Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Frontier Digital Ventures FY 2019 Results Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Shaun Di Gregorio, CEO and Founder. Please go ahead.
Thank you for that. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our 2019 full year results presentation. You all will have access to our investor presentation, which was lodged with the ASX this morning. I'm going to reference that presentation as we go through it this morning. You'll see on page two that it's in three sections. First section, we'll talk to the results themselves. We'll go into a bit of detail on the headline numbers and some of the individual companies. The second section does give a strategy update. You will note in the second section, if you've been following us for some time, that there is what might seem like some early information, i.e., information that was in our decks maybe from a year or two ago. That was delivered.
What we have been receiving in recent times is an increased volume of interest from new investors from outside of Australia, particularly North America. We've, I guess, accommodated some of those new investors in this deck to give them a bit of background on the business that might seem repetitive to some, but certainly for our new investors, we want to make sure they see all that. In section three, there is a fairly expansive appendix. It's also just reminds people of our accounting treatment of the various entities into which we've invested. I've got maybe the one-pager there on most of the businesses as well. We'll go into the first section one, which is our 2019 results. If you flip through to slide four, you'll see a slide titled Rapid Revenue Growth.
That, again, just demonstrates the half-on-half growth, since we listed in the third half of 2016. Two ways in which we report our results to the market. One is at 100% portfolio level, which is 100% of everything. Then beside that, you'll see the portfolio share. This is the percentage of the portfolio that we own. We carve that out so investors can get a clear understanding of the percentage of that revenue that can be attributed to FDV. Both charts, we're really happy with the performance of 2019. I think it's been the best year in FDV's short life, where our revenue actually accelerated, our revenue growth accelerated versus 2018. Not many companies can lay claim to that. What we've continued to deliver is really solid results, half on half.
Underneath that has been the structure of our business, which is, as you know, to invest in local entrepreneurs running marketplace businesses in emerging markets. We've got a portfolio that has really increased in quality now. As a result, we're able to come back to market and consistently deliver on our results. More importantly, I think, continue to deliver on what we said we were going to do right back to 2016 when we listed. Our full-year revenues are there. Everyone can see, as I said, our growth did actually accelerate year-on-year, which was a pretty impressive result. You'll see the continued rapid growth on our percentage of that. If you flip over, next slide, you'll see that a feature of our portfolio is that all of the individual businesses are now starting to perform better and better.
That means more of them are getting closer to profitability. We always talk about our business in a portfolio sense. We will increasingly being talked to investors about our portfolio in an individual business sense. Each of the businesses are starting to get larger and larger and become more material. While we will always come back to that portfolio view, what drives that is obviously the performance of the underlying businesses. It's very pleasing to see that they've all had really solid years, and all have improved, for the most part, the EBITDA position. It means that at a portfolio level, FDV continues to deliver on what it said it would do. You can see that the EBITDA performance, again, has significantly improved over each year. We're really pleased with where that's got us to in 2019.
Some of the operating metrics you can see on slide number six. These are obviously a lot of lead indicators for us, what drive the businesses, and just really consistent growth over many halves now. Again, I guess that comes back to the nature of our portfolio, where we're across a number of markets, we're across a couple of verticals, and it really does ensure that the indicators, the metrics across our portfolio have continued to grow really strongly in 2019 as well. If I move on to slide seven. It's a really important slide for people to understand. Includes, on the left side, obviously, the operating companies, but it also includes the percentage of those companies that we own, the vertical that they exist in, and their 2018 on 2019 revenue and their relative growth. Beside that, we break out for you the FDV share of that.
You can see that some of the parts did grow faster in 2019 than we did in 2018. I think part of that was we had a couple of businesses really had breakout years, performed really well. A feature of the markets we invest in is that they're not always smooth. What we do focus on, though, is the trajectory. From quarter to quarter, half to half, different things happen in different markets, but our portfolio is structured in such a way that it all evens out, and we've been able to deliver a really strong result as well. I won't go into the individual businesses there, but I'm sure anyone on the call who's viewing the deck can look through that list and see that there's been pretty solid contributions across the board.
Now getting more and more of our businesses, and we would reference this in previous investor presentations, up over that MYR 1 million revenue mark. I think we've got a couple there that are in the MYR 900s in FY 2019, with only a couple that were really still around that MYR 0.5 million mark in total revenue. Important to remember that when we listed in 2016, I think half of our portfolio probably had only a couple of hundred thousand in revenue in total. It's been really pleasing to watch even the smaller businesses in our portfolio start to get some size and scale and get some growth over the course of the calendar year. That's really the financials, and we will go to questions at the conclusion of the presentation, so we can come back to some financials based on the Q&A.
We have updated our strategy section. As I said, continue to communicate a really consistent strategy, and I think if you go back through our previous investor decks, you'll see that much of this narrative remains really consistent. We have included some strategy slides just to give the new investors and those that are interested in our business, which I said earlier has become a longer list, a bit more background. Essentially, our footprint on slide 10 is now very much focused around Asia and LatAm markets. We've done less and less in Africa. We've exited a couple of businesses during the course of 2019 that were in our portfolio that were in Africa. Our focus is very much around two geographies, developing Asia. That's Asia, mainly Southeast Asia and South Asia, and of course, some of those LatAm markets.
The LatAm businesses did really well in 2019. As you know, whilst we continue to invest in automotive, we are very focused around the property vertical. Our business over recent years has matured a bit in that really focused on a couple of regions and really focused on a couple of verticals. You can see that reflected in the slide titled Geographical Breakdown on number 10. We break that out a bit more just to help people understand the emphasis on property. You'll see that seven, our portfolio is property, four automotive, and even one general classified business. Again, in focus for us, whether it's property, automotive or other, is market leadership.
We continue to really drive our investment to focus on new market leadership and what they can leverage with that market leadership once they become a trusted brand in their individual market. Further to that on slide 12, again, is an extrapolation and an update on the model. When we started investing in online classified businesses, it was very much the traditional model that everyone understood, which is consumers coming to a website, finding a house, finding a car, clicking on an ad, and then really disappearing into the ether. What is happening now in all of our markets, and we're really excited about it, is that as these classified businesses become market leaders, they increasingly extend their leadership in a given market and really start to become trusted intermediaries. They really start to become marketplaces. This is a really interesting dynamic we're seeing.
The online classified model evolved rapidly around the world in developed markets. It's interesting that the online classified model has developed and evolved really perhaps even more rapidly in emerging markets. Many of our brands, obviously market leaders, are now starting to leverage that leadership, not just to sell ads to property agents or property developers or car dealers or car manufacturers. They're really leveraging that position to play a much more active role in the transaction. We talk about this in the context of it being a 2.0 world. It's a very well-used label, but it is very much a rapid evolution of what's happening in classifieds. One could argue that what's happening now or starting to happen is a genuine disruption of the model.
I think historically, the evolution of online classifieds was improving on a process that was otherwise a bit clunky, helping property agents sell more properties at a better price. It's helping consumers find properties. This has now evolved to the point where the portals are starting to become marketplaces where people go not just to click and then leave, but actually remain within that ecosystem, within that marketplace that's been created and go much closer to the transaction, and in many cases now starting to complete the transaction with the portal being up close to that process. In many occasions now, portals starting to take some of the commission that's generated at the point of transaction. What that's done, I guess, is opened up markets. When we look at markets, we're not just thinking about advertising revenues that are possibilities.
We're now thinking about advertising revenues, but on top of that, we're thinking about transaction-based revenues and many other revenue streams that come out of a process such as buying a property. It's a really exciting part of our business and one that we're very focused on and very interested in to see how these businesses are leveraging their position into transactions. If you go over to slide 13, just Zameen as markets open up more opportunities for our classified businesses, and many of our businesses are really starting to improve their trading position. Obviously, growing revenue is very important. You can see from the data that we're seeing a general improvement on profitability, which means less cash burn, which means that we're getting more and more, and the business is becoming self-sustaining, which is really important, both from a financial perspective and from a management perspective as well.
Where that does leave FDV is with a really strong balance sheet and really well-positioned as we head into 2020. We've been pretty busy over the last six months or so. If I think back to earlier in 2019, we were very focused on just consolidating the operational capabilities of our investment companies. That was really a big focus for us. Over the last number of months, part of our strategy, again, is to start to acquire larger stakes in the businesses in our portfolio. We know the entrepreneurs very well now. We know the businesses really well. If I go back to December, we increased our position in InfoCasas, which is a great business in some of the Latin markets. We increased our stake in AutoDeal in the Philippines.
It's the leading auto site there in the Philippines, exceeded three million visits for the first time in January. No other auto site has done that. We're really impressed with how they're tracking. At the beginning of this year, obviously, we came off a really positive 2019 where we saw a number of our partners trade profitably for the full year. We saw another couple of our partner companies trade profitably in Q4. The underlying performance of a lot of the businesses has really started to improve. As we rolled into the start of 2020, we also have increased our stake in iMyanmarHouse, a property portal in Myanmar. This is a market we really like. We've increased our stake in Sri Lanka as well.
At the same time, we managed, for the first time, to make an exit of one of our investments, which was Propzy portal in Vietnam. That was done for a number of reasons. We were very, very pleased with that outcome and delivered a substantial return to shareholders. I guess in some respects, the proof of concept of our model where we were able to achieve an exit, but at the same time, we continue to invest in businesses that we can see scalable, growing, and ultimately are profitable businesses. Just on slide 15, again, this is addressing a wider and wider investor audience. We talk to our potential investors about potential for return to shareholders. We are very focused on the fact that we will deliver return to shareholders, and there are many opportunities for us to do that.
One of which is obviously monetization opportunities, which is documented on 15. I'm conscious of time. There are a couple more slides there, which go back to the history of FDV and a bit of information about the register. If you look in the back of the appendix there in section C or the third section, as I said earlier on the call, there's a bit of more information on the accounting treatment of our portfolio, because it's not clear when you look at our statutory reports how it relates to the performance of our portfolio. There's a slide which helps people understand the accounting treatment of the various investments we've made. Further into the deck, you'll see a one-page update on most of the businesses there just to demonstrate their track record and with some highlights of 2019 and how they've progressed.
On that note, shortly, I'll pass back to the moderator who is going to facilitate some Q&A. I think it's been the best year in FDV's short history. We're really, really pleased with how it finished and really, really pleased with the progress of our portfolio. As I said, I think it maps very, very consistently to the strategy that we laid out. We're very excited about what 2020 holds and beyond as we continue to grow this business. On that note, I'm going to hand over to the moderator who's going to facilitate any questions that might be there for people who have dialed into the call.
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 are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Ivor Ries from Morgans Financial. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Shaun. If I might just kick off with a question on Zameen.com. Obviously, last year was a great year. You had quite sensational growth in the Zameen.com Business. I just wondered what the potential is this year to grow. Obviously, the main driver of growth is the number of projects which are participating. I just wondered what this year looks like in terms of the growth rate you can achieve.
Thanks, Ivor. You're right. Zameen.com, once again, the team there did a great job. They exceeded their budget expectations. They exceeded our expectations, which was tremendous. Keeping in mind that the market in Pakistan last year was pretty tough. Had significant exchange or currency depreciation. Even in the face of that, the management team there delivered an outstanding result. Again, looking forward into 2020, things in Pakistan, there's probably some green shoots in terms of things getting a bit better as the year goes out. We think the business will have another really strong year. Difficult for us to say how much it's going to grow by, but the guys have always over-delivered. We always go in with fairly conservative expectations. The management team there have done a great job and have over-delivered in every single year we've invested.
I think if they can get anything like they did this year, we'll be very happy. A big factor is the volume of transactions that they can facilitate. They're only still at a relatively small part of that market. Agency market in Pakistan is probably starting to flatten off for them a bit. They've got most agents getting more spend out of them, like a lot of the more mature portals. Becomes a bit more of a challenge, but the volume of new transactions is still pretty good. That's a part of their model that they're really focused on. Yeah, we remain pretty optimistic about the year ahead, and we've got a great team running that business.
In terms of the-, it is obviously they made a small EBITDA profit. Would you expect them to be running better than breakeven in 2020?
They were ahead of the curve this year. We didn't think that they would get there on a full year basis, but they did. Again, it was above our expectations. I think our message to the management team is just keep growing as fast as you can. Where that leaves EBITDA, we'll probably know about halfway through the year. It's a pretty mature management team, and they know what they're doing, but we still think there's a lot of top-line growth and we would never strangle the business for it to deliver a big margin, just because there is still a lot of top-line growth to be had. I guess it's finding that balance.
If it's okay with you, I'll ask a supplementary on InfoCasas. Obviously, they had an absolutely tremendous H2. I'm just wondering whether there's an element of seasonality in their business now. What I'm trying to work out is whether the H2, which was just an absolute blinder in terms of revenue, whether that's the new base or whether it's going to be like a seasonal growth we should anticipate.
If you look historically back, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I can anecdotally tell you that their H2 s are generally better than their first, from memory. Again, I've not got all of that data in front of me. What they've got really good at, there's probably three things driving that business, and it all started to come together in the H2. they've got a really strong management team. Ricardo and his team have been at it now for a few years. They know their markets really well, and they actually execute really well. As you appreciate, Oliver, in emerging markets, strategy is one thing, but execution is almost everything else. They've done a really good job of it. Number two is they've increasingly got better at leveraging their classified base. They've got really strong classified businesses.
Now leveraging those as the playbook suggests into facilitating transactions. They're actually getting much better at that. The way in which they go about it is quite efficient. It's a very tech-driven way in which they help consumers connect with property developers and sellers. It's a low-cost way of doing it as well. It's very efficient. Number three, they've sort of put their toe into the market in Peru, which we're pretty excited about. Peru is the size of their other three markets combined from a GDP perspective. It's a really big opportunity for them, but they've done it in a really thoughtful way. They haven't gone in all guns blazing. They haven't gone in and bet the farm on the market. They're doing it smart, they're doing it low cost, and they're doing it very segment specific around urban areas.
Those are the sorts of things that started to drive the business in the H2. All of those remain in place, but the H1 seasonality does come into it, and there are a few local factors which will probably make their H2 stronger than their first, which won't be dissimilar to last year in that dynamic.
Thanks, Shaun.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. We will pause momentarily for questions to enter the queue. Your next question comes from Ryan Evans, a private investor. Please go ahead.
Hi, Shaun. Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. Just wondering what you've seen so far and what you anticipate you might see in terms of coronavirus impact, particularly in some of the emerging markets that may not have as good infrastructure to deal with an outbreak. Thanks.
It's very topical. I think the interesting thing is that all of our businesses are very domestic. They're not transporter businesses. They don't rely on trade, per se. They don't rely on movement of people or goods. They are very local businesses, which to some extent insulates them from international dynamics such as coronavirus. Not to say that they are immune from it, of course they're not. We haven't seen a tangible or any evidence of that impacting the businesses so far. I think it remains one of those things that no one is quite sure where it's going to finish. When one gets different information every day about how it's being managed, it's a bit difficult to put a finger on how it's going to affect our businesses.
I think if I were to look at a lot of the mitigating factors, each business is very domestic and it's very local. It doesn't rely on anything that is transporter. To that extent, it's probably on the right side of the ledger for the type of business unit that might not be affected. On the other hand, you're dead right on emerging markets. coronavirus does seem to be around Asia a lot. We just haven't seen it impact the businesses in a tangible manner. It's latency I guess. So far, no material impact. Be interesting in three to six months to see what moves.
Yeah. Agree. Thanks.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question is a follow-up from Ivor Ries from Morgans Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, Shaun. Everyone else seems to be shy here, I'll just barge in. With AutoDeal, obviously, they had a strong H2, I was a little bit surprised at how good the revenue growth translated through to the EBITDA margin. Can you give us a flavor of how far penetrated you think they are at the moment of the revenue potential for what they're doing? Also, if you can give us a flavor on whether you think the kind of EBITDA margin they were generating in the H2 is now the new normal for them.
Yeah. It's a business that has got better with time, as obvious as that might sound, but it's been a momentum business. They started, they were an auto portal. They're number one in Philippines, but those of you who know their history will know that they started with a big emphasis on new cars. New cars are a far more lucrative part of the auto market in emerging markets than secondhand cars. Their legacy is slightly interesting or slightly unusual to be where they are now, which is a market leader. A big part of that momentum has been their product. They're very product-focused. It really is an excellent product. If you're a car dealer in the Philippines, you use their product. The back end is very strong, and it's given them a sense of momentum.
We started to see that momentum gather pace in the H2. I think they had a pretty good result from an EBITDA perspective. Again, it's not a business that we're likely to strangle to get big margins out of because if you look at the market there, they are still relatively small vis-à-vis the auto market. While they are very large in the online market, in the online auto space, clearly number one, good penetration with dealers. It's probably only in the H2 of the year where the market started to appreciate the fact that what AutoDeal generated was a ton of car transactions. They've been measured, perhaps before that, as a business that was a leads business that generated visits to a website and made inquiries to dealers.
Where it started to come together was when they marketed themselves far more strongly to their customer base, to dealers, and correlated the fact that what they were generating for dealers was transactions of cars, not just leads, not just people coming in and inquiring, but they were responsible for most of the transactions. We started to see that come through on the revenue number, which certainly helped the EBITDA number. I'm excited about what they can do in 2020. Not a business that we're going to strangle for big margins. We really think that they're in a great position. It's taken them a long time to get there, and we're quite excited about what lies ahead.
Again, similar with Zameen.com, we are not going to strangle them on margin while we think that there is still a heck of a lot of opportunity in what is a pretty big market in Philippines, of which they have penetrated a relatively small part of.
In terms of the way they're growing, are they wiping out a competitor in that market?
Are they wiping out a competitor? I wouldn't say that. Well, there's no one competitor that doing what they're doing. They're number one. It has become a hell of a lot harder if you're behind them. Carmudi really struggled, which is one of their competitors. There's a few people popping up trying to do transactions, the faster coming the glare and room when it comes to people using the internet to find cars. The market is still relatively in its infancy, though, we think that there's a long way to go. I wouldn't want to be anyone else but AutoDeal if I were in Philippines.
If there's no one else in the queue, I'll ask another one. Obviously, Hoppler had some issues last year, and some problems emerged with the business model, and it's transitioning over to a different kind of business model. How long do you think it's going to be before we see whether that new business model is working or not?
Yeah, it's a good question because it goes to the challenge that is out there for the idea of portals moving into transactions. There's one thing we do know about portals moving into transactions is that as predictable as the classifieds business model was, the transactions model is less clear. We're seeing a lot of variations on how portals are facilitating transactions from high touch versions, where there's a lot of involvement in helping people buy a house or a car to a more technical or tech-based solution to helping people buy a house or a car. Hoppler had a model where they were very engaged with the broker networks around Manila. That was proving difficult to scale. They've pivoted. They're now engaging more directly with brokers. More brokers are starting to come under the Hoppler brand.
If you would imagine real estate agents in Australia starting to operate under the REA brand, for example. They're now getting more brokers come underneath their own brand, which gives them a couple of advantages. It gives them a bit more control over what's happening. It enables them to pay commissions slightly different. There is a kink between pivoting from what they were doing to what they are doing. They're now getting some momentum back, and I think the early signs this year are good, but it's going to take probably the better part of this year, maybe three quarters of this year, to really see that new model start to work in a way that we think is right, and we can see a scalable, profitable business at the end of it.
Early signs are good, but it has taken a fair bit of work, just a pivotal slot version of what they were doing. As I said, it does go to the fact that when portals got involved in transactions, it is less clear as to what the answer is. You've got to be really good at it, and we instill this in all of our partners. The Hoppler pivot is one, and they've had a much better start to the year than they had a finish to last year, put it that way.
Thanks, Shaun, and well done to everyone this year. Yeah, you really shut the lights out.
Thanks, Ivor.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Kevin Bertoli from PM Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, Shaun. Just a couple of questions from me. Firstly, on PakWheels, that's obviously one you've had in the portfolio for a long time. You've often said that the underlying dynamic for that business in terms of the share of eyeballs that it has, is always a great starting point and probably one of the more dominant classified businesses that you see in that regard. It's been probably disappointing for a few years now given what's happening within the auto space in Pakistan. With the green shoots that you see when you talk about Zameen.com, do you see similar things like that impacting the auto space in Pakistan? Is that really more property related?
I would say that there were some regulatory changes made in Pakistan that affected consumers' ability to buy big-ticket items. We know that there was a change in government midway through 2018. The mandate for the government was to increase the tax base. Not many people pay tax, not many people lodge tax returns. Just to give anyone who's on the call a flavor of that, I think 2% of the population lodge a tax return. The government introduced a regulation that said if you're going to buy a new car, you've got to have lodged a tax return, and you've got to demonstrate it when you buy that car. There were regulatory changes that gave that business a real whack. It also suffered from the fact that the currency depreciated significantly.
Again, Zameen.com was somewhat insulated because property is traded in local currency, cars being imported to Pakistan are imported in U.S. dollars. So the Camry went from $40,000 to $55,000 in the matter of a month. They had the perfect storm. They weathered that through last year. What we saw at the tail end of last year was some improvement from the operating metrics, which are normally a predictor of an improvement in the financial performance of a business. We saw some improvement in the latter half of last year, more toward the end of last year, to be fair. We're starting to see those continue into this year. The signs are, I guess, we're cautiously optimistic about PakWheels. The interesting thing about that business, as you pointed out, Kevin, is that based on its metrics, based on its brand, it's extremely dominant.
They only have one competitor, which is a horizontal. Horizontals always tend to get the low end of the market. PakWheels continues to be that brand. Interestingly, its consumer traffic has continued to grow. It's probably grown in popularity over the last 12 months to be even more dominant. It's taken some time for those regulatory changes to wash through. It's starting to normalize. We're starting to see some positive signs, and we're cautiously optimistic. We like the business, we've been in business for a long time. It does demonstrate also that secondhand cars in emerging markets is not always easy. There's a big emphasis on that new car market.
We're encouraged, and we continue to work culturally with the operators on getting that business back to where we think it should be, save for the fact that it got whacked around a lot by unforeseen changes and probably things that were out of their control, to be fair. The core business itself still looks really good. We'll just hope that the macro picture improves so that the business can improve as well.
Yeah. Thanks for that. Just secondly, on a couple of the transactions that occurred this year and how you compare the opportunity set that you can look at. Propzy, obviously the fastest growing business from a revenue perspective last year, but a lot of investment back into the business. You mentioned in a couple of your comments earlier on that you do not want to hamper a business by not allowing it to invest. I wa s just curious, when we look at that Propzy example and the revenue growth we saw last year, was there anything in there that was non-recurring? Because it looks like it was a pretty solid opportunity, even though it was requiring further investment.
How do you compare that to, say, something like iMyanmarHouse where, obviously there's that profitability, but you're willing to increase the investment into that business where it's growing a bit slower, and increasing the stake at what looks like a higher multiple?
Yeah. It's interesting. The Propzy business, when we invested, we liked it, we liked the model, we liked the direction it was going in, and we thought that it was building a sustainable, scalable business. It is heavily focused around transactions. It was the business in our portfolio that was most focused on pure transactions. We certainly liked its trajectory. It'd be fair to say that that trajectory started to shift, and we saw the ability to generate results, to generate revenue become more expensive to the point where spending a dollar on marketing to get a dollar in revenue, we thought was problematic.
Some of the direction that the entrepreneur wanted to take that business in, we didn't think was a sustainable, scalable direction. Became evident to us that to pursue that path was going to be extremely expensive and require a heck of a lot of capital, which our view on that was that it was not necessarily the right way to go. That was probably when we started to reassess the investment. The other part for us, Kevin, is that our model is premised around owning more of businesses, not less of them. We're an operator. We are buying more of our better businesses. With that we like to have strategic oversight. We like to have operational input, and we like to be partners with the entrepreneur.
In the case of Propzy, it was heading in exactly the opposite direction, where we were going to be diluted significantly, and we weren't going to have that level of influence and control. It didn't fit in our portfolio from a strategic perspective. When we put those two factors together, we looked at the model, we looked at where it was going, we looked at what it was going to cost. Much as we liked it earlier, we probably fell out of love with it. When we looked at the ability of how we view our investments and how we want to operate, it didn't fit that either. We took the opportunity to exit, and we were very pleased with that outcome. When you want to compare it to something like iMyanmarHouse, quite a different business.
It's a business that we think has a really solid growth platform. It's the leader in its market on a classified basis or has leadership in that classified category, which we think is really important for scale and sustainability if you want to then augment that with transactions. It's got a model that is one that doesn't burn a ton of cash, which we quite like as well. We're able to work with that entrepreneur in a really productive way, and we think that that's a really good recipe for us that satisfies our belief that we want to be strategically and operationally involved. We're very happy with the progress of that business because we think it's built on a really solid base, and we think it is scalable, and we think it is sustainable.
I guess we didn't feel the same way about Propzy necessarily over time. We liked Propzy earlier a lot, but it just wasn't going in a direction that we thought was scalable and sustainable. We took the opportunity directly.
Okay. Thanks, Shaun.
Thank you. Your next question is from James Silius from Bell Potter Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Shaun. Well done on the results. I just had a quick question on the West African part of the portfolio. It's tended to lag the rest of the investments. I just wanted to know what are the dynamics that you like about the region, and what strategy do you have or do the companies have in that area to drive the growth and penetration in the market?
Look, James, I think if you look at our deck, you'll see that our priority is Asia and LatAm, and the Africa markets are less of a priority. We have optimized our portfolio to the point where we're in the two largest speaking English markets, which is Nigeria and Ghana, and they make up that West Africa entity. We're in Morocco, which is probably the most developed market in Africa, ex-South Africa. We quite like that market. In terms of those West Africa markets, Ghana and Nigeria, they're slow blooms. We've got what we think are really solid businesses there. They're market leaders. They're growing a bit. It is operationally tricky markets to get right. We're kind of satisfied with where they're at.
We know, and it's true of the markets in that part of the world, that they are going to take a bit longer. We have to be a bit more patient. We think the outcome, the long-term prize, and we do take pride in the fact that we make long-term decisions. We do think the long-term outcome in those markets is still pretty positive. We know that they're going to take a bit longer than Asia. We know they're probably going to take a bit longer than LatAm, but we do fundamentally like the two businesses. They get a tick. We remain committed to those two markets.
All right, great. Thanks for that.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to Mr. Di Gregorio for closing remarks.
Thanks, everyone. Thanks for the questions. Much appreciated that there's a level of interest in what we're doing. I think 2019 from our perspective was our best year yet in our short history. Fantastic. I think we're getting better at this and our proof of concept is coming through. We're seeing that in the level of interest in our business. We're seeing that in the size of the register now, which is significantly bigger than it was when we listed. I guess we look forward to 2020. Pretty excited about what's happening across our group of companies. Again, I'd like to thank everyone for dialing in and their continued support. As I said, we're excited about 2020.