Good morning everyone here in Oslo, and also for you following us on the web today, and welcome to Schibsted's Capital Markets Day 2023. I think we have prepared an exciting program for you today here. Let's have a look at the agenda. First up is Kristin, our CEO, who will give an update on Schibsted's strategy and priorities in the years to come. Before Christian, our EVP for Nordic Marketplaces and Delivery, together with his management team, present how the change to vertical-based operating model will unlock significant value creation potential for our stakeholders going forward. After Q&A session, Andrew, our CIO and EVP for Growth and Investments, will give an update on Schibsted investment strategy.
Followed by that, we will hear from Ragnar, our CFO, who will give an update on our financial priorities and how we think about the Adevinta stake. Finally, Kristin will wrap up the presentations today. Then we have a second and last Q&A session here today. If you want to ask questions, you can go to Slido and send in written questions. We'll of course also take questions here in the room. Now back to the program. Kristin, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thank you, Jan-Boye, a warm welcome to everybody, both, you who are here and, also those of you following on the stream. Schibsted really enjoys a unique position in the Nordics. We have a superior consumer reach, where we reach 80% of the Norwegian and Swedish population every week. We also have this presence in people's lives because we're there when they seek breaking news or when they want deeper insight into something. We are there when they buy a new home or sell a car, get a new job, or book their holidays. We enjoy this unsurpassed frequency of interactions with these consumers because we have more than 3.3 million logged in users every day, and we have more than 1 billion visits to our sites monthly.
Perhaps the most unique thing about all of this is that Schibsted is not one of these things. We are all of these things at the same time. It's really this unique combination of all these touch points that I think make us a great company. Of course, there's been challenging and unpredictable times lately. Despite that, I think 2022, after all, turned out to be a quite good year for us. Our products continue to have high engagement and reach and making a difference in people's daily lives. We continue to be a good employer and business partner. We made continued progress on important sustainability dimensions. Despite the tough macro, we delivered, I would say, good financial results. Of course, everything wasn't all about progress and growth.
We certainly felt the challenging times like everybody else, and we also see that a lot of this uncertainty, it continues into this year. 2022 was also a year for adapting. How did we adapt then to the challenging macro and market context? Well, we did that by introducing a new operating model to our marketplaces, which will help us further grow existing positions, but also boost the transition into next generation transactional marketplaces. We did it by adjusting the growth path in news media, where we will make sure we control our costs while we continue to invest in the digital future. We did it by changing our investment strategy, focusing more on good ownership of existing assets, and also looking to crystallize value, including the Adevinta stake. Adjusting for the future is also about adopting and applying new technologies.
I have to say that all the development lately within generative AI, and I would say especially the launch of plugins in ChatGPT by OpenAI that was recently announced, this is really something that's gonna profoundly change how the internet develops in the next decade. It is also gonna affect all of us as users and how we interact with it. We have already been applying these technologies into our services, and we are very actively participating in different industry initiatives and research programs to make sure that we are in the forefront of learning and being able to apply these technologies so we can seize all those opportunities that come with it. I would say that while we are adapting and the world is changing, at least something stays the same, and that's our fundamental purpose.
This is really important to us, and it states that basically everything we do in the end boils down to that we want to enable societies that are based on trust and transparency. We want to empower people in their daily lives. We want to create value for all our stakeholders, and we want to be a fearless force for change. I would say that this is really how we have built our strength and uniqueness for generations already. Today's presentations, they are less about the positions we have, and it's all the more about how we want to build from it to create future value. As we look ahead, we see that Schibsted has four main value levers that we pursue in parallel.
If you look at this chart, you will see that it's presented with Schibsted illustrated as a layered pyramid with our businesses in the middle, all sharing and reaching for that same purpose that I just spelled out to you, coming from a common foundation of capabilities and then increasingly seeking joint consumer propositions around the portfolio or, and across the portfolio. These four value levers, they are one, ambitiously growing, transforming, and expanding our marketplaces positions. Two is developing a digital media positions, ensuring that they are financially robust, but also then delivering future growth. Three is investing selectively in new and related businesses that can benefit from Schibsted as an owner and also give good returns. Four is about creating and marketing superior consumer experiences across the entire Schibsted portfolio.
In addition, as you see underneath there is a fifth value lever that is a bit different from the others, and that is managing our stake in Adevinta. We are as committed as ever to creating value for Adevinta and Schibsted as a financial owner. Ragnar will cover this in more detail later. Now I will focus on these first four value levers, and I will go through them in turn. The first one being marketplaces and its transformation. Even if we have been active in digital marketplaces business now for almost a quarter of a century, there is simply a ton of potential still in the existing marketplaces models, and we continue to develop these forcefully. I think the revenue growth seen here in our Norwegian real estate business is a very good example of it. There is more.
Our marketplaces are now jumping to the next S-curve by becoming more transactional. These transitions represent a tremendous opportunity to us because we now provide additional services to buyers and sellers, and thereby we increase our share of the entire transaction. I think the car vertical is a good example of it, where the new transactional revenues already represent a sizable portion of the business, as you can see here. To capitalize on the transactional opportunity, but also to make sure we can continue to grow the existing positions and more traditional models, we have really overhauled our operating model for marketplaces through 2022. Of course, there is risk attached to making such transformations.
I have to say, we are so incredibly well prepared, and we really believe that making this transformation will enable us to capture all the exciting growth opportunities that we have. Then finally, we also see opportunities for expanding our most promising new concepts as, for example, Nettbil and Qasa. Christian and his team, they will in a minute go through more of this with you. I will jump to the next value lever being our news media positions. I have to start by saying there's no denying that our news division is going through rough seas at the moment. Ragnhild will talk more about this in his presentation later. Having said that, we are already well into executing on our cost reduction program. I wanna say that we really remain confident in our long-term plan for news media.
We have exciting growth avenues ahead that we pursue. The first, and I would say the most potent one, is found in subscriptions, where we continue to grow the number of subscribers as well as the ARPU. We have already begun transforming to a next S-curve where, you know, we now provide new subscriptions less based on the individual brands and more based on bundling across the brands. That way, we can be even more consumer-centric and provide better and more individually targeted offerings. I would say that Fulltilgang in Norway and Superpaketet that we have launched in Sweden are the first, and I would say very promising examples of this direction.
The second avenue is our advertising position in the Nordics, which remains strong, and we continue to develop it through technology and by new offerings. While of course advertising revenues are exposed to the shifting economic cycles, we have managed to continue to grow the digital ad business over time, and we will do so further in the longer perspective. It's good to see that we really succeed in new categories like content marketing. I would like to underline that advertising is relevant and value-adding across the entire portfolio and a very, very good example of the potency in utilizing and applying data across the entire portfolio. With the death of the cookie, our control of large amounts of first-party data puts us in a unique position to drive revenues in a world that will become more and more data-constrained.
The third avenue is that we keep building from a position of strength in the news media category. We have very strong primary news positions in VG and Aftonbladet, delivering very strong reach and frequency in their own right. Obviously they will be core parts of this new cross-portfolio offering. Then it's important to see that if you look behind the total figures, which include the declining print business, the digital media business is a very healthy growth business. We really believe in looking at it like that, and we believe in its future potential and also future potential for expansion. Finally here, we keep working our way into new positions in audio and video. As you know, the distinction between media channels is becoming increasingly blurred.
This is an exciting opportunity for us, and I think the way that consumers have received our launch of Podme is a good example that we actually managed to accelerate and integrate such services into our more traditional news positions. We have the third value lever, and that is investments. Most of our investments are about strengthening and expanding our positions in marketplaces and digital media. Over the last year, we have adjusted our investment mandate to reflect this focus on core business even more sharply. In addition to investing in our core business, we also selectively invest in adjacent businesses, often at an early stage. The two investment criterias are one, that Schibsted has some unique advantage in owning the asset, and secondly, of course, that the asset has the potential for really attractive returns on investment.
We have also kept developing our ownership strategies to reflect the potential we see in each asset that we own. We have basically become much more active owners of our portfolio. We see already the results of this. We see increased and improved performance in Lendo, in Mittanbud, and in Prisjakt. I'm very happy to see that this effort is already bearing fruit. Prisjakt showed strong growth over the last year, and Lendo shows a very strong growth and position in its core markets. Going forward, that's where we will focus with growth in market and expansions there. Our refined ownership strategies also imply that given the right opportunity and timing, we will crystallize value through well-managed exits. As you know, we have been reviewing Lendo and Prisjakt in this regard.
Finally on this point, I would like to underline that disciplined capital allocation really runs as a defining characteristic through our investment strategy. I would also like to add that seeing a bit at a higher level our investment strategy, and in particular our venture business, is a means for us to stay innovative as a group. Andrew will later go through this in more detail, so I will move to the fourth value lever, which is about how we can create superior consumer experiences across our entire product portfolio. We haven't really pursued this path very far yet, but we do see exciting opportunities going forward. At the moment, consumers do not really benefit very much from the fact that they often interact with many of our services across Schibsted.
While our brands are really consumer-centric, Schibsted has a potential in seeing and working with our large consumer base in a better way across the entire group. This is something that we will act upon. We want to create better and more seamless user journeys. We want to combine products and services for lower consumer acquisition cost and higher consumer loyalty. We want to create more tailored offerings by understanding better our different consumer segments. We want to become even better at adding new products and services to our portfolio that will benefit, first of all, our users, but also Schibsted. As I previously mentioned, we are already pursuing these type of opportunities by combining bundles and products. Media subscriptions, that is a very natural place to start doing this.
We are currently really now working hard there to see how we can become even better, work with our technology, work with our organization, our incentives, and our competence to propel this further. There is one area where we already are really good at that, and that's advertising, because for several years now, we have offered our full advertising inventory jointly across, and we do that through Schibsted Marketing Services. Based on the, all the data investments and the capability building that we've been doing for the last few years, we believe now that we are in a strong position to be able to extend that thinking and that logic into the consumer domain. I have presented all four value levers roughly in equal depth. They are not equal though in terms of capital allocation, management, attention, and resources.
Currently, the marketplace's value lever is clearly our most potent one. The growth opportunity is large, and we have the track record, we have the competence, and we have the positions to really succeed here. Most of our acquisitions and organic bets have been and will be deployed in this category. Still, we believe strongly in news media, and we will continue to invest in it. For investments, we are, as I said, very pleased that the portfolio is really performing well and that our new ownership strategies and the more active ownership really bear fruits already. We will keep investing in our core business of marketplaces and news media, and we will seek out adjacent opportunities where we have a distinct ownership advantage and where we see extraordinary ROI opportunities.
When it comes to consumer propositions across the portfolio, we are finally starting to extract more of the value that we believe can be found in working more across all our brands. We also believe that we now have built the culture and the capabilities to be able to succeed with this over time. It's exciting because I really think the best is still ahead of us when it comes to that part. Today, I am very excited to have the opportunity to go more in depth to explain to you the strong and fantastic positions that we build from, but not least the exciting plans we have for our future. With that, I'm very happy to hand over the word to my good colleague, Christian. He heads up our marketplace business, which is the main focus for today.
We look forward to hearing what you have to say, Christian.
Thank you so much, Kristin, and hello everyone. Good to see so many of you here today. This may be just an ordinary Tuesday to all of you, but to us, this is actually a quite pivotal moment. I have been looking forward to this day for days and weeks and months to really tell our story, to tell about our direction and discuss our strategic choices with all of you. Our history in Schibsted is really defined by moments like this. If we go back to the early 2000s, we disrupted our own print-based classifieds by establishing Finn and acquiring Blocket. 10 years later, we were rolling out Blocket clones across the globe. We created incredible successes like leboncoin.
This all culminated in 2019 with the IPO and spin off of Adevinta, and subsequently also the acquisition of eBay Classifieds. You can say that over the course of 20 plus years, we turned a group of Norwegian and Swedish newspapers into one of the, if not the world's largest online classifieds group. To have been part of this history is quite a privilege. I have to say, I remember still very vividly the feeling that we had in 2010 or 2011 when we knew that we had a winner in the making. To be honest, I have some of that same feeling here today. That's why we have gathered here all today to really share our vision of the marketplaces of the future.
For more than two decades, we have built leading positions across the Nordics and in all four verticals: in mobility, in jobs, in real estate, and in recommerce. As you can see here today, we control some of the most beloved household brands across the Nordics. We also have a nice and diverse portfolio of niche brands. In total, we reach millions of the digital savvy users and customers of the Nordics. As you see here, we have clear number one positions in all countries, but I really want to highlight the exceptional strength that we have in Norway with Finn. They are in a class of their own. This breadth and depth that you see here is just an excellent starting point for further growth.
To continue our success, we have built a strategy based around four pillars. First, we focus on marketplace businesses. We have more than 1,400 talented employees with deep expertise in marketplaces. We truly understand the power of network effects and the power of having leading number one positions. We also believe that to have a portfolio of marketplaces is an advantage for several reasons. First, it allows us to balance profitability and growth. Secondly, it makes us resilient against cyclicality. Thirdly, it diversifies our exposure to user and customer segments. On top of this, it also allows us to drive traffic from high frequency but low value categories to low frequency but high value categories.
Thirdly, we allocate capital, we allocate resources, and people and so on to the opportunities across the group that we see offer the best potential for value creation. Thirdly, or fourth, and last, I also have to say that being part of Schibsted provides some pretty unique competitive advantage. I'll just mention two. One is the advertising offering that Kristin mentioned. Through the group, we really have the leading offering in terms of frequency, in terms of reach, in terms of data richness. Another good competitive advantage is that through the group, we are able to not only build new services, but also very cost effectively acquire customers through the reach of our combined network.
If we look back at Capital Markets Day in 2021, we envisioned three strategic levers for value creation. Those were expanding and consolidating in the Nordics, leveraging existing positions to innovate and to extract value through pricing and packaging. Thirdly, transforming to next generation transactional marketplaces. I will argue that we have delivered on all three of these. We acquired Oikotie.fi in Finland and eBay Classifieds in Denmark. By integrating these into Schibsted, we have now created a Nordic footprint with scale benefits that I'll come back to in just a moment. With Oikotie.fi in Finland, we were very clear on our ambition to become number 1 in Finnish real estate.
I'm happy to say today that we are now the largest player in terms of traffic in the Finnish market. As a result, we have recently moved from being number two to now being a tied number one in that market. I also wanna say that with Bilbasen and Bilinfo in Denmark, we have gained some key assets that we gain benefit from in the mobility strategy that Robin Suwe will talk about later. We have also expanded into several specialist services like AutoVex and Plik that are also really valuable. We have also continued to grow our core and our continuous innovation on top of our number one positions, has resulted in even stronger and better user and customer experiences today than we had two years ago.
We have also vastly improved our pricing and packaging across almost all our positions. The example of real estate in Norway is just the latest example of that. In total, we have increased our average revenue per ad quite significantly. Thirdly, of course, we now show clear signs of early success within the new transactional models. I'll just give you three examples of that. First, in mobility, we have Nettbil, which grew an impressive 52% year-on-year in 2022. In recommerce, we delivered more than 750,000 transactions in FINN with Fiks fer dig, and we had a really strong momentum at the end of the year.
In real estate, we have our transactional rental service, Qasa, which also grew by more than 120%. Quite some exciting developments in that area. Since Capital Markets Day 2021, we have delivered solid financial results. In fact, our revenue growth has been well above our guidance range of 8%-12% with 14% CAGR through those years. I also want to point out here that we have continued to deliver solid margins while we have been investing in these new transactional services. If you look at the portfolio, mobility and jobs are our largest verticals, with mobility being the largest.
If you take the country perspective on it, we have more than 60% of revenue coming from Norway, based on the exceptionally strong position that I mentioned before that we have with FINN.no. It is also worth pointing out that around 3/4 of our revenue comes from professional customers. Also worth noting here is that as only 11% of that is from advertising, we in fact have a smaller exposure to that revenue stream compared to many of our European peers. I think we can say that we do well business-wise. I want to say that equally important is that we do good for society.
Sustainability is a fundamental underlying mega trend that we think more and more businesses will be concerned with in the years to come, and also one where we will benefit from significant tailwinds. We are sure that consumers will demand this, and that regulators will favor sustainable businesses, and clearly, talent will be attracted to businesses with a greater purpose. I just feel that we are so incredibly fortunate because our brands are already positioned as sustainable solutions, and they are even considered the most sustainable solutions in some of our markets. I'll just give one example of that. We have won the number one position in the Sustainable Brand Index, both in Norway and in Finland.
Sustainability will continue to be a core part of our strategy, going forward with this mission that we have of empowering people to make smart choices for themselves and future generations. We are sure that we will make the sustainable alternative the obvious choice. Another underlying mega trend that we benefit from is the continuous digitalization. Our users and customers, they want the simple, and they want the seamless digital solutions that just fulfill all their needs. As a result, offering only ads is really not enough anymore. Consumers, they want payment, they want shipping, they want insurance, and they want a number of other services to be integrated. As a result of this, we have, over the last decade or so, seen the emergence of vertical specialists.
What they do is that they create the absolute best user experience for a very, very specific problem, one that they invest heavily into and where they then scale that solution across countries. We also have this incredible opportunity to go deeper within each of our verticals and to really optimize our customer journeys for these specific user and customer needs. Until now, we have reached a considerable scale within our countries with solutions that in many ways treat an ad for a T-shirt in the same way as an ad for a car or a house. When you solve the entire customer journey, you see that the way you sell a T-shirt is very different from the way you sell a car or a house. As a result, they need different solutions.
Here's the thing, that is the way you sell a T-shirt is actually not that different from Norway to Sweden to Finland and so on. These individual solutions, they can be scaled across countries as these vertical specialists have shown. In essence, you can say that we envision a future where customer expectations will vary greatly between, let's say, mobility and jobs. The customer expectations within jobs, as an example, will be quite similar across our countries, and that's kind of the essence behind the change we're doing here. Now, solving new user and customer needs will open up a much larger addressable market. We think this will give us significant room to grow in the medium to long term. First, it's about addressing unmet needs.
It's also about addressing non-consumption, targeting new customer segments. This in itself will open up new, large and growing markets. There is also a second lever, which is business models, and these are typically transactional or performance-based. Through those business models, we will be able to have a much higher take rate than we have so far. In total, we will be able to address a market which is more than 10 times larger than we do today. I find that really exciting. In other words, the timing is right to build vertical champions to ride this next wave of growth. There is just this huge opportunity in these new transactional marketplace models. As I said before, we have early proof of success in these models.
With the acquisitions that we did in Finland and in Denmark, we also now have the necessary scale to make verticalization feasible. It's time to take the next step on our journey and really drive vertical specialization in all our Nordic countries. To do so, to verticalize, we have to change the way we are organized. That's why we on January first moved from a country-based to a vertical-focused operating model. We did so by establishing four Nordic verticals: Mobility, previously known as Motors, Jobs, Real Estate, and Recommerce, previously known as Generalist. In this new model, each vertical will own its P&L, its strategy, its products and so on.
By moving away from national to Nordic vertical strategies, we will set ourselves up for vertical execution on a Nordic level, which will enable us to deliver value to users and customers at scale in a much more cost-effective way than we have done so far. The idea here is that each vertical will be able to align its products, its business models, its people, technology and so on to really have the autonomy, the strength to deliver the absolute best products in the market to users and customers. The goal is to let each vertical develop independently to reach its fullest potential.
As an analogy, you can say that we are moving from having four national teams that all compete in the decathlon to having four teams that specialize in individual sports, in 100 meters, in long jump, in javelin and so on. I'm sure that some of you are now thinking, "Well, there must be execution risk when there is such a big change going on." I just have to say that's completely understandable. I would probably be thinking the same if I were in your shoes. I really want to make the point that this has been in progress for more than one year already, and we have already implemented this organizational change after quite some careful planning.
While it is too early still to declare success, and we still have many things that we need to optimize in our new model, I wanna say that the results from our employee engagement survey, the results from that show a still very high level and almost at the same level as before. That gives me quite some comfort on where we are in this change. I also want to stress that we have taken particular care in this change to limit the risk for our most valuable asset, which is, of course, Finn. Now, our strong local brands are one of our most important competitive advantages, and we will surely continue to invest in those brands.
Even though we are letting the verticals develop more independently, the look of each brand will stay the same. Finn will remain as Finn and Blocket will stay as Blocket and so on. What you will see over the coming years is that the user and customer experience will become more and more similar across the countries as we use more and more common technology. We think that this will unlock lots of synergies. It will also unlock value to users and customers through several different means. First, we will develop even deeper expertise on users and customer needs within each vertical. Secondly, we will gain economies of scale. And I'll just mention one example here.
We have product teams that have been essentially doing the same thing in each country. Now they can specialize on different things and roll out those solutions across countries. In a way, you can say that instead of duplicating efforts four times, we are now letting our employees have four times the impact. Thirdly, as we move to this common technology, we will also be able to quickly roll out new solutions across our countries. This will increase our speed of innovation and as a result in the and in the end, also our ability to monetize. I have to say there is no quick fix here. The goal here is to realize these synergies successively over the years to come.
We also think that we will take significant steps on this journey already this year. Going forward, we will do our financial reporting along the vertical dimension, and we are confident that this will give better insight into the underlying business drivers. That also means that our financial guidance will be per vertical. The reason for that is that the verticals have different financial profiles, and we want them to really develop on their own terms. By guiding on revenue growth and the EBITDA margin per vertical, we will be in line with how we will follow up our business going forward as well. We have released this guidance for each vertical today in the medium term.
It's worth mentioning here that this guidance should be considered to be neutral in the medium term compared to previous guidance. At the same time, we clearly believe in an increased growth and value creation potential in the long term. Let me now just comment briefly on each vertical. For Mobility, our ambition is revenue growth of 12%-17% over the period and an EBITDA margin of 51%-56%. Robin will come back and talk about the importance of pricing and packaging, scaling of consumer-to-business solutions, and also the transformation to transactional consumer-to-consumer solutions. For Jobs, our ambition is low to mid single digit revenue growth over the period and an EBITDA margin above 50%.
Eddie will explain how we aim to develop value-based business models and expand our products to increase our audience reach. For Real Estate, the ambition is revenue growth of 12%-17% and an EBITDA margin of 42%-47%. Kjersti will cover the importance of winning real estate in Finland and also the potential in continuing to develop our packages in Norway. For Recommerce, the goal is to triple revenues from 2022 and over the period and achieve EBITDA breakeven during 2025. Cathrine Laksfoss will talk about this transformation from our freemium C2C model to a transactional model in this area. To summarize, we are a true marketplace powerhouse with leading positions across the Nordics with a proven track record of value creation.
We are perfectly positioned to capitalize on the key macro trends of digitalization and sustainability and verticalization. We are optimizing our existing business model, and we have significant room to grow still in that area. On top of that, with these new business models and by moving to a vertical-based operating model, we unlock this addressable market, which is more than 10 times larger than what we have today. With that, I think we should deep dive into our four verticals. With me to do so, I have members of my team, Robin Suwe, Kjersti Høklingen, Eddie Sjølie, and Katrine Laksefoss. We will start with Mobility and Robin.
Robin, he started his career in Schibsted in 2009, and he's held several management positions in Schibsted, in Blocket, in Adevinta, and in Nordic Marketplaces. Most recently, he served as CEO of Blocket. I can also say that he spearheaded the work of building Nordic Marketplaces with a unified strategy, and also led the two M&A deals in Finland and in Denmark, and scaled Blocket into the current vertical. In some ways you can say that Nordic Marketplaces, as we know it, wouldn't have been what it is without Robin. Please welcome him, now SVP of Mobility.
Thank you very much for that warm introduction, Christian. Over the next 25 minutes, I will introduce you to our mobility vertical. I will do so by giving you an introduction to our markets, our favorable positions, the key trends, then we will lay out the strategy and wrap up with the financial ambitions for the coming years. Let me start by giving you an introduction to our four markets. As a whole, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland represents 27 million people in population, and we see a total of 3.3 million used car sales per year. If we compare with the rest of Europe, the Nordics score very high on digital savviness, and we are more than three times as high on EV penetration.
Norway is leading the way on a global scale, and Sweden and Denmark are rapidly catching up. We have favorable positions in these markets. If we start from a user perspective, across our Nordic platforms, we have 92 million monthly visits across our Nordic platforms. Our brands Finn, Blocket, Bilbasen, and Tori are beloved household brands since decades. From an industry perspective, we have more than 11,000 car dealerships as customers, which gives us a penetration of almost 100% in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. With the acquisition of AutoVex, we have also strengthened our challenger position in Finland, a case that I will introduce at the later stage of this presentation. There are two megatrends shaping the automotive industry at the moment.
First of all, sustainability leading to electrification of the car fleet, secondly, digitalization enabling new go-to-market strategies for OEMs and online sales. These trends are especially mature in the Nordics due to the recently stated market characteristics. Hence we see OEMs launching in the Nordics first, both with new business models, with the agency models, and also focusing on online sales models. The Nordics acts as a testing ground for new innovations, and we believe that this will unlock attractive opportunities for Schibsted. Furthermore, we see how dealers continue to consolidate, and they focus even more on used car sales, and also sourcing more used cars. Hence, this strengthens the relevance of our core offering, but also our new offerings within C2B.
Our strong presence in the Nordics over decades, together with very attractive markets, gives us a solid foundation for future growth. We have a balanced growth strategy built on three value levers that will set us up for success in the future and will enable us to deliver on our vision to empower people to make smart mobility choices for themselves and for future generations. Our core classified marketplace positions have several attractive opportunities for growth. Here we see continuous innovation opportunities to make it easier and more efficient to both buy and sell used cars. In transforming to next generation marketplaces, in transforming into transactional offerings, we have a solid momentum in scaling our consumer-to-consumer offering, as well as our consumer to business offerings. We have also started to explore transactional offerings for car dealers.
Finally, we see the transition from ownership into more flexible forms of ownership or access to mobility as an interesting opportunity in the long term. We have started to explore future positions in this area and to build long-lasting collaborations and partnerships. Our strategy is based on an ambition for significant growth in the future. We have divided our thinking into two main buckets, and let me unpack that. The first one is C2X or the selling position. This key is sort of driven by consumer demand for increased convenience, for increased transparency in the market, and for increased need for trust between buyers and sellers. C2C classifieds, our sort of traditional business, consists of about 0.4 billion NOK in the Nordics as of today in revenue potential.
When we introduce a transactional offering by introducing a take rate on the car and by leveraging more partnership revenues, we can expand this to NOK 2 billion. The real interesting opportunity to solve even more friction for our users lies within C2B transactions, and we estimate this potential to another NOK 6 billion in addressable market. Taking the selling position opens up an attractive market going from NOK 0.4 to NOK 8 billion. The second part where we see large opportunities is within B2C or our used car business towards dealers. The classified model currently has an addressable market in the Nordics of NOK 1 billion. We do believe that we can continue to expand that value pool by providing more and innovative solutions to help dealers digitize along the user journey.
We also see how a larger part of the buying journey will move online, both for used cars and for new cars. These transactional models will also unlock large opportunities. Within the used car space, we believe this could be up to NOK 5 billion, still very early days. As we see new cars moving online, and also new ways to access mobility, that opens up another NOK 2 billion. Let's dive deeper into each of these three value levers. I will begin with our current core business, the classified business, which is the most important part of our business today. If we look at the last three years, we've seen a steady growth with 9% CAGR during these three years to NOK 1.45 billion.
If we look at the country perspective, both Norway and Sweden are our main revenue contributors, which matches well with our strong positions in these countries. We have just recently acquired our position in Denmark, and here we see also further potential to develop this position and to introduce new and innovative solutions in the market. If we double-click on this and go a bit deeper, we can see that the markets of course have been extremely volatile during 2020, 2021, and the first half of 2022 due to the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. Our response to this has been to develop our products to help dealers leverage this hot used car market, to provide them with more insights and to tools to really grow their business.
Let me give you one example from Sweden, which is the bump product that we have in Blocket, which enables dealers to renew their ad and come at the top of the list. By doing so, they also increase the probability of getting a lead and selling that car faster. During these three years, we've had an uptake with a CAGR of +36% year-over-year. Last year, that product contributed with SEK 188 million. That's one way that we work with helping our dealers to sell their cars more efficiently. We of course also worked with pricing in this dynamic market. For an example, in Norway, we have a long history of adjusting our prices on a yearly basis based on the Consumer Price Index.
For Sweden, we introduced the same thinking this year. We also adjusted prices with 7% in August last year. Looking at Denmark, we've had a bit more of a challenging start during this market conditions. This is due to the particular pricing models that we currently have in Denmark. In Denmark, we charge per listing per day, which means that when we have a very hot used car market with faster turnaround times, that affects our revenue as a marketplace negatively. Despite this, we have worked very actively with the sales force to upgrade our dealers into the more premium value bundles, and also adjusted prices during August and now also in January. In H2 2022, we saw a 7% increase in revenues in Denmark.
If we look ahead, we expect more settled market conditions going forward. We expect that volumes will continue to come back on the used car markets. Given that we've already worked with our ARPA and adjusted our prices, this will give us a strong momentum going forward. If we take an outside-in view of this, we also compare ourselves with some of the best operators in Europe and in APAC, and we can see almost a 2x upside potential in our dealer classifieds revenues. The way we will address this gap is to both harmonize and transform our pricing model across the Nordics for car dealers. We also see that we have proven winners in our local markets that we can scale across.
Let me give you two examples from Norway. The first one is Finanstorget, which is a marketplace for financing and insurance products that help consumers finance their used car. This product leads to better leads to our finance partners. It creates a better experience for our users and a more favorable financing, and it increases the yield to our marketplaces compared to what we currently offer in Sweden and Denmark. Here we see potential to roll this out, of course. Another example from Norway is Diagnose Support, which is a dealer insight tools that help dealers both source cars and also sell cars more efficiently by leveraging data from our marketplaces. Also here, we see potential to roll this out in the short term. That was the first value lever.
Moving then on to transformation to next-gen and to transactional marketplaces, I will start with C2C. In the past, it was very difficult as a private consumer to offer seamless buying experience to another consumer. Here we lay out our vision for this. We have around 1 million paid listings from private car sellers across the Nordics. With this unique content, it creates high traffic, high user engagement that builds a strong competitive moat for our marketplace positions. It also opens up as an enabler for new business models. For example, C2B, where we can see that we can drive high-quality leads to from Finn to Nettbil. However, there is also a potential to transform this position into a transactional offering.
We estimate that the take rate in such a transformation can 4x compared to the baseline, both based on a transaction fee and from commissions from insurance and finance partners. In total, this unlocks an addressable markets of NOK 2 billion. How does this look in practice? We have digitized five of the distinct steps in the buying journey of buying a used car. We have built this solution in Norway, and last year we transacted 17,000 cars. This year in Q1, we turned on monetization. We charge the sellers approximately 1% of the value of the car in addition to the normal listing fee. We have also started to scale this transactional journey to other subverticals within mobility, for an example, motorcycles.
This service is really beloved by our users, both from buyers and from sellers, and we have a satisfaction rate above 90%, even though we have turned on monetization. Okay, moving on to C2B. This is one of the largest growth initiatives within mobility, with an addressable market of NOK 6 billion. There are strong underlying industry trends that's accelerating the growth of the C2B business model, as dealers prioritize the used cars business to a larger extent, and private-owned cars becomes more and more relevant for dealers in terms of sourcing. With Nettbil and AutoVex, we have acquired two synergistic Nordic winners that eliminate the hassle of selling a car as a consumer and the sourcing a car as a dealer. Both these companies operate an auction-based model that is fully online.
Nettbill is focusing on slighter older cars with an inspection, while AutoVex is focusing on more of the premium used cars and have minimal steps from uploading that car to selling it. We see possible synergies not only between these two companies, but also with other strategic bets. For an example, how this could play in as a best-in-class trading solutions for OEMs as they move online or to have it together with our C2C transactional solution or when you onboard to car subscriptions. Let's dive a bit deeper into the numbers of these two companies. In 2022, we transacted NOK 4.4 billion in gross merchandise values through these C2B solutions.
With acquisition of AutoVex in December last year, the combined CAGR of these two companies have been 93% from 2020 to 2022 in number of cars sold. Still, there's plenty of headroom left as these two concepts have a penetration of about 5% of the addressable volumes in these two countries. We believe this is just the beginning. We see strong synergy potentials with our classifieds positions, where relevant integrations can boost brand awareness, traffic, and leads. We also see how Nettbil and AutoVex complement each other. With learnings from AutoVex, we can boost volumes for Nettbil. With learnings from Nettbil, we can improve the take rate at AutoVex. Of course, we also see opportunities to scale this solution also across the Nordics.
The next 2 chapters are a bit more long-term in its nature, but we see this as key trends affecting the marketplace industry at the moment, and we'd just like to give you our current thinking on this. Digital retailing or online sales of used cars is growing out of its infancy as consumer demand for a more seamless online buying experience of their next used cars. As we can see, some of the activities are more important than others to perform online. Based on our very own insights into this from our car buying survey, it's clear that the research phase is already dominated by online channels. We also see how payment and finance is ready to be completed online to a larger extent in the near future.
For us, digital retailing provides great benefits both for consumers and for dealers. We expect over the years that more and more parts of the transaction journey will happen online. That said, we do believe in the importance of car dealers and of the physical presence, both for vehicle inspections and for test drives. We believe that consumers will value increased convenience, increased trust, to perform their purchase from anywhere that suits them. On the seller side, we believe that dealers can realize time savings and unlock a national market for used cars.
This model has seen a lot of shifting dynamics in the market recently. We have taken an asset-light approach to digital retailing to do and develop this together with our dealer partners to give them the right kinds of tools and services to digitize their customer journey and to sell cars more efficiently. We have launched the first version of this in Sweden together with a set of key partners. We will continue to develop and test that solution this year. It's not just about buying and selling or actually owning a car. We also see a great potential in new models to access a car in the future. This is an early-stage, organic bet that we have built out from Norway.
What we can see is that consumer preferences are changing towards more flexibility rather than actually owning their car. For a long time we've seen how leasing is increasing in importance across the Nordics, but we also believe in the subscription model. Car subscription is really an attractive supplement to our marketplace positions both for our dealers, for importers, for rental companies, and for OEMs to optimize their inventory. We have launched our own car subscription marketplace, Honk, first in Norway and just recently launched it in Sweden to explore the potential of these new business models and to build relationships with key industry stakeholders and to better understand user behavior. Okay, moving on to the financial outlook for the coming years.
As outlined in the presentation, we see clear growth opportunities in our current core classified business. This will further be boosted by our transactional initiatives, most importantly, within the seller segment, in other words, from consumer-to-consumer transactional offerings and from consumer to business with our proven winners, Nettbil and AutoVex. As such, we target revenue growth of 12%-17% and an EBITDA margin of 51%-56% in the medium perspective. We expect during the time period to expand our margins towards the upper range. Moving on to a summary of this part about mobility. We have clear number one positions in mobility in highly attractive markets across the Nordics that have a high digital maturity, and we see a strong uptake of EV penetrations.
We have a balanced growth strategy based on three value levers, where we see a solid headroom for growth in our core classifieds positions across the Nordics with an up to 2x potential from our dealer classifieds. We see how we can further boost this revenue growth with our transactional initiatives, especially from the selling position with C2C and C2B. Finally, we have started to explore opportunities in a lean and asset-light approach, both in terms of digital retailing for transactional offers for used cars, as well as new and more flexible forms of ownership with Honk. With that, thank you very much, and back to you, Christian.
Thank you thank you so much, Robin, for showing us the multitude of opportunities that we have in the very important mobility vertical. Now, we should move to jobs. Here Eddie will present. He started his career in Schibsted in 2011. He's held, several different positions, in FINN.no, most recently as CEO of FINN.no. I've known Eddie for many years, and I can say that the few people I know have such profound understanding of marketplace dynamics, and he has been absolutely critical in the strategy of becoming next generation marketplaces. If you like what FINN.no has done, I'm sure you will like also Eddie. Please welcome him and as he is now SVP of Jobs. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Christian, and hello, everyone. We heard from the introduction that the jobs vertical is number two in terms of revenue. I will start by stating that we have really a great starting point to really continue that growth going forward. We have really strong brands in the markets where we are present. We are able to engage the candidates, and we experience close to 12 million visits a month. We are also relevant to the professional market, and we had almost 500,000 ads posted on our marketplaces last year.
We are also able to transform that market engagement into financial growth, showing strong growth figures over a long period of time, 20% in average in Norway, 18% in Sweden, and 10% in Finland over the last seven years. If you look at growth rate, we have been able to triple the revenues from 2015 until 2022, and the growth has been continuous, only interrupted by the pandemic. If we look into the country distribution, we can see that, of course, the Norwegian market is the largest, but we have healthy and growing businesses also in Sweden and Finland, and to me, that represent a growth potential. In this presentation, I will not focus on the short-term macroeconomic cyclicality but rather focus on the medium and long-term potential in the vertical.
If we look a little bit about what are the drivers behind the growth, we can start by Norway and Sweden. We can see that we have a very positive ARPA development, and that is a consequence of a systematic and long-term work with pricing and packaging. On the ad side or the volume side, we have, of course, had help from the general positive economic development in the market, but we have also been able to engage new customer groups and new customer segments. This is especially true in Norway, where we have been able to meet the small and medium-sized businesses through our self-serve solutions. In Finland, the development is slightly different. We can see the ARPA is declining, but that is not a signal that there is a general price dilution in the Finnish market.
It's more a consequence of the high volume from a few segments in that market. The Finnish market is still growing in total. Another key driver behind the figures is our investment in reaching the passive candidates. There are different definitions of the passive candidate, but to us, they are the candidates who are not actively looking for a job right now. If the right position presents itself, then they might be open to change jobs. We do this by using audience extension products to reach the candidates outside our platforms. As you can see, in Norway, this is, I would say, a healthy business in itself, and we have had positive development also in the Finnish and the Swedish market.
If you look into the trends for the jobs vertical, I will say that they truly support a continuous growth curve. We know that the passive candidate segment is growing, and that gives more headroom for more growth into the audience extension products. We know that our professional customers will be even more focused on return on investment and for us to share data, and we believe that will open up for more value-based pricing based on the performance that we are giving the customers. Of course, diversity, belonging, and inclusion is a trend that we believe will give us closer relationships, both with the professional customers and the candidates going forward. Of course, we know that there are similar customer and user needs across the Nordics.
I would say even only three months into the new organization, it's really great to work alongside job specialists with a different experience to really investigate and be able to create more value in the job space going forward. Of course, very in the news and the data and artificial intelligence, of course, we believe that will unlock a great potential for businesses like us going forward. If we look at the total addressable market, we believe that there is still a lot of headroom for growth going further. We will tap into that market with, of course, to attract new customers, to win more of the recruitments that the customers do, and of course, by continuing to innovate with our products and price models. Is still a good room for growth.
This is our strategy, and in the vision we have creating equal job opportunities for everyone. We know that businesses that have a more diverse workforce are more innovative and create more value. And of course, a more inclusive workforce also is a value to the individual and of course to the society as a whole. We believe that through our strong positions, we are really able to make a difference in that space going forward. This is truly motivating to me, to our employees, and I guess also for future employees in our vertical. On the financial side, we have identified three main growth levers. It is about driving growth through value-based pricing, it is about delivering more job opportunities for the candidates, and it is about developing and distributing the audience extension products. Let's look at the value-based pricing.
I think we have a good track record of being able to increase ARPA over time. Still the market is dominated by a very sort of fixed price regime, based on the price of the ads and not reflecting the actual value we are creating to our professional customers. By changing that model and being more focused on the value we are creating, we believe that we will be able to attract also more value from that segment. We will also have more aligned incentives with our professional customers to really create value for them and for us. In the other part of the scale, we know that the current price model represents maybe a too high price point for some segments, and by adjusting that, we also believe to engage non-consumption or new customers.
Really a good basis to continue the growth. We have one example from Norway that we have implemented this year. It is about upsell products in the business center, and we have introduced a more segment-specific price model based on more insight about price sensitivity. We have been able to tap into more value where the willingness to pay is higher, and we have been able to engage customers that previously didn't choose our products because of the high entry price point. I think if we use the same philosophy for all the markets and all our products, we believe that this will create more value over time. I've already touched upon the passive candidates and the audience extension products. This has been a success, I would say.
But still these are only products that are not easily available for actually the main part of the market, the so-called ATS or application tracking system, users, the third-party systems. When we make these products available also for the larger part of the market, we are convinced that that will create new growth. Of course, it's still a relatively immature market, so general innovation and price development will also create value. I will also say that being part of Schibsted and the huge reach, the strong brands, of course, will give us an competitive advantage in this space over time. Now, what about how to win the candidates over time? We know that that is crucial for any marketplace to be really be relevant to the candidates over time.
We know that the candidate really want the full selection of opportunities in one place. Even though we have a wide selection on our marketplaces today, there are still, we are still not complete. We are now changing this by using new sources to harvest ads that are not currently on our platform. We will continue to have the paid ad, but we'll supplement with ads from different sources. I can give one example from the Norwegian market, more in the blue-collar segment with the shop workers and kindergarten. Yes, we have a substantial number of paid ads today, but when we source ads from, in this case, NAV or arbeidsplassen.no, the government body, you can see that the total offering to the candidates increases substantially.
Of course, we need to make sure that we don't have a revenue loss from this. The key parameter there is of course to manage the effect of the paid ads versus the sourced ads. We know from our experience that we are able to fully control that, and we know also from talking to peers around the world that this is the way to do it. We are actually now able to pre-present a better selection to candidates and at the same time, make sure that we have continuous high revenue streams from the same segments. How do we do this? How do we manage the effect? Of course, we have a lot of tools in the box to really, make sure that we control this.
We can use the push notification, the email alerts, recommendation in general. We also have different way of visualizing or presenting the ads to the audiences. In sum, we are really able to control the effect over time and of course then control the revenue streams accordingly. The last thing I would like to highlight is this, what we call a recommendation ecosystem. Of course, we believe that we have a state-of-the-art methodology. We have the capabilities in place. Of course we realize that a lot of happening around us as well. I would really like to highlight the data side here, because we have the most ad data in the Nordics.
We have the most candidate and profile data in the Nordics, so we are really confident that we are able to train the models faster than anyone else. We have already seen that. Already, almost 20% of the traffic to our ads comes from our recommendations, and we are continuously improving that, and we see a four times improvement in click-through rates only over the last 12 months. We believe that this will be a key value lever also in the future. Yes, it will help us control the effect of the ads, but I think it also will make us able to present more relevant options to the candidates going forward, more tailored and relevant offerings.
On the financial guiding, we have said that on the revenue side, midterm, we target a low to mid single-digit revenue growth and a margin above 50%. Of course, the key drivers are the macroeconomic uncertainty, which is difficult to control. We strongly believe in the value-based models to create growth and also to work more with the audience extension products to engage the passive candidates. To sum up, we have a vertical that has performed well over several years. We believe that the market in the Nordics represent a lot of growth opportunities going forward, and we have only tapped into a small part of this potential so far. We believe that we have a balanced growth strategy, as I mentioned, to work based on our strength in the marketplaces.
Of course, the strong brands and the user engagement and the professional candidate relationship will help us deliver on this going forward. Thank you.
Thank you, Eddie, for a really well explanation of the dynamics in the job market and painting the picture of the long-term opportunities in jobs. Now we will go to real estate, and here Kjersti Høklingen will present. She started in Schibsted last year, and as such, she is a new and exciting addition to the team in Nordic Marketplaces. She comes from the role of EVP of Technology and Digital Channels in DNB. She's also been a board member of Eiendomsverdi, which is a real estate tech and data company. She has a proven track record in building new market positions in quite changing environments. She's also over many years demonstrated strong and engaging leadership.
Wanna add that she has a very deep understanding of real estate trends. Since she started last fall, she has been working hard on drawing out this new and exciting Nordic real estate strategy. Please welcome Kjersti, SVP of Real Estate.
Thank you, Christian. Thank you so much. I will use the next session then to take you through what I think is a very exciting potential within the real estate vertical. I will do that by taking you through the market and business overview, and obviously tell you about the Nordic strategy and of course, our financial ambitions. As the others, I will start by giving you an overview of our strong real estate portfolio of brands. We have strong brands with unique positions and high user engagements across the Nordics. In Norway, we have FINN.no, which is a number one clear position with very, very high user engagement.
Here we are present both with, within sales and rent. In Finland, with Oikotie.fi, we have a tied now number one position with our main competitor, and in Sweden, with Blocket, we have a solid position number one within rentals, here we're not present, represented in sales. In addition to these positions, we also have strong presence within leisure homes, new constructions, and commercial properties in both Norway and in Finland. Altogether, our marketplaces have 1 million listings across all segments. Looking to the financial performance, we have delivered a compound annual growth rate of 14% over the past three years. It's important to see that when you look at the revenues, Norway is by far the largest contributor for this. Accounting for 83% of the total classified revenue in 2022.
2022 was a great year for us. Today I will tell you why you will be able to accept the same development from us also going forward. Before we do that, I will give you a deep dive into each of the market, because we have different positions. I will do that, starting with Norway. With its clear number one position, FINN.no has been a trusted source for advertising and finding properties for more than 20 years now. We reach the majority of the Norwegian population, and with close to 100% of properties are listed on FINN.no now. Simply put, we are at the heart of the Norwegian property market. FINN.no's user engagements is close to unrivaled.
96% of the Norwegians have us top of mind. On average, we all spend 40 minutes every month on our site. Norwegians have saved more than 2.1 million property searches on our site. We are sending out 1 billion notifications to our users. This is only for real estate. Our growth success has come from our ability to develop value-adding products over time. Here I will just take you through a few examples of this. First, our neighborhood profile. This is a service making ads much richer by delivering relevant and trustworthy information about the neighborhood surrounding a home. Second, we have our audience extension products.
Here we are able to leverage our rich amount of user data in our Schibsted ecosystem to give sellers a reach that is superior in the Norwegian market. Maybe the most important and recent growth driver was the introduction of the new product packages in 2020. This enables our customers to differentiate their marketing offerings, sorry, in our marketplace. The demand for our new packages has been solid, with a 90% conversion to non-basic packages. This clearly demonstrates the value of our product. These are just a few examples that all serve as strong fundamentals for strengthening our positions, also in other markets, especially in Finland. Now let's move to Finland. Since the acquisition of Oikotie.fi in 2020, our main focus here has been to strengthen our marketing position in the Finnish market.
We are pleased, as Christian was saying, to see really good progress in key metrics here. Since 2020, we have increased traffic by 30%, reaching the number one position in traffic in Finland overall. Our ability to create cross-traffic from Tori has been a key driver for this. Oikotie.fi has, during 2022, achieved a content leadership in residential for sales market in the largest cities. Here we now have 5% more listings than our main competitor. The last two years also, we see a 10% increase in top of mind for our two brands, Oikotie.fi and Tori combined. We are now very pleased to see that Oikotie.fi has a clear number one in top of mind for rentals.
All in all, we are pleased with good progress in Finland, and this serves as a good foundation to accelerate growth. Now let's move to Blocket and Qasa. In Sweden, we have Qasa, which is an end-to-end transactional rental solution owned by Schibsted. In February last year, Blocket launched a freemium model to enable the transformation from a classified model to a transactional model together with Qasa. This new service provides users with a safe and convenient rental experience, handling all major pain points in the rental process. Some examples of this are that it's no deposits for the landlord, no deposit for the tenants, I mean, and guaranteed payments for the landlord. It's a hassle-free contract process, to mention a few.
2022 showed very promising development, with a signing value of SEK 55 million, representing an increase, as you have seen, of 122%. We are now converting 15% of the listings on Blocket into the transactional model. This number is steadily increasing. It's important here also to say that this, in this model, revenue is recognized over the course of the rental period. As a result of that, revenue will always lag behind the signing value. Signing value is therefore a way to look at the net present value of future revenues to come. Now I would like to take you through ARPA and how that has developed in the different markets. Overall, we see strong ARPA development. In Norway, we see that the decline after ads of very high levels during COVID has now normalized.
We have had a compound ARPA growth of 19%, driven mainly by the residential for sale segment. Last year, we reached an ARPA of about NOK 3,700 in this segment. This was boosted by our new product packages and increase in audience extension products. In Finland, with Oikotie.fi, our priority the last two years has been to strengthen our position over monetization. Looking at the ad volumes development here, we actually see an increase due to an overall positive development in several segments. Financially, we also see development in the right direction with a compound annual ARPA growth of 6% driven by our strengthened market position. Finally, in Sweden, our main focus has been growing transactional revenues, which makes the previously mentioned signing value a better indicator than ARPA for performance.
Now I'd like to draw your attention to the dynamics of the real estate market. In light of the current market uncertainty that we now all face, it is important to note the historic stability of the Nordic real estate market. Here you can see the relationship between sold properties and published listings in Norway over time, and we see similar relationships across all the markets. There are two things worth mentioning here. First, the residential for sales market in the Nordics has been historically had a modest but stable growth over time with ability to quickly recover after economic downturns. Second, we benefit from counter cyclicality in economic downturns as demand for upselling products and republications of ads increases, which again, softening the drops in volumes. Moving on to trends.
The real estate industry is becoming increasingly digitized, and they all aim to make the real estate processes more efficient and cost-effective. One important trend that we see is the emergence of services enabling customers to carry out the sales or rental transaction partly or completely by themselves. Within the residential for sale segment, these new services have not gained traction, and real estate agents' positions remain strong. Oh, yeah. More than 90% actually of the Nordic property transactions are carried out by an agent today. Given the high stakes of buying and selling property, we believe agents will continue to play a crucial role also going forward. That is why our strong commitments to increase value for agents also going forward will be further amplified.
We also see potential in further fueling customer engagements by increasing our presence in more part of the housing journey. Through capturing more data and applying state-of-the-art technology, we aim to deliver world-class user journeys on our platform. When you look at the trends within rentals, which is more of a C2C market, new and disruptive model has gained traction. Here, long-lasting pain points related to trust and convenience fuels the demand for more convenient solutions. That is why we have launched Qasa in Sweden, and providing end-to-end solutions in all our markets will be prioritized going forward. Moving over to strategy. Our vision is to empower people in their journey to find a home at every stage of life.
The rationale for building a Nordic strategy in real estate is built upon similar user journeys, similar market dynamics, and overlap in products and business models across the markets. This will unleash synergies in this new strategy. To build upon and strengthen our position to create further growth, we have three main value-creating levers. Firstly, we will leverage our current position to grow further in Norway. Secondly, we have an ambition to become the clear market leader in Finland. Within rentals, we will focus on next-generation services by combining our strong rental positions with new transactional offerings. With this Nordic strategy, we see a compelling opportunity where our addressable market for real estate by 2025 is expected to be NOK 7 billion. In Norway and Finland, we have several paths to growth.
First, by increasing our share of the classified spend and increasing our market share in Finland, we see an addressable market of NOK 1 billion. Secondly, we have the opportunity to tap into a larger share of the total marketing spend, bringing the addressable market up to NOK 2 billion, a potential almost four times larger than at our current level today. By transitioning into a transactional offering in the Nordics, we have a significant opportunity to tap into a NOK 5 billion addressable market in the medium term. We believe this is a value that we are perfectly positioned to capture. Now I will then show you how we will capture this growth potential, and again, I will start with Norway. FINN.no will continue to be our most important growth driver, and we see potential for further growth.
Let me take you through the main rationale for this. In Norway, we operate under favorable market dynamics, and especially vendor paid marketing allows us to tap into more of the overall marketing spend. The willingness to invest in value-added marketing is high, with every house sellers spending on average NOK 18,500 on marketing. We strongly believe in continuous growth by creating and capturing more value with our efficient marketing solutions. Last year, we introduced new packages solutions for the residential for sale segment. Here we are still in an early stage compared to our classified peers, and we see potential in further developing our value of our packages. Furthermore, we also see potential in scaling these packages to subcategories such as leisure homes and new construction.
In addition, the demand for audience extension products has increased due to stricter limitations of using third-party data in marketing. Since we provide high quality first-party data and superior distribution through our Schibsted ecosystem, we are less affected by these limitations than our competitors. We see this as a competitive advantage, as Eddie also was mentioning. Finally, there are several opportunities in adjacency and consumer services as well. We aim to increase engagements with buyers and sellers in our marketplaces by capturing more data and expanding our user journeys across. This will also be a priority going forward. All in all, this gives us confidence that FINN.no will continue to be a very strong growth driver going forward. The second lever in our strategy is Finland.
The Finnish real estate classified market has been highly competitive for a long time, and we know that winning the number one position is not done overnight. We really have a clear ambition. We aim to become the number one position in Finland by providing our users and customers with superior offerings. When we capture a market-leading position, we will be able to realize future monetization potential. To accomplish this, our focus will be along two dimensions. First, we see significant potential in expanding our position further by building on the good progress on the key metrics that I went through earlier. Our strategy is to continuously strengthen the flywheel effect by improving lead efficiency and content leadership fueled by cross traffic and content from Tori. Second, we strongly believe in potential of our new Nordic vertical operating model.
We will leverage product packaging and go-to-market strategies from FINN.no, as well as technology and product sharing. This work has already begun, and we plan to transfer value-added product from FINN.no to Oikotie.fi already before this summer. Succeeding in this, we see significant headroom for future growth in Finland. Now let's look at the third lever in our strategy within rentals. Here we want to transform, as I have said, to the next generation models across the Nordics, and we believe we have a strong starting point and a strong momentum to succeed. The growth in Qasa has proven our ability to convert rental listings into transactional offerings, and the combination of Blocket's strong number one position with Qasa's scalable model and innovation and speed has been the recipe for success for this. The transactional business model allows us to capture significantly higher take rates.
Across our markets, we have half a million rental listings. Our current listing models generates on average a take rate of less than 0.5% of the GTV. Comparing that to the transactional model with an average rate of 5%, we see a ten times revenue potential in this model. The momentum now is strong. This journey has it's already on the way with our success in Sweden, and we have just launched Qasa in Finland, and planning of scaling to Norway is ongoing. Also, we have exciting collaborations with Adevinta to take Qasa to France. These were our three levers in our strategy, now we'll end by looking at the financial mid-term ambitions.
With these value-creating levers, we target our revenue growth of the range of 12%-17% in the mid-term, with an EBITDA margin of 42%-47%, expecting to increase during the period. As outlined in the presentation, we see headroom for future growth in, within our core classified in Norway and expanding our position in Finland. The growth will be boosted further by transforming rental listings into new transactional offerings. I will just sum up. The real estate portfolio consists of strong brands which operate in attractive markets with cyclical resilience. First and foremost, we see high potential for further growth in Norway, and we have a strong foundation to become the clear market leader in Finland. Secondly, we see a significant financial opportunity by combining our classified positions with new transactional offerings.
We are confident that the Nordic verticalization model will unleash synergies across our markets and increase scale, innovation, and speed to do this. Thank you. Christian, I'll give the word to you.
Thank you so much, Kjersti, for sharing the exciting real estate strategy. I think in particular, the insight into the rentals is something that I believe not so many have heard here before. Last but certainly not least, we have Recommerce. Cathrine Laksfoss will present that. Oh, is there a break now? Welcome back from the break, everyone. Now it's time for Recommerce. Cathrine Laksfoss will present that. She started her career in Schibsted in 2013. Most recently she was CEO of E-commerce and Distribution, where she was the driving force behind transforming the traditional newspaper delivery network to Norway's fastest e-commerce and recommerce parcel delivery network, Helthjem.
I can say that, her burning commitment to circularity and extensive experience with low-margin businesses where unit economics are crucial, together with her entrepreneurial skills and proven track record made her an excellent choice for SVP of Recommerce. Please welcome, Katrine to present that.
Thank you so much, Christian. I want to take you on a journey to understand how we plan to transform the heart of our marketplaces, what we used to call Generalist, into a fast-growing and profitable business in its own right. As Christian has mentioned earlier today, we have renamed our Generalist positions into Recommerce. To illustrate why we are so excited about this, I invite you to join me in watching a short video together. Imagine the year 2030. The world is very different, yet somehow familiar. People are still consuming and connecting over fashion trends, sports, hobbies, but the only difference is that by now, circular consumption has become the obvious choice, and you were one of the early believers in this development, or early knowers, as you like to put it.
To be honest, there were a lot of signs along the way. Between 2017 and 2022, the percentage of consumers who had or were willing to shop secondhand went up from 52% to 93%. They all wanted the same convenience and ease that had gotten them jacked on the ancient e-commerce, with the newly found affordability and sustainability of recommerce. 50% had cited affordability as the key driver behind choosing secondhand, followed by 40% driven mainly by sustainability. They all wanted, nay, demanded everything entailed in the word recommerce, circular buying and reselling of used, new and unused or refurbished goods, as well as the increasingly used option of sharing and renting rather than owning.
The EU followed in the same footsteps as they kicked off the early 2020s with the Green Deal Taxonomy, Circular Economy Action Plan, and regulations on everything from eco design of products to sustainable textiles and empowering sustainable consumers. As a result of the consumers and regulators demanding more responsibility, business after business was already signing off on sustainability ambitions and circular transitions. The wheels of Recommerce were in motion. Already in 2023, you knew that in 2026, Recommerce was expected to grow 16 times faster than the retail sector for fashion alone. All in all, Recommerce was projected to grow four to five times the speed of traditional e-commerce. In sector after sector, the ocean of Recommerce was already rolling in, washing away the linear models of yesterday. The tides were already turning, there were, of course, winners and losers as it washed ashore.
The winners were the ones who saw the future before it unfolded. I am a recommerce super user myself with 10-year-old twins that are in constant need of new clothes, new devices, books, and sports equipment
I get goosebumps when I think about the tremendous and large opportunity we have in turning shopping for used goods into as easy as buying new. Like e-commerce, but better for the wallet and for the planet. When my twins turn 18 in 2030, I am sure that circular shopping will be the obvious choice for them and their generation. Before we look at this vast and large opportunity, let's pause a moment and look at our point of departure. Schibsted has a fantastic starting point. Recommerce has always been at the heart of our marketplaces, and one could argue that these incredibly strong brands with mass market reach and recommerce vibrancy are the core that allowed us to build the successful verticals we heard about earlier. Today, we have an unparalleled portfolio of number 1 market leader positions within recommerce across 4 Nordic countries.
We reach the majority of the Nordic population on a regular basis, with 110 million visits to our recommerce marketplaces every month. We are amongst the most used digital services in every country, and in three of our countries, our brands have been chosen as the most sustainable brands across industries. Until now, we have used our recommerce positions to deliver value to the other verticals through our brands and network effects. Now we have a fantastic opportunity to turn these positions into a profitable business in its own right. Today, recommerce has around 40 million new private listed ads every year, accounting for NOK 66 billion of listed gross merchandise value. Most of our brands have been free for sellers and buyers for a decade. Thus, the monetization of our C2C inventory is currently below 0.5%.
Over the past year, marketplaces in Europe and worldwide have shown that there is a huge monetization potential in C2C inventory. We also see that posting of ads is free, but buyers are willing to pay a cut for safe and easy transactions online. The most successful of the players are able to take a cut as high as 20% of the gross merchandise value. Recommerce now has a unique opportunity to put the transactional business model to work on our unparalleled Nordic recommerce inventory. The recommerce space is also benefiting from strong macro tailwinds. Consumers are demanding more affordable and sustainable ways of consuming, especially during economic and environmental crisis. Regulators are putting up robust framework for promoting circular consumption. The new transactional models make it easy and convenient to transact online.
This attracts even more people to try and to buy and sell online. All these trends occur at the same time, and we expect rapid growth in this market. To be honest, it is really hard to size a market in creation. We and other players in this market expect exponential growth going forward. As I talked about before, the transactional model also opens up large opportunities of monetization. If you combine these two forces, the growth on the one side and the monetization on the other, we expect this market to have a 50 to 100x potential going forward. That's why we have one focus in our new Nordic organization in recommerce, and that is to transform our strong leading positions into successful transactional marketplaces.
This is how we will remain relevant for our users, for the other verticals, but also how we will bring shareholder value by tapping into a large new revenue stream. We are already well underway with the business transformation in Norway. After significant product investments last year, we launched the transactional service Fiks ferdig, which translates into Ready and Done, in the summer of 2022. This service makes it easy and convenient for consumers to shop online. Let's look at how Nina, that you see here, fulfilled her handbag dream using our new service. After spotting her handbag dream on FINN.no for half of the retail price, she simply clicked the buy button and made an offer to the seller. With our e-commerce-like checkout, she was able to purchase and pay for delivery and buy protection in only two clicks.
Once the seller accepted the bid, the seller immediately received a label-less code to write on the parcel from our delivery service, Helthjem. The parcel was shipped from the seller directly to Nina's door in very short time, and Nina had 24 hours to confirm that the bag was in the desired condition. After that, we released the payment to the seller, and thanks to this Fiks ferdig service, Nina easily and safely could purchase her preferred bag. There are many Ninas out there, and they simply love our service, and 2022 marked a strong start to our business model transformation in Norway. Following our commercial launch in the summer, we developed a powerful playbook for driving growth through marketing, shipping campaigns, and product and price changes.
Thanks to these efforts, we arrived at 750,000 transactions in only seven months. On a per capita basis, that's comparable to what leboncoin had only after three years in the market with their service. More than 450,000 of these transactions happened in the last quarter, and we were happy to see a good mix of new adopters and returning buyers. Each buyer transacted three times on our platform during these seven months. Within six months, 70% of all Norwegians became aware of this service, and we saw a large elevation on FINN.no's reputation as an innovative and forward-thinking business. In addition, we have proven that a good transactional model not only converts the existing inventory on the platform, but also strengthens and extends our marketplace.
I want to underline that we saw a 24% increase in key categories like clothing and children's items after having launched Fiks ferdig. This is a promising start, we are confident that we can unlock additional growth and shareholder value with a transactional model, there are several levers for growth. We can grow the number of ads and the gross merchandise value of these ads, over the past few years, we have seen a steady increase of number of ads of 7%. Going forward, we anticipate continued and stronger growth. There's also headroom to grow the transactions on platform, currently 10%-15% of all of the listed items on FINN.no are transacted with the Fiks ferdig service. There is significant room to grow this through our product and marketing efforts.
We can also increase our take rate. The average order value last year on FINN.no's orders were NOK 610, and this reflects a healthy mix of low-value and higher-value items. Our take rate is currently between 9% and 13% depending on category, and there are many opportunities to optimize further. Last year, we focused on growing the number of transactions. This year, we are focusing on monetization and pricing experiments. I want to tell you that our latest experiment increased gross profit in our test group by 54%. This is due to higher take rate, but also a higher number of conversion to transactions. We also have opportunities of adding value-added services, and this will further enhance the product, like insurance can do, but also increase our potential take rates.
We will also work on our costs of goods sold. They will give us flexibility in our pricing, which can give higher growth or also higher margins. C2C shipping is an immature market. We see that in both in our own shipping, our own delivery service, Helthjem, and working with others' delivery partners, we can improve prices by leveraging our Nordic scale. Looking at our gross margins, we have already lifted our gross margins significantly during the first two months of 2023. Altogether, this makes up the levers that we can pull to build a successful recommerce business. Let's look a little bit where at where our different brands and market are. First of all, we see a good availability of transactional enablers in every market, and I'm then talking about C2C delivery and P2P payment solutions.
We also see strong consumer demand for our services by looking at our opt-in rates for shipping and we see that we do have different transactional product maturity in the different countries. FINN.no is of course leading the way and will continue to be a strong engine for growth. Blocket has launched their transactional product and are currently working on product and marketing improvements. In Denmark and Finland, we have a large portion of our inventory which is enabled for the sale of shipping labels, which is this first step towards a transactional offering. We are currently in an investment phase, and we invest most in transactional capabilities, but also heavily in marketing in order to shift consumer habits. We are making significant strides in leveraging our learnings from Norway and going fully transactional in all four markets before 2025.
If we look at our financials, midterm, our primary source for revenue growth will be on platform transactions. Our goal is to triple our revenues from 2022 to 2025. Before 2023, we have not operated recommerce as a standalone business unit, but rather use this as for traffic and brands for the other verticals to grow. In 2022, we made heavy investments into product, tech, and marketing in order to do the transactional transformation. Recommerce reports a restated EBITDA of minus NOK 266 million for 2022. We firmly believe that there is a huge opportunity in turning recommerce into a fast-growing and high profitable business. Our ambition is to reach an EBITDA break-even during 2025. To achieve this, we will double down on nailing and scaling our transactional model.
The new Nordic operating model is a key enabler for achieving profitability. We will focus our efforts on one scalable platform rather than the four we have today, this will accelerate our development speed and also ensure more efficient operations, which eventually will allow us to also reduce costs. With strong execution, deep transactional expertise, a highly scalable Nordic organization, and efficient operations, we will arrive at a positive EBITDA and also be well-positioned to tap into the growth of this market. To sum up, we are in the beginning of the recommerce revolution, a revolution that we will push with high growth and volumes to come. We are strongly positioned to capitalize on that growth. We will do that by facilitating easy and safe on platforms transactions, creating substantial monetization potential.
Going Nordic and going vertical is a critical enabler, as it ensures that we will have one platform and efficient operations. This will mean that recommerce can become a profitable business in its own right. As we have done in the past, we will continue to provide value to the other verticals by our brands and our traffic. As we will grow in number of ads and number of users, the crossover value of this will be substantially higher. Altogether, we are very well positioned to make circular consumption into the obvious choice. Both me and my twins are really looking forward to that. Thank you.
Thank you, Katrine. I'm very excited about this opportunity in this exponentially growing market. As I hope that the four deep dives have shown, we have significant headroom to grow in our traditional classifieds offering in the core. We are also perfectly positioned to unlock these new business models that will open up an addressable market 10 times larger than what we have today. That is really the reason why we have moved to this vertical operating model. That being said, the four verticals, they have a slightly different focus, and I'll just reiterate briefly what that is. For mobility, the primary focus is to leverage the existing positions to through pricing and packaging and transforming to transactional models in C2B and C2C.
Jobs success depends on improving monetization through these value-based business models that Eddie explained, and also through these audience extension products reaching passive candidates. Real estate is about winning the number one position in Finland and also continuing to deliver more value to agents in Norway while using packages to monetize more. Here in real estate, we also have this exciting opportunity in the transactional rentals as a secondary priority. Finally, as you heard here at the end, recommerce, it's all about transforming the freemium C2C model to a transactional model. As I said at the beginning of the meeting today, this very much feels like the early 2010s or 2011s when we knew that we had a winner in the making when we were rolling out classifieds across the globe.
Today we really see many early signs of success in these new models. We have already moved to a vertical operating model so far with minimal disruption and decline in employee engagement. With Nettbil and with AutoVex, we have taken significant steps towards winning this huge C2B market in mobility. As Katrine explained here at the end, we are well underway on nailing the C2C transactional model in recommerce with the 750,000 transactions in FINN.no last year. To succeed with this journey, we have a stellar leadership team in place with what I think is a winning combination of people with deep experience and expertise in their respective areas. You've seen some of them here today.
I'm very happy to have people from all the Nordic countries represented so that we stay close to our users and customers. I also want to highlight the strong tech leadership that we have under Hanna, where we have deep transformation experience. I know that with this team, we will drive value creation through ownership, through engagement and competence in the organization, and we will really build on the strengths that we have. I think the absolute best testament of the execution ability of this team is really the high engagement, the positive mood that we see in our organizations even after pretty significant changes last year. I'll just round off and say, why is Nordic Marketplaces and Schibsted a solid investment?
Well, we have an exceptional long-term track record of value creation in marketplaces. We have highly profitable asset-light businesses with large competitive moats and attractive investment opportunities. We still have significant runway for growth in the traditional classifieds offering. On top of that, we are uniquely positioned to benefit from this verticalization as it opens up this new enormous wave of value creation going forward. I think this is going to be super exciting, and thank you all for listening to our vision for the marketplaces of the future. With that, I'll hand it over to Kristin again.
Thank you. Thank you, Christian. Thank you also to all of the vertical leads for inspiring us with a deep dive and showing all the opportunities. Now I'll invite you to come back up, and we'll do a Q&A. Ragnar, please, you can also come. Then I urge you to focus your questions in this round on the marketplaces presentations, and we will have a Q&A at the end where we can focus on some of the other stuff. Jan- Boje, you will guide us through it.
I think before we start with questions from the web, we can see if there are questions here already. If we have a microphone for Andrew here.
Should we borrow one?
Maybe we can borrow yours.
Come around. Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you. It's Andrew here from Barclays. I'll start with two, if that's okay. The first one is on, I think it was slide 92. There was a really interesting data point that in Norway, people spend NOK 18,500 of marketing spend per transaction, and 75% of it is not going to FINN.no.
Can you just help us understand what that 75% is and kind of practically how you go after it, just to make sure we're fully on top of that?
Yeah. Yes. That is a good question. We actually see, as I said in the presentation, we have high marketing spend in Norway. That's because we have the vendor paid marketing, as I said, as the favorable market dynamics in Norway. The other parts are You, you were asking about the other parts of the total NOK 18,500? Yes? Yeah. The other parts are marketing that is not classified marketing. You have, you know, you have a marketing package that is sold by the agents to the seller. It's different. It's a sum of parts, I will say, but it is not classified, and it's more marketing, also showing, you know, the apartments and, yeah.
It's more than just the classified.
Presumably, you think some of that could go to FINN.no over time, at least some of it anyway?
Yes. We believe that we can take a larger part of that. Also, we have seen that the NOK 18,500 has actually increased over time. You know, the last two years, it's actually been also increased by NOK 1,500-2,000. It's also increasing because the willingness to pay for marketing is high.
Cool. I mean, my second question is on the take rate difference between AutoVex and Nettbil, the 1% and the 10%. Just help us understand, A, why the difference is so big, and then, B, going through the unit economics beneath the take rate, 'cause I guess for Nettbil, there's an inspection piece. Just help us understand how to think about the kind of gross profit differential in the longer term.
That's an excellent question. As I presented, the two companies have had a very similar growth path both in terms of number of cars sold and in gross merchandise value. However, there are also some differences between the concepts. Netbil is targeting a slighter older segment of used cars which benefits from an inspection. By removing the meeting between the seller and the dealer, Netbil has also been able to elicitate a higher take rate.
AutoVex, that we then acquired in December, so very limited time to start to extract synergies, they have taken a more of a low touch digital customer offering and have had a very strong traction within the premium used cars, so slightly younger segment of cars, and have been very much focused on driving volume growth rather than monetization. During 2022, they have performed some expansion of that take rate without any implications on the growth rate. We see very good opportunities to expand the take rate in AutoVex over time. Your second question was regarding sort of gross gross margins.
We're not at this point going into depth of this, but it is so that the AutoVex model is almost purely digital, so a very, very high gross margin. While we in Netbil has the inspection cost, which is sort of the main driver for the gross margin. Both companies are also investing heavily into marketing, which is more variable cost. Thanks.
Question over there.
Thank you. Marcus here in SEB. Two questions for me as well. The first one is just trying to reconcile your new growth ambitions with your old. If I look at the growth target for the main verticals, we're talking about 12%, 17% growth and 3x in recommerce and then 5%-ish in jobs. If I reconcile that with 8%-12%, previously, are we supposed to expect a lower base due to some macro headwinds, or, how should I think about that? That's the first one.
I can comment on that. I think what we're saying is that the previous revenue guidelines for us was 8%-12% revenue growth for Nordic Marketplaces. What we are saying now is that the new targets is let's say neutral towards the older targets and what will be in the upper part of the range. I will say in the short to midterm, meaning this year and next year. Let's say what a bit, little bit of the question mark in the short term is particularly the development within jobs.
Given so let's say the increased potential that we see from growing the business through the new transactional models, we clearly have an ambitions to move sort of upwards towards the upper end of the targets that we have presented today, and that goes both for revenues and also for EBITDA.
It's correct to think that maybe 2022 is not the best base for that, for those growth numbers. Is that how to read it?
You could add it to that. We should be a little bit careful on, let's say on the range, on the being in the lower range for this year, and then we will see some of the growth coming over the next couple of years.
That's clear. Thank you.
And then my final question is on recommerce and, and the EBITDA loss that you have. Uh, obviously you have to scale the business, uh, but can you shed some more light on, say, fixed cost versus the gross profit in twenty-two? And how should we think about that sort of EBITDA loss transition? Is it forward, like it's back-end loaded, the, the break even in twenty-five? Or will you see some significant sort of gross margin benefits, uh, now already in twenty-three? Uh, so just a breakdown on sort of variable cost versus fixed cost would be helpful. Thank you.
Do you want me to comment first or?
You can give a comment first, and I can help you.
Looking at recommerce, the I would say that the largest costs have been and are right now, personnel driving product and technology, and also marketing. This is, you know, converting users to new habits that they haven't had before. Going forward, of course, we have been operating for four different systems and platforms. Of course, we will work much more together in the future. Maybe Ragnar, you want to comment on?
I think just bear in mind that you will see a steady contribution from the increased gross margin or gross profit. Bear in mind then that we removed the listing fees in Blocket in May last year. Sort of the, let's say, the potentially when you look at the numbers, the underlying growth from the new transaction models will be somewhat weaker normal terms in the first half of this year. That's just for the gross margin.
I think that we will sort of work both with the cost side and of course then, we very much believe in the, in the top line growth and the contribution is the main factor for moving recommerce into the, let's say, the positive territory also in EBITDA.
Before we just move over to PV, there's one question on the web on a clarification. The midterm targets for Nordic Marketplaces, it's not a CAGR over the period 2 to 2025, but it's annual for the single years 2024 and 2025. Just important clarification. PV, go ahead.
It's Pete from Morgan Stanley. A few, maybe let's start with mobility. In real estate, you did this packaging change in 2022, which led to, I'd say, like quite a decent ARPA uplift. Is there something similar that you see in mobility? If so, in which countries?
Thank you for an excellent question. As I pointed out during the presentation, we see a quite large headroom to grow when it comes to to dealer classified revenues. If we compare it to peers, it's sort of up to a 2X potential. We believe we can drive this in several ways. First of all, it's all about supporting our dealers to sell their cars more efficiently. We can do it both with the sort of premium products and by supporting them with more insights. I mentioned the Diagnose support as one such an important tool. Then in terms of upside between the countries, I think there's actually opportunity across the Nordics to scale this.
Of course, the bit particular model in Denmark has worked against us in the short term. Yeah.
All right.
Chris, maybe I want to add. I can maybe just add what we have said before also that as we move to this Nordic model, we're also looking at opportunity to align business model across the countries, and we are running an initiative now in mobility looking at exactly how to do that. When you do that, we will of course also optimize the structure you through that transition. Yeah.
Okay. Thanks. The next question is on C2B. Do you think it's possible to win in C2B if you're not the number one in the vertical more generally, so Finland mainly?
Yeah. I think what we have learned over the last few years is that C2B is a strong standalone position as well, and that there is an opportunity to build this into a separate destination to sell your car and to be that trusted advisor for consumers, and really sort of facilitating that end-to-end. We have seen that with Nettbil during these years when we've had limited collaboration with FINN.no due to the process with competitive authorities. Still very, very healthy growth and attractive. I mean, Nettbil has been EBITDA positive, and despite that has seen very strong growth.
We believe that we can achieve a similar trajectory in Finland, and AutoVex is today a clear number one player with a pretty solid head start compared to the other local players. Yes, we do believe so. Still there is strong synergies with Tori, both in terms of monthly active users and sort of brand endorsement, and also a quite strong uptake in C2C.
Actually, a follow-up on C2B. What should we think about Bilia or like Sweden regarding this? Should we expect Nettbil to go to Sweden at some point?
Another excellent should I take it, Christian? Or it sounded like.
Please do.
Okay. A bit of a history lesson then on Bilia. Bilia was the Swedish branch of Nettbil that was launched in collaboration with Blocket just three months after the acquisition of Nettbil back in 2019. When the authorities, the competitive authorities started the investigation, Nettbil founders decided to pull back out of Sweden. We only did approximately three months of, yeah, of venture into Sweden. We did see some promising KPIs initially, but focus for the company, given the uncertainty, was to preserve cash. We still see a good potential in Sweden.
All right. Thanks. Yes, Catherine. Just...
Oh.
Okay. Ole Martin?
Yeah.
Okay.
Thanks. It's Catherine from Citi. I just want to ask a question on the Jobs vertical. Firstly on the revenue growth guidance, which is 2024/2025, so I understand it. I just wondered how much you're factoring in macro versus an impact in the shift to the value-based model, because it's clearly a lot lower than some of the other verticals. Secondly, I guess linked to that on the margin is a less sort of specific range, and the Jobs margin is 56%, or was in 2022. How should we think about the more than 50% that you're guiding to for the medium term?
I think I will leave it up to Ragnar to comment on the margin development and the financial guiding.
I can do that on the I think the Coming back to the presentation of the Jobs vertical, you saw that sort of we are moving into, let's say also a transition in Jobs, meaning that we're moving to more of these sort of more, let's say, value-based kind of services also in Jobs. Through those, that transition, we also will have a sort of a little bit of different sort of margin picture on those services. On top of that, I think Jobs is the vertical that is most exposed to the present macroeconomic development. We, yes, we have factored in that we see some weakening in the, in the labor market over the next one to two years within Jobs. That is fair to say.
Ole Martin.
Okay. Ole- Martin Helland from DNB Markets. Starting off with a question on, you mentioned, several of you, that there were significant cost synergies driven by this verticalization. At the same time, you're left with a feeling that you're sort of acceleration in order to grab the opportunities that are ahead of you. Can you comment upon, you know, how should we think about product investments, and the cost associated with that for the coming years?
Yes, I think I can comment on that. Your observations are correct. We are investing into these new innovations, into these new transactional models that requires investments in product and tech in particular. At the same time, you can see that from the increase in the number of employees and so on throughout last year. That was a result of that. Now that we have moved into the new vertical operating model, we are much more cautious into increasing those investments. We're holding back, and instead, the focus right now is about using the employees that we have in a more effective way in this new setup. That's really the focus for this year in particular. Yeah.
While we wait, I can just maybe take one question from the web before we move on. Christian, for your question, you talked about how the vertical leaders will manage their own P&Ls going forward. Can you please discuss how they're incentivized to deliver on the targets? If there's also like a bias to either revenue growth or EBITDA, which will be like the main focus for the vertical leads.
The vertical leads have their own P&L. As a team, we are now incentivized on the totality of this year in particular, in the totality of the marketplace's P&L. It's a combination of of revenue and and margin. I think I will leave it at that.
It comes on, I think.
Hello? Yes, Olav Gram from TDN. I've got one question. When do you expect to deliver positive EBITDA in the News Media segment?
I can, just shortly answer that. We expect to be EBITDA positive this year. The comments that we are giving, sort of, and I'll come back to that later also, is primarily related to first quarter.
Thank you.
If there's no question in the room, I can just take some in the meantime from the web. Looking at Nordic Marketplaces, there was limited talk about further M&A today. Are you looking at further consolidation opportunities ahead?
We will always be open for attractive M&A opportunities. Right now we have a somewhat more constrained capital situation, and we're focused very much on the transformation to the vertical operating model and so on. There are, there's always a stream of interesting opportunities that we are considering.
As a follow-up from the question from Andrew earlier, when you asked, like, what about the marketing package here which is not classified, how has this evolved over time? Especially like last year when you lifted up ARPU, did you take more of that share, or did the agents just push through the price increase, to the clients?
Yeah. To follow up on that, as I said, you know, the marketing spend has, the willingness is quite high, as I said, in Norway to actually spend on marketing. We believe that we, in our packages, is in a very early phase, as I said, compared to peers, and we know that there are more value. We believe in value-adding products into the packages. That is something that, you know, if we bring value into the packages, we believe there are more potential to actually increase, both marketing spend and/or potential in the classified spend.
I think it's probably fair to say that there was a mix of that. We saw that the total marketing spend increased somewhat, like you said, but that we also probably have taken a larger share of the package from.
Yes.
stemming from the change that we did last year.
Yes. We saw that we also saw that, you know, some the packages, when we launched that, the price marketing spend was increased as well.
Yeah.
Yes.
A combination.
Yeah. Combination.
Kristoffer Pedersen from Nordea. I was wondering about the jobs vertical. You said it's weakened a bit more into Q1, but based on the number of listings I've been tracking on FINN.no, it's still at a fairly high level. I was wondering, is there anything we should think about in terms of pricing? Is it a new pricing model maybe that's impacting revenue as well? How's that developing?
Pål MacKenzie.
Yes. just, if you're, if you're tracking, you need to be aware of the fact that I mentioned earlier that we are now, sourcing some additional ads from different sources. I think that would be wise to look into that specifically. Otherwise, I'm not, guiding any more on, what is going on in, this quarter or this year. Yeah.
What I can say then as an additional comment is that we see sort of compared to last year that the volumes is somewhat down also in Norway. They are more down in Sweden and in Finland. Then we have increased prices, the CPI prices, sort of at the start of the year. The question is a bit how this net effect will, let's say, influence top line as such then going, sort of in Q1 and also going through the year. There's a little bit of question mark how, as I said, how the macro will influence the job markets in each of the main market offers within jobs.
Hey, it's Pete from Morgan Stanley again. Question on real estate. You mentioned that you want to win in Finland, but what does winning mean? Does it mean 2x traffic or 3x traffic of the competitor? What is the kind of investment pipeline that you need to do in order to make it happen?
Yeah, that is a good question, because what is number one position? I believe that, you know, it's still early. We acquired Oikotie.fi in 2020. It's still early, what we see is the good progress that we have made. We, as I said, we know that winning that position is not done overnight. We strongly believe now that we have building on the good progress and also, as I said, taking the synergies from FINN.no to Oikotie.fi, it will boost our strengthening our position. When you can say that you're number one, that is if you really have superior offerings, we will be able to monetize over the period of next period.
I do not have the exact answer for the number one position, but we are very confident that we will be able to monetize when we increase our value for users and customers.
I think more generally, I mean, we know that, your leverage increases when you have a significant leadership, right? That's why we are happy that we are now in a tied number one position. We are not done with that. We have to still continue to grow. Yeah.
Martin from DNB again. Sorry for going back to this, I just want to follow up on Marcus's question earlier here. On your guidance, if you sort of use the 2022 as a reference base, you will end up in 2025 with sort of 13%-70% revenue growth for Nordic Marketplaces compared to the original guidance of 8%-12%. The problem with the guidance is of course that 2023 is not given, and you have highlighted that the job market is gonna be weaker. When you look on the other verticals and the growth rates that you're targeting from 2023 and 2024, is there an acceleration of growth there as well?
Can you comment some high-level comments on what your expectations are for 2023 so we can have a fair expectations of what the starting point is for this guidance?
As I said, I don't think we have a comment on the, on 2023 in itself. I think it's fair to say, particularly for jobs and motors, that you will see a, let's say, an improved performance on growth and profitability throughout the period.
We move towards the upper part of the range, that is clear, that is clear. For jobs, as I said, it's, I think we will sort of be in the range that we have guided on. That's fair. Of course, yeah, we are sort of quite confident that we will sort of reach also the EBITDA targets for, the, sorry, the revenue targets for e-commerce. Bearing in mind then. Yeah, I think that's that.
You said jobs and motors, but you meant real estate?
Yes, sorry. I said jobs, I meant real estate and motor. Sorry.
I can maybe comment on some of the drivers this year for each vertical. In mobility, there will be both some volume effects of some rebound and pricing impact that Robin talked about. In jobs, you have the opposite situation on the volume, there are also some positive pricing effects. In real estate, there is a continued strong traction on the pricing effects in Norway. In Finland, there will be some positive volume effects. In e-commerce, it's all about this growth in the C2C transaction model. Those are kind of the elements to play with this year and the main drivers.
Thank you. Just to follow up on your volume , because you could imagine a model where you have more stable revenues, and you have sort of subscription base, and you will be less... It will be more visible, more transparent maybe for everyone to know what your sort of price increase or sort of the revenue trajectory would be. Are you looking into different revenue models that would bring more predictability both for your customers and for yourself?
Yeah, that's an excellent question, I think for all verticals, but maybe especially for mobility. Over the last few years with especially 2020 and 2021, with big disturbances in the delivery of new cars, we have suffered a bit from being very much exposed to the demand side or supply side, sort of how many cars are listed on the platforms. I think as Christian pointed out, we're now doing a new pricing strategy for mobility going forward. We are looking into both how to be sort of demand-driven going forward as a revamping from supply to demand, but also how to create more stability. I think subscription is also an interesting opportunity.
We have not yet concluded on which model, but we'll take that into consideration.
All these models have different pros and cons, right? To give an example of the other thing is that we in Blocket in the past, we had the slot-based, which is a more subscription-based model in the past, and when we moved to a pay-per-ad model and saw a significant uplift as a result. They all have their strengths in different environments, so to speak. Yeah.
I think we soon have to round up the first Q&A session. There will be a second one after Kristin will wrap up at the end of the day. One on the tech stack, Christian. Within classifieds, are you planning on changes to the tech stack with a shift from a geographic to vertical management? What are the complexities and risks related to that?
Yes. As I mentioned, we are moving towards a more common technology across across the Nordics with some shared components across and more, let's say, individual technology solutions for each each vertical. That kind of enables this more independent development of the customer offering in in each vertical. I think that's sufficient for now. Yeah.
I think that concludes our first Q&A session. Thank you for that.
Great. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. We will move on, and we will change the topic. I'm happy to introduce Andrew Kolset . He's our CIO, and he heads up our growth and investment division. Before, we called this financial services and venture. We have renamed it to reflect the focused investment strategy. Andrew, please come up and tell us all about it.
Okay. Thank you, Kristin. Hello, everyone. I'm gonna talk to you about three topics today. Number one is who we are and what we do in terms of the Growth and Investments team, which Kristin mentioned has been renamed and refocused a bit. Number two, I'm gonna talk to you about how Schibsted has invested historically and add a little flavor to that and also what we've learned. Most importantly, I'll talk to you about how we're refining our investment focus going forward, both based on what we've learned, but also the changing macroeconomic conditions around us. If you look at the right-hand side of this slide, you see the three business areas of Schibsted. You of course have Nordic Marketplaces, news media, and then you have Growth and Investments.
You'll notice it's drawn a little bit differently, and that is to signal that we are a bit different than the other business areas in that we are here to really support the rest of Schibsted in their growth and investment journey. Below that is a small diagram of how investments have historically worked for Schibsted, where we've made investments across stages from early stage to late stage. Through time, the idea has been to double down on things that work, and we see are really becoming part of the core, but then also to exit things which we realize over time are becoming non-core, and then to reinvest or redistribute the proceeds of that. We help in this picture in four areas. Number one, we drive growth investments and M&A on behalf of the other business areas.
You saw the great presentations from Marketplaces earlier, where they talked about the four verticals and how they plan to grow. For the inorganic portion of that, we're assisting there. At the same time, we run the active portfolio. We have the active portfolio management for the assets which are not part of Nordic Marketplaces or News Media. That's really companies that are going through that bottom portion of the diagram, either on their way up and in, or ones where we realized it's non-core and then on their way out. Today in that portfolio, we have Lendo, our transactional marketplace for consumer loans, Prisjakt, the price comparison websites, and Mittanbud, which is a marketplace for home services. We also manage then the collection of other smaller assets and minority holdings that we have.
We also do early stage and minority investments on behalf of Schibsted and the business areas, and that's an area where we are refocusing as well and refining and focusing more behind core, and I'll come back to that. Something I think we don't talk about nearly enough, but is very important, that is how we take out synergies and accelerate value by utilizing all of Schibsted's assets in the ecosystem. I'll come back to that as well and go through a few concrete examples. Investing in growth has really always been part of Schibsted's DNA. If you look over the last decade plus, we've made over 200 investments and deployed more than NOK 18 billion in capital.
When you look at how that's been deployed, 90% has been to marketplaces and the vast majority to growth stage and beyond, with around 18% deployed to earlier stages. This has been a tremendous driver of the value creation within Schibsted. At the same time, when we've looked back through all these investments, we've seen that it really worked well when we invested close to core, where we have a clear competitive advantage with synergies to be gained from those investments. That, again, is going to be informing the investment strategy that I'll talk to you a bit about in a moment. You're all very aware of the fantastic growth that was created through all of the acquisitions that built Adevinta.
We've also included on the right-hand side of this slide some other transactions and some of our larger assets and what those have generated. Of course, we have some older ones like Prisjakt and Lendo, which we still hold. Also Nettbil and Podme as more recent examples. Despite the fact that only 18% of our capital was invested in early-stage investments, it's been an important part to building strategic positions and strong returns for us through time. If you go way back, we acquired Blocket, which not only became a valuable asset on its own, it also served as the source code and the basis for the international rollout of many other assets, including leboncoin. This created a tremendous amount of value. Lendo and Prisjakt also created very solid value, and more recently, Podme.
It's not just about the strong positions and returns of the past, it's also about positioning ourselves for the future. Some of the companies you've heard earlier about from Nordic Marketplaces such as Nettbil, AutoVex, Kazza are doing exactly that. After going through this history of our investments internally and also looking at how the world around us is changing, not least with regards to inflation, interest rates, and what that does to far out cash flows versus more near-term, we have refocused our investment strategy. We've done that around four key areas. The first one is simply, as stated before, investing closer to the core, where we have a clear competitive advantage and synergies. The second one is around more active ownership, value creation, and synergy realization, where in the past we have been quite good at making a large number of successful acquisitions.
We wanna be as good or even better at how we manage those for value, even the ones which over time we end up exiting. It's also about realizing and crystallizing value from non-core holdings through time. Once we've done that, it's really about how we reallocate that capital or redistribute it. That is not simply talking about making new investments, but it's also redistributions through share buybacks or other means. I'm gonna talk about the second three of these in more detail, starting with the more active ownership. If I go to this one on the more active ownership, this is something we've put a tremendous amount of focus on over the last year plus so that we can be even better on this than we've been in the past.
There's a few simple components to that, I'd say, but the importance is how we execute on those. One of them is making sure that we have a clear ownership agenda, including a full potential plan from day one. That's really something we should have clear in our mind when we're making an acquisition and then refine and lock after we've acquired a company.
In addition, we've put in place a bit of an internal governance for how we manage companies we invest in. Of course, the business area and the P&L lead from, let's say, Marketplaces, for example, is running a company that we buy, but we govern it through something that we call a troika, where we also have a, the deal captain from the investment team who's part of that so that we can ensure it really follows a plan which gives a good return on investment compared to what we paid. I think from my experience in large corporates, when you acquire a company, it is quite easy for all of a sudden the acquisition price to be considered a little bit sunk as you start to manage things through the P&L and the regular targets.
We wanna keep a heavy focus on what we've paid and make sure that we're getting value back out of that. It's about having really active performance management and evaluating how do we do versus the plan on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis, and refining and adjusting that as we go. As mentioned, one of the most important things is also how we unlock synergies and how we accelerate that value creation and realize those synergies. This is not just about the synergies that we had in mind at the time we made an acquisition. It's also about continually searching for new ways to get out more value between our assets.
We also now have put in place an annual process where we do a regular portfolio review. We look at every asset in the portfolio, how it's doing, and how it fits with where we are today. We take a decision, is this something we want to hold? Is it something we should further integrate, or is it time to actually sell and exit a given asset? On the back of that, we also are increasing our focus on just streamlining the portfolio, not just to realize value, but also because it helps improve our focus as well. Again, one of the more important pieces of this is really driving synergies across our portfolio. We are not a financial investor. We invest where we have synergies, competitive advantage, and a reason to be a better owner.
Concretely, the few areas where we really can do that is when we can scale through our platforms, where we reach 80% plus of the population on a regular basis. It's about applying our knowledge and competence like we've done through the marketplace journey through time, and it's around bundling, cross-selling, and upselling like we've done with Podme, but also in the marketplaces. I think it's fairly easy to read off in a way generic sources of synergy, but I think it's a bit more useful to click through a few examples that bring to life how we've been doing that historically and some more recent ones as well. If I start with one you heard about earlier, and that's FINN.no and Nettbil.
Of course, Nettbil is adding a nice transactional model with a higher take rate and value to our existing marketplace. That's promoted in a few ways. One is through its presence on the main page within Finn, which obviously helps to drive traffic, but it's also deeply integrated into the buying and selling journey that's already there. That, of course, has helped contribute to a rapid growth in Nettbil, which you also heard about earlier in the presentation. Another example, which is I like this one because it's about taking two assets which have been in the portfolio for a while, then finding new ways that we actually get more value out of those two assets together.
That is, in this example, Prisjakt and Finn, where we have taken the product catalog from Prisjakt, where we have millions of products, and we allow Finn to basically draw that data in. When a professional seller in this example is going to sell a phone, they can pull in the information on the new prices, including where it's priced the lowest and what that price is. By presenting that in the ad, consumers are also more aware of the value they're getting versus the new price that they would have to pay. At the same time, that new price and the little Prisjakt portion under it is clickable, so if someone does want to purchase new, then that traffic is driven through our other asset. It really drives traffic to both our different assets.
It improves the seller experience, the buyer experience, and is a good example of how we can get value out of the different companies in our ecosystem. Moving along, Podme, another company which has grown quite successfully since we acquired it. That really, again, is heavily on the back of our distribution power and our ability to reach that 80%+ of the population on a regular basis. Podme has been bundled in with the news media subscriptions. It's been promoted across our platforms, and that has contributed to this more than 3x growth of the subscriber base since the time we acquired it.
You also heard about this example earlier, so I won't go into it in great detail, but that again is a good example of taking a transactional marketplace, combining it with our existing positions, and improving both as a result of that. Lendo, a company that's been in our portfolio for quite a while, is to me a good example of our sheer ability to build a strong brand through time by using that reach and distribution and the frequency with which we communicate with consumers. We recently did a survey looking at unaided brand awareness of loan comparison websites and major banks. I was surprised not to see that Lendo beat other loan comparison websites because that was a bit expected by their size. We were surprised to see that they had greater unaided brand awareness than most of the major banks.
Of course, what that means is that when someone wants to take out a consumer loan, Lendo will be top of mind. It will be more likely that they type that into Google. That will lower our customer acquisition cost, and that improves the margins of that business. That I think is a good demonstration of that strength when we really use it repeatedly over an extended period of time. Very important as well, after creating value is how we really realize that value through exits. This also is an area that we are working to step up on, let's say, or do more of. We pursued exit processes to unlock value in Lendo and Prisjakt. Unfortunately, those were stopped due to the macroeconomic conditions.
I would say not just macroeconomic conditions, but also conditions in debt markets and other things which made it not an optimal time to sell those. At the same time, we see a really good journey ahead of us in building value in Lendo and Prisjakt. We will do that and evaluate our options through time. Of course, you're aware we realized 4.5 billion NOK from our Adevinta sale and TRS, and the capital from that was used both to pay down debts and then also to do share buybacks, because at the time, share buybacks represented really one of the best investment opportunities that we saw in front of us due to the discount. We've also increased an emphasis on exiting non-core holdings based on this refined focus. You'll see a list of some smaller assets up there.
It's not necessarily about the huge amount of capital that will be flowing in from releasing some of those, but again, it is about the increased focus which we will get by doing so. That is also something that we are now emphasizing quite a bit. When unlocking capital from our portfolio, it is very important that we reallocate that in a disciplined way. We're putting in place a few things around this. One is focusing our investments behind core domains where we have clear synergies, as mentioned. The other thing is having strict return requirements based on risk. It's also about treating our share buyback and opportunities like that as one return criteria or threshold. You saw us do that when we did the recent buyback, when that was a very high threshold that was set due to the discount.
It's around, you know, being even more disciplined in our approach internally and doing the kind of simple tasks, let's say, but important ones, of making sure we run the investment committee in a good way, that we have the right processes leading up to that, doing scenario analysis, doing postmortems, which we've done now in the entire portfolio and led to the refined strategy that you saw here. In conclusion, going forward, we will be investing where Schibsted has a competitive advantage to build towards the future and generate shareholder value. We'll be doing that by focusing behind the core, by making sure we get even more value out of the portfolio, by realizing that value created, by making sure that that realized value is reallocated in the optimal way based on what maximizes return to shareholders. That's all from me.
Thank you very much. Back to Kristin.
Thank you, Andrew, and thank you for all the good job you do in this area. We have come to the final presentation, last but not least, Ragnar. Take it away.
I'll do this. Yeah, I will work to try to keep your attention for 21 more minutes if I keep the time. Yeah. I will end today's presentations with some perspectives on our financial development, our financial position, how we see our ownership strategy in Adevinta going forward, and finally summarize our financial midterm targets, which I have talked somewhat about already. How we will present Nordic Marketplaces in our external reporting going forward, and then also give you a Q1 trading update. Following the spin-off of Adevinta in 2019, Schibsted has continued to deliver solid revenue growth. This has to a large degree been driven by Nordic Marketplaces, but also the digital part of News Media has grown significantly during this period.
Our EBITDA in 2020 came out stronger than 2019 despite the pandemic, showing the resilience in our portfolio of businesses and business models. This was followed by a record high EBITDA in 2021. We have navigated the rough seas of 2022 solidly. We have used the second half of the year to further adapt to changes around us, focusing on bringing costs down and adjusting our capital allocation. Nordic Marketplaces, which is the main topic of today's Capital Markets Day, has proven strong financial performance over the period, looking at both revenue growth and profitability. At the start of 2023, we have a portfolio of strong digital brands with continued significant growth potential in the years ahead. Today, we have presented the breadth of growth opportunities and growth and profitability ambitions within Nordic Marketplaces.
We have high ambitions for continued strong growth in revenues and profitability linked to digital subscriptions in News Media from our delivery business and from the portfolio companies in growth and investments as presented by Andrew. This is important to bear in mind when, in the short term, we expect to get potentially temporary lower revenues from the job vertical in Nordic Marketplaces and advertising in News Media as the result of the macroeconomic developments, combined with the continued migration away from print in News Media. Our policy for allocating capital focus focuses on three areas. The first being organic and inorganic investments in or closely linked to our core businesses, Nordic Marketplaces and News Media.
The second is stable and predictable dividend distributions to shareholders, the third being extraordinary distributions in the form of dividends or buybacks of our own shares when the strength of our balance sheet warrants it. In his presentation, Andrew explained our focused non-organic investment strategy. As the diagram to the left shows, roughly around 80% of our capital allocated to non-organic investments over the last three years has either been invested in businesses related to Nordic Marketplaces or has been distributed to shareholders. While roughly 7.88% has been invested in early-stage companies and 11.8% in other businesses, including those related to News Media. Our allocation of capital to organic investments is prioritized towards Nordic Marketplaces and News Media.
Looking at the graph to the right, in the last three years, overall, around 32% of capital expenditures has been allocated to Nordic Marketplaces, and the proportion has been increasing over the period. 33.5% has been invested in News Media, while 18.4% has been invested in our delivery and growth and investment portfolio of businesses. In a situation with high inflation, rapidly increasing interest rates, and uncertain macroeconomic developments, Schibsted's portfolio of robust digital businesses, combined with our financial stake in Adevinta, puts us in a solid financial position.
After a sale of 2 percentage points of shares in Adevinta, combi-combined with entering into the total return swap for another 3% in November last year, our financial leverage ratio was 1.3 at the end of 2022, well within our target range of 1-3. The implementation of the share buyback program of up to NOK 1.7 billion will in isolation, gradually increase the leverage ratio to around 2. We believe that a level around 2-2.5 is right in the situation we are in now, with greater uncertainty linked to the economic development going forward, and the consequences it might have for our profitability development in the short term.
With the Adevinta stake on our balance sheet, we have the capacity and the flexibility to temporarily increase leverage in order to carry out particularly attractive investments, as was the case with the acquisition of eBay Classifieds in Denmark in 2021. Schibsted is a major shareholder in Adevinta, as you all know, a company that Schibsted has built over a period of 20 years. The company was spun off and listed on Oslo Stock Exchange in 2019. Following the acquisition of eBay Classifieds business in 2021, it is one of the largest classified players globally. The company currently has a market value of between 95 billion NOK and 100 billion NOK. Schibsted has a 28% ownership stake in the company.
Together, Schibsted, eBay and Permira have a stake of around 72% and are all active owners in the company through their board positions that the stakes entitle them to. Schibsted is a financial owner in Adevinta, but with a mid to long-term mindset. We consider ourselves being competent owners and supported by a very competent internal ownership office. We take an active part in the company's strategic development through our board positions. We are of the opinion that this is value creative both to Schibsted and to Adevinta shareholders. We stand fully behind the strategy that Adevinta's new CEO and his team have now laid out for the company together with the board. We believe the company is very well positioned in its key markets within motors, real estate and recommerce.
We are particularly positive about the upside link to the expected recovery of the motor markets going forward, especially in Germany. We are aware that having such a large financial investment in another listed company on our balance sheet relative to the size and value of our core businesses is not an optimal solution to unlock the full value of our core assets to shareholders short term. We are value-oriented owners and strongly believe in the long-term potential of Adevinta.
However, the sell-down in November last year is one example of how we can create shareholder value by reallocating capital from Adevinta to other use such as shareholders when we see that is suitable. For Adevinta, the relatively low free float of the share due to the combined size of the major shareholdings and also anticipated sell downs to the market is not optimal either to unlock the full underlying value of the Adevinta stock. We are with this backdrop working with strategies to reduce our ownership stake in Adevinta in a value creative way for Schibsted shareholders. Given the size of our stake, we are now prepared to use the time needed to do so.
At a point in time with significant turmoil in the financial markets and where we are of the opinion that the share price is rather far from reflecting the future value creation potential in the company, we believe some patience will pay off. The lock-up entered into as part of the eBay deal and Permira's entry into the company ends October this year. That does not advocate an immediate transaction or corporate action in itself, but gives us flexibility to pursue a wider range of options to reduce the ownership stake going forward. We see in principle three main options to reduce our exposure to Adevinta. The first being a structural sale. The second option is share sales in the market in line with the communicated capital allocations framework as was the case with the transaction in November last year.
The third is a full or partial distribution of Adevinta shares to Schibsted shareholders. You could also say that a combination of the three is a fourth option. We work continuously with monitoring and developing all these options as the attractiveness, likelihood and timing of the various options is dependent on multiple factors, including the development in the debt and equity markets, and not least Adevinta's performance and share price development going forward. Let me elaborate a little on our thinking around each of the three. We believe the first option of a structural sale has the potential to be highly value creative to Schibsted shareholders due to, one , realizing a control premium, and two, avoid selling down in the market at a potentially significant discount. This is also the option that is most complex and less controllable ourselves. It's actually rather binary.
Either we succeed with such a transaction at that point in time or not. If an attractive structural solution is not within reach, share sales and share distributions or a combination of these are viable options. Sell downs in the market over time means a continuation of the strategy that we have followed until now. The shares are held until they are sold with the purpose to finance dividends, share buybacks or new investments, or when the market conditions are particularly appropriate for a sale. Proceeds will not be used for general purposes, but always for a specific reason, investments or shareholder transfers. This optional strategy will benefit from the mid to longer term value creation upside that we strongly believe in Adevinta. This is also the same strategy as we have seen from other large PE owners in other companies, for instance, like Hemnet.
We also understand that there are some downsides to this one. It is a solution that take time to realize. It does not realize any value from the present control premium. Sell downs, on the contrary, come with potential discounts to the market at the time of the sale. It potentially creates an overhang situation in Adevinta, in the Adevinta share for a longer period of time, and it will require some coordination with other main shareholders. Dividends to shareholders as a result of this option is subject to Norwegian withholding tax, as is the case also for the other two options. Distribution of Adevinta shares to Schibsted shareholders is the third principle option. This leaves the decision on the future of the Adevinta shareholding to the Schibsted shareholders while reducing Schibsted's exposure towards the share.
It will increase the free float in the Adevinta share in the short term compared to the sell down option, as well as reduce the perceived overhang in the share faster. It will shift focus in Schibsted more toward the Schibsted core. It also means that Schibsted will no longer engage as an active, competent shareholder value focused owner in Adevinta. The option is also more complex from a tax perspective, even though we are investigating whether there are solutions that are more flexible from a tax perspective, particularly for non-Norwegian shareholders, as we have seen examples of that from others, though outside of Norway. As I said at the start of this section, we work continuously with monitoring and developing all these options.
Until we decide and communicate otherwise, it is also so that a continuation of the strategy that we have followed so far with sell downs in the market is the one that we are prepared to act upon in the shorter term. With that, I leave the top-topic on Adevinta ownership strategy. I will move to some final comments on how we will report and disclose information on the new vertical operating model in Nordic Marketplaces and summarize our midterm guiding for Nordic Marketplaces and News Media. On the new reporting structure in Nordic Marketplaces. We will, for each vertical in Nordic Marketplaces, report revenues and EBITDA together with volume and ARPA KPIs where relevant.
We will, on a regular basis, evaluate how the transactional business model influence top line growth and margin developments to see if further information should be disclosed to better understand the value drivers. As a start, we will for the recommerce vertical also report gross profit and this will improve visibility on the profitability development of the transactional model since the revenues within these verticals consist of a significant portion of passthrough shipping costs. Going forward, we will also for all high-level financial segments, meaning Nordic Marketplaces, News Media, et cetera, improve transparency by splitting out CapEx and leases as part of an overall stronger focus on profitability and cash flow per vertical or per segment. This slide summarizes the medium-term revenue and EBITDA margin ambitions for each vertical within Nordic Marketplaces, as discussed previous today, and also for News Media.
I will underline that these are medium-term targets, meaning ambitious over a period of up to three years, and that we will not give concrete guidance on the expected performance for the current or single year. There are no changes to the midterm target for News Media. The ambition is still that revenues should grow low single digit, and that EBITDA margin should be in the 10%-12% range. Like we said in our Q4 presentation, News Media will be below this EBITDA range in 2023, but the ongoing cost program should bring the margin back into the range in 2024.
Within Nordic Marketplaces, we find it more insightful, as also Christian mentioned, going forward to be transparent on our financial ambitions for each of the verticals instead of Nordic Marketplaces combined, as the mix of business models and the effects from macroeconomic developments varies between the verticals and hence also the revenue growth profile and margin developments. Christian and each of the vertical leaders presented their respective revenue and EBITDA targets early today. I will not go through this in more detail here. I just want to repeat an early comment, that is on the Jobs vertical, where it's important to notice then that this vertical starting point is an all-time high in revenues in 2022, and it's also the vertical with the most clear exposure to macroeconomic developments in each market.
Before I wrap up my presentation, let me also then give a short trading update for the first quarter. As we has presented today, our Nordic Marketplaces business has significant room for growth and valuation over the next years. The start of 2023 shows solid trends in the Mobility and Real Estate verticals, with increasing volumes in Mobility and good ARPA effects in Real Estate. In addition, CPI-based price increases will have a positive effect on revenues in Nordic Marketplaces in the quarter. Due to the same trends as in Q4, we also see some headwinds in the shorter term. Particularly, the negative volume trends observed in Q4 within Jobs has accelerated into Q1, particularly in Sweden, but also Norway is somewhat weaker.
Advertising revenues, even though not a big part of the revenue streams from in Nordic Marketplaces, shows a further weakening trend in line with that we see in News Media. The increased cost from tech hires seen in Q4 last year spill somewhat over into Q1 this year. Combined, these negative elements will affect EBITDA and EBITDA margins in Q1 somewhat. Looking at News Media. Q1 will be a financially challenging quarter for News Media. In the first 2 months of 2023, trends for News Media have worsened compared to Q4. While digital subscriptions are showing steady growth, the print business is facing an accelerated volume decline. This is affecting casual sales, print advertising and non-digital subscriptions in combination with further increased paper and in other input factor prices.
In addition, digital advertising revenues have had a challenging start to the year, driven by market headwinds, particularly in Sweden. At the end of January, we announced a 2-year cost reduction program of NOK 500 million in gross savings in News Media, with the aim to return to then the targeted EBITDA of 10%-12% in 2024. Effects of the program are limited in the first quarter, but will accelerate throughout the year with an estimated gross effect in 2023 of around NOK 250 million. Based on the combination of these developments, we project News Media's EBITDA to be negative in Q1, potentially in the range of -NOK 20 million to -NOK 40 million. Beyond that, the previously communicated strategy and outlook statements for News Media remains unchanged.
I will then conclude my presentation by short summarizing that, despite a somewhat challenging Q1 or start to the year, Schibsted has a strong portfolio of digital businesses with continued significant growth potential, both looking at revenues and profitability in the years ahead. As we have seen from today's presentations, Nordic Marketplaces will continue to be the growth engine of ours, both from continued growth within core classifieds and from strong growth within new transactional models. As a group, we have a solid financial position with an added flexibility from our financial shareholding in Adevinta. We work structured with the three possible options to reduce our ownership stake in Adevinta in a value creative way for Schibsted shareholders over time.
I finally presented to you our new reporting structure for Nordic Marketplaces focusing on revenues, EBITDA, as well as volume and ARPA per vertical, co-combine with some comments to our midterm financial targets and our Q1 trading. With that, let me hand over to you, Kristin, we will wrap up before we start our new round of Q&A.
Thank you very much, Ragnar. It was a dense and informative presentation. Thank you also all for following us through the day. When I welcomed you this morning, I said that I was looking forward to really showing you the strength of the positions we're building from and the exciting plans we have for the future. I hope that that is your takeaway. We really do enjoy very strong positions. I think it's fair to say that we are a Nordic powerhouse when it comes to both media and marketplaces. We have robust financial positions and a solid financial performance over time.
We have this absolutely superior Nordic consumer reach and number of interactions, and we have this very fundamental anchoring in our purpose, and I think that spills over to our ability to create value for all stakeholders, for consumers and customers, but also for owners and investors, for our employees and partners, and also for society and the planet. As we just heard, there is no denying that our News Media division is going through a rough time for the moment with higher cost and lower revenues. We are also going through a quite substantial transformation in our Nordic Marketplaces. That means somewhat increased risk, also for higher cost for the short-term period. I hope we can reassure you by the fact that we are already way underway in implementing cost measures in our News Media division.
I hope we have been able to show you today the vast opportunity space that we have within Marketplaces, that we are really well prepared going into this transition, and that we are in a super position to actually benefit from all these opportunities that we see. We are confident that we are doing the right things and that we are well-positioned for the future, that we will succeed in building the vertical marketplaces, that we will succeed in building a financially robust position within News Media, that we will succeed with our investment strategy and our capital allocation, and that we will succeed in creating greater value for our consumers by combining our assets in a better way across. With that, I think I will round it off.
We are ready to take a last round of questions. I will ask Christian and Ragnar and Andrew to join me. Jan Boye, I hope you can guide us through it again.
Yeah, I think we can start with some questions here in the room. Ole Martin.
Yeah. A question on News Media for me, please. You're guiding now for a negative EBITDA in the range of NOK 20 million-NOK 40 million for Q1, and you have a guidance of 10%-12% EBITDA margin for next year, assuming some revenue growth. Based upon the sort of current revenue trends that you're seeing, is it likely that we should expect revenue growth next year? Or how much dependent are you on in that guidance that you have revenue growth to deliver on those targets and in terms of the cost cutting that you already implemented?
You should assume that we are to come back into the, let's say, 10%-12% margin range for News Media next year. You should expect that we have a more of a normalization of the, let's say, advertising market from second half this year compared to what we are seeing for the time being. That is the main thing that sort of influence that.
Just to follow-
Then also we believe quite strongly in a continued growth for our digital subscription business. Then of course then the cost effects, or the cost program will also help, sort of bring us in, back into that territory in next year.
You launched, you know, quite significant initiatives already in January. Is the current trend significantly weaker than you had expected, or can you sort of comment on the delta news today?
It's fair to say that, the development within the advertising market is weaker than we expected. Sort of going back to the, let's say Q4 and also when we gave the Q4 presentation. Particularly we have seen that the development in Sweden has been very weak.
A question from Andrew at Barclays.
Thanks. I've got a couple on the Adevinta comments, just to clarify your position. Am I right in saying the order of preference is what you listed on the slides, i.e. one, structural solution, two, sell down, three, spin? If so, why is spin not second? On the face of it, that seems to be a cleaner exit.
I don't think it's necessarily an order of preference, actually.
Okay, that's helpful. The second one is: How are you guys thinking about your balance sheet in a world post Adevinta being part of Schibsted, whenever that day comes, which could be some time away, let's say? You, you clearly have a target ratio, but clearly that's with the cushion of Adevinta maybe being there if you need it to be. As you start to live alone and you have to think about investing into News Media, et cetera, going forwards, what's the kind of optimal balance sheet position of Schibsted when you exit Adevinta, and how does it play into your thinking of how you exit Adevinta?
I think to be honest, it's a little bit early days to comment on that. We have started also to sort of look into those. Let's say the strategy for that, but we come back to that when sort of that is more relevant and dependent on the timing of the sale of Adevinta.
Okay. My last one is on tax. I think you said that each of the three solutions would expose you to some withholding tax. Can you just be a little bit more specific on exactly the tax treatment of each of the three, both to Schibsted and also potentially to shareholders as you, as you see it today? I appreciate there's a lot of variables here.
In general, the each of the options is there's no sort of tax, is tax neutral. There's no tax from the perspective of Schibsted as such. The tax effects is more than towards the, let's say the, our shareholders, the primary one is actually then the withholding tax due in Norway. Of course it's difficult for, sort of to comment on the tax positions of the various owners, depending on sort of their domicile and so on. If you, let's say everything that is considered as dividend or a payment to shareholders would normally be subject to withholding tax in Norway.
Of course, if you look at the three options, little bit how, sort of how we do it, all of those three will end, potentially end up in a situation whereby we will have, some sort of dividend, distribution to shareholders unless. Also a spin will be seen as a dividend from a Norwegian tax perspective.
It sounds like any option is gonna have some tax associated with them. There isn't a way to-
All options potentially have some sort of withholding tax effects, yes.
Okay, thanks.
Catherine?
Thanks. I've got a couple of questions on News Media. Firstly, I just wondered what your view is on retaining print operations versus going fully digital and how you think about the timing of that, 'cause you mentioned print is declining more than expected. I just wanted to clarify on the cost savings. I think you said about NOK 250 million to be delivered this year, and I think previously you said NOK 250 million-NOK 300 million. I just wanted to check if that's changed? Then just finally, whether there's scope for any further cost savings given the trends seem to be weaker than you expected?
I think when it comes to the paper, I mean, it's clearly the profitability of paper has deteriorated with the inflation in especially paper prices, but also electricity in general and also the acceleration of decline of print advertising. I think it's fair to say that probably the disappearance of paper has moved closer. We are obviously monitoring that very carefully. We are also laying out scenarios and strategies for what is the best way forward in managing that. For the time being, despite the current decline, it's still profitable, and we will maintain it as long as it is profitable. We're making very clear plans and scenarios for how to best exit when that day comes. When it comes to the cost saving program, it's not changed.
We are implementing it as we planned, and we have identified, I would say, 98, 99% of that program, so that is under very good control. We are also communicating now that we think for now that is the best thing we can do, and for the next few months, we will focus on executing that program. If we should see a further deterioration of News Media, we will have to reevaluate whether we need to also increase that program further. For now, we're not doing that, and we are focusing on implementing the current program. You had a third question. What was that again?
That was all of them. Thanks.
That was it? Okay, great.
You can start, Pete. We'll wait.
Yeah. All right. It's Pete from Morgan Stanley. First on the TRS structure that you have, you updated it recently. What was the main benefit that you received from that update? Because you don't need the liquidity anymore, why did you do it?
The main reason. Okay. The main purpose of, let's say, of entering in, of sort of postponing or rolling the TRS was to actually to get more control on when the TRS is expiring. That is actually. Of course, it is important because it is 3% of shares that will go in the market at the day of the expiry. For us, being a little bit more in control of when that could happen, that's why we roll over. It was not primarily for the liquidity element, which was slightly positive at that point in time.
Like, I know because the only change is the expiry. Like, you expect something to happen when it expires, and therefore it was good that you put it forward.
You have to bear in mind that we are, since Adevinta is listed and also we are on a regular basis in red periods, it's important for us that we move, that we are, let's say, have a clear visibility and also a ability to, a room for maneuver for when that instrument is expiring. That's the main reason. You should not read into it any particular happenings and so on. It's just to create room for maneuver.
Just a clarification. When the TRS expires, the shares basically come to the market, right?
Mm-hmm.
With extending, now we have more flexibility when the timing could happen, because we can always stop the TRS, but we can also, going forward, maybe roll it again.
Yeah. All right. The next question is on CapEx. Should we still expect 2023 CapEx to come down from 2022? If yes, is that coming from Nordic Marketplaces or news or everywhere?
You should expect it to come down. Not so much from Nordic Marketplaces, but primarily from, somewhat from the others. I think, bear in mind that, let's say, under the other part, we had a quite significant investment into a new AP system last year, which was finalized in Q4. That will sort of be taken out. That is one significant part. As part of the general, let's say, increased cost focus, we also work with, in general, taking down the overall CapEx level across the business, but less so in Nordic Marketplaces than for the others.
All right. Last one from me. Somewhere in the presentation, you mentioned news media being fully digital at some point. I'm not even gonna ask, like, when that might be, but when that day happens, whether it's in five years or 10 years or whatever, does it mean something for the e-commerce and distribution business, which nowadays is delivery? What is the relationship between print news and that business?
Yeah. I mean, there is a relationship, that's part of that overall assessment that I just explained that we're doing in terms of what is the smartest way to handle that transition when that day comes. With the volume increases that we see now with our parcel business, the hope is that we will be able to make our delivery business sustainable in its own right based on the parcel volume. Hopefully we will be able to do that before we are forced to close down the paper business. In that case, that business can either live on or it would be a good candidate maybe to be sold to someone who has that as their core business.
All right. Thanks.
Marcus.
Just one question from me, and that is on back to the capital allocation. You show about 30% allocated to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. How should we think about that allocation if you have a big chunk of cash coming into your balance sheet? How will you think about distributing that cash versus, say, invest into adjacent businesses that could scale, say, recommerce or another area where you find exciting? Some flavor on that thinking about shareholder distributions and investments would be helpful.
You want to say something about that?
Yeah, sure. I can take it. Just making sure the mic is on. Yeah. No, good question. I think it was, I would say, covered in the presentation in the sense that it would really be driven by the different return profiles of the opportunities that we have in front of us at such a point in time. Obviously, buybacks and distributions are all taken into account in that. That would be the way we would look at it. I don't know if you want to add to that or...
No, I think it also depends upon what will be the, you know, the profile of a divestment, right? It could come in one huge chunk, or it could come over time one way or the other. I think it's hard to give you one precise answer. Of course, you know, we will be very disciplined in how we think about that capital allocation.
I shouldn't take that 30% as a reference. That could really vary for shareholder distributions or, so you don't have sort of one rule of thumb in that perspective.
We don't have a rule of thumb on 30%, no. It will vary a little bit depending on the, let's say, also the investment opportunities at the time. Yes.
Okay. Thank you.
Maybe just a follow-up for you, Andrew, from the web.
Sure.
There's a question like what's your investment budget for the years to come? I suppose it's more referred to like early stage investments, where we sometimes have said in the past we invest roughly NOK 300 million per year. What's our thinking here going forward?
Yeah, we don't have a dedicated budget for how much we'll deploy towards investments. That similar to the last answer will be very much opportunity-driven, and things will be compared against other opportunities that we have at the time. We don't move forward saying, "Okay, we're going to invest X over the next 12, 24 to 36 months.
I think there was one question over there or no? Otherwise, I can take some from the web instead. Coming back to CapEx again, 2020 to 2022 showed like 33% of CapEx has been news media, but also NMP was growing. What should we expect for CapEx news media going forward?
I think you should expect that also over time will come down as part of the focus we now have on also reducing cost. It's natural also that you sort of implicitly by that also reduce the overall activity level and hence also then reduce CapEx somewhat over a period of time. It's worth also mentioning that as part of sort of making the print value chain more efficient, in 2023, we are investing into a new much more condensed printing plant, which is much more efficient, and that takes some investments or CapEx in 2023. Of course, that will be let's say gone in 2024. The effects of the, let's say the reduced CapEx will be more visible in 2024.
I think we have to round up soon. Maybe if we have one more question here, otherwise we can round it up. No?
Sounds like that's it. I think this ends our stream. Thank you to all of those following by video. To those of you present, if you will get your coats and stuff in that room, we will have some food served and mingling in this area over here just following now. See you there, hopefully. Thank you.