Good morning, everybody. Very nice. To see you, all you here today. Thank you for coming. Also welcome to our online viewers. My name is Lena K. Samuelsson, I and my colleagues are here today to give you information, insight, and inspiration. We have an extensive agenda, of course, there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions. We will also take questions from our online viewers, of course. There will be a break in the middle, there will be something to eat afterwards. Management, naturally, will be available for you during our day for questions and comments. Now, let's start our day together. I was newly appointed Executive Vice President for Communications and CSR within the Schibsted Media Group. Before that, for 12 years, I was the editor of Svenska Dagbladet, our upmarket business daily in Sweden.
For me, personally, it's an extra treat to stand here today at the stock exchange in the heart of the city. Journalism is all about telling stories, interesting, engaging, at its best, important stories. Whether those stories are written on the walls of cave or on paper or on your mobiles, that is really just a sign of the times. A really interesting story will always engage and inspire the audience. Let me tell you a story. Schibsted, it was founded in 1839. That's almost 175 years ago by Christian Schibsted, an orphan who had married into a printer's family and taken over the business. In the spring of 1860, he was in trouble. He had lost his biggest client, and the printing plant was at risk. Christian, he was an innovative man. He was an entrepreneur.
That night, when he sat down at his table, after working for hours, he had an idea. He had a vision of a vivid marketplace, transparent for information, for opinion, for debate, for trade, and for exchange. His idea was to start his very own newspaper. He created Aftenposten, which is even today, one of Scandinavia's most important newspapers. That vision that Christian had that night, that marketplace, that vivid marketplace, that is still what we are all about today. The scenery has changed, what we do is answer to and hopefully cater for really basic human needs: to be informed, to know things about your world and your time, to trade, to sell and buy things, and to exchange. It might be services, it might be goods, it might be thoughts and ideas.
We are an online company with a mission to empower people in their daily life, and we are on a steady course, continuing to build online leadership. Here today to tell you all about that is a man who has built Schibsted from within, both in media houses and in classifieds. Many of you know him. Today, he is the CEO of Schibsted Media Group. Please welcome Rolv Erik Ryssdal.
Thank you very much, Lena. First, I'd like to say warmly welcome to all of you. We're very happy that so many are attending, and I think that we have an interesting program for you. Let me start by providing a brief overview of the group. Schibsted has a kind of two-pillar strategy, two main business activities. On the one hand, we have the online classified businesses that are growing rapidly internationally in many countries. We have the solid media houses, predominantly in Scandinavia, that are going through an exciting transformation to digital media houses. Now, at the same time, both these two pillars interact along several dimensions. During this presentation, I will get back to our new online services and also some of our new efforts within about data analytics, payment services, organization, and competence.
The headline is that what we have defined as our mission, empowering people in their daily lives. That serves as a common denominator for all our business activities, old and new. The bulk of operation in the Schibsted media houses take place in Scandinavia. When it comes to classified, the main revenue contributors are based in Scandinavia and large European countries such as France, Spain, and Italy. However, the spreading of the online concept has taken us now to a total of 29 different countries. Spreading from Mexico in the west to the Philippines in the east, from Scandinavia in the north to Chile in the south. Overall, close to 8,000 employees contributed to total revenues of NOK 15 billion the last 12 months. The composition of our revenues illustrates that we're fast becoming a true online operation.
The combined online revenue from online classifieds and the media houses now amount to 45% of overall revenue, and that's up from 39% one year ago. If you look at the EBITDA, or the profit there, you can see that the online amount for 61% and 70% if you adjust it actually for the online spending on organic investments. We have laid out a clear strategic direction going forward. We have great ambitions for this company, and in online classifieds, we're working hard to grow that business further, and we're targeting global leadership in online classifieds. We also have a very strong ambition for media houses. We believe in them and their future, and we've set ourselves targets of building world-class digital media houses.
At the same time, we're investing in talent and technology for innovation and to reach those goals and also to create new growth opportunities for us. These are kind of three takeaways that I'd like you to take away from this gathering today. Now, let me take you through different parts of the group, and I'll start with online classifieds. We have a program here where many of my colleagues will take you through that in more detail. I'm happy to present this chart here, which illustrates the growth in revenues we've had in this business the last 10 years. They've been growing rapidly, and we have a portfolio with a solid momentum to grow further in the years to come. We'll spend a lot of time on that today.
Here, what we've done is actually to split up, in the large established, those you know, FINN, Blocket, and Leboncoin. They are clear market leaders, but we see a further growth potential here in new verticals, new products and services, new platforms, more personalized, more friendly, user-friendly solutions, and optimizing prices. At the same time, we have a lot of sites, several sites that we call the other established. These sites are not as large as the first category, but they have reached break-even. They are leaders in their markets, and I believe they have a significant untapped potential, both in terms of revenue and earnings. If you look at sites like Subito in Italy, willhaben in Austria or Mudah in Malaysia. I'm optimistic as to what we can achieve in Spain.
As most of you know, we acquired the remaining shares that we did not own in the Spanish sites this summer, so we now control 100% of the sites in Spain. Our goal there is to revive the growth in terms of or in terms of traffic. Now, given the macroeconomic environment in Spain, our sites there have not been able to keep pace with the rest of the portfolio when it comes to top-line growth. They still generate a very healthy profit. Again, our focus in Spain going forward will be building on the traffic positions, and we're prepared to sacrifice some short-term profit there in order to achieve the traffic growth. Finally, we have a large number of exciting sites in the investment phase that provides a good opportunity for long-term growth.
The recently announced joint venture we have with Telenor as an exciting industrial and financially strong partner will strengthen our capability to exploit those opportunities. Today, we have two joint ventures. We have one with Singapore Press Holdings already covering Southeast Asia. Now Telenor has come in as an equal partner there. We have a new joint venture with Telenor covering South America and the rest of Asia. That's really what these new joint ventures are all about. We also have some limited activities in other in other emerging markets, but these are our main vehicles for growth in emerging markets. As most of you know, the bulk of our revenues today and profits come from our operations in Europe, and these are not affected by the joint ventures. Why am I excited about this joint venture?
I think that Schibsted and Telenor is a very, very good fit. We know Schibsted. We have good competence in classifieds, reach 100 million people, have invested for many years. Telenor is actually one of the leading global telecom providers, especially in emerging markets and in mobiles. They have more than 150 million mobile customers. Of course, through their loan operation in the emerging markets, they have deep insight in consumer knowledge there. Things are moving much more rapidly there to the mobile, and Telenor knows a lot about that. I think for us, this is a very exciting joint venture. I think also for Telenor, who are now looking into to classifieds and getting a broader footprint.
They're seeing also that in the future, a lot of the traffic will be data. That's we're very excited about that. This is about how much have we invested the last years in organic growth. As we know, we spent most of our money, not in acquisitions but by organic growth. It's lot. It's a total of 1.7 billion NOK in the last 5 years. We have already achieved good return on many of these investments. Today we have established market and profitable leaders in 8 countries, and recent ones are in Italy, Austria, Malaysia, which have benefited from these investments. Then we also built up in emerging markets several exciting sites.
Although they're still loss-making, we're seeing encouraging development in terms of number of ads, visits, and other relevant traffic data. I think you should interpret our willingness to invest here as a sign that we strongly believe in these sites and the future potential. I think also with the recent joint venture agreement with Telenor, you can see that also other industrial professional players see the values in this and are willing to invest. I believe that our current portfolio on investment stage companies gives us a solid foundation for further expansion. Right. To kind of sum up the classifieds side, we have the established operations where we're working continuously, still building traffic, of course, but we're working continuously to build new verticals, new services.
We're looking at new things like payment models and price optimization. Then we have the investment phase sites, where investment and traffic is really the most important part. We know that there's strong competition in this market and that monetization will take longer time in these markets. We believe that with our competence and our JV partners, we're very well positioned to take to exploit these opportunities. Right. Turning to the media houses. As you know, we have a portfolio of strong and leading brands built on high-quality journalism. We're the market leader in print and especially online media in both Norway and Sweden. We have a sizable combined market reach.
I believe that in Scandinavia, we have shown that in relatively limited markets with, I mean, not very big markets, with strong positions, we're able to build very strong positions and also take out a healthy revenue and profit from these markets. Let me use VG here as an example. VG is, of course, a leading media house in Norway. They have been number 1 in terms of penetration for a long time. Now, their total print circulation has gone down by around 50% the last 10 years. As you can see, the reach has constantly been going up. Now they cover 2.4 million regions on a weekly basis.
That's a combination of the print and, of course, the online edition, and more recently, the rapid growth has come from mobile, and now we're seeing also from web TV. The penetration and reach of VG is bigger than ever. All through this, also transition that we're going through, they have shown a very good, very good development, both in terms of turnover and results. As we know, Aftonbladet has a similar position in Sweden, and we have many leading online positions, particularly in Sweden, actually, where we control four or five of the largest online sites, if you exclude Google and Facebook.
Going forward, our main strategic goal here is to convert print revenue to digital revenue and create new products, and not least, exciting solutions for advertisers. Let me give you some examples here. Here you see the mobile and tablets. Of course, mobile and tablets are exploding. It's growing quick in all countries, especially quick in Scandinavia. We're actually seeing that in small country like Norway now there's around 1 million tablets sold already on a population of 5 million. Smartphones are growing rapidly. Here we have been able, through VG and Aftonbladet, to create a lot of exciting opportunities for advertisers, where they see actually that this format works very well for them. Those revenues are growing rapidly.
My colleague, Sondre, will get more into these things a little bit later, but let me just point out that web TV is really the new big growth thing. We don't have any positions in traditional linear TV, but we have the leading positions in web TV, both in Norway and Sweden. I mean, you can check around with your, with your own family or friends and find out what are the young viewers watching. Well, it's not linear TV, it's the web TV which is growing fast. It's important for us, of course, to constantly innovate. These are some examples also. Here you see that. It's important to interact with readers. Here, there was recently election in Norway.
During that election night, then the VG interacted with the readers how the result will be, and then later on how the cabinet will look like, was taking suggestions, et cetera. I think Aftonbladet is very much leading the mobile development in Sweden. They just developed a new app, and just last week, they won the European Innovation of the Year price at the prestigious Digital Communication Awards in Berlin for this app here, which allows readers to interact with editorial department and tip them off what's happening, and they can actually film it with their mobile and send it back to the news desk to be broadcast. Very much exciting development going on. I believe also Sondre will go more into this area about payment and digital subscription.
What I can tell you is that the digital subscriptions are growing, and that we're experimenting in our portfolio. The regional newspapers have chosen one model. Fædrelandsvennen was first, seems where they bundle print and online, seems to work rather well. The circulation of that newspaper has flattened out. Aftenposten will choose different model that Sondre can tell you about. VG and Aftonbladet will choose a third model, which is more suited to their market and market position. What we've also been emphasizing here when selling digital products is to facilitate the process for the buyers. That's why we created the Schibsted Payment, which is a single sign-on solution for buying digital products.
We touched briefly upon this on the last Investor Day, one and a half year back, then it was more in the starting phase. Now we rolled it out in Norway and Sweden. We have now more than 2 million registered users. Although to consumer this is primarily a payment solution, SPiD then creates a unique one-to-one relation to the customers, and we see good opportunities and improved uses of this online database, and we can. Meaning that we can personalize content, products and services, and we can add value, not least to advertisers.
The value of having a single sign-on solution is very important, and it's also valuable for us that we're able to store credit card information, because when we're doing that, if you already use your credit card, the chance of conversion when you're entering into a site to look at the product is much, much higher. It goes up from 40% to 70%, 75%. In order to exploit this fully this opportunity, we are now carrying out a large recruitment campaign, intending to attract new competent people in the fields of digital competence. Here you can see, this is a challenge for media, all media companies. Of course, we're competing with big American players that come from completely different angle.
We need to know much more about our customers, so we can create the right products for them, and that we also can create the right solution for advertisers. We need to be experts in these fields. We need to be able to segment, for instance, our readers. We must have the data so we can set the right prices. We must have them convert when they're on our site. This is a very important part. Of course, reduce the churn. A lot of competencies here that most media companies should pay a lot of attention to, and we're building up this now, and that will help us reach our goals.
Let me have a quick look at some new online services I mentioned for you. These are built up through joint efforts from media houses and online classifieds. In Scandinavia, we have a history that Aftonbladet helped build Blocket, Aftonbladet and Blocket together built many other operations. We're seeing that the combined strength of the media houses and the online classifieds creates new opportunities for us. So far, we have focused on personal finance, price comparison, and a few other conversion models. In Sweden, where our growth media has developed best, we have a business there, SEK 1 billion. We are the leading personal finance now online intermediary.
I can tell you for those living in the U.K. that we have been inspired by the MoneySuperMarket in the U.K. and see what they're doing. What we recently did, we built up Lendo, and we built up an insurance company. Now we are. Not insurance company, but a marketplace insurance. What we recently did was to acquire Compricer, which offers a more or less complete range of personal finance products. This has reinforced our leading position in online personal finance market in Sweden. We believe that we control now approximately 50% of that growing market. This is, we're doing this in Sweden. We're seeing what can we.
We have started the same thing in Norway and then using, of course, the competencies we have from Sweden. Now looking into should we do it in other markets as well? What can we achieve in France on the back of Leboncoin, for instance? It's quite, that is quite an interesting thing to look at. These are some of the new things we're looking at, the new services and onlines. If I should go back to the start, I'd like to sum it all actually up by repeating these three messages from me. This is our strategic direction. This is what we're working on. We're working to have global leadership in online classifieds. It's a long road. I believe we're making good progress, and we're well on the way.
I believe our recent joint venture is also strengthening us in that sense. We're working very hard to be at the front and stay ahead of the curve and develop the media houses. I think we've been able to do it so far. What we're seeing now is, of course, that with the new smartphones and tablets, development is going even quicker than before, so we have to step up. That's why we're now investing a lot in talent and technology to have all these capabilities that will help propel us forward to reach the goals that we set for ourselves. I think that was the main message from me. Thank you very much, and I think I'll hand it over to you again.
Thank you, Rolv Fredrik. We will hear from our next three speakers, then after that, we will have a Q&A, and Rolv Fredrik will also be attending that, of course. Now let's take a deep dive into some of our number one players, our vivid marketplaces of today. You will hear about great successes and the challenges for us going forward. First, we will hear from Blocket, the mothership, you might say, of Schibsted Classified Media, and also a personal favorite, not only to me, but to almost every person in Sweden. Here to tell you the marvelous story about Blocket is CEO Martin Frey.
Thank you. Good morning. I'm here to tell you about the latest development in Blocket in Sweden and how we are expanding our leadership into new services and verticals. I have three main takeaways for you today, and that is our position in goods and cars, where we're the clear number one in Sweden, across all channels. Number two is that we are taking market share in important verticals like jobs and real estate. Number three is that we are growing market share in display advertising and other B2B revenues. First, I will take you back to 1996, 17 years ago, and this is a picture I love. This is the first screenshot we have of Blocket.
When Henrik Nordström launched this in 1996, I'm sure he had a great vision for Blocket, but I doubt that he could ever imagine what kind of impact Blocket would have, both in Sweden but also in other parts of the world. To give you some numbers from Blocket, seven out of 10 Swedes have bought or sold something on Blocket. If you ask a family with children in Sweden, nine out of 10 Swedes have used Blocket for buying and selling. They have not just only visiting the site, but they actually used it for buying and selling. The brand awareness of Blocket in Sweden is close to 95%, almost everyone knows about it.
If we look at the value of the advertised goods, it was last year SEK 313 billion, which is equal to 9% of Swedish GDP. It's from this local small marketplace, we now handle very big values on the marketplace every day. We know that we have made a big impact on the Swedish economy, but we have also known that we have made a good impact for the environment, but we have not been able to put a number on it until now. Together with experts in the field, institute called IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, we did a study, a research to see what kind of impact the trading of secondhand goods have on the environment.
Basically looking at what we are saving by trading secondhand instead of buying new and produce new things. The number that they come up with was 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year. That doesn't tell you anything, right? It didn't tell me anything when I saw the number the first time, to put it into perspective, it's the same effect as if all the cars and all the transportations on the roads in Stockholm would stand still for 1.5 years. I mean, we're proud of this number. Now we actually can brag about it with some numbers as well. Okay, about our position when it comes to traffic. We are the 2nd-largest site on the web in Sweden.
This is according to ERM, which is the currency for web traffic in Sweden. Also if you look at page views, this is in Swedish, if you look at this called "" you see that we are the clear number one. People that are using Blocket are using it a lot. Also when it comes to mobile applications, we are the second most used service on mobile application. It's especially the iPhone application that we have that generates the most of the traffic. You can also see here the page views. It's quite impressive. If you look at the mobile site or the m site, we are the fourth-largest site in Sweden. That's because most of our users actually use our apps.
If we dig a little bit deeper into the web versus mobile traffic, you can see here the mobile traffic coming from basically nothing to now it has surpassed the web traffic. Now we're looking at page views. It's the same picture if we look at visits on Blocket. You can also see in the dark line that the web traffic is actually declining. But the total, I mean, the growth on mobile is bigger than declining web. The total traffic and page views is at its all-time high right now. This has been an incredible development in mobile. We were quite early. We launched our first iPhone application back in 2009. We have been kind of prepared for this transition.
Okay, I will now dig a little bit down into the different categories or verticals as we call it. We'll start with goods. We are the clear number one player in Sweden. We don't have a clear competitor, like a classified competitor, but we consider Tradera, that is the Swedish eBay auction site, to be our main competitors within goods. It's a little bit like comparing apples and pears, but it's the best we can do. We are much bigger than they are in terms of traffic and monetization. In cars, we are also a clear market leader, both in privately sold cars and in cars sold through car dealers. Last year, we had around 641,000 cars advertised on Blocket.
If you look at you can look at some specific amounts to see the ad volume we have on Blocket compared to the cars sold between privates in Sweden, and it's almost the same. Of course, we don't have 100% of the market because not all cars are advertised. You sell it to friends or families. We believe that we are close to full to have the full market share. Car dealers, we have approximately 95% of all the Swedish car dealers advertise on Blocket. If we go into the new verticals, jobs and real estate, if we start with job, we launched that in 2011. It was a new platform, new technical platform. It's a new organization that we have put up, so it's a new service.
Since then, we managed to become the top three when it comes to traffic and ads on the Swedish job market. Right now we're focusing on building traffic and ad volume and also to change the brand perception of Blocket as a whole. Because Blocket is very much connected to buying and sell used goods, so we need to work with the whole brand perception of Blocket. But we're on a good path there. I will show you some more later. Also in real estate, we are the market leader in privately sold properties and also in rentals.
When it comes to real estate agents, where they advertise, we have a very strong competitor and a clear number one player in Sweden called Hemnet that is also controlled by the two biggest, real estate, agents, or the chains and the real estate associations. We started an initiative back in 2011 to focus on the real estate agents, both in terms of product and how we approach the market. We have now approximately 40% market share, and that is 40% of the property sold in Sweden through real estate agents are now advertised, on Blocket. Cars, if we look a little bit deeper into that, as I said, we basically have the whole market.
Of course, that's a good position to have. But it also has a backside, and that is that we are affected by the macroeconomic situation and the fact that the car industry is suffering. What we can see is that the used car volumes is directly correlated to the new cars sales in Sweden. As the new cars sold in Sweden is down 7% this year, we see that our volumes on Blocket is also down 7%. This is the biggest category we have on Blocket, and the most important in terms of monetization. Of course, this is affecting. This has been the case for this year. It was also the case last year where the car market is suffering.
Unfortunately, we don't see like clear signals that the new car sales will increase a lot during next year. We believe it will continue to be flat. Okay, if we go to job, this is a picture of the job section. As I said, this is a new technical platform, a new organization, and a totally new vertical at Blocket. If we look at the traffic, we are among the top three. Some weeks we are the biggest one, and some weeks, we are number two or number three. As you can see on this picture as well, it's a quite fragmented market. It's a lot of players that's been around for many years, and no one has really been able to take the dominant number one position.
As we see in many other markets, there's one clear winner in the market. We believe it's a big opportunity here to actually take that position. There's one player that we don't see in this graph. It's LinkedIn. They have a totally different business model, and it wouldn't make sense to compare them in a traffic graph like this. Of course, we see them as a main competitor in Sweden as well, in the years to come. We believe we have a good position here to grow from where we are. We also see that in Sweden, a lot of the revenues from this segment in Sweden still goes to print.
We believe that it will be a transition to online, and we have a good position there. Okay, if we then go to Blocket real estate, this is a picture I like as well because you wouldn't have found this on Blocket one and a half years ago. This is a property sold by one of the most prestigious real estate agents in Sweden. This is the result of the push we have made towards the real estate agents, both in terms of the product that we've done a lot of product improvements, worked together with the real estate agents to build a really good real estate marketplace and also how we approach it with our sales team.
So basically, we have gone from 0% of the objects sold through real estate agents just a few years ago to about 40% now. If you look at some important metropolitan areas like Stockholm, we have 55%, and Malmö, 85%. This is, this is growing. We also have eight of the 10 biggest real estate chains are advertising on Blocket. Then you can probably guess which two are not advertising on Blocket, as I told you, who also own a side of Hemnet. Also when it comes to traffic, Hemnet is bigger than we are, and we see them as the market. They basically have 100% of all the objects today. We are increasing the visitors on the real estate section and also the number of ad views.
We clearly can show effect on the ads to get more people to go to the showings of the properties. That is of course paying off. Here, we see that much of the revenues today, as much as 95% of the marketing spent by the real estate agents still go to print. We know that a lot of the real estate agents are looking for digital alternatives, and we think that we can play an important role here. Both with Blocket but also with the rest of Schibsted in Sweden, we can have a very interesting offer for the real estate agents. Okay. We see growing market share in display advertising and other B2B revenues.
If we look at professional classified revenues, we have an increase in revenues of 70% so far this year. A little bit more than a week ago, we launched a totally new pricing model for professional classifieds. Also, in connection with a lot of product improvements and the new shop solution, we will see full effect from this next year. This is a part of Blocket that is growing very fast. Also, when we look at display revenues, we're up 21% year to date compared to last year. If you compare that with the Swedish market as a whole, in Q2, the total display market was up less than 1%.
We're gaining market share here, and it's also that we are now considered to be one of the important media channels in Sweden among the brand advertisers and the media agencies. We have much more to do here in this segment. Also, as Rolv Erik told you about more advanced data analytics, segmentation, and what's being done in the rest of Schibsted, we will benefit from that. This will be an important source of growth for us in the years to come. The organization, we have been growing the organization quite rapidly. This is to mainly in the verticals like jobs and real estate and also within sales. Of course, also in developers, mostly in mobile developers.
We're growing the organization to be able to win in the initiatives we do. We're also proud that we were ranked number five in Sweden as the best working place in Sweden, according to Great Place to Work, and Blocket was ranked number 11 in Europe. We believe that the investing we are doing now in top talents and to retain good talents, it's paying off. If we look at the revenue development and the profit margin, we have had a good development of revenues. As you can see, the revenue margin is down a little bit the last years compared to in 2010 and 2009.
That is also because of the investments we do now for long term in especially in the new verticals and in building the sales organization. We see a continued good healthy growth also this year. As reported in Q2, we have a underlying growth of 12% for the first half year this year. Okay, back to the main takeaways. What I want you to remember is that we are the number 1 marketplace for cars and goods across all channels in Sweden, so we have a good position in mobile. We are taking market share in job and real estate, and we are growing our market share in display advertising and other B2B revenues.
We believe that that will be an important growth factor for us in the years to come. Thank you.
Thank you, Martin. Now, our next speaker is Olivier Aizac, who joined Schibsted in 2006 to launch Leboncoin. This is a story that has been written and analyzed over three pages in Le Monde. Leboncoin is a people's movement actually changing French society. Olivier.
Thank you, Lena. Good morning, everyone. We have talked about our Swedish older brother. I will dig into the French activity now, and present you some of the main takeouts. To start with, a little reminder of what Leboncoin is all about. Leboncoin is a free generalist classifieds website, a little bit different from the Blocket model. To post an ad is free on Leboncoin. That's the one I wanted to show you. It's a Blocket clone. It's based on the Blocket technology and on the Blocket concept. It has been launched in 2006, and within seven years, it has turned to be the biggest marketplace in France. Today, we have reached almost 40% of the French online population, with some impressive number for the French market.
6 billion page view per month, half a million new ad per day in any kind of category. As now, Leboncoin is the leading website in the main verticals. Number one in consumer goods, but also number one in cars, in real estates, and in jobs. We met one and a half year ago. Since we last met, quite a lot of things have happened. The first one was to build up the organization. In 2006, Leboncoin was only two people. Last time we met, we just passed the 100 employees. We are more than 200 people now, and that's a key part of our development path as we need new talents, we need new competencies, and this is where we will build all the developments, all the developments to come.
What we try to do here is to build a very strong company culture, and as Martin mentioned it for Blocket, the best evidence of this is that we are also among the 10 best workplaces in France, two years in a row, which is the clear evedence that there is a dynamic and there is lots of energy in the company. This leads to good revenues number with steady growth. We have almost reached EUR 100 million revenues last year. The growth over the first six months this year is still steady over 30%, and with good margin, almost 70% last year. Last time we talked, we mentioned also the development of mobile.
As you know, French are not first movers usually. We are definitely not in the same position as Blocket because mobile is not as used in France today as it is in the Nordics. Leboncoin is already almost at the same level on the mobile as it is on the web, with a position within the top 15 apps used in France and more than 6 million downloads. So it shows that We are in a moving environment, and we want to provide a solution whatever the device is used by French people is. Mobile, even if it's slower than in the Nordics, is more and more used, and we are there, and we are accompanying this movement.
The biggest news is probably that the competition has left the market. eBay announced last March that they were stopping their classifieds activity in the French market. Once again, it has been a big sign for us. When we launched Leboncoin in 2006, eBay was among the top 10 websites in the French market, was the clear market leader, and we didn't even think that it was possible to compete with those guys. Seven years later, they considered themselves as not a classifieds player anymore, and they have turned to a more traditional marketplace, proposing solution for shops and competing directly with Amazon. It has been a one and a half exciting year since we last met.
It has also been the occasion to work on, by the way, what's next and what will come. The first statement is that we have already built very strong positions in our different verticals, in our different core markets. Consumer goods, of course, where we are by far the number one player on the market, but also car, real estates, and jobs. As Martin was mentioning it, those are, of course, key markets for us. Not only, we have strong offer in terms of listings, but the gap we have built versus the number two player on those different verticals starts to be significant. Just a few words on jobs, where we have traffic and listing today. Brand awareness is super low, as of today.
This is something, of course, that we know we have to build in the future, but it shows clear line. If you do see the other verticals, we have brand awareness. Here, it's top of mind, the name you say when you are asked about the site you're using. We have very, very strong positions in most of the verticals. Beyond that, Leboncoin is today among the top 10 website in France, which means that the audience we have built opens lots of opportunities far beyond classifieds. The name on this list are not classifieds player. They are the major online media player around the world. We have a position among those, which give us perspective on the advertising market, of course.
If we have a look to the vision and what the company has evolved, the little startup of the beginning has turned into a leader in his category, and is now much more than classifieds. We want to play a role as a local media player, and we know we have the audience and the product to reach this position. To go there, three phases of developments. Short term, it's really to focus on our core market, the key verticals I was mentioning, and to develop these market shares in goods, of course, in cars, but also in real estate and jobs where we do see strong opportunities.
Midterm, it's to be to help the local businesses to better sell through us, whether through advertising solution or through technological solutions to help them develop their business either online or offline. In the long term, it's to get all the benefits of the broad audience we have built by being a key player of the French advertising. This will go through new technological solutions. This will go through fashion words such as big data, such as segmentations, things that both Rolv Erik and Martin have mentioned. Really to say that we are able to target the users, we are able to propose good advertising solutions with one single claim. That is to say the only reason to visit Leboncoin is that you have something to buy, meaning, it's a strong claim for advertisers.
To illustrate this and to give you more insight on what will be the next step, and the way we want to develop in the short term, and especially to focus on our core market and the key verticals. A few words on the next verticals where we want to develop revenues, real estates. As of today, Leboncoin is by far the leader in audience. SeLoger, that is the clear market leader today, is twice as small as we are.
The trend is on our side with more than 1 million users gained in this vertical over the last 12 years when SeLoger was losing 200,000 users. As you can see, there is a clear, a clear difference now versus most of the player on this market on an audience point of view. If we have a look to what we do offer in terms of listings and offers, we are focusing on two different markets. The private market, that is very vivid in France and probably much more than in the Nordics or than in Great Britain. We estimate that one-third up to 40% of the market is consumer to consumer, privately sold house, in France.
On this segment, we have reached a very interesting position with a 75% market share already. On the professional segment, where the competition is and where SeLoger is definitely the clear market leader as of today. We do see interesting developments with leading positions on real estate agents, a number of real estate agents using the site in 18 out of 22 regions. Nevertheless, in terms of revenue, SeLoger remained the clear market leader, and especially thanks through very strong positions in the key markets and especially the Paris region. To develop on this, we are already an important player on this market today through an external sales partner that is selling our product and that will sell the product until end of 2014.
What we want to do in the meantime is to build our own offer and to be sure that we will propose to agents solutions that are fitting their needs in order to keep and develop those customers. As Martin mentioned it in his presentation, we are here to build something in the long run. We know that it's a big market with big competitors. We know that we have some key advantages that we want to work on. We want to be the leading player in the long run. It's a long-run job, and this is what we're focusing on today.
To sum it up, first thing, as Lena was mentioning it, Le Monde had a big title early this year on Leboncoin and on the fact that Leboncoin give a good view on how the French society is evolving. Leboncoin is not only about classifieds today. It has entered the daily life of the French households. It has changed the way French people are consuming. Sustainable consumption is now a trendy word in France. And Leboncoin has played a key role on this part. Le Monde is talking about a social phenomenon and has asked historians, philosophers to explain this success.
What I want you to take out of this is that what Leboncoin is now is a very strong media player and not only a classifieds website where you can find used goods. This enlight the step-by-step vision we have to build up the company with, in the short term, a clear focus on our core markets. We are nevertheless still a classifieds player. It's our core business, and we want to develop this vertical by vertical. In parallel to this, we know that we have strong opportunities to build solutions for local businesses that need channels to develop their business. We're here to provide solution for local advertisers.
In the long run, our position within the top ten websites on the French market give us clear opportunities to play a key role in French advertising through better technological solutions, through better segmentations, through better data analytics that will help us to propose targeted solutions for advertisers. Thank you, and I think there will be a Q&A sessions later. Don't hesitate. Thank you.
We will shortly ask you up here again. Thank you, Olivier. We will now continue our story here today with a story of more about Schibsted Classified Media. Here to give you insight is actually the boss of Martin and Olivier, Terje Seljeseth, who first built FINN to a great success in Norway and then moved on to take on the world.
Yeah. The world is large. Anyway, we have heard the presentations now from Olivier and Martin on Blocket and Leboncoin. If you attend the webcast tomorrow from New York, you will also hear the FINN presentation. Of course, these sites are the sites that really are impacting, short term, the revenue and profit, of Schibsted. I will actually talk more about, the medium and long-term assets, in Schibsted. Before I do that, I will explain to you the portfolio management system that we use. The core, as also Rolv Erik mentioned, is the European sites. Examples of these kind of countries, France, Sweden, Italy, Finland, and Spain.
You have heard announced joint agreement with Telenor and also Singapore Press Holdings, a joint venture that will actually cover the emerging markets, typically like Vietnam, Indonesia and Brazil. We have something strange called shotgun sites. These are sites that we actually launch from Stockholm, operate from Stockholm without local organizations. We use this as a recruitment channel for new sites in the core or in the joint venture. We do experiments in both emerging and all the markets to see if we can get some traction. If we are successful with that, we will move them into either the core or to the joint venture. We have sites in more than 40 countries.
It might be a disappointment to you, but we will probably not succeed in all of them. Now and then, we will also be taking some of the sites from the core or the joint venture and move them to the shotgun kind of phase. Well, the rest of the world. We also see some countries that are not suited for our classified models yet. And of course, we have some very mature markets, like here in the UK with very strong players already in very, very strong number one positions. There are actually some countries in the world that we will not launch in. Hope you will appreciate that, actually. Back to the medium-term sites. Italy, Subito. This is actually the site we hope will become the next Leboncoin.
Italy, with 63 million people, is a very exciting market, and Subito has been growing for, steadily, actually, for several years. We see increased growth lately, accelerated growth, and we are really excited about the opportunity in Italy. We, as Rolv Erik said, focus a lot on the large South European markets, France, Italy and Spain. It's very important for us actually to succeed in these large countries with altogether 170 million people. This is a very exciting market, and we have acquired full control in the Anuntis system in Spain with several strong verticals. We have a goal to build a FINN-like situation in Spain. These sites are actually already strong verticals, and they are also quite good when it comes to monetization.
We will now after the acquisition focus a lot on traffic growth because that is something that is really needed in some of these sites. Of course, we will work with the products and use best practice from the rest of the Schibsted system, and we have already inserted some talent from the rest of the group into the operations here. I'm not saying that we will build a FINN brand in Spain, but this is one of the opportunities and possibilities we have. We would really like to build a FINN-like position for the classified sites in Spain.
If we are able to build a strong kind of Leboncoin in Italy and a strong kind of FINN in Spain, we think we will actually have a whole market in this part of the world. Some examples from the rest of the medium-term assets. We have a leadership now in Austria. This is also a FINN model, by the way. Strong in all and leading in all verticals. This is new from the last time we met, by the way. Also in outside Europe, in Malaysia, Mudah has been very strong for quite some time, and is now a clear leader in Malaysia, and is looking more and more like Leboncoin also.
We can see here the huge traffic growth in mobile, which is something that we see in, especially in emerging markets. Then I will move to the investment phase sites, and I give you some examples from these markets. First, an example from a very mature market. We have been able to build a very strong position for Tori in Finland. Finland is definitely a very mature market. It has one of the highest internet penetration in the world. And just in a few years, we have moved from a startup shotgun launch to a number one position. This has been very important for us to really see that we are able to move into a competitive market, a mature market, a mature internet market, and get a number one position.
Also in emerging markets, this has been possible. An example from Chile, where we have in just a few years gotten a number one position with this rocket clone, Yapo. Still growing very strongly. Then we have, of course, quite a few markets with very strong competition, and Brazil is definitely one of them. A very interesting, very exciting market, and we are growing rapidly but with strong competition from several players. Such an attractive market will always attract a lot of players, and that is definitely the case with Brazil. Of course, we have a lot of markets where the jury is still out.
We see, especially in emerging markets at least, that there will be longer time to monetization, and we will also need more investments. A good thing also, we will have to innovate even faster than we have done so far. To sum it up, building global leadership is still our target. I hope you understood my portfolio management model. I hope that you have seen that we have been successfully able to roll out both the thin kind of model in several countries and also the Blocket model. Also that we have been able to move into a clear number one position, both in mature but also in emerging markets. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll ask you to stay there for a little while, because now it's the time for our first Q&A. Please, Martin and Olivier and Rolv Erik. There will be microphones, so please, wait until you have the microphone before you speak, and, state your name and institution. Let's start. Questions here.
Hi, good morning. This is Jerome Stacks from UBS. I have a question for Olivier on Leboncoin. Can you maybe give us a bit of color? Because in the press release you said that you expect some short-term slowdown. Can you just maybe give a bit of a color on this? And maybe, can you help us a little bit, so again, for France on the advertising trends, because I think last year when you said that you were hiring more people, there was a lot of these people were to help you to build a sort of bigger sales force for advertising. Can you give us a bit of color on the progress you've made in that area? Thank you.
We have insourced our advertising sales force one and a half year ago. It was an external sales house that was selling advertising for Leboncoin before. We have taken the decision just because we are now one of the key player to have a dedicated team. Within one and a half year, Leboncoin is now within the top five advertising, online advertising player on the French market. It's a team of 12 now, focusing on the key accounts. On top of that, we have also built a strong local sales team, selling advertising through telesales. This is the biggest evolution.
On your first question, the point is to say that we have very strong positions, that we don't want to waste this. We want to build a business in the long run. We want to go step by step on this.
Maybe just to follow up a little bit, 'cause obviously you're gonna end your agreement with SPH at the end of 2014. You've explained that you're gonna continue to sell your product with them until the end of 2014. Do you expect maybe there's a disruption with the real estate agents given that, I don't know, they're gonna have to sign up for maybe just six months, or they're not, they won't be too sure of, you know, what to do? Do you expect maybe they're gonna wait, and, you know, wait for 2015, basically, when you'll have your new offer?
Actually, what we do expect is the same kind of evolution as when we have insourced national sales house. It's the same kind of situation with an external sales force proposing our product. What we are putting the focus on is really the transition period, just to be sure that we have a clear message to the market and they know exactly what we are proposing and that the transition is not not about destroying value and and positions that have been built.
Thank you.
Okay, we have a question over here.
Thank you. Martin Stenshall, Danske Markets. First a question to Mr. Røstad. Encouraging to see the JVs a couple weeks back. Could you please talk a bit about the speed and the commitment you're putting in with respect to what we actually can expect out of these JVs? Naturally, Telenor brings some interesting knowledge and experience to the table, but what kind of, let's say, mobile solutions can we maybe expect and what could really drive growth and earnings for Schibsted on back of that? Naturally also, your thoughts on Schibsted's investment levels in total and particularly maybe to the JVs.
We have seen, you know, large hikes in the investment levels in the first and second quarter of this year. Should we expect somewhat lower investment levels with the new joint ventures going forward? Thank you.
Well, I've said that I'm excited about the joint venture because I think Telenor is bringing in a lot of good things for us. They're bringing in competence about the mobile and about those emerging markets and also a more solid financial base. I think in total, this will strengthen our competitive position because Terje mentioned that we're seeing a strong competition in many of these markets. I think with this joint ventureship, we'll have both the stronger operational and not least financial base to move forward. I think that we can achieve more in a shorter time than we could have done before.
I think I'd like to be a bit careful on guiding on the levels because as we've said previously, as the ones that read those with most interest were, of course, our competitors and therefore, you know, we're not, we're still in that situation. We're not going to guide explicitly on that. Of course, you know, in the joint ventures, there's going to be there's going to be then three parties in Southeast Asia and two parties in the other parts. That will have some effect, of course. I think, you know, we're discussing many interesting opportunities with Telenor these days, and we're looking forward to get the agreement finally closed.
We're preparing for it to get operational pretty soon. We haven't at the same time, we don't want to disclose too much about exactly what are the operational synergies, because that's also something we regard as a competitive advantage for us that we'll like to disclose in the market.
Thanks. A question to Martin Frey in Blocket. Do you got any plans to expand into new verticals? Obviously, I think you have a lot to do with the car, no, sorry, the job and wheel set vertical. Any plans to expand into other verticals that we see in Finn, for example? Also a question regarding monetization in Blocket. Could you please elaborate a bit on your thoughts on, you know, basic listing fees, for example? Just on the top of my mind, I think that a basic listing fee for a car in Blocket is, let's say, EUR 20, and in Finn in Norway, it's, let's say, EUR 70. There's a big difference. Any thoughts on that, please?
Yeah. For the first question into new verticals, we are, as I said, focusing on jobs and real estate. In Sweden, we have a little bit different situation where we have Schibsted Sweden, and we also have Schibsted Tillväxtmedier that also have positions within travel, within services, and so on. We have kind of split that responsibility. Of course, we are cooperating, Schibsted as a whole in Sweden. The focus for Blocket is jobs and real estate at the moment. On the second question, we have done some price adjustments for the private listings, but what we're doing now is that we focus more on professional classifieds, also to have the good balance between professional and private content on the site. I, yeah.
We have to look more on the Swedish market, and to see what we can do there rather than to look at FINN in Norway.
Yeah. I think it's important to also mention that Blocket has some products that FINN does not have when you buy a classified ad. The price difference is not that huge, actually.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We are working more on extra features like...
Yeah.
-galleries, extra pictures, and, keeping the basic ad at a good level.
Okay. We have a question, in the back and then in the middle.
Hi. Good morning. Rasmus Engberg with Handelsbanken. I had three questions to Terje. Firstly, on a sort of philosophical level, when we look at the traffic, how do you see, you know, the focus between unique viewers or unique browsers and page visits? Is it one of them that you always focus on, or does it change over time? That's the first question. The second question relates to the traffic that in Spain and in Brazil, how you see those positions at this point in time compared to your competitors.
That was two. You have three. Okay. The 1st one, yes, we are mainly looking at the same kind of metrics all the time. We think some metrics are more important than others. We look a lot at page views and number of ads because that is really what the users are doing on the site. We look a lot less on unique visitors, to be honest, because it's quite easy to buy unique visitors. It's much more difficult to buy quality traffic and engagement on the site. Does this change over time? Yes, a bit because of the mobile development, because we have a lower page number of page views per visit on a mobile device than on web device.
Of course, we are focusing some more on visits now than we used to do because of that.
The second question, the traffic development in, let's say, Spain first. It's developing good now. We are not satisfied with the traffic development in all the verticals in Spain, and that is why I also mentioned the product makeover and inserting new talents and so on. When we have full control over the Spanish assets, there are a number of things we want to do to improve exactly traffic. That's the main target, actually. Brazil, we are growing strongly. Are we number one or number two? Depends on what kind of metrics you are looking at. I think we can say that we are leading in some metrics and the competition is leading in others.
I think we are actually giving a lot of data about the competition and none of the competitors are actually doing that, so I think I will stop with that.
Okay. The third question, we have the question in the middle over here.
Yes. Good morning, Sarah Simon from Berenberg. I've got three questions. First two about the joint venture. First one is, you've obviously done an awful lot with mobile already. I'm not entirely clear as to what is on the mobile side that Telenor brings you. They're obviously a large mobile player, but is it that, or is it some kind of media expertise that. I'd like to understand more about what you, what Telenor really brings, because from a financial perspective, you talked about stability, but you have a very strong balance sheet already. Which kind of takes me to the second question, which is you've obviously booked a profit on those deals, which is good, except it would seem that the valuation put on these assets is actually pretty small if you consider the market opportunity.
You've obviously got less exposure to that going forward, having sold part of it. Is the message that we should take away from that you think there is materially and larger, more investment required to achieve that kind of value and you don't wanna take all of that risk yourself? Third question is rather more simple. In terms of how Blocket's taken market share from the real estate agents, in Sweden, can you talk about how you've done that? Because, I guess you're competing against a business which is actually owned by the estate agents. Are you just going in with a very cheap offer and saying, "Look at it, all the extra traffic I get," or is it something beyond simply a price competition that's because you've taken a lot of market share already. Thanks.
Thank you.
I think I'll actually start with the, with the second question. Perhaps Terje can take the first one, and then Martin will follow with the third. I think that, you know, in a negotiation, when you're negotiating a joint venture agreement, there's always a negotiation going on as to what is exactly the right price. I think it's a fair and good price we have. When you say about the potential in those markets, yes, I believe it's a good potential. That's why we are investing and continue to invest. What we also pointed out here today, what Terje did, we're saying that it'll take some time. You know, it takes longer time in the emerging markets than in mature markets.
Terje mentioned Finland. That's going quicker than in Brazil for all the players. It's taking longer time to maturity, to maturity, and it's also a, it's also a strong competition. That is really also reflected in the whole joint venture. We believe we'll have a stronger operational and financial base to succeed with the joint venture. Terje, you know, we get this question about the exact operational things, and we don't want to move too much into that.
Not too much, but I think most telcos see that the future will actually be a lot about data traffic and not with speech. If you look at that kind of development, you will certainly see that some of the most advanced telcos are really looking into how should they develop in the future, how should they use internet, both for distribution and other things. That also is important for us because it has something to do with mobile marketing that they have actually done research in. Mobile marketing is somewhat different from the marketing we are used to on the web platform or offline. It has also something to do with product development.
When you are an operator, you can actually experiment with user behavior on a product easier than what we can do. There are also some other things, local presence, in some large markets, which is definitely the case for Telenor in Asia, but that's a bit more complicated.
For markets?
Yep. Well, I think it's a combination of many things that we've been able to grow the market share. It's really the way we built the product. We didn't have that before for the real estate agents, and we've done that together with the real estate agents. Now for the first time, we have a really good offering towards the real estate agents. It's not like we have been pricing us into it because Hemnet has always been for free. They started to charge for the listing now in July, but that's pretty new, and we grew the market share before that. It's also about, I think, no one actually did advertise anywhere else than on Hemnet. That situation has changed recently.
Yeah, so we can show good effect for the ones joining and then the rest will follow. Hemnet has always been for free, so.
Okay. Now let's see. I have four questions listed. We have one in the back, over there, and then we're moving forward here, and then back there again.
Morning. David Reynolds from Jefferies. I've got eight questions, but I'll just ask one. You all talked about the growing levels of mobile traffic across your assets. I wonder if you could just share some views on how your businesses have to change or whether they have to change to actually monetize that traffic as effectively as you have done on the desktop.
Yeah. I can perhaps answer that. For the paid models like Blocket, Bonial and FINN and so on, I think it's easy to understand that if you pay for an ad on the web, you'll do that on a mobile device as well. When it comes to advertising models, and extra features and all these kind of things, most of these business models or products are possible to develop also on the mobile device. You just have to do it differently. It's different in design and different in the whole user experience actually, which is something we are doing a lot of research in.
I think it's more open for discussion how the display ads will actually develop in the future on mobile devices. I think FINN is really experimenting a lot with this for the time being. You can see that in the listings, for example. We are looking into that as well, of course.
People are using the mobile devices, typically in a different way, and they have usage perhaps only two minutes and they check into it. To check the news, then VG will benefit from that. If you go into classified sites, you don't have time to navigate, if you have only two minutes. Therefore, the user interface has to be different. If you look at, for instance, the latest developments we've done in apps for FINN, it's much more quicker access directly to personalized content, so you don't have to navigate a lot.
I would add that it's not like we necessarily see that the mobile devices are replacing some of the web usage. Some of it, yes, but it's also complementary. People use it for different things.
I have a question here.
Thanks. Good morning. It's Ruchi Malaiya from Citigroup. If I'm correct, Mex case sits outside of your JV. I just wanted to know whether the intention then is to move that into the JV as you develop it, or what happens if you choose to develop it on your own? Are your partners expecting that eventually more of your sites move into the JV?
No, the JVs are then limited to South America and Asia. In addition to that, outside Europe, we have a few emerging markets that are in Mexico, as you rightly say, and we're also experimenting a little bit in some nations north in Africa. They are all outside the JVs, and there's no plan to bring any of these sites into them.
Thank you.
Okay. We have a gentleman over here waiting for.
Hi, there. It's David Force from IBIS. I just had another question about the Telenor deal, particularly in Latin America. I mean, you valued the business at EUR 170 million, then sold them half for EUR 85 million. You know, we don't know how that's split between Brazil and Chile, but if it was, say, 70-15, you know, that doesn't seem a particularly big value for half of those businesses. Although Telenor have got a presence in Asia, they don't have a presence in Latin America. I was wondering, you know, did you consider doing a deal in Latin America with somebody that has a mobile presence in Latin America? You know, if what you wanted was mobile expertise in Latin America, couldn't you know, have gone out and bought it or hired somebody?
Which sort of leads me to think that maybe, you know, the reason you wanted the deal with Telenor is actually to help them, you know, fund, you know, the business going forward, which seems slightly at odds with the comment about you having a very strong balance sheet. I wonder if you could comment about, you know, what seems to be a cheap sale and, you know, why Telenor particularly in Latin America.
If the price is something you want to...
Can comment on, Ulf-Erik.
What we've done is to create this joint venture. I think your, you know, your comments on the price, I've always commented on that. There's always a negotiation taking place. I think it's a fair price that reflects both strong market position, but also that there's some time to maturity. I think it's easier for us to handle, you know, a big joint venture like that covering emerging markets. These were kind of how the discussions panned out.
We can also see that a lot of the knowledge in emerging markets where people are typically jumping over desktop, fixed phones, et cetera, to the mobile, a lot of that knowledge is also transferable to the emerging markets in Latin America.
Okay. We have a question from the web.
Yes, we do. We have a question from the web for Olivier.
Regarding Leboncoin. The question is, will you be slightly more careful in terms of ad pricing on new verticals going forward in the light of the volume decline that you saw in auto parts when you introduced payments there? Could you generally comment on when you expect ad volumes to come back after introducing pricing on the new vertical?
Just to make the point here to everyone, we have introduced insertion fees for professionals in car parts before the summer. It's something that we have done before. It has been done in real estates for professional. It has been done in cars. I think that the best example we have to base our future development and our future pricing strategy is what we have noticed on the car market. We turn from free to paid ads for car dealers. Of course, we had a drop in number of listings. Today, we have more paid listings posted by car dealers on Leboncoin that we used to have free listings before the introduction of insertion fees.
We are of course, super careful when we are introducing insertion fees because to turn from free to to paid service, it's a big change for for our users. What we have noticed on the car market is, when we are providing an efficient service and that thanks to us, car dealers can can sell used cars, we are recovering and developing our market.
Okay, I think we'll move on to the third row first and...
Hello, my name is Katja Riefler from N Group. I have a question for Leboncoin. I wondered, you said that you were going to develop new services for local dealers to sell better. I wondered whether there's a problem with the culture that people are used to finding used goods on Leboncoin, and now they are more and more confronted with new items and with advertising. That's my first question. The second question I have is more general for all, and I wondered whether you plan to invest into pure mobile marketplaces or what you have done besides Shpock.
On Leboncoin, we are proposing used products. As you have seen it today, used products is something a little bit wide, as real estate is considered as used product. We are also looking at what we can provide in the service vertical, which is something where lots of local businesses are already using the site. We consider that the level of service we are proposing as of today is super basic and that we can improve this a lot. This is the kind of development we have in mind to help local businesses to better sell through us.
To the second question, yes, if we see good applications, mobile applications that are pure mobile, we will probably invest in them, yes.
We have questions here in the second row. We have two questions here, and I think we have some more from the web.
Thank you. Preben Rasch-Olsen, Carnegie. Some quick questions to Terje. You were talking about Subito and hoping to see a new Leboncoin in Italy. Can you give some examples of where Subito is today? Revenues, revenue growth, where are the margins? Are the professionals already paying in Subito, or is it still just for free? Where are you on the monetization?
Professionals are pay-paying, yes. As you know, we are not giving out exact revenue and profit and these kind of things per company or per site. Subito is growing faster than Leboncoin and will be the second-largest site in Schibsted Classified Media very soon. It's a large site and growing faster and faster every year. That at least is giving us a good hope for the kind of Leboncoin development.
Yeah, Martin Stensrud, Danske Bank again. Another question to Oliver. eBay quit their online, classified operation in France earlier this year, as you mentioned. We have seen that Leboncoin has the number one position in all selected verticals. If I'm not mistaken, the prices, features is actually higher for selected items in Subito versus, you know, the same kind of items in Leboncoin, despite the fact that you face tougher competition from eBay in Italy. My question is basically, what are the reasons why you're still cautious in monetizing users in France? Because it could seem to me that you could monetize a bit harder with practically no competition in France right now. Thanks.
Pricing strategy is something that we are focusing a lot on recently. We are coming from a free model. In the end we are making money out of a free model. We are coming from a very simple model. When we have introduced paid features, it was the same price, whatever the category, whatever the kind of product you were selling. This is more advanced today with different pricing depending on the kind of product you are selling. We are continuously working on this pricing strategy to make trade-off and to see what how pushy we can be on this. It's super tricky.
The question coming from the web shows that we are on the market, and even if we have strong positions, we cannot do whatever we want with our pricing. We have to be very cautious on how to position our paid services.
Okay. We have a question from the web.
Okay. Yes. Two questions here. Can you talk a little bit about building out new services and also new services on Leboncoin in a market where we don't have media houses supporting the new online services? The second question is also more on the market situation in Europe. Any visibility on how the current market economical environment could weigh on revenues?
Yeah, economic development. Well, we've already commented, and Trond will get back to that on the macroeconomic things that are happening in Spain. You know, we're hoping that things will turn up there, and then I think we're very well positioned. So far, the macroeconomic outlook in Spain has been rather weak. When it comes to other countries, I would say that in France, I see some uncertainty, but I'm not so afraid of that due to Leboncoin is not exposed that much to the macroeconomic swings. In fact, many of the things, the consumer revenues are probably not exposed to much of the economic outlook.
When it comes to the first question, I would say that, we, it's right, we only have 50% of 20 minutes in France. Things that we should do there will have to be on the back of Leboncoin itself, and if we develop new financial services there. I would, however, say that, with the strength of that site and 6 billion page views per month, they're in a unique position to really develop new things that are adjacent to classifieds.
We have a lot of time for one more question, then we'll go for a break.
Volunteer.
Volunteer.
Hi. Thank you. Jerome Stacks again from UBS. Can you just tell us a bit more about, I mean, Italy, so you've talked about it, but I think, I mean, following the pricing that you guys have been doing on the Italian website, Subito, and I think you've been increasing prices like the bump to the top option for instance, like quite a lot this year. Is that, well, I guess part of your experimentation, but is it also a sign that you're increasingly confident that you're getting really good traction and that you can allow yourself to do that? Yeah, just to be a caller on that would be helpful. Maybe, well, I guess on versus eBay as well, like how do you compare them to pricing?
Why would people list on Subito versus the classified eBay? Thank you.
Of course, since we are growing all the time steadily and actually, more and more every year in Subito, we are more and more willing to try to take paid for different services. But it's more like you say, we are trying in different countries with different competitive situation to experiment with different payment models. It's correct that Subito has actually done a lot of that when it comes to what we call premium products.
Okay. Thank you for being a very engaged audience. We will now have a 30-minute break. Of course, management will be available for questions and comments and discussions. You will have to be back here at 11:15 sharp. Okay? Thank you. Okay. Welcome back to all of you and to our viewers online. In our first session, you have heard Rolv Erik give an overview of our strategy, and we have dived into some of our vivid marketplaces of today. Let's continue to build our day together. Remember the story about Christian Schibsted and Aftenposten? Let's take a look at his newspaper and the digital journey of the Schibsted media houses. It's a story of change, it's a story of disruption, and it's a story of innovation. Most of all, it's a story about our readers.
Here to tell you about this is Sondre Gravir, who is the CEO of Aftenposten.
Thank you, Lena. Hello, everybody. Hope you had a good break. There's been three guys presenting the Schibsted Classified Media part. I'm the only one presenting the Media House part, so I have to speak very quick to get all my messages through. On the Capital Market Day last year, we presented or summarized the Media House strategy in Schibsted like this: profitability in print combined with transformation to digital. This is still a valid summary, as you will see from my presentation today, we have increased the focus on digital growth, even though in some areas it might affect print profitability. That being said, we are still very committed to maintain acceptable margins in our media house business throughout this digital transformation, I think our track record is demonstrating that commitment.
Over the last years, we have been able to offset decrease in offline revenues with online growth and cost measures. In August last year, we communicated an additional NOK 500 million profitability program in order to improve margins and to increase our digital online development efforts. Most of this is history. Let's look at the way going forward. I will start with two pictures, which I think really illustrates the market we are operating in our media houses. This picture is taken in 2005. Anyone knows the occasion?
Pope.
Pope, somebody said. Yes, that's correct. It's the inauguration of Pope Benedict in 2005. The next picture is taken at the same place, same location eight years later. It's the inauguration of Pope Francis. It looks like this. It's quite a big change just eight years, and it all started with the iPhone in 2007. I think it really, as I said, I think it really illustrates the market we are operating in. In the digital transformation of our media houses, I think there are three important milestones that we need to focus on. The number one is about our readers. We need to have more online readers than print readers, and we need to have more mobile readers than print readers. The second milestone is the ad revenue.
Basically, we need to have higher online ad revenue than offline ad revenue. The third milestone we need to reach is within digital user payment. We need to have sufficient digital user payment levels, not as high probably, or personally, I think they will not be as high as the user payment levels we see in print today. It's not necessary either because it's a different cost base with our digital products combined, compared with our printed products. If we have these three milestones, let's evaluate the media house performance today according to these milestones. If we start with readership, we have a dominant position in both the Norwegian and the Swedish market with our media houses. What we see is that the position within mobile is even stronger than the position online within desktop.
I think Aftonbladet is the media house that has the strongest position within mobile. As you can see, they reach more than 4x as many readers as their closest competitor in terms of news on mobile in Sweden. What we see is that as the transformation move along from print to desktop and from desktop to mobile, we are actually strengthening our position. Two weeks ago, we got the results from the biggest annual and most trustworthy readership survey in Norway. The message from that survey was very clear, and it was very positive. All our media houses in Norway and also in Sweden are strengthening their coverage in the digital transformation. That is very, very good. In terms of milestone number one, online versus offline readership, I would definitely say we're on the right track.
In terms of milestone number two, the picture is somewhat more balanced. If you look at the offline versus online advertising revenue, the situation, per second quarter this year is that in total, across our media houses in Norway and Sweden, 41% of the total advertising revenues comes from online. That is up 3%, compared with second quarter last year. Here is a different situation for VG and Aftonbladet and the subscription-based media houses. VG and Aftonbladet has a higher share of their revenues from online compared to offline. Now it's 62%, up from 52% by summer last year, which is an impressive number, and the lines in, for example, VG crossed around the summer last year. For our subscription-based media houses, the picture is somewhat different.
Here, we see that 14% of the total advertising revenue per 2Q this year comes from online. The strong print advertising revenue is due, among others, to still strong positions within the print job market and the print real estate market. What we see is that now in 2013, all the subscription-based media houses have a very strong digital growth in online advertising revenue. This picture will be more balanced over the years to come. For all our media houses, though, we see that the digital growth now is mainly driven by growth in mobile. Desktop advertising revenue is still growing, but at a softer or low levels than we have seen over the last couple of years. By 2Q this year, mobile revenues is up 90% year-over-year.
What we see is that with strong mobile traffic growth in all the media houses compared to a very strong development within mobile ARPU, the mobile revenues goes up, simple as that. Mobile ARPU today is, across the Schibsted Media Group, 66% of desktop ARPU, compared to 37% of desktop ARPU just one year ago. We are really successful now in monetizing on our mobile traffic positions. To summarize, milestone number two, offline versus online advertising, Aftonbladet is and VG, they are already there, and the subscription-based media houses are on the right track. Milestone number three, digital user payment. Just to be clear here, I will not use the word paywall.
Being in the media house industry is being in a consumer-oriented industry, I just don't understand how it's possible to use such a negative term as a wall when you're operating in a consumer-oriented industry. This is not about building walls. This is about empowering our readers and our advertisers with better digital products. 2013 will be an important year for the Schibsted media houses in terms of digital user payment, because by end of this year, all the Norwegian and Swedish media houses will have introduced digital user payment models. As Rolv Erik said in his presentation, VG and Aftonbladet, they have introduced the so-called plus model, which means that you are actually paying for the premium articles. We have the regional media houses in Norway.
They have introduced a freemium model, where some of the content, or actually most of the content, is, you need to be a subscriber to read that content. Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden and Aftenposten in Norway, we are introducing a metered model, more like the New York Times. The reason why we have three different models, so to speak, within Schibsted is that we actually think there's no one-size-fits-all solution when it cmes to digital user payment models. We have different market positions. We have different digital traffic patterns. We come from different print business models. We need to launch different models, but this will not be a static picture. This picture will probably not look the same in one or two years. We are doing a lot of experimenting.
We are doing a lot of A and B testing in all the media houses, and we are sharing this knowledge across the group, so we can develop each other and actually also adjust the models going forward. In terms of milestone number three, I think we will summarize by saying that 2013 is the year where it's really starting. In order to develop our media houses further, and in order to reach all the three milestones in all our media houses, we will focus the efforts going forward along these three dimensions. It's customer centricity, it's moving pictures or web TV, and it's the print to digital transformation, especially for our readers. I will dig into detail in each of them. Let's start with customer centricity.
As I said earlier, our customers, our readers, they are the fundament of the business in our media houses, because as long as we have a strong readership position, we will deliver good effects to advertisers. Data and insight is now really changing this market. We are now moving from mass market communication to more individual targeted communication. Customer centricity in our media houses, as also Martin and the other speakers mentioned in their presentations, customer centricity is all about capturing all available data from our readers and our advertisers, turn that data into insight in order to make better editorial products and also better commercial products. Big data, that's a buzzword nowadays, you all know. You probably also know that the Netflix series, House of Cards, is just a result of big data. It's a buzzword for a reason.
I think for the media houses in Schibsted, advanced data analytics and start to use, you know, all the data and insight we have about our readers and advertiser is really one of the most important areas we should focus on going forward in order to increase our reach and to increase the monetization of our strong readership positions. Because we have a lot of data. With the strong traffic positions we have in Norway and Sweden, we have a lot of data from our users and from the advertisers. As Rolv Erik was mentioning in his presentation, we are using the Schibsted Payment ID, login, and payment system across all our media houses.
Combining both the demographic data and then the behavioral data, since our readers will be logged in, we can create very rich consumer profiles, which we can use in three areas specifically. First of all, we want to use this insight to create, as I said, better editorial products. That is, for example, personalization of editorial content. Very interesting in order to drive up the readership of our newspapers. The second area is to develop better targeted advertising products. We do a lot of experimenting in this area nowadays, and we see huge effects for advertisers. The third area where I think we have a big potential across the media houses is within our sales and CRM work.
By improving both the cross-sales, the conversion, and the churn, I think we can have improved numbers in terms of reach and monetization. This being said, let me just be clear on one thing. When we talk about data gathering and consumer profiles, we move into a very important area in terms of reputation and regulation. As a media company, we are dedicated to be open and honest on what we do and of course act within existing regulation. I think it's really important that our readers and advertisers actually experience that they get better products from this initiative. Because if we manage to be relevant and not intrusive when using personal personalized information and targeted advertising, we have succeeded. Okay, that was customer centricity. Let's talk about a very, very interesting part, and that is the web TV part.
I have to admit, it feels so good to be a disruptor in the TV market. As a new player, we basically just act differently. This picture is from outside the court building, when the trial after the tragic event in Norway, July 22, 2011 was held. Here you can see the national broadcaster, NRK, and the biggest commercial national broadcaster, TV two, with their big and complex setup, with a lot of technology and a lot of people and 100 meters of cable. We have the small rented for transit from VGTV. Who won the competition? Who had the most web TV viewers during the trial? It was VGTV. That's because we just adapt quicker to new technology.
For example, a reporter now, a journalist in VG, can report live on the VG web service with his mobile telephone. That was the case during the tragic bombing in Boston earlier this year. A VG reporter happened to be in Boston, actually on holiday, but he started to report live from Boston with his mobile telephone. VGTV was one of the first Norwegian media houses offering live reporting from Boston. As Rolv Erik also said, we have a very strong position already today within web TV. We are the market leader with VGTV in Norway and with Aftonbladet in Sweden. The web TV part is an integrated part of our news offering.
Now we are significantly stepping up our focus and our resources within web TV, both locally in the media houses, but in Norway also in a central unit branded VGTV. The central unit will coordinate the local efforts in order to extract synergies within content production, technology, and ad sales. We are very confident that web TV will be an attractive market going forward because we expect growth in the advertising revenue due to money shifting from traditional TV advertising to web TV advertising. To be honest, if I was an advertiser myself, I would definitely do that shift myself because this is driven by what really matters. It's driven by the viewers, by the audience. Here times are changing, especially among young people. This graph I think is very interesting.
Here you can see that 55% of the VGTV viewers are under the age of 40, while for the two biggest national competitors, 50% of the NRK viewers in traditional TV are over the age of 60, and for TV 2, that number is 50% over the age of 50. We know that young audience is attractive advertisers, so the money will move. It's just a question of time. It's not only because of the audience money will move. In web TV, we can be more creative in terms of ad solutions. Today, we have post and pre-rolls. We are now launching product placements, overlays, mid-rolls, et cetera. We can combine all these advertising formats in creative solutions. I will now give you a short example illustrating this.
This is example where we actually used one of our own brands, Finn.no, in the VGTV advertising. The reason why we do that is that what we see is that within new digital channels like web TV and mobile, we actually have to educate the advertisers. We have to show the way with our own brands. Finn.no, their travel section, earlier this year, launched a new hotel search. We had a fashion show program on VGTV called Min mote. In one of the programs, the show was actually going to London. We thought, "Okay, let's illustrate how we can use all the digital ad formats together," and the result is like this. You have a skin, banner advertising around, and then you have product placements within the program.
The program host is actually doing a search on FINN travel in the program. Of course, the result of a campaign like this is incredible, both in terms of brand awareness, but as you can see, very interesting click-through rates. These are quite high click-through rates to be a traditional banner ad, and that's because of the relevant content surrounding the banner ads. We have the third pillar, moving the readers from print to digital. More than 50% of our digital traffic comes from a mobile platform. This graph is from Aftonbladet, the day after the national election in the beginning of September. There you can see in the morning, we have more than 70% coming from a mobile platform. This really changed the way we work. We don't have one deadline anymore.
We have a deadline 24/7, we have to constantly work across the channel to optimize the traffic because we really need to transform our readers. In Aftonbladet we know that actually a majority of the digital readers, they are not print subscribers. Most of our print subscribers don't use our digital product. We will transform them. I think these are four good examples on digital product development, and Rolv Erik was mentioning one of them, the Aftonbladet Tipsa, and it's fantastic. Aftonbladet can send mobile push notifications to readers that are located geographically close to a news event and ask for their input. In a way, Aftonbladet readers, they become the live reporters, and that is improving Aftonbladet's news offering. It's a fantastic service made possible by the penetration of smartphone and the Aftonbladet app in Sweden.
I could tell you many more examples on product development because I think product development online and innovation power is one of our core strengths in the media houses nowadays. We are talking here a lot about digital product development, but I just want to be clear here, of course, we are still committed to develop our print business going forward. This year, we have redesigned many of our products. We have launched new weekends magazines, we have launched new niche magazines in print, and we have launched new newspaper titles. It really affects both the readership and the revenue. For example, last Friday, we launched a new weekend magazine in Aftonbladet, Our Magazine, in a new version, and the single copy sales that day was up 20% compared with single copy sales the same day one year earlier.
As I have said, the main focus going forward will be digital growth. Yes, we do develop our print product offering, but the prioritization in the product development process has changed. It's not anymore print first. Now it's mobile first, then desktop, and if we think it's profitable, we will develop the new products for print as well. That was the overview of the focus going forward. The three pillars, customer centricity, web TV, and print to digital transformation. As you understand, we are running at full speed in each of these three areas. What's next? I don't know. Probably, BlackBerry will not be the leading smartphone operator. I don't know for sure, though. One thing I know for sure is that change will continue. There will always be disruptive forces in the market. Anyone knows this guy? Come on.
You're not that old. His name is Tim Bergling. He's a young Swede, mostly known as Avicii. Let's see a clip.
You might ask, why do I bring up a clip with Avicii? We're on a Capital Market Day, not out clubbing. Avicii together with Madonna as well. The reason is, Avicii is one of the artists in the world in 2013 bringing the most people to his concerts and making the most money. He's not developing songs and lyrics from the beginning as a traditional artist. He's borrowing content from other artists and then adding a little bit flavor, adjusting the content, and he's making the content more popular than ever before. It's he, the deejay, that is making the money, not the original content provider. Is this relevant for our media houses and our positions? Of course it is. News aggregation and curation is absolutely not a new phenomena.
In order to still be a front runner, we are now launching Omni in Sweden, which is a mobile news app with personalized content from many different content providers. We are, with this, becoming the aggregator ourself, giving the readers a total overview. Since we are operating in the content business ourself, we are, of course, the nice guys, so we are bringing the traffic back to the content providers. We are doing this because if this is an attractive product in the Swedish market, if it's possible to disrupt our strong media house positions, we want to be the one disrupting ourself and not let anybody else do it. With all these examples, I hope I have succeeded in showing you that we are dedicated to build world-class digital media houses. We have more offline...
Sorry, we have more online readers than offline readers. We have higher online advertising revenues in VG and Aftonbladet than offline advertising revenues, and we are very innovative in terms of online product development. Combined with increased focus on web TV and customer centricity, I'm convinced that we will fulfill our mission, which is shaping the media of tomorrow, today. Thank you.
Thank you, Sandra. I think you made a good job in equaling the three classified guys. Just before you sit down, does anyone have a question for Sandra before we move on? Yes, we have one question over there.
Can you talk about the change in the cost base as you migrate, and at what point you can kind of eliminate the double cost structure that you're currently running with? Thanks.
Yes. What we do on the, on the print logistical side, put it like that, in terms of print presses and in terms of distribution, is that we, for example, in Norway, we have centralized all these in separate centralized industrial companies, fully owned by us. In the printing press, it's like, it's not a marginal cost game. Basically, we get that, of course, the print or the paper cost when we reduce the circulation, but we still have to run the machines and still have to have people running the machines. There, we don't see a one-to-one comparison in cost reduction compared to revenues reduction.
In the dis-distribution game, we have, turned more and more to external providers, and there we have, there we pay by each circulation number in terms. We, so we actually get out the cost when the circulation levels are going down. In terms of the content production cost within the media houses, that's not affected in a way because it's so important to still have the, of course, the same good journalistic content in the online world compared to offline world. We are, of course, changing the competence and the digital, building up the digital competence among our journalists in terms of both, you know, optimizing the traffic across platforms and not only focusing on delivering the content by itself.
We have a question here.
Thanks. Martin Stenshall, Danske Markets. great to see that SPiD has more than 2 million registered users right now. Could you please talk about any ambitions you have regarding creating a peer-to-peer payment service within SPiD, like eBay's PayPal? I think that was a hot topic, let's say a year ago, but I think now we are seeing a lot of banks and other players that are into, let's say, mobile payment solutions also. Could that even now with a changed competitive landscape, still be something you were looking at? Thanks.
First of all, just to comment on the SPID coverage in Norway, I think it's very interesting to see the coverage in Norway already. It's important for us. We are introducing SPID as a login mechanism in Aftenposten within the next one and a half months. What we see is that already more than 50% of our existing print subscribers have a SPID login account due to the SPID login used by FINN.no. The transformation for us from being a print reader to becoming, you know, with no walls to go over in terms of login, it's very easy for our print subscribers to start to read us online and to log in. That's very good.
In terms of payment solutions within SPiD, I guess that also Rolv Erik and other could fill in here, but that's a very interesting area, not only of course for the media houses, but also for the classified area, and it's very interesting in terms of, for example, display advertising. There's quite a lot of opportunities there in terms of giving, you know, interesting solution for e-commerce players in their brand advertising, et cetera.
Okay, thank you. Thank you, Sondre. As you can see, the Schibsted media houses have a lot of energy and an exciting future. Now, let's move on to what you all have been waiting for, the numbers. Our last speaker today is on home ground here at Stock Exchange. It's Schibsted CFO, Trond Berger, and you will give us some financial highlights and also a deeper insight into some key targets.
Thank you for that, Lena. Rolv Erik, he guided you through the strategic direction in order to be the global number one in classifieds. I will walk you through the financials going forward. Also... Well, this clicker didn't work now, but it should if somebody could assist me on that. Starting with that, the key financial takeaways is something that I will go through here. To start with that... Okay. There we are. That's fine. Okay. The key financial takeaways that I will walk you through is that, of course, we will continue with the strong online momentum, and that's set to continue. We reiterate our financial targets being 15%-20% online classified growth.
We have a good cash flow from the media houses. That's also important to fund, of course, the growth going forward. We will continue to invest in innovation and also accelerate digitalization. We are building up a lot of competency in our group, and all, in order to do this, we also need high financial flexibility that we have today and that we also have demonstrated through the new partnership that we are entering into. You look at the continued growth with high margins, you see that over the last three half years, you see that the EBTA before investments has been rather stable. Also the EBTA margins, ex investment phase, also stable.
There has been some deterioration, of course, from the media houses with the migration. At the same time, we have invested heavily in new growth. One thing is important for us is to keep the cost base and taking out further efficiency in the established businesses. If you look at the cost base, operating costs first half 2012 compared with the first half 2013, you see that the real big change is, first of all, investing in new growth companies, both within classifieds, but also personal finance in Sweden, building up new activity there and also in Norway. We're also considering, of course, to go with the growth companies into other markets, like France, and could also be other, where we have strong traffic machines.
At the same time, we have been able to take out cost from the more established business. We have good control over cost base as such in Schibsted, and we continue to do so. We have established the new partnership with Telenor and Singapore Press Holdings, the SNTC. We are satisfied and have achieved a good price as we see it for our assets in LatAm, first of all then, Brazil and Chile. We have a great return on what we have invested there. And we have a 50/50 now JV in South America and in some Asian markets, and valued at EUR 170 million.
At the same time, we have entered into a three-year partnership in 701, what we call, which is the Asia together with Singapore Press Holdings and Telenor. Also, that valuation is great looking at what we have invested, being a 100% value of NOK 180 million. And the proceeds that we get from this partnership, NOK 119 million, most of that is accounted for as gain, as we have expensed this cost, of course, historically. The closing is expected to be in November, beginning December. The way it works is that it is set up as a JV, and that you can draw cash from the owners. So it won't be fully funded itself, the JV. But it's, of course, we have discussed the business plans going forward.
There are some agreements on what to do going forward in these emerging markets between the partners. It has worked very well so far, the discussions and the negotiations, and they fully understand the way to build the value in these markets. We will continue the strong online momentum, and that's set to continue. 45% online share, 71% online share, EBITDA. If you look at what has happened over the last three, four years, this has rapidly been growing, and we expect it to continue to grow. We have consistent profitable growth in Schibsted. We have had 24% growth in EBITDA from 2009 to 2012.
Excluding, of course, Spain, which has been somewhat more troublesome, 34%. We are very satisfied with that. First of all that the classified business is stable growing the way that we see here. The high investments add value, and we see many opportunities out there. That's why also we have increased the investments. We have entered into big markets, of course. That also, we need more investments, but also more opportunities. We have invested NOK 1.7 billion since 2009. As I said, we have achieved good ROI on the investments. It has been something that I struggled with in Schibsted, is to give to the financial markets some KPIs that you can see the development in our sites.
Because we won't re-reveal too much on competitive information. One thing that is important is, of course, the growth in daily new ads in investment phase companies. If you look at this graph, we are currently around 180,000 new daily ads in these companies. If you go back just one year, we were half of the figure today. We have doubled in a year in number of new daily ads, which is quite impressive. I can assure you that Tarjei and his team focusing very much on traffic and traffic development and different KPIs, and they have dashboard following this daily. They are constantly getting messages if things are doing this and that.
This is something that we focus very much on. It's a long-term play to have a leading position. These demonstrate that they are on the path and track to do that. At the same time, we need to maintain capital discipline. We do thorough analysis before we launch in a market. We do different surveys. Of course, we look at the GDP growth per capita, online penetration. We do surveys. We do see, check if these markets are ready for some kind of marketplace thinking. Also we do backward calculation, looking at what is the monetization potential per capita, if you reach this and this position. There are many ways to look at different markets. During after we have launched, we do also then reviews, of course.
We're having a, at least monthly business reviews within the SEM, the classified media team, with Tarjei and his team, looking at all these KPIs and metrics that we see here. It's thoroughly followed up. From time to time, of course, there are some that's not following always the plan. We also have, well, just to remind you that we have also exited something that wasn't successful, like in Australia, and also Greece. That's also, of course, a part of this, that at some point we have to take a decision and exit. The online growth continue. We will also do cost cuts in prints.
We last year concluded a 1.7 billion cost reduction program that was implemented end of 2009. That was successful. We actually over-delivered on that. Currently, we are running with a NOK 500 million program, remind you on that. That also will be now concluded during 2013. Most of that is being already taken out. We will continue to do efficiency program, do cooperation across the group. There are further scope to take out cost reduction. Although we don't have any plan for any substantial cost reduction program as we have been communicating. We'll continue to do this gradually. We had a capital market day one and a half year ago.
If you, then, saw at what the target that we communicated to the market, we had the online classified, growth of 15%-20%. We delivered 17% in this period. We can tick off that. Equity ratio, 35%-50%, currently 40%. Net interest-bearing debt to 1x-2x, and it's currently, 1.1x. Dividend payout ratio 25%-40%. There we have delivered in the upper range of, the interval. We have demonstrated that we have delivered on the targets that we communicated to the markets on the last Capital Markets Day. We reiterate, what we have said, also in the last capital market.
We reiterate that in this capital markets day, meaning that we remain with the online classified growth target of 15% to 20%. That's a medium-term target. However, as we have said, is that bear in mind that the Spanish situation, as Terje elaborated on, is that it's a weak macro situation, although we may see some sign, but still too early whether we see some improvement. At the same time, we need to refocus and focus on traffic. So there will be some further investment of activity and building position in Spain. At the same time, also, Leboncoin has been a star performer and is still expected to be a star performer.
Just if you look at comparables, it will be strong comparables, of course, out of a more mathematical standpoint. Longer term and mid-term, we have really strong potential, as Olivier has demonstrated when it comes to new verticals and new services. Summing up, it means that the targets will be reiterated, as I said, medium term. On the more shorter term, it could be in the lower range of what we have stated as the financial targets. Just to remind you what is the potential risk factors in relation to the financial targets, in the online classifieds, of course, it is the competitive situation. It varies from market to market. We may be exposed to disruptive models. We haven't really seen it yet.
But of course it is there. We were afraid of the Google going back two, three years when they launched real estate and tried this. They had to pull back. Macro is always something that we follow closely. It is weak macro situation in Southern Europe. Spain talked about. France also new car sales there is little sluggish. And Italy, so of course, that's something that we have to bear in mind. But looking at our exposure, we are also to a certain extent countercyclical in some parts of our classified business. Jobs, of course, is most exposed, but we don't have that in too many countries. Media houses, I'll just remind you, there is migration expected to continue.
The pace that we have seen is something that we may see also going forward. Of course, there is uncertainty what will happen here, but also many opportunities, especially with the mobile position. We have solid cash flows. We have limited CapEx. We have maintenance CapEx in the area of NOK 400 or 500 million per year to 3x revenues. We do the spending over PNL. Of course, that destroys our figures in a way. When we report, we have to, of course, pinpoint that. We have a solid balance sheet because we are investing through organic spending through the PNL.
We are not really building up so much in the balance sheet either, it has been rather stable over the last five years. We have an equity ratio of 40%. As we see it today, we have limited risk of impairments in our balance sheets as we see it, based on the earnings and positions we have. We have a prudent financial gearing. We, as I said, we had 1.1 end of first half, we have invested buying out the Gonzalez family in Spain, it will increase somewhat end of Q3. In Q4, we will get in the proceeds of NOK 119 million. Of course, it will improve again.
We have also said that we may allow ourselves to be slightly overcapitalized compared with each measure going forward as such. We have also stable long-term financing with maturity more than five years . We will continue to ensure that we have that going forward and have a stable and solid fundament for growth. We will maintain the dividend policy and the healthy dividend and being 35%-40%. Just also remind you that we have a small percentage of treasury shares. We have authorization, of course, for buybacks. We have seen that more as a mean to adjust over time the capital structure. As such, there is no immediate plan for that.
Summing up, we have the key financial takeaways. We have the strong online momentum set to continue. We have well-funded plans for growth, digitalization and innovation. Just to reiterate the targets, mid-term, 15%-20%. We will continue transition in the media houses and we have flexibility to grow within the financial targets that we have with the equity ratio, net interest-bearing debt and the dividend policy. That was.
That was you.
Schibsted's, financial story as such.
Thank you.
Give it over to you, Lena.
Yes. Thank you, Trond. I will ask Rolv Erik to join you on stage, and we will open for questions. Yes, please. We have a gentleman over here in the white shirt.
Hi, it's Bergmann Nordal from Arctic Securities. It's good to see that you reiterate your guidance of 15%-20% online classifieds growth. If my calculations are correct, you're running at slightly shy of 14% in the first half of this year. You mentioned some factors that will contribute to lower growth in the second half of this year, I suppose. Are you still confident that you'll reach the lower end of your guidance, near term of 15%-20%? Thank you.
Well, there is no change in what we have said there. First of all, the guidance that we give here is, of course, midterm. As I said, that in the short term, it will be in the low end. The figures you refer to is, of course, right. Adjusting for Spain, it is certainly within our targets. That's the situation.
Thanks.
Thank you. We have a question over here, I think, on the right-hand side.
Yes. Hi, this is Rasmus Engberg again from Handelsbanken. I wanted to ask you if you can shed some light on, say, how you think about the margins in Sweden, France, and Norway over the next couple of years. Are they stable, slightly down, slightly up, or perhaps market by market if you?
Well, first of all, we don't give guidance on the margins going forward. I won't be precise in answering that. What we have said is that we certainly will continue to invest in product development and services as we always have done, and we will do that. Martin and Olivier and all the classified team demonstrated that we will continue to do that. Of course, we could meet much more and take up much higher margins if we would like to do so. It's a fine balance on investing in future growth potential. But I'm not going to give any precise guidance on the margin development as such.
The trends in the first half of the year coming down slightly in France and in Sweden, if I remember correctly. Do you think that that might continue in the second half?
Well, now, just remind you what we said when we reported in Q2 was that, first of all, like in Sweden, in Blocket, they invest quite heavily in product development. That's the main reason for the slight deterioration we saw there in the first half. In France, they're coming from also very high levels, around 70%, of course. Some small adjustment there. Also, if you invest somewhat more in product and services, that also could be the situation. That's what we said when we had the first half reporting.
Okay. We have a couple questions here. I think we'll start over here.
Thanks. First, a question regarding 20 minutes in Spain and France. We haven't touched upon those assets here today. I guess they're still small in the group overall, but what are your strategic targets regarding 20 minutes Spain and France, please?
I think in Spain, we've been a patient owner through the downturn, and we're now the only player left standing there. What we're doing now is that, since we've taken our full control over our classifieds assets, we're actually seeing how can they collaborate and how can we create a broader media house in Spain that can work together with the classifieds to promote the both, kind of cross-promote them. That's what we're exploring in Spain now. In, in France, the situation is, should I say, not changed. We're having 50% of 20 minutes and that is continues to be the market leader and is leading quite well to the second and third player.
Okay, thanks. Just two more quick questions regarding SPiD. Just reverting to my question, do you got plans to launch a peer-to-peer payment solution in SPiD?
Well, I mean, we will look into what we will do in and build this into the classified sites like FINN Blocket, of course. What kind of solution we will have there is yet to be seen, but it gives at least the possibility for peer to peer and we'll look to type of solution within these classified sites, but not yet decided how it will actually be defined.
Okay, thanks. The last question from my side. High financial flexibility is obviously a target for you. With the recent JVs in mind, could you please put some color on how you're looking upon opportunities in M&As going forward with regards to new markets or new verticals? Thank you.
What we have said when it comes to M&A, I mean, we certainly would like to bolt on acquisitions within the classifieds. That has always been the story. Of course, we have now even more power to do so if we find the right candidate. Also right to say that it's tend to be fairly expensive out there. I think we the main route will certainly be to go the organic route. Of course, we are open for if we find the right candidate, but not too many out there.
From my point of view, it's important to have a robust balance sheet. I don't think we have to go too long back before people remember what happened the last time there is an external shock.
We must be able to absorb all kind of shocks. We'd rather being a little bit on the prudent side there. I think it's good for us going forward to have the flexibility to do if opportunities occur, acquisitions for instance, then we have the financial flexibility to participate where we believe that's a good thing to do.
Yes. Over here on third row.
Hi. Jean Staff from EBS again. I have two questions, please. The first one, just a bit of a housekeeping, but you say that you're going to discontinue the separate ABDA reporting of online and print in your media houses. Well, I was wondering, what does that mean for all your sort of websites in Sweden that are outside? They're not really part of the newspaper businesses. Are you gonna put it with all the newspapers or?
No. The way, first of all classifieds is of course separate.
Yeah.
When it comes to the growth media, we call Tillväxtmedier in Sweden, also separate. This goes really for like the VG, like for Aftenposten, for the traditional media houses. What we are seeing there is that the staff working both for the online and the print, and it's they are so and so integrated. The way we operate and steer the run daily business is integrated. That's why also we will do that for reporting. It's not so easy to find the right allocation. In a way, we think it's the right time now, since the digital is becoming such a big part of this, that it will be or integrated as such.
Okay. Thank you. Other questions. So you say you're open to bolt-ons, obviously. Do you have agreements with the websites that you have in, like, Austria or Ireland, with, like, call options to buy them out at some point? Is that something that you have? Given that you've done more deals with Telenor, Singapore Press Holdings, you have JVs, is that something that you're looking at doing in other countries that you're sort of currently looking at?
Well, when it comes to just to comment what we have said earlier, is that when we did acquisition in Ireland, the done deal, there is some kind of put call mechanisms for the remaining minority share there. At some point, that will happen of course. In Austria, it's a more traditional type of JV, and with no put and call mechanism. Yeah.
Yeah. To the other question, I mean, I'm very happy now to have this new vehicle in place. Now we cover the larger emerging markets where we are through these two JVs, so South America and Asia. I'm very happy with that, and look forward to get that really operational. There's no plans for other JVs outside of that.
Okay. Anyone else who has a question? We have a question from the web.
Yes. There is some further interest from the web regarding the growth target. If you from Berg could elaborate a bit more on that. Concretely, do you expect to reach 15% year-over-year growth, underlying, in 2013? Further on, do you expect the growth in Leboncoin to accelerate from 2013? Alternatively, is it the other established that will become so material that you will be able to reach the 15%-20% target range?
When it comes to the guidance for 2013, I mean, we don't give guidance. What we said when we had the first half reporting is that we are within the targets. Of course, if you adjust for Spain, there isn't any change as we have seen in development as such. Of course, Spain is still struggling somewhat. When it comes to the somewhat into the short-term targets, I said that we remain with the 15%-20%, but it could be in the low end in the short-time period. When in midterm, in order to really deliver, of course, on these targets, it will be a mix.
I'm not going to say how much will come from Leboncoin and growth there and new sites. What we see is that we have many growth engines in addition to the established, also new ones coming up.
Yeah. Another one regarding the future, when it comes to investment or losses from the new ventures. Touched upon it briefly earlier, but should we expect sort of more than 10% lower losses, 14 than in 13? Any comments on that?
Well, as we have changed our policy, giving guidance to also do the spending due to competitive situation, I'm not going to be pre-precise on that. Of course, we now have reduced risk that we share it with partners. And also it gives us somewhat more power, of course, in some of these markets and other markets. Not going to disclose what will be the exact level going forward.
Okay. Any more questions? We have one more question over here.
Simple one. Is there any debt, either internal or external, on the assets that have gone into the joint venture?
No, there is no debt as such. These are startup companies, very simple balance sheet and PNL. No.
The only balance sheet adjustment would just be the cash that you receive and the stuff going into associates and that kind of thing?
Well, no. I mean, the reporting, if that's the question, in 2014, you have the IFRS being more strict that you can't do line by line consolidation in JVs. Of course it will be reported as one line going forward. Yeah.
Will the JV appear as an associate? Is it gonna be below revenue and EBITDA?
No. It will be the way we plan to. These rules are changing, and what will be the IFRS in 2014 and ongoing. The thinking for time being is that we report it as a part of the EBITDA, but as 1 line.
Okay, thanks.
Okay. Anyone else? In that case, I think I will thank you, Trond, and leave the floor to Rolv Erik for a few closing remarks.
All right, today we've given you a very thorough presentation of Schibsted and what we're working on. As you have seen, we are pursuing our ambition of digital growth at a fast pace. Number one, we target global leadership in online classifieds. Believe the new joint venture is a step on that way. We work hard to build world-class digital media houses, and we're investing in technology and capacity and people to give us new innovation and new growth opportunities. Important partnerships that have always been and still is to work on the long term. Even though we're competitive and profitable every day, we always try to make the decisions that are right for the long term. This is not only a sprint, it's also a marathon.
I think Olivier pointed out to that today, so that we have very solid positions and will not waste them by being too hasty. We have demonstrated today our commitment in a number of areas. To mention a few highlights, we mentioned Spain, where we're determined to revive growth. In France and Sweden, Leboncoin and Blocket are working hard to develop new verticals, jobs, real estate. In the emerging markets, we are aware that monetization will take time, but we believe we have an exciting portfolio moving forward. I think as Sandra demonstrated clearly here, there's a lot of activity going on in the media houses, and we'll do all we can to secure digital transition because we believe that they're relevant and healthy and profitable also in the digital future.
Lena, you pointed out today that we're almost 175 years old, Schibsted, and that we have a tradition for staying ahead of the curve. Today we have shown you the path that we'll take the next few years. I hope you've enjoyed it, and that you've been inspired by it. Now I would like you all to invite you all for lunch and for mingling with the management just outside here. Thank you all for your attendance.