Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz (KASE:KSPI)
Kazakhstan flag Kazakhstan · Delayed Price · Currency is KZT
40,305
+355 (0.89%)
At close: May 4, 2026
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: Q1 2022

Apr 25, 2022

Operator

Hey, buddy.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Thanks very much, Harry. Good afternoon or good morning to everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2022 results call. As usual, we have the full team on the call. Mikheil Lomtadze, CEO and Co-Founder. Yuri Didenko, Tengiz Mosidze, Deputy CEOs, and myself, David Ferguson. We'll take the usual format. Mikheil will run you through the sort of key strategic developments. I'll run you through the key financials, and then the whole team is available for Q&A. On that note, I'll hand over to Mikheil. Mikheil, please go ahead.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Hello, everyone. We'll be presenting our first Q1 2022 numbers. Our team has really executed strongly despite the challenging environment. If you go through some of the highlights, you know, my section in general would be, as David suggested, you know, always picking up on the important strategic developments as well. On the payment side, I mean, payments continue to grow extremely strongly. Revenue generating TPV +60%, you know, revenue 59% and net income 73% on the payment side. You know, our bottom line growing faster than revenue on the payment side because of enormous network effect and operating leverage for this business. In the marketplace, we have grown 50% on the GMV.

Starting from this quarter, we are reporting in the GMV and some of the KPIs as travel business, as travel has become a very important part of our business very fast. I will have a couple of slides about this. We have it through the presentation. Revenue plus 40% in the marketplace, net income 39% growth year-over-year. The fintech plus 21% on TFV, revenue 43%, net income 39%. On the fintech side, we have this sort of standard playbook, how we manage this business when we have the, you know, challenging times or lack of visibility on the macro side. We basically just reduce the origination, but we can ramp up it quickly.

You have actually seen this multiple times during the COVID, especially, for example, what we have done. So we know this business really well. We know exactly what needs to be done. On the consolidated side of things, we have remarkable transaction growth, 63% transaction growth per active consumer. Transaction is one of the sort of most important, not only KPIs, but also this is how we make money, right? So we make payment fees, seller fees, and we make also interest when we fund the purchases. So transactions itself are extremely important for us, and it's very important number. Revenues have grown 45%. Very strong growth on the revenue side. The net income is up 49%, again, growing faster just because of operating leverage in our business.

Here are some of the sort of transaction and app KPIs. The transactions have grown 63%. Now in the first Q, we have over 53 transactions a month per consumer. That's extremely encouraging. I mean, you basically see that we constantly drive that number. Our mobile app is used on a daily basis, and we will soon cross almost two transactions a day per consumer. That's one of the highest transactional models in any comparable business in any other market. DAU to MAU, that's basically follows the transaction. Now 63%, which means over six out of 10 monthly users are coming daily to our app. Our app extremely important for our users and shows this remarkable engagement.

DAU is growing 34%, very good growth, and the MAU 14%. If you look at our business model, we build the user base, then we grow the engagement, and we also grow the sort of transactions or the business around the user. We have multiple levels of growth, and all of them continue growing nicely, but most importantly, transactions which we basically monetize directly or indirectly. Here you have in action our strategy which we've launched in 2020, when we basically said that the merchants are our important priority. We have grown the merchants and merchant stores to 292,000, which is 233% growth year-over-year. The merchants again, extremely important.

A couple of years ago, we've been a consumer-driven business, and now we're both consumer and the merchant-driven business. Our foundation, again, as we've done with the consumers, is to grow the merchant base, then grow engagement with the merchants, delivering additional services, and basically drive the business around the merchant. Again, sort of three-step strategy, acquire, engage, monetize. Here you have this in action, and we continue growing merchants, and we're very bullish, and that remains our priority for this year. Here you have another trend around the merchants. As we onboard the merchants, payments is the step number one with the merchants. Pretty much the same as with the consumers. We are onboarding merchants very strongly, and we are also building the network of the payments on the foundation of those merchants.

Our POS devices in the first Q now cross 300,000 POS devices. Again, we have here only year-over-year comparison, but if you take 2020, this business was virtually nonexistent. Now 85% of all the transactions are done through our proprietary network, and only 15% is done through third-party acquiring networks or devices. Extremely important trend. We'll continue building up the network of devices which again enable us to control the entire value chain and interaction from a consumer and the merchant. When consumer goes to the merchant and transacts with our Super App.

Therefore, you know, we control the entire value chain and economics of this business, and continuously monetize also indirectly by providing different services for merchants and consumers on the back of data which we acquire during those transactions. We have launched last year a e-Grocery business jointly with the largest food retailer, Magnum. Growth has been extremely high. Again, I just would like to reinforce this is only one city, and we're just scratching the surface with this opportunity. We're talking about, you know, the total food retail market around, you know, depending on estimate, but KZT 12 billion. Here we are launching this sort of disruption jointly with the major retailer.

The grocery GMV has grown almost 23x , and the purchases have grown 23x . The average ticket is about $18. It just tells you that this is not just an engagement tool. Actually, it's a very solid economics because the ticket is a good size. The consumers that are generating this growth have grown 10x , and only 56,000 of them in the first Q. We're growing extremely rapidly. We're planning to enter another city during the year, actually quite soon. We're planning to add another dark store in Almaty, which is the biggest city in Kazakhstan. This business is ready to scale. We're just focused on the growth really. Consumer feedback has been incredible. Retention rates are huge.

If you just take numbers into perspective, you know, number of active consumers grown only 10x , but actually purchases have grown 23x . This tells you that every sort of consumers retained are just transacting more and more as soon as from the moment when they join our platform. We're also constantly increasing the number of SKUs which are delivered to the consumers. We're also speeding up the delivery. Most of the deliveries are actually done very, very fast and within the day. That's important opportunity for us for the year. The take rate is also very healthy on the marketplace side, 3.2%. On top of it, there is a Kaspi Pay transactional fee of 0.95%.

Very good business for us and top priority for next couple of years. Another business which we have developed and started to grow last year is B2B payments. Now, that business is again an indication of how we are actually building our businesses. Some innovations are coming just because we believe we can just launch completely new business like travel, for example, and start growing really fast. But there are some use cases which are coming from our existing consumers and merchants. When we see that they're using our existing products for their own needs, and then we start developing the targeted products for them, and we intensify the growth. This is an example when actually some of our P2P transactions have been used by micro merchants, wholesalers.

They really love the idea of instantly getting paid and seamlessly getting paid. As a result, we took this use case last year and segmented out this business and started to develop a highly tailored products for wholesalers, basically. The idea of this business is quite simple. I mean, wholesalers would have their invoices distributed through our Kaspi Pay solution, and then the convenience store which they deliver the goods, for example, they will scan those invoices and immediately pay them to the wholesaler. Very fast-growing business. Take rate 0.9 on those significant volumes. We've grown this almost 10 times, and we just started last year. It's already a significant part of our revenue-generating TPV.

I mean, with these growth rates, we've achieved 2% of revenue-generating TPV in the first Q. We're just starting to grow this business. Opportunity is huge, and we're onboarding more wholesalers and also the merchants that are acquiring goods from them. Another opportunity with what we're doing is we're building the last mile delivery network. Postomat was also launched last year. We actually in April will already have 1,000 of them. The Postomats are already almost 9% of our delivered orders on our e-Commerce side. And again, this is roughly about 20%-30% cheaper to operate than actual delivery by courier. But from consumer experience, it shows a remarkable Net Promoter Score, very high quality, positive feedback, just because consumers don't really have to interact with anyone.

They can conveniently pick up their items on the way home. We are on track to deliver around 3,000 lockers during this year, and that will be a game changer, both in terms of delivery economics, but also the value that we can create for merchants that are joining our delivery smart logistics platform and also consumers that can conveniently pick up items. We have been also driving travel. You know that, travel we launched basically in 2020, nonexistent business for us. We've acquired a small company as a platform, rebranded it quickly, integrated within three months, integrated with our Super App. Now the GMV of Kaspi Travel is 9% of the total GMV of our marketplace. We have enabled the 2.1 million purchases in the first Q.

The GMV has grown over 5x to KZT 37 billion. That's a very significant business for us, and we both enable airline tickets and rail railway ticket sales. We are now the largest player on the market. As it has become such a significant business for our marketplace, we'll be reporting this as a part of the GMV going forward. We'll be providing more details on the travel itself. Very exciting business opportunity. A lot of growth. We see the growth from airline and railway tickets, but we also have a couple of business ideas how we expand the services around the travel. Very exciting opportunity for us and being part of our marketplace business.

We have also launched together with the state bodies, with the Ministry of Digital Development and their subsidiaries. We've worked really hard to enable Kazakhstan citizens to access their documents through our Super App. Now, that basically has been a remarkable success. We just launched it several weeks ago. You know, consumers can access ID card, marriage certificate, you know, driver's license and so on and so forth. So basically, all your sort of documents will be digitally accessed through their Super App. Already airlines are accepting the ID card from our app when the consumers are boarding the planes inside the country.

Very exciting product and the service done jointly with the government, which basically enables people not to carry paper documents anymore with them. If we look at the adoption of this service has been remarkable. Again, I mean, or if you calculate unique users across all the services, then over 1.5 million users have accessed the service during the first weeks from the launch. Again, I mean, the government services, the mission here is just to give access to the regular citizens to a lot of government services seamlessly online. Now people can access the digital documents, people can register the car, get the vaccination certificate. There are other services around businesses, like people can register business.

There is a very broad range of services, especially accessible through the government services and we will continue developing those. They are extremely relevant for our Super App. They are extremely relevant for the users. This is increasing their engagement as well, and also extremely important for the country as a company like Kaspi.kz, you know, doing these services, enabling distribution of government services to regular citizens. Very exciting product we'll continue developing. This is one of the latest additions to our product suite on the government services side. Okay, David, so back to you.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Thank you, Mikheil. I'll run through now the performance of each of the three respective platforms and then the 2022 full-year financial guidance. Starting on the Payments Platform. We've always talked about Payments Platform as the sort of the engine of the Kaspi Super App. What you see here is that even in the context of increased macro volatility, the underlying drivers of our business and our Payments Platform remain very, very strong. Namely, merchants up 252% year-on-year to 292,000. That is again ongoing strong execution of the strategy Mikheil talked about, the rollout principally of Kaspi Pay. Despite the fact that the Payments Platform is our relatively most mature platform, again, here you see still very solid.

Growth in the number of consumers up 23% year-on-year to ten million. That is actually very consistent. Both these trends are consistent with what you were seeing in the second half of last year. If we then think about what that means from volume perspective, here too, a similar message to the message that we communicated in the second half of last year. Strong growth in total payment volumes, funds flowing into the ecosystem up 46% year-on-year. More importantly, this is now the third quarter where RTPV monetized volumes are growing at a materially faster rate than TPV. This hasn't happened by accident. This is a result of the strategy to onboard merchants to roll out Kaspi Pay.

As long as growth in new merchants to the platform remains strong, and given that there's a period from a merchant signing up to sort of migrating their volumes over to our ecosystem, RTPV should also remain very, very strong going forward in the first quarter, up 60% year-on-year. Here you see the breakdown of revenue-generating payment volumes. As discussed, the bulk of the growth in RTPV is being driven, and its outlook is dependent on success of the rollout of B2C or Kaspi Pay payments. What you also see here is the growing share of B2B payments.

Whilst you might initially be dismissive and say, "Well, 2% doesn't sound like a big number," if you think about that in the context of a RTPV base of KZT 3.6 trillion tenge, it is a substantial number, and it's a number that's growing very quickly on the one hand. On the other hand, this can just be the start for B2B in that it can enable us to develop other merchant-specific products going forward. Interest-free balances, again, another good lead indicator for health of this ecosystem. This is people moving funds to Kaspi with a view to transacting with Kaspi, up 44% year-on-year. A very, very decent number at almost no slowdown versus the second half of last year. Again, money in the ecosystem will be spent in subsequent quarters.

For our payment business, what you see is that strong RTPV growth translated into strong revenue growth, and then the combination of lower sales and marketing activity in the quarter, tight cost control, and the ongoing benefits of shifting payments from third parties to our own proprietary payment network drove decent margin progression in the quarter. 62% net income margin up from 57%, with net income growth at 73% ahead of revenue. As we go into subsequent quarters, it would be fair to say that you won't see the same level of benefit. A lot of that sort of elimination of third party costs has now played out and will be less for our use in Q2 and going forward.

In the first quarter, clearly the payments division had a very, very strong standout performance, and its outlook is equally strong, going forward. Moving on to marketplace. Marketplace also, again, despite all the sort of macro volatility and geopolitical news flow, continued to also produce very, very robust numbers. What you see here is, again, evidence that the strategy is translating into the numbers. Having focused on dramatically accelerating payment merchants since the second half of the last year, you're now seeing that translate into very, very strong growth in marketplace merchants. Growth of 346% year-on-year to 163,000 merchants, that is actually a material acceleration on the run rates that we were seeing in the fourth quarter of this year.

More merchants, more SKUs attract more consumers and will translate into more transactions and GMV growth over the medium term. You see that playing out. Consumer growth up 50% year-on-year to 5 million consumers. Still some way to go in terms of cross-penetration of the user base with marketplace, but very healthy numbers to date. Now, one of the things we've also talked about on the strategy last year and this year is we add more merchants. What we're trying to do is increase our relevance so that you can purchase consumers can purchase all their regular day-to-day transactions, purchases, goods through Kaspi. That typically means lower price points.

What you have seen and you will continue to see is the number of purchases grows at a faster rate, 102% than GMV. GMV is diluted by lower ticket sizes. That's a strategic decision, but with growth in purchases of 102% year-on-year or 21 million purchases, our relevance to our user base is only increasing. Marketplace take rate is impacted by a couple of factors. It's impacted by number one, lower promotional activity to some extent in January, but particularly in March. Lower promotional activity nukes both GMV growth, and it nukes take rate. Merchants pay a higher take rate to participate in marketing campaigns, number one. Growth in supermarkets, number two, and growth in travel, number three.

Those three things all combined led to lower marketplace take rate year-over-year, 7.5% down from 8%. I'd also expect marketing activity to gradually ramp up again, particularly in the second half of the year. That will have positive implications both for GMV growth and for take rate later on during the course of the year. The other point just to make on this slide, and Mikhail touched on it earlier. Following the success of Kaspi Travel, which we've taken really from start-up to the number one online travel operator in the country today, our marketplace business now comprises three material segments, mCommerce, e-Commerce, and Kaspi Travel, all fast growing, especially Kaspi Travel, and a more diverse, more relevant overall proposition to our consumers.

Breaking it down, this is the first time also that we've broken out take rate by the respective components mCommerce, e-Commerce, and Travel. What you see here is the point that I made earlier, that purchases up 89% year-on-year are at a faster rate than GMV, up 66% year-on-year. There is some take rate dilution there in mCommerce. Still, both numbers are very, very, very strong. You see that the mCommerce take rate is 7.4%, muted in part by the absence of promotional campaigns and growth in the supermarket vertical. Looking at e-Commerce, the trend is more pronounced, i.e., number of purchases up 71%, but GMV up 14%. Here you should bear in mind that e-Commerce ticket sizes are higher than mCommerce ticket sizes, and they are therefore more promo sensitive.

That is one factor, but also the factor, again, that it is particularly e-Commerce where we're adding more SKUs at lower price points. Both of those factors will play their part, but higher promotional activity will also ensure that GMV growth accelerates as we go into the second half of the year. Again, you see the take rate here split out for e-Commerce, and I would just say here that the take rate is higher for e-Commerce, and that just reflects higher value items versus m-Commerce. The point about adding more SKUs and it having a dilutive impact on ticket sizes and GMV growth, here is the dramatic progress we've made. This relates to e-Commerce specifically. You can see, again, the strategic objective was to dramatically increase the number of merchants, number one.

To dramatically increase the number of SKUs, number two, with a view to adding more consumers and more transactions per consumer. Here you see number of SKUs up 2.4x year-on-year to 1.6 million. There are other parts of the marketplace strategy. One, adding more merchants and SKUs. Another is adding free delivery, now available to 95% of consumers. Free for the consumer. 53% of orders delivered within two days or less. You can see that the consumers are taking up this product proposition with great enthusiasm. Number of orders delivered up 107% year-on-year to 2.3 million. Kaspi Travel that we now include in marketplace GMV.

Very, very strong growth additive to overall marketplace GMV growth, but a similar trend for slightly different reasons, i.e., GMV growing 5.1 x, number of tickets sold growing 8.9x . That is the reason is the rapid growth in domestic rail bookings, which is a lower ticket size item. The offset being is also higher take rate, and you see here the Kaspi Travel take rate has moved up year-over-year to 3.5%. A very, very healthy take rate. All combined, what you see here is strong revenue growth, up 40% year-over-year with broadly stable profitability.

The combination of tight cost control and lower marketing activity has broadly offset investment in free delivery, which we have ramped up substantially over the last 12 months. Finally moving on to the Fintech platform. The messaging here is the same. A lot of macro volatility, particularly with regard to FX. Actually in terms of our consumer behavior, you see that very little has changed versus the fourth quarter of last year. Deposit customers, deposit base growing very healthily, up 32% year-on-year, and a broadly similar rate of growth in loan customers, up 39% year-on-year to 5 million. What Mikheil talked about earlier is that the playbook during periods of increased volatility, we take a more conservative approach to origination.

In practice, how that sort of manifests itself is in lower average. Well, in two ways. One, lower average ticket sizes, and two, a shift to buy now, pay later, which in itself is lower ticket size. Here you see that lower origination continues to grow, albeit at a lower rate, +21% year-over-year. You can look back in our presentations from 2020 during a much more sort of severe economic shock, and you can see both how quickly we scaled down TFV, and again, later on in the year, how quickly we were able to ramp it up. Conversion trends 2.2x. That suggests the consumer is healthy in terms of borrowing, repaying, borrowing, repaying, a pattern actually consistent with pretty much what you saw throughout last year.

I mentioned it previously, so lower origination takes a couple of forms. It takes the form of lower ticket size, number one, and it takes the form of a shift to buy now, pay later. Buy now, pay later is lower yielding, so you will see that play out over the course of the year. The nature of the buy now, pay later product, i.e., small ticket, short duration, means that it is also lower risk. That helps us maintain lower cost of risk, even in the context of a more challenging economic environment and limited macro visibility. Here, if you look at the loan portfolio, the loan portfolio growth of 67% year-on-year, it's important to look at that in the context of higher origination in the second half of last year.

Lower origination in the first quarter of this year will impact net portfolio growth as this year progresses. Savings, again, to my point earlier around some of the sort of news flow around economic effects, particularly volatility, you see our deposit base continues to grow at a nice rate. Our loans to deposit ratio has now normalized from low levels during COVID, and we see that sort of level of around 80%. That sort of region as being optimal going forward. Shift to buy now, pay later last year, and again this year does manifest itself in lower yield, and that is consistent with the guidance that we provided to the market at the end of February. In terms of credit quality, we specifically stated that we see high levels of credit quality.

If you look here at things like first payment, second payment defaults, delinquency rates, what you see is still very, very low levels of default delinquency. Yes, it is higher than in 2020. We flagged that before. 2020 was a year where there was an extremely low level. There was a trade-off, very low level of origination, albeit to the highest quality of users. The trends we see here are consistent with longstanding trends, and that includes also a normal sort of seasonal increase or uptick in Q1 following the sort of Christmas holiday period. It's a similar message on loss rate vintages and collection vintages. The long run trend, namely of us improving our origination capabilities, better collection capabilities continues to play out here.

As a result, underlying credit cost of risk has improved year-over-year. Again, this is on the back of us getting better at origination, better at collection, albeit macro provisioning has gone up 1.7%, and that is macro provisioning, simply more cautious GDP assumptions for 2022. By the end of 2022, those GDP assumptions are amortized out, and you're left with your underlying risk. NPL ratios remain broadly similar. Again, I talked about a normal sort of uptick in first quarter seasonality. What I would stress here is that we don't see is any sort of real material impact either related to the civil unrest in January or the effects from the sort of Russia-Ukraine war in March. We continue to see normal consumer and credit behavior.

We'll continue to take a cautious approach to origination over the next quarter, but as implied by our guidance, we would also expect to be able to gradually ramp up origination as we move into the second half of the year, and that would be consistent with maintaining low cost of risk for the year. Overall for the Fintech Platform, strong revenue growth. This is on the back of the strong origination in the second half of 2021. That translates into strong net income growth, and there are mixed factors in there. On the positive, again, you have tight cost control and lower market activity. That's a theme across the entire business, albeit slightly offset by the ramp up in macro provisioning and lower yield.

Overall, in the context of a challenging macro environment, the most macro sensitive part of our business continues to post very robust numbers that remain consistent with our guidance that we provided to you in February. To wrap things all up, overall, a strong quarter revenue growth up 45% year-on-year. Dropping through to bottom line gearing margins up 43% from 43%, sorry, to 44.3%, 49% year-on-year growth. The message is the same as I've said several times previously, tight cost control, lower sales and marketing activity combined with the elimination of third-party costs in the payment business particularly, overall delivers very robust bottom line growth.

In terms of the 2022 guidance, this is the guidance that we provided to you in February, excluding, at that point Kaspi Travel was not part of of marketplace GMV. When we gave that guidance, we had built in the Russia-Ukraine conflict had commenced. We had built in conservative planning assumptions for the year and that guidance we're happy to reiterate today. Going forward, we will guide including Kaspi Travel, and that is the only difference between these two slides. In the interests of transparency, we've provided both to today, but going forward, the business is being operated and guidance will include Kaspi Travel.

At this stage, we're very happy to reiterate our guidance of 20%-30% year-on-year growth, and that is even taking into account our very limited macro visibility and high volatility that we see to date. On that note, I will pause. I'll ask Harry to open the call up to Q&A, and the full team are available to answer your questions. Harry, over to you.

Operator

Thank you, David. As a quick reminder, if you'd like to ask a question today, please use the raise hand button that you can find on your Zoom toolbar if you've joined the call via Zoom. If you're dialing in over the phone, please dial star followed by one. We'll just leave a moment for any questions to be registered. Our first question is from Mikhail Butkov. Mikhail, your line will be open now. If you'd like to unmute locally, proceed with your question.

Mikhail Butkov
Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Yes, good day. Thank you very much for the presentation. A couple of quick questions. Firstly, how did your acceptance rates for new loans have changed since the macro challenges have began? When can you roll them back to previous levels again? The second question is a little bit similar. You mentioned that you scaled down the investments into the marketing in the marketplace. What metrics will you be looking at to consider that you now can invest more and increase the investments into the marketplace? Finally, that is almost one more month of the second quarter. Can you provide any indications of changes in the underlying asset quality trends? Is there any deterioration or it remains stable? Thank you.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Thanks for your questions, Mikhail. I'll pass those questions on to Mikheil to give his view.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Sure. Okay. On the loans, the loan approval rates, I understand was the first question. I mean, in general, again, for the new consumers, again, the way we always do is that we work, as David explained, on the number of consumers. We basically are reducing the ticket size rather than not approving a consumer. Our approval rates in general are quite solid. We are reducing the origination. We're reducing the amounts. And yeah.

The one thing I can also say that in general, if you think about the sort of this year or the medium term, the visibility, the demand for our products, has not been that high in our history. The demand is there. It's just we are mindful about the visibility. We're mindful about making sure that we perform according to our mission, improving people's lives, which means we're not driven by the short-term performance. We do those changes pretty much every time when we see that consumers are not as confident as usual in terms of their spending.

I would say this is our managed decisions, which we take in those type of circumstances. Second question was the marketing. I have to clarify. What we call here is the promotional activity, and the promotional activity means running the marketing campaigns on the marketplace, which are promotional campaigns for selling the items. That's not the usual marketing investment, what you would say, right? It's just the promotional campaigns. We will slow down the promotional campaigns in January because of the January events, obviously. We've slowed down the marketing communication in March as well. Partially, the reason for it was also the fact that you have a lot of merchants, you know, this fluctuation of the pricing on their items.

The merchants themselves, they were a bit adjusting to the environment. The March was basically just the kind of month when you don't really want to run the promotional campaigns because the prices have been changing, you know, up and down during the March quite frequently. That's. We're talking not about marketing investment. We're actually talking about running promotional campaigns together with the merchants and for the merchants to increase their sales. On top of it, in March, some of the merchants did experience some shortage of the items and things like that just because distribution networks have been also impacted. Traditional routes of delivering items have been impacted during March. Now in April, we see a pickup.

As David explained, you know, we're resuming the promotional activity. We're helping merchants to grow their sales. Asset quality, again, we're extremely sort of experiencing that. Our guidance, as we said, you know, is standing for the year. We don't see any deterioration in the asset quality. Again, the asset quality is a result of things which we have described. The asset quality, you cannot just take on a standalone basis. We actually do manage our asset quality, which means we take the right decisions at the right time, and therefore the asset quality is there, and we don't see any deterioration in April. I mean, if the question was about April. We also stand by our guidance for the year.

Mikhail Butkov
Equity Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Thank you very much. Very clear. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Mikhail. Our next question is from Gabor Kemeny. Gabor, your line will be open now if you'd like to proceed with your question.

Gabor Kemeny
Managing Director, Autonomous Research

Yes, thank you. Hi, everyone. Another question on asset quality from me. You are showing in the presentation that the loss rate in the loss rate vintages that the loss rates have been increasing in the new origination. Now, I understand you manage the asset quality very proactively with cutting like the approvals, the amounts. My question is, how confident are you about re-accelerating new lending in this environment when the risks seem to have increased? Another question on asset quality is on the macro overlay provisions which you created in Q1, and I understand you expect this to reverse in the next few quarters. Can you talk a bit about the assumptions here? 'Cause what...

Why do you exactly assume that they will reverse, and why did you create those provisions then in the first place? Just a final question on the e-Grocery market. Can you help us size the addressable market, here? I think you mentioned the KZT 12 billion figure, but I wasn't sure what that referred to. Thank you.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Okay, Gabor. Thank you for your questions. I'll ask Mikhail again to continue on the sort of the asset quality question and the supermarket market opportunity question. I'll just take the macro provision. Effectively it's GDP. We take assumptions for a number of different forecasts, Economist Intelligence Unit, Ministry of Finance and so on, and it just reflects real-time what they are forecasting. Those forecasts are all sort of publicly available. I can help you source the numbers offline, but it's a relatively mechanical process, and therefore, really what is important is the underlying real-time sort of credit risk quality, which is what actually has improved year-on-year. Okay, David, can you pull out the slide with the vintage?

Gabor Kemeny
Managing Director, Autonomous Research

Yeah.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

I think Gabor was referring to it. No vintages, the previous one. Great. Thank you. Okay. First of all, I mean, there are two comments in general. Number one comment: there is always a seasonality on the credit quality in the first Q against a fourth Q. I mean, the first Q usually it's delinquencies are a bit higher historically, and the main reason for it is because there are a bunch of holidays and the discipline of payments during the holidays time is just a bit worse. It doesn't mean that people are getting delinquent because we do have a process. We work with our consumers, so the consumers get back on track quite quickly.

That's number one. Number two, what David actually said, you should be benchmarking credit quality against a 2020. Because in 2020, I mean, in the second quarter and the third quarter, we had pretty much no origination. It was completely minimal. Just because of the COVID restrictions, people were at home. They didn't really have to buy anything, and they shouldn't be getting loans because there is no purchases behind those. As a result, we basically had a super minimal origination and only to the highest quality consumers when we had the confidence that this money was actually needed being used and specifically people actually could spend it. That's basically the two points about the vintages.

The vintages are. I wouldn't call them the risk is picking up. There is natural seasonality, and there is a back on track in terms of the volumes and therefore you cannot have like if you look at the second Q, I mean, we had a second payment default close to zero. I mean, this is not normal. I think about, you know, second payment default about 0.5, that's as good as it can get, and we're just normalizing sort of post-COVID. We don't see material impact from neither January events or from the March. We're quite confident in the credit risk. In terms of the food market, I mean, the food market, you know, there are different estimates.

You know, our estimate is roughly about in excess of $12 billion and more, and that's the $12 billion size of the food retail. We do believe that that's a huge market. Usually, based on our estimates, roughly the household is spending around 20%-30% of their budget on the food and related purchases. This is an opportunity for us just because, you know, we enable the purchases straight from the app delivered to your door. We have this incredible retention rates when consumers don't leave the app. Once they do basically multiple purchases, they get used to it, they repeat those purchases. Yeah. I mean, it's a really exciting opportunity. It's huge.

You know, when we're talking about the travel, we said the travel airlines roughly was a billion-dollar opportunity. Here we're talking, you know, 10, 15x bigger opportunity in food retail. The total market is huge. We just need to execute and make sure that the consumer experience remains incredible high quality as we scale our business, which grows you know extremely rapidly. We just need to make sure that we maintain the high-quality service, and that's our number one priority.

Gabor Kemeny
Managing Director, Autonomous Research

Thank you, Mikheil. That is $12 billion.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Yes.

Gabor Kemeny
Managing Director, Autonomous Research

Of current market size without taking into account future growth?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Yes. Correct.

Gabor Kemeny
Managing Director, Autonomous Research

Got it. Just on David's point on the GDP revision. The negative GDP revisions basically required you to set aside these provisions which you expect to reverse based on your underlying asset quality trends you see. Is this correct?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Yeah. It has nothing to do with asset quality. It's just the GDP growth assumptions which we take public sources as given. If you actually take our previous presentations during COVID times, we did exactly the same, and we reported the market provisions, and we amortized those market provisions over the course of a year. It was exactly the same exercise we went through during the COVID lockdowns.

Gabor Kemeny
Managing Director, Autonomous Research

That's very clear. Thank you.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Thank you.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Just, Gabor, to add on your question around TFV origination. It's just to manage expectations, if you look at the acceleration that's implied by the guidance, this isn't gonna happen overnight, and it is going to be weighted, not to Q2, but towards the second half of the year. It will be gradual, and it will be second half weighted, so you should just bear that in mind.

Gabor Kemeny
Managing Director, Autonomous Research

All clear. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Gabor. Our next question is from Sergey Dubin. Sergey, your line will be open now if you'd like to proceed with your question.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Hi, Sergei. You might be on mute. We can't hear you.

Operator

Hi, Sergey. Please ensure that your line is unmuted locally and then proceed with your question. It appears we're having issues connecting with Sergey's audio, so we'll just move on to our next question from. Sorry, one moment. We have it from Sam Griffiths. Sam, your line will be open now if you'd like to proceed with your question.

Sam Griffiths
Analyst, Vergent Asset Management

Yeah. Hi, gents. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is on cost of funds. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing there? Is this a period where you really need to start being more defensive and maybe raise rates more than you otherwise would need in a more benign environment? Some comments there will be helpful. Additionally to that, why are term deposits so high in the funding mix? If customers aren't using the Kaspi ecosystem for yield, then wouldn't we expect higher CASA in that funding mix? The next question, can you talk a little bit about the challenges that you see in migrating merchants from m-Commerce to e-Commerce?

Migrating from payments to m-Commerce makes a lot of sense, and I guess it's relatively easy to do, but are there challenges migrating them from m-Commerce to e-Commerce? Thank you.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Thanks for your questions, Sam. I think maybe I'll pass all three of those to Mikheil.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Yeah, sure. On cost of funds, this is a very good question. Basically, we have already done so. Our guidance actually incorporates us increasing the rates on the deposits. The deposit rates are, you know, capped in Kazakhstan by the deposit insurance fund, and they have increased the maximum rate you can charge to 13%, and before that it was 10%. We have increased this to 13% already. That was done in March, I think. That's number one on the cost of funds. In general, I would say that, you know, we have, on our fintech side of the things, we have a huge demand on the lending side.

That basically means that, you know, our growth is actually we could grow faster if we would have ability to raise more deposits. But the way that we run our business is that we think it's not appropriate to go for capital markets and raise U.S. dollar or the foreign currency denominated funding because our business is in tenge. Therefore, you know, we basically are just, you know, focused on internal market, and yeah. We are competing very successfully with other players for the consumer savings, and that's our important priority for this year. The second question was about the term deposits. Now, the term deposits are high.

In general, the way that you know we build these high quality products for our consumers, and consumers can actually move money seamlessly between their current accounts and deposits. Consumer behavior that you have in general means people have what we call their sort of daily needs account, which is the Kaspi Gold, where they can spend the money for the immediate purchases. They can fund the deposit seamlessly through the app. As a result, you know, term deposits are quite. It's just a product where consumers are accumulating for some medium-term purchases. Both products are very high quality and consumers love it, but there's the difference. It's not like people keep all the money on the interest-free accounts.

I mean, they keep some on the interest-free accounts for immediate spending, and then they keep the rest on their deposits where they fund the medium-term purchases, you know, which are higher ticket, let's say car or maybe apartment in the future. That's the difference, and that's why the term deposits are, you know, usually quite high. On the merchants and migrating the merchants. Now, basically what you actually have is the merchants on board for payments, everybody accepts the payments, right? The mobile commerce, virtually most of the merchants that accept payments actually would like to sell to get on our platform, get listed as a merchant, but also sell with buy now, pay later products.

When we talk about e-Commerce, e-Commerce. The difference between e-Commerce and the mobile commerce from the merchant's perspective, number one, you need to have items which you can list. I mean, for example, if you are a barber shop, I mean, you are not fit for the e-Commerce, right? You are fit for mobile commerce. If you are a shop which is selling actual items, sort of, I don't know, electronics or garden or things like that, then for home, the furniture, then those are the type of merchants which are meant to get on e-Commerce. Now, e-Commerce is the. If mobile commerce, you're listing yourself as a business. e-Commerce, you are listing your items which you sell.

There is a little bit of a more work to be done because you need to list the items, you need to monitor the pricing. Launching marketing campaigns looks a bit different. If in m-Commerce, you're launching marketing campaign for your entire store. In the e-Commerce, you're launching marketing campaign and the promotional campaign for specific items. The conversion, not 100% of m-Commerce merchants are fit for e-Commerce, but the e-Commerce itself, even though it's a bit difficult or it's a bit more time-consuming for merchants to join because of assortment management tools. We're constantly developing those tools to increase the speed to listing, speed to sale, and also the delivery helps a lot. Now Postomats are incredibly well received by the merchants.

As we develop the new tools for the merchants, I think the merchants will be increasingly moving to e-Commerce. It will be basically catching up. First fastest growth is payments, then the m-Commerce is catching up with the payments, and then e-Commerce is catching up with the m-Commerce. Not 100% of e-Commerce m-Commerce will be on e-Commerce, but anyone who can actually sell the item will be on e-Commerce, and the Net Promoter Score of those merchants is really high. We actually have a huge demand for the e-Commerce platform, and we are within the next basically shortly, we're rolling out a fully redesigned onboarding cabinet for e-Commerce to enable merchants to faster onboard.

Yeah, e-Commerce has a very strong demand from the merchants.

Sam Griffiths
Analyst, Vergent Asset Management

Thanks, Mikhail. Can I stick a couple of quick-fire follow-ups in that?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Go ahead.

Sam Griffiths
Analyst, Vergent Asset Management

The term deposits are at 13%. Were they at 10% before this rate, this hike?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

I don't recall the exact numbers. Do we have them in the presentation? In general, we don't really.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

10%-13%, yes.

Sam Griffiths
Analyst, Vergent Asset Management

Okay, great. Roughly speaking, how many merchants do you think that you have now on your platform can eventually be migrated to e-Commerce?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

I mean, the way we evaluate the merchants is we do almost the same kind of risk quality metrics for the merchants to onboard them. The way basically it works in our case, if you're a merchant on e-Commerce, you will get an offer to onboard on e-Commerce, right? That's the preferred route for us. For that, we'll score you for the volumes. We'll score you for the quality. We'll score you actually for a credit risk because we want to fund your business in the future. Out of, let's say, 100 merchants that you have of m-Commerce, you know, roughly about, you know, 50%-60% of those merchants would be qualified for e-Commerce.

Qualified for e-Commerce and actually getting onboarded by us, it just takes a bit of a time because the merchants need to, you know, learn all the tools, and they have to get comfortable with managing their assortment, pricing in real time. The difference of our business from other e-Commerce platforms is that we are working with a huge number of merchants, and most of those merchants are offline merchants. It's not like they have experience of working with other e-Commerce players. You know, for us, we are basically their number one, sort of, the first entry to the e-Commerce world.

That's a very important point because as we educate those merchants, as we are sort of first one to teach them our tools, you know, then the switching costs of those merchants are much higher than they would be sort of e-Commerce merchants working with multiple platforms and so on and so forth. The retention rates are also extremely high. It will take a time, and the e-Commerce will be catching up. We already see this year that we are onboarding e-Commerce at least two times faster more merchants than last year. On top of it, you know, the merchants are also learning.

I mean, we also see a lot of merchants, some merchants that have been selling smartphones, now they're selling home and garden equipment. It's really exciting actually to see how we help merchants to grow. That would be the numbers. You know, around two-thirds of the merchants you know, 50%-60% of the merchants would qualify for e-Commerce. I mean, I'm talking now because we are onboarding a lot of micro merchants as we speak.

Sam Griffiths
Analyst, Vergent Asset Management

That's great. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Sam. Apologies there. Our next question is from Simon Nellis. Simon, your line will be open now if you'd like to proceed with your question.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Oh, hi. Thanks very much. Hi, Mikheil, David. Thanks for the opportunity. I was hoping you could maybe just elaborate a bit more on e-Grocery, just on the partnership. What are the terms? Do you have exclusivity? Why did you choose them? Also just on the economics, if you can elaborate on what kind of costs are involved for you, what kind of profit margins you might expect going forward. Yeah, that would be helpful. Sounds like an exciting new venture and good to see that it's growing rapidly. Second question would just be, could you give us an update on any regulatory initiatives? I know there was talk about a new bankruptcy law. Has that gone into effect? Do you see any impacts there?

There was some talk about potentially rate caps on consumer loans. What's the latest on that? Yeah, any regulatory issues you think worth highlighting? Thanks.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Thanks, Simon. Questions on e-Grocery and regulation, I think for Mikhail.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Sure. Basically, I mean, we work with multiple grocery companies on the supermarket side of things. In last year we have actually realized, and our team has done incredible job. We have actually realized that it takes a lot of time to convince any leading offline retailer to be comfortable with e-Commerce concept, because they are usually defensive. They're usually, you know, love building stores rather than, you know, using the technology to sell, basically to sell more. They are in the store business. We have decided that considering how much effort it actually takes from us, we have decided to select simply number one. I mean, Magnum is by far number one food retailer in the country.

You know, basically, I don't know, multiple times bigger market share. We have decided we would focus on Magnum for the size of it, the brand which consumers know and like, and we would enable our technology to show them that actually, the e-Grocery can bring them sales and can be also profitable and operational, super efficient. As a result, the business model that we have with the Magnum as a standalone partner is that we have a dedicated section for Magnum in our app. The Kaspi team is managing consumer experience. Kaspi team is bringing sales. Kaspi team is helping defining assortment, and Kaspi team is helping define the pricing. Magnum, as our strategic partner, is responsible for operating the dark store. It's actually quite a big dark store.

It's almost like a hypermarket size, about from 7,000 sq m-10,000 sq m, depending on the location. I mean, at least that's the business model we're building. They are responsible for maintaining. So for buying the SKUs or the assortment which we have defined together, storing is in a dark store and delivering this assortment to the door. That's the operational responsibility of our partner. Again, technology, marketing, driving sales, consumer experience, pricing, assortment is done by Kaspi or with a significant involvement of the Kaspi team. So Magnum has its own margin. We're getting paid the take rate of around 3.5% from every purchase. That's the basic economics. Very simple unit. Very simple economics of that business.

That's on the e-Grocery side. On the regulatory side, yes, the bankruptcy law being discussed. There is a very productive discussion with everyone participating, both from the regulator and from the Government bodies. I mean, clearly there is a need for bankruptcy law just because, first of all, I mean, you cannot keep accumulating consumers which are not able, as a country, I mean, or as a financial sector. We're not talking about only financial debt, right? We're talking utility bill debt. We're talking about tax. We're talking about any other debt or liability that consumers could accumulate. There is no bankruptcy law.

There is no way out for these people or for those, you know, sometimes even businesses, matter of fact, but we're discussing only consumers. The balance is, I think there is a balancing discussion, which means there should be a very transparent criteria for consumer to go into the bankruptcy. There should be a very transparent criteria how consumer can behave during the bankruptcy. For example, you know, can consumer to enter the bankruptcy to ensure there is no cash on the accounts, there is no property. I mean, the consumer is genuinely looking for a bankruptcy procedure. Then when consumer goes into the bankruptcy, there should be also evident kind of consequences of this bankruptcy, right?

For example, you cannot take any other debt. You cannot travel. You cannot acquire real estate or acquire car because you actually went to the bankruptcy in the first place because you had nothing to pay your debts off. This is all being discussed, and I think everybody understands the goal of this bankruptcy law. In my personal opinion, the bankruptcy law is needed because it doesn't exist in the country. There is a segment of consumers which actually is accumulating debt without any possibility to repay. The bankruptcy law clearly is not the law to avoid any financial responsibilities, right? The bankruptcy law is needed, but there is a balance to be found. I think everyone is on the same page at the moment as we discuss it.

We're also actively participating in this, as many other players.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Are there any other regulatory initiatives that might impact the business?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Well, in general, for example, if I'm not mistaken, from the 1st July, you cannot charge any penalties, fees, and interest and charges on the consumers delinquent more than 90 days. So that's, I think. I think it's from 1st July. I'm not sure. The reason why I don't follow this is very simple. It's just because.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Because you don't do it.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

We don't do it. Exactly.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

I think this change works very well with the bankruptcy law, right? Because, I mean, if a person cannot pay-

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Mm-hmm.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

You're not supposed to charge the interest. This is not correct. There was a lot of going back and forth, but finally, the right decision has been made by the regulator to stop accruing after 90 days. That's, for example, change-

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

is coming from the 1st July. In general, there is always discussion about, you know, what else, whether there is a consumer debt bubble or we don't have it. There is discussion about this, which is, I mean, every call, Simon, you're asking this question, so there is always the kind of discussion.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

The one thing which we're trying to communicate and make sure is that, you know, before in general coming up with a strategy, I think it's important that the country and the financial sector defines the kind of criteria, what does it mean? Do we have a risk from a mortgage, or do we have a risk from a consumer finance? And if we have a risk, we need sort of the kind of, you know, how should I say, the indicators for the country, and there are no indicators at the moment. The focus on our side, talking to our colleagues and also talking to regulator, has been that there should be defined the criteria according to which the environment is evaluated and then the actions are taken.

It shouldn't be the situation where an interest of a specific players and a specific regulation is erected. I think in today's environment and in today's context, I think that's highly relevant and there is always, you know, at the moment there is discussion like let's define the criteria, which will help all of us to understand where we are on the curve of the credit risk on any financial product section, not just the consumer loans.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Okay. Very helpful. I'll probably ask you the same question next time, though. Sorry.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

No, no. Go ahead. I think it's

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

It's important. It's important to check.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Thanks very much.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Thank you, Simon.

Operator

Thank you, Simon. Our next question is from Stefan Groşca. Stefan, your line is now open if you'd like to proceed.

Speaker 9

Yeah. Hi. Well, first of all, congratulations on the good results in this difficult quarter. It's very impressive. I wanted to ask you about a buyback. I understand you have KZT 100 million which you're buying back. I just wondered where you how much of this has been already spent, how much did you buy? Whatever you can say about this and potentially about the price that you bought at. The second thing is about dividend. Actually, interestingly enough, I saw some publication saying something about your dividend a few weeks ago, but which I'm not sure is correct, but maybe you could say where we stand with this. The third question is about the U.S. listing.

You were guiding, I think, for the second half of this year as a kind of soft target. Maybe you could say, given all what's happening, if that is still realistic or if there is any change to it. Thank you.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Stefan, maybe I'll start on your question. Firstly, with regard to the buyback, that's been announced today, up to $100 million. We haven't bought anything yet. It's been approved by the board of directors, and I think you can expect it to start imminently, and there will be disclosure when that is the case. Thereafter, there will be regular disclosure around the amount and purchase price of which we've bought at. We've chosen that amount, if your question is why isn't it a higher amount. Well, simply because that will allow us to be a material player. Given the liquidity of stock, that is a realistic amount that will allow us to be a material player in the market over the next three months. It will take us through into the summer.

That leads on to your second question, around dividend. We've chosen to start with the buyback, taking into account the valuation of the stock, so we've had a preference for returning cash via buyback as opposed to via a dividend. The business continues to generate cash, which I guess you're alluding to. This will take us through into the summer, and then in the summer, everything will be on the table again for discussion, and we'll start and make an announcement at that point. At today's point, the message is we're starting the buyback. On the U.S. listing, I would simply say that, as a company, we are completely ready to be listed in the U.S. It would be subject to market conditions. Clearly, market conditions not conducive to that today.

Long term, the objective hasn't changed. We believe that the most sort of appropriate home for Kaspi as a public company is in the U.S. When market conditions are right, we would look to do that. At this point in time, it's hard to be any more specific than that.

Speaker 9

Perfect. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Stefan. Our final question is from Ronak Gadhia. Ronak, your line will be open now if you'd like to proceed with your question.

Ronak Gadhia
Managing Director, EFG Hermes

Thank you. Thanks for the presentation.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Mm-hmm.

Ronak Gadhia
Managing Director, EFG Hermes

Taking my questions. Two questions which are more follow-ups. First, just going back to the discussion on deposits. On a Q-on-Q basis, deposits declined. Could you just elaborate maybe why that is? Is it just because you're being conservative because there's not that much opportunity to grow the loan book? Are you being conservative, or are there other reasons for why the deposit growth was a bit weak during the quarter? Then just looking at your marketplace platform.

When I look at the overall net income margin, so not the adjusted, but just the overall margin, you know, the margin seems to have dropped to around 55% from an average of around 60%- 65% in the last three quarters of 2021. Could you just maybe help me understand why there was such a significant drop and, you know, what we should expect going forward given the increasing contribution from Kaspi Travel and e-Grocery? Thank you.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

I'll take the second question, Ronak, and then I'll pass the first to Mikhail. I would simply say maybe it's not quite the right way to look at it. If you think about the seasonality in the business, Q1 is the sort of least important from a revenue perspective. Given the gearing in the business therefore, it will be the lowest margin. At the other side of the equation, Q4 is the most important from a revenue perspective. In usual terms, you would expect it to be the highest margin. I wouldn't necessarily look at it the way you're looking at it, and I certainly wouldn't compare Q1 profitability with Q4 profitability.

I'd suggest the answer to your question is really just probably seasonality rather than any specific change in the cost base of the business.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Okay, the question is about the deposits in the marketplace margin or just-

Ronak Gadhia
Managing Director, EFG Hermes

No, no. Just the deposits. When I look at the overall deposits in the balance sheet, it seemed to decline slightly.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

I mean, in general when we're talking about, you know, term deposits, there were a couple of things that were going on from the autumn of last year towards the first quarter of this year. The first of all, there was a program which allowed Kazakhstan citizens to withdraw their pension funds and buy real estate. As a result, you know, whoever was actually using the money to buy or accumulating money to buy the real estate, they were using this money for that significant decision in their lives. That was putting a drag on the deposit growth in general. I mean, term deposits and the high-ticket deposits, not deposits of a couple thousand dollars.

That's number one. The currency fluctuations, what we have seen multiple times before. As soon as there is a fluctuation in the currency, then consumers are actually preferring to take the money and buy something, either again, cars and real estate. That was going on in March. That basically are the trends which sort of impacted the deposit trends overall. The sector as well, I mean, the market of deposits. The program for real estate acquisition was wrapped up by the end of the first Q. We'll see consumers again accumulating. In general, I would say that there is a strong demand for our products and therefore, deposits is important. We don't have any limitation on demand side.

We are at the moment focused on deposit products very substantially. That's why we also increased the interest rate alongside with increasing rate for the cap on the deposits which happened in March, I think. That's basically on deposits. In marketplace platform, I would also say that we're focused on the growth in general. I think our marketplace is probably one of the highest margin marketplaces in the world. When we're dropping from 60%+ to around 60%, I wouldn't call this significant drop. In general, I don't think also that we can reasonably expect our marketplace to continue increasing its net profit margin endlessly, right? I mean, this is still a business which we operate.

It has its operating costs, and therefore we do provide guidance on the marketplace marginality, and that guidance have been updated also with the travel side of things. Yeah. We're focused still on the growth. We're not managing the margin, but it just happens that it's one of the highest margins in the world among marketplaces.

Ronak Gadhia
Managing Director, EFG Hermes

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you, Ronak. Our next question is from Simon Nellis from Citi. Simon, your line is now open if you'd like to proceed.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Hi. I was hoping I could just ask one more follow-up question actually on e-Commerce. Can you give us a bit of an update on the competitive environment? I've seen in the banking sector some of the Russian banks have been exiting or divesting. Are you seeing similar things with Russian players in the e-Commerce side? Just where your position is, that would be helpful. Just on the e-Grocery, is the GMV from e-Grocery currently included in the marketplace GMV numbers? It's not clear to me if they are.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Okay. On the e-Commerce side of things, Simon, you have actually made a very good point. I completely forgot to mention that deposit trends and the consumer confidence has been also shaken up by Russian banks being sanctioned, right?

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Mm-hmm.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

People cannot withdraw their money. This is going back to the previous question about deposit trends. People cannot withdraw their money from those banks, so there is all sorts of discussions about it. The consumer confidence has been challenged dramatically, and those banks were, the one of them was a second or the third by size. This, we're not talking about the small bank. Usually what happens with the consumers, they take the money first from the bank. They keep them at home. They get confident, and then they decide where they want to place the money. Considering the top of mind of our brand and the quality of our products, we believe that we'll be net beneficiary of this redistribution. That's about.

This is one fact which I completely missed, so thanks a lot for reminding. On the e-Commerce side of things, I mean, competitive environment, we haven't really seen, we didn't see a significant impact before, even though there was a lot of discussions about different players ramping up their business. We couldn't see their numbers flowing through, really. At the moment, that's basically where we are today. I mean, I think they reduced their activity even further. We don't really see any significant competitive threats. The e-Grocery numbers are small, so they are included in the marketplace. We'll do the same thing as we've done with the e-Grocery, which means.

Sorry, with the travel. Which means once they become material size of our GMV, then we'll be sort of putting more details about the grocery business. At the moment, they're part of the marketplace and yeah and we just show the GMV and the take rate.

Simon Nellis
Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Okay. Thank you.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Thank you.

Operator

I'm afraid we have no more time for any further questions, so I will hand back to David to make any final closing remarks.

David Ferguson
Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations, Kaspi.kz

Great. Thank you, Harry. Thanks, everyone. We've been going for an hour and a half, so we'll wrap things up, now. If you do have follow-up questions, then I'm happy to take that offline. Thank you for your time today and, please keep in touch and speak to you in three months' time. Thanks a lot.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO and Co-Founder, Kaspi.kz

Thank you. Take care. Bye.

Powered by