Hello, everyone, and welcome to Yandex fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. You can find our earnings release, letter to shareholders, and supplementary slides on our IR website. The key speakers on our call today are Tigran Khudaverdyan , our Deputy Chief Executive Officer, and Svetlana Demyashkevich , our Chief Financial Officer. Vadim Marchuk , our Chief Operating Officer, Yevgeny Senderov , Chief Financial Officer of Yandex Taxi, and Alexander Balakhnin , Chief Financial Officer and Head of Strategy of Yandex Market will be available on the Q and A session. Now I will quickly walk you through the safe harbor statement. Various remarks that we make during the call regarding our financial performance and operations may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.
For more information, please refer to the Risk Factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. During the call, we'll be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures in the earnings release we published today. Now I'm turning the call over to Tigran.
Thank you, Yulia, and hello, everyone. We are pleased with our performance in 2021 and consider it to have been a successful year for the company. We achieved solid progress in many of our verticals, including both our core segments, advertising and ride-hailing, and also our new businesses, particularly e-commerce, delivery, and media services. There is a lot of detail in our letter to shareholder published on our website. Let me just highlight several key headline numbers. Total e-commerce GMV for the year grew almost 3 times to RUB 160 billion. We saw similar 3 times growth in our fulfillment infrastructure and number of active merchants, as well as over 10 times increase in assortment. We finished the year with 12 million Yandex Plus subscribers.
We carried out 2.4 billion taxi rides in 2021, which is even more than some of our global public peers have reported. The revenue of Yandex Delivery, our logistics business, grew 4 times, Cloud 3 times, Devices 2.6 times, and the list goes on. In terms of key priorities for 2022, our top priority remains E-commerce, followed by Yandex Plus and Fintech. On E-commerce, I would highlight that we are focusing more on improving the efficiency of our operations and delivery channels and increasing the utilization and automation of our existing fulfillment capacity. We will ensure to further improve unit economics while continuing to expand rapidly in order to outgrow the competition and the market. Overall, the majority of our businesses will keep doing what we are doing as we see that our strategy is working well.
Separately, I wanted to share a few thoughts on our international potential. We have always considered the possibility of taking our technologies abroad, and we see substantial opportunity here. For the last 20 years, we have invested significantly in R&D in Russia to create a world-class tech stack and win our domestic market from local and foreign competitors. We believe we have outstanding proprietary technology and a number of proven business models where we are experts. As such, we should be able to successfully leverage them as we continue to diversify and pursue selective opportunities internationally.
As we consider international expansion opportunities, we will always be guided by these core principles, be thorough in selection of new markets and analysis of our competitive advantages vis-à-vis them to ensure we have a right to win in new geographies, progress gradually, attract local talent, and consider local partnerships, and remain disciplined in terms of capital. In terms of how we are doing with some of our existing international projects, in ride-hailing, we have a presence in 20 countries now, including 11 in EMEA, where we are developing according to our proven playbook. Our ride-hailing business is getting good traction in EMEA countries with significant GMV growth of 146% in Q4.
Our progress with Rovers in the U.S., Dubai, and Korea, and routing in Turkey and Dubai, as well as the success of ClickHouse, prove that our technologies and products are attractive outside our domestic market. Lastly, a few words on sustainability. 2021 saw a number of important milestones in this area, such as publication of our first sustainability report, which allowed us to materially improve disclosure, appointment of a chief sustainability officer, and visible progress on certain social and environmental initiatives. These efforts did not go unnoticed. Our ESG ratings have materially improved, and Yandex has joined the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index for the first time. In conclusion, I wanted to say that our focus has always been on prioritizing sustainable development over short-term gains, and this is now more important than ever.
We concentrate on things that are under our control, which is executing on our key strategic initiatives to create long-term value for our shareholders. With this, let me turn the mic over to Svetlana.
Thank you, Tigran, and hello, everyone. You've seen our press release and all other supplementary materials provided on our IR website. Let me focus on select financial highlights from 2021 and outlook for 2022. We ended the year with RUB 356 billion in revenue, which is ahead of our full year guidance and 54% more than the previous year.
Stronger than expected results reflected robust revenue trends across our advertising and ride-hailing businesses, as well as solid performance in media and delivery services, devices and Lavka sales. Our main businesses performed well. The advertising revenues exceeded our internal expectations and enabled us to upgrade our guidance three times throughout 2021. Each time we outperformed market forecasts, including with today's Q4 results. This is a result of material progress in our iOS share and further enhancements in the efficiency of our advertising instruments for all types of clients, including SMBs. In the mobility segment, we continue to focus on rapid growth and efficiency, which is the basis for increasing drivers' income and improving our margins. Our effective take rate is still less than 10%, which is one of the lowest levels globally.
Thus, stronger profitability is primarily a result of improving driver utilization and route efficiency, optimizing arrival times, and implementing cost controls. Overall, our key cash generating verticals, Search and Portal and Mobility together earned RUB 103 billion in Adjusted EBITDA, implying 50% year-over-year growth. This has served as a solid foundation for our investments in attractive new initiatives. Our E-commerce business expanded by almost threefold in terms of GMV and delivered numerous improvements in customer value proposition, quality of service, and streamlining of key operational processes. The total cash burn for our E-commerce business amounted to $600 million, less than our guidance of $650 million, emphasizing our commitment to disciplined capital allocation.
We improved market unit economics by approximately 15 percentage points during 2021, driven by discount optimization, 3P take rate increase, 1P pricing revision, as well as operations and cost efficiency enhancements primarily related to logistics infrastructure. Turning to the financial outlook for 2022. We expect our total group revenues in 2022 to be between RUB 490 billion and RUB 500 billion. For search and portal, we expect our ruble-based revenue to grow in the mid- to high-teens% and Adjusted EBITDA margin to remain stable compared with 2021. As we have communicated previously, we may consider reinvesting more margin only if the opportunities we chase will help us to achieve a higher absolute Adjusted EBITDA and are in line with our long-term strategic priorities.
We expect the GMV of our second-largest cash generating business, Mobility, to be in the range of RUB 700 billion-RUB 720 billion in 2022, implying slight acceleration of two-year stack growth in 2022 compared with 2021. We also expect a further expansion of its Adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of GMV by up to 50 basis points compared with 2021. Finally, E-commerce, which remains the number one priority for the management team, in 2022 we expect our total E-commerce GMV to double while limiting the increase in total cash burn to 20% maximum. This is underpinned by a significant improvement in unit economics.
We believe our current warehouse capacity will be largely sufficient to support the growth of our business in 2022, and thus our focus will be more on improving the efficiency of fulfillment operations, including further automation of our distribution centers and increasing personnel productivity and the utilization of the existing warehouse infrastructure. Yandex's CapEx, excluding Compass, as a percentage of revenue for 2022 are expected to remain at around the low teens%, which is similar to last year. Including Compass costs, CapEx is expected at around the mid-teens% in percentage terms. Last but not least, a few words about our liquidity position. We finished the year with $1.4 billion in cash after paying a consideration of $1 billion for the transaction with Uber in second half of the year.
With this amount of cash and two solid cash generating businesses, advertising and mobility, we remain well capitalized to fund our planned strategic investments. With this, let me turn the mic back to the operator for the Q and A session. Thank you.
First question we have today comes from Vyacheslav Degtyarev of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you very much for the call. My first question would be on E-commerce. How do you see composition of the E-commerce cash burn progressing this year compared to 2021? In other words, how will the investment priorities within the E-commerce shift this year?
Hi, Vyacheslav . That's Sasha Balakhnin speaking. Let me try to answer this question. First of all, I wanted to highlight, before I begin, that this 20% increase is the maximum level of investments into e-com this year. The full allocation of that is subject to achievement of a certain product improvement, unit economics improvement, and growth targets. As you may see from the absolute GMV number we plan to generate in 2022, the guidance clearly implies a material improvement in unit economics. Now let me tell you how we think about the capital allocation.
Well, first of all, with regards to capacity of our warehouses, I wanted to highlight that despite we do not add the square meters of warehouses, we keep invest into the achievement of a maximum possible efficiency of those warehouses, and that will require some CapEx on automation processes improvement. Keep this in mind, and we have sufficient CapEx allocated on those things. Apart from that, we have two main areas of investments. Number one is delivery in terms of quality, speed, and convenience. As we highlighted during our previous call, we have a fairly front-loaded nature of our logistics investments as we add warehouse capacity, sortation centers, pickup points, walkers. We hire couriers and so on.
To put this a little bit into perspective, this allowed us to achieve 2-3 times improvement in the quality of operations throughout 2021. On top of that allowed us to introduce such differentiated features as super fast on-demand delivery together with Lavka, express delivery together with Yandex Delivery and some other exciting things. Clearly we are satisfied with the progress in this area, and it's reasonable to expect that logistics in a broader sense will consume a sizable portion of our investments. Well, needless to say, we'll be further expanding our last-mile capabilities, and we'll invest in the branded pickup and delivery and drop-off points. The second big area for us is assortment, again, in a broader sense. We plan to develop categories further.
There are two fairly new categories for us, which are Fashion and Kids. In those, we need to fine-tune our product. We need to fine-tune our logistics capabilities and so on. Last but not least, within the same bucket, we will double down on our FMCG efforts, where we will leverage our audience across three real estates of Lavka, Eda Grocery, and Market. Together with logistics advantage we have to drive both growth and retention at the optimal unit economics. I would say those two are the key priorities for us. I hope that answers your question.
Yes. Thank you very much. My second one would be on Yandex.Rover. You have signed contracts with various global players on the Rover delivery. How would you describe competitive landscape here? Where do you see your competitive advantages? How large are the entry barriers on the Rover side? Thank you.
Vyacheslav , hi, this is Vadim speaking. Let me take this question on the Yandex.Rover. Look, I mean, the reality is it's a very much kind of, you know, wide space. It's open field with some competitors that differ significantly with respect to the level and quality of technology that differ with respect to how their Yandex.Rover operate. For example, you know, there is another company competitor of ours that actually uses Yandex.Rover on the streets as opposed to the sidewalks, which means they're regulated somewhat differently. Truth be told, we don't really feel the competition just because the space is so widely open.
Right now it's you know we see it as an excellent opportunity to you know further test our technology further test the quality of Yandex.Rover themselves. Also one of the important metrics for example that we track is you know how many Yandex.Rover can one operator track just in case if something goes wrong. What we are seeing that we are significantly ahead of the competitors based on the information that we have. Our goal is to further increase that ratio but I would say probably by you know increasing it five or six fold from where we are now.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Cesar Tiron of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the call and the opportunity to ask questions. I have two. I'm just gonna ask them in one go. The first one is really on the search and portal guidance. Given that Q4 was growing closer to 30%, do you already see any evidence of a slowdown in search and portal in Q1, which would make it grow only mid- to high-teens%? Or is the outlook more reflection of the limited macro visibility in Russia going forward? The second question would really be on E-commerce.
Just wanted to check if you see any signs that your competitors are probably pulling back on marketing or any intensity in their competitive behavior, probably due to tougher funding conditions. Thank you so much.
Cesar, hi, this is Vadim speaking. Let me take the first one. Look, with respect to the trends, we're seeing January trends as comparable with Q4. But also I think what's important to note is that the base has been the lowest in Q1 last year, and therefore the growth will be normalizing towards the year-end, as actually is implied in our 2022 guidance. The January trends remain solid, and we're seeing this growth continuing in the first two weeks in February. All sectors are positive on a year-on-year basis.
The only sector that is negative is in the negative territory on two-year stack basis is travel, which still hasn't recovered, I mean, to its pre-COVID levels.
Hi, Cesar. That's Sasha. On the competition overall for the customers, I would say that most of our competitors are still fairly well-funded. Speaking specifically of marketing, we don't see so far significant changes other than the seasonality. I would say the start of the year is normally on a quieter side here. Well, we saw quite a bit of competition for the new customers and reactivation of the existing ones in the end of the year. If we speak broadly in terms of competitive environment, I would probably mention a few things. Number one, the pricing competition has been fairly stable over the last six months.
Please keep in mind that the competition in E-commerce stretches beyond just the pricing competition as we compete not just for the customers, but also for couriers, pickup point locations, even for the delivery trucks. I must say here that being a part of Yandex with its realm of businesses like taxi, drive, delivery, among others, helps us significantly in that competition. On a positive side, with regards to the competitive environment, we see very stable situation in terms of the take rates. Our main competitors either keep them stable or even increase them, and I would say that that is a good thing.
That being said, we still see a potential for the market to rationalize further because the Russian take rates are fairly low in a global context for the depth of services we and other leading marketplaces provide to the market. We would definitely welcome some further rationalization in that area.
Thank you so much. Very clear.
We can now take our next question from Ulyana Lenvalskaya of UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thanks a lot for the call. Congratulations on strong quarter. First of all, I wanted to discuss profitability in the core ride-hailing business. We have seen quite a steady progress over the past quarters and years. Longer term, how do you see the potential of the core ride-hailing business in terms of EBITDA margin in five years from now?
Hi, Ulyana. It's Yevgeny Senderov . Look, as we, you know, it was given by Svetlana in the guidance, we expect next year to improve by 50 basis points. Going forward, we continue to see operational improvement. I think, you know, we expect further expansion in 2022 and beyond, frankly, again, based on our continued historical focus on operational efficiency, tech improvements, and benefiting from the existing sort of network effect that is really playing in our favor. We continue to expect improvements specifically, and we're guiding to it in next year, and we see further improvement in the outer years.
This is clear. Thank you. The second question is about other business units. The investments over there are visibly growing and honestly just becomes a bit too big. The segment itself a bit untransparent in my personal opinion. Could you please comment on maybe the key priorities within the other business units and also the EBITDA loss trajectory for the coming years, say at least, you know, the trajectory versus 2021?
Hi, Ulyana, thank you for the question. First of all, we are very cautious and conservative in terms of our investments. I would say that lately, you know, with the situation on the markets, and with the growing number of businesses we invest to, we became even more conservative and rigorous in the way how we prioritize and how we make our investment decisions.
Our number one priority, as we already mentioned, is E-commerce, followed by Yandex Plus and FinTech. You understand that, you know, these elements are crucial for building our ecosystem, and that's why it's crucial for us to continue investing in these directions. At the same time, during the last year, we deprioritized and scaled back several projects. For example, general classifieds or a regional expansion in Lavka, where we became much more cautious in terms of opening of new stores in regions. Overall, in other segments, we do have businesses like self-driving and FinTech, if we're talking about 2021, our cloud business devices.
For all of them, we do have very good developments in terms of their growth and market positions. That's why we will continue investing in this directions also.
Thank you. Within these other business units, cloud is the biggest one, right? Or can you somehow describe the biggest EBITDA burn in your?
Well, we do not guide on the, you know, cash burns in this business units which are included in other segments. In terms of the revenue, for example, the run rate for cloud in December reached RUB 4.7 billion with 174% year-on-year growth. Almost all of it is generated by enterprise clients. We're really happy with the results. Another direction which is included in other business units is FinTech. As I mentioned, yes, we're building the core of the platform for FinTech while we will continue building the products for the verticals of our ecosystem during the next year.
Okay, thank you.
We can now take our next question from Vladimir Bespalov of VTB Capital. Please go ahead.
Hello. Congratulations on the great numbers, and thank you for taking my question. First of all, I would like to ask you mostly about E-commerce. When Yandex divorced with Sberbank, in price comparison, the total turnover was more than RUB 200 billion. As far as I understand, you almost completed the switch from this CPC model to this new dropship buyer-seller model. When I look at the growth of GMV of Yandex Market for the past year, it was roughly RUB 80 billion. Maybe could you comment whether some of that turnover that was in the CPC platform was lost? Is there anything else remaining which could fuel your growth in 2022 and beyond? In general, how do you see this?
Related to this, on your growth, we see the numbers from in the key marketplaces, and like, Wildberries is growing very fast, in absolute terms. Ozon is growing fast in absolute terms. The guidance that you're providing doesn't mean that you're gonna bridge this gap in absolute terms. You're gonna be well behind in 2022 and probably beyond. What is the strategy here? What do you expect to turn into a kind of a niche play in e-commerce, focusing more on unit economics, kind of profitability, but not aspiring to leadership in this area? Thank you.
Hi, Vladimir. That's Sasha speaking. To your question on the price comparison, RUB 200 billion GMV we had. Let me remind you that we have different lags over quarters within the Yandex ecosystem, and we are the, I mean, obvious one with the marketplace. Obviously we benefited during 2021 with the price comparison to marketplace migration. Please keep in mind we also have a substantial E-commerce vertical as a part of our search business, search and portal business. The search and portal is developing its own product vertical, which we mentioned, and we demonstrate very solid results here.
Some of that got redirected to the advertising traffic, and we do not think we lost any of that RUB 200 billion, to be honest.
Hi, Vladimir. This is Vadim. Let me take the second part of the question. So look, you are right. The both Ozon and Wildberries continue to grow quite fast, you know, given their size and absolute. The way we think about, you know, where are we gonna end up and how are we going to compete and what exactly is gonna be our place in this market, you know, when we think about it, one of the what we consider and what I think others should consider is that, frankly, the market is still in very early stages. There is definitely gap, you know, between different players in terms of size, but we do think that the market will reshuffle in terms of leadership within a certain period of time.
When we think about what exactly can give us a claim to be one of the market leaders is, you know, we kind of outline a couple of things that we do not think other players have or are likely to develop in the short or medium term. Therefore, those are our kind of unparalleled advantages or superpowers, if you will, which is, you know, Yandex Plus, which is the kind of cross utilization of the logistics infrastructure that we have in different platform-based verticals, whether it's gonna be food tech, delivery, mobility, et cetera, that allow us to be much more flexible, come up with new business models. For example, Market Express, which, you know, we put together and launched quite quickly.
Essentially what it does, it's, it offers approximately 1.4 million SKUs delivered within one to two hours without the need to build a very heavy and expensive infrastructure. Currently, I think we cover 55% of Russian population, you know, with Market Express. So that's one component. Another component, you know, that I mentioned was Yandex Plus. What you do need to keep in mind that at the end of the day, once, you know, you kind of assortment depths and breadths will be comparable with other players. When your delivery times and convenience, which by the way, we improved very significantly over the past 12 months.
When those things will be compared, at the end of the day, the consumer will be choosing based on the number of other benefits in addition to e-com that they can receive. We do believe that our subscription program, Yandex Plus, is unparalleled in its width and the quality of different, you know, leading services that are part of that subscription. That's pretty much it.
Can I clarify maybe, if you could provide, when would you expect that your growth in absolute terms in E-commerce would be comparable to the market leaders in your long-term planning?
Look, I mean, it's an excellent question, right? As you understand, we can, you know, have every type of projections today, but they become relatively irrelevant in a vacuum because, you know, the competitive situation changes. You know, we do have internal views as to when we would be able to reach some of the players, but we think it's, you know, absolutely pointless to guide you guys towards that data point simply because so many things will change in the next, call it six, 12 or 18 months.
Okay, thank you very much. May I ask another question on another topic, on ride-hailing. When I look at the guidance that you're providing for GMV, the growth, I would say would be comparable in Mobility, maybe slightly higher than in search and portal, in advertising, whatever. Do you think that this market is getting more mature and the growth opportunity here are shrinking, and as a result, you expect a kind of higher profitability of this more mature business, or you still believe there are quite a lot of opportunities to accelerate this business going forward? Thank you.
Vladimir, hi. Great question. This is Yevgeny Senderov . There are a couple of ways I think of looking at this and, you know, breaking the numbers. You know, 2021 was very strong for us. Rides were up 50% and GMV was up 74%. If we look at 2020, rides were up 18% year-over-year and 13% in terms of GMV. That was a low base year for us. On a two-year CAGR basis, rides were up 33% in 2021, and GMV was up 40%. Actually, if we look at 2022, I think the right way to look at it is on a two-year CAGR basis. We actually expect growth to accelerate. If you look at our guidance, GMV growth would be somewhere between 44%-46%.
Second of all, I think we're typically prudent and cautious when we're giving our forecasts. There are a number of things are going on in the world, and in general, we're cautious in the beginning of the year. You know, maybe it's not always right to compare different markets, but our global peers are actually still down from the pre-pandemic levels, while we have exceeded them significantly. You know, if you look at Lyft in terms of revenue, they're still down low single digits to compare it on two-year CAGR. Uber is down in high single digits in the fourth quarter on a two-year CAGR basis. While Yandex Mobility was up 40% on two-year CAGR in the second quarter.
We actually think we're gonna see strong growth, continued strong growth on the top line, the bottom line, and you kinda have to look through these, you know, pandemic cycles and other cycles. We're not arguing extracting profit, but we continue to expect strong growth in this business.
Thank you very much.
We can now take our next question from Luke Holbrook of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good afternoon, all, and congratulations on the set of results. I just wanted to ask how you're thinking about the category mix in e-commerce over the next three years. You've got 42% of your GMV now from electronics. Apparel is 1%. You've mentioned that you wanna build out this apparel and kids segment over the next year in particular. Any details on how you're envisaging your platform looking would be very helpful. Thank you.
Hi, Luke. That's Sasha speaking. Yes, you're right. Well, given our background, we obviously we're very skewed towards electronics, given our price comparison. The way we think about this is, well, now if you think about not just Yandex Market, but broadly E-commerce, you have two very strong legs. One is electronics, another is FMCG. They are largely comparable between them. The categories we develop now are Fashion and Kids. With those, well, I think they will be big parts of our effort in 2022 and beyond. Specifically speaking of Fashion, we just launched it three months ago, and already now have hundreds of brands on the platform, including the premium luxury ones.
Our ambition is to increase the assortment at least fivefold during 2022. For the development of that vertical, we redesigned the logistics from within. It's a special process in the warehouses. The delivery was redesigned. Just to give you an idea, the partial return was only available in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It's now available in 60 other regions. Our couriers and pickup points now offer the try-on service. That's on the offline side. I mean, clearly the development of a category also requires quite significant changes on the online side of the business. We basically redesigned the product specifically for that category to ensure the distinct category experience. The other one is Kids, which is low single digit.
We plan to mid-single digit of GMV, and we plan to increase the contribution during 2022 of that. I would say that the distribution will be FMCG, electronics, DIY, Fashion K ids.
Right. Thank you.
Luke, just for the avoidance of doubt, I mean, obviously, our huge ambition is to maintain the leadership in both FMCG and consumer electronics categories, which we believe we now hold.
Understood. Just to clarify on the investment spend, you came in $50 million, a bit under budget in 2021. Is this just a phasing where you're just pushing out that investment into 2022 simply because of the underutilization that you were seeing in the fourth quarter? Was that, you know, more drop ship being adopted than you expected? Is that the right way to think about this?
That's pretty right way to think about this. I would say we have a very rigorous investment allocation approach within the company. The metrics I was mentioning earlier in the call are strictly monitored. Basically we were thinking about whether we should or should not press here and there, and just decided that we better save RUB 50 million in the market circumstances.
Great. Thank you very much.
Operator, the next question, please.
Apologies. We can now take our next question from Dmitry Vlasov of VTB Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, yes. Thank you for the opportunity to ask the question. I have two, both on the E-commerce business. The first one, we can see that you slowly improve your unit economics while continuing to deliver solid GMV growth. You guide that you will focus on the utilization next year. It just seems to me that you are more focused on the unit economics rather than the growth, given the fact that the gap between you and the leading players does not really shorten as the other participant mentioned before. I'm just curious, maybe you could provide some more color on when maybe do you expect to break even with the E-commerce business? How do you see progress towards that? That's the first question.
The second one on your express delivery. Yes, you've made some progress around express delivery, but you're still definitely behind the Ozon. You still have a lot of next day delivery. I was just wondering how your progress is gonna look like next year. Are you planning to significantly improve the same-day delivery and maybe the express delivery to better compete with Ozon? Thank you.
Hi, Dmitry. Let me try to answer your question and provide you sort of the pecking order of our decision-making. Well, first of all, we do believe that there should be always a right balance between the growth and the economics, because that is the cornerstone of building a sustainable business, and we are in the business of building sustainable businesses, I would say. That's first. There are certain level of unit economics which we believe is a must-have, sort of in all scenarios situation. We try to achieve that.
I mean, obviously, we are not in a vacuum in the market, and once we see, I don't know, the aggressive pricing by any of the participants or some other events, we participate as a market player. For us, it's of paramount importance to keep a right balance between growth and unit economics dynamics. That's one. That being said, we not just think, I mean, we are growing faster than any of the market participants, and we're gaining market share while building certain differentiated capabilities for our marketplace. Many of those are just unparalleled. I mentioned on-demand delivery. I mentioned express, and those two already account for over 20% of our business in Moscow.
Given how attractive those are and given the retention of those businesses or those customers, it's reasonable to expect the share to go further up. There will be more of that. We have a luxury of being a part of Yandex, and by adding together different capabilities of different businesses within the food tech, ride-hailing, delivery groups, we basically create new products which are very attractive. I think those will be big differentiator for us.
Dmitry, hi, this is Vadim. Let me just quickly add to something that Sasha mentioned. I think in your question, you know, just if I heard you correctly, I just wanna kind of clear up the misconception here. Based on the numbers that we have, we believe that our Market Express is larger in Moscow than Ozon Express, and we are slightly smaller than them, you know, if you look countrywide. Just keep in mind, that was something that we built in the past six or seven months. The trend is extremely encouraging, you know, how quickly this is rolling out and how quickly our customers are actually adopting this.
We do think, at least in those terms of, you know, of delivery, especially once you add, you know, Lavka, you know, part of our food tech, which we also consider, for comparison purposes as a part of the e-com platform. Once you combine all those forces, we do think that, you know, the quick and short delivery, especially with wide selection of SKU, which is, you know, 1.4 million SKUs today, this is something that, you know, we are extremely well-positioned to overtake our competitors in the market.
Thank you very much. Just a quick follow-up on the unit economics, if possible. Given the fact that you have the lowest take rates on the market in comparison to all the Wildberries and AliExpress, and you also have 42% of electronics as a percentage of GMV, and taking into account that electronics has the lowest take rate, I'm just wondering if at least at the current mix, is it even possible to kind of achieve the unit economics or positive unit economics, or you maybe would have to significantly diversify your GMV and raise take rates? Thank you.
Dmitry, that's Sasha again. First of all, I would say on a like-for-like basis, our take rates are fairly comparable to the other marketplaces. We are not a discounter by any means. With that, well, the take rates between take rates and unit economics derive from a few elements. What brings take rate to the unit economics. From that standpoint, I would say we are fairly comparable to the other participants. For us, the strategy of unit economics improvement comes from one just overall operations improvement and, adjusted for some underutilization during the fourth quarter, our unit economics across the country would be in a low single-digit percent. That's clearly where many of our competitors are.
The other layer obviously is the diversification into other categories and driving retention. The business doesn't stop with unit economics. It's also the market optimization, and that's also a big focus. Rest assured, we did a good progress during 2021. The trough to peak unit economics swing was 15 percentage points, and we are very proud with that dynamics. We are working hard on the delivery channel mix. We almost got rid of the third party deliveries. Now it's basically the utilization play. It all goes into one direction. Hope that answers your question.
Yes. Thank you very much. Very clear.
As a reminder, please ask only one question and one follow-up question. We can now take our next question from Catherine O'Neill of Citi. Please go ahead.
Oh, hi. I just wanted to go back to the investment levels, particularly when I look at media services and other business units and initiatives. The EBITDA losses in 2021 for both of those increased quite significantly year on year. I just wondered if you could give us any sense of how we should think about 2022. Should we expect them to be much higher than 2020, 2021, continuing at a similar pace given their FinTech and content investment? And then on Yandex Market, I know you mentioned focusing on FMCG, Fashion K ids. Should we expect to see the take rate improve given the expansion of those categories, which tend to be higher take rate than electronics, for example? Should revenue growth come in ahead of GMV?
Hello, Catherine. I will start with the other business units. Overall, for all our businesses, we do expect them to become positive in midterm in the horizon of three to five years. That means that even for businesses which are enabling to other business units like, for example, media, which you asked about, we still do expect profitability from them. For media, it's a horizon of three to four years, and it's achievable subject to increasing number of paying subscribers, where we do see very good dynamic. As we already mentioned, we already have 12 million subscribers. Out of them, around 80% are paying subscribers.
Actually, this proportion improved significantly during the last year. The same trend as you see, we do have on the total number. We need the scale, and we need to get this scale quite fast. We are committed to invest in this direction and believe that media is one of the core advantages. Well, our Plus program and our media segment are one of the key advantages for our ecosystem. Talking about other business units like Cloud, for example. As I mentioned already, we do see very good progress in growth and in fourth quarter, you know, the run rate even improved.
At the same time, we do of course have the five-year model, and we do see the profitability of this unit also in the horizon of three to five years. Talking about other segments, on SDG, we already commented today that we believe that SDG unit has very good international perspective, and we already have very good contracts in U.S. in terms of rovers. The monetization will firstly come from our rovers division and then at some longer term horizon from our self-driving cars. Another segment which we do have in other business system segments is food tech.
We just started building it last year, but still, we do expect them to become profitable from three to five years, just for the other businesses.
Hi, Catherine. That's Sasha. To your question, yes, you're absolutely right. As we are adding those new categories and grow their share, it's reasonable to expect the effective take rate to go up as it is reasonable to expect it to go up when we move the merchants from drop shipping operation model to the warehouse model, which we will also develop. I mean, this transition. Yeah, there are many layers how the effective take rate you observe will be improving.
Okay, thanks. Can I just come back to the comment on EBIT, EBITDA losses in media services and other business units and initiatives? I just want to understand, should we expect those losses to be higher in 2022 and 2021? Is there anything you can talk about on FinTech in terms of how much investment we should expect?
Overall, we do not give guidance on the EBITDA of this specific segments. You can be sure that we're always considering our liquidity position and our overall EBITDA levels when making decisions in terms of prioritization of our investments. Of course, we do discuss all of these factors when we make decisions on our next year budget. You can be sure that, you know, the budget for this year is well-balanced and we ensure that we do have sufficient liquidity coming from our core businesses, Search and Portal and Mobility.
Now, Catherine, with respect to FinTech, again, we don't give specific guidance for investments in other than E-com. But overall, I would say that in 2022, the amount of investment into FinTech will definitely not going to be as high as E-commerce or even self-driving group. It's gonna be less. What we're gonna focus on in 2022 is essentially kind of three prong effort. We're gonna continue developing of IT platform for the bank, and you know, further expanding the bank, the team itself.
We're gonna start rolling out the products first transactional, and we do plan to launch, well, I wouldn't say the first, but essentially second credit product, because the first one was our buy now pay later service, which we launched in September of last year. Overall, we think that, you know, the investments that we're gonna be putting into FinTech itself are gonna help us to, you know, quickly gain the customer base among our loyal customers. Overall, we are planning to focus on several synergistic retail products with our other Yandex services.
Okay, thank you.
We have no further questions. I would now like to hand the call back to Yulia Gerasimova for closing remarks. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much for all your questions. If you have any follow-ups, as usual, you know, myself and Ksenia and our team, we're available to help you with those. Thank you very much and have a good day.