Right. Dennis, are we good to go?
Maybe wait two more seconds or two more. Sorry, one more minute, as the attendees are joining the call. They're being let in one by one. I think we're good to go.
All right. Welcome everybody to this Q3 call from us, VNV Global. I'm joined here today with my new-ish colleague, Dennis Mohammad. Been in for a year, but many of you may have met him. He joined us from Boston Consulting Group, but he was also the first employee at Voi. He will run the call with me. I'll kick off and do some highlights, and then this will run through some numbers. We'll go into, we'll round up going through the new portfolio, et cetera.
In terms of housekeeping, there's one thing to remember, as you may remember from these calls earlier, and that's to ask a question. You type it into the Zoom chat function or Q&A function at Zoom. You do that, and then we'll sort of pick up the questions that haven't been answered and at the end of this presentation. If you could take us to the next slide, Dennis. I think there's a lot of familiar faces and numbers on this call. For those of you who don't know us from before, so very quickly, what we look for are companies with strong network effects that operate on global markets and that have sort of exceptional founders.
We have the portfolio is about 70 companies all in all. Measured over the past 10 years, we've delivered a 20% IRR up until this quarterly report, which is the end of September. We aim for a much higher IRR return in our investments, 30%-50%. In fact, the companies that we have sold over the years have been, the return profile has been of that sort of order. I'll come back to it, but the portfolio, as you'll see also from this presentation, is essentially all about companies with network effects. That's not essentially, it is. But you could also.
There's sort of three main macro themes or sectors, if you will, which is mobility, digital health, and marketplaces. Different companies belong to different sort of themes. Next slide. The NAV as of the end of September was just shy of $700 million, $691 million, which is down some 19% quarter-on-quarter. If you measure it from the beginning of the year, it's down by about half. Our NAV at the end of last year was like $1.4 billion, plus minus. This market that we're in has had its toll, and we're down by half. For this quarter, we're down by 19%.
That's all in U.S. dollars, and of course, you have the currency moving around. Swedish kronor less, we're down about 10% over the course of the quarter in Swedish krona. It sort of on a per share basis, it adds up to $6 a share, which is just under SEK 68 per share. Next slide. Just wanted to highlight a few things that have been going on since we last spoke. We're very happy to sort of be done with the financial restructuring at Gett. This company is essentially debt-free now. We're the largest owner. It's performing very well, and it's EBITDA positive. So a big turnaround from where it was, well, at the beginning of the year.
This financial restructuring is very recent, so we're not yet at liberty to give all the details around that. For example, how much we own of the company. We have to remain at least for this quarter, I believe, until we issue our annual report. By then, we will be able to disclose how much we own, but we're the largest owner of the company. We sold some Property Finder. We did announce that at the previous quarter report as an event that after the end of the period, and that is now within this quarter.
Again, post the end of this period, there's been news around one of our formerly larger holdings, which has now gone down so much in the stock market. It's quite a small holding. This is, of course, Babylon. The company announced that it has completed an $80 million raise, where we participated with $20 million, alongside Kinnevik with $26 million. I'll come back to this as well a little bit, and we can talk about it in the Q&A. This money, together with the proceeds from an exit that they have announced their intention to sell one of their U.S. assets, will take them all the way to profitability.
I feel confident about that. The asset is of course not sold yet, but the indications we get will cover them with quite a broad margin. More on that later. Our slot, we hosted a capital markets day in New York where we had, I think it was 5, of our portfolio companies that made presentations. They were streamed live to everyone who wanted to watch. There were some people in the room too. Moreover, you can watch the recordings of them. They're available on our website. Now we're gonna move over to go through the actual numbers, and Dennis will help me with that.
Thank you, Per. As Per mentioned, NAV came in at $691 million for Q3, which is a fair value change of approximately $169 million quarter-over-quarter, and corresponds to $6.01 per share or SEK 67.9 per share. In USD terms, the NAV is down roughly 19%, while in SEK terms we're down about 10%. The difference is driven by FX tailwinds as the Swedish krona has depreciated against the dollar during the quarter. When looking at the main drivers of the fair value change during the quarter, our listed holdings Swvl and Babylon were the biggest contributors. Swvl was down 87%, which is roughly $81 million on the VNV NAV.
This is primarily driven by PIPE shares having been registered for trading in the beginning of July, which caused a large imbalance between supply and demand and subsequently caused a downward pressure on the stock. Babylon was down roughly 52% during the quarter. During the actual quarter there were no major news other than probably a continued funding overhang, which has, as Per mentioned, now been addressed through the announced PIPE funding of $80 million and the planned asset sale that was announced after the end of the quarter.
Among our private holdings, the main drivers were first and foremost Voi, which we marked down an additional 10% from our Q2 NAV, primarily driven by us increasing the discount that we apply to the peer group median multiple. In the case of Voi, it was to reflect general market uncertainty. There were some additional markdowns across the portfolio, main ones being when going from valuing a holding based on the most recent transaction to valuing it on the back of peer model. As a reminder, a transaction is typically valid for a year, unless market volatility makes the valuation go stale earlier.
During Q3, we moved over to a model for some of our larger holdings, such as, but not limited to, Bokadirekt and Wasoko, despite these transactions being less than one year old. From the Q3 NAV report and onwards, the vast majority of our holdings are valued based on a peer model. Cash for Q3 is roughly $97 million when including liquidity management, $90 million when excluding liquidity management. That's up from roughly $70 million or $77 million in Q2. When deducting the already announced investment into Babylon, our cash position is roughly $70 million per Q3 or per these first two weeks of Q3. $77 million when including liquidity management.
On the right-hand side, you see our debt position, which is primarily the two bonds that we have outstanding. Here, the SEK-USD FX movements as of late have also impacted our position in USD terms, taking it down to roughly $151 million in Q3 versus $171 million in Q2. In terms of main investments during the quarter, there were no big ticket investments done other than a few follow-on investments into Vezeeta, BlaBlaCar and Gett. After the end of the quarter, there was also, as already mentioned, a roughly $20 million investment into Babylon. In terms of exits, we, as Per mentioned, successfully exited our stake in Property Finder.
This was closed in September 2022 and generated proceeds of roughly $39 million. I think I'll stop there and hand it back to you, Per.
Yeah. Just resting on this slide for slightly longer. I think one general comment to make is that just important to point out, and I've made this point sort of in these sort of write-ups that we have these last couple of quarters, that whereas we value or you know pretty much all these companies on the back of a model today, that model takes its inputs from a listed peer group. All of those are trading in common shares, which is full upside, but full downside also, just a normal equity instrument. We apply a discount, typically 10%-30% on top of that.
Whereas in fact we have most of these unlisted holdings in the portfolio, which is all of them apart from Swvl and Babylon, are pretty much all of them we hold the most senior preferred shares, and those preferred shares are you know take debt-like qualities on the downside, which you know has our NAVs reporting yielding a slightly too conservative scenario. One thing here, for example, on this slide, you got Wasoko, which is an investment that we did pretty much all of it like earlier this year. Now we've taken that down by 40%, which is you know the value of the company if you look at you know the best peer group we can come up with.
In fact, all of our shares there are very you know are the most senior preferred shares. There's no way you know the company at this moment of time at least. I mean, there's risk with everything, but we think the risk is on the upside here. The point I'm trying to make is that the preferred shares we hold are nowhere near where they're not at full value. 40% markdown here is yeah is too much. You get the point. This is the way we value our you know our holdings and we I guess you could say that we're debating if we should move over to what could be described as more industry standard, which is to go through a waterfall.
You would sort of pick up the actual instrument that you hold in these different companies. There's pluses and minuses with everything. If we are to err, we'd like to err on the conservative side rather than the other way around. The other point I just wanted sort of to highlight here, and Dennis you walked us through that, but for those of you who've been following our cash movements, there is. We had $70 million of cash at the end of June, plus liquidity management, which is still there, the $7 million. We've added on cash of about $40 million from the proceeds of the exit of Property Finder.
We made investments of roughly $10. On top of that, of course, we have Babylon. The difference that you may find there is essentially OpEx, coupon, and 1 or 2 sort of one-off costs that we've had. That will give you a good picture on the movement in cash from last quarter to now, hopefully. Good. If you move to the next slide, I just thought I'd sort of highlight a little bit on the you know, give you an update on the actual portfolio companies. This is our portfolio. You'll recognize it.
The main difference here is that Babylon, due to its stock being down like 95% up until the 30th of September. It's moved up slightly on the back of this financing or quite a bit. It is still down to some 2%. On the whole here, we can go into sort of more details if at the Q&A. Voi, as we wrote in this report, was EBITDA positive in August. I think it's, and this company obviously differs from month to month. There's some aspects of seasonality especially in the Nordics around this.
I think this is a good sort of sign that this company is where this company in general is at. Very positive. That's a result of some cost cutting, but is also a result of this company just continuing to perform well. BlaBlaCar is maybe a standout in the portfolio as of this quarter. I worry or I sense maybe is a better way to put it that the risk here on the mark is on the upside. This is a company that you'll know, but this has got very large elements of countercyclicality in it. It's cost sharing, which is something that people are more prone to do in tougher times than in good times.
Moreover, this is cost sharing around the price of petrol, which of course is at very high levels around Europe today. This company is really performing very well, EBITDA positive for the latter part of this year, will be profitable next year. Again, I think the risk here is on the upside. We, I mean, in terms of our mark. Here again, I mean, we fail, as per the previous slide, to sort of pick up in the way we go about valuing our companies, the fact that we hold senior preferred shares here. Not only, but a lot of our exposure is to senior preferred shares.
The mark that we have, which is derived by looking a little bit, you know, maybe too much backwards or too much at a situation which still has remnants of COVID when, of course, business was very slow for this company. Even at that mark, you know, those preferred shares are still sort of 100% good in terms of mark. There's that technical sort of upside in this as well. Get financial restructuring done, EBITDA positive, so in a very good place. Booksy has moved up in this report.
We moved it to a model from a transaction, and it's simply that we had it we carried it too low, even when taking into account that the peer group that we use for their model has of course traded down. HousingAnywhere keeps on nibbling away at the European market. They're consolidating the European market for medium and long-term rentals. The last acquisition was their largest French competitor called Studapart. So performing very well. Similar to Numan, Breadfast, Babylon, we mentioned a little bit before, this is of course one where when we spoke in this format a year ago, it would have been our largest position, larger than Voi.
Now it's down here, driven by the stock falling severely over the course of this, you know, these last 12 months, really. A lot of that, I think, has to do with that the company entered its public life or public listed life with a financing deficit that was manageable in the sort of first quarter or two. When sort of cost of capital started rising on the back of the war in Ukraine and the inflation worries, et cetera, the funding risk and the actual point when the company would run out of cash became closer and closer.
This had inflicted sort of pain on the company shareholder by the stock falling. We're very enthusiastic about having the opportunity to invest more in this company at these sort of levels. It's sort of levels that are reminiscent of where we first invested in 2017. That's despite the fact that the company has sort of developed immensely since those days, which was essentially pre any revenue. The company's guiding to the order of a billion-dollar revenue this year, up from a little bit more than $300 million last year. A completely new company. We think that the company here is probably a standout again in terms of risk reward in our portfolio.
We think it's in the interest of our shareholders that we take the opportunity to fund the company at that, which is also what we've done now as per the announcement earlier this week. This $80 million, together with the proceeds from the future exit of their IPA network in California, will get this company until profitability, which of course takes away the financing risk of the company. Of course, the exit of that asset is not done yet. From what we understand, there's good demand for those type of assets in the U.S.
The type of valuations that you'd expect from it will leave the company with a buffer to get to profitability if you include this $80 million as well. Furthermore, the company is performing a split or an inverted split so that it gets to above that dollar threshold mark, which is so important when you're trading on the New York Stock Exchange. That's also something that will open up the company for U.S. investors where large category are prohibited in investing into these companies, which are, I don't know if you call them penny stocks or what you do. We'd expect that to sort of, you know, more.
I mean, the funding risk being taken away is of course more important because that's a real fundamental development of the company taking that risk away. There's technicalities around it also, like this reverse stock split that we think will be positive for the company. I think if you could take us to the next slide, Dennis. Not much change in terms of how the difference from macro themes and sectors stack up here. Mobility, marketplace, digital health still the largest ones. Emerging markets have come off a little bit as a percentage of the overall portfolio. It's quite a small part.
If you go to the next slide, we call our Avito's of tomorrow or our Voi's of tomorrow. Now that Avito has this bad sort of Russian-sounding name. Essentially sort of we think our future sort of home runs are already in the portfolio, and they're sort of in the shadows of the Voi's and the BlaBlaCars that are arguably more important for the performance of our portfolio in the shorter term.
When we speak in this format or in any format a couple of years from now, we think that some of the holdings that are now hidden in that other part will in fact be much more much larger and having much more impact about the short-term development of our share price during the course you know at that point in time. I sometimes get a feeling that the discount that we trade at is partly attributable to this part of the portfolio. Where I can sort of sense that from a distance people may say that this portfolio is questionable what it's worth.
There's a lot of companies, difficult to get insight into them and cost of capital has gone up. It's yeah. Then that yields sort of an uncertainty that one could argue maybe has an impact on our discount. We've created this slide and just to sort of highlight a few of the companies here, because my view is that this part of my portfolio is by no means worth anything less than where we have it marked because. Certainly not sort of zero. These are companies that are, you know, mature, growing fast, their products are in demand, they're well-funded, 60 of them all in all. Yeah, there'll be a few of them that don't make it.
We have a sense of who they are, and they're pretty small. The big ones and some of them, some big and some small, we have highlighted here are performing very well, basically. Bokadirekt is a very mature marketplace or booking platform for the beauty industry in Sweden. HungryPanda is the food delivery platform for Chinese communities outside of China. Flo is the world's largest period tracker with 50 million subscribers, most of them in the U.S. OLIO is this food waste community platform which we funded together with Delivery Hero. NoTraffic, Israeli company around the software that changes the way traffic lights are monitored.
Humanly is HR tech around improving an AI platform that improves the way you do job interviews. Rekki, a marketplace between providers of raw material for restaurants and restaurants. Alva, one of our favorites, highlighted also in my intro to this report because the management has been joined by Christopher Norman, who many of you will know from the days of him running Avito. He's joined Alva, which is also again an HR company based on data rather than the CV antiques that we have been used to. He's joined that company as a CEO. Sort of very solid, very well-funded companies. Finally, before we go to Q&A, just to highlight on the next page, yeah.
Our NAV is halved since the beginning of this year. As Dennis was talking about, it's now mark to market as if it was all common shares to a listed peer group. It's come off. We're not sellers of these companies at these levels, but this is the way our accounting sort of standards works, and this is where we mark them. We think we maybe have erred on the conservative side here because of the nature of the preferred shares. Despite that, we trade at nearly a 70% discount to that NAV, which has created some turnover in the stock. We have some changes in the cap table, and it's interesting to see.
I think with that, we'll stop this, and then we'll move over to Q&A session. Yeah. Please send them through to the Zoom Q&A function, and we'll sort of take them one by one. Dennis, if you could get us started on this, that'd be great.
Yes. Happy to. I guess the first question is on our $97 million in cash and liquidity. Obviously $20 million has been invested into Babylon, as we mentioned. Question is here, what do we plan to do with the remaining $77 million that we have? What's our view on buybacks, given the current discount? And how do you view a buyback of the bond at current levels as well?
The $77 million is the cash that we'll have then post yeah you know the investment into Babylon and about a $10 million aggregated investment into the other part of the portfolio. As per my guidance of about $40 million you know needed for the existing portfolio to get funded there's 10 left of that. That would be you know this is our estimates but we're close to these companies so we think it's fairly accurate. That would be one maybe priority number one use of cash. Moreover of course, it costs about $10-$12 million to run the company every year. We got our coupons to pay.
We have to preserve some cash for that. Beyond that, it's very difficult to find new investments that measure well against our own stock, to be frank. If we can buy our own portfolio at a 7% discount, it's very hard to find something that measures well against that. Now we have some limitations on what we can do in our own stock because it's essentially a dividend. We've got our bonds outstanding, and we've got some covenants that limits to what we can do there. In general, buybacks is always on the table for us, especially when we look at a new investment. Again, new investments becomes less prioritized.
If something fantastic comes along, that's sort of at a bigger discount than 70% of our NAV, we'll of course look at that. So far we haven't found that. Yes, I mean, our debt at some point should be repaid. Constantly watching where that debt is trading as well. Next question.
Yes. Sorry, here we go. Why has the debt holdings in BlaBlaCar been revalued during the quarter?
Yeah, it's good. Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe, Dennis, you could flick us through to that more detailed portfolio slide. The convertible that we hold in BlaBlaCar is a convertible at some price into equity. Whereas we've before been carrying it at sort of the nominal value, well, in this quarter, actually, we've marked BlaBlaCar up, but we marked it up from a level which is still below the sort of floor of that convertible, if that makes sense. That's convertible at, like, EUR 9.5 per share.
We have it marked lower, so the negative $12.5 million is the difference from where we will get equity and where we have it marked. The way it's carried now is more correct if you like, and you know, the way we mark our portfolio, how we value our portfolio. However, the convertible that we have converts into, again, senior preferred shares. It does have debt-like qualities on the downside. If you would value this debt on the back of a waterfall, you would put that $12.5 million straight back. But I hope that explains how that sort of $12.5 million comes about.
Excellent. Another question specific to VNV is how much of our cash, of the VNV cash position is held in dollars as opposed to SEK, probably due to the FX movements, and what impact that is having?
Most of it's held in dollars, but we do hold some in cash. We're not currency speculators, which would be scary if we were, because that's difficult, at least for us. Most of it's held in dollars, but we do hold some in SEK because we have costs in SEK, and we have a coupon to pay in SEK. Our cash balance has come off, and that's part of the one-offs that I described in you know, making sense of how the cash sort of has moved up and down. The cash in dollar terms have come off a little bit also due to FX.
Of course, in terms of the net debt position in the company has improved because we have more debts in Swedish crowns than we have cash in Swedish krona.
Excellent. Thank you. Another question, more broad stroke question. Can you discuss consumer behavior and how it affects our largest holdings? Probably elaborating on that question is, are there any concrete examples of shifting consumer behavior that we've seen so far in our larger portfolio companies?
I mean, I think the question sort of alludes to that if there's a risk on the downside on the consumer. I think the obvious one that sort of strikes me is that the main sort of risk here is on the upside with BlaBlaCar because that consumer is very cost sensitive, and they want to share costs, so that's been performing well. Beyond that, sort of getting on the upside, all the other companies are performing well, right? Revenues are growing, so we can't really see any consumer sentiments sort of coming off from the back of a down cycle in really any of these sort of portfolio holdings.
That, you know, of course, you know, if the sentiment or the economic sort of pain for the consumer becomes much worse, that may come in the future. I also think that a lot of these companies, they sell products which are cheaper, better, more efficient, et cetera, than alternatives out there. It's not necessarily that you get sort of a negative impact here, because if consumers feel more economic pain, they may opt to move over to Voi instead of taking a taxi or something else. They may move over and use the cheaper sort of platform of, you know, through Booksy, et cetera.
Great. Thank you. Another question, also on the VNV level. What, when do you see the next exit materializing in the portfolio? I think, particularly, any thoughts on the timing of some of the largest holdings such as BlaBlaCar, Voi, Gett, or any other specific name?
It's too early to elaborate on that. I mean, financial restructuring of Gett, of course, is done now, and I think that's an asset that's very attractive for a lot of the obvious players out there. Too early to say. There's bits and pieces in the portfolio where we have that are easy to exit. There's some interest for some parts of the portfolio, some portfolio holdings, and there's some portfolios that will turn into a liquid instrument that would also, you know, that one could sell should one want to. There's bits and pieces here and there. It becomes more.
There are some holdings that I think will be sold in the not too distant future, at least if you allow too distant future to be defined as sort of 6-9 months. But it's too early to sort of talk about them in any sort of detailed form. Then one can speculate. We're not certainly not sort of eager to exit things like BlaBlaCar. One can imagine that there will be an increasing interest for some of those type of assets.
Excellent. Specific question on Voi. How do you see competition from scooter ownership? I think private ownership of scooters versus shared scooters.
Do you wanna take that, Eitan?
I'll take a stab at that. I think as Voi is, it's a matter of shifting consumer behavior from using, as Per mentioned, that taxi or that, you know, sometimes it could even be some public transport solutions, to moving over to micromobility solutions, so light electric vehicles. To answer the question, so far, we haven't seen or heard any, you know, major impact from private ownership cannibalizing on the shared side. If anything, it's probably a good sign that more and more consumers are considering these micromobility solutions. Another aspect to that as well is that the use cases are quite different.
With a shared vehicle, you don't have to, you know, you don't have to care about the hassle of actually moving the vehicle in and out of building. You don't actually have to keep track of the vehicle at all time versus, you know, a shared vehicle that you can use to go to, it may be a restaurant, to your job, to the gym, whatever it may be. The use cases also differ. But on the whole, it's definitely seen as a positive when more and more consumers are shifting towards micromobility solutions rather than combustion engine, you know, taxis or cars, for that matter. I think we have covered most of the questions that have come through.
There's one question on the ownership of Gett after the restructuring. Is there any more light you can shed on that, Per? Or when can we do so?
You know, for sure in our annual report, which is out, well, in like March, I think. Maybe earlier. At this point in time, we're not at liberty to do that. I think we'll have to leave it at that. We are the largest owner in the company. All right.
Thanks.
Well, if that concludes the questions, thank you so much for joining us. I promise not to bore you with any more Bruce Springsteen lyrics. Someone said I should use Kendrick Lamar next time around. We'll see. Thank you for joining us. You know where to find us if you wanna kick some other stuff around. Otherwise, we'll see you in three months. Thanks.