Allegro Stock

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and I would like to welcome you to Allegro's Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

So without further ado, I will now pass the line to Tomasz Pozniak, Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Rafael, and welcome to all participants of our call. Let me introduce the presenters of today. Mr. Marcin Kusmierz, the CEO of Allegro Group, will provide you with the highlights of Allegro performance in Q2 2026; and Mr. Jon Eastick, our CFO, who will guide you through the financials and update of the outlook for the full year 2026.

As usual, our results presentation is available for download from our investor webpage at allegro.eu. You may also download the slides from the link available on the webcast.

As a reminder, today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from the expectations expressed in such statements. Please make sure that you review the full disclaimer on Slide #2.

Also, please note this presentation and the Q&A session are being recorded and will be available for a replay on our website at allegro.eu.

With this, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Marcin Kusmierz.

Thank you, Tomasz, for the introduction. Good morning, everyone. I'm very happy to present our results for the second quarter of 2026.

This was a strong quarter for Allegro. First of all, we delivered solid financial results, keeping us well ahead of our targets for both the first half of the year and as we look into Q3. A big engine of our growth is our continuous investment in AI, which we are using to boost both sales and our day-to-day productivity. At the same time, our international business surged at integral speed, showing just how much customers across Central Europe love what Allegro brings to the table. On top of that, our financial services advertising view fast. We also made great progress in logistics, and our tests in new services look very promising.

Looking at the numbers, Q2 was simply outstanding. In Poland, our main business picked up speed, with GMV growing by 12% year-on-year, backed by 11.3% increase in adjusted EBITDA. Internationally, our business really took off, with GMV jumping by over 82% year-on-year and revenues growing by more than 46%. Because of this strong performance in Q2 and the fast growth we are seeing right now in current Q3 trading, we are upgrading our full year outlook for 2026.

To keep this momentum going, our goal is clear. Our main focus is making our core marketplace even better by combining the best parts of 1P and 3P models. We are focusing on building special offers and expertise for key product categories. Second, we are constantly hunting for the new growth opportunities, reaching new customers and product [ niches ] just like we did with our recent launches in travel and health care. And third, we plan to share our best-in-class infrastructure in the future by allowing business partners to use our financial advertising and delivery tools. Thanks to that, we plan to create new revenue streams, optimize our operations and offer much better value to our partners.

This strategy showed clearly results in how we will run our day-to-day business during the quarter. We run our best-ever Smart! Week campaign, launching at the same time across all 4 of our markets, with 22% more use offers from our sellers. We also strengthened our position as the undisputed price leader in Poland. Our best price guarantee now covers 2.5 million products, beating major stores at almost 77% of compared offers. On top of that, we brought major new global brands to Allegro like NEXT, Under Armour and S. Oliver, while adding great new services like Lux Med health packages and new holiday options with impact.

Technology and AI are moving fast, changing how our buyers and sellers use Allegro. Both shoppers and merchants are adopting our AI tools every day. Our Smart! AI shopping assistant for buyers already has over 500,000 monthly active users. And our AI assistance for sellers is fully up and running, resolving 89% of merchant issues automatically without human help. To push this even further, we teamed up with ElevenLabs, the global leader in AI voice technology. Alongside our partners, Google and OpenAI, we are bringing AI voice agents to customer hotlines, giving assistance, help and creating an amazing customer experience.

Our international model is working very well. GMV growth across our international marketplaces accelerated to an impressive 85% year-on-year in Q2. Even better, we officially passed 5 million active buyers across Czechia and Slovakia and Hungary. Customers just also grew fast. Our app reached #1 spot for shopping apps in Slovakia, and customer satisfaction scores in Czechia and jumped by 8 [indiscernible] points year-on-year.

Shoppers are really getting into the habit of buying on Allegro. We achieved this by [indiscernible] Allegro to local needs while giving customers unbeatable prices and selection. Across our [ 3 ] international markets, Allegro prices were 12% to 16% lower than local online stores in Q2. We now offer a local buyers [ 40 ] million active products and 120 million offers. At the same time, Allegro serves as a powerful bridge for regional sellers. For example, sales from Czech sellers exporting to buyers in Poland grew by over 100% year-on-year.

Moving to fintech. Allegro Pay had another strong quarter. Total loan volume grew 35% year-on-year to PLN 4.5 billion, funding over 16% of our total sales volume in Poland. Customer uptake broke records. Allegro KliK has become our fastest-growing payment feature ever, and the Allegro Pay Card passed 200,000 users who use it daily for everyday shopping outside Allegro. We also supported merchants, with over 4,000 sellers using our financial options to grow their businesses.

In logistics, our Allegro Delivery program scaled very smoothly during the quarter. Allegro managed deliveries grew to cover nearly 50% of all parcels in Q2. Our talks for a long-term view with InPost up to 2031 are going very well right now. The new contract will be securing better parcel prices and to long-term delivery capacity. Meanwhile, our network reach over 11,000 One Box machines, keeping [indiscernible] on 12 -- on track to -- for 12,000 by the end of the year. And what is also interesting, we successfully tested our new Zero Energy parcel lockers.

To carry out these big plants, we keep adding top industry talent to our leadership team. I'm very pleased to present Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann as our new Chief Financial Officer, taking on her role from October 1. Daniel Roginski, who already joined as Chief Commercial Officer; and Dariusz Mazurkiewicz, Chief Financial Services Officer, who will join the team in the upcoming months. All of them bring strong leadership and vast experience in finance, retail and fintech. And I can say, we have even more great talent joining us pretty soon.

And now I will hand over to Jon.

Thank you very much, Marcin. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you today. And as you've already heard, it's a really great set of results for us to go through together. And after that, I'll be going over the upgrade of our guidance.

So let's get started. And we'll begin with the group overview. And starting with the GMV, the Polish operations grew 0.4% sequentially to 12% growth for Q2. And our international operations, as you've heard, the segment grew by 82.4%, up from 46% a quarter earlier, so really surging. And that meant that the group GMV has gone up by 14.4% year-on-year, and that's 1.6% higher than in Q1. So really good momentum on the top line.

Our active buyers is also growing really well, 0.5 million more added just in the single quarter. We're now at 20.9 million, with 400,000 added in international and 100,000 added in Poland. And also very solid growth on the spend per active buyer, 7.3% in Poland and 9.8% for the group as a whole.

Looking at take rates. Take rates came in at 12.59%, which is 40 basis points down on a year-on-year basis. As you'll recall, for 2026, we took a decision to pause increases in our take rate policies, our monetization policies. And this is obviously, in itself, supportive of growth in the marketplace. And in addition, we've been strongly supporting our merchants to deliver the best possible prices to the consumers, which has also led to some discounting of the take rates in terms of rebates.

On the other hand, the advertising business goes from strength to strength in terms of monetization margin, with the revenue up by 31.1%, and we're now at 2.31% of GMV in advertising revenue. So putting those together, the total revenue was up 14.4% in Poland, and at the group level with 46% contribution from international, 16.1%.

So then moving on and looking at profit and cash flow. And I'm really pleased to report that for the first time ever, our group adjusted EBITDA on a quarterly basis has topped PLN 1 billion. We've seen the Polish adjusted EBITDA up 11.3%, supported by that strong advertising and also fintech performance and also very good cost control. And international is 8 percentage points better in terms of loss to GMV margin on a year-on-year basis, which means it's accretive to our overall margin performance. And the group, therefore, is up 11.5% for Q2.

Looking at capital investment, PLN 292 million, 37.7% higher year-on-year. The main movement being additional investment into the delivery program. Cash conversion is still superb at 71.6%, and that leads to really strong free cash flow. And that brings us to the leverage, which you can see on the following slide, our -- the strong cash flow and the strong rise in adjusted EBITDA together has contributed to produce a 0.21 of a turn improvement Q-on-Q to 0.72 net debt to adjusted EBITDA as of [ 30th ] of June. So everything very much in line with policy. We have over 3 billion in cash, 2 billion of undrawn RCF and a new facility with EIB with a 6-year maturity, also undrawn coming online for PLN 1 billion. So we have absolutely tremendous financial flexibility.

A quick comment on the buyback. As you know, we have a 1.6 billion share buyback program approved by the shareholders. We launched the first phase of that, PLN 800 million on the 15th of July. And as of the 15th of September, we've almost completed this first phase. 777 million spent for 1.71% of stock repurchase. So very near the end of that first stage.

So good, let's now zoom in and look at Poland. And as usual, we'll start with the key KPIs that back up the growth. Active buyers is up year-on-year at 3.1% of 15.64 million customers, so 470,000 up year-on-year. And on the spend side, we're up 7.3% year-on-year. This is just moving up inexorably over time, and we're now at PLN 4,482 per active buyer on a 12-month rolling basis. The 7.3% compares very favorably to around 3% inflation in the Polish economy.

So as you've heard, the GMV growth came in at 12%, and that means 18.5 billion of GMV for the second quarter. The quarter basically started off dealing with a headwind from the calendar effects around Easter. And that slow start was then offset by an absolutely tremendous Smart! Week, where we performed brilliantly in terms of execution and in terms of pricing. And later in the quarter, demand held up extremely well, and we also saw less competitive pressure, particularly in the marketing area coming from the Chinese platforms. So all of that contributed to a really positive quarter and sequential improvements.

The growth was stronger across several categories, so quite broad-based, and higher ASPs have also been helping the performance, and there's now a significant inflation component in the GMV growth. I'm also very pleased to announce that the Polish marketplace is now a 70 billion GMV business looking at the last 12-month basis.

So moving on to revenue, which came in at 14.4% year-on-year for Q2. In Poland, that's PLN 3.2 billion. Slightly lower contribution from marketplace than we're used to at 8.2% because of the slightly lower take rates. Sequentially, the take rates were very nearly flat that 12.59%. However, overall, we see really strong contributions from the other segments of our revenue, which allowed us to grow strongly. As I've mentioned, advertising up 31.1%; logistics storming forward 103% growth year-on-year. Price -- retail at 24%; and other, which, of course, is mainly the fintech, another 23%.

So then moving on to adjusted EBITDA, and we have 11.3% growth for the Polish business year-on-year, which is PLN 1.153 billion. The GMV margin is a highly resilient 6.23%, and this remains above the 5.7% to 6% target range that we set back in March for the midterm guidance. How is this possible? This is coming from, obviously, the accelerated GMV growth, those strong contributions from ads and fintech, which are very margin accretive and also very, very strong cost control across the operation.

Cost of delivery grew by 19.9% year-on-year, 5.4% of GMV. But breaking this down by components, we have roughly 12.4% coming from volume growth, which comes from the higher GMV and increased Smart! penetration. But the biggest -- a very large item is purely accounting, which is where parcels have moved from agent-based accounting, so net of revenue in the prior year to principal-based accounting and gross cost in the current year. And that's obviously coming from our Allegro managed delivery, which is up to 50 -- almost 50% of the total parcel mix. So that's pure accounting that's offsetting logistics revenue that you see on the previous slide. Most importantly, our unit cost per parcel is actually down by 0.3 percentage points year-on-year. And despite the blended mix of pricing going up by 4.8 percentage points across all the players in the delivery space, a 5.1% mix improvement because of the shift towards the cheaper Allegro Delivery and Allegro managed services players means that we were able to deliver that overall cut to the cost per parcel.

Marketing, also looking good, 7.2 percentage points slower growth than in Q1, a 14.3% growth. And this is partly reflecting the easing competition for share of voice towards the end of Q2, presumably as the Chinese players began to get ready for the changes to the duty environment that they live with.

Other SG&A, also looking really good, 7.6% growth year-on-year, very tight cost control over staff costs and numbers of employees and also on IT expenses.

Lastly, for Poland Capital Investments, PLN 284 million is up 47.2% year-on-year. There's about 100% growth across the hard CapEx at PLN 160 million. And the biggest element of the acceleration here are the investments into the Allegro One delivery network. You've heard about APMs already. We're also working on a big sourcing center and additional depot Korea network assets.

Looking at capitalized development costs, the increase is much more moderate at 9.4%, reflecting a stable team, higher productivity also aided by AI-based coding assistance. And looking overall, we're at 23.9% year on -- year-to-date Polish CapEx, which is within the 25% guideline that we set earlier in the year. So that's Poland, which is clearly going very well.

And now let's look at the strong momentum that is building in the international business. As always, I'm going to start with the pro forma view of the marketplace only, leaving out the legacy mall activity, which I remind you is something that we closed down at the end of the first quarter of 2025. Now this means that what you see here is a GMV gap or GMV of 85% for the marketplace only is starting now to converge very tightly with the result for the overall segment, which is now up to 82.4%. And that's because the -- that legacy activity is really now slipping away into the distant past in the baseline. And I'll try and cover that as we go through.

But let's start first with that 85% growth that we've achieved on the international marketplace, which is a really phenomenal result. That comes in at PLN [ 1.058 ] billion, and is up sequentially by 17 percentage points from Q1. And I think the first thing to look at is that this has been achieved with 30% traffic growth, which means that the conversion is moving up really, really significantly. And that's because the customers are developing the habit. The purchase intent is up significantly. The trust in the platform is up significantly. All the other factors as well, that Marcin mentioned, shows that there's really strong momentum building.

Looking at the components, active buyers is up by 33.5% at 5.3 million customers, and the spend per buyer is up by a strong 23% year-on-year at PLN 663 per active buyer.

Now when you look at the same KPIs presented for the segment as a whole, the legacy active buyers are still visible in the last 12-month metrics that you see on the left-hand side of the slide, but not beyond Q4. Only in the first -- not beyond Q4 of 2025. And if you look at the blended spend per active buyer, the last impacts of this last 12-month metric from the legacy business, which we closed Q1 '25, comes in Q1. So the Q2 2026 numbers are purely the marketplace activity, and it will be the same going forward from here.

You see the same thing in the GMV at the segment level, which grew 82.4% versus the 85% delivered by the marketplace itself. And the reason for that is just an PLN 8 million difference in the baseline for Q2 of 2025 that related to the legacy store closed down back in 2025.

Looking at segment revenue, it is up by 46.3%, and this is obviously driven by the marketplace, which is up 65.5% year-on-year. That's lower than the GMV growth of 85% because the take rate is at 7% for the second quarter, and that is reflecting promotional programs that we're running, both in terms of pricing similar to what we do in Poland to help the merchants at really great price points. And secondly, also new unique selection is also receiving promotional take rates to really drive extra selection into the marketplace, which is also way superior to anything else that's available across CE 3, but we want to double down on that and keep growing selection.

Looking at the overall retail -- the overall revenue performance, retail is also a bit of a drag on the overall revenue as it was up 7.1% on a year-on-year basis, but we do expect that to be much stronger in the third quarter.

So lastly, on the international section, let's look at the adjusted EBITDA. The loss edged up very slightly by 8% year-on-year to PLN 122.8 million. This is reflecting the investments that we're making to scale the marketplace growth and we're really leaning into the evidently very, very strong demand conditions that we're seeing in order to drive the flywheel faster and faster.

The marketplace component of the adjusted EBITDA loss was at PLN 100.7 million, but the margin is improving significantly, 11.6% negative to GMV versus 19.6% a year earlier. And the extra spending is coming in areas such as ATL, with an extra 12 million spent during Q2, including the first ATL campaigns that we run in the Hungarian market. And we're also spending more on PPC, but at much better ROIs to help drive that flywheel faster.

Last thing to point out is that mall as a merchant, now operating in a lean model, has had a loss of PLN 22.1 million, down 53% on the old model a year earlier. So that's the international, and that is the end of the tour of those results.

Now let's move on to look at the management outlook. Let me start with current trading for the third quarter, and these comments all relate to GMV. In the first -- starting with Polish operations. In the first 10 weeks of Q3, we've seen a further acceleration in the business, with the growth moving up to between 14% and 15% year-on-year. Now that means that on a year-to-date GMV basis, the growth has now moved beyond the 11% higher end of the outlook that we set earlier in the year.

When it comes to Allegro International segment, again, in the first 10 weeks of the quarter, we've seen the business going from strength to strength with further acceleration, and we now are seeing growth rates typically around 100% year-on-year. As a result of that, on a year-to-date basis, the GMV in the International segment is now above 70%. So looking at the consolidated group, this means that for the 10-week period, we're seeing 17% to 18% across the group. And on a year-to-date level, about 15% growth. So this really, really strong performance has obviously prompted us to make a significant full year outlook upgrade across the group. And I'll go through that now.

So on the left-hand side, you've got the last updated guidance in May. On the right-hand side, the new outlook. And let me start with GMV in Poland. So we're moving up the guidance for 2026 to 11% to 13% growth for Poland. And Allegro International, we're now seeing for the whole segment, between 65% and 70% growth for the full year, and that's translating to a group result now of between 13% and 15% growth.

On revenue, we're seeing 13% to 15% growth for Poland, higher than before, and Allegro International segment moving up strongly to 35% to 45% growth. For the group, therefore, 14% to 16% growth.

On adjusted EBITDA, we're seeing 11% to 14% growth for Poland, so moving up significantly. That's coming from the higher GMV and also for the strong cost control performance.

On Allegro International segment, we're seeing a fractionally lower improvement in the loss at 3% to 7% lower loss versus the prior year. We're continuing to invest to support the growth into the fourth quarter. And on the group level, therefore, we're seeing 13% to 17% growth in our adjusted EBITDA, which equates to PLN 3.9 billion to PLN 4.1 billion of adjusted EBITDA.

On the CapEx side, no changes required to the guidance. So that's the outlook.

And the final slide of the presentation covers financial takeaways for anyone who's going to be reading this coming to the document later. Marcin has graciously given me the last word today as this will be my final earnings report as Allegro's CFO. And it's probably going to be the last one in my career as well, which I've calculated, I'm up for around about 78 of these during many, many years.

So as I'm standing down on the 1st of October, after nearly 9 years in this role, it's really great to be finishing it such a really strong set of results. And even more so because I'll be handing over to my successor with the group in such an excellent financial condition. It's been a great privilege to be the CFO of this amazing business and work with this tremendous team for such a long period of time. I wish Marcin and the team great success as they continue to explore new avenues to grow the business in a more and more exciting way.

And lastly, I'm really excited that Katarzyna Ostap-Tomann has agreed to take over the role. She's a really highly experienced CFO and also in public companies. And she's coming from a sector which is highly relevant to our business. I'm sure she's going to do a really great job, and I'm going to be here for another 4 months after the 1st of October to actually help her with her onboarding.

So that's it for me. I'm just going to hand it back very quickly to Marcin.

Thank you, Jon. And I'd like to thank Jon on behalf of the whole Allegro team. Thank you, Jon, for helping us grow, helping us to -- or pushing us to achieve the highest standards and mainly for being a true model for all of us. We wish you all the best in your next chapter and finger crossed for everything up ahead.

Thank you, Marcin.

Thank you, Marcin. Thank you, Jon. We are now ready for the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] And we will start the session with a question coming from Andrew Ross from Barclays.

Great. Let me start by congratulating Jon on your time at Allegro. Thank you for all of your support in the 6 years since the IPO, and also wishing you all the best going forward.

I've got 3 questions, if that's okay. The first one is about the competitive environment. It sounds like you've seen some easing in Q2. Curious just talk about was just towards the end of Q2 or for the whole quarter? And then if you can give us some color in terms of how that's changed into Q3 would be very helpful.

Second one, built on that. Just remind us how much share of volume or GMV in the market you felt that the Chinese platforms had and how much back you think you can gain back?

And I guess, third one also built on that. Clearly, you see an acceleration in Q2 that's continuing nicely into Q3. Do you guys think about this as being a onetime benefit of competition normalizing, but then as you annualize through, that growth goes back to a kind of more normal trend rates? Or are you seeing something in the KPIs and cohort behavior that might suggest this could be the start of a kind of multiyear improvement in the growth profile of the business?

Andrew, thank you very much and really appreciate the cooperation over the years and also really, really good questions.

So let's start with the Q2 to Q3 competitive environment. Obviously, when it comes to the Chinese platforms, the key topic has been the 1st of July, the introduction of the EUR 3 per parcel charges. And what we saw was some level of disengagement during Q2 on the part of the Chinese platforms when it came to the top of the funnel activity and acquisition of traffic. So share of voice became easier to come by and the cost per click started to come down during the second quarter. Obviously, the more recent data is showing both lower traffic or sequentially lower traffic month-on-month for these players. And we're also hearing anecdotal or reported evidence around Europe as significantly less parcels coming in to the -- across the continent. And I think that's true of Poland as well.

When it comes to the impact on growth as a whole, this is obviously a factor, but it is not the only factor that we see in our strong performance. The -- I think the first thing to say is that the Polish consumers are holding up very well. Despite all the global turbulence and the fuel prices, demand is pretty stable. But we've actually been executing extremely well in addition.

On surfacing the best possible prices for the consumers, you see it in the take rate changes or the take rate discounts that we've been giving to help the partners hit those great price points. They're really responding to that. I think the merchants themselves, the partners are also responding positively to the fact that we're not changing take rates this year. So there's also growth coming from that.

And I also need to say that Marcin has given Daniel, our new Head of Marketplace, and the whole team really, a lot more flexibility to move at their own speed and to be innovative. And this is really also starting to pay off at the marginal level in terms of how quickly we're moving. So there's quite a lot going on.

It's also worth pointing out that Q1 was a bit flattered because of the Easter calendar, and Q2 was negatively impacted because of the Easter calendar in April, which actually means the growth was picking up more strongly than it looks, more strongly than the 0.4% that you see in those numbers. And that's continued, obviously, into the Q3 with the 14%, 15% growth that we're seeing. So China is part of the story, but it's not the only thing.

The second part of your question was how much do we think the Chinese platforms have. We think it was mid-single digits, sort of 5%, 6% type of area between those players. Altogether, we think that the alternative platforms to us have about 10% share when you throw the numbers on and a few others. So some of that will go into reverse in the short term, obviously, because of these charges. But we don't underestimate the Chinese players. We're hearing lots about them taking warehousing space around Europe, and they may obviously start to experiment with other ways of doing business to change the situation. What really matters is this is long overdue, this regulatory change, and it levels up the playing field. And fair competition, we have no problem with.

Next question will -- comes from Cesar Tiron from Bank of America.

Yes. Congrats on the results and best of luck to Jon on your new ventures and thanks for the help over the years. I have 3 questions, if that's okay. The first one relates to the acceleration of revenue and GMV growth. I think we spent some time on Poland. But if you can please also explain the very substantial acceleration in international, especially in Q3.

Linked to that question, if my GMV growth accelerates and reach a certain milestone in GMV, in international, is it not possible to break even earlier than 2029? Let's say, if international GMV continues to surprise your business plan on the upside.

And then I think last question. I noticed all the new hires. Just had a question just on fintech. Any read there? I mean, if fintech strategy with the changes that you hire, can it become a bigger component for Allegro?

Obviously, I'll give the second part of that question, Cesar, to Marcin.

Yes, on the first part, I think the -- the key point with the growth in international is that we have, totally in our control, the take rate lever. And we're deliberately holding that one back until we choose to monetize a little bit more strongly with our partners. And as you saw, right now, it's running at 7% take rate. So it's about 5 points down on the Polish rates. So whilst the demand is growing the way it is at the moment and the customers are responding with such enthusiasm and the momentum is building the way it is, it doesn't make sense to take of our foot off the gas. It makes sense to keep supporting the business and try and grow it into being as big a business as we possibly can. So getting to that breakeven in 2029 is something that we're committed to, and take rates will be part of that story to make that happen.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that the trajectory that we're following may not -- won't be somewhat better than it would have been otherwise, obviously, if the GMV growth was lower because obviously, the fixed costs are going to be spread over a much bigger base.

Second question, Marcin, on fintech.

Thank you, Jon. So of course, we do believe that with fintech business, we can do much more. We are very strong [indiscernible] providing by an operator service on the Polish market, the most better one and the strongest one. But of course, hiring values and making the team stronger, we have much higher ambition to concur some new parts of the market.

We want to do much more with insurance, like for example, extended warranty related to some products we have on the marketplace. We have a pretty strong pipeline related to new products also based on some partnerships like we do it with PKO BP. What we mentioned today during the presentation. We have a great example of Allegro KliK, the fastest growing payment network on the marketplace historically. So we feel that we can be much stronger. And of course, some of services will be provided by ourselves, and we want to increase our expertise in this field, but also some of them will be provided based on partnerships like with PKO BP because we see that the appetite of some partners is also very high, and they see that can also achieve with us much more.

The next set of questions comes from Roman Reshetnev from Goldman Sachs.

Congratulations on strong results. And thank you, Jon, and all the best to your next chapter.

So firstly, based on your guidance, the implied range for Q4 poly GMV growth looks quite wide [ at just 6% to ] 14%. So could you please help us understand what would drive the low end versus the high end of that range? And in particular, what operational competitive or macro variables do you see as a key swing factor over the next few months?

Secondly, could you please give us an update on the discussions with InPost following the letter of intent? And where do things stand today? And what are the main areas that still need to be resolved before the final agreement can be reached? And actually, as a follow-up to the second question, on delivery economics, how do you think about the long-term target for net cost of delivery as a percentage of GMV? In particular, in the medium term, would you consider simply stabilizing that ratio as a good outcome? Or is ambition to drive it lower over time? And in the context of your negotiations, is it focused mainly on preventing further cost inflation? Or are you also pushing for a meaningful reduction in per parcel delivery costs that could technically support margin upside going forward?

Okay. Thank you, Roman, for those questions. Yes, you're absolutely right. The range is effectively quite large on the Polish GMV. If I'm totally honest about it, the lower end of the range is partly just the mathematics of the fact that we're trying to work with round numbers here. It's as simple as that. But the top end of the range, I think deserves more examination.

The fourth quarter, every year in Poland for Allegro brings some uncertainty for us because we always worry about what version of the consumer is going to turn up because there's a lot more discretionary demand in the fourth quarter than we see in the everyday shopping that people are doing in the rest of the year. And the fourth quarter does have quite a big weight of around about 40% -- 35% rather in the overall GMV. So we always try to take something of a cautious position on the fourth quarter. And this year is no different to the others, although the geopolitical aspects and the fuel prices, I would say, are the major threats to the momentum that we're seeing at the moment. But because the mix is a little bit different, it's hard to be 100% confident that what we're seeing in Q3 is going to continue into Q4. So we're being cautious on that.

I'll pass over to Marcin to tell you how the InPost situation is developing.

Thank you, Jon. I can say that we stay optimistic. And of course, I said before, we continue our negotiations with InPost. And I think this is -- we are on the right path. And of course, we expect the economics related to logistics costs will be significantly better, but we should wait because, again, we are still negotiating some conditions. And at the same time, we want to continue our investments to develop our network and to have better capacity on our side and to improve efficiency of the whole network. So we don't expect any revolution, thinking about the future in logistics. Of course, year-over-year, improving efficiency of the whole network and cooperating also with our partners quite closely.

Roman, sorry, the last part of that question was around cost of delivery to GMV. Yes, we are not going to say anything specific regarding guidance until that contract is actually signed. We don't want to preempt that. Obviously, the lower prices that we've got negotiated in the NOI will have the margin, a positive impact on us. But we don't want to say too much more than that at this moment. I mean, as Marcin said, we're still committed to developing our own capabilities. We're committed to being diversified in terms of suppliers. And most importantly, what we really like is the fact that the consumers have got access to just about every locker in the country, which is around 60,000 plus, at this point, 70,000 even. And that means closest locker to you is going to be available if you're shopping on Allegro and that's a brilliant situation.

So next set of questions comes from Michal Potyra from UBS Securities.

I have 3 questions, please. The first one is on the lower take rate in Poland. If you could break down the key drivers here and if you can also perhaps comment, is this a temporary effect around this kind of easier competitive environment? Or should we factor a structurally lower take rate into medium-term expectations? That's the first one.

Second, a quick one is on Allegro International CapEx, which looks relatively low comparing to the scale of growth ambitions. So I'm wondering if is the current run rate sustainable? Or should we expect a step-up in investment over time or perhaps some of that CapEx is actually recognized in Poland?

And the last question is on your guidance. So you may upgrade to your full year guidance, but you have left the medium-term margin ambitions unchanged. I'm wondering, is it something you are just waiting to do or you are seeing or planning some margin investments going forward?

Okay. Thank you very much, Michal, for the questions. Starting with the take rate. The big picture is that these small changes to the rates that you're seeing are really mainly reflecting one thing, which is the discounting that we do to share the cost of making sure that we're hitting the best price points in the market as much of the time as we possibly can because this is extremely important to keep the customers coming back, to have the confidence that when they come to Allegro, they're getting great prices. And in essence, we see this lever as more and more important to us. And at the same time, we also see it being more calorific for demand than spending the money on the marketing side. So I would say that this will continue for the foreseeable future, that we'll continue to press maybe harder on this lever, possibly somewhat less on the traditional marketing levers that you see lower down in the P&L.

When it comes to -- there's one other thing to add on that as well. The -- keeping a much better take rate for the partners that are available with other players is obviously a cornerstone of our strategic positioning as the biggest player in the market. And whilst we have so many positive levers to pull on the cost side across delivery, across AI and productivity, across marketing, it doesn't make sense to be moving up the take rates. It makes much more sense to focus on the cost side as a way to deliver margin. So this was the thinking also behind the fact that we didn't put the rates up in March for 2026.

The second question, international CapEx. It's a fair observation that the numbers are extremely small. But this is really just a function of the fact that the way that we run that business is that we are leveraging software that initially we're writing for the Polish business. So we add new functionalities. They immediately become available for the international platform as well. And we don't really assign any specific allocation of the CapEx to that fact. So the numbers are really quite small.

When it comes to hard CapEx, we're not really spending on anything other than some APMs going into the WE|DO, the former WE|DO logistics network that we own in the Czech Republic. We've switched to an outsourced provider for our 1P transactions when it comes to fulfillment. So there isn't too much CapEx to spend there.

And lastly, the question on the medium-term guidance, the medium-term margins. As you're probably aware, our cycle is that we're in the seasonal line of the planning cycle at the moment, and we tend to look at these things in March each year once we finish the planning with the Board.

Next set of questions come from Sven Sauer from Kepler Cheuvreux.

I only have one question left. The other ones were already answered. I was just wondering about the news on expanding to China a few days ago, that you were opening an office in Shenzhen. It looks to me like the strategy has changed previously. It was my understanding that you were a bit restrictive towards Chinese or Asian sellers, and now it looks like you are opening up a bit. And is this, of course, a result of the AEU tariffs that have been implemented now? So just wondering what the intention and the strategy is behind this?

Thank you. This is a super interesting question. But in our strategy, nothing changed. Of course, we are open to support all merchants or partners on the platform. And of course, opening our representative office in China is to identify some new opportunities for Polish sellers, but also for some Chinese vendors or producers and to have access to innovative products. This is very competitive market with a lot of innovation. And thanks to that, we see that our value proposition and the selection of products or offers on the marketplace can be even more attractive. And of course, we want to support them also to meet some European requirements related to regulations to taxes and so on.

And next question comes from Aaron, I would assume Armstrong, from Ashmore.

Just a couple outstanding from me. Firstly, on the new management, obviously, some very high-quality individuals that come on kind of C level. It'd be great to hear what their priorities or the key deliverables would be over their first, say, 1 or 2 years?

And then secondly, just on the services. So obviously, we have 2 categories at the beginning of this year in health and travel. Could you talk a little bit about scale up within those service categories? And then in terms of the pipeline of any new additions?

And perhaps just finally from my side in terms of the competitive landscape from the duty implemented on the Chinese platforms, would you say that's more meaningful on the international side, is transformational, given that those were the dominant platforms in those markets or perhaps a more present over-indexed in those markets?

Start with the question related to new executives joining our company. And as we mentioned before, we have Daniel Roginski for several months in the company being in charge of all commercial operations and further development of the marketplace. And of course, this is the guy with us from -- in Zalando and many other e-commerce platform. So he brought to the company, deep expertise how to develop, especially some expertise in some dedicated parts of the market. Of course, we wait also for Dariusz and Katarzyna joining quite soon to the organization and supporting our further development.

But our priority is quite clear. We want to speed up our development. We want to speed up growth of the organization, but also keeping a very healthy margin and investments under control. And I think following what Jon said before, like our investments or our CapEx, it is something under control. We have a very flexible platform. We do invest, of course, innovation in order to update our value proposition. But of course, we stay strong and we want to have the strongest team on the market because our appetite is even bigger than in the past.

The second question was related to services. As we mentioned many times, this is still in the test mode, let's say. So of course, we can say that we are satisfied with the first month and how we see progress in development of travel services or health care services. We still have quite [indiscernible] selection of services because this is the initial stage of those projects. And we do cooperate with Lux Med, we do cooperate with [indiscernible] and of course, we should expect new partners being implemented quite soon with their services to improve value proposition in both categories. But of course, impact of both categories is quite limited on current results because we just started like several months ago and this is still very early stage.

And -- thanks, Marcin. The last part of the question was about whether or not the situation with the Chinese players might be more significant in international than it is in Poland. I think, yes, you're very well informed when it comes to the relative shares and things like top of the funnel and traffic and things of that nature. They are more material in the C3 in Slovakia, Czech Republic and Hungary than they are in Poland.

But I don't think the nature of their play is that different in that it's still really kind of a niche demand, which is not directly what Allegro is about. Allegro is much more about branded Western European products. So we're mainly competing with all the more legacy incumbent players across those 3 countries. But this more sort of treasure hunt-type shopping, as we've called it in previous quarters, that's being done by the Chinese. I mean, that really doesn't survive well with these EUR 3 charges. So they probably are under a lot of pressure all the way across Europe. And it may be that it's showing up a bit more clearly in the growth rates in international than it is in Poland. But as I said, I don't think they -- what we are selling is a direct substitute for most of what they do.

So we are now ready to wrap up with a follow-up question from Cesar from Bank of America.

Yes. I just wanted to discuss about the new initiatives. So for now, to boost GMV growth, for now, you have 2 in terms of these new services. When do you think -- so I have 2 questions. First, when do you think you'll be ready to share some preliminary KPIs so we understand what to track and how well this is progressing?

And then I think the second question, is it possible that in the next year, we see more of these initiatives, i.e., more of these services being sold on the Allegro platform?

Cesar, of course, in '27, you will be ready, I guess, to share some data related to development of both categories. I can say that we see and we have much more initiatives. And I guess one of the key ones is related to AI because we see a huge opportunity to use AI and to boost our GMV. And as you know, this is something deeply implemented in every single piece of our platform. But of course, we have quite big appetite and being a strong player on the services market. And we see that first reaction of the market and how we are able to combine services with physical growth we have on the marketplace and also with value-added services like financial ones, it looks very promising. And we see that thanks -- our Allegro Pay, thanks to other capabilities we have on the platform. The demand is really high, then the satisfaction of customers, what is even more important on a very good level.

So it looks promising. Of course, this is again quite early stage. So I guess, in 2027, we'll be ready to share some details about development, about some perspective of growth of both categories. But I guess we will be ready also to share some bigger picture related to our presence in -- on the services market because the value of the services market is really promising. So we want to play one of the crucial roles.

And the last question today comes again from Andrew Ross from Barclays.

Sorry, guys. I thought I'd squeeze one in on AI. Interesting that the AI system has got to 500,000 monthly users. Can you talk a bit about how those pieces are behaving? Are you seeing engagement deeper and as people start to use that tool? And then I guess, a follow-up from that. There's a lot of innovation and development going on in kind of generalized AI agents right now. I guess a good example is the Muse product that Meta came out with recently. What's your kind of latest thinking in terms of how the Allegro platform or agents on Allegro could start to engage with generalized systems to facilitate agentic commerce going forward?

Firstly, we are very satisfied in achieving 0.5 million active users using our assistant every single month. So this is really great number, and we see this high increase week over week. Secondly, thanks to that, we see that some group of customers, they are much more active than in the past, for example, using assistant to be advised, to be inspired or, for example, to compare some products. So we see impact on some selected categories or products that we see that conversion can be, in some cases, significantly higher. So it looks also very promising.

As we mentioned before today, we have several partnerships with global industry leaders starting from -- we have OpenAI, Google, but we just added as a partner, ElevenLabs, also to use some AI voice assistance as the new capability available on the platform, but not only because you should know that we also implemented some AI functionalities to our ABMs, which is a very innovative approach, and this is something, in some cases positively surprising our customers.

So we do believe that AI will be one of the key drivers, and we'll be improving our conversions on the marketplace also in the application, but also, in some cases, outside marketplace. So we stay more than optimistic. And we really see the positive impact of AI. Of course, firstly, we are focused on growth. But of course, we use also AI as a tool or other tools to boost productivity in the company.

Thank you, Marcin. And this answer concludes our presentation for today. We are looking forward to seeing you during our investor -- upcoming investor events, and then the Q3 results are just less than 2 months away. Thank you very much for attending our call.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. and I would like to welcome you to Allegro Q1 2026 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] So without further ado, I will now pass the line to Tomasz Pozniak, Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Russell, and welcome to all participants of our call. Let me introduce the presenters of today. Mr. Marcin Kusmierz, the CEO of Allegro Group, who will provide you with the highlights of Allegro performance in Q1 2026 and Jonathan Eastick, our CFO, who will guide you through the financials and update of the outlook for the full year 2026. As usual, our results presentation is available for download from our investor webpage Allegro.eu. You may also download these slides from the link available on the webcast. As a reminder, today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations expressed in our state. Please make sure you review the full disclaimer on Slide #2.

Also please note that this presentation, the Q&A session are being recorded and will be available for a replay on our website at elected. And with this, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Marcin, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Tomasz for the introduction. Good morning, everyone. In a single sentence, I could summarize, it was a very strong quarter for Allegro. To start, our deep dive, let's look at the 5 strategic pillars of our performance this quarter. First, our Polish operations have shown great resilience with growth rebounding to 11.6%. And this performance came in with margins that actually exceeded our internal expectations. On the international front, we are seeing a very exciting acceleration with marketplaces growing 67% year on growth -- year-on-year.

Because of this momentum, we are moving to our international outlook upward. We are also aggressively expanding our addressable market by entering the services sector, specifically healthcare and travel. Everything we do remain focused on the customer and seller experience, increasingly powered by our unique AI expertise. Moving to the numbers, the Allegro Group delivered excellent results in Q1 2026. What's particularly notable is that our international segment is now actively contributing to the growth rates of both our GMV and adjusted EBITDA.

In Poland, our nearly 12% GMV growth outperformed our previous outlook. Revenue grew by 18% and adjusted EBITDA surged by 18.5%, significantly beating our 7% to 10% full year production. Internationally, we achieved a massive over 46% GMV growth. And while revenue saw a 11% percent decline. We made significant pre-progress in our in clauses to a 17% improvement in adjusted EBITDA. At the group level, GMV grew by almost 13% and adjusted EBITA grew by nearly 24%, which is well ahead of our original full goals.

Our long-term strategy is built on 3 pillars to supercharge our marketplace. First, we focus on growing the core Polish marketplace by leveraging our existing assets. we are also reinventing our expansion model to replicate our success internationally, which as results show is heading in the right direction. We are working to externalize our assets logistics advertising or financial services to offer them to partners. We are also moving into everyday online shopping by adding new categories and segments. The most important shift this year is launch of services, which improves how customers buy nonphysical products on our platform.

All of this is supported by strategic enablers, AI-driven productivity gains and strong focus on ESG and our people. seeing good progress in our development last quarter as I can add, we have strong and stronger appetite to explore new growth opportunities. In Q1, we focused heavily on driving loyalty and category expansion in our core market. We reached a major milestone by crossing 9 million smart users across the group. To simplify the experience we unified the smart minium or value to a bit less than PLN 50 for all delivery types.

We also scaled our smart partnerships, adding names like Zaka, Multikino and Mall. For our sellers, we invest a lot to provide the best value for them and creating completely new possibilities like new categories for products or now also services and actively supporting their growth. We also introduced a lot of our outpatient to help them to more -- to be more efficient. We've also seen brand store launches accelerate, with 19 new stores this quarter, and our best price guarantee now covers 2 million products in Poland. Finally, our AI support and marketing is making campaigns preparation up to 9x faster. AI is now a live part of the Allegro experience. For buyers, our shopping assistant already offers improved results matching conversation history feature.

We are also piloting and ask on Page AI component and answer specific technical questions about products before users turn to external search engines. For our selling partners, we are piloting frictionless listing. This allows Atea to simply pass product link from their own store and our AI automatically maps into our catalog. We are also using specialized ML models in categories like automotive to ensure catalog integrity and high-quality product images. To maintain our technological edge, Allegro has launched a new collaboration with OpenAI, which is designed to build the next generation of cores using front.

It gives us first-mover access to leading AI models and allows our engineers to work closely with open AI experts to design and test new commerce solutions. This joint engineering effort aims to set new global standard for the industry. By strengthening our technological advantage, we can further simplify the shopping process, support our selling partners more effectively and significantly accelerate the development of new products.

Our international segment cover Cacia, Slovakia and Hungary is delivering robust growth. We saw over 67% year-on-year GMV growth this quarter, reaching over PLN 800 million. This was driven by very strong price offering with our prices being on average 14% lower than local competitors. Our active base in the region grew by 32% to 4.9 million people. We are also seeing structural shift towards free traffic with app adoption driving a 7 percentage point increase in free traffic share. Most importantly, the customer trust in Czech and Slovakia has now reached the same high level as in Poland, and our adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 4.3 percentage points. We are officially entering the healthcare services market through a partnership with the Luma group.

This move allows us to capture a high-growth nondiscretionary sector where private health spend in Poland is projected to reach PLN 48 billion by 2026. By partnering with Luxmet, a market miner with 2.5 million customers and over 3,000 medical centers, we gain immediate scale. Our ambition is to become the largest end-to-end online healthcare marketplace, scaling from current position in consumer health products in supplements to full service offerings. This strategy capitalizes on long-term tailwinds from an aging and increasingly affluent population in Poland. In Q2, we are launching Cara a dedicated storefront for the packaged travel market. This is a large and fast-growing segment with estimated spend on foreign package travel in Poland projected to hit PLN 27 billion.

We are leveraging our e-commerce expertise and partner in Quivitaka, the leading tour operator in Poland with a 20% market share. Our right to win comes from our 15 million loyal customers and the ability to combine travel services with physical goods. We will also offer Smart corns rewards and win around 2 months of launch easy buy now pay later financing through Alegro app. Allegro pay continues to show exceptional performance. loan origination is up 37% year-on-year, reaching PLN 3.9 billion in Q1. Currently, Allegro pay finances over 16% of our total GMV. We are also successfully growing our other operating income from consumer loans, which is up 125% as we increase self-funding to nearly 60%.

Beyond standard loans, our Allegro Pay card has incredible NPS of 92 and is increasingly used for everyday off-line spending. Additionally, our newest payment methods, Alegro click, reached 150,000 users in just 2 months, making it our fastest-growing payment tool to date. Finally, our logistics and delivery program is making great strides. The share of volumes managed by Allegro reached nearly 45% in Q1, up significantly from the previous year. the shift towards Allegro delivery partners to critical because it lowers our average cost per parcel.

Our network is now the largest partner network in Poland with over 75,000 lockers and pickup points. Our own Allegro 1 APM network exceeded 9,500 machines this quarter, and we are firmly on track to hit our goal for over 12,000 locations by the end of 2026. As volume in the network growth, we continue to drive down unit costs. And now let's move to the financial section and our outlook.

Thank you very much, Marcin, and good morning, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be with you today to talk you through the Q1 2026 results. It's been an excellent start to the year for the Allegro Group. We're going to do things a little bit differently, and I'm going to start off with the group perspective this time. And turning to first to the top line metrics. As you already heard, it's really a story about acceleration this quarter. Q1 GMV for the Polish operations has accelerated to 11.6% year-on-year which compares to 8.9% in Q1 last year and to 8.6% in the fourth quarter of '25. International is up 46.3%, which is 24.8 percentage points higher than it was in the fourth quarter. So tremendous sequential growth. And together, that boosts our GMV growth for the group to 12.8%. And this is about the best level we've seen since 2022 when we purchase mall. .

Why is it going so well? Well, the first aspect is that the mold transformation, as you know, is well behind us now. And the more legacy GMV is fading away from the baseline in 2025 removing that growth headwind. But even more importantly, the whole management team is now able to fully focus on our core strategy, which is to grow our marketplaces across the 4 countries where we're operating. and you see this across the results. Looking at some of the metrics, the active buyers group level is now 20.4 million customers but they're all marketplace customers. There's no legacy left in these numbers.

The GMV per active buyer at the group level is at PLN 3,500 and it's up 10.4% year-on-year. The take rate for this quarter for Poland is at 12.65%, essentially flat, and that's because we've made a management decision to forgo significant monetization moves for 2026. I will talk about that a little bit more later. Advertising has done very well, as usual, 24.8% revenue growth. It's at 2.24% of GMV. And we've also had strong contributions from delivery and from fintech, as you've heard, which means that the Polish business is growing revenue at 18%, and the group grew revenue at 16.5% year-on-year. One technical note on -- also before we move on from this slide. because we sold the Mall South business in February, obviously, that's a discontinued operation, so it doesn't appear in these numbers.

And it's also been taken out of the prior year numbers. So the prior year is restated ex small cells. So let's move on. And it's really great to see that, that growth has dropped through into our adjusted EBITDA performance. Q1 adjusted EBITDA for the group is up an excellent 23.6% year-on-year. Poland is up 18.5%, and our international losses narrowed by 18% versus last year. That means that the group EBITDA in managed returns is PLN 932 million for Q1. And looking at Poland, the growth in revenues, partly coming from the high-margin ads and fintech contributions, lower cost per parcel due to the impact of our Allegro delivery expansion. slower G&A growth as we tightly control our expenditures were all contributing to the margin being strong and the EBITDA growth being as fast as the revenue growth.

Capital investment is up 16.4% on the group level to 239 million. Most of the incremental spend is into our delivery investments. our cash conversion remains in the top tier of e-commerce businesses at 74.3%, actually up on the prior year by 1.6 percentage points. Our investments in growth, whether that be the Polish CapEx or our international expansion are both well within our guardrails that we set out for you back in March. And when it comes to leverage, I'll look at that on the next slide.

And as you can see, the leverage is slightly higher than it was at the end of the fourth quarter. It's at 0.93x versus 0.81x a quarter ago. but it's right around our policy target of running with a 1x leverage level. This tick up is coming from the seasonal Q1 working capital outflows, and that's slightly higher year-on-year capital investment, offset by the higher EBITDA that we have over the last 12 months. The main reason for the tick-up though or the main reason for the increase is that the cash is down by 520 million compared to December, and that's mainly due to 3 one-off items, the increased investment in the consumer loan book. the disposal of MuleSoft and also move from straightforward cash into money market funds, which technically does not go into the cash balance.

When it comes to the next 3 quarters, you should expect it being back to business as usual with a strong downward trend in leverage. Our group liquidity position is tremendous. We have 2.3 billion of cash and 2 billion in undrawn RCFs at the end of March. And this means we have absolutely no hesitation in recommending a PLN 1.6 billion buyback to the shareholders to vote on at the June AGM. So now let's zero in on the Polish business. And as usual, starting with the key growth KPIs -- it was -- our active bias is up 400,000 year-on-year at 15.51 million active buyers. That's 2.6% up over the 12-month period and a 1% improvement versus December.

Active buyer -- or spend per active buyer is up by 7.2% year-on-year. So that continues to be the key lever for growing our GMV. It's reached now almost PLN 4,400 per active buyer per annual period. So those 2 KPIs combined to deliver that 11.6% year-on-year growth, which is 3 percentage points higher sequentially than we achieved in Q4. And you probably noted that retail sales in March were extremely strong in the Polish economy. Allegro fully participated in that.

And as a result, compared to the current trading that we shared with you when we last met to discuss Q4 are high single -- very high single-digit growth rate that we were seeing at that moment in time got boosted to this 11.6% level. Where does that extra growth come from in March. There was a couple of reasons for it. One was that February was extremely cold. And as a result, the seasonal shopping didn't kick off the spring season shopping really didn't kick off until March, so it was not in the February numbers.

And secondly, the move of Easter right to the beginning of April meant that the typical pre-Easter increase in shopping in the categories where we're strong, slipped into March and into the Q1 quarter. That obviously then reverses in Q2 as we'll see later. So as a result, we had PLN 16.5 billion of GMV in Poland. Other highlights that are worth pointing out are that the average selling price has also been 1 of the strongest results that we've had for a while, 3.1% year-on-year increase and mix adjusted, it was 3.4%.

So a little bit of inflation creeping into the numbers, which is great for GMV. and it's also worth noting part of that improvement was because our relatively high ASP categories, particularly electronics and automotive also had strong quarters. So moving on and looking at revenue. As usual, much faster than the GMV growth. Revenue growth for Poland was 18%, supported by the usual growth engines. It landed at PLN 2.8 billion for the quarter. Advertising contributed 25% growth; Dex, a massive 110% growth delivery experience. And within the other category, you have the fintech improvements, which and other grew by 80%.

When it comes to the take rates, you see the seasonal improvement from Q4 level up to this 12.65% for Q1. As I mentioned before, we decided that this year we'll run with essentially constant take rate compared to 2025. And we did make small tweaks to cofinancing, around about a 3% increase in the rates per parcel for cofinancing. But other than that, we basically left the whole structure unchanged. So adjusted EBITDA, as I mentioned earlier, came in at 18.5% to land at PLN 1.018 billion for the quarter.

The faster growth is coming from our ads and fintech, and it's coming also from the lower SG&A growth compared to the levels we were seeing a year ago. And the real highlight here has been our delivery performance, where the multiple -- sorry, the growth rate came down to 19.6%, so quite a bit better than we saw in the fourth quarter. And the real star of the show here was our average cost per parcel, which is down by 4.2 percentage points compared to Q1 last year. Now that's coming from the investment in our rollout of Allegro delivery and the change in the mix from 29% managed this time last year to 45% of deliveries being managed by Alegro delivery in Q1.

And that was worth 6.8 percentage points of mix shift and that more than offset price increases that have kicked in from index on delivery partners at the beginning of Q1. So the strategy is really working. The parcel prices are coming down, which is really excellent news. The margin is at 6.2% of GMV, which is a bit above our full year outlook, and I'll come back to that as well later in the presentation. Moving on to capital investment and 24.8% increase in CapEx to 235 million for the Polish business.

The absolute growth is roughly evenly split between the other CapEx, the physical CapEx, which is mainly due to the increasing speed of our investments in the delivery network both APMs and the core network for the middle mile. And also our capital development -- capitalized development costs. The team size is roughly unchanged. We have obviously higher salaries to pay. But the main difference here is that we're getting increasingly efficient on the maintenance side and more of the time of our tech team is being spent on functional improvements and developments to help drive growth. So that's Poland.

Now let's look at Allegro International. As you've already heard, it's been doing extremely well. Let's start with a look at the pro forma data for the marketplaces only, so without any impact of the legacy mall activity, which will come to later. And we're really excited to report that the momentum that we were talking about in Q4 and how the flywheel is starting to accelerate in the marketplaces is really continuing to build. The GMV growth has accelerated by 19 percentage points quarter-on-quarter to 67% year-on-year for Q1 and it's worth to remember that as in Q4 of '25, geographically speaking, these are comparable like-for-like numbers.

All 3 of the markets were open already in the fourth quarter of 2024. So this is like-for-like growth and like-for-like acceleration. You already heard from Marcin, some of the reasons for this improvement in terms of the customer-facing metrics, there's a few more here that are worth touching on. Traffic growth is up 25% but the GMV growth is 67%, which, of course, means that the conversion rates are massively better than a year earlier, which means more engaged customers. The actual number of active buyers is up to -- is up 33.4% to 4.9 million. That's roughly 25% of e-commerce shoppers across those 3 countries which is really a good result after 3 years of activity.

The spend per active buyer is starting to pick up quickly now at 17.8% up on a year earlier. and is it PLN 613 for a 12-month period. And that means that the GMV itself adds up to PLN 804 million. So then now looking at the whole of the Allegro International segment, which means we need to take into account the more legacy effects as well. Here, we have the key KPIs of active buyers and spend. And when it comes to active buyers, you can see, first of all, in Q1 of 2026, there's those 4.9 million marketplace buyers.

So these customers only shop on the marketplace. Mall North legacy front ends were closed right at the end of Q1 last year in March. And at that point in time, there were 1.6 million customers who only had been shopping in the previous 12 months. on that legacy platform. So they've gradually faded out of the numbers, as you can see there, over the following 4 quarters and they're completely gone from the figures going forward. similar thing is going on in the spend, where all you have as of Q1 2026 is the marketplace spend and on this basis, we're growing by 22.8%, again as the legacy impact drops out of the numbers.

So for Q2 going forward, in essence, we're only going to be looking at the marketplace versus the marketplace a year ago. Putting that together at the level of the GMV, you can see that Allegro International segment grew by 46.3%, which is up by that 24.8 percentage points sequentially because this was the very last quarter where we had some significant GMV coming off of the legacy business. You can see that in gray there on the right-hand chart in Q1 of 2025, PLN 70 million of headwind which combines to reduce the growth rate from the 67% on the marketplace only to that 46% for the segment. 804 million of marketplace GMV on the Q1 2026 slide.

So going forward is blue skies. There's no legacy. There's only marketplace growth to look at in the numbers for Q2 onwards. On revenue, because of the fact that the more legacy business was predominantly a 1P business. So the revenue numbers relative to GMV are over-indexed. mean that we still see some revenue shrinkage in Q1 because of that mall legacy activity in the prior year. Q2 going forward, you're only going to be looking at the marketplace which grew 80% year-on-year in Q1 and the advertising in the marketplace, which was growing 30%. When it comes to profitability, the adjusted EBITDA loss was down by 17.7% or PLN 19 million for Q1.

You can see on the left-hand side there, the main improvement has come on that legacy business, which has now been transformed into a leaner merchant business, which only operates on the marketplace. That losses reduced from 43.6 million a year ago to just under PLN 19 million for Q1, and that includes the we do delivery business as well as the merchant. When it comes to the marketplace part of these numbers, the loss is slightly bigger, 60 million went up to 67 million because we've invested more money into marketing.

We're seeing a better return on marketing expenditure because of better conversion rates and the better engagement. So we're leaning into that and spending a bit more. You can see it's 10 million in the bridge. And that results in us pushing that flywheel even faster and growing the GMV even quicker. When it comes to our adjusted EBITDA margin to GMV, here is where you can see the real progress in our journey towards breakeven. As you remember, we're targeting breakeven by 2029 for these international markets. And there, you can see an improvement from minus 19% a year ago to minus 10.7% for Q1, 8. 3 percentage point improvement. It's nearly approaching 50% better than a year ago.

So that's international going really well. We're very happy with it. So let's now move to the outlook to finish up my part of the presentation. And we'll start with current trading comments for Q2, which obviously relate primarily to GMV. So starting with Poland, the first 6 weeks have seen high single-digit growth, and that is because there are some significant headwinds from the March effect I was just talking about earlier. First of all, the Easter trading that shifted into Q1 is not in Q2 as a result of the calendar.

And secondly, and just as importantly, our annual Smart Week events started this year a week later in the calendar and it only kicked off this past Monday, which means, essentially, it's not in that first 6-week period. It's actually started extremely well. We're 3 days in of about a 10-day shopping festival. So if you look through all of that and look at 4.5 months on a year-to-date basis, we're actually right around the midpoint of our GMV guidance, the guidance to remind you for the full 2026 is between 9% and 11%.

Moving on to international. And again, for the first 6 weeks, this flywheel continues to accelerate, and we're seeing year-on-year marketplace growth moving now above 70% year-on-year. And as I've been mentioning ad nauseam in the earlier part of the presentation, the more legacy effect is now basically completely disappeared from the numbers for Q2, almost completely disappeared. And as a result, the Allegro International segment growth has moved up from that 46% in Q1 to nearly 70% growth for this point in Q2.

And on a year-to-date basis, we're up now to 50% growth. What does that mean for the group? For the group, it means that quarter-to-date, we're very nearly 10% year-on-year GMV growth and the group level -- sorry, on the year-to-date level, is at nearly 12%. So just below the 12.8% we've reported today for Q1. So what does that mean for our outlook? We've made a slight upgrade of the top line expectations for International, slightly in the sense that obviously, it's a much smaller segment than the Polish business, but it's a very important improvement for international itself. And we're holding the Polish outlook unchanged at this point in time.

So let's go through our thinking on this, and let's start with Poland. As you just said, we're right on track for the midpoint of our guidance when it comes to GMV. And we're ahead of plan or we're delivering on our plan and our key objective to grow the GMV faster than we did in 2025, which would be a major change of trend that we've seen over the last few years. At the same time, we do have obviously, like everybody else, an eye on the geopolitical situation, and we have an eye on consumer sentiment.

But so far, we're not seeing any signs of ecerioation in performance. But we're obviously aware of the risk and we have an eye on that. When it comes to that really great EBITDA performance, the 18% growth that we saw in Q1, we don't expect that to continue at that level for the whole of the 2026. And the reason for that is, obviously, we haven't put up the take rates we will need, therefore, to absorb the cost increases, operating expenses and obviously, salaries will be higher over the course of the year.

We have factors offset some of that, like our growth engines. But nonetheless, we should expect the growth rate to be a bit lower in the subsequent quarters. So we're not making any adjustments at this stage to the EBITDA guidance. For international, we have increased the guidance by PLN 100 million of GMV, which translates to 5% faster growth than in the original outlook. That's adding 30 million to the revenue -- commission-based revenue from the marketplaces, which is also a 5% improvement in revenue growth.

There's clearly potential that it could be stronger than this, and we do have an appetite for more. At the same time, we have that same geopolitical concern about the consumer. The business is more discretionary dependent, especially in the fourth quarter than our Polish business, and we need to bear that in mind. We're also enjoying an FX tailwind right now, which can always reverse, so we to be cautious on that front. So we do have an appetite for all, but this is enough of an increase for now being prudent. No change to the EBITDA guidance for international because any additional gross margin we're getting from the faster growth, we're happy to reinvest into marketing at better ROIs than we've been receiving a year earlier.to grow that flywheel even faster.

So the group metrics don't really change very much, but I really want to underline that the international business is now accretive across all the group metrics on top of the Polish business and helps drive our full year growth. And the faster growth of the Allegro Group. So with that final comment, I'm going to hand it back to Marcin to wrap it up before Q&A.

Thank you, John. Great summary of the great results we achieved in Q1. So key takeaways for today. Allegro delivered robust Q1 results with growth in Poland rebounding to almost 12% year-on-year and margins coming in ahead of our previous expectations. We are seeing a continued strong acceleration in our international marketplaces, which grew by 67% in the first quarter and as a result of this momentum, we have officially upgraded of our full year outlook for the International segment.

Then our strategic evolution is progressing very well, and we are successfully expanding into our first raise categories. At the same time, our key growth engines like fintech delivery and advertising all delivered more than solid performances this quarter. In terms of operations, we continue to increase the share of volume managed directly by Allegro, which improves both efficiency and the customer experience. And finally, we are committed to shareholder returns with PLN 1.6 billion share buyback proposal set for a vote this June. Tomasz, it's time to open the Q&A session.

Thank you much, and John for the presentation. We are now ready for the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Andrew Ross from Barclays. .

Question. I've got 2 out okay. My first 1 was to ask about the new travel platform that you've launched in partnership with take. Can you give us a sense as to how the unit economics work, kind of you fine economics as I make transactions on the Allegro platform? And then any learnings you're having in terms of how your cohorts behave as you're adding in additional services in the Allegro platform. My second question is pretty much exactly the same 1 in terms of the partnership with Loxmed in terms of health. And maybe you can give us any color in terms of how the economics and the learnings from that call. And I guess, as part of the answer, it would be great if you could give us some perspective as to what we should be expecting next and perhaps some kind of vision as to how adjacent services on Allegro might look kind of 1, 2, 3 years down the road in terms of what you're trying to build.

This is a great question. And of course, as we announced, we just started to explore both segments, starting from healthcare and then travel having or seeing quite promising economics behind both corporations and both segments because of, firstly, rising value of the market in both segments and quite promising signs we see on the market. What we can share right now is take rate is relatively high.

We can say something about double-digit take rate and some kind of competition between some potential partners or vendors we see or we will see on the marketplace because as you probably said, we started cooperating with Luxmet and Itaka but of course, we are marketplaces so we invite all major players to join us and to develop these both segments together. The great thing is that we see this appetite from our customers to purchase services on Allegro. And combining physical products with services with value-added services, this is something creating very unique value proposition on our side. because you can imagine that even purchasing some healthcare services or travel packages, you can use potentially our financing products like Allegro pay.

So this is really something very unique on the market. Of course, we should remember that we do some tests, and this is kind of exploration for us because this is the very first time we or we promote services to our customers as a standalone. But again, of course, we do this development with our customers, and of course, with our merchants. So we did many analysis in the past. We we are close to both segments of the market, and this is something looking for us very promising.

If I could just follow up on that. So double-digit percent take rate on each incremental transaction, but that's to you guys and then any of the costs that you incur as part of that? Or is the incremental margin on this transaction is pretty high.

So looking at investments on our side, we can say that we are very, very efficient. And there is let's say, no risk on our side. Again, we are a marketplace. So we do not provide those services. We do it with partners. So quite limited investment on our side and again, very promising market.

Maybe just to add, Andrew, the way we're approaching getting into these services is to partner up with a key player in both cases, a very strong player. And it's a win-win opportunity because they see the opportunity to reach customers amongst our 15 million active buyers, which maybe they've not reached so far, and they think it gives them an edge.

And obviously, for us, it's a high take rate, 3P business model, so if we get traction, it's going to be a value -- EBITDA, sorry, accretive very quickly. And as Marcin said, it's about testing and seeing how well it goes. Over time, we'd expand it into more of a marketplace with multiple players, but we try to start with a strong player in each case.

The next question comes from Cesar Tiron from Bank of America.

Yes. Congratulations on the results. I have 3, but I think they're very easy. The first 1 is on the OpenAI partnership. I wanted to check what are the economics there? Are you paying them that's going to help you to generate in your opinion, incremental revenue, et cetera, et cetera, or potentially lower traffic acquisition cost. So that's on the OpenAI partnership. Then on the new services that you've discussed, I wanted to understand, without asking for formal guidance, just as an aspiration. If I look at Allegro in the next 3 to 5 years, these new services and probably others that you launch might be, in your view, a material contribution of the revenue of the marketplace revenue. Is that the case?

Or do you think it could be just low to mid-single digits. And then I think the third question, looking at Allegro1 -- the share of Allegro 1 in deliveries as keeps on increasing. So we're done on that how significant do you think it will be in the next, again, couple of years.

So great questions. I will start with describing our cooperation with OpenAI because this is something really big and I guess, 1 of the first initiatives in Europe between technology vendors specialized in AI and marketplaces. So thanks to this cooperation, we have early access to the newest technology. And you know that OpenAI is the owner of ChatGPT, the world #1 AI application, having access to hundreds of millions of customers or potential customers and for us, opening the new possibilities to be closer to some attractive new group of customers like young generation, for example.

So of course, thanks to this partnership, firstly, we think we will be able to increase conversion in some products or product categories because of giving our customers better advice in some -- related to some specific products. Thanks to that, as you probably mentioned, we also believe that traffic can be based on different stores, quite attractive 1 because again, we see that millions of users or customers in Poland, they use ChatGPT.So we will have our position secured by this -- in this application and potentially having access to some new attractive group of customers.

And of course, you know we have a clear strategy how to leverage AI both externally and internally, of course, internally to use this great technology to just be more efficient and to increase our productivity. and externally to reach some new group of customers and, of course, to be much more diversified than in the past when it comes to traffic. So great cooperation and something very promising to us. But of course, we do cooperate with all major players specialized in AI development. So OpenAI, this is 1 of the key players, but not the only one.

Thank you for the questions. I'll take the other 2. On the new services, as Marcin said, we initially is testing how the consumers respond to these offers and whether it works for both us and for the part and assuming that it will do, then we'll obviously build it from there. And the -- as I said in the previous -- to the previous question, it should be accretive in an EBITDA sense, very quickly if it catches hold. As you saw in the presentation, both of those categories are multibillion opportunities. So we can potentially take a reasonably large share, but we've not tried to make any projections at this point in time.

I think more important is we're not finished with just these 2 sectors. There are other sectors that we can address. and what we've got in mind will become clear over time. We've got within the marketplace, something like 10 different categories, we're covering a really wide range and that's -- and we're not overly dependent on any particular category. And we'd probably like to get to a similar situation on the services side.

Regarding Allegro 1, there's every reason why we'll continue to build the Allegro delivery share and the managed share. quarter-to-quarter over time. I mean it clearly works. Proximity of the lockers is very important, and we have enough lockers out there in the market that proximity is doing its work and the quality of the service is also very strong, and customers are happy. So they're happy to use the nearest lower. Back in March, we gave you quite a bit of additional information about where we would need to increase our geographic coverage.

We think we need maybe another 15,000 lockers deployed in underserved areas by Allegro delivery in order to really have the coverage that we need. But the middle mile capacity is there. Remember, there's 4 different players within the consortia, all with middle mile capacity. So we have potential to do a lot more than we're able to do at the moment. But that isn't the target objective. The target is to keep the impose lockers also within the offering for the consumers to make sure that everyone's nearest locker is going to be available to them on the Allegro, that's the preferred outcome.

Thank you, gentlemen. The next question comes from Roman Resene from Goldman Sachs.

Considerations on strong results. I have 3 questions. The first 1 will be just a follow-up on Allegro delivery and your expansion into lower density areas. Would you expect some impact on cost per parcel? And are you sure you would still have a cost advantage versus what you pay to impost as you go further into the lower density areas. The second question on the international, what technically has structurally changed in the business that gives you confidence on the GMV acceleration, would you say that you have reached some sort of real inflection in any of the flywheel drivers such as order frequency seller and to traction and customer acquisition?

And the last 1 on the LLM if you can please quantify the current share of traffic and GMV coming from LLM driven discovery versus traditional channels, how has it trended over the last few quarters and how does the LLM driven traffic compare in quality versus traditional channels.

Roman, thank you for the questions. I'll take the first 2 and then hand it over to Marcin for the LLM. Allegro delivery in low-density areas. It's a very fair question. And the answer is pretty obvious. Obviously, the lower density areas will have a higher unit cost than the bigger cities. So it is something of a headwind on the average unit cost for sure, going into those areas. But for the time being, given where we are with negotiations, et cetera, it's absolutely necessary to do that. And we need to be present everywhere.

And I think that's also true of the partners. It isn't such a strong headwind, though, that it would stop us on the average unit cost seeing improvement over time as we continue to build the volume. So yes, there is a headwind from it, but it doesn't overwhelm all the good stuff that we've been seeing over the previous quarters. International, you were asking what's giving us confidence in this flywheel. Maybe starting from -- the answer is quite a long one. I think there's many things that are starting to move positively and reinforce each other. If we start from the instrument, remember that these consumers 3 years ago have never really met a marketplace with massive selection superiority that we're selling mostly branded goods and mostly Central Europe specific selection.

But it took -- and it takes them a while to get used to it, right? And -- but the metrics that Marcin was going through should give you some confidence that they're warming up to it. They're starting to trust it. And as a result, the frequency is going up. The frequency -- when we look at the older cohorts, we can see that they're getting up to levels which are above 10 transactions a year. We have an average in Poland of above 20%, right? So it's going in the right direction because it's only been for 3 years.

And at the same time, we've got new customers coming in, we'll obviously start with low frequency, right? So that's keeping a cap on the overall average. So the frequency is going up, it means that the conversion rates when they come to shop, there's much higher purchase intent, which is why the conversion rates are going up. And that then feeds into the cost of marketing. You can buy the traffic more cheaply when the conversion rates are better when Google has confidence that sending customers to this particular site is something that the customers are going to be happy with, you end up being able to buy the traffic more cheaply. So the cost per click is moving in the right direction. The conversion rate is also moving in the right direction.

So the marketing spend is more and more efficient in terms of driving growth. And at the same time, the frequency in itself because it's going up, some start to get used to coming direct, either via the app or director in their browser. And you don't need to buy as much of the traffic because they start their searches always on Google or on other platforms. So all of these things start to work together and turn that flywheel better and better. The other aspect, which is very important, is obviously the merchant side. And again, we've got some really good initiatives running around bringing in local merchants and also additional Polish merchants and widening selection even further.

And all of that is helping as well. So it's really very exciting the way that it's going. We've been very patient with it, and we've done a awful lot of work over the last 2 years to address initial suspicions or concerns that consumers had about working with the marketplace and it's paying off.

The question about rare and traffic and impact is super interesting. Unfortunately, we don't share any specific data related to traffic structure, but we can say that this is something we perceive as promising source. Today, I can say this is not material in the whole big picture. But of course, we do invest because -- you know that the paid traffic is mainly based on sales changing from Google or some social media platforms from meta, so every single player trying to change or to help us to diversify sources of traffic is -- this is something really helpful for us.

The second thing is that people use AI assistance applications today mainly to explore, to be inspired or to comparison products or to get some additional specific information. And I guess I believe that the traffic from AI assistance will be growing next year, but we should be quite patient because this is something all about changing habits and some scenarios to help people use e-commerce and how they want to purchase some goods or now services as well. And as you see, we do invest in corporations like with OpenAI just to have access to the absolutely U.S. technology and thanks to that to create some advantage in comparison to other platforms and, of course, use this cooperation or cooperations to also create some additional or new sources of traffic.

So this is something very promising. Right now, this is not material in the whole big picture. But we strongly believe in that technology that this is something like tailwind to our marketplace to speed up our development and having access to attractive group of customers. So that's the answer.

Thank you, gentlemen. We're quite popular to pay. So the next question comes from Aaron Armstrong from Ashburn Group.

Congratulations on a very strong results. Firstly, on the opening actually just follow up on the recent points. Can you talk about, say, a customer that begins a product such within ChatGPT Poland for a product or a service that you offer would you then be a preferential kind of option for them? Would you be bumped up the more organic ways in the way that you would be, say, for paid Google traffic, would you be kind of like a paid ChatGPT listing.

Is that kind of how that's going to work for you? That's part one. I just pack question. Other question is on the ASP growth that we saw just over 3% in Poland this quarter. Is that an explicit strategy from the management team to help drive higher ticket prices, which can help absorb delivery costs over higher ticket size with positive implications of profitability?

And can that continue through the year? And then also in the slide deck under your partnerships section, Sabka mentioned. Could you talk a little bit about that and perhaps any broader comments on grocery, please.

So I will cover the first question related to again, our cooperation with OpenAI. And of course, or results, what you see asking ChatGPT, for example, for some products is currently based on organic results. And as you know, I guess, any single platforms announced yet commercial model like to present some paid traffic like we know from series like Google. So again, this cooperation is based mainly on using the newest technology. And of course, thanks to that, we can expect that we will see some improvements in visibility of product fit in many applications using AI but this is not something securing our position.

So we do a lot, of course, to have perfect descriptions of products. Of course, the best offering and the best I think on the market. And as said, we do cooperate with many vendors of AI technologies on the market. So we will be even much more active in the future in this field.

Sorry, that second question, there was a bit of background noise. I didn't catch exactly what you were asking about ASP. Could you rephrase it.

So maybe I will jump to the question related to Japan our view on the grocery market. I guess, many times we shared with the market some data related to quite promising or the most promising categories we have on the marketplace and our supermarket, including grocery, which is 1 of them. So we do invest, of course, to have better selection and of course, to keep the most attractive prices on the market cooperating with hundreds or even thousands merchant partners we have on marketplace. Today, we shared that we do cooperate with Zabka mainly to accelerate growth of our loyalty program, smart. So we have great cooperation with this company.

But answering your question related to grocery, we do believe in this category. We see increasing demand from our customers. We see high growth in our supermarket, so this is something giving us confidence that we should invest maybe even more to improve our presence in this part of the market because this is really exciting part of our journey investing in changing habits of our customers, and you know that grocery in is it's still quite demanding category, but promising.

So we carefully invest, but we want to improve our presence in this part of the market.

Let me take another stab at the ASP question as I think my colleague understood better than I did. So the question is, is it our strategy to drive the higher ticket categories, if I understand correctly, on average selling price. The answer to that is not particularly all categories are good. We make money on all categories. And what we see in this quarterly result is that inflation is creeping back into average selling price generally across the categories.

Obviously, after the very high inflation back in '22 and '23, it almost completely disappeared out of our numbers if you've been following closely quarter-by-quarter, in later 2024 and through 2025, there was very little ASP inflation, but it's starting to creep back in.

Having said that, we are very focused on UX on all categories. As Marcin said previously, there are improvements across the board. In particular, automotive is just introduced a great new function where I think you just put in your registration number, if I recall, and it knows immediately what car model it is. And when you then say you need windscreen wiper or rubbers or something like this or any other component in those immediately what you're looking for. So that's made a difference.

And it's only 1 of many things that contributed to automotive having a good quarter. So -- any relative faster growth in the higher ASP categories is obviously going to have a positive impact on ASP. But as I said, just about anything we sell brings us a profit and we'll take the growth wherever we're getting it, and everyone is working hard to deliver growth.

So the question comes from Michal Potyra from UBS.

Just follow-up questions really. So really, the first follow-up question is regarding the delivery unit cost. In your presentation, you mentioned a decline in unit cost. Could you just please clarify whether this refers to the full cash costs, including leases, you have to pay on your APMs or only the portion recognized at the EBITDA level? And perhaps if the latter is the case, could you perhaps elaborate on this trajectory of total costs, including leases you have to pay for your own APMs. So this is the first question. .

That's a really good opportunity to clarify. Yes, the costs that we're measuring in that metric, if you remember, it was on the EBITDA bridge. So it's the EBITDA cost that we're taking into account there, which means for the Allegro delivery partners that we have, DPD, DHL and ORLEN. It's the effectively the unit price per parcel that we're paying to them for delivering a package, right? And that's the whole cost that we have to worry about. And in the case of Allegro 1, which is the fourth partner and is responsible, not for the whole of that 48%, but for a part of it.

You're absolutely right that the lease costs are not in that number because they're below EBITDA. But those lease costs grow with a number of locations. And from then on, they're just the fixed cost and the more volume we're putting through the lower the full cost of delivery. I think back in March, we were sharing the -- some information on the full cost. But certainly, the full cost now on Allegro 1 is low enough that it's competitive with what we're paying to other players, including their profit margin. Hopefully, that's clear.

Let me have 1 more, please, maybe a little bit more philosophical. You have 15 million active shoppers in Poland already, maybe you could provide your perspective on what you see as the potential ceiling for the number of active shoppers in Poland? Or perhaps you could share some penetration data on different age cohorts? How does it look like?

Yes, that's also a great question. I mean as you know, our definition of an active buyer is a unique e-mail account. And that means that, in some cases, that's 1 buyer who's representing a whole household. So there can be 2, 3, 4 Polish citizens or residents behind that single account in many cases, right? So just about everyone in Poland shops with Allegro either frequently, very frequently or there is a tail of occasional shopper.

It really becomes super relevant to just about everybody once they become a household, right? It's maybe not so relevant for very, very young shoppers who don't have much wallet. And when they do have wallet, they buy beer or maybe sneakers, or bus tickets and things like that, right, the students. So once you actually set up on your own and you rent a flat or you own a flat -- just about everybody shops on the Allegro. Do you want to answer that margin?

Yes. And as John said, of course, the number of our customers actively use in our marketplace. This is 1 of the crucial things or KPS to us. But or secondly, we should think and to invest a lot how to improve frequency of shopping at that marketplace because we do invest to convince people to move some from the offline world to the marketplace because we offer them better selection, better prices, better convenience. So this is a great opportunity to us.

And of course, it should be always combined with the number of active buyers. But again, the big win is also to improve frequency of shopping or average spending of our customers. So this is something we are focused on.

So I understand there is just like no material difference for kind of older cohorts like 60 plus, let's say, people who are not as used to using online tools in their youth or is there is a difference.

They are interesting questions because I remember exactly the same questions when I started 9 years ago in Allegro. We were worried about lack of young cohorts. And at that time, we're also a bit worried about the fact that some of these older cohorts were not highly representative because as you just described it, they weren't really Internet natives, right? The people who were 65, 9 years ago, are now in their 70s, right? And the consumers who were 16, 17, 9 years ago are now in their mid-20s and have probably moved out of home and they've got their first flat and stuff like that, right? So in both cases, the problem has gone away.

Those very young people are now starting out in their adult lives. They start to shop more on Allegro. We've got just as many people in the mid-20s category as we add, if not more, than 10 years ago. And the same in the sort of 65 category, they are old people that are much more familiar with the Internet than the people that are in the 70-plus category and they are very active buyers. The amazing thing about Allegro is people, once they start stopping on it, they don't stop shopping on it, right?

What you do see is probably the heaviest offers are the people in their mid-40s who've got the most spending power. We were like peak spending power. And then people tend to start spending less once their kids move out and stuff like that, right? So all of these type sort of typical lifetime patterns are visible, if you go look.

Thank you, gentlemen. The next question comes from Nick Baker from BNP Paribas.

I was wondering if you can talk more about how the Allegro shopping assistant has been received by buyers and what the learnings are from it in its early stages. Feel free also to talk about any of the other AI initiatives outside of the OpenAI relationship that we've obviously touched on a fair amount, how they're progressing. And then my second question is just what's behind sort of the rollout progress of the Allegro Pay Card and how can that continue going forward?

So I will take the first question. Again, we do believe in AI, and this is the second or even the third version of our AI assistant or maybe assistance because we do invest also to help not only consumers, but also our partners, our merchants to improve efficiency to be more effective selling some goods on marketplace. And comparing both versions because I think the initial version was introduced in Q4 for some limited part of our customer base.

We see huge progress. This tool is much more effective and the results are almost perfectly looking for something or to be advised by AI technology or AI assistant. As said before, this is something really helping us to improve conversion in some specific products or some specific pretty advanced product categories. So -- and again, the new source for us to create some additional GMV, we see that use AI assistant to explore the catalog and to be inspired by AI. So -- even yesterday, having meetings with our customers and observing how they use our AI assistance, they were absolutely amazed how helpful this technology is and how they are advised to find some proper products. So again, to summarize, we do believe in this technology very strongly. and we want to continue our investment in cooperation with OpenAI, but also as said before, with other leading AI technology vendors.

Allegro Pay Card. I think it was the second question. This product is very well received by the consumers. We're only offering it to customers who are already having an Allegro Pay wallet shop on Allegro. And really, the sky is the limit as to how much we can continue to penetrate this space and get an upsell them a card or open a card account to go with the -- with their wallet that's dedicated to Allegro. So plenty of headroom here to keep growing that.

Thank you, gentlemen. And the last set of questions for today comes from Pito pack from PKOBP, Porch, Go ahead with your questions.

It's just one. The question is what take rate do you expect in the next quarters, especially comparing year-on-year. I know that the take rate increase was very limited in March, but it seems that in the last 2 quarters, some investments into price seem to be visible. of my leaders bet here. I mean the base for comparison in the second, third and fourth quarter last year is higher in terms of take rate. So yes, what should we expect here on the policy business?

Yes, Pat, thank you for that question. Yes, you're absolutely right. One thing that does detract from take rates are when we share take rate with the merchants to try and hit a particular price point, either as part of a campaign event like Smart week or just generally because we know that somewhere off of the Allegro there is a lower price point and we want to match it. So the amounts we're investing are getting larger, partly because we're managing to monitor more and more selection at scale.

So there's more, more opportunity to spend and to fulfill our promise to be extremely price competitive. And that does take a few bps off of the take rate on a year-on-year basis. So the take rate will -- there's no reason that the take rate is going to move higher because we haven't increased the rates significantly. You will see a slight uptick probably because of the few bps that come from that co-financing change. but the effect that you just identified is working in the opposite direction.

Okay. So roughly flat take rate versus first quarter, I guess yes.

Roughly flat. Did I hear you say, I think.

Yes versus first quarter this year.

You have to wait and see how it comes out. But yes, there's no reason for it to make a significant move in either direction.

Thank you, Piet, and thank you all. This concludes our presentation for today. Thanks for joining, and we're looking forward to speaking to you again when we publish first half results in September.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and I would like to welcome you to Allegro's Q4 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

So without further ado, I will now pass the line to Tomasz Pozniak, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, [ Rafael, ] and welcome to all participants of our call. Let me introduce the presenters of today. Mr. Marcin Kusmierz, the CEO of Allegro Group, will provide you with the highlights of Allegro performance in Q4 and full year 2025 with a summary of key takeaways towards the end of our presentation. And Mr. Jon Eastick, our CFO, who will guide you through the financials, update of medium-term aspirations and the outlook for the full year 2026. As usual, our results presentation is available for download from our Investors web page at allegro.eu. You may also download these slides from the link available on the webcast screen.

As a reminder, today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from the expectations expressed in such statements. Please make sure you review the full disclaimer on Slide #2. Also, please note that the presentation and the Q&A session are being recorded and will be available for a replay on our website at allegro.eu.

And with this, I would like to hand over to our CEO. Marcin, the floor is yours.

Good morning. Thank you, Tomasz, for the introduction. Today, Jon Eastick and I are pleased to meet with you and present and discuss the results for Q4 and for the entire year 2025. Let's move on to the presentation. We are delighted to present the successful year and the results we achieved in relation to updated guidance. We delivered them in all areas. Our international operations even have exceeded our expectations and plans. And this is a very good sign for 2026, especially since we have a lot of great projects and initiatives in the pipeline that are focused on accelerating the growth of the company.

Moving on to the annual summary of results, we show the enormous scale that Allegro has achieved and how various financial indicators contribute to strengthening its financial profile. Group GMV is nearing the PLN 70 billion mark achieving a 9% growth rate. Our consolidated group revenue reached PLN 12 billion, a robust 11% increase, while the group adjusted EBITDA rose over 15% year-over-year to PLN 3.5 billion. Total group CapEx was around PLN 940 million, showing around 52% year-over-year growth and finishing in line with expectations. A significant achievement this year was our profitable growth in Poland, where we reached a full year GMV margin at 6%. This marks the second straight year we have exceeded our midterm margin aspirations in our home market.

Our Polish revenue growth specifically reflects rising take rates, higher advertising penetration and the successful expansion of our fintech and logistics engines. To understand our current momentum, we turn to the fourth quarter top line results. We demonstrate Allegro's continued leadership in the Polish market, where we are constantly growing faster than the broader economy. In Q4, Polish GMV grew by 8.6% year-over-year, steadily outpacing the domestic nominal retail growth of 4.4% for the same period. We saw our group active buyers base advanced to 21 million, which is -- which over 15 million in Poland. Crucially, average annual spend for the group accelerated to 8% growth, while in Poland, the average spend reached over PLN 4,000 per year, up over 7.3% year-over-year.

Financial discipline and balance sheet strength are the focus for the group. We successfully reduced our leverage showing good progress quarter after quarter. This strong position was maintained even after funding a share buyback PLN 1.4 billion. In Poland, our adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin remained stable year-over-year at 5.59% for Q4. Group CapEx for the quarter was nearly PLN 300 million, up 60% year-over-year as we accelerated investment in our logistics rollout and new platform functionalities.

Looking ahead, we are refining the strategic focus to ensure solid fundamentals for the future. We show our evolution from simply growing the Core to supercharging through AI automation and high-value services. Our revised priorities include transforming our international expansion model into one that is low capital intensive and replicable. We are also focused on externalizing our assets by offering wider change of logistics, advertising, financial services to our partners to improve unit economics and build deeper loyalty. Our ambition -- and first of all, the plan we have is to speed up the growth of the company and grow faster than in the previous years.

Allegro is technology-native organization, and we use artificial intelligence as a primary driver of internal efficiency. We are currently running almost 100 specific AI projects across the whole organization. We are targeting a 20% to 25% productivity increase in 2026 by integrating AI across full product development cycle. Our goal is to have AI embedded in around 40% of our tech portfolio by year-end 2026, aiming for 33% performance gains in our processes by the end of 2028. To make AI tangible for our users, we are rolling out specific customer-facing products. We've introduced our newest AI tools based on conversations designed to simplify journey for both buyers and merchants. For buyers, our AI assistant offers a new way of discovering products through natural language search. For selling partners, we are testing Ally, a new all-new AI assistant that provides instant sales support and step-by-step guidance for seller center tools, helping them to manage daily operations much more effectively.

It is worth emphasizing that we treat AI as a booster for our growth. Increasing work efficiency is one very important dimension. The second is ability to acquire new customer groups, have an attractive sales channel and generate traffic. We work with all leading providers of this technology so that customers in Central and Eastern Europe have access to the latest and best AI-based solutions. Our core marketplace remains our greatest competitive value. We are expanding selection and technology to ensure Allegro remains the first choice for consumers. Our best price guarantee badge reached a record 1.7 million products in Poland. We continuously onboard major brands like Bestseller Group or FC-MOTO. Additionally, we deployed semantic search for our markets in Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, allowing buyers to find products using natural descriptions instead just keywords.

Customer loyalty is cornerstone for our long-term value. Last year, we showed the significant progress of our Allegro Smart! program and strategic changes ensuring its continued growth. We have reached 7.5 million Smart! users in Poland with nearly 90% of them on paid subscriptions. To use more often Smart! in daily life, we also launched a multi-area exclusive partnership with Zabka last December. We also announced that starting March 2026, the minimum order value for Smart! renewals will move to PLN 49. In practice, this means that we have equalized MOV deliveries for APMs and Kurier, significantly expanding the group of customers who can benefit from door-to-door deliveries.

Advertising is our fastest-growing high-margin revenue stream. This segment is transforming Allegro into a powerful retail media platform. Advertising revenue grew 24% year-over-year in Q4, reaching 2.24% of GMV. Our flagship sponsored offers produced PLN 1.2 billion in annual revenue, driven by advanced algorithm development and bidding optimization. Furthermore, our Off-Allegro network advertising grew by an impressive 70% year-over-year, supplying additional traffic to drive the marketplace flywheel. We see significant headroom for further growth in advertising. Here, we see our road map for 2026 and beyond, focusing on reaching customers earlier in their journey. As revenue growth is expected to continue outpacing GMV over the medium term. In 2026, we will accelerate investment in upper funnel advertising solutions to help brands build awareness and consideration. Machine learning-enabled improvements have already increased ad relevance, driving 10% higher click-through rates.

FinTech has shifted to a major financial pillar to the group. This slide tracks the growth of Allegro Pay and its role in financing marketplace volume. Loan origination reached closely PLN 14 billion for the full year, a 26% increase year-over-year. We reached over PLN 10 billion in total GMV finance in 2025, which represents 20% growth. Our innovation in fintech will accelerate in 2026. We plan to move Allegro Pay beyond our platform and deepen integration with daily banking flows. We will scale Allegro KliK and externalize Allegro Pay card to extend credit origination beyond Allegro. For selling partners, we are increasing Allegro Kapital fixed term loan limits with PKO BP up to PLN 500,000. We're also developing our first merchants credit product for release in 2026.

Control over the delivery experience is central to our strategy. We showed the rapid shift towards Allegro managed volumes, allowing us to guarantee quality and manage costs. Allegro managed volume share grew by 17 percentage points during 2025, reaching 41% in Q4. Over 90% of parcels are delivered within 2 days with the majority arriving next day. We successfully managed peak demand using Allegro delivery alone to service extended times on December 24. This shift in volume is a major tailwind for our margins. Diversified delivery partnerships and our own infrastructure allow us to manage unit cost effectively. All Allegro delivery partners are currently cheaper than the highest priced supplier in the market. Continued growth in our One Box network is driving unit cost down and total Allegro One volumes, including One Box one, One Kurier were up 80% year-over-year.

To support our volume goals, we have built the most accessible pickup network in Poland. Here, we see the scale of APM's infrastructure. Our network reached over 36,000 APMs and 37,000 PUDO points by year-end 2025. We do it together with DPD, DHL and Orlen Paczka. Customer satisfied [ its Elite ] with NPS of nearly 80 points for Q4. We also plan to extend One Box network by another up to 4,000 units in 2026, alongside additional investment in sorting facilities. Data shows that convenience is driven by proximity is quickly closing the gap with competitors. Nearly 55% of buyers already have Allegro Delivery IPM as their closest or equal distance pickup option. Closely 70% of buyers on Allegro machine is closer or no further than 200 meters away from the highest price supplier. We are moving rapidly to cover remaining gaps to ensure that we are most convenient choice for every Polish consumer.

Turning our international presence, we present highlights of the strong performance of new marketplaces. Allegro international marketplaces, specifically in Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, saw very strong top line growth with full year GMV up to 60% year-over-year. This has been achieved alongside significant optimization of cost lines, resulting a major improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin since 2023. To understand our international scale, let's look at how our customer base is evolving in Central Eastern Europe. We present the rapid adoption of our new marketplaces and the deepening engagement of international shoppers as we successfully replicate our Polish flywheel across the region. In 2025, our international marketplaces reached a major milestone with 4.6 million active customers, representing nearly 40% increase year-over-year.

This growth is being driven by the expansion of our footprint in CEE markets, including the launches of Allegro Slovakia in February and Allegro Hungary in October 2024. We're seeing strong signs of increasing trust. For example, NPS in Czechia has climbed to nearly 60 points, trending towards Polish levels. Customer engagement is also stepping up with an 80% increase in highly engaged buyer, making 10 or more purchases annually.

Moving on to Mall turnaround. This slide details the successful completion of the transformation. This was a critical strategic objective to move away from heavy asset legacy models towards a lean marketplace-centric approach that aligns with our core strength. We have officially transitioned the Mall and CZC brands to lean merchant model, integrated them into Allegro marketplace environment. To further sharpen our focus on the core business, we divested the Mall South segment in Slovenia and Croatia with the sale concluding in February 2026. Our logistic capabilities were also streamlined with WE|DO integrated into technological staff and rebranded as One Kurier. Beyond financial metrics, our success is built on a foundation of strong culture and corporate responsibility. We present industry-leading performance as a top employer and deep commitment to ESG.

We are proud to be ranked as the #1 employer in the retail category and #12 overall among Poland's top employer for 2025. Allegro remains committed to equality, having been certified by the Equal Salary Foundation for paying women equally for equal work. Our social impact is tangible. Allegro Charity raised over PLN 70 million in 2025, a 25% increase year-over-year.

Thanks very much, Marcin, and good morning, everybody. I'm really pleased to be with you to take you through the financial aspects of our Q4 results and then later in the presentation, the outlook for 2026. Before I start, as usually, with Poland, let me just quickly explain why you'll notice on most of these slides, we have pro forma marked on them. As you probably heard, we divested a couple of weeks ago, our Mall South subsidiary, which -- or segment, I should call it, which was the Slovenian and Croatian business. And this was the result of a strategic review we did as part of the Mall turnaround during the course of 2025. That culminated in December with us making a final decision that the best option for this business was to dispose of it and sell it. And that resulted in a change to our definition of continuing operations, and we moved Mall South into discontinued operations.

Now making that change means that all the as-reported numbers in our financial statements effectively exclude Mall South, both for 2025 and for 2024. And that causes a bit of a conundrum because obviously, the last 3 quarters, we've been explaining the results, including Mall South and also the guidance was set up, including Mall South. So we decided the best way to tackle that is to use pro forma numbers, including Mall South to maintain consistency. So the following 2 slides, which I'm not going through in any detail, should convince you that these differences are very marginal. The one thing worth noting for the full year perspective, this means in as reported numbers, PLN 0.6 billion less GMV, PLN 0.4 billion less revenue because most of that was retail revenue. And most importantly, a PLN 23 million higher profit because it was a loss-making business.

So that's why it's pro formas. Let's move on and take a good look at Poland. As usual, the key stats are laid out on the summary slide. Let's go and look at the KPIs. So nothing much new here. Our key growth lever remains the tremendous loyalty of our customer base who spend year-over-year more and more on the Allegro platform. Q4 was no different. 7.3% advance on a year-on-year basis in the fourth quarter to PLN 4,327 of average spend per active buyer on an annual basis, which is a really, really strong performance. Active buyers has also done pretty well in the fourth quarter. We had 0.8% increase in the quarter alone and 1.9% for the full 12-month period. So we had 15,350,000 active buyers in Poland at the end of 2025. So putting those 2 levers together, you get a GMV result of 8.6% year-on-year growth for Q4, which lands us on PLN 18.9 billion for the quarter. The results, if you recall, we were a little bit worried about in the first half of November when we met to discuss Q3 because the first half of November was moving slowly.

The second part of Black Week and then the Christmas demand was way stronger, and we executed extremely well in the second part of the quarter. We were also supported by the cold weather finally arriving, and that all made for a really strong December and a good overall finish with 8.6% for the quarter. High-frequency categories continue to move ahead faster than the average, 2x faster in this quarter. And it's also worth noting that when you do a mix-adjusted view of the categories, we had the highest result in terms of average selling price we've seen for quite a long time, 1.6% category-by-category average growth in selling price.

So let's move on and look at revenues. And as usual, revenue is moving well ahead of GMV growth. For Q4, it was 16.4% year-on-year growth landing on PLN 3.238 billion for the quarter. And as usual, that additional growth is coming from the growth engines primarily. Advertising, as you heard from Marcin, 24% up in the quarter year-on-year. Logistics, as we move more and more business into our Allegro Delivery operation, up 161% year-on-year. And within the other revenue, you have mainly fintech growth, which added PLN 41 million, 72.8% on a year-on-year basis. Looking at the take rate, which obviously also supported marketplace revenue growth. Q4 was 0.25 percentage points higher year-on-year. That was all down to the co-financing increases that we made back in March. When you look at it seasonally or look at it Q-on-Q, the typical fourth quarter seasonality was visible with a drop down to 12.26% that will then rebound in the first quarter. This comes from a couple of reasons.

One is that merchants spend less on promotion because demand is there anyway. And secondly, this year, we leaned more on the pricing lever, which we fund by sharing take rate with our merchants and a bit less on the marketing lever than we did in the prior year. So the take rate came down a bit. You'll see later marketing costs didn't grow as fast as last year. So let's look at adjusted EBITDA. It's lower seasonally in terms of margin at 5.6%, but it's flat on a year-on-year basis, 5.6% adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin. That translates into an 8.2% rise in adjusted EBITDA for Poland year-on-year, PLN 1.055 billion of adjusted EBITDA generated in just the 1 quarter.

When you look at the bridge, the revenue drivers and their contribution are clear on the left-hand side of that bridge. As usual, let's focus in on the cost of delivery, which was up by 24.7% year-on-year. So the difference being PLN 194 million higher cost than a year earlier. That splits out 9% from volume growth and from increased penetration of the smart services on the one hand. 10% is purely accounting because as we move into greater use of Allegro Delivery within the delivery mix, we have to report the cost growth, and we recognize the revenues gross as well because we're actually the principal in the transaction rather than subcontracting when the accounting is done on a net basis. So that's 10% and that leaves from a unit cost perspective, a 5.6% increase in the average unit cost per parcel. And again, Allegro Delivery contributes here. That would have been over 10% if we hadn't had that mix shift away from the highest cost supplier.

Marketing costs, 17% up year-on-year. much, much slower growth than we had a year ago. Instead of PLN 67 million growth year-on-year; last year, it was about PLN 120 million of increase. So that's adjusted EBITDA. CapEx. Our year-to-date Polish CapEx came in at 22.3% of our Polish adjusted EBITDA, which means we were comfortably with inside of our guide rail of up to 25%. Looking at the quarter alone, we had 77.6% increase Q4 to Q4 to PLN 286 million of CapEx. You can see clearly the biggest driver is the other or physical CapEx of 155% growth, and that's mainly coming from the investments that we're making in logistics across APMs, middle mile and the sorting center. Capitalized development cost is also up, but much more moderately at 19% growth, bigger tech team, higher salary costs, but also a bigger share of spending on new initiatives that get capitalized.

So that concludes the Polish review. Now let's move on and take a look at international, which, as you already heard from Marcin, had an excellent fourth quarter. So let's start with the marketplace perspective. And I start with this because, obviously, the strategically important activity in our international business is to build these 3 marketplaces into large and profitable businesses over time. So let's look at how this has been going. In the fourth quarter, we had almost 49% year-on-year growth in the marketplace. And bear in mind, this is the first quarter where the baseline actually included the activity of all 3 of the geographies at the same time. We lapped the Hungarian launch right at the beginning of the fourth quarter. So 49% was a result we were really happy with, and it also beat our guidance. And what this is really reflecting is that increasing enthusiasm and engagement of the customers.

As you saw on the slide that Marcin presented earlier, all the metrics are starting to move quickly in terms of their trust in Allegro, brand recognition, you name it, it's starting to move really positively. And that is then reflected here on this slide where you've got some of the funnel metrics. Traffic, for example, we only needed to grow the traffic by 16.6%, buying a lot less free traffic because we had a lot more -- sorry, buying a lot less paid traffic in proportion to the free traffic, which has been exploding. And that 16.6% was enough to generate the GMV growth of 49%. So also conversion rates going up very quickly. It also, therefore, translated into active buyer growth, which is up very strongly, 37.3% to 4.6 million customers. And when we look at spend per buyer, it's now starting to move, 15.1% growth on a year-on-year basis to PLN 584. That metric for Q3 was 10%, okay? So it's really starting to move very positively. So we're really happy with the marketplace.

Now let's look at the segment view, which is called the Allegro International segment. And just as a reminder, this is including the legacy Mall North business. So that includes the legacy e-shops, which we shut down at the beginning of -- sorry, at the end of Q1 of 2025 and also the WE|DO logistics business. So that's blended in with the marketplace numbers that I was just showing previously. And that blending means that a lot of these growth trends are a little bit hidden, and I'll go through that in a second. But that is going to drop out of the baseline numbers during the first or second quarter of '26, just leaving that growth story that I went through on the previous slide.

So let me just run through that and illustrate how that works on the next couple of slides. For example, on active buyers, there's the 4.6 million marketplace buyers for the fourth quarter that I just discussed, 37.3% growth. But overall, we're minus 1.2% growth because of the legacy customers who are now dormant and gradually running out of the last 12-month metric on the top of the slide. So 1.2% down in terms of active buyers in total. Similar trend going on in spend. The 15% growth to PLN 584 averages out to PLN 544 of spend and 3.4% growth when you include the Mall legacy. Applying the same to the GMV and the Allegro International segment. You can see on the left-hand side of the slide there in the gray, the legacy retail revenues that are still going to be in the baseline until the second quarter. And that means that the 48.8% growth that we had in the 3P marketplace nets out to 21.5% growth in the blended view.

Retail, you see an even stronger effect because obviously, the retail revenue of the legacy business over-indexes with the 3P marketplace where we only own commission. So in this case, the revenue is down 30%. But by the time we get to Q2, that's all behind us, and you'll be seeing positive revenue growth. So to wrap up this section, let's look at the adjusted EBITDA loss, which is, I think, much more interesting. The loss has been cut on a year-on-year basis for Q4 by PLN 13 million or 7% year-on-year. But you see here clearly the mall turnaround effect where the PLN 42 million loss we had a year ago has been cut drastically to a PLN 12 million loss in the fourth quarter. And that's because of all the transformation we've done. What's left now essentially is just the mall lean merchant model selling over the marketplace. We reinvested some of that saving into growing the international marketplace faster, essentially into additional marketing. So the loss was slightly higher at PLN 159 million for the fourth quarter.

But as you can see, we're really getting good GMV growth in exchange. And overall, the margin has come down from minus 21.8% to minus 16.7% for the year as a whole. Okay. And then just for the record, the Mall South segment, which is essentially what we divested to Mutares at the end of February. Those numbers are there on Slide 41. So total international operations is also there for your convenience. And moving on to the consolidated group. And here, as usual, I'll just limit my comments to leverage, which is laid out on Slide 45. And let's start with the end of year leverage position. We finished the year with 0.81 of a turn of leverage, so last 12-month adjusted EBITDA compared to the net debt position. And this is comfortably within the capital allocation policy where our target is 1 plus or minus 0.5 turn. And we managed to do that or keep -- essentially keep the leverage steady compared to Q4 a year earlier despite giving PLN 1.4 billion back to our shareholders in the form of a stock buyback that we executed in the middle of the year.

When it comes to financing, we had a busy fourth quarter. We've actually replaced the financing facility, the senior debt financing facility we had in Luxembourg, which was for PLN 5 billion with a PLN 6 billion facility, which is borrowed at the level of Allegro in Poland. And this facility is cheaper. It has a lower margin, and it also has no security. And the maturity has been extended from 2027 to 2030. So this is a great improvement in terms of our financing cost. But also very importantly, PLN 3 billion of the PLN 6 billion is in RCF form, which allows us to borrow in order to do these buybacks and then pay it back as the free cash flow comes in during the course of the year.

Last comment would be regarding the cash balance then. There's PLN 2.8 billion of cash at the end of the fourth quarter, plus PLN 2 billion of those RCF is undrawn. So that's tremendous financial flexibility for developing the business moving forward. Okay.

So that's the financial tour of the fourth quarter completed. It's time now to look at the outlook, the management outlook for 2026 and for the midterm. And as usual, at this time of year, we finished our planning process and discussions with the Board, and we can share with you our perspectives. Let's start with the medium-term aspirations, which, as a reminder, is essentially a 5-year perspective on where we think the business is going to go. And let's start with growth and profitability. So first of all, the core business as it is now, we're expecting in Poland to grow at least 10% GMV CAGR over this 5-year period. The first key objective, just to underline, is that we grow faster this year than the 9.4% we just delivered for the previous year, and we're going to do everything in our power to make that happen.

As we layer in new products and service categories and some of the new ideas that Marcin was going through earlier, these numbers might start to move up over time year after year as we do further planning rounds. But based on the current footprint, this is what we have. Sustaining Polish adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin at between 5.7% and 6% range. This is a little bit higher than we were saying last year. We just completed 2025, again with a 6% margin. We are prepared to reinvest some of that to accelerate the business, but we're still very confident that we can stay in that 5.7% to 6% range.

Now the international business, which I was talking about earlier, is going to be a key driver to accelerate the group GMV growth over and above the Polish GMV growth in the coming years as we drive those and scale those marketplaces in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. As you've heard, we're really encouraged by the progress and the improvements that we've seen over the prior 12 months. It's giving us the confidence that we need to keep investing and building an even bigger international business than previously assumed. That means we'll run it at a loss for a bit longer to 2029. But as you'll see, those losses are relatively small relative to the overall cash generation in Poland.

And let's talk about that now, looking at the guide rails, which are on the right-hand side of this slide. So obviously, the cash generation of the business is coming from the Polish adjusted EBITDA. And we're setting guidelines -- guardrails as to how we are going to reinvest that money. Up to 25% will go into funding the Polish CapEx, and that's going to include 3 more years of accelerated logistics project spending as we try to reduce the delivery costs that we would otherwise be facing and also to diversify the number of partners that we're working with.

When it comes to international, we're expecting at the beginning of this 5-year period to be investing roughly 12% of the Polish adjusted EBITDA. And as we drive that business towards breakeven, that figure will obviously come down to a 0% figure by 2029. That means for the first year for 2026, essentially 63% of the Polish adjusted EBITDA would drop through to fund interest and tax and the balance will be left to be managed via our capital allocation policy. And that capital allocation policy -- that capital allocation policy is actually continuing unchanged. We've agreed -- management and Board have agreed we're going to run with exactly the same policy going forward for 2026. You can see key principles on the left-hand side of the cash flow waterfall unchanged. And similarly, leverage and liquidity targets on the right-hand side also unchanged. So the key one being a leverage ratio of net debt to adjusted EBITDA of 1x, plus or minus 0.5 as we go through the course of the year.

And that means for this year, we've calculated that we can afford to return PLN 1.6 billion to our shareholders. The Board took that decision yesterday. And in due course, we'll be providing you more information for the shareholder vote to authorize such a buyback. That shareholder meeting is in June 2026.

Okay. Now outlook for 2026, the expectations, starting with GMV. As I just -- as I said a moment ago, our real objective here is we want to grow faster than last year, but it still needs to obviously have a range from an outlook perspective. So our range is similar to last year, 9% to 11%. For international, we're targeting 35% to 40% year-on-year growth. So very strong progress on 2026. And that's going to, obviously, therefore, result in the group GMV growing faster than Poland. We're looking at 10% to 12% GMV growth for the year as a whole. For revenue, we're targeting 11% to 14% year-on-year growth. We are not planning to make significant increases in our take rates in 2026, which means that the growth engines will provide that uplift over the GMV growth, the advertising, the delivery and the fintech.

In International, the marketplaces that we're expecting to deliver the 20% to 30% revenue growth, still with some of that legacy retail revenue in the Q1 baseline. So therefore, 12% to 15% growth in revenue for the group for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA in Poland, given that little bit of reinvestment of margin, we're looking for 7% to 10% year-on-year growth. For international, another 7% to 12% improvement to between PLN 450 million and PLN 480 million of investment in driving the business. And that means a significantly higher 9% to 13% year-on-year growth rate for the group EBITDA. When it comes to CapEx, we're expecting it to be between 12% and 22% higher between just over PLN 1 billion and PLN 1.15 billion.

So to finish up, my last slide before I hand back to Marcin. The current trading is looking pretty strong. Q1 quarter-to-date, so essentially to the end of February, the group GMV was growing 10% versus the 9.2% that we had in -- we just reported for Q4. In Poland, we're growing ahead of the 8.6% we delivered in the fourth quarter. We're seeing high single-digit GMV growth. In Allegro International, the marketplaces are delivering 55% GMV growth on a quarter-to-date basis, which is faster than the 49% we did in Q4. So more evidence of increasing momentum. The legacy Mall or the Mall North GMV is down 75% because we were still running those legacy stores in Q1 of last year. And net-net, that means the International segment is growing GMV quarter-to-date at about 30%, which is better than the 21% we just delivered for Q4.

So that's it from my side. Back to Marcin.

Thank you, John. To wrap up today's presentation, let's summarize the year and look at the path forward. 2025 was a year of exceptional delivery, and we are entering 2026 with a clear plan to accelerate our growth while remaining disciplined in our capital allocation. So trying to sum up the previous very good year in a few sentences. We successfully met our 2025 outlook across the board with international GMV results beating our expectations. For 2026, we are raising our goals, aiming for group GMV growth acceleration to 10% to 12% range. Our strategy remains focused on supercharging the core marketplace through investments in AI, new product categories, entering the services market and further development in logistics infrastructure and development of Allegro Delivery program. Finally, we remain committed to returning value to our shareholders with a proposed share buyback for 2026 up to PLN 1.6 billion.

So thank you for listening to our presentation. And now we invite you to participate in Q&A session.

Okay. Thank you very much for the presentation. We are now going into the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]

Our first voice question comes from Cesar Tiron from Bank of America.

Congratulations on your very strong results. I have 4 questions. I'm very sorry, but they're very easy. The first one, Marcin, can you please help us understand what factors will drive a potential acceleration of GMV in Poland in 2026? The second one, I understand from the current presentation that the increase in the take rate is likely to be less material in 2026. Is that correct? The third one, logistics. If I exclude any potential impact on higher inflation from the current geopolitical issues, do you think that the unit cost can further improve at Allegro One in 2027? So I said 2027 because in the presentation, you are showing an improvement in 2026. And then the last question, I promise, in absolute zloty terms, our peak losses in international behind us?

So thank you for your questions. Maybe I will start trying to cover the question related to the growth because this is, I guess, the most exciting thing. We do invest a lot to find some new opportunities to sell more, thanks to adding new product categories, extending portfolio of products we have right now in the marketplace. adding services, of course, investing, as mentioned before, in AI heavily because we do believe that this is the solution. This is the technology supporting our growth and giving us opportunity to have access to a new group of customers and generate additional traffic, thanks to new sources of traffic to our marketplace. So we cover several initiatives. We opened several projects. We are excited about that because we see so many new opportunities. And of course, the core marketplace is in -- as a main priority, and we're adding new functionality to the platform as well. But we do invest to discover some new places on the market to gain new group of customers and then, of course, to boost sales on our side.

Cesar, thanks for the questions. So let me take the take rate one first. We announced the annual take rate changes back in the end of January, I think, and they're actually taking hold in the last few days, so the beginning of March. Long story short, we made very little change this year. We have increased the co-financing, but only by 3 percentage points on the nominal numbers that we charge per parcel. So in essence, we only increased it by inflation. When it comes to the most expensive supplier, the indexation is that they're able to apply is a little bit above that percentage. And we've decided that strategically, we don't want to pass that on to the merchants. And we want to give a really stable platform for the merchants to keep engaging, keep investing and support that growth that we're trying to generate, as Marcin was just describing.

I'll come back to your index question because I didn't totally get it. So I'll come back in one second. When it comes to the international, I think we can unequivocally say that on an annual basis, we've gone through the peak loss that we're going to see. The objective now will be to keep driving that GMV growth, gradually bringing down the percentage margin versus GMV as we go. And eventually, we'll get to that 0%. We think at the moment, that's 2029. It means it's going to be a much bigger business than it would have been if we'd have moved into monetization mode in the Czech market already this year, which essentially would have been necessary if we stuck with the 2027 objective. The business is really exciting us the way it's starting to build momentum at the moment.

The unit cost question, if I understood correctly, you asked me about unit cost. Could you rephrase the question or explain a bit more?

Absolutely. I'll try without the French accent. So on Slide 16, you are showing the year-on-year change in unit cost of parcel delivery to APM. In 2026, it's minus 8%, assuming no inflationary shock from the current geopolitical events in the Middle East. what would be the number in 2027? Would it be even lower? Can that number keep on going lower?

Thank you. Now I've got the question. Okay. Right. So your question was actually on the Allegro One component of our unit cost because the total unit cost where we're taking all suppliers into account is a bit higher than in the prior year because of indexation. But we managed to reduce that loss significant or that increase significantly because of the mix effects that we drove. So that's one point. Coming to your question then. In general, yes, there's going to be a strong downward trend on Allegro One as we add volume. As you heard, we added 80% of volume last year, and we would expect similar things going on this year. In the short run, we will be putting more lockers into areas where currently we don't operate because most of the lockers in Allegro Delivery are in the bigger cities.

In the short run, that has a unit cost negative impact because you have longer Kurier routes and when they first open fairly empty lockers until you build the demand. So that might cause a little bit of a bump for 18 months or so. But long term, the trend continues to be strongly downwards. And hopefully, that's clear for you. And the reason for it being strongly downward is the core network and the middle mile will obviously respond very positively to additional volume going through it.

Our next voice question comes from Roman Reshetnev from Goldman Sachs.

Congratulations on strong results. I also have 3 questions. The first one is a follow-up on your Poland GMV growth. I just wanted to ask what underlying e-commerce market growth assumptions do you use in your approach? And do you assume that you will gain overall market share going forward? Secondly, on AI, I see you flag that you have nearly 100 specific AI projects currently running. So I'm just wondering how much of the projected 2026 group CapEx do you specifically target for AI and machine learning infrastructure and how is it looking versus traditional software development?

And the last one on externalization of Allegro Pay because you mentioned extending credit origination beyond the Allegro platform, the Allegro Pay card. So I just wanted to ask what is the time line for this externalization? And how will you manage the increased credit risk profile of platform spending?

Thanks for the questions, Roman. I'll take the first one and pass over to Marcin on the second and third. When it comes to the GMV growth, we're expecting obviously a reasonably robust retail sales backdrop to the growth by making changes like not increasing significantly take rates and making improvements to things like the MOV that Marcin was commenting for Smart!, where Kurier deliveries are going to be more accessible than they were previously. These things we think will be like high-level positive levers to help. Then obviously, the work we're doing around improving the UX around categories and this type of project that Marcin was going through, we also expect to be supportive. Share-wise, we're not trying to -- or expecting to grow the share in any significant way. But our major objective is to hold on to what we have. And more or less, that's what we would expect to do. The Chinese are still there in the market. But they -- although they grow fast, they are working from a very low base, and we do believe they're a bit of a niche that will eventually reach its ceiling and stop being such a factor.

So as mentioned before, we heavily invest in AI because we see high potential, not only because of higher efficiency, for example, production of software, but also to boost our GMV. So we split the key directions of our investment in AI into 2 areas. The first one, as I said before, is related to improving efficiency, but not only in the tech departments, it's across the whole organization, and we see huge impact implementing AI and helping our team just to be more efficient. But this is investment we continue. We started last year, and we see constant growth and the rising efficiency. And the second layer, even more important one is, of course, related to the growth and development of the platform and development of additional functionalities related to the platform.

As you know, we started to provide functionality called AI Assistant, of course, driven by our technology and driven by technology developed by our partners. This is something helping us to boost GMV because we see that this is something supporting our customers to find products perfectly fitted to their expectations, to their needs and especially in some more sophisticated categories or products, this is really something helping.

So we see that this is technology having or allowing us to earn more and giving us opportunity to present the better return on this investment. Of course, we do cooperate with all major players from this industry. So we have benefited because of our position on the Polish market in the region that we have access to the newest functionalities of AI provided by them. So we want to stay as a very rational and cost-efficient company, combining the expertise from Allegro, but also having access to external platforms.

Maybe I'll answer the question regarding the Allegro Pay externalization. As you rightly said, yes, we have the credit card product already up and running. It was in tests last year, and we moved it into more general commercial release a couple of months back. We expect to scale it probably up to 350,000 to maybe 500,000 cards this year. Consumers love it. They're really happy with the card. The NPS score is very high. And it also means that our essentially extremely profitable model where we really do know very deeply who we're lending to, and we have very strong control over the amount of bad debt risk that we're taking means that we're very confident that we can make good money from this product.

And what's interesting for us is that a lot of the money gets spent on areas which are actually not competitive to Allegro. I mean 2 of the biggest buckets are people buying their weekly grocery shop which obviously includes a lot of fresh food, which we don't sell or buying or filling their car tank. We don't sell gasoline, unfortunately, on the -- over the Internet. So it's a very interesting product. And as I said, the most important thing, the customers really love it. So we're scaling it up.

Our next voice question comes from Michal Potyra from UBS Securities.

The first, like a very technical question. Do you anticipate any changes to how the buyback will be executed compared with last year? So that's the first question. The second question is, could you please comment on the expected impact from the surcharges on parcels coming from Asia, potentially making life a little bit more difficult for your competitors? And the last question, if I may. I noticed -- I believe this is the first quarter since you began disclosing the details when the item growth came below the GMV growth. Can you perhaps walk us through what drove the divergence? And is it a new normal going forward?

I will take the first and the last question. Maybe I'll do them one after the other. So the first question, thank you for it was about the buyback. We're in discussion with our brokers about exactly what would be the best way to return that capital to the shareholders. As with last year, our time line really is to finish those discussions and make those decisions ahead really by May ahead of the Board meeting so that we can give you some concrete information on what we're planning to do so that when you vote, you're able to -- or when the shareholders vote, they know what they're voting for. But we're still at the discussion stage at the moment. So I don't want to speculate on exactly how we're going to go about it.

The second question, yes, very good spot regarding the items sold versus the GMV growth. It actually was a bit of a one-off impact. If you go back to 2024, we were -- we had a deal with the biggest APM supplier that we would get volume discounts for additional volume over the course of 2024. And as we reach the end of the year, we could see that there was an opportunity to collect bigger discounts. As a result, we ran a promotion in Q4 last year, bringing the MOV for Smart! down to PLN 30, and we ran that for about a month. And that brought in a lot of additional low-priced parcels or low GMV parcels and obviously also helped us to collect those discounts, which were applicable for the whole year. So we got discounts which applied to all the parcels that we bought during the year, and we booked those discounts in the fourth quarter.

So it was a bit of a one-off, and I would expect us to go back to the normal trend of the high-frequency categories that grow considerably quicker than the overall marketplace, gradually resulting in item growth being slightly ahead of GMV growth.

That was that and you take the other question, Marcin?

So of course, we are happy that finally, the European Commission decided to implement the first fees creating the European e-commerce market more competitive, but also securing against unfair competition. So starting from July, we expect to see EUR 3 fee per parcel, something what will be helping local merchants to be much more competitive and winning the battle against unfair competition. Of course, for many of them, it will be tailwind and for us as well. And what we expect also is that some additional fee will be implemented in Q4 this year, called handling fee, it should be additional EUR 2 or EUR 3 per parcel. So in total, it should be this year EUR 5 or even EUR 6. And this is for sure helping European companies because today, we observed that million parcels coming from China without paying local taxes and creating some unfair advantage.

Our next voice question comes from [ Nicolas ] from BNP Paribas.

A couple from my side, if that's right. Firstly, a clarification one. So does your guidance for FY '26 include any assumptions at all about events unfolding in the Middle East and the knock-on impact on the European consumer? That's my first one. And then secondly, I've got a couple of niche questions, if that's okay. Interest expense stepped up in Q4. How should we think about this? I know you mentioned some of the reasons behind that on the call, but how should we think about these going forward? And then another niche one as well about the tax rate as well. I know you've got some benefits from R&D tax relief in the current financial year. Again, how should we think about the normalized tax rate in the new financial year?

Okay. Thank you for those questions. So the second one was interest rate. The first one was yes. Yes, the Middle East, exactly. How could I overlook that? Yes. So the short answer is that we haven't tried to make any assumptions regarding what's going to happen in the Middle East. I think it would be a false game to do that. It's obviously a very serious situation with the potential to cause issues. But for the time being, we see absolutely zero impact in trading. And we need to wait and see. With the volatility on fuel prices and things like this, obviously, there are risks, but they haven't come to fruition as yet or an established pattern hasn't come to fruition yet. So it's a bit too early to try and take anything into account.

What I would say is that if there is some kind of inflationary shock, we live through that back in '23, '22, '23, very similar. Allegro, because of its incredibly wide selection is the place where you can get just about whatever you want. So if the consumer purchasing patterns change, if they become much less interested in discretionary spending, much more interested in every day, they still shop with us. And that's been stress tested, as I said, back in 2023. So as long as supply, given that so much of manufacturing comes from China, as long as the supply chains hold together, and obviously, a lot of the supply arrives to Europe comes up by ship and not through the Middle East. As long as supply stays available, the marketplace should do just fine.

Second question was interest rates. Yes, it's a good question. There's actually a noncash item in the Q4 financial expenses, if I'm addressing your question correctly. If you look at total financial expense, it's about PLN 100 million charge, if I recall, from basically redoing the amortized cost calculation, the amount of money that gets allocated over the life of the loan. All of that needed to be written off because we stopped -- we basically closed the existing loan, which was borrowed through the Luxembourg entity and replaced it with a brand-new loan. So there was no basis to carry that over. Interest rates generally ought to be on a year-on-year basis going down. You just also need to remember, we did have hedges that were highly in the money, but those are dropping out of the baseline as we go along.

The final question was about the tax. Yes, we had a one-off PLN 250 million tax credit in respect to claims for R&D relief in respect to prior years. We collected -- or we haven't collected yet. We're in the process of collecting the money, but we had to in accordance with the accounting standards, we booked the gain in the tax line ahead of getting the refund. We collect it for '21 to '24, which means a further R&D relief claim will probably go in for 2025 during the course of this year, but it won't be as big as that PLN 250 million because it's only for 1 year, if that's clear. So overall, collecting these R&D reliefs should reduce our effective tax rate a little bit, but don't assume that, that 2025 result is going to be projected forward indefinitely.

Thank you very much. This is the end of the voice questions. So I'm going to pass the line to Tomasz Pozniak for the text questions.

Thank you, Rafael. And unfortunately, as we are running out of time allocated to this call, we will address your written questions calling back or just replying to the e-mails. So please expect us reaching out to you still today on the written questions.

With this, we are concluding this call. Thank you, Marcin. Thank you, Jon. Thank you, Rafael, and thank you to all participants.

Thank you. We are now closing all the lines.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and I would like to welcome you to Allegro Third Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

So without further ado, I will now pass the line to Tomasz Pozniak, Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Rafael, and welcome to all participants of our call. Let me introduce the presenters of today. Mr. Marcin Kusmierz, the CEO of Allegro Group, who will provide you with the highlights of Allegro performance in Q3 and summarize the key takeaways. And Jon Eastick, our CFO, who will guide you through the financials for Q3 and update of the outlook for the full year 2025.

As usual, our results presentation is available for download from our investor web page at allegro.eu. You may also download these slides from the link available on the webcast.

As a reminder, today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from the expectations expressed in such statements. Please make sure you review the full disclaimer on Slide #2. Also, please note this presentation and the Q&A session are being recorded, and will be available for a replay on our website at allegro.eu.

And with this, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Marcin, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Tomasz for the introduction. I'm Marcin Kusmierz, CEO of Allegro. I'm very glad to be here with you today to walk through our third quarter results, the key business development from this period and what we're currently working on across Allegro Group.

Let's begin with the highlights of our financial and operating performance. Group GMV rose by close to 10%. And in Poland, it came very close to 10.5%. What's especially important is that GMV on Poland in -- on Allegro in Poland grew more than twice as fast as domestic nominal retail sales. GMV per active buyer also improved strongly, up nearly 6% at the group level and almost 8% in Poland. Strong GMV dynamics, higher take rate approaching 13% and rapid growth in advertising contributed to an excellent top line results.

Group revenues were up by more than 12%. And in Poland, they grew by over 20%. The number of active buyers increased by nearly 3% year-on-year to more than 21 million across the group and to over 15 million in Poland.

Adjusted EBITDA at the group level grew by an impressive 24%, driven by the outstanding profitability of our Polish operations and reduced losses in our international business. In Poland, we delivered this, thanks to strong performance in advertising, financial services and improvements in co-finance. CapEx increased by 26% year-on-year to almost PLN 230 million as we continued investing in our technology platform and expanding our logistics network and solutions. Financial leverage was slightly following the successful share buyback in the third quarter of 2025.

Let me briefly recap on our medium-term strategic assumptions and pillars. We remain fully focused on enhancing our core marketplace and constantly strengthening our value proposition. We are investing in a new AI-powered services, developing projects that allow us to expand into new categories and market segments and improving our presence across Central Eastern Europe, giving us access to 25 million additional customers.

When talking about international business, it is also worth mentioning that we have successfully completed the turnaround of Mall segment. As mentioned at the previous conference, we continue to analyze opportunities in new products and service categories and explore expansion into additional market areas. We're also evaluating the externalization of our financial, advertising and logistics services, potentially making them available to sellers beyond our marketplace. We expect the first test of these products to begin in every month of the next year.

Our loyalty program, one of the most popular in Europe keeps expanding. Over the past year, we have added more than 1 million new subscribers. We've introduced a wide range of partner benefits, both Polish and international, and we recently announced a partnership with Disney, giving our customers 3 months of access to Disney+.

We constantly work to ensure the best selection prices and convenience. We continue to attract outstanding brands to our marketplace. For example, in the third quarter alone, we began partnerships with category leaders in home and garden category, such as Homla, Hansgrohe, or Gardena. We also launched new tools for brands, including BrandHub, a unified console that makes it easier for brands to manage their presence and activities on Allegro.

For business customers, we've introduced Allegro business, a dedicated platform for SMEs with expansive product selection and new tools such as campaign optimization and automatic currency conversion. At our last conference, we dedicated significant time to discussing artificial intelligence initiatives at Allegro. Today, we're showcasing one of these projects, demonstrating our advanced level of AI commercialization. In our mobile app, we've launched Allegro AI assistant at this stage for selected users. With its advisory capabilities, it helps customers to find the right products through conventional search.

Buyers can specify features, price ranges or even detailed factors such as warranty length. Using Allegro AI assistance feels very similar to interactive with ChatGPT or Gemini, customers that with the platform and instantly response with the best match products and alternatives. It's worth to mention that Allegro is one of the first marketplaces in the world to offer such functionality, and it will be available for all customers early next year.

Our advertising business continues its strong momentum in gaining popularity amongst sellers. In third quarter, advertising revenues grew by nearly 32%, reaching over 2.1% of whole GMV. Our off-Allegro advertising also performed very well. Network PPC spending increased by 60% year-on-year and continues to show strong growth potential. Additionally, in October, we hosted Retail Media Powerhouse, an event that brought together over 300 marketing leaders and demonstrated how to effectively leverage Allegro's retail media capabilities.

Our Financial Services segment is also breaking records. Loan origination rose by nearly 30% year-on-year, reaching PLN 3.4 billion, more than 15% of GMV or PLN 2.5 billion was financed through Allegro Pay. This segment continues to grow rapidly and strengthening its leadership position quarter after quarter.

I'm also delighted to highlight a major development from just a few days ago. Last week, we announced a partnership with PKO BP, Poland's largest bank. Together, we are launching the first services for buyers and sellers. Both companies are 3 leaders in their segments in Poland and CE, bank serves over 12 million consumers and nearly 650,000 companies, offering the broadest financial services portfolio in the market. These partnerships creates exceptional value for customers and will help Allegro accelerate customer acquisition and GMV growth. Thanks to the partnership with PKO BP, in fourth quarter, we were launching 2 innovative services that can significantly enhance the attractiveness of our marketplace. The first one is Allegro KLIK, a new fully integrated payment method for buyers. It enables 1-click payments up to 3% cash back and includes a 6-month Smart! subscription for PLN 1.

For sellers, we are introducing Allegro Capital, easing fast fully integrated financing. Entrepreneurs or companies can apply online for loans up to PLN 300,000 and starting next year even higher to PLN 0.5 million. Applications are processed within minutes and payouts are made the same day.

Now let's turn to logistics. Our managed volume continues to grow and has surpassed 36%, up 2.4 percentage points compared to the previous quarter. In September, DPD, the largest -- the second largest logistics operator in Poland joined Allegro Delivery. Since October, it has been fully integrated into our network and steadily increasing its share of Allegro shipments. The Allegro Delivery network already includes more than 70,000 points with over 33,000 lockers from Allegro DHL, DPD and Orlen Paczka and over 37,000 pickup points, including the chain of Zabka. Our own lockers network will exceed 8,000 machines by year-end.

In third quarter, we also added 3 new depots and new sorting facility. We see network efficiency continues to improve and remain focused on the further development.

A final word on our fast-growing international business. GMV grew by 56% in the third quarter. And on the LTM basis, it's nearing PLN 2.5 billion. The number of active buyers increased by more than 50% year-on-year, reaching 4.2 million. We continue to prioritize local selection. For example, in Czechia where local assortment grew by over 80% year-on-year. These initiatives are including buyer satisfaction and boosting Smart! loyalty adoption. We're also very pleased to see growing cross-border sales from Czech, Slovak and Hungarian sales into the Polish market.

And now it's time to discuss the detailed financial results for the third quarter. Jon, it's your time.

Thank you very much, Marcin, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you again today. I'm going to take you through another really strong set of financial results for the Allegro Group. And as usual, I'm going to start with the Polish operations.

Let's start with the key drivers of the GMV growth, and this is obviously active buyers and spend per active buyer. And I think the best way to summarize this is that Q3 was very much steady as she goes, in that the incremental improvement in these KPIs was very similar to the Q2 level, as you can see on the slide.

On a year-on-year basis, and looking at active buyers, we're up 300,000 active buyers in Poland, 2% growth at 15.230 million at the end of the third quarter. And when we look at spend, this is the -- as usual, the stronger driver of growth. It's up 7.9% on a year-on-year basis. The average spend per buyer on a 12 month -- for a 12-month period is PLN 4,263. That means that the GMV growth accelerated sequentially by 0.54 percentage points in the third quarter to 10.4% year-on-year. And that translates to PLN 16.2 billion of GMV. On a last 12-month basis, that means that the GMV and the size of the business has moved forward to PLN 64.9 billion, which is 10% up year-on-year.

Looking at Q3, the marketplace itself is roughly growing at the same rate as it was in Q3, approximately 10% we had a windfall quarter for our ticket sales subsidiary, eBilet. They were selling tickets for some of the biggest acts in Poland who are running big concerts in the summer of next year, and that contributed roughly 0.4% of additional growth for Q3.

When it comes to our high-frequency categories, they continue to grow more or less twice as fast as the average category. And also, they contribute to the 11.2% growth in items sold, which is obviously ahead of the GMV growth.

When it comes to average selling price on a neutral mix basis, we see 1% inflation in the average price of an item. So growth is not very strongly impacted by inflationary considerations.

When we move on to revenue, as you already heard from Marcin, 20.2% year-on-year growth. This is a significant acceleration sequentially and a really excellent result. That growth translates to a revenue number of PLN 2,747 million for the quarter. And if you look at the growth bridge, you can see that the GMV combined with the take rate increase produced a 14.4% increase in marketplace revenues. And then if we look at the other categories of revenue and in particular, at our growth engines, you can see excellent contributions across the board. 32% growth in advertising. The logistics services revenues are up 140% year-on-year, and other category is primarily our Fintech business, and that is up 128% on a year-on-year basis.

Looking at take rate itself. This has come in at 0.47 percentage points higher than a year ago at 12.98%, sequentially almost identical to Q2. The last time we made material changes, as a reminder, was the annual changes we put through in March of this year, and that's why you're seeing such stability in the numbers here.

So moving on to adjusted EBITDA, and it really has been an exceptional quarter for profitability, our adjusted EBITDA to GMV margin has come in at 6.38%, 0.37 percentage points above the last year level. And this is actually, I think, a record level of profitability since our IPO back in 2020. In absolute terms, that translates into a year-on-year increase of 17.2% and it's PLN 1,035 million adjusted EBITDA for the Polish business for the quarter.

Looking at the bridge, you can see that those strong revenues contribute a good deal of this growth. And looking on the cost side, as usual, the most significant drag on the profitability comes from cost of delivery. Cost of delivery was up 28.5% year-on-year, sequentially, it's a marginal increase to 5.1% of GMV in the third quarter. It's a fraction of just a couple of basis points higher than we reported in Q2.

What's very important is the composition of that 28.5% increase. 17.3% of this is GMV related or Smart! penetration related, which are both good things, obviously, in themselves, and nothing to be concerned about. And an additional 8% of this growth is pure accounting. As you know, we're growing out our Allegro managed volumes. And within the scope of operation of Allegro managed volumes, we take a principal role. So we're responsible for the delivery which means that the revenue we earn on those deliveries is shown growth in the -- in the logistics revenues I just described. Not net, is it the case when it's the agency model, which applies, for example, when InPost is doing the deliveries. So that there's 8% increase coming from that, but the revenue is offsetting that to a large event.

The last element is 3.5% related to the unit price of a parcel, and that's the average outcome. Without all the efforts to move mix towards Allegro managed volumes, it would have been 3.5 percentage points higher so nearer to 7%. And that's mainly due to the price increases that we received at the beginning of the year from our largest delivery partner. So everything going very much according to plan on cost of delivery.

Marketing spend is up 19% year-on-year. We're investing and having to pay higher cost per click. And we're also diversifying our channels and getting more and more into social media. Other SG&A, the impact is much down on Q2 when it was PLN 67 million versus PLN 37 million this time around, reflecting strong cost control.

The last thing to mention here, again, coming back to the high margin is that this is an intra-year high. We are used to and are expecting a lower margin in the fourth quarter. I'll tell you more about what's behind that later in the presentation, but this -- it's seasonally always the case that the fourth quarter margins are lower.

Moving on to capital investments. And as you know, we accelerated our CapEx program at the beginning of this year. And you see here really that, that acceleration is starting to level off. The growth is down to 52% on a year-on-year basis for Q3, PLN 220 million of investments. Similar to the previous quarter, the main driver is in the physical CapEx or other CapEx. And as in the previous quarters, the main component of that are the investments in logistics. This is coming on the APMs, but also middle mile depots and work on one sourcing center we put into operation in the quarter and another one that's going to come online a big one next year.

Capitalized development costs is up more moderately at 28% growth year-on-year. This is reflecting a tech team, which is about 9% bigger than a year earlier. Obviously, salary costs are higher, but also they're spending a bigger proportion of their activity on new functionalities and projects that add value to the business rather than maintenance, that's why those costs get capitalized and that's part of the reason for the higher CapEx.

Looking at it on a year-to-date basis, the Polish CapEx is at 20.5% of the year-to-date Polish adjusted EBITDA, and that's, therefore, well within the medium-term guardrail we set for spending up to 25% of Polish EBITDA. So that's the comments on Poland.

Now let me move on and start going through the international operations. And I'll start with going through the progress on the new international marketplaces. Now as you heard from Marcin earlier in the presentation, we had a very strong quarter in terms of growth on our new marketplaces. It's up 56% year-on-year. And on this slide, you can see some of the key drivers behind that great performance. First of all, the traffic is up 18.4%, but the important thing here is that the quality of this traffic is improving from month to month. We're getting more and more traffic that's coming direct, in particular because our -- we're getting a lot of traction with people downloading the app. And the conversion rates are also starting to move up as the frequency moves up. So we're getting a lot of value out of this traffic compared to the situation a year ago.

Active buyers is up a tremendous 50% year-on-year at 4.2 million customers. The spend per active buyer up more moderately at 10.1% increase to PLN 556 per customer for -- on average for the last 12-month period. That means that the GMV has come in at an absolute level of PLN 600 million for the third quarter. And the important thing here is that -- this is the number that we really care about. This is our strategically important GMV. The part of the international business that we're looking to grow sequentially and massively over coming years. And it's a combination of the 3P GMV that these 3 marketplaces are doing, plus Mall acting solely as a merchant and selling on a 1P basis to support the growth on the marketplace.

Now just to underline, these numbers that I've just shown you are pro forma numbers that focus only on the marketplaces. If you recall, when we met last time, I took you through the segment changes that we made with effect from Q2. And those changes involves folding the Mall North segment. So the Mall North sales of Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, plus the WE|DO logistics business into the Allegro International Marketplace segment. And we did that because we finished closing down the old legacy store so that in effect, it was no longer an independent -- Mall was no longer an independent business with its own route to market.

That, therefore, has some knock-on effects on as reported numbers because it means all the legacy revenues of that closed legacy business are in the comparative figures for the earlier quarters. So bear that in mind as we go through the next couple of slides.

So now we'll look at the as-reported numbers for the Allegro International segment. So the marketplace is Mall North and WE|DO combined. And let's start with the key drivers of the GMV growth, and with the active buyers. So here, you can see the 4.2 million active buyers that shop on the marketplace and a residual number of 1.1 million Mall North legacy active buyers, combined make 5.3 million active buyers for the segment. And the growth rate is 7.8% in total on a year-on-year basis because the Mall North segment, as you can see, is shrinking significantly. And it's going to run down to 0 that 1.1 million figure by the time we lap the closure of the front end, the legacy shop at the end of Q1 next year.

And it's a similar story with the GMV growth or the spend per active -- sorry, for the spend per active buyer, which is PLN 487 and is down 18% year-on-year and is reflecting the same thing with the runoff of the legacy -- the legacy GMV that's in this last 12 months KPI. Again, by the end of Q1 next year and in the Q2 numbers, there will be no impact of this legacy revenue anymore. So when you put all of that together into the GMV, the as reported GMV for Q3 is exactly the same as that pro forma number I took you through 2 minutes ago, PLN 599 million. But in the earlier quarters, you have this legacy spend, which means that the growth rates of GMV Q3 to Q3, as reported, is minus 3.5%.

On the right-hand side here, you can see the components of that GMV. And at the bottom, you can see 55.9% growth of 3P revenues from the marketplace, another PLN 25 million coming from the 1P Mall as a merchant sales to create that PLN 599 million GMV for Q3. And then if you look to the left and look at the prior quarters, the gray bars show you that legacy revenue that we're no longer generating -- sorry, legacy GMV that we're no longer generating and what that's -- what's generating the minus 3.5% growth. Again, by the time we get to Q2, next year, there won't be any of this legacy left and we will just be looking at the growth.

Taking the same topic to revenue, you can see that, that minus 3.5% of GMV growth actually translates to -- sorry, of GMV decline actually translates to a 58.5% revenue decline. And that's because all of that legacy GMV from the Mall legacy site was done on a 1P basis, which obviously is massively over-indexed compared to the revenue you earn from take rate on a 3P model.

So let's shift gears and look at adjusted EBITDA, where we're already seeing the growth, an improvement that's coming from all the measures that we've taken to transform the Mall business over the last couple of years that completed at the end of the first half of 2025. And here, we have PLN 34 million lower loss for Q3 than we had a year earlier, which is a 23% year-on-year improvement. You can see that the Mall loss -- Mall and WE|DO loss has cut to PLN 32 million from PLN 60 million a year earlier. And we've been able to invest more into marketing on the Allegro marketplaces, but still cut the loss there by PLN 5 million from PLN 88 million to PLN 83 million. So good sequential improvement or year-on-year improvement, I should say, which is then helping us to the 24% group level adjusted EBITDA improvement for the quarter.

Looking at the bridge, you can see where these savings are coming from. It's the marketing costs and other SG&A that's gone away on the legacy business. And we've only lost PLN 11 million of margin despite shutting down all of that legacy activity. So that's the Allegro International segment. Just a reminder, Mall South still operates, and it's now a separate segment on its own, 2.5% lower GMV, much more moderate declines than we were seeing in the northern region. This business still runs on all the legacy software systems and still essentially as an independent business.

And then looking at international operations in total. Just as a reminder, these numbers are completely unaffected by the reshuffle of the segments, all the segments still total to the same figures. So that's it for international.

Let me move on. So a few comments about the group consolidated results. And as previously, I'm limiting the comments really just sort of leverage situation. As you know, it was a very busy quarter in the third quarter when it comes to financial transactions for the organization. In particular, we returned PLN 1.4 billion through the share buyback at the beginning of the third quarter. And that had the effect of lifting the leverage from 0.72x just last 12 months adjusted EBITDA back in June to a pro forma number of 1.16x, giving effects of that buyback.

In the meantime then, over the last 3 months, we brought the as-reported number all the way down to 1.05x due to strong cash flow generation and the strong increase in the adjusted EBITDA. We're very much on track to come back to that 1x adjusted EBITDA level, which is what we are targeting as our long-run level in our capital allocation policy.

It's also worth mentioning that 2 days ago, we've announced the signing of a very successful refinancing initiative for our senior debt. The -- we will be swapping out the old debt with PLN 5 billion of new senior debt in the next couple of days. It's on -- it's being taken on better terms than we had in the legacy arrangements. And most importantly, the maturity is extended now from 2027 out to 2030, so by 3 years.

So that's the financials. Now let me wrap up my section by going through the management outlook. And first of all, just a quick summary of where we were at the end of Q3. We had updated the outlook, as you'll recall, slightly improving on various metrics compared to the original targets we set in March. And in certain areas, we actually moved up the midpoint of the guidance in some areas, we just narrowed the range. And basically, going into Q4, everything was -- is in line and on track for the full year.

So now let's talk about current trading and what that does to the outlook going forward. The current trading and starting with Polish operations. So first of all, the GMV. So the first month of Q4 look very much like Q3. We booked like-for-like growth of approximately -- or just over 10%. However, in the first 2 weeks or so of November, we've seen a slowdown in the growth to low single digits year-on-year growth. And this is reflecting a few things. In particular, we're still waiting for the cold weather to come and bring the typical seasonal sales relating to things like cold weather or winter tires or cold weather clothing. This is still ahead of us still to come, but obviously, we don't know when.

Secondly, the Black Week has been extended to a full month but it got off to a fairly slow start slower than maybe we were hoping for. So the growth over the last 2 months -- or 2 weeks has been a little bit lower than we were looking for.

When it comes to adjusted EBITDA, very much as expected, we're seeing the EBITDA margin being lower in the fourth quarter than I was just describing for Q3. This comes from the usual factors, lower take rates, reflecting less need to make discretionary spending by merchants, because of the high demand that you see in the fourth quarter. It also reflects the investments into pricing refunds and sharing costs with the merchants, and also additional marketing spending, which we always do in the fourth quarter.

There's also one additional element, which is a headwind that we faced this year from the volume discounts that we received and we're booking mainly in the fourth quarter of 2024 a year ago. We haven't repeated such an arrangement with our largest delivery partner this year because we needed the incremental volume to help build out the Allegro Delivery and the Allegro managed volumes. And therefore, that's going to create a bit of a headwind on the average unit cost of a parcel in the fourth quarter.

When it comes to international operations, the marketplace is still going very well. First half of the quarter, we're seeing above 50% year-on-year growth. The Mall North 1P sales, so just Mall as a merchant now is improving sequentially as they build from the restructuring that we implemented right at the beginning of the second half of the year. Mall South is chugging along at the similar levels to we saw in Q3. So just a very small decline. And in combination, this means that the international operations are looking at a low double-digit percentage growth in GMV, not a decline, which is what we've been used to seeing for the quarter to date. And for quarter-to-date, that means that on a consolidated basis, we're looking at a high single-digit percentage growth rate. So that's the current trading.

What does it mean then for the outlook? The -- there's only one change in our outlook, given the slow start to November, we've decided it makes sense to be cautious about our ability to catch up in the remaining weeks of the quarter. We are starting to see some recovery in the growth rate, but the big surge in spending is still ahead of us, and it makes sense to stay cautious on exactly how strongly that growth is going to come back and make up for the slowness in the first 2 weeks of November.

So with that in mind, we've cut the -- or trimmed the GMV guidance for Poland to 9% to 9.5% from around 10% as it was previously, so a marginal reduction. When it comes to revenue and adjusted EBITDA and also the CapEx, absolutely no changes, whilst the margin is coming down, it's coming down a little bit more slowly than we had allowed for in the guidance. So we're overperforming the original forecast, and we don't see any need despite the slightly lower GMV forecast to make reductions on revenue or adjusted EBITDA. So everything there is confirmed.

So that concludes my comments. I'm going to hand it back to Marcin now, who will take you through the key takeaways.

Let's move on the summary of the third quarter. So summarizing, we delivered excellent financial results with strong profitability, what is confirming our strength and potential of our business model. Additionally, we saw dynamic growth in both advertising and financial services with both areas making a significant contribution to our financial performance and driving GMV acceleration.

We welcomed DPD, the second largest logistics operator in Poland into Allegro Delivery, expanding our network of lockers and pickup points up to 70,000 locations. We also launched Allegro AI Assistant, further proving our ability to innovate and adopt cutting-edge technologies at scale. And it's worth to mention that we are one of the first marketplaces in the world having this functionality on the marketplace. We also announced a high potential partnership with PKO BP, the largest bank in Poland, unlocking new financial services for both buyers and sellers.

And finally, we continue to advance our strategic evolution setting the stage for even faster growth in the future.

So that's all what we had in our presentation. Thank you for listening. It's time to Q&A session. Tomasz, the floor is yours.

[Operator Instructions] So we will start with Cesar Tiron from Bank of America.

I have 3 questions, if that's okay. The first one relates to the slowdown that you're seeing in the GMV growth in Poland in November. Can you please give us a bit more comfort that this is really driven by the cold weather and not, for example, by macro or potentially market share loss. So I would suspect that the categories that are related to cold weather, would have to decline probably by 20% to 30% on a year-on-year basis to trigger such a significant slowdown on the GMV. So probably give us more color on that, if that's possible?

The second question relates to this partnership which you've signed with PKO. So that sounds very interesting. Would you be open to share maybe more on the economics and what it means from Allegro, more revenue probably lower acquisition costs, et cetera.

And then the third one would be on the AI agent. When would you expect this to be fully operational? So basically, when will I be able to use the agent and just tell him help me buy some clothes for the winter season and he's going to be able to buy all that with the relevant clothes for what I like and be able to do the check in as well -- the checkout story as well on the platform.

So thank you for all questions. Maybe I will start with some explanation of how we see first 2 weeks of November and our performance, but also performance of the whole market because, of course, we are in discussion also with other players trying to understand the reasons, the reason of a slowdown of the first 2 weeks. And we see that this is nothing related specifically to Allegro. We have the same information with all major players that something really happened on the market. Probably it's related to weather. But also you should remember that we had in Poland a long weekend. This is something always affecting sales quite strongly.

So what we see the last couple of days, this is something positive. We see that some categories are growing faster than in the first 2 weeks. So we see -- we think that this is something what will be changed next couple of weeks and our results will be improved.

And let me just follow up on attack the same question, Cesar, from -- you were asking about the cold weather categories. It's not quite as steep a decline as you calculated. But yes, the categories like automotive and fashion in particular are down year-on-year, and that's essentially because we haven't had that cold weather so far.

The bigger topics are the ones that were just mentioned by Marcin. Also, we've extended the black week, which is an experiment. We've extended it now effectively to a black month. And I think customers are essentially still waiting to start spending their money for the season. And we are starting to see some recovery in the growth rate is still that the big surge in that -- in the spend that surely is going to come, it's still ahead of us. So we need to be a little bit cautious as to how it's going to turn out and whether or how much we're going to recover the total growth for the full quarter.

I'll take also the second question on the economics of PKO and then -- of the PKO deal, and then Marcin will come back on the AI agent. Yes, the PKO deal is very exciting. It's combining the power of the biggest bank with obviously the biggest marketplace in Poland. And for the bank, this is mainly a play about getting new accounts. They see it as a -- for them, acquisition cost will be quite competitive if they work together with us.

For us, what we see is 2 things. One is a new payment method, a one-click payment method that goes straight through to the bank account of the PKO customers, making it incredibly convenient to shop on Allegro. And secondly, if you shop on Allegro versus on other sites, you're going to get cash back, right? And it can be anywhere from 1% cash back to 3% cash back in various scenarios.

What we know is that from talking with PKO is that they have something like PLN 25 billion of e-commerce spend going through their customers, which is not being spent on Allegro. So whilst we haven't got any specific estimates about the impact of this project, we're hopeful, obviously, that with those 2 enhancements, some of that PLN 25 billion will start to be spent on Allegro rather than at competing sites.

Today, obviously, PKO is one of the biggest banks, many, many millions of their clients are also within our 15 million clients already. So for us, it's less a play about acquiring new customers. It's more about getting a bigger share of spend. Marcin, the AI question?

Yes. Maybe I will add something also to our cooperation with PKO BP because you covered new method of payments, very effective and potentially improving conversion called Allegro KLIK. But also, we have the second product called Allegro Capital helping sellers with financing and having fully online process of getting some money from bank. And this is great information to us because this is capital helping our merchants to improve selection on the marketplace and potentially to make it even more attractive. So this is fully digital process, very convenient, very easy and also based on some attractive rates.

So of course, the cooperation with the largest Polish bank is very promising. And of course, we expect that it should boost our GMV. Of course, we just announced this cooperation. We will implement both services next couple of weeks. And of course, carefully observing reaction of the market, but it looks right now, very promising.

Following your question about AI agent, we are excited to implement this functionality on the marketplace, and we see first very positive reactions from our customers. We should remember that this is still on test with, let's call it, friends and family, so with a limited number of users. But we see the first results that it's boosting conversion. And this is great because thanks to this technology, and this is comparable to what we see on the market using applications like ChatGPT or Gemini quite the same functionality that this is something helping our customers to find and to choose their proper products.

So there's functionality AI assistant will be available for all customers early next year. So it will be full implementation. And as said before, we're expecting something good because we see high demand, especially thinking about young generation, they look for such functionality. So this is something great. This is something exciting. This is something showing different the new way of shopping and for sure, supporting or improving even experience on our marketplace.

That was very comprehensive and helpful.

So we'll now move to our next question. That comes from Luke Holbrook from Morgan Stanley.

My first is actually back to the weather because it does look like it has got cold in the last couple of days, and you're suggesting that trading is picking up. It looks like it's going to remain relatively cold over the next week to 10 days. So I'm just wondering if the weather patterns do go in your favor, is there a possibility that you think you might have been a bit conservative in the guide into Q4, that could you actually outperform the guidance on where you're suggesting?

My second question is just if you can kind of give us an indication on where the cost of delivery could hedge for your largest logistics provider into 2026? Or if you can't comment explicitly on that, where we should regard like the cost of delivery increase into next year?

And then finally, just more of a conceptual one here on Agentic AI. Is it possible just to comment on how you see your proposition evolving if consumers do end up going to an LLM more to search for products or items or perhaps you can comment there on any partnerships that you have in the space?

Yes. Thank you very much for those questions. Yes, you -- you've obviously got your eye on the weather very closely. It has started to get colder, and we are indeed seeing some improvement in the categories that I mentioned, and that's contributing to the recovery in the growth rate that we're seeing. The weather is not the only part of the story. As I said, the initial part of Black Week has not gone so strongly. As I said, that was an experiment to try and extend it. And we do think that the growth in the Christmas season spending is going to come through strongly over the next weeks. We're just being somewhat cautious that having lost essentially 2 weeks out of the 8-week season in terms of the growth rate that we've seen, getting back all of this over that remaining 6 weeks is very optimistic, and we want to be a little bit on cautious side, right? So we do expect recovery. But in the circumstances, we need to be a little bit more cautious given what's happened in the first 2 weeks in November.

The second question was about cost of delivery. And in particular, I think it was related to the pricing for InPost for 2026. There is a binding contract through to 2027, as you all know. And within that contract, there's provision for indexation increases on an annual basis, they kick in on the 1st of January. It's totally at InPost discretion if they want to implement those increases or not. Inflation this year is -- has come down considerably. Right now, it's running at just under 3%. So these increases are going to be -- if they are implemented low single-digit increases this year compared to '26 compared to 2025.

If they choose to implement them, then obviously, they're already more expensive than the alternatives as we've said many times. So if they implement those increases, they're going to be even more expensive than they have been up until now. And so we will see what happens. But the simple answer is that they have the right to do that should they choose to use it. Agentic AI, you want to take that?

Yes. Thank you for this question because this is an extremely interesting one because, especially in the past, we heard many times that Agentic shopping mainly or some applications like ChatGPT, they can be quite competitive to marketplaces. We see completely on the opposite side because we are in discussion with all major players about cooperation, what we can do together because we see as opportunity to just generate higher GMV, thanks to accessing through these applications to a new group of customers and, of course, changing a bit way of shopping.

So you see that we implemented own technology or own solution to the marketplace. But of course, you can expect that we will be also visible with our offering in different types of applications in the market, major ones, because cooperating or discussing with all major players, we see almost unlimited opportunity because we can do a lot for them giving selection, wide selection of products, giving some value-added services. And of course, using these applications, using this opportunity for us to again generate additional GMV or to be closer to a new group of customers. So this is something promising to us. And of course, we will be announcing, I guess, next couple of quarters, many new initiatives related to AI because this is really technology changing the industry and helping marketplaces as Allegro to even boost GMV and the whole business.

So we'll move to the next voice question. That comes from Mia Strauss from BNP Paribas.

I just got 2. I know you talked about Q2 and today that you're looking at offering services outside of Allegro. Could you maybe just give us bit more color on maybe the delivery sort of services you could do and what timing that could be?

And then secondly, just on the Polish adjusted EBITDA, where you talked about that 8% or 8 percentage point impact from share principal cost. Can you maybe just explain this? I think I missed a little bit of that and how we should think about this going forward?

Thank you. I will take the first section of your questions. So yes, we do analyze externalization of our services, some of them like, for example, some of financial services, you should know that our buy now, pay later is, I guess, the largest or most popular service on the market, of course, very competitive to others and existing on other marketplaces or online stores.

And of course, we see huge demand from our merchants for potentially to use this service also of Allegro, because many merchants, they use mainly Allegro as a key sales channel for them, but also having additional sales channels like, for example, online store of them. So -- we think that some financial services, some logistics capabilities or maybe some advertising services can be also sold outside Allegro. Of course, we analyze attractiveness. Of course, we analyze potential impact on attractiveness of the value proposition on Allegro as well. We are in discussion -- internally, we are in discussion with the Board.

And if we decide to go further, I guess, next couple of quarters, next year, something will be visible in the market. But of course, we should test firstly, we should get some feedback from customers how attractive our services are in comparison to others in new places, in digital environment outside marketplace. But we are sure that we can potentially enter some new markets and to create some attractive -- very attractive value proposition and be competitive against other players.

Thanks, Marcin. So I think the second question, if I caught it correctly, was about the 8% of the increase in cost of delivery that related to proprietary accounting. So let me try and walk you through that. Historically, the -- historically, the delivery services have been done on an agent model in the sense that we would arrange a delivery for the Smart! customer and we would cover the cost of it.

And therefore, we were acting as an agent. And in those situations where there's revenue that revenue gets netted off against the cost. Now the revenue in those cases is the Smart! subscription revenue. And historically, essentially 100% of the cost of delivery was agent accounting and the Smart! costs were being netted off.

More recently, we started to do deliveries using the framework provided by the Allegro managed volumes. And within that, there's Allegro Delivery, which particularly relates to APMs. And in this case, it becomes a proprietary method of delivery where we're taking responsibility as the provider of the service. And we're either doing it ourselves with Allegro One or we're working with our partners like DPD and DHL as subcontractors to us, but we're ultimately responsible.

So in proprietary accounting, it means that the revenue gets recognized gross. And you probably recall that the logistics revenues were up 140% year-on-year when I was describing the revenue side. But the costs are also showing growth, yes. So what you have going into cost of delivery is essentially, that switch in mix from agent accounting using the old methods, i.e., InPost, for example, to the 36% that's now going through Allegro managed volumes and the costs are therefore recognized gross and any revenue is shown also gross.

The revenue is obviously those Smart! subscriptions, but we're also starting to handle some of the non-Smart! deliveries ourselves as well where the consumer is paying for the delivery. And that's additional -- that means additional cost that was not recorded in the P&L previously. But on the other hand, we make money on that because the consumer pays more than the cost of the delivery. So hopefully, that answers the question. If you're still a little confused, then we're more than happy to take it after the call with the IR team.

Our next voice question comes from Michal Potyra from UBS.

I have 3 as well. The first one is a follow-up on your PKO partnership. It seems that the cash back is supposed to be one of the main, let's say, incentives for the shoppers. So I'm wondering if you could share who would be covering the cost of the cash back, please? So that's the first question.

And the second question, I noticed that your balance sheet shows growing amount of consumer loans on your books. So I'm wondering if that's something you want to continue doing like a change in the policy? Or is it more -- I understand like was commented last quarter it's more of an opportunistic choice given the high cash balances.

And the third question, a little bit a complicated one. I'm wondering if you can give us a little bit more color on your delivery cost changes. So what I'm actually trying to understand is that once you onboard new partners like DHL or DPD, I try to understand how much of that increase in your kind of Allegro managed delivery is incremental and how much is still done by DHL, but just under a different agreement? And then if it's under a different agreement, I'm wondering if there is a difference in the unit cost for you, DHL now under Allegro Delivery and previously? Any color would be appreciated.

I'll take this. Michal, thank you very much for those questions. Let me start with -- I'll take all 3 of those. Let's start with the PKO and the cash back. This is an important contract, but it's not considered to be material. Therefore, we don't need to disclose the specific terms and conditions. The financial impact in short is not expected to be material. So exactly who is covering the various elements, the Smart! discount or the cash back is something that stays confidential. But as I already outlined previously, both sides have got a lot to gain from this cooperation. We're very comfortable with the agreement that we've got.

When it comes to the consumer lending, you were asking about our intentions in terms of using our own balance sheet. It's certainly the shift to using more of our own balance sheet this year is opportunistic in that we do want to run with significant liquidity to give us a lot of financial flexibility. And this is a much better way to invest that money than simply sticking it on deposit. But we are also able to very quickly access that money by going back to selling the loans in larger amounts from one week to the next, literally.

If we decided to, we could recover this money very, very quickly with the partners that we have at the moment. And also, we have other financing -- potential financing partners in the pipeline. Many banks here would like to be part of the Allegro Pay story.

The last question, yes, around delivery. So yes, building on what I said to the previous question, as parcel deliveries have moved from the agent model to the Allegro managed delivery model, we move -- it's essentially, it's the same parcel, but we go from a netting of any revenue with the cost of delivery to showing the revenue growth and the cost growth. Yes. So that's accounting for that 8% increase that I was describing in answering the previous question.

If we talk about Allegro Delivery, prior to joining Allegro Delivery, neither DHL nor DPD were doing any APM deliveries for us. They will -- they have existing courier relationships with us, but not on the APM side. So the APM side is purely incremental. But it's basically then part of that 8% where we're shifting from the agency model and using somebody else to using these new partners. Hopefully, that answers your question, if I'm not covered all of it, then again, we'll follow up with a detailed answer.

If I may, just a very quick follow-up on the delivery. So I get the account, you can get the accounting and I get the APM part. But for Allegro Delivery door-to-door physically delivered by DHL is the price you pay, not the accounting, the actual price different versus what it was before they joined?

Yes. The pricing, it's a different price, generally speaking, the prices are better than the prices we had in the previous model.

So we are moving to the next voice question that comes from [ Arun ] from Maximal.

Two questions from my side. One would be perhaps just to summarize on the delivery cost to GMV on the outlook there? Obviously, it ticked up a little bit this quarter. I appreciate all the nuance that you've given on what the individual drivers are behind that, but kind of bringing it all together, looking for the next few quarters and into next year, do you think the delivery cost line as a percent of GMV, as it's currently reported in the P&L, do you think that will start to trend down over the next few quarters? That's question one.

And then secondly, I think the company has spoken in quite general terms about being excited about offering new categories being kind of broader lifestyle or ecosystem proposition, whether that may include grocery or other kind of new categories that Allegro hasn't historically operated in. Any kind of progress on that or anything that you'd like to comment on there, please.

So I'll take the delivery one, and then Marcin will follow up the second question. The -- obviously, we're not giving any specific guidance about 2026 at this point in time. So I'll answer the question more in terms of the drivers that we're looking at. The pure volume driver, obviously, the more GMV and the more Smart! customers we have because Smart! customers spend more when they convert from being non-Smart!, that's a good thing, right? So the GMV goes up, also the cost of delivery goes up as the percentage of customers doing their deliveries via Smart! increases.

So if that's essentially the 17% out of the 28%, if that keeps moving up, we're more than happy basically because it means GMV growth. The 8% that relates to this structural shift towards the managed volumes. This is something that we intend to keep growing, and this is giving us access to lower unit prices than we're currently paying with the biggest delivery provider that we have who's still in the agency model.

If we managed to sign at some point, a new arrangement that's satisfactory to both parties that will supersede the current contract than that's obviously going to have a material impact, presumably favorable to us on the cost of delivery line, but that's still ahead of us and parts subject to negotiation. And that's basically the key elements. I mean, at the moment, the more we do ourselves, the margin, the lower the average unit cost. And then Marcin, the second.

Yes. The second question was related to potential new product categories. We shared with the market a couple of weeks ago about our considerations, our plans, what we want to do on the market, how we want to enter in some parts of the market and how we see potential. And of course, we're analyzing many of them trying to identify some new core product categories, of course, giving us material impact on our GMV because, of course, we should remember that we want to give our customers the right selection with the right value proposition, but finally, to have a material impact on our business. So we can expect that something in our selection will be visible in Q1. So next couple of quarters. We are in discussion with several partners, we have some idea as to what kind of products can be helpful or can be perceived as attractive ones by our customers.

And second thing, even much more important to us is because we're also talking about services, this is something new potentially to us, and I'm saying about also how to expand offering related to value-added services, helping to boost sales of products we have on the marketplace, but also services, what we shared like ideas in the past, it can be potentially like travel, it can be potentially like health care or these type of services. So yes, we are excited doing these projects or identifying some new opportunities. And the first test should be visible quite soon, so next couple of months.

So we'll now move to the next questions. I will hand over to Mr. Tomasz Pozniak to read them out to the audience.

Thank you, Rafael. So let's take the first question from Marek Szymanski, IPOPEMA Securities. Could you please talk about the path to and the perspective for the EBIT profitability for the APM lockers?

Can you just repeat the question? I didn't catch it.

Could you please talk about the path and perspective to EBIT profitability for the APM lockers of Allegro, Allegro One box?

Yes, certainly. The -- at the EBITDA level, as we've already mentioned, it's clearly a lot cheaper than paying for the alternative, which is cover -- presumably certainly in the case of InPost more than covering their full cost down to EBIT level. In our case, we're actually making really significant progress in terms of filling the lockers and in terms of utilization, which means that we're getting closer and closer to the breakeven.

The important thing about having our own locker capability is the optionality that it's giving us if we hadn't started this project back in 2021, then the progress that we're making at the moment wouldn't have been possible. And also the discussions around the long-term deal that we have with InPost would have been more difficult than they are in the current situation.

So we're heading towards profitability at the current price level that we have in the market is the short answer to the question because we're making tremendous progress in terms of the volumes that are moving.

Thank you, Jon. Next question is from Roman Reshetnev from Goldman Sachs. Could you provide an update on discussions with authorities regarding regulatory changes to ensure a level playing field with international marketplaces? And what would be the update on the timing and nature of potential legislative action? Would you see this action different compared to other EU markets?

Maybe I will take this question. So of course, the answer is that this is something what is supported by us because we want to see fair competition on the market, and this is great that we have some new players sometimes pushing us to be even faster with development of some capabilities and to increase attractiveness of the offering we have, but we should play using the same rules. We should play having the same conditions on the market. And of course, we are quite close to local authorities doing some research, sharing some analysis to show the broader perspective. How is it impacting also the Polish economy also on the negative side. And of course, we are fully supportive to all the initiatives, the local ones, but also on the European Union level to fix this problem because, again, this is something affecting badly European companies, European marketplaces because of unfair competition.

Thank you, Marcin. And thank you taking out the time, which is running out right now. The last question would be from Harry Wilton from Virgin Asset Management. You guided for margins of just below 6% for full year '25. So if we assume 5.9%, that implies 5.2% for Q4 '25. Is that in line with expectations given the aforementioned impact?

Yes. I'll take that question. I do have a little cheat sheet here with me, and I think you're slightly low. I think I heard you say 5.2%, the low end of the range would definitely be in the mid-5s and the high end of the range -- yes, around 5.7% or something like that for the quarter because your question was about the quarter itself. But I think 5.2% was too low.

Thank you, Jon. So 11:20, the scheduled time to close the conference. I would like to thank all the participants. Thank you for the questions. Jon, Marcin, thanks for the presentation. And see you, everyone, in March when we'll be reporting in Q4. Rafael, the floor is yours to conclude the presentation.

Thank you. This concludes the call. We will be now closing all the lines. Thank you, and good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am your Jota, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining Allegro Group Earnings Call and Live Webcast to present and discuss the second quarter 2025 results. [Operator Instructions]

The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tomasz Pozniak, Investor Relations Director. Mr. Pozniak, you may now proceed.

Thank you, Jota, and welcome to all participants of our call. Let me introduce the presenters of today. Marcin Kusmierz, the CEO of Allegro Group, who will provide you with the highlights of Allegro performance in Q2 and summarize the key takeaways; and Mr. Jon Eastick, our CFO, who will guide you through the financials for Q2 and update of the outlook for the full year 2025.

As usual, our results presentation is available for download from our Investors web page at allegro.eu. You may also download the slides from the link available on the webcast screen. As a reminder, today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from the expectations expressed in such statements.

Please make sure you review the full disclaimer on Slide #2. Also please note this presentation and the Q&A session are being recorded and will be available for a replay on our website at allegro.eu. And with this, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Marcin. The floor is yours.

Good morning. This is Marcin Kusmierz, CEO of the company. Thank you for introducing and welcoming the participants of today's conference call. At the beginning of our meeting, I would like to share the key financial and operating results achieved in the second quarter of 2025. Detailed information will be presented by Jon Eastick, our CFO, in the second part of the presentation.

GMV on Allegro in Poland was close to 10% and more than twice as high than nominal growth in retail sales. We showed rapid growth compared to our competitors in the e-commerce industry as well as traditional retail chains. We exceeded 15 million active buyers, while also passed PLN 4,000 GMV per active buyer. Good results in GMV and increase in the number of buyers resulted in strong revenue growth over 18% year-on-year.

Almost every part of our business developed well, but our advertising business line deserves special mention with over 30% growth year-over-year. It is also worth mentioning the take rate, which exceeded 13% in Poland and improved by nearly 5 percentage points. We see that we still have very good potential for further growth in Poland.

For customers in Poland, Allegro is the first choice, and we are consistently building our position in the Central Eastern Europe. At the group level, GMV increased by 9%, which was influenced by continued optimization of the mall group. At the level of international marketplaces in CEE, we achieved excellent GMV growth and demonstrated Allegro's consistency in building a strong position as a regional leader. The number of active buyers in the group exceeded 21 million with GMV per active buyer increasing by over 4%.

At the group level, our revenues grew by over 10%, again, with a good outlook for the future. Strong GMV growth and excellent revenue growth had a positive impact on adjusted EBITDA, which increased by 14% in Poland and by over 20% at the group level. Thanks to that, we are upgrading revenues and adjusted EBITDA outlook towards the top end of the range.

We are constantly continuing our investments related to the development of the marketplace's functionality and making it even more attractive. We're also investing in the development of logistics infrastructure that supports the expansion of the Allegro delivery program. As a result, our CapEx expenses increased by 67% to over PLN 200 million.

It's also worth mentioning the reduction in financial leverage, which was supported by strong free cash flow generation. Let me now present the 4 pillars of our development. These are the strategic directions, which we focused last couple of years. We are constantly investing in the development of the marketplace, our core business in both Poland and the CEE region, giving consumers the widest choice of products, ease of purchase and range of added services.

We're also developing new growth drivers, which, on the one hand, strengthened our core business and on the other hand, build a long-term competitive advantage. They have a positive impact on the pace of our business development and make our business more diversified. I'm talking about advertising, financial services and logistics. With each quarter, we are growing stronger in the markets of Central Eastern Europe. Customers from Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary are increasingly shopping on Allegro, building relationships with us and taking advantage of our loyalty program.

They increasingly treat us as one of the main places to buy products based on our wide selection and attractive prices. We want to continuously improve our value proposition for buyers and sellers in the region so that as in Poland, we are their first choice. We're also strengthening our foundations, technological business and human. We use a modern technological platform within the group, and we are building a culture focused on innovation and development.

We are a company that invests in long-term growth and strengthening our market position. For a moment, I will focus on the value proposition we offer to buyers and sellers in Poland. We invest heavily in personalization and targeting products to the expectations of consumers and business customers.

Allegro is a place where you can find the widest range high-quality branded products. We're constantly attracting new sellers to the platform. They represent almost all industries and business sizes. They are global corporations as well as local microenterprises and have perfect understanding of customer expectations and needs.

When I joined Allegro a couple of months ago, we almost immediately started a discussion with the management team and the Board about the possibility of accelerating our growth and strengthening our market position. Allegro has almost everything it needs to conquer new market segments and attract new customer groups.

It is the leading online shopping destination in Poland, and we see further prospects for strengthening our position. So we are analyzing the market and the attractiveness of investment in its individual segments. In the coming weeks or months, we will discuss and approve strategic areas for making potential investments with the Board.

We have launched the process that we're calling accelerated evolution. Our ambition is to be the leading shopping destination for current customers and customers representing future generations. We want to be a platform that addresses customer expectations and needs and is a friendly ecosystem that supports the growth of our partners.

Let's start by discussing the core marketplace and how we see opportunities for its growth in the future. We will certainly accelerate investments in the development of marketplace functionality. For 25 years, Allegro has been the first choice for buyers and sellers in Poland and Central Eastern Europe.

We see potential in combining the functionality and added services of the 3P and 1P models, everything that is the best about that. The 3P model remains our foundation, and we do not plan to expand our own product range or maintain larger inventories. What inspires us in 1P and what we add to Allegro is sector expertise, consulting and even better product management.

Now I will focus on the possibility of expanding our marketplace with new categories and market segments. The natural direction for the development of marketplace is expansion of product offering. We currently have over 80 million products, but we still see opportunities to add some new product categories, accelerate GMV growth and increase the frequency of purchases. We're also exploring possibility of cooperating with brands that they are not currently present in Poland and CEE to become a gateway for their market expansion.

Services, a new area of interest for us. We're analyzing and looking with curiosity at the rapidly growing services segment in recent years. We're carefully looking at the segments with the largest market share and the greatest potential, both those that support the sales of products, financial services or insurance as well as those that are independent. Customers trust Allegro. They have great relationships with us, and they want to grow with us. So we believe that we will be able to create for them some new special unique value.

The next point is potential externalization of services produced at Allegro as another area that could potentially support our growth. We're considering selling some services outside the marketplace. We create world-class products and following the example of global players, we're thinking about selling them in other parts of the market. Our Allegro Pay is the best buy now, pay later solution on the market.

Our logistics infrastructure is the engine for the highest quality services. This is a potential opportunity to build relationships with the new groups of customers and sellers. We see a lot of interest and demand from merchants. We're talking with them about joint opportunities for growth, business development and new directions for expansion.

Finally, our goal is to update our value proposition so that customers continue to see its uniqueness and fully appreciate its value. For clarity, I want to underline that presented directions of development are fully consistent with the current strategy and are still the subject of our analysis and consultations with the Board.

We're constantly investing in improving our value proposition for buyers and sellers. In the first half of the year, we developed a shop-in-shop service combining the shopping experience known from 3P and 1P models. The solution has been recognized by regional and international brands such as Finish, HP, Inglot, Karcher or Pampers. The number of authorized sellers representing well-known brands has also increased significantly. Now we have over 3,000 of them on Allegro.

Thanks to better management of AML and KYC processes by Allegro Finance, we have improved the merchant verification process. As a result, new merchants can start selling on Allegro much faster. As part of the partner channel, we're working with merchants to further simplify processes. Our ambition is to have the most merchant-friendly ecosystem among European marketplaces. Over 1.5 million products in Poland and nearly 0.5 million in Czechia are covered by the best price guarantee. This is further confirmation for customers that Allegro is the best shopping destination. With us, they can save some money and time. And it is also worth mentioning the prestigious awards we received in the second quarter, Brand of the Year, Best Marketplace and the Best Shopping Experience.

Smart! is one of the leading loyalty programs in Europe. We have added new benefits to it and to activate and reward its users. The program now has many new additional features, fun and gamification, unique deals and benefits to be used on Allegro, but also outside the platform.

Smart! is extremely popular and attracts hundreds of thousands of new users every year. They also have access to unique events and promotional campaigns. In Poland alone, they are already over 6 million subscribers. We are happy to announce that Allegro Delivery has become the program serving the largest number of parcel lockers in Poland. Thanks to the new agreement with DPD announced in recent days, their number within Allegro Delivery has exceeded 33,000 and the number of pickup points has exceeded 37,000. Thanks to the close cooperation with DHL, DPD, Orlen Paczka and of course, Allegro, buyers and sellers have even more choice in both delivery methods and locations.

It is worth remembering that consumers always decide how they want their parcels to be delivered and they use Allegro app to track their shipments. Buyers on Allegro also have access to logistics services provided by other companies. By developing the Allegro Delivery program and our infrastructure, we are increasing the efficiency of our logistics services and our independence from selected service providers. By the end of the year, we want to have over 8,000 of our own parcel lockers, over 1,000 more than we originally planned.

It is worth mentioning that thanks to successful negotiations with manufacturers, the installation of a larger number of parcel lockers will take place within the approved CapEx. We have also decided to invest in new depots and completing new sorting facility. This is associated with rapid increase in managed volume, which exceeded 34% at the end of Q2 and increased by nearly 5 percentage points compared to the previous quarter.

We're also achieving one of the highest NPS results in the industry, which amounted to 82 points in the second quarter. We are already seeing the positive impact of the cooperation with DHL, which began a couple of months ago, and we expect at least the same effect from the new cooperation with DPD.

Let's move on to my favorite slide because it's related to AI technology. Our company is certainly one of the leaders in AI-based technological transformation. We do massive implementation in the company, which will cover almost all parts of the organization. We're talking about areas related to purchasing such as intelligent search engines or recommendations, increasing productivity in software development and equipping our employees with new skills to improve their work efficiency.

We believe in this technology. We have already implemented it commercially based on an agentic approach in marketing or customer experience or customer service, and we are convinced that AI is an investment with a high rate of return. We are constantly increasing the use of AI technology in our current and planned projects. We expect that next year, around 40% of the software we produce will contain some components prepared or produced by AI. At Allegro International, we achieved excellent GMV growth in the second quarter, 61%.

We also increased the number of Smart! users to over 1 million, and the GMV generated in the application grew by over 100% year-over-year. Allegro International sales are mainly based on Polish sellers, but we're also consistently increasing the number of local partners.

We have launched a new program aimed at significantly increasing the number of local sellers and supporting them in their sales. We're also completing the transformation of some of our international assets. In the case of Mall North, the process has been already completed. In our international development, we focus on the 3P model and group synergies. The growth dynamics show that we are doing this better and better.

Thank you very much, Marcin, and good morning, everybody. It's great to be with you today, and I'm really looking forward to taking you through these really great Q2 results for the Allegro Group. As usual, I'll start with the Polish operations. Key KPIs are in front of you at the moment. Let me move to the next slide and the key KPIs behind the GMV.

So as you've heard, the business accelerated in Poland in the second quarter. The main driver for that was increase in spend per active buyer. You can see there on the right-hand side that it's moved up sequentially to 2% growth on quarter-on-quarter, which gets us to PLN 4,178 of annual spend per customer, well over $1,000, and that's an 8% growth rate on a year-on-year basis.

In terms of active buyers, over the last 12 months, we've added over 300,000. We're at 15.2 million active buyers for the Polish market. It's very important to remember behind many of these accounts are households. So there are millions of more buyers on Allegro than you see here.

When it comes to GMV, up 0.9% sequentially to 9.8% on a year-on-year basis, PLN 16.5 billion of GMV generated in the second quarter. On a last 12-month basis, that moves our GMV up to PLN 63.4 billion, which is 10.1% higher than this time a year ago. It's also important to note that in the second quarter, we had a headwind from the fact that Easter had moved back into April from March a year ago. And for our categories, Easter is actually a headwind unlike for the grocery businesses that you also follow.

So with that in mind, the result is even better than it looks at first sight. As usual, supermarket and health and beauty, high-frequency categories that we're focused on continue to grow faster than the average. This quarter, it was 2x faster.

Looking for a physical measure of our development, as you know, we track items sold as a marketplace. That's up 11.4% on an annualized basis. It's also worth looking at the ASP on those items sold. Mix adjusted, the ASP is up by 1.7% year-on-year. This is the highest reading since the figures turned positive about a year ago and continues to move on an upward trend.

And a quick word on Allegro Pay, 15.3% of GMV was funded by the Allegro Pay payment methods in the second quarter. Loans origination has moved up to PLN 3.3 billion in the quarter.

So then let's look at revenue, and we've had an excellent quarter. The growth has accelerated to 18.1% year-on-year, landing on almost PLN 2.8 billion of revenue. And this is obviously coming from the GMV growth, combined with the higher take rates, strong performances from advertising, logistics and consumer lending. Focusing on the take rate, you'll remember from the previous call regarding Q1 that we increased the cofinancing rates in our annual monetization change in March. So there was 1 quarter of improvement included in the Q -- sorry, 1 month of improvement included in the Q1 results.

Obviously, we now have 3 months' worth in Q2, and that results in the take rate moving up sequentially to 13.01% for Q2. On an annual basis, it's almost 0.5% higher than a year ago. You see as well on the bridge there, the rates of growth across advertising continuing to be over 30% quarter after quarter. Logistics moving up significantly, more and more of the services or the deliveries that they're doing are actually also the paid deliveries that we do outside of Smart!. So the logistics revenues are going up and also financial income being a driver behind the other income that you see on the slide.

So with growth like that in revenue, it's relatively straightforward to grow EBITDA, and our EBITDA moved up by 14.2% for the Polish business in Q2. PLN 1.037 billion of adjusted EBITDA for Poland for the quarter. And you can see the impact of those revenue drivers on the bridge on the left-hand side there, the first 3 items on the bridge.

Let's focus in a little bit on cost of delivery. PLN 156 million higher cost of delivery than a year earlier, which translates to a 23.1% increase in delivery cost. As a percentage of GMV, it's actually come down very slightly from Q1 from 5.1% to 5% of GMV. And most importantly, most of the growth in this cost has actually come from volume, from additional parcels from the higher GMV and from additional penetration of Smart!. You see that laid out there, 18.1% of the 23%, plus another 3.5% where Allegro Delivery is delivering parcels that are being paid for by the consumers.

That leaves only 1.5 percentage points of impact that's coming from higher unit cost. And when you remember that on the 1st of January, we absorbed a double-digit indexation increase from our largest delivery partner, we're really very happy to see that we managed to offset most of that increase in the Q2 numbers.

That unit cost increase is mainly held down in that way because of the growth in our Allegro managed volumes, which were up by 4.6 percentage points Q-on-Q to 34%. And in essence, every single delivery that we move into an Allegro managed delivery method is at a lower cost than the alternatives, and this is why we're now starting to see a significant positive impact on our cost of delivery.

Looking at the net cost of delivery, which requires also considering the revenues that are coming from cofinancing, which are part of take rates, the net burden of running the Smart! program expressed as a percentage of GMV has actually come down in Q2 compared to Q2 a year ago.

Final comment really on this slide is to draw your attention to the 6.27 percentage adjusted EBITDA to GMV, which is 24 percentage points higher -- sorry, decimal points higher. This is going to be the high point for the quarter -- sorry, for the year. As we expect going forward, as the year progresses that certain cost increases will need to be absorbed; higher salaries, higher costs of various delivery methods, other indexations. And therefore, the margin will come down a little bit later in the year.

Moving on to capital investment. And we were signaling to you earlier in the year that the CapEx program this year is significantly more ambitious, and that's what you see in the numbers. 72% growth on a year-on-year basis for Q2 to PLN 193 million, which is mainly coming from an increase in other CapEx, which was up by 4x at PLN 80.3 million for the quarter. This is mostly obviously coming from investments in our logistics expansion.

It's predominantly APMs, but also investments in our courier depots and network. When it comes to capitalized development costs, those are up much more moderately, up 22% year-on-year or PLN 20 million. The tech team is slightly larger than a year ago. Obviously, salaries are higher than a year ago. And they're actually spending more time programming new functionalities that Marcin was describing earlier than on maintenance, which is also increasing the share of the cost, which is being capitalized.

When we compare to our medium-term guardrails where we've set out a maximum of 25% of Polish adjusted EBITDA to be reinvested into CapEx, our H1 situation is that we're running at a 20% spend. So comfortably within the guardrails.

So let's move on from Poland and take a look at the international operations, key KPIs set out on the slide that you see in front of you. I will come back to why this is on a pro forma basis in a couple of minutes. But let's focus in on the Allegro International segment for Q2. Now as Marcin said already, it's been a very good quarter for the international marketplaces, which are our new marketplaces in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

Great growth across the board. Starting with the traffic, it's up 47% year-on-year. And this despite the fact that we've actually dialed back on our marketing investments and really focused on improving the ROIs on those investments on a going-forward basis. Active buyers up even more, 57.4% at 3.9 million active buyers across the 3 markets, which is a really strong performance. Spend per buyer also moving up 10.2% higher than a year ago at PLN 540.

Looking then at the other key metrics, that means that the GMV growth was able to reach 61%, so very comfortably up at the top end of our outlook, and that's PLN 572 million of GMV from these marketplaces. Revenue was up even stronger at PLN 63 million, 111% higher than a year ago. The take rates are up by 2.6 percentage points on last year. More of the Smart! subscriptions are being paid for by the consumers.

There's more revenue coming in from logistics. So altogether, revenue is moving up nicely. And that means that we were actually able to cut the size of the loss for the first time on a year-on-year basis. It's down PLN 21 million on a year ago, PLN 66.5 million invested in the marketplaces and the margin to GMV has improved to minus 11.6% in the quarter.

Let's move on and take a look at the Mall segment. And as you've heard from Marcin, we've essentially finished the projects around transforming Mall in the northern markets of Czech, Slovakia and Hungary. And the main component of that has obviously been this intentional rundown of their legacy unprofitable e-shop business, which you see reflected here in the GMV for the second quarter, 58.7% lower than it was a year ago at PLN 184 million. That was only generating PLN 24 million of margin, as you see on the right-hand side.

And with other cost savings, we were able to actually cut the loss to PLN 55.7 million. And most importantly, because we shut down now the independent operation, the independent front ends, we've been able to take further reductions in staffing. We've also been able to move out of the legacy warehouse, which is too big for purpose and move to outsourced logistics solutions. And those things will help us cut the loss much further in the second half of the year.

So summing the 2 segments together, you get the results of international operations, which are shown on the next slide in summary form. And let me now come back to the topic of why those numbers were pro forma. We've made a change in the segment reporting between Q1 and Q2. And what's triggered this is one of the points I mentioned, which is that we've finally shut down all of the Mall North front end, the independent legacy front ends. And now, Mall North only trades as a lean merchant selling over the marketplace.

Now applying the accounting regulations, what that means is that the Mall North segment no longer has an independent route to market to generate revenues. And in those circumstances, the segment needs to be rolled up into the bigger segment, the one that does have that capability to generate revenue.

So as a result, we now will be reporting the Mall North operation together with the new marketplaces going forward. To see this in numbers, take a look at the next slide. And the key thing here is that the numbers themselves in total are not changing. So the total international operations, which you see there on the right-hand side of the slide is no different between the old way of doing the segmentation, the pro forma, and the new segmentation, which you'll find as reported in the financial statements, exactly the same numbers. The difference is that the Mall North segment moves out of Mall and into the Allegro International segment. You can see that in the gray boxes between the 2 tables and nothing else really changes. What's left in Mall is just the Mall South business, which is in Slovenia and Croatia, where they continue to operate using their independent e-shop.

And the last part of this story is that the accounting rules also require when you make a change in segments to retrospectively restate all the history. And we've shown you what that impact is for GMV on the following slide. On the left-hand side, you have the way we've been reporting the marketplaces and their growth historically. And on the right-hand side, this new segmentation.

Now what you see there is that the Q2 numbers are essentially exactly the same. And going forward, you'll be looking at the growth of the marketplace as we continue to develop it. When you're looking at year-on-year growth rates, you're going to see the impact of that shrinking legacy Mall growth in the prior year comparatives. And that's going to make the headline GMV growth rates look lower for a few quarters.

So that's it for International. Let's move on and take a look at the consolidated group. I normally just talk about leverage when we look at the group numbers, and I'm going to continue that today. Let's start with the leverage as of 30th of June. It's moved down by 12 basis points of a turn to 0.72x adjusted EBITDA. It would have gone down even more if we've not made the decision to use some of the high cash balances at our disposal to increase the investment that we have in our consumer loan book. We put PLN 364 million to work funding Allegro Pay loans during the first half of the year, bringing the total to PLN 867 million.

And that, of course, means we retain a bigger share of the financial income that's coming from these loans, sharing less of it with our financing partners and helping our EBITDA. We've also prepared for you a pro forma calculation for the 30th of June to show you what is the impact of the financing transactions that took place in the few weeks after the end of June.

In particular, you see here the impact of the return of PLN 1.4 billion to shareholders via a share buyback for 3.7% of stock. Taking that PLN 1.4 billion out of the balance sheet, in effect, has moved the leverage up to 1.16 on a pro forma basis as of the 30th of June. And it will be coming down from there. We expect to be generating significant cash flow in the second half of the year, and we would expect to land around about that 1x leverage that we have in our medium-term guidelines and capital allocation policy as our target level for the group's leverage.

So let me move on to the outlook, which, as you've heard from Marcin, is moving up for the full year. But let me just start with a quick look at how we've done at the halfway mark in comparison to the guidance as originally published back in March, which you see on this slide.

The key message here is across all KPIs and all segments, we're on track. And the year is going very, very well indeed. Let's look at then current trading, which is laid out on the next slide. How has it been going in the third quarter? Well, we're continuing a gradual acceleration of the Polish business. The GMV is up towards 10% year-on-year.

On the international markets, the international marketplaces that were growing 61% in Q2, we're still seeing growth in the 50% to 55% range, reminding you as well, we're now lapping Slovakia as well as Czech Republic results in these numbers. The Mall North legacy front-end GMV that I was describing in the context of the segment changes means that the results for this segment as a whole are going to be slightly negative because we still have these figures in the prior year numbers.

And the Mall South segment, which has continued to be reported separately, is shrinking, but that shrinkage has slowed to mid-single digits. So looking at GMV on a group level, we're actually growing somewhat quicker than we were doing in the first half of the year.

So that means moving on to look at the outlook update. As we get closer to the end of the year, we're either able to narrow the ranges because there's obviously less variability remaining or in some cases, we've managed to move up the guidance because we're getting increasingly confident we're going to move towards the top end of the range.

And that's particularly true for the revenue and the adjusted EBITDA where our expectations are moving up. A couple of numbers just to call out. The Polish operations, we're expecting to come in on or around that 10% growth rate for the full year, but going faster in international than we were originally expecting.

Revenues were up across the board. We're looking at 8% to 11% growth for the group and 16% to 18% for Poland. EBITDA costs very much under control, especially in Poland. So the guidance has moved up for Poland to the 10% to 12% growth for the full year.

And capital investment, very much on track, no change in the guidance, but we are managing to do 1,000 extra APMs within the cost budget. So with that, I think you can agree that things are going well, and I'm going to hand it back over to Marcin to hit the key talking. Marcin?

Thank you, Jon. So let me remind you of our key achievements in the second quarter of 2025. A very solid improvement in almost all financial and operating results. We are very pleased with the growth in GMV, revenue, adjusted EBITDA and the increase in the number of users of our marketplaces and their growing spending. .

Advertising and financial services are developing very, very well and have good prospects ahead of them. We are successfully developing our international business, focusing on 3P model, we're seeing solid and promising growth in GMV. We also have completed the transformation of Mall North in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. And we're continuing the strategic development of our logistics network and the Allegro Delivery program. Managed volume is already at 34% with an increase of nearly 5 percentage points quarter-to-quarter.

The new agreement with DPD will certainly have a positive impact on the efficiency of the logistics area. And for sure, it will be accelerating the diversification process. We also have completed a very successful buyback and achieved a historically high free float of 72%. And last but not least, we're working with the Board about new potential growth opportunities to build additional growth drivers into annual strategy update.

Thank you, Marcin. Thank you, Jon. We have just concluded the presentation, and we're ready for the Q&A session. Jota, over to you.

[Operator Instructions]

The first question comes from the line of Holbrook Luke with Morgan Stanley.

My first one is just on your delivery partner network that's now handling about 34% of your volume. As you mentioned, it's up 5% Q-on-Q. It was up a similar percentage to the quarter before. So with DPD coming online, almost doubling, I guess, the amount of APMs you have through that network, how can we expect that to trend over the next 2 or 3 quarters, if you could just map that out for us?

And then secondly, just on your comments that your delivery partners are now cheaper than your largest non-network delivery partner. I'm just kind of wondering how that looks in terms of when we can expect you to kind of announce the outcome of your renegotiations with InPost for your contract that's due to expire in 2027.

Okay. Thank you for those questions. Yes. Let me start with the one about DPD. So obviously, we just signed the contract. There has been quite a lot of work going on in the background to get ready for DPD, but there won't really be much impact from DPD in Q3, obviously, because these deliveries will only kick in, in the next few weeks. It will have much more of a significant impact on the fourth quarter.

And you rightly highlighted the fact that there's a lot more APMs, 11,000 additional points where we'll be able to funnel traffic, although they're smaller APMs than the others, means that it will also be a driver for increasing the Allegro managed volume metric, especially in the fourth quarter.

When it comes to the pricing, obviously, we are talking with InPost and it's too early to make any predictions about if and when we will come to conclusions. We are very constructive about the situation, but we do need to see lower prices. And Marcin, if there's anything you want to add to that?

Yes. Thank you, Jon. I think you know that we are purely focused on the development of Allegro Delivery. And you see that we're inviting new partners to the program, all major players on the Polish market. So we just announced cooperation with DPD, the second player on the market. So thanks to that, we have the largest network of lockers on the Polish market and [indiscernible] as well. So this is the crucial point for us, and we want to invest mainly in development of this program.

The next question comes from the line of Ross Andrew with Barclays.

A couple for me, please. The first one is just to double-click a bit on some of the investments, but it sounds like you're discussing with the Board to help growth accelerate. I'm wondering if you can put a bit of a framework around that in terms of when we might see these investments and kind of how you think about margin investment in that context and then kind of when we might see Polish growth accelerate. And I appreciate it's hard to be specific, but if you could just give us a bit of a kind of directional framework, that would be helpful.

And then the second question is to kind of follow up on that. In the opening remarks, you spoke about the idea of taking -- or kind of selling some of your services off-platform. On the fintech side, I think you touched on buy now, pay later, but are there any other fintech services that you could envisage being sold kind of off-platform? And you've also touched on logistics. Can you just be more specific by what you meant when you spoke about kind of selling your logistics solution? Does that mean taking other kind of merchant volumes through the Allegro One network? Does it mean something else, it would be helpful to better understand by what you mean on that.

Thank you for these questions. Of course, I just joined the company started in May this year. And of course, I was -- and I am still specialized in new business. If you look at my career and my development, I was always looking for some new opportunities, how to speed up growth, how to accelerate development of the company. And I do the same here at Allegro. So we started as a management team discussion with the Board, how we can accelerate our growth, how we see potential directions, also entering some new fields. But this is quite early stage. Of course, we see some new attractive parts of the market we can potentially cover.

We see new product categories. We see services, as mentioned before, we see some cooperations or even strategic partnerships, thanks to that we can add something new, something extra to the platform and thanks to that attract new group of customers to us.

You know that we have great potential and we have great position on the market, but the market is changing rapidly. So we try to discover all the time some new possibilities, again, to help our customers to find all they need at Allegro, but also, of course, thanks to that to accelerate our growth.

And we're also discussing how we can use existing products we develop at Allegro, using example of Allegro Pay or using example of our logistics infrastructure. They represent absolutely the world class. They absolutely are the best-in-class in those segments. So we analyze how we can help our merchants, how we can use our infrastructure to be even more efficient. What is the attractiveness in creation of some new capabilities for our merchants? Because finally, as we saying many times, we want to build a very merchant-friendly ecosystem and to support their growth, of course, mainly on Allegro because we see and we know that this is the perfect place for them to do business together. But of course, we want to be as efficient as we could be. So again, we have many innovations. We have some advantage in comparison to other players, and we want to use these tools to be even stronger.

So just to be clear on that, could that involve putting in kind of non-Allegro inventory through the Allegro One network?

Andrew, it's Jon. If we were to go in that direction, it would almost certainly be on the Allegro Delivery level, right? So it might be non-Allegro parcels, but across all the partners in Allegro Delivery. But it's still at an early stage. As Marcin was saying, these are the areas that we can see a first look to expand our footprint of activity, which is another way to obviously find additional growth drivers.

We're discussing these with the Board in this year's planning round. And we would anticipate starting to make tangible moves on some of these once it's all been agreed over the next few months in our planning process.

The next question comes from the line of Reshetnev Roman with Goldman Sachs.

Congratulations on the solid set of results. Just to follow up on logistics. InPost previously mentioned that 30% of their Allegro checkouts in Q2 included a prompt to use your delivery network. And given InPost's legal action and some customer pushback reported in the media, could you comment on how do you view the situation from your side? And as we enter the high season when service quality becomes more sensitive, how sustainable is this approach for volume redirection for you going forward?

And second one on logistics, just like following the recent partnership agreement with DPD, what would be your long-term vision for logistics in Poland? And given you still have a long way to build out your own network and considering your stronger leverage position, would you look at some M&A opportunities in the logistics space?

Okay. Thank you for the questions. I think the first part was relating to the arbitration case, if I understood correctly, that InPost has brought under the scope of the long-term contract that we have that runs until 2027.

As we actually showed in one of those slides that Marcin put up earlier, have the capability to prompt customers in the checkout process to see and to consider using lockers, which are now available under the Allegro Delivery framework, either because they've just been deployed or because we've added partners, and we do that. We make use of that. I'm not going to comment on what percentage of the time, but we don't use it all the time. We respect the choices of consumers.

But what's most important there is that in accordance with the agreement, the customers have just one click on a button that says change, and they can see the full list of all the available delivery methods that they have at their disposal and they're able to pick whatever they want. So we will see what happens in the arbitration, but we don't think that there's any merit to the claim.

Now the second part was M&A and logistics. I mean, we don't really comment on M&A. I don't think there's any need to be considering M&A. The Allegro Delivery approach is working extremely well. The partnerships are working extremely well. Who knows in the very long term what may happen in an industry. But in the short term, there's no comment to make on M&A.

And just a follow-up on the current trends, given that you already highlighted an update on the third quarter GMV growth. And since we're now in the high season, could you also elaborate on the EBITDA growth trajectory? And specifically, how would you describe the activity of Chinese marketplaces in Poland and international over the last months? And do you still see them driving significant pressure on customer acquisition costs?

Yes. Thank you for that question. Yes, let me come back to the margin. Obviously, the margin was up to 6.27% in Q2, but we try to limit our monetization moves to once a year, and we've been doing that for a couple of years now in the first quarter. So it tends to generate a high watermark in the margin in the second quarter, and it will then trend down somewhat over the rest of the year because the salary raises, for example, are in April.

Generally speaking, delivery partners need some kind of indexation increase during the course of the year. The IT providers are obviously also looking for increases. So as these things come into the numbers, plus a natural trend for the take rate to drop lower in the fourth quarter mean that the average margin for the year will be lower than that 6.27%. And obviously, you can back calculate it into the guidance that we've given you today that it's expected to land just under the 6% mark for the full year.

Yes. And the second part of the question was around the Chinese. We are seeing an increase in activity. This kind of the rebound or the knock-on effect, if you want to call it that, from the tariffs and the changes that were imposed in the U.S. So there is clearly more activity of the Chinese players across Europe, not only in Poland, in recent months. But we're still not seeing a significant increase in the rate of increase in our own surveys.

They're still in the similar sort of range. So there's a lot of top of funnel activity. We don't see that much of it coming through in the surveys that we do that try and look at where people are actually shopping in the month-to-month surveys. It is having an impact on our marketing spending. I didn't touch on it in the EBITDA slide, but you can see that we're up about, I think, 17% on a year-on-year basis.

We're fighting on all fronts for the share of voice on all different advertising media. We're not going to cede any ground. We are the leader in this market. But yes, they're an important player.

And as Jon said, we see kind of limited direct competition because Chinese players, of course, they are strong, they are innovative, but they cover different parts of the market, mainly being focused on most price-sensitive customers. And this is, by the way, they show some potential for us or some parts of the market to be covered.

But we should remember that the strength of Allegro is based on cooperation with 100,000 merchants from Poland and the region, and we have the widest selection of branded products. So again, we see, of course, some rising competition. But right now, we see that we cover a bit different parts of the market.

The next question comes from the line of Potyra Michal with UBS.

I just have follow-up questions. The first one on your net cost of delivery. It seems to have plateaued at 5% of GMV. So my question is, is this the level you are satisfied with? Or we should expect that to return to growth in the coming quarters?

And the second question, another follow-up this time on the Chinese competitors. I just wonder, I mean, it seems that margin was lobbying in Brussels. There was also an article in FT on the topic. So maybe you can share some intel what are your expectations on the potential regulatory changes in either Europe or Poland, which could even the playing field between the international marketplaces and the incumbents.

Okay. Let me take that first question. Yes, the cost of delivery that's at 5% of GMV is effectively the gross cost, we call it cost of delivery these days. And the short answer is we'd like to see that going down over time, right? And the way to do that is to successively blend lower than the average unit cost methods into the mix.

And we're on a good path to do that using the Allegro Delivery solution. And hopefully, at some point as well, we may make a modified deal with InPost, but also obviously have a big contribution to that cost. The total burden though, of running the Smart! program and paying for deliveries is, as I mentioned, you need to take into account the cofinancing, which is up in the take rate.

The net of the 2, we talked about in a bit more detail in Q1 in the previous update. When you net one against the other, the 5% comes down to about 2.5% of GMV, which is the net cost of running the Smart! program. And the comment I was making earlier was that it's ticked down fractionally on a year ago as a result of the cofinancing changes and this progress that we've made on controlling the gross cost.

Hopefully, that's clear. And the second question was about the Chinese.

So we don't expect any kind of protection for Allegro or other European players. The only thing we expect is fair competition and to have the same rules for every single player existing or selling some goods on the European markets. So we know -- you know as well that this is today unfair competition. We see that, for example, the U.S. is acting faster and protecting the market against unfair competition.

And our expectation is almost the same. So again, we appreciate that some companies that invest in development of European markets, and this is great. But we want to build our competitive advantage, thanks to having the same rules for everyone.

But do you have any more kind of specific expectations about potential changes, the timing, et cetera?

This is quite complicated or complex topic. And of course, we work with other European players to create some pressure or to explain why some Chinese players, they use the European market on different conditions than we.

So of course, we explain to authorities how the market should be defined and how we should act with some initiatives. And we are quite patient. But of course, we see that some Chinese players, they have some advantage, not because they are much clever or they are stronger or much more innovative, but because, for example, using some unfair advantage.

[Operator Instructions]

Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further audio questions at this time. I will now give the floor to Mr. Pozniak for any questions from our webcast participants.

Thank you, Jota. We have quite a long list of questions. Luckily, part of them already answered when they covered the questions asked by the analysts so far. Some of them, I believe, were explained during the presentation, the ones that came early.

I will address them by topic rather than question by question because they touch upon the similar points. So the first question would be, where are we with the cofinancing and how much headroom we still have to improve it?

Yes. Thank you for that question. So the cofinancing move that we made in March moved the share that's being carried by the merchants up to approximately 45% of the total cost. That will tick down, as I said, as we absorb indexation increases from some of the players that have different timing to InPost in their contracts. But essentially, we don't have plans to move it up very quickly from here. The long-term expectation that we've mentioned many times is that we see a 50-50 split as being something which merchants can comprehend and still be excited about, and it's very typically the level that you see around the world.

So we probably will get there eventually. But we would think that we've gone from 0 cofi to this level in about 4 years. So we won't be moving up so quickly going forward.

I believe the next question would be to Marcin because this is asking about the AI-driven marketplaces, AI chats taking away our business. Can you comment on this?

Yes, absolutely. We do cooperate with all major players producing AI technology or potentially giving us some access to AI capabilities. And we rather perceive it as a chance for us to have additional sales channels. So this is not kind of competition. This is something supportive for us.

And we, again, do cooperate with all major players providing this technology. We know how to use to improve efficiency. We know how to use this technology to achieve better conversion on our marketplace and how to create some new extra value, thanks to purchasing through applications.

So we perceive it as something positive to us and hoping that new models will be implemented commercially quite soon because as I said during the presentation, we are pretty matured with this technology, and we know how to build advantage of using AI.

The next question will also be to you, I believe, because this covers the recent changes to the regulations concerning access to the Allegro API. And this has triggered some comments on the web. So what is the main reason for doing this? And can this have impact on our KPIs?

This is an interesting topic, but this is a technical change because API, this is the protocol used by our partners to manage their products on the marketplace or to automate some processes. And some of our partners, they shared the access to API to other companies without permission for example, and we do invest heavily in development of API because this is something that supports in boosting sales on marketplace and also helping our merchants to be much more efficient. So this is something that we want to secure efficiency of this protocol and to help merchants.

The next question, international operations. Are they still a strategic priority for the group? Or could potential exits from loss-making operations be considered?

This is a strategic point or strategic direction for us. And of course, we are still mainly focused on the development of the Polish market, and we are here over 25 years. But we are present in the region, not by accident. This is something like a strategic move for us, and we see that we are able to create some special unique value for customers living in Czechia, Hungary or Slovakia. We see increasing number of customers using our marketplaces. We see increasing number of Smart! users. We see also huge demand from merchants using our marketplaces to cover some expectations of people living in the region.

So there is no consideration today that we will be only Polish company. We want to stay in the region. We want to develop these markets. And this is quite early stage of development. Let's remember about that. And we're consequently improving our position and our competitive advantage in comparison to any other player on the market. So yes, we want to invest and we want to be there.

Thank you. And I believe we have time for just last question. So could we comment on the OCCP case related to our trees being planted for the packages delivered in Allegro boxes -- status and potential impact on the financials?

Yes, there isn't too much to add. There is a conversation going on with OCCP about their findings. We don't know how that will play out. We planted an awful lot of trees, which we're actually very proud about, and we want to continue that.

And as part of our branding identity of Allegro One, but it's also inherently intrinsically a very good thing to do. So if something happens, then we will reflect it in the financial results. We certainly don't expect anything material from it.

Thank you, Jon. So that was last question answered by the management. I will address offline a few technical questions that are still there. And thank you very much, everyone, for participating. Jota, over to you for the conclusion.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a good day.