Morning, everyone, and welcome to today's call. It's an important day for CAR Group, and we're really glad you can all join us today. On the call with me, I've got Eduardo Jurcevic. Eduardo is the CEO of Webmotors, and I've got William Elliott here, the CAR Group CFO. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take you through the acquisition of an incremental 40% stake in Webmotors. It's a business that we've owned 30% of for 10 years now. What I wanna do is just talk to you about why this acquisition is so attractive for our shareholders, why we think Webmotors is one of the most exciting automotive marketplace businesses in the world, and what our integration and growth plans are gonna be for Webmotors going forward.
We released a presentation on the ASX this morning. I'm gonna briefly run you through that starting on slides eight and nine, being the transaction summary. I'll call out the page numbers like I normally do, and once we're through that, we'll save some time for Q&A at the end of the presentation. If we could move to slide eight, and yeah, I'm very confident that you all know we've wanted to own more of Webmotors for a very long time now, so we're really pleased to be increasing our ownership. Importantly, though, Santander will remain as a 30% shareholder, and the strong commercial relationship that Webmotors has with Santander will remain unchanged.
Webmotors is the leading digital automotive marketplace business in Brazil, which is an enormous and highly appealing automotive market. It's many times larger than the Australian market with outstanding long-term growth potential. Webmotors has a very strong financial profile, as you would've all seen over many years now, and it's delivered excellent growth in revenue and EBITDA CAGRs of 23% and 28% respectively over the last five years. Business also demonstrated it can grow through the cycle with attractive counter-cyclical attributes. From a valuation perspective, the acquisition price values Webmotors on a 100% enterprise value equivalent basis of 3.1 billion Brazilian reais, which represents a calendar year 2022 EBITDA multiple of 21.7x . Valuation reflects the quality of the Webmotors business.
It's in line with our overall trading multiple, which we think represents good value, given Webmotors has been a historically a very strong grower and has great future growth potential as a business as well. At this multiple, we expect the transaction to be EPS neutral in the first year of ownership and accretive thereafter. Future accretion will be underpinned by the strong growth of the business and the financial and strategic benefits it will deliver in our ownership of Webmotors. Just in terms of equity funding of $500 million is via a fully underwritten renounceable entitlement offer. We think this is important and a fair structure for all eligible shareholders.
AUD 133 million of the raised proceeds will be used to provide increased capacity to pursue future growth opportunities. As at December 31, 2022, our pro forma leverage will be less than 2x and leverage post-completion will be even lower than that. Strong cash flow generation of both Webmotors and CAR Group is gonna enable us to continue to invest in both businesses, delever, and also continue to pay attractive dividends, maintaining our existing dividend policy of 80% payout ratio. Our franking percentage will come down to approximately around 50% going forward given the proportion of profit that's now generated overseas, but there's no impact to our declared interim dividend that is fully franked.
All of our directors will unanimously support this transaction, and all directors are participating in the entitlement offer. This is a highly strategic acquisition for Carsales, benefiting from the increased exposure, I guess, to a fast-growing and highly attractive business in Webmotors and the Brazilian market. As a company, we do have an excellent track record in terms of our ability to grow long-term shareholder value creation through building scale in our international acquisitions, we're, you know, we're very positive about the opportunity that we've got moving to a controlling stake in Webmotors. We also reaffirm the outlook statement we recently provided, you know, nearly a month ago, with our half-year results as well.
On to slide 10, and just before we get into the rationale of the acquisition, I'm sure a number of you are wondering, you know, why the change of ownership and why now. Yeah, we've had a very productive and transparent relationship with Santander for over 10 years of joint ownership, which is reflected in the fantastic performance of the business. We've regularly discussed, as most of you know, the merits of potentially changing that ownership structure. Look, I guess, we both believe that now is the right time to make a change and reverse the ownership positions.
We think it's important for the Webmotors business to have a closer alignment to a strategic digital marketplace shareholder, in Carsales, and for it to have increased independence outside of the bank as it embarks on its next phase of growth as a company. The business remains incredibly important from a strategic perspective to Santander and, you know, the commercial relationship between Santander and Webmotors, as I've already said, remains unchanged. The strategic rationale for the transaction for Carsales shareholders is also very compelling. We know this business incredibly well, and we see material long-term upside. The key reasons to do this transaction include the size and long-term growth potential of the Brazilian auto market.
Multiple short- and long-term growth opportunities for the business that we see, it ensures the Carsales shareholders are being rewarded appropriately for the value that we bring to the Webmotors business. Onto Slide 11. Our international growth strategy of acquiring minority positions in large, high-growth markets and moving to control over time has worked well for us over many years now, and we've developed a strong track record of delivery here. Moving to a controlling stake is a logical continuation of that strategy and it's gonna, you know, ensure that we continue to deliver, yes, diversity and earning streams across our enviable portfolio of assets. With that, I'll now hand you over to Eduardo.
Thanks, Cameron. Good morning, everyone. I'm very excited with this partnership. I really think that's going to add a lot of value for both companies. Probably most of you have a very good understanding of the business, given the long history of Carsales ownership. For those who are not as familiar, Webmotors is the leading automotive marketplace business in Brazil. Similar to Carsales in Australia, it was founded around the same time, 25 years ago. The business has impressive scale, as you can see by some of the metrics on the right-hand side of the chart. Our traditional digital marketplace business is supported by offerings we have in software, data, and insights. For Webmotors, the business has delivered strong growth in traffic, dealer counts, and lead volumes over many years.
All of these have been key drivers of the strong financial performance outcomes in the company. It's also nice to see inventory rebounding, which is similar to other CAR Group companies. Across both revenue and EBITDA, we have seen an outstanding growth over the last five years. Webmotors is a business that's proven its ability to remain resilient through economic cycles and has growth through periods of market disruption. All this resilience comes from a number of sources, such as the development of the digital advertising market in Brazil, which is still less mature than the Australian market. The growth in car ownership being a developing co-economy. The need for dealers to promote stock in more challenging environments in order to maintain inventory turnover. Used cars generally are resilient through cycles. The last one being on the buy and sell sides of the automotive transactions.
I have also a really high-quality team at Webmotors. This is a key component for our success, as well as the connection between ourselves, Carsales, and Santander. We have a strong alignment with Carsales across our values and business culture, which are all critical in running such a great business over many years. We are looking forward to working even more closely with the Carsales team in future. Thank you very much. Now I will hand it back to Cameron.
Thanks, Eduardo. Just onto Slide 18, just looking at the investment highlights. You know, I mean, there's a clear compelling investment thesis here supporting this acquisition and reversing the equity stakes of Carsales and Santander, which are. You know, we're investing in a business that we know exceptionally well and that Carsales shareholders have known very well for the last 10 years, and it's delivered. It's a growing auto market with 28,000 dealer customers or potential customers. It's the 5th largest car market in the world. We're building our market penetration and take rates. There's significant opportunities to continue to do this over time. Webmotors has a strong market leadership position. An exciting new product pipeline.
The partnership with Santander continues in equity and as a contracted commercial partner. There's a significant pipeline of proven product and IP that can be developed and deployed over time into the Webmotors and Brazilian markets that we have. There's considerable headroom for margin expansion and a strong management team that already works closely with Carsales to ensure that there's good cultural alignment and de-risking around the execution. Onto Slide 19. As mentioned earlier, the Brazilian market's enormous. It's the fifth largest car market in the world, and with a number of annual auto transactions being significantly higher than what we see in Australia and South Korea combined. It's all supported by a dealer network that's five times larger than the Australian auto dealer network. Onto Slide 20.
There's a considerable opportunity to increase dealer penetration. Webmotors has a strong track record of acquiring dealers over the last 10 years, and the Webmotors business benefits from leveraging the 800 people-strong Santander consumer finance sales force that sells finance and Webmotors product packages to car dealers. From a take rate perspective, you can see here the ongoing opportunity that there is for us to continue improving the monetization of the value that we provide to dealers. Under the new ownership structure, we'll increase some focus on non-dealer products that we can leverage through our IP and product as well to accelerate growth in areas like media and private seller areas in particular. You know, with things like dynamic pricing and so on that you've seen us do in the past.
On slide 21, Webmotors is an incredibly strong business in two of the most populous states of Brazil, being São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as you can see on the slide there. As most of you on the call will know, over the last sort of 2-3 years, we've been focused on creating a truly national brand by investing in dealer acquisition and consumer marketing in tier two key cities with large populations. And this strategy is really paying dividends for us, as you can see on the slide, with significant upside to come as we continue to push into other regions. They'll be a strong contributor to our growth over the next coming 2-3 years as we continue that push.
Onto Slide 22, as you can see here, Webmotors has a clear advantage over its nearest competitors, attracting the largest and most engaged audience of in-market buyers. As already mentioned on Slide 23, the Santander partnership is incredibly important to both companies and has strategic advantage for the Webmotors business. Not only does Santander provide a large workforce that sells Webmotors subscriptions, but we've also built a highly sophisticated auto consumer finance integration on Webmotors, where we're doing, you know, many million finance applications a year, and it's a material and growing source of revenue for Webmotors. Onto Slide 24, key near-term growth drivers are customer acquisition, yield increase, growing dealer product penetration rates and finance commissions.
There's also a very strong pipeline of additional services and products that will deliver long-term value for the business. CarSales, as the majority shareholder, is gonna accelerate the deployment of media and dynamic pricing products, as just mentioned, into Webmotors, which we know we can do and also have a material positive impact as far as revenue is concerned. Moreover, the adjacent markets of servicing repairs and auctions are a significant future growth opportunity for Webmotors, and they already operate in these areas, albeit they're still in their relative infancy in terms of contributions to the business. The opportunity also exists, I think, to export these adjacent market opportunities to other countries in the group over time as well, if it stacks up.
Onto slide 25, as you can see, the Webmotors business has a long-term margin expansion opportunity, which could drive, yeah, very strong earnings growth when you benchmark margin performance against other marketplace businesses in the group. The strength of our market position and the ability to push yield increases and high margin nature of the product set really means that, you know, we've got a significant ongoing operating leverage opportunity that will drive future margin expansion as well. In the short term, we're gonna continue investing also in that national expansion program I mentioned, and anticipate margin will expand despite that. Onto slide 26, the Brazilian economy is the ninth largest in the world and the sixth largest by landmass.
It's got a growing middle class and growing levels of car ownership at about 353 cars per thousand people, which is below Australia and the United States, which are in the 800s and 900s. Market conditions there have been quite similar to what we've seen here in Australia and what we've been talking about at the half year announcement. Prices there are up around 40% on used cars in particular, compared to pre-pandemic levels, and they remain elevated today. Time to sell decreased during the pandemic, but has returned to more normalized levels. Overall, like Australia, used car volumes have demonstrated resilience through the economic cycle. With that, I'll hand over to you, William.
Thanks, Cameron. Looking at slide 28, I think Cam covered a lot of the detail in his summary, but I'll run through a few additional details around the funding of the transaction. The purchase price is being funded entirely by equity. The equity funding of $500 million is via a fully renounceable rights issue, which we think provides a very fair structure for all eligible shareholders. As Cam mentioned, we are taking the opportunity to de-lever a little faster than we originally planned post the TI acquisition, which gives us increased flexibility to pursue future growth opportunities. Our balance sheet will also continue to de-lever organically due to the attractive free cash flows that's generated by all the businesses in the CAR Group.
The capital structure of the acquisition is attractive, given we can repatriate cash relatively easily through the dividends, we get from Webmotors without incurring any withholding tax leakage. Moving on to slides 29 and 30. There is quite a lot of financial information on the next two slides. I don't propose to go through all the detail, but I will call out a few key points. The pro forma historical performance, shown on page 29 demonstrates the impact of moving Webmotors from a 30% equity-accounted associate to a 70% consolidated subsidiary.
The Webmotors pro forma numbers on this slide include two small adjacent businesses called Loop and Carzen. They're owned by Webmotors. These were mentioned earlier in the presentation. The businesses are operated independently from Webmotors, and they generate some revenue and small losses currently. There is a reconciliation in the appendix showing the combination of the Webmotors standalone marketplace business and these two subsidiaries. This slide illustrates how the acquisition will be broadly EPS neutral in the first full year of ownership. That makes sense given that we are paying an acquisition multiple similar to carsales. The accretion beyond the first full year of ownership will be driven by the strong growth expected from the Webmotors business.
Moving on to slide 30, which shows the pro forma impact of the acquisition, and the repayment of debt on the balance sheet and the results of net debt position had the acquisition and capital raise taken place on the 31st of December 2022. Slides 32 and 33 provide some additional detail on the equity raise and timing, which I don't propose talking through, in detail. Look, that completes the presentation, the formal presentation for today. In summary, we are really excited about the opportunity, to increase our ownership in Webmotors. It is a fantastic business with huge ongoing upside potential. And it's a great fit both strategically and culturally for CAR Group. Now operator, if you'd like to open up the lines, we are happy to take Q&A.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Eric Choi with Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Thanks for the questions. I'll just fire them all. First one, just a simple one on valuation. I guess the headline multiple of 22x is pretty similar to TI. Obviously, TI had tax benefits. I just wanted to confirm you'd expect better EBITDA growth for Webmotors versus, say, a TI to justify that multiple. Just a simple one. Just a second one leading on from that. I guess dealer's the biggest revenue pool and probably an important driver of that growth. You've launched dealer leads over at Webmotors now. Is it about AUD 10 per lead today? Can you give us a sense of how many leads to convert and what a dealer typically makes per car transaction?
Just trying to get a sense of where we are versus the upside. Then just the third one, just on how important this Webmotors is to Santander. I know simulations don't equal transactions, but in your slides it sort of suggests Webmotors is doing 3.5 million finance simulations per year, and Santander looks like it probably only does, like, 1.2 million auto finance transactions per year. I guess does Webmotors generate the bulk of Santander's auto finance now? Does that sort of speak to how important that remaining 30% is to them? Thanks.
Thanks, Eric. I'll answer the first couple of questions and I'll let Eduardo answer the third. Just in terms of valuation, mate, I mean, we're extremely happy with the multiple that we achieved with this. I mean, the Webmotors business is a much faster grower than the overall group. I mean, it's tripled its EBITDA in the last five years. You know, in terms of value, we think we've got an exceptionally great asset at a very good price. We all know that you know, you don't get great assets like Webmotors, and we actually think Webmotors is probably the best digital auto marketplace business in the world, cheaply.
You know, we're thrilled with the, with the multiple and, as far as that growth question you asked, what I'd suggest you do is look at the historical growth rates. I mean, the CAGR growth rate for EBITDA is about 28%. I mean, you know, over the last five years as a business, it's gonna continue being a great performer for us. That, that probably should give you a steer around that. On the, I think you asked about the dealer model. In, in 2017, we moved Webmotors from a subscription-based model to a leads-based model, as you might recall. The, the way the model works there is pretty much exactly the same as what it, what it does here.
When we initially launched it, we gave dealers the ability to dispute leads, like we did here in Australia. Over time, you know, we've modified and changed that. At the moment, a dealer pays roughly around AUD 10 per lead, which is significantly below what an Australian dealer pays per lead, which is again, part of that opportunity. In terms of gross profit, I think you asked about gross profit and take rate. Take rate is around, what? 3% I think we put in the slide deck. When you comp that to Australia, again, it's significantly below Australia, as you'd expect it to be. In terms of gross margin, do you know what a dealer's average gross margin is, Eduardo, roughly? If you don't, it's okay.
average gross margin on a car-.
Yeah, yeah. It's between 10 and 15%.
Yeah. Which is the same as what you'd expect to see here, mate. That's the answer to the second question. Then on the third question, just around finance and how important Webmotors is to Santander and finance. Eduardo, do you want to do that one?
Yeah, yeah. Hi, Eric. Yes, it's material. We can't disclose the information because you have data from Santander and all this. I have been working Santander for the last 20 years, and I know how important is Webmotors for the total journey, the complete journey that we have with financing. It's material. We can't disclose this information. One thing that I would like to add is that finance here in the past, in the last 5 years, increased a lot inside Webmotors. Today, 15% of our revenue, and there is a lot of space to grow. The fee that we receive included this is inside the contract, is 2% that we receive from Santander.
We are going to keep this for the new agreement that we have right now. I'm very excited that we have a lot of opportunities with this issue that the financial integration with Santander.
Can I ask a follow on Eduardo? That's really helpful. On slide 20, you've got that finance revenue mix increasing from 12% in 2022 to way more than double as a potential. You just mentioned you'll keep the success fee pretty flat. What drives that? Is it sort of branching out to other auto lenders and is that easier after you kind of move to 70%? Am I thinking about it the wrong way?
What is happening right now, at the market, as we increase a lot the simulation, the total simulations that we have in our platform. Brazil right now and the banks are lending money just for the low risk clients right now due the market conditions that we have. We increase a lot of the numbers of simulations and the journey improve a lot. What we expect for this year is to the banks are going to be more aggressive in terms of credit. This is supposed to we expect that to have this maybe in the initiating the second quarter and the third quarter.
When this comes back, the approval and all this, we are going to increase a lot our percentage of the total revenue that we expected came in from credit.
Also come with the regional expansion program as the business keeps rolling out into other regions too. It'll just come naturally.
Makes sense. Hey, thanks a lot.
Your next question comes from Entcho Raykovski with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Hi, Cameron. Eduardo, William. My first question is, it's just around the multiple, which is, which is reasonably attractive given the growth rate. Interested in whether there was any cap on that multiple or any other formula you can talk to, which was contained in the original agreements with Santander back when, you acquired the original 30%.
Thanks, Entcho. Yeah, I mean, in the agreement, there was some principles that we had, to describe how valuation would be struck on the occasion of a change like we're seeing now. There was some principles that we worked around, and that certainly fed into multiples.
Okay. Got you. I mean, perhaps you can't provide any more color. Was there a specific formula you had agreed, or was it pretty broad?
I'd say principles, and just conscious of, you know, we're only one party to that agreement. There were principles around how that valuation would come together.
Okay. Got it. Thank you. On the yield growth potential with Webmotors for dealers, I think you put through a 15% price increase in the price per leads in the fourth quarter of 2022. I don't know if you're able to confirm that, but is that sort of number indicative of the annual yield growth for the dealer business?
That wasn't a straight up price rise. That was a change in yield. You know, like we have here or we had here many years ago, some dealers were on special pricing, et cetera, et cetera. There were some changes that were made to the way all dealers were priced to bring them in line and remove some of those special offers, which overall gave us a yield uplift.
Yeah. Got you. I guess that's, I mean, maybe as a follow on to that. Do you think you can move to a sort of like an annual price increase in the price per lead? Do you need to essentially just work out, what the market looks like every year and whether it can absorb any price increases?
I'll do that quickly. The answer is, mate, we, the business always assesses ability to make price rises, do price rises, but there's no decision, discussion around any sort of immediate price rise or any pattern for price rises. They manage their business like we do ours, so they consider it regularly but may or may not do them.
Okay. The final one from me, if you're able to talk through your thinking behind raising more than you need for the acquisition specifically, I mean, I obviously get that it helps with the leverage ratio, but how you sort of have to balance up.
Lowering your leverage ratio versus potentially jeopardizing any greater accretion. If you, obviously, if you raise just AUD 350, accretion would be greater, and I mean, whether lowering the leverage ratio you saw is more important.
Yeah, no worries. Look, I think we've said for quite a while, Entcho, that our target leverage is closer to 2x or under, and that's what we always were aiming to do post the Trader Interactive deal. We came down to about two and a half, and we thought it was the right opportunity for us to take to bring it down a little bit faster to our target leverage, which gives us greater flexibility. In terms of accretion, you know, you'll see that the deal we've said is EPS neutral in the first year and then accretive thereafter. The mix of funding didn't have a very significant impact on accretion, so that wasn't really a consideration for us.
It was more around giving us the flexibility to pursue future growth opportunities and getting down to our target leverage a little bit quicker.
Okay. That's great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Darren Leung with Macquarie Group. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. I'll just ask three as well, please. I might start with the first one, a follow-on on that leverage piece. Maybe asked another way, has there been a change in your thinking around interest rate environment versus June or, you know, sort of nine months ago, why we sort of raised a little bit more, you know, to sort of pay down that debt piece? That's sort of question one. Question two, was just in terms of the near-term earnings outlook, I don't wanna seek FY2024 guidance, but I remember when we did the TI equity raise and acquisition, we were talking around, like, a period of investment, so the growth dealer share, et cetera.
When I think about this business, obviously there's a lot of exciting opportunities on the dealer side and in particular on the finance side. Is there any incremental cost to achieve those, or will we be able to sort of start monetizing of those initiatives in the next 12 months? The third question is a more of a broader one. You know, how should we think about management's time allocation between the sort of 3 big offshore investments now sort of spread between, you know, North America, South America and Korea, please?
Thanks, Darren. Will, do you wanna do the first one?
Yeah. I mean, in terms of leverage-wise, no change in thinking around interest rates. I mean, we're obviously cognizant that the forward yield curve was increasing when we did the TI deal. I think it's more just we took the opportunity as part of this transaction to de-lever and get back to our, what we'd stated as our target leverage a little bit faster. Nothing in that. Obviously, interest rates have probably moved up a little bit more than everyone anticipated, that is incrementally helpful in terms of us lowering our interest bill, but it wasn't the primary driver. It was more about giving us flexibility to pursue growth opportunities.
I'll do the third one and, Eduardo, if you wanna do the second one. Just on management time allocation, we're conscious of making sure that we don't spread ourselves too thin as a management group. Oh, and so, you know, what we've done is we've given everyone a little bit more time, and we've promoted some people to spend more time on the Australian operations to give the executive team more time on other businesses that we have overseas so that we're just balancing ourselves up a little bit better. It's, it's something that we've been focused on through this process.
Just quickly on the second question you asked, in terms of near-term earnings, we won't give you guidance on that clearly, but there's significant opportunities that we've got. The incremental cost, if there is incremental cost on any of them, it'll be largely on the regional expansion, which is a marketing spend. But the rest of them, like, you know, dynamic pricing, media, et cetera, et cetera, I don't think that has a big impact on the overall cost base of the business. Did you wanna talk about Jan/Feb trading, Eduardo, maybe?
Yeah. We start the year in a very good shape. Very good shape. January, it was incredible in terms of audience, in terms of we are seeing about rebuilding and recovering, sorry, in terms of audience leads and all this. As Cameron said, we are not going to give guidance, but I'm very happy how we started the year. Very good.
Thanks, Darren.
Your next question comes from Kane Hannan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Three for me as well, please. Cameron, I think we spoke back at results that you really ramped the spend in Webmotors sort of coming into the end of the calendar year. Give us a sense of what that spend was, I suppose, what the margin for Webmotors might have been in the first half if you hadn't have made that accelerated spend. Secondly, the 40% of dealers that aren't subscribed to Webmotors at the moment, just give us a sense of who these dealers are. Is this mostly the regional guys or are there dealers in the metros that aren't using the platform currently? Lastly, Luke, Carsten, any change in plans for these businesses post-transaction? You know, how we think about the move towards breakeven for those businesses too.
Yep. No worries. Thanks, Kane. Will, do you wanna do the first one?
Yeah. First one, probably won't. You know, we don't split out our marketing, but, you know, it's obviously multiple millions of AUD that we're investing in that regional marketing push, and that's both brand investment, you know, people investment and performance marketing instruments. You know, it would've been multiple percentage points better in terms of EBITDA margin had we not done that expansion. I think we've also called out that, you know, there's a maturity to this expansion. There's an opportunity in the next couple of years to continue with that. Beyond that, we see really good margin upside as that expansion program matures.
Eduardo, do you wanna talk about the dealers?
Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about the dealers. In the market, in Brazil market, we have today 17,000 dealers inside the platform. Most of them focus on used cars. The offerings is, of course, that's the complete ecosystem. We have, of course, the leads that is very relevant for them. We also have the Cockpit, which is the management tool that we provide for them. We are in almost 15,000 dealers that use this platform. The strategy that we are making with them is to make a lock-in with the client and of course, offers a lot of products to really increase the revenue that we have right now. In Brazil, the used market is very mature in terms of the dealers that we have there.
Most of them we have in our platform. We are the main platform in terms of leads and audience that we send to them. That's a summary about the dealers.
I'll just add to that a little bit, Kane. I mean, clearly, Webmotors' strength is in Rio de Janeiro and in São Paulo and the two other regions that they've been focused in the north of Brazil. The opportunity is, again, in that national expansion, and in that national expansion rollout, there'll be franchise dealers and non-franchise dealers that will be, you know, similar to Rio and similar to São Paulo, that will exist inside those regions that will become Webmotors customers. It's not, you know, we've got 80% of the value, and now there's this 20% tail that we're chasing. There are big dealer groups in these other regions as well that we haven't picked up yet, and that's a great opportunity.
Just to add what Cam said, which is very important, that São Paulo, it's a huge market in Brazil, and we have 70% of the audience in São Paulo. When you look at other cities like the in South, Southeast, we also very strong. In some cities also have more than 50% of our audience. We are, as you can see at the presentation, we are expanding in the Northeast and some cities, big cities that we have in Northeast, we included Serpa as the second player. We are national right now, but we are going to be relevant in more than 50% of the audience in the whole country.
Hey, Kane, what was the third question, mate? I forgot.
Just Loop and Carsten, sort of, EBITDA drag from those guys.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. When do you expect EBITDA drag to go away? Is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
I think
You'd probably take out the, you know, the residual share of them. You know, some of that organic growth that you've obviously got a bit more debt funding for now. Is that how I think about that?
No. I think, you know, those positions that we have, those businesses will sit for now. In terms of earnings drag, I mean, what we're seeing with Loop in particular is a pretty decent turnaround. I think, you know, it won't be long. I won't put a timeframe on it, but it won't be long until those businesses will be making a good contribution to Webmotors' overall earnings.
Beautiful. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from Paul Mason with E&P. Please go ahead.
Hi. Just two from me. The first one, I was just hoping to get a bit more color on sort of the overall trajectory of your audience versus competition, whether the dynamics you presented are sort of like relatively static or whether you've taken a lot of audience share in recent years? If you can maybe give us some color on that and maybe the dynamic around that, how much of it is from going to new regions versus growing audience in the existing markets where you're strong?
The second question is just on the remaining 30% that Santander has, obviously there's no follow-on transaction today, but are they committed to making sure they remain a part-owner, or is there actually theoretical potential, say in two years plus or something like that you might end up getting to 100% on this business now that Santander is a bit more open to obviously reducing their control? Thanks.
Thanks, Paul. I'll do the second question first. Look, let me just reiterate that consumer finance is extremely important to Santander. You know, going into this transaction, it was extremely important to Santander that they maintained their commercial exclusivity with Webmotors, that all the commercial agreements that we have in play with Webmotors remain in play. That's, that's part A. Part B is, you know, Santander, as you guys might recall us saying many times over many years, you know, they see themselves as an evolving digital bank. Webmotors has given them great gravitas around that, being able to project that they are a digital bank. You know, for them, maintaining this 30% stake is extremely important.
It also gives them the opportunity to continue to participate in the upside that we'll create in Webmotors over the long term. They won't be going anywhere, and is my expectation into the future. They'll be partners of Webmotors for a very long time.
Okay. In terms of audience that you answer, two years ago, of course you have different sources of audience in Brazil. We have Similarweb, we have Google, we have a lot of desk, the data desk should you see this. What I would like to highlight it's about Google that, we used to have two years ago, 38% of the total searches in Brazil. We reached last month 46% of the total searches. We are increasing, we are in a position gaining market share. Of course, there are cities that, as Cam said about the regional expansion, that, we are doing this in a major way.
We more accelerate this process in these kind of cities and like Fortaleza and Recife, that's the cities that I mentioned before, in Northeast, also in Rio de Janeiro. We have a very clear plan about 13 cities that we are going to expand our audience and we would like to reach 50% almost in the total audience of Brazil.
Great. Thank you.
Sure.
Yeah. This is the last, probably time for last question. Thank you.
Your last question comes from Roger Samuel with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Well, hi morning guys. I've got two questions. First one, can you tell us more about the competitive environment in those non-core cities? Whether, you know, the number two player is actually the number one player in those new regions that you are planning to enter. My second question is more general.
You know, just wondering in terms of the timing of this transaction, and I appreciate that you confirmed your guidance for FY23, but looking ahead to FY24, are you concerned, any concerns at all about the outlook for the domestic business given the macro environment and therefore potentially, you wanna fill that earnings hole by doing this transaction, given that Webmotors is growing faster than the rest of the business? Thanks.
Thanks, Roger. I'll do the second question first, and Eduardo, if you wanna do the first question. The second question, look, just in terms of the timing of this transaction, I mean, as you guys know, every year we've been having conversations with Santander about trying to acquire more of the equity in Webmotors.
Webmotors is a digital marketplace business just like us. Culturally, values-wise, it's very much like us. Probably, you know, that it fell on deaf ears for a long, long time as we all know. The last 12 months, the conversation started to change. You know, this time last year, the conversation started to change. This is not something that we've just started to work on recently. This has been an evolution more recently over the last 12 months. I think the key driver of it has been largely a change in management at Santander in Brazil, and just the difference in management philosophy. I think, you know, that's helped us to get to this point now. It's got nothing to do with earnings.
If I had the opportunity, I would've done this transaction six or seven years ago. It only arose now. We, you know, I don't wanna make any comment about FY24, but clearly you heard Eduardo say that, you know, January and February has been excellent for Webmotors and, you know, I'm pretty confident that the team at Webmotors will keep delivering for us. Do you wanna talk about competitive environment?
Thanks Roger for your question. In Brazil it's completely different market about the marketplace because every bank, every larger banks in Brazil has a marketplace, but it's not so relevant in terms of audience. You have the banks with the marketplace 'cause they really know how important is in Brazil to have a marketplace, to have the audience, the consumer and all this. We are the biggest in terms of included looking to the bank. It's one type of marketplace that we have there. We have the horizontal players and of course they are more focused on the real estate, on the retail, but they are competitors also.
You have some of them that is regional marketplaces in some cities like Belo Horizonte, that you have one there, and Curitiba in the south, that you have another marketplace. This is a little bit about the environment. What we chose in terms of strategy that we realized in the past that we bought some regional portals, regional marketplaces, and right now it doesn't make sense to make this. We are investing more in the regional expansion and focus on this, the 13 cities that I spoke before.
It's fair to say that all the competitive dynamics are pretty similar to what we'd see here between, you know, horizontals and vertical competitors. Thanks for the question, Roger. Thanks everyone for joining the call this morning and look forward to hopefully catching up with as many of you as we possibly can over the next few days. Thanks again.