Good morning and welcome again, this time to discuss Allegro Financial Results for the Q3 2021. Let me introduce our host. We have with us today, as usual, the CEO of Allegro, François Nuyts.
Good morning, afternoon.
Our CFO, Jon Eastick.
Good morning.
My name is Michal Kuzawinski, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Before we begin, you can download a copy of the presentation discussed today from our IR website, allegro.eu. Please click on Investors, and then you should see a link to IR presentation on the top left corner of your screen. Please download the slides and read carefully the disclaimer on slide two, in particular, the comments on forward-looking statements which are contained in today's presentation. We will have a Q&A session after the main part of the presentation, which is in approximately half an hour. You can ask your questions by clicking the Q&A button, which is located at the bottom of your Zoom webinar screens, and you can ask your questions at any time during this call.
Just a final comment, we are being recorded today, and a replay of this presentation will be available on our IR website. With that, we can start. François, over to you.
Hey, thanks, Michal. Hello, good morning. We met many of you last Friday, where we covered the Mall acquisition and how it enables our forward-looking international growth and also multiply some of the initiatives we're doing across the region. Today, obviously, we're going to talk about Q3 results, as always, joined by Jon. We're always will focus on both the inputs, so what are we doing to improve the long-term health of our business and how it delights consumers and merchants alike. Then we'll also talk about the financial outputs of the business. Without further ado, let's start projecting the slides. Thanks. In terms of agenda, as usual, I'll cover the highlights. Jon will cover the financial results.
I'll summarize, and then Michal will help us through facilitating the Q&A. Moving on to the next slide. In Q3, as expected, we saw acceleration of GMV to about 20%. That's due to consumer, existing consumers shopping more, reaching 3,000. And then also, more consumers joining the platform. It was a bit more of , what I would love to call a usual quarter, or what we hope will be a usual quarter in the sense that there was limited lapping of COVID last year at that period and limited lockdown this year. You'll see, and Jon will cover, we're on track both to meet expectation, and we're maintaining the guidance that we raised in Q1.
Last but not least, as announced on Friday, we announced the agreement to purchase Mall Group and WE|DO, which nearly doubles our headroom for further growth, and we expect this to complete sometime in the first half of the year. Here, I won't cover. This is more for you to have all the core financial metrics in one place. Moving to the core inputs of our business. This is the roadmap. It stays the same.
As usual, we'll cover a few of those components, notably Retail Basics, Delivery Experience, and Smart! in terms of the core base, for the business and its accelerator, which is a loyalty program, Smart!, and Allegro Pay International, which are obviously additional initiatives on top of the existing business and some progress in not only what we do in terms of ESG, but also how it's received by the wider market. Let's start with Retail Basics. Again, very simply, our business is about the choice we provide to the consumer, we call this selection, how they can come and always have a competitive price, and how we make the overall shopping experience convenient.
In terms of selection, we continue to see very fast ramp-up of the number of offers we offer consumers, and this is mostly as we improve continuously the tools for merchants and as we continue to invite, for lack of a better word, new top brands to join the platform. As you see, we reached over 250 million offers on Allegro, and we signed some new brands. Dada, for example, is the leading baby care brand for the leading food retailer, Biedronka, in country. Duka is a well-known Swedish kitchenware brand, and DeeZee is the private brand of the leading shoe/online retailer, CCC, in country.
All great progress across, and we expect to see continued growth, not only number of offers, but also of the brands that keep on joining the platform. In terms of price leadership, here you may recall we launched Allegro Ceny, which is our tool to share and incentivize sellers to extend the lowest price to consumer. Since we launched Allegro Ceny, we see a massive uptick of the number of merchants that joined the program. You see quarter-over-quarter a six-fold increase in Q3. What this means is our ability to extend the lowest price on the wider selection keeps on increasing, and also to do it at better financial, both for us and the merchant, keeps on increasing, and that's massively important. On improving convenience, we've kept on automating the refund process, both on the consumer and the merchant side.
It's a great driver of both consumer and merchant experience. You see continued progress of Allegro Family. If you recall, Allegro Family is this program where family members, extended family members can easily join different benefits, Smart! for sure, also Allegro Pay, and benefit as a family and also shop as a family. It means if you don't have a credit card, the younger member of the family can start a transaction and the family member that owns the account completes that transaction, for example. In terms of selection, pricing, and then delivery. In terms of delivery, we continue to sequentially improve how fast and reliably we do delivery. First using our unique third-party AI-based model, notably through incentives to merchants.
Here you see the progress, 8 percentage points year-on-year in Q3, mostly driven by the fast delivery subsidy program for merchants. We see continued increased usage of that program, and it's exactly doing what it was intended to do. As the coverage of fast delivery increased, we improved the visibility to consumers through search results and search filters and results. As mentioned in previous quarters, we're also at the same time that we're improving our third-party AI base, we continue to do targeted acquisitions and developments that enable us to keep on improving delivery speed over time. Here you have a few example on this slide. The first one is the acquisition of a rather small same-day delivery company called X-press Couriers on 11th of October.
The second one is the progress on One Fulfillment. One Fulfillment, which is our own fulfillment for merchants. At the moment, it's in the stage that we call commercial pilots, where we invited a select number of merchants, on 13th of September, and where we're rolling up and scaling up the quantities to make sure that all the processes work to further launch and further extend the base, in early January. Here, all things are on track and we'll see more progress in the early part of the year. Last but not least, on last mile, One Box, our unique green APM network.
That's been a bit of a time in the making, but we're super ecstatic that we launched the first green APMs just what is it a week ago?
A week ago.
Six hundred green APM from the 3rd of November. As we discussed multiple times, we plan to have at least 3,000 by the end of next year. The feedback from consumers is amazing, but also from local authority in terms of how contributive they are to the environment, both visually and ecologically, is quite high points in getting them accepted even more further. Moving to Smart!. Smart! is really the fuel on our overall core marketplace engine. Meaning if we have leading selection, best price, great convenience, great delivery, Smart! enables any, like, consumers to shop more and merchants to sell more. We continue to improve Smart! in a number of different ways.
First, the number of consumers that participate in Smart! keeps on growing, not only through the regular Smart! program, but also the Smart! na Start campaign, which allows slightly lower engaged consumers to benefit from Smart! and start using it. We had a record campaign in terms of Smart! Week, both in terms of the number of offers we extended, but also in the number of price reductions we were able to extend. We also do a longer-term improvement to Smart!. The one that you probably will have noticed is how we aligned the MOV across locker and courier. That experience of having two MOV was always a bit of a consumer defect.
You only knew at the end of the shopping journey whether you had a courier delivery available for you. We did two things. We reached almost parity in the coverage of selection between lockers and courier, and we made the MOV the same. What we can see here is an uptick in Smart! and in spending as we see consumers that do not have easy access to locker engaging more with us, which is exactly the idea of reducing that initial, I would call it again, consumer defect. Moving to Allegro Pay. Here at a high level, and Jon will cover questions.
What we can see since we launched the what I like to call the kind of the universality of the Allegro Pay program, meaning we made Allegro Pay available for all consumers in Poland. You see a massive uptick in the loans being issued, which leads us to increase our guidance by about 50%. We're sharing for the first time the incrementality of our A/B test results. We see that a little bit similar to when we did that analysis for Smart!. We see a massive uptick from consumers that start using Allegro Pay in terms of at least 35% higher spend. The other thing moving to slide 11.
The team secured external financing for Allegro Pay, which allows us to grow and continue to grow Allegro Pay ahead of plan, you know, so to speak. Now, let's recap briefly because we spent quite a bit of time together on Friday, the strategic rationale for the great acquisition we did of Mall and WE|DO. The whole reason we're doing this is it gives us access to geographies that are nearby that accounts for doubling our headroom for growth. It's over PLN 1 trillion combined retail TAM. Well, there are a couple of core parts of the projects, but the first one is when you look at those geographies, it's a very scattered competitive landscape.
What it means in practical terms is the type of experience you expect from Allegro, for example, where you only need to go to Allegro. You don't need to shop around to find everything you're looking for, to find it at the lowest price, to find it with great delivery, convenience, Smart!. It really doesn't exist across the region. By creating that one-stop-shop, great value proposition, we know we're going to be able to massively uptake the consumer engagement. The main way of doing this is by what we call turbocharging Mall's 3P marketplace. Mall has started that evolution, but the base of sellers they have, the base of selection is massively different. By adding all that selection, we know invariably from Poland, but also other countries, that consumers become more engaged.
Not only the existing consumers, but also more consumers, as a one-stop shop. We also acquire, both through Mall and through WE|DO, critical assets, last mile infrastructure, cross-border infrastructure, that were already on our roadmap at Allegro, and we obviously get the know-how of those teams. The two last points, it's around, so the first one is around team. We spent a lot of time over the last quarters, interacting at a quite in-depth level between the two teams, and it's very important that it's quite evident that those two teams are very aligned.
Sometimes they differ a little bit how they run the business, but in terms of how they look at it's very aligned, so it's going to make that merger of the culture much easier, and it's something we're really working on. Last, obviously, this is not only about the core marketplace, it's also about taking all the other investments and improvements we're doing across, whether it's Allegro Pay, whether it's Apptech versus or mobile app, and making sure that those investments scale across the region and provide a unique shopping experience to the consumers. Here, not going to cover the transaction highlights. Jon covered them on Friday, but we wanted to have them here to have one point for you to have all the information.
Similarly, with the midterm ambitions, which we covered Friday, but obviously very happy to take any question, or Jon, when we go to the Q&A. Wrapping up before I hand over the mic to Jon. In terms of ESG, what is great is not only the work the team is doing on a recurrent basis, but also the recognition that we're getting from time to time. Q3 was a little bit unique in both perspective. In summary, to look at the output of it was great to see the reflection in the MSCI ESG rating that moved from BB to A.
Again, it's a recognition of the multiple streams of work, the team are doing and a commitment we're making, to being a very ethically responsible company across everything that we do. Jon.
Okay.
The mic is yours.
Thank you very much, François, and good morning again, everybody. Great to be with you and, I'm going to now take you through the financial results for the Q3 2021. As usual, I'll begin with active buyers and with spends per active buyer. We made a good start again to this year, to this quarter. Sequential growth resumed again in terms of active buyers, 13.3 million active buyers at the end of the Q3. 5.6% growth on a 12-month basis. I think what's much more exciting is passing the PLN 3,000 of annual spend benchmark for spend per active buyer. It moved on sequentially 3.3% Q2 to Q3, and 24.5% growth on an annualized basis.
Now, that growth in spend is obviously what's really underpinning our growth at the moment, and it's really coming from three different main sources. One is the tremendous expansion in the number of customers signed up to the Smart! Program, who then are much more engaged, spend much more year-to-year. François was also mentioning the Allegro Pay incrementality. Allegro Pay is becoming more and more material in our GMV, bringing about 35% incrementality in GMV. Then finally, this mysterious stickiness factor coming from the pandemic that we all lived through last year. Our buyers obviously have learned new behaviors to rely even more on e-commerce than they did previously before the pandemic.
We're seeing that stickiness of that behavior is really starting to come through in the numbers. That's the purchasing per active buyer. Putting those two metrics together, we get to our GMV result. In the Q3, we had PLN 9.9 billion of GMV. That's a significant acceleration in growth to 19.9%. You'll probably recall from the previous discussion, when we met, I think it was right back at the early August to discuss the half year, we were growing mid-teens in July. That growth sequentially improved during the rest of the quarter, and we moved on to 19.9% for the quarter in total.
It's worth remembering that in terms of COVID disruption, Q3 is the first quarter we've met where in fact there was no lockdown disruption in the prior year in the summertime. Again, no disruption thankfully this year. The numbers are pretty much an apples to apples comparison. The CAGR for the two-year period therefore is interesting at 34% from 2019 through to 2021. That means that the business is about 80% bigger than it was back in 2019, which is really a tremendous performance. In terms of last twelve months GMV, we moved on by 30.9% year-on-year, and it stands now at PLN 40.8 billion . Moving on to look at revenue.
The growth on the revenue line, comparing to the 20% GMV growth is at 32.9% for the Q3. That's partly coming from the higher take rates and also obviously from a strong contribution from advertising, which I'll cover on the next slide. Excuse me. I did take a COVID test yesterday, I would like to point out for everybody. This is not COVID-related, but I do have a bit of a cough.
Thanks, Jon.
Yes, looking at the revenue bridge, 31% growth in the marketplace revenue and 39.7% growth in advertising are the main underpinnings of the growth in revenue in the Q3.
As we were flagging ever since the beginning of the year, the take rate is ticking down slightly quarter-to-quarter. We're investing more in terms of commercial rebates, and as François was mentioning in our Allegro Ceny program, to share take rate with merchants who are prepared to provide the best possible prices on the platform. Those factors result in the take rate ticking down by 17 basis points quarter-on-quarter. Year-on-year, we're still well ahead, 0.9% up on a year ago. We in the Q3 lapsed the increase that we made a year ago relating to success fees on delivery on the delivery charges that our merchants levy on customers when they're non-Smart! customers.
We started collecting a success fee on that in July of last year. We now lap that, so that's one of the reasons why the year-on-year growth has compressed slightly. Okay, moving on to costs and starting with cost of sales. As usual, the main interest point here is around cost of delivery. Quarter-on-quarter, it was steady at 22% of revenue. Behind that, there is actually 60% increase in cost of delivery. What's that coming from? Obviously, that's coming from the dramatic growth in our Smart! subscriber base, the additional transactions that that drives amongst those subscribers.
Finally, as François was mentioning, we've made sequential improvements over the last 12 months in the courier component of our Smart! offering, which results overall in a 10.8 percentage point increase in courier within the mix of deliveries. More courier relative to lockers and to pickup points. Obviously, courier delivery costs somewhat more per unit than those other two ways of delivery, and that therefore translates into another cost driver. At the same time, it makes the whole user experience with Smart! that much more compelling. When it comes to retail sales, using that lever a little bit stronger than last year to also help with pricing and selection, to make the overall experience on the platform as fantastic as possible.
There's a slightly higher cost of goods sold. Okay, moving on to SG&A expenses. We continue to ramp up the team that we have in particular around technology and around our ability to develop and innovate within the business. As I mentioned, we're now 80% bigger than we were two years ago. To keep growing this machine at this 20%+ growth rate, we need to be able to innovate across multiple levers across the whole business in order to have enough ammunition and enough power to keep growing this business as strongly as we target. There is some increase in our team size, 32%, 33% more employees.
We're also spending in line with revenue growth on marketing expenses, continue to get great ROIs on our expenditure in that area. In terms of EBITDA, we've had 15.5% growth in EBITDA in the Q3, PLN 472 million, and we're at 28.8% growth on a year-to-date basis, just under PLN 1.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA for the nine months. When it comes to adjustments below EBITDA, there's a couple of things to call out here. In comparison to the situation a year ago, obviously last year we were just in the middle of doing the IPO, so there were a lot of one-off expenses going through EBITDA adjustments and lower down in the P&L related to the IPO.
This year, I think the most interesting thing to call out there is point number one, where you see PLN 18.6 million of restructuring and development costs. I can now say after last Friday's call that this was mainly due diligence and management consulting and support around the mall transaction, where we worked very hard and meticulously on looking at that asset before we finally made the decision to make that acquisition. We've done a lot of preparation for the integration, which is to come after the transaction closes next year.
The other thing worth mentioning here is that, because our interest rates that we're paying, or the interest margin that we're paying on our financing has stepped down 50 basis points from the mid-year, there is a non-cash adjustment to the carrying value of our debt, which puts up about PLN 100 million non-cash financially positive financial adjustment into the P&L in the Q3, in the financial expenses line. Okay, moving on to capital investment. François was talking about the milestones that we've met over the last few weeks, in particular the APM launch, for example. That project is scaling really well. We're also investing in the automation phase on the fulfillment project.
As a result, you see 120% growth in our capital investment, compared to the Q3 a year ago. We spent just over PLN 100 million in the Q3. We're on course to keep ramping that expenditure, keep ramping those projects, and spending the full guidance for the full 2021. Moving on to leverage. It was another quarter of excellent progress. We took the leverage down another 0.2 points to 1.8x debt to EBITDA. As I already mentioned, that in itself resulted in lower margin, 50 basis points lower than previously.
François mentioned that we signed a great deal with Aion to provide us with off-balance sheet financing of up to PLN 2 billion over the next two years that will provide us the fuel that we need to really scale Allegro Pay without doing any negative impact on our leverage. That's a really exciting project. When it comes to the Mall acquisition, we need to raise approximately EUR 200 million in new financing in order to have the funding ready for the middle of next year when the transaction should close. We're considering primarily starting a PLN bond program as the way to raise that financing.
Okay, that brings me to my final slide before handing back to François, which is our expectations for 2021, and a short update on the outlook for 2022. When it comes to 2021, we're maintaining our guidance across the board. The year is very much playing out in accordance with our original expectations. If we start from GMV, the Q4, I'd like to remind everybody there were lockdowns this time last year in November in particular. The shopping centers were actually closed due to COVID, and that's going to result in a slightly lower or somewhat lower percentage growth rate than we saw during the Q3. Having said that, the absolute level of growth is looking very promising.
We were doing mid-teens growth in October, and we're starting to see that Christmas or pre-Christmas ramp up in sales coming through very strongly. So everything's looking good for a really good Christmas season. When it comes to revenue, that tick down in our take rate that happens during the Q4 because merchants tend to invest less in promoting their offers because demand is simply so strong anyway is likely to come to fruition. That's what we see almost every year. We expect that to be in the numbers again this year.
In addition, as we mentioned earlier, we just took the MOV on our courier for Smart! from PLN 80 down to PLN 40 , which makes the offer that much more compelling for consumers. Currently, we're not charging for co-financing for courier on those on that extra group of courier transactions. That's going to create a small additional headwind on the total take rate that we see in the Q4. When it comes to adjusted EBITDA, continued growth on Smart! penetration, more courier in the mix as we've been talking about, and growing that team to be well positioned to continue to grow the business in 2022.
All those expenditures will be visible in the adjusted EBITDA. When it comes to the outlook for 2022, we're in the middle of our planning phase, our annual planning round at the moment, so we don't have anything concrete to share with you. We will share expectations when we meet again for the Q4 when we finish the planning. The key points here are that we're really prioritizing our GMV growth and prioritizing getting traction in these great investments that we've been making around Allegro Pay, getting started in APMs, getting started in fulfillment, and obviously also in the retail basics to drive our GMV growth for next year.
We do think that this will probably result in some softening of our margin compared to the very high levels that we've seen in 2021. It does remain the case that our, one of our key planning objectives is to keep our EBITDA moving up sequentially year-to-year. With those comments from my side, going to hand it back to François.
Thank you, Jon. Let's move to summarize. Q3 accelerated to 20%, pretty much as planned. This was driven by higher engagement from existing consumers and the growth of active buyers returning quarter-on-quarter. The Allegro Pay rollout is working incredibly well, both in terms of the incrementality per user and also by the sign-up of new user to Allegro Pay, which is a great future growth lever, notably now that we have arranged the financing. In terms of more retail basic levers, we continue to see massive uptick in the usage by merchants of the program we put at their disposition, to improve delivery times on this great asset-light third-party model.
While at the same time, we see continued progress and some milestones being achieved, notably on lockers, on our own fulfillment for merchant solution. As Jon mentioned, we're maintaining our guidance. We know that competition has done some activities, but we see limited impact from that so far. But obviously it's always good to be humble, so we keep on investing and having no less than the leading value proposition, both for consumers and for the merchant, and we'll continue to do so. One of the enabler for that is how we continue to invest in our people, both in terms of quality and development of the existing team, which continues to ramp up very well, and executing on our ambitious tech development roadmap and headcount development, notably in that domain.
Last but not least, the addition of Mall to the group, hopefully to come early in 2022, will not only double our headroom but also give opportunity to develop a lot of the progress and projects we did not only on core retail basics, but across a much wider consumer base. All in, very excited about this quarter and what comes next. Without further ado, Michal, why don't you help us facilitate the Q&A?
Yes. Thank you, François, and thank you for asking your questions. We received quite a few of them already. Once again, a quick reminder, if you would like to still ask a question, please click on the Q&A button, which you will find at the bottom of your Zoom webinar screens. Let's kick off with questions from Elena Zhuravleva from JP Morgan. First, what % of GMV can be covered by own fulfillment services? And when is the fulfillment capacity going to reach the planned size in Allegro?
I'll start, and then, Jon, maybe you help with some of the specifics. Maybe here in terms of business model, it's important to remind everybody. We intend to keep our business model to remain different. What I mean by that is our business model, that asset light third-party fulfillment scales better than anything. Meaning, we're able to do fast, predictable delivery. Sorry, Jon had a bit of a voice infection over the last couple of days, and it's amazing he's with us, but okay. Let me continue. We intend to have still most of our delivery done through that model because it's uniquely help us do it on a much wider selection, and that would be possible with, let's say, with a hard asset model.
Now, as we talked in the past, there are some gaps where we expect hard assets to play a part, whether it's international inventory, whether it's merchants that just do not want to build on the capabilities and want to give us this inventory to do that service for them. We expect indeed a percentage to go that way, but nowhere close to the mix that you're expecting, that you normally see on a 1P plus 3P model. In terms of reaching, I'm just looking to Jon to see to what number we've guided to.
Yeah. I mean, in the medium term, once we've rolled out all the fulfillment centers that we have in the projection, then we're expecting to land somewhere in the region of 25% or so of GMV going through fulfillment centers.
Right. I'll remind, this is not the target for us. The target for us is how fast we deliver, how reliably, and we'll keep on improving our third-party AI model to cover the overwhelming majority. Obviously, we'll use hard assets to cover the gaps as we have so far.
Elena is also asking about Allegro Pay, the scalability progress since the full launch and the expected monetization profile of Allegro Pay.
Similar. The scale you see in the achievement in Q3, where we raised our expectation by 50%, really the key game changer here is the change in eligibility for consumers. We're really at the beginning of this, right? We made that possible only a few, a couple of months ago, if at all. Now there is a number of communication and even word of mouth that is happening. Here, the NPS, obviously, that we continue to see, which is even better than the world-class NPS of the platform, is incredibly reassuring. Ultimately, that also gets translated in the data that we shared, which is the incrementality in terms of consumer shopping behavior.
Yeah, maybe I'll pick up on the monetization.
Of course.
Aspect of the question. Allegro Pay is doing extremely well. When it comes to monetization, there's really two models there. The customers can take a BNPL product, or they can choose an installment product. When they go for the BNPL, what that means is that we get a very fast rotating loan book that rotates 6x a year, something like this, on average. With that 35% incrementality that we're seeing, that translates into, you know, over 100% incrementality, once you multiply that loan those 6x. That then produces obviously a hell of a lot more commission than we would have generated without Allegro Pay. That's just fantastic.
Then the second group is around the installment loans where we're getting good traction charging this 8% interest rate. There, obviously the money turns over less frequently. But on a weighted average basis, the incrementality is around 35%. Generally speaking, where customers are prepared to pay interest, it tends to be even higher. Yeah. We haven't actually split between the two in terms of incrementality, but suffice to say incrementality is even higher on GMV for the installment loans and we're earning 8% interest on top. I mean, in terms of monetization, the project is really in line with our expectations, if not exceeding them. The other aspect, obviously is NPLs. They continue to be under control.
It was another quarter of around 2% NPL results.
Next one from Elena. Where do you feel the Allegro platform lags on selection and price versus Amazon offering in Poland?
We benchmark not only international competitors, but also local competitors. When it comes to selection, suffice to say we're in Poland. What I like to call selection authoritative, meaning there are very few things consumers do not find on Allegro at 250 million offers, and we keep on improving this sequentially. We don't see any gap, even so there is always some delta between brands, but again, in Poland, we're largely authoritative. On pricing, again, I'll talk more around total competitive base rather than single out. We see that normally we're very competitive. This is due to a couple of things we covered over the last quarters and since IPO.
First, the prices in Poland are uniquely competitive, which indeed helps us and helps the merchant base. We see also that the way we pay merchants, so we pay merchants immediately, allows for a much wider merchant base, including some of the very well-known retailers that are known for those unique selection, unique price point to be present on Allegro, and that's massively helpful to our own competitiveness. Unlike other platforms that traditionally are 1P plus 3P, the way we collect and share the data and the incentives with our merchants base allows us to be competitive not only on the sliver of front catalog, but on a much, much longer tail.
The progress here of Allegro Ceny that I mentioned only a few minutes ago, where we see that's one of the key KPI where we see more and more merchants, 6x quarter-on-quarter more merchants participating in this program, is really the testament to the success of that approach, which is better for consumers because it extends across both the front and the back of the catalog and is much better economically for the merchants and ourselves.
The final one from Elena, do you believe that, the competitive landscape in Poland requires higher margin investment to drive GMV growth in line with your midterm expectations?
I mean, Jon covered. We don't see. I mean, we see some activities obviously from competitors, both local and international competitors. So far, we see limited impacts from those moves, and quite humbly, we benchmark across a quite extensive array of competitors on the number of, let's say, funnel metrics across, and we see very limited impact so far. Now, as both Jon and I mentioned, we keep on looking at ways we can improve the life and the shopping experience of consumers and sellers.
We do have a number of initiatives that we're in the process of quantifying part of our Q4 financial planning to make sure we still have, how do you say it, we win the hearts and mind of both consumer and merchants. It's already the case, but, you know, consumers are wonderfully demanding, so that's something you need to be continuously deserve.
We have questions from Michał Potyra from UBS. Can you please give more color on the recent trading? Do you see any changes to the competitive environment?
Yeah, I think we said in our management report that in October trading was in the mid-teens. Bearing in mind that after everyone went back to school last year, September-October timeframe, the COVID cases started to dramatically accelerate. There was let's say a lot of COVID-related buying online that then culminated in November with an actual lockdown. That 15% growth rate, we think, is actually pretty decent in terms of absolute GMV growth or absolute GMV. It was a strong performance.
We're now seeing, as we come into the Christmas period, or the pre-Christmas shopping period, that the GMV growth week to week is really starting to build very nicely, as is normally the case. We're expecting a very strong Christmas season. As I said, I mean, our GMV guidance we're maintaining, we're very happy.
Can you please comment why price comparison revenues are declining?
Yeah, that's a good question. The price comparison business is mainly driven by the amount of e-commerce searches that are going on on the internet, particularly on Google. Because of the very unusual situation a year ago, there actually isn't very much growth in terms of the amount of search activity that's going on year-to-year. That means that there's limited therefore potential for Ceneo to grow their business in the short run. In addition to that, Allegro itself has been using the Ceneo channel much more strongly than in the previous year.
Obviously on a consolidated view, where Allegro spends on Ceneo, those transactions get eliminated in the consolidated result, and you only see the third-party component of the Ceneo price comparison revenue. Those two factors together really are the reason for the relatively slower growth.
Now we have a few questions from Cesar Tiron from Bank of America. Number one, can you please better help us understand your comments about margins trending down in FY 2022? Where is the incremental investment that will be spent, and how much will margins decrease in 2022?
I'll start. I think the way the question is written is a little bit more assertive than the comment we made. First, we're very early in our Q4 financial planning of 2022 and forward. What we do see is indeed. I mean, we maintain our guidance on GMV because we see the trend ahead of us. What we do see is also a number of opportunities to keep on investing to improve both consumers and merchants. Those are in the process of being evaluated and forecasted, budgeted.
Mm-hmm.
At this stage, it seems humble, reasonably cautious to say that yes, we may want to do investments that mean a slight lowering of the EBITDA percentage. Again, with that in mind, to keep the EBITDA absolute growing year-on-year. It's a bit of a sequence, and as Jon said, we'll come when we do Q4 earnings. That's when we'll come with a more detailed plan and updated guidance.
Yeah. Exactly. Question number two has already been answered. Number three, besides buyer financing, what steps will you take to further enhance your fintech offering in 2022?
Oh, that's an interesting one. Plenty, but I'm not sure it's right now we want to talk about some of the detailed building block. Keep in mind, just by focusing on executing what the team has launched, there is massive opportunity to grow this business, right? We barely launched what I like to call the universality of the product a few weeks or months and a half ago. We're incredibly early stage on this. It's true with more consumers using Allegro Pay, it gives plenty of opportunities to improve the offering to the consumer. Here we'll indeed keep on improving it. I don't think we've shared any timeline in terms of using the same kind of skill set, technology to from Allegro Pay to the merchant side.
Obviously, the team knowledge, skill set, data, AI are very much the same. We're expecting that over time, obviously, this will occur. Really at the moment, as you saw in the output financial results, this is really a moment for the team to focus on executing so well on Allegro Pay, so it gets to a very different cruising altitude than where it is now. All systems green or even better. For them to focus on that, it seems the absolutely right.
The final question from Cesar, w hat do you make of AliExpress opening a logistics hub in Poland? Do you think their products can have a wide market audience in Poland?
You know, not for me to comment on competition, but if you look at the press article first, the size of that fulfillment center is quite limited. It's in terms of ability to cover any sizable selection. Second, as I've said in multiple prior occasions, when we're talking about, let's say non-European, notably Chinese, marketplace, some of the oldest, most recurrent benefits they tended to have is what I call VAT avoidance. How you receive a package that has not cleared VAT, which gives an unfair 20% price advantage. The more they locate inventory in country, the more that advantage is removed, and fairly so. We see those developments as very neutral.
Yeah, good for the taxpayers overall.
Now Andrew Ross from Barclays, he asked a similar question about the scale of margin investment, but he's also asking for some more precise comments, if possible, on the possible range of GMV growth targeted for 2022.
Yeah. I mean, as we said, we're at very early stage in the planning round. It's not really possible, as you can appreciate, to say anything more precise until we finish that planning process. We will announce growth expectations most likely when we meet to discuss the Q4 results sometime during Q1.
We received a set of questions from Miriam Adisa from Morgan Stanley. First, could you talk more about your decision to cut the price of Smart!? What impact have you seen from this? How are you thinking about the Smart! offering and how to make it more competitive other than price?
I like the question because it also allows for a clarification. We haven't cut the price of Smart!. The price of Smart! is PLN 49 . It's incredibly competitive. What we did is last year we did a promotion during Q4 of PLN 39 on the yearly and the monthly doesn't move. Why do we do this? It's quite simple, right? Q4 across most of the countries in the world is where you see renewed customer activity. Some of those customers have not joined Smart!. You see us doing activities, notably in back to school, in Smart! Week, in Black Friday and Christmas, or holiday shopping season, as a great tool to get to a higher base of overall users and overall Smart! users.
If ever consumers needed a little bit of an extra incentive to join Smart!, that's the right season to do it. What you do see in terms of price of Smart!, it's also, while it's not the actual intended thing, Allegro Family is also one way for consumers to save on the cost of the Smart! program, as they share Smart! across household members. That's also very relevant for the people that are value-focused. As you well know, Polish consumers are very, very thrifty, and Allegro obviously have spent a whole lot of time and effort making sure that that thrift is well answered on Allegro.
Next one from Miriam. How are you thinking about take rates into next year, given the increased competition and your investments in rebates?
Well, again, we're in the planning round, and we wouldn't pre-announce any changes in take rates, you know, until the appropriate moment to do so. Big picture-wise, we continue to invest a lot of money in delivery and in expansion of the Smart! program. There may be some initiatives to come around co-financing, but there's nothing concrete to announce at this moment in time.
The final one from Miriam, you have previously mentioned some structural reasons why local delivery is so popular in Poland. Do you think it will be the case over time, and do you expect the share of courier delivery to continue significantly?
I mean, the underlying reasons for lockers to be very successful, yes, I fully expect will continue. Just to name a few, economically, it's obviously much more efficient to deliver to one point, where you're nearly 100% sure of being able to load the product versus of hitting a elusive consumer door, which may or may not be there. Obviously, in terms of consumer convenience, being sure that your product is there versus again, that elusive time coincidence with the courier is much better. Lastly, which is absolutely right and is an increasing focus for everybody around, but also for Allegro, might contribute to the environment.
Again, delivering to one single point with limited, how you say, multiple supply chain back and forth when those packages miss the consumer is also a key reason to push. Obviously, we'll keep on offering both to consumers and consumers will choose, but our equalizing the MOV is aligned in that direction. We also know that lockers geographically don't have the same footprint, so you have areas of consumers away from notable urban centers that will continue to use more courier not only as we make it easier for them. Overall, I think there's a shared interest both for consumers, for Allegro, and overall for the environment to keep on improving the lockers offer, and it's why we focus on it.
Now we have one really unanswered question left from the list of Maxim Nekrasov from Goldman Sachs. Do you plan to introduce co-financing on courier delivery?
As Jon said, this is not the time to either affirm or confirm this. We're working on our financial planning. Maybe it's a time to remind, kind of.
Remind.
I was looking for a softer word on what are the principles we use to look at those things. The first thing, we're overwhelmingly a marketplace, which means we want consumers to have, how do you say, the best price, the best selection, but it's only possible if merchants have a very healthy business, right? We always look at this in the stream of, do we allow for a healthy, growing business for merchants? Now, it's true that at the moment, the level of co-financing is very conservative, and we'll look at where the sharing of those costs can be better done, if it can be better done. At this stage, we have no announcement to be made.
Just one thing to add as a point of fact when it comes to co-financing on courier. Co-financing on courier has actually been the case since Q2 of last year. It's just that MOV for courier in Smart! back in Q2 last year was PLN 100 . Earlier this year, we brought it down to PLN 80 , and we have been charging co-financing on deliveries at PLN 80 and above. We just made this additional move a few weeks ago to bring the MOV down to PLN 40 , and we haven't yet imposed any co-financing between PLN 80 and PLN 40 . Okay. That's the component where there isn't co-financing at the moment.
Next, we have questions from Catherine O'Neill, Citi. How likely is that you will remove the minimum order value altogether on Smart!?
At this stage, no comment on this. We look at always multiple scenarios, but there is no.
Your question number two, Catherine, has already been covered. Next, let's move on to Paweł Szpigiel from mBank. What do you think of your segment share? Is it falling or rising in Poland this year? There were a number of similar questions referring to the Central Statistical Office methodology. Are we lagging the market? Are we growing above? What is our take on the segment growth from that statistical data?
Thank you for the question, because I do recall when asked this question, I think last quarter, a couple of quarters ago, the question puzzled us a little bit because we didn't connect it with the data we had, either in traffic or anything else. We broadly looked at not only our own data, but a broad-based consensus of, let's say, market analysis. We see the market growing at about 12% if I recall.
The segment.
The segment. Thank you very much.
Got me once.
Got me once. Why there is potentially a data gap, let's call it this way, with the Office of Statistical .
Central Statistical Office.
Thank you. It is because the way the data is collected, right? It's a sample data of a reasonably small base of e-commerce. It's purely declarative. Actually, that office directly says this is not to be used as a tool to evaluate the e-commerce as a separate segment. That's probably why you get a disconnect between those two.
There is a number of questions asking about whether the midterm outlook still applies given the, you know, competitive landscape. Some questions about, you know, in this context with regards to the recent actions of some specific competitors, both in terms of, you know, GMV growth outlook and EBITDA margin stability outlook in the midterm.
I think we broadly answered this. We benchmark quite tightly a number of competitors, whether international and local. We see limited uptick from the recent activities, but we'll continue to benchmark. Jon, you probably want to.
Yeah. I mean, on the midterm expectations, yes, very much that remains our, let's say, medium-term planning horizon objectives of where we're aiming to drive the business to. That means mid-20s GMV growth, and in the medium term, a stable margin on GMV. What we said in our current planning round, that we're in the middle of now, is that, when it comes to that margin, we don't think we're going to achieve that stability next year. We would see it softening somewhat next year as we invest heavily in GMV and in the opportunities that we have, because so many of these growth levers are just really well primed now, for us to invest and scale.
you know, it would be the right thing to do is to invest in those and drive the GMV growth, not worry so much about the margin in the short run.
A question from Ali Al-Nasser, how does Allegro Ceny work? Do you reimburse price difference?
There is a bit of a cascade that we covered, I think in previous, but we can. First, unlike 1P plus 3P marketplace, what we tend to do is we collect the data, right? We know what is the competitive price point in our country. Let's call it that way, so I don't use. Then what we do that is unlike 1P plus 3P, we start sharing that data quite openly with merchant. With indeed a nudge which says, if you were to align and have a competitive price, you would sell more. It works actually in a wide array of cases, and it's obviously financially creative for the consumer, he saves money, for the merchant, they sell more, and for us at very efficient economics.
There are some instances where obviously this is just not quite enough, and that's when we start incentivizing, thank you, by providing take rate discount. Right. Part of the program actually, which is Allegro Ceny, is doing even more than that, is taking price control to a large extent directly. What this does, it's not only about how you say, being able to reduce, but also the speed of reaction, which is also important for a consumer. Last, really last, that's when we use 1P as an ultimate resource, when all those stop work. Again, you see a massive uptick because there is a clear need, obviously, from consumers.
They love low price and competitive price, and they love not only when they're Smart! to come to the platform and know that they have a competitive price, they don't need to shop around. Also you can see the massive uptick on seller usage because it really fulfills one of their need in terms of managing their price points to sell more.
Now Adnan Bilgin from Metzler is asking if we could share similar comments about the 2020 active buyer cohorts as we did on the occasion of the last quarter on the retention.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, on the retention side of things, the Q3 was very similar. Something like more than two-thirds of the active buyers that came on board a year earlier continued to purchase, made a second purchase at or more than the second purchase later in the year. Those customers were retained. That's very similar. I think generally when it comes to new active buyers coming to e-commerce, we do see that there is some impact of the pandemic sucking in the marginal new buyer into 2020, bringing forward that decision to become an e-commerce customer caused by the pandemic.
We're having maybe some kind of hangover from that at the moment in terms of active buyer growth. It did start to move back to a positive trend, and we would expect that to strengthen over time as all of these pandemic effects start to go into the distance in the numbers.
Just a final question for today, a follow-up from Elena Zhuravleva, on the 2022 outlook. Should we treat the investments in the margin to drive GMV above the current expectations?
Our medium-term expectations, as I said, our target is to grow the business in the mid-20% range for GMV. As I said, the levers that we have at our disposal at the moment, such as Allegro Pay, really are worth investing in strongly. We've done all the groundwork, all the preparation, and we feel it's the right moment to invest in those initiatives. Also, the initiatives around delivery and in that way, we'll maximize our chance to hit those kind of growth rates. Next year is not a year to be focused on stabilized margin.
That is a medium-term objective for us, to stabilize the margin, but we're just flagging today that next year is a little bit too soon for that.
Thank you. With that, we complete the Q&A session. Thank you for your participation today.
Sure.
See you next time next year.
Thank you. It's a pleasure, and talk to you again right after Q4. Thanks very much.
Thank you very much.