Welcome everybody. My name is Ole Jacob Sunde, and I'm the Chairman of Schibsted, and it's my pleasure to welcome you all to our Capital Market Day here in Barcelona. We will have an interesting presentation today. Here are the celebrities that will present. Rolv- Erik will start and give the overview of from his perspective. Sondre will focus on the marketplaces in general, Antoine will give us a deep dive in what is happening in France. Anders will talk more about FINN.no and what is happening in our Norwegian marketplace. Finally, Raoul will talk about the new media division and his perspective for the media division.
Now, as you listen to the presentations today, there are two issues that I would like to bring to your attention and to which I think you should pay particular notice. The first is execution is eating strategy for breakfast. There have been investors asking me about why Schibsted is reorganizing again. It's only two years since you organized last time.
My response to that is that in this competitive landscape, you actually have to change, learn and adapt constantly. I think it's a good sign that we actually do that we do adapt and from the learnings that we've taken. The reorganization that we did two years ago has produced enormous value for those two years. It was definitely a step in the right direction.
Now we adapt and go forward because we need speed, we need agility in order to tackle the challenges that are confronting us. So superior execution is my first sort of hint to you that you should look at when the presenters are up here. The second is, we have to converge and scale because if you look at Schibsted's history is actually a history of local entrepreneurship that's been enormously successful, and we have to keep that local presence, but at the same time reach out for global scale.
Because all the good product and tech development that we are doing in Schibsted, we have to make sure that we get the operational leverage of that, so that we could see that flowing through to the results of the company.
I do think that we are on a good path of achieving that, but there are still lots to do. So my second point to you is that look at how we are able to converge and scale. Since I'm always also then representing the trust, the Tinius Trust, the biggest investor, I could tell you that those two superior execution and the ability to converge and scale are two of the value drivers that I think will stand us good in the years to come. Rolv Erik, would you like to kick off?
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jacob and I think we can do that here. Thank you. Warm welcome to all of you to Barcelona, which is actually one of our hometowns. Hope you have an interesting program for you. Marcel, where are you? Marcel asked me when coming in here, a little bit disappointed that we're going to see the same familiar old faces.
I promised him there'll be a couple of new faces. Not least, there's going to be many from management present. I encourage you to also talk with those present from the management during the mingling session afterwards. I'll kick it off. My introduction is that Schibsted has been an innovative company, and we have had growth as one of our main themes for many years.
We will continue to deliver value to our shareholders by continue to grow the company and continue to innovate. We're going to tell you more about it today. Most focus will be in classifieds. We'll also have an interesting section on the media division. We have recently, as the Chairman referred to, reorganized the company or in fact, we're in the middle of the reorganization. The whole point with that is that we've created two main divisions. Classifieds encompassing all our classified businesses in more than 20 countries and the media houses.
by doing that, we're putting the people who are delivering the new products, the new technology closer to those who are sitting in the markets. That is really the whole point, because we're seeing that in the world that we're living in, developments are taking place at an accelerating pace, and we need to be able to act quickly. I'm confident that with this new divisional structure, we'll be doing much better. We'll be able to execute faster in our marketplaces, which I think is necessary, but also give us advantage towards competition. Then there's the focus.
We are, I dare to say, among the best-in-class in the things that we're doing, and we want to be able to focus on that and continue to spread our expertise throughout our different sites, both this growth, both for marketplaces and also in Media division. Scale, as we referred to already, we have the ability to scale our products and technology platforms throughout the different sites that we work on.
We'll tell you more about that today. If you look at our history, this is our recent history, on the right-hand side there you can see the marketplaces, both in terms of revenues and in terms of EBITDA. You can see it's a stable, good development as projected.
I think if you'd drawn those bars another five years back, you would have seen the same development, the same pattern. I think this shows you that the classifieds business is a good place to be, where there are many interesting growth opportunities also going forward. In the Media division, you've seen that, of course, the revenues has come down a little bit.
If you look at the EBITDA development, it's actually been very favorable, especially if you compare it with industry peers. I'm sure you noticed that during our Q3 presentation recently. We have reorganized the company, and we are putting in the organizational plan, but I'd like to stress that our overall strategic targets, they are the same.
We've said that we want to be a global leader in classifieds. We are one of the global leaders. We want to continue to develop that position. I'm confident then with the new organization that, headed by Sondre, which you'll hear more about later today, we're in a good position to do that. We've had the assignment from the board already for a number of years.
We want to create world-class digital media houses. I believe also that we are well ahead in that development. Not that the development stops, on the other hand, it's going quicker and quicker even there. If you look at the results of VG and Aftenblad and many others, I'm actually happy with what we're seeing. Previously we have communicated some financial targets.
Let me just touch upon those. Most important perhaps for many in this room is then the growth rate that we outlined for the online classifieds. You see we have had that target for a number of years. We have delivered on that target. When it comes to the investment phase, losses, we said we're going to reduce it, and we will continue to reduce it also next year.
If you look at the targets for the for the media houses, when it comes to their margins, we have delivered or slightly over-delivered to what we have communicated that we would do. Let me get into the classifieds business. We are a global leader in online classifieds, but we are of course managing our portfolio actively.
If you compare our portfolio today from what it was three, five years ago, I believe we're in a better place. We have focused our portfolio around the big operations in Europe and also in Latin America, sold out most of our businesses in Asia, increased our exposure to the big and leading sites such as Brazil. We've chosen to exit some markets where we didn't do that as well. For instance, Belgium, that we tried for a number of years, didn't really work, we sold out. We have also then had a strategy of doing in-market consolidation. Of course, we did the big transaction with Naspers a few years back.
We've also done smaller transactions in countries like Morocco and countries like Ireland with the local partners in order to achieve that, number one position, and we're working further on doing that. I'm very happy with the development of our portfolio. All right. This is something that many are asking us about. Are we maintaining our growth rate?
Yes. We believe that we have a history that can prove that we have lived up to that, and we believe that our businesses will continue to deliver on those growth targets. We'll continue doing the things we're doing with portfolio optimization, but we're also seeing now more operational leverage in the business that will enable us to continue to deliver on the growth targets.
At the same time, also a focus on profitability improvement and a focus on cash flow, which we've reinforced especially then the last few quarters. Right. We will get more into the classified strategy today, and you have the opportunity to deep dive. But many of you have noticed that over the years, it has become more competitive situation, more players in the generalist markets.
That is right. I still believe that we're doing well in that market. But we also have as a main priority for a number of years to deepen our vertical roots. Classified's business is actually quite simple. It's all about providing good leads or the best leads to the sellers. The professional sellers are the ones who are interested in paying for those leads, car dealers, recruiters, real estate agents, et cetera.
To work closely with them and understand their needs, and thereby customize products, that actually helps boosting the leads that they're living off and what we're living from. To have those vertical routes within cars, within jobs and real estate is very, very important. We've also talked about the platform, and we have the ability with the number of sites we have in many countries to work more closely together and use the same components over again, which gives us an advantage when it comes to developing new functionality. We'll get more into that later.
Because to provide the lead is the important thing, and if you're able to have those number one positions that you see an example of a number of examples over here, that gives you a very strong position to drive that traffic and is really a very much dynamic that if you have the leading position, you can monetize also in a very good manner and make good products for all the users. We just wanted to show you this one because many people think, well, advertising is most important or general is the most important. Well, it's actually verticals that you see cars, real estate and job, where we have more than 60% of our revenues.
We believe that is a stable and good place to be, and we'll continue to pursue building those relationships to further build out those revenue streams. More about that later. There's one other things with classifieds that I like to mention to you, and that is that it helps building a sustainable society.
These are some calculations we have done with an outside institute that shows you know, savings that are due to the fact that people buy and sell second-hand things. Big effects on greenhouse gases, and we're contributing to big reduction. Why is that important? Well, of course, we want to contribute to a sustainable society. The... what's also important is we're seeing our users.
They want to use sites and services that play a good role in society, and not least, talented people, young talents, especially the young generation, they're very concerned about what's happening to our planet. If they want to see what role are we playing in society, and for the media houses, it's been pretty clear for a long time what kind of important role we're playing in democracy.
We highlighted that as many as we see that many of our users are interested in, also many talented people that want to come and work for Schibsted. All right. We believe that we have more potential in the classifieds industry, and this is just an illustration to show. Yes, U.K., i s the most digitized country in Europe, and Germany is also a big country.
You can see, well, how big are these, how big are the different vertical segments in these countries. You can see that France, of course, already quite advanced, but still, we believe a significant growth potential in the years to come. If you look at Spain, where we're in, you can see that the growth potential should be large for the whole market and hence for it also for our position.
Some people ask us, "When will all the sites have the same ARPU as FINN.no?" I cannot promise you that that will happen. This illustrates to you that there is still a significant growth potential in two big markets that are important for us. It's actually the same situation also in other, many other markets.
A bit more about our position again then. We believe that we differentiate ourselves from others players in this manner. Of course you have the global platforms and you know them. They are very good at rolling out scalable technologies. No doubt, no doubt about that. But that's their main strength. If you look, people ask, "Well, what's Facebook doing in the classifieds market, et cetera?"
Of course, we're watching them very closely what they're doing and never underestimate such big platforms. But what they are not doing so much is really customizing their product. They have one product mainly for all markets. What we do is that we customize our products for the different markets. This entails strong routes again, with the vertical players.
We have a lot of feet on the ground to talk with real estate brokers in Spain, in France, in Norway, et cetera, et cetera. How do you achieve the best effect? How can we improve our situation for you? That local customization is important.
We believe also that compared to some players that are only present in one country or in a few countries, we have a strength and advantage in the sense that since we're in 20 countries, we can develop the classifieds components, technology and product one time and use it in many places. Of course, the-Of course, we're working towards a stronger convergence, but we're also seeing that some components are being built in one place and rolled out in many places.
Examples of this could be messaging services, in-app messaging, in-app notifications that was recently built, rolled out in France, for instance. Targeted advertising based on data that we collect, data analytics and then also a number of tools for those professional customers that I talked about, car dealers, real estate brokers, et cetera, give them dashboards, what kind of ads are working, what is the most effective, what should you do, and what should you change, et cetera.
By having a large number of very qualified people in product and technology, we have their advantage because we can utilize what they're making then throughout our whole portfolio. Right. That is what I wanted to say about the classifieds, but of course the laboratory presentation afterwards will go more in detail on many interesting topics.
I would also like to talk about our media houses. I'm very proud of what they're doing. It's a constant product development. They've been very good at staying ahead, I believe, of the curve and taking part in active disruption of ourselves. We are a leading publisher in the Nordics. We have a good portion of the ad market there.
We've seen now for instance, recently that VG and Aftenposten is actually taking market share. In the growth business, we're creating new digital winners such as Lendo and other players. Of course, this one with not many in this room, not myself either, have expected a few years back. This illustrates how people now are willing to pay for quality content.
I think most people know what happened a year back after the election in the U.S., The New York Times, the day afterwards went like this. People were really illustrated they were willing to pay for that. I think the same thing happened now after the Brexit, actually, The Guardian got a jump. Even in the more quiet corner of the world where we're living, it's proving that people are willing to pay for quality content.
This exceeds my expectation. The good thing here is that this is also happening at good prices, at good rates. It's a much younger generation that is signing up for these products than is the case for the paper product. There's a positive development there.
I would say also relentless focus on developing new products. VG is, for instance, collaborating with Snapchat. That gives them not only a young public, but also a lot of impulses for how to increase their product development. I think that our media houses are doing very well, and as you can see also from the economic results, you can see it as reflected there.
Before we move on, let me also say a few words about our growth business. We have the growth businesses in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, but it's also in Norway and Sweden, a collection of interesting marketplaces and other growth companies that we help promote and boost throughout our sites.
Here you see a collection of them, you can also see that on the, both on the top line and also the EBITDA, they've had a very healthy development. I think our the success has been obvious for within personal finance, there particularly Lendo has been doing very well in the, for a number of years. You can see Sweden is doing nicely and growing, after we launched it in Norway, it's had a very positive development, after we're also Finland is growing at a more rapid pace than perhaps we had anticipated. We believe there's good growth, we'll continue to drive it in the Nordic markets.
we're also announcing today that we will actually initiate the strategic review of personal finance, including Lendo, to see what is the best way to develop those companies, going further. There might be growth potential, outside Scandinavia. In that case, I think it, we would look whether we should take on a partner for that we'll look at it and have a strategic review and see what, how, what's the best way to grow that company, and the personal finance sector further on. Right. Now I think I'll hand it over to the next speaker. I'm very happy to see you all. I believe that we have an exciting afternoon, next couple of hours, for you.
I'm confident that the way Schibsted is now set up, we have a very interesting growth story to continue our innovation and grow the company for years to come, and I'm looking forward to telling you more about it through my colleagues. I'll end my part here, and now I'd like to introduce the next speaker. After that, we'll have a Q&A session. Next speaker is Sondre Gravir that many of you already know, and Sondre has a history of. He has been head of FINN, he's been in the media houses, he's been running the big sites here, and since then, a few months back, he's now head of the classifieds division. Please, Sondre, go ahead.
Thank you. Thank you, Rolv- Erik. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see you here in Barcelona. I talked to some of you before we started now, and some of you were flying out of a snowy Oslo this morning, so I guess it's nice to come down here. I'm excited to share some more insights on the journey we have had since we last met in the investor days in London and New York a year ago, and also to look ahead, and, you know, dive into where we'll have the focus going forward. I have some key messages for you today. Those are that we will continue to drive growth by verticalizing our products. This will be a key message throughout the presentation, as you also understood from the introduction from Rolv- Erik.
We will also focus relentlessly on converging our platforms to achieve global scale and speed. I will also come back to that. Thirdly, we will continue to grow our investment phase assets, and you will see of the charts I'm having later that they are now reaching profitability. As Rolv- Erik said, we reconfirm our mid and long-term growth ambition of 15%-20% across our marketplace portfolio. Let's zoom out a little bit and look at the Schibsted marketplace portfolio by numbers. As Rolv- Erik mentioned, we have a business in 22 countries. We have 38 products. We're generating more than or close to EUR 850 million in revenues and around EUR 240 million in EBITDA over the last 12 months.
Currently, we have 30 million daily users on our platform, but the total population in the countries we are present in is 1.2 billion people. We are just starting our growth journey, looking at the potential we have in the markets. Then we divide our portfolio in marketplaces in two categories. The first category is what we have called when we also report to the market, the developed phase assets.
These are mainly European assets where we have been growing and where we have monetized over several years. The second segment is what we call the investment phase assets. These are high-growth assets where we have strong traffic positions and when we are now focusing more and more going forward on verticalization to drive increased monetization.
Also in the investment phase portfolio, we have our new models like Shpock, which I will give some more highlights on later in the presentation. First, let's look into the status of our developed phase assets. As you can see here, we have very strong market positions across the verticals with these assets. This scoring is based on the total unique total number of unique users across our platforms.
As you can see, we aim to be number one in the markets and in the verticals we operate in. We use these strong traffic positions to monetize our professional sellers within cars, real estate and jobs. We see strong results as a result of this, and we have been growing both our top line and our EBITDA over the last couple of years in the developed phase assets.
We will have some more insights, specifically from Leboncoin and FINN, from Anders and Antoine after me, but I can share some more flavor on Spain in this part of the presentation. Here in the Spanish market, we have several brands and products. We have two generalist products, which is Milanuncios and Vibbo. And then we have some strong vertical positions with Fotocasa and habitaclia in the real estate area.
We have Coches and Motos in the motor vertical, and then we have InfoJobs in the job vertical. Spain is, as many of you know, a highly competitive market, and it's been so for a while. Yet, as you saw in the Q3 presentation we had last Friday, Spain continues to deliver good financial growth, and this growth is driven by the growth we have in our vertical positions.
In the generalist area, we remain the leader in terms of total traffic across the platforms, but Wallapop, you know, has taken a strong position with content and top-of-mind leadership. As I said, the financial growth is driven by the vertical positions. Here, as you can see, we see very good development for Infojobs, which is experiencing 20% top-line growth.
We're doing this with really improving our product, especially within the mobile area. Now 80% of the traffic of Infojobs is coming from mobile, which is a very strong performance for a job product. We're also very proud of the fact that in 2016, 1.2 million jobs were closed due to Infojobs. This is truly delivering on our vision on empowering people in their daily life.
It's an important contribution, of course, to the growth of the Spanish economy. In motor, we are also clearly the market leader here in Spain. We are strengthening our position throughout the year, and we will continue to do so going forward. This year, we have seen very strong growth and development for coches.net with a 27% traffic growth year to date. We also experienced strong top-line growth for our car positions in Spain. Milanuncios, our generalist in Spain, in addition to Vibbo, is maintaining its very strong position as a lead generator for both private and professional car sellers.
Wallapop has gained traction in the Spanish market in cars in terms of onboarding professional dealers to get the content on the platform. We are confident that we will stay clearly as the market leader in the car area in Spain in the time to come. In real estate, we have intense competition, as you know, with idealista. We see solid content growth for Fotocasa, and the traffic development for Fotocasa is equally robust. For habitaclia, the growth story continues, and the total visits of habitaclia has grown 41% since January 2016. It's a really strong development also for these assets.
We remain the leader in terms of total traffic across the platforms in the real estate category in Spain, even though it's fair to say that over the last year, idealista has strengthened their position, especially in the Madrid region. Looking ahead for Spain, we will continue to invest hard and execute forcefully and invest in marketing and product development.
We have done some management changes to strengthen the leadership or organization in the Spanish businesses. The political situation we are experiencing in Catalonia at the moment might, of course, affect the macro uncertainty in the Spanish market that might have some implication of the short-term development within real estate and jobs. We remain very confident on our midterm growth and ambitions for the Spanish market. Let's move into the more investment phase assets.
Also, as you can see here, we like number one positions. We like the gold medals. We like being the leader in traffic, because when we have the leadership positions in traffic, we can use this to monetize the professional sellers in the verticals, and so we are also doing for our investment phase assets. This is the focus for these assets also going forward.
We also see strong top line growth for our investment phase assets. The local teams are also here focusing very hard on improving the vertical products and the vertical competitive position we have in the different markets. Overall, as you can also see, profitability is improving across the portfolio. Looking ahead, we will continue to invest in Shpock and Mexico, while the rest of the investment phase portfolio are now reaching profitability.
This development is exemplified by this slide, where we have shown the relative index EBITDA development in three key markets, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. All in all of these three markets, we have seen tangible improvements in EBITDA over the past year, and this is driven both, of course, by reduced marketing investment, but mainly also by the increase in vertical revenues.
Looking a little bit more into Brazil, which is of course among our biggest and most interesting markets. In Brazil now, we currently have more than 16 million monthly listings, and we have solid growth in that number. Brazil is also, as some of you know, a $3 billion advertising market growing at around 12% per year. In Brazil, the team is also very focused on improving our vertical products and improving our vertical competitive situation.
The growth potential is significant. Brazil is still an immature market when it comes to online classifieds. For example, in the car vertical, we have more than three times the content of our closest competitors, but we only have still 20% of the car dealers onboarded on our platform, because many of the car dealers in Brazil, they don't spend money yet in the online classifieds area. Here we see great growth opportunities in both growing the online classifieds market in general, but also growing our market share within that area. In real estate specifically, OLX faces competition from two vertical players, ZAP and VivaReal.
While OLX benefit from a very strong position in traffic in real estate, as we saw on the previous slide, it's fair to say that the penetration with professional sellers within the within the real estate categories, that penetration remains somewhat lower. We are confident that we will be able to strengthen our position here and to also monetize the professional sellers in the real estate vertical of Brazil going forward.
The team earlier this year in OLX Brazil launched Storia, which is a dedicated real estate vertical, which are serving the needs of the real estate agents even stronger than our generalist position. The next asset I would focus a little bit on is Shpock. Shpock, we started our investments in Shpock back in 2013, and we have been fully consolidating Shpock since 2015.
It's been a great journey since then, with, establishing a very strong position in some of the key European advertising market. Shpock has a unique product being, you know, a purely mobile native app in our portfolio. We see some key strengths in the product linked to this mobile position. I will not go deep in those here, but I guess you're all familiar with this. We see that most, the majority of the Shpock users are below 35 years old.
Also, they close the transaction on the platform that gives us unique user data in Shpock, you know, even closer to the actual transaction. We are seeing strong traction for Shpock in several of our markets, both in the markets where we are attacking, and also like U.K. and Germany, and also in the market where we are already present, like Sweden and Italy. Looking at the biggest advertising markets in Europe, U.K., Shpock has become the leading marketplace app, if you measure in terms of total app usage. We are significantly bigger than the incumbent player, Gumtree, in terms of app traffic, and we are rapidly closing the content gap as well.
In some categories where we typically see that the native apps get a strong traction, like fashion and electronics, we are the biggest generalist in the U.K. by now. We are also catching up strongly in the private car area, where we are now the second biggest player in terms of private cars listing in the UK market. The Shpock team is headquartered in Vienna.
It's a very strong and focused team. We are now stepping up our monetization efforts in the product development. So far, the Shpock team has been focusing on advertising revenues and private revenues. We start to see substantial revenue streams within those two areas with very strong performance within the native and in the programmatic advertising space. Until now, Shpock has not monetized professional sellers, not at all.
Actually, they have not even been allowed on listing their ads on the platform. This changes now. We will now start to monetize also the professional sellers, allowing them to enter on the Shpock platform. We have launched a new product for the professional sellers, a shop product, which we have called Shpock Shop, Shpock+. We have done a lot of testing in the market since the summer with this product, and we see really promising results so far. We have also started to verticalize the product, as you can see on the last example here.
If you see, if you use the app now, for example, in the U.K., you will see that we have a car-adapted listing page with much more richer info than the typical generalist listing page, and we also have car-specific ad insertion using license plate lookup, so it's much easier to have rich data on the car listings as a both professional and private seller on Shpock.
Then Rolv- Erik commented a little bit on the competitive landscape. Yes, competition is increasing. We all know. We see new native apps coming into the market. We see specialized verticals, both global and local, competitors coming into the market. Of course, we have several global tech companies we are competing with. We take this seriously.
At the same time, we believe that we have some core strengths and very focused execution, we are well equipped in facing these competitive challenges. We have a very strong mobile position with all our marketplace assets. We have strong local presence, as Rolv- Erik was commenting on, and we have local knowledge, and we have very strong verticalized products with key relationships to our professional sellers in the verticals.
At the same time, we are starting to really benefit from the global synergies from our global product and tech investments. Facebook is, of course, a player that we are following closely, and some of you asked about this before the presentation. We are following them, of course, after their push into marketplaces earlier this year.
We really don't see any strong effects on our growth rates in the markets where Facebook has launched its marketplace functionality yet. We believe this is because we, in general, have higher quality content than we've so far seen on Facebook, and also because we deliver, and we have the domain expertise on marketplaces and will deliver strong also on the product development going forward.
At the same time, we're also launching social features, improving our product also on the social dimension in terms of notification, trust mechanism, and messaging, which I will give an example on later. Looking at Rolv- Erik mentioned deepening the vertical roots and platform convergence, we will focus our efforts going forward around these two dimension, I will spend some time on giving you examples on this. Let's look into deepening the vertical roots first.
This, this is not a new thing, as you know. We have already started on that journey. This was also the key message when we met last year in New York and London for the Capital Market Day there. We see good results so far from these investments. Yes, we do have strong positions in the verticals in the markets we are present in.
Also for the developed phase assets, as Rolv- Erik indicated with the market sizing on his slides, we see that we still have a tremendous growth opportunity in investment phase and developed phase markets to really, you know, grow the online classified category and to increase and improve our market share within the category. As you remember from our first slide, we are here to win.
We are here to take number one positions, that means to increase our market shares going forward. Let me show some examples concretely on what we are doing in order to deepening the vertical roots. On this slide, we have two examples. On the left-hand side, you can see how we have worked systematically over the last period to improve the ad listing for cars for the professional sellers in FINN.
Where we have added functionality in the ad listing for the professional sellers to really show to the users all the benefits you get from buying a car from a professional seller instead of a private seller. Anders will comment more on this in his presentation, for example, around the financing solution. The second example here is from Subito, where we are also over the last 12 months have focused really on improving the car product.
We have put together a very focused team on cars with resources both from product and tech, marketing and sales working together. We have launched a new car section with more detailed filters, with, you know, the quality seal for professional cars, et cetera. We see strong traction of this product in the market.
We are also investing in vertical product development to target the efficiency of our marketplaces. On the left, you can see an example of a car valuation tool, which is in beta testing at the moment for some selected users in FINN, in Norway. What we enter here is, of course, to give a better estimation of the price of the cars. We really believe that this tool will reduce the friction in the car vertical in the marketplace, and hence also improve the transaction rate in this vertical.
On the right-hand side, you will see an example of the performance dashboard that we have launched for professional sellers in Leboncoin. Anders, Antoine will comment more on that in his presentation, so I will not go into the details there.
What is interesting with these examples is not only that it's really improving our vertical product portfolio in the market where we are launching these products, but this is also a great examples on the scalability and the synergies we get in our global data platform. When we have really nailed the performance of these products in Norway and in France, we can rapidly launch these tools because it's built on a global data infrastructure in other markets to benefit from our global tech investments.
Then we see the results of the initiatives in the number. You will hear more from FINN and Leboncoin later, as I said, but I want to highlight the development of car listings in FINN the last year is mainly driven by professional sellers. Secondly, you can see that the professional car, or the revenue from the professional car dealers in Italy has been increased by 55% over the last year.
The last example is from Ireland, where we have also launched new products for the car dealers, where we really have increased the average revenue we get from each car dealer on the platform. The second area, platform convergence. Platform convergence is not a goal in itself, but it's very important in order to achieve the global scale and the speed that Rolv- Erik was focusing on in his presentation.
As you know, we have already started the journey investing in global scalable product and tech solutions, and it's good to see now that we really start to see the results of these investments. On one of his slides, Rolv- Erik also had the messaging, but I will give you some more detail on this component.
The messaging component is important for us because messaging is a really important product feature on the marketplace product, because it really enables us to be closer to the transaction, and it reduces the friction in the communication between buyers and sellers. As you can see here, we have now launched the global messaging component in 14 countries with more than three million messages running through the component every day. In the past, we used to build this functionality in several assets.
This started as an initiative locally in FINN. What we now see when we have built a global solution is that we can build only one component that we use across our portfolio, both reducing our operational costs linked to having a messaging component and also increasing the quality of the service we give to our users.
A second example is on fraud, because in the messaging area, we also have fraud detection technology. We use this technology not only in messaging, we also use it, of course, as a part of our ad reviewing. As you can see here, a few years ago, Antoine, approximately two-thirds of the ads in Leboncoin was auto-moderated. Now it's close to 90% due to the new global fraud component, which is developed out of Leboncoin, but it now scales across several of our marketplace assets.
The last example I want to show you is around image recognition service that we are now experimenting with in our markets. Here you can see how we use this service to search in our search mechanism to find more relevant ads for the user in addition to the ad the user is looking on. This also, again, is about reducing the friction for the users so they can find their ideal purchase more effectively, and hence it drives liquidity in the marketplace, which is, so to say, the ultimate KPI that we are looking for in matching the buyer and seller's needs on the platform. This service is again enabled by our investment in platform solutions.
It's not something we talk so much about. This is again, as I said, crucial to get the global speed and synergies we need to have in our product and tech efforts. Many of our assets are now running on a common cloud-based infrastructure solution, and they're also using the same image services with more than 100 million images uploaded every month. This is, of course, a great starting point to train image recognition algorithms because we have the global data available, which gives much better results than if we would do this in only one market.
I think I have to stop there on the product examples, but as you can understand, I'm getting really excited talking about this because we really see some strong results in our markets. It's strong deliveries both from our local and global teams, and we will forcefully execute on these two dimensions going forward. I'm looking forward to the next Investor Day already, where hopefully I can give you many more new great examples.
To summarize the key messages from marketplaces, we will continue to drive profitable growth by deepening the vertical roots and to drive platform convergence, and we will execute forcefully on that. We will reach profitability for most of our investment phase assets, and we reconfirm the mid- and long-term growth target of 15%-20%.
In the marketplace organization, we have more than 3,000 employees who are working on delivering on this as we speak. They are excited on this, on, you know, working on this journey, attacking all the growth opportunities out there. This is the management team. Many of them are present here today. Please grab them in the mingling session afterwards and ask more questions. I think I will round it off there, Rolv- Erik, and then we can have a Q&A session.
Well, you know, I think ideally we would like this to be an interactive session. I think we'll open up for Q&A of what you heard so far before we go into the next presentation. Right. Now on. Okay, it's better. Thank you. I think we'll open it up now for Q&A for what you've heard so far before we go into the Leboncoin presentation, if there's anything at this stage. Yes. Is microphone coming. Thank you.
Thank you. Martin Stenshall, Danske Bank. We saw the revenue split on the online classifieds overall. Would you be able to comment on the EBITDA split in terms of verticals, advertising and then generalist?
Yeah, it's, that's not exactly the way we're running it because, you know, in FINN.no, for instance, you have one profitability obviously on, on the margin level. If you look at jobs, for instance, that is extremely high, but we haven't divided it that way. I think it's fair to say that, what we're seeing now is that we believe that, we are able to take out operational leverage, and that is good for us. The strategic thing is for us, most important is to continue to strengthen the position in the verticals. If we're able to do that will also give very good EBITDA results.
Thanks. A question regarding Shpock. Exciting to see that you're moving fast within the professional vertical and car on Shpock. To what extent are you worried that Facebook could do the same in your other markets?
We see, you know, if you look at the Facebook performance in several markets, we see that they following, you know, generalist typical generalist approach, where they have, where they're getting traction in the generalist category, and then the first category they move into all the verticals is private cars.
We don't see any, you know, strong evidence yet that they will have a strong traction in the professional cars area. I don't think, you know. As I said in my presentation, it's a competitor we're following closely. When it comes to being, you know, present on the ground, listening to the car dealers' needs in every market, tailoring solutions for the car dealers specifically from market to market, in addition to the global scalable solutions, I think we are in a strong competitive situation.
Lastly on Shpock, you are present in six, seven countries right now. Why not launch in other markets also just to be there, let's say, before any other player will establish themselves?
I think we've proven in the past that we can launch Shpock very rapidly in new countries if we want to and if we see that there's a business opportunity in the market. We launched Shpock in just a few weeks' notice, both in Italy and Norway, as an example. If we see interesting opportunities, we will continue looking into that, but we don't comment on any specific launch plans, of course, now. At the same time, of course, we want to be disciplined, and that's what we're doing now in the U.K., where we're really seeing good progress. We want to take it also through to the next phase to see that we can show monetization and profitability.
Thank you.
Yes. A couple of questions. Right.
It's Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs. You spoke a lot about partnerships, consolidation. I'm just wondering, you know, out of the 22 markets that you operate, where you still see some scope for consolidation, for instance. You also have this JV at the moment with Naspers, and I think you have non-compete agreement, which is going to expire next year.
So what could be the risk after this agreement ends? And the other question is on the impact of Facebook Marketplace. They recently announced they're going to enter the real estate verticals and do rentals. I'm just wondering what proportion of your revenue in the real estate segment is coming from rentals. Thanks.
Yeah. You can take the last one. Let me start with the partnerships. What I can say there is that now we have shown that we're pragmatic. We want to create the best marketplaces for our customers. Sometimes that happens through an acquisition, sometimes through a partnership and joining forces. I think that's the important thing for us.
It's, it's difficult for me to comment on existing panels. I just want to underline that we're always looking to find the best solutions. I've, I think we've done a number of good deals. I think the Naspers example in Brazil is an excellent one. This created a much better marketplace, both for consumers, for advertisers, but also for shareholders, of course.
We're always looking to see can we create better things. Apart from that, I cannot comment specifically on things. When it comes to the partnership with Naspers again, I think, well, it's really the important country, the big country there for us is really Brazil, where we, you know, where we increased our stake from 25% to 50%. We did that because we thought that OLX Brazil is showing a very interesting development and a very good growth. I think it's a great opportunity. That's the important thing for me. How is the site going? How is that developing?
I think that when it comes to the our discussion with Naspers, you know, we know them, I believe that our goals about developing that site has are aligned. They also want to build traffic, build position, and then go into monetization. That's the important thing that we have the same interest in building that site. That partnership is working fine as it is. I don't want to comment on, you know, any more than that. When it comes to the real estate, rentals as part of the real estate.
Yeah, As we all know, Facebook announced over the last, you know, couple of weeks, several partnerships, also within the verticals. As I said, again, it's back to the same thing. I think we are in a very good position of serving our professional sellers in both, cars and real estate, in the markets we are in. We have a big product and commercial force in each of the markets that can really listen to the customers' needs.
Then we have been competing, for example, in the job area, we have been competing with aggregators of content, which is what Facebook will be, when entering these partnerships, in a very good way, and we have been successful in that competition. I think we will also be that going forward.
Concretely on holiday rentals, this varies from market to market, where we are. In some of our markets, this is an important category, and we have had, you know, strong competitors there, also global competitors there lately, and we have performed well. I'm not too concerned about that.
Just a final thing on the Naspers thing, because I talked about Brazil, and then of course, we have a couple of minor positions in Asia. But that's not stakes that we consider strategic for our part.
Can I ask two questions? The first is on the central tech investment versus the local tech investments. Obviously, we've seen quite a big increase in the central tech investment. You obviously talked a lot about the kind of products and improvements that you think come out of that. We've seen big increases from the last two years.
It's not obvious that we've seen any reduction in spend from all the local operators over the last two years as well. Are we just at the stage now where you start being able to reduce the tech investment spend at all the local operating companies and really start to see that operating leverage come through? How should we see that play out?
I think it's fair to say, you know, we don't divide so much between the global and local investment. We are one global product and tech organization, as we are organized in a functional way. Yes, over the last couple of years, we have invested strongly in our product and tech resources and increasing that to be able to deliver better products.
Of course, now, as I showed you several examples of, now we're really starting to see the scalability of these investments and the synergies across our portfolio. We expect the investments to increase at a lower pace than we have seen historically, and also, you know, start to flatten out in terms of the increase in the total investment.
We're seeing return from, we're seeing results from the investments that we're doing. As I've said also previously, I think both on the company level, but also on the total group level, we believe there's good operational leverage, and we will have a focus on earnings and cash flow going forward.
Secondly, on Shpock. You've obviously invested quite a lot in that over the last three years as well. I mean, as you've been building out that business plan and that's been developing, I mean, what had been your big vision for what the scale of the opportunity is there compared to the amount of money, which is a pretty significant amount in the context of the size of the company, that you've invested over the last three years?
Schibsted is, we have Europe as our home market, and we saw Shpock as an exciting entry into the two biggest countries in Europe where we were not present, so U.K. and Germany. We want to pursue that opportunity. I think what we're now seeing in the U.K. is that things are developing well. You also see that our total investments have gone down. But the U.K. is developing very well and we're starting to experiment with different kinds of monetization there. Here, yeah.
Hi, it's Silvia Cuneo from Deutsche Bank. First question on Shpock. Just thinking about the big picture, obviously great success in the generalist vertical. You've taken over Gumtree and you're looking to expand into the professional verticals, that's an area where usually people talk about the incumbent players being hard to challenge. Just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about why you think that Shpock could enter the professional verticals.
I don't think I will go, you know, in detail in our go-to-market approach, when it comes to Shpock in the different markets. What we truly believe is in the generalist model, that, you know, when you have a strong traffic position and when you have the users on the platform, you are able to also give leads to both private and professional sellers. We think that we can enter market with interesting business models given the strong generalist presence and the strong traffic position.
Two questions, please. One is, on the product and tech spend, how does that split between marketplaces and media houses? On Shpock, you haven't mentioned Germany much. Are you kind of de-emphasizing Germany at this point?
Well, when it comes to the product and the tech aspect, we have not really divided it. Oh, yeah. You want to comment on that? I would say that it's a fair split, meaning that there is certainly and fairly equal when it comes to resources in those two areas, I would say. You can cut it little differently, but in general, fairly equal.
What we've seen also is that we have a lot of synergies on many fields, especially in Scandinavia, then where we're seeing that in the fields of advertisement, for instance, we're building out a platform which is used by both the classifieds and the media houses. It benefits both parts. Then to comment on the Shpock performance across markets.
Yeah, we used U.K. as an example here. It's not to de-emphasize the traction we have in any of the other markets, both in Italy, Austria, Sweden and Norway, where we have Shpock running, you know, in parallel with our other positions and also in Germany. We see good growth, and we, you know, we invest in marketing and user acquisition.
What we see is that we see, you know, improving retention rates, we see great user engagement, and we really follow the metrics closely in terms of the health and quality of the growth, and we are very satisfied with the development across markets. Then, of course, the relative strength of the position is varying based on how much we invest in marketing. More questions. Preben first, sir.
Thank you. Preben Rasch-Olsen, Carnegie. Two, I hope quick questions. First also on Shpock, what about the budget going forward? Do you need to spend more money on Shpock, or have you reached sort of a critical level when it comes to costs in Shpock?
No, the cost, this, you know, if you look at the Shpock investment, we're investing in two areas. We're investing in the product and tech area in the team, we're investing in marketing in the different countries. This is, you know, varying a lot from country to country, of course, something we have full control of in terms of increasing and decreasing, depending on the quality we get on the return we get from the investments. As long as we see strong return on the investments in terms of that we are able to acquire users, retain the users, engage the users at a competitive level, we will remain investing in those positions.
Of course, we will also balance the overall investment in Shpock based on the different investment opportunities we see across the portfolio. I think you raised the question last year, and you reminded me of that last week, whether we knew what we were doing when we're investing marketing money. I think that We need to make our own plans, we also need to be reactive to what other players in the market are doing. That's why we boosted the investment in Shpock and marketing the first half of this year. I think that was very good, and it was effective.
It's not always easy to know exactly how that's going to be, but, I think, you know, you need to trust us, that we're watching the development and the competitive scenarios and acting on that. As we've said today, and in the material also, the total spending will go down next year. We'll continue down, as you've seen throughout this year as well.
My last one was on page 15. Very interesting to see the size in U.K., a nd Germany versus France and Spain. Given your know-knowledge about the classifieds market, why is that? Why is the U.K., market so larger in million euros?
I think U.K. is a big country, high GDP, very advanced digital. You've seen it in banking services, you've seen it in many digital services, they've had many services quite. They were the launch pad for some U.S. companies, due to the language thing. It's a very advanced country when it comes to moving to digital advertisements. I think they're also got very, I would say, very good classifieds operators.
Exactly
who know exactly how to develop those services. U.K., is a great market, both in total, in the total digital advertising area and in the classified area. I think we'll take one more question, then we move on because, you know, we got the program and there's going to be more opportunities here.
Okay.
Hi. Alex Marie from BDL Capital. I just want to clarify on the platform convergence team. You gave us two examples of products that were developed, if I understand well, centrally and rolled out to all the websites globally. Do you now have one central team to develop all backend functionalities for your website, or do you still have R&D teams in various countries, and is the plan to rationalize your R&D?
On the product and tech area, we have strong product and tech teams in the countries we operate, and in addition, we have global product and tech hubs. What we see is that, you know, we are developing global solutions, both in the hubs.
Also some of the local product development we're doing in our assets, we are now doing based on the global, for example, data infrastructure that enable us to roll out also locally developed product features across the portfolio. It's not. It's a combination of both development happening in the hubs and in the local assets, but all with the global scalability in mind.
How do you make sure this is all rational? Can you be sure at any point in time you don't have two teams somewhere in the world developing the same product or a similar product?
We cannot be sure, in detail, for sure. We have
Good question.
We have a product and tech organization which is now organized globally. Yes, we have pretty good overview of the roadmaps. No, we cannot be sure that we don't have any duplication.
That was a better question. That question was actually better than your, even you yourself. We're looking into those things and, you know, we're getting more and more coordinated. Okay. I think in the interest of time, I know many of you have pressed agendas as well, we need to move on now. The next speaker is someone that you don't that often get an opportunity to meet.
It's Antoine, who runs Leboncoin. Many people want to meet him and ask questions. What I can tell you is that Leboncoin has such a strong position in France that if you wanna be president of France, you need to visit Leboncoin. That's, you know, everyone understood that last year, so they all came.
One guy, one guy came more often than the others, two or three times, and that was Mr. Macron. Antoine is, has been with Leboncoin in since 2009 and has been the CEO for the last years. Please, Antoine, go ahead. I think you could use the slide.
Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. It's a great pleasure to be with you this afternoon. I will try to explain the situation of Leboncoin in France and what we are doing in France. As you know, we are an ambitious company with a strong and regular growth. Before starting, a few key messages from me. The first thing is, everybody know the Leboncoin, except maybe a few former French president. 97% of the market in France, they know us. We are the best place here in France to buy and to sell. In four markets, in consumer goods, on real estate, on cars, and on jobs.
We usually have a strong ability to generate value in terms of revenue, in terms of EBITDA, but also in terms of value for our users, which is very important for us. As you know, notice maybe the last few years, we made a strong change in the company. We are very focused on mobile and user experience, and we are investing a lot in our data to develop some good product for our customers, advertisers, and professionals. As I said, we are by far number one in our market today, very focused in developing our audience. In France, we are the top five brand in terms of audience with around 26 million unique visitors per month. We are well-known brand, everybody knows Leboncoin.
In terms of ads, we have 28 million ads in four big categories. Consumer goods, which is for us a very important way to develop our audience. The real estate market, where we have a very global offer with private and professional content. The car market is important for us as well. We have private and professional content. The last baby, we have just improve our job market. We are a very strong company with lot of traffic on mobile. We now are around 70% of our traffic on mobile and probably in the next 12 months, we will be around 80% on mobile. Leboncoin is not as a company as joined in 2009, where we were five people with no coffee in the kitchen.
Now we are a big company, very solid, with a strong impact in the economy. We are allowing 98 million transaction per year in France, which is 1% of the GDP, which is a huge impact. We have a social role as well in France. Just to remember how we are making our business today. The first thing is our traffic growth, our virtuous circle. What we are doing now is we have a lot of private people. They are posting a lot of ads, and this is the basic of our audience. These three basic listings are the DNA of the company. We are making our best to develop features that are allowing the efficiency of buyers and sellers. We have developed a strong business model based on three main key drivers.
The first is we have monetized the free content thanks to a premium model, which is, as I show you, a bump. You can bump your ads when you are private people posting your car, for example, or gallery because you want to be at the top of the list. This is the first thing we have done. We have started to monetize the professional market, including interaction fees on this market one by one, first on the car market, then on real estate, and last year on the job market. If you are good in making a good audience, if you are good in verticalize your market, then you are able to monetize on the advertising market.
This is the third key driver for us to develop our business model. Last years, we were able to make a solid and regular goals. This is our way to work. We try to invest in parallel in each market and to have a long-term vision in terms of revenue, in terms of EBITDA. Also, we have now strong teams dedicated in our market. We are now able to manage this market in parallel. Our strategy, of course, is we are a growth company. We are investing in every markets we want to reach. Our strategy now is based on four main drivers. The first driver for us is what I call the virtuous circle.
The virtuous circle for us is, as we are generalist, we are attracting buyers. We need content. We are pushing a lot of features to develop the efficiency of the buyers. This is the most important thing for us. This is the basic of the generalist role, but we are investing a lot in our product to prove that Leboncoin is the best classified site in France. This is why we have invested a lot in the mobile product the last years. This is why we want to now to move along the value chain and to invest in the transaction. The first is accelerate our virtuous circle.
If you are very good on doing this, then you can personalize, you can verticalize your experience market by market. It's why we have attacked the real estate market, the car market, and recently the job market. We try to verticalize the experience of the users and of our customers. If you are good in making a good audience, a good satisfaction of the buyers, if you are able to personalize your experience by market, then you can address the advertising market. It's what we have done the last two years, switching to AppNexus, which is our new ad tech platform, investing in our data and investing a lot to deliver good product and a good alternative to the advertising market.
The last is to build not only Leboncoin, but a shifted company with a few companies in a group in France, addressing and buying companies to accelerate in our market. This is the four main drivers we have. In each market, we will invest in term of product and IT. We'll invest in marketing if we need it. If we need to address new market, we will invest on it. The last point is, we'll invest, of course, on sales people. We are expanding our sales force, combining sales serve and sales team by DSS and field sales. If you have a look on the last years, we had a strong acceleration on Leboncoin in terms of product.
The main thing was to switch from the web to the mobile from 40% mobile now to 70% and probably to 80% or 85% tomorrow. It was the main thing we built when I become GM. It was to develop a responsive site. The first thing was to improve again our user experience. First, the mobile and the app. The second thing is to continue to develop some good product for the professionals, I will come back to it, based on data, based on the user experience that professional needs in their daily life to get more leads, more quality leads. The last thing is to continue to invest in the user experience, to continue to invest to make good leads for our private people.
We launch within three weeks, safe search and push notification that increase the efficiency of Leboncoin. Recently, we have, we sent the messaging center, and I will present to you a small commercial that will be shown to the TV next week. The idea of this is, before it was discussed, nothing to say during the visit and, the messaging was able to give all the information to the buyer. This is what we will be shown to our users next week. As we are innovating a lot of Leboncoin, this is an example of what we are able now to do in parallel in each market, which was not the case before.
Now we are company, we are able to address five markets and probably two more next week, next year. I would love to the next week. Now we are able to address five markets in parallel. We are strongly accelerating in each market. We are delivering product by market for professionals, for private people. Now we are able to accelerate on this, and this is a big change and because now we are bigger company. If we zoom on real estate, the real estate market for us is one of the most important one for Leboncoin. This is a clear position of leader on this market.
In terms of content, we are able now to have a complete content from private and from professionals. We are by far number one on the content. We are also by far number one in terms of audience, and we are strong position in brand awareness. The KPIs are very good, and we are continuing to improve it. The key driver on this market, we continue to invest for on the private part of course, to be better in the transaction. We are now investing also on the professional part, giving tools to our real estate agents. Also now we are buying Avant Relais, which is a vertical on real estate. Combining Leboncoin as a generalist plus Avant Relais as a vertical on real estate, we will offer to the market a complete solution.
Avant Relais is a company with a lot of specialists on real estate. They have a lot of product for real estate agents. We will be able in the next months to have synergies on this and to propose to the market users and real estate agents a good proposal. On the car market, the motors, this is the first market we have started to monetize. In terms of KPIs, we are very, very high in terms of market share, in terms of content, brand awareness, audience. We are still growing on this market. The market is much better than a few years ago. Now our strategy is to continue on the professional part, to give tools to our car dealers, like the performance dashboard, I will explain it just after.
Also in parallel, we are continuing to invest on the private part, and the idea is in the future will be to propose to move along the value chain, proposing, for example, payment system during the transaction. This is one of our most important market, and we'll continue of course to invest product on it. On the job market. The job market is our last baby. We just started to monetize it one year ago. As you can notice, this is we have a challenging position on this market, except the brand awareness, which is very good.
We are by far number one, because we have invested a lot in terms of marketing, in terms of PR, last year, and we will continue in the next months. The rest of the KPI, we are gaining market share more and more. This is an encouraging first year. Our strategy on this will be to continue to develop good user experience for the candidates and for the recruiters.
We continue to improve the virtual circle, improving the content, improving the features for recruiters. This is the first thing. The second thing is, as you noticed maybe, the content of Leboncoin is mainly blue-collar content. We have invested in Kudoz, which is a mobile job application, very focused on data and matching and very focused on the white-collar part.
The combination of Leboncoin plus Kudoz will be a very strong offer in the market for recruiters, for the blue-collar content and for the white-collar content. We have already started to monetize Kudoz. We have already started to propose a bundle Leboncoin plus Kudoz on the market. Next time, I hope we will have a better KPI on this.
To illustrate this acceleration on this market, as you have noticed, we're investing a lot in terms of tools for our professional customers, for private also, but now we are focusing a lot of professional. This is an example now, what we have done the last months, because now the professional real estate agent, car dealers, they are moving a lot.
They need to manage their investment and their content and their ads in their mobile. We have developed some nice tools on mobile to allow them to manage their investment on Leboncoin. The second thing is that we have developed first for France locally, but it will be scaled for the group in the next months, a performance dashboard.
The performance dashboard now is one of our main strategic investment in terms of product. Why? Because we are using our data to give advices to our professionals, to give them some input to allow them to optimize their investment. This is very important for us to optimize our ARPU in each market, on real estate, on car, on jobs.
For example, it's not only to give statistics, cold statistic like your number of visits or your number of leads. It's also to give recommendation on it. You should invest on it. You should bump your ad. You are less efficient than your competitor. This is something intelligent. First, this is the first step is in France, then we scale it in other countries. This is something we are quite proud, and we have a good feedback from our customers. Another example is what we do on advertising. Advertising market, as you notice in each market in Europe and the rest of the world, you have two dominant player on this market. They are trying to trust in the investment on the advertisers.
Leboncoin in France, this is an alternative and a serious alternative. The media agencies, advertisers, they want alternatives to their investment. Now what we are doing is we want to be credible on this. To be credible, why we are credible? The first thing is we are the strong audience, very strong, top five website in France. The second thing is we have the data, and the data we have is a purchase intention, not only users calling some nice stuff and some nice music articles. No, no. We have users that they are buying and selling things on Leboncoin. This purchase intention is a basic to show to our advertisers a good, some good data, a good product.
The last thing is now our traffic is so strong on mobile that we are improving our advertising experience on it, and we are testing a lot of videos and mobile formats on it. The advertising market for us is a room. There is room to improve our market share and to be a credible alternative to the bad players, the dark players in North America. The last thing, not least, so as we have reinforced our position in classified, on real estate with A Vendre A Louer, on jobs with Kudoz, we have also continued to invest on MB Diffusion, which is an agriculture company and construction company.
it's a niche, but as we are not able to grab this market with Leboncoin, MB was a leader on this market, so we bought it. leDénicheur, which is a Prisjakt, which is a solutions, which is a price comparison of the group. We have started to launch it in January, and they have a quite promising start. We continue to build around Leboncoin a few companies that are able to grow as a group. If I summarize what is Leboncoin today, we are a delivering company, very focused on results. We have a strategy based on four main drivers. The first driver for us is a product, the virtuous circle. We want to improve our audience.
We are, for your information, last week, we beat 2 times our traffic audience on a daily basis, which is quite strong for us. This is important, and we will invest on mobile, and we will invest to the transaction payment system. This is the first thing. The second thing is if you are able to have a good audience, you are able to verticalize your experience market by market. We are investing on real estate, on the car market, on the job market to give good tools for our professionals, but also good features for our users. The third is when you are building this huge audience and the quality of this audience, you are able to develop a good advertising offer. Being a credible alternative on this market, we have a huge audience. We have data now.
We have to prove that we are able to deliver good value for advertisers. The last thing is to continue to develop Leboncoin as a group in France around us, buying companies if we have opportunities. We did it on real estate. We did it on the job market. If we have opportunities, we will continue to buy companies. I'm very excited by these challenges. It's a lot of work for this stuff, but quite, we will continue our regular growth, our solid growth in the future. Now we are able to address every or each market one by one, but now we are able to do it with a good with a good approach. Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you. Last year, Leboncoin celebrated their tenth anniversary. They really have been able to keep the entrepreneurial spirit. There's a lot of activity going there on there. If you visit Leboncoin and you go home a little bit late in the evening, there's still a lot of people there working, there's a buzz in the room there. There's so many things happening. Now we have the opportunity to ask questions to Antoine. Please go ahead. Yes, I think. All right.
Pablo Morales, Pelham Capital. Can I ask, I don't think I can name any other online classifieds in the world that grows at high teens with the scale that Leboncoin has and the position that they have, that you have in the market, not showing operating leverage. In the last three years, the margins have come down. Can you tell us why that is happening, and when are we gonna start seeing operating leverage in Leboncoin?
Your question is about margins. Is that what you are asking about?
Yes.
Well, what I can say is that, you know, we have, what we've been doing in Leboncoin is to prioritize growth. They've had a good margin. What we've seen lately also is that they have invested in many new products and things, which we believe is a good thing to do. What I can also tell you is that we prioritize growth. When we look at new opportunities, we rather look at from a net present value perspective rather than from purely to maximize value. Sorry, maximize margin. There is, if you look at the results and the EBITDA of Leboncoin, it's had a very healthy development the last few years.
I think what we have is, we have a long-term view, we have a clear plan-.
Yeah.
We are very focused on execution. It's an obsession, execution. We try to be good in executing, and then we switch to another market. It's what we have started by market one by one, and now we are only able to prioritize. In terms of execution, we are very focused on user experience on the product side, and when we are good enough on it, we switch to another market.
As we don't have the breakdown of the profitability by vertical, can you give us some comfort that we are seeing operating leverage in each of the verticals? What we are seeing in terms of the margins, is just a mixed effect and just adding into new verticals?
Well, I think Antoine said that real estate is the most important vertical in terms of biggest in revenues. Obviously, in cars, we've also been the strongest player for a long time. What we now see growth most rapidly is the jobs. That's a guide to you. Then... you know from Finland and other places, if you really succeed in job, that is a very, very high margin business. Martin here, and then Henriette, I think.
Yes. obviously, your investments have paid off in Leboncoin. Still, we hear a lot of talk of investments now in the presentation. Would you be able to comment on anything that investments are coming up, let's say, compared to 2015, 2016 and going into 2018?
You're talking about investments?
Investments in terms of buying companies.
Of course, I mean, Can you specify a little bit more, Martin?
Yes. Yes. Yes, I will. you know, we're talking about investments into new products and technologies and also marketing in Leboncoin.
Yeah.
I got the sense that there was a lot of talk about investments going forward. I'm looking for any comments or color on if there's a hike in the investment spending so-called in Leboncoin compared to.
In the market.
No, no.
No, no. No, no.
If I-
You know, I.
If I clarify it, we are investing in terms of marketing and product and IT, no more than before. We are switching our investments market by market. If we think that we are good enough in the market, we will switch this investment to another market. No extra spend on one market or marketing on it. We continue to have a regular growth on EBITDA, which is our main goal, but we are not switching any investment on it.
Obviously there's a lot of new products and features for professionals. How are you making sure that you're getting paid for those new products and features?
On this, we are measuring a lot of the efficiency of our product. We are making a lot of data tracking on it. We know that we are good on this. We are making a lot of beta version, we are iterating with them, we are building the product with them. At the end, the product we are launching is good enough. For the private part, this is the most important KPI that we are following is the leads we are making, we are generating with the buyers and the sellers, we are very focused on it. We are trying to balance the content between the private and the professional. Private content is 90% in average, 10% on the professional part, and we try to keep it like this.
Thank you.
I think the value we have created for car dealers and the real estate brokers, I think they are very much aware of that, and that has enabled us to increase the prices. You know, that's why you're seeing a positive development. Still, you know, we're creating value for them. That's the most important part. I think it's Henriette who's next here.
Henriette Trondsen, Arctic Securities. First, how much of revenue growth year to date has been driven by M&A or MB Diffusion?
It's.
sorry, similar.
No, it's a relatively small part. We haven't been specific about it, John, have we? Or...
No, just a very few percentage, that's all I can say.
Yeah. Very low percentage points.
Okay. How do you think the competitive landscape will look after the SeLoger, Logic-Immo merger? Do you expect any impact in the real estate?
At this moment, the real estate market is completely concentrating with a lot of movements. SeLoger is not signing the deal yet with the rest of the market. We don't expect any drop in our audience or in our sales. Absolutely not. On the contrary, we are investing a lot in our product to be able to continue to deliver our view.
We have a strong position in content in terms of real estate agents, in terms of product, and we try to become quickly a number one on this market. It will change, of course. The market will change completely. As a leader, it will be, of course, we will be a locomotive on this market. It will be for us, not a big change. For our customers, it will be a big change.
Thank you.
There's a question here.
Could you elaborate a little bit on the strategy between Leboncoin and A Vendre A Louer in the property segment?
The point is, quite simple. Leboncoin is a generalist, very good on making a lot of leads and a lot of content with private and professional content. A Vendre A Louer is a specialist, so number four on this market. The combination of both, it's, you have a good bundle to propose to real estate agents. We have much more content, much more real estate agent than A Vendre A Louer.
A Vendre A Louer has a lot of product, a lot of experience and skills on real estate. The combination is we'll launch new product on Leboncoin, thanks to A Vendre A Louer and thanks to Leboncoin, we have a lot of content and real estate agents. We'll have some sales initiatives in the next months to the market to propose a bigger offer, to propose to real estate agents a more complete offer on the market.
Will the same listings be on both sites? For instance, is A Vendre A Louer gonna be positioned as a high-end site to kind of address the brand concerns some agents have in France, you know?
It's a little bit, I think, early to say it. The idea is, now we have, 60% or 70% of the content of the market at Leboncoin. A Vendre A Louer have only, 25. We can invest a lot on A Vendre A Louer to have a good player as a vertical and to be competitive with 0G, for example.
There's a question here.
Hi, could you just explain how your tech development at Leboncoin interacts with the centralized tech development? To what extent Leboncoin has really been benefiting from the centralized tech development?
I have a lot of examples. The last one is the messaging center that was launched in a few countries. We were the last one to do it. Now we have two million messages in on a daily basis on on this. So we worked together during this launch because we are very focused in integrating this component in our user experience. So we work working closely in terms of front-end part, the back-end part as well. It was a very good cooperation. On the contrary, now we are developing the performance dashboard, which is developed in France. but this component will be scaled to be launched in other countries. It depend on the component and on the focus.
When you sit down at the end of the year and work out your R&D or tech development budget for next year, and you say, "Okay, well, I think revenue's gonna grow at 15% or whatever it is, so I can increase my tech spend by 10% or 15%." Am I then saying, "Okay, well, that's okay, 'cause I know that the central tech team are gonna take care of a big chunk of that, and so therefore I don't need to increase it as much as that?" Are you still driving that investment in the kind of mid-10% or mid to 15% level?
I mean, this relates to the conversion question that you commented on, so perhaps you want to say something. Yeah.
I think, you know, we will, as I said in my presentation, we will continue to invest both in the global teams and in the local teams because they work together. You know, some of our products are really specific market by market. Much more of our product development going forward will be focused on being global scalable, independently if it's developed locally in Leboncoin or in any of the global hubs.
Of course, the further we come with the conversions, then the easier that process will be, and then the simpler and fewer developers will have to work on it. All right, last question here. Go ahead.
Just looking at a slide you showed earlier with the market opportunity by country for France.
Yes.
Is that showing the online classified market only so that potentially there is still some structural shift from offline to online spend to capture?
To be honest, on if you have a look on this market now, the real estate market has 90% switched on the digital part. Same on the car market. Maybe the job market has still room. Maybe we will have a switch on it. If you have a look now, this, it's 90% of this market is, you know, on the digital way. My feeling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The numbers we showed in the presentation were purely online classified market, not the total digital ad market.
Yeah, it's online.
We believe that market can be expanded as you, for instance, seen in the U.K.
Advertising, yeah.
All right. Thank you very much, Antoine. I think we'll move to the last classifieds presentation. As you know, FINN.no was the where it all started for the classifieds, online classifieds in Schibsted, that was 17 years ago, in fact. After a couple of years, all the houses and all the cars in Norway were online. People say, "Well, okay, then, where's the growth going to come from?"
What I can tell you is that Anders has been having different positions in Silicon Valley before returning to Norway. He's had different positions, and FINN.no has been the CEO the last year. He's been very insistent all the way on showing that FINN.no is a growth company. He's going to tell more about that story now. Thanks. Please, Anders, go ahead.
All right. Thank you, Rolv-Erik, and good afternoon, everyone. I am super excited to be here to talk about Finn, especially because I feel I'm really here to talk about a growth story. It is only, what, two or three years ago that I would say that there was some concern about Finn being a mature player in a mature market, and we were wondering where the next wave of growth was gonna come from. I really feel that we have now cracked the code, and as I'm certain most of you know, in Q3 of this year, Finn or Schibsted Norway marketplaces delivered a 21% top-line growth. I think that very, very nicely demonstrates that we have found a way to grow our position in Norway.
Before I dive into my actual presentation, I would also like to share with you an advertisement from FINN. This is one of our recent commercials, and it shows you what kind of a brand FINN represents in Norway. This demonstrates the type of brand we have built in Norway around FINN. They include associations like humor and being smart. This is an example of that. There are four areas I will dive into now. The first is I will give you a deep dive on the position that FINN has in the Norwegian market, and then I will go into three areas of focus for us. The first one being that we are deepening our vertical roots also in the Norwegian market through better insights and better tools for our customers.
The second area, or the second area is we are working on integrating Schibsted common components into Finn to really draw out the synergies that Sondre also talked about earlier. Finally, I will give you a sense for the new concepts we have launched in the Norwegian market and what kind of traction they are experiencing. Finn is the clear market leader in the Norwegian classified space. Pretty much every used home for sale ends up on Finn. The vast majority of used cars for sale is on Finn, and the vast majority of advertised jobs end up on Finn. In addition, our general merchandise position, FINN Torget, also has a phenomenal position and is a clear number one.
In travel, we also consider ourselves to be number one, or at least we have the number one meta search engine in the Norwegian market. Then we have our position within the services or tender space. This is branded Mittanbud. But again, we have a very clear leadership position in that space. Not only do we have very clear number one positions, the FINN brand also has a phenomenal standing in the Norwegian population. Our aided brand awareness is holding steady at a solid 96%. There are not very many brands around the world who can show this kind of sustained brand awareness. In terms of internet usage, we are the number one Norwegian site in terms of page views.
We will cross the 13 billion page views threshold this year, which is not bad considering Norway only has a population of five million people. In terms of visits per capita, we are approaching 200 visits per capita per year. Norwegians are now spending over 28 hours each on FINN every year. This is a phenomenal number. In terms of monetization, we are now able to generate over 300 NOK, close to EUR 35 per Norwegian per year. The GMV, gross merchandise value, of everything transacted on FINN during a given year now exceeds way more than 10% of the Norwegian GDP. If there's one statistic that I'm particularly proud of, it's our reputation.
For the third year in a row, FINN was awarded the prize in Norway for the company with the best reputation of all companies operating in Norway. I consider this reputation to perhaps be one of our most important competitive advantages as we see other players enter the Norwegian market. Our reputation is really the sum of not just on the marketing we do, but it's how our users feel we interact with them when they contact our customer service. It's how our clients feel how we interact with them when we're in client meetings, and it's even how we handle rejections if someone has applied for a job at FINN and perhaps not gotten that position.
To really top things off, one thing we have been following extremely closely now that new players have entered the Norwegian market is how we are developing in various segments, because you could speculate that there are certain segments where some of the new entrants are gaining noticeable traction. The one segment that we pay particular attention to is the younger segment or the younger demographic. What we are seeing now is that not only are we holding steady, but FINN is improving its position within the younger demographic. There was a study that came out by YouGov not many weeks ago that said that of all brands in Norway, FINN was the biggest riser or had the biggest improvement in what's called word of mouth among the younger demographic.
We are now in the younger segment, number five overall, among the most talked about brands, ahead of brands such as Spotify. Not bad. We also conduct study groups to see how various user segments perceive FINN relative to other entrants. What is becoming increasingly clear is that FINN has really set the standard for what people expect of an online marketplace in Norway. Other new players are perceived as ineffective, as too simple, or as incomplete. FINN is maintaining very clear leadership across all segments, including the younger segment. Then what you would hope is that this position translates into strong financials. Yes, it does. FINN is now back on a very clear growth trajectory on the top line, and we are maintaining high margins.
Some of you might be tempted to say that, "Oh, boy, but you're not at your historical highs when it comes to margin." Yes, I agree with you. I agree with that observation. There are some natural explanations for this. One is we are coming out of a period with intensified local competition. One of the ways that we met that competition is we did spend a little bit more on marketing. I am expecting going forward that we will reduce our marketing spend as a result of that situation. Additionally, some of the new concepts that we are working on and rolling out do require us to invest a bit in the short term.
It is the case that some of these new opportunities may not have quite the 40-plus margin, but they are still extremely profitable opportunities for us. If we dive into our revenues, they split in the following manner. Approximately half of FINN's revenues come from the big three, from jobs, real estate, and vehicles, where they contribute about a third each. Generalist contributes 3% of our top line revenue, but I would comment that we consider generalist to be more important to FINN than these 3%, than this 3% contribution on our top line. That's really where we see a lot of the best engagement on our sites. Our display revenues have come down over the last couple of years, unfortunately. There is some light at the end of the tunnel.
In Q3 of this year, our display revenues more or less matched the display revenues we had one year ago. It looks like that area may be turning around. Finally, we have this other segment or the new concepts that we have launched, which is growing very, very nicely with the personal finances segment really leading the pack. Shifting to some other statistics. Our strong traffic growth is continuing. We've seen a 10% growth in visits thus far this year. About three-quarters of our visits are now coming from mobile devices, and over 60% of our visits are coming from logged in users. I think that 62% number is a fairly impressive number considering that We do not require users on FINN to log in.
They only log in if they find that there are value-added services that warrant them going through that step. Apps are the biggest contributor to our traffic growth. The apps usage is up 40% year to date. The apps usage also shows great engagement relative to other types of traffic sources. For example, we see that a typical app user visits more listing per visit than traffic coming in from other sources. We are the number two app within the shopping category on both the apps, in both the App Store and in Google Play. As a side note, the number one app is Wish, it's not another classifieds app. We are now approaching three million total downloads of our app. Not bad considering in Norway we are only five million inhabitants.
Our listings growth is also very strong in jobs. The listings thus far this year are up 12%. In real estate or real estate for sale, they are up 7%. We are also seeing a growth in the rental listings space. Cars, the number of cars listings is up 9%, where professionals are really driving that growth. Finally, we have the generalist vertical, where listings are up 28%. Again, that 28% is that increase has happened during a period of additional players entering the market. Very strong performance in the generalist vertical. Now shifting gears a little bit. One thing we are focusing quite a bit now on in FINN is to provide our customers with better insights and better tools.
There's a very clear reason for this, because what we have concluded and what we are finding is that it is no longer sufficient to have the best product. We do believe that FINN have the best product, has the best product, but we also recognize that that is no longer sufficient. You also need to be really good at communicating the effects of those products and make it very easy to buy those products. That is what we're investing in here. One example here is the performance dashboard that we've launched in, within real estate. Yes, we are starting to collaborate more closely with Leboncoin when it comes to the real estate dashboard. The version we already have, we've already launched at FINN, is definitely driving engagement.
On average, a real estate agent will visit this performance dashboard six times during the listing period, and the home seller will visit it 12 times during the listing period. A good indicator of the kind of engagement we can drive through this type of tool. To the right, rightmost, you have another interesting example. What we are starting to do now is we are starting to run algorithms that determine whether or not a particular job listing is underperforming relative to similar types of listings. When we detect that type of situation, we alert the employer, and we tell them, "Hey, look, we detected that your listing is underperforming.
How about you buy this upsell product to drive additional effect? This is proving extremely successful, and we have an over 50% conversion rate when we suggest that our customer buys an upsell product in this case. Not only are they happy to put additional money on the table to buy that effect, but they're also very happy that we contact them and advise them on how they can get additional effect to their listing. Perhaps the most exciting product we have in FINN these days is a product that we call Blink. This is an advanced, what I would say, advanced marketplace product. If you think about the way that a traditional marketplace has worked, you've really expected candidates or buyers to come to the site.
What we're doing with Blink is we are saying that, "Ooh, maybe there are some additional potential buyers or additional passive candidates out there that had not actively come to the marketplace." Using data, we identify other people that we should bring into Finn, to the listing, and we target them when they are on sites outside Finn. This type of product has been very well received in the market. You can see why here in the middle where we show the type of effect you can get on a listing if you buy the Blink product. In this case, the basic listing generated about 6,000 visits. They added on Blink, and they created an incremental 3,000 relevant visits to the sites.
This product already has a run rate of over NOK 50 million, annual run rates of over NOK 50 million. It is such an exciting product that we are looking at how we can expand it to other verticals than real estate for sale. We are looking at new builds, we are looking at revamping our solution within jobs, and we're also experimenting within the motor vertical. To this question about what kind of advantages are there to local site being part of the greater product and tech initiatives going on in Schibsted. For FINN, there are already many advantages that we've been able to extract. We are on the common advertising platform, we're on the common login platform, common messaging platform. We're using the audience targeting engine, the eID verification.
These days, as we're working to prepare for GDPR, it's been extremely helpful to have a larger Schibsted community to help us roll out the features and functionality needed to meet the requirements from the EU. Very clear advantage for FINN to be a part of the greater product and tech community in Schibsted. The last topic has to do with rolling out new concepts. We are continuing to invest in new concepts that will secure our long-term growth. The one on the left here is Mittanbud.no, the services or tender play that we have. We're now at a rate of over 200,000 listings per year, and it's already contributing over a hundred or it's at a run rate of NOK 120 million per year.
Small Jobs is also showing very good traction, and revenues are up 80% year-over-year thus far. FINN Shopping is a vertical we launched, about a year ago now. We consider this to be a very exciting new area for us. It's really our first clear foray into kind of the new items business. If we can really crack the code here, I think there may be other opportunities for us both in Norway and perhaps even in other Schibsted geographies. If there's one area where I really feel like we have cracked the code, it's in the personal finances vertical. We have great traction in integrating a lot of the personal finance products into our classified listings.
Some classic examples here are that we provide in-context financing options, in-context, insurance options, and we're now also rolling out things like digital contracts, which really help to create a better user experience and open up new revenue opportunities for us. Lendo has been a runaway success in the Norwegian market, phenomenal growth.
We are building on the success and will now experiment with launching additional personal finance marketplaces under the FINN.no brand, really leveraging the strength that we have there. Finally, we are the player in Norway that can provide the most comprehensive kind of personal finance advertising services. We offer display advertising, we offer content solutions, and we also have lead-generating integration products. All in all, an exciting area where I'm certain we will continue to grow.
To summarize, we are definitely continuing to strengthen our number one position in Norway across all of the verticals where that we are operating in. Number two, we are focusing on developing tools and insights that really will strengthen and deepen our vertical roots. We are integrating Schibsted components to extract synergies and also enable us locally to focus on more local revenue-generating products. Finally, we're continuing to launch new concepts that will help secure long-term growth. With that, I'll round off and then invite you to ask any questions. Thank you.
Anders, I think you proved that FINN.no is indeed a growth concept, growth company. Now we'll move on to questions to Anders. Anders is normally not in the room when we have a presentation. Here's Preben first.
Thank you. A quick question on the marketing spend. We got some numbers in Norway indicating that FINN.no combined with Blocket was up almost NOK 200 million in gross- marketing value, in 2017. My question is, are we going back down on those NOK 200 million? Can we expect 47% margin in 2018?
Should I take the question? I think the short answer is, we do not expect to spend as much on marketing this coming year as we have in the past year.
I also think we all know that the discounts in the Norwegian advertising markets are quite high, so the NOK 200 gross estimate is also quite high.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Next one. Yes, Martin.
Thank you. obviously super strong positions in the Norwegian markets in all verticals. I would really like a bit more color on your view on pricing power. just to have a let's say a bit of a loose example here. I think it costs, you know, tens of thousands of NOK to put an ad on your home, let's say 10 years ago in Aftenposten. The price, let's say, to put out a home on FINN.no is less than what it was years ago. My question is around how do you see the opportunity to actually increase prices, let's say on different products, given your very strong positions? Thank you.
Sure. Hoping there are no customers in the room. No, no. No, we are increasing our focus on what we call take rate. What we see is that the opportunity to dramatically increase our prices on, say, the basic listing is somewhat limited. Through some of these new upsell products, such as Blink, there is a very large opportunity for us to increase take rates. I believe that we will I do believe that we will be able to grow above, say, the organic growth in the market through pricing or other upsell products.
It's kind of a related question. When I look on your property website, there are not very many prominent ads, I guess. If I compare it to the Australian sites in particular, if you look at realestate.com.au in Australia, you get lots of levels of prominence ads with much larger pictures. When I look on the FINN.no property site, they're mostly the same size, and it's obvious that the top couple may have been paid for, but I just wonder if you're fully exploiting the monetization potential of prominence ads on the, especially in the property business.
I'd say the good news is that there are additional opportunities for us to continue to grow. Yep. You know, we also work closely with our customers and also industry associations to find the right balance between, you know, monetizing the listing itself and other types of solutions.
Other questions? Yes.
You mentioned good synergies with Lendo at FINN.no. Just wondering if or like what are the potential options and exits of the strategic review of Lendo? Will you retain a stake in Lendo? Like, which kind of options are you considering?
Well, for Lendo, we said, for the whole personal finance, we'll do a strategic review of it. That is to find out how is that best, how is that company best run and in the time to come. What we've been open about is that we've said that, well, we think we've done great in Scandinavia, but if we should expand it further, we think that we would look at partners to see if someone else could come in and take part of that. There's actually a great interest because Lendo is and the personal, whole personal finance area is, I believe, set for rapid further growth. A strategic review means that we must look at what's the best way to manage that.
I also think it's fair to say that the growth of Lendo is really strong in the Norwegian market, and it's not only fueled by the integrations and the synergies with FINN.no. It's a great standalone product with great direct traffic, which is growing independently of some of the few integrations we now still have with FINN.no.
Yes. Final question here. Yes.
Hi. Two questions, if that's okay. The first is on the revenue breakdown, where you've now given 33% from the new concepts. Can you just give me a sense of what that was three or four years ago? How much they've been a big driver in that re-acceleration of the revenue growth?
I would say that piece of the pie has grown, but it has not grown dramatically.
Okay.
Yep.
Secondly, you talked about how there'd been new competitors come in over the last few years. That had prompted a, what looks like a meaningful increase in marketing spend. Can you just talk through what competitors you'd seen in what areas and what pressure they had put on?
The new entrants have been most obvious in the generalist space with Letgo and Facebook Groups and Facebook Marketplace being the most obvious competition.
Is that?
Does that answer the question?
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay. Any further questions on that? No? Thank you so much, Anders.
Yeah.
That ends the Classifieds part of the presentation, but now we're moving on to our other big division, which is the Media division. We have a very exciting story for you also here. I touch upon some of it. There's a lot of activity, lots of great product development going on, and we also see very good results for this division. With the new setup, we have them seven leading media houses in Scandinavia, which is high ambitions. They're headed by Raoul Grünthal, who previously was running the whole of Schibsted Sverige. Raoul, please tell us about how you execute on the Media division.
Thank you. The last hour, Sondre and Anders and Antoine has told us much about how they will deliver growth and shareholder value within the Marketplace division. Actually, I will tell you that within Media, there are very exciting growth opportunities as well. As you all know, running a media division is about doing two things at the same time. It's really about firstly, of course, managing the decline of print, and thereby continuing to deliver growth, good cash flow further on. It's also about creating new growth. I think that we are doing that as well, and thereby creating shareholder value. Of course, the focus is tilting more and more over to the latter to create new growth. The Media division is based on three strategic pillars.
The first one is to be the leading publisher in Sweden and Norway. The second one is to be a key online advertising player, and I would say, as Antoine said for France, the leading digital advertising player among the national players in Sweden and Norway. The third strategic pillar is about creating new adjacent business. We have two business areas. The first one is publishing. That deals with being, of course, a leading publisher, but also being on the advertising market. The second one is about growth, and that deals, of course, with creating new digital winners, but these companies are also, of course, active on the advertising market. We are on the Swedish and Norwegian market, a very clear leader in digital news.
First of all, first, we have two, I would say, super brands, VG and Aftonbladet, and both of them are reaching around 50% of the population of Norway and Sweden every day. That's tremendous. I mean, that creates a very good base for advertising. It also creates a very good base for other kind of business. We also have very strong regional brands with a strong position in their region and their cities. Of course, being a publisher is not only about reach, it's also about impact. Thanks to our high-quality journalism, we have impact. We have a very strong impact on our societies. I will give you just a few examples of that. Let's start with Svenska Dagbladet, our morning paper in Stockholm, in Sweden.
They have been working during a few months now on the case with the Swedish pension fund cheating their clients. This has led the Swedish government now to probably change how we manage the Swedish pension system in some ways. Another very famous example is Espen Egil Hansen, the editor, the publisher of Aftenposten in Norway. He, when nobody else was really talking about the role of Facebook in a news market, he really tried to challenge them and make them understand that to be a strong player on a news publishing platform, you must be serious. You must take it seriously, and you must do it in a responsible way. The whole world is talking about that. He did that more than 1.5 year ago.
I think that, this is, of course, is not just about business, but it's also about business. I think that quality journalism is the foundation of our publishing business today, and it will be tomorrow as well. Rolv- Erik told you, earlier on, a little bit about the figures in publishing. As I told you, we are managing the decline of print and the possibilities of growth at the same time. As you can see, as the print part of the top line is still important, we have a decreased top line all in all. At the same time, the margins have increased the last 2 years, and so have the profits. That, of course, has many explanations. I would say the most important one you have it on the right.
We are all the time trying to become more efficient, to cut costs, so our operating costs are going down every year. Of course, it's also about working with pricing. It's about finding new opportunities for growth. The interesting thing when talking about digital growth is that historically, it came basically from advertising. Now this is really changing. The last 2 years, I would say that the figures coming from user payment, from subscription mainly, to our news products, is becoming significant. Right now, we have in Sweden and Norway around 600,000 subscribers to our news products. That's around 4% of the population. As you can see on the right hand, the change in revenue is around 60% right now year-on-year.
The interesting theory here, thing here is to see that if you calculate the growth of revenue is much larger than the volume growth. The ARPU is much higher this year than it was 1 year ago or 2 years ago. This is of course, partly because we are working with pricing, but it's also because of mix. That the newcomers, the new subscribers are mainly subscribing to our morning papers, our subscription papers, and the high price on these papers are much higher than the evening papers. It's very much a question of a product mix leading to a higher ARPU. So far it has been very much about managing the digital transformation of our legacy news products. This is changing as well. This is just one example.
It's a new app that we have launched in Norway. It's about financial news, personalized financial news. It's called Min E24. Those of you who do not speak Norwegian should download it because it's really great. It shows you a little bit, you will not ever understand everything, but it's a great app. It shows you a little bit what kind of financial journalists you will have in the future, I think. It's really great. We are launching a similar app in Sweden based on the same platform. Talking about platform, this is also very good example of what you can actually achieve with platforms. If we would have done this 2 years ago before we had installed our new media platform, this would have been extremely expensive, complicated, taking lots of time.
Now we have done it in a very efficient way. This, the new platforms are really a game changer, I would say. Actually, I would say, go as far as saying as publishing business is becoming more and more of a, of a publishing, of a, of a platform business. We have the last years been working a lot and investing a lot in our platforms. I would say that so far, the focus has been really on creating tools for our journalists, for our newsrooms, in order to become more efficient and be able to make it better work, basically. It has also been to get all our news products on the same platform, because that will enable us to be more efficient and much more, much faster than before.
I think that the years ahead, we will see much more examples of the one I just showed you, Min E24, with products that are not only creating efficiency within the newsrooms, but also creating new and better products to the consumers. I think is quite interesting future for our publishing products, thanks to the investments we have done on the platforms. Okay. That's about the first strategy to be a leading publishing player in Sweden and Norway. The second one is to be a key advertising player. When Rolv- Erik spoke to you two hours ago, he said that Schibsted is very much being more global than the local players and more local than the global players.
I think that the advertising market is really a great example of that. What we are facing is of course both challenges and opportunities. But we have a very strong position on the market that is actually growing, the digital advertising markets. Of course, we have fierce competition, we all know about it, but we are taking market shares from the traditional national players. I think that right now, and you can see that the third quarter, one very clear example of that is that VG in Norway is taking important market shares from traditional television. What does more local than the global player mean in practice? Well, two things that we have that they do not have, and that gives us really a competitive advantage is firstly, products with really premium inventory.
We have a kind of inventory that is very difficult to find if you don't come to our salespeople. Talking about salespeople, we have local and national sales forces that are really second to none. They are really extremely strong, and they know very much about their market and about their clients. This is the Swedish sales organization. What we have done both in Norway and Sweden, we have gone from a situation where we have more or less one sales organization for every brand, and or we are organization this in one organization on a national level. As I told you, there are both challenges and opportunities on the advertising markets. One very good example of that is that the market is changing at a very high pace right now.
What was actually a strong growth market just a few years ago, the traditional display advertising market, is stagnating right now. We have some segments which are experiencing great growth right now. Just to give you three examples. One obvious one is the programmatic sales growing at a high pace right now, both in Norway and Sweden, and we are growing at well on that market. One other market that helps us taking market shares both in Norway and Sweden is the growing native and branded content markets. We think that that will continue to grow the years ahead.
The third one that you cannot see here is, of course, the web TV market, which is growing very rapidly as the traditional TV cannot deliver the need of the customers on traditional television. I mean, for us on web TV, it's really about creating inventory. We could sell lots of advertising if only we had the inventory. It's really an inventory challenge to not only us, for the whole market right now. Of course, on the advertising market, what we will do the year ahead is to continue to launch product, because that's what we really have to do in order to take market shares. We will improve the buying interface for the customers.
We will, as I told you, invest a lot in new video products, extremely important. We will, I would like to mention also that we will develop more new geotargeting options. We have a high demand there from our customers, of course. It's quite obvious that there are important growth opportunities in our both traditional areas, meaning publishing, user payment, and advertising. I think that the most important opportunity of value creation with how within the media business is within the adjacent business within the growth business. Of course, as have been said before, very much within personal finance. We have, over the last years, built a great portfolio of great companies.
They are within different businesses, but the two most important by far is fintech with Lendo, but also other great brands, and what I would call e-commerce enablers. There, the most important brand is Prisjakt. That's a Swedish brand. It's called, as Antoine said, leDénicheur in France. It had these different brands. We will continue to invest in these kind of companies further on. What we are looking for, of course, is companies that are within the right areas. We are also very focused on finding the greatest entrepreneurs. If we look back where we have been successful, it's very often not because of a greater idea. It's often because of greater entrepreneurs. For instance, the entrepreneurs behind Lendo are among the best that I have seen.
Actually, we have invest now, and I will tell you later, in a new company created by the same entrepreneur. We are sometimes investing in very early phase, startup phase. If we can choose, we prefer to invest at the moment where, when a company has a proven product but still need lots of marketing power. That's the phase where we can really help them to make the difference and to get a better position on the markets. It's very often about finding companies which are in big need of marketing power. When we started this business, it was to say the least, not very tough competition to get the best entrepreneurs. This, as you all know, have really changed the last years.
Today, it's not only what the entrepreneurs have to offer us, it's really what we have to offer them. We have lots of things to offer them. Of course, first of all, and that's what they look at very much, we have a great track record. Many of the companies that we have invested in have actually become great companies. So the track record is great. We also have expertise so that they really, these entrepreneurs can focus on their business, what they are good at. We have, of course, the funds. We have synergies, and above all, we have our marketing ecosystem, and that's what they are mainly looking for when they are coming to Schibsted.
They know that if they come to Schibsted, they get the marketing power that they can never get if they go to other players. Rolv- Erik and also Anders mentioned Lendo. Of course, Lendo is really, for the moment, the big star in our growth portfolio. In Sweden, where Lendo is the most mature, it's the most mature country of Lendo, and also the original country, the margin is right now over 50%. The growth is still very important. You can really see the potential that we could get in Norway, Finland, and other countries where we are launching this great product. It's interesting to see that out of three trials, we really have, at least what we think, three great successes. In Sweden, it's already proven.
I think that as Anders said, in Norway, we are nearly there, and we are still growing a lot. The first sign from Finland are really great as well. I think that we really have something very interesting here. Also, at the starting point, we have very strong synergies with our assets. Of course, when the market become more mature, the dependence that Lendo has to other assets is decreasing. There are still important synergies. You could, of course, ask, this is not rocket science. Basically, what we are doing is a price comparison between banks, and then, and then we put the consumer and the banks together. It's quite simple business in one way. Lendo has lots of competitors.
Just two, three years ago in Sweden, more or less every month, there was a new competitor to Lendo. The interesting thing is that there's nobody else than Lendo so far that has been able to get a product with 100% digital conversion. All the competitors of Lendo also need telesales, and quite heavy telesales departments. The great scalability that we have in Lendo, nobody else has been able so far to copy it. That I think is the main asset of Lendo, and that of course make Lendo a super scalable business. Of course, we want to have the Scandinavian market as a market for growth and for trial for all these companies. The long-term goal, of course, is to be able to launch the stars of this portfolio outside of Scandinavia.
Far, I would say that we the most successful launch we have made is of course the Lendo I just mentioned, but also Prisjakt mentioned by Antoine before. Of course, we hope that there are more to come. Just to repeat myself, we have within the business area, within the division, three strategic pillars. One is really to continue to be the leading publisher in all of Sweden, to be the key national player on the advertising market, and to continue to create new digital winners. Thank you.
Thank you, Raoul. That leaves a few minutes for our final Q&A session. Any questions to Raoul about the business? Yes, Goldman Sachs.
Just a very quick one. Just wondering what's the rationale behind keeping the new business and digital services with the Media House? Because Lendo, for instance, is in Norway is in Classifieds and in Sweden is with the Media House? I think, I'm sure when investors do their, sum of the parts, they put just the kind of print ad multiple on the overall Media House's business. Does it make sense to break it up or move it to Classifieds?
Well, you know, I think the big advantage of the of those growth businesses that is with the Media House is they have been promoted heavily by the marketing muscle in our Media Houses. That has really been very effective for them. That is why they have traditionally have been there, and they're working closely together with Aftonbladet and VG, which is really prioritizing pushing this. That has been the reason. Of course, if we now go in another direction with Lendo, then that will be taken out and separated.
Of course, there are still very important synergies between the growth companies and the marketplace companies in Norway and Sweden as well. We will continue to build on that, on these synergies, even with the new organization, obviously.
Other, questions or comments? Yes, Martin Stenshall.
I think we learned that you said 4% of the population in Scandinavia are now subscribing to the digital product. What kind of penetration rate would you see, let's say, two, three, four, five years going forward if we compare to, let's say, other markets we can, you know, compare to in Europe or in the U.S.?
Good question. I don't really have the figures for other markets, but from my knowledge, I mean, this is a very high figure. Scandinavia is well ahead of many other markets regarding user payments. One thing, of course, is about growing the volume. I think that perhaps growing the ARPU is even more important. I think there's still room for growth. It's difficult to say a level. I mean, it's really a new market.
What has been the development on ARPU over the past year?
You can calculate from this. I would say, as I told you, a small part of the increase is about pricing within every product. The large part of it, by far is the change of mix. Aftonbladet is much cheaper than Aftonbladet.
Thank you.
For the subscription papers, especially in Norway, we can take, we are able to take out very good prices. Any further questions or comments? If not, then I think it's time to round this off. There has been some questions around the detail about companies that are present here. There has been some questions around technology. I'd like to point out that we'll be present afterwards. Our Chief Platform Officer, Rian Liebenberg is here and can help answer that. You answered, you asked specifically about the spending level there. The central part, I think what we said there was that will be flattish as we expected for next year. You'll be able to interact with the management for some time now.
What I can tell you is that, we have presented today our portfolio of companies and the group plans. We're very excited about the prospects and the growth prospects. We have promised the Chairman that we will execute on it. Thank you very much for coming. I look forward to mingle with you outside.