Good morning, everybody. It's good to see everybody, welcome to this capital market day for Schibsted and Adevinta. I'm Ole Jacob Sunde, I have been chairman of Schibsted since 2002. I entered the board in 2000, I also have the pleasure of being the chair of the Tinius Trust, which controls the largest stake in Schibsted. In my spare time, can I say that? I do like most of you, run a wealth management company. I founded it in 2000, we now manage about EUR 10 billion in Scandinavia. It is interesting to see what an enormous change there has been in the last decades in the capital markets.
I can assure you that the change of pace that we have seen in the capital markets, it's nothing compared to the change of pace in the modern media industry, and that's one of the topics for today. The change of pace in the media industry also reflects the history of Schibsted. Our history is about the interaction of technology and content and how to build sustainable growth. Our founder, Kristin Schibsted, was an orphan. He started a printing shop in 1839 to publish books. He had spare capacity, and he thought, "Well, I'll produce sheet advertising." To get people to read his sheet advertising, he needed editorial content. That produced Aftenposten, who is still the largest newspaper in Norway. Following five generations of family ownership, Schibsted was listed on the Norwegian Stock Exchange in 1992.
What we should learn from this history is not only that we possess the qualities of a first-rate publisher, even if you do that too. You should learn that Schibsted was born and bred in the intersection between technology, information, and trustworthiness. Our growth over the years has never been linked to only one of those dimensions. It has only been strong when they are brought together into play together. Looking back at the development of the company, it is the combination of content and technology and how we have created value through experimenting in new markets, always seeking market-leading positions. The ability to examine and exchange our output, our methods, our assets, does not mean that we compromise on our corporate values, our growth ambitions, nor our profitability. Only by understanding our customers can we understand other markets.
By analyzing our data, we can reduce the costs, find the opportunities, and avoid mistakes. By fostering a culture of independence, entrepreneurship, and willingness to commit to rapidly dominating the markets, we can build further growth on the foundations on those competences that we already possess. This picture shows an array of our corporate assets, some highly successful and some yet to prove themselves. I can assure you, there is also a long list of initiatives that are not shown here because they simply didn't make the cut. We have left Linear TV. Some of you might remember the search engine Sesam. We had a social site, Nettby, the biggest in Norway, that we let fade away. The history of a successful company is rarely a history of unmitigated and continued success. It is the history of trying.
It's the history of having the strength to sustain experiments and also to hold your horses. At the end of 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, Schibsted was valued at about NOK 6 billion. As you can see today, we are valued at about NOK 80 billion. Even if the entire market has experienced a significant lift in that period, that has not happened to the news media where we originated. I guess that we must have done something right. One of the things that I think that we have done right is to ensure that Schibsted has available capital. The earnings from our news brands meant that we were able to develop a growth company for more than the first decade after our listing to the stock exchange without ever accessing capital markets for additional funds.
Mind you, still paying a dividend. Since 2005, we have raised more than 6.5 billion NOK in equity to fund our growth. These infusions have been investments that have been very wise by our shareholders. The founder of Schibsted, Tinius Nagell-Erichsen, or the Tinius Trust, I should say, not Schibsted. Tinius Trust is Tinius Nagell-Erichsen. He once said that the newspaper who is not profitable cannot retain its independence. This is still true today, and it is not only applicable to the news business, it's applicable to every company in the Schibsted portfolio. Each investment should be profitable by itself and contribute at the same time to the whole. Our industrial logic builds on existing competencies, market positions, and platform. It should also make sense in financial terms with profitability, growth potential, and capital strength.
During the last decade, despite the capital commitment of our owners, we have several times been compelled to build partnerships in order to control the growth initiatives because capital has been a constraint for us. We have formed good and solid partnerships that have developed well, both with Telenor and with Dagens and with several other companies. This experience has taught us that even when a company has supportive and strong shareholders, it will always be subject to market forces outside their own control. It takes financial strength and strategic commitment to ensure that you can develop the company and the interests of itself and its shareholders, and not to become reliant on beneficial intent of others. The industry, the Tinius Trust is a long-term industrial owner of Schibsted.
That is enshrined in its bylaws, and is outside the choice of either itself or Schibsted to choose whether to be a shareholder or not. There are many different forms of trust, I could say, and you all know. Some are tax vehicles, some are merely holding companies for families. The Tinius Trust and its investment company, Blommenholm Industrier, is neither. It is the, it is there for perpetuity, and it is committed to upholding the key values and independence in Schibsted by firmly committing to the idea that only by pursuing a path of maximizing profit can this goal be ensured. The Tinius Trust has no family nor shareholders it can turn to for additional funds. It is the wealth created by the success of Schibsted that is its source of funds. This is why in 2015, the B-shares were introduced.
Any lack of financial strength in the trust should never be a hindrance for Schibsted to raise capital in order to reach its corporate goals. Through two subsequent equity issues, this has proven correct. I believe a strong, predictable, profit-seeking anchor investor has been a key to the success of Schibsted. You see a similar pattern in hundreds of companies throughout the world. It ensures long-term think-thinking in the asset allocation, the willingness to take appropriate risk, and a culture where we can learn both from our successes and from our mistakes. Unlike other shareholders, who are free to vote with their feet and seek returns elsewhere, the commitment of industrial owners is to stay put and just fix it. We must take risk. We must be able to...
We must understand risk, we must also have the ability, based on our resources, to take risk. Over the years, we have invested millions in ideas that did not succeed, we've also earned billions from those who made success. Such an owner also has to know when to step away. The story of the listing of Adevinta as a separate company is part of that story. We have seen the company grow enormously in an industry that will keep growing, where the market forces re-require both concentration, consolidation, and capital flexibility. The pop artist Sting sings that if you love somebody, you have to let them go. Releasing Adevinta into its own listing does not mean that we no longer believe in the future of the company.
On the contrary, we believe it will be a highly profitable value-creating company for years ahead. That is one of the reasons for Schibsted to holding on a significant stake of the company. Another reason is our belief, experience from a multitude of other companies that we have been invested in, that a company can benefit from a strong owner, especially in an industry with strong consolidation forces. Strong owners can produce and protect the control premium of the company on behalf of all its shareholders, and it can ensure that the company setting out to manage on its own has a supportive, cornerstone investor. Adevinta, as you know, is characterized by very strong margins and a healthy growth. Make no mistake, Schibsted will continue to be a growth company with solid margins and a number of opportunities also after Adevinta has been spun off.
It's important to stress that Adevinta will act and trade as any other company. While the company initially will have both A. and B. shares, Schibsted is committed to ensure a collapse of the share classes based on an appropriate valuation over a period of time. Unlike Schibsted, Adevinta will have no ownership restrictions. All these changes are supported by the trust, which will receive Adevinta shares as any other shareholders, and which considers the Adevinta holdings as a financial investment. In a short while, shareholders in Schibsted will become shareholders in two companies. They have grown from the same base, and they share important corporate values. The fact that the company is for profit does not mean that it is without values. Schibsted Adevinta is here for a purpose.
We have created wealth for our shareholders, jobs from our employees, but we have also created information and access to knowledge for our customers. At the core of what we do is the trust of our customers. We have served individuals for 180 years, and this has built a respect of the individuals into our corporate culture, including the personal data that they leave with us. Where others may see access to customer data merely as advertising opportunity, we consider the trust to be a trademark. We shall be perceived as reliable and trustworthy, not because we are promoting it, but because we walk the talk. We shall help customers make well-informed decisions on issues that make a difference in their lives.
We shall make consumers better informed, but also ease the transition to a more sustainable living, help reducing waste over time and resources, and increase the general pool of knowledge in the societies in which we participate. In our times, no company can run away from its commitment in protecting information, ensuring diversity, working for equal treatment independent of sex and origin, nor the obligation of simply telling the truth and paying your taxes. Our purpose is important because it drives long-term profitability. It builds a deep, mutual, and long-term relationship to our millions of users. It forms the foundation for the trust embedded in our many leading brands. Our purpose helps us to attract and retain excellent leaders and talent, and it also helps us to give credibility in our discussions with governments that shape our competitive environment.
This brings to me to my final slide, showing you all the wonderful people at Schibsted. On the Schibsted side, I will soon be leaving the floor to Kristin Skogen Lund, who is our new CEO. Over the last few months, she has put together a strong management team. Kristin came to us, three, four months ago. She has a very strong background from the Norwegian business environment. She has held positions in Telenor, in The Coca-Cola Company, in the Norwegian Confederation of Enterprises, and she has even a long track record in Schibsted. I'm very glad that she is here today and can guide us through the coming years.
On the Adevinta side, there is a familiar face to you, Rolv Erik Ryssdal, known to many of you, and I'm very happy that he is now taking charge of Adevinta as the first CEO of the listed company. I think that you know most of the management teams in both the companies. I will not go through them in detail. They will be presented throughout today. All I can say is that I am very proud and happy that we have such excellent management teams. One person I would like to present to you is my counterpart in Adevinta, Orla Noonan, who is the Chair of Adevinta going forward. Now I have the pleasure to turn the attention to Kristin. Before I do so, I can say that we have never feared the future. We report on it.
We live preparing for it. We enter it confident in our ability to grow, to change, and to maintain leadership positions based on a strong corporate culture, a commitment to trustworthiness, and an obligation to remain a technology frontrunner. Kristin, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thank you, Uli Jakob, and thank you all for coming here, so many of you today, and also to those of you following us through the webcast. It is a great opportunity for us to tell our story. While we definitely have a lot to be proud of from our past, I hope that we, during this day, will be able to convey to you why we also believe that we will be able to create exciting new value opportunities in the future. I will today focus on the Schibsted... Oops. I will focus on the Schibsted business areas today. Of course, we will remain an important owner of Adevinta, and later in our presentation, our CFO, Torun, he will present and talk about more in depth how we will execute that ownership. Our long history of... Oops.
Our long history of purpose-driven adaptation to constantly changing and new customer needs is really what has now shaped the Schibsted that we see today. We have different businesses. We have different brands from which we meet those consumer needs. We share a lot of things as well, as you will see during the day. We have decided then to divide this business into these three areas. We have the Nordic marketplaces. We have the strong brands of Finn, Blocket, and Tori covering Norway, Sweden, and Finland. We have the news media business, where we have the strong franchise concepts of these very iconic brands that we have, and also importantly, that they are the prime news destinations in the Norwegian and Swedish market.
We have, in Next, we organize a number of new initiatives, and maybe most interestingly there now, we have a new financial services offering, with Lendo being the most important asset. Managing these business areas and keep growing them through business development, through individual initiatives within each business will be very important going forward. But there are also a lot of synergies to be extracted across our businesses that we will come back to. Of course, having these positions is a fantastic starting point for creating new business and be able to constantly solve new customer problems. Some 15 years ago, our online media business was absolutely essential to have the competence to build the online classifieds business, which we have now been able to expand across the globe.
Some 8 years ago, both the digital news business and the online classifieds were instrumental in building up Lendo, which we're now able to expand internationally. I think, as Uli Jakob pointed out, we have certainly made our mistakes in the past, and we will keep making them. We are confident that we will be able to use this system to make new successes and that those successes will outweigh those who will not make it, also going forward. What is our success formula? We have put up a very simple strategic model. In the middle of it, we have the different businesses that we want to grow. They are different, but they share a common purpose, a common aspiration of being close to the customer, helping them make informed decision, and thereby empowering them in their daily lives.
At the bottom of all of this, these businesses share a common foundation, and that is the Schibsted Group. We share capital, we share people, and we share technology. I would like to take you through these three layers, and we start at the top. Solving problems for people and also broadening the scope of the type of problems that we can solve is actually essential to Schibsted's success. By doing this, we believe we can also increase our value creation to the benefit of the shareholders, but also to the benefit of our societies. In marketplaces, the whole point is to facilitate the transaction between buyer and seller. By facilitating that, we are also helping the economy to be more efficient, more circular, and more sustainable.
In our news media, growth is all about making sure that we manage to engage and entertain our readers. We need to make sure that they're willing to pay for those services so that we have a healthy business with the media going forward. It is absolutely essential that we manage to maintain the trust that these readers have in us. We need to keep up the high quality, our editorial integrity, and truth worthiness in all of our reportings. I have to say that in these days of fake news and manipulation, I think this task is more important than ever, and we simply need to succeed doing this. It's very, very important. Finally, for our financial and price comparison services, it's all about helping customers make the good deal.
By doing that, we also help society by making markets more transparent and more competitive. On a final note on this one, let me also say that in today's labor market, if you don't have a trustworthy and credible purpose, you simply don't get the best people to work for you. This goes beyond idealism. We really depend upon this to keep being good at what we do. Let me go down to the business layer and to our three business areas. They're strong in their own right. As you can see here, we have nearly 800 million monthly site visits, which is an absolutely fantastic starting point for detecting and solving more and more customer problems. In marketplaces, it's all about getting stronger and stronger, also in the verticals where we're not that strong today.
In the news media, it's all about continuing our success of digitalizing that business. In Next, it is about, make sure we have the right initiatives that we can spot, scale, and then expand going forward. It has been very important for us and it will be important as well for the future. While these business areas operate different models, it's also very important for us to convey that they also reinforce each other. The most obvious example is advertising. The fact that we have such a broad offering makes us able to service the market in a very holistic way, and it also enables us to excel at targeted advertising. We also have some other examples. We have had great success sharing traffic.
The thing is A lot of the traffic on our, let's call them traffic machines, are not always that high in value per visit. When we then manage to channel that over to some of our Next initiatives, for example, shown here with Aftenbladet to Lendo, we can monetize a lot better on that traffic when we manage to channel it into another concept. Then there are some other examples here which are maybe not that great in terms of monetization, at least not yet, but they're very good examples of these synergies. We have, we control together... Oops, sorry. We control together with Oops, sorry. We control together with partners about 90% of the households in Norway with physical distribution through our newspaper delivery. We are at 90% of the households every single day.
We have expanded that into having like a last mile delivery service for e-tailers. Now what we do is that we integrate that into the soft category at Finn, and then we solve a transportation problem for Finn's users. Now when they wanna sell something, they can put it outside the door, it'll be picked up, and it will be safely delivered the next day. That way, we boost our distribution business, but we also improve the Finn offering. A couple of other examples, and Anders will get more back to this later, but the Qasa Blocket is a great example of how we can take an asset that we have acquired through our venture investments in Next. We boost that by integrating it into Blocket.
It really increases the value of Qasa, which is a rental, a house rental full service offering. But it also improves the ARPU of Blocket when you integrate this type of service. It's, again, it's a win-win. Finally, we have the example here, going back to finn.no, we have the example of Blink. Some of the most interesting targets on finn.no are the ones who do not actively come to finn.no to search for a new house or a new job. They're the passive ones. By integrating our whole ecosystem, we can target those with ads on other platforms, and that makes finn.no a more attractive partner for our business customers. Anders will get back to that later. Let's talk about growth. We have multiple growth opportunities within our business areas and also beyond the existing business areas.
Succeeding, growing in our core is obviously very critical going forward. We have made this, can model, I guess, a bit Obama-inspired there. It gives a guideline that about 70% of our efforts should be put into building our core business. We will need to venture outside of that comfort zone, and we will need to also succeed in building adjacent business as well as new business. Then we have, over time, used these different growth tools that you see there on the right in the green. We have used all of those very efficiently. I guess FINN is our best example of organic disruptive growth. We have Lendo as a good example of a venture that we have then grown through our system and which is now ready for international expansion.
I think going forward, we will keep using all these tools, although I guess it's fair to say that there might not be that many acquisition opportunities within the news media. When it comes to international expansion, we find the obvious candidate for that within the Next portfolio. I don't think we can talk about growth without also looking at the macro environment in which we operate. We are fortunate to be in the Nordic region, defined by McKinsey as a digital front-runner region. We have good infrastructure, we have a digital population, and more and more rare these days, we actually have sound and digital governments in all of our markets. This has, of course, created a great environment for entrepreneurships. There are many brilliant examples of that.
An important feature here is that we're also able to make good industry institutions, a good example of it being BankID. Operating in this type of environment, we have been able to make new concepts where you have fully integrated digital customer journeys. The example, for example, with Lendo. You know, then we can be very good partners with our banks at home. The fact that we know how to do this makes us a very attractive partner for banks and financial institutions in non-Nordic countries. That is a great asset for us now that we wanna expand abroad. Let me then spend one slide talking about the final layer, the bottom layer, which is the Schibsted foundation.
While, of course, it is the individual businesses and brands that are known outside and that we will keep reporting to, for the financial market, they do share this common platform, and it is very important that that platform is strong and solid for their continued success. Within finance, it is very important that we keep managing a capital, good capital discipline, and that we allocate capital where it is best put at use. When it comes to the people layer, we need to attract the best talent, and we need to put that talent to its best use. We need to make sure we have the most competent people.
We need to have the right incentive systems. We need to have a good culture where we collaborate, where we stimulate entrepreneurship, where we make sure that people actually are able to spot these opportunities and take them further within our working environment. Finally, very importantly, we share common technology, common infrastructure, and we have a common approach to how we manage traffic and data. Of course, it's not just about managing that. It's about making sure that we constantly manage to translate that into value also going forward. I'll try to sum it up. On the left here, you have our best examples of these different growth avenues. Finn having being a great example of organic disruptive growth. DG being an example of how we're able to take an existing analog asset and having success in digitalizing it.
I can probably say this 'cause I'm still so new, but, you know, it's 9 years since I left Schibsted, and I have to say, coming back and seeing how Schibsted has been able to digitalize and actually make sound business out of its media business is very, very impressive to me. I wouldn't have thought so, that this was possible when I look 9 years back. Finally, Prisjakt is an example of a venture that we acquire, where we use our system to grow it, and that could be a potential candidate for scaling further. Of course, as you see in the middle here, our biggest success in terms of value is Adevinta, originally built on the internationalization of the Blocket concept.
As you know, we now think that it's the right thing to spin it off, and it will have better preconditions for growth on its own two feet, and you'll hear a lot more about it at the winter later. Drawing your attention to that green circle, I know some of you have been critical to our ability of divesting things as well, and maybe we have been too slow sometimes. When you look at all the assets that are no longer with us, our portfolio looks very different now than it did a few years back. We have actually also been quite good at divesting. We've had our spectacular failures, as Ole Jacob mentioned, for sure.
We will keep having them, but as you said, we have lost millions, and we have gained billions succeeding, and we will keep trying to follow that success formula. On the right is a basket of our next portfolio. Raoul will take you through this, but here we already have some exciting candidates for further growth. The point being that we will keep adding to this basket of potential by constantly being out there spotting new opportunities. Finally, it's all about people. We believe we have put together a strong team, and our team rests on the strength of all of those in the rest of our group. You will hear from many of them today. We have Anders Skoe. He heads up Nordic Marketplaces. He's also the CEO of finn.no.
He's been that for about 3 years now. He has a background from Google in the U.S. We have Siv Juvik Tveitnes. She heads up our news media division. She has made her way working her way up through that division, having several management positions throughout the year. We have our Swedish alibi, Raoul Grünthal. He's been with us for a long time now and had many responsibilities. He's headed our Swedish business. He's been in charge of media. Given the fact that this next portfolio is going to be so important to us going forward, it's the right thing to entrust it with Raoul. Given the importance of financial services within that, we have also brought with us Dan Ouchterlony, who will deep dive into the financial services portfolio, so he works with Raoul.
We have Trond, who most of you know, our CFO. We have two new members of the team. One is here today, actually listening. That's Mette. She was with Schibsted before in HR. She'll now be in charge of people and corporate affairs. In the meantime, she has done a brilliant job of building Korn Ferry in Norway. Finally, we have Sven Thaulow. He will be our new chief data and technology officer. He has a background from Telenor, and now lately he has been for the past few years, heading Cisco in Norway. Two great additions to the team. They'll both be on board within only a couple of weeks' time, so we really look forward to having this team complete very soon now.
On that note, I'm very happy, Anders, to give the word to you and listen to what you have to say about the Nordic Marketplaces.
Thank you for the introduction, Kristin, and thank you for the opportunity to present the Nordic Marketplaces, which I am sure you will agree with me has not just been a phenomenal business historically, but has a lot of potential for future growth. The Nordic Marketplaces division comprises of three primary businesses. We have finn.no in Norway, Blocket in Sweden, and then tori.fi in Finland. In aggregate, in 2018, these three businesses generated approximately 2.8 billion NOK in revenue and close to 1.3 billion NOK in EBITDA.
It was also a year where we continued to maintain, if not strengthen, our number one positions. It was also a year where in any given month we had approximately 190 million visits across our three sites, which is not bad considering the population of these three countries is only about 21 million. Finally, we are very proud of the contribution we make to our environment through all the secondhand trade on these sites. In sum, we saved emissions of close to 1.5 million tons of CO2 in 2018. There are three or, excuse me, four key takeaways I would like for you to have from this part of the presentation. The first is that we continue to have extremely strong leadership positions across all of the three marketplaces.
The second is that because of this phenomenal starting point, we are also very well positioned to take additional, capture additional market opportunities. The third is that not only historically have we delivered very strong financial results, but we also expect to do so going forward. Finally, we believe that we, as marketplaces, have an unfair competitive advantage by being part of the Schibsted ecosystem in the Nordics. Looking at the 3, marketplaces, we see that Finn continues to hold an unrivaled number one position within all of the key marketplace verticals in Norway. Finn is the clear number one within general, goods, within vehicles, within, real estate, and within jobs.
In Sweden, Blocket has a clear number one within general goods as well as cars or vehicles, has a very solid position within the jobs, and then within real estate, a strong and evolving position. tori.fi has a clear number one within the general goods space, a solid number two position within cars, at least if you look at listings, and then kind of a nascent position within real estate, but definitely a very interesting starting point for capturing additional market share. Looking at the financial development of this portfolio, I would say it's been very strong over a long period of time. finn.no was launched right around, officially launched, I should say, right around 2000 and has been profitable pretty much since the beginning.
Blocket was acquired in 2003. Tori.fi was an organic launch in 2009.
On this graph, I would say that there are two key takeaways. One of them is obvious, the other one is not so obvious. The obvious one is that we have continued to maintain very high margins over a very long period of time. The other one that's not so obvious is what happens kind of around the 2013 to 2015 timeframe. What you're seeing here is kind of a flattish development in top-line revenues. Especially if you look at Finn, I would say that there was a concern at that point in time that Finn was a very mature player in a mature market in Norway. There was some concern that Finn had reached kind of peak classifieds.
What we saw was that with the starting point we had, we had an opportunity to solve many more problems for both users and customers, that has really provided the foundation for the increased growth trajectory you see ever since. Examples of that are things like presenting financing options to users or consumers when they are looking to buy a car. It's things like helping sellers of secondhand homes market their homes for sale in new ways through things like the Blink product. What we have also done is become much more sophisticated when it comes to pricing and packaging during the last few years. Moving on to a deep dive into Finn. Finn, as mentioned earlier, continues to hold clear number one positions across all the key verticals.
Finn is also a large enough player that it's meaningful to talk about, revenue per capita and also business per capita. Finn's brand recognition is also close to unrivaled with a 98% aided brand awareness, which is very unusual for any company. Finn has continued to grow nicely over the last few years. CAGR over the last two years was 12%. In Q4 of 2018, Finn delivered a 17% year-over-year growth. It's good to see that the business is solid and continuing to grow. Finn also has a nicely diversified revenue portfolio. Diving then into the jobs vertical. Jobs crossed the half a billion NOK revenue threshold in 2018 and is now the largest revenue contributor within Finn.
The key drivers of the last two years have been, one, volume increases. The Norwegian economy is going pretty well, and more companies are looking for talent. The other driver is that we have made significant changes to our pricing and packaging setup. Looking forward, we see that there's some very substantial opportunities for our jobs vertical. Perhaps the most interesting one is to help employers looking for talent to get access to the more passive candidates. It is the case today that candidates actively looking for a job will already be on FINN looking for a job, but we want to help employers get in touch with the passive candidates as well.
We are also working on a product that will more automatically activate various types of upsell products when a job is particularly hard to staff. The third opportunity is really just to make our various upsell products easier to discover, understand and buy. Moving on to the real estate vertical, we continue to see a nice growth in this portfolio as well. The pretty much all homes for sale or secondhand homes for sale in Norway are already on Finn, so there's not much volume growth here. The key driver for the revenue increase has been the launch of the Blink product, which I'll get back to later, but is really a innovative marketing solution for those wanting to sell a home. Looking forward, we see a number of interesting opportunities for growth.
One of the ones that we are working very intensely on right now is one that involves new construction. We see that there is a need among developers to present their offerings more smartly, and we also see a demand among consumers or potential buyers to get a better overview over the new construction market. We also see that there's an opportunity in evolving the property rentals or long-term rentals space. Then we are continuing to roll out adjacent services such as financing solutions, insurance and other related products. The motor vertical has also seen growth over the last couple of years. The key driver from 2016 to 2017 was an increase in volumes.
Private leasing has become very popular in Norway, the dealers saw a lot of leased cars return. Those leased cars were used, they had to be put on FINN and sold. From the driver from 2017 to 2018 is primarily changes to the pricing and packaging structure. Looking forward, we see a very interesting opportunity around what we call our digital purchase contract. What this is, we are now providing our customers the opportunity to sign a contract at the time of transaction. This gives us an entry into a very, very interesting point during the user journey.
The point at which you make that purchase is also when you need financing, you need insurance, you need to make a decision about who will service this vehicle, what you're gonna do about storing the tires and so forth. It's become this very interesting point of introducing various value-adding services. The last opportunity here, which is Blink Motor, again, has to do with helping car dealers solve more of their advertising challenges. This slide here on the travel vertical. The travel vertical is very interesting because it was launched some number of years ago now, but is already contributing well over NOK 100 million per year just in the metasearch and classifieds revenue.
On top of this, we have revenues from display advertising. The drop here in ARPUs, or really average revenue per account, is not alarming. It just means that we have more smaller agents joining this platform. In addition to there existing a number of product, or feature opportunities such as city packages and last-minute travels, there's another particularly interesting opportunity for Finn Travel, and that is to create a white label version of the Finn Travel platform and scale it initially into Sweden. We are planning here within the next couple of months to launch a travel vertical in Sweden under the Blocket brand built on the Finn platform. It's a nice example of collaboration and also reusing the technical platform. Moving on to Blocket.
Blocket, as I mentioned earlier, continues to hold a very clear number one position, particularly within general goods and cars or motors, and is also large enough that it's meaningful to talk about revenues per capita and visits per capita. The financial performance of Blocket continues to be strong. However, we have seen a contraction in that business over the last year or so. There are three key drivers for that contraction. Number one is advertising, number two is motors, and number three is the general goods segment. The key reason for the contraction in the advertising business is not Blocket specific. This has to do with the generally challenging advertising climate in the Swedish market. Then I'll get back to the reasons for the contraction within motors and general goods.
Blocket also has a very nicely diversified revenue portfolio and delivers high and predictable cash levels. Looking then at the motor vertical. This is the largest vertical within Blocket. It did see a slight contraction from 17 to 18. The main reason for that is that a number of the largest car dealers in Sweden decided to list their inventory exclusively on an industry-sponsored competitive website. This obviously impacted volumes on Blocket. However, during the course of 2018, we have been able to resolve the situation, and as of the end of 2018, more than 90% of the car dealers that decided to go exclusively with a competitor have now relisted their cars for sale on Blocket.
Here at the beginning of 2018, we are seeing a positive listings development for within the professionals segment. The other thing we've done throughout 2018 is we have become even better at listening to our customers within the motor segment and rolled out a number of new product features that also makes it even more attractive to come back to Blocket. Looking forward, this improved climate between Blocket and the car dealers has provided a foundation for us to start discussing things like new pricing models, which is very, very exciting for us. We also see an opportunity here to develop products closer to the actual transaction. Finally, in Sweden, we see a particularly interesting opportunity in developing kind of the new markets marketplace.
Blocket has a sub-brand known as, which we are developing into more of a new cars platform. Before I leave this slide, there's one particularly impressive statistic that I would like to share with you, and that is that in Sweden, one car is sold every minute through the Blocket platform, which is a very, very impressive effect statistic for a site like this. Moving on to the generalist goods vertical. I'll just start out again with a statistic that has to do with effect. One-fourth of all items listed on the Blocket general goods site are sold within 24 hours. There are very few sites of this type who can show these kinds of effect numbers.
We also believe that because we deliver such strong effect, we are very well positioned to also capture value from this value we create for our customers. The key reason that you see a little bit of a dip here is a reduction in volumes. Again, this is primarily tied to the fact that this vertical on Blocket is still on a paid listings model. We are starting to conduct experiments to see how dramatically this paid listings model affects volumes. We ran an experiment in November, December on certain categories where we reduced the price not to zero, but to SEK 10 per listing. By reducing the price to SEK 10 per listing, we increased the volumes in those categories by 100%.
I mention this because we are planning to continue to evolve the pricing and business model within this segment on Blocket, and you should expect us to continue to run experiments to see what is the best model going forward. In addition to running experiments going forward, we also believe there's a good opportunity in increasing monetization among professional listers on this segment. We are now also in the process of launching what we call Blocketpaketet, which is a bundle of delivery and insurance solutions for those wishing to sell through Blocket. The jobs vertical in Blocket has now crossed 100 million NOK run rate, which is good, but we still believe that there is a lot of potential to generate even more revenue from this vertical.
Some of the key things we are now doing to increase revenues here are, not surprisingly, to continue to roll out more premium products. We are also looking at rolling out a marketplace for educational opportunities, which interestingly enough is kind of anti-cyclical versus jobs. It would really benefit us if there was ever a significant change in the Swedish economy. Finally, we believe that the jobs vertical is a segment where there is opportunity for market consolidation in Sweden. Looking at the real estate vertical in Sweden, Blocket does not have a particularly strong position. These revenue levels are much, much lower than what we see in other markets. The main driver for that is that Hemnet is the clear number one within the secondhand property space in Sweden.
That said, we believe that going forward, we have some particularly exciting opportunities for Blocket within real estate. The most exciting one, which I'll do a deep dive on in a second, is the Qasa-Blocket combination that Kristin alluded to earlier. We also see that there's an opening to become the de facto marketplace where people look for holiday houses and rentals. There's also an opportunity in Sweden to develop or launch a marketplace for new construction, likely in collaboration with Finn. If we do a deep dive on the rentals opportunity, we just made an acquisition or closed an acquisition of Qasa. Qasa is a full-service rental offering. They have a very solid monetization model, but they don't have the inventory or the listings.
Blocket, on the other hand, has all the listings but does not have a particularly solid monetization model. Yeah, if you look at the numbers here, you see that this is really an interesting marriage. We've already started the integration of Qasa into Blocket, and we see that the conversion levels are very strong and holds a lot of promise for us to develop this as a significant source of revenue going forward. Moving on to Tori in Finland. Tori's primary position is within the general goods segment, where they have a tremendous amount of traffic. We believe there's opportunity going forward, both in developing that general goods segment, as well as using that as a springboard to further develop other positions.
Tori has been on a very good revenue growth trajectory, 2018 was also the first year that the company turned EBITDA positive, which is a big milestone in the history of Tori. If you look at the revenue distribution, you see that Tori is very heavily reliant upon advertising. This is not unusual given that it is primarily a general goods site today. As we evolve that vertical as well as grow in other segments, you should expect this balance to shift. Looking at Tori, some of the more interesting opportunities include, one, evolving the cars category, learning from both Blocket and Finn to see what has been successful there. We also think there are opportunities within the Finnish real estate market, not necessarily within the secondhand property for sale segment, but within some of the other segments, like what we saw in Sweden, including rentals. We also believe there's a general opportunity in taking concepts that have already been proven in Norway and Sweden and scaling them to Finland, as well as pursue selective M&A opportunities in the Finnish market. Starting then to wrap up a little bit. What we are looking at with the Nordic Marketplaces business is really a business that has delivered very strong financial results over a long period of time. It doesn't end there, because when we look forward, we think that there are plenty of opportunities for increased monetization going forward.
I would say key part of the playbook there are things like continue to work on packaging and pricing as well as upsell products. The second thing is we will continue to do product development to further strengthen our positions. We think that by doing so, we are also positioning ourselves very well for capturing even more of the value that we are generating for our users and customers. We will continue to launch new verticals, either by scaling them from one geography into another or by establishing entirely new verticals, such as a marketplace for educational opportunities. Finally, we will look at selective M&A within the Nordics. To summarize the key takeaways, again, within the Nordic Marketplace business, we have some phenomenal positions. We like to use the word unrivaled.
We believe these positions are a great springboard for capturing additional market opportunities, especially by moving or developing products closer to the transaction. These are businesses that have an impressive financial record that we expect to continue going into the future. Finally, we think that we have, as marketplaces, an unfair competitive advantage by being part of the Schibsted family, both because it gives an opportunity to share learnings across the three markets, but also because we have our sister businesses within News Media and within Next. One particular example that is relevant is the Blink example, which really exemplifies why we are at such an advantage as marketplaces being part of the Schibsted family.
The situation in Norway today is that if a potential buyer is actively looking for a home, they will be on Finn actively looking for a home to buy. In some situations, people might be willing to buy or bid on a particular home if just the right opportunity came up. In that case, we have the opportunity now to actually take a classifieds listing and distribute it onto the VG news portal. The way that we do this is that we collect a lot of data on Finn about what kind of users are likely to be interested in a particular property. We can share some of that data with VG.
We have developed machine learning algorithms, such as collaborative filtering, that allow us to be very targeted then in terms of which listings we expose to a user when they are on VG. This is, as far as I know, kind of a one in a kind example of how a company or companies have been able to leverage both the strength of classifieds and the strength of the media business with it, their reach and frequency to create additional value both for users and customers. With that, I thank you. I'm super excited about the Nordic Marketplaces business. It's been a great ride so far, and I think we have a lot of opportunity for growth going forward. Thank you. With that, we'll open up for Q&A.
Thank you, Anders. We'll take a couple of questions. Anybody? Yes, Henriette, you wanna start?
Yes. Henriette Trondsen, Arctic. First, can you give some color on the expected growth rate for Blocket going forward? Also, in the car vertical, given that almost all the car dealers are now back on the Blocket platform, have you cut prices to get them back from Wayke?
Starting with the first part of it, our expectations regarding Blocket and their trajectory going forward. Blocket shall become a growth company again. In terms of more specific guiding, I think I'll leave that to Trond, who can maybe cover that later on. In terms of what we have done in order to bring the car dealers back onto the Blocket platform, I would say that pricing has not been a key element of that. The key learning has actually been that you have to talk to and listen to your customers and make sure that you develop the features and the products that they need in order to be successful on your platform.
That has really been the key reason why we are now in a much better position than what we were about a year ago.
Thank you.
I can add that on Blocket, we believe within reasonable time that we should be able to reach high single-digit growth numbers. Okay, it was one in the back there with a beard. I think that was your turn now.
Fashionable beard. It's Andrew Ross from Barclays. Two for me. You talked about the potential to consolidate in jobs in Sweden. Could you give us a sense as to what the environment's like in real estate and whether you could ever come back there to do anything? I know there's been a history there. Second question, in the release this morning, you talked about 8%-12% growth in the mid to long term for Nordic Marketplaces. Can you give us a sense as to how much of that is from M&A, and if any, and how much is organic?
I'll take the second part of your question first. When it comes to guiding, I will leave those questions to Trond. Let's park that, and then we'll come back to that later. When it comes to M&A within, I believe your question was related to the real estate vertical within Sweden. Yeah, as you alluded to, we have been through one such process. We are aware of what the situation is around Hemnet. In terms of our specific strategy relating to that, it is not something I wish to comment on.
We'll have one final question. I think it was. Yeah, you there in the front.
Good morning.
Sorry. It was this guy. I'm trying to take you by turn.
Thank you. Martin Stenshall, Danske. Follow-up question regarding Blocket. You mentioned this experiment of putting the listing price down to SEK 10 with a very high growth in volume. You know, back in 2014, I believe we saw this freemium model in finn.no. Why aren't you trying to do kind of the same thing, putting it down to 0? Because we have seen a tremendous growth in listings in the generalist vertical in finn.no. Because when you look at the numbers for the generalist vertical in Blocket, it's kind of dropping quite a lot. I was just, you know, trying to pick your brain on how aggressive measures you're planning to improve the growth in Blocket general. Thank you.
You're absolutely right. finn.no went to a premium model a few years ago. One interesting detail about that decision was that finn.no went freemium overnight across all of its categories. What happened then, as you described, was that we saw a tremendous increase in volume almost overnight, whereas demand did not follow quite the same trajectory. It took us, order magnitude, one to two years to be back at the same liquidity or effect levels as following that decision. We'd like to learn from that experience. I don't think the right model for Blocket will be to go freemium overnight.
I think the right model for Blocket will be to evolve that listings model and also see, and also acknowledge that on Blocket today there is actually a fairly high willingness to pay, and we would like to find models that allow us to capture that willingness to pay instead of going freemium and then creating, you know, a big hurdle for additional monetization going forward. The key, I think the key point here is we want to take learning from what happened at finn.no, and we will continue to experiment with various models in Blocket going forward.
Just a short question on the travel experiment, or let's say launch from finn.no to Blocket. Could you please give a bit more color on that, how you expect that to ramp up? To what extent is that actually contributing to the growth guidance you're giving? Was it 8%-12%?
We will launch Blocket Resor or the travel product on Blocket this spring. Again, we have an experimental approach to this, and I think I'm professional enough for me to be very specific about, you know, how we expect that to evolve. We do think it is a great way to capitalize on the strong Blocket brand and also help solve more problems for more users in the Swedish market. Thank you.
Okay, we're out of time, but since I kind of ditched the lady in the back, I'll give you a chance to ask your question.
Thank you. Thank you very much. It's Silvia Cuneo from Deutsche Bank. Just a few quick ones. On the guidance for the Marketplace business, you talked about top-line growth, but nothing about margin while you did give guidance for Adevinta instead. Can you comment on margin for the Nordic marketplaces as well? Second, on your idea to launch for Blocket a product to go into the actual transaction, just wondering why you think it's a good opportunity and what would be the economics. If there is time, just on the different packages you offer for your customers, how does the pricing change for premium products?
The first part of your question regarding guiding, again, I think I'll give those questions to Trond, so he can follow up on those more holistically later on. I'm not sure I caught the nuances of your other two questions.
No, I didn't catch them either, actually. It was very difficult to hear.
The second one was about entering the actual car transaction business.
Oh, the car transaction business.
With Blocket.
Right.
What would be the economics and the potential opportunity?
Okay. Can you touch also on that, on the economics?
Sure. I think the most interesting thing we're doing around the actual car transaction is in Blocket, where today, we have a partnership with DNB, which actually allows you to buy a used vehicle through the Blocket platform. It's kind of a one-click solution, and you can actually buy used vehicles. I think that in terms of those type, that type of opportunity, we are more likely to partner with other companies rather than develop that sort of solution from scratch ourselves.
Thank you, Anders. I think, sorry, we're kind of out of time, I have to cut you off there. Thank you. I'm sure there are a lot of more questions for Anders, he'll be around for the break and for lunch, please look him up. Now it's my great pleasure to introduce Siv, who will take us through the News Media business.
Thank you very much, Kristin. It is a pleasure to be here. As we all know, the traditional media is in the middle of a digital transformation, with huge changes in consumer behavior and business models. The industry has been characterized by pessimism. In Schibsted, we have transformed our traditional media house to be world-class digital brands and positions in our market. We now have a much more optimistic view of the future. As already Kristin mentioned, the need for quality journalism has never been greater. With world leaders and global giants create doubts about what is true and what is false, what is right, what is wrong.
We are very proud of the role we play by informing citizen, by informing citizen and driving the societal debate and being a fundamental force of the democracy in our society. Our value proposition is to be a leading provider of independent quality journalism. We, and we have had, and our strategy has been digital first for years already, resulting in a strong news business that is very well digital positioned for the future. We have just finalized a great 2018, with growth in revenue and with a very strong EBITDA of more than NOK 680 million. News is big business for us. What is the highlights, what is the highlights for the new media? Our portfolio consists of trusted digital and iconic media brands.
They are amongst the most famous brands in our markets. As traditional media, we have a good grip on the digital transformation by growing our digital recurring revenues, having a tight cost control. For many of our brands, we can see a pure digital profitability within reach. We have also invested in common product and tech capabilities, giving us an efficient and rapid product development to provide excellent user experience. We are a very, very natural part in the new Schibsted, leveraging reach and customer insights to further grow and build our digital business. In Norway and Sweden, we have a high internet penetration and everyone has a smartphone. We are also a wealthy people, historically, we happen to be the most newspaper-reading people in the world.
This combination is most likely the explanation of why the willingness to pay for news is highest in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Plus our media brands itself has also been an important driver for this development. We have pioneered this market, and we are in the forefront developing the digital subscription model for news. Our focused digital strategy for years has resulted in a good growth rate for our digital revenues, and at average, it has been 17% over the last 12-15 years. The growth is accelerating, both by that we are strengthening our digital positions, and thereby we are an attractive advertising channel in a brand space environment and by accelerating the digital subscribers. The growth rate within the digital subscription is impressive for all our brands.
We now see that this revenue stream is as important as advertising. In our portfolio, we have, to simplify, we have two types of news businesses. We have the primary news destination, and we have the premium subscription brands. Let me introduce you for VG. VG has the unrivaled number 1 position in Norway, and this unique market position make VG to the go-to destination when it comes to all parts of news in Norway. The best way to demonstrate the strong position of VG is the extremely high direct traffic coming to VG. More than 90% of the traffic coming to VG is direct, and less than 3% comes from Facebook. This is by international comparison, very, very high.
Last year, VG reached a very important milestone by having more pure digital revenues than revenues coming from print. In 2018, VG had more than NOK 1 billion in pure digital revenues. We can clearly see a pure digital profitability within reach for VG with no dependency to the print economy. The success of VG is a story about a news company that has dared to challenge itself and that has invested in new technology long before it has been commoditized. VG had its first copy out in 1945 after the war, and already in 1995, VG had its first online edition.
In 2002, it was the peak year of the paper copies, that was 7 years after we went online for the first time. This story has continued. A very important part of VG's strategy has been to establish new business areas such as VG Mobil and VGTV as separate company outside of VG to make sure that this initiative gets focus and speed in the start. It also demonstrates the way that we have disrupted ourselves within the news business. Big news is big business for us. That's why we love this guy so much.
This is the most famous Norwegian these days, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. I think, yeah, I've seen him with a lot of coverage in this country today as well. When he was appointed as the interim manager of Manchester United, the news was actually breaking in VG. Our colleague, Erik, was searching and investigating. Suddenly, he found this story at the Manchester United's webpage, but it was not published yet. He published it. Very shortly after, our prime minister in Norway was tweeting a congratulations to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on his new job. Manchester United immediately contact the secretary of our prime minister and ask her to remove her tweet, and she had to do so.
Shortly after, the story became official, and it exploded in news media and in social media all over the world. It has, of course, been one of the most important news stories for VG for the last month. VG, when they are covered this kind of story, they covered it at 360 degrees, of course, being present in all their own channels, but also using Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, podcast, because we really must be present with content tailored to the different audiences in different channels, even though our direct traffic is more than 90%.
This is in many ways a good story, but it is still just an example of how VG discover and cover big news events and keep up their position as the unrivaled number 1 position in Norway. Being an early adopter and having a very clear digital strategy has given VG very good financial results. Last year, the digital growth rate was at 80%. Driven by both online advertising and digital subscription revenues. The VG had a very strong EBITDA margin of 80% last year. Moving over to Sweden, we have Aftonbladet. Aftonbladet has the same history of early adoption and a digital-first strategy, and has the number 1 position in the Swedish market, with almost as high traffic as VG. Aftonbladet has also, is the majority of it is revenue coming from the digital.
Aftonbladet also see a growth in the digital revenues and the digital subscription revenues is becoming a more important part of the total revenue base. The advertising was a bit lower in Sweden last year. That was also mentioned by Anders when he presented Blocket. This has affected the EBITDA margin in 2018. However, Aftonbladet is in the middle of a digital transformation, and have a very strong performance in the Swedish market, with both high EBITDA margin and high profitability. It really confirms the strong position that Aftonbladet has in Sweden. The rest of our portfolio is what we call premium subscription, premium subscription brands. That's newspaper that have historical, delivered home to our doors in the morning.
That is high quality content newspaper, with a long history and a very proud culture. These papers are also on their digital journey, where the online recurring revenues is growing and are becoming a significant part of the revenue base. In Norway, we have a clear number 1 position with Aftenposten. In Sweden, we have a strong number 2 position with Svenska Dagbladet. In Norway, we also have three regional papers along the coast in Norway, where they have a very clear number 1 position in their local markets. These newspapers, and the business model for these newspaper have totally changed for the last 10-12 years. Let me illustrate that with Aftenposten. 10-12 years ago, Aftenposten had a 70% of the revenues from advertising and 30% from the subscription.
Today, this is turned around. Now 80% of the revenues are coming from the subscription base, and with the digital part growing nearly 40% year by year. All the digital subscription brands see the same trend. It is also two milestones or two highlights I would like to mention when it comes to these papers. For Aftenposten and Bergens Tidende, today they have more pure digital subscribers than offline subscriber, which is a big milestone. For all these newspapers together, they have an all-time high of paying customer due to the very good growth we have seen in the digital subscription, which is impressive. This is not really what we just predicted a few years ago. The print revenues continue to decline.
However, our premium subscription brand has been able to deliver a good and stable EBITDA margin due to very tight cost control. All of the media operation has been streamlined, and we have been taking out the synergies by building common functions. A key learning in building up the digital subscription model is that it is quality journalism that converts paying customers. We have many examples. Here are two that have been converting thousands of paying customers. A key learning in this is that it is story that makes engagement, that is enlightening, and that is quality journalism that converts to paying customers. Providing the best user experience is also a prerequisite to sustaining the digital number 1 position for our news brands. We have invested in product and tech capabilities.
We now have a standardized tech stack and a common product and tech organization across all these brands. The aim is to build scale and work with product innovation in a cost-efficient way. One example is the way we have been working with our new live studio that we have built, that we use for big news events and the breaking news. Has been a very important part of VG's coverage of the Ski World Cup that was finalized a few days ago in Austria. This feature was built in one of our smaller newspapers. Step by step it has been scaled, and it is now used by all our publication.
This is the way of how we can build scale in efficient way. We also Another example is our state-of-the-art content management system that we have built ourselves, and our journalists have, as far as we know, the best available tool to produce and to distribute digital journalistic content. Product and tech capability has also been very important in the way we have succeeded with our advertising strategy. We sell inventory targeting across all Schibsted brands, also included marketplaces based on common Schibsted data. Anders already explained to you about the Blink product, where we use the listing from VG and use the targeting advertising tool that we had on VG to create a great marketing and advertising product. Behind this is a shared advertising technology used by a common sales force.
In this way, we utilize the best from two worlds. We develop the technology centrally and together, and then we use it by our local sales force that sell our inventory across all our brands. The last product and tech feature I would like to mention is one that we also find very promising. Recently, Aftenposten switched to an automated and personalized front page to all its digital users, and this is a big milestone, and it is a very important feature of how we can provide a better user experience to provide a more relevant content to all our users. The way this work is that the model uses data from individual reading history combined with an editorial criteria, and thereby we present a personal front page.
This is still in a very early stage, but the result is promising, and we see already a documented higher engagement with this kind of technology. We will now roll out this technology to all our sites. We have digitalized our business in a very good way. In looking into the future, we also see future growth opportunities. We have already talked about the digital subscription and the impressive growth rate that they have had for the last year. Currently, the growth have been coming from increasing the value to recruit new customers. At some time, this will flatten out. There is still a potential to developing the ARPU through a deeper and more extensive subscription relationship with all our user.
We will look into to bundling to product development and pricing. Here it is still a big potential. Advertising will continue to grow, and we still see big potential in native advertising. In using data in a smarter way, we will be able to create better advertising products. We also believe that the trust and the brand-safe environment that we represent will be important in the future advertising industry. We can also see a future potential in the voice and video. The voice is a very premature stage, but it will be interesting to following the changes in the traditional TV viewing, and how that will affect the TV money. With part of that will move to be digitally, and we have already a very strong digital position with very good data driven products.
This can be an interesting opportunity for us. To sum up, the News Media consists of trusted digital iconic brands that is managing the digital transformation in a very good way by increasing the online recurring revenues, having tight cost control. By investing in product and tech capabilities, making us able to deliver scalable product in a cost-efficient way. This is confirming our position in Schibsted, leveraging reach and customer insights to further grow the digital business of Schibsted. The last thing I will mention is that the News Media has also been instrumental in building up many of our digital services. You will later today hear about Lendo, the very successful history of Lendo.
The growth of Lendo has been accelerating, also by Aftonbladet, the number one position in Sweden with very high traffic. Using this as a marketing tool together with Blockets and with the integration with Blockets has been an important part of that story. Ole and Dan will come back to that later. Yes, that's me. We are ready for-
We have time for a couple of questions for Siv as well before we go for a break. Anybody? Yep.
Hi, Siv. Martin Stenshall, Danske. Just a question regarding Aftonbladet and VG. There's quite a difference in growth in online between the two papers, and obviously, advertising could be one reason for that. Is it one of the only reason, or is it the only reason, that the Swedish advertising market is softer than the Norwegian market?
I think that's the main. Thank you for a good question. I think that's the main explanation. What we have also seen at the way VG has working with the digital subscription model is a bit more mature than Aftonbladet. In a very short time, we will rebrand the Aftonbladet Plus, which is the digital subscription model for Aftonbladet. We have been putting a lot of work into that, and we will rebrand that very shortly. Hopefully that will give us good revenue growth also when it comes to the digital revenue growth.
Thank you. You also mentioned selected Nordic M&As. What kind of M&As would be attractive for you?
Well, as I said in my presentation, you know, it, the news media is not the most obvious area of acquisitions for us. There could be some select opportunities to make sure that we fulfill an even better ecosystem that could make sense to pursue. I think that's where we are on that one.
Thank you.
Anybody else? Yeah, in the middle there. She's coming the other way.
Thank you. Marcus Diebel with J.P. Morgan. Two questions. Clearly very impressive performance in online, as you said. I have one question just regarding on pricing. When I look at other publishers, the German publishers, there seems to be still a large gap between pricing in online and offline. Could you comment a little bit more how that has developed? Maybe the second question related to that, if we look a bit more into the future, given the strong or the strength of the brands, we might see that these papers become very strong online-only businesses in the future. Do you feel that in terms of the cost base then, you will be able to sustain the quality, the editorials, as they are now on an online-only business model in the far future?
ARPUYeah. Let me start with the first one, which the pricing opportunities. I think we are on the very early edge of how we can experiment with pricing when it comes to the digital subscription revenues. I think there are very various way that we can increase the ARPU going forward. I think an interesting case to look at is, for example, in New York Times and the way that they have presented their financial results in 2018. Now more than 50% of the digital growth is coming outside, you know, the core news product.
Their ability to build different products and services around the digital subscription is very interesting for us, and we are already experimenting with that in some of our smaller newspaper to see if we find model that is scalable. The other question was, can you
Just in the future, if these brands potentially become online-only business models.
Right.
Do you believe that then the cost base or the revenue opportunity will be enough to cover the cost base to also make sure the quality will continue to be as strong as it is today?
I think the way we have developed show that we can deliver on that and the way we have been working with our cost base. Yeah. You know, I tend to think of this, I often use this analogy about the movies and the popcorn that, you know, the cinemas don't make enough money from showing the movie, but they make quite a lot of money from selling popcorn and other things. You know, we need to do the same thing. I mean, we have the movie, right, in our editorial content, and we need to get better at selling popcorn.
I think having very strong digital subscriber bases is a very good, foundation for finding some of that popcorn, in my analogy. Of course, at some point, but further down the road than we expected, we will not have, you know, the printing cost anymore. We will see what happens to distribution. We might be able to build that so strong based on other things that we might keep it. We'll have to see how that evolves. The idea is that we have to make, you know, sustainable systems in the digital world so that that business can live on its own and ensure enough editorial quality going forward. That's definitely our objective.
I think an also interesting note on that is for many of our newspaper, we can see a pure digital profitability within reach. You know, it's not like it was a few years ago that that was impossible to understand how we will be there. For some of our brands, we are not, we're not very far...
That's a positive note, so now we stop there, and we take a break. Please be disciplined and be back, at 10:55 A.M., please, and then we'll continue with next.
Welcome back. My name is Raoul Grünthal, and I'm not only Next, I'm also heading Next business area Next. Very funny. I will, together with my friend, Dan Ouchterlony, talk with you a little bit about growth and financial services. Let me begin with what Christian said this morning. Christian, you alluded to the fact that different parts of Schibsted together form a great foundation for growth. Our job within my team, the Next team, is to help great entrepreneurs and to find great products in order to really unleash that possibility of growth. Because if you look at Schibsted from entrepreneur's point of view, it's quite interesting. Imagine that you could get access to the enormous marketing power that Siv just told us about.
Imagine that you could get access to the marketing power and the conversion engine of marketplaces that Anders told us about before. Imagine also that you could get access to Schibsted's organization, the power of this organization, and also all the knowledge of this organization. Of course, this would be very powerful for an entrepreneur with very limited resources. I think at least if I were an entrepreneur, I would look at Schibsted as a very interesting partner. This is exactly what we do. We partner up with entrepreneurs. We connect the power of Schibsted to some of the greatest entrepreneurs in order to create value. We have a historical track record of incubating growth businesses. Since the acquisition of Blocket in 2003, ventures have been a method for us in order to take Schibsted to the next level.
Mind you, we are not a venture fund. I wouldn't even describe us as a traditional corporate venture business. We are actually industrialists using some of the tools and the methods of venture capitalists in order to condition, continuously build a strong digital company as Schibsted. Sometimes we enter business, new business that may look different. We have done this with financial services, and now we are doing it with e-health, but we always focus on strategic fit with Schibsted, and we are always guided by Schibsted's overall mission. Our basic idea is quite simple. We find great entrepreneurs with a great idea or a great product. We create an environment where these entrepreneurs can prosper. When we are at our best, we manage to give them the power of a large media group that will let them be entrepreneurs.
They can still build upon their culture. They don't really need to become one of us day one. That's extremely important. The perfect match most of the time is when we are able to acquire a company which is not really at its starting point. Because we're not really a seed investor. The best match is when we find a company which has perhaps a great product which is already proven but still needs lots of marketing to gain a strong market share, and perhaps is also at the beginning of its monetization, because that's where we can really help with the strong marketing power and help of monetization. In these cases, we can really become kind of kingmaker, and we have done that several times.
Of course, if we succeed in building a strong position on our home market, then we export the concept to other countries like we have done already with Blocket, we are doing it with Lendo, and we are starting to do it with Prisjakt. Yes, we have done this historically, and we will do it again. The first concept, once again, was Blocket. We are not a one-hit wonder. We have, as you know, initiated Lendo and its expansion abroad, and our vision is to create new homes later on. Prisjakt could be one of them. I will come back to that later on. We are quite confident because we think that we have found a, so to say, modus operandi that really works. It's all about capitalizing on the digital ecosystem that we have built in our home markets, the Nordic countries.
I think that Christian earlier explained that in a quite good way, how it works. Let me do that again. It works a little bit on three different levels. First of all, we have the massive traffic created not only by Siv and the news media, but very much by the news medias. That, of course, creates a huge opportunity to get display advertising for these new companies in a disproportionate way, I would say. That, of course, is very important for their brand building. It's not only about digital advertising. Most of the time, the integrations are even more important. Let's take Lendo as an example. Of course, Aftonbladet, as Siv said before, is very important to build the brand Lendo. Even more important is perhaps the integration of Lendo in Blocket.
For instance, if you buy a car in Blocket, you get an advertising where you can take a loan from Lendo. That of course creates conversions that have huge, huge value for Lendo. That's the integrations and the traffic. The third dimension, which is perhaps a little bit at an early stage, yes, but that really could be extremely interesting, is about data. Anders mentioned an example earlier on, which is Blink. I think that we'll have more and more good examples of how we use data across the group. Of course, the great thing with data is compared to display advertising, you just have one display advertising, then it's gone. With data, you can reuse it. It's an infinite value. Yes. Of course, our digital ecosystem is our main asset.
Many of the great companies we have built have been built on that ecosystem. We're also, with our position in Norway and Sweden, a company with different kind of infrastructures that are really interesting. Let me just mention one that could be a start of a new ecosystem, and actually already is. Distribution. In Norway, we have a huge distribution power. We have used that in order to create new companies. For instance, we have HeltHjem, which is a company that is expanding at a very high pace right now. What it does is really that it's built upon the explosion of e-commerce.
At the same time as the national post company is having trouble and perhaps is getting out there more and more seldom to the households, we still dominate the last mile to all the households in Norway. That really creates a very, very interesting position. I think that this could be one of our most interesting points of expansion in the coming years. All in all, we have a, I would say, solid and diversified portfolio of ventures. The common denominator is that all these companies have synergies with other Schibsted assets. We are happy to invest in different kind of verticals. It may be verticals or industries where we already have some important assets, like marketplaces or financial services.
It may be emerging verticals, like e-health, where we just made a new acquisition earlier this week called Add Health Media. It's a small acquisition, but I'm extremely excited about it. It's a very, very interesting small company. Sometimes, quite often actually, we want the majority because we think it's strategically very interesting, but sometimes we can also be happy with a minority stake. We've already mentioned Prisjakt several times, and there's a good reason for that, because it's a very exciting company. Prisjakt is our price comparison product. Or rather, I would call it our pre-shopping service, because it's not only about price comparison, it's about all the information you need before you make a decision to buy something. Prisjakt is not only a great product, it's also a company with margins, as you can see, around 30%.
It has also double-digit growth. The last two years, it has been about 20%. Right now, Prisjakt has a very strong position in Norway and Sweden. It's present in many different countries, but we have not really put much marketing into it yet. We're waiting for getting the traction, and we'll see. I hope that we will be able to find some new markets with Prisjakt, where to expand. Actually, you could try it. We are here in the UK. It's called PriceSpy. If you want to use the product, you can do that. It's great. I would really say that it's one of the best products in this price comparison industry in Europe. Okay. In order to find the next two new thing, we must of course make many bets.
We're still very selective and disciplined when it comes to investing in startups. We never compromise on the fact that we invest in companies with outstanding entrepreneurs, and also that we invest in companies where we can find clear synergies with Schibsted. We have so far avoided to taking too large risks when starting expanding abroad. We are a bit cautious, even if we, of course, when we see that we get traction, put a lot of money into it. This has so far at least proven to be successful. The annual internal rate of return the last 13 years has actually been around 30%. And that does not include the Blocket investment, mind you. This is in many ways thanks to home runs like Prisjakt or Lendo.
It's important to note that it's always thanks to the fact that the losses we've made, and we have of course we have made some losses, this is venture business, are quite limited on the downside. As Ole Jacob pointed out before, it's all right to make losses of NOK million if you can make gains of NOK billions, and that's a little bit what we are trying to do. Cut our losses and let our profits grow. There are, as with the other business area, many different ways of growing. Monetization and product development goes of course for every of our company. Also we are continuing to invest in new ventures, and we will further on. I did not mention M&A.
That is perhaps not the most obvious thing for our business area, but I think later on, as some of our businesses become more mature, M&A may become a way of growing as well. Of course, geographical expansion, and I mentioned it with Lendo and Prisjakt. Of course, our ambition is to find new companies as well to expand abroad. To conclude, we have a proven ability to incubate future market leaders. We've done it several times already. We have a robust investment track record with a rate of return that is far above the industry average. We have some proven scalable platforms for international growth, and we would like to have even a few more. We have found a way of working where we can combine the entrepreneurial spirit with the strength of the Schibsted platform.
That's is something that many other media groups are trying to do, but it's actually quite difficult to manage to do it, and we have succeeded. I think that our best showcase right now is probably our financial services business. Daniel Ouchterlony, who is leading this business, will now make a deep dive into this. Please, Dan, take it away. Thank you.
Hi. Is the mic working? Yeah. Pleasure to be here. It's been 15 years with Schibsted. I'm really excited to be presenting today. I'm excited because I'm gonna talk about something I think is really interesting, which is what Schibsted has done in fintech for the last decade. We invested in Lendo about 10 years ago. Today, Lendo and 8 other assets has made up a new business unit. We already have some good numbers in the unit, over NOK 1 billion in revenue. I'm gonna change the slide. Good margins, some really interesting established number one positions, and also some interesting growth options. This is gonna be an exciting ride. I'm also proud of our partners. We have over 100 partners, banks, insurance companies. We love them. I think they love us back.
At least they pay us. We have users, I mean, and they love us, because they get true value from using our products. With this in mind, I'm gonna go through some of the highlights of financial services. First of all, we're taking advantage of the massive change happening in financial services overall. I mean, you know this. You're in the middle of it. It's not perhaps as massive as media, but it's getting there. All of that change is giving opportunities to focus players like ourselves. We like that. Second, we think Lendo is in and of itself a highlight, and I'm gonna talk about Lendo in detail in a minute. Third, Lendo is not everything. There's other stuff in there which we think is perhaps just as exciting but sort of on an earlier stage of development.
We'll get into a couple of case examples. Last but not least, the Schibsted platform again gives us reach, scale, and access to some great people that we can leverage just right out the door. Getting into the meat of the matter, Lendo, I'm gonna start by showing you actually a movie. It's a TV commercial from the Swedish market. We put some English voiceover on it, on the, on the video, so you can sort of understand it. And it really tries to get you in the shoes of the consumer using Lendo. Please play the video.
Just as you compare the price of flights, hotels, and electronics, Lendo makes it as easy to compare loan offers from up to 30 different banks, and it's free. Lendo, Sweden's biggest comparison site for private and business loans.
Right. Comparing loans is not that new, is it? We think we do it in a new way, and that's the interesting part. We take something that's supposed to be easy, comparing products, you know, the rational consumer, you read about it in your textbooks, but it's hard. In financial services, it's hard. And we do it in a beautiful, delightful product that the users can really have an advantage versus quite complex marketplace. The banks like us too because they get eager customers from the platform. They lower their onboarding costs, and they only pay us once they get customers. The way we do it underneath the hood is to use quite a few different sources of data, integrating all of that into one beautiful product. It's consumer data, tax data, credit report data, all the regulatory data you need, AML, KYC, CFT, all these words.
All of that data is accessible in real time. On our APIs for our banking partners to submit bids. They get the data, they look at the data, submit bids back to the platform, and the user gets the offers in real time in their inbox. It's a beautiful list view, and they can, in their due time, select whichever offer they think is the best. Usually, it's price, but not always actually. That user is then transported to our banking partners, and they get a pre-vetted customer. They know everything about that customer already. They trust us to do that part of the process, and they can just close the deal and get the new customer. We get the revenue once the deal is closed, about 5% of the loan value. Is this working for consumers?
We're tracking that quite often and quite in detail because it's our promise to power people. The Schibsted promise. There's some data I can share with you. We're giving users on average 6 offers. On average, the spread between the best and the worst offer is 10 percentage points interest rate. Since you all know your math, you know that's quite a big difference between the best and the worst offer. If you're a random consumer on the street walking into a bank asking for a loan, you could end up anywhere on that scale, basically. We're proud of that part, that we really deliver value to our users. Getting into a bit more detail on the next part, we do think this is probably the leading consumer lending broker in Europe.
Our arguments, we're number one in a couple of really interesting markets, Sweden and Norway. We're number two in Finland. Actually yesterday, we opened up Poland. We opened up Denmark and Austria earlier this year. We're starting to expand. The business model is a digital native, so it's scalable. We're starting to see that it's building network effects. That's something quite interesting because it gives us that economic moat that's important when competitors will start to come to the market. If we dig in a little bit to the underlying business of loans, these are some facts of our home markets. I'm gonna summarize. The Swedish market has grown quite steadily. It's the largest market, both for us and for loans.
Sweden has been under regulation from the Swedish FSA for a number of years and under formal license since 2015. I think this is a good thing because this eliminates bad actors and cleans up the marketplace. You can see Norway, explosive growth. Some of you Norwegians know that. The market has grown radically. This growth has actually moved Norway, in our view, into a more normal situation compared to the rest of Scandinavia and Europe, because Norway used to be a credit card market, and now it's a more balanced market between cards and loans. Of course, this growth has attracted a lot of attention from competitors. Not all of them are as serious as one would like, and also the regulator.
Now growth is definitely slowing down as the regulator is moving in and trying to put some restrictions on that. Overall, we're definitely confident on the growth long term of Norway. We see some early signs of that we have some really interesting measures being taken by the FSA and by the players in the market themselves. Last but not least, Finland, interesting market, more erratic growth, which we are being part of. We're building Lendo in Finland, and we're quite confident long term that Finland will follow, develop, and mature. On our positions in the market, we're number one in Sweden by a wide margin. Just to note, there's no official statistics on loan brokerage market shares. There's no report you can buy. This is our internal analysis.
We're confident that in Sweden, we're the number 1, we're pretty sure that we're number 1 by a wide margin. We think we're growing the margin to number 2. Norway, we're also number 1. In the current flat market, we're pretty sure that we're maintaining our market share, and we're building the fort to keep growing when the market gets back to growth. That's the situation there. We see some early signs of consolidation. The Norwegian market has been perhaps too bullish in terms of new actors coming in. I just wanna say from the user perspective, there's still quite a bit of credit card debt that needs or should at least be refinanced to loans.
Comparing loans once every year or every second year is still a very smart thing to do if you're a consumer, even though the overall loan market is not growing. Finland, we're number two. We're confident that we're growing faster than number one, and we're investing. We know that Lendo is a bit of a J-curve business model. I was talking about network effects earlier, we believe it's worth to invest to win. A bit more on detail on the J-curve of Lendo or the network effects. It's all about spinning this flywheel of reinforcing positive network effects. As users come to the platform, banks come to the platform to get users. That's pretty natural. The second step is that as more banks come to the platform, the users can expect to get better offers on average.
They're more likely to get approved. They're more likely to get a good interest rate with good terms for that loan, and in the end, they're more likely to get the full amount they would like to get for the loan. That in turn improves the satisfaction of the user, which of course spreads the positive word that brings more users to the platform. We see our job as to spin this flywheel of network effects and growth, and as you know, we do it with marketing. We do more marketing in different segments. We do it by onboarding more partners to get that competition going on the platform. We do it by developing the product, reducing friction for our users and for our partners so that the marketplace liquidity increases, and then back to more marketing. That's how we grow and build the moat versus competition.
A further note on the partners of Lendo, we're proud of that. This is the panels of Sweden and Norway, these are small, large, aggressive, not so aggressive banks, but they all are part of the Lendo community. We have a quite intimate relationship with them because we're integrated into their processes. When we started, we used to receive offers by fax. 2009, remember? Now, it's real-time APIs data, the whole works. Important note, we don't want to be dependent on one single partner because that would reduce competition on the platform. As you saw on the previous slide, reduce the likelihood of getting one good offer to the consumer in the end. We try to keep the number one partner quite low.
That competition is good for us, it's good for the consumer, we also believe it's actually good for the banks because they will use Lendo to benchmark their own offers and improve their processes. Just a quick note on the financials. It's been a good development, good growth, good margins. You can see the margins are going a little bit down last year. That's because we're investing in internationalization. Most of the profits are actually converted to cash. There's just a little bit of Capex man-hours to develop the platform and a little bit of receivables that grow as the overall volume grow. That's a pretty good number in terms of converting to cash. With all this in mind, what would we do? Well, of course, with Schibsted, there is some Viking blood in there, some history.
We're gonna go and try to make this international. Norway was the first thing we did for Lendo. 2012, it took two years until break even. The second year of operation, we turned over NOK 50 million. This is roughly what we're planning to do in the next set of countries. Our plan is to do break even within three to four years, and we're looking at Denmark, Austria, and Poland. This is one place where I'm really, really happy to be part of Schibsted. I mean, we have people that have done this before. Not in terms of Lendo, but in terms of going abroad, entering new markets, what you look for when looking for a market, how does it actually work? I mean, Rolv Erik, you used to be my boss back in the day.
I can call you know, "How does it work in country X?" We're actually now partnering up with willhaben in Austria. I think that's gonna be a good partnership. Looking forward to build on that. We're gonna follow these companies, look at the KPIs. We're not gonna go with a 18-month plan and follow that one slavishly. We're gonna go where we find traction. What we said is that for this year, we're investing NOK 70 million-NOK 100 million the rollout for these three countries. That's the ambition level and what we're trying to achieve. We're also looking at new countries, of course, larger countries outside Europe, et cetera. This is the plan we're executing on at the moment. so far, I think we learned a lot.
Most importantly, we're looking for markets where this massive change that you know is happening in financial services, where that is seen and where we can touch and feel that change and see that banks and consumers are ready to get onto a real-time platform for loans. Denmark, we're not the first, but the local competition is something we think we can handle. In Austria and Poland, we believe we are pioneering this kind of loan marketplace. Taking a step back, zooming out, financial services, it's a little bit more than Lendo. I'll try to give you a bit of flavor before we close up. When we entered financial services, we came in as a media company 10 years ago. We pioneered that aggregation comparison layer on top of the established providers. That was our first step in.
We're doing that and developing that, and that's our perhaps most interesting asset in the short to medium term. We're moving into the layer below, which is the actual provider layer. This is where we're investing new ventures that actually provide the products themselves. It's a slightly different approach, but it's still within the frame of financial services. I just wanna give a special mention to Bynk here. It's a new bank, much like Atom or Starling. It's founded by the same team that founded Lendo. It was founded in 2016. Excellent growth. They passed SEK 1 billion in loans to consumers. We just closed a big round with them. It's a super interesting venture. Another case example I wanna bring up is Hypoteket. It means mortgage in Sweden, in Swedish, basically.
It's a model where we can deliver digital mortgages to consumers without being a bank ourselves. It's a super innovative model where we can use new regulation and new technology to basically shortcut the mortgage value chain and connect asset managers, pension funds, and consumers directly. Early venture launched in March last year. We just passed two and a half billion lent to consumers. This is the overall financial development over the last 10 years for these assets. As you can see, it's been consistent profitable growth, margins have developed nicely as well. This is quite inspiring and also a bit scary because now we have to work super hard to keep that growth going. We're not out of options for growth. I think there's more options than there's people and energy at the moment, that's a good thing.
What we're trying to do is trying to focus. Right now we're focusing on these four areas. First, just winning Scandinavia with Lendo and the other concepts that I mentioned. That is perhaps, in the short term, the most important growth driver. Second, we're doing a lot of product development. I mentioned a couple of new ventures, but also things like Lendo for small businesses. It's Lendo, but for small business loans. You know, why shouldn't it work? We see that explosion of startups in that space, and we're giving them a place to find their customers on the Lendo platform. Third, new investments and M&A. We're gonna selectively look at M&A to accelerate growth. It's not gonna be a core focus, but we're gonna keep eyes open. New ventures, we're definitely investing in new startups, new interesting products that we could bring into the Schibsted platform.
Last but not least, I mentioned geographic expansion for Lendo. Super important. 3 countries for this year, and who knows what's for next year. I'm gonna sum up and say a couple of things, the highlights again. First, financial services is a really, really exciting place to be for Schibsted. 2, the portfolio is really well positioned, both for the short term with Lendo, medium term, also for the long term with our growth cases that I gave a few examples on. We believe Schibsted is a great owner and driver of these assets based on the synergies that we walk through, but also with the mindset of going abroad and finding new growth. With that said, I'm gonna close off. I think we have time for a few questions. Raoul? Actually, do we have time?
Yes, we have, 4, 5 minutes.
Four, five minutes. We are a little bit over, I think.
Just about a minute or two.
Okay, great. Yes?
You showed us this great growth with capital invested and the IRR for our full portfolio . Would you be able to give us some data on the, let's say, success rate or failure rate? How many assets have you closed down, let's say, over the past five years?
I don't have the figures of how many we have closed down. As I said, we have quite decent figures regarding our annual return. I would say that, of course, we have closed down things and, but I don't really have the figures. I think that as we are not entering companies at the very, very early stage, I think that perhaps the rate of failures is perhaps a little bit lower than you could expect, perhaps. I think that annual return has been good, and I'd also think that the number of failures have been perhaps limited, I would say.
Okay, thank you. Maybe a question for you, Dan. now with the international expansion of Lendo, what is the most critical factors to succeed with? What are the greatest risks you see?
Success factors, I mean, that's the key KPI we're looking for in the early stages is the number of people actually finding the platform and submitting an application to get a good comparison going. That's the number one factor. I guess underlying that factor is the number of banks we're able to sign up and the quality of those banks. I mean, we're nothing without our partners. We're a platform in the end. Those are probably two first. We're looking for countries where we see users that are ready to start to handle their loans in this kind of more digital and perhaps more active way. Do we see banks that are ready to integrate to real-time platform? I mean, not all banks, unfortunately are ready to do that or perhaps willing.
We're looking to banks that, you know, perhaps we have a relationship already through Scandinavia. You mentioned Kristin, you know, they look to us and say, you know, "Tell us what's happening in Scandinavia." We get meetings with banks when we go out to say, you know, just tell us what's happening. It's an interesting market. What can we learn? Our answer is get on the Lendo platform. You know, that will automatically improve your processes.
Excellent. Thank you.
The 5% take rate for Lendo, how's that calculated? Like who takes the hit there? Is that coming out of the bank's pocket or from the consumer? If it is the latter, then how do you actually cement your sort of position within the process? What's to stop consumers finding the cheapest option, going straight to the banks, and sort of stopping your position to monetize the product?
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I mean, just first, the commission comes from the bank, period. There's no user payment upfront on the platform, zero. You could say, well, isn't the bank raising prices to sort of capture the commission of the Lendo platform? And yes, perhaps there's some element of that happening. On the other hand, we believe that if you're a bank paying around... I mean, it's, first of all, it's varying across markets, and it's varying across time, roughly 5%. But if you're a bank, 5% is a pretty good price for a signed, pre-vetted customer with almost no Opex for the bank. That's sort of how we argue versus the bank to actually pay that kind of commission.
If they would go and get customers in other channels, they would pay the TV and the SEM and whatever to get that bank. Perhaps they're doing, print ads. We think Lendo is a more efficient way.
Yeah. Thank you.
Do we have time for one more?
One last.
Maybe one.
Maybe one. A short one.
Is there one short?
We learned so far that in Scandinavia, new launches really benefit from the business that you have there, the publishing business or the established digital side. You don't necessarily have this in the new markets that you launch. Why are you so optimistic? Is it really the much better algorithm, a better product, or is it really that simply there's no meaningful player yet in those market?
Well, I would say that, perhaps you would answer to that because where we are really optimistic is about financial services, for a bunch of reasons, I would say. I think many of these financial services, this wave of products coming out is perhaps at the same level as classifieds 10 years ago, just sort of on a high level. There's an element of us being early and being good at what we do just because we've done it a little bit ahead of the other guys. I mean, we see markets in Europe starting to develop local champions, that's definitely one element. We're just early and we think we have a good product.
The second element is, I guess, the DNA and the skills that we built in Schibsted, and that we have that experience of rolling out products to new markets. I mean, Blocket was a great concept in Sweden. We took it out into Europe without support of huge media companies. I think that's some of what we're trying to do again, with, of course, some learnings from that journey. I guess the last point is when you look to these markets, we're not saying we're never gonna partner up. Perhaps you will see a partnership in the local market going forward. Perhaps it's a partnership in a big market where we wanna sort of balance the risk. That's definitely on the table.
Right now we're just trying to work really hard to prove that we can roll out Lendo standalone.
Okay. Thank you. Over to you, Kristin.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Then we have last, but absolutely not least, we have Torun. He'll go through the financials. There'll be another Q&A after that before we wrap it up. Please, Torun.
Thank you, Kristin. Schibsted has proven a superior return to shareholders if you look at the last 10 years. We have gone from around NOK 50 up to about NOK 300 in share price. There have been some key events in this period. First of all, Schibsted has been a growth company, investing organically and M&As. We did that, of course, up to then 2011, 2012, 2013. We realized that we ending up in a spending war with large competitors. We understood that in order to be able to have strength in this situation, you need a strong balance sheet. What we did was actually that we teamed up with Telenor, created a JV. That actually gave us confidence in the negotiations that we later ended up with Naspers.
Then we could actually do, so to say, in-market consolidation, without having access to capital, because then we didn't have the B capital. This just demonstrate the importance of being in a position to further, do consolidation and growth. That was actually very quite value, accretive. Then, of course, we have continued to invest, and now we have decided to split the company and spin off, Adevinta and create two strong growth companies. That's the journey that has proven to be successful. Looking at just the split of, the, P&L and revenue, I think that for these are figures just for Schibsted, excluding Adevinta. We have been able to, manage the downturn, especially in the print, increasing the same time digital revenues.
We have invested in new growth that, in the financial services as an example. At the same time, we have also been able to develop the marketplace business in the Nordics. It has been a growth in EBITDA and at the same time managing this digital transformation. We are quite happy about that. If you had asked us 3 or 4 years ago, we foresaw a more bleak outlook, especially in the news part. That has not been the case. I think we're happy with what we have achieved. If we now look into the figures again, I think that we will continue to do some investments. It will be disciplined investments. It will, first of all, be within financial services.
It will be adjacent businesses, we will do some M&As, first of all, bolt-ons that we see in these different markets. If we look at then the different reporting structure, this is a little bit technical for, first of all, analysts, but we will of course split the marketplace in the different markets like Norway, Sweden, and others. Then in the news, it is important to split out VG and Aftenposten. Those are the two dominant, I would say, digital media companies in Norway and Sweden. Then we have subscription newspapers growth that includes, of course, Prisjakt, but also distribution. Distribution is something that we would like to utilize the strength, first of all, in the last mile type of distribution, and that's why we have taken that a part of the growth.
That includes also the newspaper distribution part, just to be aware of that. Then, of course, we have the financial services with Lendo, et cetera. When it comes to the headquarter and product and tech, we have said that it is likely to be slightly lower headquarter costs in the new Schibsted. Then, of course, it will be some increase in Adevinta, and we have given an estimate of NOK 50 million-NOK 100 million in the setup of this Barcelona headquarter, but with a slim head office as such in that context. If we go to the financial targets for Schibsted, we have looked into the outlook for the marketplace business.
We have seen over the last years good growth, like in Finn with coming also from a stronger position over many years. We have Blocket that we now expect to come into growth models. We also see opportunities in this adjacent business around this position and then Tori. That has led us to come up with a target of 8%-12% for the marketplace business. The news media, again, we have the same target as we have had before. It is to manage the digital transformation, meaning that continuous decline in print. At the same time, quite promising growth in digital, and that leads to a flattish EBITDA going forward as a guidance. When it comes then to the capital allocation, we will continue to pursue M&A opportunities.
It will be, first of all, adjacent businesses around these three areas. First of all, in Nordic marketplaces, and of course, within financial services, it could also be some other interesting opportunities. It will be disciplined, bolt-on type of acquisitions. We also see that there could be some further consolidation opportunities in parts of the marketplace, positions that we see both in Sweden and in Norway, first of all, in Finland. The dividend policy, we will continue with the policy that we have had in Schibsted. That means, stable to increasing dividend over time. When it comes to the capital structure, we will also have a leverage policy which is a net interest bearing debt to EBITDA between 1 to 3.
We have, of course, a strong cash generation, and we will do different measures in order to have an optimal capital structure over time. That also may imply that we, of course, will over time could increase dividend or do buybacks in order to adjust, so to say, the right capital structure. Schibsted has a history of being, in a way, prudent in the way that we also manage our business. If we look at another element that we're being asked about, that goes both for Adevinta, that I'm sure that Rolv Erik and his team will elaborate on the LTI system there. We in Schibsted going forward will continue with the LTI system, which is the same as we have had in Schibsted, including Adevinta.
It means then that we will have a total share of return target in the LTI program, and it will be linked then to the level of salary and it also then depending on the performance compared with peers in this sector. There are a scale of payout depending on that. There are also holding requirements. If you're in the top management, it is between 2 to 4 times salary. There are some restrictions on the shares being granted over time in this program. It's aligned with you as shareholders on a total shareholder return. That's important to notice. If we then go to the merger, we have already said that Schibsted will distribute 35% to our shareholders.
We in Adevinta, we will sell down 5%, and this divestment will of course be also something that the foundation have said that they will also consider to do a limited placing of their holdings in Adevinta. Because they have said that there are financials long-term owners of Adevinta. This will be of course subject to customary lockup, the way we will do this transaction. It will be something that is planned, of course, as we have said, to take place now in April with a planned date of 10th of April. If we then go to how we will manage our long-term ownership in Adevinta, that is important.
We will then remain with 60% ownership in Adevinta, and we will still have a cooperation quite closely with the Adevinta marketplace activity. That goes also for Schibsted's marketplace activity. We will have agreements on other also services in this transition period in order to make this to be successful for also for Adevinta. It will be then a process that a board has already been set up, an interim board. Of course it has been approved by the EGM recently. It's an independent board. It's Orla that was presented here that she will chair that board, as we said before. Kristin, of course, will be on the board. We have other key members and it's an independent company.
We as Schibsted will support the best value creation for our ownership in Adevinta going forward for all shareholders, of course. We've also been asked, "Why don't you spin off everything?" I mean, we do believe that there are further value to be created to have a controlling stake in this Adevinta going forward, and also being able then to participate in further consolidation of further structural solutions that could be to the benefit for all shareholders. That's the reason for the structure and the setup of this Adevinta. It will create 2 growth companies, Adevinta, Schibsted, and we believe that is a good foundation for speed and focus and value creation in both these 2 companies going forward.
With that, I just leave the word over to Q&A and some concluding remarks, Kristin.
We'll do the Q&A first, I'll round it off. Here we have questions. Good. I'll take you in the back there first.
Anders Lambert from Catella. I just wondered, can you confirm a little bit on the headquarter cost? Did you say that they would go up by EUR 150 million because of the Barcelona headquarter? Or are you lowering it in the Schibsted side? What's the net change in the headquarter costs?
What I said is that, Adevinta will establish their own headquarter out of Barcelona, estimate of NOK 50 million-NOK 100 million extra, in if you're looking at the old Schibsted. That of course will come in addition. At the same time, of course, the new Schibsted, will have some ambition to, over time, take down some costs in the headquarter. That we have to come back to. That's, that's what we can say about that for time being.
Short term, it will go up NOK 50 million-NOK 100 million.
In short term, in 2019, You shouldn't expect any significant changes in headquarter costs.
Okay. We'll do Henriette next then.
Hi. Henriette Trondsen, Arctic. In your press release, you stated for Adevinta 40% margins, about 40% margins longer term. What can we expect here for Nordic Classifieds? Are there any structural differences except the somewhat higher cost level, maybe in the Nordic, that they cannot reach the margins up to your peer groups, such as for Trade Me, AutoTrader, and so on that has 60, 50%-60% to 60%-70% margins?
Well, I mean, on the margin, we frequent to get that. We are not giving guard margin guidance. I think that we are happy with the margins around 45% that we saw in the presentation here from Anders. I think that we have to be prepared to continue to develop Finland. If you look at then both Blocket and finn.no, I think that we have the history of investing also in some attractive adjacent businesses. If you look at the margin of the real estate or the car vertical.
those are much higher than the combined finn.no as an example. I don't think it's a fair comparison either. Going forward, I think that we're happy with the levels that we are seeing today. Of course we could have driven these margins much higher if we think that was the right thing to do, but we don't think that is what we should do. We should continue to broaden our business and scope and have the growth that way.
Thanks. My follow-up question.
Sorry, I think we need to move on.
Okay.
Carnegie, please.
Preben Rasch-Olsen, Carnegie. Quick question on the capitalization. Given your 5% sales in Adevinta, you should be at least cash neutral, maybe even cash positive. At the same time, you're saying you target net interest bearing debt to EBITDA in the range of 1-3. My question is should we expect a high extraordinary dividend this year, or do you have a huge acquisition in sight already?
First of all, we know when it comes to acquisitions, there is no immediate in the pipeline that we said we use the money for that, I can assure you. I think that we will have a capital discipline. We will look for interesting bolt-on acquisitions. Of course, we will be well capitalized. And it also may be that we, as we have always been slightly overcapitalized in certain periods, I think that we have to go back to the market in order to help adjust the capital structure. As I said, we have a target range, 1 to 3. And then there are different means or measures in order to adjust that over time. Too early to be precise on that.
Anyone else? I'll take you in the back. I won't call you the one with the beard anymore.
Thanks. I've just got two left. First one's on cash conversion, which has been a little bit impacted in the last couple of years by higher Capex and restructuring charges. Can you give us a sense as to what you expect for that going forwards in Schibsted? Second one's just to come back on an earlier question on the 8% to 12% growth in auto marketplaces. Is that on an organic number or not?
Yeah. Hopefully that's that. Yeah.
Also
Yeah. When it comes to the growth of 8-12, that is clearly organic growth. Yes.
What was your first question again? I heard it, but I forgot.
Wait. Speak of the second question, please.
Yeah.
First question was cash conversion. What do you expect for Capex restructuring, anything else going through?
Go ahead.
Yeah.
I think that when it comes to the Capex, I think that, we will have a fairly low maintenance Capex, first of all in Schibsted and in Adevinta as well. Then, we will have Capex when it comes to the, I mean, product and tech. That also over time is likely to go some down, I would say.
Okay. In the front.
Thank you. I just wanted to follow up on the increase in headquarter cost for Adevinta, EUR 50 million-EUR 100 million, which is significant, I think. Could you please go in a bit more detail what this EUR 50 million-EUR 100 million?
I can't believe that Rolv Erik being responsible for that, I mean, this. He will come back to the firm, sure. I... The way we see it, to answer it a little bit differently is that if you benchmark the headquarter of a new setup, a new structure, Adevinta, it will be a slim head office. It will be, I would say, quite low headquarter compared with what you see in these kind of setup structure. That we can say. Rolv Erik, any comments?
I'm not gonna get back to that, I support the general take from there. I think we're going to have a lean and slim set up. As long as you guys can support the Norwegian Airlines, we get the lower tickets. Thank you for using, but otherwise I'll be based in Barcelona most of the time, but we will still have a small background.
Adriaan, please.
Adriaan from Intrinsic Value. I just have two questions. One again on the headquarter cost, but then maybe to help you out as well. I thought of that NOK 800 million which you used to report, about NOK 300 million was technology development with offices in London, for example, and I think you're closing those down. Can you give us the true headquarter cost excluding those technology development which are, which probably are going to be abandoned? Secondly, I see Spok now in Schibsted, and I thought it was going to move to Adevinta. In your slide you say that Spok is part of your assets. That's on page 101. You say Spok is part of Schibsted. Just want to make sure where Spok now sits. Sits it with you or with Adevinta?
Yeah.
With Adevinta.
Yeah.
evinta, Spok. Of course, in the new Schibsted, we have the license for Spok in Sweden as an example. When it comes to the headquarter, I mean, we have in 2018 headquarter cost in Schibsted around 300.
We have product and techs, central product tech, both for Adevinta and for Schibsted, around NOK 500 million. We have said that the product tech, we can split that roughly a 50/50. What we are saying going forward for Schibsted is that if the headquarter cost of around NOK 300 million is likely to go slightly down going forward, we have to go back to that in order to have an optimal setup in the new Schibsted.
Any other questions before we wrap it up? No. Okay, thank you, Trond. I'll just very briefly try to wrap it all up. I hope we have been able to convey to you that we have this fantastic history, 180 years, of continuously challenging and disrupting ourselves to ensure new growth and to meet our customers' new and changing needs. We will try to take good care of that inheritance and keep doing the same thing going forward. This history has led us to the 3 strong market areas that we now have. We will, as you have, you know, we have also been through those in depth. From here going onwards, we have then several growth avenues. We believe that this portfolio is strong in itself, and our ability to monetize it will keep growing.
We also hope to be able to expand the portfolio that we can continuously solve more customer problems and thus also create more value. We will selectively invest with partners. We will invest in entrepreneurs and build growth and value that way. We will do some select M&A, and we do have the opportunity to grow internationally the concepts that we managed to grow in the Nordic space. We have a few concrete examples at our hand as we speak, and we hope there will be more going forward. The final slide I wanna leave you with is this one. This is what Schibsted going forward is all about. Schibsted as a group is a platform, a unifying platform and foundation that enables all our different businesses to grow in the best possible way.
Those businesses are different, but they do share a common purpose and a common aspiration of being close to the customer, solving more and more of their problems, helping them make informed decisions, and thus empower them in their daily lives. This is a very. It's an important purpose and aspiration. It's very motivational for us, and I hope that it will prove itself to also be very prosperous going forward. With that, thank you for listening so far. It's lunchtime. Please be back at 12:45, and then we will go into the Adevinta story. Thank you.
Warm welcome to this session after lunch. My name is Rolv Erik. I'm very happy to see you all here. This is, I hope that you've had a good day so far. Now, I look forward to telling you about Adevinta story together with my colleagues. This is, of course, the story of a pure play international marketplace company. Now, this is an important day for me. I've been working at Schibsted for more than 25 years. I've been the CEO for almost 10 years. I think in my period, this is the biggest milestone for the group. A milestone is one thing, but even more important, this is the exciting start of a new journey, I think for all of us and also all of you here, for all stakeholders, actually, in Adevinta.
We've taken away Adevinta, which of course signifies that we're advancing, it signifies the used idea, a new beginning. You can see here also on our logo, the delta there, we're going to change the classifieds world. Right. Together with me, we'll have a host of presenters, a list of presenters here. You get to know those very soon. First, I'd like to introduce those who are not, those important persons who are on the management team that are not presenting today. First, I'd like to just present our chairman, chairwoman, Orla Noonan.
Hello, everybody.
Sitting next to her is Laila Dahlen, who's the head of product, CPO.
Hi, everyone.
There we have Nikki. Please stand up. Nikki is the head of HR and communications. Then we have. Where is Renaud?
Here, sorry.
All right. Renaud is standing there. As our CTO. Right. This is the program we have for you. I'll start out with the beginning part. Let me tell you about Adevinta. What we like to say internally is that at Adevinta, we're matchmakers. Our mission is to ensure perfect matches between people looking for goods or services and people who are providing those goods or services, and to do so in a trusted environment. We believe that every House could be a home. Every person has a role to play, and every object can live a second or a third life. They only have to find their matching need. If we're successful in doing that, we will make the everyday life of our users easier, we'll contribute to more sustainable society, and we will create value for our shareholders.
What does our company look like? We are a leading player in the global marketplace context. You can see here we are truly global. We're present in 16 markets, covering a population of 800 million. We have a lot of monthly visits, 1.5 billion. I'd like to point out also the diversified nature of the company because we have a diversification when it comes to geography, but we also have a diversification when it comes to income sources. You can see that verticals contributes a bit more than 2/3 of our total revenues. Our biggest one, of course, real estate, followed by cars, and then jobs. We have financial scale. We have revenues of approximately NOK 600 million. We have an EBITDA margin of 25%, which has been going up. Get back to that later.
We're upholding our mid- to long-term revenue growth targets of 15%-20%. I'd say in summary, our operations are large, diversified, and globally significant in scope. Here you'll see the reporting segments going forward and also what we'll be going through here today. Antoine is here to tell you about leboncoin . Which is our largest business segment, of course. Spain is our second biggest segment, and Gianpa is here to tell you more about that. In joint venture, our main presence in Brazil is through the joint venture with Naspers, OLX. I'm very happy that Andres has flown in from his vacation to present that.
We have also a diversified global portfolio, and the video will get more into to that. This is what does our operation look like from a geographic point of view. As you can see from this slide, this is how it looks like with the operations, primarily leadership positions in key markets in Europe and in Latin America. I'd like to point out that we have been present in these markets for quite some time, therefore built up experience as we have built up our leadership positions. Important thing for me is that kind of the international nature of our portfolio helps us to learn from one market to the other. If you have a test case or we have a case study in one market, we can apply the learnings from from that market into other parts.
I think that's an important advantage that we have in Adevinta. If you look at our summary of where we are and the key investment highlights, I would say that, you know, we've spent 20 years now of hard work in the online classifieds field, and this has led us to where we are today. We operate within attractive geographies where there's more growth opportunities, and we have a highly attractive business model with networking effects and scale, and that winner-takes-most characteristics. What differentiates us from many others is that we have leading brands in local markets that are backed by our global scale in product and technology.
Therefore, this has translated into our into our rather long-standing track record of good revenue growth and also increasing EBITDA margins. Even more importantly, I believe that with the positions we have, with the assets we have, with the people we're having, then we are very well positioned to continue on that exciting journey in the years to come. Let me talk you through some of these different themes. Let me start by the market characteristics. As we all know, the market is very the classifieds market is very attractive place to be. You can see here that we have online classified market is predicted to grow at close to 10% annually for a number of years.
I think importantly here is that all the main segments, so real estate, cars, and jobs, the prediction is that they will continue to grow either at high single digit or at low single digit numbers. It's important for us to continue to develop the product. Of course, the user expectations are going up. So we are working hard to develop our product and create safe and trusted marketplaces for our users. If you look at the further growth potential, I think that I can point out here is that whereas this is predicted to be the overall market growth, we in Adevinta, we believe we can grow stronger, quicker than that.
The reason for that is that we are positioned in markets where there is a significant growth potential and also that we're continuously rolling out new products. Looking at the potential for future growth, here you can see statistics which shows you the internet ad spend per capita. Of course, you see, I would say, very developed market in the digital sense, US and United Kingdom, but also the Nordics. You can see that the internet spend per capita is very high. Whereas many of the markets that we're present in is still at a much lower level. This is a signal to me that we have good growth potential.
You can also see it here that when it comes to the internet penetration, some of these countries are still lagging quite a bit behind what we're seeing here in Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom. What's the attractiveness of the business model we have in online classifieds? Well, it's a very resilient model and favoring the market leader, actually. Some of the features are it's a clear value proposition. It's a win-built value proposition in a well-working marketplace. It's a good place to meet for buyers and sellers to get the job done. Then, of course, you have the network effects, meaning that if you attract more sellers, you attract more buyers, et cetera, et cetera, and then you are on the leading.
You have a great development if you're able to take that number one spot, because that will then drive the further eco-economics. That's why we say winner takes most, which is a defensible position which is harder to attract from the competitors. What you continue to do is continue to develop the product and tech part of it, and then you can improve monetization and the user experience even more. I would also like to point out that this model is relatively asset light. As opposed to an e-commerce company which builds up large inventory, holds that, we're not doing that. We're the marketplace. We're matching the buyer and the seller. Let us have a look at some of the leadership positions that we have built up through the years.
These are our biggest markets, and you can see that we have built up a strong position. Starting with France. We were probably the number one in generalists. Started there, then went into the cars, where we also are the leader in this metrics, then into real estate, which is today our biggest business. You can see on all these measures, which are traffic, and ads, and customers, that we are the leader in that field. More recently, we have started in jobs. I think that with the development that we've seen so far and with the huge power that is in the leboncoin brand and traffic machine, I think we're well positioned to develop also that position furthermore. In Spain, we're number two in generalists.
Then in real estate, in some metrics we're number one, such as the total ad listings and total number of customers. In some metrics, we're number two, so in traffic and I believe also re-revenue. We're, you know, developing well there, and I think that what we've seen in the last couple of years is that we have been able to speed up our product development much more in Spain, which makes me confident for the future position of the real estate vertical in Spain. Looking at cars, We are the leader. I would still say it's a, it's a market that can be developed further. It's still at a relatively immature stage compared to what we've done in other markets. Then in jobs, we are the strong leader in jobs.
We've been that, and we continue to see a positive development for that site. Brazil, that you'll hear more about, is a much newer story, but it was really kind of the same playback to large degree as in France. It started by taking the generalist sites and building that up to a leadership position, then going into the car segment. Now we're in the real estate. We're, we're not the number one, of course, in revenues, but we have taken the leadership position in traffic, and we'll increase that. Then, the jobs have also developed positively. Relatively recent start. Here you can see the total growth profile. You can see that during those last few years, we have grown among the top players in our industry.
I think that is kind of testament to the diversified portfolio we have, where some are positioned in more established markets, still growing a lot, whereas we also have positions in higher growth emerging markets. Now, I believe that this to continue that growth, we really need to continue to innovate. That's the key to develop the products. You see that user demands are increasing. We have the scale to continue to develop. Innovation is key if we're going to continue that growth. How are we going to do that?
What we are doing is that, we are developing a lot of our products locally, and then we have also a central staff and central products and tech that rolls out a number of components. In total, we have close to 1,400 developers, in, working with product and tech, and they represent more than 40 different nationalities. Here are some of the products that we're have been developing and are developing. Global messaging is something that facilitates the interactions between buyer and seller. Meaning you can communicate across all platforms, real-time instance. Same thing with notifications. If you have the same search as you're looking for a flat in a certain part of London, then we will immediately notify you when that comes available or rather Paris, I would say.
Those metrics, those components also help develop traffic and engagement. We're seeing that. Trust and reputation, I mentioned we want to be a trusted, a trusted player. To develop good user profiles, we also allow ratings, is something we're working hard on, will be rolled out in leboncoin relatively soon. We have the performance dashboards. Those are for our professional customers. Helping car dealers, real estate brokers to optimize how they get response on their ads. Why isn't this ad working perfectly? Here are some suggestions we have for you to improve it.
The good thing is with the professional users is of course that this is where the big monetization is, and they are willing to pay for qualified leads. I think everyone will tell you that they're working on product development, innovation, and why are we doing it? Well, of course, we do it to have better user experiences, and we develop these tools to be able to have better monetization. Right. Here is what it's all about is of course, to capture data and use them in the best meaningful manner about our customers. This is, for instance, image recognition. The more data you have to train your algorithm on, the better you are at predicting what kind of ads you want to insert, as an example.
The data continues, and to show you then an example of that, this is something we aspire to do and we're working on as an example. Let's say this is a woman living in Marseille, and then she finds a job in Paris using leboncoin, of course. When we know that, we know that that person, that she will need a place to live, and we provide that, come up with some personalized examples for her. When that is settled, we know that she will probably need to furbish the house and do that. Then we're also going to come up with new offerings.
That degree of personalization and take away the friction in the use, usage journey is something that we're constantly working on. That's about data and products. How does that translate into top line and bottom line? Well, I think we are pretty happy with what we can show you there as well, because we are among the fastest grower, and you also see that in the revenue terms. This is for the 3-year period, where we have the 90% revenue development, and the EBITDA margin has also gone up. The reason the EBITDA margin goes up is as we continue to grow our big sites, but also more of our sites are going into profitability.
So the investment phase losses have gone down a lot. Then, as I said, it's a relatively capital light business we're running, so the Capex is at a relatively stable level. Now, let me give you, for those of you who know us for a while, you know this story, but this is an example from Brazil on how you build a classifieds business. What we do is we invest a lot in attracting listings and brands in the first place. If you get the brand, you get a top-of-mind situation, and then you attract listing, then attract buyers. The first thing is we do is to build the generalist brand because then you can attract also the professionals. The professionals will typically come to where the privates are.
You typically attract private cars first, then the car dealers, et cetera. Then you move on to different verticals. Brazil follows the same pattern, where you go into different verticals, so real estate and then jobs. If you're able then to provide the good experiences, then you can develop products for your professional customers that they're willing to pay for, and that will help them improve the offering and the total monetization. I think this next slide, I could ask you to spend some time reading through that. I won't do that because it's a lot of very text-heavy, but rather when you're back in your office, perhaps you would like to study it. Let me just try to sum it up a little bit.
What we'll do is that we'll continue to build on our core functionality, and that is matchmaking, matching the buyer and seller, whether it's a good or a service. Then simultaneously, we will put a lot of effort on growing in the verticals. Develop good tools for professional customers so that they get their leads, and then we can de-develop the monetization. We talked, Tom talked briefly about the M&A, and I'll get back to that as well. That has been part of our growth story. For sure that will make sense, then we'll continue to do that as well. Then I think from the, from the separation and Adevinta will benefit from improved flexibility and even more speed and focus to execute even faster than we've been able to do previously.
The point again about diversification. I think just to show you here that while all our markets are attractive, they are of course in diverse in terms of maturity and actually also our overall strategy. Online business, online marketplaces is a local business, then we benefit from global scale. That means that we adapt tailor strategy to every market. In France, we started from scratch 12 years ago, built that position further and started with a generalist, et cetera, you have the story. Developed that into what it is today with one strong brand covering the different verticals. Spain is a different story because here the market looks somewhat different and our journey there is a mix of organic growth and acquisitions.
What we do there is that we have strong vertical brands, we feed traffic into those verticals from the generalist web. Brazil, you hear more about more of the same stories in France, building from scratch, one focused brand going into different verticals. Early stage markets, still huge potential to transform offline to online. A local business, but we benefit from the global scale we're having. All right, I talked about the monetization, and I just wanted to show you this illustration here because we heard Anders today previously talk about how are they doing in terms of monetization. Well, I have to say, Anders, where are you? I admire you very much because I haven't seen any other players being close to that level of monetization.
So I think it's fantastic. I think Sweden is also at a high level. I don't think that our size needs to be at the Norwegian level in order to do well. I think, you know, if we're able to continue to develop our product, then I'm sure that, you know, there's good long-term potential for growing even more in the years to come. All right, I mentioned the portfolio and M&A. This is again a slide with lots of information. I want to take you through all of it. The important point with this is that we are active at portfolio management. We have been that historically, we continue to do so.
Historically, we have used M&A as a way to pursue growth, both in existing markets but also in new markets and adjacent markets. Recently, we've done bolt-on things in Spain and France, which fit very well into, with what we're doing. I'd like to point out we have also divested when we needed to do that. You know, gone out of Asia. We have, we closed down or we sold our operation in Belgium, didn't pick well enough as examples. Of course, we've also done bold moves like the joint venture with Naspers when that was a good thing to do. My signal here is that we will continue to monitor our portfolio and look at external opportunities. Right, I'm nearing the end, but I...
There's one thing, important thing I'd like to point out. In addition to having the right product and having the right portfolio, it's also very important for us to have the best people and to be able to attract talent. Adevinta is working hard to do that. I think we have an international scale that will allow us to do it. What I can see is that we are. Many of our sites are regularly awarded top three placement when it comes to great place to work. We offer interesting career opportunities for many people. We have now slimmed down our tech hubs. The central tech hubs will be in Paris and Barcelona, and I believe we're very attractive there.
I've actually spoken to some of the engineers, and to join us, some of them have come from big tech giants. What they said to me is that, you know, it's interesting company. It's not too big, which meaning that it's still entrepreneurial spirit, and they feel that they have the ability to have some impact. In addition to that, we're also trying to offer interesting career opportunities, rotation and development and placements internationally. That point is something that is very top of the agenda in our internal discussions. Right. I think I'm nearing the end of my presentation. Let me just remind you then because why I'm so excited about the future of Adevinta. We spent 20 years in Schibsted building up knowledge, building up positions in these markets.
We operate in very attractive geographies where we believe that there is continued high growth potential. We have a very attractive business model, where if we're successful, it's a winner-takes-most. It's relatively defensible. There are strong network effects. Our differentiates f-factor is that we have strong local positions, and those are backed by the central and global product and tech scale. That's why we've had a positive economic journey and a good development when it comes to revenue and profitability, and I'm confident that with the setup we have, we can continue that journey in the years to come. That was what I planned to say in my introduction. Now we get into the really interesting part because now we're going to have a closer look at our operations.
First one, I'm very happy to welcome on stage is, of course, the man that many of you asked to meet and ask questions to. Today you're meeting him, and you can ask questions later. Please welcome Antoine. Antoine has been with leboncoin for, in the senior management position, for 10 years. He's been the top boss for the last three years. Please.
Thank you very much, Rolv Erik, and thank you for the comparison with Norway. I will have the discussion with Anders later. I'm very happy today to present leboncoin. I'm very proud of what we have done the last years. Leboncoin is a fantastic success story during the last 13 years. It's a generalist marketplace. We are leader in the consumer goods, on the real estate market, on the car market. We are a challenger on the job market, I will explain how we'll be bigger later. Now, we have a very strong brand in France. Half of the French internet population is using leboncoin every month. It's something we are very proud of it.
Step by step, the last three years, we were verticalizing our experience in each market, and we will continue to do it, mainly on the professional part. We also, we build a very strong and profitable company in a very strong competition market. In each market, we have strong competitors, and we became, step by step, a very strong leader. What we will do for the future, we'll do a lot of things for our customers. On the professional part, we'll build a lot of data-driven product. I will come back to it for the future. If I come back to the history of leboncoin, is 13 years of a lot of launches of new product, new markets we have attacked. As you can see on this snake, there's a big change in 2009.
I arrived in 2009, and then we see the acceleration. We have started the monetization of leboncoin by the car market, as you remember, in 2010, and then the real estate market, and now the job market is improving a lot. We built, the last 13 years, a big leading marketplace leader. If I have to point out a few KPIs on leboncoin, we have a few. It's a lot of big figures, but I think I will take two. One is, of course, our audience. We have around 28 million unique visitors per month, around 10 million per day, and we are around this only GAFA company. The second is the impact of leboncoin on the French economy, and I think this is what leboncoin is bringing to the French economy.
We are making 110 million transaction per year. It means more or less 1.2 GDP impact. It's a huge impact of leboncoin on the French society. What we are proud of it is where we are working with half a million professional every day, recruiting on leboncoin, selling goods on leboncoin, buying on leboncoin. Professionals are using our platform to improve our business. I didn't build this company alone, of course. At the beginning, we were five, doing everything, but now we are 900 with strong brand. This company is a tech company. We have a lot of very good engineers, a lot of very good sales people working hard every day, tough, in a tough market to build the best product we can.
The best product we can is to be very good on the transaction path. To be free, of course, on the, for the private part, to be quick for selling your goods, to be safe for selling your goods. Our users, they are asking it, and we are building every day to develop this good product. Based on it, we built a very strong brand, and I think this is an amazing achievement what we have done, and we'll continue to reinforce it. Leboncoin in France is one of the well-received brand, the more useful brand. As you can see, we are compared to SNCF, La Poste that are very old brand, and we are a very young brand. We have only 14 years behind us. I hope step by step I will be on the podium.
During the last years, we have developed a very strong company, a steady growth on revenue, regular growth, but also profitable company. Leboncoin is a very profitable company, and we will continue to increase this revenue, and I will explain to it mainly on our strategy. The strategy we have today is we want to enable all exchanges in the daily life of our users. It means that we are providing perfect matches between sellers and buyers. Okay? We have a very ambitious goals. We want to touch all the French people in their daily life during one year. It's a big ambition. To do it, we have three pillars. You will see that a lot of pillars. I love this word. The first pillar is we'll continue to develop what we call our virtual circle, our liquidity.
What does it mean is the long tail, the number of product we have today that are using leboncoin to buy and sell, and we have to accelerate the transaction on this movement. To doing this, we launch some peer-to-peer payment system, some shipping system to improve this velocity on our selling. Secondly, when we are a good generalist as a marketplace, we'll continue to develop our verticalization. It means on real estate, our first market, I will come back to it, on the car market, on the job market, but also on the professional equipment market, which is quite interesting with our subsidiary in MB Diffusion. To reinforce our leadership, we will launch a lot of professional tools to help the professional to have better leads and more leads. What is next for leboncoin?
Step by step, we will continue to attack new markets. Now, we are very interesting in the holiday rental market. It's a tough market, but we are already quite, we have really good KPIs on this market, and we'll continue on the services. Next, we'll invest to conquer our new market, to test, to fail, and to win also. It's a very solid strategy. It's based on very good teams, on product, on data, on sales. We have very strong team behind this strategic plan. Our business model, as you understood, is based on four things. The four things, most important thing for our marketplace is the first thing. The free listing is a basic of our audience, the basic of our liquidity. We have to accelerate the number of transaction in the daily life of our users.
This is very important for us. For this, we are launching a lot of features, transaction, shipping, to be sure that we will be the best place to sell and to buy. On this, we can monetize on three different pillars. I love pillars. First, the premium model. The premium model is a way to monetize the free listing on the private content. Okay? Step by step, we'll improve the monetization also on the transaction path. The private content will be monetized by the premium model, but also... Premium model is you are buying for bump, you are buying for editing your ad, for adding pictures, like this. Secondly, we continue to develop our verticalization, so monetization on professional, so introducing insertion fees.
We have insertion fees and paid product on real estate, on car, on jobs, on professional equipment, and we will continue to develop tools and new added product on this. Third, when you are a good generalist with a strong audience, when you are able to verticalize a lot your content, you have a lot of data. Combining with your audience and the way that you are very good in providing leads, you will be able to monetize with advertising. Advertising is also a pillar of our strategy to monetize our audience.
If you have a look of what we have done the last year and to show that, I will not detail one by one these features, but what we have done the last year is, as you can see, market by market, we are launching a lot of new product, a lot of new offers. It's a way for us to monetize better one by one. For example, on real estate, last year, thanks to Aviv technology, we have launched a new construction site, which is a very good with a very good start. On the car market, we are launching what it is called Pack Auto Référence in French. It's a pack that it allows us to have more leads with your ads. On the job, we are attacking the white collar market.
We were a blue-collar content, but now we are attacking the white-collar content. Advertising, we are bringing new local offers like, some banners in your app, targeting in your city, something like this. Step by step, as you can see, we are accelerating on the product side. Not only on the product side. Leboncoin is not alone in France. We build a portfolio around us, mainly to, sometimes to consolidate our markets, like on the real estate market, it was very useful, and it is very À Vendre À Louer is a specialist on the real estate market. Step by step, we go up to the value chain expansion.
Now we bought Videdressing to bring us their skills and know-how on the shipping, on the peer-to-peer that we will deploy on leboncoin. We have a very strong strategy on MA also to reinforce our position in our markets. Now if I'm going to the different markets. As you know, the real estate market is by far the number 1 in our, in our company. This market is a quite dynamic market. The last year was very good in France, especially last year in terms of number of transaction, price are increasing in France, so the market is in a good health. The online classified market is the biggest of what we are attacking. It's around 350 million EUR. The value chain, as you see, is much bigger.
What we want to do is step by step to propose more services like insurance, advices, data, to try to attack this value chain. What is our position today? We are leader by far on this market. Leader in audience, leader in content, leader in terms of market share. Leboncoin is not alone now. We have À Vendre À Louer also that it was very far in this rank before, but now what we have done the last 15 months with À Vendre À Louer, now they are taking some position, and now we are number 4 in traffic. They became number 3 in content and number 4 in terms of number of customers.
Step by step, À Vendre À Louer plus leboncoin, it's the good solution for customers to have a generalist and a specialist to push their ads. What are we doing with À Vendre À Louer? À Vendre À Louer is a specialist. We bought it 15 months ago. What we have done the last months is we have bundled leboncoin and À Vendre À Louer. If you are a real estate agent now, you have to buy leboncoin and À Vendre À Louer because it's bringing a much more traffic, much more leads, and it's a good combination between a generalist with a strong audience and a specialist. The last thing we have done is we have deployed the new construction offer, it was in September.
It's a new market for us that we are attacking thanks to À Vendre À Louer platform. In terms of KPI, the real estate market is a very strong and growing market in a regular way. How, if I can explain how we are doing these moves, there is two things. The first thing is we are taking market shares, so we are attracting more and more real estate agent in our portfolio. At the same time, we are growing our APU thanks to new product, new offers that we are proposing to them. The last year, it's an amazing market, and we strongly believe that for the future, we'll continue to grow and to conquer our market share, especially we'll continue to develop the APU. How to do it? There is two thing.
There's a lot of things to do, of course, on this market, but I think there is 2 main thing. The first thing is, of course, we'll continue to develop offers for our customers. What they want, our customers, they want to have new mandates for their business. We are attacking the new construction market. Step by step, we are verticalizing in this vertical, our offer. The second thing is we will continue to develop good product for our customers. Not focus on the private part at the beginning, but we will focus on the professional part. Why? Because they want more tools to manage their leads. They want more data. They want more intelligency behind the leads. They want to manage the leads in their performance dashboard, for example. We will continue to improve this market.
The real estate market, if I summarize it, this is our number one market. We have strong position on this market in audience, in content, in terms of number of real estate agent. We will continue to develop it. It's a profitable market. It's a growing market for us. Let's go now to the car market. The car market is our second market. We have started to monetize leboncoin with this market. The market is quite positive as well. It's growing. It's a growing market. As you can see, the online classified spend is EUR 160 million. In comparison with the real estate market, it's 40% of this market. But the value chain of this car market is quite interesting and quite attracting for us.
It's why I will explain that we go through the value chain step by step to be close to the transaction, sending new features like C2C payment, for example, for private people. We believe that we can increase the size of this market to be closer to the transaction. What is our situation at this market, on this market today? Probably this is the strongest market where we are today in terms of audience, in terms of content, in terms of number of customers. We are by far a strong leader, and we will continue to increase our position. Mainly, I think in content we can continue to grow on this part. What is it in terms of monetization? Monetization is very good as well.
A little bit below real estate, a very strong, impressive growth. It's coming from two thing. One is we are continuing to gain market share, to attract more car dealers. As you know, we are quite high in terms of market penetration on this part. What we are doing mainly is we are working our RPU, so increasing the value of what we are bringing to the customers, giving more, giving them more tools like pricing tool they can use today, more data to improve their RPU and to convince our car dealers that we are the best solution. Bringing more added value. At the same time, we are increasing prices and developing more product. What is the strategy on this market? Two thing.
This is the first market where we will launch new offers. We will be focused on developing data-driven product on this market. What does it mean? It means that we are working now developing some algorithm to develop the visibility of the ad. Now most of our car dealers, they are bumping manually their ads. What we'll do is we will do this for them. Some data-driven intelligence will be behind, and we will bring to these car dealers more intelligent product to bring them more leads. Secondly, on the product side, we are changing completely the way we are developing our new ad insertion feed, but it's quite technical. We will attack the C2C payment market. It will be for private people.
It's something quite exciting for us because we are by far the number one in the private segment, and we will bring them a very useful and safe payment system. This solution will be deployed next year. Now happy to present our last baby, 'cause it's a baby in comparison with the other, this is our last market, the job market. After the real estate market and the car market, the job market is quite different. As you know, in France, the last years and the last months, sometimes it was a little bit difficult for the economy. We have quite strong unemployment rate. It's improving now, it was a tough years.
Now we are recovering growth, and we see some potential to for leboncoin on this market. What is our position on this market? It's clearly a challenger position, which is good because sometimes with my team, we are number 1 in the real estate, number 1 on car. We are feeling quite confident. Now the job market is different. It's a challenging position, and we are a challenger position, and it push us to innovate more. What is our position today? Traffic, we are number 3. And we are growing. On content, now we are number 5. We are number 5 because we have implemented some insertion fees. We lost some content, but we are recovering dynamic content on it.
The customers and recruiters, we are number two, and we are attracting more and more small businesses on, and big recruiters on our platform. As you know, we have started to monetize this market, three years ago, so it's a very young market. It was an incredible growth rate between 2016 and 2017. Now we see very good trend on this market, and we are very focused on attracting new recruiters. This is what we are doing. We are not working a lot on ARPU. We are working mainly to attract more recruiters, to attract more content. This is the basic of the virtuous cycle of this category. We need more job offer to have a very good service.
This is what we are doing, and this is what we will continue to do. We will continue to reinforce our position based on two thing. The first thing is, to be honest, this market needs more investment in term of product. We are generalist, and our platform is generalist, but we verticalize it, and this platform needs specific product to adapt. The first product is we will do exactly what we will do on the car market. We will develop some performance offer for car, for our recruiters to bring them more leads. As you know, on this market, what is important is to bring leads, but the quality of the lead is very important at the same time. Good candidates, it's much better than 5 candidates with good quality is much better than 50 candidates without any quality.
First thing, data-driven product to push more leads to our customers. Second thing is we will continue to develop some performance product for our recruiters, but also mainly we will work a lot on, with the big recruiters to have the connection with their ATS. You see, it's a software managing the HR, your HR people, your people. We connect to this. The job market for us, as you understood, is our firm market, is a new market for us. We are investing a lot on this market to build the right features, the good product to recruiters, and we have room to continue to grow, not by 500%, but we continue to grow towards the next years.
After presenting the different verticals, real estate, the car market, the job market, as we are a good generalist now, we are also a very good media for advertisers. Why? Because we are bringing a lot of audience, 28 million unique visitors per month. A lot of data. The quality of our data is very good. Why? Because we know what kind of flat or house people are buying, what kind of car they are buying, what kind of job they are doing, what is the furniture in the house. We know a lot of things. We have plenty of advertisers that they will be happy to buy some advertising in our site. What is the strategy on this advertising market? It's different market, much bigger than the classified market.
We have three main pillars. As I said, I love pillars. First, we'll continue to accelerate on display. Mainly on the local part. The local market for us is dna. Leboncoin, when you are going to leboncoin, there is a geolocalization when you are arriving to leboncoin. It's very interesting for small businesses to touch these users using leboncoin around them. Secondly, we'll continue to attack the search market. As you know, the market, the advertising market is divided in display, search, programmatic. Search market for us, we'll continue to develop a self-serve, self-service that we have developed a few years ago. We are refactoring it, and we have a good sign to relaunch it in France, and it's very tactical for us. What is it exactly?
It's you are bringing your credit card, you are bringing clicks, and you are doing by yourself. The last, we strongly believe that the advertising market and the classified market are very close. We are bundling a lot of classified offer and advertising offer, and it's working well. For real estate agents, for example, it's very interesting to push their ads, but also to have some branding locally. We are doing a lot of things for, mainly for the telesales force. Advertising market is continuing to be an interesting and attractive market, even if it's a tougher market in comparison with the other. To build this, of course, we have an IT strategy. We are a tech company. It's what we are doing. We are focused on the satisfaction of our users.
What is our strategy on this? We have five pillars on this strategy. First, we accelerate. To give you an example, three years ago, we were doing two releases per month. It's very bad. I was complaining a lot. Now we are doing 20 releases per day. It's okay. I'm complaining. But what we are doing is we have changed a lot our way to work. We have very, now very small teams. We have changed the tools, we have changed the processes. We are accelerating. Secondly, we have to leverage our data. As you can see, most of the product we are launching are based on data. We have made a lot of efforts to build very good data-driven product and to bring some good experience to our users.
The basic product on our platform, we have it. The next product that we have to propose is based on recommendation, blockchain, all this kind of stuff. It's very important. Third, we have to protect our users. This is our DNA, leboncoin. We respect the data, we have worked a lot on GDPR and Adevinta globally has worked a lot on GDPR. This is important and this is a differentiation with other players. Synergies with Adevinta group, of course, but also within France. We bought À Vendre À Louer, we bought Videdressing, and to grow this company, they need leboncoin. Step by step, we are going to share components and to have more or less the same platform.
At the end, anticipate we were a challenger in the last years, running in our market, but now as we have more capacity to develop more product, hopefully we will be able to innovate more because this is the most expected needs that our users and customers, they want, they expect for us. Just an example of what we have done. I will not detail all this stuff, but during the last 3 years, of course, we have switched to mobile completely. 75% of our mobile traffic now on leboncoin. Now we are deploying some huge and big features. Like we have changed our search engine last year. We are deploying self-service. We are deploying peer-to-peer payment. We deploy shipping before the end of the year.
We are accelerating a lot. If I have to summarize what is our strategy. First, to be the best marketplace to buy and sell, the best brand and the best reflex to use leboncoin for selling on the real estate market, on the car market, on the job market. We have to be the best on it. To do it, we launch a lot of transaction product. We go up to the transaction. Secondly, we will continue to verticalize our approach on each market we have presented to you on the real estate, on the car market, on the job market, we deploy a lot of features specifically for real estate agents, car dealers, recruiters. It will be important. We are preparing the future, the next strike for leboncoin. Why not holiday rental? Why not services?
We have team now that we are starting to develop features and strategy on this market. The main revenue drivers for the future, you know it. We'll continue to reinforce our leadership on the verticals, on real estate, on car, on job, for sure. We are moving along the value chain on consumer goods, content, and we are attacking new markets. The cost driver will be, of course, the product and tech investment. Some of this market, they need more investment to develop quite complex features. We'll need marketing spend. Of course, some of this market, our users, they don't know that we are very good on holiday rental, so they need to know. Of course, we'll expand our sales force.
It's a growing team at the same time of the tech team. If I summarize what I said today, now I'm very happy to be with you, to present leboncoin. Very proud of what we have done. I'm very confident for the future of leboncoin group. Not only leboncoin group, because we have a strong brand, we have a strong audience. We are touching half of the French user every internet user per month. We'll continue to grow in each verticals we have because we are a growing company. This is our DNA. We are making a lot of project, new project because we want to expand our revenue and because we want to continue to be a very steady company in term of profit.
To do that, we will do it based on data-driven products. The data-driven product is not only data-driven because data it's fancy, but, we'll use it for building concrete product for our users or for our customers. More leads, more qualified leads, more intelligence. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Antoine. Now, of course, you have the chance to ask questions to Antoine. I think I remember it was last Capital Markets Day where there were so many questions to Antoine that even when he was going to the, to the men's room and in the break, people were following him. Hopefully we can do most of the questions before that.
I removed my badge.
Right. Yes, here on the second row.
Could you possibly comment on whether there was any acquisitions in Q4 and what the impact of this was on your top line?
The acquisition was Q4. It was Videdressing. Videdressing is it's a small company. We do it because we want to accelerate on the fashion content on the fashion market. Not a big impact. As it's a very small company, it's not a big impact for us.
But this complete-
It's bringing a lot of product insight.
Yeah. This completed in Q4, right? Were there any since then which have been included or?
Sorry, do it means?
Has there been any other acquisitions since that one completed or?
That was the acquisition, we done in Q4. That's last for them.
Yeah.
Preben.
Thank you. quick question. very impressive growth in recent years, but we've been a bit disappointed on the margins. listening to you now, it seems like you still will have to spend a lot of money. my question is really should we expect stable margins in leboncoin going forward, or should we hope to see margins coming a bit back up?
Well, you know, we don't. I know you like to ask that question, Preben, and as you know, we're not guiding specifically on margins. We're very happy with the development we're seeing in leboncoin and the growth. I think they'll have good margins in the years to come, but I won't be very specific about it.
Can I ask about the bundled product that you mentioned in terms of what kind of impact you saw on that product? What kind of price you are able to charge? Actually how the reaction has been from clients?
I will not detail completely the offer, but we have started to deploy this offer one year ago. At the beginning it was not mandatory, but now it's mandatory since September. We are bringing a lot of added value to our customers. We have deployed a very strong strategy. It's a real only one product and within this product you have leboncoin and A Vendre otherwise included. It was a way for us to increase the RPU and to increase the prices because the average prices increase was around 20%.
Customers are very happy with.
The feedback we have today is that it's very natural to have this bundle because it's a generalist bringing a lot of power for audience, and the specialist is bringing a lot of qualified leads. Now we are attacking the market not with two verticals, but one vertical and one generalist is the best of how you can, because within you are covering 100% of the needs of your customer.
A general question about your product development. I mean, in what extent are you cooperating with your colleagues in Spain or in finn.no or in Blocket to actually develop the new products? It sounds to me like you're kind of a lot of the product development by yourselves in leboncoin. Could you comment on that, please? Thank you.
We are doing both. What we didn't say is the performance dashboard is a common component. Messaging is a component, is a global component. Step by step, as you can see, I said, yeah, we did it, but we did it together with our Adevinta team. We have plenty of components deployed on leboncoin and on the Spain, and step by step, we are sharing this component. It's very useful to accelerate because now the performance dashboard is a very sophisticated product that will be deployed in other country the next month.
Marcus. Need a microphone here in the middle.
Sorry. Could you comment a bit more about the competitive environment and the property vertical? We've seen some slides about the current traffic share and listing share. More gradually, your competitor had a big acquisition, you had a big acquisition. How do you think the competitive environment go from here? I mean, so far it has been relatively behaved, I would call it. Do you think that this is changing? Clearly there are some regional differences, but do you think that is, this is intensifying a bit more from here, or do you think the developments that we've seen, yeah, in the past 2, 3 years will kind of continue?
It's. You're right. I think the real estate market is concentrating a lot, between two players, between us and the German company. What I think is now we are growing so fast. As you can see, our growth rate is quite impressive. We think that we will continue, and we are very happy to have Aviv to help us to accelerate, mainly on the new construction market. We are quite positive in continuing to grow.
Regionally, you think that you would go more into regions where you're maybe not that present right now?
So we have-
Like Paris is always the debate, Paris versus the rural areas.
Clearly, if you see our penetration rate, we are quite high on this market. Now we have deployed a specific approach in Paris. You're right, not only in Paris, in the South of France as well, with the sales force dedicated to this place. Now we are producing the first results. The impact, the rate growth on getting new market shares on the above customers is based on this sales effort.
France is a big market. It's growing rapidly. There are room for 2 players. We're very confident about our position on development. Right. Any other questions? There's one up there. Yes.
thanks. Leboncoin is clearly the largest asset within Adevinta. Is it fair to assume the 15%-20% growth target longer term would apply to leboncoin as well? Of that, how much roughly would be volume-driven? Just wondering how much further penetration of customer can increase. You talked about it being high in real estate. Is there scope for real estate agents to use more than one portal? Is it a thing in France?
When it comes to the growth, we don't specify growth per asset, as you know. Obviously, with the size of leboncoin, they will be an important contributor to the total growth. Then I think for the second.
Penetration rate. I think in France, we are around 30,000 real estate agents, and we have 90% of this real estate agent. We have still room to grow, mainly in Paris, and in a few region in the south of France. We'll continue to grow on this region.
I have room for one or two more questions. One here. Hi. John.
Thanks. You mentioned, I think, shipping a couple of times as a new service or feature. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about the TAM and the pricing model, and if you've seen that elsewhere, you know, and what's kinda led to that?
Yeah, you're right. We will. As we want to be close to the transaction, we want to develop some features around this. The first feature was to develop a C2C payment. It's what we are testing since last summer, and we're deploying slowly now. The next stage will be the shipping part. The shipping part is the natural after paying. You need a shipping solution. The business model is not completely finalized on it, but it's not there's not a lot of complexity on it because we take a margin on that. Thanks.
Okay. There's room for one final question before we move on. Yeah, it's the back here.
Could you describe what's happening this day, in France? Seems like there is a slowdown. Shall we expect that to continue, or are you guys doing things to change the dynamic?
Yeah. As the advertising market, as you know, is changing a lot, not only in France, but in all the market in the world. Mainly because there's strong competition by the GAFA on this on this market. At the same time, leboncoin is one of the biggest national advertising, national sales house in France, and we are continuing to grow on this. What we have realized is that we have to improve a lot what we are doing. It's what I've presented, a strong action plan to develop more formats on mobile, on video, to continue to solve our to improve our revenue on the programmatic and to accelerate on this, which is quite important.
The last point is to continue to have a sales expansion. You're right, I think it's a big market, but it's a tougher market in comparison with the others.
I think in the aftermath of GDPR, you can say that the GAFA has actually strengthened their positions. We are doing a number of things now, both with products and sales forces, et cetera, and formats that makes us confident that we'll take a bigger part again going forward. All right. I think there, we have to move on to the next part. Thank you very much, Antoine. I'd like you to welcome on stage, Gianpa. Gianpa has been a senior member of Schibsted's sales management team and especially classifieds for a number of years. For the last year, he's been the CEO of Spain.
Thanks, Rolv Erik. Welcome, everybody. We move south. We move from France to Spain. Let me start with a few key messages that I want to give you today. First of all, Adevinta, in different forms, have been operating in Spain for already more than 40 years. We know the market, the users, the customers very, very well. Second, Adevinta in Spain has a clear leadership position. We have the biggest, we are the biggest online classified company in the market. We have faster revenue growth, and we are growing profitability even faster. We will see it later. Third, we are present in Spain through a multi-brand strategy, and we are present in all the vertical that matters. We are very happy with the position that we have in jobs and cars.
We believe we can have room for growth in real estate. We strongly believe in the power of the generalist to enhance our vertical positions. Finally, similar to what also Antoine was saying, we believe in data. We believe that they can represent a unique source of competitive advantage going forward. Let's see how we've built this position. I will not tell you all the story. The first form of Adevinta presence in Spain was in 1978, one year before I was born. Segunda Mano was a monthly free newspaper for classifieds. Since then, many things have passed. One of them is that we've moved completely online. A very nice thing is that we have moved many of our customers online with us. We've done this journey together with our customers.
In the years that followed, we had several M&A acquisitions. As a result of this, we have now a portfolio of brands. We are present in many verticals, in all the verticals, the main verticals in online classified business. Since a few weeks, as you know, we have already, again, 100% control over our operations. We are ready to move forward together with our customers as we have done in the last 40 years. Let's see how our brand play together one with another. As you can see, there's a bit different from what you've seen in France, right? In France, Antoine talked about a lot leboncoin and this fantastic position that he and his team have managed to build organically. Adding few assets around it to make it even stronger.
In Spain, the situation is different. Ulric, in his introduction, said that, you know, we don't have a one strategy that fits all, but we adapt our strategy to the market. In Spain, we are different. We are presenting with many, many brands, results of our M&A acquisitions. As you can see, we're present in jobs, in cars, in real estate, and in generalists. Let's start looking at them one by one. In jobs, we have a leadership position that is very strong. I say very strong because it's a kind of leadership position that is very easy to explain because it's number one everywhere, right? We are number one in traffic, in listings, we're number one in content, we're number one in revenues, we're number one in margins. Whatever, we're number one.
In Milanuncios, help us helping for jobs to give also access to lower income jobs and temporary jobs. With that, we are also clear leaders in terms of content. In cars, we are very proud that we have recently managed to build a leadership position similar to the one that we have in jobs. Very strong. Again, very easy to explain. Number 1 everywhere. We are number 1 in traffic. We're number 1 in listings. We're number now in customers, in revenues, in margins. There we have the strength of playing with both the generalist, Milanuncios, and with a leading vertical, coches.net. Coches means cars, by the way. In real estate, our position is not as strong as we have in jobs and cars.
Our vertical competitor has more traffic, listing, and customers of any of our vertical players taken individually. If we join our forces, if you put together Fotocasa, Habitaclia, and Milanuncios, we see that we are number one in listings and number one in customers. Again, this is the kind of leadership position that yes, is there, but it's not as nice as the first two, right? It takes a bit longer to explain. We want to improve Fotocasa, Habitaclia, and all our brands work together so that over time it's easier to explain this leadership as well. In generalist, finally, we have a challenger position. We've a competitor that is app-based that is stronger than us in miscellaneous good, in everyday goods, so in clothing, sport equipment, electronics, et cetera. They are stronger there.
I'm proud and I'm happy of the fact that Milanuncios is stronger in real estate, in cars, and jobs as a generalist. Milanuncios is still stronger where it matters. Nevertheless, we want to develop Milanuncios further to reduce the gap that we have in miscellaneous goods. Together, these positions create a lot of value for our users, for our customers, for our shareholder, but also for our communities. A clear example of the latter, of our impact on communities, InfoJobs. Only in 2017, InfoJobs enabled 1.5 million jobs and contracts to be signed in Spain. In a country like Spain, where unemployment rate is still pretty high, that's make me and my people very proud of what we do.
Together with all our brands, we also touch, every month, 17 million people in Spain. This means one every second person that access the internet in Spain uses at least one of our brands every month. This is a penetration similar to what Antoine was describing for leboncoin. The difference that he does it with one brand and I do it with many because our strategy is different. Together also we managed to deliver some very good financial results. Actually, this is the first time that you will see it. I'm very happy that, you know, in 2018 in Spain, we managed to deliver EUR 160 million in revenues.
This was a 16% growth versus 2017, following on our solid growth in the last two years. In 2017, clearly, our revenues were also accelerated by the fact that we acquired Habitaclia. Also after the acquisition, the growth stayed strong and stable. We are very proud of having beaten our, by far, our EBITDA record for last year. We reached EUR 47.1 million in EBITDA and get very close to 30% margins. What is nice about this, what we are happy about, this is also that this is happening through operational leverage. Out of the more than EUR 22 million of fresh revenues that we generated last year, approximately 60% directly translated into EBITDA.
You can see this if you could analyze our numbers, you could see this mainly because the weight of personal costs and marketing costs on our total revenues is decreasing. Right? The weight of personal costs has gone down 5 percentage points, our total revenues in the last 2 years, and 4 percentage points for marketing. Numbers look good, and we are proud of what we are doing. To keep delivering on these results, we have a clear strategy. It's pretty easy. The very strong positions that I spoke about at the beginning, we just want to make them even stronger. We want to solidify them. We see that there is room for growth in the market.
There is room, both in underlying market to grow, but also in our capacity as a OSC company to capture part of that value. In real estate, we want to strengthen our position even further, playing together with our, with our brands, and we want to reduce the gap in the miscellaneous everyday goods categories, when it comes to our generalist position. While every vertical has a clear strategy to execute, we also believe at a company level in Adevinta, in Spain, we have three main foundations. Sorry, I don't have pillars, Antoine. But we have three main foundations that we want to build on. The first one is, like, our users and our customers.
We have 17 million users every month, and we have tens of thousands of customers, and their expectations are ever-growing, and we want to exceed them. We are making organizational changes and also changes in the way the company works so that we get closer to our users and our customers, and we put them at the center of all our decision-making. We also, to do this, we also need to attract talent. Only in 2018, we hired more than 100 people. There's a pretty fierce battle for tech talent, in particular, in Barcelona in these days. In order to improve our employer branding, in the next few weeks, we will move most of our talent in one single building in Barcelona, in the tech district of Barcelona, to get where the talent is.
Finally, as Antoine was saying, also we believe in the power of our data, and I will tell you a bit more later in my presentation on why we want to do this. Let me take some water. This was introduction. In the slide that follows, I will analyze the key vertical segments, so jobs, cars, and real estate. For each of them, I will show you four things. First one is how the market is developing. Second is how the competitive landscape looks like. Third, our commercial metrics, OLM. Fourth, our product development efforts, examples of what we're doing in developing our products. Let's start with jobs.
In jobs, as you know, we had a big crisis, and, you know, unemployment rate skyrocketed to 26% during the crisis, and now we are in a healthy recovery path. In January, February, unemployment rate was around 14.5%, but still far from the record lows that we had in 2006, 2007, etcetera. We believe that there is still room for further job creation in the market. Also, when we look at the market, we see that the total marketing spending of recruiting agencies and of corporates is estimated in 2017 to be around EUR 120 million. Roughly half of it is captured by classifieds. We believe that there is room for growth there.
We believe that, you know, when we compare, the take rate of online classifieds company in jobs, in Spain versus other European markets, we see that there is room for growth. We also believe that there is further room for growth, when you look at adjacent businesses. We believe that there is revenue opportunity moving in the value chain of recruiting, either upstream, for example, looking for employer branding revenues or downstream, taking part in all the business related with recruiting and candidate selection. Next slide, I will show you the competitive position, but before I show it, let me tell you that now what you will see will show you that, you know, all the opportunity is there. InfoJobs is the best positioned player in Spain to capture it. Hmm.
When you ask, or actually when Ipsos asks, people in Spain, you know, where do you find a job? Where do you go when you need to find a job? Well, InfoJobs come first, 40% higher than our social network competitor, and I don't know, many, many times distant from the first job board. When TNS asks, okay, does it work? Is this liquid, right? Do you find a job? Well, again, we are 30% more effective than our closest job board, and by the way, twice as effective than the social network we were discussing before. If you ever happen to be jobless in Spain, you know what to do.
What I'm proud of is on the fact that, you know, this leadership, my team has managed to translate it also in a commercial delivery. If you look at our indexed figures, revenues have grown by 38% in the last two years. This is impressive, and this is the result of mainly an increase in volumes. What has happened here is that with our number of customers have increased by 69% in the last two years. That's mainly because we have managed to open up InfoJobs to small and medium enterprises in Spain. Small and medium enterprises are a super important part of the economy in Spain. With the new offering from InfoJobs, we are now able to address them with a self-service tool.
Companies, small and medium companies, can just buy our products on a web-based self-service tool that represents for us a very cheap distribution channel. No wonder, and don't get scared when you see these numbers going down, because this is mainly the reflect that our customer mix is changing. We have many, many smaller companies in our mix. By definition, small and medium enterprises hire less and hence pay us less every month. Nevertheless, if I take the long tail customers out, and I only focus on the customers that were already in 2017 paying us more than 400 EUR during the year, for those customers, ARPU has increased by 8%.
We keep growing the ARPU on our stable customer base, but we keep also adding new customers, smaller customers at the bottom of the pyramid. Let's look a bit at what we are doing in terms of products. Few examples. We're doing many other things, but I think that these are three good examples. First of all, we are a bit paranoid about increasing constantly the quality of the information that is in the job posting and in the CV. Now we are creating incentives for companies, for employers, to be transparent about the salary range of the offer. This is something that employers in Spain don't like to do, and we are creating incentive because it helps. It good for candidates, but also because with that information, we can improve our matching.
We are categorizing the information that we have in the job post, but also in the CV, in a way that will enable us to do automatic matching between job posts and candidates. As I told you, we have attacked the small and medium enterprises in the last 2 years. We realized that in small and medium enterprises, not always there is an HR department that takes care of the recruiting. Many times, the recruiting is done mainly by line managers. We developed a app for recruiters. A app for recruiters on the go. On your mobile, you can easily manage the recruiting process, look at candidates, filter candidates, et cetera, et cetera. Only February, 1,000 companies were using this product.
As a last example of what we are doing, I told you before that, you know, Spain is a bit crazy for tech talent lately, and that's good, and we like it. We want to give more visibility for the companies that are looking for these positions. This is why we've now very recently reached a exclusive partnership with Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a tech community. It's a giant tech community. Now in exclusivity for Spain, all the job posts that are posted on InfoJobs are automatically posted for the benefit of all the members of the Stack Overflow community. This is very good. Recapping a bit the job sector. Market is good. We keep growing, and InfoJobs is the best position in the market to capture all the opportunities that will come. Let's move to Motors.
As you can see, also in motors is the car business is recovering after the crisis in 2012 and 2013. Both new cars and used cars are growing. There are more used cars sold in Spain than new cars. There is approximately 1.7 used cars sold in Spain for every new car sold. Nevertheless, this is not a number that is like best in market. When, for example, I compare my figures with Antoine, I see, for example, that the number of second-hand car transactions per capita in France is almost double than in Spain. There is room there for growth in second-hand car business.
When we look at the total market size and the addressable market, we see that, you know, EUR 32 billion are spent in Spain every year to buy cars. Of these, EUR 2.2 billion are captured by car dealers, excluding financing services and ancillary services. Out of these, EUR 80 million are spent in marketing, and only EUR 35 million are spent in classified. There is clearly room for growth, mainly because in this EUR 80 million, there is still print. No? Still EUR 50 million are spent every year in printing marketing, so we want to go for that. That's our job since the last 20 years, going for the print revenues. We'll keep doing that. Also, we believe that there is a lot of revenue potential and revenue growth coming from all the ad agencies of the car business.
Let's look at the competitive landscape. As I said, in Spain, Adevinta is present with both the leading vertical, coches.net, and the leading vertical, leading generalist, sorry, Milanuncios. Now, volume is the superpower of the generalists. Conversion and monetization is the superpower of the verticals. In Spain, we play with... Look here. Milanuncios is number one everywhere. No? When it comes to traffic, when it comes to content, when it comes to customers. It's higher than its generalist competitor. And after that, we see coches.net everywhere. Very strong position. Clear position in content, in customers. We share most of our customers between Milanuncios and coches.net. And I'm particularly proud because in the last 2 years, coches.net has also done a lot of progress in terms of traffic.
In 2 years, coches.net has doubled its traffic, and we are happy, very happy about it. All of these, let's say, superpowers have translated into commercial performance. If we index our revenues in 2016 at 100, last year, we did 60% more. This was mainly the result of an increase in customers. In particular, in 2018, we moved many of the smaller customers that were on Milanuncios. We convinced them to move to coches.net and buy our bundle. We are also increasing constantly our ARPU. Now again, don't get confused by this 5%. It's mainly because there are many small car dealers coming.
If I do the similar analysis I did for job, and I only isolate the customers that in 2017 were paying more than EUR 100 per month, for those people, our ARPU increased by 25%. This is mainly because of the bundle. Let's look what we are doing in terms of products in coches. First of all, imagine you want to buy a car in Spain. Most probably, most likely, your journey will start on your phone. 75% of our traffic now is mobile, and we have built our app so that they have top-notch rating. When you find a car that you want to buy, you can contact the seller directly through a chat. It's the same chat that Antoine was talking about. It's not a chat that I've developed with my team in Spain.
This is the chat that comes from the group, and it's super good. Imagine that, you know, you have chat with the seller, you are happy, you are close to make the transaction, you know, trust is an important barrier in Spain. You don't really fully trust the seller. You want to do the last check. From few weeks now, you can check online directly from the ad page of the car you are looking for, the history report of the car. We can do this through a partnership that we have with Carfax that also creates for us further opportunities of revenues because, you know, we give more visibility and branding visibility to Carfax, also we have a revenue share deal, that for every report that comes from coches.net users, we get a share of those revenues.
Before moving to real estate, let me recap a bit cars. We believe that we are in a very strong position. We are happy with the position that we have. We believe that the market will grow, and we believe that there is significant opportunity also in the adjacencies of online classifieds. We believe that with the vertical experience that we have in coches.net and with the breadth of reach that we have with Milanuncios, we're best positioned to capture this opportunity. Let's move to real estate. Same story when you look at the market. You know, the real estate market is growing in Spain, recovering from the credit crunch and from the bubble burst.
We believe that we are still distant from peak levels or from bubble levels, both in terms of number of transactions and in terms of unit pricing. There is still room for growth. Out of the EUR 90 billion that every year in 2017, according to our estimate, were spent in residential property, well, real estate agents capture EUR 2.5 billion, EUR 150 million approximately are spent in marketing, and classified companies capture 2/3 of that. We compare take rates with other markets, for example, Germany or France, et cetera, we believe that there is room for growth, both in the market, in the underlying market, but also in the OLC take rate. Let's look at the competitive landscape.
As I told you, at the beginning, Fotocasa and Habitaclia have the number 2 and the number 3 position in the country in terms of traffic. This is fantastic for Habitaclia. Habitaclia is different from Fotocasa in a way. Fotocasa is a national player. Habitaclia is a player that is only present in certain regions of the country. In regions that represent more or less 50% of the residential transaction last year. Despite being only a regional player, and on the back of our launch of Habitaclia in Madrid, we're already number 3. Unfortunately, there are no official sources that can split the traffic of Milanuncios into the different verticals. If we could, well, I can tell you that Milanuncios will be in the top 4 players there as well.
Yes, we don't have the number 1 position yet when it comes to traffic, but we have 3 out of the 4 top positions in terms of traffic in the market. When you look at content and customers, again, the superpower of the generics comes back. Milanuncios is number 1, followed by our vertical competitor. Here you can see that both in content and customer, the distance from Fotocasa is much smaller. Again, as I said when I was trying to explain our strategy, this is a leadership position that, no, is not as obvious as in cars and jobs. We want to keep working hard to make this slide look better in the future. Nevertheless, our financial performance is very strong. We've increased revenues by 54% in the last 2 years.
You know, clearly, 2017 was positively affected by the acquisition of Habitaclia, but the growth has been strong and stable also in 2018. The growth is mainly a result of an increase in customers. Again, here you see dark bar for Fotocasa, light bar for Habitaclia, representing the fact that Habitaclia is only present in certain parts of the country. Similar ARPU, though, between the two players, and we keep the ARPU stable despite an intense competitive pressure in this market in Spain. Let's look at some of our products. Let's imagine you are Pablo and you are a real estate agent, and a customer comes to you and asks you, "What I should sell my house for?" Until now, Pablo should guesstimate. From few months, Pablo can use our product that is called Data Venia
That is the combination of our proprietary data with third-party data and third-party tools, and we believe that is the best tool for valuation in the market right now. It's a data-driven valuation tool and, you know, we are getting a lot of positive feedback from our customers. Maria instead is a new user, and she wants to buy her first flat. She'll receive a link on her chat about a property. If she clicks it, she can now have a app-like experience on her Android phone, similar to what would she have if she had the app downloaded. This gives a lot of improvement in terms of user experience. Our users are loving it.
It's translating it, better conversion, better lead generation, and you know, contrary to what we thought at the beginning, it's also boosting our downloads of apps because it's a very first good first trial. From the link, you see how the app look like. You like it, and then you end up downloading it. Finally, I wanted to show the content aggregation system that is what we are building to give to our users an exposure to a wider catalog and to give to our real estate agents access to a broader audience. The content aggregation system makes so that when you have applied your filters for the house you're looking for on Habitaclia, at the end of your result page, you're able to see Fotocasa ads that match that exact search.
In this way, you can have in one spot all the possible ads that we can offer you. Synthesizing the position of real estate. It's not as strong as in cars and job. We believe we have a strong position as a combination of the power of Milanuncios, Fotocasa, and the rapid growth of Habitaclia. We want to improve that position. We believe that there is room for growth because the market has still potential for growth. Finally, before I conclude, I told you that we believe in the power of data. We believe on the fact that we are collecting an unparalleled set of data in Spain. We believe that this can help us to increase our relevance, our engagement, our accuracy, our safety in our marketplaces. Let me give you an example.
My wife is a heavy user of our products. From the information we collect from her, with her consent, we know her demographic information. We know her salary from InfoJobs. We know her hobbies. We know that she likes to cook. We know where she lives. We know where she dreams she would live. We know, you know, that she's looking for the smallest car possible that can fit two kids and a dog, and we know that she will never be interested in a motorbike. All of this information can help us to give her better advertising, better recommendation, help her to taking better consumption decision. We believe that this is a fantastic opportunity. There is only one company, only one online classified company in Spain that can reach this level of information, and that's Adevinta. Let me close, just recapping my remarks.
Adevinta has been in Spain for more than 40 years. We know our market, our user, our customers very well. We are the leading online classified company in the market. We are the largest. We have revenues that are growing very healthy, and profitability is growing even faster. We have a multi-brand strategy. We have many brands. We are present in all the key, important segments. We are leaders, clear leaders in jobs and cars, and we want to improve our position in real estate. Finally, we believe that we are collecting a lot of data, and over time, we are best positioned to make a fantastic use of this data. Thanks a lot.
All right. Thank you, Gianpa. We'll soon have a break, but first, before that, we'll have a Q&A session for 10 minutes on Spain. Anyone wants to deep dive? Yes. In the middle here.
Hi. how can... Let me start with this. Sorry. why having so many brands and not only one?
Well, it's the result of our of our strategy. Right? The way we're built in our position in Spain is different from what we did in France and is the result of many acquisitions. With every asset we acquire, we realize there is a loved brand. There is a lot of brand recognition in that brand, and, you know, thinking of changing that brand or moving to a single brand is not something that would work for us and for our users. For sure, honestly, I would love to have only one brand, right, because I have many to feed. You know, we believe that it's still the best choice.
Yes. Question here on right hand.
Hi.
Is InfoJobs participating with Google for Jobs or are you planning to? The broader question, what are you seeing in the competition with Google for Jobs, Facebook, Indeed competition, and in Vibbo with Facebook Marketplace?
Yeah. We are not partnering with Google for Jobs for the time being. We have decided not to do it. We believe we don't need it anyway. We are the strong leaders, we don't need an aggregator. Nevertheless, you know, coming to your broader question, we have a lot of respect for these global players that are coming. You know, we are used to compete with global brands all over our history, and we believe that competition improves us and is a fantastic stimulus to improve us. We hope that, you know, the competition comes with fair terms and fair regulation. This said, we are very happy with the position we have. For the time being, we don't see a lot of user traction, right?
If I can give you the example, yes, I'm a bit worried because Google for Jobs has very rapidly, very rapidly, achieved a lot of content. When it comes to user engagement, we still, believe that, you know, we have a great margin. Did I answer?
Yeah.
Okay.
There's a question there in the back.
Hello. Anders von Burg from Catella. Further on the competition, if you compare, like France, Sweden and Norway, they have done perfectly well all the time and kept leadership position, but it seems like Spain has been more challenged more often. Milanuncios used to be a challenger to you that you had to acquire, and then Wallapop popped up. Can you explain a little bit what's the difference in the structure in the Spanish market? Why is this new competition always kind of appearing and not in the other markets?
Well, more than trying to explain, I can just observe, right? What, what is observable is that it seems that at least for the generalist position, it's more difficult to keep that position. That, you know, private users are more inclined to quickly shift to something else where that something else is easy and free, right? That was what happened with Milanuncios, and that was what happened also with Wallapop. Yes, there might be something structural, but it's what it is. We keep working hard on Milanuncios to improve it every day. We believe that, you know, the team is doing very good progress.
I think it's fair to say that this has not affected us when it comes to monetizing on the verticals.
No.
I mean, you have a different market and we have very strong vertical positions and that progress is going very well. Yes, Martin.
I just wanted to follow up on the question about running seven brands and multiple platforms. I can see that you have Milanuncios and Vibbo in cars, real estate and generalist. Would it be an opportunity to kind of merge the two of them? That's the first question. The other question is basically about product development. How does it really work, for example, within cars, when you've got Coches, Motos.net, Milanuncios and Vibbo doing cars, are you able to do product development in cars that kind of run all four of them? To what extent do you have to do adjustments to have a new product run on all four platforms?
Thanks. Good question. The first question on Vibbo, Milanuncios. We're happy with having both. It's clear internally that, you know, we are putting all our bets or most of our bets on Milanuncios. No, all our product development is in Milanuncios. We don't spend any marketing on Vibbo, but Vibbo is an organic way of existing. It generates leads. It's strong in some parts of Spain, in some islands, it's very strong, Vibbo. We keep it and we are happy with having it. You know, our priority in terms of product development and brand building is Milanuncios. When it comes to how the different platform play together, well, as I said, Coches, and Motos.net are, have a very similar platform, and over time we want to completely merge it.
There I will have only one platform. Vibbo, I don't want to develop that platform further, so it's only the Coches platform and the Milanuncios platform. On those, we are breaking our code, our monolith in modules so that we can develop common components or use common components that come from the group.
Will that also be the case for Fotocasa and Habitaclia? Sorry about the pronunciation.
Yeah. The two products are different.
Yeah.
now. Over time, I don't exclude that we'll try on the back-end part from the data part to try to converge to some common data platform.
Thank you.
Couple more questions. We've time for that before we take a break. If any. Oh, here's a question on the front.
Can you tell us a little bit about the new cars? Can you tell us a little bit about the new cars market and whether you see a strong opportunity there for Coches?
Yes. We are in a great business because it's a prioritization business. One year ago we had to prioritize on whether capturing the second-hand market opportunity or looking at the new cars, and we decided to focus much more on second-hand because we believe that there is more to grasp for the time being. Still, we look carefully on the new car segment, and actually we are doing experiments. There are more than 6,000 new cars now on coches.net, despite we are not like advertising them very loudly because we are testing continuously a solution that can work for car dealers and car brands at the same time. No, we like the opportunity.
Final question over here.
There was reference in the leboncoin presentation about cross-listing in real estate and actually that you're forcing the agents to do it now. I'm wondering why you don't do that in Spain. My thought is it would... Does it not apply for some reason? Wouldn't it strengthen both?
it's.
All three, frankly, of the assets if you put a listing up on all three.
We give freedom to our customers to choose if they want to use one, the other, or both. We don't force them at this point in time, mainly because the coverage is different and the tools and the platform is different, right? We still have separate commercial force, separate CRM, et cetera, et cetera, and also different coverage. Nevertheless, as I showed you in the content aggregation system, this will enable us to show content from Fotocasa to Habitaclia, from Habitaclia to Fotocasa.
It's mostly a geographical coverage point. I mean, I guess my question is, why would that apply so nicely in France? We heard the positive results.
Not apply in Spain. I could, I could understand if it, if it's a geographical coverage point.
Yes.
If it's overlapping geography, it should be the same logic, no?
The real overlapping geography is in Catalonia, and there we have strong customer relationships that we want to manage carefully.
Right. Okay. I think we're ready for a break. Please be back in 15 minutes. The coffee and refreshments outside, we'll start with Brazil in 15 minutes. Thank you.
All right. Welcome back to the final part of the session. Please find your seat. We're now moving to the next part of the presentation, and I'm very proud to present to you that Andres, who has just left his family on vacation and come to join us for this day. Andres is started actually working in Schibsted, which I think you believe it was 2008. Three years later, he moved to Brazil, where he was the first employee and the founder of the company, Bom Negócio, and he's been running it since. Of course, also he oversaw the merger with the Naspers site, OLX, and has been running that also since the merger. So please welcome on stage Andres.
Thank you, Rolv Erik. I'm really happy to be here with all of you. This is a really important day for Brazil, not only because there's this great group of people talking about Brazil together, but you probably all know Chinese New Year. There's also such a thing as Brazilian New Year, right? You might think, oh, that's the first of January, right? The reality is today. Today is the first working day after the summer holidays and Carnival, and today is when Brazil really starts running. Really important is that the new Congress is now starting to work, and they have some really important reforms coming for the economy and for security that we all believe will be a great propeller for a new phase of growth for Brazil. We are going to really take advantage of that, right?
Because we believe that Brazil has a great opportunity. The market is much bigger than we expected when we entered into the market. We now think we have an addressable market of about $5 billion, which really is one of the biggest markets that Adevinta is going after. We also think we have a great starting point to go after this opportunity. We have a top-of-mind brand in many different segments. We have a very strong local team with strong talent, 600 people. They're extremely passionate about this journey of changing the consumption model in Brazil. We've already started to enter in several of the key verticals. We are already leader in cars.
We are building a leadership position in real estate, and there are several further verticals where we will enter in the next few years. We've also got a great structure. We've got the two biggest classifieds groups in the world. On the one side, Adevinta and Schibsted. On the other side, OLX Group and Naspers, who are really strategic investors in this industry. They really believe in Brazil as a key market, and they're giving us full access to all the knowledge and technology that exists in both groups. That's a great position to be in, and we're learning from the best. We really think that is a key strength in going after this market opportunity. Just to look a little bit backwards.
Over the past 8 years has been an incredible journey for myself. Like Rolv Erik said, I moved there in 2011 because I really believe that this is an incredible market. A huge number of consumers that still need to learn this new consumption model. In 2011, both Schibsted and Naspers started to invest heavily in building the brand, building the category. 2015, we joined forces and really consolidated all the buyers and sellers and the brands into one marketplace. That really helped us to propel further growth and create further network effects. We started to focus on monetization, building verticals in cars and real estate. Now, 2018 was a key milestone that we are profitable.
What we've got now is really a number one position in users in many other metrics. More than 6 million daily users. More than 80% of those are mobile, which is clearly the best platform for marketplaces. We're also one of the top 20 sites in Brazil with more than 50 million monthly visitors. This big market opportunity I was talking about, $5 billion. It's a great market opportunity and much bigger than we expected. Like Antoine and Gianpa have been talking about before, there are many adjacencies that are very relevant in these markets, right? All these key verticals exist in Brazil also, cars, real estate, jobs, and others. It's not about, just about listings.
Someone who needs a car, they also need financing, insurance, and other services to make the whole process more seamless. In Brazil, probably these adjacencies are even bigger than in some other markets because, for example, the banking spreads are much larger in Brazil, thus making car financing a much more attractive market than in, than in some other markets. Looking at the past few years, we've already shown very solid growth, more than 50% annual growth in revenues, looking in euros. When you look in local currency, it's more than 70%. Also, you can really see the operating leverage that we've got with this model. Nearly all the extra revenues and extra customers we bring on board, we can do with existing organization and existing operations.
Our costs only grew about 10%-15% per year in the time we're growing revenues more than 70%. It's really showing this business extremely scalable, and we expect that to continue going forward. That's how we turned this loss-making business in 2016 into a profitable business in 2018. We're really standing on the shoulders of giants here, right? We didn't invent this whole model ourselves. We're looking very closely at what leboncoin did, starting in 2016, 2006, and also what Avito did in Russia. Those are two benchmarks we have. We look at them very closely. We exchange a lot of knowledge with them.
And you can see that our revenues have been following a very similar trend to them with about 6 years delay to leboncoin and 4 years delay to Avito. We expect to be able to continue that, even though probably the strategy is different now than it was back then. We expect that the potential is the same. We're now more or less at the level of revenues that Avito had when Naspers acquired a majority. That was at the valuation of $2.4 billion. It clearly shows also the value of the market. GDP is more or less the same, right? If you compare France, Russia and Brazil, they're similar in size of our GDP, and we think also similar in size of the classified opportunity.
Let's talk about our biggest asset and the biggest value. That's our top-of-mind brand. If you ask any person in Brazil on the street, where would you buy or sell a good, or buy or sell a car, or buy or sell real estate, they always mention OLX first. If you first look on the horizontal level, the key competitor there is Mercado LibreMercado Libre . This is more or less kind of an Amazon of Latin America. They have shifted their focus from C to C used goods more to B to C new goods, and they've been very successful with that, and they're very strong also in payments and delivery.
We see this reflected also when you look at top of mind of selling, you see the gap between OLX and Mercado Libre is much bigger because consumers now primarily see Mercado Libre as a place where they buy goods and not to sell things. You also have a new entrant, which entered last year, as Facebook Marketplace. It's the first new entrant that actually showed up on the charts because it's very difficult to enter such a competitive market with strong network effects. Of course, Facebook has some key advantages there, but they don't really entered the mind of the consumers yet as a place to buy and sell.
Where you really see the value of this top of mind brand is when you enter the verticals, right? Because there we have a huge advantage versus the vertical players. You see the gap in top of mind versus the key vertical players in any of these verticals. This was without any marketing investment in the verticals, right? Even before we started to think about real estate, we were already top of mind in real estate. It's really shows the strength of this horizontal model that was, yeah, it was pioneered by leboncoin and others in Scandinavia, right? We really think that we'll continue to leverage this and use OLX as the core brand in each of these verticals.
Let me tell you a bit about our key pillars to use Antoine's language. We have three key pillars for this year that we're focusing on. The first one, and really important is to continue growing our users, right? We really believe that we're only halfway there in this journey of converting Brazilians to this new consumer model, right? When we entered Brazil, nobody believed that this model would work in Brazil. We're never going to buy and sell online used goods for people we don't know. It doesn't make any sense. A lot of people already started using that, but we believe that the model can be much bigger, right?
When we benchmark against OLX in other mid-income markets, we believe we can double the number of users in the next 5 years. The second front is about verticals and monetization. We've already started to enter in cars and real estate, and we continue to focus on those because we see big potential to grow further, and we're starting to develop the next verticals. The third front is our technology and organization. We're investing a lot in machine learning and data, same what you heard from Antoine and Gianpa. We're hiring 100 new product and tech talents in Brazil this year.
Until now, our technology is 100% local, but we are starting to share more and more knowledge with both OLX Group and Adevinta, because we believe there's a lot of synergies and there's a lot of things we can do together. That's something we expect to do more in the future. Just to explain to you why cars and real estate is still the main focus. Here you see how penetrated we are in the market, the total number of dealers and the dealers that are using OLX. About 25% is using OLX now, and that's partly because many are not even using the Internet, and they're still primarily offline. The ones that are online are not all using OLX yet.
Clearly, we're just at the beginning of penetrating this market, and we will continue to focus on those as a primary source of revenue growth in the next few years. There's many different ways to show that there's huge market potential. I can talk about this for the whole day. Just to show you a few more data points here. If you look at online, if you look at ad spend for cars, only 5% goes to classified sites, and we think we can grow this a lot. Also new cars is a big opportunity where we're talking with several of the brands to use classifieds in a better way.
Also, when you look at international benchmarks, you see that the penetration of car classifieds versus the general economy is still very under-penetrated, which means that we believe that the category can really outgrow the total economy in the next few years. You also see that the car market is really starting to recover. Brazil went through a very tough recession, and in the last few years, people have really started to regain confidence in the market, and we really see that also in car acquisitions, which are starting to grow, and we expect this to continue in the year going forward. When you look at our competitive position, this is like what Gianpa would call an easy-to-explain slide.
lear leadership position on all metrics in cars. If you look at traffic, if you look at users, and also if you look at revenues, we are the market leader in cars. Our key competitors are Webmotors and iCarros, which are owned by two of the biggest banks. Autoline is also owned by a bank. These are the key competitors. Why do banks own these classified sites? Because of the importance of car financing in Brazil, and they really see this as an acquisition channel for leads. We've also started to work with those banks.
All these banks see that their own vertical is not enough to capture the full market opportunity, and also all want to work with OLX to capture more leads, and that's a big opportunity for us. Mercado Libre shows up here because they are very strong in car parts, which is a market we've not started to look at yet, but also a big opportunity for OLX. If you look at our revenue growth over the past few years, we managed to quadruple revenues in cars since 2016. That's driven both by penetration of the markets and acquiring many more professionals. 'Cause back then in 2016, we were a C2C site primarily, with some professionals using it via C2C channels.
We really started to develop the B2B channels. We acquired a lot more professionals and really started to establish OLX as a key player in the car market. We also managed to make our solution much more complete, which allows us to increase ARPUs over time, and really show that we're delivering value to our customers. This is just the beginning. There's a lot of investment we still need to do. We're going to continue to penetrate the markets and get all the professionals on OLX. This really also means being perceived as a key partner for the professionals.
ing that although we are clearly the leader in the eyes of the consumer, I think professionals, there's still a long way to go for them to really see OLX is the only key place I need to be. It has a lot to do with building great tools, building our brand. We've also launched a specific vertical site called Autoline with only professional content to further strengthen the relationship with the professionals. We're also going to work a lot on the buyer experience, verticalized experience to help people in their journey to find what's the best car for them and also to select the best dealer and the best price. We're starting to develop adjacencies.
Already mentioned, financing as a key one, but also insurance, and also looking at end-to-end flow of buying and selling a car and adding on various services to be able to really make that whole flow seamless. Because when you think about removing friction, actually the whole process of posting and negotiating on OLX is actually reasonably frictionless. There's a whole offline process which is extremely with extreme friction, right? Especially in Brazil, it's definitely not easy to transfer a car or to get financing, all these other processes. To really make the end-to-end process of C2C as good as it is with a dealer, there's a lot of additional adjacencies we need to develop, which will be great for our users and also really expanding the opportunity for OLX.
This was all I had to tell about cars. Now looking at real estate, it's also really interesting, but a little bit different situation. There's a few things that are different in Brazil from other markets. One thing is the importance of new properties, the developers. It's a very big market. About half of the marketing spend in real estate is for new properties. This is something that we've only barely started to go after this market. It's a huge opportunity because people are close to the Brazilian real estate market know that the mass market new properties is where the big growth is.
OLX has a very strong position in that, and we've already started some partnerships with mass market developers, the Minha Casa, Minha Vida, developers, to go after this market. The first results are very good. You can also see that the real estate market is much less developed than than the car market. We're still very far behind some of the international benchmarks. We really expect this market to mature over the next 5-10 years. This is really about educating professionals in the market on how to digitalize their business and to better use digital channels for marketing their properties. You have the same effect in real estate as you have in cars, that the economy is recovering now.
Interest rates are at a record low, which really is boosting financing and investment. You see the past few years we've already seen growth, and optimism is extremely high, especially in the key São Paulo market, where there's a lot of construction and property purchasing going on. When you look at the competitive situation, the real estate story is a little bit more complicated than in cars. Last year, two key competitors, Viva Real and Zap, they merged, so they are now one company. They're owned by Globo, which is the biggest media company in Brazil, and there are several financial investors. This is a really tough competitor to be up against, right?
We are largest in visits on an individual basis, but if you add up the two, we are, we are number two. Also in content and dealers, we have a lot of room to grow. We have, like, a few key insights here, right? This market's extremely early still, right? You cannot really speak about a defendable leadership position, right? In, in shifts at Adevinta, I always talk about, okay, what's a defendable leadership position? One of the key criteria there is that the market needs a certain level of maturity. We believe that this market is not there yet. This is really not a defendable leadership position that cannot be challenged.
The main challenge for all of us is going to be to develop this market and digitalize it. We have these incredible assets, which is a top-of-mind brand, right? Everybody in Brazil who thinks about real estate thinks about OLX. That's a huge opportunity, and it's very difficult to replicate that for others. It's, we really believe that with those two assets, we really can, we can build a leadership position. We've seen over the past year since their merger, that we've been growing much faster than ZAP Viva Real, and also been able to acquire a lot of their talents, who believe a lot in the growth opportunity of OLX.
Looking at real estate, even though there was quite a competitive market, we've still been able to triple revenues. You can see that a big part of the revenue growth comes from penetrating the markets, which is really crucial to get the entire market on our site to have a complete database of properties. We've had a little bit less growth in ARPUs, especially because we want to be cautious with price increases, so we've been adding a lot of functionality and results without increasing prices a lot because we really want to capture the entire market. We're really investing heavily to further improve our products.
We'll continue to really focus on penetration as the key thing to get this complete database of properties, which is extremely important when a buyer comes to our site, they can trust that all the properties are there. We're also improving the whole buyer experience, verticalizing it to make it much easier for people to find properties, to help them in their decision-making of where they want to live, for what price, how to negotiate. Yeah, we're looking at really improving our professional tools.
There's a lot of demand from professionals in this sector to have a much more complete set of tools, including CRM systems, administration systems for the dealerships, the data, other intelligence to really help them optimize their business, and those are things that we can uniquely offer to them. There's another really important segment apart from cars and real estate that I can tell you about, and that's jobs. This is a market where Adevinta is not only active with OLX but also with InfoJobs. This is a site that has been able to grow traffic really fast over the past few years when there was a big unemployment and a lot of job seekers.
Now it is in really in a good position to take advantage of the economic upturn and also grow revenues. There's still a very big gap versus the market leader, Catho, in revenues, owned by SEEK. Also, OLX is a brand that we're looking after with jobs, especially blue-collar jobs is a segment that we think could be really big for OLX, both as a new vertical for monetization, but also as an engagement driver. Because like I said, there's a lot of people in Brazil looking for blue-collar jobs. As a summary of the key messages here, Brazil is a huge market with a great opportunity.
We have an excellent starting point to go after this opportunity with a very strong brand and user base and team. We already started to develop some of the key verticals, and there are many more to come. We have the best shareholders you can imagine with huge support from both Adevinta and OLX Group. Now I'd like to open for some questions.
Thank you very much, Andres. I know that there are many interested, in Brazil, and I think it's a fantastic development that you've been overseeing the last few years, so I'm sure there are many questions. Here, starting with one at the back there.
Hello. Anders Lambert from Catella. A couple of questions. First, I wonder about Mercado Libre. I realize they're a different animal. They push more into e-commerce and into payments. Still, they do classified, and they seem very aggressive. They've pushed down their margins from 30% to negative or 0. Do you think they could become more aggressive also in the classifieds market?
Definitely they could be. Like I showed, Mercado Libre has a very strong brand, just behind OLX. They have made some inroads into classifieds, both cars and real estate over the past years, but without big success in Brazil. They've had success in some other markets. It doesn't seem to be the big focus for them now. You mentioned the big investments they're doing. That's primarily in offering free shipping on their B2C business, which is quite similar to Amazon. We're watching them closely, and I think it's a great company. Of course, we have to take them very seriously. We actually see the overlap with Mercado Libre reduce over time, over the past few years.
I also wonder, if you look at the sister companies, leboncoin has obviously been very successful, and also Finland, Norway, et cetera, while Subito in Italy has completely failed. What can you learn from these two? How can Brazil become more like France than Italy? Is there any learnings to do?
Well, I wouldn't say Subito is a complete failure. Yeah, I think that's one of the big questions I think that many people have asked in Schibsted over the past few years, what explains the difference between leboncoin and Subito. Yeah, big asset that we have, which is very similar to leboncoin, is this very strong brand and a very strong user base and a very strong engagement, right? I think it all starts with that. Once you have that assets, I think all the other problems can be solved.
I think that is something that has been, again, the key strategy for us and the key kind of learning we took from leboncoin that the first focus always has to be on building a very strong brand and engaged user base.
I think also the timing was good to attack the verticals the way you've been doing. Whereas in Italy, you had a very strong incumbent both in the real estate and in the car sector. Martin and then Henrietta, I think.
Thank you. Are you able to offer any, let's say, thoughts about financial aspirations, targets, for Brazil? Obviously great growth so far, and I remember the slide looking at the monetization level for the I think it was 6 assets. As we saw, Brazil still in a very low territory. Please some comments on that and also any comments if you, if you can on margin over the longer term. Thank you.
Well, you know, the margin is heading north. We can say that. You know, we don't go out with specific margins targets.
Yeah.
The business you can talk about.
Obviously, we're very ambitious, and we look at some of the benchmarks like leboncoin or Avito and try to replicate that success. Of course, every market is different. And yeah, we really see ample opportunity both in cars and real estate to penetrate the market, increase ARPUs, and also the many different verticals that we have not even mentioned here yet that we want to go after the next few years. I think yeah, the growth will continue for many more years.
Would it be, then reasonable to assume that the margin uptake could be as in Avito, since you made the example of being X amount of years behind, Avito?
I think both leboncoin and Avito had very high margins early on. I think that was a reflection also the market was different back then. I think the complexity of the business increased a lot, so now we have to develop for 4 different platforms and competing against some global players. Our cost base has increased a lot earlier on than they did. It's difficult to say something about the long-term profitability. I think, yeah, in the short term, you cannot expect the same uplift as you've seen in leboncoin and Avito, 6 years ago.
Thank you.
I think Henriette is next, just behind you, Martin. Thank you.
Yes, Henriette. Your revenue growth has been quite impressive. Could you give some more color on the competitive environment in real estate, and if it has intensified since you acquired Viva Real?
Yes. We were actually not totally unhappy with this merger happening, because before we had 2 competitors, now we only have 1. We've actually not seen that this is bad for us. We've actually seen, yeah, a lot of receptiveness in the market who want to have OLX as a as a competitor to Viva Real, and, we've been growing much faster than they have, right? If you look at metrics like the number of dealers, So number of ads, we've been growing much faster. Yeah, I think, I think they've been in a situation where after the merger, they have a lot of internal challenges.
We have to see what's going to happen when they get their act together. I think it's a very serious competitor. But like I mentioned, I think it's mainly about developing the market now, which both of us are doing. I think in such an early market, it will take a long time before you really get consolidation, right? We think that we can both grow in parallel, developing the market. But in the long term, I think one will need to win. I think with our top-of-mind brand, I think we are best placed to do that.
Thank you.
Other questions? Now we have the chance. It's not that often that Andres is available. He's normally in Brazil, of course, so.
Okay. Thank you.
Oh, there's one in the middle there. This is Marcu s.
Can I, may I ask it in the Martin question in a different way? We turned profitable in Brazil, but can you basically rule out that we're gonna see losses in the next 2, 3 years? Is that given the competitive environment, is it really that we should think about, yeah, margins going off?
Sorry, I didn't completely understand the question.
Basically, is it a gradual improvement for margins from here, or is there a risk that you fear that we need to invest more and we might see losses again for a short period of time?
yeah, we don't really do any.
No
...statements there. No indications at the moment, yeah.
No, no. You know, I think the main message here is that we're very confident about the progress Brazil is making. I think, of course, they navigate in markets like we all do, that are dynamic. Sometimes you need to do investments, and it's not possible to really foresee exactly when or where they come. The main thing is that, you know, I mean this, Brazil OLX is going very well and has a lot of opportunities ahead.
Yeah. No, we think extremely long term, right? We want to win each of these verticals in the long term. If needed, we'll make the investment necessary. If not, I think we can keep on growing top line, which a big part of the top-line growth would translate directly in profits.
Yeah. I can say also that, both the shareholders have the same view because, you know, Naspers have similar experience, and that was Avito, et cetera. They also take the long-term view that we're building this business for the long term. Right. There's one question here.
Without talking guidance or margins or anything, is there any area where you feel you're underinvested today and you wish you could invest more?
No, not really. Actually, we have this discussion often, with our two shareholders. We really have full commitment that if we need to invest more, we can do it. We're definitely not in the mode of milking the business. Really, you have strong focus on user growth and also investing in that. Also, yeah, if we see we need to make acquisitions or other investments, to really accelerate our path to leadership, we're definitely willing to do that.
Marcel.
Can I ask you still have a quite a low penetration in real estate agents and car dealers. To get that up to much higher levels, you need substantially bigger sales force. Are you now regionally focused or is it nationwide? Just to understand why this penetration is so low.
Yeah, we have been scaling up our sales force recently quite a lot. We have now regional key account force all across Brazil with primary focus on São Paulo, which is like 40% of the economy in Brazil. We also have a telesales force which attacks the whole country. Definitely we see we'll see further increasing that sales force as a key part of penetrating the market. It's also a question of time, right? I think when we started looking at professionals, nobody was considering OLX as a key player. Often in the real estate agents, a lot of their individual agents were using OLX secretly, but the boss of the agent had never heard of OLX.
it was for consumers only. this is this takes time, right? This is a very conservative industry. we've been doing a lot to educate the market about how they can use OLX and establish OLX as a key B2B brand also in the sector. we see that that's starting to pay off, but will take a few more years before everybody's on board.
I think it's Björn in the middle, right there.
Hi.
Yeah.
Björn Blix. I was wondering, the joint venture with Naspers, between Naspers and Adevinta, does it have a termination date, or is there a shootout clause, arrangement for terminating it?
No, we.
Will run forever?
No, we don't comment on any of those things. Just saying that I think we have two shareholders that both committed for long-term development of this company.
There's a question here on the left-hand side.
Thank you. Can you comment about the dynamics of the car market in Brazil? You mentioned that financing is really important. Just wondering if people buy the car on financing and then at the end they retain ownership or is it more like a PCP type of market?
The majority buys the car with financing, and they retain ownership of the car afterwards. It's. Often, the financing is acquired through the, through the dealer. Big part that we're also trying to develop is now the financing for C2C, which is a market that doesn't work as well. We really expect this market to grow a lot in Brazil.
How often do people change cars? Like in the UK, I think it's about every... Well, it's more often than other markets. Just wondering what it's like in Brazil.
It's actually very far, very often. I think when we benchmark internationally, the ratio of new cars versus used cars, I think in Brazil, the number of used cars is like 5 times as big as the number of new cars that's sold, which I think is one of the highest in the world. It's a very dynamic market.
There's one in the back here.
Sorry, let me just go first.
All right. Yeah.
You're showing in your presentation slides that you're showing there's static relative precisions in terms of traffic. Can you provide us with some updates in terms of the evolution of traffic and user engagement since you have significantly dialed back from the heavy investment, just so to provide some level of visibility or assurance to investors that your historical quality of investment is high enough and your current level of investment is will not, you know, accelerate from here.
Yeah.
I guess I'm just trying to ask the same question as, you know, previous attendees in a different way.
Yeah. Yeah. Since the merger in 2015, I think our growth profile has changed a lot, right? Because before it was really a TV-driven growth. When we consolidated the two marketplaces and brought all the buyers and sellers together, we saw liquidity increase a lot, so people sell much faster, and that really helped to generate a lot of organic growth. Basically in the years afterwards, we actually continued to grow at the same speed as before the merger, but with much less investments. I think growth has become lower in the past few years because it gets more and more difficult to grow.
But like I said, we still expect to be able to double the number of users in the next five years, so it's a growth of about 15% per year. And that's not really so much driven by heavy media spend, right? We actually have about 600,000 new listers every month, posting for the first time on OLX. And the big challenge is actually to get them to have a great experience, right? And to sell fast, to have good customer satisfaction. We think that will be the main driver to really turn this kind of trial users into recurring habits. That will be the main, the main driver of growth. It's not so much a media investment as it is a tech investment.
That's why we're really scaling up our product and tech force in Brazil and really making sure that we have a world-class product that people really want to return to. We don't expect that we on a general level have to go back to some of the investments that we had in the past.
Thank you very much.
One final question that goes to Billy Gifford in the back.
Thank you. I don't think you could pick two higher quality shareholders to support you in your, in your growth. How do you access their respective technology platforms given they are also competitors? Are you as free, say, to choose the advances that leboncoin are making, then versus Avito or is there some conflict there?
Yes. We actually have a contract in place with both companies to have full access to their knowledge and their technology. What we're already doing is basically visiting all the different companies and head offices to learn what they're doing and also share what we're doing in Brazil. Actually using some of their components a little bit more difficult for us than it is for some of the other businesses, because some of these components are somewhat linked to other components in the platform. It's definitely something we are looking into.
We are working much closer. That's really something that's been changing now over the past six months, where also, yeah, the maturity of the tech stack of both the OLX Group and Adevinta has increased a lot. I think now is a good point for us to see how we can share more technology.
Right. Thank you very much, Andres.
Thank you.
Thank you. We wish you a safe journey back and a happy new year. A good business year coming up. Here, we're moving on, now we've been through our three largest segments. Now we still have an interesting presentation for you because now we're going to talk about what we call the Global Markets, which is the rest, a very diversified and interesting portfolio. To present that, please welcome on stage Ovidiu Solomonov. Ovidiu has been working in central functions at Schibsted. Strategically and especially in Classified last 5 years, he's been responsible for this portfolio a little bit less than a year. Ovidiu.
Thank you, Rolv. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm really excited to be here and give you a deeper look into the Global Market story. I hope I can convey that excitement. I've heard already a veiled question towards Italy and Subito success. I'm hoping to address that head-on a bit later on. Before getting to the pillars, right, we love pillars, we'll get there. One big message that I really hope I can pass over. We see significant untapped potential in this part of the portfolio. I think we're present in very attractive geographies, so it's a diversified mix. We're covering more than 300 million people, so that's exciting. We have the building blocks in place, right?
We have strong brands, and we have strong traffic generation, and you've already heard how important that is. We are converging our technology base, and I think that's especially important for us because we are benefiting a lot from those common components and developments. Last but not least, we are verticalizing both our products and our commercial approach, and this is the key driver for monetization. A deeper look at the portfolio. It is diversified, right? It... The whole map didn't even fit properly on the slide. It's, it is geographically diverse. We're touching four continents, and it is diverse in terms of maturity, right? We're touching a pretty broad scale of maturity levels. We are looking at two main levers when managing this portfolio.
One key tenet is moving all assets towards profitability, right? We have mature assets that are already profitable and are increasing their operating leverage, and we are moving all the investment-phase assets towards profitability. That's rule number 1. Rule number 2 is actively managing the portfolio. We are continuously looking for opportunities to strengthen our positions wherever attractive and feasible, and we are also reviewing our performance in terms of generating value. Now, a quick look at the larger assets, right? Again, you've seen many clear wins, not-so-clear wins. It's obvious. It's not obvious. In our case, looking at the 4, let's say, most mature markets, we're seeing leading positions in the generalist. We are already leading in cars in all of them. In Hungary's case, we're actually having the number 1 and number 2 positions.
We are already leaders in real estate in Ireland and Austria, and challenger positions in Italy and Hungary, and in quite a few countries, we have good challenger positions in jobs. I think this is a very good place to start from. Again, the key driver and the next enabler to put on top of this is verticalizing our product through those, through that converging technology and common components and verticalizing our sales approach. Looking at financials, right? This part of the portfolio, how does it look? How did we manage to do so far? In the past 2 years, we've seen good revenue growth across the whole portfolio, and we've seen that trickle into profitability, right?
Both in mature markets, where we have been improving our leverage, also in investment-phase assets, where we have been getting much closer to breakeven. We're not guiding, but we're expecting this trend to continue. We are looking to be a profitable part of the portfolio within the next years. Looking a bit, we selected some of the large countries and giving you a bit more detail on them. In Ireland, we operate through a JV with a local partner, Distilled Media. Our approach in Ireland is quite similar to what we're doing in Spain, right? It's a vertical-first approach. In real estate, we're present through Daft. Daft, if you don't know it, you can think of it as the Rightmove of Ireland in terms of traction, penetration with agents.
Not yet in terms of monetization, we're working to get there. I think this is the key message there that we have a very strong position. We are continuously developing our product, focusing on data-driven products, and capturing much more of that available revenue pool. DoneDeal has historically been a generalist operation with a very strong presence in motor. What we have done in the past year and a bit is emphasize that development in motor. We are much more aggressive with our product development in motor, and we are commercially pushing more upmarket and attracting professional dealers. That's working really well, and we'll continue to do that. Advert is a generalist operation.
It's rather strong in Dublin, and it works much like Milanuncios, to say, in Spain, delivering good leads for the verticals. Now to Austria. Austria is an interesting country, right? Because it is small, it is rich, and it didn't yet fully do the transition to online. Right? Internet penetration is high, but on the classified spend is still offline. There's quite a bit of radio, of print in there. We see good potential going forward. In terms of playbook, this is the traditional leboncoin-like playbook, right? You can think of willhaben as the leboncoin of Austria.
It's a strong generalist brand and traffic machine that made a good transition into the verticals, is now leading in cars and real estate and is a challenger in jobs. The blueprint is there. Now if we look in more detail into the verticals. We see in terms of, as Anders was mentioning earlier, right? Top of mind brand perception, ability to generate traffic, we're doing very well. We're clear leaders. In both cars and real estate, we are continuously developing our product, and we're pushing even stronger on the supply side. Towards professionals, attracting more content, going even more upmarket, right? Expensive cars, expensive properties. We think that that's going well, and that will help us increase our lead versus our competitors.
Now, in jobs, it's a pretty interesting challenger position, right? Because, again, we're touching a large part of the Austrian population. We have a very good access to candidates. We have unique relationships with many SMEs, which are the, you can say, the backbone of the Austrian economy. We will now start developing our product even more. I think this is the next clear avenue for growth for us in Austria. Now to Italy. I'll start with the obvious. Italy is large, right? It's a large country, many people. Internet penetration, not there yet. Hopefully picking up. Online classified spend, again, a lot of it's offline, so quite a long runway for growth in the online transition.
Many players have found Italy a tough nut to crack, and I think that's both because, let's say macroeconomic conditions are not ideal and there are also structural factors to the market, right? The level of trust of the average Italian user in transacting online is not high. It's probably closer to emerging markets than to developed Europe. Italy is a very, let's say, regionalized country, right? The south is not like the north, and one needs to take into account all of those things when developing the product, moderating content, and so on. On our end of the story, we have deployed the traditional generalist playbook, and I think it's fair to say that it wasn't as fast as we would have liked.
I think it's both due to some of these, let's say structural trends, and it's also due to poor execution, especially in product and technology. We have acted on it. We have made changes to the management team, and we are focusing much more on product development around search, discovery, and trust and towards verticalizing our product for, especially in cars. Why am I optimistic? I think traffic is behaving well, and it can accelerate. We're already seeing good acceleration in cars, actually. In jobs, we have a solid position, so Subito is very strong on blue collar. InfoJobs Italy has a strong position in the middle white collar part of the market, so we can develop both of those quite well.
Real estate is a pretty competitive market. Right? There are three big verticals fighting it out. Our strategic choice is to focus on our strongholds, right? Focus on private content, focus on rentals, and then not join the big five, but leverage our unique strengths. On Italy, I would actually say that going forward, acceleration in Italy can be a pretty interesting driver for growth for us. Yes, managing to deploy into the cars vertical, into jobs, and to some extent into real estate. I think that acceleration in cars is particularly exciting. The position we have in jobs is particularly exciting. Now to our next interesting case, Shpock.
I think we have been presenting it a bit and mentioning it quite a bit. I think there are two interesting parts to the Shpock story, right? One is the Shpock product. It has been built in order to remove friction. It is very simple, easy to use. It's a very efficient tool to acquire both content and users. We have been focusing on the U.K. market especially, and to our knowledge, we are head to head with Gumtree in the generalist. I think that's a good position to build from. Now, strategically, and I think we have been announcing and discussing this quite a bit over the past quarters, we have chosen to change a bit the playbook at Shpock. Historically, we have tried to execute on the same generalist playbook, right?
Build traffic, content, you know, create that virtuous circle in consumer goods, then move to the verticals, attract professionals, and then monetize. Then seeing the developments in the past years, we thought it's a, it's a much better strategy to actually go for profitable growth, right? Move it from a generalist classified blueprint towards a transactional marketplace, which especially in consumer goods, is much better able to monetize early on as it grows. We have a new management team in place since October. We're seeing very good progress. We're seeing monetization levels increase, we have significantly reduced the cost base, and we're seeing very good development of our product. We're quite well on the path of becoming a proper transactional generalist marketplace. For the last, deep dive on Hungary.
In Hungary, we are present with two brands, right? Two products. One is Jófogás, which is the absolute leading generalist, and the strong number two in cars, jobs, and real estate. The other one is Használtautó.hu, which is the clear leader in cars. We see several interesting levers for growth in Hungary, right? One is cars, where we're operating number one and number two, and we're going for a, let's say, a bundle strategy, much like Gianpa was mentioning in cars in Spain, right? Milanuncios and Coches, or what Antoine was saying in real estate in France. We're seeing good opportunity to ramp up Jófogás' traction, both in terms of product and commercially, especially in jobs and also in real estate.
I think that's a pretty good avenue for growth. Summarizing with our strategy for this part of the portfolio. Changing the pillars into a small little puzzle, right? I think that there is one key enabler, which is converging technology. For us, it's extremely important. This is what will ensure accelerating time to market. This is what will help us get operating leverage, and will help us benefit from all these common components that we're developing. The second one is to fuel user and content growth, and that comes by focusing on matchmaking and liquidity. Third one is verticalizing the product and commercial execution. Fourth one is focusing on monetization as a result of all of the above. The underlying logic for all of this is an active portfolio management, right?
We are doing all of this across the portfolio. We are continuously looking for opportunities to consolidate our positions and reviewing our ability to deliver value. I think that's an important message to think through. Now, two new models. We are called global markets and new models. What is the new models part about? I think it's a page out of the Schibsted growth playbook. As we were saying, we have strong capabilities in terms of knowledge, traffic generation, and content. We're looking to use those to accelerate and scale startups that are remaking the value chain of our key verticals, right? We want to be able to be part of the new wave and bet on these new winners by using our unique ability to create value.
It's not just financial investment, it's bringing our traffic content knowledge to play. We have already done 2 exciting investments in 2018. One in the property tech market, in an iBuyer. One in the jobs market with a transactional marketplace for medical personnel. And we have partnered with a few funds in order to be able to get access to really good deal flow, especially in locations like London and Berlin, where we are not directly present ourselves. I think mid to long term, this can be a very, very interesting catalyst for growth. Summarizing, why am I excited about this part of the portfolio? I think we have really good opportunities for growth. I think with a diverse portfolio, attractive geographies, more than 300 million people.
We have the building blocks in place, so both strong brands and traffic generation. We are converting our technology base, so we'll be benefiting a lot from these common developments, and we are verticalizing both product and commercial approach. I'm really excited about the journey ahead, and I hope I'm managing to convey some of that to you. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Ovidiu. Let's move to Q&A for this part. There's a question in the middle on the back there. Yes.
Hi, thank you for the presentation. If I remember this correctly, Mexico must be the only country left that, you know, that yet to turn profitable. I was hoping that you will be able to provide a deep dive on this market as well. Can you just update us in terms of the, you know, the path to profitability on this market? The second question is that given that both Italy and Mexico are both, you know, two of the tough markets to crack, you know, so far, and it hasn't been a smooth journey, wouldn't it make sense to swap assets with eBay Classifieds between these two assets, like what you did with Naspers?
Would it make sense at all to do it now, given that profitability is still low or, you know, still loss-making, that you would not attract the attention from competitive authority like you did probably in, you know, Sweden with Hemnet? Could you just reason with me, in terms of, you know, both Mexico and Italy, please? Thank you.
So-
Take the first part.
Exactly. I'll conveniently start with the first one. Regarding Mexico, I think the market is developing and it is actually slower to develop, right? I think there is a lot of, let's say, people coming into the market. Classifieds is still gaining traction. We are moving rapidly towards breakeven in Mexico, and we are doing that by focusing a lot on the verticals. We are very pleased with our progress, both in cars and real estate. With regards to consolidation-
I think, I think, you know, these sites that attract many of these sites in the portfolio that yet has yet to turn a profit or a good profit still represents very interesting options for us. I think that they can. I think for instance, in Italy, we have an option to develop that site in several directions. Of course, as I said previously, we will do active portfolio management and continue to do that. Some will, you know, will continue to develop the local leaders and, sometimes we don't succeed, and, sometimes we do both on acquisitions, and we'll continue that active portfolio management. Yes. There's a question here.
For Italy, you didn't include the normal chart of competitive positions. Could you tell us a little bit more about how the competitive positions rate in Italy, and particularly, how do you think you perform versus AutoScout24 in the cars segment?
I think we have included the first one with the medals and that was traffic based by vertical. I think we're number one clearly in cars. In content, we're also ahead. Again, to the best of our knowledge, we're ahead in content as well.
And-
In cars.
do you believe in revenue that you're anywhere near AutoScout in.
I think we're progressing fast. I think we're gaining share.
Yeah, no, I think there's quite a distance there, but we're quite happy with the progress we're making in product development in motor and thereafter revenue.
I think, I can't go too much into the commercial strategy and so on. We're making good progress both upmarket in terms of, let's say, more expensive, newer cars, larger dealers, and in terms of some regions which are inherently more interesting than others.
Okay. Thank you.
Question here in the back. Is Adrian also or?
Bit about how.
I think that's, that doesn't work with Microsoft.
Could you talk a bit about how product development works for all of these different sites? You know, do you have local development resource for the bigger countries like, say, Italy and Austria, or are you mainly calling on the central functions?
All of these except the two smallest ones have their own product development resources, and they're increasingly benefiting from the common components. That part is increasingly becoming a lesser part of the mix, right? We are deploying the messaging that you've seen earlier, we're deploying it as well. Notification service for professionals, right? Performance dashboards, valuation tools and so on. What we're increasingly being able to absorb components from group, and we still have local teams because I think a large part of that verticalization is market specific, right? The more you go closer to the user and customer experience, the more you need to adapt it locally. All the fundamentals are coming increasingly from central.
Can you give us an idea how big that would be? So, say, Italy's product development team, how big would that be?
In which country?
In Italy, for instance.
Sorry, what was the question?
Just how many people do you have in your, like, tech team in...
Well, you know, I think we're increasing, the numbers there, so it has been a little bit north of 50. Yeah.
It, yeah, it's closer to 60 and we're ramping it up significantly.
Okay.
Yes, there's a question here.
Thanks. mine's a slightly bigger picture one on where classifieds go over kind of 5, 10 years. Historically, they've been capital-light, kind of high margin, no balance sheet type businesses. There's some pretty interesting adjacent models in thinking Also One, what Zillow are up to. Can you give me a sense as to how you see that developing and whether you think you need to deploy a balance sheet at some point, as classifieds evolve closer to transaction?
I can take it from the New Models angle. Right, with the New Models team, we're actually looking at these more transactional place. What is remaking the value chain in property, in jobs are much more, let's say, end-to-end models. Hence we invested in one iBuyer and trying to understand, you know, what are the drivers there, you know, what makes it successful, how does it perform, when a downturn hits the market and so on. I don't think we're at the point of saying we would be moving our business in that direction like some other companies have been.
I think, like we talked about, for instance, leboncoin , we're trying to take out friction in the user journey, which will also mean that we can do other parts of the value chain. Payment, transportation, pickups, et cetera, et cetera. That's an interesting opportunity, I believe. We don't have any plans to go in the direction we've seen some of the U.S. players have done, where they use their balance sheets, like Opendoor and now Zillow are doing that. We don't have any plans to do that. There's a question here on the back.
Could you describe what has changed in the common technology stack for you to be able to use a lot more of the common options? Is it more from them, their side, or from your side to change your code in a way that allows you to do that?
It's very interesting to answer this question with Renaud in the room, right? No, I think it's the fruit of the work we've been doing over the past years on both ends, right? If you think in order to, let's say, easily plug and play components at a product level, what you should have is at least a pretty standardized data layer. Right? Data taxonomy, all the mount points for those components need to be pretty standardized so that when you build something, it's easily deployable. I think that required work on both ends. I think we've been working on it for a while now, and I think now we're starting to see some of the benefit.
Room for one final question. Search. Let's thank you very much, Ovidiu. Let's go look into the some of the numbers and let's go into the financials. Borja will do that. Borja is the interim CFO. He's been with the company for six years, and he's also head of business controlling. Please, Borja.
Thank you, Rolv Erik. You've heard the insight from the different segment leaders. Let me try to pull this together and take you through our reporting structure to frame context of our financials. Post the demerger process, Adevinta is composed of these segments: France, Spain, Brazil, and global markets. While we consolidate most of our assets to 100%, let me be very specific around the assets that we consolidated via the equity method. Those are OLX Brazil and willhaben. Both of those are owned by Adevinta on a 50%. We are very pleased to have seen the top-line revenue development in... that you see in this slide.
Basically, from the year 2016 to 2017, we grow by 21% and from 2017 to 2018 by 16%, providing a very robust CAGR of 19% over the last two years. This growth has been achieved across our portfolio. As you see, France and Spain have been growing at a 20% CAGR, while Brazil has grown on a 50%-plus basis over the last two years. Let me point out that the Brazil segment includes OLX Brazil, which is accounted via the equity method and hence not consolidated into our figures. This is as a result, you have here the eliminations, which are basically composed of the Brazil operation. Therefore, the, you know...
If you want, those consolidated figures do not show, do not reflect, our Brazilian growth to the full extent and a proportionate owner's view would be better to actually look at that. Let me get back to you. I'll come back to that in a minute. As you know, our revenues, so 76% of our revenues come from the core classifieds, while 23% come from display advertising. You know, we are very pleased to have seen very strong growth on our core revenues from classifieds, particularly in the verticals. As you also know, in the last quarter of last year, we also saw some softening in the display advertising growth.
Similarly, beginning of the Q1 of this year, we are seeing slow growth of the display advertising while experiencing very strong growth on the verticals. You know, as it is the first time that Adevinta is reporting separately, we thought it would be helpful to just walk you through our P&L structure. You know, please complete the slide if you want, I just wanted to point out a couple things from here. First one, as I mentioned before, you have on top of the slide our reporting segments. France, Spain, Brazil, global markets, headquarters and others, the eliminations. The eliminations are prices later reflected below EBITDA via the equity method. The eliminations also include some inter-segment sales.
The last thing to point out here is as you see willhaben is only reported via the equity method and therefore below EBITDA. In the last column of this slide, what you will see is basically our consolidated numbers of EUR 594 million in revenues and EUR 151 million in EBITDA, which you can reconcile to the previous pages. As I mentioned before, a better way to actually understand our scale, our growth, and our profitability across our portfolio, is actually to look at it from the proportionate ownership view. This is what I've laid out for you on this slide. On the one hand, you have our consolidated numbers.
You have here the perspective of our proportionate ownership view, accounting for 50% of OLX and 50% of willhaben. From the Q1 of 2019, Adevinta will disclose proportionate revenue and EBITDA. Let me be very clear: Our targets are always based on a proportionate view basis. Just to reemphasize this idea, right? Our targets when referring to revenues and EBITDA are always taking into account on a proportionate, on a proportionate view basis. Turning to profits. You know, we are very happy to have seen a very robust development of our EBITDA margin.
Over the last two years, we have expanded margins by 10 percentage points, resulting in a 25% margin in 2018. While also focusing on investments, primarily on the tech area. We have been able to keep the requirements of Capex fairly stable and at a low 5% of revenues. Basically, this is the result of the high cash generation nature of the marketplace's business model. Just to wrap up this presentation, let me give you an update on our balance sheet.
Again, crowded is light, but I think what it's very important to point out from here is that post the demerger process and post the buyout of the minorities in Spain, our net interest bearing debt is going to be EUR 116 million. This puts Adevinta into a very good and flexible position for future growth. Basically I think we've gone through our reporting structure. The key messages is a strong revenue, a strong top-line growth, while at the same time being able to expand very rapidly on margin, and we have a good balance sheet for future revenue growth. Now let me hand it over to Rolv Erik .
Thank you very much, Borja. We'll have a final Q&A towards the end, if you have detailed questions around this, I suggest that you talk to Borja or to Trond or to Jo Christian or Åston outside. Let me just wrap things up. Some of you have been asking questions about the management incentive schemes, Trond also commented on the management incentive schemes. We have developed our own incentive scheme in Adevinta. There's two things to remember. One is that management should build up skin in the game, second is that the interest should be aligned with shareholders. We'll be able to provide some more details around this later when we publish the prospectus.
As you can see, there's going to be performance in shares of B shares, like granted to the participants. It's going to be measured against the subset of the STOXX Europe 600 index, comparable companies in sites. The maximum amounts for some of the people involved will be 300% of the salary if we do a good job for the shareholders and have a good return there. We'll be able to publish to give you more detail on that, but that's just an overview of the things that we're working on. Two things, management should build up skin in the game, and we shall have aligned interest with shareholders. All right.
Towards the end, let me say a little bit about our targets, about our financial targets. Here I'd like to say that in the medium to long term, we remain confident about our guiding, the guidance of 50%-20% annual review as annual revenue growth on the proportion of the U.S., as Borja pointed out. I think that the presentations that we've gone through today, they support that firmly. In the short term, as we have explained, we have experienced some softness in the display advertising market. Although verticals, let me reiterate that, continues to drive a very strong growth.
Our current assessment is that the revenue growth in the first half of 2019 might come in slightly below the 50%-20% target range as it is, as a result of the display ads softness. I mean, we talked about potentially 1 to 2 percentage points below the range. I'm relaxed about that. Because as you've seen, we also spent time today, for example, and on Trond's presentation in France, about what kind of actions we're taking to mitigate this trend, both in the terms of strategic initiatives, product development, new ads, products coming on board, but also short-term tactical things and initiatives we're doing in the market and the sales force.
On the EBITDA margin, we have said that we have increased our margin from 50% to 25% the last few years. We believe that as a result of continued good growth in our main businesses and that Ovidiu's portfolio has also shown a positive development. In the long term, we should look at EBITDA margins about 40%. For leverage, we have the ability, we have a very sound balance sheet today, as you saw, with NOK 160 million in total debt. We've said that we can increase that up to a multiple of up to 4 times. That gives us strength and the ability to participate in further consolidation.
Of course, with that leverage and then combined with our ability to issue new shares, will give us good opportunities going forward. For the dividend policy. This year, we're not going to pay out any cash dividends, but the ambition is from next year on to pay stable and growing dividends while maintaining all the financial flexibility to invest further in growth opportunities. Right. Now we're very close to done. Now, I actually like to invite my team to come up on stage with me to share for the final Q&A. If you have any more questions, of course, there'll be a mingling session outside the, right after this ends. We're looking forward to that as well.
We'll give you the chance to ask some questions. I think, Varshni, are you and Renaud? Thank you. Now we're all here. I have a microphone to pass around. Any final questions? Yes.
Just one. The 15%-20% growth target, again, is that an organic number or is it, assuming some bolt-on?
No, that's largely organic. You know, we have included them. We do smaller bolt-on acquisitions, but it's largely organic.
Do you think you can grow 15 organically in the mid to long term, or what's sensible in terms of organic growth?
Well, you know, I think 15%-20% is worth ramming for. Of course, you know, 20 would be more, more of a stretch. This is definitely the range we're aiming for.
Okay.
Yes.
Hello.
Yes.
Okay. Is it working? There we go.
It works.
Markus Borge from SEB. In Norway, you had a fantastic success in finn.no with the Blink technology. We not heard very much about similar usage in the other sites. All of that has been on your own assets in the Nordics in Schibsted. What about the potential to do similar technology in third-party channels for the rest of the group?
I think, now we have Laila and Renaud here. Laila, do you wanna start?
Yeah.
few product perspectives?
We probably haven't talked enough of what we've done as common product in the Adevinta portfolio. A lot of the products that Ovidiu and Antoine and Gianpa were talking about is actually commonly developed product in our central product and tech team. Which is for instance, messaging, trust and reputation products. We do a lot with the more machine learning capabilities, where we've seen really that it makes sense to develop, you know, in one place to attract the right talent for that. For instance, in the fraud detection for, you know, on the apps in our marketplaces, we use machine learning. We do it with a system for all the marketplaces, you know, for quality review.
There is a lot of examples where we're actually using common products and technology. For finn.no and Blocket, especially on tori.fi, until now, we've done a lot of common also with them. Of course, now we're separating, but we're sort of taking forward some of these products both for the Nordics and for Adevinta. I don't know if you want to add, Renaud. I think one area we should also comment is a lot what we've done on infrastructure. There's quite a lot.
Yes. We talked about product that are visible, we're also creating synergies at more the infrastructure level. We talked about data, there's a lot of data infrastructure that we are sharing across the sites, also when it comes to transitioning to the cloud, all the cloud engineering and automation that goes with this, we're also leveraging central teams for this. That also generates speeds, not just product features.
I might have misunderstood your question if it was about third parties.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think my question was more related to the success we had with finn.no Blink in Norway is phenomenal. Why have we not seen or heard anything about using third-party channels to do similar targeting with, particularly in real estate and cars on the other sites?
I mean, what we've done in Norway with the Blink has been amazing. It's clear that finn.no is a very advanced marketplace. We're doing similar things in our other marketplaces as well, we are able to do this even without having the ecosystem that we have in Sweden and Norway, because we can do this with distribution on third parties. It's nothing preventing us from doing that. I have to say, finn.no has been a sort of leading star in that area. Of course, we have the knowledge to copy that also for the rest of the marketplaces.
I will have to say we are doing a lot of, you know, partnerships with third parties in areas where we're not the best ourselves. I think like the payment solution in France, for instance, that's an example of that, where we, you know, go to the best third-party player in that marketplace.
Preben. There's a question there in the back. First, Adriaan, this is you, and then, Preben next.
It's Adriaan. Page 121, footnote number 2, you say EBITDA before JVs and associates, but your EBITDA margin is including JV and associates. I just wanna clarify, how did you define your EBITDA? Because in the footnote, it says that you do that before JVs and associates.
So-
Page 121, note number 2.
EBITDA.
You have the microphone.
Yeah. EBITDA, NOK 151 million is excluding. Well, it's excluding OLX and willhaben that are accounted via the equity method below EBITDA.
The targets. The numbers that you've seen in a consolidated basis, they are excluding the assets that we consolidate via equity method. When we refer to targets or to guiding, what we talk about is, it's from a proportionate view basis.
Preben, next.
Is that you? Or...
Okay. Yeah, sure.
Thank you. Revenue growth came down in 2018 with the improvement in profitability.
Sorry, improvement in?
In profitability. Better margins, basically.
Yes.
Now you're saying that the first half revenue growth is coming down. Going forward, you are aiming at 15%-20% revenue growth and also improving profitability. In my experience, those two things never come at the same time. What I wonder is, what's most important for you? To get the revenue growth back up to the 15%-20% or to get the margin up towards the 40%?
Well, you're the guy who's been telling us that we should have more operating leverage, so the margins could come up. No, but you're expecting it to happen and now I say it will happen, right? In the years to come. No, I think that, I know you don't like that anymore, so. No, I'm just kidding. I think that, we work hard for this long-term revenue growth, and that's why I said, you know, 20's obviously a stretch. We believe that, it's a combination of our portfolio and new things we'll do that we'll be able to improve that segment. I think that, you know, as the portfolio changes and as Ovidiu's portfolios become more profitable, then we'll actually see more operating leverage throughout the group.
That's why we say so for those margins, we guided that that will be in the longer term. Removing in that direction will take some time. Yes, Margaret?
Yeah. It's a question regarding the demerger transaction. Why not a collapse of the A and B shares in Schibsted? Secondly, any comments relating to the approach or how you will actually do the collapse in?
I think you should pass the microphone to Trond here because so this is more for our owner.
Yes, when it comes to the Adevinta, I mean, we, due to legal reasons, have to mirror the A and B structure in when we do the spin-off. As we have stated, is that we will collapse, and the plan is, of course, to do that during 2019, subject to an EGM. It will be one shareholder structure in Adevinta from 2020 and onwards. That's the planning there. When it comes to the Schibsted A and B structure, as we have said, we have had the vehicle of an A and B historically in Schibsted, and that has actually proven to be the right thing. Longer-term view is could also be some of the same thinking in Schibsted.
That's been also addressed and discussed at the board and therefore, we will continue with the A and B structure in Schibsted.
Right. Any other, questions? Yes. Here.
Thanks. Just on Shpock. Compared to previous CMD presentations, I noticed a lower focus on the app. Just wondering if it's because of the country and geographic exposure you have at the moment. Is there anything that you can learn from Shpock to implement in the other websites, like the geographic location?
Sure. Ovidiu?
I wouldn't say it's a lower focus. Probably. No, I think. Is this on? It's on, right. I think in terms of making this transition from a, say, classified generalist product towards transactional, I think Shpock is actually probably the more advanced within our, let's say, our group. I think it is the one moving fastest, right? Because for them, this is the key focus right now. I think we're quite excited about that, right? Because we're seeing the transactional model already validated by some other players in consumer goods. I think it's a pretty clear runway for us. I think that there are a lot of learnings, especially around payment, escrow, delivery, that we're building and we're sharing among ourselves.
A question here. Trond, here. Okay. I have room for, I think, two, three more questions.
Just a quick question. Does that mean you're de-emphasizing the focus on autos in Shpock?
Yes. Short term, we're focusing on moving to a transactional model in consumer goods and kind of having profitable growth. From that basis, I think we can continue to grow both in consumer goods and we can, let's say, look at the verticals with a fresher look.
Okay. Thank you.
Question up here.
Elena.
For instance, for leboncoin management. What kind of incentives are we using?
In my management team.
For this group, of course, we're using then the total shareholder return. For your management team?
It's, so it's a combination of different thing. They have, of course, the fix, and they have, what we call STI, so it's short-term incentive based on EBITDA. Then, they have part of the program, to get some shares, also. They will have, shares on Adevinta. It's, so it's good money for them if we succeed in reaching our targets.
Okay. Well, it's... Yeah, sure.
Short term we combine both financial metrics, like really using EBITDA with also strategic measures like traffic and content, et cetera.
Well, I think it's been a very long day. We're nearing the end now and but let me, you know, emphasize that we'll be around and looking forward to meeting you in the mingling hall Before we leave, let me just, you know, repeat the main messages from Adevinta. We've spent many years to build up the positions we have and and the competence. We operate in very attractive geographies with a big room for growth. We have a very attractive business model. Winner takes most. Clear networks effect. I believe that what differentiates us is that we have the local leaders and then we're backing them with a global scale in product and tech.
We've delivered results throughout, and I'm sure that with the strides we're having and the market positions and the financials, and not least with this team in place, we're very well positioned to continue on the prosperous journey. Thank you very much for attending. I look forward to speaking, talking more to you in the mingling hall.