color you can share on sort of how conversations are going with OEMs about their intentions for advertising in the second half, that might align with your comments at the start of the presentation. Thanks.
Ajay?
Yeah. No, thank you for that. On the first question around SELECT. As you probably see from the graphs, inventory is increasing month-on-month quite a lot. We had some initial issues, operational issues, around just inspecting cars and getting cars up, et cetera, which was one of the larger impediments in accelerating inventory. Over the last month or so, the team has been focused on inventory acceleration, and I'm very proud to see more than 500 cars live on SELECT right now, which has come up substantially just in the last two months. In January alone, we sold 200 SELECT cars.
The number just keeps increasing and we're also seeing the rate of selling these cars is twice as fast as normal cars on carsales, and that's what's very attractive for dealers, you know, going more and more into the transaction model. We're very bullish on the long-term prospects of SELECT. There is a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of pieces that we wanna bring together, be it Dealer Finance, be it trade-ins, be it deliveries. The premise of the product and the product market fit has clearly been proven for us.
Now, it's a matter of inventory growth and a bit of tech work to improve the user experience to go on a multi-year journey to capture that addressable market that Cam mentioned right at the start. Just on media, I'm very pleased with what the team has done in terms of that 11% growth that you see over the last six months. In my conversations with OEMs and with the team's conversations with OEMs and agencies, everyone's feeling good in automotive, but also some of our non-automotive advertisers about the coming next six months. Our pipeline looks really good. Our bookings for January were very pleasing.
Our bookings for February have been very pleasing, and our March pipeline looks really good, so I'm fairly confident of that media line continuing to perform, and the team has truly done some really remarkable work to turn that around into double-digit growth.
Okay. That, I guess that's all we've got time for today. Look forward to catching up with people over the course of the next few days. Thanks for joining the call this morning.
Thank you.