Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us for Aramis Group full year 2022 results presentation. I'm Alexandre Leroy, the DFIR of the company. Today with me, Guillaume Paoli, Nicolas Chartier, Co-founders and CEO of the company, as well as Valérie Laborde, our newly appointed Group CFO. Before I hand over to the top management, just a few reminders. One, this conference is recorded, accessible both over the phone and the internet. Two, a replay will be made available on the company's website at www.aramis.group. By the way, the slideshow is available already there. Three, today's presentation contains forward-looking statements, I remind you that the future results may differ materially from the statements on all projections made today. Four, this presentation will be followed by the usual Q&A session. Five, last but not least, I recall.
I remind you, sorry, that Aramis Group has a non-calendar fiscal year, meaning that the full year 2022 results we are going through today refer to the period ranging from October 1st, 2021 to September 30, 2022. I now leave the floor to Guillaume. Guillaume, please go ahead.
Thank you, Alexandre. Good morning, everyone. In 2022, Aramis Group has strongly outperformed the market in an environment that we have never seen before in the over 20 years that Nicolas and I have been in the business. Very specific year, but we have delivered on the strategy, our strategy to achieve our ambition, which is to become the preferred platform for Europeans to buy a used car online. First, with organic growth, we grew over 38% on our strategic segment of the refurbished used cars. Also with external growth, we have increased the number of countries where we operate by 50%. We now operate in 6 countries with the recent acquisition of companies in Austria and in Italy.
We have also laid the foundations for future profitable growth with major achievements in terms of strategic achievements and operative achievements, as Nicolas will detail later on. This, whilst continuing to satisfy our customers, which is absolutely key in our model, and that is thanks to the great commitment and work of our teams, we thank them teams for that, in a quite adverse environment. We'll come back more in detail on the market context, which is truly unprecedented. First, we have the aftermath of the COVID crisis with the shortage in chips, which has impacted the new car production. There was the geopolitical and logistical turmoil. Finally, there has been a slowdown in the high demand of customers due to the high inflation rates, in particular in the automotive field.
At the moment, the visibility for the coming quarters is limited. A number of uncertainties around the new car production, around the car prices evolution. Finally, customer demand is weakening, and it's not clear way, which way it will be oriented. We have a lot of moving parts internally with two new acquisitions this year. We have a limited visibility. Longer term, our market potential is absolutely unchanged. We have a huge market opportunity. We have the assets to address it. We know that mobility is not an option for Europeans, and the products we propose, a refurbished used car, enable to combine both affordable mobility and a limited impact on the environment. If we go very quickly, No, it's not the right slide. Thank you.
Very quickly on a few key topics at the heart of the model. We have a unique, vertically integrated, digitally native business model with three principles. One, the customer is at the center of what we do. Whenever we work in the interest of the customer, it means we are on the right path. It's more value for the customers and more sales and market shares for the group. Two, it's about engaging our teams. We have a specific culture which is lean-inspired with some very strong guidelines and management principles. We are working every day to improve our offer and making sure our teams have the ability to learn, to manage their problems, and to continuously improve our operations.
Finally, I stated at the beginning, controlling the value end to end, we do everything from sources, sourcing the car, the logistics, the refurbishing, of course, the sales and the delivery to the final customer at his doorstep or at a customer center. Now, if we move on to our strategy, Aramis is a growth company, sorry, with three pillars. One, about organic growth, more sales, more marketing, more refurbishment centers to provide for organic growth. Two, it's about expanding in Europe. We are very selective, but we have a European ambition. Finally, creating value with innovative offering and services. We performed in 2022 on each of these dimensions, as we'll see later on.
Now if we move on to the market environment, which is very specific, I'll give you a quick update on. This is the picture for the new car market. As you see, the new car production was once again strongly impacted in 2022. Over the last three years, we lost in Europe the equivalent of 1 year of production, which has a massive impact on the market, both the new car market and the used car market. The direct consequence for us is a very limited number of pre-registered cars available. The sourcing of this category of cars has almost dried up. You know that, up to last year, it was almost 50% of our business.
Now if we move on to the used car market, which is much more resilient, much less cyclical, it has held much better this year throughout the year, but you can see that at the end of the fiscal year, Q3, Q4 of our fiscal year, the demand has been slowing down due to, in particular, due to the inflation on the used cars. You can see on the left-hand side that the prices have been keeping to go up, have started to go down in the UK, which is probably in advance versus the continental markets. The prices remain very high with a maximum in Spain at over 120% of the prices that they used to be last year.
Despite these adverse conditions, Aramis Group has continued to grow and to outperform the market, thanks to its high value-added proposition for our customers. As you can see on this slide, we have strongly outperformed the market with a 47% spread between the market and our refurbished used car sales, which grew by 38% in a market that decreased by 10%. As a result, if we move on to the next slide, we have continuously gained market share, as you can see on the left-hand side. In gold, you have the total B2C sales of Aramis Group, refurbished car plus pre-registered cars on the total market in the geographies where we operate for the cars below eight years.
As you can see, they have grown, particularly on the refurbished one, which is a dark blue line, which has increased dramatically. We have been progressing in terms of market share, but we still have a lot of potential going forward. If you look on the right-hand side, you can see the market share that we represent in Europe, again, on the cars below eight years, and this time on the whole European Union plus the UK. We don't even represent 1% of the market. We have a lot of potential going forward. I now will hand it over to Nicolas, who will drive you through our operating performance in more details now.
Thank you, Guillaume. Good morning, everyone. 2022 has been a strong year of achievement, both from an operating and a strategic point of views. Our unique vertically integrated digital business model delivered once again a strong performance in terms of top-line growth, with revenue reaching almost EUR 1.8 billion, up 29% year-over-year on a pro forma basis and up 40% on a reported basis. In spite of this very challenging market environment, we continue to build and consolidate each of the three dimension of our model, strengthening our competitive advantages. A few examples among many others of our achievement and work over the period.
First, in terms of our vertical integration in the value chain, the most emblematic and visible is certainly the opening and ramping up of two new refurbishing centers, one in Antwerp in Belgium, and the other one in Nemours, in south of Paris. Another one is about to become operational in the United Kingdom in the coming weeks. Let me give you some example of what we brought to customer, as the year was rich in innovations. One of the biggest challenges this year was to find solution for our customers to fight against the rise of prices.
In this regard, as an example, we have worked with our financial partners to improve the terms of leasing contracts, and in particular to extend their duration in order to make monthly rates more affordable. As you know, we want to make car easy to make car buying easier. We want to offer a very easy process to buy and deliver quickly a car. This year we have dramatically improved our customer experience and our digitalized journey, especially on financing application, making it far easier for the customer. This has led to accelerate lead time for car delivery. Finally, we have improved the quality of our service in many areas.
For example, we have made easier and faster all the selling process for private customers, offering solutions to buy their car even faster than before. As you can see, our NPS remain once again very high at 71, as you can see here. As regard to sourcing, one of the major event of the year was the change we made in sourcing channels, and the acceleration on the C2B sourcing. We have a long-lasting experience in C2B sourcing, as we were the first to launch the service in to private customer in continental Europe years ago. In the UK as well, CarSupermarket has been operating this service for years.
For us, the challenge was first to spread this knowledge to Belgium and Spain, where the share of C2B was very low, and to increase the share in the UK and in France. As a result, as you can see on the left of the slide, C2B sourcing accounted for 57% of total used cars sold B2C in 2022, which is an versus 35%. 57% versus 35% in 2021. This is a very good example on how the team are agile and also how the group can easily and quickly share know-how and deploy new services in countries when needed. One other interesting insight on this slide are the volumes from Stellantis.
As you can see, they have almost disappeared, given the dramatic lack of car they have. This is temporary, of course, as you can imagine, it has affected us this year. On the right of the slide, you have an example of tools that our data team has developed to gain productivity in car sourcing. This is a good example of what we can do with artificial intelligence to increase the efficiency of our teams while better serving our customers. A few words on brands and marketing. As you see on the right of the slide, the awareness of our brands remains high. Overall, customers know and love our brands.
You know how disciplined we are in our marketing spend, given the changing market environment, we have adjusted them in H2 2022. In particular, we have optimized our air time on TV as well as our traffic acquisition expenses. This has contributed to our objective of keeping our SG&A stable in H2 2022 compared to H1 2022, as we committed to do. Finally, in spite of this negative environment, we were able to nearly maintain our average monthly visit to our website compared to 2021. As regard to the industrial side, we have opened and ramped up two new refurbishing center. So I was saying in one in the Donzère, one in Antwerp.
Building on this area and the expertise that we have developed since 2014. This is another example on how we spread Aramis Group business logic among the countries. Here again, teams have done a lot of work to share know-how, our methods to build synergies and to converge. As we speak, given that we have acquired two new companies, Austria and Italy, we have eight centers well-distributed in Europe. You know that our business development in countries is mainly through merger and acquisition, and we made two operation in 2022. We have finalized the acquisition of Onlinecars , and Brumbrum in Italy. Onlinecars is a market leader in the sale of refurbished cars in Austria.
In fiscal year 2022, the company generated EUR 168 million in revenue and sold more than 8,000 B2C cars. It has three customer centers and one refurbishing center, as shown on the map. We believe Austria is a very interesting market as it is located in center of Europe and close to Germany. One of the other reasons for the move is that it offers very good synergies, especially because Onlinecars has a leading position in its market and has a great expertise in sourcing German branded cars. We also have a local experienced team eager to learn and from which we can also learn a lot.
Priority for the next quarter includes reducing inventory, decrease the operational debt, and improving certain aspect of the customer journey, on the online customer journey. The last geography is Italy, with a very exciting project. We've been knowing the team of Brumbrum for years, and we're very happy when the opportunity to work with this team came in the middle of 2022. We bought the company from our British peer, Cazoo, who decided to close its mainland European operation. Brumbrum is the only fully digital player in the sale of refurbished vehicles in Italy. The company generated a fiscal EUR 19 million of turnover in 2022, and sold about 900 B2C cars. It has one refurbishing center.
It's small volumes for now, for us, Italy is a very strategic market because it is the fourth largest market in Europe and our main shareholder, Stellantis, has a massive market share there. Top priority for us is to turn around the company. The activity has been stopped for a few months, we have to relaunch the Brumbrum brand because it was operated under the Cazoo brand. We are going to deploy our business logic, our expertise in buying the right cars and manage inventory, the expertise in logistic, in refurbishing, or in digital sales, and all the things that we have proven very effective in our other geographies.
With that, we are very confident that with the help of Aramis Group, Brumbrum will converge to profitability in the future. I will now turn the floor to Valérie, who will go through our financial performance.
Yes. Thank you, Nicolas. Good morning, everyone. Very happy to be with you this morning. Let's start with the financial highlights for the year on the slide 18. Once again, the company posted sustained revenue growth with the revenues up 29% year-on-year on a pro forma basis, reaching EUR 1,769 million. It was in line with our guidance 2022 of above EUR 1,700 million. In term of volumes, we delivered a very strong performance in B2C refurbished cars, which grew +38% year-on-year, also in line with our revised guidance. Our GPU remains strong at EUR 2,142 per car and above our European peers.
Our adjusted EBITDA landed at -EUR 10.7 million, right in the middle of the range, between EUR 10 million-EUR 12 million that we had guided for in July. Aramis Group model is low CapEx intensive, as you know, our expense for the year were 1% in line with previous years. Finally, operational working capital landed at 31 days of revenues versus 48 days 6 months ago. Let's have a look now on the details of revenues by segment on slide 19. All our segments are growing except for the B2C pre-registered one, decreasing by half, starting with the B2C refurbished revenues increasing by 71% to EUR 1,215 million. Volumes are up 38%.
This performance was made possible by the depth of our offer, the ramp-up of our refurbishment centers, and of course, the expertise and the engagement of our teams. The average selling price was +23%, in line with the general car price increase in our geographies. On the other hand, the B2C pre-registered volume revenues went down -48%. The volumes were down 59%, suffering from the lack of product to source. It was partly compensated by the price increase at +28%. All together, B2C revenues landed at EUR 1,460 million +23%. Looking now at the B2B revenues, they increased by 90%, so almost doubling to EUR 218 million.
This is partly due to the price increase as for the other segments, to a large extent, due to the change in sourcing, we have increased our sourcings from individuals and part of the cars that we are buying, whether they are too old, generally above eight years, or have a too high mileage, above 150 km. These cars are generally reserved to professionals and not coming in our offer to individuals. Last but not least, the service revenues grew by 27%, reaching the EUR 91 million revenue. We reach in September 2022, a penetration rate of 50%. We can look at this revenue evolution per country on slide 20. Starting with France, revenues increased by 7%, reaching EUR 726 million.
France, performance is, of course, generated by the sales of refurbished cars, given the drop of the pre-registered ones. In Belgium, we achieved a revenue growth of 20% to EUR 241 million. Belgium is the other geography to, together with France, that was particularly affected by the drop of pre-reg. You need to know that last year, 75% of their business was a pre-registered one. They did an amazing job in switching and accelerating the volumes of the refurbished cars. The opening and ramp-up of the Antwerp Refurbishing Center played an important role in this achievement. If we move to Spain, so +79%, there is no issue about pre-registered car segment in Spain.
A very strong growth that was partly also helped by the services and the financing part that has a major role there. We are above the 50% penetration rate in Spain. Last but not least, in the UK, plus 55% growth to GBP 433 million. here again, no issue on the pre-registered. The amazing jobs that the UK team achieved were to change radically the sourcing of cars, as last year, they sourced 43% of their cars from professionals and sorry, from individuals, and they managed to increase that share to 82% of their cars, given the reduction in the professional sourcing opportunities. Now let's address the topics around margins, starting with the GPU on slide 21.
Once again, we generated a European leading level of gross profit per unit. 2022 level is at EUR 2,142 per car. It is EUR 150 below last year. 38% of the decrease is simply explained by the change of mix in our geographies. Our French and Belgium share within our revenue is increasing, and they do have the highest GPU level, while Spain is increasing and has the lowest GPU level. 62% of the decrease come more from operating effects, being inflation and spare parts and transports, the progressive ramp up of our two new refurbishing centers and the destocking that we did in the course of the year.
As there are differences in how the listed players account for the GPU calculation, we thought it would be a good opportunity to remind you of how we do calculate this GPU. As you see, the refurbishing centers rents are charged into the GPU, on the contrary to what would be required by IFRS 16. Our GPU excluding rents would be EUR 2,170. It was a choice made at the time of the IPO in order to be comparable with our peers, because at the time, the only listed companies in our business were the American ones.
It's also a much more relevant choice to our mind in term of following the operations, as our GPU includes, amongst other, the cost of spare parts, the cost of people working in the refurbishing centers and the rents. These are important parts of our costs. As a consequence, anyway, our GPU is not directly comparable to the ones you will see for our peers. From the GPU, let's move now to our cost structure on the slide 22. Our SG&A reach EUR 186 million, increasing by EUR 38 million at constant perimeter. This increase comes from several factors. First one is that all countries prepared themselves in the course of 2021 and at the beginning of 2022, to generate and support an accelerated growth. They invested in marketing expenses.
They enlarged their sales force. That's the first factor. Second, a corporate team was built at the end of 21 to support the countries and to structure and drive the development of the group. We had on top several external factors, and notably the inflation on our downstream logistic costs, with the increase of fuel and the scarcity of drivers that impacts everyone. In the course of H1, when we faced the sudden drop of the pre-registered cars, volumes and margins, we started to readjust our structure to this new reality. As we committed to, we maintained stable our SG&A in H2 versus H1. We achieved that thanks to the optimization of our marketing expenses, as we already talked about, and efficiency gains in all our value chain.
Of course, our objective is to maintain this cost under control in 2023. What does this give now in term of Adjusted EBITDA? You can see here on the slide 23, the bridge between last year Adjusted EBITDA and this year. Last year we had a EUR 37.2 million Adjusted EBITDA. The drop in the pre-registered cars volumes generated a loss of EUR 44.2 million, and it was entirely offset by the volumes increase of the refurbished segments. We had the impact of the GPU decrease, so EUR 10.7 million. We invested EUR 7 million more in marketing costs, and labor cost and other SG&A increased our cost by EUR 30.6 million, thus reaching the minus EUR 10.7 million Adjusted EBITDA for the year 2022.
Let's now have a look at our working capital and inventories on the slide 24. We achieved a massive reduction of our working capital, significantly reducing inventory after the high level reach in the middle of the year. As you can see here, operating working capital decreased by EUR 64 million sequentially in H2 2022. During this period, we decreased our inventories by EUR 80 million. Operating working capital fell from 48 days of revenues at the end of H1 to 31 days. As a reminder, it was 34 days at the end of last year.
A great achievement. What is really important in our business is to have the right inventory, both in terms of the type of cars we offer to our consumers and in term of prices that we offer. Cars are assets that are expensive and that depreciate over time. The key success factors of the business is really to manage to grow while maintaining the inventory level at one to two months, depending on the seasonality during the course of the year, and to rotate this inventory quickly. This is a clear point of differentiation. I think it's clearly in the DNA of Aramis, who worked with this principle since the business was created. This ways we managed to really maximize the return on invested capital.
Finally, on the slide 25, let me take you through the net debt evolution. We started the year with EUR 102 million net cash position. We end the year with EUR 18.4 million net debt. We had EUR 74 million cash out directly linked to real operations. One third on CapEx, EUR 25 million. One third on change in the working capital, and the last third on the Adjusted EBITDA and rents. Taking only into account these operational cash outs, we would have landed at a net cash position of EUR 28.2 million. We had the cash out linked to the earn out, EUR 37.3 million, mostly related to the earn out of the Clicars founders that left the group in April as was agreed.
We also have an impact on our net debt that is non-cash, linked to an agreement that we signed with the new business partners. Yes, we land with a net debt positions. Nevertheless, our financing situations remain very solid. We have EUR 189 million of available credit lines without conditions, including EUR 135 million from Stellantis that clearly supports our development. It gives us a lot of room of maneuver to finance our ambitious growth for next years, both externally and internally. I will now hand over to Guillaume Paoli for the outlook.
Thank you, Valérie. A few words on outlook to conclude this presentation. As I said in the beginning, visibility is limited. In the preregistered segment, we are dependent on the normalization of the production by the OEMs. There are some signs, but we are not counting on a short-term improvement of this segment. In the preregistered segment, as we have said, there is currently a slowdown of demand that is also linked to the price inflation, and we will continue to monitor the prices very closely. Aramis Group has been around for over 20 years, so we have known a number of crises, a number of cycles, and we're very confident in our ability to go through this cycle.
It has some added benefits as we had to maybe switch even faster on the refurbished car segment, which is our strategic segment and which has the most potential in Europe. We will maintain a high level of financial operational discipline to get through this crisis and continue to work hard with our teams to create value for the customers to fuel our growth and to be very strict on our cost structure and inventory turns to protect our balance sheet. Unless there is a further deterioration of the market, we expect a positive organic growth of the B2C refurbished used cars sold. We will gradually improve along the year, the Adjusted EBITDA, excluding some restructuring costs, especially in Italy.
In the longer term, we remain convinced that we have the right asset, the right strategy to address this EUR 400 billion market, as we have a lot of room to grow. Less than 1% market share, as I said. We operate at the heart of the circular economy, and we believe that our refurbished cars are a great combination to both ensure individual mobility at affordable prices, and as Nicolas said, we fight every day to propose affordable prices, and also to limit the impact on the environment. Thank you for your attention. Now we will open the Q&A session.
Thank you. Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question over the phone, please press star one one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. Alternatively, you are more welcome to use the Q&A box available on the webcast link. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A to you. This will take a few moments. Thank you. We're going to take our first question. The first question comes to line of Alexandre Réveret from CIC Market Solutions . Your line is open. Please ask your question.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking the questions. I have three questions, please. The first one, obviously on the, on the guidance. I understand you have limited visibility overall, but could you please help us at least quantify what you mean by positive organic growth? Then in terms of EBITDA improvement, whether we should expect EBITDA to turn positive again or whether you expect it to remain negative but improve throughout the year? That's the first question. Second question on working capital. Good performance, I would say, at the end of the year, 31 days. Same question here, what should we expect in terms of operating working capital, days of sales?
Last one on the, maybe Brumbrum, whether you could provide us more details on the profitability path, where Adjusted EBITDA stands today and when do you expect to reach breakeven? Thank you very much.
Thank you for all these questions. Maybe I can take the first one. And Valérie can take the second one, and maybe Nicolas would want to add something. The third one, or I can take it, or Nicolas. Regarding the guidance, fair enough. Just to maybe come back to that, we expect. The visibility is limited. We have a lot of moving parts around between the new car market production, which is uncertain, the slowdown of the demand and the car prices, and we have our internal moving parts. We've over 50% of growth of the number of countries where we operate. I remind you that these 2 latest acquisition were done in the last 4 weeks. We have a lot of moving parts.
In this context, we will outperform the used car market, deliver a positive growth of refurbished used car, which means above zero. We don't want to say more today because again, there are too many moving parts. Regarding the EBITDA, we did two negative quarters in a row for the first time for a very long time. For all the reasons that we said, huh, the pre-registered business was almost 50% of our business in 2021, and it almost vanished during the year. The visibility is limited, and what we will do is gradually improve this EBITDA level along the quarters, excluding, of course, a few restructuring costs. In the longer term, of course, we aim for the profitability level that you know, but at this stage we want... we don't want to say more than that. Working capital.
On the working capital side, as you've seen, we've reached 31 days at the end of the year. We think that it is already a very good achievement. Next year, end of year, we don't expect a further strong reduction. The aim of our business is, as I mentioned, to have a very rapid rotation that allows for sound management of our business because it ensures also margins levels, and it enables us also to protect against price fluctuations. The objectives of the year will be rather to reduce the amplitude that we had last year in the course of the year. Our business is seasonal. We know that we have a seasonality in sales, and we usually have some ramp-up in inventory at the beginning of the year. The objective is to lower this peak at mid-year.
George, do you want to?
No.
Regarding Brumbrum, what we can say is it's a loss-making company. As you know, we took it over from our friends at Cazoo that realigned their strategy. It's a loss-making company. We believe that there is a strong head team that we will work with them. We're working now, they are working on adjusting their costs, relaunching the Brumbrum brand, rebooting the factory. It's too soon to give you any, you know, horizon on when it will come back to profitability because we are just starting the work with them.
We feel confident that in the midterm, with the support of Aramis Group and also the support of Stellantis, huh, they have something like 40% of market share in the country, we can build the leader in Italy.
Thank you very much. I have a follow-up for me on the M&A strategy. You have acquired two companies recently. Will this next fiscal year be focused on integrating those companies, or are you ready to acquire another one if there is an opportunity?
Well, again, we have extended by 50% the reach of the countries, and integration takes time, because people need to work together, to know each other, to learn from one another. We'll be probably focusing more on this and on returning to, on working to return to profitability rather than expanding in new countries. In the midterm, we believe that we can continue to expand. Right now, we are serving precisely 51% of Europeans, we still have some room to expand.
That's very clear. Thank you very much again.
Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. The next question comes to line of Christophe Chaput from Société Générale. Your line is open. Please ask your question.
Hello, good morning. Hope you can hear me well. Thanks for taking my question. I have three. First one on the guidance. I do get that you're not going to give a precise guidance, but I was looking at slide 8. The extent to which you are outperforming the total used car market, is it fair to expect that at a minimum you would outperform the market, whatever is the final level by at least 20 percentage points? The blue sky would be 30, 40 percentage point. Is that fair assumptions so that we can try to, you know, set a range from the outside? That's the first question. The second one on pre-reg, the market has collapsed, looking at the number, it seems it bottomed.
Is it fair to assume that the Q4 volume number is a bottom and will not get below that? The sub question is on Onlinecars. Looking at slide 15, I was seeing that it seems there is EUR 32 million of debt. I wanted to have more clarity on the impact of the Onlinecars acquisition. I understand you paid EUR 26 million or EUR 27 million for the share of equity you're buying initially. Is the impact going to be EUR 26 million plus EUR 32 million of debt consolidation on the balance sheet? Thank you.
Hello, Christophe. Maybe I take the two first ones, and Nicolas maybe will complement if you want. And the third one for you, Valérie.
Mm-hmm.
Regarding the market, look, as I said, there are a lot of moving parts. We will outperform the market, but we are not today going to give a range, because again, there are too many moving parts. We'll do our best. We have worked hard this year to, you know, to lay the foundations. Nicolas explained, we have opened factories, two new factories. We're going to open a third one. We have switch our channels of sourcing to adapt to the new market environment. We'll do our best to outperform the market. We will outperform the market. We plan to deliver positive growth on the refurbished used car segment. At this stage we're not going to give you, unfortunately, a more precise range.
Regarding the pre-regs, look, I hope we hit the bottom. Actually, I think we hit the bottom. But
We're starting to see some sign of production coming back from the OEM, but it's still the beginning.
You know, it's like in scuba diving, you're not never sure where the bottom. There is. This business is built on the spread between the production and the demand. I don't know if you can see my hands on the screen, the production has gone down by 30%. The demand was still resisting, now it's going down because the prices have increased a lot. As Nicolas said, we hope we hit the bottom. We believe we did the bottom, we are not counting for next year on an improvement of the business because, you know, we have, we don't want to, you know, to have a confirmation bias and to be too optimistic in this field. Maybe Valérie on the online car.
Yes, I fully agree. I think it's better not to bet on this as we are uncertainties. We prefer to build a solid plan on what we think could come and not bet on this pre-register that will come on top. If they come, that would be good news. Yes, regarding your question on Onlinecars, yes, we acquired the company and yes, we acquire it with its debt. The debt is directly related to the quite large inventory they have. As Nicolas explained, this company was used to work with several months of inventory. This is one of the expertise point of Aramis to work with a reduced level of inventory and working capital. This debt level should reduce over time as long as, we optimize the inventory level. Hope this answer your questions.
Christophe?
Excuse me, Christophe, if you don't mind, please can you press star one one on your telephone keypad? Yes, please just give us a moment. Christophe, line is open.
Hello. Yes. Sorr y, my line had dropped off. Just to finish on what Valérie was saying, the EUR 32 million is definitely not what we are going to see on the balance sheet once their inventories have been, let's say, normalized, right?
Operational debt, so it's linked to the financing of cars in inventory. Yes.
That we want to reduce.
We will.
We are actually on the way to reduce it.
We will reduce inventory and debt in parallel.
In the course of the year.
Yes. Yeah. Opening balance sheet, so we have this debt.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions. I would like now to hand the conference over to our speaker, Francois, for any written questions.
Thank you. We have a few questions online. The first one coming from Dominique Cauchi at CIC. Hello, Dominic. I'm basically going to summarize what the point you touch. You're saying there is a decrease in the B2C used car market. Dominic would like to know what's basically the impact that is like offer generated and the one that is demand generated. Said differently, there are increased difficulties in sourcing
On the other way around, you said there is a softening in demand. Is it possible to give a bit more color on that? First question. Just you.
Okay.
Maybe one by one.
Okay. Maybe... Do you want me to?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay. We cannot precisely give you an answer, especially because there are many different countries and many different markets. Is it the demand or the offer? On the offer side, as Guillaume has shown, the price has increased really a lot during those last months. We still have quite a lot of offers or cars on the market. We cannot say that you cannot find a car. You have cars on the market, on the used car market. Price came to be very, very strong. As you know, we have also had the increase of interest rate more recently.
70% of our cars are financed by credit. This further increase the price for the final consumer. I would say that it's mainly... Today, I would say it's mainly a question of demand, and in the last months, it has mainly been a question of demand.
Okay. To be, Maybe to follow up on that and to be a bit more specific, Dominic is also asking about whether or not we're able to comment on the drop of 0 kilometer, 0 to 8, and more than 8. I think, Dominic, you're also asking about the aging of the overall automotive fleet. If you have a comment on that.
I have no precise figures on that. We have the zero kilometer and the used car, but I have no precise figures.
Z-
... below eight and over eight.
The market we have seen is that the budget of household has not extended this year to buy cars, that some customers have been buying older cars. On our side, we have worked, as Nicolas was saying, we're fighting every day to propose good prices to our customers. We do that by offering the right car, so completing our offer, but also by adapting our financing offering. For typically, very recently, we extended the length, the maximum length of a private lease to reduce the monthly rate. On the overall market, there is a slight aging of the mean age.
Which is normal because we have lost one year of new car production, so by capacity it will move along, the age period.
Good. Second topic from Dominik, restructuring costs. What do we expect they might be in 2023, and on which line of the P&L they could appear?
As Guillaume was mentioning, we are still working with Brumbrum to define their plans, so there will be restructuring costs. We are not in a position today to give you a clear envelope. We need to have more work on it. These costs as exceptional restructuring costs will not be included in our Adjusted EBITDA, of course.
Good. Thank you, Valérie. If I follow up, Sorry, I keep on the internet questions. Catherine from Citi, hello Catherine, asks if we still expect Adjusted EBITDA to be positive in 2023? First question. Second, how do we see the evolution of GPU that was previously guided to stable around EUR 2,150 per B2C car sold?
Yeah. Hello, Catherine. I'll take the first one and maybe leave Valérie answer the second one. Regarding EBITDA, as I said, today, the guidance is that we will gradually improve the EBITDA level during the year, except for restructuring costs, particularly in Italy. This is a consequence of the market decreasing very strongly in the last two quarters. We are doing our effort, our efforts are concentrated this year on working to return to profitability. At this stage, we're not committing to a positive EBITDA in 2023. It's too soon, and we have too many moving parts with the two new countries joining the group, as I've explained earlier.
Continuing with the GPU, of course, GPU is a critical component of our EBITDA. A bit the same thing. The environment will remain quite uncertain and challenging in the coming months. The GPU will be impacted by transportation costs that are increasing everywhere. In some countries, we have the obligation to increase salaries at the official inflation level. Internally, we still have some cost of ramping up our new refurbishing centers to be open. We have some headwinds. On the other hand, we continue to make progress on the way that we select our cars and build a car offer in line with customer expectations.
We also continue to improve the assessment of selling prices and refurbishing costs. The better we assess that, the better we have control over our GPUs. With our lean management approach, I mean it is a daily focus to improve our processes to reduce waste, to improve the lead times. These lean times also helps a lot to support the GPU. I think, all in all, we will have headwinds, but we are quite well equipped in order to mitigate them to a large extent. We will have to take into account here also the change in our scope with more work obviously to be done on the new countries that we integrate to put them at the same level as the group.
As a follow-up on the GPU topic, I come back to your second question, Catherine, after. Jose Martin, you're asking how basically is going the first month of activity on 2023. Should we expect the level of GPU to be in line above or below the H-2 2022 implied one?
I would say that the months, the first months of the year, are in line with the last months of the previous years. We are during a soft period. I will not repeat what I said before on the perspectives for the following months. We have a lot of uncertainty. We do whatever we can do to mitigate them.
Okay. Thank you, Valérie. Your second question, Catherine, you are asking about the price trend for full year 2023 across our market. First question on the price trend, and second, whether or not we see, I mean, supply improving in our market. Nicolas, you started a bit to answer on that with both topics being linked.
Well, regarding the price trend, we believe that the prices will come down at one stage. The movement has already started in the UK. The question is when. There is a very different situation in each country. The complicated bit is that the price level impacts the demand. If the price go down, the demand will probably increase. The price will go down, but when is all the question. Probably during the course of next year, in continental Europe. It's very difficult to give you a more precise assessment. On the supply, you want to say something?
Yes. This is what we said for the 0 kilometers. We expect to have an improvement. We think, as say Christophe, that we have reached a bottom. If there is some improvement on the 0 kilometer and new cars, this will give an improvement on all the rest of the chain, on the used cars. Yes, we expect to have more car, especially from Stellantis, by the way. Again, it's a bit too early to make a, to have any high expectation on that. We prefer to stay cautious on that, knowing that we don't know exactly when it could happen.
Okay. We are done with the question on internet. Operator, do we have any more question over the phone?
Yes, because there are no questions over the phone.
Okay. If there are no more questions, I think we can end this presentation call here.
Thank you very much for your attention, and, we'll, speak soon.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.