Welcome to our 2022 strategy update. I'm Patrick Schmidt, Co-CEO of Global Fashion Group, and I'm joined by my Co-CEO, Christoph Barchewitz, and our CFO, Matthew Price. Let me take you through the agenda for today. I will start with a brief overview of the business and update you on the opportunity in our markets. Christoph will then talk about our focus on providing excellent customer experience, being the partner of choice for brands, and being People and Planet Positive. Matthew will conclude with our financial performance. Let me start with a short overview. We aspire to be the number one fashion and lifestyle destination in our markets. We already have a leading position in online fashion and lifestyle across our regions, but we want to be the leader across all channels.
Being number one is important because scale enables us to attract the leading fashion brands globally, offer the best selection, and create an outstanding experience for our customers. Our purpose is to enable customers to find true self-expression while providing a safe and inclusive environment for our teams. As a reminder, we operate under four different brands in four regions: Latin America, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Southeast Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. Scale drives profitability. Our largest regions are also furthest ahead in terms of EBITDA. SEA, our smallest region, has reached break even last year. We have already achieved impressive scale to become a leader across our regions. Over the past four years, despite the impact of COVID, we have almost doubled the size of our business and have grown at an average annual rate of 24%. We offer two key business models, retail and marketplace.
Our marketplace model gives us the flexibility and helped us to pivot into new categories quickly during the pandemic as customer preferences changed during lockdowns. Marketplace in 2021 accounted for 38% of NMV, and it is a key lever to enable true self-expression through a wide range of fashion and lifestyle products. Of course, marketplace helps us to grow gross margin. Our orders and customers have also grown consistently since 2018 at 19% and 15% per annum, respectively. This growth is critical to achieve our long-term goals. Let me turn now to the market opportunity. Our ambition is to quadruple the size of GFG over the next six-eight years to become a EUR 10 billion business. We've achieved an average constant currency growth rate of 24%, and we expect to continue growing at this level using two main levers.
First, growing our active customer base. We now have 17 million active customers. 1.7% of the people living in our markets have shopped with us in the last 12 months. We have grown our active customer base by 53% in the last three years and believe we can continue on this growth path in the long run. Secondly, we are growing order frequency by improving the customer experience across the areas that matter most. First, by growing our assortment in existing categories and expanding into new categories. Second, by creating an inspiring and seamless digital experience. Third, by ensuring deliveries are both fast and convenient. Let's turn now to look at our markets. 1 billion people live in our regions, and in 2022, consumers in our markets are projected to spend around EUR 300 billion on fashion and lifestyle products.
2021 was slightly down on pre-pandemic levels, but we are seeing signs of recovery in 2022. To give you a sense of our scale relative to developed markets, the U.S. market is worth approximately EUR 500 billion, and Western Europe is at roughly EUR 450 billion. Most importantly, our markets have a lot of upside when it comes to e-commerce penetration. Online adoption has accelerated as a result of COVID, and the average penetration rate has increased from 7% in 2018 to 16% in 2021. Despite physical stores reopening this year, online penetration across our markets has remained stable, and by 2025, we expect our average rate of penetration to reach 19%. This still leaves significant headroom as our penetration rates are currently half those of markets you might be more familiar with.
The U.S., for example, was at 33% in 2021 and Western Europe at 19%. Over time, we are convinced that about 50% of fashion spend globally will be online, including in our markets. Taking a look at our two main growth drivers, you can see we have a consistent track record of delivery. In the chart on the left, you can see active customers as a percentage of our target age group. For ANZ, with its relatively small population, we already serve 15% of our target age group. Then looking at SEA and its much larger population, our customer penetration falls to 1.6%. The gap between these markets highlights the opportunity we have. On the right, you can see orders per active customer or frequency, which again reveals regional differences.
Over time, our ambition is to grow order frequency to four-five orders per year in all regions. Today, we are just at the beginning of reaching our market potential. All our regions have huge opportunities, but they are at different stages in their growth. In LATAM and SEA, we see potential for online penetration and order frequency to roughly double in the long run, and even in more developed markets such as ANZ, we still see a lot of upside. I will hand over now to Christoph to explain how we plan to unlock this potential.
Thank you, Patrick. Our strategy for winning remains unchanged. We're the leading online fashion and lifestyle destination because our platform connects millions of customers with thousands of the most relevant brands. We offer our customers a first-class experience. We are the strategic partner of choice for local and global brands in our markets. Our local expertise underpins our relevance for both customers and brands alike. Our approach to sustainability is not just about doing the right thing, it's increasingly driven by customer demand and is a long-term driver of value creation. I'll start by talking about customer experience, where we focus on three critical areas. First, a broad and relevant assortment. Second, an inspiring and seamless digital experience. Third, fast and convenient delivery. Let me talk in more detail about these areas, starting with assortment.
We are very proud of the quality and quantity of product we have brought onto our platform over the last 10 years. Local brands account for about 50%, global brands 45%, and own brands 5% of our NMV. Our core categories of apparel and footwear make up 57% of our business. These remain very important, and we continue to expand our assortment here, especially in premium and luxury. Moving into adjacent categories such as sports, kids, and beauty has proven to be very successful, and we expect these to be strong growth drivers in years to come. Beauty, for example, is a large category which sits naturally alongside fashion and lifestyle, so we are well-positioned to grow here. Today, it represents just 2% of NMV, but is growing quickly.
Now, I'd like to share a short video on how our team in ANZ have done a fantastic job of building their beauty proposition.
Hi everyone, I'm Erica Berchtold, CEO of THE ICONIC. One of the key successes for our business here at THE ICONIC is beauty. It represents a large and growing category that will help to deliver our growth ambitions. Beauty is a complementary purchase to fashion and lifestyle, so it's a logical next step to unlock our potential in the years to come. It allows us to attract new customers, and it also enables us to build deeper relationships with existing customers, more than a fashion-only destination ever could. We first launched beauty in the second half of 2020, and this year we have plans to grow over 200%. Let me hand over to Josh Noonan, Head of Beauty at THE ICONIC, to talk about how we're building Australia and New Zealand's leading beauty destination.
As Erica said, we first launched beauty back in 2020. The exciting aspect when launching a new category is that we were starting something totally new, so we chose to be purely guided by our customers. Our customers are always at the forefront when we make strategic decisions. What did this mean for our launch? Well, let me get into it. First, we know our customers value sustainability, so we introduced Free From Beauty, which is an assortment of products free from harmful ingredients. Products with sustainable credentials now represent 26% of our beauty offer. Second, our customers want the comfort of trying products on without having to go into a store, so we launched Virtual Try-On with our mobile app. Initially with lipstick, which was a great success, so we're now expanding into foundation and eyeshadow.
Third, research and external data told us customers want emerging Australian brands. Today they can be inspired by local brands such as Ultra Violette, Grown Alchemist, Sol de Janeiro, and many others. Finally, we have matched this with a global brand portfolio including M·A·C, Clinique, Aesop, Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani, and a whole lot more. Our customers can access the very best products in beauty at THE ICONIC. Our new beauty customer is highly valuable. Last year, customers that bought only women's fashion had an order frequency of around two times a year. Customers that buy multiple categories, including beauty, shop with us around five times a year. Customers benefit from having a single destination for their fashion and lifestyle needs, and it's also good business.
Our team is highly focused on achieving collective success in our brand partnerships, and we were able to build on our group experience across retail. Today, we have 175 beauty brands, and we adopt the business model that best suits the needs of our brand partners. We deliver around 40% of our NMV through our marketplace platform, which optimizes both our working capital and cost efficiency. In the near future, we'll continue to improve the areas that matter most for our customers. We'll continue to expand our assortment. For example, we're launching brands such as Estée Lauder and Bobbi Brown this quarter. We are improving the shopping experience by expanding Virtual Try-On to more products and by inspiring our customers through live streaming. Together with our large customer base and growing brand assortment, these initiatives will ensure we build Australia and New Zealand's leading beauty destination.
As you can see, the progress ANZ have made in beauty over the last year is really impressive. We plan to leverage their learnings and expertise as we continue to expand beauty across our other markets. Our highly localized approach is another important differentiator. It ensures we can deliver a broad and relevant assortment tailored to the local market and consumer. Our local teams select and buy products from both local and global brands based on their deep understanding of customers in that market. The dresses shown here are a selection of our top ten bestsellers by region, so you can see the value in having a local team that alters our selection based on local preference, with swimwear in LATAM, core labels like Hugo Boss in CIS, modest wear in SEA, and color in ANZ. You can also see how customers value the breadth of our offering.
Local and global brands, our own brand products, and premium items all feature in this top ten. Global brands are an important part of our fashion offering, and we work with 40 of the top 50 non-luxury brands. This enables customers to come to our platform for every occasion at price ranges across a full fashion offering. They can pick up their new Marc Jacobs bag at the same time as their adidas running shorts. They can also grab a new shade of lipstick as we partner with about half the top 100 global beauty brands. Growing premium and luxury remains a key priority for us. We already partner with 30% of the top global premium and luxury brands, and over the last year, we have continued to create more choice and add new inspiring brands to our platform.
As a result, premium and luxury grew 46% during the year and now represents 13% of NMV. I want to move on now to our inspiring and seamless digital experience. We are essentially an app business. In 2021, 63% of our NMV and over half of our total visits came from the app. App usage is key in driving loyalty and engagement. More than 40% of our app customers visit the app five times or more a month. We constantly evolve our app experience to help customers feel inspired and engaged. For example, we help our customers build their perfect outfit through suggestions of matching items, and when they find something they like, visual search will present similar products. Our Virtual Try-On features are continuously improving, and we are delighted with the customer feedback.
These technologies will help support the transition to buying more beauty and fashion online. We also know our customers care increasingly about sustainability, and we are the first major online retailer to have sustainable shopping edits in our markets. Our app functionality allows customers to search by the values that matter most to them, such as fair production or sustainable materials. These and other app features are supporting our transition from a transactional experience towards one that is both engaging and personalized. The way we showcase the product in an attractive and locally relevant way also differentiates us from other online retailers. Here in a short video, I will show you how we do that from our state-of-the-art e-production studio in Brazil.
Welcome to Dafiti, where we aim to revolutionize the ecosystem of fashion in Latin America. My name is Aline Mori, and I'm the CMO at Dafiti. I joined the company last year following a 50-year career in the beauty and lifestyle industry in Brazil. A lifelong consumer and lover of fashion, I couldn't be prouder to combine my personal passion with my work as part of the amazing team here at Dafiti. Today, I'm here at our e-production studios in Brazil, where our fashion energy really comes to life. This is where the magic really happens and what has allowed Dafiti to become the most important shop window for fashion brands in Latin America. We consider ourselves a reference in the market.
Through innovative process, a talented team, and state-of-the-art equipment, we showcase products and brands on our platforms and social media channels with revolutionary quality and inspiring fashion content. In the last 11 years, we have produced more than 25 million photos, and more than 15 million images, and uploaded more than 2.5 million products. Working with a wide variety of thousands of models allows us to continually promote diversity in fashion. Thanks to our customer obsession and understanding of individual brands' commercial strategy, we can create content focused on both brand and client needs. This ensures the connection between brand and customer is never lost. Working with a wide variety of both local and global brands across our retail business models means we can build quality content.
By owning the product, we can inspire our customer by producing multiple looks while showcasing the details of the product at the same time across both our app and website. Across high fashion, sport or premium, we can connect specific brands to specific models in order to inspire all the different customer profiles who access Dafiti. We are only 11 years old. We want to continue innovating and developing the best fashion and lifestyle online content in the world and to have an even bigger impact on the fashion ecosystem. Thank you. It was a pleasure to open the doors of our wardrobe for you.
That's a great example of how localized management delivers for our customers. Let's move on now to fast and convenient delivery, which is an essential part of excellent customer service and supports the continued growth of our business. Last year, we shipped over 120 million items from our nine fulfillment centers. We now have the capacity to support over EUR 4 billion of NMV through three automated centers in CIS, LATAM and ANZ, and six more in SEA and LATAM. Though these are all leased facilities, the operations are entirely run by GFG to maintain high standards and full control. Ongoing investments in our operational infrastructure will help unlock our full growth potential. I want to show you how we've been investing with this video from Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asia covers a land mass of almost 2 million sq mi and is home to more than 650 million people, close to 10% of the world's population. Hi, I'm Rostin Javadi, Chief Operations Officer of Zalora. We're very proud of the operational and supply chain expertise we've built up over the years here in Southeast Asia. We have three fulfillment centers across the region, in Manila, Jakarta, and here in Kuala Lumpur. Today, I'll show you the largest center here in Malaysia and offer you a glimpse of some of the ways we deliver a great service to our brand partners and a top-class customer experience. The center covers a total of 470,000 sq ft, approximately the size of nine football fields, and is split across five levels.
It plays a crucial role in fulfilling thousands of orders every day and facilitating the movement of fashion products across seven markets, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Philippines. Today, Zalora customers can access thousands of local and international brands no matter where they are. We have invested heavily in building the e-commerce infrastructure from warehouse facilities to delivery fleets. All the systems we use to manage our complex supply chain have been built in-house by our team of engineers based in Vietnam. This has revolutionized fashion shopping in second and third-tier cities across Southeast Asia. Our center holds a single stock pool for all markets, which is an efficient way to offer a wide selection of goods for all our customers across the region.
We are really proud that our fulfillment centers run with speed, efficiency, and safety, and that we have maintained high service levels over the last two years despite the challenges of COVID-19. We attract brands by offering flexible business models to help them grow, and our marketplace offering has been a popular choice, nearly doubling in size over the past year. We are more than just a sales channel. There is a huge opportunity in the region for the development of GFG's platform services. This offers global brands support with operations, e-distribution, and fulfillment to facilitate their digital entry into the region. These services reinforce our position as a trusted partner, improve our margin performance, and generate incremental revenue streams.
Setting our sights on the future, we recently embarked on expanding our current space by up to 50%, allowing us to store over 6.7 million items at the center, and we're working on operational innovation, incorporating more technology into our fulfillment centers.
I hope that video gives you some sense of how we are constantly improving our delivery services and increasing our capacity as we grow. Making delivery and returns more convenient is another important way to drive greater customer satisfaction and higher online penetration. Our aim is to make returns as easy as possible, not to minimize them. This gives our customers the confidence to buy products from us where size and fit may be difficult to predict. Our delivery services are tailored to local preferences. We offer courier delivery and pickup points, both through our own infrastructure and through third parties. In CIS, nearly 90% of our customers use our try on service, either at a pickup point or at home. It is a fantastic way to offer customers the opportunity to try before they buy and to minimize post-purchase return rates as a result.
In our other markets, return rates vary a lot. In LATAM, they are 9%, which is lower than we would like, so we are investing to improve the process and give our customers greater confidence. SEA and ANZ are more similar to other developed markets. Return rates here have reduced recently as customers bought more casual clothing during the pandemic and accurate sizing became less important. Let me summarize how we create a unique experience for our customers. We stand out with our broad and relevant assortment, which is current, authentic and expanding. We stand out with our inspiring and seamless digital experience with high levels of curation and inspiration across our apps. We stand out with our fast and convenient delivery and return options tailored to the local market. Together, this gives us a strongly differentiated position in all our markets with significant barriers to entry.
This quality of customer experience has driven our fast growth to 17 million active customers. Our 3.4 million most active and loyal customers shop with us eight and half times per year and spend more than three times the customer average. Now let's take a look at how we win with our brands. We are the partner of choice for our brands for three reasons. First, we unlock complex markets, helping to manage local regulations or the lack of infrastructure. Second, we adopt a flexible approach to align with our partners' own strategies. Third, we help them by sharing our e-commerce expertise through our platform services offer. Brands gain access to a very large customer base and broad audience at GFG. Our customers are typically female, they live in urban areas, are digitally savvy, and of course, fashion conscious.
They also live in markets which are underserved by global brands. GFG offers brands an opportunity to expand their e-commerce business and deliver international expansion while relying on us to take care of the challenges. Our teams help brand partners manage these challenges by navigating the import process and complex regulation and by providing end-to-end fulfillment services across vast geographies. It's important to remember that our markets often do not have turnkey solutions readily available, and there's also less bricks-and-mortar space, making e-commerce even more important. Our highly localized approach gives us a strategic advantage and enabled us to manage the industry supply chain challenges for both GFG and our brands over the past year. We also operate a number of flexible business models to suit our brand partner strategy. Retail represents the majority of our NMV. This is a traditional business model that most are familiar with.
We take ownership of the product, control pricing, and all aspects of the process. Our teams use data and technology throughout to optimize decision-making and results. We have another business model called Marketplace, which represents nearly 40% of our NMV. Here, the brand retains ownership of the stock and controls the selling and pricing across our platform. Product and inventory risk remains with the brand. Within Marketplace, we offer three different fulfillment models. Starting on the left, we have Fulfilled by GFG. This is when we hold the stock and manage fulfillment, just as we do for retail. This is a popular choice in CIS. In the middle, we have cross-docking. In this model, the brand holds the stock and we pick up the items and consolidate them at our fulfillment center before delivering to customers.
Finally, on the right, our light touch option is drop shipment, where the brand sells on our platform and retains responsibility for all aspects of the process. We're constantly evolving our fulfillment model to drive efficiencies and improve the experience for our brands. We're also constantly innovating to bring together the best of our retail and marketplace offers. For example, we use retail for the core assortment and marketplace for the long tail within the same brand, and we are trialing size refill to use marketplace inventory when items are out of stock in retail. We seek to balance these two models to create the best customer experience and in turn, best results for our brand partners and for GFG. Our strategy is working.
Here you can see that 93% of our top 30 brands, which account for 1/3 of our NMV, operate on both the retail and marketplace models. Nearly all of them use our platform services. Let me explain what that includes. It's a natural extension for GFG to allow brands to leverage our strong e-commerce expertise. This has created deeper relationships with brands as well as new income streams for GFG. Platform services remain small in the group context, but we are actively scaling it. We offer operations, marketing, and data services, and I'll talk about each of these in turn. Operations by GFG helps brand partners that lack infrastructure with end-to-end operational services, ranging from procurement through fulfillment, delivery, and returns, all the way to providing customer service on their behalf.
In addition to supporting sales on marketplace, we've increased the number of brands using Operations by GFG to support their own website to 90. Marketing by GFG and Data by GFG provide brands with additional customer reach, engagement, and insights. Today, our brand partners can access Marketing by GFG in most of our regions, and the number of campaigns we have supported has more than doubled since 2018. Data by GFG is currently in the rollout phase. There's a lot more to go after as we introduce the offering to regions beyond SEA, where it is currently live. These offerings for our brand partners have supported our development into a platform business. Today, our marketplace is at 38% of NMV, and we expect this to grow to about 50% in the longer term.
We think this provides an optimal mix that balances the benefits of each model from both a commercial and customer perspective. Fulfilled by GFG and cross-docking now accounts for 73% of marketplace-shipped items. We expect this to increase slightly over time. We have made progress on building platform services, which is now 2% of revenue, and we see services as a whole as a significant driver of future growth. Now I'd like to conclude with a video on GFG being People and Planet Positive.
Hello, I'm Jaana Quaintance-James, and I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer at Global Fashion Group. What motivates me is our ambition to place sustainability at the heart of the business as a driver of long-term value. Our People and Planet Positive agenda is informed by a comprehensive materiality assessment with key stakeholders. Through this, we have identified six strategic priorities. Today, I'll focus on the first three, specifically related to sustainability. Let's start with climate action. We have a lot to do to transition to a lower carbon economy, but our work last year is evidence of our commitment to driving this in a way that is meticulously planned and informed by science. In 2021, we achieved carbon neutrality for our own operations and outbound deliveries. We started purchasing green energy for our fulfillment centers.
We continue to increase our use of materials with a lower environmental impact, such as organic cotton and recycled polyester. 12% of our own brand range is now made from preferred materials. Our 2030 climate action targets include delivering 50% of parcels by low-emission methods for the last mile and generating 60% of our NMV from products made with sustainable materials or production methods. Our second strategic priority is circularity and conscious consumption. We continue to influence the fashion ecosystem and empower customers through our sustainable shopping edits, available in all GFG countries. We enable them to make conscious choices at the point of sale. In 2021, almost 10% of our NMV came from sustainable assortment, and almost 1/3 of our 17 million active customers chose to shop this range.
We have an ethical auditing program for our own brand factories, which continues alongside our supplier training program. 70% of our factories have participated, which is above our target. We have also introduced a minimum sustainability requirement for brands wanting to partner with GFG and joint sustainability plans with our largest brand partners, which we are continually progressing. Our fair and ethical sourcing targets are ambitious. By 2030, 100% of brands working with GFG will meet our human rights standards. 100% of our own brand manufacturing sites will have been assessed against living wage benchmarks. In brief, we see sustainability as a long-term driver of value creation at GFG. We have made demonstrable progress, but in recognition of the need to do much more, we are setting some challenging new targets for the future.
Find out more detail in our upcoming People and Planet Positive Progress Report.
We are excited about announcing our science-based targets next month, and as Jana mentioned, look out for our People and Planet Positive Report in April. In summary, we are unlocking the potential in our markets by offering customers a first-class experience, acting as a partner of choice for local and global brands, and drawing on our local expertise to serve both. I will now hand over to Matthew to cover our financial performance.
Thank you, Christoph. I'm gonna talk about how this strategy drives value creation. Before talking about the future, I wanna look back at our track record over the last four years. We've delivered strong NMV growth at an average of 24% a year and have turned this growth into profitability. Our gross margin has improved by 7 percentage points as a result of growing marketplace and maintaining a stable retail margin. This has translated into a 5 percentage point improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin. Acquiring new customers and developing profitable relationships with them lies at the heart of our business. This slide shows we've improved the customer economics through disciplined cost management and growing scale. We've increased our NMV per active customer to EUR 140, and gross profit per customer grew by EUR 1.5 to EUR 42 .
We delivered benefits of scale and productivity on our cost to serve. After fulfillment, tech, and admin costs, we've increased profit per customer before marketing by EUR 7 to almost EUR 11. Looking ahead, we will further improve these economics by increasing gross margin and cost leverage. As Patrick showed earlier, our regions are at different stages of maturity. By plotting adjusted EBITDA margin against NMV, you get a sense of the progress we've made in each region. What drives profitability is both scale and average order frequency. The clear financial strategy that I set out at IPO underpins our progress. Number one, we build and develop a valuable customer base who give us an increasing share of their fashion and lifestyle spend. Two, through the growth of marketplace and platform services, we improve our gross margins over time.
Three, as our business scales, we achieve leverage across key overheads. Four, we continue to reinvest in technology and fulfillment assets to drive further growth. Let's take a closer look at our customer base. We continue to recruit, retain, and develop this over time. In 2021, 77% of our NMV came from existing customers, compared to 68% in 2018. You can see we are increasing loyalty. With the start of the pandemic in 2020, we recruited a large new cohort of customers. This cohort is good quality, and the level of NMV from them in 2021 is slightly higher than normal. At the same time, we saw existing customer cohorts reduce their frequency of purchase during 2020.
In 2021, we were pleased to see a strong recovery in NMV from these older cohorts as COVID restrictions started to lift and we actively marketed to them. Overall, this data shows a strong, consistent, and improving relationship with our customer cohorts. This slide gives you more detail on how we think about customer acquisition. Starting on the left, in total, 61% of our visitors were unpaid. At 39%, our share of paid visitors was 5 percentage points higher than the prior year as a result of the influx of new free customers in 2020, a record year for them. In absolute terms, we saw almost as many free visitors in 2021 as in 2020. On the right, you have our payback period, which is based on new customers who have never shopped with us before.
This ratio is our entire online marketing spend divided by the profit contribution after all fulfillment costs earned from those customers. In the past, we targeted a payback period of 12 months. The 2020 payback was unusually quick as we benefited from a large cohort of free customers with the onset of the pandemic. In 2021, we increased our payback period to a little over 18 months, recognizing that customer lifetime value has increased as a result of higher order frequency and retention, so we could increase the payback time in a rational and disciplined way. As you've heard, we continue to grow both our marketplace and retail models as part of our overall strategy. In 2021, marketplace sales comprised 38% of our NMV, up from 31% in 2020.
These two models have different economics and capital needs, which I've shown here in a simplified comparison. Both retail and marketplace are fairly capital light as we largely finance retail inventory from supplier payables, while the marketplace model does not require us to own the product. Marketplace provides a much broader pool of stock, so it gives us greater flexibility to respond to shifts in demand and allows us to grow faster than we could from retail alone. We provide fulfillment under both models with 73% of marketplace fulfilled by GFG or through cross-docking. Both models make use of our shared fulfillment assets. Looking at the profitability of each model, IFRS accounting conceals the underlying economics. First, it's important to remember that only the marketplace commission, also called the take rate, is recognized as revenue, whereas in retail, the total net value of the item is recognized.
Our marketplace take rate includes fees related to fulfillment services for sales made by those brands on our platforms. Our retail margin is strong at 36%, which is 8 percentage points higher than the group's average marketplace take rate. After fulfillment costs, these two margins converge with retail 3 percentage points higher than marketplace. The average take rate charged across the group has declined 3 percentage points since 2020. This is mainly a result of lower take rates, most notably in CIS, alongside some regional mix effects. Retail has a higher margin than marketplace, yet under IFRS, marketplace margins are 100% since only the commission is recognized as revenue.
As you heard from Christoph earlier, we value both models and seek to maximize overall profitability, flexibility, and growth by making the right choices about which brands and SKUs we allocate across the two models in close collaboration with our partners. Next, you can see how our three business models, retail, marketplace, and platform services, have enabled us to grow our gross margin. Looking forward, we will continue to deliver stable retail margin with the opportunity for growth from premium and category expansion. As marketplace becomes a larger proportion of NMV, we estimate a 30 basis point margin expansion for every additional point of marketplace share. In the last two years, marketplace growth has contributed 3.5 percentage points to overall margin growth. We expect this to continue as marketplace approaches our target of 50% of NMV. Platform services are significantly more profitable.
While today they account for just 2% of our revenue, we plan to grow this to somewhere between 5% and 10%, which will increase gross margin. Taken together, we plan to deliver a gross margin of 50% over time. Moving on to our cost base. Since 2018, the total cost base as a percent of NMV has reduced by over 5 percentage points to just under 32%. There are strong opportunities to improve this further as we continue to scale, most notably in fulfillment and tech and admin costs. We will continue to run marketing targeting payback rather than a cost income ratio. There are two main parts to our CapEx spend. First, our investment in technology, which we expect to grow over the medium term.
We're expanding our tech teams to create the features and tools that enable greater personalization and higher frequency of purchase, as well as building out our marketplace and platform services. Second, we're investing in property, plant, and equipment, which relates mainly to regular expansion and development of our fulfillment centers. We expect CapEx to grow over time and our investment rate to remain around 3% of revenue. There will be some years when we have a higher CapEx, as we need to complete a major fulfillment center project. In the short term, we will finance CapEx from a combination of project-specific finance and our permanent capital base. As we deliver on our margin targets, we expect to finance CapEx from operating cash flows and from project-specific finance. We've developed and diversified our sources of working capital finance to cover seasonal working capital needs and better match our currency exposure.
This enhances our natural currency hedges as a result of buying and selling in the same currency for 83% of our cash flows. As we expect the group to finance its development through becoming cash flow positive and from existing resources, our medium-term capital, in other words, the proceeds from our convertible bond, is available for business expansion and accelerating growth beyond the plans we're setting out today. Taking all this together, what does it mean for our business over the longer term? This slide shows our long-term financial goals. We are of course operating with a lot of uncertainty in the near term, so I'm not including dates and data points for short and midterm targets in the way that I normally would.
As Patrick set out earlier, the long-term opportunity for the group remains huge, and despite immediate challenges, it's worth setting out how we intend to deliver on this. We expect to quadruple NMV to EUR 10 billion by growing at about 25% a year for the next six-eight years, broadly in line with the growth we've delivered since our IPO. We believe that the business is capable of growing at this level, though of course not every region will achieve that every year. To deliver our EUR 10 billion goal in six years would see us growing by 27% a year, while getting there in eight years would mean annual growth of 20%. We plan to grow marketplace to 50% of NMV and platform services to between 5% and 10% of revenue.
We expect this growth to deliver a gross margin of about 50% over time. Our increasing scale and cost leverage will increase profitability. We're targeting a 10% adjusted EBITDA margin within six-eight years. On the way to this long-term goal, in a year with normal CapEx, we expect the business to be cash flow neutral at a margin of 6%. We know that developing our technology and fulfillment infrastructure is important both to our customers and brand partners, so we're planning CapEx at around 3% of revenue, excluding major fulfillment center expansions. To conclude, we have a significant growth opportunity given the low fashion e-commerce penetration in our markets. We also have a strong track record of delivery for both our customers and brand partners.
We are leading the change in sustainability across our industry and markets, and our business expansion is supported by a clear financial strategy to deliver strong and profitable growth. Thank you.