Good morning or good afternoon, as the case might be where you are. Welcome again to our conference on our 2021 full year results. A bit of information to get through this morning, and thank you everyone for participating in the call. I'll give you a quick overrun of a number of parts of the business. Firstly, just to remind people of kinda who we are and what we do. We operate online marketplaces in emerging markets. We divide our group into essentially three geographic categories. That's FDV LATAM, FDV Asia, FDV MENA. We undertook this restructure toward the end of last year, and this is really designed to give us far more operating flexibility, far more focus in our regions, and look for more opportunity within those individual legal entities.
Up until we did this restructure, we were loosely geographically grouped, but essentially a group of 16 companies that were spread everywhere. Now we're legally structured in this manner, and this gives us an opportunity to talk about not only the regions, but to be far more operationally focused on these three key regions. We'll talk a bit more about their progress over the course of 2021 as we get through the presentation. All of the businesses in our portfolio are online marketplaces that are focused on property or auto, with some general classifieds businesses that have strength in those verticals. A really important piece of our strategy is to ensure we have market leaders in our portfolio. All of our businesses are market leaders.
They're all number one in their market. Our geographic footprint really has been aimed at markets that we see a lot of opportunity in. We see low levels of competition. For example, in our LatAm business, we're not in Brazil or Argentina or Mexico, but we're in places like Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, and others. In Asia, we're not in China or India, but we like the large population markets like the Philippines and markets like Pakistan, where we can invest and operate clear market leaders. Similarly in MENA, businesses like Avito and Moteur and Tayara are all clear number ones in their segment.
In terms of our strategy, the clear mission for us is to really get a seat at the table with some of the rather large companies that are currently trading, companies like Adevinta and Prosus. We recognize that we're not quite there yet, but we're building a business that is focused on emerging markets. We do have a clear ambition and a clear vision to be the leading operator of marketplaces in these types of countries. As I said earlier, we don't wanna be everywhere. We're selective about where we go, and we're really focused on market leadership, and we're really focused on evolving the model, the marketplace model, into transactions, which I'll talk to later as well. In terms of what we'll cover today, there's essentially three key sections in this presentation.
First section just talks to our results. Our revenue performance, our improving EBITDA at a portfolio level, and helps people sort of wrap their head around our reporting. Our statutory results are obviously a little difficult to get your head around given the nature of the way we're structured, and we'll help people understand those. We'll talk about our operational update, and then I wanna spend a bit of time talking about the evolution of our business and the businesses in our portfolio towards becoming, you know, more transaction-focused businesses. Not just this year, but over the coming years. That really encapsulates our strategy as well as we start to build a lot of value in the portfolio that we're building.
When we look at the portfolio results and just get your head around the numbers again. Some real highlights for us. On an economic share basis, our revenue tipped over $60 million. It was roughly $23 million last year. That was a significant increase of 150%+. We see clear pathway to the next milestone for us, which is $100 million in revenue. If you look at where we sort of finished the year in December, already annualizing it, you know, halfway to that mark. Trying to get from $60 million to $100 million, just on a run rate basis, we're tracking at about halfway to that target already. Which is really good way to finish 2021. We've got a lot of momentum heading into 2022 as a result of that strong finish to 2021.
What we saw in the back half of last year were, I guess, increasing tailwinds. Not only around COVID restrictions being lifted in a lot of markets, but what we have seen, of course, is the rapid movement toward more and more of these marketplace businesses facilitating transactions. In terms of the performance of the portfolio. Our portfolio increased its EBITDA on a portfolio basis. This is a really important measure. This is essentially the sum of the businesses at an operating level in our portfolio is profitable, which is great. Puts us in a really strong position where the sum of the parts, there's no obvious funding requirements. The portfolio is effectively paying for itself, which was a position we wanted to get to at the beginning of 2022.
Our ambition over the past two years is to have landed out of COVID with a much better portfolio, growing at a rapid rate, that's trading at a break-even level. Perhaps even more importantly than anything at the moment is we've got a really strong balance sheet. Our balance sheet was well-stocked at the end of last year. The number you can see there, AUD 36 million, excludes the SPP that was really well taken up by almost 20% of our register. And at twice the value that most SPPs are taken up. Our balance sheet, you know, has AUD 50+ million sitting on it. That really puts us in a strong position where there's no plausible requirement for us to raise funds.
I think in the market at the moment. Good management and a bit of good luck. We've got ourselves in a really good position, you know, compared to what's happening around us with strong revenue growth. The portfolio now paying for itself at an operating level and a really strong balance sheet. If you look through that, some of the really strong performances you'll see when you walk through the deck from businesses like InfoCasas that has really blossomed. You know, this was a business that a couple of years ago, people kept asking me, "Oh, what do you think is the next Zameen?" Or, "What do you think is another great business in your portfolio?" I often referenced InfoCasas, and they hit it out of the park this year.
It's a business that we're really pleased to now have more of, and in fact, 100% of, and it's a great team running it, and we see a lot of opportunity for them in their part of the world and certainly as part of our LatAm business. Of course, there's some names you know very well, like Zameen, that continued to perform really strongly in 2021. It's no mystery that those two businesses mentioned are businesses that are really now starting to accelerate their ability to not just have online marketplaces, you know, online advertising with their customers, but more and more into facilitating transactions. InfoCasas alone in 2021 actually helped facilitate 1,400. That's 1,400 property transactions in its markets. Zameen over 7,000 property transactions.
These businesses now, having built their core really strongly, performing in that key area, which is wrapping right around the transaction and being able to facilitate it and of course, extract fees. You can see from the revenue growth profile of our portfolio, really breakout year in 2021 for us. A much better balanced, we feel across the portfolio with some of the acquisitions that we made in 2020 and 2021. We feel we've got a really good spread now across the three key geographic regions. You can see that, you know, from 2020 into 2021 on the right side of your screen, this is the economic share view. Really had a breakout year.
As I mentioned earlier, the next milestone for us is to get over $100 million and start to see the EBITDA performance generating cash flows and this company start to really blossom over the next sort of 12-24 months. When we look at the EBITDA performance on a portfolio. This is a really important measure for us. This cuts through all of the sort of noise you hear around what's happening, and this just says, "How is your portfolio of companies performing?" You can see going back to when we listed in 2016, few tough years when we were building the business, but we've now grown revenues. We've cracked the code on this movement from marketplaces into transactions.
You can see that we've now got our portfolio trading at right where we want it, which is paying for itself, which allows us to really focus on growth, but doing it on a sustainable basis and doing it with a really strong balance sheet underlying our business. We feel like we've sort of fireproofed our business right at the right time when the markets are going a bit crazy all around us. You know, we're really focused on our mission and we know that if you get this formula right, and we're seeing it, we're seeing it pop in many, many more markets, this movement from marketplaces to transactions is really powerful from a revenue perspective. From the unit economics of the model are now starting to really become clearer as well.
Our LatAm business, if you just look at that group of LatAm companies, that's actually a profitable group for us now. The FDV Asia group is profitable. 5 of the 7 companies are profitable in that group. The MENA group, which is smaller, but incidentally about the same size as the whole FDV group was about four years ago. Avito. We've actually halved the loss of that business. When we bought that business into the portfolio, it had losses of $3 million. We halved that in 2021, and we've halved the loss from Tayara as well. Both of those acquisitions are on track, and we look forward to them contributing really solidly to that MENA group over the coming years.
All of those businesses are executing against a really clear plan that we've got in each of them. When we look at the revenue breakdown by companies, this gives you a really good granular view. It looks at the 100% basis in the middle columns there, and then the economic share. You can just see the evolution of the group based on the ownership. You can see that LatAm is now wholly controlled by us. That business alone on an economic share basis, over AUD 30 million. We're really bullish about just FDV LatAm. If you consider FDV LatAm is about 50% bigger than well, about 40% bigger than all of FDV was in 2020. Really bullish about that business. It's a really good spread.
Four key contributors with our acquisition of the rest of E24. Asia is a part of the world we're probably gonna focus a bit more on. We feel like we've got a really good group in LatAm. Asia's an area that we think there'll be more opportunity. It's growing really well for us. We think that the dynamism of the region can certainly present opportunities. We know that our strategy's clearly been about, you know, getting businesses that are performing well, buying more of them as they start to grow, and then obviously trying to get control of them over time as they start to generate significant value for our business and consequently shareholders. You can see MENA, albeit it's the smallest.
As I said, it's actually bigger than FDV was only a few years ago, so business is starting to get going in that part of the world as well. Give you real granularity around the EBITDA performance. You can see that 12 of our 16 companies had positive EBITDA in 2021. That's a significant improvement from the previous year. Some real highlights for us, actually some of the new acquisitions, which is not evidenced here, but Yapo is now growing faster than it was under its previous owner, and it's now trading on an EBITDA level, positive. When we bought the business, it had lost over AUD 1.2 million the previous year. We've now got that business to break even. It's growing its revenues faster.
The other acquisitions we made, Avito, again, we're growing this business faster than it was before, and it's also halved its loss. We feel like 2022 is a really important year for that business to become profitable. Similarly with Tayara, we've halved the full year loss and look forward to those businesses going into a break even profitability phase while really focused on their revenue growth. Our formula is to get a hold of these businesses, run them more efficiently, unlock the code around transactions, and then be able to create value as these businesses really start to crack the code on their ability to bring more and more transactions through their platforms. Whether it's houses or cars, we're seeing some really big numbers in the transactions start to occur, particularly in Q4 of last year.
bodes really well for where we see the opportunities this year. Just in terms of understanding our statutory accounts, it's always a bit of a tricky one for us because of the nature of our structure, where we have a whole lot of businesses that we consolidate. We've got two large ones that are equity accounted. That means when we get to our statutory accounts, they take a bit of understanding. You know, this year there's a mixture of full year effect of the acquisitions and our ability to integrate those businesses. We've seen a much better contribution from the equity accounted businesses, which were a positive contributor to our bottom line. There's some. We have.
The way we've been structured historically means that there's a lot of intercompany balances, and they get revalued when the currency moves around, which produces these FX gains and losses. Our new structure will largely solve that. We'll capitalize a lot of those intercompany balances, so you'll see those foreign exchange movements sort of go away. We've inherited a fair degree of depreciation schedules, particularly around some asset purchases in businesses in LATAM. A lot of those schedules will wash through our PNL over the coming year. Then there's a fair value adjustment, which just means that the contingency we've made for the acquisition of InfoCasas. InfoCasas is outperforming, so there's an additional contingency that washes through the PNL as well.
The good news is we're fully funded, and we've raised the money for that acquisition, so that's all done. That just gives you an ability to look at our statutory accounts and kinda map them back to the revenue and the EBITDA performance of our portfolio. It's always a bit of a tricky one for us, but there's some things that are worth noting on the statutory accounts. When we move through to some of the more operational parts, I always preface it with a nice quote from me, but I will stop on it for a moment 'cause it does sort of highlight the fact that our run rate is sort of ticking around AUD 80 million. We wanna get to a hundred. That's a goal for us.
We're running our EBITDA levels, sort of performance of our operating companies right where we want it, as we start to crack the code on the growth that comes from transactions, which we've seen really significant way from a number of our portfolio companies in the last 12 months. There's information on the previous slide about just trying to reconcile some of the unusual numbers that appear on our statutory accounts. Really for us, it's now really focusing on the momentum that we've built, and seeing that the companies grow their top line while they're really aimed at being operationally efficient as well. That's a big focus for us.
We've worked really hard on a number of the businesses we've grown over the years, and we've worked even harder on some of the acquisitions we've made in recent times and really been getting these businesses to be increasingly operationally efficient. That comes as they really crack the code on this movement from marketplaces into transaction-based businesses. It's worth noting that, you know, our ambition as this year unfolds and our portfolio grows is to really focus on the opportunity in transactions. If you think about some of the macro settings you need, the dynamics you need in these businesses to really make the most of this model and really make the most of the transaction fees that are going through these portals.
Just to give you a sense of where we're at as a group on some of these key metrics, and I think people might be a little surprised at how rapidly we're growing and sort of the footprint we now have. Maybe a good way to think about it is that, you know, in terms of the number of people who are using our network of sites all of the time, it's almost 400 million unique users. We're getting almost 13 or 1.3 billion sessions through the course of 2021. It's just a really big number. Of course, the value creating element to getting people to your website is generating leads to your audience.
We generated, you know, over 220 million leads to sellers from consumers in 2021. Point of this is to say we've built a really big group of marketplaces. The power in this model is taking that marketplace to then be able to complete transactions. A really key starting point is to have your ecosystems in place, is to have market leadership, is to have consumers coming to your portals who wanna transact, a preparedness to buy and sell through a trusted platform like our brands in these markets. Then a captive audience of sellers who depend on you for their business, who depend on you for throughput of their houses and cars.
These are really important metrics that probably get overlooked a bit nowadays, but it's really to demonstrate the size of the group we've built, the opportunity that we see in the group, and then some of the success stories that are starting to blossom out of our group, which are really exciting for us. When we talk about transactions, and again, this is a narrative that will surface more and more. It is the volume of transactions now happening through our network of sites. Our 16 companies across 20 countries in 2021 helped transact over 14,000 houses and cars. That might surprise a few people.
I know we tend to think that the metrics around classified ads and number of properties being advertised and numbers of customers and clearly they're really important because they build the foundation of what is ultimately an opportunity around transactions. If you stop and think, you know, over 14,000 transactions have now been facilitated through our platform in 2021. That's twice the year before, and that was a COVID year, and it's significantly more than the year before that. This is now starting to happen right across the portfolio. It's not just in one or two companies. Of the 16 companies in our portfolio, 15 of them are now actively facilitating transactions, and we've got to work on the 16th.
It's not a bad strike rate when you've got your entire marketplace, your entire portfolio of marketplace businesses now having built really solid foundations, and cracked the code on transactions. Now, of course, after that comes the economics of transactions, which are starting to become much clearer and much more attractive as these models start to evolve. If you think about that, over 14,000 houses and cars transacted through our platforms in 2021. Just in terms of an operational perspective as well, our LatAm portfolio, we're very active in that part of the world in 2021. We completed the acquisition of Yapo, which is the leading general marketplace in Chile. As I said before, we've got that business to now be profitable. Its revenues are growing faster.
Its new site will be launched on March 7, which we're very excited about. It was a really old site that we inherited. We've done a lot of work on that business. We're now starting to see the revenues grow consistently and their ability to offer consumers more and more tools to complete transactions. We bought the rest of InfoCasas. Again, I mentioned this business earlier. It's a business that I often referred to as being one that I thought had a lot of the hallmarks that predicate success and value for shareholders. They had a wonderful year. We're really excited about what this business can do over time. It's now in four markets across Latin America, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.
You know, we've seen a lot of our competitors a bit stressed over the last 18 months, so we think there's more opportunity for InfoCasas to grow, not just its core business, which is what its foundation is, but increasingly its ability to help buyers and sellers transact. As I said earlier, InfoCasas facilitated over 1,400 property sales through its platforms in 2021. Now that was up from 185 the year before. So really, really strong growth in that part of the business. E24 is another one that we wanted to get control of. We completed that transaction in late 2021. For us, that transaction enabled us to then have 100% of control of all of the businesses in our LatAm group.
In Asia, we stepped up in Hoppler, but we do think there's some really interesting opportunities in the region. In MENA, we completed, you know, the rest of the transaction of the automotive portal, which sort of bolts together with the Avito in Morocco. Plenty of activity in 2021. It was another busy year for us. We feel like all of that has really helped us sort of getting to the beginning of 2022 with a really strong performance from our portfolio and the revenue metrics. Really strong drive to be more efficient, which means getting these businesses toward breakeven. Then they use that platform sort of to launch themselves into, you know, the ability to get more and more involved in the transaction.
We'll stop and talk about the transaction strategy a bit because it's important to understand that when we're talking about transactions, people immediately think that that means a property portal is now selling houses or auto portal is now selling cars. In a literal sense, that's very accurate and fair. The way we think about transactions, though, is the transaction event. What we're saying is when a consumer comes to a property portal or an auto portal or a general classified site, they're thinking about transacting. There is a transaction event that's gonna occur when they engage with the seller. Now, in each market, the opportunity around that transaction event is going to be a little bit different. In some markets, we're already able to fully facilitate the complete transaction and generate significant fees from that event.
In other markets, it's about helping a consumer do more of the transaction. It mightn't be completing the transaction, but we're working toward fully facilitating the transaction in other markets. This is evolution. It's not as clear to say that in every market you're facilitating the entirety of a transaction. What we are saying is that we're now getting more and more consumers. We're helping them do more and more of the transaction in concert with the seller. Now, go back a few years, most of these businesses were just search-and-discover businesses. The buyer would contact the seller. They'd go offline and complete a transaction. The clear strategy here is to close the loop on that, bring the transaction back into the environment in which it was started, which is these portals, and then generate fees from doing that.
There's a lot of different ways you can do it. Fundamentally, for us, you know, this is an old slide, and we just keep repeating it because it goes to our reputation of doing what we say we're gonna do. You know, if you go back and you look at what we said we were gonna do, we looked at opportunities. We improved the businesses that we identified that we wanted to invest in and ultimately become operators of. As those businesses stabilize and improve their market position, started to leverage their strength in the market, we'd like to increase our ownership. As we do that, use that platform, that classifieds platform, their market leadership, the significant consumer audience that I referenced a few slides back.
The significant volume of leads that are being generated through these marketplaces, and start to unlock the opportunities around the transaction revenues that are much more significant than the advertising revenues. This was a long play. I reckon this slide goes back any number of years in bringing our investors along this journey and saying, "You build these really strong brands, you build strong marketplaces, you've got a wonderful opportunity to then get involved in the transaction and generate fees." When we think about it, you know, the low cost, high frequency items are readily available online and everyone uses them, in some cases every day. That's easy to disrupt. It's a low cost. It's Netflix at $10.
We saw mid-cost items, which is anything from household goods to travel to services that you could now access online and less frequent, higher value. They're clearly being disrupted and improved. What we have seen in the last little while are these high-cost items, these low-frequency, high-cost items, starting with cars and moving into houses. These are the big consumer purchases that people make, and they've been the most difficult to disrupt because they're such high value. What we have seen in the last 18-24 months is now an online marketplace's ability to really improve the purchasing experience for a buyer from a seller's perspective, to give them security and safety when they're wanting to transact through one of these platforms.
This is a really significant shift in terms of the value that you can create when you're running a marketplace for houses or cars. If you think about the value we were creating in these marketplaces, it's always predicated around advertising revenues, but you were really leads business. You were really there to generate leads, which ultimately became sales. We all knew that. Frustration was being able to monetize that. The ground has shifted. Buyers and consumers have shifted. Sellers are more willing to engage. What that means is you've got a significant opportunity if you can tap into the revenues around the transactions. We know that, you know, the good old model on the left, God love it's made lots of companies lots of money, and a lot of investors have done really well on just this traditional classifieds model.
We know the ground has shifted. We know that if you can build it into a transaction-based marketplace, there's significant value that you can create. We're not talking about having to transact every single house or every single car in every single market. What we are saying is that you really only need to crack 10 or 15% of the transaction fees in a market and you can create significant value. We're already seeing in our portfolio today, businesses that have 5 times the revenues coming from transactions than they do from advertising. That's today. That's 5 times the revenues are coming from transactions versus traditional classifieds revenues, and that's in 2021. What we believe the opportunity is more like 15 to 20 times the revenues that can come from transactions versus classifieds.
You just look at the pool of fees that are generated from transactions versus classifieds and advertising revenues, and there you significantly resize the opportunity. As I referenced in some of the earlier slides, we were always about this end game. This was always about building great marketplaces, building great brands, having large consumer audiences, coming to a trusted intermediary with a willingness to transact to a captive group of sellers, and your ability to close the loop on that engagement, and your ability then to facilitate the transaction and of course, to generate potentially significantly more revenues, which is what our businesses are now starting to do. This is a really important shift, one that we'll continue to help our investors understand. It's one that we're very focused on.
It's 80% of our thinking, and it really is starting to generate some significant value across the portfolio group. Just by way of case study, this is Zameen. It's a business that everyone who's followed our story probably knows. These numbers are a bit old. When I say old, the chart on the right side, rather, just in terms of the value that's sitting inside this business. This is a business that did AUD 60 million in revenue in 2021. When we invested in this business, it did less than $300,000. Three hundred thousand to 60 million. This has largely got there on the back of building a really strong classifieds business, but then leveraging their market position to facilitate transactions for their consumers and their sellers.
Significant value creation that goes along with this, and we think the Zameen story is much closer to the beginning than the end. We think this is a billion-dollar standalone business. If you think about its trajectory, if you think about its run rate, it's done AUD 60 million this year. You can probably do the math on where it'll get to in the next one to two years. It is a very plausible scenario for this business to be a billion-dollar business, and I think it'll get bigger again. It just has to keep executing against its plan. It's got a really dominant position, and it's a bit of a case study on what you can do. You know, fast following, of course, is InfoCasas in LatAm. They started tinkering with transactions a few years ago. They really cracked the code in 2021.
This is a business that built a strong classifieds marketplace across its core markets. It then set about working with property developers, and interestingly, have built a proprietary process that is built around their ability to leverage big data. We hear a lot about these terms, you know, big data, AI. I can tell you that this business is putting those terms into practice, and it is generating significant results for the company. That's their ability to really be more invested in understanding their consumer audience, using big data analysis. It allows them to really then take leads that are coming from consumers and target them much more effectively towards sellers. They can then use the data that they're accumulating to help their sellers with AI-driven marketing plans. It's not a spray and pray methodology anymore.
This is AI-powered targeted campaigns to consumers, matching them with properties. It's using things like bot chats on WhatsApp to chat to consumers 24/7, and then, of course, bringing consumers and sellers together in digital open days. This is all being done digitally, of course, then facilitating the complete transaction. What we're saying is the movement from marketplaces into transaction is not a blunt or brutal, you know, process. It's one that is having an increasing amount of technology overlaid it, and that technology is starting to make it more and more efficient for consumers coming to these marketplaces online, engaging with sellers, being able to be matched with a product of high value. We're not talking about buying a new laptop. We're not talking about booking a holiday here. We're talking about buying houses and cars.
The engineering that is now built into some of these portals and their ability to take consumers through that environment with targeted matching, with AI-driven campaigns to match them with the right product is becoming more and more powerful. We certainly think this is a wonderful template, for example, for some of the other businesses in our LatAm group. One of the reasons we wanted to get, you know, full control of our LatAm businesses was because we're starting to see this sort of innovation occur in some of the businesses, which with full control, you can move around the group much more effectively. That's a big focus for us this year. The ability to take what's working in some businesses and move it into others and see the results.
On the other side of the coin, of course, is our ability to operate more efficiently by having full control and starting to apply more and more of the learnings around transactions into other businesses. You sort of wanna walk these businesses from bottom left to top right. That really is, again, as we've been emphasizing over the journey, it's building. It's starting with a classifieds playbook. That's clear. That gets you market leadership. You build that into a marketplace where you can create an ecosystem with large numbers of consumers coming to your site through a trusted intermediary with a willingness to transact. You've got captive sellers who depend on you for throughput of their products and increasingly excuse me high-value products, houses and cars, till you become this intermediary facilitating transactions.
You could plot all of our businesses on this curve. We've just taken the two case studies that we've provided for you today to give you a sense of where they're at. Of course, the real ambition here is value creation. That's what, it's why these companies exist, and it's why we exist and how we drive that long-term equity value for our shareholders. You know, by way of realizing some of that value, we get asked this question a lot. There's any number of ways we see liquidity and value monetization options over the journey. I guess that's really to put a stake in the ground to say we get it, we're all about shareholder return. We are on a journey of taking these marketplaces and building the knowledge into them to become transaction facilitators.
Of course, the value that can be attained through what is a significant rethink of the opportunity from just classified ads in marketplaces and generating leads. That's all good and well, and it's worked really well. We know that the real value opportunity over the next 12, 24, 36 months is this transaction thing. We're getting better and better at it. You can see earlier, there's been over 14,000 houses and cars that have been transacted through our portal in 2021. That's not just the number of people that have inquired and ended up going off and buying offline. That is absolutely the number of houses and cars that we have helped facilitate the sale of. That's not just sending leads to sellers.
That's keeping the consumer in your environment, facilitating the transaction and charging fees for that event. It's a really significant number and got a real couple of leaders of the pack here, which are setting the pace in terms of how they execute against this strategy. That is essentially the guts of the presentation today. There is additional information in the back of the deck here, which gives you really quickly, just a history of our fundraising, which we're really proud of. Obviously, the markets are giving everyone a bit of a whack at the moment, but our ability to raise funds from shareholders to deploy it effectively and generate value for shareholders off the back of the use of those funds is a track record we're really proud of.
Our balance sheet is fully stocked. We feel really good about where we're at. Strong revenue growth, obviously with our EBITDA performance across our portfolio really strong. I'm just sort of flicking through here because there's a whole lot more financial information in the back of this deck, for people who wanna access it. Yeah, we think we've hit a bit of a sweet spot coming into 2022 with our revenue performance, our ambition to get to AUD 100 million, our ability to have our portfolio break even, our fully stocked balance sheet, and a really clear strategy on how we grow our stakes in these businesses and ultimately open up opportunities around the transaction. To that end, I'll flick back to the start of this and we can certainly
I'll go back to the host. Maybe we can go to Q&A if there's anyone who's on the call that wants to dive into any one part of our performance in 2021.
The first question comes from the webcast. Brendan York has a question. Brendan would like to ask, other than the property and vehicle marketplaces, are there other marketplaces in your geographies that would make sense to add to the?
I think I got the end of that question. I think it was makes sense to add to the portfolio. Is that right?
Yeah. I'll read that again for you.
Other than property and vehicle marketplaces, are there other marketplaces in your geographies that would make sense to add into the group?
It's a really astute question. We love houses and cars because they're the highest value consumer items. There's a heck of a lot of fees that go around the transaction, and there's a heck of a lot of opportunities even up to the transaction for different revenue opportunities, products, whether that's finance, insurance, and other. Houses and cars, you've almost got this lovely environment where, you know, up to a purchase, you might help consumers with home loans or car loans or insurance or pre-purchase inspections and legals. You've then got the fees of the commissions on the actual transactions, which is what makes it really attractive. Certainly, there are other options in our markets. They're probably not as attractive for us today as those two.
I think there is certainly opportunity in general consumer goods in some of our businesses because you want the ability for consumers to come to your site and sort of have a full experience, and that should enable them to purchase anything they find. On some of our sites, there's consumer goods. That certainly just goes to the trust. Look, for us, the real high-value items are houses and cars. We will ultimately allow consumers to transact any goods they can find on our sites, but we do stay pretty focused. Our investors have enjoyed our focus on those two key verticals. They're verticals we understand, and they're verticals we know how to monetize.
There are certainly other parts of the market, but we're probably gonna stay in our lane on houses and cars for the foreseeable future.
Thank you. The next webcast question comes from Brayden McCormack. Brayden would like to ask:
Thanks, Shaun, for the update. Is the broader market softness creating opportunities in 2022 to buy further interest from vendors, for example, FDV Asia?
Well, yes. I think the short answer is yes. We certainly have ambitions, as we've done with the rest of our portfolio, to increase our stake. I think getting over 50% was significant for us in most of our businesses now. That certainly gives us a really good driver's seat. To go the rest of the distance, we'll look at it on a case-by-case basis. I think the other thing is that, you know, you've got active founders running the businesses who also are aware of the markets, and that they recognize that the markets are soft. If they were gonna sell, it probably is not an opportune time for them to do it equally, while it might be opportunity from a buyer perspective. We'll still focus on growing those businesses.
If the opportunities come up, yeah, we're gonna look at them. Yeah. Look, who would have thought three months ago we'd be where we are? I think it's taking a pretty considered view of the next sort of 12 months. I think the key for us, Braden, is really getting those businesses to accelerate their transaction ability. When we see that, they become a lot more attractive for us to wanna buy more of. It's kinda balancing those two factors for the next little while.
Thank you. The next webcast question is from Mark Devcich. Mark would like to ask:
What is the take rate on transactions, real estate, and auto?
It varies from market to market. It varies from sort of 1.8% up to 10%, depending on where you are with properties. That's typically new property. It typically varies. It can vary depending on how much you do. At a 10% take rate, you might be doing a lot of the advertising as well. At a lower take rate, you might be free from those extra costs that come with transactions. It might just purely be a fee. In auto, again, it varies. On new cars, the margins, I'll say pretty good without necessarily divulging it 'cause it varies a lot. Secondhand cars, the take rate on just transactions is much leaner.
What you're seeing as a result of that is a greater preparedness of more and more businesses to say they wanna buy the whole car and control the entire transaction. With cars, the ability to generate fees necessitates you really controlling more of the transaction. The beauty of property, of course, is that you can just facilitate and there's a decent fee pool there. Cars is harder 'cause you've actually probably gotta control the transaction from right from the beginning to the end. That's why you're seeing more and more companies wanting to buy your car or finding ways to help you sell your car that allow them to control it more. I think, you know, fee structures on property is really healthy from the get-go. Fees on cars, it's a bit more work.
It's obviously higher volume. So the throughput on cars, it just makes it a lower value, higher volume opportunity, but over time, pretty attractive nonetheless.
Yeah. Apologies. Your next question comes from Mark Devcich, who reads:
What was your total transaction revenue FY 2021?
I can share that number with you. It is detailed in one of the decks. It was roughly half the revenue. That varied significantly from company to company. In companies like Zameen, it was 80+% of the revenue. In iMyanmarHouse, it was actually 85% of the revenue. In InfoCasas, it was closer to 18% of the revenue. It varies a lot depending on how far they're into it. When you take the big number, sort of weighted, but as I said earlier, we're now seeing volume in all of the companies that are now generating transactions. Expect that the average percentage share of transaction revenue to continue to grow. Through this year it was about half.
As I said, probably weighted toward a few companies who have been doing it for a number of years. Companies that started doing more and more of it in 2021, you'll probably see the average percentage share as transaction revenue grow in 2022 and beyond, that's for sure.
Thank you. The next webcast question comes from Charles Patterson. Charles would like to ask:
Hey, Shaun. Thanks for doing the call and congrats on a good result. Could you talk about the broader potential to use the transaction model that is working well with Zameen and InfoCasas in your other markets? Could you provide an update there?
It's a really interesting question because what you find, the online classifieds marketplace, the traditional classifieds model, it's relatively straightforward. Now being able to look back, it's relatively the same everywhere you go. It's probably 80% the same in most markets. You go out and you target car dealers and property agents. You charge them a subscription or a lead fee or some sort of mechanism to monetize their advertising. When you come to transactions, it's a little bit different, right? If you think about the way you buy a house or a car, beyond the search and discover, which is fairly generic, when you get to the transaction itself, it's quite a local experience.
All of these companies are sort of solving local problems. When you see, for example, in iMyanmarHouse or in Zameen, it's largely been labor-intensive up until now. They've gone out and solved the transaction problem using a lot of people and that's now being made more efficient by the application of tech and customer databases and the ability for algorithms to relate products back to a product from a seller to a buyer. The intriguing one for us is sort of what's happening in Latin America. Latin America, structurally, the market there lends itself quite well to the portals playing a significant role in transactions. The markets are reasonably well-structured, they're reasonably sophisticated, but they lack formality and they lack trust.
In comes the portals who guess what provide formality and trust to consumers and structure for sellers. What InfoCasas has been able to build is really fascinating. We're now building that for Fincaraiz in Colombia. They have actually taken large chunks of what the InfoCasas team have been doing and effectively sort of white labeling and adding on the Fincaraiz experience to it. We see great opportunity to leverage that into Central America, where largely our approach to transactions has tended toward consumer goods. We've sort of struggled to really figure out what the right model for houses and cars is, you know, despite the fact we're the clear leader in houses and cars in those markets.
The beauty of the InfoCasas product is it's largely tech-based, so it's a process they've built, and there's very few humans involved in the execution of it. Which is fantastic because the economics of that become really appealing over time. Certainly we see opportunity to pick up, not necessarily the whole thing, but large chunks of it replicated into other markets. Obviously, in Latin America, one of the reasons we wanted to get a hold of it. What we're learning in our Asia footprint is that a lot of this stuff is, at the moment has been quite labor-driven, with technology now starting to make it more efficient. It's probably got a little way to run in our Asia group just to see the various models and how they work.
You know, at one end of the continuum, you've got AutoDeal. Now, they helped transact 3,500 cars last year, and they're getting better and better at it. There's a throughput through their portal, and it is almost wholly driven by technology. Whereas you look at what's happening in Zameen and InfoCasas, for example, where it's primarily driven by labor. It's letting those models run a bit within the Asia group, seeing which ones are the most efficient. Clearly, some of them are working well, and happening upon what we think is closer to best practice. I think one of the other challenges with transactions, as I mentioned, is that best practice is not altogether obvious at the moment.
Market to market, it's evolving, and there's lots of different ways of doing it, and we're seeing some work and some not. We saw Zillow in the U.S. buying people's houses and then stop. It didn't work. We've seen other people, other companies far better at, you know, increasing transaction volumes using different models. Whilst we've got a really clear view in LatAm because it's a little further down the track, the markets are really well suited to this ability to help with transactions. What we've seen through a lot of the Asian businesses is a little bit of the model to play out. Some doing it one way, some doing it another. It's quite fascinating for us. We've got a really good view of all of it.
If I think about the MENA businesses, probably a little fewer variables on what's happening in that part of the world. We've got a really clear view on how the automotive piece can work, and we're starting to do auto transactions through the general classified sites in Morocco and Tunisia, for example. The property piece is ironically a little less evolved in that part of the world, so we're learning a lot around how we do the property transactions. The exciting thing is that, you know, it's happening really quickly. I think it took quite a long time to figure out, you know, the classifieds model. Probably took 10 years. What we've seen in the space of just three or four years in transactions is gone from nothing to a whole lot really rapidly.
I think the next 12-24 months gonna be really interesting in how the model plays out and watching the economics of it grow and improve.
Thank you. The next webcast question comes from Daniel Gittus. Daniel would like to ask:
Public markets have seemed to significantly change the way they are valuing businesses that aren't yet generating cash flow or are in early development of generating cash flow. Does that change anything for your business? Does it create new opportunities for M&A? Does it reduce competition? Does it change the way you'll invest cash into existing businesses?
I think Daniel's managed to turn one question into five there, so fair effort. Look, for us, I think just from an FDV perspective, if you look at our operating cash flow on our Appendix 4C last year, you saw a lovely trend back to all but breakeven on cash. We've been really focused on that number. It's really important that people understand that cash burn in our business has gone from a lot to not much to almost breakeven. That was where we wanted to get to by about now. That puts us in a really good spot because we've restocked our balance sheet, we think pretty timely in December, given what's happened in the last couple of months. You look at the way the markets have sort of rethought their attitude toward these businesses. If
I think what happened, there was so much money floating around going towards so many speculative ideas that it was essentially free, and you could burn it, and there was always more there. Now, all of the money that was printed is still there, but it's becoming much clearer that you have to actually have more than a PowerPoint deck and a plan. You've actually got to have the ability to execute. I think when you think about this business model and the marketplace model into transactions, the transaction piece is really execution driven.
It's one thing to have a marketplace where you can sign people up, but if you wanna go down the path of transactions, you've really got to be in the market, and you've really got to have an ability to execute. I think if you look at the businesses that are doing it well, they're doing it because they've got market presence already. They're able to engage with a captive group of sellers and a loyal audience. You have this move you down the path to transactions. If you're coming at transactions cold, you're not in the market and you're doing a startup and you're purely about transactions, it's a really capital-intensive business to get going. You've got to build audience, you've got to go out and get customers, you've got to build trust.
That takes time and takes a lot of money. That's where a lot of the VC money flooded in, you know, last year and the year before. We sort of watched this going on around us while we just really focused on running good businesses that had good foundations. I think you're seeing the markets wake up to the fact that, you know, you do actually have to, you know, be cash flow breakeven to begin with and have a clear path to profitability. The extent to which that presents opportunities for us, it may well, and I think it probably will, but that remains to be seen. If it does, we've got a really strong balance sheet, and we're really well-stocked, and we're in a good position.
I think we've done everything we feel we could, you know, to a large extent to get us in the right spot now as this market's sort of whizzing around us. We've got good control of our cash flows. We've got a good balance sheet. We've got a good model. We're executing it effectively with good local teams. There's a lot of stressed businesses around us. I think that'll continue through the course of this year. Money gets a bit harder to get. Valuations drop off. If you have to raise money, it's just got a lot harder really quickly. Yeah, fast changing environment. I think you just wanna be, if I may say, in a position like ours, which is good balance sheet, good run rate, good model, good teams executing it into an opportunity that's really significant.
Yeah, it'll be really interesting over the next sort of six to eight months to see some of these stressed assets around us come to market and what they look like.
Thank you. The final question comes from Neil Sahai. Neil would like to ask:
As your businesses approach maturity, what margin levels do you think they are capable of achieving?
Yep. Great question to finish on. You know, the classifieds margins, I guess you could throw a blanket over and say anything from sort of 30%-70%, depending on where you were. The Rightmove's and REA's of the world and some of the auto guys got cracking margins in the 60s. A lot of the businesses running classifieds are probably, you know, 30%-50%. You know, 50% is a good margin. The economics of the transactions are really fascinating 'cause they're getting better over time. When you start out in transactions, as I just said, if you're starting a business doing transactions, you're gonna lose a lot of money figuring it out. We much prefer starting to learn about transactions from the perspective of a market-leading, you know, classifieds business.
The more and more we understand the economics of it, the better they look. We fully expect the margins to be as good as the classified. That's all of the evidence that we have and all of the work we're doing at the moment to understand the economics point to the fact that if you can facilitate transactions with a preexisting consumer audience that you don't have to buy every month, it's a wonderful start. If you've got a group of captive sellers that you don't have to go and chase and convince every month, even better, and you overlay the transaction opportunity into that, it just makes the economics of the event much more attractive than doing it from scratch.
You've got an existing business to build upon, and we fully expect the margins to look a lot like the classifieds margins. That's all of the evidence suggests that at the moment.
Thank you. I'll hand back to you, Shaun, for any closing remarks.
Oh, look, only to say thanks, everyone, for joining us. It was a really, I dare say, fun year for us. We had a lot on, and we did a lot, and we did it, as everyone would be aware, under unusual circumstances, not being able to move around. I think one thing it helped us do was figure out how to run these businesses perhaps more efficiently than what might have otherwise been the case. We saw it as a plus. As we head into this year, as I said, some of the key milestones we wanted to achieve, getting to that AUD 60 million revenue on an economic share basis was our goal. Just got over the line, which was fantastic.
We did it with a really healthy balance sheet, with great support from investors. We've got our portfolio and some of the parts paying for itself. Lots of opportunity in our mind. We think we've built a great foundation, and you know, we really look forward to this year and starting to see these businesses flourish with their ability to facilitate more transactions and understanding the economics of that opportunity and what it can bring. Yeah, we're quite excited and look forward to joining you again on these calls over the course of the year.