Okay. With that, I think we are set. Very warm welcome to the VNV Global conference call for the first quarter report of 2023. Today our CEO and Managing Director, Per Brilioth, and I, Dennis Mohammad, Investment Manager at VNV, will walk you through the financials and key events of the quarter. Per and I will hold a presentation followed by a Q&A where we welcome you to type in your questions in the dedicated Zoom chat. After the presentation, we will address questions. With that, I hand it over to you, Per.
Thanks, Dennis, and thanks everyone for joining on this quarterly call. I think there's a lot of familiar faces and in the participant list here. I guess all of you know what we do, but in terms of just a very short intro, we invest into companies with network effects. We define network effects as the product that the company sells becomes better with every new user. That's the first check in the box. Second is that the markets have to be large for them to sort of at some point make sense in our portfolio size-wise. We're looking for founders that even I've spoken about this many times.
We don't have an ABC, the founders that we're looking for really has to sort of possess certain characteristics because the journey is long and sometimes hard. We spend a lot of time trying to understand that the founders that we're involved with are of a certain quality. The portfolio is 70 companies strong. The 70 names in the portfolio. Again, we look for companies with network effects and bottom-up, we have found ourselves in three main sort of themes or sectors, which is mobility, digital health, and also marketplaces. There may be a fourth one coming up, which is climate. All of these fit very well into an ESG format. I'll come back to that.
We're sort of trying to up our game in explaining where this fits in into an ESG format. It's very topical and important now. The NAV performance has over these past 10, now nearly 11 years since we became a pure investor or investor into purely sort of unlisted companies is just shy of 90%, 18.5. If you go to the next page, this quarter will go into much more details, but the NAV at the end of the quarter, which ended Friday, and by the way, I sort of challenge anyone to come up with a company that has done this faster, including a weekend and so we're just four days into the new quarter.
Well, the last quarter as of last Friday, ended with an NAV for us at just shy of $700 million, $697 million to be exact, which equates to $6.1 per share or SEK 63 per share. It's up 14% quarter-on-quarter in U.S. dollar terms and slightly below that in Swedish crowns. The reason for us being this fast is the ongoing rights issue. This rights issue, as all rights issues requires prospectus. We wanted to base that prospectus on a very fresh set of numbers.
As per the, you know, the schedule that we had communicated before we were due to report like 19th or 20th of April. We put that we made a little earlier in order to base the prospectus that you'll all get in a couple of weeks based on sort of very fresh numbers. That's also the big event for this quarter, that we are buying a block of BlaBlaCar shares, EUR 25 million worth of BlaBlaCar shares. We're funding that with the rights issue, which is priced at markets. Market moves around a bit, little bit, but SEK 20 per share. That I guess that's unusual.
Rights issues are typically priced with a discount to market. We wanted to make sure that this was priced at market. Now, the market price of our stock, as you well know, is at a large discount to NAV. We want to also make sure that this financing was one that all shareholders could pick up in a pro rata fashion. Hence a rights issue, and so that everyone has the right to pick up their pro rata share of the issue. But in the usual sort of way here in Sweden, these rights will be traded. I'll come back to that. For every seven shares you own, you'll get a preferential right to buy one new share.
That adds, I think it's roughly 16 million new shares to the company, which will be sold at SEK 20 a share. Of these shares, just under 40% has been formally committed. In addition to that, our third-largest shareholder, Baillie Gifford, has expressed its intention to take up its pro rata share, which is another 5.5% of the rights issue. Yeah, that's the order of things. The rest that's not spoken for, we have received guarantee commitments, which we paid a little bit for. That's in order to sort of get this transaction sort of fully underwritten so that we could be firm in our acquisition versus the sellers of these secondary shares in BlaBlaCar.
I'm taking up my full pro rata, as are my colleagues. That equates to about SEK 5 million, 1.6% of the company. I'll speak much more about BlaBlaCar since it's not only before this transaction, our largest holding, but also one that's become much more topical around this. Basically, we have come across sellers of BlaBlaCar shares that have been I don't want to call it a distressed situation, but a pressed situation for liquidity. We've been able to sort of take advantage of that situation and to purchase these shares at a discount that makes sense, even if you compare it to the kind of discount that we trade at in our stock.
It's exact, everything moves around, but that's sort of the general thinking behind the pricing of this and which makes it a, I think a transaction that's absolutely in all our shareholders' interest that we do and finance in this way. The other thing which is tiny by comparison, or but, you know, of main events during the quarter is that we have one of our portfolio companies has been acquired by its larger peer. This is Kavall, which would be best described as a quick commerce player in the sort of, you know, the digital retail grocery area. They've been acquired by their larger peer, Mathem, which with this acquisition sort of deepens their offering also into the quick commerce things.
We own a small percent of the combined company post this merger. We're very bullish about the macro behind both of these companies, in that, you know, we believe groceries will basically be transacted retail digitally as we go along. There's like a lot of growth gonna come out of this space. We're exposed in a small way, percentage-wise, of the portfolio and also of this company. It gives us a seat at the table, which we'll be monitoring carefully as we go along. I just thought I'd sort of remind everyone about BlaBlaCar for the reasons before.
If you go to the next page, just at a glance, this is a global company, and it's a global leader in its space of initially carpooling, but maybe best described as a marketplace for long-distance travel, with, I mean, over 100 million members in 22 countries. I mean, just the sheer scale of that is enormous. In France, this is a French company, and France is where they've been at it the longest and where they're most mature. It's as much as 15% of the adult population are not only members, but they're active users.
The number of members is a larger percentage, but active users is that large of a subset of the entire adult French population, which I think is a very good indicator of how deep this product can entrench itself into a very modern society like the French one. And furthermore, it's also got very topical characteristics to it that it's not only a sharing economy, but it's also one that benefits, goes the right direction and is directly beneficial for the climate. It fills empty seats on the road and it saves a lot of carbon.
1.2 million tons of CO2 was avoided last year by just filling all these empty seats. That's something that's increasingly become something that is also being able to monetize into real cash, predominantly in France today, but very likely everywhere where they operate in the future, because it's such a, it's such an easy way for politicians to sort of do something about the climate situation that we have in a way which only benefits taxpayers. But the sort of the tailwinds for BlaBlaCar as this sort of, as this picture tries to sort of capture is one of a sharing economy, asset sharing, which is starting to become mainstream now.
Airbnb, which is a good peer for BlaBlaCar, but also one, that it's been a benchmark, not only valuation-wise, but also in terms of pointing the direction of that sharing assets is something that larger, and larger sort of population sets are, you know, very not only willing to do, but increasingly looking to do. In the case of BlaBlaCar, you're essentially sharing the car, which, and that cost sharing is very closely sort of tied to sharing the cost of oil, of petrol, essentially energy prices. Now that those prices have this past year gone upwards, and so increased the sort of the interest from travelers, wherever they may be to share that cost.
That's a very strong macro tailwind for BlaBlaCar in addition to the sort of concept of asset sharing, but also that there's monetization to be had from using this platform as a way for politicians to tackle the climate crisis in a way that's, again, beneficial to sort of everyone around and also to BlaBlaCar because it's a monetization tool. The other thing is that part of these 22 countries are also in the sort of subset of emerging markets.
There it's been for a long time now, but people are moving offline to online from going down to the bus station to buy a ticket to booking their bus ticket online, is something that's a very, very strong macro tailwind that BlaBlaCar is in the midst of. If you go to the next page, I think it just becomes so clear when you look at it in this way. If it's a consumer proposition that is just difficult to beat.
If you take your historic alternative to going long distance from a place like Rouen to Nantes in France, 300 km trip, you used to have to engage in four stopovers, where you take three metros or buses to a train station, and you had to change train. There were two trains and then three metros or buses, four stopovers, whereas carpooling in most of the cases is door to door. That's just premium right there. Then these four stopovers basically take nearly double amount of time than this, than the door-to-door trip takes.
In this example, it's 3.5 hours in carpooling versus six hours in that alternative, which is public transport. Even though all of that is premium, this is cheaper by a wide measure. It's just a consumer proposition that is impossible, I'd say, to beat, and hence it's one that's become so popular, which has become so clear. If you go to the next page, I think we've tried to sort of also map out so how the company's been developing. This is a C2C carpooling platform at its core. I put up on the platform that I'm going from this address in Paris to visit my parents in Lyon at 5:00 P.M. on Friday.
Other people who probably live in the same neighborhood, find my trip, my offering on the BlaBlaCar platform and engage to come to my house and get into my car and we travel together to Lyon, we share the cost of the petrol. That's, that's the heart of this business and this very, very vibrant and fast-growing and profitable heart. From that sort of starting point, the company has both expanded the C2C proposition to short distance, more like commutes going from a suburb into the city. That requires a higher tech, so it made sense that that was not the starting point.
It's one that over the last couple of years has grown and where BlaBlaCar is increasingly becoming active also in the form of M&A, where they bought, I guess their only competitor in France, Klaxit, just the other day. You can see on the website the details around that. Also, they basically leverage their existing supply to create new products, which is an even further door-to-door sort of premium product. So that's all that, you know, the C2C product has been increasingly sort of been developed to offer alternatives to the initial sort of heart.
Around that, there is this concept of energy certificates, which is widely adopted now in France, and which is something that's, yeah, just positive all around and good for BlaBlaCar in every way. On the other side of things, from that sort of very liquid marketplace on C2C, they've expanded into also allowing businesses to engage in this marketplace. I think most easily understood to offer business-run supply into the same marketplace in the form of operated buses to attach bus marketplace to it. Not yet available now, but also in the future, getting train supply into this essentially marketplace for long-distance travel.
You can sort of sense that. You know, it's expanding very much into becoming like a marketplace with a much more multifaceted sort of characteristics and multi-modular sort of offerings. Still around the very liquid marketplace for this kind of long-distance travel. These were just a few slides to sort of try to share why we're so, you know, interested in BlaBlaCar and we have been for many years. It's the business model in my portfolio which is most reminiscent of classifieds in that it's, you know, barriers to entry grow so high. It really sort of becomes reminiscent in the concept of winner takes everything that we know so well from classifieds.
Part of the reason why that's possible is also that it's a very fragmented supply offering into a very fragmented demand, and the marketplace in between gives rise to this sort of high barriers to entry and winner takes everything. The rights issue that we're doing to fund this acquisition is already on its way. We announced it a week or so ago. Today we're publishing the report. The last day that you can buy the shares and still get the right to receive the subscription rights is next Friday. That's the 14th of April. So that's the last day when the VNV Global stock trades, including the right to the subscription rights.
Following Monday, on the 17th of April, subsequently, that's the first day when the shares do not include the right to receive the sub-subscription rights for the record date on the 18th of April. We'll publish the prospectus based on these Q1 accounts on the 19th of April. Then we have this usual sort of period when the subscription rights will trade. It's roughly a two-week window, and that's between the 20th and 28th of April, one can trade these subscription rights. When that's done, the subscription period ends on the 4th of May which is also the value date for this, for this new issue.
All of this will be made very, very clear in the prospectus that's coming your way in on the 19th of April. With that, as a long-winding introduction, and apologies for that, I'll hand over to Dennis to run through the actual numbers of the Q1 results. Over to you, Dennis.
Thank you very much, Per. NAV came in at some $697 million per Q1 2023, which amounts to a positive fair value change of roughly $84 million versus Q4 2022, corresponds to $6.1 per share or SEK 63 per share. As Per mentioned, in dollar tems, we are up roughly 14% year-to-date, in SEK terms that number is around 13%. The difference being driven by FX as the Swedish krona has appreciated against the dollar during the quarter. At this NAV per share, our NAV discount is or was around 68% at closing on Friday, so the last day of the quarter, which is up from where we closed the fourth quarter at around 50%.
FX has also had a very minor impact on our debt position in dollar terms, taking it up to around $167 million in Q1 versus $164 million in Q4. That's approximately up 1%. Looking at cash, as per Q1, it is $61 million when excluding liquidity management, and $67 million when including liquidity management. This is down approximately 9% versus Q4 of 2022 at $74 million when including liquidity management. Looking at the main drivers of the fair value change this quarter, starting with our private holdings, the largest driver on the upside is BlaBlaCar, which is up some 45% over the quarter. That has had a $64 million impact on our NAV.
This is on the back of very strong trading among peers. As Per mentioned, as we have communicated earlier, we are planning to do this acquisition of a EUR 25 million block of BlaBlaCar secondaries. However, since the rights issue, as Per made clear now, is not yet completed, the balance sheet in Q1 does not reflect our BlaBlaCar position post buying this new stake. This will be reflected in the Q2 numbers. In the Q2 numbers, you will see the balance sheet including the new stake. The second driver of the right of this quarter is Voi, which is up some 17% over the quarter. That has had a $14 million impact on our NAV.
also this is due to strong trading among peers. Voi closed a record Q1 in terms of rides, revenues, and margins. Just looking at, you know, gross margins in January and February. They were 10 percentage points better than January and February of 2022. They're making huge improvements on their path to profitability, having guided to be EBITDA positive this year. Voi's written up 17%. Also to make it clear, there's been no changes to any peers or anything like that. This is purely driven by the peer group, having traded up. The third one to mention is HousingAnywhere, which is up some 18% over the quarter.
That is a $7 million impact on our NAV on the back of strong trading among peers, but also strong revenue growth in the first quarter, having grown some 40% year-over-year. Beyond that, there's also been an additional write-ups across the portfolio, primarily driven by peers as well, and some smaller transactions, for instance, Breadfast, Booksy, Numan, Bokadirekt, and some other names. In terms of drivers on the downside this quarter, the main ones were in the food delivery space, where we have seen write-downs on both HungryPanda and Borzo, driven by weak trading among peers in this space.
As we know, we don't disclose exact peers, but as an example, Delivery Hero, which is one in this space, is down some 30% year to date, just as a reference. On the listed holdings, the impact has been very limited this quarter. Babylon was down another 25% during Q1, which had a $6 million impact on our NAV. Swvl was down another 61% during the quarter, which only had a $1.2 million impact on our NAV. No major impact from those. In terms of main investments in this quarter, there was a $1.3 million investment into HousingAnywhere.
There was a $1 million investment into Breadfast, another $1 million investment into our portfolio company, Hume, and a few smaller investments and drawdowns as well. There were no exits done in the first quarter of 2023. The last one to mention, which Per's already mentioned, is Kavall having been acquired by Mathem during this quarter, the leading online grocery player in the Nordics. This will have no significant impact on our NAV or on our cash position, even after we have done the small equity investment that we are due to make in the coming months into the combined group. That's it for me. Handing it back to you, Per.
Great. Thanks, Dennis. Just concluding with a few slides of a general nature and then. Yeah, so. The first one being this usual sort of portfolio slide, which looks in many ways similar to the one you saw last quarter. You know, and the changes that Dennis has gone through result in some sort of a little bit different sort of percentages here, but the overall structure of it is virtually the same. We've said before, and that roughly holds true still, that about 40% of this portfolio, maybe a touch more, is EBITDA positive now. Yeah, 40%, 50% even.
Another sort of 40% is EBITDA positive in the next 12 months, and the remaining sort of getting to profitability a little bit later, or after 12 months. The focus across the board is not on revenue growth, but it's on profitability growth, which means sort of, you know, growing the existing profitability like the ones I just mentioned. BlaBlaCar is, of course, one, Gett is another. Also moving to profitability and in some situations at the expense of revenue growth. That's the focus across the board of the portfolio. We'd like to highlight, as we often do, just the other part.
On the next slide, you'll see sort of, there's 60 names in this other part of the portfolio, which has gone down a little bit percentage-wise in terms of its percentage of the overall portfolio. Here's a few of these 60 names. Some companies are very young, but a lot of them are, you know, and certainly in terms of size of this part of the portfolio are companies like Bokadirekt, which is, which is profitable, Flow, which is just a $100 million company in terms of revenues. NoTraffic, which is sort of, you know, finalizing a raising now, which is above our mark, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, again, without the ability to, in this context, as we go into the detail of every single one, wanna just really convey that this is not a portfolio that was just built on the fumes of the very sort of expansive liquidity period that we've been through. These are companies which have a product that their customers pay money for and that are very sort of carefully run businesses, and that are, you know, in many cases, getting funded despite the sort of tough environment that we are in. We'd like to sort of, if we flick to the next page, just to spend a few pages sharing with you how to sort of map up this portfolio in terms of ESG.
It's something that people we've or us here, we've felt for a long time that we're not an ESG investor, but everything we do has an impact in, you know, in either the E or the S or the G or all three of them. On this slide, we mapped up the portfolio by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. As you can see here, as much as over 60% of the portfolio fits very well into the goal of making cities and communities more sustainable. Of course, you know, is populated by holdings like BlaBlaCar and Voi.
But also as you move down to going to you know, decent work, economic growth, health and wellbeing, et cetera, are also large constituents in our portfolio if you just map them up by these development goals. Then going specifically into the climate part of things, if you go to the next page, you can divide the portfolio up into two basically, where half the portfolio has no direct impact on the climate. Certainly no negative impact, but no direct positive impact, like Booksy, for example, or Bokadirekt, which is a booking platform for the beauty industry. It does have an effect in one of these UN Sustainable Development Goals, but if you go specifically to climate, it has no direct impact.
On the other hand, the other half of the portfolio has a direct positive climate impact. Again, mobility and BlaBlaCar and Voi are big names here, make up the bulk of that. There's also asset sharing, sustainable consumption, food waste in one of our favorite companies, which is Olio, et cetera, et cetera. So 50% of the portfolio, positive impact on the climate. If you go to the next page, since we come from being marketplace investors, the concept of circular economies is very embedded into what we invest into. It is very embedded into the nature of the companies that we invest into.
It's, you know, Classifieds is basically trading secondhand goods. I think, you can see here how the circular sort of concept is through reduce, reuse, and recycle in these different sort of segments where our portfolios, you know, a large part of our portfolio fits very well into this concept of circular economies. I think, like the founders of Olio put it very well, in that they are a marketplace, a community based around food waste. Since that business model hinges very much on a hyperlocal network effects around in the hyperlocal concept.
Like, they phrased it very well, I think, that the future consumption is secondhand and it's hyperlocal, and they're in the middle of that. That's just one part of this. We'll share these slides with you and take any questions on them as we go along. If we leave the ESG part of the presentation and go back to the usual sort of slides that we go with, you can see that our NAV has, for the first time since, well, is it 2021, has had its first uptick for a long, long time. As Dennis has explained, it's very much driven by the peers of the companies that we are invested into.
Despite that sort of uptick, our stock is still at a historically very high discount to that NAV. I'll just flick through the next couple of slides to see if there's anything that we haven't talked about. The next one is on BlaBlaCar. We spent some time on this, we can come back to this if there are any sort of questions. If you go to the next page, we have Gett. Gett is EBITDA positive last year, continues to be that now. There's not that much news around the company during the course of the first quarter of 2023. The trend of growing profitability is still there and accelerating.
We're very active, as you know now, we own nearly half of the company and remain very active around every aspect of the company, supporting management, of course. We're not running the company. It's got an excellent management, based in Israel and in the U.K., running it. Voi, also on the next page, we have, we've talked about, I think maybe the main... I mean, it's just doing very, very well. I'm not gonna repeat stuff that we've talked about in the report, but its first quarter of 2023 is the strongest in the company's history in terms of rides, revenues, margin profile. Everything is going in the right direction.
The company has also been very active around managing its cost base. In December last year, it reduced its cost base, which helped the company take it to EBITDA profitability for the full year of 2023. Now, those of you who follow the space of e-scooters closely will know that there was an election in Paris just this Sunday, which from a distance may look a little worrisome for the industry at large. We're not worried.
First and foremost, the, this election in Paris, which ended up in the results where, which told the politicians to sort of ban scooters from the city of Paris, is one that's something that we've seen in several other cities, which adopted e-scooters early and had maybe a wild sort of entry into the world of e-scooters, and then sort of had to stop and then, but then launched e-scooters again. This has happened in many other cities like Madrid, Copenhagen, to name a few.
When they were relaunched, they relaunched with better regulations on parking, safety, you know, all the stuff that actually Voi does very well, which has also helped Voi, you know, be the leader in protected market share in terms of holding, you know, winning tenders and holding licenses to run this business in cities across Europe. That leads us to the other aspect of this is that it's also an opportunity for Voi 'cause the three operators that have the licenses in Paris that are currently ending, which is TIER, Lime, and Dott. They also incidentally hold them in London. They are now not likely or, you know, who knows?
You know, they, they lose their licenses, and when this gets relaunched, we don't have a date for that, then I think Voi is a very strong contender. It's, it's also an opportunity, and it's very clear that this will come back to, to Paris. There was a 100,000 voters voted, so a very small subset. You couldn't vote by post, you couldn't vote electronically, so you had to sort of make your way through the rainy sort of Parisian afternoon, Sunday afternoon, and also make your way through many closed streets due to a marathon. The people who went out to vote were the ones who really don't like e-scooters.
You know, the people who, you know, made 20 million sort of trips during the course of 2022, did not vote, and they will want their scooters back. Anyway, that's a long winding sort of comment, I guess, on Voi and Paris. I think we'll stop with that and then open up for Q&A. If we could take us back to the portfolio slide, I think that's a good starting point for the Q&A. Dennis, if you could organize the Q&A, that'd be great.
Absolutely. We've gotten a few questions in the Zoom chat. Please feel free to write if you have any, if you haven't done so yet. First question on BlaBlaCar. We say that BlaBlaCar has doubled revenues and gross profits in 2022. Can we comment on how much of that is organic and what type of revenue growth we expect going forward?
Yeah. None of that is organic. Or I mean, sorry. 100% is organic. So they did do an acquisition, a small acquisition, but an important one, extending the reach in short-distance carpooling. That was done very, very recently. For the course of 2022, that's all organic. We not quite at liberty to sort of, you know, in this sort of broad context, sort of discuss growth rates.
To give you a sense, we expect the company to grow a lot on revenues, but even more on earnings, even though maybe not quite at the annual sort of pace that we saw in 2022, 'cause then you're comparing to 2021, which is still a year affected by COVID when this business was very slow. High growth rates, although a touch slower than the 2022 numbers, I think is a broad enough comment.
Thank you. Another question on BlaBlaCar. We do a 45% increase in the fair value of BlaBlaCar in this quarter. And that's, as we've commented already, driven by multiples. A question here is this driven by peer share price performance or changes to the peer group?
The peer groups have stayed absolutely the same. It's just that that peer group, the multiples of that peer group has traded well during this first quarter of 2023.
Great. Thank you. Another question, not specific to BlaBlaCar, but of more the composition of the portfolio. The top three holdings make up over 50% of our NAVs, and what are your thoughts or what are our thoughts on this concentration, and do we want to, in any way, increase diversification? What's our view there?
We don't build our portfolio out of a diversification perspective. For those of you who've been with us for longer, you remember that in 2018, we had like 60%-70% in one name only. That was just a result of that name growing a lot in value in relative terms to the rest of the portfolio. It didn't make sense for us to sort of sell that in order to make it a smaller part of the portfolio. If it makes...
If it's in the interest of our shareholders to want to hold on to the stock, for example, on BlaBlaCar now, if that sort of would double everything else that is the same, it will obviously be a much, much larger part of the portfolio. There will be less diversification. If we think it still makes sense to hold on to BlaBlaCar, then we, you know, we will, that's what we'll do. We're not gonna sort of manage it, sort of to have a portfolio where there's a max 20% stake or et cetera. Having said that, we think there are many benefits to have, you know, not only, you know, for our company not to be, you know, very concentrated on one name.
I think you as our shareholders appreciate sort of that there's a general theme that I think is, you know, that is very, very strong. Very strong moats around this concept of network effects. We've got lots of defensibility on the downside while still having sort of very high growth prospects. That theme is the one that we concentrate on, but that we have maybe a bit, you know... Diversification is good, even though it's not how we run the portfolio. I think where we come from is... I mean, we've been around a long time, so but what I was gonna say is that we come from...
We're in this space because we are part of setting up what became this, you know, one of the largest classified players in the world. Whilst that was being built up, there were other classified players to look at. You could Even if it was like early days and many people didn't really look at classifieds in the mid-2000s, it was still a concept that was very, it was clear on. It was an established business model, is I guess what I'm trying to say. That is something that is present in large parts of this portfolio, that Booksy has a very established business model across the world.
Bokadirekt is one peer, for example. We know and people can understand how they work and how they make money. That's obviously a lower risk investment. There's lower risk connected to those type of investments compared to when you go into something where there's no established business model to look at. Sometimes those investments work out well and sometimes they don't. We have examples of both in our portfolio. What I'm getting at, I think, is that we will endeavor to sort of be...
We're more careful when there's no established business model is where. That's the atmosphere in the room, especially after this sort of a little bit bruising or very bruising sort of period that we've been through over these past 12-18 months. Anyway, sorry, long, winding, maybe more philosophical, answer to that specific question. I'll shut up now and let... What else, Dennis?
There's one other question on Voi and if there are any other cities that are planning referendums similar to the one that we saw in Paris. I can take that one, Per, if you want. I would say the short answer is no. We don't see any other cities doing this. There might be some spillover effects obviously in France, but no one has really announced any such intentions. On the contrary, I would say we're seeing city after city in Europe moving towards a tendered model, so issuing a tender where you restrict the number of players to one, two, or three. Basically one to three operators are allowed to operate in a city.
You know, all operators submit a application where they are judged based on their performance on safety, sustainability, and parking. Those are the three main criteria. That is really the most orderly fashion to regulate the scooters, and something all operators really agree on and 'cause it's better for the users, it's better for the cities, but it's also better for the operators. On the contrary, we're actually seeing a regulatory trend that's positive. I think Paris is probably the odd one out here. Back to you, Per. A question on both Babylon and on Swvl. Any update that we can give on those two? They're obviously listed, so we're a bit more restricted on what we can share.
If there are anything we can share.
Those two companies are listed, any information that's relevant to those are present at their websites or in their communication. There's really nothing more to add to that in this context, just because the nature of those listings. That's frustrating. I think that's the way we have to
Clear
Yeah, have to play that.
Thank you. Is there any update on raising third-party funds? I assume this is a reference to the, to the fund that we announced in the Q4 report that we are planning on raising.
Yes. That's very much getting going. We have received all the necessary regulatory approvals from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority that you need to run that type of money. That was turned around at record speed, which we were very positively surprised by. Now we're in the final innings of putting together the material for that launch, for which we have received quite some interest. We're very positive on the getting that closed up over the coming sort of period, a quarter or two. Good update there. Not yet closed, but looking good.
Excellent. I think we have two last questions as it looks right now. One is, if you could elaborate, Per, on the statement around, you know, the, basically the closing statement of the quarterly report and the introduction around VNV becoming an investment house that's debt-free and having a cash flow generating asset in the future. Is there any more flavor you can add to that, basically?
Color I can add to that? No.
Color. Sorry.
That's been an ambition for a long time. In many ways, we were hoping that Avito would become that. In fact, it was. I think in the final year that we held it, I think we were due to get, like, a $20 million dividend stream, which was up by some, I don't know, 50% since the year before. You know, with $20 million, you could fund a lot of new Vois, basically. You could probably fund four or five new Vois by the, you know, by the size of the Voi's first funding round, which we took half. If we only take half, then you could fund a lot more.
that's the best structure of the kind of work that we do, to have one portfolio holding sort of develop into a cash flow source of cash flow through dividend streams. We have several in the portfolio now. Maybe I think BlaBlaCar probably stands out as one that could very well become that. You know, it's profitable. It's a true marketplace. You know, it could very well become that sort of source of dividend streams, which then funds not only OpEx, but also investments into new areas.
In parallel to that, I mean, we do have debt today, but our financial strategy is to have no debt, and we only allow ourselves to take on debt as a bridge to an exit. Not to go raise equity to fund new investments when we sort of have good visibility on an exit in the future. That's the background to why we have debt. We don't have debt to sort of juice up the, you know, use for leverage and to juice up the returns. We think the kind of work we do will provide enough returns. We don't need leverage for that.
There are companies in the portfolio that are in an exit phase, which where the plan is very much to use those exits to retire the debt. Nothing is sold yet, and so that, you know, that has to sort of be achieved first. The ambition is to live under our financial strategy, which is not to use debt. That's the other point of this. Like, just to try to, you know, remind ourselves and you as our investors of how we'd like to and how we aim. Our ambition is to design the structure of this company to be debt-free, to have a cash flow generating asset that allows us to take risk in younger companies.
That balance, I think is very, very good. I also think the nature of the, you know, of our capital structure of permanent capital is one that I think will be. It's very attractive, and where we can attract talent in the form of founders and operators and investors in different sort of formats.
Maybe it's through funds and maybe it's through the balance sheet, but I like to think of it as an investment house that I think is modern and will basically evolve, you know, I think exactly down the line where capital markets where our little part of capital markets are moving, you know, the same direction as these capital markets are moving in a very general way. I think that's maybe hopefully a little bit more color on that last last note.
Thank you for that, Per. The last question that we have and that we have time for is. It's really two questions, but I think one is how much cash is needed to support portfolio companies, but then also how are we seeing deal flow evolving and are we seeing, you know, attractive investment opportunities in this market? How do we see capital allocation because of that? I would say one is probably the existing portfolio, and another one is allocating to new ones.
Yeah. In existing portfolio, there's like a $10 million-$15 million cash reserve that we have that, you know, that we modeled the size of it that's needed across the portfolio. Which sort of takes, you know, the receivers of that cash essentially to cash flow positive as well. That's the size of that. The second question was relating to?
How we are seeing, deal flow evolving in the market.
Deal flow. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, deal flow. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, the best companies are also the best companies because they don't have to raise money when there is when the markets are this volatile. That's one factor. The other factor is I think is that. Or that's one aspect of deal flow that there, you know, there's an absence of that type of deal flow. If you wanna increase exposure and take advantage of volatile markets in the very best companies, you basically have to go to secondaries. I think our transaction in BlaBlaCar is a good example of where there may be holders who have a very high desire or need for cash.
That can get you to a pricing which is attractive enough for us to invest into. On a general note, sort of where our, where our NAV is, you see some opportunities. That's not good enough for us. We need opportunities that are priced alongside our stock. And those are pretty rare, but we endeavor to sort of pick up the, you know, the ones that make as much sense as BlaBlaCar did in this quarter. I think we have to end there, Dennis. I hope we've answered most of the questions, and if not, please reach out to us directly, and we'll try to help on any outstanding questions.
Thanks for joining. We'll see you in three months in this format.
Thank you.