All right. Real pleasure meeting you in person. This is our first year as a public company, so it feels very special for us. I'm even more excited to announce that last year results were very, very successful. We have exceeded our IPO guidance and delivering all our commitments, including financial, governance, and the capital allocation. The revenue grew 21%, reaching EUR 51 million, while adjusted EBITDA grew 19%, exceeding EUR 39 million with industry-leading margin of 77%. We are implementing our capital policy, including returning excess cash to shareholders. We paid down EUR 14 million of debt, reducing the leverage to 1.7x adjusted EBITDA. Proposed final dividend of EUR 0.014 per share and gaining necessary authorities to initiate a share buyback program.
In addition to this, we appointed additional independent non-executive director and became carbon neutral across Scope 1 and Scope 2. In our view, it has been the busiest period in company history, but it's at the same time the most successful one, including in the beginning of the year becoming a public company. We had a record revenue across all our four business lines. It's important to remember that we are still in the early stage of monetization. We started the year in May 2021 by implementing pricing events for private customers. In the autumn, we improved our pricing and packaging for business customers, and we finalized our financial year in April 2022 by launching annual pricing event for private customers a few weeks ahead of our regular schedule. Last week we completed acquisition of services vertical in Latvia and Estonia, GetaPro.
Before, the BCG owned the service vertical in Lithuania, Paslaugos.lt which almost doubled last year. This acquisition marks the strategic expansion into the fastest-growing segment in new territory. BCG organic revenue grew 22%, led by 11% in autos, 17% in real estate, 6% in generalist, and 97% in jobs and services. Adjusted EBITDA grew 19%, exceeding EUR 39 million, with industry leading EBITDA margin of over 77%. While operating profit has tracked EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA numbers exceeded EUR 38 million and was 20% up. Cash conversion was close to 100%, and we significantly re-reduced our leverage from 2.75 to 1.7 times adjusted EBITDA. I'm then pleased to announce that the board recommends the final dividend to be paid in the middle of October. It's very important that the number of business customers grew across all business units.
We had 1% more real estate brokers, 4% more automotive dealers, 47% more employers using our sites than a year ago. The BCG portfolio has a huge reach in Baltics. On average, our sites were visited 65 times per month, suggesting that each citizen in Baltic has visited one of our sites 11 times per month. The lead over close competitor, which we consider to be the most important KPI, has increased across all major portals and now is from 4.4 to over 30 times, depending on the portal we look at. The pricing and packaging improvement helped increase yield both for business and private customers. Average revenue per automotive business customer grew 8% and 40% for the private. In real estate, 15% and 22% respectively. In jobs, 29%. In Generalist, 8%.
BCG were among those very few companies which grew throughout the whole pandemic period. The organic growth in 2020 was 9%, while last year we grew 22%. The revenue compared to the pre-COVID period was 35% higher. It was not a technical growth last year, but it was organic growth and quite a significant improvement compared to pre-COVID period. COVID led to a strong growth in labor and real estate market, but disrupted automotive supply chain. Basically, the same trends we've seen across other European countries. The impact of the Russian invasion in Ukraine had very little impact on our company and Baltics economy as a whole. In the first few weeks, people were following news more than usual, so our KPIs were 20%-30% lower.
However, it recovered very rapidly, and already on the fourth and fifth week of the invasion, business results exceeded the pre-war level. We estimate that we lost around 1% of the growth concentrated in the first four weeks of the invasion. Baltic economies are very independent from Russia. Last year, we exported below 1% of locally produced goods to Russia. We have built our independent energy infrastructure with liquid gas terminals and storage facilities. Baltics were the first to completely cancel all energy imports from Russia. Now I will hand over to Lina to talk about finance in more detail.
Thank you, Justinas. Good morning, everyone. Starting with revenue. We ended our year with the highest ever yearly revenue exceeding expectations at the IPO during which we targeted 15% growth for the group. Organically excluding the disposed revenue from the comparatives, our revenue grew 22% to EUR 51 million, and as Justinas just mentioned, compared to two years ago, our revenue grew 35% organically. The main drivers of revenue growth were increases in the number of business customers, C2C listings, except for autos, and the average spend per customer and listing. We've returned to our usual schedule of pricing events. In May 2021, we introduced C2C price changes for most of our portals. It's impact is reflected in the reported yearly revenue numbers. In autumn 2021, we introduced B2C price changes.
The ones for autos and real estate rolled out throughout the following couple of months, and the ones for jobs are still rolling out during the 12 months period until September 2022. Almost three months ago in April, we again introduced C2C price changes to the main portals. These made so far a limited contribution to 2022, with the full impact to be seen in 2023. Due to Russian invasion of Ukraine and consequently people reading more news rather than shopping or looking for property or real estate, we estimate that we lost around 1% of growth this year, which dropped to the bottom line as well. This was an immediate and a short-term impact on revenue, which bounced back in a few weeks, and we returned to pre-war level and our normal run rates.
Now looking at each of business lines. Revenue grew in all four business lines. The group again proves the strength of the diversified portfolio, and we saw a wide range of organic growth this year. We believe that this in large part reflects the indirect consequences of COVID, it's also seen in other countries. Simonas will soon explain each business line growth factors in more detail. Overall, in addition to our pricing events, in all four business units, the number of B2C customers increased with the biggest growth in jobs. In C2C, we saw a gradual increase in listings, which is primarily due to growing activity in the underlying market in real estate and Generalist.
While in automotive, the average monthly number of active ads is below last year level, primarily due to shortened selling time, which means that each advert is active for less time, and also fewer market transactions than pre-COVID, which is influenced by the global disruption in supply chain. As a result, organically, Auto business line grew 11%, despite just mentioned global supply chain shortages. Jobs & Services was benefiting a lot from current market trends and more difficult search for employees. Therefore, this year, this revenue line almost doubled, grown 97%. Real Estate has also contributed a solid growth to group revenue. Business line grew 17%. Generalist revenues grew 6% against a strong performance last year, which was driven by pandemic lockdowns. Moving to our operating costs. These are our operating costs to EBITDA line.
Before I start here, the only adjustments to our costs and profitability are IPO related and historic acquisitions related. Once again, we manage our costs well. People costs account for the majority of our operating costs. The team grew by three full-time employees to 127, and the majority of the 25% increase in the people cost was driven by annual salary reviews, the cost of Performance Share Plan, PSP, and board remuneration. PSP and board remuneration impact for this year was EUR 0.9 million for the 9-month period since IPO. The cost of PSP should continue increasing gradually during the first three-year period after the IPO. Based on the assumption that the PSP will award a list of employees yearly with three-year nominal value options, and thereafter, the cost should be relatively constant.
In addition to ongoing costs that we had last year, this year, other costs included other additional costs relating to first year of being a public listed company. In addition to that, at the end of the financial year, end of February, we supported several non-governmental organizations assisting Ukraine and Ukrainians fleeing the war in their country by donating EUR 0.2 million. Just for clarity, we don't adjust for it. Because of these two mentioned items, other costs grew 35% this year. Marketing cost of close to EUR 1 million per year and less than 2% from revenue is a benefit of the locally well-known portfolio of brands and also our cross-marketing. We're seeing strengthening network effects across all business units as a growing number of customers drive content, which in turn encourages greater engagement of our audience.
Looking at the portal's lead versus closest competitor, which you've already seen was growing, additionally assures us that there's, you know, just no need to spend any more on it. Overall, our adjusted costs grew 26%, and the majority of the growth comes from new costs relating to being a public listed company. Without these costs, our operating cost base would have grown 9%. By the way, one of the hot topics today is inflation. Our group operates in a high inflation environment for quite a few years, especially in labor costs, and recently inflation was double-digit. However, our costs represent a relatively small part of the revenue, therefore, this did not significantly affect our profitability. Instead, there are angles from which inflation even benefits us. First of all, inflation environment supports us in thinking about the level of next price changes.
When [Inaudible] real estate prices are growing, we benefit from the value-based pricing in C2C, where the higher value asset falls into a higher level of price spread. Now moving to profitability. We ended our year with the highest ever adjusted yearly profitability, exceeding expectations at the time of IPO. Starting with adjusted EBITDA here, this is the profitability measure that we talked at the IPO. As also mentioned in the revenue section, due to Russian invasion of Ukraine, we estimate that we lost around 1% of growth, and EBITDA margin, with impact being concentrated in roughly one-month period, end of February, and first half of March. Despite that, an additional public company cost this year, our adjusted EBITDA grew 19%. We ended our year with 77% adjusted EBITDA margin.
As a reminder, at IPO, we were confident in the sustainability of group margin prior to the impact of listed company costs. Prior to public company costs, our EBITDA margin grew to even 80%. Moving to other profitability measures. The upper part of the table presents a list of adjustments that we use to get to adjusted profitability measures. Once again, they're all related to either IPO this year or the historic acquisitions. For clarity, the bottom part of the table shows both the reported IFRS measures and the adjusted ones. What Justinas already mentioned, similarly to our adjusted EBITDA, our adjusted operating profit grew strongly, 20%. We also present here adjusted net income, which is basis for company dividends.
Mainly because of the refinancing at the IPO and therefore lower financial costs, in particular interest, our net income grew 109%. Instead of 6% EUR + Euribor interest rate prior to IPO, the group was paying 2 + Euribor interest rate from the lower gross debt amount borrowed at IPO for the 10 months out of 12. Moving on to operating cash flow information, if adjusted for IPO-related payments, cash generated from operating activities grew 22%. Generated cash was used to reduce the loan liability by partially paying down debt. We also bought EUR 2.1 million of company shares, paying EUR 3.4 million to employee benefit trust for our future employee awards. Touching on capital expenditure, as a reminder, we do not capitalize any personnel costs.
This year, in addition to usual CapEx, we finished establishing the disaster recovery site in Poland for Estonian sites. Our cash conversion, EBITDA less cash CapEx divided by EBITDA, was strong at 99%. We significantly reduced our net debt and leverage this year. We started our financial year with EUR 214 million loan and leverage of 6 times. At IPO, so 2 months from the beginning of the financial year, we repaid this term loan and drew down a new term loan of EUR 98 million with leverage 2.75 times. As touched upon earlier, during the next 10 months of the year, we voluntarily repaid EUR 14 million of debt, and at the end of the year, we had a gross debt balance of EUR 84 million and leverage 1.7 times.
With consistently increasing LTM EBITDA and cash balance, the deleveraging is quite straightforward to us. Now continuing with our capital allocation priorities. We intend to use the excess cash we generate in a year within the same year and the year thereafter. We will continue considering value-creating M&A opportunities. All options for financing or for attractive acquisitions opportunities remain open, including using cash, increasing our debt and even seeking additional equity capital. However, using cash is the most likely, and this would most likely not affect dividends, but might reduce the capacity for share buybacks. As detailed at the IPO, after the first year as a public company, BCG intends to return one-third of adjusted net income each year via an interim and final dividend, split approximately one-third and two-thirds respectively.
The board proposed the final dividend, which is expected to be paid on the 14th of October 2022, but that's subject to shareholder approval at the AGM. Because our leverage is already below 2x, we do not have any particular target level of debt. We intend using a combination of share buybacks and debt repayment from the balance of cash. Currently, we are working on gaining the necessary authorities for the board to initiate a share buyback program following the AGM. Well, that's shortly about the group financials. Thank you very much, and I'm handing over to Simonas, who'll guide you through our strategic process.
Hello, everyone. It's really nice to meet you face-to-face finally. I would like to update you on KPIs we're disclosing for each business unit. Just to make it easier to navigate through the slides, I will remind you that the market context is on the top left, the C2C performance in the top right, B2C performance in the bottom right, and our lead over competitors is in the bottom left. Let's start from autos. In 2022, automotive market in Baltic stabilized and even grew by 4%. In general, we observed similar post-COVID dynamics as six months ago. It's less cars, much higher average price, higher dealer margins. Our yield has increased significantly, but volumes are still much lower than pre-COVID.
This means that we are carrying huge potential to grow in the future when the car supply will recover. Let's dig into more details. In C2C, we have value-based pricing, which means the listing price grows together with the car price. As you can see, average car price grew by 24% in 2022, so this increased our revenue. Plus, we implemented pricing actions, and as a result, we have 40% higher average revenue per ad in C2C. The number of active ads is lower 18% than the last year. This doesn't mean that we are losing any content. This, the reason is shorter selling time. Ads are simply being removed from our platforms faster than it was before.
You know, as you know, probably ironically, in our auto business, and same applies for the real estate, it's more lucrative when the market is less active, when it takes longer time to sell, which means that we get more paid ads extensions in our C2C business. In B2C segment, average revenue per dealer grew by 8%. It should have been higher, but the growth was diluted by a bigger number of smaller dealers joining. As you see, there are +4% of new dealers. This is mostly the small dealers who used to list at C2C, and now they are switched to B2C. In the bottom left, you can see that our lead versus closest competitor keeps growing. It's more than four times in Lithuania and more than 32 times in Estonia. Real estate.
Real estate market is very active. For last two years, both number of transaction and average price grew significantly, around 10%, and we directly benefit from this price growth in C2C segment as we have this value-based pricing. In addition, pricing actions were implemented in the beginning of 2022, and as a result, we have 22% revenue per ad growth. Number of active ads remained nearly the same as a year ago due to the shorter selling time, similarly to automotive market. Bottom right chart shows you the number of brokers is stable because we already have super high penetration. As a result of annual pricing actions, the average revenue per broker grew by 15%. You see we are further strengthening our competitive position.
The gap between us and the nearest competitor is up to 29 times in Lithuania and nearly 12 in Estonia. Jobs market is booming, so unemployment rate in calendar year 2021 went down by 2 to 7.1, and average wage keeps growing on average, you know, annually for several years, 10%. In some segments, it's much higher, of course. In some segments, lower. The market is very supportive for our business. For companies, it's getting, you know, challenging to find employees, so companies tend to invest more and more into hiring. We grew our average revenue per customer by 29%. As you see, the customer base grew by 47%. Our job board is really a champion this year.
You have already seen in Justinas and in Lina's slides that CVbankas, our job board nearly doubled the revenues. I want to stress here that we more than doubled our lead over closest competitor in last two years. Now we have, like, 8.3% times the lead over the competitor. Generalist. Generalist platforms had a tough comparables because of the COVID e-commerce boost in 2021 caused by lockdowns. As you saw in Lina's slides, the generalist segment grew by 6% in 2022, but while in 2021 it grew 16%. Our biggest generalist platforms, Skelbiu.lt, grew its average revenue per listing by 8% because of the pricing actions we took.
Our lead for our closest competitor in Lithuania grew from 15% to 19% in the last two years, from 2020 to 2022. We had really abnormal year in 2021. As I already mentioned, it was the COVID lockdown year, so it boosted our lead to 23 times in 2021. Anyway, for the business it doesn't make sense if it's 20 or 30 times the lead. It's much more important to grow from two to three than from 20 to 30. Now I would like to talk a bit about the developments. There are innovations happening continuously on each of our portals. Our platforms is literally changing every day. So on average, we make 30 production releases daily.
In those next two slides, I will present you some of the developments implemented in the H2 of the year. Just to give you a feel to know of things what are happening under covers. Starting from autos. On the left-hand side, Auto24.ee in Estonia expanded car financing products. Firstly, in the collaboration with a financial provider, we offered full service car rental for new vehicles. This means that customer pays monthly fee, gets new car and all the maintenance, including cars, insurance, et cetera. Secondly, our car leasing threshold was lifted up to 40,000, so that these developments increased addressable market and the future revenue growth. On our Lithuanian property platform, on Aruodas, we implemented virtual numbers for C2C customers, which strongly contributes to the personal data privacy and the marketing as well.
Let's move to jobs. We translated CVbankas.lt into Ukrainian and Russian languages. We implemented automatic translation system to translate the content of the site, the ads themselves. This extends our job seekers market audience by attracting more foreign candidates, especially refugees from Ukraine. We kept onboarding large customers last year. We made more than 10 integrations with the applicant tracking systems to make this onboarding go smooth. On Generalist we introduced the registration wall for buyers. The new buyers have to register on our platform to be able to contact the seller. That's important step to protect the user privacy and prevent from frauds. Actually, besides mentioned above, I would like to touch on several more developments we made in support to Ukrainian refugees.
There are 150,000 refugees in the Baltics, so it's important that our platform, platforms welcome these people. We can really help to find them housing, job, affordable, you know, things needed for daily life. We made translation of the platforms. We made options to find the suitable housing and then job offers easier. On Generalist platform, we launched a special category where the people can give away things for free for the refugees. On that note, I will hand over back to Justinas to finish our presentation.
All right. Thank you, Simonas. We believe that our growth runway is significant and we are early in our monetization journey. Our portal take rates compared to international peers are two to three times still lower. Improving pricing and packaging will help to grow our revenue and profits in coming years. This we consider to be the core of our growth story. In addition to this, we are developing ancillary products, particularly financial intermediation, and we have a shortlist of M&A targets we are constantly circling around. The Baltic economies are in a very healthy shape and growing faster than the EU average. Underlying markets of real estate, automotive, labor and e-commerce grow in terms of transaction values and volumes. This benefits our customers and this favors our company as well.
We have started 2023 year with a strong performance, supported by the pricing and packaging amendment across all business for private customers launched in April. The board feels comfortable guiding 15% revenue growth in real estate and in auto in line jobs and services above and generalist slightly below overall average. We expect to maintain adjusted EBITDA margin despite a rise in costs and high inflationary environment and incremental public company costs. Following the AGM in September, we expect the appropriate authorities to be in place to begin a share buyback program. The board will consider the allocation of excess cash towards reducing debt and the share buyback program at the time. Thank you very much for your attention. Hopefully it was more entertaining than political drama in UK. Now we are ready to answer any questions. I don't know. Women's first.
Hi. Morning. It's Jessica from Peel Hunt. I've just got three, if that's all right. The first is, you've suggested for the new year, you're expecting Jobs & Services to be another year where it's ahead of your average. You've obviously added a lot of companies last year. Going into the new year, is it much more about increasing the yield from these companies? Or is there potential to actually incrementally increase the number of companies recruiting on the website? Shall I carry on with the questions?
Yeah.
One by one?
One by one I think.
Okay.
Maybe one by one. Actually, it's a very good question. A very big question, and I think that I'll answer it. You are correct. Last year, in Jobs we grew a lot in terms of the new customers. This year in terms of the new customers, we will grow, but with much more modest growth because the growth for last year was just, you know, tremendous. We are aiming pricing increases 15%-20% in Jobs. Basically, we think that the Jobs and Services will grow above the 15%, our guiding average. The growth will be also very strong this year.
Okay. The second question is about, you know, similar to the UK dynamics have been that the supply issue with cars continues. I mean, what do you expect kind of going into the year with both cars and also just housing transactions in the region?
I can start. Maybe Simonas will also help me. Actually I think that we have already started seeing the inventory to start recovering in the automotive. I think that the bottom or the lowest point is already behind us and we started to recover. Definitely the recovery is currently very slow. It's not that, you know, the supply chain is restored. It's not yet happening. It's already recovering. What we expect. You know, a lot of economists are talking about the slowdown in the economy. If the slowdown happens, it will benefit number of active ads on our platforms. If it will take longer to sell a vehicle. Basically the number of active ads will grow on our market or on our platforms. We will benefit from that.
From here, we kind of feel that the inventory will start recovering in the real estate. Basically we saw that the inventory level was similar to last year. If we go deeper and look deeper, actually in the rentals we had a very low inventory because the rentals market were so hot, especially Ukrainian refugees coming to the countries. They actually all the properties were rented so fast. We expect that maybe rentals will start recovering. Also if we face that there will be some sort of a worldwide recession. Again, this would impact that actually the it will take longer to sell the real estate and then our inventory level and active ads will increase.
Okay. Just the final one is on Generalist. I mean 6% is lower than the average you normally guide for the group, and you've suggested that it's gonna be slightly lower this year as well. Is this kind of the level that we should be expecting kind of going forward? I mean, obviously if it's also driven by macro and if macro environment is weaker, should we be expecting kind of sub-10% kind of going forward for that particular division, or are you doing things to kind of boost that revenue?
Sorry for not letting you.
Yeah, it's fine. It's fine.
Maybe just like a few points that Simonas said. I think that we need to look to the Generalist from different directions. First of all, is it a healthy business? We definitely consider it's a healthy business. However, if we are looking here at the revenue streams in the Generalist, there are one revenue streams which can be driven or increased through increased pricing. Another revenue streams which are based on the growth of the volume. So basically the part which actually can be increased through the pricing actions. This is in our control much more so we are actually you know taking care and through the pricing events we are increasing the yield here. The volume part is the one which is actually growing with e-commerce side. So this is the second point.
The third point to consider here is that the part of the generalist categories are competing with our own verticals. Usually verticals are the ones which are winning. The price, you know, sensitivity is yes, it's higher than in the generalist side. That's why we are guiding slightly lower compared to our overall revenue. However, the much better performance in jobs will compensate. That's why we are for the whole company, we are guiding mid-teens.
Thank you. Just a small thing to add that how we look at the generalist. Actually, we know that we can monetize better on verticals, right, than on generalists. Because of price sensitivities, it's obvious. I mean, it's not so prestigious, you know, we cannot price it very expensively. That's why we moved the marketing-wise. Let's say, moved the traffic and then the content moved from generalist to verticals because we can monetize better. We look at the generalist not only like a cash-generating business, but also as a hub for redistributing, let's say, the traffic to feeding our more profitable business.
Thank you.
Not maybe more profitable, but ones where we can monetize.
Ones who have the bigger potential to monetize.
Thank you.
Hi, it's Will Packer from BNP Paribas Exane. I'll do the kind of question format following. I suppose it's kind of two parts to my first question. I think the issue that the investors are really grappling with here is in the context of the macro uncertainty, just how defensive will online classifieds be at this phase of maturity? Obviously things are very different in the previous crisis back in 2009. I suppose in terms of BCG's, BCG specifically, could you first comment on how the end markets reacted in the previous period of economic recession? I suppose for context, if we look at somewhere like the U.K., property transactions were down more than 50%. In Germany, they were down 5%. How under pressure were the various verticals that you operate in?
How under pressure were your various customers? Did you lose 10% of agents to bankruptcy or was it 0%? Then the related question would be, how defensive do you think your business model will prove in any period of economic stress, in terms of both some of the core verticals, can you push through price? Will you have churn of agents? Then perhaps more cyclical areas like advertising.
I will start. I think that, you know, we are running this company close to 20 years, so we definitely know how the business performed, and we have quite a good view. 2009 crisis in Baltics were severe. The GDP dropped 16% because the economy was not healthy at that time. It was too much boosted by the credit. The drop was one of the highest actually in the world, 16%. Just a few countries in the world faced the same. Now the situation is completely different. Completely different. The Baltic economies are very healthy economies. We have a surplus trade balances. We have a very well-managed public finances. We have low debt ratios.
I'm not saying we are isolated, but if something happening in Europe or in America, most likely we will face it. This time, the recession or what we feel in the market will be much less modest. Now talking about each business line, how it will be affected. I think, you know, if the economy is dropping 2%-3%, real estate, there will be very few bankruptcies in the real estate. Very few. I think that we will maintain and increase yield and the real estate continue to maintain and increase yield in the real estate. Because once it's harder to sell, usually it's also beneficial for the marketplace, because now it's very easy to sell real estate.
Once it's harder, the customers need to invest more into the transaction. I am kind of very confident what will gonna happen in the real estate sector. In the vehicles, there is a very similar situation. Currently, the vehicle transactions are so fast that we actually thinking that it would be more favorable for the company if they were not happening so fast vehicle transactions. I think that maybe the most effect could happen on jobs. However, I think that we are currently in a very strange situation. COVID has caused this great resignation. There is such a huge demand for employees that our belief that even a slowdown will just by little affect the you know the activity of employers. Because currently it's just the demand for employees, it's huge.
You know, even some slowdown will be quite a low effect on our customers. The fourth, our business division generally is usually through the crisis, they flourish. Because income, I mean, people tend to sell additional unneeded stuff. They tend to look for additional revenue, income. Usually during the crisis, they do well. In our view, our company is very, very resilient to kind of shocks which we are forecasting to be. We don't know, you know, or nobody, you know, economists are also don't know how severe the crisis is likely to be. If we are agreeing, the most likely scenario of some technical recession or a 2-3% decline. We feel very comfortable in continuing to maintain and grow the company and maintain customers. I think the customers will live through the time okay.
There will be just a few bankruptcies.
One of the scenarios is the stagflation.
Mm-hmm.
You know, stagnating would help some of our business lines to keep their inventory for a longer time, which would drive some revenue up. The inflation, as I mentioned already, it also has very positive angles for us in revenue wise.
Maybe one small thing. Now because they know the actives, the market is in real estate and in cars in the active, some content is even unlisted because it gets sold even unlisted for the marketplace. This content will definitely come back to our platforms when it's harder to do a transaction. I suppose you didn't mention the most, probably most exposed segment of advertising, which grew a little bit in 2022. That should decline sharply in this scenario that we talked through. It's obviously small in the grand scheme of the group.
Exactly. It's very small. Currently in our revenue stream it's 6%-7% currently. Well, it declined during the COVID. It hasn't recovered yet. In our view that, you know, still we are not yet performing at peak year. Also the decline wouldn't. If there happened a decline in, you know, advertising, there wouldn't be a big one. Also in the overall context, the whole revenue will be hardly visible.
Understood. Maybe my second topic I was hoping to discuss was the conservatism of guidance. I suppose we have a context for the company whereby you came ahead of your guidance so far, and you've executed very well. Could you talk us through the size of price increases that you've put through already and your planning? I suppose it will help us take a view as to whether you're being implicitly quite conservative or not.
Lina, do you want to start or shall I?
Well, normally, because we came back to our normal price changing cycle, we plan to go forward with that. We already plan our B2C price changes in the end of summer, in September. Actually the percentage wise, we're not moving anywhere much from where we were last year. We plan similar price changes. Although definitely inflation supports this, you know, argument of growing prices.
I would maybe just add that, you know, we know very well that last year we exceeded our guidance and it was 22% organic growth, right? This year already comparables become harder, right? Usually I think that, you know, about our, you know, thinking it's better overdeliver than overpromise.
Maybe I suppose just a factual point on the C2C price increases you've already done.
Yeah.
How significant were they?
It's 10%-20%. However, the moving part in C2C is volumes.
Yeah.
This is harder to predict. We predict that the volumes will grow, will start growing slightly. This is in our assumptions. It might happen that, for example, there is this recession comes faster and then the volumes start growing faster. Or it could happen otherwise, that there are no any recession and, you know, we continue this good economic outlook. We are kind of more in stable level of business. It's somewhere in moving part.
Final question from me, just to clarify the capital allocation policy. My reading of what you're saying is you don't have a number for us to put in our model for a share buyback. It's gradually drift down from 2x the net EBITDA. The mix of debt repayment and share buyback is to be confirmed and we should wait to hear from you in the future.
Yeah, exactly. We're now gaining all the required approvals needed. Basically, the final one will be at the AGM. Post that we'll just come back to the topic.
The level of leverage you feel comfortable with just under 2x is for us to have in mind?
Yeah. There's no particular level of leverage that we target, but we feel comfortable with even the one we have at the moment, as, you know, mentioned earlier, we felt comfortable even with six times you know, before IPO. Definitely we are a public company now, so it's different.
The fact that this drives the level of buyback is how cheap you think the share price is?
Well, also, you know, the first priority is M&A, so it depends on the excess cash. We have so many things, parts I think will be considered.
Thanks.
Alastair Reid from Investec. A couple from me. I guess firstly, I think you talked quite a bit in the statement about what you've been doing with some of the packages and sort of package structures and staircase. Can you just give us a sense across the businesses on the B2C side, the penetration of those sort of where we are in terms of your customer base? How many are sort of using those at the higher end? I guess maybe start with that.
Right. I think that we need to like look business line per business line. I will give you example. For example, up to 10% is using the top best performing package, which was introduced last year, and it's twice more expensive than the middle package. The majority of the customers are in the middle, and then I guess around 20% is in the minimum basic package.
The penetrat ion.
Penetration of brokers.
Yeah. That was right. Sort of
I think, you know, penetration of brokers with auto dealers is close to, I don't know, 99%. Everybody's using our sites 'cause it's your best performing marketing channels. There are no any other cheaper or more effective marketing channel. We just. This is our core inside everyone.
Jobs & Services.
Jobs and Services. Yeah.
Yeah.
'Cause, you know, jobs market is much wider. There are thousands and thousands of companies who are not hiring maybe today, but they will hire tomorrow. There are still some competitors on the market we can take the share from. The same segment with our services. It's not touched a bit before. Those services market is also like kind of unlimited in general because, you know, everywhere the service, you know, needs something to be cleaned or sort of repaired or so and so on. There are so much services we can get onto our platform. We're working on this, and it's really growing well.
Actually, a year ago, we did an analysis of, you know, the penetration in our business lines. As colleagues mentioned, you know, jobs and services, real estate and autos, it's high 90s. In jobs we found out it's around 70%. There's still room to grow.
7% among top 100.
100. Yeah.
In total there are 100,000 companies. You know.
Got it. As a second question, I guess, Simonas, you touched on some of the recent product developments that you've been doing. Perhaps talk about, I guess, your product pipeline on a sort of longer term view, sort of, you know. We've obviously heard a lot from some sort of UK peers around the sort of, you know, digital retailing opportunities. You know, what are you thinking about doing in that area in terms of helping people transact online? I guess more broadly to the costs of that product development pipeline, do you feel you have sufficient headroom sort of baked into your sort of budgets and plans, whether it's on the OpEx side or the CapEx side?
You want this one?
I can. In terms of, you know, the online dealer kind of business and so on, we're constantly monitoring, of course. It's not in our budgets, let's say, to do this, but it's in our minds. We are still, let's say, not sure if this business model is really the way to go. Let's say in the ideal world, we would like to stick to the more like a platform, to be like a technical partner of the platform or the auction or whatever, but not to buy the real stuff on our balance sheet because, you know, it's the most high risk and capital intensive and so on.
What we can see we can be like a middleman, for example, to make the quick sale from private customers, cars from private customers to the business, to the dealers basically. We can be this middleman making the auction or some kind of offers, you know, providing the offers, do some, maybe, inspection, technical inspection of the vehicles and then offer it to our dealer base. That's more like our view. I cannot say that we are working on this, but we are kind of investigating this.
Exploring.
Exploring, maybe that's the right word. In the real estate, it's. We are partially doing this, let's say, as we have. For example, we want to own the whole transaction fee in real estate, which is much, much higher than we have it now, right? Than we earn from our brokers, let's say. So we partially have it as we have the package for C2C, for example, when you list like as long as until you sell and it's quite expensive. You may pay like EUR 200 and it's. At the end of the day, it's kind of a transaction fee. But we are not moving into, you know, Zillow, iBuyer or something like that. Definitely not. It doesn't look very attractive. We do see potential, but we don't have the good recipe how to work with.
It's the mortgages which at the end of the day, again, kind of transactional fee. When someone takes mortgage and you get the share of it. It's very complicated. We don't see very good examples among our peers, let's say. We see that there are quite a lot of potential avenues, let's say. Maybe touching the transactions.
I would maybe also kind of add or summarize. We believe that our business model is so good. That we are kind of, you know, developing rather than jumping on revolutionary ideas. Because we see so much, you know, opportunities to grow here that, you know, we think that maybe, well, there are no kind of good reason just to completely change our view and then start, you know, immediately new.
Maybe our company a bit different, right? Because we have so many categories. Not just like automotive, it's a very broad one. Within the automotive we have a car parts. It's also quite a big category. We are developing this one currently, actually. We want to make it, like, more user-friendly for both buyers and sellers. Here we can take some revenue that, which is more realistic, more straightforward.
On the cost side of things, do you feel you have sufficient headroom in terms of OpEx and CapEx? There isn't something that, you know, you can foresee on a sort of 18-monthly, but something like, oh, this new opportunity that means we're going to need to invest net incremental ads.
I think for what we are doing now, so we are fully sufficient in terms of human power or some investments, you know, in the meantime and whatever. We're fully sufficient. In case we will do some revolutionary thing, which is not planned. Then definitely we would need some investment, but most likely it wouldn't be like in times, you know. It'll be some incremental steps.
The things we are developing right now is done by one third of our total team. It's all in-house. Our CapEx is actually computers, chairs, and tables. That's it.
Some servers.
Servers as well.
Can I ask a quick follow-up? One area where it'd be good to have an update is on the regulatory backdrop. During the IPO process there was some noise around, competition investigations and the intentions of the estate agency industry. Could you just kind of fill us in on the various geographies and the various verticals and so that we should know how things have changed?
Unfortunately, nothing to update here. It's the investigation with Lithuania which we're having. It was concluded before the IPO, and it was resolved positively to us, stating that our prices are not abusive. We are low compared to our competitors, even if we count price per lead or if we compare it to international peers. The one in Estonia is just moving very slowly, and no update here. However, we think that, and we believe, and we know showing to investors and you guys that proving that our pricing are low and the take rates are by far much, much lower than the international peers. We have a lot of, you know. We think that our position is very strong, and we believe that we will defend it. No further developments have been here.
The process usually with institutions are very slow.
Actually, our take rates are shrinking because of the high inflation. We have to catch up.
Yes, yes.
Maybe a quick update on the M&A pipeline. Anything to share on that basis?
Currently nothing to share, but I said it several times. We have a short list of the companies, and we are constantly circling around week by week. I guess we will share it when it happens. We don't want to create any expectations or. Because in M&A, it's usually, you know, both parties. We have aspirations to do M&A, but it has to be, you know, also someone willing to sell. I think that also I wanted to maybe mention M&A of GetaPro and [inaudible]. I mean, it's like, even though it's a small M&A, but, you know, thinking also, this service vertical is the one which is actually growing one of the fastest, maybe the fastest in the BCG portfolio.
We see it as a huge market in the future. For example, when we were thinking of expanding from Lithuania to Latvia or Estonia, we were considering either organic expansion or M&A. For example, GetaPro acquisition was kind of a very good and fast entry into the market. Basically saved us two, three years of the potentially launching and trying to be in the position where they are. Hopefully we will do our best to develop this business in Latvia, Estonia to make it as successful as Lithuania. In the future, we see that this category can be as big as used or automotive. Because if we think about the services, anybody needs their services. Anybody needs plumber, gardener, cleaner, photographer, everybody uses all around.
We believe in this category.
Maybe one very last one from me. In C2C Auto, there was a very nice growth in yield. How should we think of the mix of that yield growth between you increasing prices versus the price of cars going up? Clearly you had a very inflationary backdrop for cars. Should we think of it as a kind of one-off benefit of that, or is this more evidence of your pricing power?
I think that, you know, we don't have any kind of estimates supporting that. I think that could be a very simple math, you know. I mean, the listing prices grew over 20%, 24%. Yield grew 40%. We were aiming price increases from 10%-20%. Basically, it's kind of from this 40%, it's kind of half.
To be completely crystal clear, there is some small effect on this yield increase. As I mentioned that some small dealers before they listed the C2C, now they are converted to B2C. This a little bit decreased the number of ads, the base. When we calculate the yields, it's like the number.
Great. Thank you.
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Thanks.
Thank you.