Prosus Stock price
Compare with Peer Group
📊 Peer Group
📈 What is it?
The peer group consists of the companies with the most similar business model. They serve as a benchmark for putting a stock into context.
🧮 How is it selected?
Based on similarity of business model, meaning companies from the same industry with comparable products and a similar customer base. That's the only way to compare apples to apples.
🏛️ Why does it matter?
Whether a stock is cheap or expensive is best judged by comparison. A P/E of 18 or an EV/FCF of 20 can look cheap or expensive depending on the yardstick. The peer group gives you the most accurate one: companies with a similar business model that operate under the same conditions.
🎯 What does it mean for investors?
When a metric sits below the peer average, the stock is valued more cheaply relative to its competitors, and above the average more expensively. A discount to the peer group can be an opportunity, but it can also have a reason (for example lower growth). The comparison is a starting point, not a verdict.
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StocksGuide Unlimited – full access to AI analyses
👉 More detailed insights
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Invest better with AI
StocksGuide Unlimited – full access to AI analyses
👉 More detailed insights
👉 Exclusive perspectives on opportunities & risks
👉 Clear answers to your questions
Invest better with AI
StocksGuide Unlimited – full access to AI analyses
👉 More detailed insights
👉 Exclusive perspectives on opportunities & risks
👉 Clear answers to your questions
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Key metrics
📘 Market Capitalization
📈 What is it?
Market capitalization shows how much a company is currently worth on the stock market.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps classify companies by size (Large, Mid, Small Cap) and indicates their market presence and relative stability.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Large-cap companies tend to be more stable, often pay dividends, but may grow more slowly.
- Smaller firms may offer higher growth potential but come with more volatility.
- Market capitalization is a useful indicator of company size — but not a measure of whether a stock is undervalued or overvalued.
📘 Enterprise Value (EV)
📈 What is it?
Enterprise Value represents the total cost to acquire a company — including its debt and excluding its cash reserves.
🧮 How is it calculated?
(= Market Cap + Net Debt)
🏛️ Why is it important?
EV gives a more complete picture of a company's value than market cap alone and is used in key valuation ratios like EV/FCF or EV/Sales.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Enterprise Value shows the true cost of buying a company, including all financial obligations.
- It is more accurate than just looking at market cap, especially when comparing companies with different levels of debt or cash.
- Professional investors prefer EV-based multiples because they better reflect the company’s full financial footprint.
📘 Net Debt
📈 What is it?
Net Debt shows how much debt remains after subtracting a company’s available cash reserves.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It indicates how dependent a company is on borrowed money and how easily it can service its debt in the short term.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Low or negative net debt signals financial strength and flexibility.
- Companies with strong cash positions are better positioned in crises.
- High net debt increases financial risk — especially in environments with rising interest rates or economic downturns.
📘 Cash
📈 What is it?
Cash represents all liquid assets a company can access immediately — including cash, bank deposits, and short-term investments.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It reflects a company’s financial flexibility and resilience — enabling investments, buybacks, or buffer in downturns.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A strong cash position means greater room for maneuver and crisis resistance.
- Cash-rich companies can invest, pay down debt, or repurchase shares.
- But excess idle cash might indicate a lack of growth opportunities.
📘 Shares Outstanding
📈 What is it?
Shares outstanding represent the total number of a company’s shares currently held by investors — excluding treasury stock.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It’s the basis for key metrics like Earnings Per Share (EPS), Market Capitalization, or the Price/Earnings ratio (P/E).
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Fewer shares in circulation typically increase earnings per share — making each share more valuable.
- Share buybacks reduce the number of shares and boost per-share metrics.
- Issuing new shares does the opposite — diluting shareholder value and lowering per-share figures.
📘 Price-to-Earnings Ratio (P/E)
📈 What is it?
The P/E ratio shows how many times a company's earnings per share are reflected in its current share price — in other words, how "expensive" the stock appears relative to its profits.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The P/E ratio is one of the most widely used valuation metrics. It helps investors assess whether a stock appears cheap or expensive compared to its earnings power.
🧮 Calculation
📊 P/E (TTM) = Based on earnings from the last 12 months (Trailing Twelve Months):🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low P/E may indicate undervaluation — or signal underlying issues.
- A high P/E may reflect strong growth expectations — or an overvalued stock.
📘 Price-to-Sales Ratio (P/S)
📈 What is it?
The P/S ratio shows how much investors are paying for $1 of the company’s revenue – regardless of profitability.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
P/S is especially useful for evaluating growth companies or businesses not yet profitable. It reflects how the market values the company’s sales.
🧮 Calculation
Market Cap = €71.29b | Revenue (TTM) = €8.45b
Market Cap = €71.29b | Estimated Revenue = €11.05b
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low P/S may indicate undervaluation — or low profitability.
- A high P/S can reflect strong growth expectations — or excessive optimism.
- Especially helpful when evaluating companies where profits are low, volatile, or negative.
📘 Enterprise Value to Sales (EV/Sales)
📈 What is it?
EV/Sales shows how much investors are paying for $1 of revenue — considering not just equity, but also debt and cash. It’s the capital structure–adjusted version of the P/S ratio.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It’s ideal for comparing companies with different levels of debt. It reflects a company's true cost relative to its revenue.
🧮 Calculation
Enterprise Value = €72.82b | Revenue (TTM) = €8.45b
Enterprise Value = €72.82b | Forward Revenue = €11.05b
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- EV/Sales allows for capital structure–neutral company comparisons.
- A lower ratio may indicate undervaluation; a higher one may signal strong growth expectations or overvaluation.
- Especially helpful when evaluating high-growth companies with low or negative earnings.
📘 Enterprise Value to Free Cash Flow (EV/FCF)
📈 What is it?
EV/FCF shows how many years it would take for a company to "pay back" its enterprise value using its free cash flow.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It focuses on real cash generation, ignoring accounting noise — ideal for assessing profitability and value based on liquidity, not earnings.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low EV/FCF may signal undervaluation and strong cash generation.
- A high EV/FCF might reflect weak recent cash flow or aggressive growth expectations.
- Best suited for stable, mature businesses with predictable free cash flows.
📘 Price-to-Book Ratio (P/B)
📈 What is it?
The P/B ratio compares a company’s market value to its book value — showing how much investors are paying for each dollar of net assets.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
P/B is commonly used for asset-heavy industries like banks or industrials. It helps assess whether a stock is trading above or below its net asset value.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A P/B below 1 may signal undervaluation — or weak profitability.
- A P/B above 1 implies the market expects future value creation (e.g., brand, IP, growth).
- Best used for companies with tangible assets and strong balance sheets.
📘 Dividend per Share (DPS)
📈 What is it?
Dividend per Share shows how much cash a company pays out to shareholders for each share they own – usually on an annual or quarterly basis.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
DPS is the absolute value of the payout per share – crucial for income-focused investors and dividend strategies.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A stable or growing DPS often signals a strong, shareholder-friendly business.
- DPS alone doesn’t tell you how attractive the payout is – the stock price also matters (→ see Dividend Yield).
- Long-term dividend growth is often a hallmark of high-quality companies – like the dividend aristocrats.
📘 Dividend Yield
📈 What is it?
Dividend yield shows how large a company’s dividend is in relation to its current share price.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It allows investors to compare dividend payouts across stocks, regardless of price or payout size.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A stable yield can reflect reliable distributions.
- Comparing 1Y and 5Y yield shows whether dividend growth keeps pace with stock price appreciation.
- A low yield isn’t always negative – it can signal strong past performance or growth focus.
📘 Dividend Growth
📈 What is it?
Dividend growth shows how much a company has increased its dividend per share over time.
🧮 How is it calculated?
5Y: Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)
🏛️ Why is it important?
Consistently rising dividends are often a sign of financial strength and shareholder orientation – especially relevant for long-term investors.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Stable dividend growth is a sign of sustainable earning power.
- High dividend growth can significantly boost your total return:
- If a company pays $1 in dividends and increases it by 15% annually over 5 years, you’ll receive $2 per share in year 5 – twice as much as at the start!
📘 Payout Ratio
📈 What is it?
The payout ratio shows what percentage of a company’s earnings (per share) is distributed to shareholders as dividends.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps assess whether the dividend is sustainable – especially in relation to the company’s profitability.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low payout ratio means the company retains more earnings for reinvestment – typical for growth companies.
- A moderate payout (e.g. 25–50%) indicates a healthy balance between returns and reinvestment.
- High payout ratios may seem attractive but can carry risk if earnings decline.
📘 Consecutive Dividend Increases
📈 What is it?
This metric shows how many consecutive years a company has raised its dividend per share – without any cuts or pauses.
🧮 How is it calculated?
(Special dividends are not considered.)
🏛️ Why is it important?
A long track record of increases reflects financial strength, consistency, and shareholder commitment.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A long dividend increase streak builds confidence – especially in volatile markets.
- Such companies are seen as reliable and income-friendly investments.
- The longer the streak, the stronger the company’s dividend discipline.
📘 Revenue
📈 What is it?
Revenue shows how much a company earns in total from selling its products and services – the gross income before any costs are deducted.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Revenue is one of the key figures to assess a company’s size, market position, and growth potential.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growing revenue indicates rising demand and can be an early signal of future earnings growth.
- Comparing actual and expected revenue reveals trends in the market environment and analyst sentiment.
- Note: Strong revenue alone isn’t enough – margins and profitability matter just as much.
📘 EBITDA
📈 What is it?
EBITDA stands for “Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization.” It reflects a company’s operating profit before the effects of financing, taxes, and accounting depreciation.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBITDA is widely used to evaluate a company’s operating performance – especially across capital-intensive sectors or international comparisons.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high or growing EBITDA indicates strong operational profitability – independent of taxes, interest, or accounting methods.
- It’s especially useful for comparing companies across sectors or geographies.
- Important: EBITDA is not a net income figure – it excludes key costs like depreciation and interest.
📘 EBIT
📈 What is it?
EBIT stands for “Earnings Before Interest and Taxes.” It reflects a company’s operating profit after depreciation, but before interest and tax expenses.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBIT is a core profitability metric that shows how well the company performs in its main business operations – independent of capital structure and tax environment.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBIT indicates strong profitability from the company’s core business – before financial and tax effects.
- It allows better comparison between companies with different debt levels or tax structures.
- Compared to EBITDA, EBIT already accounts for depreciation and reflects capital intensity more clearly.
📘 Net Income
📈 What is it?
Net income is the company’s total profit – the amount left after all expenses, taxes, interest, and depreciation have been deducted.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net income is the most comprehensive measure of a company’s profitability – showing how much actual profit remains after all business and financing costs.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growing net income indicates that the company is managing all of its costs efficiently.
- It directly influences valuation metrics like P/E ratio and the company’s dividend capacity.
- Over time, net income trends reveal how resilient and profitable the business model really is.
📘 Free Cash Flow (FCF)
📈 What is it?
Free Cash Flow shows how much actual cash remains after a company covers its operating expenses and capital expenditures.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
FCF reflects a company’s real financial strength – regardless of accounting profits. It shows how much flexibility a company has for dividends, share buybacks, or debt reduction.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- High free cash flow means the company generates real, usable cash – independent of reported net income.
- It’s often the most reliable base for sustainable dividends and buybacks.
- Declining FCF can be an early warning sign – even when profits appear stable.
📘 Revenue Growth
📈 What is it?
Revenue growth shows how much a company’s sales have changed compared to the previous year – both on a trailing basis (TTM) and based on forward projections.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected revenue ÷ Revenue in prior year − 1) × 100
Forward growth is based on analyst estimates for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Rising revenue signals growing demand, business expansion, and market share gains – especially important for growth-oriented companies.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Growth is the engine of long-term value creation – especially in tech and growth sectors.
- What matters is not just current growth, but its sustainability.
- Forward projections reflect whether analysts expect continued momentum – or a slowdown.
📘 EBITDA Growth
📈 What is it?
EBITDA growth shows how much a company’s operating profit (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) has increased or decreased compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected EBITDA ÷ EBITDA from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate is based on analyst projections for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Growing EBITDA indicates improving operational profitability – regardless of financing or accounting effects.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Strong EBITDA growth signals operational efficiency and scalability – especially during growth phases.
- EBITDA growth can be an early indicator of margin and earnings expansion – but should be assessed alongside revenue and EBIT.
📘 EBIT Growth
📈 What is it?
EBIT growth shows how much a company’s operating profit (after depreciation, but before interest and taxes) has increased compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected EBIT ÷ EBIT from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate is based on analyst projections for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
EBIT growth is a direct indicator of a company’s business performance – taking into account capital intensity through depreciation.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Rising EBIT signals improving operating profitability – even after accounting for depreciation.
- It’s especially important for evaluating companies with significant capital expenditures.
- Combined with revenue and EBITDA growth, EBIT growth provides a well-rounded view of operational progress.
📘 Net Income Growth
📈 What is it?
Net income growth shows how much a company’s bottom-line profit has increased or decreased compared to the previous year – both on a trailing basis (TTM) and based on analyst projections.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Forward = (Expected net income ÷ Net income from prior year − 1) × 100
The forward estimate reflects analysts’ expectations for the current fiscal year.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net income is the ultimate measure of profitability. Growing net income signals stronger efficiency, cost control, and sustainable earnings power.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Stronger net income boosts valuation, dividend potential, and investor confidence.
- If profits stall while revenue grows, it may signal margin pressure.
📘 Free Cash Flow Growth
📈 What is it?
Free cash flow (FCF) growth shows how a company’s available cash – after covering operating expenses and capital expenditures – has changed compared to the previous year.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Free cash flow reflects real financial strength. Growing FCF indicates more flexibility for dividends, share buybacks, and reinvestment.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Declining FCF may point to rising investments, increasing costs, or weaker operating performance.
- Especially for dividend investors, FCF growth is critical – since dividends are paid from actual available cash.
- A negative trend isn't always bad, but it deserves closer attention.
📘 Gross Margin
📈 What is it?
Gross margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains after deducting the direct costs of goods sold (like materials and production). It represents the company’s “raw profit” before fixed costs, taxes, and interest.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Or simply: Gross Margin = Gross Profit ÷ Revenue × 100
🏛️ Why is it important?
Gross margin indicates how efficiently a company can produce or procure what it sells. It is a key measure of product-level profitability and pricing power.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high gross margin suggests strong pricing power and efficient production.
- Falling margins may signal rising input costs or competitive pressure.
- Compared to peers, gross margin offers insights into the quality of a business model.
📘 EBITDA Margin
📈 What is it?
The EBITDA margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as operating profit before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.It reflects operating efficiency without being distorted by financing or accounting factors.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The EBITDA margin reveals how much operating income a company generates per dollar of revenue – independent of capital structure and tax effects.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBITDA margin reflects strong core profitability – before accounting distortions.
- It allows for effective comparisons across companies and sectors.
- A stable or growing margin signals efficient cost control and business scalability.
📘 EBIT Margin
📈 What is it?
The EBIT margin shows what percentage of revenue remains as operating profit after depreciation but before interest and taxes.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
The EBIT margin reflects a company’s core profitability while accounting for capital intensity (e.g. machinery, infrastructure). It’s especially useful for comparing businesses with different levels of depreciation.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high EBIT margin shows that the company remains efficient even after factoring in depreciation.
- It’s especially relevant for capital-intensive industries.
- Stable or rising EBIT margins over time are a strong indicator of pricing power and business quality.
📘 Net margin
📈 What is it?
Net margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as bottom-line profit after deducting all costs, interest, taxes, and depreciation.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
Net margin reflects a company’s overall efficiency – across operations, financing, and taxation. It shows how much actual profit is generated from each dollar of revenue.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high net margin means the company is not only strong operationally but also manages financing and taxes efficiently.
- Peer comparisons reveal business quality and competitiveness.
- Declining margins despite revenue growth can be a red flag for rising costs or inefficiencies.
📘 Free cash flow margin
📈 What is it?
The free cash flow (FCF) margin shows how much of a company’s revenue remains as actual free cash after covering all operating expenses and capital expenditures.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
This margin reflects the true liquidity generated by the business – independent of accounting rules or depreciation. It’s especially relevant for dividends, buybacks, and reinvestment decisions.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high FCF margin means a company consistently generates strong cash flow.
- It’s a positive signal for financial stability and shareholder returns.
- The long-term trend is key – a declining margin may indicate rising investments or weakening operating efficiency.
📘 Equity Ratio
📈 What is it?
The equity ratio indicates what portion of a company’s total assets is financed by shareholders’ equity – in other words, how much it relies on its own capital.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
A high equity ratio reflects financial strength and stability, especially during downturns. It’s a key indicator of a company’s solvency and long-term risk profile.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Companies with high equity ratios are generally more resilient and less dependent on external debt.
- Low equity ratios can signal higher risk or aggressive financial strategies.
- Important: Always assess the equity ratio in combination with the return on equity (ROE). This shows not just how stable the company is – but also how efficiently it uses shareholder capital.
📘 Return on Equity (ROE)
📈 What is it?
Return on equity (ROE) shows how efficiently a company uses its shareholders’ equity to generate profit. In other words: how much net income is earned per dollar of equity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROE is a core profitability metric. It helps investors understand whether a company delivers attractive returns on the capital provided by its shareholders.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROE indicates that the company is using its capital efficiently and profitably.
- It’s especially meaningful for capital-intensive businesses or firms with high equity bases.
- Important: A very high ROE can also result from high debt levels – always interpret it alongside the equity ratio to assess financial health.
📘 Return on Capital Employed (ROCE)
📈 What is it?
ROCE measures how efficiently a company generates profits from its total capital – including both equity and interest-bearing debt.
🧮 How is it calculated?
It evaluates the return on all capital employed, regardless of how it’s financed.
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROCE is ideal for comparing companies with different financing structures. It shows how well management uses capital to create value for both shareholders and creditors.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROCE means the company uses its capital efficiently – regardless of whether it's funded by debt or equity.
- The higher the ROCE compared to peers, the more value the company creates with its invested capital.
- Especially relevant for capital-intensive sectors like industrials, energy, or infrastructure.
📘 Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
📈 What is it?
ROIC measures how efficiently a company generates returns from the capital invested in its core operations – regardless of whether the capital comes from equity or debt.
🧮 How is it calculated?
- NOPAT = Net Operating Profit After Taxes
- Invested Capital = Operating assets minus non-interest-bearing liabilities
🏛️ Why is it important?
ROIC is one of the most accurate indicators of capital efficiency. Unlike return on equity, it is not distorted by leverage and shows how much value is created for all capital providers.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high ROIC shows how effectively a company uses the capital that is truly invested in its core operations.
- Unlike ROCE, ROIC focuses only on the capital that is actively used to run the business – and that requires a return (i.e. interest-bearing).
- Especially useful when comparing companies with large amounts of excess cash or non-interest-bearing liabilities – giving a more realistic picture of capital efficiency.
📘 Leverage Ratio (Debt-to-Equity)
📈 What is it?
The leverage ratio indicates how much a company relies on interest-bearing debt (such as loans and bonds) relative to its shareholders’ equity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
This ratio helps assess a company’s financial structure and risk profile. High leverage can enhance returns – but also increases exposure to interest rate changes and financial stress.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A low leverage ratio signals financial strength and independence.
- A higher ratio can improve returns in good times but increases risk during downturns or rising interest rate periods.
- 👉 Always interpret in the context of industry, capital intensity, and interest rate environment.
📘 Earnings per share (EPS)
📈 What is it?
Earnings per Share (EPS) shows how much profit is attributable to a single share – and is one of the most important metrics for evaluating a company's performance.
🧮 How is it calculated?
The diluted share count reflects potential new shares that could be issued through options, convertible bonds, or other rights.
🏛️ Why is it important?
EPS is the basis for many key valuation metrics like P/E ratio, PEG ratio, or payout ratio. It enables comparisons of profitability across companies, regardless of their size.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- EPS captures per-share profitability and is especially useful for comparisons over time or with analyst estimates.
- Rising EPS may signal consistent growth or share buybacks.
- Important: Always use diluted EPS for more realistic valuations – especially in companies with stock-based compensation.
📘 Free cash flow per share (FCF per share)
📈 What is it?
Free Cash Flow per Share shows how much free cash flow a company generates per outstanding share – after investments, but before dividends or debt repayments.
🧮 How is it calculated?
Free cash flow is calculated as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures (CapEx).
🏛️ Why is it important?
FCF per Share reveals how much real cash is available per share – useful for dividends, buybacks, or reducing debt. Unlike net income, free cash flow is harder to manipulate and often seen as a more reliable metric.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- High FCF per share signals strong financial flexibility.
- It shows how much capital the company can effectively reinvest or return to shareholders.
- Particularly relevant for dividend payers and capital-efficient businesses.
📘 Short interest
📈 What is it?
Short interest indicates how many shares of a company are currently sold short – that is, borrowed and sold by investors who expect the price to decline.
🧮 How is it calculated?
It reflects the percentage of a company’s shares that are being shorted relative to the total shares available.
🏛️ Why is it important?
Short interest serves as a sentiment indicator: A high value may signal skepticism or bearish expectations – but also increases the potential for a short squeeze if prices rise unexpectedly.
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- Low short interest usually indicates market confidence in the company.
- High short interest can be a warning sign – or an opportunity if sentiment shifts.
- Especially relevant in volatile markets or ahead of key earnings releases.
📘 Employees
📈 What is it?
The employee count shows how many people a company employs worldwide – offering insights into its size, structure, and business model.
🧮 How is it calculated?
🏛️ Why is it important?
It helps assess operational scale, labor intensity, and cost structure. Combined with revenue and profit, it enables key metrics like revenue per employee or productivity.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high headcount can signal operational complexity – but also significant growth capacity.
- Revenue per employee is a key indicator of efficiency.
- Especially useful for comparing tech, industrial, or service-heavy companies.
📘 Turnover per employee
📈 What is it?
Revenue per employee indicates how much revenue a company generates on average per employee – a key measure of efficiency and productivity.
🧮 How is it calculated?
The employee count is typically taken from the most recent annual report.
🏛️ Why is it important?
This metric helps compare business models – especially between labor-intensive and technology-driven companies. A high value suggests automation, operational efficiency, or strong value creation per head.
🧮 Calculation
🎯 What does this mean for investors?
- A high revenue per employee indicates a scalable and margin-strong business model.
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Prosus Stock Analysis
Analyst Opinions
22 Analysts have issued a Prosus forecast:
Analyst Opinions
22 Analysts have issued a Prosus forecast:
Prosus Events
Past Events
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JUN
29
Q4 2026 Earnings Call
3 months ago
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FEB
24
Special Call - Prosus N.V.
7 months ago
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NOV
24
Q2 2026 Earnings Call
10 months ago
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AUG
20
Shareholder/Analyst Call - Prosus N.V.
about one year ago
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StocksGuide Free
Prosus — Q4 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
Hello partners. Welcome to our Results Day. I am Fabricio, I'm CEO of Prosus. Today morning, we released our results. I'm very excited about what we are delivering, and I hope you enjoy our results call today. Today, it's a special call. I'm not going only to show you the numbers, but we have 2 special guests. Last time, you asked me to talk more about ecosystem and food delivery. And today, we have the CEO of iFood and the CEO of Just Eat . Here with me tell you much more details about what's happening at Prosus.
I'm very excited about the results. I'm going to make a introduction to you about our ecosystem and I hope you enjoy what we are going to see today. So to start, first, I'm very happy on how Prosus is delivering. We are now much more focused. We are focusing delivery, we are focusing finance, we are focused in experience. And all our business are growing and doing well, and I'm going to open to you today much more info about how we are operating.
We are also focused in Latin America, in Europe and in India. And I think this focus, this focusing results and also our innovation capacity, we have many more years of good results to share with you.
As you know, we have around 1 billion customers. We have around 5 million partners, around the $100 million, that we sell, and we are going to open much more about how we operate. And I think -- look, first, as you know, we got to almost $10 billion in revenue. It's going to keep growing to more than $13 million next year. We've got $1.3 billion in EBITDA. That's 84% more than last year. What is very good in my opinion. But, if some of you think this is adjusted EBITDA, how much cash you are generating, we increased our free cash flow by $2 billion in the last 2 years from minus $0.5 billion, $0.6 billion to plus $1.5 billion. So I'm very confident we are in the right direction.
As I told you a few months ago, the center of our vision is how we make our existing work. But -- and I know 1 year ago, 6 months ago, it was up planned. My plan was we are going to build an ecosystem as a competitive advantage. We are not here just to show you plans. We are here to show you real results, and we are going to open a lot to you how our Latin American ecosystem works today and how this is going to connect to what we are going to do in India and in Europe.
So today, we are going to talk a lot about our ecosystem and also food delivery. Hope you enjoy seeing Prosus with much more details. Moving on ecosystem is the core of everything we talk about here. Some people think Prosus in Latin America is iFood. It's not iFood is the foundation. iFood is a very important foundation. But our competitive advantage, what we can do better than everyone else is how to run a full ecosystem and now starting to open all the details for you.
So as I told you, that was what -- some people think Prosus is iFood, Prosus is food delivery. Yes, Prosus started as food delivery in iFood. iFood is amazing. iFood is growing a lot. We are close to 200 million orders today. It was like when I started, 20,000 orders, now close to 200 million. iFood, besides doing food delivery is the right foundation because we have many customers with a very high frequency. And on top of that, we can keep growing. We have a big moat against competition. And now is time to open that for you.
So as I told you, food delivery is an amazing business. iFood is an amazing foundation, but that's the vision I sold to you last year. It's not only for delivery, it is travel, grocery, adds, events, classifies -- the good news, this is not a plan anymore. This is a reality. It's a reality with very good results. Why? Because the total addressable markets of of those business are much bigger than food delivery. They are 10x bigger than pure food delivery. But I don't have a plan to do that. We are executing that.
Over the last 1 year, we made so much progress in all those areas. Some of you are going to be surprised. But we have Despegar. You all know we made a big acquisition. It's not only Despegar. We have very strong in grocery, and we also invest in 2 important grocery companies, Shopper and [indiscernible]. In the mean, iFood is strong in delivery, but also iFood is very strong today transactions inside restaurants. We acquired 5 companies, including kiosks for restaurants and loyalty programs for restaurants and ERP for restaurants.
And now we have tens of millions of orders in the dine-in. And the markets that we have there are very big markets. In fintech and credit, it's a big business. In payments, it's already a big business, not only iFood, but also Zoop. In pharmacy, we are growing very fast, but we also invested in Mevo that's enabled us to grow even faster. I will get in details on that today, and [indiscernible] going to be here with me to show you all details. So everything I'm showing you here, they consisted besides food delivery, today have revenues of $1.5 billion, and today, it's growing more than 40%.
So the ecosystem plan of last year is not a plan anymore. It's a very big business, growing fast, and we have so much more ahead of us. Today, the ecosystem is more than 50% of our revenue. You can see here Pure Foods, 45%, fintech, 17%, travel 29% and other marketplace categories 7%. So we are much more than food delivery, growing 40%. It's very good to know that because this whole market has a lot of runway of growth. We have a lot of growth ahead. And it's very difficult to compete against a company like us that has customers buying and I mean the benefits of us offering them many services together, cheaper, faster with less friction.
All those markets together has a lot of runway. You can see here comparing Brazil to China on all those markets, we believe we are going to see growth for many years ahead. Look at that, starting to give you some more details and some more colors about the existing ecosystem that we run in Latin America. If you look to our grocery business, we are growing 50% over the last 3 years, year-over-year. Today, we are 2x bigger than the #2 player selling gross series online. The second player, it's an amazing marketplace company. They are very good. And even though we are 2x bigger than that, growing 50% in a market that is going to keep growing for many years.
On pharmacy, growing 70% year-over-year. And now that we invested in Mevo, we expect that to not only to keep this growth rate because now we can also sell prescription medicine. On FinTech, we never showed this number open one by one. Many of our Fintech business are growing 100% year-over-year. Our credit for restaurants are growing at 115%. Our infrastructure for Fintech 100% and meal vouchers 60%. All of those businesses are not growing much faster, but their profitability are increasing aggressively.
So I show in the other slides. Our ecosystem besides food, generates something $150 million in profits. So that's what we built in the last one year. Food deliver is the foundation. We have a big brand. We have lots of customers. We have very good technology. But then now we built amazing ecosystem. Latin America has another company, a marketplace component that values between $50 billion and $100 billion, and it is an amazing ecosystem. That's what we are building. And we will build another $50 billion to $200 billion ecosystem in Latin America.
Let me share you with some more data with you, ads is growing 100% year-over-year. And we have a lot of run rate to grow on ads. Today, we acquired a company called Advolve and our ads business is accelerating and growing amazingly well. We are serving tens or hundreds of companies, having the best solution to increase sales, for example, for companies like [indiscernible]-- not only at Despegar, as you know, last year, I promised you is it's possible because we acquired Despegar.
Despegar is going to grow faster because they are part of our ecosystem. We got a lot of questions on that. Can you really help travel company to grow faster? Look to this data. Today, Despegar is growing the whole Despegar 30%, only Brazil, 40% year-over-year. Before we acquired Despegar, Despegar was growing around 10%. And the reason of that is the second chart. 21% of Brazil revenues of Despegar are related to cross-sell together with the products ecosystem. That was our vision. It is we can because of our frequency of our technology, sell better service to our customers. Our customers are happier because they can buy easier and better and cheaper travel business.
And as I told you, it's not only travel, it is grocery, it is fintech, it is credit, it is meal voucher. That's the Prosus ecosystem. I want to give you this overview on the ecosystem, but I hope you will stay tuned because after me, we will have Diego here explaining you in much more detail how each of those companies are working, and we will be here for questions today.
Besides developing the ecosystem and part of the ecosystem vision is how technology makes all of it work. One week ago, we made an event called Prosus already, and I'd like to invite you to go there and watch the Prosus forward events, where we showed how we are using AI to change completely our business. We really, really use AI to operate the iFood business. Last year, I told you about large commerce model. That was our dream to train a model that is smarter than everything else we have to offer better service to our customers. It's a reality. 100 million customers in Latin America are modeled in our AI model. It operates, 10x to 50x cheaper than if we bought a model from a leader model in U.S. So if you think you didn't heard it right, we developed our own model traded using our own data, and we operate 50x cheaper than if we just buy from a global AI company.
That's when cheaper and faster because we do distillation of our own model. So we make sure that we can have the results as fast as we need. So Prosus is very good in the large commerce model. It's a reality in iFood, we're expanding to all ecosystem now all those companies you saw they are going to use the same model and improve their numbers. Then we developed Toqan Claw. So inside Prosus, we have 70,000 agents and 12,000 apps and we launched it less than a month ago.
So all our employees, 4,000 people that are using our Toqan Claw to have and own cloud-like assistance. They can start the morning, Toqan Claw call them and say, what are their problems? What is happening they just asked for an app that connects to LCM and connects to our all data. So everyone can work faster. Everyone can work together. We create skills and the skills are used between the other people inside the company. I think we have the best implementation in a company of AI, helping the company to move faster.
But it's more than that. We just expanded Toqan Claw to our 5 million restaurants. So now if you're a partner of Prosus as a restaurant as a partner, you have access to the best AI in the world. And we just launched last week in Prosus forward, how we came through Zappia, have access to the best assistance to deliver whatever you need, you can say, just help me with that, negotiate buy, et cetera.
So Prosus is positioned as best-in-class in AI for sure, best in class in Europe, Latin America and India. And we are going to see a little today how this connects with the reality. So in the core of the Latin American ecosystem that we are going to talk about today, we have a large commerce model, define however single operates. And on top of that, many assistants like Zapia, I just said, but also many others like Sofia in Ilo and Toqan and [indiscernible].
AI for us is generating results, reducing costs, accelerating growth and serving better services. Today, we had opened how the ecosystem works. Hope you watch also Prosus forward and hope you will enjoy seeing how we operate. I'll be back here in a few minutes.
But now I want to ask Diego to come here and share more about Prosus in Latin America. Diego.
Thank you, Fabricio. Big pleasure. Thank you very much. It's a big pleasure to be here and to have the chance to double click on the ecosystem that Fabricio was explaining. The whole idea here is to show exactly how the synergies work and how we are organizing each pillar of it to generate the results that we believe in our strategy.
So to start, I want you to take a look on this chart that Fabricio already showed, but more importantly, to show that we have developed an ecosystem that is 10x bigger than the original pillar, the food delivery one, iFood. More importantly, in each of these blocks, you can see companies that are mentioned, companies that we develop internally or that we acquired or we invested in the beginning and working with them to all the journey.
What does companies mean? It means optionality. These companies are the ones that we are integrating, that we are learning, that we are being able to attract synergies and build the entire ecosystem that you're going to see. Everything starts from the foundation. iFood is the foundation because it can give you us -- that tends to have a business with high frequency, high retention and high growth.
In this chart, you can see how we are being able to grow fastly during the last years. And you can see not only from the revenue point of view, but also from the client's point of view. On both graphs, it's already important to mention that the other categories, the new business, the adjacencies they are already becoming meaningful. So all the blocks that you saw in the previous slide is already represented here by more than 30% of the revenues generated inside the ecosystem. All these revenues are actually based in one thing in the loyalty program in the capacity that we have to not only attract but to retain why do we increase frequency of the users.
So the program that we developed that we call Club. It was developed 4 years ago and already presents a retention and a frequency that is much higher than the average customer at iFood. The more we bring the customers, the more we put them inside club, the more the company grows with very important qualitative fundamentals. Also, Club was not only important to the food delivery business, but now it's much more important to adjacencies. As you can see in the chart, groceries, pharma and pet, they already have around 50% of the orders originated by clients that are linked to the Club.
And Club now we're moving from the food delivery ecosystem to the entire Prosus Latin ecosystem. When we are able to do that, what we do is we feel, we create the capacity to grow much faster, much stronger the other adjacencies. As you can see, grocery is already growing more than 50%, pharmacy is growing more than 70%. And on top of that, we create several optionalities.
So now it's time to invest in beverages, in pets, and flowers, small electronics, gefits. The good thing here is to have the possibility to make these questions and then to decide when to speed up one or the other. Also, because we are able to generate so much traffic with so much quality we gained optionality to explore the ads business. As you may know, ads have been very important to marketplace around the globe as a way to have a marketplace business that is very focused on the transaction, while you can grab much more profitability on the ad side.
So Fabricio already mentioned this, our ad business is growing more than 100% per year, spread in all the categories, not only food delivery, but also grocers, pet, pharmacy, among others. The capacity to increase the traffic through club allow us to generate what we are seeing here in terms of heads. And this entire ecosystem what gives us the chance to sell more. And the more we sell, the more we attract the merchant, the more we attract the merchant, the more we generate data, the more we can do finance. Fabricio already showed this slide, but I want to pinpoint here one specific thing.
What we are doing here in terms of fintech, it's not what the traditional banks are doing. What we are doing in fintech is to understand the operational and financial data that we grab from the versions and built intelligence on top of that using our AI models and as a consequence, offering products that are not available for them in the Brazilian marketplace. As a consequence, we see the credit grow strongly with a great ROI. We are seeing Zoop, which is our Banking-as-a-Service as well, growing margin more than 100% with very long-term contracts, very low churn portfolio. and the meal voucher business, which has the largest LTV to the food delivery business.
So with all of that, we gained the capacity to keep thinking about the future. When we say about future here, it again comes to the same flywheel. The idea to find much more clients that has a good value that generate traffic with retention and give us the chance to bring more sales to the merchants. And it's exactly where our future stands right now.
Why? Because Brazil has an immense market in the low-income side of the society. And this market is very tough. Most of the players, they will try to play in this market just giving subsidies. And subsidies may work in the beginning. But in the low AOV market, subsidies don't create fundamental value. We've been working with hits since 2018 testing, learning, testing, learning, testing learning. And 1 year ago, we understood how we could do that. We understood how we could operationally change the way we deliver the way we attract the customer and the way that the [indiscernible] to make very low AOV, works economically for everybody linked in this equation.
So the slide shows how we were able to decrease by more than 30% AUV, how we are able to increase the TAM by more than 25%. And finally, how we have been able to scale the operating margin to the breakeven level. So if you think that we are doing almost 1.5 negative operating margin in this order, which in dollar goes to almost 0. Actually, in more -- a few months, we're going to be able to reach the breakeven point and fight and play in a market where, historically, it's not possible to be -- to invest.
Why? Because the AOV is very low. So the way that the future holds for us give us the chance to answer a question that probably you may be thinking. So how the competition is going in Brazil, especially because some companies arrived in the last 12 months. So let me show you the mechanics of the P&L of IFO during this last 12 months. First of all, the main source of revenue for us is commission. The commission is exactly the same as we had a year ago.
Let me jump the CPO and I will come back to it. Our ads revenue keep growing as expected because the traffic is very strong. The company grew orders clients, frequency and retention during these last 12 months. The logistics margin is still in the same place, which means that we have been able to operate even with the intensity of the competition, we've been able to operate with the same economics.
Payment costs and platform costs are in the same level as well. What does it mean? It means that a year after a very intense competition in Brazil, our structural economics remains in the same place. So what we have to discuss here is the CPO, the cost per order, the cost to acquire an order, how much we spend to make an order happen for the consumer point of view. And this, of course, went up. It's because the competition just brings irrationality at this point in time, and we have to fight against it, fight in a good sense, fight in the sense that we want to fight for the consumer.
So as soon as irrationality goes down and come back to the rationale field, CPO comes down naturally. And as a consequence, we go back to the same place that we were before. Why? Because the structure of the economics still are still the same. And we keep working on it. And of course, what I expect is to have more sources of revenue in the ecosystem in the future.
So when we go back to the story, what we are saying here is, we have a foundation, strong growth, strong retention, strong frequency. With this foundation, we can spread the customers towards other adjacencies. We bet on options in the past that materialize it and allow us to have a 10, that is 10x bigger than iFood. We are now grabbing growth from these adjacencies and incremental profitability coming from that. More and more, iFood will be seen as an ecosystem. Half of the revenues in the next 12 to 24 months should be coming from other adjacencies versus the original food delivery. And this gives us the confidence that what we are building will be much stronger in the future.
Thanks Very much. Now I pass to my colleague, Roberto.
Thank you Diego. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with all of you. I'm Roberto Gandalfo, the CEO of Just Eat takeaway. My last 12 years, I spent with -- in iFood, helping [indiscernible] the food delivery business there.
So just to start with today, we're going to talk about JET, on this new chapter, where we are very much focused on growth and to reposition the company as an AI-first company. So let me start with this chart. So JET has been struggling over the past few years to really grow. And you can see now we are in a new trajectory, bringing the company back to growth.
So what we did this new chapter just started like less than 6 months ago. The first approach was let's test and learn extremely fast in more cohort of cities where we can prove that we can grow much faster than what we are doing today. And we did it. We have more than 25% growth. We saw this level of growth in those cities where we did this test and building this playbook of new growth flywheel.
And now we are -- the challenge is to bring that to the entire portfolio of jet, and that's what we are doing exactly here. And you can see month-over-month, the trajectory that is changing. Of course, we are not there yet, but we are in the right path for sure. And here, you can see the scale of JET. The challenge is how we turn all this scale, all the density of JET into back to growth. That's our focus for now.
So how we are repositioning JET to become an AI-first company. This is very important to understand. So just to simplify here is basically, we are talking about 3 main layers. The first layer is a unified platform where you have one back end everywhere, it can operate multiple countries in a much more scaled and efficient way. Then we are building on top of that our LCM model. LCM is the large commerce model that Fabrico just mentioned in his presentation, and basically, this help us to understand much better who is the customer, what the customer really wants, and then we can leverage that to bring the right offer. So you're going to see that we can personalize what we are showing in terms of content, subsidies and so on.
And then on top of that, sits our growth flywheel. The growth flywheel is basically bringing more traffic to the platform, a high-quality traffic that can be converted into orders. And once we deliver an amazing experience in the post purchase, then it will lead us to a higher retention and higher frequency. The same foundation that you just saw, Diego explaining here about iFood.
So we are doing this repositioning here. how we are executing all of that. So we have here seen blocks where we are focused on to really deliver this plan. So culture and management model, which is very important for us is the foundation of everything that we are doing. Our rights to win. This is being part of an ecosystem like Prosus. Capital allocation, the discipline to have the capital allocation, the tech platform, logistics and our supply.
So let's go through each one of them. Starting with culture. Culture is the foundation of everything that we do. We are really raising the bar inside the company. When we look at the results and what we are doing, that's what we need to do. Like we are here to really bring the best customer experience ever to our customers. And we need to move extremely fast. This is a very important behavior on everything that we do. We have this tech profile to test and learn, use the data to drive our decisions. And we are operating more and more as one JET as a team that has -- is a cohesive team that operated together, and you see very good early signals that we are getting there.
So the company now understands the strategy, they have clarity. They believe in this strategy, and we have clear ownership about each of those things that we are doing, which is very important for us. The other point is, I started in iFood when we were doing like 1 million order a month and had 120x growth over the past few years, based on technology, bringing the best experience to the customer. And this is what it means to be part of an ecosystem like Prosus, where you can exchange knowledge and leverage on this knowledge to start to reposition in JET in this new chapter. So this is what really help us in the whole flywheel.
This is exactly what we delivered over the past few years. That said, JET as I said, is a scaled business. So the P&L is there. What we have here as an opportunity is to do a better capital allocation. So we are investing. What's the principle behind -- on how we invest. It's basically we invest where we have the density and scale to really deliver the best experience to our customers. When we do that, you can expect better returns, better paybacks on our investments. because we have the foundations in these cities.
So it's a set level approach that we are doing for all the 6 countries, which is very important to reinforce this discipline of capital allocation. We are also all the time reviewing our entire portfolio and really making sure that where we are, we will have a relevant position. So we just exit Australia and Denmark in the past few months. because it was not part of the core strategy anymore. And we are doing a cost management that is very important.
I'm going to show one example of this in logistics where you're going to see a very important improvement in our efficiency here. This efficiency allows us to reinvest in the business to grow, and we are focused on investing P&T, product and technology and to invest to build our large customer base. So that's what we are doing in capital allocation.
When we go through technology, as I said, we are unifying the whole back end. This will give us speed to deliver a new capability and be live everywhere immediately when we build something new. And as another example is the LCM, the large commerce model. Fabricio talked about this cost reduction. This is really important. So the cost to identify the user profile and understand who is this customer is now 90% cheaper than before. This brings us -- enables us to really scale this model of the entire portfolio.
Now, we -- you can expect that it's coming soon that we're going to have all the components you see in the app, they will be driven by LCM behind. So you have the AI engine behind saying what's relevant to this customer? What kind of subsidy? What should be the restaurant that they are seeing. This is what will bring us this customization, this personalized experience.
Here is logistics as one example of cash management and discipline on how we operate the business. So you can see on a weekly basis how much progress we made really adjusting the demand shaping, the network optimization. This is our Scoober, which is basically the employed model that we operate in in some countries. And you can see the level of evolution. When we were talking about [ 5 million ] a month we are talking actually [ EUR 60 million ] a year in terms of impacting our EBITDA. And we did that in just a few weeks. And now this allows us to reinvest in the business, to reinvest in our growth. This is technology behind it. It's impossible to do a number like that without being more efficient through the technology that we are applying to the business.
And here, we also had to supply. We need to bring the best choice to our customers. That's very important. When you open the app, what really matters is what you see around you? What are the options that you have to bring? And here, just as an example, we are bringing the best content at this level of 80% in Netherlands and the same principle, the same approach applies to other regions where we are. So we want to make sure that they when open app, they really have the right and the best content.
We are also using data, which is our model to say where should we bring offer groceries, restaurants to our customers. So this will directly connect with the increase of conversion rate in that. And then we are also automating and using agentic operations to speed up the Prosus of onboarding a new restaurants at JET. So doing all of that, we can spin our flywheel faster than ever before, and this will lead us to a higher growth.
So what we did over the last 5 months, less than 6 months, was basically setting the new strategy that is really very focused on growth and a sustainable growth, cultural shift, so raising the bar, bringing these behaviors to be live on a daily basis and started the path to grow, like a test and learning in a few cities. And now what we're going to do is to, as I said, accelerate this flywheel to really place -- to really put a system in place where we have a unified platform everywhere for logistics, for the consumer, the back end. And do product improvements, as you probably saw in the Prosus forward 2 weeks ago when we launched at Stockholm for partners in the Netherlands with good feedback and experience. So that's our expectation. I hope now you can have a better view of what's going on in [indiscernible] its takeaway.
And I will call Fabricio back to here today's stage. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you Gandalfo. Hello, everyone, hope you enjoyed to learn more about food delivery, with iFood and JET. And I want to finish this presentation. And we'll get -- we will be here for lots of questions.
Talking about the next steps. The ecosystem was a dream one year ago. Now it's a reality. You saw $1.5 billion, growing more than 40%. But that's the first step. We are going to move that to the [indiscernible]. So what we are -- Prosus does delivery, finance and experience. You see that in details in Latin America. We are doing the same thing in India.
The foundation there is happy with Swiggy, iyzico and PayU. PayU is the bigger foundation because of the infrastructure of payments. But for example, we have also Swiggy in this year, [indiscernible] are part of what we are offering there. But then we have financed and we have experience. What we've seen in Latin America, we are going to the same direction in India. We are replicating the technology, we are replicating the learnings. We are replicating the cross-sell, and we are replicating the LCM and the excellence.
Right now, we're expanding LCM after a lot of success in iFood to our ecosystem in Asia. And we are starting in Europe to be directly a few. We don't have the full ecosystem in Europe. We have some amazing business, for example, [indiscernible], it's amazing in Europe.
To me, food delivery is very important as foundation. So I need to just itto go from now is minus 4% year-over-year growth to plus 10%, and we will get there, and we will keep sharing with you this progress. And then we will build the ecosystem around this food delivery, including OLX and our other business like iyzico and eMAG.
So what we are doing is moving ahead. The same learnings you saw in Latin America, where we are doing -- having a lot of success to our other regions. So very briefly, you know that PayU was the center of India, but now we have many more. And just 2 highlights, iyzico is travel, just like we have Despegar in Brazil. And again, we are learning a lot from each other. We invested in [indiscernible]. [indiscernible] is growing more than 100% year-over-year in mobility in India. So here, we have hundreds of millions of customers, and we will share next time with you how we are also developing the same things you saw in Latin America, how it's been replicated in India.
Europe, we are starting. We have OLX, we have any eMAG. But re-priority now is to make sure that our foundation just it works. We are going to keep delivering that. And in the future, you now more how we can keep growing -- grow also with the European ecosystem. It's not our priority for now to expand on to other big acquisitions right now. That's what we are doing. I hope you enjoyed to learn more about ecosystem, about innovation and Prosus forward and about food delivery. We will be here for one hour of questions. So I ask Eoin to organize our Q&A session. Eoin?
Great. Thanks very much, Fabricio. Thanks, Diego, Gandolfo. I think that was a really great look at food, how through scale, frequency, retention and density can serve as the foundation of the ecosystem and the ecosystem with its inherent growth and profitability can then unlock significantly other bigger opportunities through the TAM.
So we'll go to Q&A right now, and we also we'll have Fabrico. We'll have Diego Gendalfo, and we'll bring up our CFO, Niko, and it's clear that I'm going to have to add another O on my name, so I can retain my job here.
So let's get to Q&A where as we said, we're going to have our to speak with you. So let's go to the first question, and that comes from Caesar at Bank of America.
2. Question Answer
But now I'm going to have some difficult questions on looking forward. The first question, which I think I wanted to understand, a year ago when you hosted this Capital Markets Day, you mentioned that you're very confident that Prosus is on track to deliver billions in EBITDA in the next couple of years. And of course, we've seen that in the next 12 months, you're going to have to invest more in iFood and JET. I think this is mainly due to competition, which you could not foresee at the time that it would be so intense. So I think we understand that. But just wanted to to understand from your perspective, looking at the consolidated numbers, does it seem about right that EBITDA for the group will not grow much in FY '27?
And then what's going to happen in the next 2 to 3 years. Are you still bullish on this opportunity to grow and deliver [indiscernible] EBITDA? And then probably linked to that, I think the presentations we had on the LCMs were very insightful. I just wanted to probably understand a little bit better, when are we going to see the impact of this AI into the numbers, especially on the EBITDA side?
Thank you, Cesar, for the comments. I agree with you. The results are very good for last year. And I comment on your comment is when I showed that those expectations for 1 year ahead guarantee $1.3 billion in EBITDA, many people also said, can Prosus keep the current numbers or keep the current trajectory in? Over the last 18 months, we are consistently delivering. So hopefully, I'm sure you're going to keep seeing these results ahead of us. Your first question is, if I'm still bullish in profitability for the future. So I reaffirm, I expect and we will deliver $1 billion in profits, and we will get there for sure.
Yes, you are right. So this is not a I expect to increase profitability. This is not as a sentinel latter 1 month ago. And the rationale to that is the following. We had good business. First, I'll start with JET. I could just say I'm going to invest more in JET or increase profitability in JET. That's not the objective, the objective is to have a global food delivery leader.
So first, we are fixing technology, growth rate, how it treats the customer, lots of internal areas, so you can have a company that cannot only grow 10% to 20%. But we can have profitability on JET for many years, and that's my expectation. That said, for the moment, it's better to meet you fix everything that we have and create the right foundation to growth than to just increase profitability JET in the short term.
On iFood, it's nice that we have Diego here. The iFood business is doing very well. Yes, I know there is more competition there. The competition is not having better offer, better products, enology, -- they are not. Actually, IFood offer, iFood brand, iFood communication. iFoods ecosystem. It's a very complete and good of ecosystem and set of products. I could keep just increasing profitability, but I prefer to invest in it what is growing. For example, you saw fintech. It's growing super fast.
For us, growing in iFood heat. It's super important. So, can I just say let's take the maximum profitability now. That's not my objective to make the maximum profitability next quarter or the next 6 months. My objective is to have not only $2 billion, but many billions. And we will get there. So I'm as confident as ever.
That said, during -- there is cycles of investing more and deliver more results. Last year, many people question food delivery the results. We delivered all the results. We are going to invest more this year, and we will deliver much more results in the year after.
Fabricio, if I may, Cesar, one of the points that Fabrizio mentioned here, that's very important is do you have options. And that's the point. We have the option. For example, at iFood, could I grow less and deliver much more profitability, for example, on the adjacencies? Yes, I could. Is this the right option? The answer is no. The market is still growing. The habit is still being formed by the new options that we're bringing to the market.
So the point for me here is not if we're going to deliver or not. Its when we decide to deliver. And I think that the right option right now, especially on the grocery side, the pharmacy side, among others, is still underdeveloped. I prefer to develop by myself and be the leader of the market, then wait for this just to deliver more profits this year.
He made a second question?
I think Nico [indiscernible]
I think maybe just to provide a bit more color on the expectations for the year ahead. So I think the first thing that I want to emphasize, for some businesses, the expectations that we outlined at the CMD, we're actually tracking iron ore ahead for many of those. Which are they? Things like is [indiscernible] an really stellar performance in the last year, $480 million of EBITDA, 16% top line growth. We expect that kind of improvement both growth as well as profitability and margin to continue.
We have seen PayU India growing but also returning to being profitable. Again, that trajectory is continuing. Within the iFood business, we are seeing the adjacent season, you saw the presentation from Diego, who are growing fast and starting to contribute a lot. So all of those businesses are actually in line and tracking well to the expectations that we've set a year ago.
In terms of some of the new acquisitions, also Despegar as well as LA CENTRALE that we acquired in the last year that we are tracking on or ahead of our investment cases. And then, clearly, there are certain investments, and we've highlighted that in the presentation today, but also within the CEO letter that we published in May, where there will be investments this year going into JET as well as the core iFood business that Diego outlined.
And we've given you a range there because the market remains dynamic in terms of the spend and our competitors are actually reacting to that. So what is our expectations? From a revenue perspective, there's still an element of our full year like-for-like, like JET was only in for 6 months. It will be in for a full year next year. So our revenue should grow still healthy to $12 billion, $12.3 billion at least next year.
And then you can see the dynamic of some businesses, as I outlined, really continuing on the growth and profitability path, offset by some investments, which then more or less get you to the conclusion that you came to Caesar in terms of overall profitability. And then in cash flow-wise, that should be the same [indiscernible] dividend for the FY '27 year. We've already received that in June this year. And clearly, as our e-commerce business remains profitable, and it will continue to generate additional cash flow on top of that.
And the second question was on the LCM and some of the products we announced forward and when they should be showing up in revenue and EBITDA.
I can't explain regarding the LCM and the impact in the business and in the numbers. So if you see that we are challenging ourselves in JET to deliver growth this year. So we want to bring the entire company back to growth. Why we remain profitable? This is only possible if we use LCM properly. If we have an efficiency in terms of CPO, otherwise, it would be impossible to bring the entire company back to growth, and we would need to spend much more than what we are doing now. So here is where you can see the impact of this kind of technology in the business.
Just to complement here. You're not the first person that's asked me those days. But look, for example, Despegar has 20% of this revenue coming from the iFood ecosystem. Despegar is growing like 30% or 40% overall. This is a lot related to LCM and data and AI. Look, our profits, I go to this event sometimes you say, oh, let's talk only about the future. It's [ 1.3 ] this, it was [indiscernible], 2 years ago. We are using AI heavily to reduce costs, to serve customers better, to increase sales. So the results are already there.
The point is they are going to keep compounding because we are not just using some technology, some on development. For example, now when I explained LCM to the whole world, that's what we are doing right now, our results in many other companies are going to keep improving. When I put LCM, all that -- we showed 10 companies in Latin America, all of them are going to use LCM, our results there are going to improve too. But we are already having strong results due to AI.
Fabricio, if I may, in the same line that Gandolfo mentioned, if you think about the synergies of iFood and Despegar because someone is ordering food doesn't mean it will buy a hotel ticket or a flight ticket. So where the synergy comes from and where the LCM impact here. The fact that I can have the power that Elysium brings me, I can identify the behavior of our specific customer and I can know exactly what to do with that customer in a specific moment. So because LCM provides me this quality of information, I can provide to Despegar, for iFood to Despegar, the exact moment where someone is not in their town or has a certain frequency of travel and so on and so forth.
And therefore, when you compare what Despegar is doing right now versus when it was publicly traded, you will see a company that is more profitable and grow much more. Where does it come from? It comes from the intelligence of LCM. So not only LCM, but also the LCM. So the answer in the end is you will not see LCM as a specific line of revenue because it's not a SaaS business, at least until now. You're going to see this inside each of the lines of the P&L of the company.
Yes. Just adding to that, we launched this week maybe that's what you were asking about Toqan Claw. So you offer Toqan Claw to the restaurants. We have a few restaurants because we had like 1,000 before launching to everyone that are saying, "I have using this model better -- substantially better experience ahead using the public global leaders.
We are not selling it today to the restaurants because we operated 10 -- around 10x cheaper then, if you are using a global leader model. So over time, we may charge basically for that. Over time, we may offer it for free for our customers and for other customers, we may charge depending on how much they use. But our focus today is not make this line as a revenue line is to say we have the best -- we are the best partner for restaurants in the world because here, they can grow fastest and better than -- that's our focus for now. And we are doing all of that. The cost of that are inside our income statement because we can operate it cheaper because we built our own model.
All right. That's question one. Now we'll go to Andrew from Barclays. Andrew.
Great. I've got two, if that's okay. First one is on JET. So you're clearly getting some early signs of positive return in the cities where you've made changes. Can you just give us more color in terms of exactly what type of changes you've been making there? And then give us more color as to how easy it is to embed across the rest of the geographical footprint? So for example, can you tell us how long it's going to take to get on to a unified back end and have the LCM set up and running? Just so we get a sense as to how easy it is to translate what you're seeing in the early cities into the rest of the group? That's the first question.
And then the second one is on Delivery Hero. Appreciating that there's a lot of moving parts here, and you're probably limited in what you can say. But as it stands today, you have until mid-October to further sell down in the company. Can you give us your consideration just to the moving parts in now as stake? And I guess the [indiscernible] and for main investor conversations around whether you might be able to negotiate with the EC to extend that deadline further? Where you might buy more shares? What your perspective is on the Uber interested in the company? Whether there are sort some assets in the degree you might be interested in? I think it would be really helpful if we could get your views on the various puts and takes around that stake.
Answered very well the first question because let's see. Yes, let me answer the easy question first. And the tough question will come to Fabricio later. But regarding what we did in the selected cities is really focused on the growth flywheel that you saw here. So bringing the right high-quality traffic to the platform and starting to do in the customer segmentation, but using LCM behind that to understand the behavior of the customer is what was driving this kind of growth. And the supply is a very important piece as it is logistics. So there is no secret on that. The secret actually is executing it with operational excellence.
We are, as I said, in terms of behaviors raising the bar, moving extremely fast and really focus on our customers to understand their pain points and solve them. And the other piece of that is technology. When we start to apply the Prosus technology, the technology that we also saw in iFood and here, you can see the level of change. And we said that in the letter, please do not extrapolate the 25% very short because we are building that to the entire platform. You can imagine the complexity when you go from a few cities to the entire portfolio. That's exactly what we are doing now. But you see the new trajectory you see the direction is going to the right place coming from minus 9% to minus 4%. So that's what we are doing to deliver that.
But it's one slide in your presentation that show number of tests of marketing or new products, part in this quarter. It was like from ...
Actually JET was not testing too much. It was not part of the culture. So now we are running hundreds of tests in a month like , and we want to bring it to thousands of tests because this is the speed that we can learn is what we're going to drive our results for the future. So that's what we are accelerating, to speed flywheel faster and faster. This is very important.
You're talking about the unified platform. This is a central project for us. I will talk about one piece of that. So we expect to have in a few months, launching one new country using already the new logistics platform, which is a unified platform. So we expect, let's say, in 6 months, less than that, to really start to operate one entire country with this new platform, and then it comes naturally a rollout to all the countries after that. This is the kind of speed we're trying to build internally.
And that's some of the areas that you're investing in this year, correct?
Yes. Yes, for sure. If you look at the investments that we are doing, for example, product and tech, this is exactly what we are doing. Like we said, we need this unified back-end unified platform. and it takes longer, of course, to do the entire company, but instead of doing it in like 24 months, we are breaking it down and delivering one piece at a time. So we can see the progress quicker.
I think that's really important to us both JET and iFood. Yes, you're investing in demand, but also in supply with the product that sustains after competition or after your background to growth.
This is -- let me just highlight this point, which is important and we are not the kind of operators that just use subsidies to move forward. Actually, what we love to do is to test a lot to build products. And these products remain for a cycle of years and years generating the results that we want.
So I can reinforce to you the change on how JET are approaching into frequency and retention are substantial. You see that chart, obviously, I'm not proud to say minus 4%, but it was minus 9%, like in March. This number is going to keep going up because we are doing profound chains, and I'm very confident about that.
Andrew, your second question, delivery hero. Obviously, I'm not frustrated that I think we could do better when Prosus was the biggest shareholder of delivery, the results could be better for Prosus and for Europe. But it is what it is. We had some commitments. We executed our commitments. We are not the biggest shareholder anymore. There are other bigger shareholders. So I think it's -- you should call them an ask them about their plans. There is nothing I can talk now in what are their plans or next steps. It would be inappropriate. So you have to wait more. I'm sorry.
So we'll go to the next question. So we'll go to Will Packer at BNP. Will.
Three from me, please. Firstly, there was a very useful slide that talk to the addressable markets for iFood across diverse areas like OTAs, food, grocery. Is it right think of that as the vision for Europe and India? And to what extent can that be done organically versus via M&A?
Second question, clearly, we've already touched on the noise in Brazil from the Chinese new entrants and you've cut 2027 EBITDA expectations quite sharply. On the other hand, when I look at KPIs like traffic, it's actually very resilient. A little bit of an update on the state of the nation of Chinese competition and the prospects for EBITDA to rebound in 2028 back to '26 level or beyond?
And then final question around the risk for the ecosystem from the rise of alternative consumer agents. So we know from Tencent, they're working very hard to be the agnetic AI assistant of China, but 1 would think in the West, Meta, Google, open AI and for [indiscernible] are working hard on the same. Could this in parallel your own ambitions to the rise of big tech consumer agents? Or if we look at something like Latin America, do you plan to coexist? Or will you be the consumer agent? Just a color on how you think about that long-term risk would be very interesting.
Thank you for all the questions. I'll try to go to the first, is that the vision for India and Europe? Yes, that is the vision. I finish with one slide, say Brazil was more advanced like it helps. I was the CEO there in Brazil. I started to dream about that 2, 3 years, 4 years ago. What I want to show you is that we delivered much more than everyone recognize or know because we are releasing more data today. And I think the consistent in Brazil is strong. We -- the vision in India is the same. We are going to do the same. We are already executing a lot of the same. We already did more than what we are talking about, and we will go for Europe later.
Then you said, oh, can we expect acquisitions now? No, my biggest goal now is deliver real results in Just Eat because this is the foundation for our next steps. In India, we did a lot, actually. Just to remind you, [indiscernible] that is growing 110%, 120% year-over-year. It's an amazing company. It's a mobility company. iyzico also has a lot of synergies with Prosus. So hopefully, we make a presentation is like today on India in a few months.
But I think the good thing to show you is that we are delivering technology and knowledge that is replicable. So food delivery may be a $10 billion potential revenue thing in Brazil, but the whole markets -- we are is $100 billion. And if you look that to India and Europe, maybe it's $300 billion. And we are just to execute in delivering more. That's our biggest priority, which to keep replicating that.
Just -- and one comment on this Fabricio, which is very important. Some people, when they look at that slide, they think a lot about the [indiscernible]. That's not the point. The acquisition is not a strategy. The point here is what's the culture and management model that allow you to build an ecosystem because it's easy to buy a lot of companies or develop a lot of products. The point is how you make everything work [indiscernible]. So that's what we were able to prove in Latin America. And of course, it's a great framework for the other places.
So regarding the competition in Brazil, as Fabricio mentioned, we didn't see anything different from what we knew, the way that logistics is operated, the way that the over works and so on and so forth. The focus of the competition at this point in time, it's been heavily focused on subsidies especially on the outskirts where the low-income segment sits in Brazil and in very small restaurants.
We saw a market that grew heavily based on that, discounts generally goes around 50%. And of course, we could just play with that. But that's not what we're going to do. We had to do some offense in that sense, but that's not our focus. Our focus is mainly focused on product. And one of them is hits that I showed here. So can we go back to the same levels of returns in the next year? Of course, it will depend a lot on the behavior of the competition, on the irrational side.
As soon as things come back to the rationality and it will eventually come back, we will go back to the profitability and as an ecosystem, we have a push that will be much -- make us much, much more profitable than we expect in the past.
But can you estimate how much the competition is spending in low order, you're giving 50% discounts to subsidies. How much they are losing per order?
So they are losing more or less $8 per order, which is something forgivable.
Yes, it's more or less. So you showed our slide that we are losing 1.5 in average. So in some countries, we cities we are losing like 0 or 0.5%. So we are going to invest a lot to fight competition without the subsidy. So I think our position is -- it's very good. It's very, very good.
And the results up to this point are great. I mentioned. We grew orders. We grew customers. We grew frequency, we grew retention. So after 1 year of is irrationality, having these figures is something that is very meaningful.
And some Brazilians are getting free food, they be happy. But we are going to offer to all Brazilians cheaper food through better product. That's what we are doing and having the capability to invest for that makes the difference. And we are ready for that. We are a big enough company that we have a competition. We are going to win, and we are doing that, profitably, rationally a good reasonability on how we are implementing that. So I think we are doing well.
The third question was on agents, I'll try to be quick because you're talking too much in each question. But thank you for this question. What you just asked is part of our vision on Prosus. The Chinese -- some companies in China, they are more advanced and then you said open AI and [indiscernible] Google Gemini.
But actually, what we are seeing in some places in China, sometimes Alibaba, I think there is a lot of expectations on Tencent too, is to have agents that are much smarter than just ask a question. It's an agent that do things. We are leading on that in other regions. So this week in Prosus for which shows Zapya, where you can tell Zapya exactly what I'm telling you, by voice, Zapya, call my 3 daughters, offer them 3 places where we should have lunch, negotiate with them a place, then call the restaurants, make the schedule, the reserve issue with that, then let me know what's the conclusion and put in my agenda.
It's an agent that they really commit and do things and they work for 1, 2 hours until they finish everything. We are integrating that in all our ecosystem. So that Zapya, we launched last week. Now starting to do Just Eat orders and also iFood orders . Also, we are integrating that inside -- for example, Despegar, we have Sofia and we are making Sofia, much more agent, just like open cloud, but with capability of completing the transaction. Our agents now can make [indiscernible], much cheaper much faster and easier than most of other agents.
You talked about the competition with the American companies. I don't think they are leading. I think we are doing a better job. Alibaba and the [indiscernible] doing better jobs in Ticktalk and [indiscernible]. So I'm very proud that we are doing technology, and we are moving in nice speeds in Europe and Latin America and in India. In India, we have another agent called [indiscernible]. In Europe, we are going to push more Zapya, in Latin America, we have 3 or 4. We are doing it best in class. And I suggest to you, I think -- who made the question this time?
That was Will.
Will, go there, downloads up yet, test it, and we all say, "Oh my god, this is better than what I'm seeing from the American players. We are here to lead in AI and I think we're starting to deliver real results. What we showed last week in Toqan Claw, it's better than what exists. People are using cloud code in other places, especially in U.S. We are doing cheaper, and we are sharing the data between all the companies. So our rest of that they can get skills from other restaurants, so they can operate better.
This is better than what exists outside. So I think, we are leading in innovation, not only Latin America and Europe and India, but also globally. That's where we can grow. Our numbers are good because we are a very, very tech-first company, and I think the results are coming.
And Fabricio, just to complement. What I would say as an operator is we -- the point here is not to say everything will change, and I have to be prepared. The point here is to have the options in our hand, try to shape the future. And if you are not capable to shape the future, you are ready to understand how the future was shaped. Of course, we want to try to shape. But the point -- and again, every time that we start to talk about innovation, people come 6 months after and say, where is the revenues? The point is not about revenues in 6 months. The point is to shape the future or be ready for how people will shape the future.
And we are doing that.
Yes.
I think another interesting point an important point is when you say integration of these life systems into your ecosystem because they're able to -- when they're actually connected, they can do more.
Yes, that's a good example on this is with Zapya, we are integrating Despegar and iFood. So therefore, Zapya doesn't -- wasn't born only as an agent. It was bought as an agent that can do everything that Fabricio said and also complete an entire transaction in a marketplace such as ourselves.
All right. Great. So next question will go to Monika Citi.
So I had a couple of questions on food delivery, if I can, and then one on capital allocation. So, the first one, I was just interested in when I look at the slide on the iFood revenues, the core food delivery revenues looked pretty flat year-on-year in the second half and actually down a bit from the first half. Presumably, that is the vouchering or subsidies you've been giving.
So just was keen to understand how the core food delivery business is growing revenues if we were to ex out the sort of vouchering you've needed to do because of the irrational competition at the moment? And then the second question also on iFood was around the profitability of the Pago and new initiatives. -- because that was quite a dramatic swing in profitability 1H versus 2H. So 1H down BRL 112 million and then 2H up to BRL 427 million. So if you could just talk us through, what has driven that sort of dramatic improvement in profitability, so we can start to understand how to think about that going into 2027 and beyond. Because presumably, that's going to be a big driver of profitability medium term.
And then the final question I had was just on -- there was a slide showing the dividends total to Prosus. So the $0.10 dividend, but also you've got a load of dividend coming in from OLX that have ramped materially as the OLX profitability has continued to grow and pretty stable dividends for iFood -- as I think into next year, it also seems likely the case that you're going to get improvements in the dividends into Prosus. So just wanting to understand how we think about that against the $5 billion buyback target and whether that buyback target, for instance, could expand as we go through the year, if OLX does very well or if you dispose of more noncore assets than you think at the moment, for instance.
Right. So I can start here with the iFood financial performance. So yes, there is an impact in the revenue side and on profitability as a consequence of the rational competition. So for me, that's why it's so important to understand the entire P&L and how the operational metrics are going. So again, customers going are -- the customer base is bigger, retention is better, frequency is higher. We don't have any swing on the club loyalty program and so on and so forth.
On the profitability side, what we have as an impact is the increase of the CPO as I showed in the graph of the presentation. So this is basically this movement. What are the good news. The good news is that all the clients that are the ones that generate more economic profit for the company is still there with the same level of frequency. And therefore, I'm not seeing any impact on this. So as soon as irrationally goes down, profitability comes up as a natural consequence.
There was another.
Just a you -- you had a question on iFood Pago. So on that slide, it's high food Pago and other. So you correct that there was sort of H1 versus H2 and ramp-up. Included in that was a element of a once-off relating to certain indirect taxes that we were able to recoup, which we also now use to invest in the food delivery side of the business, where you would have seen order growth year-over-year.
Then there was the question about the cash flow and dividend extraction that we have at the top. So we see that in the past year, we had a $0.10 dividend, OLX as well as iFood. So clearly, the $0.10 dividend for FY '27, that's already been received, and that's increased a bit. OLX are on a further growth as well as profitability path. So that element of cash flow generation and hence, dividends that we can extract to remain and grow going forward.
And iFood, clearly, as it will be an investment year, that will be sort of more depressed. So you then know that, but how does that impact our sort of ability in terms of the share buyback. So from an overall share buyback perspective, clearly, we continue with the open-ended share buyback program. We have adjusted that, where we found with both the sale of [indiscernible] as well as other capital, which comes from either noncore assets that we've sold or other assets that we have available.
That part, we will continue. And for the year ahead, $5 billion is what we will do. So I think that to way to see it is that as a one component of other resources that we have that we can deploy. The side tencent that makes the program actually more efficient, it increases our per share expansion to Tencent. And you would have seen how that has actually played out, for instance, in our core loan earnings per share achievement this year, where underlining grew 13% on a per share basis, it was 24% because of the effectiveness of the share buyback.
Great. Let's move on to Joe and UBS.
So firstly, last week, you announced you were investing $460 million in Allen, a French AI-powered health tech business. This is the biggest investment beyond Despegar and LA CENTRALE to date. Could you give a bit more color on the investment? What are you excited about it and how it folds into the wider Prosus strategy?
And then secondly, I want to spend another minute on Zapya, -- as you say, it's live in Europe and fascinating to use. Don't tell my dad that his birthday Whatsapp message this morning was both written and sent by Zapya, but anyway, Eoin mentioned agenetic integration versus -- and that versus the services in Europe feels like it is the differential versus the U.S. majors. What's the impediment to moving even faster on agentic intigration? Do you expect to deploy ad dollars behind Zapya? And do you see Zapya rather personal assistants, something you can monetize?
Good part of that is that you very big 3 questions, we always get lost. But on Alan, we talk too much about the AI as models. To me, models -- we have some not only American models, but we have now Chinese models have open source models. The layer above is much more important. We are doing that on commerce and large commerce model is super important for that. To meet the impact on AI in health is unbelievable big opportunity. I really believe the opportunity is going to be very big.
It's not our core to execute the health service itself, but Alan is especially amazing in a life assistance for health care. So by far, what connect us a lot is that they have a life assist that people use every week. They have more than 1 million users, every week talk checking, what are you doing with your health care? How are you feeling? Do you want to talk about something? Do you want to talk to a doctor? Can you do a video core, they want to schedule something. So this idea of making AI, [indiscernible] of the founders of Mistral getting a lot of intelligence to take care of health.
I think it's a very big market. We are not a pure investor. We are buying part of the company because we think we can help. We can help on the life assistance, and we will integrate somehow not to give too much details today. They are in health care with our assistance. So we will integrate many more things. Second, we can help a lot in the B2C approach. We have hundreds of millions of customers that we can help on that.
Third, they need to go to international expansion. And we will help substantially in international expansion strategy, and we are working a lot on AI together. Our AI is very good, there's too, and we think we can -- so it's an investment. I think Alan is going to be a $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion company, but we are not a pure investor. We are helping through our technology, how to make them operate better.
Very connected the second question. When you talk about Zapya. Zapya is the first life assistant we are pushing. We made so much progress on that in the last 6 months. And now we started to talk about, you told your father got this message. A lot of my family members also talk to Zapya quite often. It's amazing to tell. I'm not going to say [indiscernible]. Otherwise, I will have in my family. But Zapya is super sophisticated and you said how aggressive we are to integrate, very aggressive.
Over the next few weeks, we have many announcements on Zapya, how she can do things that no one else can do, because very fast to just send a message by voice and amazing things happen. Can we invest ad dollars on that? Probably, we will view. Probably Zapya is going to keep increasing their investment. And I think we started to position us as a technology innovation. It's not available. It was only in Brazil or Brazil, I think in one more South American country. Now it's in Europe, we integrated with Just Eat. There will be more important integrations in the next few days to be announced and demonstrated.
I'm very excited about that. I think we are ahead of other people are doing. Obviously, it's amazing to use, let's say, ChatGPT, but you can ask a question to them. On Zapya, you can say, solve my problem. This person is going to do that. call, like I used to that. My car has a problem, call or [indiscernible] place that [indiscernible] in your car, negotiate the data and the price, close the deal. And we are going to do similar things, for example, in food delivery. So I think we are -- again, I think in Takanawa ahead of the market. I think [indiscernible] of the market and I think Zapya is a ahead of the market too.
Keep going, and we're going to Giles from Jeffries.
So first question, Fabricio, please. Your strategy has come under some public criticism of late with an open letter to the Prosus Board using the favor of the [indiscernible] to frame the argument. So your thoughts on some of the criticisms you've faced there. Then a question for Diego, coming back inevitably to the question of competition in Brazil, perhaps to illuminate it from a new perspective, if you could give your thoughts on why Kita has indefinitely postponed its Rio de Janeiro launch earlier in March?
And, then finally, Roberto, please could tell me or tell us what conditions you accept for other markets?
Starting. I'm a founder of a tech company for 25 years. Someone was about what you are doing is part of life. So I know some shareholders disagree part of life. I can survive with that. I read this letter. My first reaction is I think he used AI to write the letter and to polish the site. So I'm sure we also like AI as much as me, doesn't told us, but I think he likes it.
You know my strategy. We are very good in what we use in AI. What we show in Prosus forwards, very few components are doing LCM training model, make the distillation of the best model. Toqan Claw, Zapya, we have more 18 life assistants that we are going to keep pushing and testing in smaller regions. I think we are substantially ahead.
Some people can say, prove me. Have you seen our numbers? The numbers happen, big [indiscernible] we are a first company, not because we are lucky. And Europe is growing 20% -- no, it's not. It's because we are executing technology very well. We are going to keep being very aggressive in having the best technology and delivering the results. Not the last 6 months. I'm doing that for 15 years. That's why iFood is so big. Some people disagree, Okay, I can leave with that. I think those people are wrong. I think we will deliver results over time. But come back in the next year results, and I'm going to have more nice slides and you can maybe make this question again.
Well, nice to talk to you. Last time you were in Brazil. Now I'm here visiting it, stays at [indiscernible]? So now I'm visiting you. So well, I really don't know why they said that they decided that. There are so many moving parts that it's impossible to know if it's the fact that there is a war in China or there are a great contender, which is iFood or other aspects that we don't know. What I care is what they're doing. And with this size, it's how I really find my tactics without necessarily changing my strategy. So that's it.
And I think there was a question, if I got it right, was basically what's the expectation in the market in Europe. What I see is the most challenging thing to build in our food delivery business is the foundation in terms of scale and density. This is exactly what JET has. If now we apply the whole technology, the management model and the culture that we said here, it's much easier to turn this high scale business with the right benefits into back to growth like in a company that can grow again, then doing the opposite.
So for sure, there are good operators in the market, but we are very focused on the customer. That's why we are deploying, for example, the LCM because if you understand better the customers than anyone else then we can have the right services, the right supply, the right choices. So this is exactly where we are focused on. JET has the density, JET has the scale. Now we need to leverage on that to bring the company back to growth.
I think what he was also getting at was, are there any conditions that will cause you to exit another country probably the opposite of what you just said.
Yes. good question. So the conditions to exit a country or not is basically based on the principles on how we allocate capital. If we don't see the right density to have the right return on capital, and it's impossible for us to win there or be a relevant player there. Does not make sense to remain in this country. So all the time, we will be assessing our portfolio and make sure that where we are, we are a relevant player. So that's the principle behind. That's why we left those 2 countries and we're going to be assessing all the time.
Great. Thanks. Let's go to Marc at JPMorgan.
I have also 3 questions. The first one is again, on the Capital Markets Day last year. Part of that was also creating a flywheel in LatAm. Clearly, you've done a lot and you highlighted the synergies between Despegar and iFood. You've done a lot there. I think your comments, I read that we're not going to see larger scale acquisitions. So we can debate what larger scale is, but it doesn't look like, given your comments previously that there is a lot.
So what is flywheel and LatAm from here yes? I mean what do you need? Is it something that we think will be built on organic revenue growth and strong execution? Or how does it go from big to bigger? Yes, really. I mean, that's the question.
The second question is, unfortunately, on just Just Eat again, I mean, clearly, the minus 4% is on the comp, but it was down minus 8% a year before. So it seems that it takes a long time. What I try to understand is really the question how do you get to revenue growth? I mean you're doing clearly a lot of things and then AI will help, but I'm sure your competitor is very busy in his tech department. So is it about market share gains? Is it about consumers just ordering more because there are more systems and hence, you have better order growth? Or do you really envisage market share gains at the end of the day that would be interesting.
And then the third question is just again on tencent [indiscernible]. The share price of Tencent is where it is right now, to keep going with a $5 billion buyback. Is there a debate how much of Tencent you actually want to sell at these levels versus taking or funding the buyback more from the balance sheet? That will be my 3 questions. Hope that makes sense.
So on Latin America, you said we talked about that last year. But I think we get the credit that I told you that's our plan that we are going to do in Latin America. There, we are showing that is the results we show that we are growing 100% in 3 or 4 or 5 different business. We're not looking for a big, very big acquisitions in Latin America now. We show more or less 5 to 10 companies we invested or acquired in the last 1 year. They were much smaller acquisitions. So for example, I showed like 3 or 4 companies doing software-as-a-service for restaurants, one doing kiosk, one doing -- there were many companies there. And were much more acquisition. The point is that there wasn't one is deleted. It would be useful now. We have the best [indiscernible] that shows going from 0% to 20% in 1 year.
We have the same slides with more 4 things at a Despegar and then more for showing CRM bonus, Mevo, Shopper and someone else. And we are showing -- we have the same kind of growth in all the companies we acquired. It's not all, but we showed at least 5. So last year, we had a dream, ecosystem as a competitive advantage. Now it is. We are doing sometimes is more acquisition or investments and all companies are accelerating their growth. That's our thesis, we are going to keep delivering organic growth a lot with smaller acquisitions we did that. So we are going to keep doing that.
And also we didn't show us right about profitability month by month, all those companies, but you've seen that it is like $160 million in profits outside the food delivery, growing a lot. So, we have some areas we started a few years ago that are every time more profitable. So I think the ecosystem is it's not adhesives anymore. And that's what I try to show today.
So regarding JET and the revenues, what do we see like over the past few years, JET has been declining and trying to compensate for that yet as all the platform -- food delivery platforms in the world, they started to operate the delivery fees and service fees and so on. That's not our strategy to grow revenue going forward.
The strategy is to grow order volume. To grow order volume, you need to grow your customer base and we are investing exactly in these cohorts of the customers in the lifetime value. That's what will bring us incremental revenue over time. And to add to that, retail media. Diego shared here some numbers of retail media ads in iFood. And that's the importance of JET having this scale because retail media can also be a better ROI for our partners, for our restaurants, so they can invest to grow and have a good return on that.
So when we put more order volume and more retail media, you have a path to grow the revenue. Delivery fees, of course, all the fees in the platform, they are part of this strategy, but has to be optimized over time. The intention here is not to become more expensive for the customer. The intention here is to become more efficient and charging the right price in the right place. That's what we need to do.
This is something. We started his presentation with a chart showing minus 9%. It was like March, if I'm not wrong or just a few months ago. The now is [ minus 4 ] , we didn't put a date, yes, but we are talking about a few months to start growing again from someone that was doing [ minus 9 ] in January, I think it is a very good result. And our expectation is very few months.
Then just on the question on the share buyback. So I think when we introduced in November last year, the fact that we will not just use tencent proceeds, but also proceeds from other noncore assets. I think we've made our share buyback program and the capital allocation around that more efficient. Last year, we did sell about [ $2 billion ] from noncore assets. In the first quarter of this year, we've sold almost [ $1 billion ]. And we have additional assets like Matt and so on that we can use to actually supplement that.
So I think that really helps because we are obviously want to be long-term large shareholders in tencent because of the potential that, that has. And by doing the capital allocation and share buyback this way, we've actually enhanced the effectiveness at least on a per share exposure to tencent in this way. So we will continue on that path and here's [ $5 billion ] within that we have got significant financial flexibility to actually fund that.
All right, guys, we're out time. But do you feel strong? Can you do one more? Okay. Well, Adam take us home, please.
I'll do 2H quick ones. First, you gave us the number for iFood in Brazil competition losing $8 in order. Any idea of their monthly order volumes so we can kind of calculate how much money they're losing a month? And the second question, when I look at the cash flow statement in the annual report you put out today, when you look at working capital there, there's a huge swing from a $10 million inflow to a $570 million outflow. Can you just explain the moving parts on that? I know some of it is trade related, but I think there's other things in there as well.
Yes. So on my side here, of course, this is just an estimation. But when we take everything in account, we obviously is that they are spending like $150 million per month. Combine it.
On the cash flow, yes, if you look at the statutory cash flow, it obviously includes a lot of merchant receivables and payables. When we measure essentially our free cash flow element, we sort of exclude that. So if you then look at the the actual working capital element is a lot lower. Where does most of that go, essentially, it goes into growing many of our fintech businesses because there's a capital requirement. It's obviously a big debt element that goes against that. There's still a capital element, and we contributed about 20% capital to fund and grow our authentic business as a greater component of that.
All right. Great. We have a number of other questions here that we will get to from the IR team will reach out to you directly. But Fabricio, do you want to make any closing comments to send us on our way?
Hope you enjoyed our results. There was lots of questions. Can we deliver this improvement in EBITDA and free cash flow, we did. For the future, the ecosystem is working. We are going to keep expanding our innovation. I think, we are going to come here every time much well dressed because our innovation is going to connect us for an amazing future. Thank you for coming here, and hope to see you next time.
Thank you.
Prosus — Q4 2026 Earnings Call
Prosus — Q4 2026 Earnings Call
Prosus reports strong top-line and cash gains as an expanding "ecosystem" and in-house AI drive growth; near-term EBITDA tempered by investments in Just Eat and competition in Brazil.
📊 Quarter at a Glance
- Revenue: Nearly $10.0bn reported; management and CFO expect roughly $12.0–$12.3bn next year (company guidance).
- EBITDA: $1.3bn (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), up ~84% YoY.
- Free cash flow: Improved ~+$2.0bn over two years to about +$1.5bn (cash after operations and capex).
- Ecosystem: Adjacent businesses (grocery, fintech, travel, ads) generate ~$1.5bn and are growing >40% YoY; ecosystem now >50% of revenue.
- Scale: iFood ~200m orders and the group cites ~1bn customers across platforms.
🎯 What Management Says
- Ecosystem focus: Strategy is to run delivery, finance and customer experience as an integrated ecosystem (cross‑sell between iFood, Despegar, fintech, grocery, ads) rather than a pure food‑delivery play.
- AI as lever: Rolling out a proprietary large commerce model (LCM) and internal assistants (Toqan Claw, Zapya) to cut unit costs, personalize offers and scale across regions.
- Investment priority: Management will invest in Just Eat Takeaway to restore growth and replicate the LatAm model in India and selectively in Europe, accepting near‑term profit trade‑offs.
🔭 Outlook & Guidance
- Near‑term revenue: CFO flagged at least $12.0–$12.3bn for the coming year (like‑for‑like uplift as JET is consolidated for a full year).
- Profitability: Group EBITDA may be broadly flat in FY27 as targeted investments in JET and iFood offset gains; management reiterated a multi‑year path to higher profits and strong cash generation.
- Capital & returns: Free cash flow recovery supports a $5bn share buyback program and a recently received $0.10 per‑share dividend; further noncore disposals may fund buybacks.
- Key risks: Intense Brazilian competition has increased CPO (cost per order) and could press margins until subsidy intensity normalizes.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Brazil competition: Analysts pressed on subsidy‑led price competition; management says structure and retention remain healthy, estimates rivals lose ≈$8 per order in some segments and expects economics to recover as irrational subsidies subside.
- AI / LCM timing: LCM and agentic tools are already lowering costs and enabling cross‑sell (Despegar shows material benefit); impact shows up across P&L lines rather than as a single revenue item.
- JET turnaround: Tests in selected cities delivered >25% growth; a unified backend/logistics platform will be piloted in a country within months with broader rollout thereafter — management accepts near‑term investment to rebuild scale and margins.
⚡ Bottom Line
- Summary: Prosus is shifting from a single‑product story to a multi‑product ecosystem supported by proprietary AI; that diversification is already driving revenue mix improvement and cash generation. Short‑term EBITDA may be held back by targeted investments (notably Just Eat) and competitive pressure in Brazil, but management presents a credible path to stronger, more durable margins and shareholder returns over the medium term.
Prosus — Special Call - Prosus N.V.
1. Management Discussion
Welcome, everyone, to Lisbon. Thank you so much for joining us and for people joining in on the webcast. I have to tell you the back story of that corporate photo was actually taken by my brother-in-law yesterday. And he said to me, think of you murdering your husband and that evoked the genuine smile you actually saw up there. So the reason why this was done at such last notice is, unfortunately, Owen couldn't join us today, and that's because he's under a couple of feet of snow. So he will be joining us tomorrow. So we look forward to welcome him then.
But who is here today is the OLX management team. So one of the reasons we chose to do this event in the manner and in the location that you find yourself is because of a very exciting event they are hosting tomorrow. So we've already got the management team here at captive, and we thought we'd expose them to the financial community. We know all of the hot topics that you all are facing and puzzling over, and we hope to share their thoughts, their insights and their wisdom with you. So we've got a very exciting lineup. And as you know, it's very unusual to have access to Chief Data Officers, product and technology officers and then the CEO and CFO.
So without further ado, I'm handing you over to Christian.
Thank you very much. And it took me a while to get smiling as you've seen, but I think that was probably on purpose. Welcome to Lisbon. Welcome here in the manner. Thank you very much, Kaeleen, for the introductory words. Why are we here? I have identified 3 reasons. I came in on Sunday evening. I just enjoyed the sun and the mild weather. It's probably one of those things that basically you're really looking for, and I guess you also enjoyed it.
The second thing is for those who are not so familiar with Portugal, Portugal has developed into a real strong tech up. Lisbon, Porto, we ourselves have about 500 people here, mainly acting in the space of product, marketing and tech. So again, this is certainly an important reason. But the third reason is the more important. It's our CLAIM AI conference. It's a big happening. It's the first industry-wide happening in this space.
There is a reason why OLX does it because we are certainly at the forefront of the development in terms of AI. We are not a listed company, so you cannot know, and that's the reason why we want to show today what we have already been doing in the past, what we have been cooking on. Tim and Andreas, obviously, are the stars of today, and we'll give you a deeper insight in what this really means. So now let me get into it. And -- the clicker works.
Yes, the clicker works perfectly well. So we call it leading through agentic innovation. AI,gentic AI is obviously the talk of the town. It's not the reason why we're here. We don't want to be talk of the town. We want to have basically -- we are playing that role in that space for many, many years already. And I think what we want to show you is what you can do in that space and what is the speed and the pace in which you need to work if you want to be in that space.
And it's moving very much away from marketplaces and platforms towards very much verticalized transactions because that's where the depth and also the benefit lies. Just to give you a short heads up on OLX. OLX is a leading business. We have been consistently overperforming. And for those who have been with us on a Capital Markets Day last year, remember very well when I was starting to talk about our verticalization effort into motors, real estate and jobs, which was a clear strategy and which also define our ambition level to grow at 20-plus revenue growth rates and also to reach EBIT margins of 50%, which Suresh, as our CFO, will continue to talk about because we believe that those are margins that you can further achieve.
We have continuously built our financial momentum. We have been able to deliver 43% of EBITDA margins or adjusted EBIT margins after the first half year of our financial year '26. We have leading assets in many -- across many markets. The latest that we obviously acquired was La Central and La Central is also something where we are now starting to roll out our product, and Andreas will certainly talk about this.
If you think about OLX, OLX is a player that is existing for very long now. And we have been constantly innovating and evolving. We have done some mistakes around OLX Autos, but we have continuously tried. This is -- we have been testing. We have been moving on the technology. And I think this is something that is super important because the market view translating into what OLX reality is, I think, is the most important thing, namely we are shaping our own proactive future.
In the past, classifieds were seem to be resilient. They still are, but we believe that the vertical leaders are the data foundations of the agents. That's basically what the future today already looks like. AI is a feature. It's not a feature. It's not a feature. I think a lot of people are talking about feature because it's sort of new. But for us, Agentic AI is the product. It's the product. It's not a feature. It's something that you need to be immersed into and you need to understand. Discovery Channel was the past.
Now it's about partner for a transaction. So it's trying to get the customers and the consumers closer to each other. It's enabling them to basically faster and better transact, which then leads in the last one where in the past, monetization was very much seed and ad-based. Now we're getting far closer towards the transaction, which is what we call a value-based outcome-based revenue, namely closer to the transaction, closer to the lead and then also showing the customers the value that you're delivering. And this is also something that will help you not only to facilitate monetization, but probably also increase your take rate because if you make the customer more efficient, there is a reason why you would also benefit from it.
OLX, as I said already a couple of times, has had a decade of dominance, especially on the -- in the AI space. We started early on in 2018, data, data gathering, data structuring, that's super important because without data structure, you can't go anywhere. The data structure back in the days already helped us in 2021 of starting personalized search. And this is something that is basically the inception, if you want, of AI.
In 2024, we started with our first program, basically called OLX Magic. OLX Magic was a great product, but probably ahead of its time, ahead of its time. And we learned from that, that certain variables that were in that product was then used going forward. And we released our first AutoiQMotors program, which is probably the only one in Europe that helps the dealer in every bit of his business. Is it pricing? Is it sourcing? Is it inventory management? Is it financing? This is the most complete set of product that you can find in the market, and we're adding new functionalities every day.
On job site, in January, we released the matchmaking. The matchmaking is something that is very similar to the dealer side, but on a very different vertical. And tomorrow, we will show the world basically what our ChatGPT Compass is going to look like, namely the real estate app that we're going to use and that we're going to launch into the user hemisphere, which, again, helps us also on the auto side because in April 26, we will launch sort of the same product on the auto side.
Don't forget, the good thing is that the underlying tech allows us to play around synergistically between motors, real estate and jobs, jobs, real estate and motors. So all those things are interdependent and therefore, things are working very, very well into each other and which helps us also to gain speed and to be much faster in the iteration of what we're trying to achieve. Now I've talked enough.
I think Tim, who now takes over, will give you a very deep insight into how we structure this whole AI journey.
Okay. I don't know who that guy is. I'm Tim Davis. I lead up our product, technology and marketing efforts here. First of all, welcome to Lisbon. I think we arranged a special early spring day for those folks in Northern Europe, and hopefully everyone has a chance to get outside and catch a bit of sunshine. I am super excited to talk about what we're doing today. Like this is just such a dynamic time in the industry, especially in classifieds.
I think we have a tremendous amount of good stuff to share and take feedback on, and we're really excited for this whole week of this AI-centric classifieds moment. So I'll talk about scaling AI-powered customer experiences, and I'll kind of lead with like AI is not a feature of the product. The core of our product is AI, but really, the core is the marketplace and how do we help customers sell things or solve human problems.
I think we'll go into some details about how we think about those things. And then my colleagues, Andreas and Suresh will talk about some of the numbers that actually show the results. Okay. First of all, like eyeballs, visibility or exposure listings. -- beautiful business. We have made a ton of money in helping customers just find visibility or discover products. G love it. It's been super great. But that is not the future.
We believe the future is taking those eyeballs and turning them into solutions or I'll say, getting to the finish line. So I think if we think about like this concept of a marketplace, actually, how do we make the marketplace more valuable, more differentiated, more immersive and actually, how do we package that in different ways. And I'll tell you what that means to us. So first of all, like we have -- I'll call it -- we have a flywheel, but I'm going to draw it a little differently today about a top funnel, which is about consumers, the middle of the marketplace mediation and, of course, the supply funnel.
And we attack all of those things independently because they're all super important to us. One is like a core principle for us is people have human need. I think it's not new that for thousands of years, customers or clients or consumers have needed a place to stay, transportation, work or other services they needed to find -- so one of our premises is we find customers or we meet customers wherever they're at. So there's multiple places customers will have intention. It could be mobile apps, it could be upstream search providers, it could be partner ecosystems.
Our goal is to bring those all into the marketplace in our verticals and have the best place to do business. Same thing. Our goal is to help our listers or sellers sell the product. Exposure, very classic, one of the important things that we do and we continue to do. But in the end of the day, like leads lead to a sale, okay? So we're actually all about like helping customers make the sale.
So we're actually transitioning to very much focused around these marketplace services are the place where the business is done or what we might call the transactional marketplace versus the exposure marketplace. And well, this is AI-driven. It's not an AI-driven, it's AI founded. So all these services that operate autonomously in the marketplace are built and delivered through AI and can be packaged in multiple experiences, which I'll talk about.
Okay. As I mentioned, like what we've been winning. I mean our results have been fantastic for the last couple of years on traditional classifieds business models. Suresh will show some of those numbers that we've been driving revenue and margin very aggressively for the last 3, 4 years. But then also, we actually have Agentic AI in the market today. This is not a future thing. This is a today thing. So we're actually generating real money, real ROI on investments and helping consumers find better experiences today with the technology we're creating as well as sellers package and produce their products in different innovative ways.
And one of the things we're really super excited about is like what differentiates classifieds and especially OLX in this world? Well, one is we see a ton of data. And I think it's what Christian mentioned is like the scale. The scale is on at least 2 dimensions. One, we operate across many geos. So we see a wide diversity of consumer behaviors, and we can take that data and aggregate it into interesting insights across many different geo markets. Second, we operate across a bunch of different verticals. I think that's one of the differentiating factors of OLX is we see consumer behavior in cars, jobs, real estate, even goods and services.
So we actually have this huge pile of data unique to OLX that we can synthesize package and apply algorithmic AI to actually generate insights. That's everything from like vehicle history is cross border, something actually is kind of hard to do. But looking I actually have a lot of personal connection to is like the jobs market. We actually can see what employers actually hire for, the success rate of those applicants and actually fine-tune the matchmaking services over time based on who's applied for these jobs, how they performed, what employers come back and look for. Those are real proprietary data things that are very vertical-centric and I think can't easily be replicated outside of the OLX ecosystem.
Second is like trust. Well, in any high-value marketplace experience, buying a car, looking for a job, there's the need for quality data, okay? So you trust these transactions, are you giving your personal information out to some place that will honor integrity and actually connect the appropriate services to a trust foundation and mediate those in a marketplace environment. I think about like all of the untrustworthy data that exists in the world.
I think this is a key place of why actually people will come to OLX in verticals and say, well, you can't just buy fraudulent reviews from OLX. You actually have to earn those reviews, again, back to the proprietary data, back to the connection of agents and people. So again, like if we can do a search and find 5 different providers of loan services in any given market, we actually can show the history, the attach rate, the success rate and connect all those services to the transactional flow.
And then on scale and depth. As I mentioned, we operate at high scale. I think we're all super clear that building this type of technology is super expensive. But what we're really excited about is we actually take this cost and reuse it and rebuild it and redeploy it across multiple geos in multiple markets. I think this is a case when scale tremendously helps us pay for this technology that smaller, more specialized vendors will have a hard time with.
And I think also, Suresh, I'm going to refer to a few times to talk about the economics of this. But this is built into our business model. This isn't a new investment for us. We've been doing this for the better part of 7 years, as Christian mentioned. So our entire revenue margin profitability model is founded upon driving these technologies. We were doing AI before it was called AI. We used to call it ML, but this is the basis of how we deliver value to our customers. And I think I just kind of sum up this, what does this really mean? What's like trying to help customers get to the finish line of sell their product, whatever that may be. And we really are excited by these services being flexible, okay? We're about sellers and actually helping them sell. But we don't have a one-size-fits-all sales model. We're not a logistics marketplace.
We're expecting people to put their products into our warehouse. We're saying, bring your best offer, package it, price it, choose the liquidity level that is most appropriate for your business model. You can have different offsetting ways to offer value to the customers and making that data and those offers accessible to consumers, whether they're coming from a traditional discovery experience or in the future, dispatching their own AI agents into our marketplace to find the right solution for them.
Yes, and we look ahead, and we think like things will, in fact, change. Again, in a classic exposure or visibility-based marketplace, whether it's classifieds or ads, lots of techniques will become not relevant in the future, like boosted listings, probably one of the mainstays of most advertising businesses is like buying ranked listings or boosted up ad spots.
When you have a consumer AI agent who's processing tens, hundreds, thousands of listings and close to real time, those things go away. Consumers will bring their own preferences, their own ranking algorithms and their own scoring to the marketplace. Our job is to make sure the agents match up in our marketplace with high integrity data and high integrity place to actually those transactions. So I think we look ahead and say, well, what will change? That's one of the things.
Second is like all these services like purchase reviews, fraud bots, those are things that are intrinsically like will not be valuable as the marketplaces get more mature, generate algorithmic IP or algorithmic AI to filter sort and remove those from the marketplace aggressively with scale and deep IP. So it's a zero-sum game. There's always a cat and mouse type of thing with fraud.
We think trusted marketplaces will win over time, whether they're human eyeballs or agent transactions. And the third is proprietary data. Our customers are largely small- and medium-sized enterprises. We have a bunch of data for distribution of our listings. These are things that no single job lister, no single real estate agency, no single auto dealer can really replicate. We can bring these insights and data sets to them, have the algorithm IP, which then are used to augment their listings, their value and their decision process.
So we're basically again helping people sell their products in a larger context, but still allow them to personalize what's relevant for them. So I think about personalization in that context, we're personalized for the consumer, but we also personalize for the seller. And I think about like what winning looks like -- well, first of all, actually, sorry, these matter. These are in market today. So like we're actually seeing real tangible results, not just future agent transformation, but things are being packaged, customers are picking up these services, and they're showing it in our financials quarter-over-quarter.
And we are relentless about doing these things in front of customer, finding product market fit and scaling up and boosting things that work. I'll just talk about one of these data points. It's one of my favorites is the jobs market or the matchmaking marketplace. I love this because we solve some really essential human needs here.
One, job seekers, they may be in a bad time. They may have lost their job or looking for a better life for their family. We're helping them find better fit, more likely to find -- to pass an interview process and making that time to find that job happen that first touch point within 5 minutes. At the same time, we're solving an economic opportunity for our sellers to find more candidates better suited to them, preserve precious human time for interviewing qualified candidates and shorten the time to find labor or capital to help them make money.
So it's a beautiful market and that I think is a really great touchstone piece for AI. And again, they show up in tangible numbers for our customers and how they purchase and consume these products.
Another theme here I want to talk about is as we -- anyone who follows the news, the world is on fire for AI. And one of our principles is speed is the only sustainable advantage. And it used to be, we talked about being 20% faster. But now we only need to operate at computer speed or silicon speed. This is a great statistic I read a few days ago is the world market for compute will go, I think, $3 trillion of investment in the next 4 years, doubling the world's capacity for GPU or general compute. That just staggers me as a technologist. Like there's so much more capacity to do these things than ever before. And that means anyone who's operating with people first versus AI first will fall behind.
We need to be operating 10, 50, 100x faster, getting value to customers, not squeezing a few percentage points out of our existing team. So again, it's a very AI-first infrastructure that we're all focused on. So again, what are we doing? Well, we're doing like more than 1,200 product updates per week. We test these, we experiment, we fine-tune them. We see what customers want. And we see something, we double down on it and scale it up, put it into a package or an offer and get it to market at scale. We love that. Same thing, the delivery rate. We are not immune to this.
So again, not 20%, but 2x faster, and we expect to go even 2x faster in coming years. We have like roughly 2,600 employees at OLX. We also have roughly 2,600 autonomous agents working for us. And some of that will be 5,000, 10,000, 20,000. Our scale out will be agentic workforce as well as agentic value delivery, not with people. Well, we like to win, and we want to keep winning. So first of all, as I mentioned, like we've had a fantastic several years. I think we've actually built a culture, a drive to win and the whole company.
Today is about AI and technology, but we're also about customers. And the key interface to customers and how we build technology and take it to market as well as learn is often coming from our account management and our sales teams. And of course, our marketing groups are about a bidirectional conversation. We think that's a deep moat of how do we actually help our customers co-win with us. It's not just a one-way communication. This is a dialogue, which we think is essentially a value to how OLX does business.
And then kind of these categories or these rough boxes I laid them out is, first of all, we're AI first. All of our services are built with AI at the core. They might be packaged in traditional Discovery UX or into a ChatGPT experience, but they're AI core into the marketplace, building on the proprietary data and algorithmic IP that we build on. Marketplaces, we are making excellent tools for our suppliers to augment their data, sell in the way they care about.
And also, we think a super interesting differentiator for us is we are verticalized. We think that the data has shown, the economic ROI has shown huge value to being a specialized marketplace and domain focused. We have people who deeply understand the real estate business, what drives agent behavior, what drives sellers, what drives apartment rentals. Same thing for motors, same thing for jobs in our other businesses.
So we are able to concentrate that value, create the right products, create the right sales engagement model for our customers, which I think is very different than a broad generic approach that you see from maybe other providers. Yes. And those are things that -- it's not just technology, the whole company aligned to this winning metaphor. So on that note,
I'm going to let my colleague, Andreas, talk about the details of how...
Thanks a lot, Tim, for showing us the future, how we think that the future will evolve and the trends that lead to that. And from here, I would like to also emphasize concrete AI use cases and data products that we have already in production, what comes next and also the culture of innovation that will take us there.
So some of those numbers, of course, you have already seen. I would like to emphasize here that we have more than 75 customer-facing ML and AI use cases, 25 generative AI use cases and more than 10 agentic customer-facing use cases that have been developed in the last few months. Of course, everybody in this room knows that generative AI performance is improving very fast, fueled by science.
On the left graph, you can see how much time it took traditionally for ML to reach human level performance. It was typically years or more. And in the last few years, how this has compacted with generative AI and more recently with agentic AI to just months or even weeks.
And on the right side of this graph, you can see some of the many projections of how the Agentic market size will evolve in the next decade. And of course, the numbers are staggering. Of course, putting those together, it means that we are in a transition phase. The typical static experiences that users were experiencing in the marketplace, searching, comparing items, purchasing through static interfaces is largely going to change in the next few years, where agents are acting as consultants and advisers for users, helping them search, negotiate and potentially purchase items.
And this means that the user experience in the next 1 to 5 years will be very different, more different than the previous 15 years combined, have all the differences that have been brought in the previous years combined.
OLX's innovative approach to address this consists of 3 different streams working in parallel. So our first stream is called optimize, and this is improving the existing user experience and of course, maximizing profits. It's basically improving our bread and butter.
The next stream is called scale, and this is all about moving fast and finding product market fit for upcoming solutions and innovations. So allowing the teams to really experiment quickly, take risk in a controlled way and find what works best for the user.
And finally, we have disrupt, which is our bold bets and really inventing the future. In a world where speed largely defines the winner, our execution is going from good to great. Some of those numbers, I will not repeat because Tim has already mentioned that. But what I would like to emphasize is that we are running already more than 600 AB tests per year, the majority being AI and ML related. And those numbers are actually accelerating. So you can see that on the right part of the screen, how our speed of execution is improving year-over-year in this space.
And of course, 600 is already quite a lot for classified companies, but we are not happy with that. Our aim is to actually double this year again. And this is on top of quadrupling already in the previous 4 years. So putting this together, if we rank across some of the core dimensions of having a cloud scaled AI platform and AI-enabled tech teams, OLX is fully on cloud since many years. It has a unified tech stack across all the markets.
It has a quite advanced generative AI platform that allows our teams to experiment quickly with all the major LLM providers from OpenAI, from Anthropic, from Google, from 11 Labs and many others as they are coming. And it has also a very large and capable AI-enabled team and total engineering capacity. What I would also like to highlight here is that OLX has agentic AI investments and use cases across the entire customer journey and user funnel.
So if we think about the top of the funnel, that is all about inspiration, exploration and intent, then middle funnel that is about comparison, trust and personalization. And finally, lower funnel, which is about selection and support. Of course, in every different part of the user journey, we have different intents. So at the beginning of the customer journey, it is all about multiple touch points for the users, for the potential buyers and of course, seller value and convenience.
On the middle funnel, it is all about choice and trust. And at the bottom of the funnel, it's about peace of mind. And with this, I will present just the tip of the iceberg, 5 selected agentic AI use cases that are already live and share also the results that those are producing. But as I said, there are many, many more.
So first of all, with respect to seller convenience, we have already live in all of our verticals, AI-powered ad posting, where you can already today take a photo of an item and the majority of the ad is automatically generated from that. This, for example, in real estate reduced the time to post by 50% already some months ago. And at the same time, it significantly improved conversion as well. But this is only the beginning.
So our next release is going to be video to ad, where in motors, you can, as a dealer go around your car, take a video and the whole ad will be automatically created from this sort of video, making it easier than ever to post. Another use case is actually our experimental partnership with ChatGPT, where this plays to the strategy of being everywhere where our customers can be.
The idea here is that we have conversational AI agents integrated in the ChatGPT flow where users can explore the market, use personalized information about their preferences, of course, and find properties that are interesting for them and then, of course, convert to buyers. So you can see here how the comparison looks between the, let's say, row OpenAI experience without our integrated app and how it looks with the OLX GPT app integrated there.
And you can, of course, see that it is much more intuitive. You see the images of the listings. You get a lot of interesting insights about the properties, locations of interest, appreciation of value and many other things that it is just not possible for a generic LLM to show that same type of depth and quality of information.
And at the same time, I would like to emphasize that the core user experience is still remaining with us. So everything that it plays in the carousel of the items, the order of what we are presenting there, the type of insights that are provided is very much still generated by OLX. Another use case that I would like to talk about a bit more.
I think Tim mentioned it also already, but going to a little bit more detail is jobs matchmaking, and this is all about choice and trust. So here, our Agentic AI deep mines candidate profiles in a complex job descriptions going beyond just matchmaking of keyboards. And this is already live. It is the #1 paid employer feature. 59% of all the engagement actions are generated by that today. It has 3x faster positive actions and 63% engagement rate for the employer in the first 5 minutes.
And as I said, this is just the beginning. Going to the dealers -- the car dealers case, we have AutoIQ in place. This is the dealership operating system. So this is something that allows the dealers to really manage the entire dealership automatically with AI, and that includes everything. It includes sourcing, it includes pricing. It includes managing inventory, promoting ads and many other optimizations. And this is already rolled out in Poland with 21% week-over-week retention at 100% of the Polish dealers. And those numbers are also increasing quite rapidly.
We think that it will be above 30% quite soon. Then going finally to the bottom of the funnel. This is all about maximizing impact and, of course, providing peace of mind to the buyers. You can see how a traditional UX of classifieds looks like. It's actually one of the, I would say, relatively good ones in automotive.
But we are really transforming it with the add-to-video capability to something that is the next generation of experience with very much signal reach and information reach ad formats. that help the buyers make the correct decisions, find what they are looking for and engage deeply, of course, with the advertisement.
At the same time, from the perspective of the professional sellers, this has more than 70% acceptance ratio from motors dealers and real estate agents and with quite high willingness to pay as well. So I would like to close saying that at OLX, we are really believing that the best way to predict the future is to create it. And with that, I will pass to Suresh to tell us a little bit more about the financial impact of AI.
You heard the great strategy discussions on AI that Tim laid out, starting with Christian laying out the strategy for the company. And then hopefully, Andreas has wowed you going through the various AI use cases. And I hope to then ground you into what does it mean on us, on financials, on value creation and address some of the topical questions that's probably first and foremost in your minds.
All right. But before I get going, as I walk you through how we are positioned for growth, first, I want to take a little bit of time showing you who we are. And I don't think everybody understands us because I don't think we come out that publicly. We've not shown our numbers or our financials. So a little bit of a glimpse of who we are, probably sets the stage before we get into some of the other topics.
First of all, we are the hidden giant. We are by far the #1 classifieds company of Europe, probably one of the top most in any part of the world. This year, we should be crossing $900 million of revenue at about 43% EBIT. And when you translate that into EBITDA, we don't capitalize. We're talking about close to 50% EBITDA. We operate across 7 markets. We have 70 million-odd ads. Those are the markets we operate in. And so when you think about it, we're largely -- we are market leaders in almost most of the platforms, most of the countries, not all of them, barring a very small few, we are the market leaders in almost all of them. That's a pretty big company, number one.
Number two, we operate in markets that are growing faster than most of the Western economy. Even overlooking Ukraine, Poland, Romania are almost 2x GDP per capita growth rate CAGRs compared to the Western peers. So we operate in markets that are growing in economy where people are buying more cars, they're buying more houses, they're renting more stuff. They're creating jobs and they're growing faster.
Third, when you look at our headroom on take rates, our leading verticals of, say, automotive or auto dome, our motors and real estate verticals in Poland are either half of the leading peers or even less than half of the peers, the leaders in the market. So we have a long way to go for the amount of value we deliver, the value extraction that we do is far lesser than that of what we have. And it's important because I'll tie to tide at the end to give you a sense on this, why it's important that we still have a lot of pricing headroom here.
And then we continue to be the leader of our brands. Yes, you'll have a ton of questions saying, how is that going to stay back in the world of agenting AI, I'm going to address that. But hold the thought, for now, we are the leaders, both in terms of demand and in supply. We dwarf the #2 players in the markets that we operate in, barring 1 or 2.
Now I'm not oblivious to what's going on in the market. I know there's a lot of questions going on. Public markets are giving a beating to our fellow peers in classifieds. So let me try to address the bear case first. What do I think about it, give my perspective on it, and let's probably have it in the Q&A, have a discussion on that. I'll take some time to walk you through this.
First of all, this is a glimpse of our supply of automotive and Autoome. Automotive is our leading Polish motors vertical and the real estate verticals. Number one, these are expensive assets. These are price-sensitive, expensive assets for any user. Number two, each and every supply that you see is a heterogeneous product. No 2 used cars are the same. No 2 properties are similar. So that kind of tells you that, there is heterogeneity in the product. It's a high-value product.
Now let's talk about supply. I've given you a frequency distribution where I show the ads per seller and number of sellers. So that tells you that, say, at 50 ads per seller, we have about, say, 80-odd people who have 50-odd ads per seller. Why is that important? Because we have 87% of sellers in automotive who post 3 ads or less, and they only account for 30% of the ads. That's the kind of SMB spectrum we're talking about. And this is where -- coming back to what Tim was saying, they need a lot of AI solutions.
The #1 reason that a customer goes and engages our sales guys go and engage with the customers first telling them, why don't you answer your leads? Why don't you take the calls? These are the kind of stuff that these people go through. So we provide a lot of AI solutions there. And the salespeople -- so AI solutions for the SMBs and salespeople are augmented with AI solutions as well. And this is something that we certainly think this kind of fragmented supply supplemented by our sales efforts is definitely a proprietary data moat, against any kind of LLM or agent AI world we're talking about.
Second, 91% of our daily active users are from direct or organic traffic sources. And I'll address what could be the risk on the next page. That gives you a sense of how strong our brands are. It also tells you that -- the organic stuff, the organic searches, et cetera, is about 1/4 of our numbers or less than 1/4 of our kind of daily active users. Now comes the million-dollar question that everyone is talking about saying, you know what, agentic AI is going to disintermediate your top of the funnel. What could be that impact on that? I've tried to lay out a scenario. I may not be perfect, but let me walk you through it. I certainly think that is resilience, okay?
Let me walk you through this. This is a kind of a pie chart of our traffic. The earlier page was daily active users. This is our pie chart on traffic, okay? Now the direct traffic is about 76-odd percent and organic search is about 13%. You can say direct traffic, oh my God, agentic AI is going to be the direct traffic. I would say yes. But why would anyone use Agentic AI outside our product? Tim and Andrea walked you through it. For us, Agentic AI is the product. It's embedded in it. You saw that kind of supply that's going to be with us and that we'll continue to augment it with all the kind of AI solutions and solutions that make them win. Why would any user go in a direct world, go and try to do it elsewhere when they already have that app that is very superior to going through that Pepsi challenge.
Then comes the question, what's at risk? So let's take an example. What I've tried to do here is, today, AI search is say, 0.03% of our total traffic. And then you -- I think all of you track the stats. It's less than 2%, 3% at most for many of the other peers.
Now let's take a situation that, that jumps to a big number. It hasn't happened. Say it happens. Number two, one of the Agent or the LLMs ends up being the Nera UO, takes over the world. I don't know if it's OpenAI, it's Gemini, whoever else. And number three, they choose to monetize at scale. Now if all of that were to happen, I'm taking a situation saying, let's say, half of our organic search becomes paid due to an LLM coming in charging us for that. And I'm assuming a 50% increase in price because I'll have to buy a lot more traffic.
Even if that were the case, we are talking about a 3 to 4 points EBIT margin compression for us. And that's manageable, and I'll walk you through why. First of all, this is indicative. I don't want people to say, "Oh, that number is right or wrong. We looked at publicly available information. We looked and said, okay, how much of this -- their revenue is from nonclassifieds. And we are certainly in the low end of the spectrum. So we don't have that much of eyeball-led revenue.
Most of our revenue is classified revenue that the agents or the dealers are happy to pay because they're getting solutions. On top of that, if you look at -- and this is where -- if you remember, when I talked about less than 5% margin compression is a worst-case risk, why do I feel comfortable? Our margin expansion in the last 3 years is pretty impressive, 21% to 43%. People would tend to think, "Oh my God, you've slashed investments. " You've taken it out of the pocket, you're just squeezing the lemon, and that's what it is. That's not what drove it. Those were the times where we were still focusing a lot on paint ship, a lot of transactional businesses, doing a lot of subsidies, chasing the inner goods category.
We've changed our focus. Number two, so our core revenue, as you can see, motors, real estate and jobs has gone from 65% to 70% and grown too. That's causing a lot of the expansion. Plus a lot of the tech investments that we did on replatforming, et cetera, got over there. That sets the stage for Andreas and Tim to light it on fire with AI that we've been doing. So this expansion has come without kind of -- yes, we've been prudent on costs, but it's not like squeezing the limit. That's the expansion that has happened in us.
And when you look at our peer set, again, these numbers are from public information. They're not from the same time zone, some are fourth quarter, some are half year, et cetera, but it gives you a sense on what kind of relative zone of EBITDA they are. And that's where we stand. Compared to pure-play verticals, we still have a long way to go. And our journey has been without squeezing the lemon. And oh, by the way, we have been never letting down on our AI investments. If anything, we've only increased it. We have 150-plus people. We have more than 80-odd teams that work on AI, probably the highest in the -- and Andreas has talked about it. We've been investing between OpEx and CapEx plus $30 million this year. It's only been growing. So that margin has come on top of this.
So that gives me comfort to say, yes, as long as our product is superior, the direct traffic stays with us, which I don't believe why they would move. And even if there is disruption in the paid traffic or in the organic traffic, we can manage it. With that, hopefully, I don't think I can ever assuage the bad case, but at least I'm addressing some of the questions you may have. Let me go to an exciting bull case that probably we all tend to overlook. AI is already a monetization or a pricing driver.
We've already embedded into our product. Tim talked about it. That is a screenshot from our current package in automotive. We already have ad to video there. And by the way, it generates 8% to 10% of incremental leads. So customers are saying, "Oh, I love that. " Give me that because I get more leads. And that's causing a lot of our price increase. Now it's very tough to say, okay, this came from AI, this came from this because they matched. We're not going to have an AI product package and a non-AI product package. It's part of the package.
And on top of that, we're also deploying it now in Lab and 12, where all of these tools are coming in. And that's one of the power of the synergies we're going to have with them. And it's also driving productivity at scale. And we are just scratching the surface.
Right now, the margin enhancement we're getting is about 2-ish percent, but that is only the start. We already see customer service efforts are going down -- efforts are going down, productivity is going up in a massive scale. We already are doing a lot of projects so that by '28, we get that. 98% of our content moderation happens without human touch.
We're getting a lot of savings in campaign management, et cetera. And these are prospects. You can get it off any of the third-party solutions, but we are leveraging all of that. And as AI becomes more and more embedded into the enterprise, we're going to see a lot more of productivity that even I can't [indiscernible].
Finally, look, there's always a question on our industry, where is the terminal value? What's going to happen to the outer years? I feel there's a lot of opportunity on OLX. We've got exciting markets and geographies. I talked to you about that. We have a lot of take rate headroom with all the AI solutions that helps us because it's already a pricing booster and AI cost productivity is just getting started, and the risks are quite manageable. So with that, hopefully, I have laid my case, and we can discuss it more in Q&A.
With that, I'll hand it to Christian.
2. Question Answer
Thank you very much. Yes, why are we excited? Obviously, again, tomorrow and the day after, you will see senior product people. You will see a lot of very innovative AI people around us that will give us an insight into what innovation looks like. On the second day, we will try to operationalize the whole thing. So it's going to be people talking about what does it mean to talent. Suresh already made cases around the financial piece, but we're going to leave that there's in more. So that's the reason why we're excited.
The second thing is we're absolutely excited and I'm absolutely proud of being able to run this business because as you've seen, not only are we leading, which is good on financials, but we're also leading in terms of product. We're also leading in terms of the product and also in terms of the ideas. And if I have to wrap up, it's to say, and this is, I think, very important, the proactive future, the OLX reality. We're not reacting to AI. We are leading it. And it means that basically, we are working on very deep vertical integration, which we started and real estate motors and jobs is a testimony to it.
We have a proprietary data loop, which is super important because it's not only the underlying data, as Tim was saying, but it's also the structure of the data and the usability of the data that makes it so important. It's an AI-first infrastructure. And you've seen on one of the first slide, we have invested across those years, about EUR 200 million already. So we are not just starting. We have been there, and we have spent it and we continue to spend as the CFO was telling, which is always a good sign. And we have a desire to win culture.
We have 2,600 people in our company. We have 2,600 agents joining us. We have many more agents that's going to join us. Obviously, those agents will have even more desire to win. And I think this is super important because this will enhance us, it will create more efficiency and will help us to deliver on our long-term ambition, which is very nicely summarized for you and 20% revenue growth and 50% adjusted EBIT margin that even if we look into the beer case, is something that we can -- I don't call it easily, but we can well achieve.
With this being said, I'm very much excited to welcome you tomorrow to our CLAIM AI conference, which I think is an outstanding conference and we are representing here classifieds because classifieds an industry has not been good at that so far. And again, as a leader in that space, we are taking the helm, and we very much welcome you there tomorrow.
[Operator Instructions]. It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas.
Three questions, please. Okay. First question. Could you expand a little bit on what you classify as proprietary data? In the recent sell-off of classifieds and other media Internet names, there's been quite a bit of debate around what is genuinely proprietary and what's not.
In today's presentation, you gave a very fair example, which was unique inventory from the long tail of small dealers and private sellers. But could you expand a little bit beyond that as to what you would count as proprietary data to help us think through data as a moat?
I think Tim probably was the one who basically was talking very much about it. It's not only about the supply as such and basically the very small pieces. It's also the geo. So we have a lot of element that plays into it. But Tim, I think.
Yes, that's a great question. So part of it is just supply. The supply is intrinsically proprietary, although we don't always own it. But it's all of the interactions and the connections of those data sets. I think one of the examples I love to talk about is actually how are the candidates performing at a certain employer. So that's the history, that's the retention rate, the interview pass rate, even coming back and advertising for additional job requirements. We actually are building closed loops, as I call them, for employers to give us more data to capture is what's actually working for them, what are the candidates who were successful.
Eventually, we'd like to capture their performance and how they're impacting the business and build a better candidate database for passive and active recruiting. Similarly, for things like real estate, it's not just like the number of bedrooms or bathrooms in the property. It's like what do consumers value? What is the comparative data, what's the dwell time, what is the actual interest in a particular distance to a park. Those are all interactions that are captured uniquely on our platform.
And we, of course, database them and build insights out of those. Those are things that any one given seller can't capture. They don't really show up at the top of the funnel, either they show up inside the marketplace, what's the attach rate of a particular financing offer, what was interesting to a consumer and what actually performs better. And remember, we're a marketplace business, small differences of conversion rate are huge economic drivers. Same thing on other verticals like cars.
We actually see a lot of the same cars year-over-year. People come back, resell, repurchase, relook at those same cars. We actually can track those both in market as well as across markets. We can track a car history as it goes from France to Poland, for example, what's the history, what's the accident record, all the things that don't show up in public databases nor will they show up in that, call it, a naive broad-based top of funnel search.
Secondly, on the basis of today's presentation, you could definitely envisage a bit of a change in the classified industry and that potentially consolidation will make more sense. Historically, there's been relatively few revenue or cost synergies, but in the context of some of the developments you've talked to today, they could be applied across the portfolio. You've recently completed the La Central deal.
One obvious challenge to me would be the data architecture of the businesses you would acquire. I imagine that's been a work in progress. Interested to hear how the work has been on La Central from a data architecture perspective and how the synergies have played out so far?
Yes. I think this is a great question for Andreas to me at the microphone of what AI is going to transform that whole problem.
Exactly. So in the case of La Central, there is already an advantage that both businesses are fully on AWS cloud. So it is relatively easy to connect the data platforms. This is something that is already ongoing. So already in terms of financial and key user metrics, the integration basically has happened since last month. So we are still putting some final details here and there, but already at the level of financials and user metrics, this is already happening. What comes next is synergies on AI.
So the first use case is that we are going to actually share with L Central are ad to video and video to ad. Those are both coming in April, and this is just the beginning. So already, we are building on top of businesses that are fully on cloud. The first level of integration was literally done in 2 months and the next level with first synergies on AI in the next 2 months.
And if I may add also, Will, the way we look into companies that we buy, it's not about the size, and it's less about cost synergies. It's what can drive that revenue growth. What is it that we basically can contribute to the top line. And this is what basically also is the fundament of due diligence process. It is the understanding of us, of our opportunity to move the things forward.
And that's exactly what Andreas was referring to. It's something we identified early on. We know where L Montreal needs support, namely on the small and medium-sized dealers, hence, the video to ad and the ad to video, which is something that will help us to basically acquire them. So we're very, very thoughtful about what we're doing once we move into an acquisition.
And if I can add one more thing, I think it's thematic throughout our entire strategy of AI first is lots of integrations or things like data mergers are total disasters. They have been historically tons of people, tons of costs, unrealized value. What is different about AI and especially how we're putting AI first is we're actually making that a machine problem.
We're not hiring hundreds of consultants that take 5 years and actually have a low friction. Remember, our principle here is time to market or velocity, okay? So by actually building self-described data sets, applying agentic transformations, integration, whether it's data sets across our properties or whether it's third-party ecosystem providers, we're removing slowness.
There's often people in making these AI to AI or agent-to-agent interactions for data integration, API integration, things like credit scoring, things like real estate transactional support for digitization of property records. So effectively, AI is letting us bring these things faster, better to market and getting rid of the entire, a, high cost of humans; and b, slow realization of value. So I think that's an important part of how we're approaching these problems.
And then last one on all. Thanks for all the color on the Bull case. It was very interesting. I suppose one challenge for your peers is that they are listed and have financials they report every quarter, and the market is very sensitive to them. In contrast, you within a larger process, there's obviously the Tencent stake, which drives the primary driver of earnings.
From your perspective, what happens to numbers during that transition where you're changing the revenue model to more outcome-based when you're grappling with the changes in how customer acquisition works, how product development works. Is there naturally a period where numbers come under some pressure before accelerating? Or is it relatively benign?
Look, we've been in this kind of AI/ML investment journey for almost a decade. So we've seen these things start panning out. So when you see an ad to video in an automotive page, it's been there for some time or something of that derivative has been there for some time. So we've seen the impact of this in the financials for some time. And the good thing, I guess, is being part of a Prosus eco family is we don't have to report quarterly at the same kind of and have to deal with volatility of external pressures beyond our control.
So we deal with that with laying out a kind of a short-term financial plan and working through that. So it's that way that we do. And in terms of revenue and cost that you talked about, you could see that. I mean we do have a lot of headroom. We don't see that going away anytime soon. And the cost around traffic disintermediation, we haven't -- we haven't started seeing it. You can -- and not as any other classifieds. But in spite of that, they are facing short-term volatility.
First one is back to this kind of, I guess, flow in an Argentic AI world. So in this view of future where I tell my personal AI assistant to go find me a car or a house. Just curious as to why you're so confident that it will definitely be the #1 classified that is then providing that Agentic flow. And is it your view that technology, i.e., your set is set up for Agentic and user experience is enough?
And then what are kind of the trade-offs in how much of your secret sauce you kind of open up into that flow versus bringing people back into your own ecosystem and also how the kind of commercial relationship works with OpenAI or Google or Apple or however it's going to be to make sure it's definitely you.
And I guess that conversation may be different if we're thinking about, I don't know, Poland where you're super strong versus in France where La Central is competing with Leboncoin and it's a 2-player market and maybe a bit more of a race to the bottom debate. Like how do we think about that?
I think -- I mean, obviously, Andreas as well as Tim, I think, have spoken to it, and I think it's good for them to answer. I think just one comment on the La Central. I'm not sure whether the competition with Leboncoin is exactly the place to go because that's not exactly what we're looking at. The question is always when you go deep into the verticals, the horizontal has a problem. and that's exactly what we're doing.
So with the product that Andreas was referring to, the way we approach it is something very different. And that's the reason why I would probably take this into the equation, but take it out of the equation of competition. That's not the way we look at it. And that was, by the way, never look, we looked at it when we bought it. So it's something very different. But Tim and Andreas, please.
I can perhaps start with perhaps 2 points, and of course, Tim feel free to add to that. So the first point is, as I said in the strategy, and I think Tim referred to that as well, we will be everywhere that our customers are. So at the very beginning of the funnel, we want that people have choice. And if they start their journey with OpenAI or with Google or with any other place or they come natively to us, as Suresh was saying with the data points, we'll be present in all of those.
I think that with the experience that we show the side-by-side comparison with the OpenAI row and OpenAI with our app integrated, we can already see that we can provide much more insights and a better experience for the user objectively. They can really find what they are looking for, see images, understand exactly how it works and of course, still see deep links that send them back to our sites to continue the middle funnel and bottom funnel experience there.
But the other thing is also perhaps other players have similar strategies. But as also team and me referred to that as well, we are entering an era that more than ever, the sustainable advantage is execution speed. And this is something that we are really believing and doubling down on. We already are in a quite good place, but we are going to be in an even better place in the next 6, 12, 18 months because we are really doubling down on our existing investments and making certain that we are making the most out of what we already have, getting more and more speed as we are moving forward.
Yes. I think I wouldn't have anything to add on the technical side. But I think about the essence of your question is these agentic transactions or agentic AI transactions. And again, I think about like AI to human, human to AI, AI, we don't really care. It's going to be AI at the core and how it's presented may vary based on what users need. But it is effectively the place these transactions are going to happen. There's going to be more data to operate with. There's going to be more trust.
In the same way today, you've seen things like ad broker networks actually mediate real-time ad purchasing and personalization at high scale. We look at this as high scale for our verticals. Now that's where these things are trusted. There's transaction orchestration, there's attach rates. This will be the most efficient place to bring your agentic AI and operate within a real estate or a motors or jobs or even general goods marketplace. So I think that has to happen somewhere, and we think that is the best place in a very vertically centric transactional environment with all the attributes we talked about, agentic AI, agentic data, trust, verification, history. So those are the things I think will differentiate why classifieds, especially OLX has a right to win there.
And potentially, I'm also trying to simplify, Andreas. I would say we don't give you personal assistance any opportunity to go somewhere else into us. And whether it's Poland or France or somewhere else, I mean it's not so much whether you're #1 or not. It's the way you basically are represented. And I think that's what Tim and Andreas were displaying.
If I can just supplement a question to that, just one of the ones from the chat. So Sylvia sent through a question and said, talking about your AI integrated product, what do the economics of an offering like that look like? How much does that lead cost you the economics less attractive to you versus someone coming to you directly?
Look, the cost of AI investments I laid it out, we're investing about $30-odd million on AI this year, both OpEx and CapEx. We are not trying to branch out every single investment and look at it and say, this is the return that it gives. We do investments based on priorities that we lay out and we go against it. And then when you look at the returns that we get, it's embedded into our pricing, it's embedded into our customer journey. It's embedded into the pricing that we get and the revenue growth that we see. And that's how we measure it.
So right now, there is -- I don't look at it at least to say, I put x amount on this and here is the return I need to see. All I'm saying is I need to invest because this is the customer journey, this is the customer product that we need to build, and we need to be best-in-class to ensure that we get every possible traffic source coming to us. And what does that investment do? And can I balance that within the margin expectations that I have?
And I think to the point of Suresh, I think that detail is not relevant to us because we are focusing on the revenue growth. We're looking to getting 20% plus. If we're getting there, the costs that are associated with it will be born like they have been in the past. That's the first. The second thing, as I was saying, there's a lot of synergies on what we're developing between the verticals. Real estate, motors jobs, the other way around. So I think trying to be very nitty-gritty on this is going to -- it's not helping us because it would rather be focused on what is really relevant.
And most importantly, the investments that go is against the right priorities and the speed of deployment is all we measure. And then it plays itself out. Otherwise, you'll get into false precisions trying to do all kind of allocation engine on cost, which honestly, nobody can then understand.
Sorry, it was a long first one, I promise a shorter second one. So it's about data. And as there starts to be engagement in an LLM environment to take the app in ChatGPT as an example, whose data is that. So presumably, you get to keep all of the insights about how people are searching for a house or a car in ChatGPT. But how is OpenAI able to use that data that's going to get created?
So exactly, I tried to show that a bit on the example, but the way that it works today at least is the experience, the core experience is still with us. So everything that is shown on the carsell with the photos in what order you see the houses and so on. Similarly, next month that we will launch motors, all of that is with us.
And that, I think, is where part of the secret sauce is. Some of the secret sauce is even deeper. So it is, as Tim said, the user journeys or the history of the cars, how many accidents they had, the appreciation potential in different neighborhoods in real estate, how that has evolved historically, but also how you are predicting that it will evolve in the future. These are quite detailed domain-specific problems at least in the midterm, it is very difficult for a generic LLM to address.
Of course, in technology, it's very difficult to predict what will happen in 7, 8, 10 years. But at least the current situation and the reality of where technology is and combined with the advantage in terms of structured data that we have built over a long time, makes us quite optimistic that we will have a very strong position in that.
It's Luke Holbrook here from Morgan Stanley. One of the benefits that you think OLX has is being multi-vertical, multi-geography. And we've seen in European classifieds in recent years, actually single vertical, single countries have basically been the norm. Can you just articulate from a data point of view, what is the exact advantage that you get? Because if I'm searching for a job versus searching for a house, what is it at the back end that you think actually leads to a meaningful advantage?
Yes. Let me make my first point. I think Christian might have something to say about the overall investment case around that. First of all, a principle that I have used for 20-some-odd years, and I'm kind of an older person, I suppose, is that people are much the same everywhere. So we actually can reuse learnings, user behaviors, preferences at higher and higher scale across geographies. That's unique. So this gives us more data.
And we believe many, if not most, of the consumer preferences or seller scenarios that are applicable in Poland are also relevant to France. So part of it is just the basic premise. I think that's been pretty well borne out by many other e-commerce consumer-centric companies. So that's a fundamental of why we believe this transcends any particular geo as well as any particular vertical. Again, we actually see more variety of touch points for these significant life events, searching for a job, searching for a car, selling your car.
So I think we actually can compose back to what I call that 2 dimensions of both geo and vertical into a single set of algorithmic AI plus proprietary data sets that let us apply to new problems. That's kind of, I think, our fundamental hypothesis. Now as far as why one European-wide company, Christian, maybe you can talk to that.
No, I think -- I mean, just to the example, if you've seen the Pepsi example, we're starting in Portugal. We're not selling Poland. That gives you a clear understanding on how we're playing around the synergies. It's not -- Poland is certainly the largest countries, obviously. But we're looking for a lot of synergies from the other. So -- and as I always say, 80% to 85%, it's everywhere the same business because buying a house and selling a house Unfortunately, whether you do it in Germany, in France, Portugal, it's not so much different. People are looking everywhere for the same. What is the valuation? Is it fitting? Is this? What about the supermarkets and so on and so forth. And the cars is not very different.
The only difference potentially between cars and real estate, one moves border, the other does not. What -- if that then has an impact on business, that's a different story, but that's probably the largest difference. And that's the reason why I think the synergistic element below makes a lot of sense.
So something that we have not touched and we have not basically worked at all in terms of the AI space is you can also read from an intent. So if somebody is buying an SUV, maybe he has just got a second kit. I mean, again, we are not there yet. And I know this has been talked about in my former days when I was at Scout24. But there's a lot of elements that we have not identified yet that can help us to continue to drive those businesses. we will learn.
And if I could just put one more thing on top of this, and maybe it's a bit controversial, but like execution matters. We're talking about some fundamentals. I actually think we have a track record of executing with single product, converge data, converge operational tools across our markets. I think a lot of people had some good ideas, but not everyone was able to pull it off.
So I think we have some track record that Suresh mentioned, we got ahead of this. We certainly had our own learnings along the way. I can't say everything was perfect. I think we've actually crossed -- use an old metaphor, crossed the chasm around this next now, we're seeing accelerating returns -- we're actually operating single product, multiple markets and sharing these experiences across verticals.
My second question is just actually a bit on what you described as the transition of the monetization model away from boosted listings, paid visibility, I think gaming rankings. And I'm just trying to work out how you think about that gap in the way that the transition happens and what you're doing internally to help manage what you think could be quite disruptive to the existing model?
Yes. I'm going to address and maybe let Suresh talk about this. So first of all, it's additive for us. We're making a ton of money on things like value-added services, listings, rankings, letting people compete in a competitive marketplace for placement. We love that. It's funny, and we actually -- people value it. So we're happy to provide it.
These newer services that we have some fantastic things coming, for example, that are more marketing tools for the real estate business we'll be launching in the next year or so, which actually is now new revenue streams on top of -- above and beyond just listings. So we're actually looking at these as additive.
And then over time, the ratios may change as customers choose what they prefer. But we're not trying to diminish anything. We're trying to say what net new revenue products and monetization models can we add to the mix and then look at that as a blended growth future. Suresh, maybe you can explain it better.
I think exactly. What Tim said, we're in a state of transition where we're not deprecating what we have right now, but instead peppering it with a lot more of AI tools and other stuff that becomes part of the package and also gives us a lot more of -- the customers get a lot more of leads and better returns from that without having to get boosted ads, et cetera, and trying to see how we can push the price and find the right balance of that.
And then over time, these things -- the earlier visibility products that people were paying for will deprecate automatically as these things take over. And that's the transition phase we're going through.
We are learning as we're going. And end of the day, we would want everybody to put all their inventory if possible and get the best returns as possible and not have to worry about, am I getting this or am I getting that? And that transition AI helps us a lot. and some of the tools you saw, these things are really, really easy to do for the SMB population that we talked about. And on top of that, it gives a phenomenal returns.
Any more questions?
Christian, I just wanted to follow up on one of the answers you gave to a previous question. You said to win the floor, you will not give the AI a choice, but to pick you. And I just wanted to understand what that means and what advantage OLX enjoys so that no one else can replicate it.
So I mean I will give you -- I will start, and I will hand over to Andreas because he answered the question already. But so I think the way I look at it, it's about the execution, and it's about basically making sure that the consumer because he was talking about the consumer has always access to us. So we are -- we should be present everywhere. And whether it's, as Tim was saying, AI to AI, AI to human, human to human, whatever, we need to be present everywhere. And then it boils very much down to the execution. And that's basically my -- that was my analogy or my metaphor when I was saying, I'm not going to leave them the choice.
And today, also don't leave the choice. Otherwise, I would have not been -- we would have not been able to build a brand like Automoto, Autodome, Storia, Autoit, et cetera. So if you want the mindset should stay the same. Obviously, we need now to make sure that the technology that is underlying is changing and that our execution goes against it. But that's the idea behind.
Exactly. Just building on what Christian just said, it's a couple of different things. So one is offering the best possible customer experience in every different channel. So if you are in OpenAI or if you are in Google or in any other, you basically have to have the best possible experience for the customers in each of those. So that's one thing.
The other part is being actually a first mover in each of those different channels gives also a first mover advantage. So that the young generation that gets to interact with you, interact with already strong brands, gets the trust and then you are basically very difficult to displace in addition to that. And we are moving very fast.
We are integrating with all of those different channels with all of our verticals. We announced in real estate, motors will come practically next month, and then we are moving to jobs. So everything will be there very, very soon. And we believe between that and between having very good user experience and strong brands, we will create the habit for the users that they come naturally to OLX to continue the user journey.
And probably also, I mean, Tim, maybe you want to comment, but we have also tons of content which depending on how you basically package that content, again, this will help us in different channels to steer people towards our brands.
Yes. I think that's a good point and something we really didn't talk about today, but with Lawson Trial, we actually have like a very large amount of consumer content, which is adjacent to the core listings business. And we look at extending that, packaging it. And that type of content is essential to things like the interface to upstream chat LLM-based systems. So we're actually looking across a broad things of not just listings, but the augmented data, how do we offer that up or present it to different consumer experiences make a broader funnel.
Actually, I don't want to say broader funnel. We think there's going to be dozens and dozens of funnel. That's actually a core reset for us. That's a bet. It's a strategic bet for us. But we don't believe it's going to be one single ChatGPT funnel in the future.
We think that the market will be healthy, vibrant and competitive and being able to package different experiences, different customer intents, engage people wherever they are in that buying journey. It could be long lead automotive enthusiasts. It could be job training and development for folks with exposure to local market trends. We think that's an essential part of our overall consumer experience strategy.
Sorry, can I just ask the -- I think the point is I can understand from a human user experience why somebody would choose you, but why would Andrew's avatar or agent choose you because the brand wouldn't matter.
Okay. Can I start? So the difference between Andrew is who is a human and has emotions and the machine is the emotion. The moment you take the emotion away, it will be even easier because the machine will always choose the best solution. The human will always potentially define a best solution as something he likes. That's the reason why I'm less concerned about the machine. But it's -- sorry for that.
Yes.
I think that's very helpful.
Yes, I think it's a good point. I think if I just sort of kind of say that's absolutely true. And that's why I would call like the agents will be purely rational, but they will also need to operate off of data, okay? So we actually can package and augment and give a wider set of package data and services to the agents coming to our marketplace. So even if it's like headless or Zero click or Xero UX, those agents need to operate against something interesting to differentiate and choose from. So we think the solutions of more selection, more services added, deeper data stores actually will actually be the reasons agents come to our marketplace and make those choices, even if it's purely logic, not emotion.
Exactly. So just building on top of that, at the end of the day, -- at the end of the day, the fundamental aspects are still choice, trust and in some sense, pricing. And we intend to have the best possible combination for those. So exactly as I think both Christian and Tim mentioned, if you have the best choice on those, it's actually even easier for the agents to be attracted to your marketplace. And I think we are quite clear that we intend for OX to be the place where all of that is happening. I think it was one of the opening slides from Tim's presentation today.
It's Giles Stone from Jefferies. Is the importance in brand investment going to go down?
So that's a great question. No. Okay. Now the packaging and the connection to the value chain may change. The relative spend that we make, we actually vary even today market by market. But when you talk about consumers and actually discovery and trust, brand, I think, is an important part of that. And the brand is not just like a marketing brands like the entire promise of the product and the realization of that product. I think those are the brand attributes that generate, I'll call it, a virtuous growing brand. So we think those are important. We think trust is a brand attribute. And those things I don't consider.
Does an AI agent care about trust?
Yes, absolutely. Like your agents does not want to spend EUR 50,000 on a fraudulent car, okay? So essentially, how do you actually have a agentic marketplace with believing the data and actually having orchestration and rollback and protections built into that marketplace. So those are I think, essential, whether it's a human being choosing or an agent choosing, you have to believe the transaction has validity, the products are authentically.
You can do that through data...
Our data. Yes. Yes. No, I think I agree. like that is the data.
You got EUR 10 million to spend. Do you spend it on 3 data scientists and whatever, whatever or do you spend it on brand?
I'm not aware of most consumers can hire 3 data scientists.
I think the brand investment that you're alluding to is potentially something that -- and Tim was phrasing it exactly the right way. It's not about the investment above the line, TV and so on. That's I think -- I was never a big believer in the classified, especially in the verticalized space of the spend. because you never -- you're shooting at a little bird with a big canon, which doesn't make any sense. I think what we need to build, and that's still the point of Tim, is we need to build something that's very comprehensive that is paying into the brand. That's what it is.
So I think the old brand investment, like I give you EUR 10 million and do radio and that, I think that's not what is needed, especially not in our cases where we have so strong brands. I think you need to keep those brands at a level, but it's what you put into the brand, what the product is looking like, the convenience, the trust, that's what is important.
Okay. Great. We got that. And then I wanted to come back to the margin impact from an ever larger channel. In the hypothetical you put forward, it was like, I think you said OpenAI is going to win just be when it takes all in generative search. How can you credibly sit here and say that they won't just set any price that they want? Because you put some numbers up and I don't have my glasses on me, so I couldn't read the footnote. Can you really sit here and say hand on hard that OpenAI is going to be a fair price setter in this 5-year forward hypothetical?
Let me quickly recap what I put there. So I've taken a solution -- taken a situation where organic search was X percent and I said half of that gets paid now and comes from an LLM, whoever that is, an agenting LLM or whatever, it comes to that and it comes at a price. And the price I assumed was 50% more than today's price, assuming I'm buying a bigger traffic and I have to pay that. could hypothetically an LLM be the market choice or leader by far? And could they insist on pricing, monetizing it widespread at any price so far? It's all hypothetical. Yes, maybe.
But the question is, then, a, the customer value proposition that they're going to do is going to start dying down. And there's enough capital in their competitive set who could come in. And you could see the ad in the Super Bowl, where people were clearly saying, I don't push for price and give you whatever junk you want. That's the way it is. So what I'm saying is, I don't know, hypothetically, can OpenAI be the #1 LLM by choice and they're going to push everybody to say, pay to participate?
Sure, could happen. And would the Chinese leave it or will the European LLM or something else come up, Mister or something come up, who knows? It's a very hypothetical space. But we didn't see that happen with Google. Google didn't put up beyond, say, free search in the old world. They didn't say you only pay to search, but they have to keep the vibrancy of the platform going. I don't see how OpenAI could do anything different. If they insist that you only pay and only participate, then they'll become a completely machine monetization-led funnel. And then people will stop believing what this is going to say.
It's Will Packer from BNP Paribas. A couple of quick follow-ups. Just going back to that bear case scenario. Could you talk me through why you see the bear case is only 7% of traffic going to LLMs? That was kind of the implicit one, right? Because it was 15% of traffic via organic search and half of it being replaced. Just sort of what's your thinking as -- I suppose when I speak to bearish investors in the classifieds, if you were to paint a scenario where only 7% of traffic was LLM based, I think that's a pretty benign outcome.
Again, this is my hypothetical case, right? Today, our traffic is 0.03%. It's less than even 1%. Could that become 7%? Maybe. Could it come at a price 50% more than what I paid? Maybe. Could it be not 7%, could it be 14%? Then the question is, will somebody coming through an agentic AI source organically not find us given all the markers we're talking about, the proprietary data, the speed of innovation, all of that.
I'm pretty sure in a lot of agents, if there are agents crawling around, somebody has put a white coated agent out there saying, go look up a property. I'm pretty sure that's probably come to Autodon first and look it up. And that's the question is, if they're going to do that, then we're going to be the brand of choice. Now that means that organic search moving away from, say, the Facebook or the social or Google is going to move to something called Agentic. I'm assuming a worst case saying even 50% of that becomes paid at a price 50% more than what I paid today.
You can argue it's a number X or Y. My point is, for us, it's a 5% at worst case kind of a margin dilution scenario. But it's not even a margin dilution. We're already finding ways we can supplement that. We have enough investments going. And 5% in the long run for a business like classifieds, people have found answers to that repeatedly.
Just perhaps super quickly to add to what Suresh said on the -- will the agents come to ELX, you are actually measuring it from the perspective of GEO today. And typically, in most of our markets, we are both #1 and #2. So typically, our vertical is the #1 in terms of GEO references and our horizontal is the #2, and the competitors are starting from position 3 and below. That is something that we are measuring today, at least from the perspective of generative engine optimization.
And the way I think about it is, end of the day, 2 things matter from all this, you need to have a lot of good control on data and how you're going to package it to ensure it's AI friendly and the speed of development. These 2 continue, then you're going to still be the AI's choice of brand or choice of platform.
Very clear. And I suppose just to finish off, I suppose, ultimately, what you're arguing today is that this is not a segment where new entrants can use price to deflate the industry. And so for classifieds, you've always had the competitive threat of cheap alternatives that never had the network effect. So effectively, the network effects hold in the agentic world, where agentic technology won't change the difficulties associated with acquiring inventory and you retain the direct traffic. That's a fair summary.
Let me jump in and maybe you guys can jump in as well. Here's how I think about it. What do we have in hand? If you think about somebody in a garage white coded and said, I'm going to build the next classified and I'm going to deflate price. Number one, what is the price we're talking about? We're talking about a classifieds take rate, which is less than 1% of the value of the car or the property, okay? What does that seller get in return? -- superior AI tools, sales efforts, proprietary knowledge, trust and safety and all of that.
Now this seller or this white coder need to go replicate that and a, go after all of those distributed and fragmented supply, a lot of people who don't even go log into their computer every other day, you'll have to go and tell them, we have something that's going to do that. It's -- and on top of that, the current cost of entry of paying the classifieds price and what they're going to get is cutting edge.
So that's what makes us comfortable in arguing this case here. I'm never saying no, never, but all I'm saying is -- if I were somebody in the outskirts of Poland selling 10 cars, I'd be really hard-pressed to believe why would I go into something else, first, getting access to know if that is something like that out there. And number two, instead of paying my, I don't know, $20, $30 for participating on a particular car, why would I go into something I don't even trust -- and I'm getting all these sales efforts.
If I can add, I think you raised a really good concept of the network effect, what's that value of the network. Like one is today, and I think class, it is a very efficient network. It was very well cash amortized. The had a concentration of supply and the demand was very efficiently acquired and injected into that network. I don't think that will change, but the bar for providing a great network what, okay? And that's what I call the data, proprietary data and the algorithm API. So we kind of had a really great run and not just classified in the ad business of network effects with a relatively low value add.
Now we're in a technology business. We must add new value year-over-year. So adding that value is what we're talking about is the agentic services in our network go from just exposure or just eyeballs to actually the transactional infrastructure of the network. So we think that still is the core -- rephrasing what I was saying earlier, I love the network metaphor is the network has to be more valuable than the alternative. And we believe those verticalized networks and the augmentation that we are working toward in those vertical networks will be highly differentiated versus broad horizontal undifferentiated networks.
That's the reason why Kim, suresh here. I would have given you the answer to say, yes, you're right.
Might be.
Why haven't we heard about Prosus' large commerce model today?
This is something that we are actually working very closely with the Process AI team, and they are already using it. So when I'm referring to deep personalization, this is very much in collaboration with Process AI, and it is building on top of the LCM. But generally, LCM is a very generic, very powerful personalization engine. And then on top of that, you build a specific customer-facing experience that utilizes LCM as the personalization layer. So the customer-facing experience might be still I don't know, as we said, Compass GPT or it might be add to video. But the deep insights in terms of personalization in many of those use cases will be coming from LCM.
And can I make a little bit of humor here. That's also because Calin told me we only had 5 slides. LCM -- and those of you who are staying for the next couple of days, we'll probably see some of our marketing teams who actually were both training process LCM, our own data set and then feeding that into things like CRM. We are generating tremendous success in our marketing.
How many people at OLX are working on that?
Oh my gosh, my CRM is probably my most efficient team is probably 4 technologists and like 7 or 8 marketing people driving this. So it's highly automated. I call it 24/7 data mining. It's all agentic off of the LCM infrastructure, feeding that and doing, I'll call it, real-time closed-loop triggers and marketing optimization, all based on the LCM itself.
Big fans of the LCM.
We love that. It's just one of many things that we love...
Yes. I think it goes further than just the LCM. I mean, let's face it because the question comes from that angle. Prosus is a good shareholder for us because they are investing huge tons of money, of which we're benefiting. And I think this is something that probably goes beyond the LCM, and that's the reason why I think we are happy to be participants of it. We are contributing, but we're also getting a lot of it. And I think that's the most important message that I'm looking into if I look at it from a CEO's perspective is how is the work? How is basically the synergies going. And that's exactly what happened.
Just to add to that, we are having -- I'm going to do a little punt now, a tech day on the 12th of March. And so that's kind of -- well, it's one of the topics that will be showcased at that particular event. So 12th of March, Amsterdam, do we have a time?
And Tim will be rather again.
You'll have a slide, he will be able to have a slide.
I've got one more. So there's, I guess, 3 core verticals, jobs, real estate, autos. Do you have any theory as to what kind of pace each vertical might move into a kind of LLM and agentic environment because they are, in some ways, quite different, like house is much more expensive than a car, cars and houses both have images, jobs don't, cars of physical assets for dealers oone.ere puts and takes to this. Like which is going to happen quickest?
So let's say, most likely case is that jobs will be one that is moving faster and not only for the reasons that you mentioned, but because both the supply and the demand can be completely digitalized and accessed by agents. So if I really have to bet, I would say probably it is jobs. Between motors and real estate, it's arguable, but it's probably a bit more likely that motors moves faster and real estate after that. But as I said, from our perspective, we are preparing very much that all 3 will have the capabilities, both from the demand side and from the supply side to support agent journeys very, very soon.
And potentially, it's a bit of an internal element is probably jobs is the last vertical that came to the party. Therefore, it doesn't have a lot of legacy in terms of old product, et cetera. So we have the opportunity to think it immediately from an AI perspective, and that's exactly what we're doing. And I think that's the reason why maybe it's going to be faster and also the approach -- because the approach from the very beginning is very different.
Okay. I'm just going to go to the webcast. So Cesar from Bank of America asked, I have 3 questions. One, in your bear case -- I'll do them one by one. In your bear case example, you mentioned that listings are very fragmented. Does this apply only to Poland as some car markets are B2B and it's also very different to real estate?
No. I think most of the supply is fragmented across all the verticals. It may be slightly different when you are a pure play, say, motors vertical that focuses on a particular subsegment of dealer space, say that's probably in La Central. But other than that, usually supply is quite decentralized and fragmented across most of our countries.
And then a second question, which was asked also by Marcus from JPMorgan. You're talking about increasing the take rate, but aren't LLMs going to allow users to find cars or property on any website or app. Could that actually not put pressure on prices as listers don't need to be present on the classified app or space that has the highest traffic?
Again, this goes back to the fragmented supply. A large part of our supply that pays us is SMBs who have like 10 cars, 6 cars, 5 cars, 3 cars, 87% are 3 or less. And they're scattered, and they're all across the place. Now they are getting cutting-edge tool. They're getting cost of participation that is not prohibitive or inhibitive to their future. I don't see why they would not participate through us and get discovered and their supply gets discovered. So definitely, it's I don't see that as a big risk.
And I would also add for Marcus, working capital that the dealer has every day that he doesn't sell the car is about EUR 35 to EUR 50 that he is basically losing. So trying to go a route and finding something that may be a bit cheaper will cost him far more money than basically staying with us where everybody knows this is the place to go because of the network effects even in an AI agentic world.
And also, just to remind people, right, we are just not providing visibility. We're not getting them just having somebody see their ads. We're giving them real-time chat solutions. We're giving them valuation advice. We're giving them AI platforms, dealer management tools. We have so many different things. And to Christian's point, every day of delay of working capital pays off their cost of entry in that classified that's not take rate. So they are more worried about speed. And they want to get it out.
At the right price. If you look into the AutoIQ thing, I mean, we have them sourcing. The sourcing is not just getting the car, it's getting the car at the right price because the system also knows what that car basically should be sold at. So there are a lot of intelligent elements within that, that others potentially are not able to replicate because we also not have the proprietary data. We are able to advise and say, if you want to sell that car, you need to go down by EUR 500, not 1,000, not EUR 250, EUR 500. And this is something that I think it's underestimated when you think in the global scheme of take rate.
Yes. And I kind of ripping on that point, and I think Suresh made it well is like that approach where, I'll call it, federated inventory being searchable through an LLM, that's the exposure model. We think the exposure model is the past. We're still making money from it fantastic. But we look at it as sellers in the value-add model, the tooling, that's the full package of augmentation because these are super high-value transactions. They're cars, their houses, their employees. These things are substantially expensive.
So every tool that we can give these folks with better data, better integration, being more third-party ecosystem services to this, I'll call it, value network, further pushes the center of transactional orchestration into a verticalized marketplace, not just an exposure marketplace pushed up to an LLM strategy. Other people may tell you differently, but we feel convicted that that's what our customers are asking for and where we think the value lies in our business.
And then the third question, do you think apps can disappear midterm and be replaced by a super agent or app?
Do I think apps will disappear by super agent? No. I think you will see all varieties, we say modalities or delivered vehicles will continue to exist. That's what I would call agent to human, to agent, agent to agent. We think all those permutations are super important. Like again, my personal example would be that I think humans for quite some time will still want human connection with looking at a real estate property where they will live with their family. I think we'll still see apps that are dedicated and there'll be some human connection to actually appointment setting and view properties personally.
I think there are also cases an agent to agent will be the dominant factor. And then I know we've seen this pendulum has swung in different areas of technology life and e-commerce and advertising of one single app to all their apps versus fragmentation.
I actually think what I've observed in both classifieds and other businesses is fragmentation tends to win over time and the cost of fragmentation, which is the product development costs and marketing costs are actually going down. I think AI is making it easier to build purpose-built apps, purpose-built experiences. They're all sitting on top of the safe agent to core for sure. So I do not forecast a world where there's one agent which does everything for all people. I don't think that's a realistic competitive bet. Andreas, do you want to?
No, I think that I actually completely agree. Generally, we see a world that there are multiple starting points of the user experience. multiple LLM providers, at least for sure, Google and OpenAI, perhaps Perplexity and others will end up playing there. And we intend to be integrated on all of those. So that's one part. And then the other part is we are really believing that verticalized experiences win over time.
And to a large extent, this is for sure true today. You saw that with the Pepsi Alen example. But we believe that this will be continuing even in the future to be the case because it really takes quite a bit of effort and expertise and domain knowledge to create those experiences and be excellent and of course, data and be excellent for each of those types of different cases.
So perhaps there are scenarios that different, let's say, starting points of the experience that are mostly dominated by major players, but still the verticalized aspect will dominate, we believe, at least the middle and bottom funnel even in the worst-case scenarios.
You spoke a lot about how quickly you are moving. What are the 2 or 3 constraints that if you could remove them, would allow you to move even faster? Or what are the 2 or 3 things that if you could dream about you would choose to do?
Is it okay to say regulatory? I don't know. That's a great question. What can we do to go faster? I'm going to say you kind of caught me without a direct answer. Suresh has done a great job of optimizing our capital investment flows. So we think we have tons of capital to apply to these problems. I would say it's -- some of it is probably not in our control is consumer behavior. We like to lead that slightly, but people have to kind of look forward to an agentic world.
So I think that's part of it. I think part of it is there's a large gap between an idea and like making it realized, I'll call it product market fit or making things really work well for consumers. I think that's part of the product development process and experimentation.
So can we make that go faster? I'm sure there are things we could do, but we think we're running at like top speed right now. So I don't think anything immediate comes to mind. Then I would say the third piece is how do we reach more of these SMB customers through sales, marketing and expanding our core base.
So we've done some of that through geographic expansion. We brought Laws on Trial into the family. And we are constantly looking at how to bring more rooftops, more inventory of existing customers, which gives us more to work with. So those are the, I think, the model drivers to me of what would help us go faster, but that's just my ad hoc answer. Maybe there's something else I would think of.
I'm pretty sure Tim would also say the 2 generic ones, availability of great talent. It's not very easy to get this kind of talent, and there's always a war for talent. And I think we always try to be ahead of the curve on that. And the second thing is a lot of data and proprietary data, the more you can expand it. I mean it's very tough to replicate that through synthetic data in our space. It's so embedded. -- that if you have both of these, then you'll continue to grow.
And then maybe, Christian, if you want to take the last question about the dreaming a little bit. What are the 1 or 2 things if you can weigh the magic wand.
Now I need to get a dream, okay. But I mean, ultimately, I think we have laid out a picture that we believe is the right strategy. We have a lot of conviction in it. And I think if we come back here, let's say, in 3, 4 years' time, probably all the prediction that Suresh has around the bull case is true. That's sort of the dream case. I think that our execution speed has not only quadrupled but have tenfolded.
And Tim is basically still happy because there are apps and the fragmentation in the market is still existing. Now but Jo aside, I think that's probably the picture that I want to paint. I'm not -- it's not about dreaming. It's about what we are driving reality.
And I think with the reality that we're driving the vision we have, the strategy we have, the clear focus on our businesses, this is something that should basically deliver outcomes of which we probably don't believe today that are possible, but they are possible.
Okay. I think that's a good note to end on. Thank you all for your time. The wonderful say has organized transport through to the restaurant that we will be going through to later. And then you'll have time to spend more time with our executives and they can explain to you how you should be managing your investment portfolio in this space. Thank you.
Thank you very much
Prosus — Special Call - Prosus N.V.
🎯 Key Message
- Summary OLX presents an AI-first, verticalized classifieds strategy across motors, real estate and jobs. Agentic AI is the product, not a feature, enabling end-to-end transactions through proprietary data and cross-geo scale. Acquisitions and rapid experimentation aim to drive double-digit revenue growth with strong margins.
🎯 Strategic Highlights
- AI core Agentic AI is embedded in the marketplace as the core offering, not a standalone add-on, shaping the entire user journey from discovery to transaction.
- Vertical focus Strong emphasis on Motors, Real Estate and Jobs with tools like AutoIQ and Compass GPT, plus upcoming real estate and motors integrations across geographies.
- Data moat Proprietary, cross-geo/vertical data with a unified AI platform; hundreds of AI/ML use cases and high-frequency AB testing to accelerate product-market fit.
🧭 New Information
- Sync & rollout La Central integration is live on AWS; ad-to-video and video-to-ad synergies to roll out starting April, enabling cross-market revenue lift.
- Scale & investment ~EUR 200 million of AI spend to date; ~EUR 30 million this year; about 2,600 employees and a large, growing agent workforce; 75+ AI/ML use cases in production.
- Financial ambition Long-term target around 20% revenue growth with ~50% adjusted EBIT margin; relentless speed with 1,200 product updates per week and accelerating AB testing.
❓ Analyst Q&A
- Bear case vs moat Discussion on potential disruption from AI/LLMs; management argues that proprietary data, vertical focus and execution speed protect margins and take rates even in a more AI-driven world.
- Data architecture & integration La Central integration shows cloud-native data platforms enabling rapid AI synergies; emphasis on AI-to-video and video-to-AI workflows to grow top-line.
- Open AI / competition Debates on multi-LLM strategies, channel diversification and brand/trust—OLX argues it will win by being everywhere, with superior data, UI/UX and transaction support across verticals.
⚡ Bottom Line
OLX is positioning itself as a scalable, AI-first marketplace where agentic AI and vertical specialization steer the next wave of growth. The combination of cross-geo data advantages, rapid product iteration and near-term integration synergies (such as La Central) support a vision of mid‑ to high‑teens revenue growth and robust margins over time. For shareholders, the story is about a defensible data moat and execution leverage in a rapidly evolving classifieds landscape.
Prosus — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
1. Management Discussion
[Presentation]
Hello partners. How are you? Welcome to our results call. I hope you received and you enjoyed our results today. I'm quite excited to what we shared today. At the same time, we could share you more about our growth not only that we are growing 20%, but even more important that our ecosystem thesis is working. So I enjoyed very much to share the numbers of Despegar. It's not only 5% of Despegar revenue coming from the iFood ecosystem, but we share the data week by week. You can see a very strong growth. I'm quite confident we will get to 10%, 15% in the short term. So this is the base of our thesis, our ecosystem thesis, we are growing very fast in iFood, but we are pushing Despegar to grow together.
At the same time, we could share a little of our numbers in terms of results. You saw we grew 70% to $530 million. I think it's great to share this number with you. One year ago, I told you I expect us to be -- have more profit than the dividends, and I expect us to get to multiple billion dollars of profit. And many people said, I can't see Prosus doing that. So I hope you can see Prosus doing that today. We are going to get between $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion in adjusted EBITDA this year, excluding JET and LA CENTRALE.
So we can expect I don't know $1.2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion of EBITDA this year and for a couple of billion dollars of profit in the next few years. So I'm quite excited about our numbers in terms of results. We keep the discipline. We sold $1.2 billion, but we are on track to sell at least $2 billion this year of our assets. We keep our buyback. Now we sold -- we bought back more than $40 billion, generating more than $60 billion in results. So I think we keep the discipline, we keep the growth -- but I want to reinforce all of that is the foundation to how we are going to build a much bigger company.
So innovation is growing amazingly [indiscernible]. I wanted to do a bigger session on innovation now, but because of the timing, we decided to focus on numbers today, but in a few weeks by December 15, maybe January 15, we are going to make a much longer presentation on how AI is changing our lives in terms of live commerce models, in terms of assistance. You saw we had 20,000 assistant already. So I could talk a lot about innovation. I hope you make questions about that. It's quite exciting.
So our moment now is execution, execution, execution. We had some discipline also in M&A. A few M&As are focusing growth. For example, the Indian ones, [indiscernible] and [indiscernible], they are growing [indiscernible] is growing more than 120% year-over-year. We are very excited about that. A few M&As are increasing our profitability, like La Centrale and Despegar. So I think the company is doing good. I'm excited about the results. I hope you have many exciting questions for us today. And my priority now execute go to those few billion dollars in results. We are just getting started. We really want to build at least $100 billion outside of Tencent and one of the best tech companies in the world. Let's talk more about that today.
So let's go for our questions. Mr. Eoin, right, guide us.
Speaking of just getting started, let's get started on the Q&A. Catherine, why don't you -- if you could remind the audience how to ask a question, please? And then I'll start off with a quick question. So please, Catherine.
[Operator Instructions]. I will now hand back to your host, Eoin Ryan, to take your questions.
That's great, Catherine. Thanks very much. It's great to be here today, and it's good to hear from you guys. As you said, Fabricio, I think we're following through on our commitments. One such commitment was investment in our ecosystems. The biggest investment to date has been Jet, and I think it's on the minds of most of investors. So can you give us a little update? We're a few days in since the delisting of Jet? What's the future look like?
Let's talk about Jet. First, we closed the Jet transaction completely a few weeks ago. But just last Monday or Tuesday, we changed the management -- the Supervisory Board. So now I and a few other people from Prosus are part of the Supervisory Board of Jet for the last 6 days. So what I can tell you, we are very, very confident. As you saw, we shared lots of data on Despegar, how it's growing, how we are working on the ecosystem. On Jet, we have just 6 days. So it would not be appropriate to share today. What I can tell you, first, we are this week working a lot with Jet on our key set of culture to enable the company to think big, move faster and grow a lot.
Jet is not growing over the last few years, as you know, obviously we know that's true. I'm very, very confident that together, we deliver a company that grow faster and is much better. The first big thing is on culture. It's happening right now the replanning of Jet. That's why I couldn't add the numbers because we need a few more weeks to have projections for Jet. At the same time, our focus besides culture. And again, you saw me here last we on [indiscernible], the results we have today is because of the change of culture 1 year ago. Besides of culture, technology and product are the 3 big areas of energy of our efforts.
On technology, we need again to move faster and to make sure Jet becomes a more a tech-first company with first-class technology in the world using AI to take all its decisions. On products, we have to make sure that a few areas that Jet is a little say, behind, we get -- we move faster, for example, loyalty program that is core in Latin America, but it's not ready here in Europe. So we are going to push those 3 things. We expect to push it in November and December. Hopefully, in January, we have a few results to share. Today, it is still too soon.
But I can tell you that I am -- Jet is not performing well. We all know that, but the level of confidence I have that we will have a company growing again and competing very well is very, very high. And probably you know I like some letters from the CEO, maybe we share a letter from the CEO, but we can share more inform Jet. But you have more specific questions, I can answer today.
It's the holiday season for letter writing, so maybe you can [indiscernible] investors there. Okay. Well, thanks. I'm sure there'll be some follow-up questions on that throughout the call. But let's open it up to the audience. And I think the first question is coming from Will Packer of BNP.
2. Question Answer
Two from me, please. Firstly, Fabricio, you talked to optimizing the buyback in your prepared remarks video. Could you help us think through the implications of that optimizing? Is it the current buyback run rate of $6 billion to $7 billion as the new normal for FY '26, '27 and beyond? Or should we think of you cutting the buyback?
And then it sounds like it's fair to assume that there's going to be some flexibility of funding perhaps away from Tencent towards Meituan and free cash flow. In terms of my second question, the global online classified share prices have sold off sharply in recent weeks following the OpenAI Developer Day and Rightmove's AI profit warning. Fabricio specifically, Gen AI is central to your vision for the group. How are you thinking about the risk and opportunity for classifieds in terms of Gen AI? Does this recent sell-off make the sector an increasingly attractive potential use of your M&A firepower? Or would you rather see the dust settle first?
Thank you. Thank you for the questions. First, you asked about optimizing the buyback. You have lots of good numbers there. I don't need to repeat all of them. But in general, as we said, the buyback is more or less $6 billion to $7 billion this year. We have an open buyback.
We are going to keep an open buyback the way it is. I like buybacks because I think we are if our company is cheap, we should be investing in our own company and increasing the value of the shareholders that want to stay. So we are going to keep doing that. On the other side, I think the company we have today is a very different process than it was 2, 3 years ago. Remember, again, 1 year ago, I said we are going to get to multiple billion dollars of profit. Many shareholders didn't see it coming. It is coming. But hopefully, you can see that in the numbers that we are sharing today. So Prosus is on a different moment. The discount is on a different moment. Tencent is on a different moment. I'm a big fan of Tencent. I think Tencent is going to be a big winner in the AI race. Tencent is positioned for that in China.
And if you compare the multiples of Tencent versus everything else in U.S. There is a lot of space to Tencent keep growing. So it's exactly what I said, optimizing the buyback. We are going to keep the buyback as we have, but I'm not going to say names of other companies. People ask me not to name other companies. I can tell you that there is other companies in our portfolio that we believe has smaller growth potential than Tencent, growth and strategic potential than Tencent. And yes, we are going to sell these companies and use this money also to keep a buyback. So what we are going to see is optimize exactly that.
Eventually, the buyback is, I don't know, $1 billion, maybe $0.5 billion is from Tencent, $0.5 billion is for other companies that we can sell and use the cash to -- I think the right word to use to make a better capital allocation, with the #1 company in China, growing fast, well positioned to win in the AI race. Not the best decision to me to sell Tencent even if we increase the value per share. So if we can optimize selling other things and increasing our participation, that's what we intend to do. We expect to sell at least $2 billion this year. And how can I say, you can expect that we are going to do buybacks using other source that is not Tencent.
Just to remind shareholders, although we're selling our Tencent stake on a per share basis, we actually increased our exposure in Tencent by the share buyback with the other proceeds from other divestments. And I will further enhance on a per share basis the exposure to Tencent compared to continuing on the current path. So I think that is a critical way of how we can further enhance the share buyback.
For example, there's other company that we believe has less focus today than they should. We could sell that we believe has less focus and invest more or sell less of that we believe are performing well, has less focus and we believe are going to the Chinese market. So that's what I mean by optimizing.
Those companies are the companies you're talking about as the additional EUR 2 billion, right? That's just to be clear.
At least 2 billion we already sold 1.2 billion, so at least -- and can we use this money to offset, let's say, sell 1 billion from other companies are true. Yes.
That's something we've seen from the group in many years, a more active portfolio management.
Yes. The buyback was 100% automatically. That's what I don't mind. We should say we should sell more or less and we should select better what to sell to buy.
Great-- and to the second question.
Yes. The second question was on AI and classifieds, you said. Many people sometimes ask me, if I think -- I'm not the first one this week, if I think AI could have an impact on classifieds. My answer is it's much bigger than that. I think AI is going to have impact in classifieds on e-commerce and food delivery, in investing in analyst reports from banks, AI is going to have impact everywhere. Obviously, as you know, the market today is a little too heavy. So everyone looks like AI winner. But there will be AI wins that will create trillions of dollars of value, not only trillions of dollars of cost, but trillions of dollars of value, and it is going to happen. How I see that on classifieds.
The point here is not if AI is going to hit your industry or not? Because if you think AI is not going to hit your industry, you are wrong. It will hit our industry. The point is how we play our game on that industry. And I think what we are doing here in [indiscernible] is very, very good. We are not like -- you said some other company or you said some classifieds went down [indiscernible]. Other -- the again, other classifieds companies, they have been much more conservative in technology, and they invested much less to be classified people were, how can I say, surfing the high profitability without investing a lot in technology.
That's not our approach. [indiscernible] as a group is investing in large commerce model to understand the customers better than itself and use data to improve our companies. We're investing a lot on agents. We have more than 20,000 agents doing everything, including many things on classifieds. We're investing a lot in ventures and the only focus of ventures from now is not to be a venture capital that invest in everything, to invest in companies that can make our ecosystem run better or that can run better because our ecosystem. So these 3 areas has profound impact in our classified business.
We are using the large commerce model to run better classified business and ads. On agents, we are running a lot of our services to agents, for example, taking care of customers, taking care of retailers. Remember our classifieds less horizontal, more focused in real estate and jobs and -- so we are taking care of the auto retailers and our partners. And third, we are investing in early-stage AI companies that can are betting in growing in classified. So we can make these companies grow faster. And we can also make our classifieds not only keep growing, but disrupt other classifieds.
So yes, AI will have impact. I think Prosus is very well positioned about that because everything we are doing. We could talk about that for 1 hour. But part of our positive results, not because we are lucky or because our markets just grow is because we are selling better. We are reducing the cost of ads. We are increasing the efficiency of the company. We have -- we are reducing the requirement for hiring people because our agents expand our working capacity.
So we are doing a lot of classifieds. For example, [indiscernible]. We just invested in one company that are automating through agents, the relationship between real estate and their customers. We are doing that by ourselves, and we invest in a company that is growing like 300%, doing the same thing. Our classifieds is very well positioned to use AI as a competitive advantage. So that's how I see growth.
And the next question is going to come from [indiscernible].
I've got 2, please. First one is to follow up on Will's question on optimization of the buyback and to understand how it relates to where the discount is at a given period in time.
It's been observable that the cadence of buybacks has slowed down in the last few months as the discount has stayed in that kind of high 20s to 30-ish percent zone depending on your definition of the NAV. So should we kind of see that as a signal that the company feels there's less attractive opportunities in buying its own shares relative to the rest of the NAV at these levels?
And should we expect the buyback to move up or down depending on where the discount is? That's the first question. The second one is to follow up on the opening remarks on Jet. I appreciate it's going to be hard to give guidance today. But if you could give us a flavor like the level of investment that you'd like to put into Jet, that would be very helpful..
Thank you, Andrew. On the buyback, I was concentrating the Jet. You want more information on...
Whether it's a function of the discount coming down, the buyback.
What I said is what I don't like is to have a completely automatic thing. So it's a function of many things, how well we are doing, how fast we are growing, how profitable we are, how our discount is. You said that was around 26, 27 over the last 1 month, 2 months. I am an optimistic founder. So you can discount my optimistic opinion. But I will also 1.5 years later, remind you that we are delivering everything that we promised 1 year ago. We are delivering the growth, profitability, the discipline, the complete reset on culture and the innovation.
So my optimistic vision is discount will go down more because if the business is very valuable and we have $1 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion in profits in our core that is playing well [indiscernible], et cetera, I will call you later to ask why is the reason to have this level of discount at $26 or $7 or $8 that it was. So considering all of that, the buyback is going to be more aggressive or less aggressive. My point on optimization now specifically is if we can keep buying back, but not only from Tencent, but from Tencent and other assets that we are selling, this is much better for us all. So that's what we are trying to implement now. I [indiscernible] another question.
Yes, it was on the level of investment for Jet.
Yes, the level of investment for Jet. It's not the problem, to be honest, Andrew, not the problem today. So how I see that? First, would I invest more in Jet? Yes. My problem today is not invest more in jet that we became operators of the company 6 days ago. We are having the full week of meeting to plan the next 3 or 4 months. The government doesn't even have a plan for the next 3 or 4 months because their budget stops in December. So we are doing today to tomorrow, the planning for the next 3 or 4 months. So we had a discussion last week, should be doing like in 1 day a proposal.
The answer is no, you have our guidance without Jet. We will give more information on the guidance with Jet as soon as we have it. But I want to reinforce first, the problem is not the level of investment to me. The problem is the efficiency, 2 things. First, Jet is under delivering what they promise their current guidance, what they are delivering is less than the current guidance. But second, the efficiency of the investment in Jet has to improve before any other movement.
So I'm not going to increase investment directly in Jet, if I don't think we are making the I could put $100 million in Jet. It's not very well invested, it's not worthwhile. So right now, we are trying to rebalance return on investments on investments and help technology improve return on investments. That's why the guidance for the next 2, 3, 4 months, they are not very valuable because if we think we can improve a lot in 45 days, I have to run it first and see the results, then a new guidance.
So that's why we need 45 days to have a better view on Jet numbers. But I just want to reinforce, Nico want to complement, but to reinforce our level of confidence that we can run Jet better in terms of growth and profitability is very, very high. And we will share in details more about that when we share more data on Jet.
And Andrew, maybe just to comment on Fabricio said that Jet did not perform well. It was a listed company until last week. Last time it came to the market, you would have seen that order growth was negative 7%. Company guided at that stage given their own internal metrics in euro terms, they reported in euros EBITDA of about EUR 360 million for the calendar year FY '25, which is December '25. Now what I can say to you that some of those trends have continued during Q3, where we've seen further reduction in some of the order growth -- and that will cause and have an impact in terms of the original guidance. Our expectations measure against that is that I will materially invest EUR 360 million. Anyway, my confidence on Jet growing faster and improving result is very high. But since we have 6 days, you need to update the numbers on Jet in the next call.
I think the important thing to point out here is that the acquisition was not made on the results of this year. The acquisition was made on the expectations for turnover multiyears, which is what you're talking about as planning has just begun on that.
Yes. So as I said, on these 6 days, we think the numbers are bad because of this reduction of 6% I believe that in 45 days with a strong reset and culture and moving faster in tech, we have good news to share, but we can do that today because it's too early.
Thank you, Andrew. And the next question we'll take from Cesar at Bank of America.
I just want to focus on M&A. So I have a couple of questions on it. The first one, do I understand correctly that the available firepower for M&A is still around $8 billion? That's the first one. The second one, should we expect you to pose a little bit M&A as you focus on integrating all these assets and focusing on the ecosystems?
Or should we expect any large transactions in the next couple of months? And then the third one, it seems to me that you've been talking a lot more about India recently. Should we understand that this is back as a focus area for you? So I felt you talked a little bit more about it than at the Capital Markets Day, for example.
Let me take the first one. So Cesar, thanks for the question. So at the end of September, from a total group perspective, we had $20 billion of cash on the balance sheet, about $18 billion of that related to our central corporate cost, corporate cash position. And subsequent to September, we have settled, of course, the Jet acquisition as well as LA CENTRALE. So that was about $7 billion that were spent on that. So on a pro forma basis, it leaves us with about $11 billion of cash at the center. And obviously, we need some liquidity buffer against that. So what is available for M&A is, I would say, at least $8 billion and more from a balance sheet perspective.
That said, our priority is not to spend $8 billion or more or [indiscernible] on big acquisitions right now, big priority by far. I think I want to highlight one thing. First, our execution has been very, very good. We talk more about on those meetings, but [indiscernible] is doing very good, very profitable, growing well. So we have good expectations with LA CENTRALE synergies. And second, again, when we announced the -- just acquisition, many people said, but it's expensive. We really don't believe. I think we are paying -- we paid $4 billion to $5 billion in something that should have $15 billion. That's what we have to build.
So my biggest priority by far is how we make sure get back growing with the best technology and products in the world and really win in Europe. That's our biggest priority by now. So as [indiscernible] read in the newspapers on the 2 or 3 rumors intends to expand $5 billion to $10 billion things. I can tell you that we read on the newspapers, the rumors, we are quite much focused in delivering right now. And again, I think now I have some reputation inside Prosus. We deliver the numbers we promised. And also, I always talk about transparency. We will give transparency just after a few more weeks or months or quarter.
So like you said in your opening remarks, it's focused on execution, execution, execution, right? And then the other question that Cesar had was on India and whether it's a bigger focus right now.
Yes. We talked a lot about the last few days. I met Prime Minister 3 days ago. So it was all in the news that we are talking about. It was really great, to be honest. I'm always complaining Europe has to move faster and talk about creating big tech companies and meeting Prime Minister was how we move faster. He asked me, let's do more.
So it was a very inspiring conversation. I think what we've done in India is very good. We are the biggest FTI, international investor in India. Many of our companies has more value to unlock. So we promised you a few IPOs in the last 12 months. Most of them happened. We still have an expectation that there will be another very big IPO and that's going to be big and good of our amazing company. So our returns on investment in India are quite positive. We invested in the last 1 month, I think, in 2 companies that are growing very fast, is growing 120% #1 company mobility [indiscernible] is growing very fast. I don't know now, maybe 70%, something around that. And they are very good online travel agents and travel and mobility, too.
So I think we are keeping the consistency in the areas we want to invest. We are keeping the idea of ecosystem synergies and I expect a lot more good news from India, not only like spending a lot of money, but we put that in the presentations. PayU for years, including you, our analysts complaining that PayU has to perform better. PayU is profitable. Finally, after many years, the profitability of PayU is growing quarter-by-quarter quite well, month by month, even better. PayU is helping other companies to grow faster and other companies are helping Pay to grow faster. So and [indiscernible] Ixigo getting closer to our ecosystem will create another positive impact. We are excited that we are going to build more many billions dollars in value in [indiscernible].
I think -- and it's clear you can see the operational improvement in the owned and operated PU, but you're also seeing that increasing connectiveness of all of the individual pieces within the ecosystem working together a little bit more.
So you see this time we shared lots of data in Latin America. Probably you saw that Shark rev in the loyalty in the center and many business around benefit from these customers, and we even shared some data. We are doing the same thing in India. The results are good. We are going to share more data with that in the next few months. So we don't expect to spend $8 billion in India right now, but to keep having good results in terms of ecosystem building in India. And I think the latest investments are very good [indiscernible].
And with au now profitable, we can say that all of our main businesses are indeed profitable, which is something we've never been able to say. And when you think about millions to 1 billion and then to multiple billions, that's certainly a necessary thing.
All the business runs.
All right Cesar. So thanks very much for the questions, and we'll move to Michael.
Yes. First of all, thank you for letting us ask the questions and for the presentation. So the first one is actually in iFood. So with [indiscernible] now ramping up their presence in the Brazilian food delivery market, what are your thoughts? And what have you seen since October?
And then how do you think this is going to impact iFood's growth trajectory over the next year to 2 years? And then maybe just touching on India. So you mentioned that there's a lot more collaboration between yourselves and the different companies that you have minority stakes in. How do you think about monetizing that going forward? Is that largely given from yourselves? Or are they providing data back at a higher rate?
I understand the name of the question [indiscernible] yourself -- it's a connection of between the companies in India and particularly the minority trust companies and whether there's -- how do we facilitate data sharing to improve the [indiscernible].
So first on iFood, I think many of you were in Brazil and visiting Brazil 1 or 2 months ago. The people that were there, they could see iFood is more than one business that they're doing the same thing for the last 5, 7 years. The reason iFood is growing so fast. We just got through including all the business, 160 million orders -- just to remind you, last time we met, celebrated $100 million $160 million orders is because it's a company innovating and rethinking how we offer business and offer the best technology for our customers.
So obviously, we have competition now, more competition that is DT and [indiscernible] is also entering Brazil just entered. Those 2 companies entering a few cities, 2 or 3, spending a lot of money per order, like they have discounts of 20%, 50%, 60%, sometimes 70% in an order. So my advice to you, just check later how much they are paying to be there competing. And look, if you give a free meal to someone people, we eat for free. It will have it. But is it sustainable to have the best service, best offer over time.
And remember, this is in the core, that is the food delivery. iFood today have besides the core, a big loyalty program that gives free delivery plus discount on Despegar, plus discount, I think, 1,000 other companies. We have fintech. We have dine-in. We have POS machines in the restaurants where we take transactions. We have [indiscernible] where we put orders in the restaurants. We have a credit card voucher credit card with 1 million people buying food with a credit card, paying to iFood. We have the business of ads that is going super well. We invest in 2.
We bought one company we invested in [indiscernible], great company in terms of loyalty. We have classified the integration with Despegar is a big success. So everything that buys in iFood, they get 3 points to use on Despegar. We have a company for entertainment that is. We have -- we are launching now -- just now launching one city today this week, iFood plus Uber. So Uber has tens of millions of customers that are not iFood customers, and iFood has tens of millions of customers that are not Uber customers. I guarantee you that we are going to see a lot of cross-sell in the 2 best companies in the region.
So some companies are investing a lot to have the offer that we had 6 years ago, and we welcome competition. This make everyone runs faster, but it's much more than let's make the next sale of a business and cash call this business. It is, can we be the best creating new business, innovating, moving faster, iFood is doing that. So if you study around the core food delivery, you see many business. Interesting thing for you because I know you like the numbers and more my things on innovation. Fintech, we spent 2, 3 years saying fintech is the future for iFood. Fintech numbers are growing very fast and profitability in fintech is growing very fast.
So our profitability keeps growing because a few business we were investing 1, 2 years ago. I'll tell you true, fintech, groceries and selling to Whatsapp. We were losing money in the last 2, 3 years, now we are making money. So my point is a good business and there will be competition and let's fight for offering the best service for our customers. And I want to remind you, we are very focused in iFood chewing there. Some of our competitors are distracted all around the world. Even in their home markets, there is a lot of, I say, pressure to compete against other players. So we are confident, but we compete.
And Michael, you also asked in terms of given the competitive environment, how do we see in terms of what the impact of that might be. And look, in terms of the high growth rates that we're very confident that for the second half of this year, we will continue to sort of stay at those levels. And we also reiterated our confidence in our overall guidance. iFood is also investing in new product, but also against some of the competitors, but we built a lot of that into our existing processes. And we are sort of reevaluating various other projects and elements to utilize and free up funding so that we can actually fight against the competitors without changing the sort of trajectory that iFood is on for this financial year.
I think another important point though is the concept of competition for iFood is certainly not new. And over the years where they've actually had the most competition are the periods where we see the most growth. And one of the things that Diego often says is you focus on price, it's the race to the bottom, but you build a real moat through product. And what you've just described there is an ecosystem that is iFood within an ecosystem that is LatAm -- and I think you've highlighted, I think there's tremendous hidden value in that Pago business that we should and will have more to bring to you guys in the future. Now how about -- we touched on the India ecosystem. And the question there was whether -- how the business -- how you can really build the LCM and the connectivity between those businesses with them connecting data.
And you asked about minority companies.
Yes, exactly.
Look, my mind doesn't work like that. I remember the last results call, someone made the same question. If you are a minority, then you can't cooperate between the companies. I disagree. I absolutely disagree. I think we can cooperate with minority companies. We do it -- we don't do it because I call that and say, I'm boss doing what I'm saying. We do it because we call and say that's how we run fine-tuning our AI models. That's how we run customer support using AI. That's our KPIs on optimizing the partner -- our partners' relationship with agents.
When we show off that to a good company, the company say, I want it. I'm going to get this data. I want to run my open just like that. With other companies, another story, we show off that to like, but [indiscernible] showed how they are doing, I think, was multi-language customer support and said, okay, this is very good. We want to use. We want to learn more from that. So the point is not being majority or minority. And if you need to be majority to do something good because there's something wrong or you are not selling well or the guy that is not the right guy.
We can work with the minorities because we're saying this company can grow faster. These are the data and the technology that gets there. And we are cooperating well on that. One example, PayU is giving credit and working with customer profiles with users that we are minority investors, but the companies are growing faster because of PayU. That's why we are here.
And the other thing to take into account is the LLM so the LC that we're testing now in LatAm, and we're getting some of the results already in the deck. That's something that we can also bring to bear in the other ecosystems.
So today, we have an event with 80 people from all around the world being trained. We launched [indiscernible] AI house 2 weeks ago, where we have now a center of learning and knowledge of AI that everyone is traveling there to participate in the event. We are running today with 80 people inside process on fine-tuning large language models to optimize e-commerce transactions. So everything that we did in Latin America is now like now really today going to India and Europe. So we don't need to be my to do that.
And we are quite confident we have a lot of growth. curiosity, I didn't use a lot of the time of the meeting today morning to talk only about tech and innovation, but it was too much information. So we said, let's focus on numbers today. We will get back soon as soon as all want to talk to me because I want to do it in 2 weeks. But we are going to share why we are more confident than ever that we are one of the best players in AI ecommerce in the world. So we'll talk more about that.
You brought up the AI and I'll get to your questions again. But I think this is an important thing to pause out because this is something that is kind of inherent in the new culture. It's not something you would expect 1, 2 years ago. Can you talk a little bit about the AI has, why you opened it, what you're hoping to achieve because it is certainly no different.
I want to make Amsterdam the center of AI in Europe has a lot of knowledge but not vibrant community [indiscernible] every day there. So create a big space in Amsterdam, where every day we have a hackathon meeting of course. And it's open for 2 weeks. We are having every day a big event with hundreds of people, and we are helping the ecosystem and we are helping ourselves to, but we are contributing to make Netherlands a center in Europe AI. We also hosted last week, the House of opening was last week, 2 weeks ago, we hosted the Luminate an event in Europe talking about putting regulators and founders together to reinforce that [indiscernible] was one of the speakers there and President [indiscernible]. We are talking about Europe needs to move faster.
Europe needs to play to win. There are many things in Europe regulation, including the AI, congratulations in Europe because we did a big change this week, including the [indiscernible] that we think should be taking more risk to create leaders. So is taking a much more aggressive or premanent position to say, let's lead technology and regulator to create a big European tech leader, and we are very confident on our actions.
I would tell more time. That's great. Please. Are so we think don't kill my e-mail now. We'd love to have some of our investors and analysts at the AIS so we can match up certain events with your travel. So please reach out to IR. So let's move on. Thank you, Michael. We'll move on to Luke at Morgan Stanley.
So let's move on. Thank you, Michael. We'll move on to Luke at Morgan Stanley.
I just wondered if I could pick up on this thread of more competition in food delivery. So you signaled more investment in Jet. Obviously, we heard from Delivery Hero and Talabat also pointed to more investment Dash as well being a big theme over the last month.
But if we just map that through then for iFood, how can we see that progressing into FY '27? Is that kind of the trajectory that you see there? And just particularly in the context that you may need to -- do you feel like there needs to be more investment into dark stores or more 1P logistics? I'd just be interested to hear your thoughts there. And then just finally, I appreciate you might not be able to say anything, but the Delivery Hero situation. Obviously, you've got until mid-August to sell down to single digits. Is there anything that you can comment on in regards to that?
Okay. So on competition on Talabat, we have no access [indiscernible] Talabat. iFood made a projection for the year that included competitors, and we are going to deliver on our projection and our growth and everything else. So we are doing quite good. I can't talk today on the numbers for the next year. But as I told you, many of the business that we started 1 year or 2 years ago or 3 years or 4 years ago, they have become mature now. So iFood is more than the food delivery. One example is the iFood Pago.
You remember me about that. Remember that Mercado Libre has half of its profit for Mercado Pago. iFood Pago is an important part of iFood already and it's growing. So I don't have any number today to share on the next year. I can tell you that what better for this year, we are delivering, we are happy with that. And we have to do the next year in 1 or 2 months. On the [indiscernible] Hero, I'm sorry, I don't have any update on that. We have an agreement. The agreement is for 12 months. We are going to deliver in the agreement that we made. Sometimes I talk in the press that I believe that this agreement is not the best thing for Europe.
Europe would be better as a content if we have global tax champions that said we have an agreement. We are going to do the agreement according to the terms of the agreement, nothing to share. However, we are selling assets of Compass that has lower -- we are selling assets of companies. When I say we are going to sell $2 billion this year, it doesn't include delivery. So maybe we're going to sell more than $2 billion, maybe you're going to sell next year. We just don't have any update on that.
Maybe just to add to that, a lot of the investments that we're making in iFood to drive the business forward regardless of the competition are exactly in the same areas that we now need to do even better because of the competition. For instance, optimizing the delivery aspect of the business cheaper food elements, the loyalty program. All of those things we have been doing. We're just accelerating and improving even more in those spaces. And now we have the AI elements that we can add to enhance that efficiency.
And to complement Nico's point on some of the investments we did on iFood over the last 5 years that are quite big, we can replicate that in Jet starting this week because only now we are in the management of Jet. So there is lots of upside inside the ecosystem. That's what I'm selling for 1 year to you. I think Google and Microsoft and Meta and Tencent are winning not only because they have one key product, but because they have a scale in an ecosystem that enable cross-sell AI technology. We have that, and we will have benefit on that on Jet and on [indiscernible].
I think one of the things that I think has done a fantastic job of in the past is areas that required investments to scale, then don't need all of that investment going forward. You take some of that from Area A and deploy it into Area B. So it's not incremental investment always in the asset. And I think one of the questions that we get underneath this perhaps is, what does this mean for kind of your future year guidance? And what -- is this a kind of a retrenchment or a return to kind of an investment cycle. But I think you were very clear at the beginning of the call that you expect to go from the 1-point-something billion today, even 3, you said more than that. And that includes investment in the other parts of the business and food.
So I ask you the credibility to think that first time we talk about $2 billion, everyone said, oh my God, I don't see how they can do it. You get to $2 billion. And -- so we are confident we are going to keep increasing our margins.
And I think they've probably said the same thing on 160 orders as I -- so thanks very much for that , and we will go to Robert Calabretta.
Yes, first question on the impact of agentic consumer applications on marketplaces. If you look at these agentic applications, people are using it for more and more tasks. In the case of process, I think you saw the first impact at stack overflow where people found coding suggestions of agentic applications better than browsing on the forum. But increasingly, it could be the case that purchasing decisions could also move towards these consumer-aggentic applications like ChatGPT. So I'm wondering, how do you plan to integrate your marketplaces inside of these applications and as user behavior shifts towards consumer agentic applications, yes, could some of marketplaces like Classifieds lose distribution leverage and the data advantage.
So how will you address this to stay ahead? Yes. Maybe a second question on the IRRs. I think in the past, you targeted a 20% IRR target with a higher hurdle for start-ups and lower for high-quality, more mature businesses. If I look at, for example, La Centrale, which you're buying for around EUR 1 billion, clearly a high-quality business. it's growing at a CAGR of 13% EBITDA, and you expect that market growth to continue. So I think it's challenging maybe to get the 20% IRR. So I'm wondering what is kind of your lower hurdle in terms of larger investments in terms of IRR. So what is your minimum hurdle to make these deals?
I'll try to quickly just because of the time. But on the first one, what you just asked, life agents are going to compete against us, Yes. I told you in the beginning, I want to talk 1 hour about our strategy there. It's exactly about that. So what we are going to tell you soon is we are doing large commerce model. We are doing agents focusing our internal and partners, and we are doing life agents -- sorry, life assistance where we deliver this kind of service to our customers. And I think we will be very well positioned because of our ecosystem and how to offer there better than any other player outside.
So I could talk about that for 1 hour, but I need you to read a little more. But I agree with you, Robert, it's a risk. Yes, it's an opportunity, too. We are moving fast to lead on that, including on many investments we made exactly on this area. So we are bullish and excited about what we can do in what we call life assistance. Next chapter to know more about that. The second is on IRR. We expect, yes, 20% IRR on La Centrale. Remember, La Centrale is a small company operating more isolated. We think that putting it together with everything we are doing outside, we are going to get good levels of growth, increasing profitability, and we expect it to get more than 20% La Centrale.
Great. Thanks. And it looks like will you're back in the line, you want to [indiscernible] I was very stressed.
If you have more time and get back to Rogelio. Will, are you there?
Sorry, I was. Just wanted to come back. So thank you for your comments earlier, very useful. So it's pretty clear the $6 billion to $7 billion is the right kind of framing for the FY '26 buyback. When we think about FY '27 and beyond, is that the kind of level we should be thinking? Or is it just you're going to have optionality and decide depending on the relative appeal of different uses of capital?
Companies, they do a buyback very specific. I'm going to buy back $5 billion. We are doing an open buyback. So we are not exactly not saying this is the number for the next 1, 2, 3 years. So we don't have any number for next year. But as I told you before, what I don't like is to have an automatic thing. We have to analyze what we have opportunities, what we have, what's happening in the world. I'll give you one thing to think. I think [indiscernible] is ridiculous ship. But again, oh my God, we can have a company that's creating $1.5 billion close to that in profit and still have a discount. The world is not like that today.
We have many companies valued at 100x revenues. having our cash position, maybe the world is going to change. That's my point. There's a lot of change ahead. I think Prosus is very well positioned. If the world change, we are going to become even a more attractive company because we are doing innovation, AI, we are generating cash and we have investment capacity. So for sure, since I have an open buyback, I don't need to think how it's going to work next year, 1 year in advance. I have to keep playing well with discipline, with good capital allocation. That's what you asked me 1 year ago.
What I'm telling you now, 1 year after, we delivered the discipline. One year after, selling less Tencent and more other companies is good capital allocation because we believe much more in the growth of Tencent. But what I commit to you is we are going to keep executing well, but we don't have a guidance for next year yet. We don't have it. So in 6 months, maybe we can share it more. Again, I'm confident we are going to keep executing well what we have in terms of innovation delivery to me. I think next year is much more a year of opportunity for us than a year of, oh my God, how we are going to handle not delivering what we promise.
Okay. Thank you. Will 4 minutes left. So let's Thanks, Will. We'll try to get 2 in Nadim from SBG.
Just 2 very quick ones from me. So we noticed that the likes of Rightmove and others are investing at quite a high rate in AI. This has the impact of weighing down on their profitability. I'd just like to understand how process have done it so that you have -- because we haven't really seen that impact on profitability with these substantial investments in AI and LCM. And then just on top of that, just how much of a differentiator is it when you're looking to acquire a business like La Centrale, the ability to bring these capabilities to the acquisition post deal?
So the first question was how has OLX been able to do so well and expand margins meaningfully while investing in AI, whereas other companies, I won't repeat their name, have now had to kind of reset expectations because they're investing. And it's been a long journey of OLX investing in AI.
Yes. So I think it all started 1 year ago on culture, focusing results, innovating more. I think OLX is really delivering and operating well, but also it has the support of an ecosystem. So many of the things OLX is setting up right now, they are also learning and sharing from inside the ecosystem. Large commerce model, for example, the investment was in the holding and iPhone. And now that it is ready, we are pushing it through [indiscernible]. So I think -- look, that's the central story or thesis of Prosus.
We can have one classified company operating in La Centrale region by itself or -- and that's my thesis together a bigger group that knows to operate classified and AI, we can make their performance better. The first big company we are operating at is Despegar. The number of Despegar doesn't look that big because April, May and June were bad were bad. I look to Despegar month by month, it is increasing every month for 6 months. So that's the difference. OLX benefits from that. And I think I'm quite sure is going to benefit from that too.
So the overall benefit of being part of the group. Nadim, thanks very much. We have to move to the last question. I think we're going to land this. Maddy take us home, please.
Yes. Just 2 quick ones from my side. The -- your recent positive trip to India and the meeting with the Prime Minister Modi, would you say your CMD ambitions for India were too conservative in hindsight, I mean, with just about 1.3x revenues from FY '25 to FY '28 and just above 5% margins, that's what your CMD guidance was. So wondering whether that changes at all post the meeting with the Prime Minister. And then the second one, on the asset monetization opportunities outside of Tencent and [indiscernible], is there any major opportunities you can talk about?
So first, it was inspiring Prime Minister was really expiring -- but then you said many numbers, 13, 14, 15. I didn't connect those numbers super well. for you.
Yes. So look, I think the numbers you is referring to related to essentially the long-term ambition that we shared at the CMD for India. But essentially, at that point, those are the control businesses at this stage in India. And obviously, we -- the ecosystem around that is much bigger. So it really depends how the control positions evolve over the next few years. So it could be substantially different depending on how we [indiscernible].
Yes, makes total sense. That's why we didn't recognize the number because we are looking just to pay you. Our expectations are bigger than that. But that's the way it is. We have report on that. after talking with Prime Minister, if something changes. I'll tell you, yes, I'll tell you one thing. We did all the -- we moved faster in innovation within Brazil and Europe. That's the true thing that we're really running on AI. I think we are this big thinking. India has to lead. India cannot be one day behind Brazil and Europe. So expect more moves from us, making sure we have the best AI possible in India. Then another question?
I forgot the other question. We've got 2 billion for this financial year. There are other assets that we can consider, but we're not going to sort of preannounce any at this stage.
Yes. There is some recommendation. We don't say we are selling this company. We probably can understand why. But our portfolio is much more than. So there is many others. Some of the others we talked about it here today, but there is many others, other 5 or 10, and there's many more billions we could sell, but we're not going to say exactly what. I can guarantee you this year, we sell $2 billion, probably in the next 6 months, we are going to announce how many billions we are going to sell the next year, at least a few more billions.
All right. Well, thank you for that, Maddy, and thank you very much, everybody, for joining us. there are a couple of words you want to leave us with?
Do you want to say a few final words? I have to say -- so a few final words. Today, the focus on numbers. And I'm happy. I think we are moving on the right direction on numbers. We will get to a few billion dollars in profit. There's much more to talk on execution of Jet, not for today and much more to talk on innovation, specifically the question that someone asked me today, I will talk exactly about that. So I am always unsure that we should be doing more and moving faster. I think we are moving well.
Just getting started, but our thesis year ago is we are going to be a strong tech-focused operating company. We are going -- we are getting there. So I'm excited with the results. I hope you enjoy them too. And I hope we're going to keep sharing good news with you in the future. Thanks for coming, and thanks for being partners. Let's keep building the future together. Thank you.
Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, guys. And there are a couple of questions here that I will follow up. And always, if you have follow-ups, please reach out directly to your friendly IR team, and we will see you very soon. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Prosus — Q2 2026 Earnings Call
Prosus — Shareholder/Analyst Call - Prosus N.V.
1. Management Discussion
Good afternoon, everybody. Joining us today in person and virtually are our valued Board members from Brazil, India, China, Europe, South Africa, U.S. and the U.K. We welcome to the venue, Craig Enenstein, Steve Pacak, Roberto Oliveira de Lima, Shar Dubey, Ying Xu, Rachel Jafta, Debra Meyer, Angelien Kemna and Mark Sorour. Hendrik du Toit and Manisha Girotra are joining virtually.
Ladies and gentlemen, folks, my lame is Koos Bekker. I'm the Chair of the Board of Prosus. On the executive side, we have next to me Fabricio Bloisi, our CEO; and Nico Marais, our CFO, over there and then to keep the good order, David Tudor, our Legal Counsel; and Lynelle Bagwandeen, our company's Secretary, next to me. And join us [indiscernible] A&O Shearman in the Netherlands. She's in attendance. We also want to welcome Ingrid Buitendijk of Deloitte Netherlands.
Now for efficiency, we've prepared some prerecorded videos to cover opening remarks by a few people, especially the chairs of our key Board committees. Then Nico and Ingrid will also make personal comments. And then Fabricio will present to you here in person briefly on operational matters. So if you allow me, I'll declare that the meeting is properly constituted and that we may adopt valid resolutions today. At this point, I'll hand over to Lynelle who will explain how the voting process and especially the Q&A session works.
Thank you, Koos. Shareholders virtually present and who have registered to vote and are in receipt of the required link and security passwords may vote online during this meeting on all agenda items. Shareholders attending in person received voting details at the registration desk. You can use your smartphone, tablet or computer. Attendees are reminded that only shareholders, both virtual and in person may ask questions in the meeting today. You may, however, submit your questions any time from now until the Q&A session begins. The introductory statements referred to by our Chair will now be played.
Shareholders, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. Some brief observations. There are 2 big trends affecting all of us now. The first is artificial intelligence is transforming our own lives. But who the eventual winners and losers will be still unclear. If you want to guess at what point we are in this game, you may well compare it to the life cycle of the commercial Internet. So I think 3 years after the big bang, 1998. Then Amazon was still puny and none of Facebook Alphabet or Tencent existed. Today, the AI race has barely started. We have a few horses running, Tencent and our e-commerce ecosystems. You'll hear more later today to help you judge whether to back the [ odds ]. The second trend is a new sort of balkanization of the world. You may still remember Gwyneth Paltrow using the term conscious uncoupling.
Now it's pretty unclear to what extent our rather intertwined world can be uncoupled or how all these present threats will really play out. But we fancy the countries where we operate, and we'll stick with them through thick and thin. Looking at our own business, in Fabricio Bloisi, our new CEO, I believe we have an excellent leader. He is shaping the group with a sense of urgency. Vasileios Sgourdos, our previous CFO, retired after long and loyal service, Nico Marais stepping into that role. Pending your approval, Nico and Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, the South Africa CEO of Naspers, will join our Board. We take leave today of Cobus Stofberg as a Director. He is a true founding leader of this group.
Now you'll notice that we are becoming less of an investor into a wide range of assets, more of an operating company. We are constructing great e-commerce ecosystems in Europe, in Latin America, India and South Africa. Now of course, one of our aims is to make money that we constantly remind ourselves of what Henry Ford is credited with saying. He said wealth, like happiness. You seldom attained when sought after directly. It comes as a byproduct of providing a useful service. So you may ask, why do Prosus and ask question if is this useful? Well, we simplify or enrich the lives of our customers through food delivery, e-commerce and payments.
And as a consequence of this drive, our financial profile is changing. In the past, we grew, but we made losses. Now we grow and we make profits. $1.6 billion of revenues yield hard cash flow, hopefully, more of it next year. So we are recommending to you that the group double our dividend, firstly, because we can afford it; secondly, because we think we can sustain it. I want to thank our Board members here for your sensible advice over the past year and our staff for making dramatic things happen.
Now over to Debra Meyer to outline what we're doing sustainably.
Ladies and gentlemen and all shareholders, thank you for joining us today as we reflect on our sustainability journey over the past year and look forward to the road ahead. This year marked a significant milestone with the publishing of our first CSRD-compliant sustainability statements with limited assurance. While we recognize the importance of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting directive, and believe in the fundamental drivers behind it, namely relevant, comparable and reliable reporting of nonfinancial performance, we also very much welcome the European Commission's Omnibus proposal. This is a step in the right direction by simplifying reporting requirements so we can leverage the same resources for putting words into real action.
At our core, we remain driven by something greater. Our belief in the power of innovation and technology to deliver a lasting and positive impact on society and the planet. We create and thrive in change. Our strategy is rooted in responsible investing, rigorous governance and a maturing sustainability framework that is embedded across our global ecosystem. Our regional ecosystem approach in markets like India, Latin America and Europe enables us to share best practices and accelerate innovation for sustainable transitions across platforms.
On climate action, Zero emission deliveries is a key focus area with a substantial portion of Scope 3 emissions arising from delivery operations electrifying our fleet isn't just a strategic priority, it's an opportunity to lead transformative change. The benefits of transitioning to electric vehicles for e-commerce deliveries are both environmental and financial. From an environmental perspective, this shift promises leaner air and healthier cities. With the fluctuating cost of petrol, drivers who adopt electric vehicles could see an increase in their earning potential, while the cost of ownership of the vehicles can also be significantly lower than combustion vehicles. Yet such progress is not achieved alone. The challenges we face require collective action and connected strategies.
Together with partners, visionaries and innovators, we are committed to reimagining delivery operations. On the people side, driver welfare and safety remain paramount. Across our group companies, platform worker earnings consistently exceed minimum wage. And we've expanded safety training, insurance coverage and AI-powered routing tools to improve delivery safety and efficiency. At the Board level, oversight of sustainability and climate strategy is firmly embedded, led by me as Chair of the Sustainability Committee. We receive regular updates on progress and our executive team is directly accountable with 20% of the CEO and CFO short-term incentives tied to ESG and climate related goals.
For the year ahead, for the first time, we have a target on social impact. While we build our dream of becoming the #1 lifestyle e-commerce company, we want to build this for and with the people in our ecosystem. By enabling access to learning and education, we seek to unlock the potential of an AI-first digital future for underserved communities. This is our story our mission and our commitment to shaping a better tomorrow. I welcome your engagement and feedback. Thank you.
It's great to be here today. Thank you for investing in Prosus and for the opportunity to share our financial progress for the year ended 31 March 2025. This year was a game changer. We proved we can keep growing sustainably by investing smartly in tech and innovation, all while staying transparent and delivering more value to you, our shareholders.
Here's the big picture. Group revenue went up 21% to USD 6.2 billion, double the growth rate of our peers. Classifieds and Food Delivery led the charge. Let me break down the numbers. Food Delivery, iFood performed exceptionally with 29% jump in orders and 50% revenue growth to USD 1.3 billion. Adjusted EBIT came in at USD 226 million. Likewise, our classifieds unit, OLX, saw an 18% revenue boost to USD 777 million with adjusted EBIT soaring 63% and margins improving to 35%. Our Payments and Fintech businesses made progress on revenue as well as margins, though PayU India posted a trading loss. Fixing that profitability is a key priority. For Etail, eMAG posted adjusted EBIT of USD 14 million with Romania driving strong performance.
On our bottom line, core headline earnings came in at USD 7.4 billion, up 59% on a per share basis. This was thanks to stronger profits across the e-commerce portfolio as well as from our equity accounted investments like Tencent and higher interest income. We ended the year with a solid USD 2.6 billion net cash position, USD 19 billion in cash, offset by USD 16.4 billion in debt. Overall free cash flow topped USD 1 billion for the first time, a huge leap from the USD 422 million last year. High food OLX and better working capital management allowed us to achieve this major milestone with USD 36 million positive free cash flow if we exclude the $0.10 dividend at Prosus level. This is almost $1 billion improvement over the last 3 years. The $0.10 dividend was meaningful at more than $1 billion. These strong results allowed us to propose a 100% increase in the Prosus dividend per share to $0.20.
Our strong balance sheet gives us a muscle to pursue opportunities that drive sustainable growth and returns. We've invested boldly in the last year, USD 7.8 billion spent and committed, but we remain disciplined, especially in today's environment. With regard to capital returns to shareholders, we should not forget the open-ended share repurchase program. Since launch in mid-2022, it's been a big value creator, boosting net asset value per share by 11%, cutting the share count by over 27% and unlocking more than $35 billion for shareholders. Thank you for your trust and support.
My name is Ingrid Buitendijk, partner at Deloitte and responsible for the audit of Prosus. I'm pleased to present to you the results of our audit of the 2025 financial statements. On June 21, we issued our unqualified auditor's report on the 2025 financial statements as included on Pages 212 to 219 of the annual report. We have obtained reasonable assurance that the financial statements taken as a whole are free from material misstatements. In our report, we discussed various aspects of our audit, including the application of materiality, our scoping and key audit matters. You've been able to read our report. I will now provide you with a summary of the main elements of our audit.
Materiality drives the nature, timing and extent of our audit procedures. We determined our materiality as a percentage of net assets, which is a generally accepted benchmark and reflects focus on long-term value creation of the investments. As for the scope of our audit, we have performed an audit of the financial information of 8 components and certain selected procedures at 4 components. We issued instructions to our component teams. We have performed a number of physical visits to the local teams and local management. In addition, we held calls and video meetings with our component teams throughout the year and reviewed selected work papers of the work performed by the component teams.
I will now cover our key audit matters. Key audit matters are those matters that in our professional judgment were of most significance in the audit of the financial statements. Our key audit matters involve complex accounting, significant estimates and management judgments and our procedures were designed to test these for bias and error using specialists and third-party information. In this year's audit, we identified 3 key audit matters. Our first key audit matter covers the accounting for the equity accounted investment in Tencent. Our second key audit matter covered the valuation of goodwill, investments in associates and investments in subsidiaries. The third key audit matter addressed the significance of share-based compensation schemes and valuation of share-based payments. The key audit matters are covered in detail in our auditor's report. Other matters reported on in our auditor's report relate to our approach to going concern, our approach to compliance with laws and regulations as well as our approach to fraud risks, which are all covered in detail in our report. We did not identify specific indications of fraud or suspected fraud.
Finally, in addition to the core audit teams at group and component level, we involve specialists and experts in the areas of valuations, remuneration, tax, IT, forensic and accounting. Throughout the year, my team and I met with a wide range of people within Prosus, including members of the Board. We have had robust discussions at all levels of management and with the Audit Committee. There was active engagement and our insights are respected and taken seriously. Next to the issuance of the auditor's report, we also issued our unqualified limited assurance report with the CSRD report for the first time. This concludes my comments.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and thank you for joining us at our Annual General Meeting. Reflecting on fiscal '25 and looking ahead to fiscal '26, I'm inspired by the professionalism and dedication of our shareholder community. You are more than stakeholders. You are our partners in pursuing growth, resilience and innovation.
Today, I'll highlight the key advancements we've made, particularly in executive remuneration, ensuring leadership incentives drive long-term value. To accelerate growth and boost returns, we have materially refined our remuneration structure over the past year and for the time ahead.
At its core, we have now included a high-risk, high-return incentive, the moonshot award. For the CEO, it's a $100 million incentive triggered by meeting 2 exceptionally difficult goalposts. Firstly, by doubling market capitalization; and secondly, by exceeding median performance against an exceptionally competitive set of peers. It's a bold reflection of our pay-for-performance philosophy, rewarding outcomes, not just ambitions. We are clear that events such as acquisitions, asset sales and other structural actions will adjust the measurement to ensure true value is being created for you in the measurement. Further, we have expressly stated that the program is designed such that the share buyback remains a positive behavioral incentive for the company, and there is no conflict with this incentive.
The moonshot award has also been extended to the CEO's direct reports and other senior team members while reducing the issuance of incentives under other existing LTI plans, the aspiration to emphasize an even more risk-based and shareholder-aligned approach to remuneration. In response to shareholder feedback, performance share units or PSUs tied to shareholder returns, including Tencent's performance as opposed to e-commerce compound annual growth were introduced into the policy and are awarded to the CEO and CFO. Value creation extends beyond financial results. Therefore, 10% of executives' short-term incentives in fiscal '26 will link directly to ESG metrics, including employee engagement and community impact. This reflects our shareholders' expectations and commitment to a broader societal mandate.
Our pay-for-performance philosophy remains key. In fiscal '26, 99% of the CEO's pay will be at-risk pay, principally tied to ambitious, measurable goals, ensuring executive awards align closely with your returns. We listen carefully to your feedback, particularly about long-term incentives and reducing the NAV discount. We've implemented stronger transparency, detailed performance metrics and enhanced communications to reflect these priorities. Despite various management efforts, including our open-ended share buyback program in fiscal '25, the NAV discount gap widened as of March 31 of this year. To ensure management's focus on the discount reduction and in line with shareholder feedback, 10% of the CEOs and 15% of the CFO's short-term incentives for fiscal '26 tied to progress on this front, highlighting our commitment to reducing the gap and delivering shareholder value.
In our remuneration policy, which will be put to you, our shareholders, later today, as committed when we spoke last year, we have reintroduced the requirement for the CEO to hold a material number of Naspers and Prosus shares of at least 4 to 6x as annual salary. The purpose is to foster longer-term alignment to shareholders. I am pleased to report that the CEO's ownership already exceeds this requirement. Some core themes in the remuneration strategy are: strategic alignment with shareholder value creation, a well-balanced LTI package promotes our aim to double market cap and per share value creation and delivers strong returns relative to the industry. Transparency and engagement. Your feedback shapes policies, performance goals and dialogue, your perspective had absolute impact on policy and implementation.
Sustainability focus, ESG-linked pay demonstrates commitment to governance and talent attraction. These pillars and others reflect our shared belief. We recognize our success depends on yours. With fiscal '26 ahead, I'm confident these enhancements position us to tackle challenges, seize opportunities and create lasting value for shareholders. Thank you for your trust, insights and commitment to our vision. Together, let's make exceptional performance our legacy. Thank you.
Craig, that's appreciated. Thanks a lot. Now we ask you Fabricio to look at the operations and give us a quick update.
Good afternoon, everyone. Hello. Good afternoon. They are there. Very good to be here with you. I am Fabricio. I'm not the new CEO. I am Fabric, the CEO. One year after, there is no new anymore. Last year, I just arrived when I came here to talk to you. So I was still trying to understand how everything work. Now I'm here for 1 year. So everything is my fault. I'm going to talk to you many things. Hope you enjoy a feel. Hope you have ideas of how to make it better. That's why we are here to improve every day. So I'm very happy to be here with you. That's our quick agenda. Koos told me that sometimes I talk too much. So I have to try to talk in 20 to 25 minutes. It's not working. That's -- Prosus is working. The only thing not working are the slides. It's a good problem to have. So next slide, please. Good.
So I'll start talking our agenda for today, that's it. Good. I started briefly on who we are, myself and Prosus. I will tell on the beginning of the first 8, 10 minutes, a little bit about what -- a few things that we already told over the last 2, 3 months, what we are doing, what our objectives, what are our priorities. When I came here, I just want to make a remark. First, we have here many shareholders, stakeholders. We have here employees. We have here our Board. Welcome, Board to have you all here. And you have also this time more than -- close to 3,000 people online. So hello, everyone online. Good to see you around. I hope you enjoy our presentation today. So I'm going to talk a little about telling you what we are doing, what are our priorities, who is Prosus, what we are building. Some of this information, I already told over the last 3 months. That's the first part on building the ecosystem and building through innovation. But then I'm going to spend at least 10 minutes or 15 minutes talking about what's not public yet.
So we are in August, what happened in April, May, June and July. Over the last year, I tried to give you much more transparency. What we are doing, what's working, what's not working. So I'm going to share 7 or 8 highlights over the last 4 months. I hope you appreciate. Hope the online people appreciate, and we are here for -- to answer any questions after that. So let's go. That's our agenda for today. It's even working here. Great. So about me, I'm Fabricio. I'm not the new CEO. I'm the old CEO in charge of all the problems. So I'm here to talk about that. But also there is a few good things. Even my friend there, he decided he's happier this year. Look forward to your question this year. I remember the question last year. So look forward to listening to you.
I'm from Brazil. I started computer science then management in Brazil and U.S. I founded a company called Movile. I grow iFood from 20 people to more or less 7,000, 8,000 people. Prosus was my investor for 15 years. And now I'm the old CEO of Prosus for the last 1 year. Very excited, very happy where I am. I think the opportunity is amazing. And the opportunities -- I'm a tech entrepreneur, so I'm optimistic. I like to build to innovate, to do more things. And I think Prosus is an amazing place to do that. Prosus story -- we had so many transformations from a press -- a print company 100 years ago in South Africa that's transformed to print, pay TV, mobile networks, social networks.
Today, we are a commerce company focused in AI. But the amazing thing of leading this company is that we are open to create the future and create the future outside U.S. Latin America needs that. India needs that. Europe needs to have big technology companies here. So I think we have an amazing asset, and I'm very excited. Today, we are a $136 billion company. I think last year, I don't remember the number, but it was around $80 billion or $90 billion. So something good is happening. But we are just getting started. We have so much ahead in terms of innovation, developing the regions, impact, creation of value to shareholders. I'm going to share our next steps with you. So let's go a little faster.
During this 1 year, a lot of my time and effort and energy was on culture. To be a leading tech culture, we should be talking about innovation, about investing in people, investing in development of the people, investing about creating the future. We did a strong transformation have here our VP of People, [indiscernible]. Thank you very much for working so hard this year, and we have our amazing [ AGR ] team, our people team. We reinforced our values of being an entrepreneurial company, not only do the budget or do what's written there is to create a better future. And we have today many owners really passionate about that, about being focusing results, talking a lot without delivering results, no one cares about that. But at the same time, being ambidextrous to innovate a lot to focus on people, the only thing that matter in a technology company, and to deliver real impact to the communities where we operate. We talk a lot about that. We did that through events and retails that put everyone together.
We have more than 30,000 people, and we made hundreds of events like that one in Stanford for the leaders or other 50 -- more than 30 events just like that or the Prosus Way or the Prosus Way award. So for me, having a culture of a tech company is the core of everything. Many times I meet banks or investors and they say, I really care about the numbers. The numbers is a result of our people, and we have to invest in our culture to have the people really believing in what we are building. Besides us working a lot on our culture, we redefine who is Prosus. We are not saying we are investing in any company around the world, any participation, but we have a focus to build the #1 lifestyle e-commerce company in Europe, India and Latin America. So we have a clear focus now, these 3 ecosystems, and we are going to do that unlocking an AI-first world. So AI is a big part about what we are doing. I believe we are one of the best players in AI.
I believe we are the best player in AI in Latin America, Europe and India, and this is very important for these 3 regions. I'm going to talk more about that today. But as I said, now we have a focus. Most of you know our origins are in South Africa. That's where Prosus started. Most of our growth came from a big investor that we are very proud on China. But now we have a focus, and the focus is Latin America, where we have an amazing ecosystem iFood, iFood Pago, OLX, Despegar and Sympla, so food, fintech, commerce and experience. We are building as exciting as Latin America one in India, where we have PayU that we own, but many amazing -- some of -- most of the best Indian companies are invested by Prosus. For example, Meesho or Swiggy or Rapido besides PayU, an urban company.
And we started to do that here in Europe. I'm very proud that we made our offer to buy Just Eat Takeaway. I'm going to talk a little about that. I'm very happy because this is based here in Amsterdam. And my intention is to make Amsterdam strong place where we develop technology innovation in Europe and the Just Eat Takeaway acquisition is very important to get there. But we are just getting started. I expected to invest many, many more billions of dollars to make the technology company in Europe much more -- much bigger, much more impactful to Europe. And I think Europe needs that. It's an opportunity. It's also a responsibility that Prosus can do. So that's the focus of Prosus, but we can only get there if we are a very innovative company, and we are in the front. We are really developing the most sophisticated kind of applied AI that happens in the world right now.
What we are doing is using trillions of data of all our transactions to train, to fine-tune large language models to predict better what users demand. We are very happy on the position we are here. I think the technology we have here in Amsterdam and also in Latin America and Brazil is top in the world in terms of AI for e-commerce. I'm going to talk a little more about AI progress today, but we are very proud that we are not here to see what the American companies are doing. We are here to create here in Europe, a lead AI center. Moving on a little. I finished our Capital Markets Day saying that many shareholders, maybe a few of you here said -- used to say, no, Prosus is $0.10 minus their cost because they're not generating value. I told you on the Capital Markets Day we did, I think, 2 months ago only that my absolutely goal is to change that to not Tencent minus, but Prosus plus Tencent. We should be valued by what we do in Prosus, the growth we have in Prosus, the technology we generate in Prosus and the profitability generated in Prosus. And we still have $150 billion in Tencent. That's the Prosus deal that I'm working for you.
I think we had a good year in this direction. Our Tencent dividends increased by 24%, what is good. People used to say, yes, but then you use that for yourself. Actually, we expected to create at least 83% in our growth in our EBITDA this year. 83% is the projection of our CFO. My number is much bigger. So I really expect to overdeliver on that. I'm not talking more about that. Otherwise, my Board are going to say, don't talk all these big numbers today. But we will over deliver that. We will grow a lot our own EBITDA and our corporate cost has to be under control. Someone here last year said, you're a big company just using this Tencent. No. We are here to create our own -- sorry, to create our own value and to pay for that and to profit for that and distribute dividends from our own value or to invest on our own value creation.
So I think we have a lot of growth ahead in our Prosus plus Tencent vision, and I think we started to deliver. I know you are going to believe me just after 2, 3 or 4 years delivering consistently, but we have 2 nice half years, and there will be many more ahead. A few of these slides I shared with you, our shareholders over the last 3 or 4 months. I really like to keep communicating what's happening. So we are just getting started. I want to share with you what we haven't shared yet. What happened in April, May and June and July. So let me share you a few things of the last 4 months. We are just getting started. First, we are on budget. Actually, we are a little better than the budget. So our revenue is more or less in line of our revenue target, as you can see there, around 15% growth and $1.7 billion in revenue. But our EBITDA is around 14%, 15% ahead of the plan, what put us much closer to the top of the guidance I gave. And that's my goal, the top of the guidance. We started well. We are confident that we are going to keep increasing this number and growing not only inside the guidance, but going to the top of the guidance.
I have other very interesting news to share with you. When I announced in February that we are going to propose the acquisition of just Eat Takeaway, most of the people gave -- some people said, congratulations. Many people said, "Oh my God, this is going to take 2 or 3 years. It's going to be a nightmare. You know why invest in Europe." I completely disagree. I think we have this responsibility to invest in Europe, and we will have a big impact. But the bigger risk, and I said that in at least 1 or twice event with shareholders was we didn't know how much time it will take to approve this deal. It could take like 1 or 2 years, and it scared me a lot because we are now in a competitive world. Our competitors are moving faster, investing more, wait 2 years for something. That was a nightmare to me. We have very good news. We got approval from [ these ] company, European Commission in 5.5 months. I know sometimes some of the shareholders, not you here, but you there in the online, sometimes investors are a little pessimist. The one here are super optimist, but everyone said it's going to take 1 to 2 years, 5.5 months even for the pessimist shareholder. I hope you are happy. We are moving faster. That's what we have to do, move faster and deliver results. So I'm quite happy with that.
I'm looking to the clock to avoid me talking 1 hour. I used to talk a lot. But look to that. This is not a new guidance. Otherwise, we have to communicate it to the whole world right now. But this is our -- the previous guidance I gave you 2 months ago, adding the existing Just Eat Takeaway guidance and look to that, maybe we are going to be a $9.5 billion company this fiscal year. Maybe I believe we can be $1.3 billion, $1.4 billion, some optimistic people think even more one day, $1 billion EBITDA company this year. And even if you are a pessimistic shareholder, I want to remind you, 18 months ago, you were complaining a lot with my Board members, Board partners here. This company should be profitable. It's losing money. This is bad. 12, 18 months later, we are preparing to have close to $1.5 billion and the expectation you saw in my other Capital Markets Day is to triple the number of fiscal year 2025. So we are just getting started. I think it's a good start.
I have a few more things to share with you. First, I talk about innovation, AI, funny things about the future, but we cannot deliver any of that if we do not have a lot of discipline. I'm a founder of a start-up for 20 years. Many times, we have to take tough decisions, reduce costs, reduce people, change plans, cut on projects. We keep the level of discipline in Prosus quite high. So we optimized our portfolio. So we sold and get cash for almost $800 million just in the last 4 months. And we -- I announced the number for the last year, I think, in April or May. So just in the last 4 months, $800 million. My intention is to do that with $2 billion. Why? Because investing is easy, divest and say this is not working, take the hard decision or say, this is not getting where I want to invest in better things is what a company has to do to keep the discipline, and our bar on discipline keeps going up.
The big topic for us last year was highlight value. And we said -- I think I said that in the August of -- at [ Maximum ] December, our priority is India. So we are happy and proud that we made the Swiggy IPO. I want to remind you, we invested in Swiggy when it was a very small company. Now it's a $10 billion company more or less. But we had yesterday another IPO in India of a company called Bluestone that Prosus is an investor. It's more or less $1 billion IPO in total. We are a small shareholder, but we are very happy because the second IPO in a few months. And I told you a few times, I expected 5 IPOs in India. We expect more 3 IPOs in the next 12 months or less, highlighting the value of our very good Indian portfolio, where we are investors of many of the best companies in India.
The lawyers is asking me to do not talk about the future IPOs by name because the regulation there is very strict on that. But we are very optimistic that we have more 3 great IPOs over the next month. Moving on besides discipline, we always talk well about Tencent, about how proud we are that we invested one of the best companies in the world, about we think that there is very few great global tech players, most of them in California. We are a big shareholder, a very big shareholder of a Chinese one and they just delivered their results. I know it sounds good, $25 billion in revenue. It's good, I'm sure. Even the pessimistic shareholder there, he says, yes, $25 billion is good. And $8 billion in operating profit. But actually, that's not the best news.
The best news is what's written here. The consensus for Tencent was 11% growth in revenue and they grow 15%. The consensus for Tencent was a 15% growth in profit and they grow 22%. I want to say that because many times, people say, but you still believe in Tencent. Yes, we still believe in Tencent. It's going to keep growing. It's going to generate good returns for us, shareholders. And we are quite happy with the results announced, I think, last week or in the last 5 days. A few more quick news. I talked the last time we met about large commerce model, how we are training AI to predict customer behavior. I'm not going to show the numbers of that today. I could, but I'm going to show another thing that was very important in the last 3 or 4 months. In the last 3 or 4 months, most people in AI are talking about agents and how agents are enable productivity, very high productivity growth. So this is an internal number of Prosus. We had around -- we started to do agents working -- helping people to work faster in December with our own system called Toqan. It was around like 500 agents. In the last 2 or 3 months, it grew from around 1,300 to close to 3,000 agents.
And more than that, look to this green. We say here, considered AI employee. It was 500 in February or March. Now it's around 1,600. What means that we have around 1,600 people doing the job faster for other real people. I'll give you a few examples. Sometimes it's difficult to see what I'm talking about. When we started talking about AI 1 year ago, we said AI expands the people's work. So for example, you have your assistance called Toqan in our case, and we write to them. Please summarize that, please do that. He write a very nice material, and we use that to move faster, just like your ChatGPT probably does. What happened in the last few months are agents that they keep working 24 hours, checking what's happening and they autonomously get the data, process the data, create a report, send to the restaurant, to the partner, to the driver, and you have humans just supervising it.
I'll give you one example. We have, for example, in iFood, 500 people doing customer -- restaurant assistance. These 500 people spend around 20% of the time, so 100 people just preparing the reports. Usually, they take from 1, 2 or 3 different systems, sending that to the restaurants and answering questions to make the restaurants sell more. Now we have agents that more or less value to 100 people doing all this process automatically. I have a few slides about that I had to cut because of the time, but it's amazing because the agents are saying, these are new restaurants. These are 10 different reports that are -- this is my analysis about these reports. These are the final reports. I'm sending to them. I'm answering questions to the restaurants and the people that is in the customers -- the restaurant support, they are looking to that and they can supervise our robots. This is growing like crazy in the last few months.
Prosus is at the front of this kind of R&D, the front of using Toqen, our own platform to enable much, much productivity, not only productivity, but treating people better. For example, in this case, we can only supply this kind of real-time information and consultancy to 45% of iFood restaurants. But now because we have that, we have 100% of the restaurants having full support of how they can operate better, work better, getting data and information every day. I think this is a competitive advantage for us.
I'd like to invite here one of our new employees. He's intern, so he's not very smart yet, but that's what we are working now. So Rob, our new employee, is being connected to Toqen right now, and we are spending our time to understand how we can teach Rob how to read all our information.
Hello, good morning, say hello to everyone, don't be unpolite. Yes, he's a new interne. He's a little like -- thank you very much. You are very kind, very polite. So it's very funny to have a robot, but what we are working with them really. I asked the team to put them to answer questions today. They said, come on, he is not ready yet, but it to you. So I can promise you in the next AGM, Rob will be there with me with absolutely all the data of Prosus, and he's going to answer that because he's integrated with Toqen. What we are -- everything good there, okay? So what we are working with them, how we cannot only teach an agent to work on a virtual word, but also interact with the real world, how we can use our own LLM, token, so you can ask things in the real world and they can support us. There is more people doing that. Yes, there's lots of people doing -- trying to do that. Prosus is pushing the boundaries on what we can do. So my promise is next time he'll be talking, he talks a little, but we decided that's too much risk for today. Next time, he will talk a lot with you. So say bye to them, go there. And if you want, you can pay a coffee for -- or he doesn't drink coffee, but you can talk to him later, but not on camera. So next time on camera, Rob will be here.
So my point here is the trend is -- I thought you -- have you been drinking, Rob? No drinking, no drinking duty hour. Our corporate shareholder presentations, I told him. Look, large language models, agents and agents going to the real world, we have to invest to push the boundaries at what we are doing, okay, almost over the time. Obviously, talking about robots is fun, but we have to understand how we talk about people. So impact is one of our values. And we tried this year to disclose more information about what we are doing, and we are committed to disclose even more information about what we are doing. I also defined a priority and the priority for us is technology to improve education. We have many, many projects, over 30 learning initiatives across all around the world, obviously, more India, South Africa, Brazil, but other 10 countries. We are starting now to have this information in a format that we can display everything we are doing all around the world.
A few data that I enjoy to share. We have more than 100,000 people impacted by our education initiatives. We think that's very high transformational impact, around 10,000 people on education through technology, what's start, good start. I love the way we are trying to put the work together to talk about impact on gig work. A few times this year, we put all companies, not only iFood or the companies that are related to Prosus, but all companies together to share how we treat employees, how is the wage dynamics, how is the driver safety dynamics, share the best practices and numbers. I really think this kind of event is amazing. So I'm very proud that Prosus is fostering that. And now we are giving one step more. We are working together with World Economic Forum to create -- we are one of the founding partners of the future of giga work to try to define a way to analyze the quality, compare and share best practices all around the world.
So I really expect you to share more how -- what we are doing here over the next year. And also not only education and giga work, but also electric fleet, where we have the #1 in South Africa. This is important for many reasons. You saw Debra talking about that. So that's our priorities. We have more focus now and expect more results where we have more focus. To finish, now I'm out of time and Koos started to say, come on, come on, you talk too much. To finish, our buyback is still going on. We bought back $40 billion in total, Prosus plus Naspers, more or less 30% of the outstanding shares. It was a very good business for the ones that haven't sold. If you sold, you can buy again. So go there now, buy a Prosus share. Can I do merchandising here? So we are going to have a lot of appreciation because of the buyback. I think it's a very success what we did.
To finish, I think this is the last one. Lots of hard work, lots of work from the Board, but most of that from the 30,000 people that do Prosus, changing culture, innovation, bottom line, making difficult decisions. I thank you for the positive response or the trust on that. Over the last 1 year, our share price was up around 60%, 59%. We enjoyed very much to make put on this chart NASDAQ. So NASDAQ had a 26% year, Prosus has a 59% year. I think it's a good start. Are we there? Obviously not. We still need to grow like a lot for 10 years, but it's a good start. So my suggestion, call your American friends and say, forget NASDAQ, Prosus, buy the European leader. That's the good thing to do. It's a good start. We also talked here last year about discounts. The discount reduced by 7% more or less. 2, 3 weeks ago, it was 28%. So it was even more. I think the trend is quite good. It created $13 billion.
Someone in this room, I'm not going to say who, but he said, look, 100% of the value is Tencent. It's not $13 billion. This is not Tencent. And more than that, we grow more than Tencent shares over the last year. That's what we intend to do. It's a start, much more ahead. So this data that you just saw is new. So I hope you enjoy to start this conversation with some news, and I hope we can answer all your questions. Thanks for coming, and let's go for the questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Fabricio. As Fabricio mentioned, we will now move on to the Q&A session. I have some information on the votes that may be cast today and details of which will now be displayed on the screen. Shareholders were able to raise questions ahead of the meeting and answers to these questions have been published on our website. If you are unable to ask a question during the meeting, please e-mail your questions to our Investor Relations team. You can use the address that appears on the screen now. And contact details are also available on our website.
We will deal with shareholders attending in person first and then those attending virtually. We invite you to raise your hand and once invited, please walk up to the microphone in the center of the room. We also request that you start by stating your name and the organization you represent. You are also welcome to ask your questions in Dutch. We will then move to questions from those attending virtually. For those shareholders attending virtually, please click the Q&A icon on your screen. Questions will be read one by one and allocated to the person best able to answer it. After this Q&A session, we will then proceed to voting. Shareholders attending physically, we now welcome you to ask your questions.
Good afternoon. My name is Peter [indiscernible]. I'm representing VBDO, that is the Association of Dutch Investors for Sustainable Development. So thank you for your nice presentations. My first -- I have 4 questions. So my first question is...
To make it more productive. You're very welcome to ask all 4. Ask one, we answer and then we get to the next, then we can give you a proper answer. Otherwise, it becomes a jumble.
We were happy with your reporting about the gender pay gap. So this year, you said the unadjusted pay gap is 26% and the adjusted pay gap between women and men is 40%. That is really good that you publish it. Our question is, is it possible to follow it year-on-year because you also stated that you want to improve it to diminish the pay gap between women and men. Can you also do that next year again?
You think we should pay women the same as men.
Well, you should adjust for a role, but you described that. So that's the point.
Peter, Debra Meyer is our in that department. So Debra, if you kindly get up here and ask and then you're very welcome to ask the other questions, too.
So thank you for the question. We also appreciate you acknowledging that the fact that we disclose the gender pay gap is a major step towards transparency. We cannot make such a disclosure without plans to decrease and eventually close the gap. So we have a number of initiatives in place to decrease the gap and then close it and we will be reporting annually on our progress.
Thank you. It's a nice answer.
So Peter can I strengthen you in your evil and put Debra under pressure. One of the biggest problems in tech is the gender imbalance at universities. So if you look at the U.S., typically about, let's say, 20% of the class of electronic engineering would be female the same in China and the same in Japan. And why that is still the case? I've never seen a plausible explanation. That's one of the biggest problems. They can fix it at the Board level. Our Board is, I think, quite good in terms of gender. You can fix it at several levels. But when you come to hard coding, engineering, you have this problem of what the universities kick out, which we haven't solved and no one has solved it.
Okay. That's I'm aware of that, but still, you have to do the adjusted -- reducing the pay gap. But thank you for your answer. Then the next question is about living wage. So you have told us about this initiative to work together in the World Economic Forum. That is really good. Can you make in next year's annual report, it's a bit more comprehensive for us as shareholders. What's your initiative entails and how you can proceed on that because, yes, the gig economy is hard to raise the standard of living, but you are working together in the right direction. And hopefully, we can have more insight with hard numbers, if possible, next year.
Debra, answer. Fabricio can add to that.
All right. Yes, we are definitely working towards it. And as you know, there's no clear guidelines on exactly how to report everything. So we are partnering with the World Economic Forum to develop a guideline as was mentioned by Fabricio that would allow all of us to benchmark but we do plan to keep on reporting our progress in that regard.
Okay. Thank you.
He is passionate about the topic.
Yes. I agree. We have to share more, and I completely agree with you.
Okay. Then I have a question on Food Delivery because you're taking over Just Eat. So you are, in fact, a real global player in Food Delivery. Yes, in your 2024 environmental impact publication, you had a nice report, on Page 11, where you state, for example, that is you decrease -- slightly decreased the plastic use in a delivery. This is a nice KPI. However, you have not published that in 2025 in your environmental report, unfortunately, because you are there more on a high level reporting just about single-use plastics, but not as precise as you did in 2024. So we appreciate your 2024 environmental publication. Could you then take that also to your annual report? This is just one pager because you report so nicely on CO2 and all that stuff. So I think this is also important for the annual report.
Yes, we can certainly do that. As you've acknowledged, it is in our environmental impact report, we will make sure we'll transfer to the annual report as well.
Rachel, you want to comment, that's your fault.
Sorry, thank you, Peter, for the question. The reason that we left it out of the annual report this year is because within the materiality piece, we were not -- we wanted to make sure everything that we presented within CSRD was material, the topics -- we would have standardized definitions across Takealot, iFood, eMAG, all of them. And therefore, that was the challenge. You will definitely see an improvement, appreciate your feedback.
Okay. Thank you. And then my final question, is about -- yes, you said science-based targets on CO2 reduction and new state on Page 98, that you have a target for portfolio companies where you invest in for 50%. That is perhaps a good target. But the point is can you also show then in the next annual report where you are at the current moment?
Yes, we can certainly do that. I think we set the target about 2 years ago, we are already at 24%. So we can certainly give you incremental...
Annually you can give that number as well.
Yes.
[indiscernible] questions, folks. Welcome.
2. Question Answer
Good afternoon. My name is Errol Keyner. I speak on behalf of European Investors/VEB. I'm glad to be here for the second year in a row. And as Mr. Bloisi said, he challenged me last year. I dare you to come back with the same negative questions, so I'm back here.
Negative and positive, I said.
Last year, I came here challenging you actually with the suggestion why just not sitting on your Tencent shares and not do anything else, stop having all those headquarter people and all those kind of ventures, all the kind of investments, [ pie in the sky ] investments and just sit on the Tencent shares and let them grow. Well, you had a very strong answer on that. You were still polite. I was still polite, but more critical, skeptical. I must admit 1 year later, I'm more positive, I'm more optimistic. So the skepticism was far too extreme.
Thank you. With that, I think we've been...
However, it will take a couple of more years for me to become a fan of Prosus. But I'm certainly more optimistic. And the optimism is not only the language in your annual report, which there's some kind of vibe in it, some entrepreneurial vibe. I'm sure that's also due to the new CEO. But especially since I love numbers more than I love people actually. So I'm especially positive about the fact that more and more of the businesses, not Tencent is becoming cash flow positive. And that is really essential. So now my question, my key question for today. I've got a new challenge, challenging question for you. Why not splitting Prosus up in 2 parts. One is Tencent, it's kind of investment fund or ETF, and they are very technical smart ways of making sure that discount will then disappear.
And then the other part is the thing where you're really spending your time on and where you're also investing, all those ventures, which are now in the meantime, getting close, some of them are getting close to cash flow positive because it has got 2 advantages. One of them, for sure, you got the type of shareholder then say, I really want to invest in the future and the future, which is in your hands instead of in the hands of the Tencent Board. There's less dependency on China. Many things can happen. So what is now a success story with Tencent can suddenly stop -- and then we've got 80% or more of our value, maybe 95% of value, more or less disappear. Secondly, probably even more important than that, it ensures that all your ventures have got more drive, more push even to become self-sufficient. You will be forced to apply an even more rigorous capital allocation process. I understand that in the beginning, it's almost impossible since you need to have funding, you need to go to banks, you need to back shareholders want to have some kind of capital from the market. If more and more of your businesses, your ventures are becoming cash flow positive, that issue disappears.
So my question to you is as a kind of new challenge, why not splitting up Prosus in 2 parts, Tencent shares separate and then all the ventures part together.
First, your 2 observations are accurate about Fabricio. The 2 things we emphasize most actually is a culture of enthusiasm and positivism. This is a dangerous game we play. You need a certain optimism. You need to try and fail and try again every day. So that's the big thing. And the next one is grow and be profitable at the same time, which is hard. It's okay to grow your revenue, making a loss, but it's hard to make a profit and then still grow because then you're not investing all your cash back into growth. On the Tencent thing, we're definitely not going to do that, not now or ever for the following reason. If you look at the U.S. economy very broadly, about 75% of all the money made during the past 2 years on all the stock exchanges, right? Careful, 75% of all the money made on all the stock exchanges were made in tech. The whole rest of the economy, defense, banks, everything else, 25%, okay? So you want to be in tech. Where do you want to be in tech?
Of that, the vast majority was made by 7 companies, the magnificent 7, right? They made $8 trillion between them in 2 years. It's unbelievable. And I say, why did that occur? It's because they have ecosystems. A typical small tech start-up has a chance of success, a chance of failure, but betting on it is a 50% game. That's not where the money is. The money is in the big systems. And why the big systems are so powerful is because they're self-reinforcing. So if you take Tencent, they have games, right? They're the #1 games company in the world, not in China, in the world, your kid, if you have a grandchild probably plays a Tencent game. And those games companies sit in America, Finland, all over the place, right? But it's a Tencent game. But they funnel traffic from their social networks into the games. They provide the payment method by their payment tool, right? They even provide credit. They provide communication between the games players through the whole ecosystem. So the strength of that -- and that's the same that Meta does, Facebook, same that Apple does. Apple is, in fact, a magnificent ecosystem worth $4 trillion.
Google has some of that. Amazon has some of that, and that's why they are the magnificent 7. Now there are only 2 places in the world where this has yet to occur, the U.S. and China, not in Europe. We're trying to do it. It hasn't happened here, hasn't happened anywhere else. Those are the 2 engines. That's also where AI is strongest in China. Tencent is one of the leaders in the world in AI. So if you say, where do we want to be invested? I want to be in China. Are there risks in China -- Is the risk in China bigger than the Europe? I don't think so. They don't have Ukraine on the doorstep, right? China is running at 4% growth, 5% growth a year. Yes, they have problems with the U.S., so have India, so have Brazil. I think the political risk is no bigger than anywhere else. It is one of the 2 gravitational centers of AI in the world. We want to be there.
The next thing is that there's a flow of knowledge and insights between Tencent and ourselves. So I was in the Board meeting of Tencent last week in Hong Kong, and we sat struggling with the problems and opportunities and so on for a whole week. Fabricio has been repeatedly there with these teams of people, how many times -- how many teams have you led to China in the last year?
I've been 4 or 5, but also the people in Prosus go there to learn. As we go to Silicon Valley a lot, we go to China a lot.
There's a flow of information. For example, the biggest food delivery system in the world is in China. It's not in the U.S. Chinese payments on mobile exceed the U.S. by a factor of, I think, 50 or so, just so much bigger. So in some fields, we can learn best in the U.S., and we respect that and we go learn. But in other fields, we can learn best in China. So China makes us a better operator. I mean they're technically far ahead of Europe, miles ahead of Europe. Okay. That's a long answer.
I recognize the story about ecosystems. Actually, that was my third question, but it's good to have addressed it right now. The one point where we probably differ in opinion is our assessment about the risk in China versus risks in Europe or certainly risks in the U.S. I'm sure 1 year ago, my point would have been stronger. The U.S. is a big friend of Europe, and we share similar values. Of course, now with Trump, that has changed slightly or even more than slightly. However, our assessment about the risk in China, the 2 of us, we differ on that point. And even if we don't differ on that point, that is a more nuanced opinion, we still have to conclude that 80% or 90% of your real true value is in China. It's not like 10%, 20%, 30% or 40%, which would make more sense as far as spreading your risks. So I do not change my opinion so far on this point yet. So the kind of risk assessment is at least different from the way I see it compared to your position.
Look, everyone is entitled to this view and to some extent, we all speculate. What is certainly true is that the level of serious risk in the world has increased, but it applies to every country in the world in a different way. So if you look at the U.S. There are certain heavy risk factors going on there. If you just look at the fiscal deficit, the risk that these trade policies are unleashing. No one knows where that will end. There's a risk factor there. It's a wonderful country. I admire it in many ways, but there's a big risk and high valuation on the stock exchanges now. I mean, Meta is trading at 25 PE, Tencent at 20 PE for no obvious reason. Then Europe has its own problems. I mean, Europe is getting poorer by the year. If you take where Europe was 20 years ago relative to the U.S. in terms of the GDP, it now has about 2/3 of the GDP of the U.S., if you add Britain to Europe, right? But a couple of years ago, it was the same. It's declining. And China is just racing ahead. India is racing. So Europe is a declining asset.
Our opinion on Europe is the same actually. So we don't differ. We did our own assessment on the risk of China versus U.S. But okay, I think you answered it very clearly. We don't split Prosus up in 2 parts. We're very happy because we want to be invested in China, and we do recognize this process is a big part of our assets of our value is tied up in China. I've got a second question, which is more technical and very easy to be answered. You've been indicating several numbers about the value creation because of the trick. I don't mean negatively. It's very obvious to do this, buying back your own shares at a discount by selling Tencent shares at a much higher price than you value yourself in your own company. That makes a lot of sense. You indicate in your annual report that this kind of procedure has created some kind of value of around $35 billion, also different numbers today, maybe $13 billion.
And I wonder if that is the correct calculation. Because shouldn't you compare doing nothing compared to buying back your own shares and selling Tencent? Because in the end, the kind of -- if you see what the value is of the shares you bought back is about $45 billion, which is a big profit compared because you only spent maybe $27 billion or so. So that's very positive. However, this came at a price. This came at a price of selling Tencent shares who've increased also in value to $43 billion. So in the end, you may have added, I think, around $3 billion. It's still a great number, but it's not $35 billion or $13 billion. So the kind of technical exercise that you've been doing, it was not a $35 billion value creation in my opinion. Or am I wrong?
I think you're largely right. Nico can come and explain. But the reduction in discounts a factor of 2 things. I think the one is the energy that Fabricio injected in the company and the good things that are happening in food delivery and classifieds and so on , that definitely added to it. Absolutely. Nico, you can ask -- talk on the rest.
Yes. Thank you for your question. Maybe to help you and our shareholders to get their heads around this, maybe the best way to look at it or a way to look at it is as follows. If we look at -- since we started our share buyback, what happened to the Tencent share price? Tencent share price went up by about 54% over that period. Through the buyback, we actually, on a per share basis, increased our exposure to Tencent. So from an individual shareholder perspective, they were not diluted in terms of their actual exposure to the company. If you include that impact, the growth for our shareholders has actually been not 54%, but 64%. That's what we refer to as the NAV and increasing the exposure to the underlying NAV.
The third part was, if you look at the actual discount that we were traded just compared to our Tencent stake, and I'm ignoring all the other assets, put a 0 value at that. At the time of starting the discount or the buyback, our discount was 41% to $0.10. Today, in the last week or so, it's improved to about 14%. That amplifies that increase from about 64% to more than 100% in the region of 140%. And that is what's driving the value for our shareholders through the discount reduction that they get on top of the increased exposure on a pure NAV technical basis to Tencent as well as the rest of our portfolio.
Actually, my comment is less critical than you may perceive it because one of my assumptions lying behind this kind of calculation is that the market assumes that all the other ventures that you're undertaking are eating up less cash in the future are probably becoming more profitable than the market assumed in the past. I was just referring to purely the technical exercise, and I don't think it was $35 billion. I think you should just conclude what have you been buying back from your own shares? What were they -- how much more are they worth right now? Well, that's $45 billion. What did you have to sell in order to be able to do that? Well, they increased also, but less than the $45 billion, only $42 billion. The difference is $3 billion. That is the actual benefit for the changing -- the Tencent shares changing to buying back your own shares. I don't think there's any other calculation you can make.
Nico. Errol is obviously financially steep and highly intelligent. I think you need to have a coffee to set and do a calculation coffee table.
I'm happy to do that. That's all.
A quick comment here, first to congratulate Errol that you came here next year as we agreed and shared his positive remarks on the progress. Koos talked a lot about ecosystem. And I would answer your question just saying one of the reasons not to split is the importance of ecosystem and also learning from China. But you said the second thing that they didn't talk about that is it would put more rigor on the operations. And what I can tell you that the level of pressure and energy we put in our own operations to improve the results no matter what is very, very, very high. So I don't think we need to split to -- I don't like to say we leave because of the money that comes from an investment that cause it. I don't like that. So our operations has the maximum level of pressure that we can do to have good results. So I don't think they split this specifically because we are already doing a lot.
Let me make a step in your direction. I truly believe that with kind of -- with your management style, there is enough pressure on every venture to make sure that they develop well, that they grow well and whatever the growth will be in the future, it will be profitable. So I've got confidence in that. I'm still skeptical about maintaining and keeping the Tencent shares for the long future.
Errol, you need to be here next year and holding to account. Questions, comments. Welcome.
[Foreign Language].
He's been here from [indiscernible] and he makes 2 points. The first point he makes is that the documents and the subtitles should have been properly translated into Dutch, and you are totally correct. We will do it next year immediately. It's an oversight, we should do it because where we operate in countries, we respect the country and we try to be good local citizens, and that includes speaking in the language of the country. So we'll do that. That's quite correct. The next question for Fabricio is for you. [indiscernible] says, just with Just Eat, why did you play the CFO and the CEO to do the deal? Are they getting big fat packets for that delivery?
I don't have -- thank you for the question. I don't have -- we disclosed most of the deals we did with the management. Can you help me Nico, on what is the extra information about this?
Nico, in Dutch. You can then translate.
[Foreign Language]
Translate quickly.
Yes. I just wanted to confirm that the Prosus has made an offer to acquire the Just Eat shareholding. That was approved. Our recommendation was accepted by the Board of Just Eat. Shareholders will now have the opportunity to tender their shares. That will happen towards the end of September, beginning of October. And that Prosus have made no arrangements relating to compensation or anything relating to the CEO or CFO of Just Eat. Their compensation arrangements at this point in time are governed by their own Board and the necessary governance processes that they have in place.
Thank you, Nico. Folks, another question or comment. Very welcome. Nothing further. No one. Lynelle?
Thanks, Chair. We seem to have now dealt with all questions from shareholders attending in person. And I also can confirm that we've received no questions from shareholders attending virtually. So back to you, Chair, but it appears that we're at our end of our Q&A.
The question session and answer session looks over. So Lynelle, could you put to us the specific agenda items that this meeting needs to deal with, and then we can finalize voting.
Thank you, Koos. So those shareholders who registered to vote at the meeting will now have an opportunity to vote in case they haven't done so. The explanations for each agenda item were provided in the notice of meeting. So I'm not going to repeat them now. I'm simply going to note the agenda item and the full text will be displayed on the screen.
So let's begin. We start with agenda item #2, which is an advisory vote. We then move on to agenda item #3. We then move to agenda Item #4 and then moving on to agenda item #5, followed by #6. We then move to agenda item #7 and then on to agenda item #8, on to the directors being agenda item #9, followed by agenda item #10. And then also on our rotating directors, agenda item 11.1 through to 11.4. And then we move to reappointing our auditors being agenda item #12, followed by agenda item #13. We then move to agenda item #14 and then agenda item #15 and finally, agenda item #16. We will pause for about 5 to 10 seconds while the votes are in, and I receive confirmation of that.
So folks, will just take a moment to finalize. The technical team will show you the results as soon as they've settled and Lynelle will then summarize them verbally for you.
[Voting]
Chair. I can now confirm that voting is completed and all the agenda items have been passed with the required majority. For your ease of reference, they will simply be displayed on the screen.
Thank you. Just to close off, the letter from Fabricio to shareholders will be published later today and the full details of this Annual General Meeting will be published in the stock exchange and new services and business wires tomorrow morning. Back to you, Koos.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. I conclude that we've finished all the agenda items put to this meeting and that the resolutions have been adopted. I just want to thank you for your support because this team cannot proceed unless they have your support. And at this point, we can declare the meeting closed. Thank you for everyone online and people physically present here are welcome to come for a cup of coffee next door. Thanks a lot. Stay well.
Financial data from Prosus
Revenue
Revenue is the sum of all sales generated by a company, e.g. for its products or services.
Revenue (TTM) metric explainedDirect Costs
Direct costs are the costs incurred directly in connection with the manufacture of the product or service.
Gross Profit
Gross Profit indicates how much of the revenue remains in the company after deducting direct production costs. If the percentage share of sales is calculated, this is referred to as the gross margin.
Gross Profit metric explainedSelling and Administrative Expenses
Selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A) include all expenses for marketing and sales as well as the general administration of the company.
Research and Development Expense
Research and development costs (R&D) provide information on how much the company invests in the research and development of its products. The costs are particularly interesting as a percentage of revenue and in comparison to direct competitors.
EBITDA
EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) is the company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The EBITDA margin is calculated as a percentage of sales.
Depreciation and Amortization
Depreciation represents reductions in the value of the company's assets (e.g. due to wear and tear on machinery).
EBIT (Operating Income)
EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) is the company's profit before interest and taxes, also known as the operating income. The EBIT Margin is calculated as a percentage of sales at
.
Net Profit
Net Profit represents the profit or loss after deduction of all costs.
Net Profit metric explainedStocksGuide Premium
| Mar '26 |
+/-
%
|
||
| Revenue | 8,455 8,455 |
57%
57%
100%
|
|
| - Direct Costs | 4,528 4,528 |
47%
47%
54%
|
|
| Gross Profit | 3,926 3,926 |
72%
72%
46%
|
|
| - Selling and Administrative Expenses | 3,662 3,662 |
71%
71%
43%
|
|
| - Research and Development Expense | - - |
-
-
|
|
| EBITDA | - - |
-
-
|
|
| - Depreciation and Amortization | - - |
-
-
|
|
| EBIT (Operating Income) EBIT | 261 261 |
60%
60%
3%
|
|
| Net Profit | 10,139 10,139 |
6%
6%
120%
|
|
In millions EUR.
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Prosus Stock News
Company Profile
Prosus NV engages in the provision of different technology platforms. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland and currently employs 21,048 full-time employees. The company went IPO on 2019-09-11. The firm is organized into six business areas: Classifieds, Payments & Fintech, Food delivery, Etail, Ventures and Travel. The company also holds investments in listed Social & Internet assets. The Classifieds business area manages mobile and digital marketplaces. The Payments & Fintech business area includes PayU, a Payment Service Platform. The Food delivery business area manages food delivery companies. The Travel business area operates a travel online platform. The Etail business area includes business to consumer e-commerce companies. The Venture business area looks for and invests in early stage companies.
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| Head office | Netherlands |
| CEO | Mr. Bloisi |
| Employees | 23,323 |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Website | www.prosus.com |


