Hello everyone, and thank you for joining the Baltic Classifieds Group 2026 half-year results announcement. My name is Lucy, and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, you can press star followed by two. It is now my pleasure to hand over to your host, Justinas Šimkus, CEO, to begin. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Our performance in the first half of the year is close to updated guidance shared after AGM in September. Revenue grew by 7%, reaching nearly EUR 45 million. EBITDA also increased by 7%, exceeding EUR 35 million and delivering an industry-leading margin of 78%. Cash conversion was close to 100%, and we moved into net cash positive position with a surplus of EUR 5 million. We remained committed to our capital allocation policy. Almost EUR 20 million was returned to shareholders through the dividend and share buybacks, and we voluntarily repaid EUR 10 million of debt. The board has declared an interim dividend of EUR 0.0130 per share, an 8% increase from last year to be paid in January. Aside from the tax-affected Estonian auto segment, we delivered double-digit revenue growth. Our core revenue streams performed well, with B2C up 15% and C2C up 8%.
This strong performance was supported in particular by another outstanding year in our Real Estate business, making it the second consecutive year of exceptional results. Our lead over a close competitor, which we internally consider the most important KPI, remained strong across all major portals, ranging from five to over 45 times depending on the portal. Our websites attracted an average of 58 million visits per month, the equivalent of the entire Baltic population visiting our sites 10 times each month. We introduced price changes for both B2C and C2C customers at the level similar to previous years, with the exception of car dealers in Estonia. These changes supported yield growth across our business and positioned BCG well for the continued progress, as the full impact of the recent B2C price changes will only be seen in the next reporting period.
In the first half of the year, ARPU increased across all business lines, up 16% in Real Estate, 13% in auto, and 5% in Jobs. Yields per C2C listed ad also rose sharply: 27% in Real Estate, 29% in Autos, 26% in Generalist, while the yields for Services C2C active ads remained broadly stable year over year. This trend of the Baltics economies has led to faster selling times, which has reduced advertising inventory, especially compared to record levels seen a year ago. As previously communicated, auto transactions in Estonia have dropped by half due to tax changes, adding further pressure on inventory. This trend is particularly visible in the lower number of C2C listings, while B2C subscription numbers remain at record highs. Now I will hand over to Lina to talk about financials in more details.
Thank you, Justinas. Good morning. Our revenue grew by 7% to EUR 44.8 million, and 91% of revenue comes from the core, which is listing fees from both contracted clients B2C and individual self-service users C2C. B2C revenue accounts for 52% of group revenue and grew by 13%, and C2C, representing 39% of group revenue, grew by 3%. The remaining 9% of revenue comes from non-core revenue streams. Ancillary accounting for 5% of the revenue and primarily being derived from auto financial intermediation declined by 8%. This half year, it was directly impacted by the decreased number of auto market transactions in Estonia. Display advertising revenue, contributing 4% of group revenue, remained broadly in line with last year. In the upper right, you see a doughnut chart showing revenue split by business line.
As you see, the verticals combined generate 85% of group revenue, with the remaining 15% coming from Generalist, of which close to half is coming from vertical category Services, Real Estate, Jobs, and Auto. The Real Estate verticals combined continue to be the standout performer this half year, and the revenue grew 20%. Growth was mainly fueled by more B2C customers, a shift toward premium longer period packages, and further yield improvement. Auto's biggest business line was flat year over year because of the market headwinds that were explained by Justinas. We had less new listings, but the yield per listing has continued to improve. Jobs and Services grew 7%, and within the segment Jobs, the B2C component grew 6% by attracting more companies and improving the yield.
Services, which is the majority of the business line C2C and accounts for a fifth of the business line, grew 12% from more users, active ads, and slightly improved yield, which is diluted by higher share of longer period packages. Generalist revenue grew by 4% through mainly yield improvement. Simonas will talk about each of the business lines a bit later, but with regards to yields, this year we followed a regular schedule of pricing events. At the start of the year, we implemented C2C pricing changes across all our major platforms, and these contributed to the performance throughout the entire half year. As in previous years, we introduced B2C pricing and packaging changes in September and October. We did that across the Real Estate, Jobs platforms, and the auto platform in Lithuania. We have this time postponed the B2C price changes for auto in Estonia.
Overall, pricing and packaging updates that were made will have a more pronounced impact in the second half of the year. In the Jobs business line, because most of the contracts have 12 months duration, the impact of pricing changes is flowing through gradually over the course of the year. Now, in terms of the cost, over the half year, our team grew by 6% to an average of 153 full-time employees. In addition to the team expansion, the personnel cost grew, the growth was driven by annual salary reviews, reflecting the wage inflation trends of what we have in the Baltics. Total investment in our people increased by 5%, reaching EUR 6.4 million and remains 14% from revenue approximately. But this growth was partially offset by the reduction in share-based payments expenses. As before, programming development costs are within people costs and handled in-house.
That's in the salary costs. The IT costs line reflects third-party Services only, and these costs grew 13% and continued to account for 1% of the revenue. Marketing costs this half year grew by 14%, driven by a few additional events and campaigns. It remains approximately 1% from revenue. And as a reminder, the majority of the group's traffic is organic, with direct and unpaid search channels accounting for around 80% of total traffic. Paid search traffic is minimal, and as a portfolio of brands, we continue to leverage our own websites for advertising. We own Skelbiu.lt, which is ranked the sixth most visited website in Lithuania and is home to strong vertical categories, which drives high-quality traffic cost-free. That's one of the reasons behind our strong EBITDA margin. And then other costs representing 5% of revenue grew by 17%, mainly due to growing data products-related data acquisition costs.
In total, operating costs before depreciation and amortization grew by 8%. The bottom column chart shows depreciation and amortization split into two. One part is from acquired intangibles, and the other is from ongoing CapEx-related depreciation. In July 2024 and in January 2025, the intangible assets related to business clients' relationships acquired in 2020 with a five-year useful life were fully amortized, and this represents the 40% decline in amortization from acquired intangibles. The ongoing CapEx-related depreciation is broadly in line with last year. In terms of profitability, with a 7% increase in revenue and continued cost management, our EBITDA grew by 7% as well. There were no add-backs to our EBITDA, and we maintained our EBITDA margin of 78%. On the right-hand side, you see EBITDA to net cash bridge. We continue to be highly cash-generative, maintaining a 99% cash conversion rate.
Cash generated from operations grew 4%, and the net cash inflow from operations increased by 7%, reaching EUR 30.6 million. Adjustments to IFRS figures remain limited. That's amortization of acquired intangibles and associated deferred tax impact. Adjusted operating profit continues to closely align with EBITDA and grew by 7% as well. Adjusted net income grew by 9%, and adjusted basic EPS grew by 10%. As I mentioned before, we generated EUR 30.6 million in net cash from operations during the half year. We started the year with EUR 25 million gross debt, EUR 3.6 million in net debt, and 0.1x leverage. During the half year, we paid the final 2025 dividend. That's EUR 12.5 million in total. Spent an additional EUR 2.4 million to repurchase shares for future awards.
We purchased and immediately canceled 1.8 million company shares for EUR 6.4 million , representing 0.4% of the issued share capital at the beginning of the year, and voluntarily repaid EUR 10 million of the outstanding gross debt. As a result, we ended the half year with the gross debt of EUR 15 million and the net cash position of EUR 5.1 million . Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. We intend to continue returning 1/3 of adjusted net income each year via interim and final dividend split approximately 1/3 and 2/3, respectively. The interim dividend for the year 2026 will be paid on the 23rd of January 2026 to members on the register on 12th December 2025. Dividends are declared and paid in EUR. Shareholders can elect to have dividends paid in British pound sterling. We will continue considering value-creating M&A opportunities, and all options for financing attractive acquisition remain open.
We could be debt-free by the end of the financial year, so shareholders can expect an update on capital allocation policy by the time of our full year results. And yeah, we continue with our share buybacks on the market. Thank you. I will now hand over to Simonas.
Hello, everyone. In the next four slides, I will walk you through our main KPIs for each business unit. The Real Estate market is very active. The number of transactions keeps growing for the last one and a half years. It grew by 7% during the last 12 months, and the average price grew by 4%. Market sentiment among agents and developers is very positive. Private sellers listed 7% less ads, mainly because of the growing share of the longer duration packages, which translates into less extensions. Shorter selling time has led to a 5% drop in the C2C inventory, and the pricing adjustments introduced in the late spring and C2C customer base segmentation have resulted in a 27% growth in yield per listed ad. The number of B2C customers increased by 4%. It is mainly migration from C2C, while the average revenue per broker grew by 16%.
This growth was primarily driven by the annual pricing and packaging event. We maintained a very strong lead both in Lithuania and Estonia. Our platforms are respectively 48 times and 16 times bigger than competitors. As you already know, the automotive market in Estonia is experiencing difficulties. The number of transactions in Estonia dropped by 50%, while in Lithuania it increased by 8%. Combined, the two markets resulted in a 14% decline overall. Despite the drop in transactions, the average car price increased by 3%, which suggests that dealers' margins did not change. The number of listed C2C ads dropped by 29%, again primarily due to the headwind in Estonia and the higher adoption of longer duration packages. The number of active ads also declined as overall market inventory shrank. As a result of our pricing actions in the spring, the average revenue per listed ad increased by 29%.
In the B2C segment, customer base is stable, while yield increased by 13%. The main reason for this growth is the higher adoption of premium packages driven by new products and pricing changes. In the bottom left, you can see that our lead over closest competitor is very strong, six times in Lithuania and 31 times in Estonia. Let's move to Jobs and Services. Jobs market stays active. The unemployment decreased by 0.5 percentage points to 7.1%. Average wage has grown significantly, increasing by 9% over the past year. The market remains supportive for our business, with the companies continuing to invest in the recruitment. As shown in the bottom right chart, our customer base grew by 1%, and the average revenue per customer increased by 5%. Yield growth was slightly diluted due to the bigger share of smaller customers in the customers' mix.
The C2C part of our Jobs and Services unit is represented by the Services segment. You can see the chart in the top right corner. The number of listings continues to grow, increasing by 11% over the past year. We are promoting longer duration packages that offer a discounted monthly rate, which has diluted the impact of our pricing actions. As a result, the yield has remained nearly the same as it was a year ago. Our job board maintains a strong leadership position with a lead of five times over the closest competitor, and our biggest service vertical Paslaugos.lt is two times bigger than the main competitor, which is a service category of our own Generalist Skelbiu.lt. As a reminder, I want to say that our biggest Generalist Skelbiu.lt is not a typical one.
Approximately 70% of its revenues derived from vertical categories: Automotive, Real Estate, Jobs, and Services. Therefore, Skelbiu competes with our own market-leading verticals. We strategically leverage Skelbiu.lt to strengthen our vertical platforms. We have cross-listing, which generates high-quality traffic to our verticals. We had 15% fewer paid listed ads compared to last year. Please note that Skelbiu has both paid and free ads. In the top right corner, you can see the number of active ads, which reflects the total amount of the content on the site, including both paid and free ads. Over the past year, the number of active ads remained flat. At the same time, we increased the yield for paid ads by 26%. This growth was driven by the price review and the price increase for the value-added service.
Our lead over closest competitor in Lithuania remains as strong as ever of 30x , and in Estonia, it's 2x . Traditionally, I have a couple of slides about product development at BCG. Over the past six months, we were focused on data products for business customers and AI-based tools, starting with Real Estate on the left-hand side of the slide. At Aruodas, we introduced Property Price Compass. It is a tool for agents to assess the asking price of an apartment. We have integrated technology from the recently acquired Untu.lt platform and developed a product that extracts data on actual nearby transactions, connects it to the listing history, and provides a competition overview with typical selling times. The agent can then review the information and provide the pricing report for the vendor, which is backed with real data. This update was the key one in the new agent's packages.
At Untu.lt, agents now contact purchased leads via AI-assisted call tracking service. Service logs what has been spoken on the phone and suggests next actions. This improves the quality of the agent service and provides more visibility of what is actually happening post-lead acquisition. At Autoplius, we have introduced AutoPulsas, a market assessment tool for any car. It allows users to monitor market dynamics for specific models, as well as the broader categories, such as fuel type, year, and more. This helps dealers to make informed decisions on their stock. The tool combines data collected from the users with information from the state registry. Also, at Autoplius, we have introduced an AI-assisted listing process. The system analyzes images and descriptions to automatically fill in key vehicle attributes. This speeds up listing creation, reduces errors, requires less effort from the seller, and improves overall listing quality. Let's move to Jobs.
We updated the salary estimator. Over the years, we have accumulated a large database of job ads and CVs. We feed this data into an AI model that estimates the monthly, the most likely salary range for the given position, and provides a forecast of the future salary trends. Users can search across nearly 3,000 job positions. At GetaPro, we launched an AI assistant. It's an AI chat tool that helps customers to define the most appropriate service for the job they describe. And at Skelbiu, we introduced an AI-based buyer-to-seller message screening system to help prevent frauds. The system analyzes conversation patterns and user attributes and flags potentially suspicious users. And now I would like to hand back to Justinas to finish our presentation.
All right. Thank you, Simonas. The Baltic countries continue to show strong economic fundamentals. Unemployment is broadly in line with the euro area, and it's expected to fall across all Baltic states in 2025, showing that the labor market is active. Wage growth remains high, reflecting a long-term trend of rising prosperity and catching up with Western Europe. Inflation is still higher than the euro area, a pattern we have seen for many years. This is driven by strong demand and structural factors, and it remains a positive signal for investors in the region. Public sector debt in the Baltics is very low, which highlights the region's solid fiscal positions. Looking ahead, all Baltic countries are expected to grow in 2025. Lithuania, our key market, the biggest market, is forecasted to grow by 2.5%, well above the euro area average.
Over the long term, the Baltics has been one of the fastest-growing regions in Europe, which provides strong fundamentals for our business. Despite record inventory comparables and challenges in the Estonian auto market, we expect revenue growth for the second half of the year will be higher than H1 and will accelerate into double digits for the financial year 2027. Real Estate and Auto are expected to lead this growth. Jobs and Services and Generalists are expected to grow at a more moderate pace. We remain cautious on inventory trends. We intend to implement product improvement and price changes for C2C in spring and B2C in autumn. With lower revenue growth and continued investment into our product, some EBITDA margin compression is inevitable. But even with the investment into data and AI, our EBITDA margin is expected to continue in line in the mid-70s.
We intend to continue to return meaningfully all our excess cash to shareholders in a timely manner, of which at least one-third will be through dividends. We could be debt-free by the end of the financial year, so shareholders can expect an update on capital policy by the time of our full-year results. Thank you for the attention, and now we are ready to answer your questions.
Thank you. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. The first question comes from William Packer of BNP Paribas. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi, Justinas and Simonas. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got three, please. So firstly, by my calculation, this is the third cut to revenue guidance on Estonian Autos. Initially, it was new news around the tax changes. Then the second element was there was this political pushback leading to a further drag on inventory. Could you outline what's made you incrementally more cautious for H2 2026 and FY 2027? That's the first question. Secondly, could you help us think through the range of outcomes for FY 2027 EBITDA margin? You have a business with excellent visibility. Mid-70s is a pretty wide range for a classified. How much OpEx growth are you planning for FY 2027 as things stand today? And so if you were to deliver low double-digit revenue growth, where would margin land? Is 76% a reasonable number? I realize the midpoint of guidance is 75%.
And then thirdly, the share price after today's move is back towards the IPO price. In the last few years, you've more than doubled the EBITDA. Why not immediately buy back more shares if you have confidence that this share price dislocation is ultimately transitory? Thank you.
Hi, Will. Thank you for the questions. I guess I will start from the easiest one, from the last one you mentioned about the company valuation and share prices. And yes, now it's close to IPO price, and the business is more than double the size. It's twice bigger. And we are back to the market. We were not buying shares the last 30 days because we were in a closed period at the time. But since today, we are back on the market and buying our shares back. On the second question, on the car tax, I will answer, and Lina will answer on the margin expectation and on our guidance. So on the car tax, such tax changes happen very rarely, once in five, once in ten years. So your visibility on the recovery is always very low.
When we initially talked in July, we saw the recovery happening every single next month since January till June. Then the recovery stalled in summer because of the politicians starting to debate about the car tax, and maybe it should be removed. Then after the debate was over in October, we again saw the increase in the transactions. But November was again a decline month over month. We have one certain thing and one uncertain thing. So a certain thing is that we think that the car tax, the size of the tax, and overall the car tax itself, it will not change the market fundamentals. We think that the citizens will have just exactly the same amount of cars. The cars will age. The cars will be broken. New cars will come to the market. People will want to upgrade those. Also, cars are something of a prestige status.
Transactions will come back to the normal levels. We are certain about that. What we are uncertain is when it happens and on which month it will happen. We know one thing that actually in November and December that we have very, very high comparables. Actually, in this presentation, in the appendix, you can find the car market dynamics. The recovery, I would say it's slower than we initially expected. But we really, from today's perspective, we know that this recovery will come sooner rather than later. We just don't have a crystal ball, and we don't know on which month exactly it will happen. Here on the slide, you can see the market trends. The blue line, dark blue line, shows the transactions this year. You see that the trend is positive.
The yellow line shows transactions last year, and this pulled forward demand that we had in the beginning of last year. So November, December, it will be very, very tough comparables. But the trend is positive. And for us, it's also very clear that once we are already in January, the number of transactions will be so much higher than last January. So we will come back to the growth phase. So hopefully that's explaining our thinking. And Lina will give a bit more color on our guidance.
Yeah. Hi, Will. In terms of your second question, we continue to invest in our products and in services, and our operating expenses this half a year grew mid-teens, if not the mentioned people cost growth offset by long-term Performance Share Plan cost adjustment. So slower revenue growth as we navigate inventory trends and dynamics in Estonian Autos will mean that if operating expenses continue to grow mid-teens, we mathematically expect some slight EBITDA margin compression as a result of reduced operating leverage. So uncertainty is in the inventory trends. Did that answer?
Thanks, Lina Mačienė . So yeah, it does. So the framing is you're committed to mid-teens OpEx growth. And so where the revenue growth lands will determine the level of margin dilution in FY 2027. Very helpful. Just to come back on your initial comments, Justinas, around the buyback, would you consider taking on some leverage to take advantage of the share price dislocation? Is that something which is potentially on the agenda? Thank you.
At this point of time, I can only say that the board is actively discussing that question and all options on the table. But no, no decision is taken. And I guess that's where the comment ends.
I can add, Will, that in line with the authorities obtained at the AGM, we are now on the market buying back BCG shares. And we wish it was possible to do it immediately. So if you know how, let us know.
Brilliant. Thanks Mačienė . Appreciate it.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Ross of Barclays. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Great. Morning, guys. So mine are to follow up on Will's. And I guess to start on cost growth, why are you sure that mid-teens growth is definitely enough? It would be helpful just to get a sense of the thinking behind that budgetary process and why there's definitely enough investment embedded in mid-teens. The second question is an extension to that. Can you give us an update on some of the back-end IT projects in the group? My understanding is it's not all on a single tech stack. Is that an impediment in a world of AI? And where are you on cloud migration? And then the third question, again, an extension. Can you give us a glimpse in terms of your AI product roadmap in the next couple of years? And I'm thinking things like conversational search that some of your peers have in the market.
It would be really helpful to get comfort that is also in your pipeline. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Andrew. So I guess Lina will answer the cost part, and Simonas will cover the infrastructure and AI products.
Maybe expanding a little bit on the operating expenses question. Well, we are investing well, close to 70% of the cost is people cost. So the number of people is growing. We are organically growing the team. It's mid-teens growth in that cost line. IT costs and third-party services are also growing mid-teens, and that's including the investment into additional hosting and servers, etc. That's including the AI part, organic growth, other costs mentioned, everything else needed in the business. So based on that, we also did this estimation for the future, how the future investments into certain IT developments might look like. We don't envisage any significant changes in that. So we consider mid-teens being the optimal and good investment level. Is that answered?
Yeah, that's helpful. Yeah. Thanks.
And maybe a few words about the infrastructure and as you ask about the cloud migration. Just as a reminder, actually, our main platforms are run on our on-prem, on our own infrastructure, on servers. But nearly all of the AI or data-related products, we actually running from the so-called public cloud. But don't be misunderstood about the public. Actually, it's configured as the private cloud, but we are using providers as the AWS or Google GCP, this kind of service providers. And we don't have a plan to migrate our core applications to the cloud, to the public cloud. We will keep it as it is. We have our own private cloud, our own infrastructure. That works. All good. There are no huge seasonalities which would require elasticity of the so it's quite stable.
For the AI, yes, we are growing this part of the infrastructure, and it grows gradually. Partially, it depends on the actual usage, and we pay as we go. Basically, more requests, more processing power, the higher the costs. So that's our approach so far. But given that the situation is changing, we might need some different kind of resources, maybe next year, more GPUs or something. So this might change. But we don't anticipate that something really sharp will happen in the next year or two. So that's, as I mentioned, our approach. And about the roadmap connected to AI and maybe in general data, AI, machine learning, and all the data products. So basically, we see from two sides, from buyer's side.
Of course, we do see, and we already have implemented some tools from the buyer's side to make their journey easier, more effective to discover the content they were not able or it was difficult to discover previously. So it's a semantic search that we would like to understand, not the word by word, but actually what do they mean by telling like, "I'm looking for the recreational house." What does it mean? Right? So the AI, large language models, they do help in this field, and we are working on that. That's the main thing, the smart search. Let's call it smart search. And from the seller perspective, of course, the first thing is to reduce the friction of the listing, the inventory. As I mentioned, we made the first steps in Autoplius already. Basically, we extract the information from the pictures.
So there could be the next step to make it easier to price the object you are selling, especially if it's a property or a car or even a small item. And if you are selling a used iPhone, it's not so easy to define the price. Is it EUR 100 or maybe EUR 300? So there is a really high, the big gap between the pricing decisions. So that's the key components which could be developed utilizing AI.
I would like maybe to add here a bit. I think that many reports focus too many or too much on how much AI would cost for the business like us, ours. And kind of in our opinion, the costs are not so significant. Kind of it's something evolution of our costs. But I think what we are missing or what we are not kind of focusing enough, how much all these AI tools are making our proposition, our products better. Just imagine the thing. This is what described, let's say, we record a phone call between the vendor and the broker. We make a summary. Out of a summary, we make an action plan. We can put in the calendar to send a proposal to meet tomorrow at 2:00 P.M. to do this thing.
So it's kind of AI tools actually implemented are making our proposition so much better and so much more available. So I think that this is, and that's kind of a lack of focus from the many reports what we see.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Giles Thorne of Jefferies. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thank you. First question was back on whether you're investing enough in the business. You've often held up your take rate as being behind peers, and that's grounds for you to grow revenue. But the recent events at Rightmove confirm that this is the wrong framing. It's more important to consider how the utility of your vertical platforms compares to peers. So some comments on where you think you are behind or better on overall utility of your platforms would be helpful. Second question is on the, obviously, agentic AI risk and how that could disrupt top-of-the-funnel discovery. Can you talk about how important it is or how helpful it is in the face of this risk to have a large pool of private listings as you do and to operate both horizontal and vertical platforms? Some voiceover to how that mitigates the risk would be very helpful here.
Finally, we haven't spoken about it yet, but on Generalist and a long-running question, are you finally going to follow every single other Generalist classified advertising platform in Europe into going fully transactional, or are you going to stay firmly stuck in the past? Thanks.
Thank you for the question. Could you a bit explain what do you mean by the utilities? So I understand your question correctly.
Understood. So across Europe, many platforms doing many things. And there are some platforms that are doing things, products, and features that are brought to market sooner than others. And as outsiders we sit here and we try and track it all, and we listen to management teams talk about why they think their platforms are great places to do things. But truly, it's only really the insiders that truly have the understanding. So some commentary as to how you think maybe Autoplius is better than Auto Trader in the U.K. I think it's a much more sensible way of framing your growth outlook than just saying Auto Trader charges more money than Autoplius does. Hopefully, that's clearer.
Yeah. That's clearer. Well, I will answer that one, and I'll take the AI search and why the C2C listings make it more defensible, and then Simonas will answer a Generalist. When we are, I think it's a fair statement. When we are comparing monetization, we look how much revenue the agents or the dealers spend on our platform, and then we compare it to international peers. Usually, we don't monetize the products which we provide extra. Let's say it's a single bill, usually, and that includes all the features we are offering. In my personal belief, I still think that 80%-85% of the bill justification why the dealers or brokers pay so much is actually related to the leads, how much leads you are providing and how much you are better than your competitors and the alternative tools.
So, I think that probably, to put it in other words, if you even kind of strip out or discontinue some of the products, probably still can maintain the same prices. And the products itself, I find it quite comparable in many different markets. I think that we, as players, we all speak the same language. We have workshops. We copy each other. And I don't see the very big difference between our propositions. And on our take rates, we are updating it. Let's say we are making these assessments once a year. The latest take rate analysis we did was spring last year. So in terms of the take rate, our take rates in automotive and Real Estate was at 3%, in Jobs, it was at 4%. On the C2C benefit and why actually C2C makes our business much more resilient.
So to begin with, AI applications, first of all, cannot perform search on live listings. It requires just too much computing. From a technical point of view, from today's perspective, it cannot do that. So in order for the AI application to work, so basically, the marketplace has to somehow plug in their database. It cannot just simply, for example, ChatGPT cannot just simply go and search on the web and give you a good result. It has to be plugged in. So I think in C2C, in this sense, is working and serving as a defensive layer because even, for example, C2C content usually is a single listed. It's a unique content. So kind of in our case, we actually have control on half of a unique market, which does not exist anywhere.
And if we would feel that AI application is somehow threatening our positions, we just simply would not integrate there. Even number two, integrating there will not help because the C2C listings is something what's unique. It's not available. And number two does not have it. So definitely, C2C market is something what is an extra defense layer in this context. And on Generalist, a transition to transaction. So Simonas, maybe you want to talk.
Yeah. I think the answer will be quite short. Of course, we are aware and monitoring all the trends in Generalist segment overall. The move towards transactional model, which is quite common for especially post-COVID, it became very common to buy and to shop online. And we see this trend, and we believe that it's the right way to go and the right further development for our Generalist as well. And as a reminder, we do have transactional Generalist in Estonia for many, many years. It works. We know how to do it. And yeah, it's the next development, let's say.
It's something what we think it's a good direction to move forward, and this is something we are working on.
What time frame are we talking about, Justinas? When will we see a fully transactional offering on Skelbiu?
Within half a year.
Very good. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Sean Kealy of Panmure Liberum. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Morning, everybody. Thank you for taking questions. I've just got two, if that's okay. First of all, listed paid ads on Skelbiu are down. Appreciate the total inventory is flat for the year. How much of that do you think is cannibalization by existing verticals, by other players, or do you think you've potentially just pushed price too hard solely on this site? Secondly, you've also had a bit of a decline in C2C Real Estate ads. How much of that is movement into B2C, or do you think there's something else moving there? Thank you.
Thank you. I guess, Simonas, you can cover since you talked about it a bit.
Yeah. We don't have 100% precise data, but definitely part of the content was moved or is moved to the verticals. And we do it ourselves, actually. We do intentionally promote the packages, including the verticals, right, because we believe it's a better product at the end of the day, and for us, it's more lucrative. The percentage, it's hard to name. I would say maybe around 50/50 could be the answer, but it's really hard to tell. We don't have the precise way to measure it.
I would maybe add, in most of the cases, our vertical is number one on the market, and our Generalist category is either number two or number three. So usually, when the number one is winning, so number two inventory or listings are going to number one rather than to number three. So it's kind of we know that majority of the decline actually still remains in our ecosystem. And the second question about the Real Estate C2C listings and how much of those are going to B2C. I can cover it.
Yeah. Actually, it's partially on the slides because the B2C we have, of course, it's in brokers, not in the ads, the listings. But 4% of the growth in the number of brokers, it's mostly from C2C. And average number of ads per broker, that could be teens, more or less.
Yeah. Maybe just additional color. When we are looking at C2C -7% decline and B2C +4%, some of the listings move from here to here. Also, partly, that's decline of economy doing well and Real Estate selling quicker. So kind of in reality, the real decline is smaller, and here, real growth is a bit also smaller. We need to look kind of as a combination of both two segments.
And the third, actually, I mentioned, the longer duration packages maybe needs more color a bit because we count as a listed ad either the newly listed property or something which was relisted or extended. So we count like transactions. And because we are selling longer duration packages, this means that there is a higher probability that it will be sold and not extended. So that's a bit shrinks the number of listed or extended.
That's very visible in the yield expansion in C2C.
Thank you all three of you very much for that. I've got a follow-up, if that's okay.
Yeah, sure.
So if we take a step back and look at some of the headwinds in various parts of the business, you've had a couple of years of pretty exceptional growth. We've now got some headwinds in a couple of your different revenue lines and cost growth accelerating quite significantly year on year. If we look at changing free cash flow, do you think it's fair to say that this business in the next sort of, say, three to five years is going to struggle to break double-digit free cash flow growth?
Maybe Lina, you can take this question.
It should be viewed through the angle of EBITDA growth, and it very much depends on the inventory levels. You see, BCG platforms, we're the market, and what's in our hands is the actions that we take in terms of the B2C and C2C pricing events, but in terms of the inventory and the volumes, this is the uncertain part, and as it reflects in the revenue, consequently, and mathematically, it goes through, drops down to profitability, and that's the unknown, which cannot answer you straight away.
I would say.
Thank you very much.
There are more unknowns. If we talk about the new products which could bring extra revenue sources, we did one in, okay, let's say, two years ago, one and a half years ago with a car history product. Now it's a decent business, profitable, growing, and we see more opportunities, and there might be even more opportunities occurring on the market, which we don't know. There are definitely some things to do in the property market. We made one step by acquiring Untu, which we are selling leads and sharing the actual broker's commission, and quite a significant part of the broker commission is paid for us if the property is sold, and there are more kind of core product extensions, which could be quite lucrative, and we are thinking about that or chasing.
Thank you. Our last question today comes from `Marcus Diebel of JP Morgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for also taking my questions. I have also three. If that's okay, maybe I'll take them one after one. The first one is on, again, the cost base. You were talking about mid-teens, mostly headcount. If you can just elaborate a bit more, what exactly are those investments from here? I obviously seen the product slide, but what are the investments from here, and why is it a mid-teens number, given obviously AI also brings a lot of cost synergies? Yeah, we understand software engineers are getting much cheaper. Maybe that's the first question.
Right. Lina, do you want to take that one?
Thanks, Marcus. This mid-teens comes from a combination of, if talking about people, investment into people, it's a combination of growth in the team, and we historically have single-digit growth in the number of, in percentage terms, in the number of people plus wage inflation in the Baltics, which is from high single-digit to 10%, so a combination of those brings us to thinking about mid-teens.
Yeah. But it's really the element that basically it's on new products, high cost inflation, which only, yeah, gets partly offset by savings. Yeah, that's the way to read it, I guess, yeah, because AI seems to be obviously a lot of cost savings as well, particularly on headcount, yeah, because software engineers are more efficient. Yeah. But yeah, I hear you. That's probably the right number then.
Yeah. I mean.
And maybe, yeah.
Just to add, absolutely. Many people are more efficient, including engineers and client support and moderators. Everyone is actually more engineer, more efficient. But that's not to reduce the headcounts. Maybe that reduces the future new hires in these sectors. So basically, probably we will hire less of the client support and engineers when the business will continue to grow. But at the same time, we will hire more data scientists, infrastructure people. So kind of maybe the profile of the new hires are changing.
Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. That makes sense. Second question again on AI. Just to be clear, sort of how you want to address it, it seems that you still want to run the business as a walled garden, obviously have an AI layer on top. You mentioned that the costs are not that high. Just to understand that there's no idea to really enter a partnership with one of the LLMs. I mean, there's obviously the model that Zillow does, which is a stronger partnership rather than just using an AI layer. If you can just comment on this. And then maybe just related to this, I guess, is the question on M&A. I mean, clearly, asset prices and valuations and classifieds have changed a lot. What does it actually mean in terms of your appetite to do M&A, particularly when you're also sort of highlighting potential for higher share buybacks?
Yeah, that's my last question. Thank you.
So maybe I can take some of those. On AI, so basically, in our case, it wouldn't make any sense, let's say, making integration with the AI tools. It wouldn't make any sense. We think actually building our own semantic search, smart search, and we are working on that. Also, I think that we are building the kind of extra layers from the kind of scraping the data from our marketplaces, kind of like registration walls, early registration walls. And kind of we think that probably in the future, there might be more competitors coming with an AI approach. So we want to kind of be ready defending our core propositions, our core data. But yes, at this point, basically, it wouldn't make any sense kind of integrating with AI applications in our case.
And on the M&A, so we always, whenever we were considering M&A, we were weighing two options, either to buy a new company, new business, or to buy our own stock. So from today's perspective, probably our appetite for new M&A is reducing because our own stocks look very attractive.
Yeah. Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. We have no further questions at this time. So I'd like to hand back to Justinas for any closing remarks.
Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the questions, and talk to the majority of you in the coming few weeks.
Thank you.
This concludes today's then.
Thank you .
This concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.