Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this presentation of the First Quarter from Schibsted. Welcome to this new location. It's actually we've been here before some years back, but we moved our head office up to this building, and I so hope you're all comfortably seated. Presentation today will be given by Sondre Gravir and myself. There are also representatives from senior management to help answer the questions. The chairman is present, and also Siv, who's the CEO of Schibsted Media. Today, we will spend some extra time on marketplaces. I'll go through the quarterly numbers, then Sondre will take you through some more strategic opportunities and market opportunities that we see for the class areas. Then we have the normal agenda, publishing growth plans and then the summary and then the Q&A.
The headlines from Schibsted this quarter are the following. On the marketplaces, we continue to deliver on the revenue side, hit 14% at this time. Margin is up by 6%. Important thing is that we have set this main pillar of our strategy to continue to deliver on monetization and strengthen our footprint in the verticals. We'll show you more in detail how we're doing that later, and you can also see that reflected in the numbers. Our major sites, France, Spain, Norway, Brazil, are continuing to further improve their position. They all have a good quarter, then we're reducing the investment-based losses as expected, as predicted by most of you, as we've said we would. On the publishing side, there is continued digital growth in advertising across the VG.
For the subscription papers, it's mainly on the subscription side, selling digital subscriptions. Print continues to decline as expected, but the overall economic development is stable. For Schibsted Growth, there is a good development, and it's particularly Lendo that continues to deliver the growth. We also have some other promising new companies that I'll talk briefly about. On the marketplaces. Let's see here. This clicker here. We maintain our growth target of 15%-20% annual growth. Here you can see the rolling numbers. There you can see that we are now on Q1 based on rolling 12 months, last 12 months, reached a turnover of NOK 8 billion.
Given that we continue to deliver on our growth target and our growth range, here you can see that we'll be able to double that number by the end of 2022. Just to give you some perspective, we've had this 15%-20% growth target for a number of years, and we have also historically delivered on it. Important thing is that there is a stronger focus on cash flow and profitability now that we are moving into that phase. We also continue to strengthen our positions and are focused on the verticals. Let me go through some of the different assets. We start by Leboncoin. Leboncoin continues to have a positive development. Here you see on the bullet point, traffic growth. That is a very healthy sign for Leboncoin.
They continue to grow on their new apps and on the mobile. When it comes to their position in the verticals, that's also very positive development. You can see that the motor and real estate continue to deliver. Leboncoin has strengthened their position in especially real estate a lot last years. That's now the biggest vertical. We're seeing then the jobs is continuing its rapid rise after we started to charge for the job ads. We acquired the real estate A {Vendre and Le] and the combination there, the bundle seems to work very well in the market and also gives some new opportunities that Sondre will come back to.
In FINN, a good quarter by FINN and when it comes to the verticals there, the car sector is kind of flattish. The new car sales in Norway are slow this year, and this also affects us. Whereas the jobs and real estate show a positive development. I think it's fair to say that in Norway we talk about Easter and winter and this has an effect. The cold winter and when the Easter is in March, actually slows down the classified business somewhat in the Nordic countries. FINN is also somewhat affected by that, and we can see that where there's a pickup on the growth numbers in April.
In Spain, we have good performance in jobs, we have good performance in cars, and also real estate, where we have acquired the site Habitaclia, we see a good continued growth. There's been a lot of product development on the real estate, and I think that's has been a good thing. I'd like to say also that, although jobs and cars are growing. You can see particularly in cars, there's, t he total market is still relatively small. If you compare it to other markets, there should be a very good potential for growth. In Sweden, this is the exception among the big sites. We're not happy with the development in Blocket, and we're working hard to continue product development there.
I would like to say that the Blocket has been affected by the ether and the weather effect, especially on the private side. When it comes to the car segment, we actually have a slight increase in revenues on the professional cars, whereas the private cars have gone down. I would like to stress also that we're working continuously to do product development towards car dealers and that we are, you know, you can see compared to the competitor, we are actually 10 times as big in traffic, and we are supreme on delivering car leads. Of course, we take all competition seriously, and we speed up the product development in Blocket, and that we have not seen any effect on the revenues here.
There's also a better trend in April. Over to the investment space and the investment space losses, because I know many here in this room are watching closely. We have said for a number of years that, that will go down. That's results of the sites doing better. You will see later also that Brazil has gone from red to black numbers. There's also positive development in other sites. Hence, we're saying that the investment fair losses will be significantly reduced. I used that expression before, remember? Some didn't like it when they interpreted significant a bit stronger than what we had intended.
This time we're saying it as well, we'll give a guidance range and hence the range of NOK 40 million-NOK 50 million. That's for the investment space. Of course, Shpock, many that we're watching closely. I would say that Shpock has a good development in the UK market, continues to grow the traffic and the number of downloads. It's a vibrant marketplace in the UK. What we're doing there is to develop new features and to start monetization. We're experimenting with that in the car market especially, where we have sales people on the ground talking to car dealers and rolling out that product. Right. I think that actually, here I'll end the part which is the update on the pure quarterly numbers.
Let's talk more about the classified strategy. What are some opportunities we're seeing? What are some market potential? Here, I'll ask Sondre to take over. Sondre, we have said that the verticals positions are extremely important for us, and I think this illustration shows that we continue to grow in the important verticals. Sondre, please.
Thank you. Thank you, Rolv Erik. I got the input so that we are very, many are following the presentation on the webcast. I stand here and try to stand still and not move too much around so we can get it with the webcast. As we have pointed out, we delivered strong quarter for our marketplace division. In the operations, we are focused on both the financial performance and our market position when it comes to users and customers. Hence, it's good to see that we are also moving on important health metrics like traffic and liquidity, illustrated by the 10% traffic growth in Leboncoin and more even stronger growth in terms of number of leads, which I will comment more on later.
As you can see, our main growth driver is clearly the classified revenues driven by the product development we provide to our professional customers. Over the last quarters, we have seen that classified revenue makes up an increased share of our total revenues. Cars and real estate, as Rolv Erik was hinting to, are clearly the two biggest verticals across our portfolio, and both of them delivers good growth in the Q1 . Further product improvements in our delivery to our professional clients in these three verticals will also be the focus in our product development going forward. As Rolv Erik mentioned, for some of our sites, we have also seen a somewhat softer growth in advertising revenues in Q1.
As you can see here, in total, also this revenue stream is growing by 11% in Q1, and we also expect some growth level going forward. The advertising landscape, it's changing in Europe with the implementation of GDPR, 25th of May. With our strong traffic positions, our vertical positions, and the capturing and usage of user data that we have, and also according to the GDPR regulation, we are well positioned to also be a continued strong player in the advertising market going forward. This slide, you have seen before. We use it from time to time. As you know, we have very strong positions in our markets. With huge potential for future value creation.
As I said, we are focusing both on the relative position we have with our users and customers and the relative position we have on revenues. There are no big changes on this slide in terms of the scoring of our positions since the capital market day we had in Barcelona in November. As you know, we have very strong positions in France and Norway and in Sweden, as you know, very competent on with increased traffic and revenues in our professional car position despite competition. Then, as you know, real estate is not an area we are pushing in Blocket at the moment, but then jobs is developing very positive in Sweden. In Spain, it's important to highlight that this scoring is based on the position across all our assets in the Spanish market.
What is also worth mentioning is the strong position we have in Brazil, which I will comment more on later. We also focus, of course, on the market size, both in terms of revenues per internet capita and the growth and the GDP size in the market we are operating in, and we have strong position in markets with strong total GDP and digital market monetization in strong growth. We have significant headroom, as you can see here, to further improve our monetization. We will continue to deliver better products to our professional clients in the verticals and continue to optimize price structures in order to capture this value creation. We also wanted to give you and share some color on the playbook and the different stages of maturity across our marketplace portfolio.
What we see is that our playbook on moving our assets up the value capturing chain is working. We build first on our strong generalist positions, having high brand awareness, strong traffic positions, and then low user acquisition costs fuelling our vertical growth. When we have become the number one generalist player, we improve our product offering in the three key verticals, cars, real estate, and jobs, usually in that order, and we are moving all our positions in these directions. For example, with the product launches and the commercials offering, we are now introducing a spot in the U.K. car market after reaching market leadership in C2C cars.
We've moved into new areas in the vertical value chain, for example, with financing and payment solutions, moving us even closer to the transaction, which in a way you can say is the ultimate goal for a marketplace to be. We focus relentlessly on reducing user pain points and frictions and to deliver a better product to our professional customers. We start to move into more adjacent businesses, creating new revenue streams and further strengthening the positions with our users because we're giving them an even better product like we have done now recently with the strong push of FINN Shopping in Finn in the Norwegian market, tapping into the huge e-commerce market. This comes also to say it's also indicating our strategic focus in the marketplace division going forward.
We are developing our total marketplace portfolio. Of course we are focusing on the key value drivers, and we will continue to deepen our vertical roots by improving the product offerings to the customers. This will result in strong revenue growth also going forward. As important, it strengthen our position, our competitive positions in the verticals because it builds new barriers for new entrants, because we're serving our customers in a better way, giving them more quality leads. We also focus on the user side of our platform to strengthen the demand side, which I will comment a little bit on later in our product development efforts. We continue our global products, global focus on Product and Tech, and we are continuously converging our platforms both on infrastructure, data and products.
We truly believe that this really strengthen and improve our overall product delivery. Here we are focusing on our core markets, innovating first with our strongest positions. As you know, we have continued to focus and to streamline our portfolio now with the focus on Europe and LATAM, and we will continue our active M&A approach to further strengthen our growth. We really start to see some interesting and good results of our global product investments. Here are some selected examples. First, trust and reputation. Trust is extremely important on the marketplace. You need to have the trust between the buyer and seller in order for the transaction to happen. We are deploying this global component now across our portfolio going forward.
What you can see here is, for example, the profile picture of the users, how long the user have been a registered user on our platform and for example, the average response time this user have if you send that person a message on our global messaging component. We are also doing some smaller experiments with buyer and seller ratings. Messaging, it's another important global component in continuous development. This is not a you know, one time effort. We have to continue to improve our messaging service. Actually now, last week, we had 3.9 million messages going through the messaging component every day. That's quite a significant number. We have launched the component in 14 of our sites. Finca Raíz in Colombia was the last site out, and the average response time from our users across our whole portfolio is 14 minutes.
It's really increasing the engagement and the interactions between our users on the platform. The third example is the Performance Dashboard. The Performance Dashboard was developed in Leboncoin some months ago, and it gives our customers full transparency, both in jobs, cars, and real estate. It gives them full transparency in terms of the number of leads they get from Leboncoin and the conversion they get from the platform. We also proactively suggest upselling products that they can buy in an integrated way in the performance dashboard in order to increase the efficiency of their ads. This product, we will also now roll out to new sites, and what we see is that it is increasing the upselling product conversion on our sites.
Lastly, an area I wanted to mention in when talking about global product and tech effort is that we have dedicated significant product resources now in the Q1 to meet the new GDPR regulation that comes into force on May 25th in Europe. This will also take some product development capacity going forward, on this area, we are truly leveraging the synergies of being a global player, sharing expertise and products across our European portfolio. Moving into a few selected markets to give some more color than only the Q1 financial numbers. In the capital market day in Barcelona in November, Anders was also there and presenting a deep dive on FINN. Today I will focus on France, Spain, and Brazil. First on France and Leboncoin.
I think it's fair to say that Leboncoin is really firing on all cylinders at the moment. Both revenues, traffic, and leads are growing. Traffic is growing by 10%, as we heard in Q1. The number of leads, total leads from the platform is growing with 25%, which indicating even a better efficiency on the platform. This is a strong performance driven by new product development and increased marketing efforts. We have delivered strong revenue in France over the last couple of years, and we will continue to do so going forward. The market is growing, and as you can see, we still have a significant upside in our vertical monetization in all the three verticals, cars, real estate, and jobs, as we see on this graph. We are strengthening our market position driven by new product development.
We are developing strong in real estate with a new bundle product offering, as Rolv Erik was mentioning, between Leboncoin and AvendreALouer.fr which have been very positively received in the market. We started to sell this bundle into the market by end of last year, and the growth now in Q1 has been strong. We are also strengthening our position in the professional car market, and we see very encouraging development in the job vertical. We just announced a new big product launch in the job vertical, and this new product launch will target specifically the white collar part of the job vertical. Hence, we expect also to continue our strong growth in the job vertical going forward. In addition to all these product launches, we are also doing price optimizations to increase our total monetization.
Going forward, as I said, it's not only about the product development for professional customers. We are also focusing on the demand side of our platforms and to improve our products for our private users. You will see a lot of product improvements in Leboncoin going forward. You will see continuous development of our app products. You will see new ad views and new ad listing pages. You will see a new dashboard for our private sellers and the launch of a peer-to-peer payment solution. We will also start experimenting with delivery services. We are improving significantly our holiday rental products at the moment, and we will also start in the next quarters to come to experiment with new adjacent business areas also in Leboncoin.
In addition, we are also improving our products offering to new builders in France, in our real estate vertical with a combination product between Leboncoin and AvendreALouer.fr. Friends, even though, we now have more than 800,000 new ads coming into the Leboncoin platform every day, as you understand from what you're hearing, the Leboncoin growth story has just started. Moving over to Spain. We delivered good financial development in Spain in Q1, growing revenues with 18% and delivering an EBITDA margin of 25%. Also in Spain, we are focusing strongly on product development. Our revenue in the market is hugely driven by our strong vertical positions. In Spain, brand advertising revenues and private revenues make up a very low share of our total revenues.
This is, of course, indicating a potential going forward. There is a sound revenue balance in the Spanish market. Our product efforts are now really starting to pay off across all three verticals in Spain. InfoJobs is continuing its good growth, being clearly the number one job marketplace in Spain. In 2017, 1.5 million job contracts were signed through the InfoJobs platform. This is a year-over-year increase from 2016 of 14%. I have to say, living in Spain with still very high unemployment rates, it really makes me proud to work in a company that gives so much transparency and help people to find a job in the challenging job market. In motor, we are continuing to strengthen our number one position.
Traffic is increasing significantly in Coches.net. With new product developments going forward, we expect this growth also to continue. Customer satisfaction for our Spanish car dealers is also improving as we are delivering more and better quality leads. This was also confirmed by the market in the Schibsted Spain Motor Awards event that we hosted in April in Madrid, with great participation from the whole Spanish car industry. We also see good growth in real estate in Spain at the moment. As you know, we have a good and strong competitor in idealista. Now we are kicking back with product improvements in Fotocasa and Habitaclia. As you can see now in Q1, Fotocasa is really back on the growth track, strengthening the competitive position with a traffic growth of 30%.
We have also launched Habitaclia in Madrid, the stronghold of idealista with early encouraging results. Going forward in Spain, we will relentlessly focus on user and customer-driven product development. We think this is the way and path to market leadership, and we will continue with a strong marketing push to further strengthen our vertical positions in Spain. Lastly, moving over to Brazil, another great growth vehicle. I recently visited the team there, and I have to say they have a very strong team in place in Rio and São Paulo. Linking back to the playbook, the funnel, which I commented on earlier, OLX Brazil is truly following that path. We are the clear leader in generalists. We have more than 7 million daily active users and growing strongly. You know, in Schibsted, we love internal competition among our teams.
It was a tough realization for our French team to realize that we have now a new kid on the block in terms of being the biggest site in our portfolio. Luckily for the French team, they still have the monetization leadership. Let's see for how long. Joke aside, the OLX position is, as I said, very strong. 7 million daily users, 80% mobile traffic share, which are healthy metrics in the mobile-driven market. Now we are the 15th-biggest online site in Brazil. Leboncoin is number three in France, OLX is climbing. As you can see, we are the clear leader in the car vertical. We deal with double as many car dealers on our platform compared to the number two player in the market.
We are also a strong challenger in real estate with our combined product offering of OLX and our real estate vertical specific product, [Estadia]. As you know, in real estate in Brazil, the recent merger between SAP and VivaReal created a strong market-leading position. We are attacking this position with strong product improvements, increasing paid search and marketing investment in the Brazilian market. We have a very strong traffic machine in our generalist position supporting this growth. Brazil is in the early stages of monetization. As you can see, we delivered strong top-line growth of 50% in Q1, and we see a positive quarter in terms of EBITDA, as we have guided on earlier. We are very satisfied with the development in Brazil at the moment.
If you look into the total market size, the growth of the market, and the speed of our local team in Brazil, we expect this asset to de, develop very strongly also going forward. With this, I hope I gave you some more insight in addition to the Q1 financials on the marketplace business in Schibsted. Our team is dedicated to deliver on our strategic development going forward. We are driven by strong growth at Opera, so we maintain our 15%-20% annual growth target.
Thank you very much Sondre. As you can see, we have a very engaged team working day and night to deliver on this, and I'm happy to give some more color on this. May also just remind you that for those who are not present, we'll have a conference call later this afternoon. Sondre and I will also travel and visit investors in London next week and in U.S. later this month. All right. Now let's turn over to the publishing. Now we're in the publishing house. We're in the same building that houses VG and Aftenposten. I can tell you there's a vibrant atmosphere also here and lots of good activity going on.
Looking at the results, at the numbers, you can see that digital growth is continuing top -line for Aftenbladet and VG when it comes to advertising. The subscription papers are delivering well when it comes to subscription, you just have all the digital subscriptions. You can see that the turnover this quarter is stable. The margin is somewhat lower than one year ago, but is somewhat higher than two years ago. If you look particularly at VG and Aftenbladet, they've had a strong development last year, especially VG had a phenomenal year last year, and they're also doing well this year. I think that the guys in VG talked about internal competition as the inspiration.
I can tell you that VG has been inspired by the tale of digital subscriptions that Aftenposten and the others are doing very well. Now VG is saying, "Well, what's in it for us?" When they started to look closer at this, you can see that the VG+ that I'm sure that many of you that in this room are following is a lot of interesting articles. That has actually provided also a lots of new subscribers even for VG. The pricing has also been increased. This is becoming a meaningful revenue source also for VG. Aftenbladet is working now exactly how should they configure their Plus offer, what can they do in order to improve their position also here.
If you look at the digital subscription numbers, I think it's. The print is of course going down, the print will continue to be there for a number of years. Some people said that, "Well, print will be dead in two years." They said that 10 years ago, five years ago. I think everyone who's talking about print all the time has to extend the lifetime of the print. If you look at the subscription papers, the growth, of course, is coming from the digital subscription. Here you can see that younger people, they subscribe to digital content.
I think in the, kind of, the world we're living in, many people also in the younger generation are learning and seeing that to pay for quality content is not a big expense compared to what you get. I think we can, we see a very positive development there. Of course, the important part, the engine in all the editorial operations is the work that's being done editorially. I think that our newspapers, and I'm proud to say that, they continue to deliver top quality journalism. Here is just a few examples from lately. Bergens Tidende wrote a very compelling and gripping story about a person who was caught under an avalanche.
You can see that in the recent award ceremony in our group, then VG was given several diplomas based on investigative journalism that they have provided. This is very healthy development in the editorial departments. Right. I think a few words on Schibsted Growth. I said that the Schibsted Growth is has a positive development. You can see that yourself. You can see that, of course, everyone knows about Lendo. I'll get back to that in a second. Tise is a well-known service that is doing well and continue to expand. I think there is a couple of promising also new kids in the on the block or in the in the portfolio.
Hypoteket is one that packages mortgages in the Swedish market. Bynk is a purely mobile bank, which we have a minority shareholding, so there are some promising new things there. Of course, the strongest growth in terms of revenues and also profits comes from Lendo, and I think that is it's a very good company. They're proving that this concept is as good in Sweden, Norway, and also in Finland. The growth there continues. That's why we're looking at should there be other opportunities also for Lendo. Right. I think I'll end that part here and turn over to the finance part, Trond. Please take that away.
Thank you, Erik. If we look at the Q1 for Schibsted, we continue to deliver a good result and improve our profits. It's good to see that our main assets contribute. First of all, the classified operations in the biggest countries. Also, we do see a strong digital improvement in the media business. If we look then at the Q1 , we have an operating profit of NOK 417 against NOK 228 . That is a result of the improved result, but also reduced investments in our investment portfolio. We also see a good contribution from OLX Brazil. If you look at the share of profit from and loss from JVs, it is flattish.
There is some technical adjustment just from our share in Polaris. If you look at the underlying, it is certainly a profit in Asia, in flatland, and then an equivalent loss in Asia. If you look at the underlying development between the two quarters, you can see that it is a big contribution from France, and delivering on especially all the verticals there. In Norway, there is, as explained, also an IFRS effect and some Easter effect. If you adjust for that, we have an underlying 8%-9% growth. Also in Sweden, I mean, we have a development that is more flattish. If you also there adjust for at least for the underlying vertical revenues, because the display is hampering really the Blocket figures and also some increased revenue.
Spain continued to do well. Of course, we have reduced our investments in investment portfolio, and it's mainly consisting of Schibsted and Mexico. The publishing has some low results, unlike strong digital development. It's right to say that we also have invested somewhat in new delivery services and also some increased activity like Olympics, et cetera, in the Q1 . The growth portfolio continued to deliver first of all on Lendo. One important thing to mention in this quarterly report is the IFRS adjustment. We have a new IFRS 15 that we need to face revenue more according to underlying activity. It is one-off effect, first of all, in the FINN and Blocket and France figures.
The negative effect in Q1 this year is due to that we had some lower income in Q4 in 2017. Looking forward, in Q2, Q3, it will be a more neutral effect, then we will have a slight positive effect in Q4 again. This will not really hamper our figures going forward, and we will see some improvement towards the end of the year. Another IFRS that will be in place is the IFRS 16, which is important for most companies and also for Schibsted. If we look at the effect of that, it will be close to NOK 500 million improved EBITDA in 2019 and onwards. It's an important figure to factor in.
This will vary of course between companies, but we have quite substantial leases that will really improve then our EBITDA figure as such. Looking at the key figures, we have a strong financial position and also deliver on cash flow improvement this quarter. We also have a financing and debt maturity profile that is a sound and good basis for continued to grow operations going forward. The board has proposed to the General Assembly later today that it will be a dividend, which is stable of NOK 1.75, and it is 32% of our cash flow from operating activities. As explained before, we have an underlying tax rate of 30% in our operations.
As we are in many countries with a tax rate around 30%, above, below, and also we have been prudent in taking into account, losses in some of the investment activity. I think that concludes my part, Rolv Erik. For you to sum up the status.
Thank you very much, Trond. I think, let me repeat the headline from the Q1 , and I think this actually serves as a good guideline then for looking ahead. The online classifieds continues to grow at the pace expected. We're continuing to emphasize further revenue growth from the verticals. We believe that is where the best growth opportunities are, and we're working hard to push our products in that direction. You can see that the of the major sites there is a continued good development in France, in Spain, in Norway and Brazil. There, I think, you'll continue to see a good development there. Sweden is a bit disappointing with Blocket. We're working hard to rectify that situation.
Then we have guided you on the investment losses and how they will develop looking ahead. For the publishing, I think then, it's when looking ahead, you can continue the same factors playing out. Prints will decline, but not at the dramatic pace that many anticipated some years ago. There is a very good development in digital subscriptions for the subscription papers, now also for VG. You continue to see that VG and Aftenbladet take market share in the ad market. For Schibsted Growth, well, Lendo is the big locomotive. I think it will be that also for the rest of this year.
There are also other companies such as Prisjakt doing well, and we have some exciting new growth opportunities that I mentioned. I think we'll end the presentation here. Then I'll invite, I invite up to help me answer in the Q&A, Sondre and Trond over there. Siv, if you also could come up and cover the media part, that would be very good. Then I think we'll provide Siv with the microphone, right? I think there's a camera, so I guess we should stand relatively close to each other, right? So we're all in all in sight. Okay, now I get the lights. All right. Well, let's open up for the Q&A. Now we got a big panel here, so let's have... Yes, I think it's Preben first.
Preben Rasch-Olsen, Carnegie. Just a few questions, first Sondre. Listening on you on Spain, it seems like the revenue growth was accelerating in Spain going into the next quarter. Should we expect revenue growth well above 20% for the coming quarters?
We don't go specific on revenue growth in concrete context. The numbers we showed on the slides were rolling 12 months forecast and it's fair to say that the growth has been accelerating over there, i f you see on rolling 12-month forecast basis over the last over the last forecast. Like I said, we are happy with the development in Spain at the moment, but I will not guide on the concrete direction of the revenue growth going forward. We will continue to have strong growth figures.
Then on Lendo, there is a strategic review of the personal finance part of growth on Lendo. When will we get some news on this? In what direction is it headed?
Well, yeah, that's. Thank you for bringing that up, because we said that last time that Lendo is developing very well. We've so far developed it into the key countries. We believe that there are also opportunities outside of Scandinavia for some of the larger markets. We said in case we do that, then we'll probably take on a partner to share that expansion. We're reviewing that now. I think in the next quarter presentation, we'll be able to tell you more about it. Guys from the webcast, you hear us sound?
Yes. Here are a couple of questions from the audience on the webcast. One is on the general situation in the markets. Some of the big names in the U.S. especially Facebook, are gaining some market share in certain markets on Facebook Marketplace. Could you spend some time on talking about this in relation to your sites? How is Facebook not really growing into your main verticals in Scandinavia and international markets? How do you assess that risk?
Yeah, we also commented quite a lot on the situation with Facebook Marketplace on our capital market day in Barcelona in November. Facebook Marketplace is present in many of our markets, with so to say different level, of maturity. We are of course following the development closely. So far, we don't see strong competition in our key markets from, Facebook Marketplace. We think that we, run our classified business in a better way. We think we have better products. We are, of course, focusing then on the trust part and the liquidity part of our marketplace to strengthen our position. We also focus very much on the content quality in our platforms, to make sure that we have, good quality ads, not so much fraud.
We have very good fraud mechanisms across our marketplace portfolio. Even though we see the growth of Facebook Marketplace in some of our markets, we still believe that we will be able to continue to develop our positions, focusing on user liquidity and content quality.
So far, they have enlarged the market, so of course, we're watching that very closely.
Okay. Maybe we can take a couple more from the web. Can you please elaborate a little bit on the competitive situation in Sweden for Blocket? How much of the pressure you feel there is related to Rakuten versus other factors?
As I commented on, we have a positive development in our professional car position in Sweden despite competition. What we see in the overall car market is that the first quarter has been slow, actually more on the private car part of Blocket, which is now recovering in April, and not on the professional part of the market. We continues to do product delivery and product development on the professional car side of Blocket. You will see some very interesting product launches now in the Q2 . We see increased traffic growth, and we see improved lead generation to the car dealers. We are not feeling, so to say, hammered by the competitive situation in the car vertical in Sweden at the moment.
It's fair to say that in the Q1 figures, as I mentioned, there are, 4%, negative effect of the display ads in Sweden. That's important. In my vertical is doing okay.
I think also, a very positive thing in Blocket is the growth we're seeing in jobs. Forgot to mention that. I think the systematic work they have been doing with by developing that job vertical last few years is really paying off, and you're seeing there a very healthy growth now.
All right. One more from here. There was a margin drop in Leboncoin quarter-over-year. Would you be able to elaborate a little bit on the background for this and what to expect going forward?
Well, again, we getting frequently the question, guide on the margin Leboncoin going forward. We have said that we are not g oing to do that. It varies from quarter to quarter due to marketing efforts and other activity. That's also little bit effect of that in Q1. I think that we are satisfied and happy with the margin, but I'm not going to say anything going forward.
Okay. Can you please talk a little bit about the output for investment losses in the more in the medium term? What's the output there? Can it turn positive? Secondly, can you also talk a little bit about the product and tech development spend? How do you expect that to continue going forward?
Well, when it comes to Product and Tech, we have said that it is now at the HQ and center product and tech that is flattish, going down. That's the guidance for 2018, and we reiterate that. Then, for the investment space, we have guided on that to be minus EUR 40 million to EUR 50 million for 2018. Of course, as the main part of this includes the Shpock investment, no doubt that we expect this to continue to go down going forward as it is key for us to, of course, deliver on penetrating the car vertical that it looks very promising in the UK market, first of all. Yeah.
I think with the current outlook, that will continue to go down even further in the medium term. Of course, we always have to respond to things that are happening in the marketplace, like we did in our markets, like we did last year.
Okay. We can have one more from here. Can you please talk a little bit about the change to the management incentives that are proposed in your annual report and for the general meeting later today, where the long-term incentive plan is linked to the total shareholder return? What's driving this change?
Well, that has been suggested by the board because there is a clear expression from the board that they want to link the performance of the management closer to also the performance of the shareholders. That is, it's relatively simple and straightforward. That's been constructed in a way that I now believe will link the shareholders development much closer to the management performance.
All right. one more from me. On Brazil, can you please talk about your medium-term margin expectations? Are there any reasons why you can't replicate the Avito success in Russia?
I mean, we would like to do that, of course. As we said, we believe that Brazil has a great potential and some of the same characteristics as we see in Russia. On the other hand, we are still two, three years behind, at least in the development of and maturity of the site. We have hit a good margin and profitable operations in Q1, that is good.
I think it's one year from today, we announced that we increased our stake from 25% to 50%. We're very happy with the development we've seen there in the last year. All right. Are there any more questions in this room? I think, any questions from the media? You got the chance. Well, I see there seems to be, not that many questions, this in public. Perhaps we can stay around for a few minutes. Then, I think, it's time to end this presentation. Thank you so much for attending. Let me remind you that there is an AGM starting, 9:30 A.M. here, 10:30 A.M. Then there is also a conference call for investors at 2:00 P.M. with us again. Thank you very much.