Welcome, and thank you for joining us on ATG's second annual earnings call. We're really excited to share with you ATG's results for fiscal year 2022, and in short, we had a great year. We met expectations despite the macroeconomic backdrop, and we maintained our margins while increasing investment in the business, both in technology and people. We diversified our business as well with new revenue streams, and in short, we believe that we exited the year in a much stronger position than we exited the last year. With that, we believe we will also have a very solid fiscal year 2023. If you go to the next slide. As a reminder for people who may be new, what does ATG do?
At the most basic level, we connect auction houses from around the world with bidders from around the world. In so doing, we are unlocking the value of the curated secondary goods market. What do we do for auction houses? We make small companies big and big companies more effective. For bidders, we connect them to fantastic, unique, and specialized inventory. So specifically for auction houses, what do we do? We give them technology that they couldn't afford to invest in themselves. We bring them bidders from around the world, and we create cost efficiencies. The reason for that is the vast majority of the auction houses we work with are small and medium-sized businesses.
There are some very large ones. The vast majority of the 3,800 auction houses we work with are small and medium-sized businesses, therefore, what we provide them is unique and very hard for them to obtain themselves. For bidders, what do we do? We provide them selection, trust, and convenience. These are things, selection, millions and millions of unique and specialized items. Trust, because when you're buying online, you already have one level of, let's say, distrust or concern relative to buying in person. When you're buying a secondary used item, the level of concern goes up dramatically. In our world, it's curated secondary goods sold by expert auctioneers, and that reduces the mistrust significantly.
Finally, there's the convenience, where for bidders who historically may have attended an auction, and they would have to drive to the country and spend two or three days potentially waiting to bid on one or a handful of lots. On our site, they can bid on dozens or even hundreds of auctions in any given day, all from the convenience of their home. With this, we are creating real value for both sides, and it's something that's worked very well, and it creates that virtuous circle. As we bring more bidders, we attract more auction houses. As we attract more auction houses and more inventory, we bring more bidders, and that allows that virtuous circle to kick in, which allows us to acquire new bidders very cost-effectively. If you go to the next slide.
By doing what we do, it's something that some people don't think about a lot but which is very important to us. We also are very much promoting the circular economy and accelerating that economy at a scale that many companies cannot match. The reason for that is that when people are buying a secondhand item, it means it's one less item new that needs to be made each year. For us, we had a third-party consulting firm that specializes in looking at CO2 emissions look at what we help facilitate and facilitate the sale of. In fiscal year 2022, among the top 15 most popular items sold on our marketplaces, we saved approximately 3 million tons of CO2 emissions versus if someone had bought those same items new.
Just to give you, again, a sense for that, every one million tons of CO2 emissions saved is the equivalent of approximately 50 million mature trees, or the carbon capture of 50 million mature trees. Not small saplings, but actual mature trees. This year, we believe that ATG helped, in the sense that we contributed to approximately 150 million trees worth of carbon capture. You see the study on the right that, where it shows that the 44% of respondents are more likely to buy secondhand than they were three years ago. 47% of these respondents cite being more aware of the impact of sustainable buying, and 42% of respondents still don't realize that secondhand is greener than buying new.
There's a huge role for ATG to play in spreading the word about the sustainable impact of buying secondhand and specifically of buying at auction. If you go to the next slide. This is one that I'm sure everybody's most keen on. We feel we concluded a fantastic year, and as you can see, that's despite the macroeconomic backdrop. In the year, we expanded our THV to GBP 10.1 billion, which is 22% up over the year-over-year. Again, THV is the value of all items listed on our marketplaces by the auctioneers who work with us. We maintained our conversion rate at 33%.
The reason why that's so important is that often when you grow THV as fast as we're growing it, you can see conversion rate actually decline a little bit because new segments we enter or new auction houses will often have a slightly lower conversion rate for a period of time before they build momentum in the marketplace. The fact that we're able to retain our marketplace's flat conversion rate while growing 22% is a huge achievement. That resulted in our GMV growing 20% year-over-year to GBP 3.3 billion. Part of the way that we were able to retain, grow our revenues this year as well was by retaining the take rate at 3.3%.
A key part of that has been the rollout of our value-added services, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. The key component of that is payments and digital marketing, which are also coming out. Double-digit revenue growth for the year brought us to almost GBP 120 million of revenue, which is 11% up on a pro forma basis. Our adjusted EBITDA is now GBP 54 million, which is 70% up. Results like these are great to achieve, but when companies move through those different stages. Sorry, can you go back to the previous slide?
When companies move through different stages of growth, something I really wanted to call out here is the big question that often comes up is whether a team can scale to the new opportunity, whether you're going from a private to a public company or from a small public company to a medium-sized one. When you achieve the results that we had this year with that economic backdrop and the confusion that was there for many companies, I think it's a real credit to the team, both the executive team at ATG, but also to all of our 375 employees and the contractors who work with us.
To achieve these results required everybody adapting and growing in this past year, and I think it's a real mark of success for the business that we were able to grow our business and have our team scale as they did that. If you go to the next slide. Our numbers, how we reflect during the year. A lot of what we did as well was to position ourselves for sustained growth into the future, and I know that's what you care about most. One of the things we will go through here is some of the highlights from that. First of all, we delivered growth across all divisions, and that's against very challenging comparisons and the economic environment that we were in.
Again, we talked last year about the fact that we delivered growth on growth coming out of COVID, and now coming out of COVID yet again, even further distanced from it, we were able to deliver growth on growth in all divisions yet again. Key here is that we added new growth levers as well through the successful roll-outs of payments and digital marketing, which now accounts for 16% of our revenue. Again, historically, we've been a business that relied mostly on fixed fees, for which the auctioneers pay us to list on our marketplaces, and the commissions that we take from the transactions. We've now added two significant growth levers in payments and digital marketing, and they're 16% to date, but can grow to a significantly larger amount of our overall revenue in the next year to two years.
Specifically, what I also wanted to call out with that is that payments we had talked about last year when we bought LiveAuctioneers. Our plan had been to roll payments out in January of 2023, I'm pleased to say that, in addition to integrating LiveAuctioneers and doing everything else we've done this year, we actually have rolled out payments two months earlier than planned. We began rolling it out in November, as of now, we have 49 auction houses who have signed contracts with us to use the payments. We have 16 auction houses who've actually used it and transacted in an auction. We processed about $1.2 million worth of payments now.
If you took just the auctioneers who signed with us so far, and you kind of ramp that up and assume that they did the same number of auctions this year as last year and roughly the same volume, that represents about $300,000-$400,000 of revenue on a run rate basis by the end of the year. Again, very early days, only a handful of auction houses so far, but we're excited by the result, and we'll begin rolling this out more aggressively in the new year. The third point I have here is, we increased the diversification of our business significantly by bringing on Live Auctioneers, and that brings our revenue to be 50% art antiques and 50% industrial and commercial.
Equally critical, particularly in the current environment, is that we are now over 80% of our revenues in U.S. dollars. The fourth point, we enhanced our end-to-end experience, and I'll show you a few pictures of that coming up. By upgrading the auctioneer and lot content, we improved our taxonomy, which results in better findability within Google algorithms, and we improved our search functionality to help people find what they're looking for more easily on the site. We were able to do this while, and I think this is something we were very proud of, was maintaining our margins at the 45% level.
We took the excess performance that we had this year and basically invested it into high-quality talent, bringing on new executives, new people, particularly in technology and in specialist roles, which we think is really important because in a year when many companies are either cutting back or, you know, letting go of staff, we're still investing. I think this is going to set us even further apart from the competition in the months and years to come. Finally, we were able to do this and really drive real value and impact for both sides of our marketplace.
We generated over 172 million bidding sessions for auction houses this year, and we sold seven million lots out of approximately 20 million lots that were listed with us, and we drove asset price as well and provided great selection to bidders. Now I'm going to turn it over to Tom, and he will take you through some of the financials.
Good morning, everybody. Right. Here's some of the headlines. John-Paul's already given you a couple of them. Our revenue for last year, or FY 2022, was GBP 119.8 million on a pro forma constant currency basis. That's 11% year-over-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA of GBP 54 million. That's 70% growth year-on-year, and that's flat margins on FY 2021 of 45%. Our adjusted diluted EPS of GBP 0.295, up 221% year-over-year. Our adjusted free cash flow of GBP 49.9 million. That's 93% of our adjusted EBITDA. Finally, our adjusted net debt at the end of the year was GBP 129 million on an FX-adjusted basis. That's a leverage of 2.2x.
Just give you a sort of idea of how revenue's evolved from last year. Last year we reported revenue as GBP 70.1 million. We acquired LiveAuctioneers on the 1st of October, 2021. There's a full year contribution of LiveAuctioneers in our FY 2022 numbers, but none in FY 2021. To create a pro forma prior year set of numbers, we bring in over GBP 30 million of LiveAuctioneers revenue from FY 2022. For FX, John Paul has already said, we get 80% of our revenue in US dollars. The average dollar sterling rate in FY 2021 was $1.37 to the pound. The rate in FY 2022 has been $1.27. A 7% strengthening of the dollar boosts our revenue. You can see that adjustment of GBP 6 million there.
That creates a prior year constant currency pro forma revenue number of just shy of GBP 108 million. We have organic revenue growth of GBP 12 million year-over-year, taking us to GBP 119.8 million. That's 11% growth year-over-year. That growth has come across all segments and all product lines, but of particular note is the increasing contribution from VAS, which we'll come to in a moment. Here's some of our marketplace KPIs. Top left-hand corner, you can see our GMV. I should say all the numbers for FY 2021 have been adjusted to include LiveAuctioneers for the full year, they're all comparable. See our GMV increased 20% year-over-year at constant currency to GBP 3.3 billion. That growth has been achieved on what was already an exceptional year in the prior year.
You can see there the growth rate of 48% year-on-year. We've achieved that growth despite the fact we had some very strong comparatives in the prior year. Look at what's driving that. If you look at the far right-hand side, you can see our THV, GBP 10.1 billion, up 22% year-over-year. That growth has come across the board from both new auctioneers that we've added, from new verticals, particularly real estate and INC, but also the lion's share of growth has come from our core auctioneers and our core verticals, which also have seen strong growth in THV. Conversion rate flat at 33% year-over-year, and take rate slightly down, 3.5%-3.3%. Three factors behind that. Firstly, it's a slight mix effect.
A&A INC has grown faster GMV than A&A. INC has a below average take rate, which drags the overall group average down a bit. You've also got the impact of some of those new verticals, particularly real estate, which has a below average take rate. Partly offsetting that is the benefit of VAS, which boosts the take rate, but overall 3.3%. When you multiply those three together, you can see our marketplace revenues of GBP 108 million, up 11% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Move to the next slide. We've shown this before, just how the half-yearly numbers have evolved over the last three years. In particular, you can see how as we moved into COVID, the numbers changed. Now we've moved out of COVID, you can see where we've settled at.
In GMV in the top right, our half year two GMV was GBP 1.6 billion. You can see how that's steadily grown over the last three years. Three years ago in the first half of the year it was GBP 0.7 billion. Very similar shape to THV growth, where it's GBP 5.2 billion in the second half of FY 2022. Again, that number was around GBP 3 billion three years ago. Unsurprisingly, marketplace revenue are on the bottom left has followed a similar pattern, GBP 56 million in the second half of the year and GBP 52 million in the first half of the year. Going all the way back three years ago, it was GBP 31 million in half year one FY 2020. We move to the next page.
The chart on the left-hand side shows our mix of revenue by product line. I'll work from top to bottom. It's our content, 3% of our revenue. You've got auction services. Auction services, the revenue we get from our white label products and our back office products. Other marketplace, that's the revenue we get from hosting auctions on behalf of auctioneers. If we take those two together in aggregate, that's 22% of our revenue. Those two revenue streams have very similar characteristics. Largely subscription fee based, not transactional. Very sticky revenue lines, a lot of recurring revenue in nature. Both of those revenue lines have grown well over the course of last year, in line with total revenue growth of about 11%, hence the constant share in our overall mix.
You can see value-added services has grown from 12%- 16% of our mix. That's where the Auctioneer Marketing Program is and payments. Both of those revenue lines have grown strongly. In aggregate, that growth has been 40% year-over-year revenue contribution from those two product lines. Predominantly in A&A, as John-Paul's just said, as the launch of payments kicks in in INC, that will accelerate growth of VAS into FY 2023. You see commission there. We've split it out between A&A and INC for the first time. Not previously shown that number, but in aggregate, 60% of our revenue, slightly down from last year. Commission has grown, it's just not grown at quite the same pace, particularly as VAS, reducing the overall share in the mix.
You can see there, particularly with the growth of VAS, you get an increasing diversification of our revenue mix, which underpins the overall resilience we have in our revenue model. On the right-hand side, you can see our revenue by geography, which we've already said 82% of our revenue comes from North America. That's up from last year because the U.S. businesses have been growing faster than our European businesses. If we move over the page again. Start to get into some segmental detail. You can see on the left-hand side, INC THV, GBP 5.7 billion, up 28% year-over-year. Eight percentage points of that growth has come from new verticals, particularly our particularly real estate.
If you strip out that, still the growth in our core verticals has been very strong, about 20% year-over-year. If you compare that to the wider market growth for used equipment of about 5 percentage points, you can see we've outperformed the market. That market growth has been a function of two factors. Firstly, you've got your reduced volumes as supply chain issues have reduced the volume of assets that have been coming for resale, being offset by strong price inflation. That price inflation was concentrated in the first part of the year. In the second part of the year, price inflation is a lot lower. We haven't seen prices go backwards, but they're not increasing the same rate as the first half of the year. We've seen that overall same macro trend in our numbers.
The difference between us and the overall market is the volume drop-off wasn't as large for us as it has been in the overall market. That strong THV growth has been accompanied by conversion rate being maintained at 45%, which has meant that GMV has grown in line with THV to GBP 2.6 billion year-over-year. GBP 2.6 billion. Take rate down a little bit by 0.3 percentage points to 2%, that's the effect of real estate coming through, which carries a lower take rate than the average. When you multiply that all together, you get marketplace revenue for INC of 52.7%, 13% growth year-over-year. Arts and antiques, going back to the top, GBP 4.3 billion of THV.
Strong growth in THV in arts and antiques, plus 15% year-over-year. About two-thirds of that growth, 10 percentage points, has come from new auctioneers we've added over the last couple of years. Those auctioneers have had a profile slightly different to a typical art and antiques auctioneer. They've included Bonhams, included a couple of large international auctioneers. Those auction houses carry a below-average conversion rate, probably about a third of the average conversion rate we see on the rest of the estate. If you look at our like-for-like core auctioneer community in arts and antiques, their THV growth year-over-year has been about 5%, lower than the headline growth rate. That growth was concentrated in the first half of the year. THV growth for those core auctioneers in the second half of the year has been stable.
Conversion rate down 3%- 16%. Two factors there. Firstly, you've got the contribution of those new auction houses with a below-average conversion rate. Also if you look at the like-for-like sort of core auctioneers, and I'll sort of characterize that as midsize U.S. domestic or U.K. domestic auction houses. Over the first half of FY 2022, we did see some normalization in the conversion rate as the sort of world reopened. That's been relatively stable in the second half of the year. We seem to have settled at a level of conversion on those auction houses that's sort of midway between pre-COVID levels and the peak levels they achieved at the height of COVID. Overall, when you take those together, GMV, small decline in A&A of 5%.
When you see below, the take rate has increased by 1.2 percentage points to 8%, predominantly due to the growth of VAS that's already been talked about, auctioneer marketing programs and payments, particularly in LiveAuctioneers, which was launched in 2021. Has more than offset that reduction in GMV, such that A&A revenues grew 10% year-over-year. See the table on the right-hand side, you can see how the segmental performance fits into the overall revenue picture. You've got total marketplace revenue of GBP 108. Roughly 50/50, arts and antiques and industrial and commercial, grew 11%. Auction services grew 9% year-over-year. That's increased adoption of white labels, the number of auction houses signed up to the white label product.
Content, slight growth of 3% above the sort of historic norm just as advertising levels have returned post-COVID to normal levels. Going forward, we expect that content to resume its normal path of mild decline going forward. Through the next page is our total P&L. If you look at the table on the right, you can see our revenue at the top, GBP 119.8 million, 11% pro forma growth. Two lines down, you can see our gross profit, GBP 79.7 million. That's a margin of 67%. That compares to 65% in the prior year. That is the natural operating leverage that we have in the business showing through, partially offset by payments. Payments is nicely profitable but does carry a lower margin than the rest of the business.
Gross margins increase from 67- 65. If you look down to the bottom of the page, you can see our adjusted EBITDA of GBP 54 million. That's adjusted EBITDA margin of 45%, flat on prior year. The reason that's flat is because of the investments that John-Paul's already talked about, particularly in strengthening the senior leadership team and the technology and product groups. Also some impact from the full-year effect of PLC costs coming through there. Look at our net finance costs just up there. You can see GBP 7.5 million charge in the year. We took a $204 million loan out to finance the acquisition of LiveAuctioneers. That loan attracts interest based on U.S. LIBOR.
As US LIBOR has gone up over the course of the year, our finance costs have been growing. We will see the full-year effect of that next year and also if interest rates continue to increase, which they will do, that will also have an effect. If you just move to the bottom, see adjusted diluted EPS, 29.5p. This is 9.2p last year. It's growth of 221%. The final comment to say here, we have no exceptional costs in FY 2022. There was quite a bit of activity in FY 2021 with the cost of the IPO and the cost of LiveAuctioneers acquisition, but a very clean year in FY 2022. If we move to the next page about cash flow.
We had EBITDA of GBP 54 million, a small working capital inflow of GBP 400,000, and then CapEx of GBP 4.9 million, giving a free cash flow of GBP 49.9 million. On our CapEx, that level of spend is about equal to the aggregate of the pre-acquisition LiveAuctioneers and the pre-acquisition ATG group figure. It's fairly flat year-on-year. We were expecting that to go up in FY 2022 as we started to incur spend on the Signal technology platform. As it turned out, because we were in the relatively early stages of that project, it wasn't appropriate to capitalize that spend. It hasn't impacted CapEx in FY 2022. However, as we now move into FY 2022... 2023, that spend will start to impact our CapEx level.
We expect for the next couple of years while that project's going on CapEx to be roughly double the normal run rates for that two-year period. Look, interest and tax, we paid $17 million across those two categories. $5 million of payments that relate to the L.A. acquisition. Those are payments that were triggered on completion. Completion happened on the first of October, so whilst all the accounting happened last year, the actual cash didn't outflow until FY 2022. Then that other movement there is predominantly FX gains on our dollar cash holdings.
At the end of the year, we had around over $50 million of cash on the balance sheet. We've chosen in early in October to use $44 million of that to repay the senior term facility or some of the repay senior term facility early, which has reduced the borrowing from $204 million to about $160 million. We will continue to pay make payments on that loan as they fall due over the course of FY 2023. With that, I will hand back to John-Paul.
Okay, great. We'll look now at the strategic update and where we're headed. Next slide. This is a slide that I've said you'll probably always see from us, and the reason for that is I think it sums up very cleanly the number of growth levers we have, and it allows us to group the different initiatives that we have in a way that I think is quite easy to understand. The other reason I like putting this one in here is because it really shows you the compound impact of the different things that we do because if you move even two of these, the benefit is more than just their individual benefit.
In some years, you have one of these levers making more of a difference than another, and in the past, we've pulled all of these different levers. In this year, the two that I really wanted to highlight were the investments we made in value-added services, which Tom talked about, and then the investments we made over the course of this year that will pay benefits we believe in the coming year around conversion rate. If you go specifically around the take rate, the big investments, as you've heard us say a few times, were payments and digital marketing. Then on the conversion rate side, it's around the integrated bidding widget combined with some of the conversion rate optimization things that we've invested in. If you go to the next slide, there's a little bit more detail on that.
We talked about the fact that we invested to improve our product and to expand our team, and there are a few highlights that I'll look at right here. First of all, in the top left there, we developed an integrated bidding solution to make it easier to cross-list. One of the biggest opportunities we believe we have is enabling an auctioneer to use us, whether they're on their white label and they want to have our marketplace. This widget now allows them to run auctions on both of those simultaneously, which creates cost efficiencies and gives them a really good reason if they're going to have a white label, which most auctioneers don't want. If they do want one, it allows them to pick our white label because there's real operational advantages to them when they do that.
The bottom left one, we facilitated the shift to timed auctions. Again, we're doing this with a combination of that integrated bidding widget, which will make it easier for auctioneers to adopt that, but also through better ROI reports and basically those ROI reports and educating our sales teams on how to sell the timed auction capability more effectively. On the top right, we improved the bidder experience, including upgrading auctioneer and lot content. We improved the taxonomy and the better search functionality. I mentioned that a little bit before, but one of the key things we did around the taxonomy is it's things that you won't actually see initially, but it's behind the scenes.
What it makes it easier to do is for Google's search algorithms to find the lots that we're selling and to make sure that they get more prominence in the Google Search results. Within our own search tool on the site, one of the key things we did was to add Auction Alerts, which again just makes it that much easier for people to sign up and get the lots that they wanted presented to them as quickly as possible. Finally, as we've mentioned, we expanded and strengthened the ATG team at the leadership level and across key specialist roles. We added a group chief technology officer. We added technology executives underneath him with deep experience. We added a chief product officer. We added a chief people officer.
The combination of those things we believe are really critical because as you take a company like ours that's grown and acquired, you want to see that team adding depth all the time so that you can continue to execute and continue to grow and do what we've done well in these past few years. I think the fact that we're able to invest even amidst everything that's gone on this year while delivering the results we have is something we're really proud of. If you go to the next slide. We talked a little bit about value-added services and we talked about payments, which I'll look at next. The Auctioneer Marketing Program is something that we wanted to really call attention to. What is it, first of all?
This is where auctioneers pay us to market to the group-- the global bidder base that we have. The key reason why this is exciting for us is that if you look at some of the benchmarks that are out there, like in Etsy, the Etsy equivalent of GMV, they monetize at 3.8%, meaning they make 3.8% revenue off of that GMV. ATG is below half a percent today, so just a fraction of Etsy's. Now, maybe we'll never reach 3.8%, but we know we can be doing a lot more with that than we historically have. There's a real effort being focused on that. The reason why we're very confident around it is that, number one, LiveAuctioneers has already done it and done it quite well.
Number two, on Proxibid specifically, when we do have auctions that are supported by paid marketing by auctioneers on our site, it results in a 72% increase in registered bidders and a 38% increase in winning bidders. We know it makes a difference, and we're very confident we can sell it. The second part is that we've upgraded the onsite advertising as well. By adding SEO-rich content to make it easier and more discoverable by Google, rotating banner space which auctioneers pay for to get their lots highlighted, new features, and then at the bottom, new ad units. The way that our marketing team did that was to look at the highest-performing ad units, the ones that delivered the biggest result for the auctioneers, and we basically created more of that inventory.
On the right-hand side, what we just launched just in October is the new marketing feature, which we believe will drive adoption. Again, we're behind the curve on this, but SMS, many of you would've expected that to be there already. It is on LiveAuctioneers, but now it's launching gradually onto the rest of ATG. Again, why we're so excited by this is that 30% of registered bidders who don't appear say that they forgot to bid. With SMS, we believe that we can drive more bidders and more engagement and hopefully, again, drive more online conversion. If you go to the next slide. On to payments.
Payments is something we've talked about, and what I'm most excited by, as I said, is that this is something where if we get this right, payments can actually be bigger than all of ATG is today. It's an exciting thing to be able to launch into. When you buy a business, like we bought LiveAuctioneers last year, part of the reason we bought them, we said, was for expansion into the North American market. Part of it was for diversification of our revenue. But the other part of it was to accelerate our entry of payments into the industrial and commercial market of North America and then into Europe. We believe that by buying LiveAuctioneers, we accelerated our entry by about two years.
The big question, of course, becomes when you think you're going to do that, is whether you really can do it. We communicated to you that we were going to be launching payments in January of 2023, and we thought that was quite ambitious to be able to do all the work that needed to be done in that year. In fact, we launched it two months earlier. As I mentioned, we now have, roughly 50 who've signed on for our payments contract. We have 16 who've actually done auctions using payments, and we processed about $1.2 million of payment revenue so far. What's exciting about our payment solution versus many others that are out there is that, first of all, most payment solutions that may be out there will be a simple gateway.
This is not just that. One of the big concerns for auctioneers is whether they are able to comply with interstate commerce laws and taxes, and this payment solution actually handles all of that for them so that they never have to worry about getting hit with a late tax bill on something that they didn't understand the rules for. The other big thing that is key with this is that it greatly accelerates the payment cycle for auction houses when implemented in a best practice way. Getting payment quickly to auction houses means they can pay their consigners faster. When you pay consigners faster, then they come back to you again because those consigners want the money fast.
Those are just two of the differences as to our payment solution versus others, and it's something that we believe is going to result in solid adoption over the course of the year. The other thing that's exciting is that the advantage we have of having seven marketplaces is that we can launch different things on individual marketplaces, which creates lower risk, and then we can see how that penetrates and extrapolate on that for how we can do it to another marketplace. While we would be ecstatic if we saw the adoption of payments on Proxibid that we've seen on LiveAuctioneers, we don't know whether that will happen, but there's some really good indications that it can be a good solid adoption.
Today, LiveAuctioneers, as you see, has roughly 75% of the auction volume that they have is processed with their payments. The amount that they sell, their GTV, it's about 42% today. 75% of the auction houses and then 42% of their GTV is using their payment solution after just roughly 20 months of a product launch, which we think is pretty exceptional. We're excited by the fact that, again, if we get even a fraction of that onto the Proxibid side, it would be a big win. If you move to the next slide. One of the things you saw in Tom's part of the presentation was the increased investment we're putting into our single platform. The key reason we're doing that is, you can see, is today we have three platforms.
We have the GAP platform, which has five of our marketplaces, then we have Proxibid and LiveAuctioneers. The goal is to move everything onto a single platform, and the key reason for that is that it will enable greater innovation, more efficient build, lower maintenance cost. The key thing is around that, the faster pace of innovation and the fact that we can roll out one shared service. It benefits all the different marketplaces faster than when you have three stacks. The great thing I think about the way that we're able to do it is that we don't have to ask you to believe that we're going to invest this money, and then in three years we flip a switch and everything works perfectly.
It's more that we've broken the different components of our site into what we see as commercializable chunks so that each piece will move over, and then that will become a shared service. For instance, payments is the big first one. We have payments. It's usable by all the different marketplaces. That's one big component. This year we're working on shipping with the goal of rolling it out in LiveAuctioneers early in 2023. It's been in test mode so far, and we hope that by May we'll have some early results for you. Again, that will just be the beginning of the ramping. We also have investment going into a common back office so that, again, all the future investment that back office provides will benefit all the marketplaces simultaneously.
We're happy with our architecture and our plan, and we're happy that we'll be able to show you each and every year, commercial benefit from the each component that goes over. I think that's it. Move on to the next slide. On this horizon slide, we talked previously about the fact that we have three horizons. You have the foundation of an aggregator marketplace, you have then the enhancement of the end-to-end experience, and then you have the expansion and transformational elements. The thing that's exciting, I think, for us, is that. Keeping in mind, we are not just seeking to build a profitable growth business.
We are trying to build the company that's transforming the entire global auction industry, that's an industry that has huge benefits for the world in terms of the planet, reefs, but it also is this shared success model. We're trying to do it in a different company than many transformational efforts have taken place in the past. What we're really doing, as a reminder, is we're enabling every auctioneer, small, medium, or large, to compete with the behemoths that are out there. We think that is going to have real value. What's great is that we can do it in these three different horizons.
The first horizon, it's not that you ever completely complete your foundation, because with the foundation, it's about building the critical mass on the inventory side and on the bidder side that allows you to create that flywheel effect. The reason why I say you're never completely done with the foundation, it's not just that we're investing in that single platform. It's also because every acquisition we make strengthens that foundation and makes it even harder for someone to beat us. We get more inventory, we get more bidders, and because of the technology that we're investing in, we allow those people to cross-list and cross-bid, which strengthens that foundation for ATG and allows us to get, we believe, again, even bigger and more able to transform the industry. We also have the end-to-end experience elements, which I'll walk you through.
All the well-trodden path that you've seen every other marketplace out there do, adding payments, adding shipping, improving the image quality, improving the cookie trail that bidders follow, the registration experience, the way that they can use their identity. Many different things we can do there, and 90% of it having been done by other companies before. We're not asking you to believe that we're doing something like reinventing the wheel. It's simply getting out there and doing that well-trodden path of experience development that drives increased conversion. Then you have the expansion opportunities, which is what we see as expanding into that auction ecosystem. Everything that surrounds an auction is where we believe we can influence and add value.
That's everything from financing, insurance, restoration, repair, and then looking at that dynamic marketplace where you can actually start to be proactive in as opposed to just being reactive and getting bidders to list with auctioneers through our site based on all the information we have around what's been sold and what could be sold. Again, a really exciting path for us, and we think we are just in the early stages of our growth still. Next slide. This is a question that we get asked a lot. We think in the past, we probably didn't do a very good job of explaining the different layers of our addressable market. You'll be able to tell us whether we've done a better job this time.
If you take a look at the right-hand side of the page, just for the industrial, I'll just focus on one for now in the interest of time. The estimate is roughly GBP 64 billion in the North American and UK used equipment market. You then come down the next level, which is the core INC markets in which we operate, it's about GBP 41 billion. We operate in probably a little bit in every segment of the GBP 64 billion, but where we really focus is in these the segments that generate the GBP 41 billion. You go down another level, you say, there are three different ways you can sell those that core GBP 41 billion. It can either be through private treaty, through dealers, or through auction.
We focus, as you know, on the section which is sold at auction. Again, what's great about this is that this core segment at auction is growing. The reason for that is we believe that it provides much more transparency to the seller, on the fact that they've achieved the maximum price possible. In the old world, when auctions were very local, you could see where a seller may trust a dealer or a private treaty person who'd come along and say, "You know, I know if you're selling your beverage plant, I know exactly the five people in the world who want to buy it this year." In the internet, we can bring thousands of bidders in, or at least hundreds for, let's say, a beverage plant.
I think more and more consignors are recognizing that that's the best way to sell their assets because more eyeballs is much more likely to result in a good high asset price than just going to an expert who says that they know the right people or a handful of people. What that brings us to is the THV, which is the amount that of the amount sold at auction of that GBP 13 billion, the roughly GBP 6 billion is the amount that gets listed by the auction houses who work with us. ATG GMV of $2.6 billion is the amount that we actually sell of the GBP 5.7 billion.
What you can see, whether you look at the INC side or the ANA side, is that for ATG, the reason we get so excited about our growth is that even if we didn't sign up one more auction house and we never raised our take rate again, we could more than double the business just by growing our online share with the exact same volume that we have today. The reality is that our auctioneers are growing, so the THV is growing. The fact is that the INC segment of the auction market is growing, and we're signing on new auction houses. On top of that, we are taking additional share. With the introduction of value-added services, we're also growing our take rate. Without that take rate costing the auctioneers any more money.
It's a huge opportunity and one that we think we're executing against well so far. If you go to the next slide. I'll go through this fairly quickly. I think, you know, the key message on this slide, which I think we've heard enough, is just despite that macroeconomic backdrop, what's very unique about ATG is that unlike many companies, the levers of growth for us to sustain our growth are within our control. Whether that be investing in that well-trodden path and simply shifting shareExpanding payments beyond LiveAuctioneers to our industrial side, we're taking the digital marketing and ramping that. All of those are well within our control to execute against, and that's what gives us a lot of confidence as we head into this new year. Go to the next slide.
I guess, this is after the financial results for 2022, probably the most interesting slide for everybody. In our second year as a PLC, I think the team at ATG is very pleased by the results we delivered and that we are stronger for the future. We remain very confident in our ability to lead the transformation of this industry. In the medium term, we remain confident in achieving our target of mid-teens plus revenue growth and mid to high forties adjusted EBITDA margin as value-added services ramp alongside those core levers that we've already demonstrated we can grow. For fiscal year 2023, we remain confident in our growth levers, as I said, those are within our control, we will be executing against those steadily.
ATG has a blend of revenue, as we've said before, which should provide protection and upside opportunities across both our divisions. You can see what we say here about INC and ANA. One of the things that I think though is one of the easiest ways to look at ATG is if you have two columns, INC and ANA, and on the left-hand side you see that we have four growth levers for each one of those. You have fixed fees, commission revenue, payments, and now digital marketing. When you look across that essentially creates eight revenue levers for the business when you look at the two divisions.
The fixed fee revenue that we have, which is the amount the auctioneers pay to list on our system, the subscription revenue, you can look at that and realize that's only going up. You look at the digital marketing and how low our penetration is relative to other marketplaces, those two lines should only be going up. You look at the launch of payments, which is new, that should only be going up. Finally, you just come to our commission revenue and whatever your view is on the pro-cyclicality or counter-cyclicality of our business or, COVID, again, we have confidence that both of those numbers are also going up.
What you can see is that you're able to look at the 37% of our revenue that comes from the INC commission or the 22% that comes from the ANA, and that helps you isolate whatever areas of question mark you may have. I think there's other six areas are indisputable going up, and again, we have a lot of confidence that the two commission lines will also continue to be rising. As we said, trading in the first two months of fiscal year 2023 has remained broadly in line with performance in second half of 2022. For 2023, we expect high single digit to low double digit constant currency revenue growth with a higher rate of growth in the second half of the year.
The reason for that is while we're launching our value-added services, specifically payments and the big effort around digital marketing on the industrial side this year, we expect that that will take a while to ramp. Again, in light of the fact that there is a recession happening, we're just being cautious around the fact that it could take auctioneers a little bit longer to make that decision to pull the trigger to move to some of our new services, and that's why we have it ramping more in the back half of the year. We expect broadly flat adjusted EBITDA margin reflecting ongoing investments to support the business. Again, we believe that that is going to deliver a very solid year.
There's a bit more detail in the appendix, which you can look at afterwards if around everything from interest rates and other things and number of shares outstanding. We won't go through that right now. Onto my last slide. Again, same slide as last year because I think the situation really has not changed. We have demonstrated strong performance. We believe we've demonstrated the resilience and attractiveness of our model in fairly difficult situations for the macroeconomic or macroeconomy. We have very compelling investment case we believe. The key things I always step back and look is, does anyone believe that in the future there will be more auctions happening offline, or does the future hold more promise for the online move?
More people bidding in the room and on the phone, or are they going to be bidding online? If you say, well, maybe there'll be some more white label adoption, we have the best white label in the market, and we have the ability to cross list on our marketplace. We think if there is any white label adoption, that will be coming our way. The second part is that if you look out and see that landscape, is there anybody that has better competitive positioning than us? We believe the answer is no. We're always out there looking to see, ways that we can strengthen that competitive positioning further.
We think what we've added now is that we've diversified our revenue, both in terms of geography, in terms of industry, and now in terms of growth levers by adding payments and digital marketing as legitimate levers, 16% of our revenue this year. We believe it can be more going into the future. We have six proven growth drivers that we've pulled multiple times over these last three years, and we believe we can pull them into the future. We think that we've had the right team to execute, but we've strengthened that team while delivering our results. We're very confident in this coming year of improving our execution even over what we've done so far. In conclusion, ATG is exiting 2022 stronger than we were before and excited about this coming year and we hope you agree.
I think now, we're gonna pause and go to any Q&A that you may have for me or for Tom.
Certainly. Thank you. We will shortly begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad.
We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. We'll take our first question from Gareth Davies from Numis. Gareth, please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Morning. First question from me is around THV growth on the A&A side of the business. Can you split that into UK and US in terms of sort of current run rate you're seeing in THV growth, and what the kind of puts and calls are as we look into 2023, when we're thinking about modeling out for that THV growth? Relating to that, we saw the conversion rate come down a little bit. Can you give a little color around that and what kind of elements of self-help there are to see that move back up as we look forward? Then the second question. Well, great that Proxibid's launched early in terms of the rollout.
Just to be clear, that payments functionality, is the whole focus gonna be on Proxibid this year, and we should think of international A&A as a, as a sort of 2024-type project? Just wondered if you can update on that timeline. Similarly, around digital marketing, when should we expect that to sort of roll into the broader operation beyond U.S.? Thank you.
Tom, do you wanna do the first THV and recommendation?
Yeah. I'll talk to the first bit. A&A THV, as I said before, if you look at our core auctioneers where we generate the majority of our revenue, over the course of last year, their THV grew 5%. In the second half year it was flat. I'd say at the moment we're still seeing that, and I don't think there's a great difference between the US and the UK. In any one month, there's be some bouncing around of that number, so you can't read too much into any one particular, you know, particular months of activity. Broadly, the two are behaving the same, and I say at the moment they're flat.
With regard to conversion rate in A&A, I think, as we said before, that the key driver there, the underlying driver there has been that normalization that occurred across the first half of last year, just as the world reopened and most auction houses reopened their rooms, versus where they'd been in FY 2021. That has been relatively stable across the second half of the year. As we go into next year, I'd expect in the first half year that will also be stable and then it should move back to its normal path of reasonably steady growth as online continues to gain traction.
There will be a period where, in the first half of the year, where we're lapping some of those higher conversion rates that we saw in the first half of the year as it normalized down across the first half of 2022.
Yeah. I think the second part of your question, Gareth, was around what are the things that we can do to help grow that conversion rate, and I think there's several things. One, you know, you see us launching SMS, which again alerts people to the fact that they've registered for an auction and therefore are better able to remember to bid, and that should grow it. There are basic things like the search results that I talked about, so the taxonomy changes and category and subcategory changes we're making to make it easier for Google algorithms to search our site should result, again, in more bidders finding the lots that are for sale and then bidding through us, which should drive it further. Then we have the work that we're doing on CRM.
A year and a half ago we implemented the recommendation engine. We're still getting better and better at using that, but our marketing team, I think, leveraging that CRM capability to present lots that are more relevant can drive it. Finally, one of our biggest channels for driving new growth is around people who sign up for Auction Alerts, and we are creating more opportunities for people to create an Auction Alert at different points in the site. Those are just a handful of the things that we can do, but there are, you know, dozens and dozens of things that we can do to drive conversion, and we'll be focusing on, you know, a select number of those over the course of the year. Again, we believe that we will definitely be able to drive that conversion further.
In terms of Proxibid, yes, you're right. You should count on Proxibid as being the focus for payments for this year, international launch of payments we would hope would be in 2024. Again, you know, if the revenue is in North America for payments for LiveAuctioneers in the industrial side, we'll be making a decision along the way as to whether it makes more sense to internationalize or whether it makes more sense to create additional features or functionality that can enhance the revenue and penetration of payments in North America. I won't commit to 2024 as payments in Europe, but that likely would be the plan.
Our second question comes from James Lockyer from Peel Hunt. Please proceed.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the time, my questions. Firstly on the take rate and VAS. A&A has always been higher than INC, and, you know, if we assume those differences remain, as INC takes on more levels of VAS over time, let's imagine they get to the same level that A&A are today in terms of VAS take-up. What might the INC take rate be on that basis? I guess, a subsection on A&A. Not everyone... You know, 8% was what was listed, but not everyone's taking VAS yet. For those auctioneers that are taking both, can we talk about their average take rate? Then just on the second question, just around the new features.
On then the sort of implications on conversion. The SMS feature, you mentioned 30% forget to bid. How might that translate to, you know, increased conversion rate if we, if we were to look at it that way? Similarly on the Proxibid, 38% more winning bidders. How should we think about that as an increase in conversion rate? Thanks.
In terms of the take rate growing, I'm not sure we're gonna be able to answer all the questions you had at the end there. In terms of the first one, the take rate for INC, if you look at our commission take rate on the INC side, it's a little below 2%, and then you have with the fixed fees, it's a little bit above that. When you add payments, I think the way that we view it is, you know, you could... Depending on the percentage of adoption, payments could add up to 2% of additional take rate, but at lower margin. I think we've kind of quoted 20%- 25%.
Then you have the digital marketing, which again, not instantly or in this first year, but over, let's say, the next several years, we believe we can get that up to potentially 1%. Then you have the other value-added services we're adding and that could be anywhere from 50 basis points to, let's say, another percent. Over time, that's where we could see it moving, but we're not saying that it's going to get there in the next, you know, 12- 24 months. In terms of the... Tom, did you wanna comment any more on that?
Yeah.
Make-
I was gonna say that the one thing you could say, the differential on commission rates between the two segments is about 3%. If you look at the moment, the take rate between INC and ANA differs by 6%. There is a differential there essentially because of VAS, predominantly because of VAS, between the two of about 3%, which is sort of the gap that you might expect to be made up as far as.
Right
adopted.
In terms of the, you asked about the new features we're rolling out like SMS and the 38% more likely to bid, et cetera. I don't think we're able to give you a specific answer around how that translates exactly. First of all, it's rolling out on one marketplace initially. We're gonna see how that goes, and then it will gradually expand. I don't think we've modeled it on a specific, we launched this feature and conversion grows by a specific amount. Tom, if I'm wrong on that, chime in.
No, no. That's correct. I think one of your questions was what's the difference in take rate when someone does adopt VAS? Perhaps a way of thinking about that is the VAS take rate might be about 3% overall, particularly with payments. When someone adopts payments, about 75% of their transactions go through payments. There's about 2.5% step up in take rate for auctioneers that have adopted VAS versus those that haven't.
Yeah. Tom, I think he was asking about the conversion rate impact of some of the new features, but I think we don't-
Yes.
We don't have-
It's hard to say at the moment what that is.
Yeah.
Sorry, James, I'm not sure if there wasn't another question in there that we haven't answered.
No, no. Those two are fine. Just I want to separate those from just my third question, which is if you could talk a bit about recruiter recruitment and how that's gone and whether you're up to your run rate where you need to be for your FY 2023 plan. Thanks.
Recruitment is something that we're definitely focused on, and I think what we're excited by in this year. Are we fully staffed? No. You always have some open headcount. I think we have maybe 30 or something right now in the business out of our 375, and then we have contractors as well. Around the recruiting, I think we feel very good about the recruiting that we've been able to do this year. If you look, we've added, as we talked about our chief technology officer, president of industrial and commercial. We added the chief product officer. We've added people below them, and we think we've done a really good job of recruiting good senior leaders this year.
We've also brought in a lot of new technology and product people, which again, you know, that's gone very well, and I think what we're looking to do is enhance that even further. When you look out into the future, you know, the way that we talk about with our, with our HR department and with the leaders is there's typical amount of churn in the business, plus we're growing, which means we're gonna have to be recruiting, you know, 50 to 100 people a year. How do you create a machine that can actually do that effectively? The reason why, again, we're excited by the year is, you see the big tech companies laying people off. We're growing.
We think we have a unique value proposition for people out there where, you know, you can go join a venture capital-backed startup, where you have maybe a one in 20% chance or one in 20 chance of even surviving and maybe a one in 100 chance of hitting it big, or you can join a big tech company, but where you may be put in a box and asked to do something very specific for a long time and wonder about the impact that you personally have. You can come to a midcap tech company that's public and where you can see it growing, has a massive TAM, great competitive position. You get equity.
You know, to me, if I were somebody out there, I'd be thinking, "This is the exact place I'd wanna be in my career," because you can make an impact. You're part of a profitable company that clearly is winning, and where you can actually do well, as well because you're gonna get some equity. We feel very confident in our ability to get out there and recruit. You know, I like doing it. I like convincing people to come and join ATG because I think it's a fantastic opportunity, and I think the rest of our executives feel the same way. You know, yes, we're gonna be out there recruiting. Yes, we feel like we have a great chance to hit the goals we have for the people we wanna bring in. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. No, that's perfect. Thanks, guys.
Our next question comes from Otto Sieber from Barclays. Otto, please go ahead.
Good morning, both. It's Otto speaking from Barclays. Thanks so much for taking my question. I have a few. I'd like to take them one by one if that's possible. First is, cognizant that a recession is happening. You mentioned that you are very. That you kind of reflected this cautious, more cautious take-up in the payments in Proxibid in your guidance because auctioneers might pull the trigger a little bit later because of the uncertainty. How did you think aboutThe macroeconomic impact on the GMV growth, more specifically going for, say, 10% revenue growth at the midpoint for next year, how much of that comes from GMV growth, and how much of that comes from the take rate?
I'll let you take that one.
The, the 10% midpoint, probably 2/3 we'd say come from GMV growth, 1/3 from take rate. As, as you rightly pointed out, the macro environment is interesting at the moment. We've talked many times before about the split in our business. The ANA side probably is more exposed or pro-cyclical, but the INC segment is more counter-cyclical. We get quite a lot of inventory from recessions. Overall, we're reasonably confident that as we go into an uncertain macroeconomic times, we should weather it well. We're also mindful of the fact that we do need a degree of caution, and so we haven't been, we haven't over-called, we don't think the contribution for GMV growth next year.
I think there's potential for upside from that if particularly INC does see the benefit of perhaps more insolvencies coming through, as the year progresses.
Oh, that's very helpful. If 6% or 7% out of those 10 points are coming from GMV growth, I presume there's a very small contribution only from shipping or payments and Proxibid in your guidance. That's helpful. Further on the take rate, currently 42% of GTV is done via payments and LiveAuctioneers. Where do you see a more mature level, and how high do you think could that go?
Well, I think, the question is over what time period. We believe that at some point we will be covering all of the THV of the auction houses who work with us. As we continue to develop our payment solution, there's no reason that if an auctioneer is choosing to use us for its GMV, that they shouldn't at some point choose to use us for their THV. We just need to prove that we're worth picking and that it's the most effective and efficient solution. That's why I say that if we get payments right, it could be bigger than all of ATG.
I'm not saying we're gonna do that in the next two years, but when you look out, say, you know, say three to five years, I'd say on LiveAuctioneers, I'd hope we would be, let's say, somewhere between 75% and 90%. On the industrial side, maybe we're getting up to 50% or 60% by that point. Again, these are all what we would aspire to, but I don't see any reason why over time we should not be covering all of the THV that goes through ATG.
Cool. Thanks so much. Final question on capital allocation. How do you think about your use of cash in fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024? You mentioned M&A as one potential lever of growth. Would you prioritize that or rather paying down debt as you've done most recently? Maybe one quick follow-up, any thoughts on the execution on the LiveAuctioneers, so the performance of the LiveAuctioneers since the acquisition take rate improvements really have been very strong and the payments growth has been very strong, but also any color on the GMV dynamic would be helpful on top. Thank you.
Tom, that's for you.
I'll take the first one. In terms of capital allocation, we have paid down the debt using some of our surplus cash. I should say we still have an RCF of nearly $50 million, we also have the ability to sort of recover the cash we've early repaid by not making future payments on the debt. We haven't actually lost the debt capacity. The reason for repaying the debt early is simply because we had such a large surplus cash, we were paying increasingly high interest rates. It just made no sense to keep that cash sitting around. We don't believe that curtails our ability to do M&A. That very much remains an option for us as and when opportunities come up.
If it's a small acquisition, so in the low tens of millions GBP, then we would have the capacity to do that off our balance sheet. If it was anything bigger than that, clearly we'd probably have to look for an equity raise. Those would be, you know, those will be decided as and when opportunities crystallize.
What was your other question?
Sorry. Yeah, sorry for the compound questions. The other question was just any color on the performance of LiveAuctioneers as since acquisition. What are you happy about? What are you not as happy about? What do you think the performance has not as been as strong as expected, basically.
I think Tom referred to that a little bit already. I don't know, Tom, if you wanna repeat that around the mix of the auction houses, et cetera.
I mean, the ANA commentary we gave earlier is very analogous, very close to LiveAuctioneers commentary. LiveAuctioneers, so it's performing in line with our expectations from when we acquired the business, but that is a mix of strong, fast growth, offsetting some of the impact of normalization of post-COVID conversion rates amongst the auctioneer base. Overall, it's pretty much in line with where we thought it was going to be at this stage in its life cycle.
Very helpful. Thank you.
The following question comes from Lara Simpson from J.P. Morgan. Please proceed.
Yes. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to come back to the outlook for 2023 and the guide for broadly flat EBITDA margin, which I understand is driven by the continued investments to support growth. My first question would just be if you could talk a bit more about the nature of these investments. You've mentioned the tech platform, leadership investments. I think a bit more insight on the spend would be helpful, and sort of any key costs that you can call out there. My second question is on the outlook period, and really how we should think about the phasing of these investments into 2024, particularly in the context of sort of your midterm margin target of mid to high forties, and just the roadmap towards that. Thank you.
In terms of where the investment is going, it's going predominantly into technology and product and again, into the leadership and the layers beneath the CTO that we brought in. That's the vast majority of it. Some in the other areas, we've talked about the fact that we brought in a president of the industrial and commercial group, so that's an expensive hire. There are some people coming in underneath him as well. Those are the primary areas that we are. Obviously we have some of the investment in the platform in the future as well, but that falls into that technology bucket, and some of that hits differently and doesn't impact our margins directly. Tom, do you wanna talk any more about that?
I should also add, most of the margin impact that you see in FY 2023, is actually the full year effect of things that we've done in FY 2022. Particularly those senior leadership roles, you can only hire those roles once. As you get into FY 2024, there won't be the equivalent drag going forward. It's very much a one-off effect.
Okay. Thank you.
Apparently, our final question comes from Bharat Nagaraj from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have three. I'll go one by one, if that's all right. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the INC is mainly countercyclical because in a downturn you would get higher volumes. Given that you're not yet offering payments and other value-added services, materially so in INC, what gives you the confidence in the cyclicality at this point in time? I do appreciate it's going to grow over the year, just wanted to get your thoughts on that.
I think we feel good about it for several reasons. First of all, When you say the countercyclicality, I guess what I'm interpreting that is what gives us confidence that we're gonna continue to grow in that area. I look at it in two different ways. One, you look at the timed adoption mix and the fact that we have about 50% of our auctions now on the INC side that are timed. When we have that, we get higher conversion and therefore that helps us grow.
If you then look at the fact that auctions, again, are becoming a more transparent way to sell, I think particularly in an uncertain market, if you're a consignor, you're gonna be likely to consign those assets to auction, which is the most transparent way to get full price. You also look at the fact that in a recessionary environment, there are a lot more insolvencies, and the U.S. has been at an eight-year low of insolvencies, and we've still been growing. If the recession kicks in and government supports that were there during COVID continue to disappear, you'd expect to see more insolvencies appearing, and that would then drive the countercyclicality of what we do. Those are three of the big components.
The other part here is that, I think what Tom talked about is even amidst all the uncertainty that's going on, the asset prices that have grown during COVID have remained very high. They're not increasing at the same rate, but they're still remaining high. As we bring more bidders, and as the supply chain shortages remain, because even in a recession, there's no sign that chip shortages are disappearing. There's so many different factors that are going into both our ability to control through bidder acquisition and the other factors, the convincing auctioneers to put assets on to keep our volumes up, bidders who are keeping the prices high, the other external factors also giving us a lot of tailwind there.
You know, regardless of what we can do with value-added services, which we feel really good about, those are, I think, the key elements that are going into why we feel confident around, continuing to grow and be countercyclical regardless of the recession. I don't know, Tom, if you want to add to that?
Yeah. I'd just say if you look at the behavior of the used equipment market, industrial and commercial used equipment market through the last recession, it was countercyclical. It grew in times of recession. I think a key point to that is the auction market is very important for insolvencies. That's the way assets that are sold when they're being realized through insolvency goes through auction. It tends not to go through other routes, which is why you get a disproportionate benefit in the auction market.
Sure. Sorry, but just to follow up on that, like, you're right. Currently the supply chain is helping the prices remain elevated. When you get higher volumes, because of insolvencies in a recessionary environment, it's certainly good. Going forward, the price may not stay elevated, and that was kind of like the basis for my question. Volumes may still remain high, but the prices might kind of taper down. I know you're not seeing that yet, but over the course of next year, and given that you're not yet significantly penetrated in value-added services, you could potentially have lower revenues than you expect.
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I'd just add, generally, volumes and prices move in tandem. It, it is possible the prices go down. I mean, that's, we can't discount that. We haven't seen it yet, but it could do. That should be, and historically been the case, that will be accompanied by an increase in volume of assets. Overall net revenues are unaffected by that. Well, you know, some net difference, and typically that difference has been positive. It's a bit. You can't look in isolation it's at the prices and the volumes because both of those are correlated to each other. In fact, negatively correlated to each other.
All right. Thank you. The second question I have is on A&A growth, which was helped along by value-added services, as you've said, which is growing significantly year on year. Can you speak about the pricing and volume related movements affecting the growth in H2 and maybe going into next year as well?
Do you wanna take that, Tom?
The volume related effects were as I described earlier. We saw over the course of the first half, sort of the impact of the opening up of sale rooms again and the sort of normalization of conversion rates that's relatively stable in the second half of the year. Month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter, that's been stable. If you compare the second half of the year to the first half of the year where we're prior year, that stable rate would be lower. If you look at THV growth, underlying activity was growing in the first half of the year. It was stable in the second half of the year.
Overall growth rates in GMV were lower in the second half of the year, in first half of the year in A&A. In terms of pricing, I mean, core underlying pricing is unchanged. The thing that's changing is the adoption of VAS, and that increased as we moved through the year, just as more and more people adopting it built up that base, and would expect that to continue as we go forward.
Sure. Sorry, on the pricing, I meant more the pricing of the assets, rather than.
Ah.
commission take rate.
Yeah. Sorry, I get you. The pricing of asset, we haven't seen the same fluctuations as we've seen in INC. I mean, the THV movements are a good indication of that. The pricing has been relatively stable in A&A in line with THV.
Understood.
Yeah.
In terms of your guidance for next year, what kind of pricing and volume declines are you incorporating for both A&A and INC? I'm talking about assets again, sorry, just to clarify. Thank you.
Yeah. We don't because of that sort of correlation between the two numbers, we don't make explicit assumptions about pricing and volume effects 'cause the two largely work in tandem against each other. As I said before, about two-thirds of that growth is gonna come from GMV. It could be that prices are softer and volumes are higher in there. It similarly, it could be that prices hold up and volumes aren't quite so high. But overall at the level of GMV we'd predict is not necessarily directly impacted by that.
Okay. Cool, clear. Just if I can squeeze in one last small one. The 50 auction houses that you mentioned which have signed up for payments, are that the ones including LiveAuctioneers as well, or is that just?
Yeah.
standalone ATG?
No, that's just on the Proxibid side.
All right.
roughly 75%
Yeah.
-of their 1,200 auctioneers signed up to it, and then we have on the Proxibid side, just those first 50.
Excellent. Yeah. Thank you very much.
There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to John-Paul Savant for closing remarks.
Okay. Well, thank you again for coming to this earnings announcement and we're looking forward to speaking with many of you in the one-on-one meetings coming up. Overall, as I said, we're really pleased with our fiscal year 2022 results. What we're excited by as we head into fiscal year 2023 is that we feel that regardless of the macroeconomic backdrop, we have levers under our control to drive value-added services, drive and payments, drive digital marketing, and to grow that GMV through conversion rate improvements with all the different things that we're doing this year that are gonna play out in the coming year.
On top of that, as I think Tom alluded to, we still have some firepower for selective M&A, and we still remain active on that front as well, and we think there's multiple interesting opportunities. Thank you for your time today, and we're looking forward to 2023. Thank you.