Morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the EMERGE Commerce Webcast.
This meeting is being recorded.
Following today's presentation, we will answer Q&A from the audience. You may submit your questions using the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen. On behalf of the speakers that follow, listeners are cautioned that today's presentation and the responses to questions may contain forward-looking statements.
Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. For additional information about the factors that could cause results to vary, please refer to the risks identified in the company's annual information form and other filings with Canadian regulatory authorities. Except as required by Canadian securities law, the company does not undertake to update any of the forward-looking statements.
Such statements speak only as of the date made. Your host today will be Mr. Ghassan Halazon, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of EMERGE. I will now pass the call over to Mr. Halazon.
Thank you so much, James. Great to be with you all, shareholders, investors, prospective investors and partners. I hope everyone's new year is off to a productive and healthy start. It's been a while. We've been trying to up our game on the webcast side of things, as many of you know. Trying to keep everyone informed. Today, we came out with a shareholder letter that I penned, entitled Rebels on the Rise. We hope you'll take some time to go through it. It's an in-depth piece.
I spent a lot of time thinking through, articulating our journey, our progress, and our plans. Definitely one to not miss. It's out there now available on our latest PR from today, but also available in the news section of our corporate site. With that, I'm going to jump right into the presentation that we have in mind for today. As usual, we'll take a Q&A on the back end of the presentation and give you guys a chance to ask us directly, and we will answer transparently and as openly as we are able to.
With that, I'm gonna jump right into our presentation. We have some new slides as well today. First, I always like to sort of level set for anyone that is new to the EMERGE story, and give you a general glimpse of where we are collectively as a diversified portfolio. As many of you are aware and have gathered for some time now, our thesis and our approach is such that we are building what we believe will one day be a one of the preeminent portfolios in digital commerce, in e-commerce.
Right? We view ourselves as first and foremost disciplined capital allocators. We've advanced our pipeline, and we've achieved a certain level of minimum scale that we believe is a starting point to much more exciting territory. Our collective brands today combine for about CAD 120 million in Pro Forma Gross Merchandise Sales. In other words, GMS for short. Meaning that is sort of the amount that we are processing across our various brands.
We currently count approximately CAD 60 million or 50% of our GMS as actual IFRS revenue on a pro forma basis, inclusive of all of our acquisitions and about CAD 7 million in pro forma Adjusted EBITDA.
I think something to highlight with this sort of Pro Forma level of EBITDA is if you think of our progress over the last year and at the time we went public when we had about CAD 800,000 EBITDA, the transformation that's occurred in 2021 and hopefully continues as we plan to progress here, really sort of graduates us from what I would call a marginally profitable company to a meaningfully profitable company. I think that's the 2022 theme here, is that we wanna start showing that EBITDA trickle to cash flows, and we'll talk a bit more about that.
Inherent in our model, we have five key verticals today, eight brands. Practically what you see from the meat section, i.e. truLOCAL and Carnivore Club, to the right with outdoor gear, BattlBox, which is our camping and hiking and survival gear business, as well as our pets B2B business, WholesalePet.com. All of that has occurred post-go public.
We initially went public on December fourteenth. Prior to that, we came into the public markets at the time with our experiences in Golf verticals, which continue to be with us today and we still have some ambitious plans across all of our various verticals. Of course, all our acquisitions currently are in North America.
We're based out of Toronto as a company, but we have offices across the major regions in Canada as well as multiple locations and regions in the U.S. Wanna kind of start us off a bit with the announcement that we made earlier last week, which is that Harish Consul of Ocgrow Ventures has joined EMERGE as a Strategic Advisor. Really that's, in our view, the perfect way to start the year.
You know, Ocgrow is a rather low-key investor, but make no mistake, they are a prolific technology and specifically e-commerce investor, having made big bets early with Amazon, with Shopify, and with Coupang. For those of you who are familiar, Coupang is the Amazon of South Korea. A multi-billion dollar marketplace, market leader in South Korea. You know, Ocgrow is actually also quite active in the broader technology world. They are co-investors with Bill Gates in a recent SPAC from last year called Heliogen.
They are co-investors with Khosla Ventures with Steve Case, the founder of AOL, and multiple A-list Silicon Valley, and really global investors. For them to come in as a Strategic Advisor and to partner with us is a major milestone and a starting point, quite frankly, and a graduation of sorts into this sort of bigger, longer-term institutional phase for EMERGE.
Again, you have to start somewhere, and we believe our starting point with Ocgrow here coming in as a Strategic Advisor, as a Partner, as an Investor, we think is a tremendous way to start 2022. I'm gonna do a quick case study. It's one slide on WholesalePet for some of you. I see a lot of new people on the call today, and we have, you know, pretty much a record number of registrants and attendees today. Super exciting to see, and really sort of resonates with really the momentum we're seeing on the business side.
Glad to see that, and I'm excited to have a lot of newbies as well today, as well as existing investors. WholesalePet was the acquisition we made mid-November. We've highlighted that we believe it's a transformative acquisition. It's a B2B play. Most of our other brands were, of course, consumer-focused. Business to Business, sort of, platform. It is one that has brought us over $250 million in gross merchandise sales, USD, over the last 20 years, with north of $40 million in just the last year.
This is a business that has had a tremendous CAGR, or compounded annual growth rate, over a 20-year period through thick and thin. Love this graphic at the bottom. Shows you that no matter what's happened in the world, ups and downs, recessions and pandemics, it's always found a way to thrive and continuously, steadily grow. It's doing so at a 75% EBITDA margin to its actual revenue. Okay?
This is just for Canadian dollar terms, we're talking about CAD 3.5 million or so in Adjusted EBITDA. Graphic below is, of course, in USD, as it is a US based business. The way it works is it connects about 8,000 retailers who come to WholesalePet.com. These are retailers looking to buy pet food, toys, treats, apparel. And they find about 1 million SKUs available on WholesalePet.com, and they come a lot of times every month. Very sticky audience. There's low customer concentration.
It's a highly diversified business, right? One of our favorite attributes of all of this, and actually quite contrary to many consumer e-commerce brands, including some of our own, is that WholesalePet need not market. It has a very minimal marketing budget. The reason it's able to do so is because of the flywheel it's created over 20 years. 8,000 retailers, 400 vendors, 1 million SKUs, tremendous worth of word of mouth, tremendous repeat revenue, right? All of these things give you a sense.
When we talk about going out and weeding through the ocean of e-commerce businesses, we're looking for hidden gems. We call them Rockstar Rebels internally, which is also, as I say, the shareholder letter today is entitled Rise of the Rebels, right? Rebels on the Rise. Really a lot of that is finding and sifting through that noise. There's a lot of little companies out there. Where are those hidden gems that demonstrate cash flow? Where are those hidden gems that have stood the test of time?
Where are those hidden gems where these founders and management teams that come on board are interested in building and scaling alongside EMERGE? WholesalePet is one such example, and it's a brilliant one at that. Zooming in on our M&A model, as I said, our approach is such that we acquire, we integrate, and we accelerate these businesses. The flywheel starts with sort of our M&A philosophy. I should say, not too dissimilar from other roll-up or consolidation plays in various spaces.
M&A, in our case, accretive M&A, i.e., profitable very early on, many times on day one, is kind of how we do it. We're acquiring businesses that add that EBITDA on day one, much like WholesalePet does. That translates to good cash flow conversion often is our focus. We want businesses that are gonna show not only EBITDA and EBITDA growth, but also cash flow growth. From our perspective, that cash is critical. Growing that cash flow is critical for servicing our debt, but also for adding ability to expand our debt.
With our size, with our improved profitability profile, we are starting to see and believe that we will continue to see increasingly better and cheaper cost-effective debt facilities out there for the purposes or the primary purpose, I should say, of acquisitions. That's sort of that next step. With the added profitability comes more debt. With more debt, we are able to continue to acquire. Today, there are thousands of niche e-commerce businesses, tens of thousands by some studies and research.
But we've identified tons, and our pipeline is an expansive pipeline. We've invested heavily last year in M&A. Those thousands, I might add, are profitable businesses. There are, of course, millions of unprofitable ones, but there are thousands of million + EBITDA businesses. Of course, our sweet spot is somewhere between 1-5, we've normally stated. Now, speaking of our pipeline, and as my legal team often reminds us, these are illustrative examples.
Of course, our pipeline, you know, we're screening anywhere between 120-250 potential businesses to acquire. It's an expansive pipeline. It's growing. At any given time, we may have multiple signed LOIs and advanced opportunities. Now, we checked these boxes. For those of you who've known us, in some previous webcasts, we've talked about buying a subscription portfolio. That turned out to be BattlBox in that case. We talked about buying a B2B platform.
That turned out to be WholesalePet. We completed both of those acquisitions in Q4 of last year. Looking ahead, wellness and beauty, both very interesting areas online. We have another interesting golf opportunity over here that we've just made. There are multiple Direct-to-Consumer specialty businesses, one we're highlighting. Smart home is obviously a growing category. Regardless of whether people are leaving their homes more often or not, people are investing in technology in their homes.
As you can see, EBITDA, last couple of acquisitions are in the 3.5 range. You're seeing some fours and threes. A lot of that mid-range between 1-5 is where we are focused for new verticals as well as some existing opportunities. We also have some bigger and more audacious ones. In this case, the smart home target is CAD 11 million in EBITDA. That's sort of a sign of things to come as we continue to execute. We build up our own scale, then those bigger acquisitions start becoming possible.
Let's deep dive a bit more, maybe in a way that I haven't lately, into sort of our planning around what we're sitting on from an organic business perspective. As I said, we have eight brands, and, you know, we're going out on a limb here to say 2022 is a big synergies year for us. We went on sort of a shopping spree last year. Right. You know, we acquired three businesses with four brands. Extracting synergy and unlocking additional growth opportunities, you know, from across the portfolio really is a priority for us.
As you can imagine, when you buy these businesses and when you're partnering with management, you know, you can expect a bit of a lag between the time some of these things happen. Some things require integration, some things are not necessarily suited in that moment in time when you acquire a new company.
But as we're getting to spend time with these management teams and as everyone is lining up what those opportunities are, there are some key ones that we've highlighted that we're looking into or tackling now or in the near future here in 2022. Examples up here. Payment processor, one of my favorite 'cause it's the easiest to explain. You know, when you have $120 million worth of gross sales that you're processing, it makes total sense for all of those brands to ultimately process with a single provider.
In other words, locking in a discounted rate or the best rate for that matter across, you know, when you look at the world of payment processors, it's highly fragmented. There are companies innovating like Stripe. There are the Moneris of the world, obviously PayPal. There's all sorts of different companies out there offering different terms. Who wants $120 million worth of business, and what rate are you willing to give us to get all of our business, right?
As an example, I would say if we were successful in reducing the payment processing fee by 0.5% on CAD 120 million over time, that's CAD 600,000 worth of savings straight to the bottom line. Very powerful stuff. Very straightforward, but very powerful. What we call Boring but Brilliant internally. Email service provider, same concept. Why are different brands using different email providers?
Once we acquire them, they come in with their own email arrangement, but we're offering different pricing terms, scaling, sort of our overall offering, and therefore speaking to email providers about a better price. Some of these conversations are happening now. Warehouses and logistics are multiple. Initially we had experiences businesses, but now we have multiple subscription/B2C businesses that have their own warehousing or outsource some of it.
Project is underway now to look into how we share facilities between multiple brands, right? It's not an overnight, but it's in the works, and we're looking at it very seriously. Customer service. Sure, every brand has its unique way and approach and rules and refund rules and so forth, but overall, it makes zero sense for this to be fragmented. Over time, customer service ticketing, data, analytics, our approach with customers, our value prop, how we speak to them, ultimately synchronization there, you know, unlocks more efficient approach.
Marketing dollars. There's certainly learnings out of every brand that we're getting. Some brands are trying different types of creatives, the way they speak in an ad, the types of images. Some brands are trying new channels. BattlBox has 1.5 million likes on TikTok. No one else has as deep in TikTok, an emerging social channel and one of the fastest growing in the world. We're learning from BattlBox about TikTok, right? We're learning about influencers from truLOCAL.
These are learnings that get passed along to the entire group, and by consolidating teams and agencies over time, there's tremendous opportunities for us to tap into a Smarter Marketing & Analytics Engine. Obviously, the Admin and Back Office is a given. There's a lot of stuff we can consolidate. Again, the boring stuff, but the pretty sure stuff. We've just acquired these businesses. We have not yet realized some of these savings. There's more HR functions.
There's things like this that we're building at HQ for everyone else. In the end, we're saving our brand portfolio companies money and time. Time is key. We need them focused on conquering their respective niche, right? WholesalePet needs to go deeper and spend more time on conquering Pet B2B e-commerce and less time figuring out what to pay and how to get a good price for payments, how to figure out security on this site and all of that stuff, right?
We are empowering our brands to go all out and giving us the pipes to take care of. Now, the third piece of our equation, as we said, it's first piece was acquire, and do so with discipline. Attract the right people, retain them, right? Fulfill and pay the right price, of course. Integrate them, we just talked about a bunch of integration that's going on across the company. Then accelerate them. There are different aspects to it. We love the case study for JustGolfStuff. We've highlighted it last year.
It was the fastest growing brand across EMERGE 2021, right? You know, sales basically more than doubled, and essentially almost tripled, essentially. Cross-selling is when you take your brand or one brand, rather, their audience, and figure out how to monetize that audience on other brands or channels within the company. There was not any better case study than seeing when UnderPar had some challenges on Golf, we were able to rotate that customer base and have it go towards golf products.
At a time when everyone was golfing, and still is, right? Despite the winter, you'd be surprised, December and November, big months for selling golf experiences, which was great to see. It showed us the agility of the team and ability to merchandise and reroute attention of customers from experiences to a products business called JustGolfStuff, which is, again, a huge growth area for us.
Advertising initiatives. Maybe not the most exciting, that sounds like, but what we like is this idea that someone like an Amex or a McDonald's or a Starbucks come to us and say, "Hey, we're looking to advertise this special credit card on Amex. We wanna access a high-end, largely male demographic with a certain income." Well, great. We got UnderPar for that. We got this other card. Do you have anyone in the millennial base that's highly social, et cetera?
Well, guess what? truLOCAL has a tremendous female-driven audience that is digitally savvy, health-conscious, has a lot of cool Millennial attributes, right? As we start pushing these partnerships, we are opening more doors by having more brands. Margin enhancement. This is a key one, and this is where there's a lot of, let's say, quiet additions and improvements. An example would be a service charge that UnderPar has added on its service ever since and grown ever since it's been with EMERGE.
Driving hundreds of thousands dollars a year in incremental margin by adding a service charge because of the added investments of staff in various areas like customer service and technology. Customers don't seem to mind. truLOCAL. In the face of higher meat prices. We've all seen that. It's been a big headline.
The ability to come in and raise prices and think through the market, leveraging HQ's knowledge and support to think through how to improve margin, how to think through that analysis, and ultimately to deploy, in their case, a CAD 10 increase, which is about a 4% increase in the overall average box value per month. To see that churn wasn't impacted because customers love the truLOCAL brand and understand the macro environment.
For truLOCAL to proportionally make that increase, that's something that we work with them from HQ to think through those sorts of ideas of how to improve margin, whether it's to offset macro climates or opportunistically, as I said, with UnderPar, the service charge. BattlBox is another great example here. They've added a mystery box that you can add upon checkout. You're buying all this camping and hiking gear, right? For CAD 49 or for CAD 59, would you add this Cool Box with stuff, really.
It's a great way for clearance for BattlBox. It's working nicely, and customers love the added value and the surprise and delight element. Finally, M&A expertise. A lot of these bootstrap companies, they don't have time or knowledge or resources to do M&A. With our M&A team, we're pushing and looking at tuck-in opportunities. Obviously, we haven't done much in that front.
We've been buying up new verticals. Tuck-in opportunities is something where we can really accelerate their geographical footprint and double down where they're already winning as well. Next up, what we call Beyond the Shopping Cart, and this is the first time I talk a bit more about the future, beyond just sort of the M&A, which continues to be a big part of our journey. EMERGE, obviously, first and foremost, shopping cart is a reference to e-commerce.
That's where the shopping cart revenue happens, when people check out on virtual shopping carts. We have about CAD 120 million worth of that. But there are multiple areas we're super excited about that we think we're gonna bring value, not only in 2022, in fact, this is just the starting point, but for many years to come. You think about all of these virtual shopping stores.
Think of us as a virtual mall, I often say. Well, wouldn't it make sense to create a unified loyalty or perks program? Some of our brands already have some loyalty inherent in them. Over time, wouldn't a buyer of truLOCAL be interested, potentially, in buying a trip somewhere or buying wine or buying some golf or buying a gift for Father's Day for hiking or camping, right? There's tremendous opportunities across the portfolio, and over time, you'll see us connect the dots more, right?
We are still in the early stages where we've been amassing this profitable portfolio. Over time, you're gonna see dot connections. You're gonna see correlations in our technology and our recommendations and our approach. Underlying it all, you can anticipate a sort of loyalty program over time. Monetizing data, again, as a Unified Data Hub, and we talked about advertising, but there are also all sorts of data monetization opportunities available to us that we're starting to explore.
Some of them are online, and you may be surprised to hear that some of them are offline. You know, we have millions of post people. Right. We have great information that allows us to potentially make great relationships and monetization with experts in the data space. Emerging technologies we're all hearing about. I'm sure over the holidays, everybody spent a little bit of time at least, and you probably should, learning about NFTs, learning about, you know, where the blockchain is going, obviously the Metaverse.
We won't go there just yet. But these are really interesting technologies. A lot of times, if you wonder, if you're sometimes thinking about what makes some of these projects super successful, it starts with reach. A lot of great celebrities go into the sort of stuff because they have great reach. We think EMERGE has tremendous reach, millions, of course, directly and indirectly through our broader community. We think these sorts of emerging technologies over time, you will see us be involved.
Just because we are a Boring business looking to buy boring profitable companies, doesn't preclude us from entering really exciting spaces if we believe that they can be highly profitable over the medium to long term. You're gonna see more of that, us exploring and thinking through how to leverage our collective reach. We basically have the reach of a small country, so it's time to think through all of these areas. Acquisitive acquisitions. The only thing I'll say on that, we already know that we made three acquisitions last year.
We already know we're gonna be very active on M&A this year and beyond. It's part of our DNA. The one thing I'll say is over time, we may not just be buying consumer or B2B e-commerce businesses, right? There might be really interesting technologies, add-on technologies, data companies, analytics companies, e-commerce enablement companies. Over time, we're building the core portfolio, but that doesn't preclude us from thinking through the future as this space evolves as well.
Brand incubation. I love the JustGolfStuff idea. There was practically nothing when we acquired it other than a side business. We've turned it into the fastest growing business in EMERGE. There will be more of that as we leverage our data. Finally, global partnerships. Again, just like any company with reach, why not strike daring and exciting partnerships, whether it's with telecoms, whether it's with, media companies and so forth.
Quickly, just to talk through sort of the last year, I've already highlighted this before, so I won't spend much time. We've seen tremendous growth over our first year of being a public company. We've grown gross sales by 4x, revenue by 6x, EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA rather, that is pro forma by 9x. Jumping into the corporate update, a snippet of Q4 and what we've shared with the market so far. Really beautiful round numbers up left. As you might have heard, we've eclipsed the CAD 100 million mark comfortably, I might add.
We had our first ever CAD 1 million day and our first CAD 10 million month, exceeding all of Q3 in November alone. Of course, as you can imagine, December is also a big holiday month. We haven't showed those results yet. Lower left, we also talk a bit about the organic business. We profiled multiple brands that have done really great things during certain stretches of Q4 as we've highlighted. It's not just the M&A driving it. We're also seeing some really solid early results. Both were set on a double-digit growth curve.
A couple of our brands are still seeing that 2x pre-pandemic. Consensus forecast, I won't touch on too much. You've heard this before, potentially, if you've tuned in or if you're following. Canaccord Genuity Raymond James, consensus price, CAD 1.73. They're forecasting around CAD 33 million for 2021, about CAD 1 million or so in EBITDA consensus for 2021. Look at that. Bam.
On 2022, that is their expectation, that EBITDA jumps up. Of course, we do not necessarily talk about our own estimates or guidance yet, and we do not endorse research analyst estimates either. This is for you to be aware, this is what they're seeing, and they're projecting us to grow to almost CAD 65 million in 2022, with just under CAD 7 million or so in EBITDA, as well. That's by the way, just to be clear, excluding additional acquisitions. All right. Comparables. You know, it's been a volatile start to the year for most, and it's been quite messy.
The only thing I'd like to highlight from these different buckets of e-commerce companies and consolidator companies that we tend to look at and peg ourselves against. When you look at the revenue correlation, you know, EMERGE remains highly undervalued relative to peers. There are some reasons for it, of course. Some of these companies are world giants, so they command a certain premium. We're not the ones who talk about or should talk about share price per se.
We are ones that talk about our own value and our own aspirations and plans, so we leave it to investors to take a look. Nonetheless, a very noticeable gap in valuation from if you look at EMERGE as 1x-1.4x revenue relative to peers in the various buckets. If you look at EBITDA to enterprise value, again, on the low, much lower end of the spectrum. Most e-commerce companies or a number of them at least, are not actually profitable, as you all might know.
We're really zooming in on that profitability and on that cash flow to differentiate us over time. Of course, increased scale matters as well. The leadership team. You've seen this many times, and it's available publicly. I'm not gonna spend too much time here. We have a veteran team of technology, e-commerce, M&A, and capital markets folks.
You have our updated cap table on the right with 103.3 million shares outstanding, CAD 67 million market cap, enterprise value of CAD 85 million plus, with CAD 7 million in cash and CAD 25 million in debt from our recent facility. Finally, and this is a good time if anyone has questions to drop them down. I already see some coming through. Our key priorities just to highlight, a lot of this has been touched on. Driving that healthier organic growth. It is not just about buying companies, it's what we're doing with them.
Translating that EBITDA into positive operating cash flow, a big theme for 2022 and something I think will separate us from a lot of tech and e-com companies out there. Driving that synergy all tied in with number one and two. Continuing down that accretive acquisitions path. We showed you WholesalePet today, showed you the value and the approach and the cash flow on that business. More of that, where are we gonna get it from, and how are we also gonna do tuck-in acquisitions to improve our existing verticals.
Of course, with acquisitions, debt. Getting better debt at better pricing and terms, something that we continuously try to do. Increasing awareness with investors. Something like an Ocgrow is a starting point, as I said. It is a sophisticated long-term, deep-pocketed, institutional type investor, and that's exciting for us, and we're starting to see the merits of that, and we believe it's, again, the door opener for other like-minded institutions over time. Finally, we're practically one to two acquisitions away.
If you look at the size of a BattlBox or the size of a WholesalePet, you know, we're in striking distance of that CAD 100 million in revenue and CAD 10 million in Adjusted EBITDA. We believe that is a big deal. Maybe it's partly optics and the idea of round numbers, but from our discussions with institutions and research analysts alike, we feel that is a range where we must be heard. We are now ultimately what I consider the largest of the small.
With those ranges, we start becoming the smallest of the large, and we believe we deserve the attention, whether that's institutional, whether that's research, whether that's other types of partnerships and opportunities available at better scale and profitability. Final reminder over here before we take any Q&A, definitely encourage you all to check into today's press release and/or go to our website, emerge-commerce.com. It is available in the news section to access the shareholder letter that I penned.
Spent a lot of time articulating what I believe. It answers many questions out there that sometimes we receive via investor@emerge-brands.com or otherwise on your mind as we think through the road ahead past the first CAD 100 million. They say the first CAD 100 million is the hardest. We are on a mission to prove them right.
With that, I'm going to open it up to some questions and we can get started with answering some of your key questions. All right. Good question. Number one, how is e-com planning to use debt in a higher interest rate environment? Thanks for that. That's a thoughtful question and a very timely one in this environment.
Let me take a step back and first of all say that people tend to forget that if you take ourselves a year back or a couple of years back, prior to the road to where we are from an interest rate perspective, businesses were practically quite fine in those early days with an extra point or two, right? We're not saying that doesn't have implications, of course.
Just want to remind everyone that taking, you know, two or four more hikes in interest rates, at the end of the day, just brings us back to where the world was a couple of years ago when it was booming. We personally take the view that what's most important to our lenders and our prospective lenders is the health of our business. To the extent that we grow our business, as an example, from CAD 800 million EBITDA last year to CAD 7 million in Adjusted EBITDA, for example, as analysts are projecting.
That is way more meaningful to banks in terms of offering us cheaper pricing relative to where we were, right? That is really the key determinant in the types of rates and types of packages that debt providers will likely give us. I can also say conversations that we are having already reflect a new level, our new level rather, and that's being priced in. I believe that's the answer. Other question. How is the global supply chain impacting your business? That's actually a pretty good question.
We get it a couple of times. For those of you who don't know, it's hard not to have missed the headline that says global supply chain is an issue for many businesses. There are specifically companies, largely, I would say, that are Amazon-based, that are big product China vendors, that will continue to see challenges for the foreseeable future. We at EMERGE are very fortunate. There are a few reasons why when it comes to this global supply chain issue. First of all, let me address.
Largely speaking, we are not seeing the pains of supply chain in a meaningful way other than some aspects which I'll highlight. Big picture, we are not, and here's a couple of reasons why. Number one, we're a highly diversified platform. Think of our businesses. Some are in experiences, right? Like golf experiences, which we said was doing quite well in Q4 again. Others are in areas of local or regional supply chain. Think truLOCAL, working with local farmers, right?
That's not necessarily impacted by supply chain issues in China. However, as you know, there are other considerations. For example, the price of meat, which we offset with a price increase. Largely what I would say is, you know, there are some cases where, for example, with BattlBox, you know, there are some aspects of China that impact supply. A lot of that has to do with planning, right? Inventory management, you know, making sure the customer experience is really.
I think consumers have come to expect it. Largely, when you look at WholesalePet, we sit in the middle, so it's just connecting vendors and retailers. When it's truLOCAL with the regional supply chain, when it's UnderPar Canada and U.S., as well as WagJag, it's all local experiences. We have a lot of diversification away from actual supply chain in China. It's not a big part of our business. That's sort of how I would say. WholesalePet's model seems to be quite sticky.
Do you see other similar B2B opportunities via M&A, or organically? Good question. I've been pretty obsessed, I must admit, with B2B, you know, seeing how well run WholesalePet is, how lean it is, how recurring the relationship is. Some of the top customers, one of my favorite stats I may have not mentioned before, their average tenure on WholesalePet is 10+ years. We haven't seen that, right? Yes, we are very much intrigued and interested in B2B e-commerce, you know, and in categories around those areas.
Now I must admit there are not as many opportunities in B2B. You don't have thousands, for example, of B2B niche platforms. However, we certainly are digging, and we have our conversations going, and we think this is a model that is very exciting. To your point about whether we would look at it organically, and that's great foresight, by the way, you know, we certainly are in different ways, though. If you think of our Merchant Community, right? Let's take truLOCAL as an example.
We have tremendous relationships and long-standing relationship with local farmers and suppliers. Are there things we can do for them behind the scenes? Are there technologies we can build for them? Are there ways we can connect them with each other? That is certainly opportunity that we believe is ripe for disruption. Same thing applies for Golf. In the U.S., we partner with Golf Associations in many cases, and we find that that idea of us powering, giving our technology, our Know-How, our Golf relationships with their audience.
Golf Associations tend to have very old school, long-term audiences via email or otherwise, and these are all ways we partner with them on a B2B basis. I do think actually, and Ryan said you have some good foresight, is we're really starting to think B2B can be an in line, almost secret sauce or advantage for EMERGE in the background. Are you seeing more competition in this space, and how do you stand out?
There's a lot more noise lately. There were times where we would speak about consolidating e-commerce in rooms with very, very few people tuning in, very much unlike where we are today with close to 100+ here today. Very, very fortunate, very humbling to see so many of you coming in, asking great questions as well here. The landscape has changed. You know, $12 billion + have been raised in e-commerce consolidation last year. That's just on the Amazon Marketplace opportunity, which EMERGE is not actively in today.
That is the buying of other Amazon merchants opportunity, leader of which is a company called Thrasio, just raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, almost 5x gross sales. Think of that as a premium valuation. They're the poster child of the Amazon consolidation. Now there are others emerging that are doing Shopify acquisitions as well. Certainly there'll be some added competition I would imagine over time in some of these Shopify businesses that we're acquiring.
Here's the main difference, and here's what I would say separates us from the pack, okay? First of all, I think we're probably gonna be more picky buyers, right? Think of what I said. We have about 120 opportunities that we're sifting through. And really we're looking to only acquire. For example, last year we did three. We're aiming to grow that, of course, with our investments.
Say, you know, whether that's four or five, you'll never see us buying 50 companies, little companies for that matter, you know, CAD 500,000 EBITDA, a CAD 1 million EBITDA. We might do some tuck-ins if it makes sense, but we're not a factory of just acquiring, acquiring, and then we see what happens. We are methodical, disciplined, capital allocators and buyers. What that means is, we're willing to sift through the rubble to find that WholesalePet.com or that BattlBox or that truLOCAL, right?
We are more careful. I would say the other aspect is we are always partnering with management teams. The first question I ask is if management wants out. If they want out, in the current form that EMERGE is set up, we are not interested in just figuring things out on our own.
We would rather partner with management teams who've done it for years, who have breathed it, who are passionate about it, who've developed great merchant relationships, and we're here to back them and support them in the ways that we know how to do best. Those are the big differences in why I haven't seen competition be a major issue for us. At what stock price would you consider issuing new shares to raise additional capital?
Now, let me say that if these questions were rehearsed or if someone was feeding them to me from investor relations, then that one wouldn't have been one that I was given. I'm happy to be transparent and open to the extent that I can. I cannot comment exactly on what share price would make sense and so forth, but what I can say is this. We really have no interest at this particular point in time at the current share price to be raising capital via equity or issuing equity.
You know, I think if you look back at our history and our approach, we've really been mindful to shareholders and dilution. If we take the last couple of acquisitions, BattlBox, we issued more shares up front, although they have room to gain shares via earnout if they achieve their goals, and we would want them to. That is a good incentive, alongside cash, of course. With WholesalePet, the vast majority was in cash, i.e., financed by debt with some shares.
If you look at both deals, very transformative deals for us, we only issued about 4 million in shares out of our 103 million total to acquire really interesting businesses. Almost 7 million in combined EBITDA between the both of them. One with no shares and one with some shares. Largely, I think if you follow our logic, we're trying to buy businesses with 4x-6x EBITDA with about 3x of that up front.
Now, those that have followed what I've said before, we're generally comfortable with a 3x-4x D ebt-to-EBITDA ratio, which means the vast majority of acquisitions should be financed with debt if we are able to do this our way. Therefore, we're not looking to raise at these levels. I think we're pragmatic, obviously. We're not looking to raise for the sake of raising, and we're not looking to raise in a very dilutive and penalizing level where we think we're highly undervalued. I hope that gives you a bit of context.
In regards to your announcement on January 14 of raising CAD 100 million, will the company be issuing additional equity and diluting existing shareholders, or will the company be going to the debt market?" I think, I'm not quite sure that a CAD 100 million raises. This might be sort of a misunderstanding. Obviously, we have not raised CAD 100 million. Now I see. You might be mentioning the base shelf prospectus essentially that we put out.
The base shelf prospectus essentially is nothing more than us setting ourselves up over the next 25 months, is what it's for, if and when the opportunity arises. I think I've just addressed this in the sense that we have no interest in raising at these levels. We are going to be a debt-driven company from this point on. Obviously, we'll be pragmatic and opportunistic. We hope that we've earned our shareholders' trust to make the right decisions. Last round, we only raised at CAD 1.40 when we felt like it would be minimal dilution to existing shareholders.
We are going to be pragmatic with how we tackle this. The base shelf was a first step to open the door over a 24-month or 25-month period, if and when it made sense to us. "Do you foresee making a bigger investor marketing push in the U.S., given your increased brand presence there?" It's a good question. I would say a timely one as well. You know, obviously, we are getting no shortage of outreach now from the US side of the pond. A part of that is because we've been acquiring businesses.
Don't think many people realize, but we now have offices and teams in California, in Illinois with truLOCAL, in Virginia with WholesalePet, you know, outside of Atlanta with BattlBox. We are now. We have a presence with our people, with our teams, but we also have, you know, hundreds of thousands of active customers and email lists, maybe in the millions as well, that we believe are worth significant value from an awareness perspective. When it comes back to investors, yes, absolutely.
That is on the roadmap. We are going to be more active starting this year, laying the foundation with US investors. We are doing non-deal roadshow, spending time getting to know people, getting them to learn about the story. There are different listing opportunities available to us both in, you know, sort of via the OTC, DTC. Then eventually, as any company would strive as we grow, you know, the NASDAQ is not something that we would take off the table either.
These are all opportunities for us to really continue to build up our awareness. Frankly, if I'm speaking transparently, which I always do over here with you guys, you know, I do think there's a general understanding and appreciation of e-commerce in the U.S. and really sort of a springboard or given how much more time they've had to absorb and digest the sector with companies like Amazon, with category leaders like Etsy and Wayfair and Zulily. All of that has made for a much more in-depth e-commerce audience and investor base.
We think the U.S. is gonna become a bigger and bigger part of the story, and we are laying the foundation in 2022. That is part of our investor awareness push. Guys, I'm seeing a ton of questions, and I will definitely not be able to attend to all of these. Here's what I'll say. Please, please do reach out to investor@emerge-brands.com. I personally review these questions with our IR team, with James Bowen and the IR team every week. I often respond to anything that needs further depth or clarity.
I do so personally and directly. These are tremendous questions, and I think I don't want you to miss out on the answers you deserve. I would request that I take one last question, and after that, please do send to investor@emerge-brands.com if it's of any interest to you for you to follow up. Here's the last question: "In view of upcoming challenges in 2022—Will we see EMERGE being more patient with acquisitions?" This is a terrific and thoughtful question.
I must say, not typically kind of what investors tend to push for or try to, I guess, preach when we speak. I think, look, like we will continue to be selective is what I have to say. I think where we'll be strategic is in picking niches and businesses that have that moat and have that ability to stand out and differentiate in a, well, a rather crazy world from a macro perspective. As I mentioned, with WholesalePet, there's practically zero monetary. They don't have to worry about some of the issues on Facebook or Google or privacy or Apple.
That was an edge there. When you look at BattlBox, they have that Netflix show that gives them that free customer acquisition. When you looked at truLOCAL, they have a tremendous cult following almost of consumers that are willing to do all sorts of things. Amazing. They write amazing letters to customer experience. You'd think it's Valentine's. You look at UnderPar, you see those relationships, deep relationships with customer, golf associations, where customer acquisition creatively is being done.
You've gotta have that edge. When we're buying businesses, as I've mentioned, we are already being super careful and crafty about how we screen and ultimately how we choose who we end up acquiring. You can count on us to continue to be disciplined. I'll say it now because it's old news, but last year when we raised capital, some were saying, "Well, where's the next acquisition? You know, it's May, it's June, it's July." Well, guess what? You know, we might have had an acquisition that we thought we were gonna do.
We did the due diligence. We were not satisfied, and that's okay. You know, the market may think, "Hey, where's that next deal?" But if it's the wrong deal, we're not doing it. As long as I'm CEO, we're not doing the wrong deal. In my mind, we are completely focused on picking the right acquisitions, the right partners, management teams, that we truly believe can partner with us for years to come as we've built into our earn-out model.
That's kind of the way I would address it. It's a crazy world as is, but our diversified portfolio and our ability to continue to be nimble and lean and focused, I think will be the key. Friends, investors, ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciated all your time and questions today.
As I said, there's tons, there's way more questions than I've personally seen before, so I would really appreciate if you follow up there. I hope you found some value in this. I hope you're as excited as we are about 2022 and beyond. Thank you so much for your time today. Reach out. Lastly, as always, Rebels Unite. Thank you so much. Have a great day.