Good afternoon. My name is Darren Huston, I'm the Chair of the Allegro.eu Board of Directors. I'd like to welcome you to this year's annual general meeting. We look forward to a constructive discussion about the performance of the company over the past year. I'd like to now hand over to Christian Kremer, who will Chair our AGM. Christian.
Thank you very much, Darren. Let me first introduce the persons in the room. Darren Huston, the Chairman of the Board. Nancy Cruickshank, Director, member of Remuneration, Nomination, and ESG Committee. Carla Nussling, Chair of the Audit Committee. Roy Perticucci, CEO and Director. Jonathan Eastick, CFO and Director, as well as Tom Ruhan, Chief Legal Officer. Right. There are shareholders in the room that I would like, first of all, to remind that all the votes have been carried by electronic voting. Let me remind that the meeting will be broadcast so that shareholders may observe the meeting online, that the convening and formality requirements have been fully complied with, and that the meeting may proceed to undertake valid resolutions. There have been no questions which have been received. No amendments to agenda have been received, so the agenda will proceed as per the convening notice.
I confirm also that the quorum and majority requirements for this meeting have been met. As far as the composition of the board is concerned, I have the honor to chair the meeting. Rafał Janik will act as secretary, and Jacek Tomaszewski will act as scrutineer. Let me now introduce the CEO, Roy Perticucci, to make a presentation.
Thanks very much. It's my pleasure to be, for a second time, here to present at the AGM. I'm going to give a brief overview of the results for 2023 and some thoughts about how we're going to be working forwards. Let me start, first of all, with the financial performance of last year. As a reminder, basically, last year was a focus on creating flexibility in our overall financial situation so that we can invest in growth. I think we made some great progress in that regard. Overall, GMV has grown to PLN 58.4 billion. That's 11% or 11.2% up year-on-year.
That's predominantly driven by the Polish business, the majority of our turnover and GMV, which grew by 11% despite continued rather difficult trading conditions here in Poland. Well, I should also mention at this point that we've had a quite successful launch, in my view, with Allegro.cz, our Czech marketplace, which has now reached its first anniversary. Revenue also grew. Revenue grew faster than GMV overall by 13.8% for the group, and that was mostly caused by improvements in the take rate for Polish operations and also some minor adjustments to Smart co-financing. One of the things that we've always mentioned since September of 2022 is that we have three priority growth areas.
Those are namely advertising, fintech, and logistics, and we're happy to say that all three are growing ahead of GMV. Adjusted EBITDA rose to PLN 2.5 billion. That's on the backs predominantly of a very strong performance in Poland. We grew EBITDA by 18% year-on-year, and that's also reflected on improved mechanisms, improved operating efficiency in the way we make decisions and overall the Fit to Grow program, which we wrapped up in the course of 2023. CapEx has, I think, reached its inflection point in 2023. CapEx declined by 34.9%. It is likely to increase and has in the first couple of quarters of this year.
Last year it slowed to 4.6% and again reflects our emphasis on return on investment of any investments in either human or monetary capital. Pleased to also point out that the new two now two marketplaces that we've launched outside of Poland have been implemented both quickly and at low cost. The total expense for both of the marketplace launches was only PLN 40 million in terms of capital expenditure for development. Further to this, I mentioned earlier sort of the success of the Allegro.cz launch last year, we're now continuing to work on the overall flywheel that we have in our marketplaces everywhere, starting with the number of buyers.
We have now had 1.6 million, or rather by the end of 2023, we have 1.6 million active buyers shopping with us in our very first year of operations. That's 60% new customers to the group as a whole and represents over 16% of the entire population of the Czech Republic. We're also pleased with the growth of the Smart program. We've now recruited more than half a million subscribers to that service. Merchants, we continue to grow, 30,000 so far on the Czech marketplace. That 30,000 actually come from many places, not just Poland, but also from the Czech Republic. And in fact, outside of the EU and certainly within the EU, outside Poland. Selection on the basis of that merchant acquisition continues to grow.
One of the things that we've introduced now also in the Czech that customers in Poland already enjoy is our Best Price Guarantee, that's just one highlight of many things of where we are standardizing the offer across the region. The Allegro.cz as a whole is the second largest e-commerce player in the Czech Republic by traffic, we continue to work to convert those visitors to regular customers. That's really within a theme of something that we've been working on for most of our existence. Allegro will celebrate its 25th anniversary at the end of this year in December.
What you see here is an overview of our very long period of time where our gross merchandise value growth as a compound annual growth rate is 40%, and the growth of buyers is 26% on average per year. You see also an inflection point during the COVID crisis. What you also see is, after that COVID crisis subsided, our GMV growth continues. We're very pleased, I think, with a much long-term perspective of how we're proceeding. Another thing that is something that we've invested with a long-term perspective in mind is our commitment to ESG. I think our work in this area is reflected also in the fact that our ratings from the MSCI has been upgraded to triple A.
We've previously also communicated our thoughts about how we organize this topic, all for people, all for planet, and all for prosperity, and selected the key metrics that we want to make sure that we really deliver on. One of the key ones for people is continuing to close the gender gap, and we're pleased to announce that it's just 3% in the Polish operations. I think that is reflected also in that we've been rated by both the Financial Times and Statista as the number one diversity leader in our region. In terms of all for planet or sustainability, there are two key metrics that we're tracking.
We've achieved just under half of all our packaging is renewable, and our CO2 emissions have declined by 5% in the course of 2023. The other thing is, this is fundamental to our mission, we are here to simplify shopping and selling. On the selling side, we're pleased to announce that particularly in Poland, we enjoy the participation of nearly 150,000 merchants this year, and that's continued to grow over time. The G in the ESG is also covered, good governance. I think one of the things that we are happy to share here is the increased number of independent directors that have moved from three to five in the course of the year. That's just one below the 50% 2026 target.
For those of you who follow us in the earnings calls, I've also tried to share with you sort of our thoughts in terms of how we think about the business and sort of fundamental capabilities that we need to be good at. Key amongst those is something that we've traditionally been very strong in, namely technical innovation. We've also been very customer-focused from our very beginning, but one of the key things we're seeing here is, it's not just that we want to work back from the customer on any new service or any improvement to the existing services that we're trying to deliver, but also we're increasingly keeping in mind that loyalty really matters. It's not just that the customer shops with us but shops with us with increase in frequency.
We're pleased to announce already, and I've shared this number before, that a quarter of our customers shop with us as frequently as at least once a week. We, of course, would like to increase the number of customers or the share of customers who shop with us on, if not a daily basis, certainly on a weekly basis. A theme since I joined in 2022 is also investing for returns. We are much more clear about what we're trying to achieve with the various investments we make, be they either be in software developments or in physical assets, and I think you can see the benefits of that approach in our CapEx over the past year. Something I haven't spoken about very often is operational excellence.
We mean this really in sort of very broad terms. It's not only the things that we do in the real world, in treads and sheds, in fulfillment centers, and in delivery, but also in our internal mechanisms, in the head office, where we try to be increasingly not only focused but structured in the way we chug through decisions that we need to make and identify opportunities to improve our performance in various areas. One last thing, if we go to the penultimate thing, is on the next slide, is we've revised the seven priorities that we first introduced in September of 2023. We've always talked about the seven priorities where we've combined two that we realized are so important we felt to split them out to give them equal prominence.
That's namely this broad theme about loyalty, and secondarily also that we are increasingly efficient in by far our largest cost block on the P&L, namely delivery costs. I think, again, we're making satisfactory improvement in those areas. One other thing that was always implicit in the way we talked about things, but wasn't also sort of surfaced to your view, and that is we also realized that particularly given the size of many of the countries that we are entering or expanding in, we need to be also acting as a single organization across our entire catchment area, and that of course means that we have a single set of technical systems, IT systems that can support the business, and we're making great headway there as well.
In the midterm, some thoughts about how we're thinking about the business. I think the key thing is we want to continue to grow profitably in Poland and also focus on some of the under-indexed, both channels and categories, that we operate. Now for about 18 months we've emphasized always that we see that both grocery and health and beauty are great opportunities to grow online. These are areas where customers in our region are still learning how to shop online, and we're confident that we can continue to grow these areas faster than the overall growth rate.
I should also add is that we have what is an increasingly compelling offer in business to business, and we are actually developing a series of solutions to make business customers shop with us as easily as retail customers do. Our overall, our targets for, or guidelines for, Polish adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin is between 5.3% and 5.7%. We do plan to accelerate our group GMV growth, also through international expansion to the five countries that we included in our catchment area after the MALL acquisition. Clearly, I think a point of underperformance has been the MALL segment, and we are still working at high rate to bring that business down to a much more financially satisfactory result.
One last thing I think also in terms of marketplace expansion, our expectations are that not only we should get a relatively large share of each country as we move in, but also that we're looking for breakeven within 3-4 years after launch. In terms of capital allocation, we think things in terms of the EBITDA that is generated by the Polish business. That is still our machine and source of growth. We plan to split or to keep the scale of our funding for both international operations and in Polish CapEx investments to below 20% for each of the Polish EBITDA.
Overall, we're quite pleased with the progress that we've continued to make on leverage, and we hope to continue to drive that down to roughly one time EBITDA, net debt to EBITDA. At this point, I'd just like to say before I pass it over that Christian, that the overall strategy here is to continue to use our Polish operations to fund our investments, to drive growth, reduce costs, and lower leverage. Christian, over to you.
Thank you very much, Roy. Let me now summarize the various agenda items of this AGM. First item will be the presentation of the annual accounts of the company for the past financial year, the report of the Board of Directors with respect to the annual accounts, including the declaration concerning the company's corporate governance, and the report prepared by PwC, the company's certified auditor. Next item will be the approval of the annual accounts, then the presentation of the consolidated financial statements, as well as report of the Board of Directors on the consolidated financial statements, as well as C, the next point, the remuneration allocated to the directors of the company during the financial year ended on 31st of December 2023.
Next item will be the approval of the consolidated financial statements, the allocation of the results of the company for the past financial year, the acknowledgment and approval by an advisory vote of a revised version of the remuneration policy of the company for a period of four years starting from the date of the present AGM, the acknowledgment and approval of the remuneration report prepared by the Remuneration and Nomination Committee. The next items will be the discharges granted to the directors for the exercise of their mandate during the past financial year. There will be the acknowledgment of the resignation of Paweł Padusiński in respect to the performance of his duties as director, the acknowledgment of the resignation of Darren Richard Huston, the acknowledgment of the resignation of Carla Smits-Nusteling, again, for the performance of her duties as director of the company.
Two proposed new nominations to the board, the appointment of Mr. Gary McGanna as director of the company for three years, as well the appointment of Mrs. Laurence Bourdon-Tracol as director of the company also for three years. The CVs of the two candidates have been published in accordance to law. Both candidates are present in the room. Next item will be the discharge to PwC for the exercise of their mandate as certified auditor. Last item, the renewal of the mandate of PwC for another year as a certified auditor of the company. Now let me announce the voting results. The voting results will appear on screen. Since all shareholders who voted gave voting instructions, these results are available and will now appear on screen. Approval of the annual accounts passed.
I will not read out all the various results in detail, but just highlight the fact that they passed. Approval of the consolidated financial statements passed. The allocation of the results of the company for the financial year ended on 31st of December 2023 also passed. Acknowledgement approval by an advisory vote of a revised version of the remuneration policy of the company for a period of four years passed. Acknowledgement and approval of the remuneration report prepared by the Remuneration and Nomination Committee of the Company passed. Discharge to Roy Perticucci as director passed. Discharge to Jonathan Eastick for his mandate as director also passed. Discharge to Darren Richard Huston for the exercise of his mandate as director also passed. Discharge to Pedro Arnt for the exercise of his mandate also passed. Discharge to David Barker for the exercise of his mandate passed.
Discharge to Carla Smits-Nusteling for the exercise of her mandate passed. Discharge to Paweł Padusiński for the exercise of his mandate passed. Discharge to Nancy Cruickshank for the exercise of her mandate passed. Discharge to Richard Sanders for the exercise of his mandate passed. Discharge to Catherine Faiers for the exercise of her mandate passed. Discharge to Tomasz Suchański for the exercise of his mandate passed. Acknowledgement of the resignation of Paweł Padusiński as director passed. Acknowledgement of the resignation of Darren Richard Huston as director of the company passed. Acknowledgement of the resignation of Carla Smits-Nusteling as director passed. Appointment of Mr. Gary McGann as director of the company for three years passed. Appointment of Ms. Laurence Bourdon-Tracol as director of the company for three years passed. Discharge of PwC for the exercise of its mandate as certified auditor passed.
Renewal of the mandate of PwC as certified auditor of the company also passed. I would like to ask whether there are any questions from the persons present in the room. Right. If there are no further questions, this closes the AGM. Thank you very much for all present and for all who have been following. Thank you.