Good afternoon, everybody, and very welcome to Stockholm, for those of you that are in the room and in the city, this mid-November day, for the Capital Markets Day of CDON Group. We'd also like to welcome everybody listening in, on the web call, and there will be possibility to ask questions later down the road.
But today is basically a deep dive into CDON, into the vision and the strategy of the group, and, of course, we will also be having the opportunity to listen on sort of the marketplace industry outlook, and the fundamentals. For those of you that haven't met me before, I'm an equity analyst with SEB Equities, since long, and, I'm responsible for our coverage of CDON.
I've been mainly focusing on the retail and similar consumer sector industries over the past 20-25 years. It's a great pleasure to have been invited here to moderate this CMD today. Today's speakers will be a very, very interesting part of the group management team. Of course, we have the CEO, the Chief Executive Officer, Fredrik Norberg, that will present during today. He is the co-founder of Fyndiq, which is a recent acquisition by CDON Group, and now a very important part of future prospects. We'll also be able to listen to Carl Andersson, the Chief Commercial Officer, and he joined as integration manager in earlier this year, and was promoted to the CCO in June of this year.
We also have Kattis Åström in the room. She's the CXO, the Chief Experience Officer, in another sense. She was previously CXO at Fyndiq, and also a strategist at Adlibris, the main online book retailer. We'll also be able to listen to Mark Nidefelt, who's the Chief Supply Officer, and also previously from Fyndiq, and most importantly, also a ex-senior buyer at Groupon. Just for the record, unfortunately, the CFO, the Chief Financial Officer, will not be participating in the room today for personal reasons. I'm sure we'll be able to listen to him later on, but not today, unfortunately. All right, I think we should briefly go through the agenda and the ambition with this afternoon.
So to start, we will listen to the vision and mission and the segments by Fredrik, the CEO. After that, we will have Carl presenting us a market overview, and then we'll also have a very interesting interview with Erik Segerborg on the title, What Great Looks Like. After that, we'll have a short, say, 10-15-minute coffee break, and when we meet back again, we will listen to Fredrik on sort of the strategic foundation of the group and the company going forward. After that, we will have two deep dives. The first deep dive will be on the supply side, how to increase and strategically plan for an increase in the future.
The second deep dive will be on the customer experience, of course, by the CXO, Kattis. And then we will come back and end the day before the Q&A and concluding remarks, with some financials and more specifically, the attractiveness of the marketplace business and CDON in particular. And to end everything, everybody in the room, on the conference call, and through the mail sort of format or the web format, there will be an opportunity to raise any questions you may have. So with those short words as an introduction to this afternoon, I would like to welcome to the stage the CDON Group CEO, Fredrik Norberg. Thank you.
Thank you, Nicklas. We will start with the first part, which we have called Great Potential, and we have the blueprint to realize it. I will start with the CDON Group's vision, mission, and the segments. CDON Group's vision is to unleash the power of the marketplace to give the best shopping experience in the Nordics. Here, we see a great potential, and this is quite something extra that we have in front of us.
The way of shopping online for the rest of the world is through marketplaces, dominantly. If we're looking in Europe, 30%-50% of the online shopping is done through a marketplace. Looking to U.S., we are nearing 45%, and if we're looking into China, +90% of the online shopping is done through a marketplace.
If we look at Nordics, we have 5%, and here we have this huge anomaly where we are doing something really differently as consumers compared to the rest of the world. And this is really something that you could compare it to, to a grocery store. 100 years ago, you went to the butcher, and then you went to the milkman, and then you went to a clothing store.
Today, you go to Walmart or you go to ICA Maxi, and you shop everything at one place. And this is what we really strongly believe, that here we have the opportunity for this company. But first up, the definition. A marketplace is a platform that facilitates the buying and selling of goods, services, or information between multiple parties. And why customers around the world love this way of shopping is that there is an enormous assortment.
Due to this, there are really competitive prices as well. You get the competition between the merchants, which are pushing down the prices, and then you really have the convenience of a one-stop shop. You don't have to go to the butcher, and the milkman, and the fashion store, and so on. You go to one place. Why merchants use marketplaces is to really add sales.
It's about the money for the merchants, but it's also a new way of entering into new markets with really low investments. And last, but not least, you don't need any marketing or tech skills or money whatsoever to start sell. You just need to be sure that you find products that people like at good prices, and then sell them with a margin. CDON Group doesn't only have one marketplace, we have two marketplaces since the acquisition of Fyndiq in April.
The nice thing here is that we have two really separate marketplaces. We have CDON, who's focused on quality products, and we have Fyndiq, who's focused on discount products. During these times of economy also, we can see that they are countercyclical to each other. During these times, we can see that Fyndiq is really nurturing and have a really boom when times are tough from an economic perspective.
I want to walk through a little bit about the logics behind the acquisition of Fyndiq. To first up, marketplaces needs volume. We will come back to this later on, but we really have a high scaling effect in the business model. With this high scalability, we need volumes, and with Fyndiq and CDON together, we now have these volumes. We also have the organizational synergies. We don't need two of everything.
We can have one centralized organization operating two marketplaces. We have one technology platform. Later on, we will have a video from an interview I did with the CEO of Cdiscount, France's largest e-commerce player and marketplace. He really emphasizes the importance of the tech platform. Here we are really at the top. We have a solely purpose-built platform in-house.
This is the second generation now that we launched just a couple of years ago, and now we are migrating the CDON platform into this combined platform for both Fyndiq and CDON. We also will have a lower customer and merchant competition. We don't have to fight about the same customers and merchants. Then last but not least, we have really the opposite brand positions. The cannibalization between the two marketplaces are really low.
Of course, we have overlaps in the customer base, but the two marketplaces really serve different purposes of what to buy and when you buy it, and there we see that we're not competing with each other. At CDON, you will find the best of the most. CDON's mission is to offer our customers the best selection of quality products in a reliable and convenient way.
Here, you will find the greatest of the latest. You will find the latest PlayStation 5, you will find the latest AirPods, the Samsung, and you will find your new hot makeup mirror. Here, you will find a vast assortment of products that you from brands that you know and with great quality. If you're about to buy a gift for your spouse, then you're going to CDON and buy it. At CDON. Sorry, at Fyndiq, you will always strike a bargain.
Fyndiq's mission is to offer value-conscious consumers unbeatable bargains with a best-in-class shopping experience. Here, we really have the latest trending products. Everything you see on TikTok, you will find at Fyndiq at really good prices. You can find this reflex vest, which is very popular now in the dark places that we live in now. We have the mobile covers, and we have this super trending TikTok product, the galaxy lamp, that of course, every kid and teenager want in their room. And down to left, we don't have LEGO, but we have magnetic tiles, which is a really popular products among kids. And here you come and find the latest trends at really low prices.
But the perception of a retailer is very much defined of the supply of the products that you present, and if you think about it, if you go to a physical retail store, you really have the same. You have four walls and a ceiling and a floor, and then you have the products. So the products are really the thing that mainly defines the perception of that retailer.
And this is extra important when it comes in online, because you don't have this physical senses. So what you get displayed with is really what gives you the sense of that brand. If you go into a dollar store, you really get the feeling that this is a dollar store, because of the products that are displayed to you.
Here is just one example where we on CDON have and will have Oral-B toothbrushes and toothbrush heads, the original, original on Fyndiq, we will have the Oral-B compatible toothbrush heads at much lower price point. Here is, to the left is actually, this is a, a classic model called the Flywheel or the Amazon Virtuous Circle. This is actually a printed copy of Jeff Bezos' handwritten model on a napkin he allegedly drew in 2001.
And this is still the foundation of each and every marketplace that now are operating. You need to have. We start to the bottom left. You have the sellers. You need to start with the sellers. To get sellers to upload supply, you, from that, you get the selection of products.
On top of that, you need to create a customer experience, where you can find the products, you have a customer service that's good enough, and you can ship the products in time. If you do that good, you will generate more traffic. And with more traffic, you will get more merchants, and the existing merchants will upload more products. And with more products, you will get the better selection, and so on.
And there, you got the Flywheel effect of it. And as the whole marketplace grow, you get the lower cost structure as well. You get lower operating expenses per unit sold. And by doing that, you can become more efficient. You don't have to charge the merchants as much, which are pushing down the prices, and also the prices are really pushed with the competition between the merchants.
So this is the whole flywheel you need to fuel. We are focusing on two parts of this. It's the selection part, which we call the supply, and also the customer experience part, which creates really customer happiness. I'm gonna give you an example, and we have quite a few examples like this, of the strength in the marketplace platform, and also that we can really catch fast trends without getting caught with excess inventory.
This is in A. This is by the end of 2019. Well, no one of us were aware of what was waiting around the corner, the corona. On both marketplaces, we had a few merchants selling face masks. No one bought face masks at this time, except some nail salons or et cetera like that.
What happened then was that we got the corona outbreak in January 2020. What happens then, and this happens every time, is that these few merchants really get increased sales. When they fast get increased sales, they do restocking. They do fast restocking because they have an efficient supply chain, so they get really fast new supply.
What they do then is that they keep up the prices because they have no competition. So they make a lot of money, and we can really get a big supply. But then, the marketplace model kicks in, because only one or two weeks after that, we get +100 merchants buying these face masks. All of a sudden, we have 10,000 face masks.
We have the biggest assortment of face masks, both online and offline, and we have the lowest prices. Because what then happens is that the merchant competition kicks in. So the merchants start to compete with each other, and the only, or the best way to do that, is to push down the prices. We get up to really high peak, and then after that peak, we had a low in the corona outbreak.
We still had the largest assortment of face masks, but we had no cost in inventory, no cost in warehouses or anything, but still had the biggest assortment of face masks. Until next outbreak came, the second corona outbreak came, and we could really catch all the demand that came out in the market.
When demand goes to zero, we have no cost in inventory, no overstock at all, and we can really start to move over our focus and marketing cost to the next trending category or product. And this is, of course, I mean, this doesn't happen every month. Usually, this blockbuster trend happens usually once a year, something like that. It could be a fidget spinner, it could be face mask, or something similar. Dancing cactuses were a couple of years ago also. But what we can see, though, is that this is happening each and every week in a smaller scale. So we have this super small trends coming up in smaller categories, in products, that happens every time. And we are at A.
We have few merchants, and then they get sales, we get more merchants, and then when the trend pans out, we have no overstock and no cost whatsoever. So this is what the marketplace model really is about, to fuel this and make sure that we get this trend catching as many times as possible. With that said, we are gonna do a deep dive in the market overview, and I'm gonna hand over to Carl, our CCO.
Thanks a lot. Over the next couple of pages, we will dive into the markets that we operate in, explain why we believe that the Nordic marketplace is that anomaly you were talking about, Fredrik. And lastly, why we believe that the time for the marketplace is now. So the Nordic market e-commerce market is valued at around SEK 400 billion at the moment.
With a similar online spending pattern across the countries, we see population being the main determinant of the size of those markets. Sweden, being roughly 2x of those neighboring countries that we are addressing. The largest categories are home electronics, accounting for roughly 20%, is a standardized common product, which is well-suited for online sales. Groceries, Pharma, grew rapidly during the pandemic, another 20%, followed by fashion, 15%, roughly.
At CDON, we address around half of that market with the assortment that we currently have, and the product that we are addressing, or the categories that we are addressing. We are strong in electronics, but we focus on home and garden, sports and outdoor, media, health and beauty, to mention a few. And in those categories, we also work with dedicated category managers who manage our assortment on a daily basis.
Looking at the distribution of our GMV, we note the slight difference between the left and right. Sweden is our main market at the moment, and this also tells me that there is an under-explored Nordic potential out there. We will go into this in more detail later with Marc, but historically, there has been a challenge to attract local supply in those markets.
But with the combination of aggregators and qualitative Chinese supply, we believe we have a clear way forward on how to address those markets. With our size, we have a rough 1% market share of that addressable market, but in Sweden, we are definitely stronger. The Nordics is an anomaly, and we need and want to change that perception. We spoke about the +50% globally, the adoption, but only 5% in Sweden.
The competitive landscape is different. There is no Amazon as a massive force as in the U.S. or Germany, for example. But we have stronger retailers and e-tailers who are out there. We have Zalando, the likes of Elgiganten and Elkjøp, and a few others, but we make up roughly 5% of the total e-commerce landscape.
What's also interesting to observe, if we go across the pond and look in France, Germany or the Netherlands, for example, there is always a local player, Cdiscount, Otto, Bol, as well as Amazon. Even the most extreme example, I guess, is in Poland, where Allegro almost dominates the market, despite Amazon's best efforts to get in there. When Amazon entered the Swedish market in 2020, I guess many of us were expecting a rapid shift to adopting the marketplace.
At the same time, I guess all of us were left surprised by the lukewarm response and the slower adoption than we were all expecting. I think the reason is the truly unique Nordic e-commerce environment. We have the strong presence of local retailers with well-established brands and also e-commerce capabilities.
We have high digital maturity among the population, and we're early to adopt e-commerce in Sweden and in the neighboring countries. We also have a relatively efficient delivery network. The strong benefit of fulfillment by Amazon, for example, was that they were solving the customer pain points of instant deliveries, and that is less of an issue fundamentally in the Nordics.
I think those are a couple of the reasons for why the Nordics look differently than the rest of the world. Establishing a leading marketplace takes time, like growing any other business, but we are at the beginning of an exciting journey. Cdiscount, France's largest marketplace and one of the larger e-commerce players, as an example, we're looking at their 2012-2022 GMV development.
When Casino Group, who owns Cdiscount, acquired the company in beginning of the millennium, they were, Cdiscount was a online CD and media reseller. They grew into adjacent categories, into home electronics, household appliances. Recognize that story at all? Sounds pretty much like CDON, right? Or Amazon, for that matter.
It's a common way of growing the marketplace and growing as an e-commerce player. In late 2011, 2012, Cdiscount launched their third-party marketplace, and since then, they've grown with a CAGR of roughly 15% year- over- year until the pandemic hit. We all know what the pandemic did to e-commerce, with rapid growth during 2020 and 2021, with a setback in 2022.
This, despite it being a factor 10 to the current turnover or GMV of CDON, we believe this acts as a source of inspiration for us on the journey that we are heading out on. We also see an increasing appetite for value-oriented shopping. Current economic climate definitely fuels that, right? But we also see a higher adoption of marketplaces among younger generations.
We believe this adds to the potential and are very optimistic about our opportunity to educate the market further and increase the marketplace adoption. But more about how we're gonna do that in the next couple of sections. Let's take a look at what great looks like. We have Erik Segerborg, as mentioned, our board member and deputy chairman, who will talk to us online. Let's take a look. Welcome.
Hi, everyone. I hope you're enjoying the CMD so far. My name is Erik. I'm a part of the CDON board, and I was asked by Fredrik to share a few insights from my experiences at other marketplaces. I'm a fairly recent addition to the CDON board. Very happy to join in connection with the Fyndiq acquisition earlier this year. I'm a full-time investor working with investing in mostly private marketplaces, and I'm a board member of several other marketplaces in different fields.
I worked previously at two great marketplaces that I will talk more about shortly. Most recently at Hemnet, where I had a few different positions, including CMO and CPO. Before that, I worked at Avito, a Russian marketplace that I will talk more about.
I had a few different positions there as well, and I founded a property portal called Domofond.ru. So, as I said, Fredrik asked me to share a few insights from these two journeys that I've been on, and I was happy that he did so because it allowed me to reflect a bit on those years. Today, in this short talk, I will go through some basics about Avito and Hemnet, and then I will reflect on my takeaways and also the relevance for CDON.
To begin with, Avito is the biggest classified in Russia. You could claim the world, and it covers basically every vertical. With vertical, you mean, for example, a category like cars or real estate or services or jobs, and also across this whole huge country of Russia.
It was founded by two Swedish guys called Jonas and Filip, and Christoffer, who is the chairman of CDON, joined a year before me. He was the COO of Avito, and instrumental in a lot of the changes and the developments that we did. I pulled out some numbers here about Avito that are publicly shared.
So back in 2013, when I joined, the revenues were around RUB 2 billion, and the last publicly known figure for 2021, they were up to almost RUB 43 billion. That's a 43% CAGR over that time period. Pretty amazing. And on top of that, you can also add that the EBITDA margin in 2018 was 65%. So basically, this is a fast-growing, extremely profitable company.
It was sold to Prosus or Naspers back in 2019. Moving on to Hemnet. Hemnet is the Zillow or the Rightmove of Sweden. Basically, it's a property portal focused exclusively on selling and buying homes, apartments, and houses. It's a clear market leader in Sweden. Here as well, it's been a nice development. In 2017, when I joined the company, it had around SEK 300 million in revenues, and in 2022 this was up to almost SEK 900 million. It's also become more profitable over time. I think another testament to this great marketplace model. Profitability or EBITDA margin was 33% in 2017, and now it's up to 52% in the last quarterly report.
And here we have great numbers because Hemnet was IPO'd on the Swedish Stock Exchange in 2021, and today has about 20 billion SEK in market cap. And an interesting fact here that I pulled out from the last quarterly report is that we introduced a new product called the premium product back in 2018, and in the last quarter, it's still growing by more than 100% year-on-year.
Trying to summarize these two experiences in a few bullet points, they in some ways can appear quite similar because they're both marketplaces; they both had strong growth and high profitability, but for me personally, they were quite different. Avito was you know, a unicorn story. A startup, very strong founders, and extreme growth in everything.
We had to hire hundreds and hundreds of people. We had extremely strong competition in every vertical. Every region of Russia, we had someone trying to eat our lunch, and that meant that we had to be very aggressive in terms of competing on product development, in sales, in marketing, everything. For us, it came down to basically, in many ways, policing the platform.
Realizing that you can't, you can't obey the demands of either buyers or sellers completely, because then you end up with a mess of a platform. You have to make sure that you are enabling the good actors, the good buyers and sellers, to do their business while stopping the platform. S topping access to the platform for the bad actors.
We had a lot of bad actors in Russia trying to use our platform to make money, either through spamming our customers or in some cases, even fraud. It came down to: how do you continue fostering the network effects while also making more money? How can you extract value while continue to create value? Hemnet, that was a very different story.
Here, the company was already the market leader. There was almost no competition, but the platform had, in some ways, been mismanaged and didn't live up to the potential. So this was more about change management, change management. Changing how we worked and the product portfolio, the tech infrastructure, taking each part of the company and changing it bit by bit.
And to enable increased monetization, we had to release a number of new products, while also making sure that we kept the network effects and we kept the strong position. So all in all, it comes down to the same. That's why the bullet, last bullet point on both of these is the same. It came down to, "how do you increase monetization while making sure that you're not losing network effects or even enhancing them?".
There is always this kind of balancing act of managing the marketplace. Diving a bit deeper into three main takeaways that I have. First of all, it's all about the flywheel. We've been talking about this previously in this CMD, but I think it's fair to reiterate again.
The real hero, as I see it in the marketplace, is not the product that you build, it's how you enable buyers and sellers to meet. You need to kind of get through all the noise and find what kind of action that you are doing will drive the flywheel to spin faster and give benefits to the business, enable more buyers and sellers to meet, maybe not tomorrow, but in a year or in two years or in three years. So once you find this, and that could, for example, be attracting more sellers, as it was in Avito. When you do that, you need to just continue repeating it month- after- month, year- after- year, and that will give you the benefits over time.
Second thing, I think user experience for a marketplace, when I think back, is so much about policing the platform. It's about making sure that it's fair, that it's transparent, and that you are enabling both buyers and sellers to have a good experience. A lot of marketplaces that head in the wrong direction, according to me, they think too much about one of the sides.
Once you have, you know, people transacting in a fair way, then you can look at a lot of other ways to remove friction in that transaction. Lastly, about monetization, and I know a lot of investors care deeply about this. I believe that in the beginning, when you are building up your position, you need to be very careful about monetization.
You need to make sure that you're not blocking your growth by monetizing too early or in the wrong way. As a good example, in Avito, we introduced listing fees after a few years. This was led by Christoffer, who is the chair of CDON, as I mentioned. That only happened after a number of years because we realized that the most important thing for us was to get more sellers, and keeping the barrier to entry low of the sellers meant having free listings.
We were still able to make money and even be profitable without the listing fees. B ecause there was so high competition on the platform. Enabling listing fees, of course, was a huge monetization driver.
So once you are at scale, I think there's so many opportunities to monetize in various ways, but it only comes once you are up to scale, because before that, you are not important enough for your buyers and sellers to create the kind of incentive to compete in a better way. Then I took away some best practices in working within these marketplaces, and I think they are quite valid for other marketplaces and in general, and probably CDON in particularly.
First of all, is that you need to just believe in the Flywheel. Sometimes you call it Snowball or Network Effects, but you need to make sure that you continue doing what will drive your long-term growth quarter- after- quarter, and you're not tempted to do things that might give you short-term benefits.
For example, increasing revenue, if they are messing with your long-term growth. Second thing, and I think this is so important, it's a borrow with pride. So the marketplace model is widespread. There are marketplaces in so many different countries. Almost no matter which industry you're in, there is another marketplace doing very similar things in a different country, and sometimes they are extremely similar to you.
So before you do any big changes, you just should look around, talk to other marketplaces, look at their sites and see what they have done. Then build on that. It doesn't mean that you're copying their exact features, but it means that you are being inspired and building on their innovation. That allows you to progress a lot faster.
And thirdly, as I said, I think the biggest value that you create in the marketplace is enabling buyers and sellers to meet. But as a by-product of that, you also generate a lot of interesting data, and which can be used for just both making your marketplace better, but also sharing with different stakeholders. I think pricing is an amazing lever to use in marketplaces.
And usually, you can have one product, but 1,000 prices for that product, and that will enable your growth. I also think that the data that you generate is very valuable for other stakeholders. In Hemnet, we used it a lot for PR. The housing market is an important part of the economy, and it's really interesting for everyone to use.
But if you are in a more niche marketplace, you can definitely share that data with certain groups that are super interested in understanding the insights. I also think it's really important to use the data to share with your customers. They need insights to drive their business, and you are probably one of the biggest and best sources for that. I would like to conclude with just looking at CDON through the lens of what I experienced at Avito and Hemnet. First of all, I am completely aligned with strategy and plans that Fredrik and his team have put together. For me, it goes back to basics.
It's a focus on feeding the flywheel, building the marketplace fundamentals by adding a lot more quality supply, meaning more customers can find what they're looking for, meaning more sales for all the merchants.
And it's about, again, going back to what I said, policing the platform. If you have a good user experience, meaning you get what, what you have ordered, you get it on time, and you get good quality, and you know what kind of quality you should expect based on reviews, and, and ratings, then you have removed a lot of the friction, and people will come back and feed the flywheel.
Secondly, I think, you know, I'm a very long-term believer in, in CDON. I believe that the improvements that we're doing now will compound over time. There are very few silver bullets that you can do to improve the business from one day to another. It's about making thousands of small improvements, adding them together and, again, watching the Flywheel spin faster.
Thirdly, I believe that we're doing a lot of great things in terms of monetization, but I believe the big unlock will be when there's a bigger scale, and you can implement more parts of the monetization playbook, going back to what I saw on Avito and Hemnet, there are really infinite possibilities once you get to a strong position. With that, I would like to conclude and say, thanks again for letting me be a part of the CMD, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you!
All right. Thank you very much for that presentation, Erik Segerborg, board member, and for sharing that experience with us. Now it's time for a 15-minute coffee break, leg stretcher, and according to my clock, we're supposed to meet back here at 3:00 P.M. sharp. You don't want to miss the second part of the day, starting with the CEO, Fredrik Norberg. Don't miss it. 3:00 P.M. Thank you.
Hello, and welcome back! Hope you had some refreshing coffee or water or whatever. We will continue now with the strategic foundation, and I will come back. This is the second part now, and we are executing along a clear path to realize the great potential that we have showcased. I will come back to this Flywheel again. This is really the foundation of everything that we're doing.
I mean, to be honest, it's not rocket science, what we're doing. You need to provide with a lot of products that people like at competitive prices and make sure that they have a good experience. That's it. And this is why we are now focusing on the selection part and the customer experience part. The selection part is really to massively increase the supply. It's all about to have this enormous selection.
But if you get bad merchants and bad products in, you will have a bad customer experience. So you need to make sure to get rid of the bad products and bad merchants. That's the part that Eric was talking about, policing the marketplace platform. That's really important. And you could compare it a little bit with gold mining. It's about getting, of course, being at the right spot, I guess.
But then also get so much dirt or soil as possible that you then can filter and pan, so you find the golden nuggets. And this is quite similar to the marketplace model. You want to shove as much merchants and supply as possible, but really make sure that you filter away the bad merchants and the bad supply, and do that as fast as possible.
I have, during the summer, been talking with some peers in this industries, CEOs and executives of Allegro, Bol, and Cdiscount. Later on, we will see an interview I did with the CEO of Cdiscount. One of these marketplaces, they told me that they have 1,000 new merchants every month, and they get rid of 800 merchants every month. That is the velocity that you sometimes need to really make sure that you fuel the flywheel with new supply, but get rid of the bad ones.
We also need to really improve the customer happiness. We have had problems with this, especially on the Cdiscount side, but we really feel that we have the recipe for it. We have managed to have really high customer happiness rates when it comes to Fyndiq, even though Fyndiq has this really low-price supply.
We really now are focusing on making sure that everything we're doing is at the customer's best. Everything comes down to happy customers, to have the customers coming back again and again. Especially now, you can fool the customers once, but never twice when it comes to online business. And this is a good segue, speaking of supply, where I will invite Marc, who will do a deep dive about our strategy concerning the massively increased supply. Thank you.
My name is Marc Nidefelt, Chief Supply Officer, and I'm gonna talk about how we are massively increasing supply and why that is important. Looking at other marketplaces in Europe, Allegro in Poland, Bol in the Netherlands, and Cdiscount in France, they have one thing in common. They are not competitors, and they have one competitor, that is Amazon, and that's the same for us.
So we're talking to these marketplaces, and we meet with them, and we exchange knowledge and insights. They are also as big or bigger than Amazon in their market. Looking at the amount of merchants and products, we can see they have thousands of merchants and millions of products. And compared to CDON and Fyndiq, we're a little bit low there.
But we intend to really massively increase supply at CDON and Fyndiq to come up to similar levels as these marketplaces. Looking at products per merchant, we have a little bit more products per merchant compared to these marketplaces. But we also intend to decrease, to curate, to refine the assortment on each and every merchant, so we basically get more merchants, and we want to have more products as well, but merchant competition is very important.
And talking about merchant competition, it's very important in the marketplace that we have a lot of merchants competing on the same products. So the products you can group products in different way, and you can have Buy Box and so on, but you need to have a lot of merchants competing on the same product, winning the sales, winning the customer.
By competing, basically, one means you need to have the best pricing, short delivery time, product quality, rating and reviews, product card quality, how things are lined up in the product card as well. So given looking at other marketplaces and these numbers, we believe that we have a huge potential in massively increasing supply and come up to similar levels with the supply that, as these other marketplaces have done.
The supply foundation in this model, as we're looking at here, is built up by API aggregators. An API aggregator is basically a software company that have hundreds and thousands of merchants. So the foundation is built up by merchants from these aggregators. I would say that each country in Europe have about one or two really strong aggregators that have maybe 1,000 merchant each.
CDON are connected to about five really strong ones, and Fyndiq is connected also to five, but they're a little bit different. When looking at this foundation, you will find a lot of merchants with a lot of different and millions of articles, products. They will be international brands, as we know about, but it will also be local brands. Local brands from each and every country where the merchant is coming from.
So we will put in brands from Germany, brands from Portugal, brands from France into the Nordic region, where Nordic customers haven't seen these products before. So we're adding up new supply to the Nordic region. When we have a really good and wide foundation of merchants and millions of products, we start to attract the next level, and this is the international merchants, as we call it.
That is basically really big companies that have a lot of different assortment. One international merchant can have 1 million product, and they trade import, export, but they're trading also A brands. And this is really interesting because now they are trading A brands, and they're selling A brands on the marketplace, and now it starts to come up to the top level of the pyramid, the supply pyramid.
And this is the local A brands. All the A brands have an agency that is locally in that region. And these agencies, these local A brands, they start to find interest in selling on the marketplace as well. So they also want to join the marketplace because they see that there is a lot of other merchants selling their products on the marketplace, so then they also come in.
Obviously, you have a lot of categories. You have thousands of categories, and you need to fill up everything in this pyramid. But when you have filled up the pyramid with these deep three levels, you are in a mature phase when it's all about to just grow. So the foundation is key, and the rest will follow. Here we have a clear case of how we, since January, increased massively supply with Chinese merchants.
And every month, we onboarded about 100, 1 million more of products. And every month we also increased sales. So we just continue increase products because we saw that the sales were following. So we had about 2 million products from Chinese merchants, and we added 15 million more. And we had 200 merchants, and we added 200 merchants more. In all categories and from Chinese aggregators.
We're connected to three really good Chinese aggregators since a couple of years. And when we say that we would like to have more, they supply more. So more supply, more sales. Continuing on, Fyndiq, we have massively increased supply with these 15 million products. And worth to say, this is mostly non-brands. It's non-branded products from China, as we know it, but also unknown brands.
There's a lot of brands we never, never, never heard about, but non-brands and unknown brands from China. What we saw that, or let's put it like this, for 10 months, we increased supply, and we sold a lot as well. But there always comes a point when you see, like, like, you need to start to regroup, or you want to know what you have done and so on.
So we sort of said that, "Let's refine the assortment right now. Let's make sure that we group things. Let's make sure that we filter and sort things, so we make sure that the customer finds what we're looking for, what they are looking for. And then we will, when we have refined the assortment, then we will massively increase again, but in a qualitative way."
At the CDON side, we are in the process of massively increasing supply, and we're doing it primarily with aggregators, as we're working very closely with, and they're partnering up with us in the sense that we're working towards a direction that we see together, and it's a very nice cooperation that we have. And this supply that we're onboarding on CDON is mainly, or mostly, branded products.
It can be A brands, they can be B brands, C brands, and so on, but it should be branded at CDON. We also have two new international merchants, as I spoke about before, the ones with the A brands and a lot of supply. So we have quite a few international merchants already, and now we're onboarding two more. They together have 1.5 million articles, products, and we're looking into onboard more international merchants.
What we've seen, though, when we have onboarded a lot of merchants on CDON since about June, we have a little bit of a bottleneck because we acquire more merchants than we can onboard. So we need to redo the onboarding process. It's about agreement signing and KYC checks, mainly.
So we're trying to automate that as we speak, so we can sort of, as fast as the merchants comes in, in acquisition, we can onboard them as fast. We also are looking into 1P, buying and selling our own products in own stock. And that's gonna be basically those products that we can't get a hold of just together with our 3P merchants. So it will be function as a gap filling with A brands. That's so we really have the full assortment that we want at CDON.
Thank you, Marc. That was quite interesting, I have to say, for outlining the sort of base pyramid as a base for future growth. And I was just gonna ask you about the aggregators. Could you perhaps just give everybody a quick rundown how this supply side landscape has actually changed or evolved over time, please?
That's a good question. I would say that, first of all, the aggregator play a really important part in the marketplace business. And I would say that these aggregators started to show about 10 years ago. And before 10 years ago, merchants were basically uploading by manually or CSV, sometimes via API as well, but that's tech dependent and a little bit tricky.
And today, most merchants have an aggregator that they're connected to, otherwise they cannot sell on the marketplaces. And one aggregator makes them sell on many different marketplaces. So these aggregators have really developed over time, and today, it's very efficient, and they work together with the marketplace as well in increasing supply from marketplaces.
And I will also add to that, actually, compared to Amazon, let's put back time about 20 years, where these aggregators didn't exist. Merchant uploading products at Amazon at that time were most likely, manually uploading them or by CSV file, bulk uploading, and maybe sometimes via an API. But I think that the time for Amazon to upload a lot of millions, massively increasing supply for them, has taken a lot of time, a lot of years. And today it goes a bit faster because, you know, the development has really speeded up regarding that.
Excellent, Mark. Thank you for this deep dive into the supply side of the, of the business. Which brings us to eventually the second deep dive. But before we go there, we're gonna watch a video interview, Fredrik alluded to, with the CEO of Cdiscount. So let's roll that film, please.
I'm Thomas Métivier . I'm the CEO of Cdiscount and Cnova. I've joined, I would say, the e-commerce revolution seven years ago by joining Cdiscount, and I've been in charge now for five years of our marketplace development. First, only for Cdiscount, and we've accelerated in terms of merchants recruitment. In our fulfillment, we've launched our advertising services for merchants, and then by launching Octopia, which is our B2B activity, which provides marketplace technologies and merchants to other retailers in France, in Europe, and all over the world.
For now, one year, I'm the CEO of Cdiscount, which is our mother company, with both our B2C activity, cdiscount.com, and our B2B activities, notably Octopia and C- Logistics. Cnova is our holding company, which regroup all our activities. We have two main areas of activity.
The first one is our B2B-B2C e-commerce website, Cdiscount.com, which is the French leader in e-commerce. Our second area of activity is our B2B activities. The two bigger ones are Octopia, which is our company providing marketplace software and operations to other retailers, and C- Logistics, which is our logistics subsidiary, which is also providing logistics for third party. So there are those two activities, and overall, we have been generating EUR 3.5 billion GMV last year. We are one of the leading e-commerce player in France. We have more than 15,000 sellers that have been doing sales this year.
More than 80 million products in on our website, and with up to 23 million unique visitors every month on Cdiscount.com, which really puts us, I would say, in the forefront in terms of activity for on the French market. And it's really, I would say, a unique situation in Europe, because we are the only market where Amazon has been launched now for, I would say, more than 20 years in the market, where there is a strong local player really competing with them, and we've been able to do so by adapting ourselves.
We've launched our marketplace 12 years ago, we've launched our fulfillment services, we've launched our advertising services, and so we've been able to stay in contact and stay in the competition with them, and to stay there in the markets and being a prominent actor in the e-commerce in France. It's in our markets, we've been able to keep our position, our number one French player in the market by really focusing on what we offer to our customers.
We are very strong on the equipment categories, for example, on big appliances, in furniture, in high-tech goods. And there are categories where we are stronger and bigger than Amazon in the French markets. Amazon is more focused on daily products and small value items.
We have an average basket over EUR 100, where Amazon is closer to EUR 30. So we really have a different position in the market, and we have also a very strong position on promotions. We have a strong commercial DNA with lots of commercial operations. We've built them first on our 1P sales, and now we are building them also with our merchants.
And this commercial dynamism, the fact that we can come every day on Cdiscount.com and find another operation, another deal, another happy hour, really creates some excitement with our customers, and which put us apart from Amazon, which is more on the kind of pure efficient website, but not that much on this excitement of the good, the good opportunity where we are very strong at.
Our third level is really to be very strong on payment facilities. We have more than 40% of our activity, which is done with four installment payments, which really is a strong differentiator with our competitors. And we do that thanks to the big investment we've made in AI now for years, because we are able to score every customer to make sure that they will reimburse, and so which allowed us to be very open, I would say, to provide those facilities to our customers.
You need to be strong at what the customer like in you, in your company. You don't want to do the average marketplace, the kind of usual marketplace everyone can do just by taking lots of merchants and putting everything in the, in bulk.
You need to have a clear identity and to build meaningful links with your merchants to bring them to your DNA, to activate them, as you want regarding your DNA. You need to have a lot of merchants, lots of products. You need to have a very strong tech. But at the end of the day, it's what is your value proposals? And it is a bit the same as when you are in 1P. When you are in 1P, you have suppliers.
Everyone is selling LEGOs, for example, when you are at Christmas, but everyone will try to execute it a bit differently, to build this DNA, to build this edge for their consumers. And it's what we are doing, and we are very strong at doing that in the marketplace world.
I think to be a strong marketplace, you need to have a strong tech. Marketplace is about technology, it's about AI, it's about dealing with huge volumes of merchants, huge volumes of products. It's being able to to validate products, to order them, to affect the right category, and to make sure that when a consumer is coming to your website, by typing two or three words, you will find and you will be able to show him the best product.
So really, really, marketplace is about technology. And you need to have an efficient technology to manage the volumes, to provide the best experience for your customers, and to provide the best experience for your merchants. Then if you have the right technology, you need to fight for supply.
You have never enough merchants and products on the marketplace. You need every day to recruit new merchants, to find the best merchants. For example, we are studying all the marketplaces in Europe to identify the merchants, to score them, and then to recruit them. We've scored more than 1 million different merchants since the launch of our marketplace, and we have recruited more than 100,000 merchants from the start of our marketplace.
We keep 15,000 of them because you need to fight and to find the best merchant, to make sure that they want to join your marketplace. To do that, you need to seduce them. They are very cautious when they join the marketplace because they know that they will have a lot of costs.
They will need to adapt to your taxonomy, to adapt to your specificities, to adapt to your legal constraints in your country. And so you need to make sure if you want to have foreign merchants, which is one of the key drivers of performance. Today, two-thirds of our merchants are coming from abroad, not from France. And so you need to make sure that you have those merchants, and you make their life as easy as possible, and you need to convince them to join you.
And, and then when they've joined you, you need to make sure that it's very easy for them to create a product, to adapt their catalog to your specificities, to adapt them to your language, et cetera. And so you need to put a lot of energy to recruit them and to help them to develop their catalog. For me, that's the second main success factor.
The third one is all the work you need to do to provide them the right services, because merchants want to have power, to have the power to push their offering, to support their commercial development. When you give them some fulfillment, when you give them some advertising services, when you give them support to develop their catalog, you are in fact giving them the tools to push their product, to make more business, and to spend time efficiently on your platform.
And so that's why when you think about your marketplace and the way to accelerate it, you always need to think of: What are the key services I need to offer to my merchants? And it's clear, for example, that fulfillment is a no-brainer. If you want to be a big marketplace, you need to have fulfillment facilities.
If you want to be a strong marketplace, you need to offer advertising. First, because it will give you lots of reviews, and second, because it will give merchants tools to push their offer to promote their new products. And so at the end of the day, it's good for the merchants, and it's good for you. We don't need to put lots of marketing investments.
We invest in technology where we can maximize all the scale effect, because what we are doing to go in your country in terms of technology, 80% can be reused to go everywhere in Europe and abroad. And so that's clearly a far better solution for us than, I would say, putting the Cdiscount.com flag everywhere.
Perfect.
All right. Thank you so much, Thomas.
Thank you very much.
For doing this.
Bye-bye, Fredrik
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right. That was, that was quite fascinating as well. Very interesting to hear. So we've gone through a lot of stuff so far this afternoon, strategic, supply chain and everything. Now it's time to listen to the customer experience part of the equation on the marketplace. I would like to introduce to you the CXO, Kattis Åström, who will now perform a deep dive into the customer experience part of the business. You were recruited from Adlibris, which is the Nordic market-leading online book store. But first up, Kattis, why don't you tell us what a CXO actually does?
I figured you would actually ask that, Nicklas. Yes. So I mean, my job is really to ensure that we listen to our customers, that we know their needs, their preferences, and their behaviors. That way, we can turn that into a vision and strategy, and that way all in the company can carry out. Without having the customer in the center, it's really hard to know where we are heading. So that's what I do. Yes.
And you did mention that I have experience from Adlibris. That also means that I have a previous experience of having a brand and customer transformation going on. So I'll start. I would actually share some of my key learnings and some reflections on that past couple of years.
Starting very simple, that your brand position is pretty worthless if you haven't implemented it through the entire journey. We can use the saying that the book you have is not gonna get any better if you just put on a fancy cover, and the same goes for a rebranding project. Unfortunately, Adlibris, we tried. We launched a very nice inspirational brand marketing campaign, but we didn't improve the customer experience at the same time.
So when the customer comes with an intention and expectation, and it doesn't match what they receive, you're not gonna get that improved sales from it, unfortunately. The next one, it's really no secret either, that if you target your current customers, and you make them happier, they will come back, and hopefully they'll come back over and over again.
At Adlibris, we took that strategy and said, "Okay, we need to turn our once-a-year customers into twice-a-year customers." And that really works well when you have a large customer base and have a lot to leverage on. The same goes for both CDON and Fyndiq. We have two really large customer bases on both our marketplaces, and if we provide a little bit better experience bit by bit, we will have them come back over and over again.
The last one, and I tie back to Mark's presentation about massively increase our supply. That we have a huge assortment is important, but it's not the key factor for the customer. The key factor for the customer is that you have that one thing I'm looking for today. And if you take Adlibris, that also has 15 million books, that's a prerequisite.
Otherwise, they wouldn't have that book every time I come and look for it. But again, it's not the unique selling point for the customer to say, "We have 15 million books." It's the one that I want that is important. So to succeed here, the key for a marketplace or for a merchant with such a large assortment is really to be relevant and to be personal. That way, you will also find what you're looking for. So Adlibris, we did quite a few trial and errors, I will admit that, that's what you learn from, but also improved the customer experience and the brand experience, and it paid off.
After one year with these things in place, we managed to actually have an uplift of 9% on the GMV, and we managed to also have an uplift of 30% on the average order value. In two years, this was one of the key factors we had when we turned around from a deficit of SEK 292 million to a surplus of SEK 84 million two years later. So I bring that with me, and we'll instead, of course, take a look on our situation at CDON Group. We have, as Fredrik presented, two consumer brands, and then we have the CDON Group mission as well. From a customer view, we need to make sure now that our experience really matches these brand positions.
If you come to us, we will take full responsibility for you as a customer, and that is a statement we have as a CDON Group. We will have the wide assortment, and it will be from curated merchants. We will have available customer service, we need to have reliable delivery, and you should never wonder, as a customer, if this is a good place to go and shop at.
When we look at CDON, we need to match this quality product with an even better experience. Here, we need to really present the, the products and our site the best way possible, so that you do find these things, and that you can compare them with each other, and that you can make really good purchases. We need to have flawless deliveries.
If you buy a quality product, you expect that experience to bleed as well all the way until you have the package at your door. And we need to have really excellent customer service if something goes wrong. On Fyndiq, we need to make sure that these products we have are indeed real bargains. We need to curate, and we need to showcase these merchants, and then have to have high ratings so that the customer can trust us, that we are the guarantee that you'll get a satisfied purchase.
And if we take this, and we look at our the current perceptions of our two consumer brands, we will notice that we have quite opposite challenges, and we need to use different tactics to strengthen each brand's position. Starting with CDON. Here, we enjoy a very strong brand awareness already.
It's over 90% when we asked people around in Sweden if they are aware of the brand CDON. Unfortunately, though, we lack a bit of a positive brand perception from these people, and that's really something we have to work on. We're not yet associated with the aspect that we really want to be strong at as a brand, so our key action here is that we need to drastically improve the customer experience.
We need to make sure that we exceed the expectations when you come and shop at our marketplace, so that you also is part of changing the perception of our brand from others. For Fyndiq, we actually have a very known brand as well, and we have a high level of associations with really positive brand aspects from our own customers.
Unfortunately, the public perception of our brand is that we do deliver a pretty poor customer experience. So here, instead, we need to really focus on changing the public perception of our brand, and we need to use the current very happy and satisfied customer to do so by using their reviews, rating, and we need to add brand marketing as well.
So we are going to unleash the potential in the marketplaces. That really means that we need to deliver a consistently high customer experience. And we do have the blueprint on how to do that. Fredrik mentioned earlier today that we have seen a decline in the customer satisfaction on CDON for the past couple of years, while on the Fyndiq side, we have seen the opposite and an increase in the customer satisfaction.
If you didn't know much more than that, you're probably surprised that high-quality products has the declining, and the less quality and known product has the increase. But we'll use what we've learned on Fyndiq and actually start to implement more of these factors on CDON. Starting from, I would say, the bottom, but probably at the center.
We need to quickly turn this and put the center, the customer in the center of our business and our priorities. It's easy to say that you are customer-centric, but we really actually need to prove that day by day in the decisions we take, in the focuses we have, and sometimes you have to decide that sale or the happy customer. I'm not gonna say that the customer should win every time, but quite often the customer needs to win that.
So we need to turn from having the merchant-centric, and instead be a customer-centric approach. We also need to really take control and set rules for our merchants, so that we, as the company, the CDON, can take full responsibilities for our customers. Running the marketplace and being responsible the customer experience is quite challenging that way because you don't own the entire experience yourself.
We drive the traffic, we have the marketplace at the site, and we sell the products, and then the merchants take over in delivering this product to the customer. But the customer shops from us, so we need to be in charge of the whole journey, and we'll need to do that together with the merchants, but also then have really clear mandates and rule in place so that we can put expectations, and that we can act on it.
The final part, we need to be much more data-driven in the entire company. It's anything from the customer insights and the knowledge we have around them, combining that with sales data and what products are currently popular and trending, and we need to make sure we use that when we decide what are the things that we should improve, what are the things that we should develop, and what are the next features that we are missing. That way, we're no different from any other tech company. You need to make sure that the product you built is actually responding to the needs of those are gonna use it.
Going back to our massive supply, this really means that if we're gonna have these millions and millions and millions of products, we need to help our customers to find what they are looking for. Otherwise, we're gonna have a great assortment, but no one will be there and find it and buy it.
So to sum this up, we know from experience that we will earn the trust and the preferences from our customers by providing an excellent customer experience. And this really goes from when you visit the site, all the way until your package is delivered at your door or after you picked it up at ICA. And like I said, we are pretty confident that we do have a blueprint on how to do that.
I can also say, well, we also have some results on that, and we know that we are well on our way. For Fyndiq, we can already see that higher-rating customers are returning with a 17% higher retention to our site to do a second shopping. Our recurring customers have a much higher average order value than the first-time buyers. So we know that if we give a good experience, you will come back, and you will do more of your purchases at our place.
As for CDON, we have started, of course, and we are well on our way to implement and changing the things that are needed to be implemented and changed and get to know the customers much better than we did before, and it really starts to show the signs.
We know that the customer satisfaction is moving the right direction. We can see and follow the reviews that we get, that we do reduce them, and especially we reduce the ones that are where the criticism is something that shouldn't be there. It should not have been a problem in the starting place. So I think we are on the right track. We need to keep pushing, and we need to continue to listen to the customers on the way forward as well. Things are changing, so what we know today may not be the exact same things that we need to address in the future. With that, I'll give it back to Fredrik to talk about the financial attractiveness of this business.
Thank you so much, Kattis. It actually reminds me, when I was sitting now, an old story I've heard for many years, from Kinnevik. It's said that, during board meetings and management meetings, they always leave one seat open. And when someone asks, "Who's sitting in that seat?" They said, "It's the customer." To always have the customer present in the room.
At CDON, we have that person in flesh and blood, and you just met her. So let's go into the numbers now, and we will talk about. First up, these are our main KPIs. We start with the GMV, the gross merchandise value, actually, what really goes through our checkout. This is the defined by the attractiveness of our proposition to consumers.
Actually, how many customers can we can transact at CDON, the willingness of opening up the wallet to us. The second KPI is the GPAM, Gross Profit After Marketing. This really shows the operational efficiency of our business. It's quite easy to sell something at no margin or to put a lot of marketing spend on that product. But to actually make money after you have put your marketing money on it and have some margin, that is what shows in the GPAM.
This is what this game is really about, and this is our main KPI, and I've been talking about this since April, and this is still our main focus for the business: to do everything to grow the gross profit after marketing. And the last one is the EBITDA, of course, shows the operational efficiency of the company.
These are our really three main KPIs that we steer our business on. A quick Q3 review. This is the last three quarters and the EBITDA of the business. We have continued to have a focus on the profitable marketing and really improving the GPAM. We have done restructuring in the OpEx space, and we also grew the supply, as Mark mentioned during the summer, which really enabled higher sales on Fyndiq.
These aspects together have really enabled a positive growth in the EBITDA. This is the first time in many, many years that we have three consecutive quarters with positive EBITDA. And we have a really backloaded also seasonality into the Christmas, as you can see the previous years as well.
We also are looking forward to continue maximizing the GPAM, and GPAM, and profitable growth, and to increase the supply, as we're talking many times about. But also one really important thing here is to really conclude the migration of the platform. This is supposed to happen by the end of next year, and we have said to the market that we will, by that, realize about SEK 40 million in cost reductions.
And what will happen is that we will increase our operational efficiency, and we will also increase the velocity of the functions that we really can release for both marketplaces, having one platform. Also, with that, we have a very positive cash flow situation now, being EBITDA positive. And all this stressful time with the, with the thin cash flow margin, we have that behind us now, and we can really look forward instead. All right.
To continue to grow the EBITDA, we see we are focusing on three levers. We are focusing on GMV growth, GPAM margin increase, and OpEx efficiency. These are just illustrative figures, but I'm gonna walk you through them. If we start to the left, here is an example of if we just increase the GMV, everything else is fixed. No margin increase or, OpEx decrease or so. We just increase the GMV.
We will have an increase of the gross profit after marketing. If we go to the middle one, we have the gross profit after marketing, and that is derived from increased GMV or increased take rate and marketing efficiency. Marketing efficiency is, of course, not spending wrong marketing on wrong products, and this is something that we have had a really high focus on the last couple of months.
Carl is gonna showcase a little bit numbers from that later on. But what we also can see is that the take rate, we have a potential to increase that as well. That is not only from the commissions from the merchants, but also from value-added services, such as fulfillment services and merchant ads, as Thomas was talking about earlier on.
The right-hand side is, of course, the OpEx efficiency. To lower the OpEx, everything else the same, will impact the EBITDA in a positive way. So what we will do now is that we will go through the status of each and every lever, and also what we're doing to improve that, because they combined will really push the EBITDA in the right direction, but they also can do it separately. Now we are focusing parallel on all three levers.
Starting out with our GMV. Quick recap, and just put that into perspective before going into the future. Overall challenging macro environment, I guess, comes to no surprise to none of us, really. The Swedish Trade Association, Svensk Handel, estimated the effect on the e-commerce industry year to date in September to -6%, with September as bad as almost -20% year-over-year. Of course, we can't hide behind that, but it's a fact and something that we are facing. That said, year to date, we are down 18% in the CDON segment, following that focus on profitable sales, well-performing merchant base, and so on.
Fyndiq is down 5% year to date, primarily due to poor Q1, where we were heavily affected by Chinese COVID-19-related lockdowns, where basically our merchant base in China closed down. No products were leaving the country for a period of time. However, we can see that Q2 and Q3 definitely is coming back for Fyndiq, and we have massively increased supply.
We see the results of it. The Nordic expansion that we are experiencing has contributed to a stronger Q2 and Q3. Going into the future, there is profitable GMV growth potential out there. We know the recipe. We will focus on the core of the marketplace model. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, it is about massively increase in supply.
It is about the pyramid that Mark was talking about, leveraging the aggregators, working with quality Chinese supply, attracting the A brands to crown our marketplace. It is about happy customers, improving the customer experience, and providing a personalized site experience, and we're also looking into ways on how to increase loyalty or introduce a loyalty concept where we strengthen retention and the return frequency of our customers.
To add to these previously mentioned points, marketing efficiency. That can in itself drive additional sales. By becoming more data-driven in our customer acquisition, targeting new sales effectively in our marketing, we are looking to grow GMV, most notably in how we work with our paid traffic, primarily through Google.
We are also looking into ways on how to drive our organic traffic and to how to strengthen our brand awareness, a much, much more cost-efficient way of driving traffic to our site. Ongoing work in the space of SEO, in particular in the CDON segment, where we've faced a declining trend over the last months. That, in combination with some brand marketing, would do wonder to the organic traffic of our sites.
This is how we plan to grow GMV in the over the next years. GPAM margin increase, our core KPI, that we are focusing on in our daily operations. There has been substantial improvements to that, and despite a 16% lower GMV year to date, we have grown GPAM by 13% in absolute terms.
We have gone from unprofitable sales to much more profitable sales, and we are now on the path forward that we want to be. For CDON, we now see steady GPAM levels of around 8%, driven mainly by a commission increase in Q1 that took effect. On Fyndiq, we have had a stable performance around that 16% mark, with an increase in Q3, driven by an increase to our shipping fee.
We now charge 29 SEK to each order in a shipping fee or an equivalent in the other Nordic markets. Worth noting, Q3 for Fyndiq is a record high third quarter and almost a record high, all-time high record quarter, by all means, beating any of our previous Q4s. As you were mentioning, GPAM can increase by GMV, previously mentioned.
Marketing efficiency, let's take a look on the next slide, but also in driving our take rate, and that we'll do next after that. Our marketing efficiency could be measured in our profit on ad spend. Basically, the gross profit over advertising spend gives us our POAS or Profit on Ad Spend. In 2022, we could see CDON segment operating at just over 200%, with some monthly variations. But in November, December, and in 2023, that level has now increased by over 25%, to around 260% to 270%. That is a massive achievement and a significant contributor to our improved GPAM.
To realize the shift, we have done several technical improvements to enable simpler upload of products to our partners in our paid traffic acquisition, and also shifted to Performance Max, a campaign format that we work on with Google. Next up, take rate, and also that has increased, and I guess you recognize the pattern on our quarterly take rate compared to that of the GPAM.
They are highly correlated, and what drives the take rate is primarily the commission, the largest part of what we keep whenever a customer purchases an article on site. POAS is slightly more volatile, and there is seasonality to that, there are campaigns, et cetera, but the take rate remains fairly steady. There's little variation.
The merchant wants visibility and understanding about the cost of selling on our marketplace, and that's why we don't really move that around. It can be done, of course, as we will talk about on the next page, moved around for strategic reasons or during a campaign period, but there's always sort of a quid pro quo to that movement.
The current commission setup on our two segments differs a bit, and we are looking to optimize, simplify it to better support the wanted position of our brands, and ultimately, to drive profits in our company. This is an example of our electronics category. For CDON, we have a standard commission, but we also have subcategory commissions.
For example, for mobile phones, the commission is lower than that of mobile accessories, which is part of electronics. For Fyndiq, we have a flat fee of 12.5% across categories, and in addition to this, we also charge a fixed category or selling fee. Peers and other larger marketplaces tend to use a more CDON-like approach, with a standard and then subcategory commissions.
However, we have noticed an unnecessary granularity in our subcategorization on CDON. It requires particular agreements with our merchants, and it also requires accurate categorization of the products that we charge the right commission, and we allow the merchant to sell at the right commission with those products that they want to sell.
At the same time, on Fyndiq, one can argue that there is insufficient granularity, and that a flat fee like this would hinder us in certain product categories, where one would expect a lower commission to realize that sale. That's why we can see that we have a deviation between our standard or sort of list price and the actual commission realized.
Where it deviates largely in the CDON segment, where Fyndiq remains fairly close to that of the standard commission. For peers, that is, of course, quite sensitive information, which they might not disclose even in our private conversations, but it tends to be more stringently applied. Hence, the standard commission and the actual commission correlates highly. As I said, we are looking to update that commission model.
We want to make it simpler, we want to make it simpler for our merchants and how they approach our categories. There should be full transparency towards the merchant, and this, in the end, will drive, we believe, will drive improved prices for our customers. With the right commission, they will set the most competitive price, hence, the customer will experience the best price.
We want commission levels to better match our wanted position in each segment. You could, for example, lower the commission in certain segments on respective sites if you want to make a bet, or a sort of growth bet into certain segments. We also want to apply our commission model more stringently to really foster the on-site competition, which ultimately drives lower prices to our customers.
We fully acknowledge that simply increasing the commission would be a nice way to improve our take rate and profitability, but that cannot be done without risking increased prices towards our customers. No sale, no profitability at all. We need to balance that and find the right commission level for our marketplaces. So we need to be careful and look for alternative ways on how to grow our take rates without risking a negative effect to our customers.
As Thomas was mentioning in the video, Merchant Ads is, for example, one way of doing that. And really, in all its simplicity, Merchant Ads is to a very large extent sponsored products on our page in our search and listing. Illustrated it here with sort of boxing the green products or laptops.
You can have them as separate banners, beams, or integrated in the organic result. We currently do this on CDON to some extent, but not on Fyndiq. It's something that we're definitely interested in exploring and something we are looking into at this moment. It is a very common practice among marketplaces, and our merchants that are marketplace sellers are very used to it.
It offers a revenue potential to us as a marketplace operator with very low cost of sale. And I also believe it improves the customer experience with simpler product discovery, where merchants tend to promote or lift products that they want sold, hopefully quality products at a competitive price at that point in time. Leading marketplaces, such as Amazon, are able to realize up to 6% of GMV through advertising sales with very high profitability.
CDON currently, currently generate slightly below 0.5%. The potential here is enormous, and, and we, we will be looking into this over the next, next year. To sum up the GPAM margin improvement, I guess we can look at our, our take rate summary and walk through that. We notice the difference between commissions on our two sites.
We notice the shipping fee difference on Fyndiq, where we apply this on top of, of that purchase price. It gives us two different starting positions. Looking at our peers, obviously, each marketplace will be different, and we, we have, we, we need to be careful when we compare the potential to the peers with the actual marketplaces that we are operating. The commission will vary.
The commission could look high for a marketplace where a fixed category fee, for example, in the case of Fyndiq, is included and will, of course, push up that take rate a bit. We notice the merchant ads difference, and of course, the shipping fee, which each marketplace tends to manage a bit differently. However, there are also other customer revenue streams that we could be looking into and exploring further.
That could be insurance, customer services, such as installation or removal of your old product, if we talk about white goods, for example. It can also be financial commission and how we work with our partners in that area. Fulfillment is perhaps a bit of a special case, and like Thomas was talking about, it is an enabler of sales for marketplaces.
I guess it's really only Amazon who have been able to monetize profitably on their fulfillment service. Many others almost subsidize or see this as a cost-neutral offering to our customers, ultimately driving value in the first place, which makes it a good investment to the marketplace. To conclude, there is potential out there. We have an opportunity to increase take rate.
If we do it in the right way, it will not have a adverse effect or a negative effect on our customers, but it will improve our profitability. The third point on how to grow our EBITDA is the reduction of OpEx. We have, as previously communicated, a target of SEK -40 million OpEx run rate by the end of 2024 as part of our plans. That stems from the integration of Fyndiq and CDON.
Work is ongoing with that, and it's progressing well. We currently have a higher OpEx than we did in April when the transaction was completed. Despite us doing several cost savings, saving actions, such as terminating employees, marketing consultants, terminating other external deals related to software or services, that is not yet fully visible in the run rate at the moment.
We have taken on external support to complete the integration. We do have duplication in some systems, and we also see some notice period in the salary, as of September this year. Over the course of 2024, where July simply serves as an illustrative point, we will realize the -40%, SEK -40 million potential that we have previously, previously communicated.
The platform migration is the main enabler of that, cost saving and cash release, cost release, sorry. We will also save on software and maintenance cost when we move to one, really, and we are eagerly awaiting the other additional benefits of having one technical platform. So, what will this look like if we add it all together, Fredrik?
Yes, good segue. Thank you. What we're doing now is trying to illustrate if we combine all of these three levers. If we start with only GMV growth, and we have added a GMV increase here of 15%, which is in line with Cdiscount's CAGR over 2012 to 2019, and also the growth of the Swedish e-commerce industry for many, many years now.
If we just add that, everything else fixed, we're gonna have a CAGR on EBITDA of 55% in 5 years. If we instead look at the GPAM, and we increase those two margins, we have the take rate, as Carl just mentioned, which is partly the commission and partly the marketing efficiency. If we just increase that by 5% annually, and then we also add the marketing cost efficiency, sorry.
If we have 5% each, the CAGR over five years is gonna be 41%. Here, we really can see the extreme scale effects that we have in the marketplace model. If we look at the GPAM margin also for the CDON Group, it would be 14% year three and 16% year five, and we have today currently a margin of 10%. If we combine this, we combine the 15% annual growth and then the GPAM margin increase of 5%, and then we consider an OPEX increase of 5%, we will over five years have a CAGR of 74%. And of course, there are some underlying cost pressure that we need to take into consideration here with a +5% OpEx.
We also should note here that you cannot see the SEK -40 million OpEx reduction for next year in this base, so this will even increase the base substantially. At year five, we would end up on an EBITDA margin of 10%, which is pretty much in line with the rest of the leading marketplaces. This is just an illustration, and the base of SEK 29 million is actually the base that SEB and Nicklas have set in the latest report, just to have some kind of base that we can use as numbers for this year. So I think everything ends up into this slide, that we have enormous effect in the scalability if we succeed in these three different levers.
We have really clear plans on how to improve all of these three areas, and when we're talking about this blueprint, we have the blueprint. We have Allegro, we have Bol, we have Amazon to be, and Cdiscount, of course, to be inspired by. They have done this. They can tell us what to do and not to do, and they have a lot of information publicly.
So let's not reinvent the wheel, but instead, really utilize this in the best possible way. And to end with, some concluding investment highlights, number one, we see a very under-penetrated market in the Nordics, which provides a great opportunity. We have two different marketplaces, twice as good to have two than one. Two different marketplaces with distinct, separate positions. And we have a highly scalable business model. With volume, this is gonna scale massively.
And the foundation now is really laid for. We have all the machinery to also enable profitable growth for the coming years. Of course, we're gonna start growing with this company as well, but it's gonna be profitable growth. And to end, again, once again, this is really not rocket science. Feed the flywheel with products that people really like, at competitive prices, and transact them in a way that leaves them with a good experience, and we have the blueprint for this. Thank you, everybody, for your attention, and now we will hand over to Nicklas and the Q&A section.
Excellent. Thank you, Fredrik. We welcome the rest of the management team up to the stage, please. So, thank you for a great presentation. It's now time for the Q&A session. There will be opportunity to raise your questions here in the room. Just indicate by raising your hand. There will be an opportunity to raise your question on the phone call, as well as any questions on the iPad that you send in. Excuse me. I would like to start, however, since I'm in the room moderating the session.
So I think it's fairly clear now, the three main sort of drivers, for the coming at least 4-5 years, what they are, what they could become, but I still like to start by an overall top-down question in terms of, what are the actual underlying assumptions for sort of online retail penetration versus marketplace, market share of that online retail spend? Could you just wrap it up so we understand sort of the main market assumptions, for the coming, say, three to five years, please?
So, following the pandemic, we've seen a setback in terms of e-commerce. We do expect that over time to return to that growth rate that we saw pre COVID. And we do expect a steadiness or a slightly positive increase in the online or e-commerce penetration of your consumption. H igh level answer to that question, I, top of mind, can't give you an exact percentage point of what we're assuming. But fundamentally, e-commerce is here to stay. E-commerce will grow over time. We see an increasing interest in the marketplace as your shopping destination.
Would it be fair to conclude that the main driver would be increased share of online spend at marketplaces rather than retailers?
I mean, still in Sweden, there are about 17% of the total retail shopping is done online. It's really crazy. 83% is still in a physical store. I cannot understand who is doing all this shopping in physical stores. But there we have a huge market that still can move over to the e-commerce penetration. We have that fundamental movement, and on top of that, we also have the movement from classic e-commerce to marketplace e-commerce system.
Yep. Very clear. Another thought I had, currently about not even a third of your total GMV is being generated outside of Sweden, which kind of gets me thinking that a lot of the potential going forward is probably outside of Sweden as well. Why is it that this share of total GMV is not higher to start with? And what are your plans for Norway, Finland, and perhaps Denmark going forward as well? P lease?
That's a good question. For now, to rephrase Kattis a bit, it's a little bit going back to the basics and to make sure that we have products that people like and get a good experience when they buy them. And we are really focused now on doing this for Sweden, and before we have that in place, we will not start pushing down the throttle. However, we see a huge potential in the rest of the countries in Nordics, and we see that we will increase that penetration the coming years as well.
Before I ask the floor for the question, just another high-level question from me. If you look at sort of, I mean, as Kattis said, the brand awareness is, is, like, everywhere, right? And in terms of active customers, you have more than 2 million of them, which makes you kind of very large in terms of market share that way.
Yep.
But either way, in the future, where do you think, what would be sort of, can you elaborate a bit on the levers for growth in terms of changes to average order value, conversion rates, number of active customers, you know, any sort of decent marketplace KPI that you can think of? What would sort of bring, what would be the main drivers for growth at CDON specifically?
I see that you want me to build your, your model, business model for you, but, it's okay. No, we strongly believe that, when it comes to average order value, for instance, it will probably be about the same for both Fyndiq and CDON, CDON being much higher, two to three times higher than Fyndiq. When it comes to conversion rate, we really believe that there we have, some improvements to do, both on the Fyndiq side and, on, CDON side, especially when it comes to finding the right products.
At, already now, with 40 million products or so, it's starting to become kind of hard to get the right search results and so on. So we see that we have a good potential in that area. The big thing will, though, be traffic to get new customers to try us out and to get existing customers to come back more and more often. And this is, the loyalty part of it is something that Kattis and her team is really focusing on now. We are doing some data-driven initiatives around this, but really to get each and every customer to do one extra buy every year, that's gonna move our top line hugely.
Makes a lot of sense. All right, let's take the first question from the room, please.
I'm Rutger Smith. I must confess that I know no, close to nothing about your business, so I came here to educate myself. I have a question. It seems that you don't hold an inventory in CDON. So all the goods are somewhere else, still owned by the sellers until you sell them. Is that it?
That's correct. In physical terms, you are totally correct. We don't have any warehouse for all the 3P. We have fulfillment services, though, but model-wise, you are correct. It's all the different merchants, and they have them in their different warehouses, and they ship them directly to the end consumer. Who owns them is a little bit differently.
In Fyndiq's case, actually, in the flash of a second, when you buy something, Fyndiq owns that product. In CDON's case, it's not like that. But you can still really see that as we, as a marketplace, still take 100% responsibility for you as a consumer, that we own that experience and that product to you who are buying it.
Okay. Next question is about pricing. There seems to be a fixed price set by the seller, so the only possibility that you have is to change the commission size to alter the price. Is that correct?
Yeah, but the biggest pusher for lowering prices is really, as Mark mentioned before, get more merchants with the same products, and that will enable the competition that pushes down the prices. That is really the main pusher for lowering the prices. So when we see that we only have one product or few merchants, we have high prices. When we, in the face mask case, get hundreds of merchants with the same product, they start competing, and the margin profit goes close to zero.
The last question from me is, with all these hundreds of thousands or even million of products, I mean, there are a lot of legal requirements as to electricity, safety, and chemicals, and what have you. Who actually handles this?
Yeah. Marc, do you want to answer?
Yeah, sure. That's me and my team, in the supply department. So we, you're talking about product compliance. And we are taking product compliance very seriously, and I would say that I mean, we have a product compliance department and a really good product compliance manager, and we've been working with product compliance for several years.
And trying to be on top of, in top of the league as a marketplace to really understand what could happen with product product compliance if something is not compliant, and try to proactively, in a way, understand all the rules and regulations and so on in every different category, and also where the product actually are coming from.
It's a complete different thing, it's if it, if it comes from a Swedish merchants from a Swedish stock, or if it comes from another country outside Europe, it's completely different. So we have invested a lot of time and money to understand what we need to do to be compliant as a marketplace. So I would say that we're confident that we're doing as much as we can in a proactive way to meet the requirements that is expected of us.
Thank you. Let's move on. We have another question from the room.
Hi. Can you hear me?
Yep.
Yep.
I think I'm the only American in the room here. Maybe my, my partner here is also an American, but, I'm a rabid user of Amazon, and I was in a meeting yesterday, actually, with someone else who was just here, and we were talking about, you know, looking through my orders on Amazon, and a very, very large percentage of our orders were consumables, like baby diapers, shampoo. I know you guys sell Swedish Match tobacco, but, you know, I look at the percentage of my orders, it's things that I'm buying pretty regularly, and I can actually subscribe to have me keep, having you keep sending it.
You sort of matched the TAM at about SEK 400 billion. I assume that's just the categories that you're selling in right now, primarily, not fashion, not food, not pharma, stuff like that. You know, I would think that the TAM is actually more like SEK 1 trillion, I mean, or SEK 800 billion, whatever, a much larger TAM when you include all the other categories.
As you talk about building that relationship with the customer and getting organic traffic directly through the site and not just through Google and the price sites, how do you think about, A, getting into these other categories, which are more than double itself, the TAM that you've addressed, and B you know, getting it so the customer is interacting with your website, you know, periodically, so they're showing up, right? Because there's no marketing costs associated with- going directly to the website. If you could talk a little bit about your plans around that, that would be great. Then I have a second question.
Cool. Thanks. Let me answer that in two well, three parts. First of all, I love it. It's a great idea. The subscription model definitely adds value to our customers. It adds value to, to us as a company. Secondly, about the market size, we, we based that on external sources, valuing the Swedish e-commerce market alone at SEK 140 billion, including groceries, pharma, et cetera. The e-commerce market in Sweden is not bigger than that. As you were saying earlier, Fredrik, we do have a journey to get customers online to do even more of their grocery or diaper shopping online.
And thirdly, those are definitely categories we could be looking into if we can carry that through our marketplace model, which I certainly believe we can, because there are existing merchants out there offering it, and given the scalability of our business, it's something we could be looking into in the future.
I agree. Now it's just a matter of focus and prioritization. We have more important categories to prioritize at the moment, especially electronics, given the time we're going into now, but there is no hindrance at all to go that way as well.
Okay. And then my second question is really around the sort of the financial model. You know, you talked about, you know, the $29 million based on Nicklas. It, it appears that doesn't include the $40 million, but it really almost looks like $50 million because you had to increase costs a little bit through September 23rd.
So from this point where we are, we would expect about $50 million, $40 million, some number greater than $40 million, but, you know, $50 million of cost on top of that as a starting point, which was helpful for me. But on sort of the GMV side, you know, again, I'm not Swedish, so I don't know, but I just read the same stuff you read on the internet.
You know, I think e-commerce has grown roughly 10% to 15% CAGR, and obviously, we're coming off of a trough here last two years, so I would think that you'd get a little bit of a catch-up to get back, but I mean, sort of the normal growth vector for the market would be 10% to 15%. So when I think about winning market share of total e-commerce from 1P, I think I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I, it's sort of fair to assume that if you want to get to 10% market share, and the market itself grows 10% to 15%, and you're just modeling 15% GMV growth, then you're not really winning market share.
So, is 15% a pretty conservative estimate? Because I would think that the GMV CAGR would be higher if you're approaching 10% market share, you know, of total Nordic e-commerce.
Yeah, I mean, this is no guidance for our future growth, so this was just illustrative numbers that we were showcasing. And we thought that 15% is a good level, given that Cdiscount have had that CAGR for many years, and also, as you pointed out, that the Swedish e-com market have grown with around 15% for many years now. Besides that, we don't really want to comment on the future growth plans, to be honest, but of course, we have a potential that's greater than that, if we're doing things right.
Right. Well, if, if you're winning market share, presumably, your growth has to be higher. That's just the math, right?
That's true.
Okay.
That is totally true.
Just wanted.
Yeah, yeah.
Just wanted to establish that. Thank you.
You're totally right. Totally right. Yep.
All right, excellent. Thank you. So we have received a question on the iPad here from the ongoing web call as well, and it's in Swedish, so I will try to translate as we go. It says, so Fyndiq and CDON has different suppliers of payment services, and they note that Klarna is known to share a part of their revenue back to merchants and could potentially be an additional revenue stream for you. Would Is there any plans to consolidate Fyndiq's and CDON's different suppliers of payment services?
Yes. I mean, that's obviously is some logic behind that. Also, we have a quite good bargain power, going into that type of negotiations. So without going into details, yes, that's a quite logic path for us to walk.
Yes. Excellent. And just to remind everybody, there's a possibility to raise your hand on the conference call, if you have a question, and for that matter, on the web, as well. It will pop up in this iPad. All right, let's focus on development of sort of your marketplace business. So where are we on mobile shopping?
Sorry?
Mobile shopping. Mobile app store shopping. Where are we on that target?
To create an app.
Yeah
For us? Okay, I got it.
Yeah.
Yeah. T hat, that's a hard question. I mean, I guess as an American, it sounds kind of wrong to not focus on that, but it's also a prioritization. For now, we will not create an app. We have had an app that was focused on refurbished products, which we actually put out of business just a couple of months ago. It is a split focus. I've done this previously before at Fyndiq, to have both a web and app. It requires different organization, different focus, and so on, and for now, we're gonna focus on the web, on the web, and do that as good as it gets, and then we'll see in the future.
Obviously, as you pointed out, there looks to be an abundant potential from sort of proliferating different services on your, on your marketplace, such as advertising, and there's a few others that were mentioned on that same slide. Just for the record, where are you now in terms of advertising as a percentage of GMV? And you know, you mentioned some of your peers would be closer to 5% to 6%. Where do you think is an appropriate level for a marketplace like CDON over the years?
The obvious answer to that, of course, is as high as possible. We are currently trading at just shy of half a percentage point of our GMV on CDON and zero on Fyndiq, where we don't offer that service at the moment. It's something we are looking into, and there will, of course, be technical implementation work to be done to get that on the Fyndiq site, and that is really what we're focusing on to make sure that we can implement it in the best possible way under the constraints at the moment with the migration to one platform.
Yeah.
We don't have a clear, or at least not gonna communicate the clear target for where we're heading, but I think it's fair to say that it's north of where we are, and I guess in the shorter term, south of where our peers.
Yeah
Are, without going into too more details.
And just.
And, and.
Yeah
Sorry, this is also an interesting area. Quite same as we were talking about the aggregators. We can utilize here that the market is really becoming more and more mature now. 10 years ago, aggregators didn't exist. Today, you can find this merchant advertising services as a third party. If we just go back five, seven years, you had to develop everything in-house. Now, we can pick and choose from several suppliers, and this is something that will enable us to really get a head start or move into this area quite fast.
Just for the record, what are sort of the financials behind your decision to grow the advertising product? Is it a particularly high margin or high return on investment, or why would you do that?
The numbers that the other marketplaces are showcasing is 3.5% to 6% of the GMV that is added on top of it, and that GMV, on average, has an 85% gross margin.
Yep. Yep.
It's highly profitable.
Yep. All right, let's, yeah, soon we have one more question in the room. As the mic is being passed, let me just ask one follow-up question. Now, you have been purchasing a few merchants over the past, well, over the past months, this year, basically, sort of focusing on GPAM, et cetera. Where are we in terms of timing here looking into 2024? When are we nearing the inflection point where you think you have sort of right-sized CDON's marketplace in terms of merchants and whatever drivers there are?
I would say so, yes. Short answer, yes. We are really, really close to that inflection point. And we need to come through a Christmas sales now, and make sure that everything past the purchase works as it should, and then after that, we are quite ready to push on all these levels.
Yep. All right, follow-up question from the room, please.
Yeah, I forget whose section it was. It might have been in Erik Segerborg's section, but, you know, one of the things that you highlighted is that marketplace businesses are, have no inventory and can achieve extremely high margins. You know, Avito at 65%, Hemnet at 50%, Rightmove at 70%, these are, you know, very, very high free cash flow conversion businesses.
You know, as you look towards next year, obviously, you wanna get through Christmas, but, you know, you have $50 million of, of EBITDA effectively coming back to you from the platform, and presumably, GMV hopefully grows next year, 'cause e-commerce won't go down forever, and you're looking at a business that's, you know, nine figures of EBITDA, you know, next year. You know, you're.
Obviously, you know, the company's merged, and you sort of went public in a wonky way, so to speak, the combined companies. But the, the market valuation is materially dislocated relative to sort of your, what I would consider your quote-unquote, "peers." You know, you are not BHG, you're not, you know, other sort of 1P e-commerce companies. I mean, you know, Hemnet is, you know, relatively mature. It trades at almost 40 times next year's EBITDA. You know, if you, you guys are trading at sort of a low double-digit multiple based on conservative EBITDA estimates, you know, how do you think about sort of narrowing that dislocation?
Hemnet has been engaged in a share repurchase, and now that you guys are sort of confidently profitable, and you have cash on the balance sheet, you know, you know, are there opportunities, and as you roll into next year, to start re-allocating capital to share repurchase, so we can sort of get our cost of capital in line and stuff like that? I mean, are those things that you would be considering?
On that specific question, we cannot do that. We are listed on First North, so we cannot repurchase shares on First North. So we have to re-list to the main market, if that should be possible.
Or the U.S.
Sorry?
Or the U.S. market.
Or the U.S. market.
Where they understand marketplace, and it trades at 40x EBITDA, so.
True that, but I think, to your point, I think it's a good point, Adam, that a marketplace should never be compared to a traditional retailer. A marketplace should be compared to other marketplaces. In our case, compare us with Allegro and Mercado Libre, and maybe not Amazon, because they are so huge, they are something else, but at least Allegro and Mercado Libre. So I think you have a good point there.
Thank you.
Just actually a follow-up question here from the webcast, and the question is, "Is the plan actually to continue to list on First North or to actually change venue?
Even if I knew that answer, I'm not sure if I can or should answer that. Of course, that's an opportunity. Right now, we're so focused on the operations. We are focused on the coming Christmas sales and making sure to oil the machinery to enable growth next year.
Okay. I think we've passed time, actually, so, I think I would like to hand back the word to you, Fredrik, and your team. On my behalf, thank you very much for inviting me, and, it's been a great, great afternoon. A lot of things to ponder, going into 2024, and, hopefully, enjoying Christmas trading as well meanwhile. With those words, thank you very much for attending the Capital Markets Day, on my behalf, and, the word is back to you, Fredrik.
Thank you so much, and I want to say the same. Thank you so much, Nicklas, for a good moderation. And thank you, everybody here online, for your attention and great questions. Take care!