The idea is that we do 20 minutes of presentation. No, 20 minutes. 20 minutes of presentation, and then 10 minutes of Q&A. That's the general sort of structure, but we can mix it up, I think. I think all speakers are happy to take some questions as we go along, but the general idea is that we present here, and then we go and sit down here. The speaker sits there, and next to the speaker is Amar. Amar is gonna be the moderator for the day. Amar works at Carnegie and covers our stock, and will be the moderator for the day, so you'll see a lot of him. I think that's it.
Yes, if you're watching at home on YouTube and you want to raise a question, you'll find the format on the screen, I think it is. Punch in the question, and my colleague, Dennis, here, he will make sure or try to make sure that your questions are addressed. That's the format. After we finish here, you're all invited up for drinks on the roof, and the weather seems good, so that'll be nice. Yeah. This is the schedule of the day. I'll do a very short intro and then get you exposed to these portfolio companies of ours, six all in all.
All of you know us, VNV Global, and what we do and the structure of our portfolio. I thought I'd sort of introduce on what's on our to-do list, what's high on the to-do list, and it's essentially two things. One is to make sure that we address our debt. As you know, we have one bond maturing in June 2024 and a slightly larger one maturing in January 2025. So that I would classify as top of the to-do list when we all get to work.
Number two is to stay close to the, to the portfolio and make sure that the companies have everything they need to, to sort of, do what they should do, and, and I think in general, as you'll be aware, the, the, the environment is such that you don't want to fundraise, so make sure that you grow, but grow profitably. On the, on the debt situation, as this slide sort of shows, we, we have, $58 million of cash, and the outstanding debt, this is all sort of per the last report, but the outstanding debt at the, at today's FX is, is just over $150 million. So the first bond that matures is in June 2024.
That is about $45 million, so that bond will pay off with the cash that we have. In fact, we've put aside the right amount of Swedish crowns and put it on an account that doesn't quite yield what we pay on the coupon. We pay 5.5% on that bond in a coupon, but close enough, so that's a wash. And then the remaining cash will have to sort of fund OpEx, fund the other coupon, and fund whatever we need to do in the portfolio. So obviously, that's a little tight, but we are also...
We then come to the stuff that we're raising liquidity from the portfolio, so there's some stuff that's pretty easy to sell, which will give us enough to do whatever we need to do in the portfolio, and then the remaining will go to paying off the second bond, which is in January 2025. And, well, until you've sold something, it's not sold, but I must feel very good and confident that we'll be able to. We have some exits in the portfolio that will cover the second bond and a little bit more. So that's the general feeling. So the...
Going to the portfolio and making sure that the portfolio, we can support the portfolio companies in every possible way, I think just high level from a, the overall sort of structure of the portfolio is getting more and more concentrated. In fact, 70% is in five assets as per the June report. We, of course, close September soon, and that report will be out in, I think, the third week of October, but the general picture is about the same. You're starting to get a more and more concentrated portfolio, which is just evolving like it is. In general, the portfolio is growing well, and over the past sort of four years, there's been a 40% CAGR on revenues, so growth is still there.
But what you'll notice year to year is that there's an increasing focus on profitability and to become cash flow positive, and that comes at the expense of high growth. So you'll see that growth from year to year has tailed off a little bit, but it, which is very natural as the companies focus on profitability rather than growth. And if you look across the entire portfolio, we've gone from about 45% EBITDA positive to, if you include Voi, well, getting close to 70% EBITDA positive. We have Voi in another bracket because I think it's the only company in our portfolio where we should really talk about EBIT. And so EBITDA positive now, soon to be EBIT positive, but going in the right direction is the picture we want to show.
The other, I think, more general thoughts, I think we have is also to, which, which we-- well, you've already heard me mention and talk about the portfolio, that, again, it's getting more concentrated, and the larger part of the portfolio is becoming profitable. Profitable growth, I think, is the, is probably what's, what I think markets overall, in good times and bad times, are probably- public markets are most prone to sort of appreciate that kind of maturity. What we've done here, and increasingly, the way we think about the portfolio, is that we put the earlier stage stuff in, in sort of two buckets. One, and we've, we've sorted them, we've arranged them here geographically, so one in an emerging markets bracket, bucket, and the other one in a more sort of Nordic European bucket.
And those two buckets may, over time, become separate vehicles or, you know. But the starting point is to at least think about them as these two buckets. The last slide we had as a very short intro to the company at large is an ownership slide, which is continuously evolving. We're getting more and more Swedish part of the cap table, but our largest shareholder, Acacia, is still the largest shareholder, now followed by Swedish family, who's organized under the holding company, Öhman. And then Back in Black, also Swedish family, slightly smaller, followed by Baillie Gifford. So that's getting close to nearly 50% across those four names. Dennis, you look worried about something or?
No? Oh, you're good. Good. I was just-- I get nervous when he looks around, so, but-
20 minutes ahead of schedule.
Sorry?
We're 20 minutes.
We're 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Okay, so I'm going to have to keep you. I have nothing more to say, really. So, we're waiting for, we're waiting for BlaBlaCar's founder to come, but I think we just rearrange and start with someone else. I see Jordi here. Do you wanna kick off?
Not ready.
Not ready. Okay. Anyone else here?
Oh, Fredrick.
Fredrick's ready. Yeah, Fredrick's around. Yeah. I don't really have any jokes to say, so I never was a stand-up comedian. Are there any, any thoughts about this? Amar, you're usually... No, no, he's quiet, too. Yeah, that's the intro. What else can I say? We have... Yeah, no, the over-- I mean, clearly, the highest on the to-do list for us is to find some stuff in this portfolio that we can sell to pay down the second bond. The first bond is covered, but the second bond, we need to sell some stuff, and I have good conviction that we can.
And I think we've spoken broadly, sort of, about which parts of the portfolio are in a natural exit phase and which ones are not. But the ones that are in a natural exit phase are, we have very good dialogue with people who are interested. Thankfully, pretty much all the companies are doing well and have done this shift from, you know, high growth with cash outflow to little bit slower growth and then profitability. And that makes them more sort of... Well, that makes them more interesting for buyers. I should also say, like we spoke earlier today with one of you, that, I mean, this, there's...
I definitely sense that you look at our market price, we had that slide here, which puts the portfolio market value about $200 million, which compares sort of to the NAV of north of $700 million. You definitely get a feeling, I know the debt plays into this, but the... Going further from that, the market's telling me that there's no way you're going to be able to sell assets at a price that's anywhere near the NAV. And from an arguably quite thin data set, because our portfolio is not the full market, but the transactions that we see in our portfolio, in the secondary space, are at NAV.
So there's some stuff going on in companies where we have opted not to be in an exit phase because we think there's much, much, much higher upside. But here, we see that there are transactions happening that are around our NAV. So doesn't mean that everything will trade at NAV if we kicked it all out today, which we're not. But from where we are, there's a lot of... I mean, there's quite a constructive sort of data coming out of our like tiny part of capital markets. Yeah. So that's encouraging. We have a speaker? Oh, yeah, we do. Here we go. Good. So Nico's here? So yeah, Nico, I Swedish and spoke too quickly.
But, so we're a little bit ahead of schedule, which is good, because I know there'll be a lot of questions for you. But, I think without further ado, I hand over to Nicolas Brusson, who is the founder of. You founded BlaBlaCar, was it back in 2007? With two colleagues, and those colleagues are not—they're not involved at all anymore. They're on the board. They're on the board, but, but you're still here, and you're the CEO. So, over to you.
The slides are just after that, right?
Yeah.
Cool. Thank you. So sorry, I was... I thought it was 1:30, and on French time, 1:30 is more like 1:45. So I'm trying to get used to the Nordics' time zone here. So now I know 1:30 means noon. All right. So, I think probably several of you have heard of BlaBlaCar, or maybe you've seen part of that presentation. So what I'll try to do is to do a pretty high-level presentation and go fairly quickly through the slides on what we do, the economics, the financials, and so on. And I understand we do Q&A after that, right? And we'll take the questions with Nico, who's the CFO, who's joined two years ago now.
Pretty much at the same time, he did that turn positive. I don't know if there is a correlation. Maybe it was positive, we just didn't know. We didn't look, so. All right. Jokes aside, I'd like to start with that slide on the state of the market, which is something that we always presented, like in the early days of BlaBlaCar with Fred and Francis. We always presented that essentially, which is a good reminder that most intercity trip on distance bands between, here we take 100-800 km, but essentially it's true from 50 to close to 800 km, are actually done by car, right? We tend to think that intercity travel is done by, you know, people flying or in Europe, taking the train.
Well, it is, but to a larger extent, it's done by car, and it's used pretty poorly, in a sense that the car occupancy is pretty low, so it's 1.9 people per car. On long distance, it's even worse when you look at shorter distance and commuting. It's the cause of, like, one of the largest CO₂ emission globally. Transport is a big third of the CO₂ emission globally, and within transport, the private car is one of the biggest source of CO₂ emissions. It's a big market, it's a big problem, and, and essentially, it's a big pool of empty seated car we can use and convince people to share those seats.
More generally, the way we position the company today, and you'll see that the business model evolved from just carpooling to a broader marketplace. We want to become that leader of intercity transport, which is a space that's not really taken today, right? So if you think of what we've put here, like city transport, you have many players, but Uber is sort of seen as maybe the category leader in that space. When it comes to hotel, it's Booking, shared accommodation, it's Airbnb. If you think of, again, intercity ground transport, it's still pretty fragmented, and we are one of the two small player amongst other players. So we need to grow, we probably need to consolidate, and essentially cement that spot as the category leader in intercity ground transport.
Lots of mega trends, essentially, that go in our favor. Maybe I'll start from right to left. First, you know, I mean, we all know that, so high energy prices, so it's sort of like the new normal, post-COVID. Frankly, it was also the normal when we started BlaBlaCar back in 2007, 2009, 2010, energy prices were higher. So obviously, that favors people sharing vehicles because the cost of doing, like, a mile is increasing. The other major trend we see mostly in Europe is the bus and train deregulation. So if you look at the landscape, here we take an example in this country, but it applies to several other markets.
10+ years ago, the only way you would go from, say, Paris to Lyon or Paris area to Lyon, you had the choice between take your own car or SNCF, right, essentially. Today, it's a more complex world, right? If you look at that specific route, you would have, like, different bus operators. You would have, obviously, us, FlixBus, Alsa. You would have, like, now 2, soon 3, train operators, thanks to the deregulation, and obviously, you have carpooling. So, so from a user standpoint, it becomes more of a fragmented, complex choice, and the, the role of aggregators is increasing, right? So, and that's where we play. It's aggregating all of that supply.
Last but not least, if you look at emerging markets, so markets like Brazil, like most of the Latin countries, even India, bus booking specifically, which are very large markets in those countries, is still mostly offline, right? So this offline to online transition of people booking buses in those countries has not yet happened, and we can go through why, I guess, in the Q&A, and we grab that acceleration of offline to online, you know, the same way it's been grabbed on hotels, on flights, on trains, in the past 10 years. So the way to think of BlaBlaCar today is we're really a tech platform. So here I just highlight the number of employees.
We have 800 employees, 350 being tech and product. So we're mostly a platform. We don't own any assets, we don't own any buses, or we don't plan to own any train. 60% of the staffing cost is tech and product, right? So that's if you think of the biggest OpEx of BlaBlaCar, that's the tech team and the product team. And essentially, we connect passenger on one side, passengers looking for this intercity ground transport solution, to a variety of supply, ranging from what we're known for, so meaning, you know, active drivers sharing their car when they drive between cities, but also thousands of bus operators around the world, where we essentially operate as a, think of it as a Booking.com of these bus operators.
We're starting, technically, we're doing the work now. Commercially, we launch trains early next year. So it's aggregating, again, like all the train operators, specifically in Europe. So that's what we do. It's very much a marketplace with a commission-based model. The type of trips you see on BlaBlaCar today, so we have two examples here. One, between two fairly major cities in Brazil, where, as you can see, the value prop is we have, like, a mix of carpool and buses that you can choose from. So essentially anything that's available on the ground in Brazil, 'cause you have essentially no trains, intercity trains don't exist in Brazil.
And then I take, like, another example of two cities you maybe never heard of, which is like a suburb of Paris, west of Paris, and a small town in Brittany. And here, same thing. Here, we would offer, like, buses, train, and carpool, but here you can see you have a lot more carpool available because essentially, your carpool makes a lot more sense when you go to these more remote areas that are poorly connected by train and buses. So carpool tends to play where essentially bus and train, specifically, become inefficient because the first mile and last mile, or the first 10, 20, 30 miles and the last 20, 30 miles, become very painful or expensive, or the time penalty is very high. So essentially, that's what we do, aggregating those trips today.
Just a reminder on, on carpooling and the business model, o-of carpooling, because it's, I think it's probably well understood here, but worth reminding that. It's a cost-sharing paradigm. So essentially, like, the drivers are doing the trip anyway, so they're gonna drive between, you know, Paris and Brittany in my example, and we end up enabling passengers to share the ride and share the cost of the ride with the driver. What's critical for us is that the driver never makes a profit, and we play within that regulation. That's truly the cost-sharing regulation that enables BlaBlaCar not to be a transport company. It means our drivers are non-professional, they don't need to pay taxes. We're not regulated as a transport network on carpooling, even though it's used as a transport network.
And that works as long as the driver does not make a profit, and that's defined in every state and every country where we operate by the state, by some sort of regulation. So if I take this country as an example, it's roughly EUR 0.60 per kilometer, right? So, so if you drive 100 kilometer, you could collect as much as EUR 60 from 1, 2, 3 passengers. You cannot collect more. And what we do is we create a marketplace within that limit. So you will understand that if we go very short distance and you start to do, like, you try to do carpooling on 1 or 2 kilometer, like center of Paris to center of Paris, it's economically unviable. Like, the driver will make, like, EUR 1 or EUR 2 max under a carpool paradigm, which doesn't make sense.
When you apply that above, you call that, like, 30, 40, 50 km, suddenly the payout for a driver that he or she would get anyway, they would get for a trip they would do anyway, sorry, becomes significant, and you can create, like, a pretty valuable marketplace. That's the business model. What's great is it operates very much like a classified, in a sense that it's very hard to get the liquidity, so it's very hard to get, like, a community and to create trust in a community for things to kickstart. Once you've done that, essentially you end up with people coming back and, A, people loving the product and people coming back to the product, and your marketing comes for free, right?
If you look at carpooling today, across not just Europe, like, across all the countries where we operate, 95% of the traffic is free traffic, right? It's not even SEO traffic. People coming back there. You upscale, and I'm sure that's fantastic news, and a very profitable business model. There's lots of functionalities. You know, one of them is something we do even monetize, by the way, which is, like, the energy saving and CO₂ avoided by the activity. You would guess that as you carpool, you reduce the number of cars and, given the cars were, you know, were used anyway, we end up saving 1.5 million tons of CO₂ on a yearly basis.
It has a very strong social impact as well. I won't expand too much on that, but we create 90 million human connections, where people essentially connect with people they would not have met otherwise in the car for, like, three or four hours. So it leads to lots of interesting stories. And we have, like, a very granular... Those are real data, by the way, very granular network, because it's not a transport company, so we don't rely on carpool stations, and people can stop anywhere and pick up and drop off people anywhere. So today, if you think of it as the network, that's really like a real view of 24 hours of the network being active in Europe, you end up with 2 million meeting points.
Over time, our job is to increase that number by allowing drivers to do pick up and drop off and tiny detour, which creates more and more value for passengers because you get closer and closer to almost a quasi door-to-door experience on carpooling. Over time, I'll speed up a bit on that, but as you understood, we went from being, like, a carpool-only platform to becoming a multimodal platform, and we're accelerating that transition to really become this one-stop shop where people can find-- you can book a train ticket, a bus ticket, and, obviously, a carpool. That, that's pretty much underway. That's a global view.
If we look at that market by market, in France, it's already a third of the booking on long distance at bus booking. So it's two-thirds carpool, one-third, a big third even, on buses. And what we hope is that that cake is gonna be more evenly distributed in the future between the different modes of transport. Business model, so as you understood, like, we are a marketplace, so, like, the vast majority of the business model of BlaBlaCar is a commission-based model, where we take essentially a fee on the transaction between the providers, you being drivers or bus operators or long-term train operators, and the passenger.
It's totally asset free, so we don't operate and buy buses, essentially, so we don't own or hire a single driver in the entire equation. Last but not least, it has very positive externality for the environment, which is not just a storytelling or a brand attribute. It's also a business model in a sense that now, in more and more states, essentially, you can monetize that benefit either in the form of energy certificates. That's what's happening in France today. That's being deployed in Spain as we speak, so we'll probably start selling energy certificates in Spain actually next year. I mean, it could be at scale, probably, in a couple of years. And we're also exploring selling CO₂ credits in Brazil, and that's something we could deploy in other markets.
So, you know, it used to be, I would say, a bit of a cherry on the cake in France, that we were selling energy certificates. It's really becoming something that's being deployed in pretty much every geo, where we operate. So jumping into the financials. Obviously, being a transport company, we isolated the COVID years, which have been heavily impacted. So, you've seen sort of the last normal pre-COVID year was 2019. Back then, the company was doing EUR 130 million of revenue. Again, it's mostly net revenue, and burning EUR 20 million. COVID, it went down. Not as dramatically as you might have, as you might think, essentially, given, you know, lots of countries got shut down for, like, several months, if not quarters, because we had underlying growth.
Then, I guess, what's interesting is to see the growth and the operating leverage that we achieved essentially post-Covid. Which, again, comes from mostly the carpool model being at maturity. So it was at maturity essentially around 2019 and 2020. We could not see the operating leverage for obvious reasons during Covid, but as being restarted, essentially, like, you can see that carpooling sort of powers itself, and that's what flows down to the growth and profitability of the business. So last year, we've done shy of EUR 200 million of revenue, more or less break even, EBITDA minus EUR 5 million, but I think cash flow was EUR 0, like almost positive cash flow. This year, we should land at EUR 260 million, so 30% growth, give or take, on the top line.
We should achieve 20, maybe even better. We should beat that essentially in 2023. That's cash EBITDA, so we don't capitalize cost yet. We will in the future, but today it's as good as cash flow, essentially. We have a strong balance sheet today, so we have $190 million in cash, $135 million net cash. The debt we have is the state-guaranteed debt that was raised during Covid. That's a debt we served at 2%, so if we could get more of that debt, we would take more of that debt. I don't think it's available anymore at those rates, but that was a good moment in time to take debt, to take debt.
So the reason, I guess, we have that much cash, it's twofold. One, we anticipated to do an M&A in 2022, which is still in play but did not happen, and part of that cash was sort of reserved, if you like, for an M&A. And frankly, the performance in 2022 and 2023, from an EBITDA standpoint, is better than budget. So we raised that money in 2021, assuming 2022 would be more painful than what it ended up doing. So today we are clearly not at risk from a cash standpoint because we are generating cash. And we also have, like, a very solid balance sheet to be acquisitive moving forward and reaccelerate that M&A roadmap, which today is the right time.
Today, like, you-- as you have the discussions, like, with, specifically with Target in countries outside of Europe, you realize that having cash and being able to execute deals with cash, and the pricing, having come down and rationalized quite a lot over the last sort of 12, 18 months, you'll be looking at many companies on very rational, down-to-earth, EBITDA multiple, which was impossible, like, a year and a half ago. In terms of, like, growth moving forward, we have really three pillars or three circles, as we define it. One of them is really around the core business of carpooling.
The thing I have not mentioned is that most countries outside of Europe today are not yet monetized, meaning people transact on the carpool platform, but we don't yet take a fee. The commission is not yet applied. So we have over EUR 200 million of GMV, for example. That's today generating zero revenue, and it's part of the playbook, right? We first build GMV and usage, and then we go to monetize. So that's probably the most predictable growth, and that's the growth that has the best flow down. But that's the growth that has the best flow down to EBITDA, right?
Because essentially, a big chunk of that is about, like, monetizing or improving the pricing and monetization of markets where we are already present. So it's something where I would say we have the dial. So we can dial between you're monetizing sooner, later, and playing on growth. So it's quite comfortable today for us. The second pillar is the old B2C segment. So what we mean by B2C is the bus aggregation play that's mostly taking place outside of Europe, and the train aggregation that we'll deploy starting next year in Europe. Here, it's really like a classic B2C marketplace model. The good thing about that market, it's a pretty known town.
So unlike carpooling, when we have, like, many, many discussions, it's very hard to define, like, the potential market of carpooling. The offline-to-offline market of bus in Brazil is very well known, and it's very clear, and it's sort of like a known playbook, I would say, that we're playing on. Here we can be acquisitive. So that's the pillar on which we will need to grow organically, but also inorganically, to take leadership faster, in some markets where essentially you have some pretty good bus, sometime train, aggregators that we could consolidate. So M&A is gonna play a role in that pillar. And the last one is really applying carpooling to other use cases, specifically short distance.
So today, I would say we cracked one of the most difficult thing, which is convincing folks to book a seat in a stranger's car, if you like, by creating trust, by creating an habit, by creating a brand around it. We apply that to long distance and trips around 250 km. There is a very large potential, we believe, and it's still early days, on commuting, on short distance door-to-door trips, and that's something we started to play with a few years back, and that's something that's nicely growing today. By the way, revenue here at 2022, we've done EUR 6 million of revenue on commuting. This year, we'll do EUR 18 million-EUR 20 million, sorry, on revenue on that segment.
So pretty high potential, but it's more like the, you know, high beta Series A startup within the company, when the first circle is more like the highly predictable, sort of like monetizing what we've built over the last 10-year type play. So the type of trips you would see tomorrow in the future is combining a train with a door-to-door carpool. It's like, you know, a true door-to-door experience on carpooling. So those are, like, the evolution of the product from a customer standpoint. Here we show, like, the potential for growth of the different pillars. In the interest of time, I won't go into it. So it's taking a long view of, like, you know, what could happen in seven years.
But, you know, what's interesting is not necessarily the precision of the number. They're not precise, for sure. It's more like what we see as the addressable market in the next five to 10 years for these different segments. And again, as you can tell, they have different sort of features of predictability, depending on what segment we talk about. And then the team, so we... I'll finish on that and open to questions. So the team has been very stable. I won't go through all the profiles, but essentially, like most folks, have been with the company for seven, eight years. Nico is the most recent addition to the team, and it's been, like, two years.
But it's been, like, a very stable team in a very unstable environment, you know, going through COVID and so on. So today, that's probably the team that's gonna carry things forward, you know, for the next few years. Thank you.
Hello. Have a seat. I think we're way ahead of time. Thank you, Pat, for that. So if you have any questions in the room... Yeah, you guys can both sit. I can stand here. And just raise your hand, and we'll pass a mic around. I think we have. Can take the first question already. We have quite some time for questions.
Thank you. Thanks for that presentation. It is very good. I'm Bharat from Cantor Fitzgerald, London. Just have a question on your most profitable region. I'm guessing it's France. How long it took to get there in terms of the number of years, the amount of marketing spend that you needed to do, and what you're thinking around the next region you're gonna focus on and how long that's gonna take? Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe one way... France is the most profitable today, for sure. I would say it's countries like Spain. Then, down the line, you will have countries like Russia, Ukraine. Just by maturity, essentially, on when we start to monetize. France is a bit of a counterexample because that's the country we started with, and it was a pretty slow beginning, so defining the start date with the existing playbook is harder. Typically, the way I would answer the first question on carpooling, I think it takes about... If you look at markets like Spain, like Brazil, like any other markets we've done, we tend to take between 6-8 years, essentially, from start to monetization....
So, that's sort of the time to maturity and time to monetization, after which the country becomes very profitable, I mean, through carpooling. Then buses is adding later on, like once we build carpool, then we start building the multimodal, the multimodal play. Today, in term of like next big countries to have an impact, it's Brazil. So, if we look at usage today in Brazil, we already have more passengers on long-distance carpooling in Brazil than we do in France. We generate zero revenue from carpooling in Brazil. And, that's a country we start to monetize essentially now/next year, and we do a progressive monetization. So it's Brazil, and then down the line, in term of growth and maturity, it's Mexico and India.
So, they would probably come in the next two or three years. And that feeds the story of my first circle, if you like. So, it's gonna be really the usage growth and the monetization of those countries will drive both top line and profitable growth for the rest of the business. But carpooling, eventually, I think around seven years from, like, start to monetizing.
And to the other part of your question, it's not tied or linked directly to the marketing budget you spend. So, for instance, today we spend, roughly speaking, EUR 20 million in marketing for EUR 900 million of GBV, gross booking value. And, in Brazil, for instance, we spent around EUR 1 million, and in all the geographies that Nico mentioned, that represent EUR 200 million, GBV, we spend less than EUR 2 million. And the fact that we implement monetization, we will do a bit of marketing, but not at all to the extent of what flows into the, the P&L. So it's really more tied to building the marketplace and the, the liquidity in the 6-7 years than it is tied to the, to the marketing spend.
Just a follow-up question on that, maybe. You talk about France being your most profitable market. Can you provide any more color on, on the type of margin you see in France and in, in other regions?
I mean, France will be something around 50% EBITDA margin. And, I mean, if you take a step back, most of the costs we have at BlaBlaCar are central costs, so they are not allocated to a given country. It's the cost of operating carpool, which is fairly light, and the fact that you open a new country, you expand into that country, doesn't change those central costs, or only really marginally. So basically, it's hard to compute a real EBITDA per country in that respect. But let's say 50%, roughly speaking, for France, but Spain will be at 30%. So it's more the scale of the country that will make the absolute number of EBITDA difference. In terms of margin, very, very, very quickly, we reach to pretty high margin levels.
It's a bit less true in the bus marketplace. It's still very high, but it's a 10%-ish gross margin less than carpooling, just because you need a bit of staff on the ground to connect the local carriers. That's the only difference between carpool and bus OTA. But for the rest, it's very, very directly generating profits.
Hi there. Thanks for the presentation. Ben May here at Cantor Fitzgerald. Just a quick question on... Well, two questions, actually. First of all, is there any way to solve the issue around short trips, so to perhaps do it on a time basis rather than a distance basis? And is that something that you've actively considered?
To be clear, what you mean is in terms of the cost-sharing paradigm I was describing, like applying that to time as opposed to distance, or?
Yes, to enable, for example, you to, operate this model within city locations, for example.
Yeah. I mean, I wish, but it's something that from a regulation standpoint, would take, I don't know, 10 years, right? Because essentially, it's not at all designed this way today. And the moment you do that, I think you would disrupt completely the taxi business, right? So if you think of it, the question you're asking is the Holy Grail of, like, Uber in the early days, where they were saying, like, "Ah, we're gonna do a bit of a mix between, like, Uber as you know it and BlaBlaCar," and essentially, like, there are no regulation whatsoever, 'cause we say, like, if someone spends... I mean, if I follow your argument, if someone spends a lot of time in his car, then you should – it should be valued, and it becomes cost sharing.
So it might happen, but it's the moonshot, I think, to me. So right now, it may be much easier for us to go and crack the sort of like mid-range, I mean, you think of distances between 20 and 100 kilometers, in more like, not rural, but, your less dense area. And there is, like, a massive use case around that. So I think we should go after that. We should go after commuting as well, which has the regulation on our side. And then I think as you demonstrate that and the benefit of that in many ways, so benefit from an environmental standpoint, but benefit also from a region or a city budget standpoint.
'Cause once you've proven that essentially you can transport lots of companies on carpooling and regions don't need to spend that much money on bus lines and trams and so on, that they request, and it's a lot more capital efficient, yeah, I think it's gonna be easier and easier to shape the regulation and soften the regulation. But today, it's not that bad in most of the market for what we target.
Okay. And, and actually, my second question was gonna follow up on some of the points you've already raised. Just around sort of, have you had any issues in any of the markets that perhaps you've been operating for a longer period of time, you know, at a government level, you know, maybe from transport ministers seeing you as a threat to, you know, nationalized transport networks and, you know, taking revenue away from them?
... Yeah, so we had, I mean, we had several lawsuits in the past. We don't anymore. I'll take one example, which is, to me, emblematic of what has happened and will happen. In Spain, literally, like 6-7 years ago, we were fighting lawsuits mostly pushed by bus lobbies that saw us as, like, unfair competition, essentially. We won, essentially, those cases back then. But, you know, our interaction with the state was like dealing with lawsuits 5-7 years ago. Today, what we're doing is we are working in Spain, shaping a regulation or the new transport regulation, in which carpooling has been integrated as public transport in some cases and is completely legalized. And they are pushing, as we mentioned briefly, they're pushing energy certificates to be applied to carpooling.
So it's a massive data, 360 or 180, rather, since you go around, so 180. So it's a 180 change, I guess, in the perception of carpooling, so it takes time. So, to your point on, like, we did continue to evolve, and we did find a place in regulation that's better. Yes, I really believe that, because we've seen that. And what I'm saying for Spain, we had the case in Brazil. In fact, we were in Brazil a few weeks ago in Brasília, and we had the right discussion with the transport minister. They see that, like, you know, millions of Brazilians are using it. It makes sense for the environment, it makes sense for purchasing power. So, at some point, the regulations do follow.
So today, I would say on carpooling, the long distance part of carpooling, we passed that risk. So right now, it's more about creating opportunity on short distance.
I think we have a question from up here. Yes.
Can you hear me okay? Hey, guys, it's Andrew Russell from Barclays. I wanted to ask a bit more about your ambitions in train, which it sounds like you're gonna be rolling out, kind of from here. I guess, curious both on timing. It feels the train market is opening now in France, but has already opened to some degree in Spain and Italy. And then also on your point of kind of competitive differentiation, given you've got Trainline, I mean, a bunch of guys, I guess, also trying to aggregate that market. So kind of curious to understand more about playbook in the next two or three years on train.
Yeah, I mean, the playbook on train is exactly the same playbook we applied to buses, to be clear. It's, A, you build supply by building the tech platform to connect, well, buses or train. We do that in markets where we already have a captive audience and a very strong audience. Spain and France are the right examples in Europe. Outside of Europe, it would be Brazil, India, and, you know, the markets we mentioned. You-- So the real question for us becomes like, if we look at the audience that comes to BlaBlaCar, not because we market, just because they want to arbitrate between a carpool, a bus, and a train. Like, what's the share of wallet in term of, like, train bookings of our audience?
When I say our audience, you don't own the audience, but you see what I mean, like, it's the people sort of coming to BlaBlaCar to check trips, and it's super large. So our goal is just for folks that essentially want to arbitrate between a train, a carpool and a bus, to come to our platform. And that supply, if you look specifically in France, well, we own carpool 100%, and we have 50% of the active bus network in France. So you have, like, a massive competitive advantage compared to any of the pure play train players. So that's one, that's answering the question from an audience standpoint. If I answer that from a...
Which is linked, but from a CAC to LTV, so a unique economic standpoint, it's the same as saying we don't buy these users. Essentially, we already bought these users, and it makes Trainline pretty interesting. Because otherwise, it's a very tough business. So if you look at Trainline in continental Europe, and I mean, we talked to Trainline, and I talk to Jody pretty often. It's a tough sell because essentially, like, you make so little on a train booking. It's about 3%. I mean, it depends on the market, but it's very, very thin.
That if you're purely a train aggregation play in continental Europe, and you don't have, like, a large brand for something else, the cost of marketing to the LTV of your user is super questionable, actually, as a business model. In our case, the fact that, you know, in France, we do 15%+ gross margin on buses and 25% on carpool, and those are the same users, and we don't pay traffic, it makes a lot of sense. And last but not least, sorry for the long answer. As we develop more like short distance carpooling, the goal is to do these trips I've shown at the end, where you connect the two.
So suddenly, like, your train bookings becomes almost like a the entry point to actually sell a door-to-door connection at the end, on which we have, like, very good margin, and we, we're very unique. So, so that's the play. But building a standalone train OTA in Europe is a tough proposition without the synergies I just described.
Very helpful. Thank you.
I think we had another one up there, yes.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, George Hutling from Pareto Securities. I have two questions. Firstly, when you describe your cost base, which is, you know, heavily on fixed central costs, would it be possible, or why is it not possible to shorten those seven years from launch to monetization? Just, like, if you could add some color on why that economics doesn't add up for throwing money at that problem, essentially?
Yeah, I mean, it's almost a question for the past, right? Because we've built essentially those communities of carpooling in markets like, you know, Brazil and so on and so on. And frankly, we tried. So I'm not sure I understand the question completely, but we tried to accelerate time back then with many, and we've been pretty inefficient at that, if we're honest. So there is, like, a degree of marketing and branding. I mean, you can always do as much as you want, but there is a degree that the marketplace is gonna sort of digest efficiently. And what we've seen is once you go above that, and we tried that in Mexico, we tried that in India, and we ended up stopping.
We ended up, like, shutting down the local team and operating everything centrally. So to give you a sense, India is like... I don't have the numbers exactly on top of my head, but it's maybe 10 times bigger than it was five years ago, or six, almost six years ago. Six years ago, we stopped doing marketing, and we let go the local team entirely. So 90% of the growth, essentially, that's been generated, has been on the back of zero marketing, zero local teams, zero anything, frankly, except working on the product, improving the experience, and word of mouth. So, accelerating that time, that time turned out to be a very inefficient capitalistically, essentially, that didn't work for us. So maybe there was a way to do it.
Now, the reason we don't brainstorm about that too much is if I look at the next two, three, four, five years, launching new country with long-distance carpool is not the priority. So it's more of a, so your question would apply to, okay, how do we crack short distance? But it becomes a bit of a different game, because once you have, like, a very large community of, like, 10+, 20, sometimes million users that have tried your product at least once, you've already done, as I said, like, the hardest step, which is, like, educating them on how it works and sort of like, you're stepping that barrier of, like, getting in a stranger's car.
Because short-distance carpooling is fundamentally the same interaction, just on a shorter distance and a different topology of trips.
Super helpful. And then, if you could just describe your customers, is the overlap of the products they use large? So if you use buses, do you also tend to have a large conversion of carpooling? And if you could describe that customer journey, also, where do you start, and yeah, the tendency to go towards other products?
Yes. So, so if I look at the, you know, I mean, the audience, I mean, maybe focusing on the passenger side of the equation, and then I'll talk about the drivers and the fact that sometimes they are the same. You essentially, the passengers tend to be, price sensitive, price shopper type audience, slightly on, on the younger side. In Western countries, very gender balanced. In emerging market, it's more male-dominated, but it's also a function of the, the market. So, so that's the typical audience. Do we see a difference in terms of audience between carpool and bus and, frankly, low-cost train? Not really. Like, it's rather, like, the type of trip that you...
So when you see, like, which mode of transport is gonna win, I mean, if you do city center to city center, and you have a low-cost train, the low-cost train is gonna win, right? And especially in Western Europe. If you look at, like, going into, like, some vacation place in, in the Alps or in, in Brittany or whatnot, then carpool tends to win, essentially, because it gets you much closer to your destination, and sort of the price-time equation is much, much better with carpooling. But at the end, the audience arbitrating those different trips is pretty similar. So we don't have a business audience. Maybe what I could add on the audience, it's on long distance, it's very dominated by weekends, so it's people going on weekends.
Which has evolved a bit, by the way. So we see the pattern of, like, working remotely. It used to be very sort of Friday, Sunday. Now, it's a lot more spread between Thursday and Tuesday, essentially, in terms of like, a trip topology. Yeah.
Great. I think we have one more up here, just,
Yes, quickly, a few. I mean, do you have any significant carpooling competition, especially in EM? I don't think so, but that'd be helpful. And then on the commuting product, essentially, it's the same trajectory, so I guess it's quite easy for the users to circumvent the platform. So could you explain how that works exactly? And I think you're relying on subsidies to some extent, where are they available in France, and elsewhere? And then I'd be interested, you know, about your R&D budget that you allocated between, you know, existing platform growth opportunities, moonshots. That'd be interesting case.
On your first question, we keep on monitoring, but the answer is there, there is none. So there is no carpool player in any of the market we operate, except from very local initiatives, but we don't see having a competition or a competitor in the carpool-only segment. Now, it's about ground transportation and the fact that some people do monitor the price or convenience of carpooling compared to bus or train in Western Europe. On your question for the commuting product, so far, it's only in France, just to define where we operate, and it's a subsidized business model.
So the fact that it's the repeating crew that is going to do the same trip, not every day, but, from time to time, is not an issue at all, because for the trip to be subsidized, the trip needs to happen on the platform itself. So there's a natural edge against the use case of repeating, crews that would then go outside of the platform. We may have that issue on the long distance. But it's very hard to monitor because it happens outside of the platform, and we don't track that. But for the commuting and the risk of repeating, which is much higher, it's naturally hedged by the fact that, that's a subsidized, business model. And then, sorry, I forgot-
R&D allocation.
Oh, R&D. So per se, I mean, so far, we haven't capitalized costs, so I did not yet improve the EBITDA artificially by capitalizing costs. That may happen in the future. But so what we call R&D costs are basically people, so it's the 60% of the staff cost. I'm not gonna give you a precise answer, for one good reason: there's the backbone of everything is the same for all of the topics, whether they are new initiatives, existing ones, so the run of it is the same. So we have a lot of teams that are working on maintaining the platform as it stands and making sure it's working.
That goes from payments, that goes from the platform, the app itself, making sure it's working on the, you know, Android and and Apple and everything. And then we have very specific initiatives, and for those ones, they are outside of the bulk of the teams we're talking about. Here, I'm referring to the commuting, or I'm referring to the train, and we're dealing with 5-10 people teams, so it's a very agile organization. Commuting is a bit more because we're dealing with SEK 19 million revenues now, but it used to be much lighter when the P&L was not fully developed. And commuting is a separate app, so it's fairly easy to monitor.
Train is an external development that we'd field into the common app next year, so then it will be blended. And the door-to-door initiative that Nico mentioned, again, it's a 5 or 6 developers team for the time being, which is working on a separate app for the time being. We'll see what the future... So all in all, we're dealing with very light costs for the very, very new initiatives, and the rest is blended. Back to my comment earlier on countries, we don't have very dedicated resources per country because they work on one single app.
Great. I actually think we are running out of time, unfortunately. A lot of great questions. Save the rest for the social event after presentations. Thank you very much, Nicolas and Nicolas. I think our next speaker here, Fredrik Hjelm, is coming down, CEO and co-founder of Voi. A warm applause for Fredrik.
Thank you for having me. I'm next in line here, yeah?
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's, that's me.
Check.
Check. So great to see everyone, and thank you for having me. Beautiful-
Hello? No. Hello. Hello. Okay.
Then we'll get started again. No, thanks for having me. So my name is Fredrik Hjelm. I am the CEO and also one of the co-founders of Voi. It's the fourth time for me at the VNV Days. So most of you probably know Voi by now, either from these presentations or from seeing our e-scooters and e-bikes out in any of our more than 100 cities all over Europe. Quick recap of Voi. I founded a company around five years ago. We founded the company with a vision of changing how people move around in cities. What we saw was that the cities had started to accelerate the move towards a greener future, repurposing space from cars, roads, parking lots, and so on, into space for pedestrians, to bike lanes, and so on.
What we also saw on the consumer side was that increasingly consumers are moving away from the privately owned car, as we heard from Nico and the team, into various forms of shared mobility, including ride-hailing, including carpooling, more eager to use e-scooters, e-bikes, and so on. And we see that especially among the younger mobility users. So these two trends, both on the city side and on the user side, have really been the mega trends that we, that we're building Voi upon. I was standing here, at the VNV Days a year ago, then we were in New York. I looked back at my presentation. We promised a few things. One, improved margins and profitability. Two, that we would win a few, really big cities and launch them.
And three, that we would continue to win, both with riders and with cities. I think we've checked most of those boxes over the last 12 months, and it's been a really good year, actually. So I'll tell you a bit more about that today. So the micromobility industry was an industry and is an industry with a slightly bumpy start. I'm the first one to admit that. We saw both some missteps on the regulatory side. A lot of capital went into the industry, both to good players and to bad players. And we heard skeptics asking: Will this ever be profitable? How long will the vehicles last? Is this a fad, and consumers would move away after a couple of months?
I think what's very encouraging now to me is that recent performance for Lime, one of our peers, and perhaps someone else. It's really starting to prove that this is an industry realizing its potential. We've seen positive movements on the regulatory side. We have seen very remarkable improvements on the profitability side, and we continue to see consumer demand going up year after year. Starting on the consumer side, we've seen a quite incredible demand increase coming out from COVID, both for scooter rides and for bike rides. We're looking at scooter rides here. We've seen a compound annual growth rate of 100% over the last three years. And most of you, if you live in any European city, have probably seen this in your day-to-day life.
And we continue to believe that this trend will continue for the reasons I mentioned before, both repurposing of city space and also consumer changed behavior on the consumer side. At the same time, we have seen a shift from what in the beginning was a quite unregulated market, a Wild West market to some extent in certain cities, to a more structured market. We see cities giving out licenses, cities giving out tenders to the highest quality operators. We have been advocating for this since day one. We think it creates better dynamics for the consumers, for the non-consumers in a city, for the cities themselves, and also for the operators, because it creates predictability.
We are leading on tendered market share in Europe, and most recently, back to what I promised last year, we've had some big wins. We won London and are launching and rolling out London on Monday, so there is a lot of work happening in London at the moment. We won Vienna, we won Oslo, and several more. Over the next coming 6-9 months, we have some major markets up for grabs, including Brussels, Milan, Berlin, and many more. And we feel that we are well-positioned for those major markets, and continue to see this trend accelerating as cities want, yeah, want to be a part and work together with us as companies.
As you know, the capital markets turned more tight end of 2021, as in the beginning of 2022, and we have seen the real effects of this, in, in many of our cities and countries. We have seen peers consolidating their footprint, pulling out from, from cities, from countries. We have seen a quite big opportunity in, in several of these, in several of these countries and cities. One example here being Bird, our U.S. peer, who left Germany last year, leaving, say, around EUR 10 million revenue on the table. We have been able to capture a disproportionately high amount of this, as other operators are leaving the market. So overall, we have seen, we've seen more...
An easing on the competitive pressure side, and we'll continue to see that, we think, over the coming 12, 8, 12, 18 months, yeah, for capital market reasons, for efficiency reasons, and so on. I'm also a big believer in focus and that this is a business model with a local network effect. So you want to be number one or number two in every market you're operating in. If you are number one or, in some cases, number two, you get the most rides, you get the most revenues, you can drive your operating cost per vehicle per day down, increase efficiencies, reinvesting in that to build scale in every city. And we are currently number one or number two in 94% of the markets, number one in 76, 76% of the markets.
This will continue to be key for us going into 2024 and onwards. We'd rather go to fewer markets, but do really well than spreading out too thin. On the cost side of the business, we have managed to decrease the operating cost per vehicle per day with 50%, from 2021 to 2023. This is a business model and industry where everything matters. So it's hardware, it's software, it's connectivity, it's operations, it's regulations, and every little detail, every little basis points matter. We've built a culture that is both very data-driven, also very excellence-focused, and the combination of very data-driven operations is the big drivers to what you see here.
It's all about the, yeah, everything from, yeah, when you swap the batteries, how you swap the batteries, when you do the repairs, when you do predictive maintenance on the vehicles, when you take the vehicles into a warehouse, how do you run your warehouse, and so on. All of these compounds up to what you see here, and what we think is a very, very important advantage versus many of our peers. On the vehicle side, since we started this company five years ago, we have iterated through six scooter models, you see five of them here on this page, and three e-bike models as well.
The early generation vehicles that we put on the streets in 2018, they were more consumer-grade vehicles, and the development and progress to the latest generation vehicles that we're operating today have been really, really big. It's not only the robustness and the sturdiness of the vehicles, we've been able to increase the lifetime up to 5-6 years on the recent vehicle models. And we've also added on a lot of smart technology to make the vehicles into really robust sensors to be able to feed back that data then into all our systems to innovate on the consumer side, to innovate on the cost side, and also on the city side. How can we optimize parking? How can we optimize flows in a city? How can we improve safety? So-...
Where we are now with the latest generation vehicles, we see that the unit economics and profitability works at scale, which has been really, really encouraging to see for us. And these two combined, so a reduced operating cost per vehicle per day, increased lifetime, and vehicle price that's been relatively the same, constant over the years, had driven significant uplift in what we call LTV over acquisition cost of vehicles. We have tripled it from 2019 to 2022, and going into 2023, we see further improvements here as we improve margins. And you should expect this one to continue to grow over the coming years. Going into 2022, we also started to tighten the belt and reduce cost centrally to get to profitability faster.
When you look at where we are today, compared to where we were at the peak cost run rate early 2022, we have decreased cost with EUR 20 million on an annual run rate basis. Some of you might have heard this from other portfolio companies as well, but I would say that we are a better company now than ever before. It's a leaner team, we get more throughput, we're more efficient, it's less middle management, stakeholder management, and so on, and we can move faster. So we have taken down the overhead cost as a percentage of revenue from 55%, as you see in 2021, to being around 28% to where we are today.
And all of this, of course, compounds up to stronger financials, and we are on the track this year to our full year of EBITDA profitability. What you're looking at here is 2021 full year numbers, 2022 full year numbers, and 2023 last twelve months up until August. You continue to see that we, yeah, that we're growing in 2023, and typically H2 is our best year, so you should expect an uptick here, both on net revenues, on gross profit, on market EBITDA and EBITDA versus the last twelve month numbers. And year to date in 2023, in August, we are EBITDA breakeven. We've improved margins on the EBITDA level with I think 32 percentage points year over year.
This, of course, also trickles down to EBIT, yeah, one layer below the EBITDA margin. Overall, feel really happy with how we kind of shifted gears from end of 2020, 2021, beginning of 2022, and now we're starting to see that all of that is paying off in margins and profitability profile for the company. VNV was, yeah, our first investor, five years ago. I met Per eight years ago in Russia at Avito, and then VNV and some of the Avito people were the first investors in Voi, five years ago. From my side, I couldn't imagine a better partner.
I always refer to VNV when other founders are asking me, "Who should I talk to for my next round, independently of stage?" They have helped us a lot throughout the years, rolling up their sleeves when needed, stepping in when needed, with various types of support. We've used the VNV network also a lot over the last couple of years, both on the company side, on the recruiting side, on the investor side. Quite a few of the people that we have hired and the companies we have worked with, including BlaBlaCar over the years, are through VNV. Quite a few of the investors that we have brought on in later rounds are also through the VNV network.
Over the last, say, two years also, since the market changed, it's been really, really valuable for me as the CEO to have people like Per, Keith, who both are on our board of directors, who have seen boom cycles, who have seen bust cycles and seen them several times, and have helped us to kind of keep calm and keep calm and carry on. Looking at 2024 now for us, as you hear, I'm very enthusiastic of where we are now. I've been running this company for five years.
I've never, yeah, I've never felt as confident as I am today with our team, with our kind of unit economics, with our product market fit, with the regulatory side, as a lot of things have improved, moving into a more mature industry. So focus areas for us now going into 2024 will be, one, to continue to grow with good unit economics, to be able to take the company into, yeah, full EBIT profitability, not only EBITDA profitability. Continue to ride this wave of car-free cities that I talked about in the beginning. We wanna continue to be the best partner for cities and the best service for consumers, and, yeah, help accelerating this shift. We will continue to explore M&A as well.
We have looked at quite a few M&A opportunities over the last couple of years. We have said no for various reasons, but think that, yeah, there might be interesting M&A opportunities as some of our peers, both direct ones and indirect ones, yeah, are starting to be in tricky situations. Last one here, also, as we're moving into profitability, we are focusing a lot now on how we can optimize our capital structure. So how can we grow the company in the, yeah, in the most capital efficient way, both when it comes to dilution for shareholders, when it comes to using non-equity solutions, and of course, also the proceeds we will start... Yeah, we will start to see coming out from the business now over the coming years.... So five years in, I'm ready for another five years.
I think in five years from now, we are moved even closer to what you see on this photo, which is a rendering of Marseille, the French second big, biggest city, and how Voi could, yeah, could look like in a, in a city like Marseille. So that's it from my side. Super happy to be here, and hope you liked it. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Fredrik, for the presentation. So just as the last time, if you have any questions, just raise your hand. We have our first question already.
Yes, hi. Can you talk about the arbitrage between owning a scooter and renting one? And do you see some user attrition to ownership, basically? That's the first question. Second one, pipeline of tenders in Europe. And the third one, more of a detailed question, the situation in Vienna, which I think you've won, and it is challenged, if I'm correct.
Okay, so we have three questions here. We have the arbitrage, ownership, and shop services. We have Vienna, and what was the third one?
Pipeline of tenders.
Ah, pipeline of tenders. Okay, yeah, where to start? Let's start with the, with the simple one, Vienna. So yeah, we won the tender in Vienna, earlier this year. We have launched, Vienna. We did it in, July. It was under challenge, for a couple of weeks, but that, that case has been, yeah, put down. So we're operating. Vienna looks, looks like a very promising, market so far. And, yeah, no, no issues on the regulatory side. Tender pipeline, I spoke a bit about it. We see, we see a wave of larger important, tenders coming up now, or we've really seen that, yeah, seen that over the last, year or so.
Closest in the pipeline, as I mentioned, Milan, Brussels, Berlin, among the biggest markets, but there is also a long tail of, yeah, of markets across Europe. Yeah, the third question there on ownership versus using shared services. I think in the beginning, we were a bit afraid of that, you know, all... Yeah, everyone would buy their scooters or buy their e-bikes instead. I think what we have learned over the years is that that's rather good for us, because if a person buys their e-scooter or buy, yeah, if they buy their e-bike, it shows that they really like kind of the form factor, and there will always be use cases when it's just inconvenient to, yeah, to bring your own bike, to bring your own scooter.
We see them rather as complementary than a substitute.
Great. I think we have one more here, if we can.
Yes, thank you, Jan. It was very nice. On the revenue growth, there seems to be a bit of a slowdown. Is that simply because you've been winning less tenders, you've seen less growth in markets uptake? What is slowing it down? So that's one question. And if you are forecasting revenue, are you really looking into simply stacking cities, or do you also see actually revenue grow over time within these cities because you add form factors, or you renew the tender, or you win the tenders again? So how do you see revenue expanding?
Yeah. No, great, great question. So yeah, the slowdown in growth, yeah, between 2022 and 2023, I mean, was a conscious decision. We went into, yeah, we went into 2022, really, to focus a lot on the excellence side of the business, on the profitability side of the business, not scale as fast. So yeah, that's a result of that. What, what we see on the revenue, side, which is, yeah, which makes me very optimistic, is that, yeah, when you look at the net revenue per vehicle per day, over the years, so same-store sales, we see that that is increasing with, say, 15%-20%, yeah, from 2022 to 2023.
So we continue to see that there is a lot of upside still on how much we can get out of the vehicles every day. And the overall growth will be a function of the number of vehicles we put out, of course, and that, so the net revenue per vehicle per day. We are currently in 110 cities in Europe. We think there are approximately 450 attractive cities in Europe alone. So we've just scratched the surface on what this can become when it comes to our footprint. And what we're also seeing is that in many markets, we're able to go deeper, increase the fleet size, and increase the revenue we get per city from year one to year two to year three.
As the user base matures and becomes bigger, as we're sorting out regulations, able to scale to, like, suburban areas and things like that. And so the growth over the coming years will be a combination of three things, really. We go deeper in existing cities, we continue to drive up net revenue per vehicle per day on the existing fleet, and then we will go to new attractive markets as well. And attractive markets mean for us now in the stage we are in today, meaning markets where we see a you know payback, where we can get to profitability relatively soon.
Okay, just a follow-on question on, on that one. So in terms of market size, what, what is an attractive market for you? What are the... Apart from, from this one, is there like a minimum size, or is there a particular configuration of a city that works best for you?
Yeah, that's also a great question. In the early days, we, we thought there would have to be a kind of minimum population slide for a market to be attractive, yeah, in terms of profitability and, and so on. I think what we've learned over the last years is that since we've driven, driven the operating cost per vehicle per day down so much and improved kind of how we run the, the whole operations of the business, now we can operate in much smaller markets as well, long-tail markets with 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people living in them, which we couldn't really do in a good way in the, in the early years. So take Stockholm as an example, in Sweden.
So from Stockholm, currently, we're operating 7, 8 cities, so within an hour and a half, 2 hours drive, from Stockholm. Since, yeah, since we don't need to take the vehicles in every day, as we had to in the beginning, we're operating with swappable batteries. The vehicles last much longer, and we don't need to touch them, we don't need to touch them that often. So, total addressable market for us today versus 3, 4, 5 years ago is much, much larger, thanks to technological and operational improvements. And what was the other part of your question?
Are there any configurations of cities-
Uh.
that simply make it a go or no-go for you?
It's a bit the same, same there. In the beginning, we, we went to a lot of markets, tested a lot, in the north, in the south. Back then, due to technological and operational constraints, we didn't really make it work in all markets, so we pulled back from some cities. Spain was one example, which was the first market we launched in after Sweden. Then we paused Spain for a year and a half, then we came back. New product, new way of operating, and now, now it works really well there as well. But overall, of course, the larger, the larger the city, the more attractive it is to some extent.
But then there are lots of variables on, kind of how this infrastructure looks like, how do substitutes and complements look like, how strong is public transportation? Are people used to, used to bikes? Are they used to mopeds? There's a lot of variables go into that one.
Thank you.
Great. Just one question from me. On a previous slide, you showed a bunch of competitors that have left several cities in Europe. I think a key question is to understand what makes Voi different from the rest of the players, and why don't you have the same issues, so to speak?
So it comes down to what I talked about in the presentation. It's a business where everything matters, and excellence really, really matters. So if you're slightly better than your peers and competitors in, yeah, on the operation side, on the hardware side, on the software side, on the connectivity side, and so on, that compounds up to, yeah, both an advantage on the user side, as we're able to drive high utilization, which leads to higher net revenue per vehicle per day, which further drives down the operating cost per vehicle per day, which also gives you a cost advantage on that side of the business.
What we see now is the, like, this obsession about details, obsessions about, yeah, being data-driven in the, in the way we run operations has compounded up to this advantage, where we see that we can, yeah, operate the business, yeah, operate the business on a city level and a country level, more efficiently than most of our competitors can in most situations.
I think we have one question from the web here.
Yes, one question from the web. Could you please elaborate on depreciation and amortization in this business model? How to think around cash flows, and basically when you're going to reach cash flow positive?
Yeah. Cash flows in this business is, yeah, bit simplify EBITDA- CapEx every year. EBITDA will be operational cash flows, and then the, the other cash flow out item... Yeah, the other big cash flow item is, is on the CapEx side. We, as I said, are o- yeah, likely moving into EBITDA profitability this year. Soon thereafter, soon thereafter, if it's next year or the year after that, we should move into, yeah, EBITDA- CapEx, so cash flow, cash flow positive as well. That one, over time, will, yeah, harmonize quite well with EBIT as well.
Great. We have one more question from the RC.
Hello. Very quickly on Paris, the situation here is very different.
Sad.
Yeah, but what do you make of it? Obviously, we're not there, so you're not responsible, but-
Yeah.
Well, do you see a future where we come back to scooters?
Yeah, so for context there, Paris is the first city, I think in Europe, that paused e-scooter scheme. They did a couple of weeks ago in September. The build up to this was a referendum earlier this year, where I think 5% of the eligible voters went to vote, and it became a no. We don't see that trend spreading anywhere else, to be honest. As I said, we've had great success in some major markets, London, Vienna, Oslo, and several more this year. We're having some of the other ones coming up later this year: Milan, Brussels, Berlin, and more.
What we hear from Paris is that, yeah, it's paused. It's not canceled forever. We really hope that the Paris scheme will come back in, yeah, in one or two years from now.
Could you-
Yeah.
One more, maybe,
Yeah.
I'm curious if we have time.
I have a quick question. What is the cash payback cycle on the new scooters?
... Say it again, Keith?
The cash payback cycle. Like how often, how long does it take for the scooters to pay for themselves?
Yeah, great, great question. So on, yeah, when we look at it on, yeah, on a group level, it's yeah, we're, we're down to less than a year. When we look at, when we look at it in our best markets, yeah, we're down to a couple of months until we have fully paid back the vehicles, yeah, after putting them out on the streets. As that's been a great, great development as well. And, as I mentioned in the presentation, the vehicles last 5-6 years when we look at the latest models.
Sorry, just a question on the M&A. I'm just wondering how it makes sense, in this business model. Is it not better, for example, to, let's say, go in win a new tender in a new city? Why do you think it's better to consolidate?
Yeah, the arguments for consolidations would be around to get to scale and footprint faster. If you feel confident that you're able to to integrate the other company on your platform, it... Yeah, and related to that, access to to good licenses, tenders in certain key markets. So it's scale and access to to footprint play.
Sure. Just a quick follow-up. With regards to some of the pushbacks that you've had from some of the cities, what are some of those major pushbacks? Did you have to do a lot of changes to your, to either the vehicles or to the approach, the business model, et cetera?
Yeah, so when we go out talking to cities, and we talk to a lot of cities, we see that what cities care about when it comes to micro mobility is, it's safety, it's parking, and yeah, also kind of how we run the yeah, all of the operations. Yeah, they call it antisocial behavior or people, you know, double riding on the vehicles and so on. We have invested and built a lot of technology over the last couple of years to be able to solve those pain points as well, which to some extent are the key purchasing criteria for cities. Yeah, so mainly around parking, mainly around safety, mainly around yeah, antisocial behavior, how people are misbehaving on the vehicles.
Thank you.
Great. Just a final quick question from me. If we look at this picture, you know, there to give us some more color on where is Voi at this point in time in terms of revenue, in terms of margins, in a, let's say, a blue sky scenario.
On what time horizon? Do I have-
Five years.
Ah, okay.
So-
Yeah, we have five years. So when we looked at where we are taking the business over the last three years, we have tripled on revenue since 2020. We have, yeah, taken the company into EBITDA breakeven. So when we look at where the company could be in five years, I think we should be able to triple it again and operate with very healthy EBITDA margins, EBIT profitability, and cash flow, cash flow positive.
Great. Let's end it with that.
Let's do it.
Thank you very much, Fredrik. I think our next presenter is Djordy Seel mann from Housing Anywhere. A warm welcome.
So good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for having me on once again. I think it was five years ago in Berlin when we just joined the portfolio. Yeah, 2018. Was a great day. Back then, I was also just CEO, so I've been with the company for quite some time, since the upfront of the marketplace that we started. Housing Anywhere has been around for quite some time as well, but let's see if we can take it there. Yes, here we are. So starting off. So, Djordy Seelmann. Been with Housing Anywhere now for eight years, CEO since 2018. It's been a great time. I brought today Erik, he's our CFO, and he will join me on the stage for questions also later.
Housing Anywhere is a mid to long-term rental platform, and we primarily focus on students, young professionals, expats. We do that with different brands, I will tell you more about that. The overall brand idea that we have is that it should be very easy to rent, and it empowers people. We wanna set them free. That's the tagline that we have. Just to get started, we'll go over some different items. Shouldn't take too long so that we also still have time for questions. We'll cover the business, obviously, in some detail, so on the value proposition as well. We'll tell you more what makes Housing Anywhere special, what is the market opportunity, and why is it such an interesting business?
So just to get started, the team itself, myself, Erik, we also have Jim, who is holding the fort today, as an experienced operator. We have quite some years under the belt, and we are all operators in that sense. We really like the space. We like to be involved in classifieds and brands that also touch consumer. And we're backed by VNV, for some years now, but also since 2016 by Realweb, which is an investment company owned by the founders of Immobiliare, who run the number one real estate classified in Italy, but also with quite some activities in Southern Europe.
And that, I think, operational experience, plus the investment experience in this space, in classifieds, in online marketplaces, and also those businesses where network effects the best, I think that combination is, yeah, is very strong, and we're very happy with, with this cap table. There are some other people as well in the cap table that we didn't mention here for some disclosure reasons. But, overall, we're very much focused on the long term. We're in it for the long term as well, as we believe that we're attacking, I would say, a huge, huge market, with rental accommodation. And, there's also quite some incumbents when it comes to classified, so, we got a long way to go. At Housing Anywhere, we really want to empower anybody to live however they want and wherever they want.
So, the vision is to become a global marketplace. We're focused on Europe, primarily, where are forming a beachhead, also in North America, in the United States. And right now, we're primarily focused on international mobility. That's really the key focus that we have as a marketplace. People that move across the border and find it hard to kind of transact with trust. That's the key part. The average rental period you find is about 6 months, so we're very different from travel. And we're also very different from local classifieds, where people look for multi-year engagements. How do we target people? Well, we have tenants and landlords, obviously. We, as a platform, serve these two, and we bring them together on the marketplace where we have them connect.
Tenants can book online very conveniently. It should be as easy as booking a hotel. That's the idea, but also with the right set of guarantees. And one of them is really focused on payments. We take in the payment of the first month rent at the time of booking. We also handle deposits, and we only release that after the tenant has moved in, so they can transact with confidence, with trust. And that's very important when you're moving from one country to another, or when you're transacting with any new landlord that you've never met before, also in a local market. So we believe this is a unique feature. On the landlord side, it's very convenient to actually rent out with, to people that, again, you've never met before. Just the...
An average quote from a landlord is what used to take weeks; now takes hours or days. Typically, after the first contact, we see an average booking time of 24 hours, which is very short if you just compare it to the more traditional rental life cycle, where you will go through this meticulous, stressful process, before you actually secure the new tenant or your new place. So that's, that's spectacular. Also, of course, we don't need any viewings because we provide guarantees, but also superior media. You can take a look at the site, but we have many different media options, and we try to make, let's say, as best of an impression of the place where you will actually move into, as possible.
And of course, there's numerous ways on how you can even push that further, but we see quite some innovation there down the line. When it comes to other guarantees that we provide to landlords, the first month rent, it's paid, and it's the landlords. That's that's important, unless the landlord cancels, then he has to refund the... Then we refund the tenant. But that's a guarantee that we provide. And in select markets, we also have a rent guarantee that actually secures them of all the rental payments throughout the whole tenancy in case the tenant doesn't pay up. So that's additional security that we provide to them that they get exclusively for us.
In the end, we're not only Housing Anywhere, we're also two other brands, but we're unifying the platforms that are powering these brands. Main platform runs on Housing Anywhere, it's the number one midterm rental marketplace in Europe. We've been going through quite some competition, some other well-funded players that I believe we've beaten. We, I think, can demonstrate also that we're quite hardened in that way, and we've done it also with far less money. I think it was, yeah, it was a clear proof point for us to become that number one. Over time, we acquired two other players. Kamernet in the Netherlands is a room classified, almost 20-year-old brand, really nice heritage, and really has a focus on students in the Netherlands.
Yeah, just made sense for us. Was an important market for the Netherlands, 90% market share, this brand there. And we saw a nice opportunity there, so we acted. Same with Studapart, French student rental marketplace, not a classified, so a marketplace also, has been doing transactions for quite some time. It's focused on students in France, growing really, really nicely. France is really booming. Sees a lot of new supply coming to the market, that we're getting booked. And overall, with that position in France, yeah, we're also very happy as it's one of the top three markets in Europe, when it comes to rental accommodation. The other ones are the UK and Germany. In Germany, we're also very strong.
In terms of business performance, just a nice high-level liquidity metric here with traffic. So we've been able to grow traffic quite, quite nicely over the last two years. Even during COVID, when all flights were stranded, we were still doing pretty nice in terms of traffic, but we've seen, we've seen a good post-COVID boom happening. 2.6 million visitors per month at the peak over 2022 that we actually welcomed on our site, on our sites last year. And if we then look at the actual revenue and the contribution margin ratio, then we see that we have been growing as well, both organically, which is the, well, the dark orange, but also with the addition of the new companies, of the new brands.
Kamernet and Studapart have not been the only acquisitions we've done. We've done 5 in total, smaller bolt-ons, those other 3. Kamernet and Studapart were more sizable businesses that we've been integrating. We're very happy with that because these are also businesses that have been adding to our revenue significantly, but also to our contribution margin. Businesses that were profitable at the time we acquired them and have been adding to our profitability since. Another element that I would just want to highlight for us, why we have a contribution margin that is around 60%, is because we're very good. We've been winning SEO for quite some time. We see a lot of recurring traffic as well, returning traffic.
It's not as spectacular where we only spend, like, with BlaBlaCar, 5% on paid. We do a little more, but with that SEO and with that affiliate traffic, those deals in place, we are able to secure a higher contribution margin with the Kamernet brand. Well, number one, 90% market share, and also has been around for 20 years, so there's quite some brand awareness going on on that brand in the Netherlands, giving us lots of direct traffic. And with Studapart, there's a lot of one-on-one relationships with universities, more than 120 schools in France, that basically promote Studapart as the go-to platform for finding student accommodation to all their students.
So there, there's some well-shaped marketing programs, developed with those universities, where basically the universities cause or take care of the distribution on the demand side. And all these kind of tools that we have in our belt, we're of course, trying to spread them across the group, but all of those tools help us to reach what I believe are unbeatable unit economics in this market. That also shows in some other metrics that I have here. So, we have been growing our lead in terms of organic traffic from 2x to 5x. So 2x is about January 2021, by now, 5x the traffic that our closest competitor in Europe has, so really been growing that lead.
Also, in terms of relative market share to those competitors that we identify, we are in a number one or number two position. So really, really happy with how that's been developing over the past few years. And, we, we'll keep on doing this, and also in other markets. This is one of our strengths, and we'll play it. Coming to market opportunity, just to put things a bit into perspective, we, we are now very much focused on students, young professionals, international mobility, but we believe that if you look at the technology that we've built, but also the journey and the user experience, rentals are going to be more managed and with a wider set of guarantees and value propositions, and, will also be more online instead of through real estate agents, for example, or through classified.
So we believe that market will mature over the next few years. It can easily also take 5-10, and I'm fine with that. We take it easy, and we take the opportunities as they come, and there's no need to deploy a lot of cash to that. That's a natural evolution as we see it. Also as we expand our platform, we can not only do rooms, but we can also do apartments, we can also do it for families. We do not then only do it for people that are international for international mobility, but also for those that are local. So that's more or less our roadmap, how we see it over the next few years.
€1.3 trillion spent per year on rent in the U.S. and in Europe. That's really all rentals. That's more than 100 million rental households. That's a huge market. Now, of course, there's quite some segmentation in there, so you have to be picky as you grow towards it. Right now, we really are servicing cross-border contracts, like people that travel cross-border to move for work, move for studies. Over time, we also go into those other categories where we basically want to target anybody below 35 years old, and at some point also just how... rental households in general. We do that by really expanding our marketplace. If you look at the entire rental life cycle, it's more than a marketplace alone where you match demand and supply.
It's also really the workflows that sit behind it. On an advertiser side, the marketplace really, activity you would see is really in lead acquisition, advertising your property, screening all the candidates you get, and qualifying them, and then confirming bookings. So that's really the marketplace part. After that, it really goes into the process of a call where you go through to the move-in, so preparing for the move-in, collecting the deposit, moving in, actually doing the checking reports, all these sort of things. And then, while you are in the tenancy life cycle, you have repairs to take care of. You have the rental payments until there's actually a move-out. So our platform will cover this over the next few years.
We are picky on what to do because, you know, as it looks like, just a few features you add, you have to really be careful that you're not bloating it and build something that is really subpar. We're quite picky, and we're now focusing on from search to move-in. That's the part that we cover. There's plenty of opportunity down the line that will actually cause more stickiness with the advertiser, but also sets us up for additional opportunities where we have a more intimate relationship with advertisers and are able to sell them insurance, mortgage, or other sort of financing products that we see there. On the tenant side, simply the mirror image, but a very different journey that you have to shape differently also, of course.
The property search, that's a key feature to actually be able to find what meets your needs, but also then securing it and really booking it, that's another part. That's what we're focused on. We also do some... We've been venturing into rental payments, doing more and more of that, but still not really at a point simply because we didn't do the investments yet. Not at the point where we say, like, we do the full rental life cycle for all our tenants and for all our landlords, that's obviously an opportunity that we dive deeper in. Over the next few years, what we want to do, well, at least 20% year-on-year growth, so we're on that path.
We're on the path, so that's great. We establish a foothold in North America. It's really important for us. It's a very sizable market. Of the $1.3 trillion, it's about 60%, so it's a very big rental market. And there's also a lot of international mobility that actually goes into the USA, so that's a key market for us to play in. And lastly, really maintaining that profitability for us, it's key. It's a bit of how we've done it, not by basically emptying deep pockets, but by really focusing on unit economics. So personally, I never really want to compromise on that one.
And make smart investments in those areas that we see that we can expand in, in terms of covering a larger part of the rental life cycle. Okay, that's on Housing Anywhere. Let's do Q&A.
Perfect. Thank you for that. Have a seat in the-
Yeah.
hot seat. So I might kick it off with a question from me. Could you talk a bit about how consumer behavior has changed and demand in overall for, for your products over the past, let's say, 18-24 months?
You mean, post-COVID?
Yeah, post-COVID, yeah.
Or just in general, if we-
Both.
Okay. So I believe what we've seen is that during COVID, obviously, was a bad time for us. So during COVID, we saw, like, an 80%-90% revenue drop overnight. So that was a tough one to swallow. But we managed to stay afloat, also because we weren't so dependent on paid traffic and these sort of things. So when you see that conversion really drops, that's not really the problem. So we've been quite resilient, and in that sense, also, we've been able to gain a lot of market share, and that's. And also act on the M&A opportunities that were there. Consumer behavior, we see more adoption of online rentals. We see that it's becoming more normal.
We see that people demand more for the money's worth. We see rental prices really go up, so people are becoming more demanding. When you see a lot of online bookings, people are moving closer to what's been set as standards in terms of online travel, hotel bookings, and Airbnb, for example. In that sense, I think consumers have turned to become more demanding. We have a set of value propositions that I think is well-aligned with that and really sets it apart from classifieds. This is, I think, a natural evolution of people starting to demand more. To add to that, you see a lot of classifieds that are looking for ways to basically answer to that.
And in some geos, you see that they are successful in testing, but actually, in most geos, not. Meaning that, they will start to focus more on real estate sales and less on rentals. So we kind of see, because the consumer is demanding more, we see the space opening up for us.
Great. And a question on competition. You showed a slide where, you know, you show that you're much bigger than your closest competitor. Is it possible to name those competitors? And a follow-up question on that: Do you see Airbnb as a potential competitor going into the long-term rental market?
Starting with the first one, sure, I can name them. So competitors we've seen in the space that have VC funded were Spotahome and Uniplaces. Those were real marketplaces. There's some other smaller players, but not really that present. What you'll-- Those are real marketplaces, and all the other competitors that are out there are simply classifieds. They typically are not really growing. They're stagnant. There's little investment happening in... Especially when they're room classifieds, so little investment happening actually in the journey and really upgrading it. They're a bit like lame ducks, but quite entrenched in the sense that they have a big share of mind, if they've been around for like 10, 15 years.
So it will take some time, I think, for users to move from one to another. And then, yeah, then the other two players that I just named, those were the competitors that we've been kind of battling in Europe. Moving to Airbnb, I do believe Airbnb still has a long way to go. I think it's a great product, but in terms of rentals or travel, it's it are really two different categories. You move, well, from a regular, a regulatory perspective in a completely, you're in a completely different ballgame. And also in terms of expectations that you see with the hosts, that they call the landlords, they're very different in terms of income that they seek.
So what we see more and more actually these days, especially post-COVID, is that we see a more hybrid game happening, where housing unit is used for more long term, and the pricing strategy reflects that of these landlords, where they use Airbnb actually for the short-term options to fill, like, the small gaps in between these longer stays.
I think we have a question from our-
Thanks. Just a couple of questions from me. Do you happen to have any liability with regards to these six-month rentals that you help out with? I'm guessing not, but how is it gonna change when you're trying to transition your model to a more longer-term rental or general rental, as you mentioned, you're going to try to do in the future? And second question, if I may just finish that off-
Just on the first-
Yeah.
What do you mean with liability?
Do you have any liability with regards to damages that might happen-
Mm.
-during the course of the-
It's insured. So no, we don't carry that.
All right. The other question is around, probably I missed this during the presentation, the commissions on either side. How is that trending over the years?
Yeah, so as a marketplace, we take a commission, and Erik can tell the details. So yes, indeed, there's a difference by market, but in general, we take a margin for the tenant as well as from the landlord. By market, it can be a little bit different and also from a regulatory perspective. For example, in the Netherlands, we're not allowed, or there's a bit of a question mark, if we can do that on both sides. So there we only charge on one side, and the other part is more subscription model. The same for Kamernet as a brand is more a subscription model as well.
Perfect. Thank you.
One more.
Hi. Can you talk a little bit more about the typical tenants—sorry, the typical landlords? How does a landlord decide whether to use a, do a short-term rental or a long-term rental? And like, is there a trend for landlords to prefer one versus the other? Also, are landlords typically, like, single, single location, or do they tend... Are there companies that have, you know, dozens of them?
Yeah. Okay, so let's, let's go with the first question. So when a landlord has a property, of course, there's a strategy on how to make an income on it. So the strategy typically is a reflection of their own appetite for risk and also for the operations that come with it. If they like the operations, if they have a bit more risk, yeah, then you typically see them more focused on short-term rentals. If they like the seasonality, perhaps also with short-term rentals, they, they are more there. With long-term rentals, these are typically people that seek to profit for longer term from, from a scheme. So, and, and they don't wanna really be burdened by the operational load that you would have with all the changes and everything.
So you see that preference set definitely is different. And of course, the location of the property is very important, if it's actually suited for short-term rentals or not, especially for holiday rentals. When it comes to the composition of different landlords, so for what we see in the markets that we operate in, about, depending on the country, 15-25% are larger residences, either co-living or purposeful student accommodation, where multiple units are in one building, and basically these units, there's like 20, 30 of the same type. So that's kind of more professional, more institutional property management that happens there. Then there's a very long tail of smaller property manager and management companies, and there's a...
Also in the long tail, even further down, you will find the private landlords. Private landlords typically account in the market for 10%-20%, and then the remainder is this group of property management companies. With HousingAnywhere, we're really good with property management companies. With Studapart, French brand in France, we're very good with PBSA and with co-living, and with Kamernet, we're very good with private landlords.
So logically, for us as business leaders, we think, "Okay, how are we gonna get actually best, best of breed across the group so that we can be an all-encompassing marketplace where we're actually combining these three sort of property categories in one?" And what's key to understand there is that if you look at many of the classifieds these days, is that they typically focus on one sort of landlord or one sort of configuration. And that makes it really unique, I believe, for us, because then from a searcher perspective, you actually see full choice and you see full market, rather than that you only see one type, and you have to visit three sites. So, we are very attuned into these different landlord types, and we also service them in a slightly different way.
Great. One final question from me. The same question I asked Fredrik as the final question. If we look five years into the future, where are you in terms of your product, your, your offering? Perhaps some color on what the financial profile might look like in five, six years' time.
Yeah, I can repeat the answer, but the answer of Fredrik. No, obviously, we wanna keep growing, so as I said, the market is huge. So we really wanna have that beachhead in the U.S. and be a sizable player there. That, that's one key for us. So that's important. In Europe, we really want to be the number one. We have a buy and build strategy, so we see some opportunities down the line to further consolidate the market, and it makes a lot of sense also, if you look at, you know, the costs that go into building a platform like we do.
From a consumer perspective, and also from a landlord perspective, we're really an end-to-end rental platform where you can transact with security, with safety. It really kind of makes you able to also transact without any stress, as the act of moving these days is a very stressful experience. That's why we believe that the experience can be vastly better, and we do that by connecting this huge pool of demand with our trusted network of landlords.
Great. Thank you very much for that.
Welcome.
Thank you, and thank you, Mark. We're now gonna take a 10-minute break, and be back at 3:05 P.M. So for everyone in the room, there are some refreshments one floor up. Please help yourselves. And for the ones on live stream, we'll continue at 3:05 P.M. Thanks.
... Okay, welcome back after your short break, everyone. We have our next speaker ready. Stefan Batory, welcome.
Thank you, everyone, and sorry for ruining your break. Well, I always get nervous when speaking publicly, so I'm just gonna pretend you're not here, if you're okay with that. So here at Booksy, we have a pretty simple mission. We want to make appointments easy. And today we are focusing on five core markets, with U.S. being half of our business and Europe, the other half of the business, with primary focus on the UK, France, Spain, and Poland. And, the value of appointments processed via our platform on an annualized basis, it's $7 billion. We've been growing over 80% year-over-year on average in the past few years. And, I think we'll be able to accelerate, and I'll tackle that in a few minutes.
On an annualized basis, people book over 150 million appointments across these five markets that I mentioned. And we have over 20 million consumers using our, our platform, and we acquired all of them practically for free, and I'm gonna tackle that, on the next slides as well. On the supply side, we have over 115,000 paying subscribers today, and I want to underline paying subscribers because some of our competitors have a premium model, so they always talk about active subscribers or subscribers. But, it's hard to tell how many, are really using them, and we believe if someone is paying, it means they see the value, and it's the best proof of our product market fit. And as a company, across these five markets, we employ over 700 people.
When we decided to launch Booksy a few years ago, we quickly realized that this is one of the last major verticals that had not been digitized. Everyone knows Amazon or Uber or Doctolib here in France, or OpenTable, Grubh ub, Airbnb in their respective verticals. But when it comes to hair and beauty, the market is still very fragmented, and there is nobody top of mind when you think about scheduling appointments in that space. And that was one of the reasons why we decided to launch Booksy. The market is super fragmented. It's predominantly SMBs and independent contractors, large enterprise chains, depending on the market, but it's usually around 5% of the total of the total addressable market.
This is a great environment to create a marketplace, and that's why we thrive in that space. We are helping both the supply and the demand to take the hassle out of the booking process. For that, we created two apps, Booksy for consumers and Booksy Biz for the providers, and Booksy Biz is available both on tablets and on smartphones. Nine years ago, when we were launching Booksy, we felt that that was the right way to move into that vertical because most of the people who work in that space, they are busy working with their hands. Most of them don't even have computers, but they all carried smartphones with them.
We felt that by putting a very powerful tool that would fit their pocket, would enable them to make more money, would enable them to grow their business, would enable them to provide better customer service for their clients. One thing we did not realize, and today we are very proud of that, is that we are also changing their lifestyle. When we were launching Booksy, I guess we were focused, obviously, on the business side of it. We wanted to make it an amazing business, and we wanted to provide value to the consumers, and we perceived Booksy as a productivity app or as a business app.
Today, the longer we run the company, the more we realize that this is also a lifestyle app, because we have providers, we have stylists and barbers reaching out to us literally every single day, every single week, thanking us for changing their lifestyle, for helping them to provide for their families, to live healthier lifestyle. We even had a guy who called us from a hospital with a FaceTime video showing us his wife delivering a baby. And I'm not kidding you. That was a real story, and when the customer service agent asked him, like: "Why are you calling us? I feel a little bit awkward looking at your wife, and in this situation, maybe you should call someone from your family." And he said, "You are my family.
“Before Booksy, I did not have any time to get romantic with my wife.” That's what he said. I would not be able to provide for my family, and Booksy provided me that security. Now I can make enough money to provide for a family. I personally had a phone call from a husband of a stylist who thanked me for saving his marriage, because he said before Booksy, his wife always had FOMO. Like, in the evening when she came back from work, she always had her phone with her, and they never went out to a dinner or to movies, because if she didn't take the calls from her clients late evening or even at night, she wouldn't have anyone sitting in her chair the next day.
And that's what I mean when I say that we are changing lives of literally, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. I mentioned we have over 115,000 businesses, but when you multiply that by number of the employees, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people, that work with Booksy, and on daily basis, we are helping them, not only to make more money, not only to be more successful, but also, to spend more time with their loved ones, to spend more time doing what they enjoy. I mentioned that in the past, we've been growing pretty strong, but we believe that we can accelerate from now on.
Something that we consider is our unfair competitive advantage is the flywheel that we have built, and that's one of the reasons why we are focusing on the five markets that I mentioned. In the past, we had presence across over a dozen markets, and the bigger we are, the more we realize that this is a winner-takes-all dynamics, and there is no prize for being second or third. So we pulled out from Mexico, we pulled out from South Africa, from Argentina, from India, from the Philippines, from Singapore, and we are focusing on the markets that really matter, which, as I mentioned, is the U.S. and four markets in Europe. The bigger we grow, the more providers we have using Booksy, the more consumers they bring.
And then the more consumers we have, obviously, the more salons want to join Booksy because the more value they get from the platform. So, we have classical network effects here because the value of the product grows with the value of the network. The more consumers we have, the more providers want to join us, because it's not only the scheduling system and the business management system we provide them, but it's also access to millions of the consumers, and the other way around. The more providers we have, the more consumers are downloading Booksy because we give them choice. We give them a great platform, a great search and discovery platform, to find new salons. And I mentioned the 20 million consumers we have using the platform today, we acquired them practically for free.
Because we don't do B2C marketing, we hardly spend any money on B2C acquisition. We acquired the demand through the supply. So with every single salon that joins Booksy, we acquire all of their clients for free because they can only get the value of... out of Booksy once they push it to their existing clients. And that's how we were able to build the flywheel and enter new markets. So thanks to that, we've been the fastest growing player in this space, and we have more monthly active users than... sorry, daily active users and more app downloads every single day than all of our competitors combined. And I'll let the graph to speak for itself. So how do we monetize?
Our bread and butter is subscriptions, so we charge the supply for using the product, and the business model is fairly simple. We charge almost $30 per month for independent staffers, and then $20 for every extra seat. So the more employees they have, the more they pay us for using the, the SaaS platform. And this is U.S. pricing, by the way, in, across other markets, the structure- Did I do something wrong? Okay. However, the structure is pretty much the same, it's just different currencies and maybe slightly different price points, depending on the purchasing power in that market. So, SaaS is our bread and butter, and this is how we take the flywheel off the ground, and this is how we build the initial inertia.
And as we continue to grow in local markets, and by local markets, we consider cities and metro areas, and as we start getting more and more consumers using Booksy, and the flywheel gets stronger, people start what we call cross-booking. So they start going to other salons, they start using Booksy as a search and discovery platform, and then we allow the providers to position themselves higher on the listing, and this is what we called Boost or Marketplace. So once we have liquidity in local markets, we start monetizing with Boost. That's our second revenue stream. And in our most successful cities, more than half of our revenue already comes from Boost. In our best cities, two-thirds of revenues is Boost versus one-third is subscription.
The more mature the market, the more favorable the structure towards Boost. Last but not least is payments. We just revamped our entire payment stack and migrated from Adyen to Stripe. Even though the penetration is relatively low today, we see it as a huge opportunity with $7 billion GMV that I mentioned. Even if we, on a net basis, monetize only 1%, at a 1% rate, it's going to be an amazing business and an upside to our model, which already is pretty good. You all know what happened last year and what most startups have had to go through. After eight years of growing at all costs, we decided to switch gears to efficient growth, and we were able to maintain our growth rate.
In fact, we are starting to see that we are accelerating, while at the same time taking the company to break-even point and generating 17% positive EBITDA. On the rule of forty scale, that put us in July, almost at 70%. As I mentioned, as the flywheel is getting stronger and stronger, we believe that we'll be accelerating, and our best markets are already growing faster than the overall company. As more markets get to liquidity point, we believe that the overall growth is gonna accelerate as well. Last but not least, we also believe that we have a few other opportunities to monetize even better. As I mentioned, today, we are monetizing through SaaS, marketplace, and payments. The next logical step for us would be supply chain and e-commerce.
We already have brands like L'Oréal, Wella, Schwarzkopf, and others, reaching out to us actively. And, I think I can use the word, "begging us," to give them access to over 100,000 salons we have on the platform. They want to optimize their, supply chain and last mile, and they see Booksy as, a crucial player to help them accessing those salons. We are also thinking about embedded fintech. First, we need to tap into the payment flow, and we'll be focusing on payments, but 2-3 years from now, we are also thinking about, short-term loans. And, we know everything about the salons that are using us. We know more about them than banks and IRS because we know how much money they are making.
We know how many clients are coming back, how many clients they are losing, how fast they are growing, or maybe declining in some cases. So we could underwrite it better than anyone else, and we believe that some kind of... That, that loan is gonna be another product on that, on the payment stack. Advertising, I personally would use it as the last resort for us because I don't like to ruin the user experience and provider experience with unnecessary advertising. But again, we think we can combine it in a very smart way with supply chain and e-commerce. A lot of people that are using Booksy, they consider themselves as artists. They are hairstylists, they are nail stylists.
They love to make people feel pretty and beautiful, but they are not necessarily very tech-savvy nor business-savvy, and they hate to be perceived as salesmen. They hate pushing products to people. So, with millions, tens of millions of consumers that we have, we believe that we can weave in marketing somewhere there in the booking process, because if we know that somebody is booking a haircut with a beard trim, we can assume they have a beard, and maybe we can upsell them beard oil. If somebody is booking pedicure or manicure, then we can maybe upsell some products that would be relevant to those services. So, we'll be thinking how to use that opportunity. Another great opportunity is a job marketplace.
A lot of these stylists are looking for new salons, and a lot of salons are looking to fill in chairs. And again, with hundreds of thousands of people that are using Booksy, we know who the good stylists are, we know who the good salons are, so we can provide some kind of a platform to match the supply and demand on the job marketplace. But these are all, like, future ideas. Today, we wanna have focus, and we wanna execute on what we already have, and we believe that this is already an amazing business, and everything else will come when a good time, like, when we think there is a good time to launch those new opportunities. So thank you for your attention, and I'm happy to take any questions you have.
Thank you for the presentation. Have a seat here. If you have any questions, just raise your hand, and we'll see to attend them. Yeah, we can start over here if we have a mic in the front here.
Today, you are in the United States and four other markets. Would you consider entering new markets? Can you win them as well?
The short answer is yes. We could win virtually almost every market that's out there. We believe that most of markets are up for grabs, maybe except of Japan and Sweden and Poland. These are the three that have already been dominated by two peers of ours, Recruit Holdings in Japan and Bokad irekt in Sweden. Poland is obviously a market taken by Booksy. But as I mentioned, we need to focus on winning the four other markets, and the U.S. is the biggest beauty market in the world, and, like, going after, with all due respect, Czechia or Hungary or even Mexico, doesn't make sense if that would distract us from winning the U.S.
We wanna focus on winning the U.S. first, and I believe 2, 3, 4 years from now, it's still gonna be a good time to go after all those other markets.
Understand. Are there any particular states in the United States where you are exceptionally strong today?
... We are very strong in Florida, relatively strong in Texas, California, and New York State, and Illinois. So these are the top five states for Booksy, but these are also five out of six or seven states with most population. So I would say these are the usual suspects, but Florida is definitely our stronghold.
Do you know why you succeeded there?
Yes. So, five years ago, when we realized that this is a winner-takes-all dynamics, and we decided to double down on the first three markets, we had chosen Orlando and Tampa in Florida and San Antonio in Texas. So, that was the initial decision we made back in 2018.
If you succeed in one big city, does it spread to closer cities in the same state or not as easy?
It does, and it helps a little bit. There is some spillover, both on the local level and also national and global level. So, we don't have time to go really deep into our acquisition loops, but today I focus only on the B2C and C2B, and I mentioned that the stronger we grow, the bigger we grow, the more supply we have, the more demand comes to Booksy, and the more demand we have, the more supply comes to Booksy. But we also have B2B and C2C loops. C2C is pretty self-explanatory because people that are happy with our app, they just share it with their family and friends.
Mm-hmm.
And the same applies to businesses when they are happy using Booksy, and somebody asks them, like, "Hey, what do you use for scheduling?" Then the bigger we are on the supply side, that also helps us with the B2B loop, and those, especially the B2B loop, it has, like, spillover, not only on hyper local level, but also on national and global level. We can particularly see that in markets where we have zero presence, like Australia. We are not focusing on Australia at all, but because we have pretty strong presence in the U.S. and in the UK, then a few hundred people from Australia just started using Booksy with zero marketing, and, like, we allow them to pay us some money.
Okay, very impressive. Thank you.
A follow-up question on that. You mentioned Boka Direkt. I think Per knows them very well and a part of some other people in this room. Would it make sense for you to, to do an acquisition of, for example, let's say, Boka Direkt has a strong market presence in Sweden, you know, just benefit of kind of synergies of that scale?
Maybe long term, it would. But today there wouldn't be any synergies because Boka Direkt operates as independent company. They have a different tech stack, different platform. There are no network effects between Sweden and other European markets where we are present, and no network effects between the markets we are in, because like France and Spain and Poland and the UK are, like, totally different markets. However, there would be a benefit of scale, but only if Boka Direkt used the Booksy platform. So it would make sense, but not immediately. And I think there are a couple other M&As that would serve us much better, especially in the markets we are going after today, to consolidate that space and to lock in these markets.
Maybe long term, partnering up with Boka Direkt and couple other local champions would make sense for us, but I think it's too early to even start thinking about that.
Okay, great answer. We have a question from up here.
Yeah, so two questions. You have a lot of growth and use, obviously, but could you just help us with the importance of the different ones that you mentioned throughout the presentation? Like, if you were to rank them, is this the focus of just adding more salons, or is it a focus of increasing or optimizing prices? If you could add some more color on that.
I'm not sure I understood the question. You're-
Yeah. So you mentioned a lot of different avenues you have to go through. So if you could help us rank the importance of these, and I mean, in a market that you're participating in, which is a winner-takes-it-all market, the price dynamic is also quite interesting, if you could describe that more.
So let me start with the second half of your question. Price... The price plays a role, but it's a little bit counterintuitive because one might think that if you offer your product for free, it's gonna remove the, the entry barrier, and you would grow faster, through that. And we have tried that at least three times, if my memory serves today, and in every single case, we didn't really see the benefits from that. If anything, that helped us with the top of the funnel, but the quality, of the acquisition was really poor, and the providers that were going after a free product were usually the worst quality providers, and we decided not to continue those tests. We also have a couple of competitors that are offering a premium product, and we don't see them growing faster than we are.
So, if they are not growing faster and we are generating revenue from subscription, then it just doesn't make sense to give it up for free. When it comes to priorities, I believe that the provider acquisition and SaaS is the most important one because we are in a land grab phase. It doesn't really matter if somebody monetizes better through payments or any other product, if eventually they are going to get pushed out of that market. So to lock in the market, acquisition of new providers is the most important thing, and obviously that makes the SaaS subscription the most important revenue stream.
But once we lock in the market, and that's the case in Poland, and that's what we are starting to see happening, in several cities in Spain, and this is what we are starting to see in some markets in the U.S., then we are starting to prioritize on Boost on payments.
Okay. I was actually thinking the opposite, that if you lock in a market, so to say, and really becoming the number one choice, you probably have some potential to increase prices to these loans.
Yeah, absolutely. So on that note, we increased the SaaS prices in Poland in February this year and February last year, and the impact on churn was negligible. So I don't know how long we are gonna continue increasing the prices, but definitely once we dominate in a local market, we have that pricing power, and we can do that, and we want to do that. To some, to a certain point, because we wanna make sure we not only extract the value, but we also deliver value to our providers. So that's why we are thinking about those other revenue streams in the future. So we not only extract value and increase monetization, but we continue delivering them value while increasing our prices.
Yeah. Thank you.
Can you talk about long-term margin aspiration and the profitability you're delivering in Poland at the moment, which is your most mature market, please?
So Poland today has 72% EBITDA margin. The U.S. is around 50% EBITDA margin. Other markets, the UK, is at 20%, if I remember that correctly, and France and Spain are slightly negative, but in the next few months, 6, 9 months, they both should turn profits. And we believe that 75%-80% EBITDA margin on a country basis, that's something we can achieve. And it's gonna be difficult to increase that because payments usually have lower profit margins. So as we grow with payments, it's gonna be dragging us down. But Boost is a 100% margin product for us because we don't need to spend any money on B2C acquisition, as I mentioned, and we are just recycling, if you will, the consumers that we already have.
So, this is why Boost is such a highly profitable product for us. SaaS is an 89-90% gross profit product, so, on blended basis, as I mentioned, I believe we can get to 80%. As a company, I think at scale, we should be able to get to 50-60% margin.
Great. I think we have to end it on that. Thank you very much, Stefan, for the presentation and for the good answers.
Thank you.
I want to welcome up our next speaker from NoTraffic, CEO, Tal Kreisler. Welcome.
Okay. So good afternoon, everyone. My name is Tal Kreisler. I'm the CEO of NoTraffic. And we've, we are a deep tech company, developed what's considered today as the leading mobility platform. Excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me. My first capital market day, so it's a huge honor and pleasure. Our mission in NoTraffic is to change the way that we are operating traffic signals and transform them to a whole cloud-connected and dynamic network with the goal of improving efficiency, safety, reducing emissions, and also to enable the next generation of advanced mobility services. We've established a company back in 2017. Our R&D is based in Israel. Currently, our business operation is in the US and Canada.
We're now starting to explore additional markets, among them Europe and other territories. One of the things that we are really proud of is the fact that we're not just developing great technology, but we're also developing a technology that have a real impact on the world we are living in. We've been in development mode for about five years. We launched commercially last year and got amazing exposure. We were selected by TIME as one of the 100 most influential companies around the world, along companies such as Moderna, Rivian, and others.
Been highlighted in various keynotes, such as the CEO of NVIDIA, that position us as the companies that's revolutionizing the mobility space using AI, and got amazing coverage in all major publications such as New York Times and quite a few others. We've built a strong team of exceptional people that's helping us to grow the company and take it public in the future. Among them, Lior Endelman, who is one of the founders of Storage. I think that's the one of the most successful companies that came out of Israel. Lars, which I think most of you already know, was executive in Uber and great help. Sebastian did bring a lot of experience in the finance side.
Victor Mendez, who was the former Deputy Secretary of Transportation for the USDOT, and prior to that, was the head of the Federal Highway Administration, and Professor Nathan Gartner, who considered today as the top professor in the field of adaptive traffic lights and traffic signals. Until today, we raised $75 million. We just announced our last round of funding couple of months ago, led by M&G, with the participation from VNV. So thank you for joining us. And we have some other top VCs and investors to join, such as Grove Ventures, probably number one deep tech venture in Israel, Next Gear, a mobility fund, and quite a few others.
So, when we think about traffic, traffic lights, the most intuitive thing to think about is inefficiency, congestion, and safety, which, by the way, all of them are true. But the problem is way broader. The problem is that we are operating traffic lights in the same way for the last 100 years or so. Meaning that the majority of them still offline, not connected to anything, and they still running predefined timing plans. That's this type of a lack of communication and real-time operation basically not allow them to react to various changing environments, and also to differentiate between different types of road users, such as public transportation, emergency vehicles, pedestrians, scooter, et cetera.
Not even talking about supporting more advanced types of mobility, such as connected, autonomous vehicles and more. So there's kind of a huge upgrades that need to happen on our traffic management system in order to actually enable the next generation of these various type of mobility services. And this is what we actually doing in this space. We developed an end-to-end mobility platform that allow us to retrofit any signalized intersection in less than 2 hours, connect it to the cloud, and transform it to fully digital. On the left side, you can see our mobility operating system. It simply allow agencies to manage a traffic lights network in a click of a button.
On top, these are IoT devices that we are manufacturing, with the idea of complementing the lack of communication, data, and compute power that we do not have currently at signalized intersections. We're using technology that's called Edge Compute. It allows to have a very fast installation, shipping our sensors to anywhere we want around the world. Our installer connected on the traffic lights, and within two hours, it's all up and running. Zero requirement from the public sector. Functionality-wise, we're providing as part of our basic package, AI detection. We run algorithms in our sensor that have the ability to detect and differentiate any object in a human eye level, in the vicinity of the intersection, and also to share this information between the different intersections that's connected to our network.
The last thing is our twenty-four seven over-the-air support, which might sound trivial to most of you that's been exposed to the tech sector. In the traffic space, that's mind-blowing feature. This sector today is very hardware-driven, and therefore, when something breaks, agencies have to call a technician, and usually take him a month or so to come to to fix it. With our platform, we're talking about less than two hours. So this is one of our great differentiator. But perhaps the thing that we are mostly proud of is the fact that we introduced the first mobility marketplace to the world.
Think about the traffic space in a very similar way to the consumer world before 2007, before the smartphone, where we had a camera and a calculator and a compass, a flashlight, et cetera. None of them could work together, and when something break, we just went out and bought a new one. This is how the traffic space look today, and what we are introducing is a single hardware platform with a variety of mobility application that do not require to go and purchase another hardware device. You can simply activate it in a click of a button. And that's, again, that's a huge, huge revolution that we are bringing.
Anything from traffic light optimization, prioritization of public transportation, emergency vehicles, and safety applications, and all the way up to supporting police and fire departments, and even connected vehicles. So I want you to imagine for a second, how a grid, an urban environment with a NoTraffic platform look like. Drivers can wait half of the time on the road. Public transportation can get priority based on the capacity of the bus and based on the schedule. Accident can be detected in real time, and first responders can be dispatched and get priority to the event and from the event. As you know, 70% of fatality cases happen at the first hour after the event, and therefore, literally, every minute count.
At the same time, traffic can be divert through alternative routes in order to avoid congestion in first place. Pedestrians can get priority access to school. Freight can get priority on certain arterials. Drivers can get information about what the traffic light is doing, when it's about to change, safety-critical information about pedestrian or vehicle beyond line of sight, et cetera. And on a macro level, based on our study and deployments, we can reduce, on an annual basis, about 4,600 months of delay, about 26,000 tons of CO₂, which equivalent to take about 6,000 vehicles off the road, and provide various types of advanced services. Now, I know it sounds great, but I want to show you how it look in the real world.
That's a demonstration from one of our customers, one of our partners in Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. They deployed our system. You cannot see there's a really cool music in the background. Unfortunately, you cannot hear. So they deployed our platform, started with 12 intersection corridor. They had major, major queues over there, major congestion, about a mile every day.... They choose us initially. And what we've done is we just put a drone, and we want to show how this corridor look before we activated our platform and after. We took the most difficult times, peak times, 8 A.M., 4 P.M., same day of the week. And this is how it look. On the left side, you can see the 4 P.M.
I hope that you can see it nicely. There's, like, a whole queue going there. Right side, going pretty smooth. Just on this corridor, we reduced about 10 minutes for driver per day. Now you can see the 8 A.M. I hope you can see the queue goes all the way to the next city. On our side, it's pretty smooth. Another cool thing is that we actually managed to improve the road capacity by about 10%. So more vehicles are waiting less time. We improve all other parameters, by the way, pedestrians waiting less. Obviously, it was a great success. The city decided to move forward with us and expanded, and now we are operating a major chunk of the city.
On the last couple of years, we also went through various state validations and approvals. We got approval to operate in Texas, California, Georgia, and quite a few others. Currently operating in dozens of cities across the U.S., and deploying every week a few with few agencies. We are operating via a network of partners. We have both traffic equipment resellers that's going out and selling our platform, and also another layer of strategic partnerships with companies such as Rogers Communications, which is the largest telco in Canada, AT&T, NVIDIA, and quite a few others. As mentioned before, we've launched commercially last year.
We see great, great growth in all parameters. We've done between double to four times over the last year. Managed to do 3.5x on our customers. Double the intersection sold. Double the booking that we've generated, and 4.5x on revenues. We're currently working on improving our hardware side, on our sensors, on a massive cost reduction project that should take us to cash flow positive by the end of 2025. Now, another interesting factor, we're all seeing what's going on in the tech space out there, the waters are pretty rough. In our space, our space is actually going through the best time ever.
First of all, there's a lot of public pressure to mitigate safety, congestion, and emissions. Right? Road fatality went up by more than 10% from last year. Transportation generate about 29% of emissions, and obviously, congestion becoming crazy. We're starting to see huge allocations of funding from federal governments toward infrastructure. So in the U.S., we're talking about the infrastructure bill of $1.2 trillion, but also in Germany, about EUR 300 billion, in UK, and quite a few others. Another interesting factor is that this domain was relatively sleepy in the last 100 years or so, with a lot of traditional companies operating in.
We're starting to see a lot of interest from tech companies, auto OEMs, telcos, cable companies, et cetera. That's seeing a lot of interest and a lot of potential in this space. Last thing is the technology leap that allowing us to utilize technologies such as Edge Compute, 5G, et cetera, in order to make the installation and operation parts for agencies as seamless as possible. We have an agenda in our company. We call it Zero Homework to the Public Sector. Give us the go, and we'll deploy it in two hours, no matter if you have communication or if you have traffic light controller from the seventies, or if the intersection is in the middle of the desert. True story, by the way. We're good with that.
We don't need them to do anything. Another cool thing that we've done, this was in Canada, in collaboration with Rogers Communication and NVIDIA. We have no sound, but basically, let me jump to the results. By the way, if someone wants, we just launched it. We've done an intense study together with Rogers Communication, NVIDIA, and the University of British Columbia. And we just launched a webinar about a month ago, sharing the results, the video, the white papers, et cetera. Generated huge exposure. Happy to share it with anyone who's interested after. But just in short, we've deployed five intersections as the initial installation in Canada.
The goal of the agency was to actually improve pedestrians' delay, right? So not only that we managed to reduce annually pedestrian delay, that's equal to 2,400 days, we actually managed to reduce, in addition, vehicle delay equal to 4,700 days, reduce about 74 tons of emissions, and generate economic benefits equal to $165,000. Now, if we are extrapolating this for the entire Vancouver, which is where we deployed, we can reduce over a year, more than 55,000 days equivalent of delay for pedestrians, more than 139,000 vehicle delay. Generates or reduce, sorry, economic emissions, sorry, by 52,000 tons. And the total economic value for this is $84 million.
So that was the, again, got a lot of attention. We already have various cities, some already deployed, and quite a few others in the region that now we're moving forward with. The last demo I want to show you really quickly is from a demonstration that we've done with California Department of Transportation, spending a full day with them, and also one of our partners, demonstrating a lot of our capabilities, among them, some more advanced services and applications. In this case, you can see our vehicle approaching to an intersection and getting an indication from our system that there is a pedestrian around the corner that the vehicle is about to hit if he's not going to reduce his speed.
Think about it like something that complement ADAS systems, specifically in signalized intersection, which are home to about 50% of accident that include fatalities and injuries. So, that's about us. Again, thank you very much, and I just want to summarize or to finalize by saying that I hope that each and every one of the people that sit here in the room is not just proud because he's part of a company that's leading this market, but also you should be proud because you are contributing to your companies that literally making the world a better place. Thank you very much.
Thank you for that. So we already have a question from the room. Please.
Hi. How, how do you price your product, and what's the competitive landscape like, and how are you sort of different from your competition?
Great. So we have a price for the basic package, which including the IoT devices, the mobility operating system, service, et cetera, everything that you've seen in the first slide. We kind of have an annual annual price for that, and then we have additional pricing for every application that they are activating on top. That's one of the advanced advantages of Edge Compute. So think about every intersection that we are operating, basically have a bunch of computers deployed, and now we can provide more and more and more and more applications. So as a company, although we have hardware component, we can get to almost a 90% gross margin moving forward, because we have unlimited number of revenue layers that we can provide.
In terms of the competitive landscape, so most of the companies in this space are what we call the traditional, the traditional group, operating in this space for a long time. We do see an interesting angle coming from a company based in Canada, named Miovision, which have good technology and great backers. But I think that in terms of, like, new new technology, we are considered today as the the top in the market.
Yeah, one more question.
Just to extend off that, how does the public sector interact with your hardware? Is it leased to them? Do they own it? Do you retain ownership of it? Just want to appreciate the dynamics there.
Great. So they are buying basically a service for five years. We bundle it for five years. During these five years, we are taking full ownership that the platform will work. And that's, again, reduce a lot of hassle from their side. They do not have to fight with technicians anymore and try to understand, there's, like, a lot of interoperability issues in this space, right? So in many cases, they don't even know who's in charge. What we are saying is we're gonna take full ownership, we're gonna make sure it's working, you're gonna enjoy the benefits, you're gonna set the policies, by the way, and that's make their life much easier.
One more question.
I completely appreciate how useful this can be, and it clearly seems to be a huge benefit. But just trying to understand, despite the benefits, how, how easy has it been to sell to these various local governments out there? Because clearly, they don't get an immediate cost benefit, at least to their PNLs, or nor do they get a revenue. So how, how easy has it been, and how long are the sales cycles typically?
Great. So I think that one of the advantages here, and I see where you're coming from. The traffic management space is a brown field, right? This space already exists, meaning that they have allocated budget to renew their traffic management systems. Every intersection have, by default, sensing devices, either the loops under the ground or cameras that replace the loops. They're doing traffic counts every 3-5 years. There are some many other hardware devices that they are installing. So our sales pitch is very simple. Imagine that you're buying a fax machine every four or five years, and now we are telling you that in a better price, you can get iPhone 15. You can still get your faxes, by the way, but it can do way more.
That's kind of a no-brainer offering for them. Since the budget is already there for maintenance, this is dramatically reducing the sales cycles. Our shortest one was 1 hour, came out of a meeting with a PO. Usually, I would say it takes a couple of months or so for the initial deployment. Agencies would usually start with a small deployment, let's say a couple of intersections. They would evaluate it. It works for them well. Some have concerns related to weather, and some have other concerns related to operational aspect, et cetera, and then they started to grow.
Sure. Thank you.
Just a follow-up question on that then. What would you say is the main pushback you get from cities and potential customers?
So there's not a lot of technology or innovation in this space. Let's talk about cloud for a second, right? Cloud is something fairly new or completely new in this space, and in many times, they do not have the tools to even evaluate what is... What kind of, how does it operate? What do they need to do? And we need to do kind of an education process. So I think that the, this entire approach of not buying a device, but buying a system, that's kind of new, but when it, when it's click, it's completely change of perspective.
Another question from me. If you could try to elaborate on market potential, because I guess some markets have more advanced solutions than others. Where do you see your biggest potential for growth, so to speak? Is it the U.S.? Is it Europe? Is it, you know, Asia or?
We currently, currently highly, highly active in the U.S. Tech-wise, this is one of the prime markets. Also, the market is very distributed, so it's much easier to operate and move fast. Canada as well. We getting a lot of interest from various locations, among several, among them, several places in Europe. I think the Western world is kind of now going through a phase of renewing the infrastructure due to road fatalities, emissions, congestion, et cetera, and they're looking for solutions, and there's not a lot, a lot of solutions on the shelf.
A completely different question. You talked about perhaps reaching cash flow positive in 2025. Do you feel comfortable with the cash position you have and the roadmap you've paved out, or how do you think about that in the coming 2-3 years?
So, the world is pretty crazy. Don't need to tell you that. In the last two or three years or so, nothing that we predicted... I mean, it was very difficult. Specifically, like, we had COVID, and then now we have all this economic thing. So I think we have to take a projection all the time. It's kind of a grain of salt when we're talking about on a long-term plans. However, I think that one of the advantages is that we are, as at the end of the day, operating in a critical infrastructure market. It's not a nice to have market. It's a market that have to be maintained, and it keep growing all the time, no matter if we have a pandemic or whatever.
Which, by the way, actually emphasize the need and accelerate some of the processes due to several things that happened. But we are all the time maintaining very well our cash position and just making sure that we're on a safe, safe side, also reflecting it to the board and investors and you can ask Per, but I'm, I'm kind of an investor group, and I'm bomb-bomb, trying not to bomb out too much, but sharing updates every once in a while.
Okay. Do we have any final questions from the room? Dennis, yes.
Thank you. You mentioned that, yeah, western parts of the world is where this probably fits best, or where you would just start. How does go-to-market differ between countries? I'm thinking you mentioned U.S., but also between U.S. and European countries, among European countries.
There is a... First of all, I would say kind of a non-recurring engineering cost when going to a new, new place. We design the system, we build it to be agnostic to location. For instance, we have cellular capabilities that we have built in that can connect to any network where we install that, right? We've, we have the ability to connect to any type of traffic light controller in the market. We submitted our patents in IP, also globally, to protect our operation. However, there is all the time thing that you need to do in preparation in going to new markets. For instance, we are operating via a network of partners, so we need to have a local partner that will support our physical operation, installation, et cetera.
We need to get approval or certification in terms of the hardware requirements. For instance, in the U.S., we had to get FCC approval. In Europe, it's like CE, et cetera. So just kind of like minor differentiation that we need we need to do in terms of, like, before we are we are penetrating and starting to operate, but that's mostly it.
Great. I think that sums it up. Thank you very much for your presentation, Tal.
Thank you.
We have today's final speaker, Socratis Papafloratos. I hope I pronounced that right. Welcome up to the stage.
Thank you. This is forward and backward. I did start shaving after that photo shoot, by the way, 'cause I realized stubble and beard don't really work after 42 or something. Right, so, I'm Socratis. I'm the founder and CEO of Numan. It is also my first Capital Markets Day, so thank you for the invite. I've been an entrepreneur for the last 17 years. This is my third company, and I started Numan in 2018 with a mission and a drive to help us all live fuller, healthier, longer lives. We started. Maybe. We do have treatments actually that stop things from going too fast, but let me see. Maybe I'll use the buttons. Right. So what Numan is, and what Numan does? At its essence, Numan is transforming health.
And the way that we do that is we bring together all aspects of kind of the full circle of therapeutic models that exist currently in offline and partially digital markets. We bring together medication, diagnostics, access to clinicians, OTC products, and digital tools to help you take better control of your health. This statement is something that it would have been harder to say when we started the business. It's been there from the beginning, though, from right the first time when we started, right when, you know, met Per back at the beginning, and Keith in 2018 and 2019. And the way that we got here is we started with men's health.
We started with conditions that represented a lot of latent demand, conditions that were fairly simple to treat asynchronously, but conditions that for various reasons men did not engage with. Men's health is where we're focused right now to a large extent. We do that because we see some of the biggest health engagement gaps exist in men's health, and we saw also the easiest points to get started. Sexual health, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, and hair loss is where we began on a simple e-commerce subscription model at the front end, and a quite sophisticated, complex, and deep operation to support those patients from day one. So we now at the point where we moved much further than that, and we'll talk about what we do today, the conditions that we cover and how we do that.
But the way that we're able to deliver this vision, this change, and this impact in our patient lives is because we are a fully integrated healthcare platform and healthcare group. This is a decision that we made really early on when we started the business. We invested in the team, in the regulatory kind of position and framework that we put the business in, and of course, the technology platform and data that we started working with from day one. So at the core. The heart of Numan is kind of the technology platform, the data, and all the work that we do around that. But also Numan and Via Health Limited, actually, is a registered healthcare provider in the UK and Ireland. That means that we employ our own doctors, our own pharmacists, our own nurses, our own clinical professionals.
We don't fully work with our in-house staff, but we are able to open up and operate a clinic and a hospital if we chose to do that in the UK. We operate our own pharmacy. This is an acquisition that we made in 2021, which means that we can dispense our own medication, we can procure our own medication, but also, most recently, we can also commission and manufacture our own medication as well. And of course, everything around the user journey and the customer experience from the very first moment that a Numan prospective patient will see one of our adverts on TV all the way to them delivering, having that medication delivered to their home. It's coming. And then the ongoing support that they will need, we control that.
What that allows us to do is, it allows us to control the customer experience and innovate and deliver kind of a superior experience compared to the alternatives. It allows us to scale, it allows us to create a natural moat around what we do, and it allows us also to internalize a lot of the margin that is lost in all the kind of different friction points and, and handovers. Which means that we can actually make an economic model that is viable, it is progressive, and it's a model kind of that has an inbuilt flywheel at the core of it. We do that, of course, with the team that we have.
The reason why I'm really proud and privileged to work with our team is that we have expertise and world-class talent in areas of the business that typically you don't kind of intermingle. We have some of the best people working on our brand, on our health platform, on our regulation, on our compliance, and on technology as well. People as diverse as people that have spent their entire careers at the NHS and some of the people that have worked in advertising until they came to Numan. And of course, we've been supported by a group of world-class investors, we have been one of the first, and BlackRock should be there as well, because they acquired Kreos Capital most recently. So this is a little bit about kind of where we are, where we come from, and who we are.
I want to talk about the kind of where we are now, what we're focusing on, and what we're delivering. So again, everybody has spoken before about the challenges of the last few years. We faced those head-on in 2022. We entered 2023 with a very clear focus of being profitable by the end of the year, while still growing, and doing that through an improved customer experience, improved economics, and of course, a rationalized cost base. We set that plan in December last year, and I'm really glad to say that we're, we're executing across all those fronts. I'm very proud of how the team has reacted to the pressures that we put on ourselves. We are entering this year, and we will look back and we have... We will have delivered revenue growth of 35%.
We will have done that while also diversifying the revenue mix by launching multiple new categories. We will have done that by, when you look at our kind of contribution margin three, i.e., this is the contribution margin after marketing, we will have seen an increase of 400%, from where we were last year. It's important to note that this growth is on the back of already meaningful 8-figure revenue from the year before. So this is not talking about being at an early point. This is now moving quite a significant, if you like, revenue engine, growth model, and team, and executing while innovating at the same time as well. If you look on the right, you see the categories that kind of drive the business. Erectile dysfunction used to be 90% of our revenue when we started.
It's actually close to 50% right now as well. That category is important. It is not as widely understood, perhaps, in the general public, because it is important, not only it is because it is quite prevalent, but because it is often connected to other areas of health. So it's a really good entry point to the Numan ecosystem. We will finish this year being EBITDA positive. Again, the question that was asked earlier, are you comfortable with your cash position and kind of where you are? Until you get to that point, it is always, you know, something that we're always mindful, but navigating that milestone and passing it is kind of the optionality that you have after that point increases drastically, and the choice that you make when it comes to funding growth and where you deploy capital are very different.
Our gross margin has. You see the slope there, that is because we've diversified the product and the category mix. Some of the products that we're working with don't have the same margin as the products that we start with, but it is more than compensated by the different AOV, the different retention, and the actual margin that we make from those products. And crucially, we now have a very good view of the business, the key levers, the costs, what drives success, what causes friction, and we're keeping a close eye on how we grow from here and how we deploy resources, capital, and how we scale the team and the business. If you think about what I was saying earlier, kind of, we wanted to grow, we wanted to achieve profitability, but we also wanted to keep a healthy level of growth.
The way that we've done that is through an improved category mix, operational efficiencies, but crucially, a different customer experience, a new set of products that create a different relationship with our patients. That is reflected in also in a different lifetime value, a different cost of acquisition, and a faster payback. The experience, the products, and the things we have been doing when somebody joins Numan, is what really drives LTV. The way that we've rationalized marketing and acquisition, and the way where we spend money and how we spend money, has reduced our CAC. And really, the way that we've made the decisions to onboard somebody at Numan and then kind of accelerate the journey through that, has shifted our payback to where it is now.
We're happy, we're proud of those results, but we still see a lot of room to grow from here on to the next level of growth. The reason why we're confident on that is that a lot of the investments that we've been making since 2021, 2022, in the product, in the technology, and in the team, are really starting to pay dividends right now. So the internal growth engine of the business is very different to what it was two years ago, very different to what it was last year. Also the momentum that we're starting to see as we get closer to the end of the year gives us confidence that next year we're set to grow by 100%, which is what we had achieved between 2019 and 2021.
Again, this is the crucial point here, is that profitability remains a constraint. We do put that pressure on ourselves, and we're expecting that growth to come despite of that. I wanna talk a little bit about the detail on what we did on some of those products that I mentioned, and how they're different and why they're different. So these are some of the highlights. We do a lot of things, not everything works. Sometimes we try things out, and we pull them back, but we try to do that quickly. These are some of the highlights. Sleep is a really important category. Sleep is a really important pillar of overall health. It was missing from Numan. We introduced it this year, and not only did we introduce a medically-led solution, i.e.
We prescribe medication that can help you sleep, but we also put together a behavioral change program and access to clinicians that can help you with that. So again, we treat the person, not the disease. We give you a holistic approach wherever that's possible. We're expanding the diagnostics proposition for Numan, so not only are we testing a range of new biomarkers that were not before... If you're not familiar, a lot of this market is driven by at-home testing. You get a kit, you draw blood yourself, you put it in the post, and then a lab interprets the results, and you find them in the Numan app. So that's how we used to operate up until this year.
Recently, we also launched a nurse, a collaboration, where a nurse will come to your home, they will take your vitals, and they will draw blood for you. Very soon, you'll be able to walk into a clinic and do a full venous blood sample. That's important, not only because it's a superior customer experience, we believe, it's important because we can collect more data around your health at that point, but also with that higher precision, higher volume, deeper analytics, we can then move into areas of health that we could not address before. As those are things like your hormonal health, your testosterone, these are things like your heart health.
These are a lot of areas of preventative health that we are stepping into, where the relationship is a lot longer, the value that we deliver to you is a lot higher, and the value that we get back from you is a lot higher as well. So diagnostics is a core pillar, and it's now at the point where it is really driving change into the product. Crucially, unlike other companies in the market that offer only diagnostics, we also connect you to one of our doctors, who can then prescribe and advise and do something about the result that you got. In our sexual health range, this year will be the first time where you're seeing Numan branding products coming out of a pharma factory. This...
We do that not only for margin, which is important, and kind of stabilization of margin, but we do it for customer experience, and we are also doing it for kind of the new opportunities that come up from that, that has to do with retail, partnerships, and kind of extending the Numan brand in places that doesn't exist right now. And then finally, on hair loss, we've developed our own range of proprietary medication that is specially available to Numan patients, where we work with partners that compound different components into a single solution, delivering superior results on hair loss prevention and hair growth that bring together things like finasteride, minoxidil, and azelaic acid as well.
If you plot kind of the arch of where we're going as a brand and as a business, and if you think about the really, if you like, simple 2019 Numan, that you could get generic medication from an online prescription and access to a doctor. You're now in a world where you have in a lot more personalized approach to your health, you have multi-component parts to your subscription, and you have a much richer engagement with the Numan ecosystem. And what is really driving that, you know, what is having the biggest impact in our numbers and in our patients is, of course, weight loss, which, pretty sure you've come across the press, you've come across... You probably heard of GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy and Mounjaro, perhaps if you're in the US. This is a new market.
It's a relatively new market. It's a market that has existed for the last few years. Medication has existed actually for quite a while, but what has changed now is this new generation of drugs, where they're once-a-week injectables, that we're seeing a real transformation when it comes to people's body weight. What's really important to remember here is that obesity, I think we all have an intrinsic understanding of how important it is, the role it plays in your overall health, and the impact that it has. When we start looking into the category, I was blown away about the actual impact of obesity when it comes to your health, the increased prevalence of cancers related to obesity, the increased cardiovascular health, the increased early mortality, and also the level of the crisis.
In the U.K., 26% of adults are obese right now, and that figure was 13% in 1994, and it's projected, if things don't change, to reach 40% by the end of the decade. In the UK, we spend as much on fighting obesity as actually funding the police, the judicial system, and the fire service as well. I didn't believe when I first saw that. I had to dig into it. It is true. It is a huge cost. And what you see here is the demand that exists in market right now for this medication far outstrips the available supply, right?
This is where players like Numan have a unique position because we not only treat with medication, we onboard you on an overall weight management program, we connect you with one of our specialist doctors, we onboard you on a dedicated mobile app that has a behavioral modification program that can help you lose weight with the medication, and it connects you to a coach as well. The reason we're investing so much in this is not only because it's an immediate, huge opportunity, but also because that market is exploding. It's predicted to reach $100 billion in sales by the end of the decade. It is now dominated by semaglutide and tirzepatide, but of course, you have a number of new medication that is coming to the market, both in injectable and in pill form.
What is gonna be most important is the access to the patient, the quality of the customer experience, the brand, and the ability to reach those patients and onboard them, and then offer them a personalized precision, at some point, approach to the medication that they need to be using to manage their weight. We've built on everything that we've been investing over the last few years. We saw some really quick updates of the proposition. Wegovy launched in the UK last week, and we're really excited about the category now in 2024 and 2025. Which takes me a little bit to what comes next. We've been growing in the UK at a very healthy rate. We've been only focused in the UK for now, and we've been only focused on men's health. I...
We treat women as well in a number of areas where that is clinically appropriate, but the brand has always been about men. We are not going to change tack anytime very soon. We are not in a position to do that, but we see a straight line path to generating GBP 130 million of revenue within the UK alone, within the next three years, on the back of the momentum that we already have with existing categories, a range of adjacent markets to what we do now, but also a range of things that we haven't really explored, but are completely new areas of innovation that are driven mainly by the market, by consumer behavior, and some of the kind of science changes as well, and I will come to that in a second.
But if I was to summarize, this is the opportunity that we see in the UK with the business as it is, and that is a really healthy, fast-growing, profitable business. But where we see even further room for expansion is taking that model, expanding it further in the UK, growing it internationally, and moving into female health as well. GLP-1s and weight loss create a really opportune timing to do that. They are, if you like, the tip of the spear in some of those markets. We've mapped them out quite well. Operationally, we're ready to do that tomorrow if we wanted it.
What we're planning now is to make sure that we enter those markets at the right time, with the right support, with the right availability of, kind of, stock to support them, with the right team on the ground to be able to, to scale. Finally, I wanna talk a bit about the tailwinds that I mentioned that are driving not just Numan, but the market as a whole. The number here is a little bit old, I have to be honest. Digital health is so broad, and I just said that weight loss is gonna be at least 20% of that market or more, very, very quickly.
But the things that we see as inevitable, right, and the things that drive me, drive the team in building what we're doing. There's a number of factors that are making us live longer, but spend longer of our lives in ill health. Paradoxically, even though we have access to the technology, the medicine, the science that we have now, we spend that middle of life in suboptimal health, too many of us, unnecessarily so, and that needs to change. The pressures on healthcare are not coming down. In fact, they're increasing. The systems, the public health systems, if you see kind of, again, the UK, where we base some of the pressures they're under, some of the issues that they have to face, it is very difficult for them to address prevention or treat the person holistically, and they sometimes really shouldn't have to do that at all.
Behavior of consumers is, for me, the biggest driver. The amount of our wallets that we spend on our health, on our wellness, on our well-being, on kind of trying new things that are proven to be efficacious or investing our time, especially after COVID, has been... It's a world apart. I started thinking about this idea in 2012, and it was too early to do it at the time. Not because of regulation, which was an issue, not because of technology, but primarily because of people were not ready for it. Now, it is the number one topic that I'm sure most of you are having with your friends, family, and, and yourselves. Which is also reflected in the number of people that are now choosing to spend their money and invest their money in their health and their well-being.
Numan is in one of the best places to capitalize on that and actually serve those patients. To summarize, this is what we focused on. This is the goals that we have with line of sight. Be profitable by the end of this year. We're very confident we're gonna get there, both from the things that we can do to increase efficiencies of our costs, but also the revenue growth that we see between now and the end of the year. We don't really have a lot to go, to be honest with you. We wanna expand into cash flow generation in 2024, or we wanna be in a position to do that if we still choose to do that in 2024.
And we absolutely want to win the GLP-1 weight loss category for men in the UK and in Europe. That's us. Thanks.
Thank you very much. I think we already seem to have a question in the audience here.
Thank you very much for that. It was very interesting. I'm curious to learn more about the Numan ecosystem in the context of, if you were to hypothetically do your job so well that, people were cured, there'd be no opportunity for upsell or extension on LTV and whatnot. So I just want to get your views on the context of your ecosystem and your product longevity in the context of that. Are you looking to cross-sell users into other products within the Numan ecosystem? Are you happy to see them lost, not necessarily to churn, but to being better? How do you think about that holistically?
We actually made that decision explicit in the company a few weeks ago, that we do wanna give you an informed decision to make. And we absolutely do not want to keep you on medication if you shouldn't be on medication, and you don't need to be on medication. Where the approach becomes harder to be deterministic about is that in a lot of these cases, that decision lies with the patient, and in a lot of the cases that we work with, there is no binary kind of gate that you're gonna pass, and you're gonna be cured or not cured. Sometimes it is. In other cases, it is a continuum, and what we want to actually invest in, and what we are investing in, is we will be there for you.
We will make it easy for you to come back and engage with the medication as and when you need to. Weight loss is a good example of that. Erectile dysfunction is a good example of that. A number of other areas are a good example of that. And we will make it easy for you to actually take that next step when it comes to your health. The big percentage of our revenue, in fact, like, it is close to 50%, comes from the minority of patients that engage with us for one more thing other than just the subscription for the pills. And these are the people that are not there because they are, if you like, at the forefront of being proactive about your health.
These are the people that, for the first time, are actually engaging in an experience that is delightful, that exposes the ability for them to do those things, and they're taking that first step. And that's, if you like, despite of some of the hoops that we would ask people to jump through, all that stuff is now a lot easier to do, and you see that in the uptick of that.
Thank you.
Great. A question from me then. So for someone who doesn't know the pharmacy industry too well, could you walk us through the regulatory landscape in Europe and, you know, how that differs between countries? And does it pose a problem to you when you're looking to expand to other countries and markets?
It's a problem, it's an opportunity as well. And what I mean by that, there is no pan-European brand and platform that can serve patients in multiple jurisdictions, yet. If you look at the components of what we do, the variables are not that many. You need to be able to treat the patient remotely, telehealth. You need to be able to engage with the patient asynchronously, either on the back of a questionnaire, and you need to be able to send medication to somebody's home via the post without a pharmacist delivering them. If those three conditions are true, then you can operate the model that we operate. Now, there are markets that in the UK, you can operate that model, in Germany, you can operate that model, and those two markets are about 40% of the kind of European healthcare market already.
So you've kind of covered a lot of the ground, as, you know, as it is. And then in different jurisdictions, you can do different components of that. Regulation is, I would say, harmonizing, but that wouldn't be true. It is moving across different areas towards the same direction. France just adopted the DiGA model that Germany employs, where the state reimburses the use of a mobile app, and they will pay for it, and the distribution of that is done by doctors. So you're starting to see movement. Still a little bit early days, but plenty of space to execute the model that we already do in Europe and beyond.
A question on expanding your product offering. So just looking at it, you're looking to expand to a bunch of new categories in the near term. How do you balance that equation with, you know, trying to be profitable by the end of this year and cash flow positive next year? How, how does that equation work?
Difficulty is the honest answer. It's the hardest thing we have to do, right? And it's where you kind of try to find the right rhythm for the business. A lot of it does boil down to the people and the talent that you've got. A lot of the constraints... It is not just having the people in the business, having the right people in the business. We measure how long things take, not, you know, to a huge degree of granularity, but we know how long it will take us to be ready to launch in a new country, how long it takes us to go and launch a new category, and we see all those metrics kind of coming down. We're getting better and faster at it.
But then growing and scaling different models, going deeper on all of those and innovating while you expand the surface as well, is hard. And that's why the opportunities that we have, we haven't set a time limit of when we would go after them. The things that we already do, we see huge opportunity in doing better and making them more interconnected, and then there's a few opportunities adjacent to that that are quite exciting. And at that point, what happens is the muscle, the platform and the infrastructure, and the way you do those things becomes better as well, so then you can do them while keeping the same level of investment, without having to grow the team and investment linearly with what you do.
Okay, great. Dennis, do you have one more question?
Yes, one question from the live stream. How do you monitor and potentially counteract on side effects that might come from weight-reducing programs? So I think it's a specific question to GLP-1.
Yeah. So you can report side effects within the app. You can connect with a clinician through the app, and they will make an individual decision for all of those. They will advise on whether you need to change the dosage, whether you need to do something different, but they will make, like, a very specific decision. These side effects, they do exist with this medication, like with any medication. You're now starting to see them also because these medications are used at scale. Quite often, they have to do with... They may have to do with individual, but also they may have to do with the way that the product is used, how quickly somebody goes up the titration. But it's something that we monitor, and we support people as they come to us.
Great. I think time is up, actually. So thank you very much, Socratis, for the presentation.
Thanks for having me.
I'll hand over to Per for some final remarks.
Thanks, guys. Thanks, Sokratis, and thanks, Amar, for moderating this. That concludes our capital markets day. I think you'll agree with me that the six... I hope you've been given more insight into these six companies, and I am certainly sort of super happy and impressed that these guys have turned around over this past year or 18 months to be profitable or be very close to profitability. And despite that, or in conjunction with that, also being able to grow as much as they are growing. And I'm also, I think it's great that there's a French guy, a Swedish guy, Polish guy, Dutch guy, Israeli guy, and a Greek guy. And so that's Swedish capital markets for you.
But I'll endeavor to our next CMD, which I think will be in Sweden. We'll get you all up to Sweden in June, which is a good time of year. It's very light, but it's. You'll enjoy it. And so June next year, I'll endeavor to show you that these same companies and others will be more profitable. We will just have paid off our first bond and provided visibility into paying off our second bond. But I'll also put in front of you some of our great non-guy founders and CEOs, so there'll be. We should have some of our female founders, which are also super great, next year. But with that, also, this thing, we've no more T-shirts from us, maybe next year.
This year, we'll thank Fredrik for giving us our giveaway to give to you, which are Voi credits. So, don't forget these. And, what else? Well, thanks for coming. Thanks, Amar, for moderating. Thanks, all speakers. Thank you, BlaBlaCar, a lot, if there's anyone in the room, for hosting us here. And now I'd like to invite you all to drinks on floor number five. Thank you.