Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, I'm hugely delighted to welcome all of you to this special event, the presentation of the new strategy of the GPW Group for 2023 and until 2027. I welcome the Ministry of Finance, Katarzyna Szwarc, in particular. I welcome representatives of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, and our international guests from the Cyprus Stock Exchange. I'm delighted to welcome members of the management board and supervisory boards of all the GPW subsidiary companies and their staff. I would like to welcome members of the press and other operators in Polish capital market. To the best of my understanding, there's a large group watching us and following this event online. May I welcome our shareholders and investors and representatives of issuers.
I would like to encourage you to send emails to strategia@gpw.pl, questions that we will take and answer at the end of the conference. Now, members of the management board of the Warsaw Stock Exchange will present sections of the upcoming strategy. Without further ado, I would like to invite the host, the President of Warsaw Stock Exchange, Mr. Marek Dietl. Over to you, Marek.
It's wonderful to see you all here, thank you very much for coming in such high numbers. Thank you for coming to the hub of the Polish capital market, to the seat, corporate seat of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and thank you to all of you, our dear stakeholders, who are following this event online. It's a celebration. It's not so often that we announce our new strategy.
May I thank you very much, my colleague here, for being with us and my guest, Ronos, for being here with your team. What we're going to present is a flash of our plans reaching out to the year 2027. With that, I would like to emphasize that we would like to make this meeting as interactive as possible. Do engage, do raise your hands and ask questions if you're here, or do signal your intention to ask a question online. We'll tell you what we know about our plans going forward. Before I leave the stage to my other colleagues, who will present the various sections of the strategy, let me give you an overall review of where we at.
Amongst Central and Eastern European countries, the countries that joined the community of the capital market in recent decades, we are the first one to gain a developed market status. It's an honor, but it's a challenge because we have to satisfy very high expectations. We are also in the region of three seas, Trimarium, including Austria, and we hold 80% of trading in equities. We have a higher share in derivatives as well. Over the entire region, not only institutionally are we the most developed, but also in terms of the size of trades. The high revenues are due to the fact that we have a 90% share in the trade of Polish equities.
The reform of capital markets, MiFID II, has made shares of companies listable in a number of exchanges, and not only security exchanges, but also in OTF or banking facilities. We have retained a high share of trade in Polish equities. We have 5 fully finished technology solutions. Over the past recent years, we have changed beyond recognition as far as our R&D center, in which we have commercial products that we use and our clients use as well. Our capital group. The most popular company, and I'm proud to say this, is GPW Benchmark. Obviously, valuations are important, but what about the reform of referential indices or indicators? With our colleagues in GPW Benchmark, we are involved in the largest reform for the past 25 years.
We will be introducing realistic indices, new reference indicators that are based on actual transactions, actual money changing hands rather than predictions. We will deliver this as public information, and GPW Benchmark is doing a very good job. Euribor, the European institution, the successes of the European Central Bank, has gained a lot of trust and has granted us a large credit of trust to us. Commodity markets have evolved and grown rapidly, and we have the commodity energy exchange representatives here, and it's impressive how much mileage we have done over the past several years.
Even though there is no mandatory requirement on the sale of gas and electricity, still, the exchange mechanisms are vastly and abundantly used, and the infrastructure appears to be extremely useful. Where are we at in terms of our competitors? To move on, looking at the market potential and IPO is the second biggest topic, and over the past several years, we have had a large number of newcomers. We have about 15-20% of the European IPOs, and 1/3 of Polish GDP is generated by companies that are controlled by international, multinational corporations. This obviously puts a cap on the way on our ambitions to acquire new issuers.
Now, once we acquire new issuers, we must be aware that there are other alternative platforms where you can invest and raise money through, which is a beautiful piece of evidence that the market is diverse. We are still very popular, so the entry barriers have been lowered, and we are still motivated to improve our performance even further. We have a number of regulatory risks. 2014, the carve-up of open pension funds and these funds are now selling rather than buy shares in the capital market.
Consolidated tape.
The consolidated tape provider, CTP, is another challenge on the regulatory front. Is going to increase transparency of the European capital market, plus, a buzzword in this community, Market Abuse Regulation that applies to public companies. There are many issuers. The competition is fierce, the economic space is enormous, and you can select your issuer for equities and bonds across the EU. Looking at the macro environment over the past recent years, higher interest rates have not been helpful. They never are. Poland, as a country neighboring a war zone or the war zone, Ukraine, which has been assaulted by Russia, that is a source of additional headache for our investors.
Questions are asked, and our issuers from Ukraine are mostly affected by that, and they have formed a big part of the market. We have concentration of trades in large, largest markets, which is a popular phenomenon, and the economy of scale seems to be on the winning side. You can obviously see the statistics, the number of national domestic companies listed on the Polish market. Since 2005, the number has been reduced or has dwindled by the share to P/E capitalization to GDP has grown. We have more and more larger operators, larger entities, fewer of them, but they are larger.
On the one hand, we want to remain a hub for medium-size corporations, and we take initiatives to achieve that goal, but we have to understand that markets inherently have to seek, the, seek to include the largest chips, the largest tickets. Within the competitive environment, the largest exchange operators and also small exchanges, have decided to enter new business areas, not really taken for granted so far. Traditional core exchange business for London Stock Exchange is 28%. It's not marginal, but it's not sizable or significant. I've heard a panel with two members of LSE, and they talked about capital markets, and they said, rightly so, that it's one of the business lines, not really the most significant one. In New York, that's 58%.
58% of their revenue comes from trade in financial instruments, traditional financial instruments, that applies also to Nasdaq. In the mid-size exchange landscape, we see the growing part of the non-exchange business in the mix. Only 16% of our revenue is outside of the classic exchange business, be it financial and commodity. Our diversification is pushing us to the left side of this chart, and the initial results early this year show that we are successful and our logistic operator seems to be growing very fast. The decision that we made back in 2018 and 2019 seems to be bearing fruit. The catch-up with the largest exchange operators seems to accelerate.
What is our response going forward over the next four years? Briefly, we see ourselves as a digital platform supporting economic growth. You will learn soon the details of what we actually mean by this. We want to achieve this by being a leader in transparency. This should be our hallmark. We want to deliver technology solutions, financial solutions, digital vehicles. We should facilitate saving mechanisms in Poland by Polish citizens in a number of forms, not only in the pure capital vehicles. We should also promote investment, but not only through IPOs. Formats should be diverse. Izabela Olszewska, may I ask you, Iza, to tell our guests what we are preparing for our investors?
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. From the perspective of our investors, it is our products that are the most important, i.e., what kind of financial instruments are we going to offer? As regards to the shares market, our strategic objective is to remain a leader in the turnover and the trade of Polish companies. It is worth a while to broaden the context somewhat. Mr. President has just mentioned that we are under a competitive pressure on the part of the issuers, that is, there are other markets competing. We also compete for volume, this is particularly important in the multi-party MTF platforms or so-called Systematic Internalizers. Our strategic objective is for our share in the trade in the Polish companies to be over 80%.
In other words, we want the Polish companies' shares to be traded in the Polish stock exchange. Now, as regards bonds, we have plans to expand our offer for institutional investors. Under our new strategic horizon, we want to establish a new market, state treasury market, part of the TBSP market, the BondSpot , our daughter company, to be running it. This should cover both spot-... and repo transactions. In addition to the TBSP market, in addition to banks, there should be institutional investors, investment funds, insurance companies to be able to join it and use the new functionalities, such as, for example, the midpoint transactions, the spread transactions or the clearing system offered by the CCP. We are going to pay a lot of attention to the growth of derivatives.
We know that in the other markets, this is a dynamically growing instrument. We have plans to boost this market further in every area of our capital group. The derivatives market, these are going to be grown along the lines already there, but we are going to add up a missing category, which is a share options with physical delivery. After our WATS system is operational, we are going to complement the existing range of derivatives with that. As regards the BondSpot company, we intend to expand the range of derivatives by instruments related to interest rates. This is going to be a complementary solution to the treasuries market and the commodities market, of course, there. The futures market is going to be a focal point over our new strategy horizon.
We want to add on futures markets for electricity and gas, so that we can offer a full range of derivatives in this new sector as well, and the agricultural sector, too. As we grow our instruments range, we are going to further expand what we already have. For example, GlobalConnect, this is a relatively young market. It is only in the making, so to speak. We only have seven companies there, we can see turnover daily, trade daily, and growing interest on the part of investors. As we already signaled to you before, we would like this market to see new entrants, blue chips from Europe and then from the United States. We want to expand the exchange-traded products.
ETFs, in particular, will grow, too, and we very much hope that the changes, which are already addressed to in the law, will be helpful in this regard. New products, too, exchange-traded notes, ETNs, and exchange-traded commodities or ETCs. A major change that we shall see in our strategy is our approach to the data products and services. The data that the investors receive from the market, as well as the capital markets entities, boil down to market data. This is our data, market data, which is processed and made available. We think that in this area, there remains a lot to be yet done, and this is something we want to do over this strategic horizon. We want to make available an iXBRL format, company reports, structured company reports.
At the moment, annual reports from the regulated markets are indeed made available in the structured format of iXBRL. This is the European SF standard. Our value added will be that we are going to include in our reporting the alternative market entities. We want to build a repository of such reports, under one roof, so that all the public market entities, data, can be tapped into that. I think it's going to be helpful to the investors and to the analysts, will certainly expedite their analytical work, so that they have more time available on the analysis proper. We want to meet halfway an important trend, which is already visible in the capital market, that is ESG, in terms of investors and data.
More and more we hear that well-structured data is more and more needed in approaching ESG, and this is the sort of data that we're going to collect, structure it, and make the data available to our investors. Now, if such data become available, this is, of course, going to be a point of departure for our growth and the finance index offer under sustainable finance. We want to build a whole group of products dedicated to traders, flow insights category of products, lepszą przejrzystość, providing for a better transparency. Po angielsku order flow, jakoś tak lepiej, and the breakdown of order flow. To use the English term for it, we all know what it does mean, so that the traders can get raw data, jak jest z rynku from the market.
Broken down into passive or aggressive? Is it non-customer data or is it market data? All these categories, all these breakdowns can be fed into the algorithms and facilitate market decisions. Depending on the market need, market demand, we are going to be looking into that, but we want to expand our offer to include alternative data. We are getting all sorts of questions concerning the sentiment analysis, capital market sentiment analysis or AI solutions could be made available there. To look into the emotional qualities of the market, and that obviously is correlated with market changes and with the price forecast.
Another type of data is nowcasting type of data, so real-time prognosis, real-time forecast. We can see that this is widely applied in the American market, for example. We want this category of alternative data to grow together with our external partners. This particular slide, wrapping it up, I would like to say that this is going to be 1 of the strongest pillars of our new strategic horizon. What else have we got for our investors? Obviously, we should also mention our technological solutions. Here, the key initiative is the WATS transaction system. It has already been started. It's actually been started over the previous horizon.
It is going to be taken further, which is a state-of-the-art, fast system, providing for many functionalities, such as potential access to all the markets operated by GPW Group, via single platform or time optimization, important for our investors and members, time to market for development, potential of technological segment. The random opening, which is certainly a solution that limits the potential for abuse manipulation. Now, when we attend various conferences, TCA tools are a light motif. That's the application for micro and macro analysis for investors and traders, so they can measure both implicit and explicit costs to understand, well, what is the real, genuine transaction cost. We also want to activate cloud-based services.
These are going to be offered to brokerage software, including software developments. We are now well underway in analyzing the legal and technical conditions for that. An example of such services, cloud-based services, would be RegTech type of service. RegTech regulatory requirements, an SSR service. We are open to collaborating with the software providers and place a software there, but also under our WATS program, we have the Watson application, which could also be made available in the cloud. We want to expand our STORK solution to better detect abuse and manipulation. Again, we want investors to be able to detect market abuse in the marketplace for these to be short-circuited.
Dużo w naszych planach zajmują również nowe rynki. The new markets are important in our plans, too.
Czy właściwie już zaczyna się era aktywów,
We are entering a era of financial assets, and here as a stock market, we think this is an important area. We already started working under GPW Private Market on that, but say tokenized non-financial assets market here, we are well underway in developing this solution and make it available to the investors. In what will follow in our strategy within the time horizon, once the regulations are in place. We would like to implement a project which we refer to as Warsaw Integrated Digital Exchange. This project will focus on the tokenization of financial instruments. There is such a possibility under the EU regulation already in effect, concerning the pilot system, for blockchain register.
We want this to be implemented into the Polish legal order, and so that we are able to develop the market for tokenized assets. We want to develop the crowdfunding platform, too. However, what sets us apart from the other platforms is that we wanted to act under the European regulations and the financial markets. The supervisory authority, once we receive a license for that, we are certainly going to explore this area of activity. Finally, we are open to support for systemic changes and response to a more opportunistic development of products and markets. An example of that, for example, is to develop a liquid market for the collateral notes. All that is in the hands of the regulators, and we are certainly going to respond once the possibility comes up.
Thank you very much, Izabela Olszewska, for your presentation.
In order for investors to be able to trade in something, we need to have issuers. There's no shop without suppliers. No shops with just customers. Monika Gorgoń, please tell us what we offer to our clients who are issuers.
Good afternoon. Hello. The new strategy offers a number of initiatives for our issuers. They are corporate solutions, and now I would like to walk you through the major highlights. First and foremost, we will provide our support in ESG reporting. As Izabela Olszewska mentioned, this is a global trend, and it will continue and grow in importance. May I stress that over the past three years, European regulations have been evolving with respect to ESG reporting, and they are becoming more and more demanding on publicly listed companies.
We are currently implementing CSRD Directive, which, apart from taxonomy, will require very clear reporting. For investors, it's absolutely positive because investors will be able to compare companies, and they will understand which companies are committed to sustainable development. Issuers, however, will have to make effort to comply with the new reporting requirements, and in that, we would like to support publicly listed companies to ensure that their reporting is at top level, at top quality level. We have 150 companies currently subject to this requirement. The number will grow to 3,000. We're going to start with public companies, but we will expand beyond the listed companies. If we talk about ESG, we need to look at G, governance even further.
For issuers, we have developed a system, GRC, by GPW Tech. This system automates governance, risk, and compliance. It is made up of three modules relative to the three letters, and this module will be available to all investors to help them manage their organizations. As I mentioned, public companies are subject to regulatory requirements and the levels of risks. A level of risk in such companies tend to be elevated, especially in terms of communications, we should look at investor relations. Investor relations are crucial for publicly listed companies because a transparent, publicly listed company will be more appealing to investors. Communication is also strictly regulated. There are laws and regulations that regulate processes and those sanctions.
In order for communication policies to be compliant, we must put in place adequate reporting mechanisms, and these reporting mechanisms must meet all the requirements in terms of timing and the scope of reporting. We must never allow any publicly listed companies to be harmed by non-compliance. We would like to support companies by providing training and by providing platforms to exchange ideas with investors. We're obviously implementing this for our own needs, for our own companies. We have launched an ESG strategy for the entire capital group, and this strategy is now operationalized. It's being deployed, and operational plans are being designed, and we're training our people across the board in environmental, labor market, and governance issues.
We have successfully implemented our own GRC system. Having done that, we have structured our processes, linked them to compliance. We have created a database of internal and external laws and regulations. We have mapped out a compliance, and we have linked it to the checks and balances and risk management areas. Now, this system is commercially viable as a product developed or commercialized by GPW Tech, and we would like to make it available to you. Furthermore, the Knowledge Exchange Forum is something that we have created, and we will expand this in order to invite market participants, market operators to come together, educate themselves, and exchange ideas and best practices in order to further the capital markets quality. Thank you very much. I have two comments.
First, Monica has done a great job of walking us through this part of the presentation. She's also modest. She didn't tell you that GRC was her own sort of baby. By the way, let me comment that ESG and GRC are things that we do first, and then we share it with others, and we have joined the WF, FE, the World Federation of Exchanges. This is a good trend, Adam M. Olszewski, can we make money on that? Tell us.
Good afternoon. Hello, everyone. Let me assure everyone, yes, one can make money on it, and good money for that as well. We have made business cases for all the initiatives that have been presented here, and indeed, this looks fairly impressive. I shouldn't be the one to judge that.
Let's let the analysts be the judges of that, but I'm proud. What is the best measure of growth, is revenue. Revenue growth, and the revenue growth in the strategy is significant. It's a rapid upward curve between 2023 and 2027. Average annual revenue will be at half a billion zlotys. To compare it to the previous strategy, the previous five years, it marks a very significant growth. We had PLN 377 million, which means that our company, our group, has been growing, and much of that growth comes from the new strategic initiatives. If we compare this year, the first year of the strategy, with the last year of this, the revenue difference will be at PLN 157 million.
100 of which, as much as 100, will come from the new initiatives. So both the new ones and the legacy initiatives stemming from the previous strategy. Of course, revenue growth matters enormously, but we need to make profit, and we have to keep liquidity. We've never had issues with that. Our liquidity is very high and has actually grown recently. As far as our efficiency of our performance, as any other exchange, we were affected by commodities, energy, utilities, the growth in cost, IT and other services. Therefore, our costs have grown recently and our performance has slowed down a little. However, the new strategy is planning to reverse that, in the last year of the strategy, our EBITDA margin will be at 50%. That is very high territory.
On average, this margin will continue to be rather high, 37, at so 37%, but 50% should impress people. These strategic initiatives don't only generate revenues, but they actually translate into the bottom lines, highly profitable initiatives, and we have done business cases for each and every of them, and we have calculated all the profitability ratio. In 2027, these initiatives will account for 30% of the financial performance of our group, and the key leverages of our growth will be the core trading platforms and the new data-based products and services that we have alluded to earlier on. Here is a mix. Here is the breakdown of our revenue, the core business that will be grown. This is annualized revenue across the strategic period.
The core business, 80% of revenue, legacy projects, 10%, new strategy projects, 10%, which adds up to PLN 100 million, half, kind of 50/50, easy to remember. Our financial ambitions, and we must ensure that this happens, must never be too sensitive to a market cycles. We want a strong component of the sort of business that is repeatable, and the new strategy talks about 40% of the repeat performance in 2027. If the plans hold true, we are going to be market leaders. We will be in the top group. We will never catch up with London, but their operating model is completely different.
This will increase our financial security and more predictability, and will be welcomed by the market. We do realize that our investors, shareholders, existing shareholders, and prospective shareholders would like to see really top performance, but they also want to participate in the profit. They want a share of that. The security exchange will be a dividend-paying organization, and we will continue our dividend policy. In fact, we will pay dividends from 60%-80% of the consolidated performance. We will tap into all the gains generated by all the subsidiaries within our group. There's one small caveat here. No surprise here, I suppose. We are still, and continuously so, committed to growing our business organically and by acquisition.
Our strategy, business strategy, department has been quite proactive, is looking at opportunities. We have successfully taken over AMX, posting very strong performance. Last week, we presented Q1 financial results, and of course, we would welcome more and more such acquisition transactions, and if this if this is successful, it can affect dividends. Of course, it will, the function of the sort of scale of that acquisition. If these are small transactions, there will be no adjustment, but if we do have higher acquisitions, it may be mirrored by higher dividends. If we don't do a lot of buying in the market, we may actually see higher dividends.
Certain slides, right, the last slide of my portion, of my section, quite an important slide, I believe. Now, you can ask yourself, yourselves a question: How do we post such a high profitability performance? On average, EBITDA is to be at PLN 255 million, compared to PLN 205 million in the previous strategy. Not a big difference, performance has dwindled in other parts of the industry, so this is quite impressive. The revenue is not the only source. We need to control our operations. We must build a strong and healthy organization. Therefore, we have designed a quite an ambitious program, a cost reduction program and operating efficiency boost programs, consisting of seven i nitiatives, interlinked. Maybe there will be more.
Far, we announced seven, mostly they will include the replacement of IT systems. Apart from what's mentioned by Iza, we will also deploy state-of-the-art systems with much more automation and much less manual work. We're also planning to introduce new tools and have more robotics in our companies and process management. We've started a pilot in our Energy Exchange, our subsidiary, this is showing good results already. We believe this project should be rolled out and should include the Warsaw Stock Exchange and other subsidiaries. Once what is put in place, which will be a breakthrough, we will launch a new organizational chart, a new organizational structure, which will apply to IT operations and business.
The structure of our, of our group will be amended, and we will operate to a new model. Obviously, this restructuring will not affect our performance. Now, these new initiatives will generate savings of about PLN 34 million across the entire period. If we look at the financial part of that, and in terms of where we will build our value, the most efficient initiatives, data-driven services and service as a business. Operating efficiency is the third strongest source. Not only do we grow revenue, diversify our business, but we also restructure internally, deploy new technologies, and building a new resilient organization that will be sustainable.
If we extrapolate the financial model that we have designed with our advisor, the numbers going forward will be actually more impressive, but we are now constrained by the strategic period of five years. With that, I would like to thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you very much for these brilliant figures. We need to get down and deliver them. May I ask all the colleagues and collaborators within our group, please, wave to us. Thank you. Thank you for being with us. I wanted to thank you very, very much. The thanks are due to you for the past six years, us working together, so that you accepted me in your midst, even though I came from the outside world and not from the world of stock markets. Thank you for being so welcoming when I did arrive. Thank you very much for the very good time together. We have 12 full financial years as a public entity.
The first six years, if you look at the average, if you look at the average revenues, they went up by almost one-third, which is an excellent result. Thank you all for put your trust and confidence in me. There were many naysayers initially that, "No, no, this forecast will never be implemented." Yet, we did implement it. Stay with us. This is a very good place to keep changing Poland, changing the capital market, and for expansion into Europe and into the world at large. Thank you very much.
Let's take a short technical break, and we will ask-
on stage, members of the board in a second. You can still send your questions to strategia@gpw.pl. We already have some questions addressed to us. Of course, you can always ask your question from the floor, those of you who are present here.
I zapraszamy na scenę.
All right. May I ask on stage members of the GPW board?
Jak tu usiąść w sukience? Z tych pytań, które już do nas dotarły, widzę, że wszystkie podchwytliwe.
All the questions we've got so far are rather tricky, I should say.
Zacznijmy od pytania-
Let's start from this one.
z jednego z analityków.
One of the analysts put the following question: Core business or new business areas, which are you going to place emphasis on in the new horizon? Let me take that, as this is a meta question.
Poprzedniej strategii.
Over the previous horizon, we took a close look at what the other markets did and we didn't, and took our key core competencies into account. That's why we expanded in new areas. The initiative was delayed because of the pandemic, these initiatives are extremely promising, and they certainly gained momentum over the last year, and you can see the results of it in the first quarter of this year. We want to continue with the initiatives that we have historically started. What we are proposing now is to focus very much on our core business, but we take a completely different attitude to it, technology-wise and product-wise. What Iza and Monica told you is exactly about redefining our core business and expanding it to include new initiatives.
We keep diversifying, getting new sources of revenue, and we still want to deepen our product offer as well. Over the previous horizon, it was 50/50, core business and new initiatives. It's going to be core business, 75%, and new initiatives-
Dziękuję
... that stand at 25%. Next question. In your new horizon, how will your revenue structure change over the next years? Revenue structure change, Adam? Well, this question really follows up on the previous one in a sense. I've showed you a slide, showing you, the average revenues over the five years. 80%, again, averaged for on a yearly basis, will come from the core business and about PLN 100 million, 50/50 between the carried over projects and the new strategy. In total, PLN 500 million, roughly PLN 400 million on the average per annum, is the carried on business, the continuation.
Perspektywy strategicznej, które już zaczynają performować
Those that are carried over from the previous horizon that now start to perform. Up to the first three months, I think we had about PLN 10 million revenue from the new business lines, and this trend will be continued. That is more or less the breakdown.
30%.
Of the strategic horizon, about 30% of revenue will be generated from the new lines. We see growth potential in the new lines, but we certainly want to defend and diversify our core business, too.
Kolejne pytanie.
Thank you very much for this response. Another question, your new strategy, new mergers and acquisitions? If so, what scale of it? All right. Very briefly on that, we've been very actively engaged. As they say, it takes two to tango. We cannot really preempt on the figure, how many we're going to buy or merge, but we are very active in mergers and acquisitions. Some of the advisory services that you're seeing when we report the quarterly revenues related to IT, operations, the strategy, some of them.
Przez te ostatnie parę lat.
This has been the case for the past years.
Armenia. No to, zachęca nas do tego.
Well, A- Armenia...
Każdy taki proces M&A-owy też nas bardzo dużo uczy.
... worked out really well, this really is encouraging. Every M&A project is a learning experience to improve our operations there. Those of you who are engaged in this kind of operation would know how these businesses operate in other countries, this is also a way to expand our knowledge. We keep looking at the technological companies related to the stock exchange, also security-wise. There are very few of these offers up for grabs, so it's very difficult to run a hard M&A strategy because it would just may not come true. It's not just the stock market which is participating, but also our capital group affiliates. TGE, for example, some group intends to move in that direction. Keep our fingers crossed for our colleagues.
We collaborate very closely with them on that. There's a bigger question here, broken down into sub-points. What activities can we expect from GPW over the next few years as regards making the public market more attractive? A, on the supply side, as a way of monetizing investment or obtaining growth capital for investors. On the demand side, for local and international investors, both active and passive, and from the liquidity point of view, what level of capital will be available from the Polish investment funds to encourage the issuers to embark on large-scale IPO tickets? First, the supply side. Right. Let's start from the operators, from the businesses. We're doing what we have influence over. We've already started doing that, in fact.
From the point of view of the future issuers, we've done quite a lot to simplify the procedure, so that entry into the public market should be more friendly, should last a shorter time. We want to simply shorten time-to-market route. Secondly, what we offer to our listed companies is not just opening up the market for them and getting capital, but as my colleague has mentioned, we want to make available to them all sorts of services to help them navigate better in this market, in the new horizon. We are certainly going to do more and more to promote these operators vis-à-vis the investors. For example, IR conferences where we present operators to the investors on an international plane.
There are one-on-one meetings as well, where we make a targeted choice, depending on the company we're talking about or the sector it comes from. We do that, too. What is beyond our control is the actual pricing, and this is all a system of interconnected entities. The geopolitical situation and the war in Ukraine certainly impacted the evaluations, and we are neighboring a war zone state. Of course, many of them stay with us. They did not give up. These are well-known brands, but they are waiting for the IPO, as is the case for many other European issuers. Again, this is not something we have control over. What we can do, we certainly will do: education and networking there.
Whatever we do under GPW Growth, where companies come to learn about getting funded from the public market, what procedures need to be taken, and so on, how beneficial IPOs were for other entrants already there, and so on and so forth. GPW Growth, ESG, that's quite important, too, to issue, say, green bonds for green transformation, what is needed, which is, in fact, mandated by certain regulations. We will do all that within the new horizon.
...significant and which certainly bears on the pricing, are the so-called flows, i.e., the interest investors take in the on the demand side of our market. Here, you can subdivide our clients in two categories. One is the long-term investors. Traders who are very important from the point of view of liquidity being provided to the first category. Now, the new WATS system will certainly be going to be helpful. It is faster, it offers new functionalities. All the programs that we're going to carry on with and expand the target liquidity providers. That is certainly going to be a leitmotif in our new horizon, how to improve on that? How to expand that, so that the market should gain depth, liquid, and the investors who enter our market should be able to tap into the conditions available.
Now, I think whatever we have said today will adapt to this. If data are available, then of course, the investors will be more willing to join the market. We have great ambitions there, and major plans already made. In the beginning, we want 80% of trade in the Polish companies to be channeled through our stock exchange. If you look at the other markets, this would be a very good indicator. At the moment, it's over 90%, but the biggest securities exchanges are at about 50%. Again, we want to keep investing, to keep our investors and traders with us.
This was an extent, quite an extended question and extended answer. May I throw the floor open to you, ladies and gentlemen present? Are there any questions from the floor? An individual investor, Sforatsky. Good morning. Good afternoon, apologies. I have a question about Ukraine. Does your strategy going forward consider entering the Ukrainian market as Ukraine recovers or will recover from war? Will you participate in building the capital market or maybe the exchange, the commodity exchange market, which is quite attractive? You also mentioned a crowdfunding platform. Can you elaborate on this? Is it going to be just equity? Which is a kind of a funnel to the core market or NewConnect?
Are you thinking of a more extended platform with loans and new investments, the green loans, for example, that are so popular in Western markets?
Thank you very much for the question from the investor community. Let me take the Ukrainian question and then hand over to my colleague for the rest of the question. We have spoken to President Zelenskyy while his, while he visited Poland for a brief moment, and we decided to sign a document that is a token of our commitment to help recover. And we have had a number of issuers from Ukraine in our exchange, which is in fact quite natural for us to be focused on this recovery process. Of course, there are ideas, there are relations, but we have to be very cautious and gradual in this process.
The war may actually last for a long time, and there may not be a launch date of the recovery. It may be blurred, so there will be risks attached to assets. Apart from humanitarian relief, which we have been involved in, especially we were involved in that last year, we are now in the process of designing future involvement, which is obviously not yet translating into our practical steps, but we find it quite attractive.
What about crowd, crowdfunding? I have told you about the process of acquiring a license from the Polish Financial Supervision Authority. I don't want to disclose all the details. Maybe this is not the right time to do so prematurely. Let me start with the smaller version of the project. We are seeing the levels of all the all the mix of the Polish economy being different. Recently, there are more and more new companies, new entrants, which cannot yet qualify for the public market. We want to be a part of that process by creating a private market. Crowdfunding platforms is, as a vehicle for that. We are thinking about this premium, the premium segment of that market, without going into any detail of how we're going to achieve it.
We would like to focus on the high-end premium segment of the market to attract investors. Probably, this may be a prelude to public listing for such companies. Other initiatives, green bonds or loans? Of course, this is something that we may consider in the future. So far, or meanwhile, we would like to start with what I described. If we do so, we will reach out to a large community of companies. Thank you very much, Madam President. Is there anything else you would like to ask about? Yes, there's a question from the front row without microphone. Thank you very much. Marek Jaśkiewicz. The end of the new strategy coincides with the ETS2 launch.
Does GPW plan to become one of the key markets for trading of the new allowances for housing and for transport and other sectors?
Yes, indeed. This is part and parcel of our soft growth strategy. We have the secondary market for trading emissions. ETS2 is the next big step. There's a discussion about the primary markets as an option for them for the markets. Primary auction system can be launched, and we are working with the KDPW CCP. The question is whether we are we will be welcome to the primary markets. I have toured international centers, financial centers, including New York.
I see that this seems to be a reversible trend. Countries are very much committed to energy transition. Global decision-makers are buying into this new model of economy. They don't want to focus on consuming the environment in an unfettered manner, and will introduce price mechanisms in order to control that process going forward. This is not, this is not the time to discuss the details, but the negotiable allowances, and Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize for that in 1981. I suppose this business will add to our commodity our commodity portfolio, I believe. Are there any other questions from the floor? Łukasz Goliszewski. 2027 Where will the Armenian exchange be? What is the strategy?
The strategy for the exchange in Yerevan was developed two years ago with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It consists of 17 initiatives that will be implemented for the coming two and a half years. The strategy focuses on building up the transactional trading side of the market infrastructure. It will focus on pulling international international investors, especially the Armenian diaspora, which is quite sizable, 8 million, compared to the domestic population of 3 million. Armenia, the Armenian exchange, is very much dollarized. As we were back in the 1990s, we were dollarized. We had this German Deutsche Mark at that time, not remembered by many these days. This is a trajectory that we would like to help build.
We're working with our business partner, the Central Bank of Armenia, and we're going to be part of the process to build a local currency-based capital market in Armenia. A partnership with that exchange will be possible in several years as Armenia builds a fully-fledged system. It's not even a frontier market at the moment, so it's a long process, and there's a lot of work to get the basics right. There are interesting projects, post-trade and pension information. They have excellent excellent software for general assemblies that is tied to their business register. You can have information about all pension accounts at a click of a button. They have a system that can be an add-on to WATS, a WATS starter.
Quite a nice and promising system. We are unifying and harmonizing corporate solutions. AMX Tech, this goes beyond the 17 initiatives. The latter project is about building a technology arm as we have. We want that to happen in Asia as well, but this is a long process. Let's go back to the online questions. We have more. The previous strategy planned PLN 470 million of revenue and PLN 250 million of EBITDA in 2022. What has happened? What are the key reasons why the strategy has not been delivered, and what is the company planning to do in order to deliver the new results?
The closing conference of the previous strategy, it made a lot of explaining, I don't want to repeat it, especially because I'm seeing familiar faces. Let me just give you the highlights. Communication, communication errors. We spoke about annual revenues. Now we're going to present, and we have presented, annualized annual average annual revenue. This is an innovation in terms of how we communicate to markets. The second reason was the pandemic. A number of our projects had been delayed, as simple as that. Operation-wise, these projects were good, but sales didn't work out. We couldn't acquire many clients, but the situation has been improved.
We also had delays or the failure to implement the capital market strategy. Under Katarzyna Szwarc, this has changed, and the Standing Committee of the Council of Ministers has already adopted a set of regulations that are designed to implement the strategy. This has changed for the better, and about 10% or 15% of the failure to deliver against the strategy is related to over-optimistic planning or errors at the decision-making level. That is related to the volatility of our business. 45%-50% of delays were the result of the pandemic. The 40% portion was that the speed of implementing the strategy was not as we planned, and 10% came from betting on the wrong horses or other omissions.
We're learning in terms of planning and delivering our projects. We appear to be in a much better point of departure, the capital market development strategy is very close to a complete version, it's much better. Towards the end of the delivery of the last strategy, which was very important, it was an entire year. We had issues that were caused by the energy crisis as a result of the war in Ukraine, which obviously affected the inflation rate. The energy crisis, without going into detail, resulted in lifting the.
... mandatory sales of, electricity and gas markets which created a gap.
Um,
It was adjusted, but the gap was still significant. We had volatility in the market, and then the market froze, and we had no IPOs at that time. Actually, all capital markets were bare in that respect. The third root cause that comes to mind is something I alluded to in my short intervention as a result of those extraordinary contingencies: war, energy crisis, and high inflation across Europe and globally. This has affected costs, high costs obviously affect bottom lines. We have operated under pressure for increased wages, which we have followed, introducing new components of wages, new terms of employment, new- terms and conditions in the labor market, which put pressure on our performance, with performance falling by about 30%.
We have rebound, and we are back on track.
Planuje zapowiadane oszczędności kosztowe.
Now, in which areas are you going to make the economies of PLN 34 million you mentioned?
tak.
Such a good start, wasn't it?
Well, I've already spoken on that quite extensively, but I may revisit certain points. This is a very ambitious operational efficiency program. Let me comment on the pillars of it. There are seven initiatives that are interlinked there. Process management, process optimization, process mapping, all that has already been started in the financial area, which I am directly responsible for. We're going to implement our new financial and accounting system. We are already collecting offers from the suppliers, but the most important for us is the, by now, famous WATS, the fastest transactional system. That will enforce a whole new organization of work because a lot of migration work, a lot of transformation will have to be effected. November 2024 is the go live date, and we must certainly get ready for that.
It takes optimizing our IT solutions as well, but also organization-wise, we will be introducing tools to automate certain processes to minimize the error risk, on the one hand, and on the other, we are going to reduce the number of operations performed manually. We already operated a pilot in the financial departments. Now it is carrying forward to other departments. It's a whole range of activities. CRM or electronic forms and many user-friendly solutions.
Friendly to our members as well, which will reduce the labor intensity of our processes and will make it easier for our clients to get in touch with the stock exchange and better perform at the end of the day. The last question, the commercialization of the WATS platform. Are you in communication with the other markets? What conduits, WATS, are you expecting there? Well, yes, we are in talks of this kind, of course. This is a scalable system, even though we'll probably not be ready to participate in a tender in one of the central banks. There it is about trade in bonds. It's a very light system, so to speak. It can be used on a big stock market, but it can just as well be applied to niche applications.
With WATS, there's always the question, you know, if it's so good, why aren't you using it? That is why we want to implement it. All the, you know, delays that may be there would certainly trigger off important outcomes, from the ongoing commercialization of the solution. One thing is to test a platform, a solution, show it to the client, but it's a whole different pair of galoshes to actually show it in full force and effect. Well, it's been done for smaller ticket recurring revenues with STORK and so on and so forth. This will be growing, more and more clients, more and more subscriptions, and then MAAs. Of course, if you find one client, it's a major development.
That of course is very profitable at the end of the day, it's not all that easy to find clients of this sort, of this magnitude, who will stay with you over a longer horizon, eight, 10, 12 years and so on. Again, we have no hard forecasts for that. What is the likelihood of the dinosaur being behind that wall? 50/50. It's either there or it is not. We'll see. We'll see what happens. We are very conservative. We are very cautious about that. Yes, we are engaged in communications about that. Thank you, the Polish Investment and Trade Agency, that takes us with them to all sorts of study visits worldwide, which helps us build awareness among the other markets and regulatory authorities.
There is the World Federation of Securities Market. We are present every year at their conferences. We demonstrate the progress of the expansion of the system. Thank you. Is there any more comments or questions from the floor, please? Paweł Biedrzycki.
Paweł Biedrzycki, the Investor Zone. I have two questions. One concerns data and analytical tools. Your targeted clients there, are these only institutional investors, domestic or international, or more broadly than that, would anyone be able to tap into such data? My second question, you did mention that the stock market should become a platform for the operators to obtain capital. What about TFIs specifically? Any special targeted initiatives to them to attract investors. I would be very happy for you to comment on the TFIs.
Well, let me give it a start, and then I'll give the floor to Iza to follow up on that. In terms of the blockchain market, if it is ever going to serve the purpose of finding investors for this segment, for this market, it's certainly going to be for the financial market. There's a long list of projects for the Warsaw Digital Exchange. I really fear to expand on that because these projects mushroom around us. As regards the data platform, Iza, I'll give the floor to you.
Well, the data platform should serve the needs of everyone. When we talk about highly specialized products for traders from, say, brokerage houses, then of course there will be such solutions.
As a matter of principle, there is a whole group of products that we want to be accessible by everyone to be able to use the tools there. you know, the structured report and its in iXBRL, and the tools therein obviously will be available to facilitate data search and so on. Of course, these things will be targeting specific groups, Warsaw Digital Exchange, the existing European regulations tell you what instruments can be traded in a digital manner. ETFs are there, yes, but generally, we are in the process of preparing all the legalese, which is necessary here. We'll, we'll see what happens legislation-wise. Once these legal solutions are available, we will move on, and we're certainly going to focus on the non-financial assets and crowdfunding, and then the regulations for the Warsaw Digital Exchange.
We do know what the European regulations include, shares, bonds, and ETFs, basically. That was the last question and the last response on the Q&A. Let me remind you that the presentations delivered today are available on the GPW website. Thank you, the management of GPW, for the presentation of the new strategy. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being with us on this important occasion. Thank you very much.