Mikheil Lomtadze
Analyst · Autonomous. Gabor, please go ahead. Your line is open
Hello, everyone. So it's our first call since we listed on Nasdaq, so it's exciting to report our 2023 and 4Q numbers and some of the strategic updates from me and some of the priorities which we're working on. So we can go through the presentation. I mean, first of all, our main goal really to list on the Nasdaq was also to achieve the high liquidity. So, as you can see from this slide, average daily volumes are 12 times of London Stock Exchange. So, we believe that's great for the company and its shareholders. And as we made an announcement also that we'll be approaching to delist from London Stock Exchange to consolidate liquidity. Our mission, to remind everyone, I think that's really important for us, our entire team is to develop the products which are highly relevant, they are world-class mobile services, high quality, but also innovate in order to improve people's lives. And we innovate through two sides of our sort of target customer. That would be -- on the one hand, would be the merchant, and on the other hand would be a consumer. And the merchant is the Kaspi Pay mobile app and the consumer is Kaspi.kz. And both mobile apps are the super apps, what we call them. And our definition of the super app is all these different services which are in a single mobile application. And those services are highly diverse and integrated around the regular needs of the consumers and the merchants. So, if we go to look into some of the services that we have in our apps, I'm not going to go through them, but I think, as you might appreciate, very few. So companies have had such a range of the services for both consumers and the merchants. So on the one hand, we have consumer super app, where we are serving 14 million monthly users, and here we have everything from e-commerce and grocery, to travel and fintech financial services, and buy now pay later, or general-purpose loan, the QR, which is the backbone of our proprietary payment network. So, pretty much everything around shopping and the payments and moving money between the users, on the one hand, of the value chain for a consumer, and on the other hand, we have the services where the merchants can actually both connect to the marketplace, but also run the advertising campaigns, manage the delivery, access the merchant finance fully online, have a business account for their business. And those are the services which we are developing -- we have been developing for merchants for the last several years, and we are kind of initial stage, actually, of the wave of innovations for the merchants. So, on the one hand, you have everything around the daily needs and the regular needs of a consumer, and then on the other hand of our value chain, you have merchants that are actually selling the items to those consumers or accepting the payments from those consumers. And those two super apps are not separate from each other. So basically what that means, they're actually connected through different ranges of services. David, next slide, please. So here what you have -- you have connected through the proprietary payment network, and that really enables the merchants to accept the payments and the consumers to pay and the QR is the foundation for that proprietary payment network. And we just move money between the consumers and merchants, and also between the merchants themselves and between the consumers themselves. The marketplace enables -- if the payments enable to accept the payments or pay, then marketplace enables the merchants to sell their goods and items and services, and consumers to actually buy those services and the goods. Then we have the logistics platform, which also connects. Again, merchants can onboard to our platform through their Kaspi Pay functionalities. And then consumers have a variety of the logistics sort of delivery options from Postomats, which is the automated personal machine sort of locker functionality, to door delivery, and then advertising, which we are also scaling. And I will talk a bit about these services later. It's actually an ability for the merchants to advertise those services, to reach the right buyers at the right time with the right offer. And that's a very nice functionality, which also is useful for the consumers because it's highly personalized, but also for the merchants to increase their sales. So, those two apps are connected through this sort of, what we would call, four platforms, the payments network, marketplace, platform, logistics, delivery, and the advertising services. And they're seamlessly working between them. Our priority historically has been always to drive the engagement, to drive the transactions. And as you can see, just a reminder, we are one of the highest engaged apps compared to some other global apps, which you might know. So 65% is actually the share of the monthly users which visits our app daily. So, 65 people out of 100 monthly visitors would come, 65 would come daily to our app. And that's really the result of all these different services around, regular needs of the consumer, which are in a single mobile application. And that's probably one of the also most important metrics, just to underline how relevant our services are. And as we continuously adding the new services, the new verticals, enter the new businesses, if you look at our business, we have been constantly innovating. We drive the transactions, and transactions are important just because that is actually our ability to deliver the value to the merchant and the consumer because the transaction is all about buying something, paying for something. And as you can see on the GMV side of things, we've grown very nicely last year, 38% and we've grown also nicely on the payment transactions, 38% as well. So we processed KZT4.2 billion payments last year and almost KZT165 million purchase transactions. And at the same time, as we sort of continue driving all those services and they grow individually, they contribute to the higher sort of transactional engagement for the consumer. So as you can see now, we are doing 71 monthly transactions per active consumer. So, that's up 17% from 60 transactions a month per consumer in 2022. And that just basically tells you that consumers are transacting through our platforms two and more times a day. And that's really a remarkable number. And again, the transactions are important because this is how we monetize directly through the value of the acquiring fee, the seller fees and now advertising and delivery, but also indirectly because this type of engagement really enables us to personalize highly the consumer experience and make sure that our business is constantly improving -- shows improving efficiency and the growth. In terms of the financials, so, we are pretty much -- we did the guidance on six months before going into the US listing route. And as you -- going back, basically we pretty much exceeded every single guidance that we had on the six-month. The numbers on the financial performance are strong. Our revenue increased 51% to reach $4.2 billion equivalent of KZT1.9 trillion in '23. Net income grew 44%, so to $1.9 billion. And then the share -- the earnings per share have grown to $9.6 per share, which is 45% growth and we are also happy to announce that there will be a dividend proposed to the subject to the shareholder approval for the 4Q of '23 of about KZT8.50 per share dividend payment. As we continue growing different services, the payments and marketplace are the fastest growth. So, here we're also happy to report that we're sort of becoming the increasingly diversified business, very unique in its nature, but also all these different revenue sources and different net profit sources, which we constantly create by entering the new verticals. So as you can see, 66% of our net income in '23 now comes from the payments and the marketplace. And those are the businesses which grow the fastest and actually they are front-end of the consumer relationship. And they will continue growing faster than a fintech, and will be taking increasing share of our bottom line -- and also in '24 and beyond. This is cohorts. So we show cohorts in our annual numbers. So that basically is another indication of our growth. So, you can see that we have been growing nicely. Our cohorts are showing a very nice sort of similar growth year-over-year. And 62% of our consumer base comes from the four recent years. So those consumers will continue transacting also in the future. And again, you can see the years we are sort of -- in the five years consumers transacting, we increased the TPV per consumer 12 times. And if you look at pretty much every cohort, they are behaving in a very similar way, so which means there is more opportunity to do sort of volumes of the business around the consumer needs and, yeah, and we continue adding the more reasons for consumers to pay for. Another cohort is for our marketplace. So, here you see the same strong growth, 50% of our consumers are coming from the last four years. And then the marketplace continues growing very nicely. We are probably one of the few marketplace platforms which have continuously grown after the COVID environment. And that's really the reason behind that, is just because we continuously enter the new verticals we've started, if you remember, travel several years ago, and we entered grocery. And we constantly increased the assortment that is available for consumers to buy. So all of that really contributes sort of more reasons for consumers to shop. And then all the added value services like delivery or advertising. They're also helping and driving the growth because they're convenient for consumers and they're increasing sales of the merchants. This is the slide about the penetration of some of our existing services that we have. So as you can see, we have services which are sort of lower penetrated, especially on the marketplace side of things. And again, that's pretty natural, right? The consumer -- the step number one for a consumer to onboard is to actually pay, and they pay through the -- through our payment network and the QR transactions. And then after payment, what comes is actually they can buy things and they can buy things which are e-commerce or the travel or the grocery. And all of that is really helping the merchants to first accept the payments, then they are listing their items and we're helping with the delivery and other services to increase their sales. So, that's a natural evolution of the consumer journey. And some of the lower penetrated services that would be growing much faster than everything else would be under-penetrated ones, like grocery or the e-commerce, for example, the travel, so all those services have the very good potential for the growth. And then some of the new services which we have been scaling and launched, like online car finance for example, which we're scaling as we speak, and that would be the -- also the foundation for the car marketplace which we intend to create. So all of those services which you have now, basically some of them are -- will continue delivering the short growth just because they are under-penetrated, but even the penetrated services that we have are growing fast like QR payments as you can see, TPV has grew 43%. On the merchant services, it's kind of another side of the value chain, right? So -- but pretty much the same. So the merchants are onboarding for the payments first and then they are moving to the commerce and the marketplace and listing their items that we're selling with the delivery and then they connect to delivery and advertising. So here again you can see that e-commerce delivery, advertising which delivery and advertising sort of first suite of the value-added services for the merchants, they will be growing nicely, contributing to the revenue growth and the take rate. I will speak about it in more details further. And then the merchant and micro business finance, that's really a good opportunity for us, under-penetrated on the market, the product is fully online, merchants love it. And as we continue providing financing for merchants, therefore, they are developing and growing. And as they grow, there fuel growth of our marketplace and the payments and so on and so forth. So, there are a lot of network effects between different services in our merchant services -- existing services and then we have a pipeline for the new. A bit about the grocery, just to -- one of the latest sort of services which we've launched, which will provide significant growth opportunity for us. So the market is an estimated about 14 billion double-digit growth market. We are in the weekly purchase. That is why we have sort of 11,000 SKUs and average ticket around $25, sorry, $29. And then the delivery is sort of same-day delivery and it's largely free of the basket above KZT5,000. So -- and then delivery speed is pretty much the same delivery. And we're delivering the orders from the one central location which actually carries those 11,000 SKUs. So have been showing a very strong growth as a grocery business itself. One of the -- when you look at the screens, you can actually see how the whole value chain is shaping up. So it's fully mobile. You can select everyday items from 11,000 skus. It's in size, it's $29 average order size, 99% is delivery for free. You can actually select the time when it's convenient for you to get the delivery. And then because we're focused on the quality of the service, especially in the grocery, because that's a very repetitive shopping experience, you really want to make sure that you constantly deliver high quality. So 92% of consumers rate service as excellent, which is extremely important because again, consumers shop weekly, right? So you want to make sure that your experience is high quality experience, is constant, and this is how you make it profitable. You're not losing customers and you don't need to spend money on the marketing to bring the customers back, which could have been disappointed somewhere in the process of shopping with you. So, that's a simple overview of the shopping process with us. So, delivered the very high growth in '23. We've grew 3.9 times. And around 0.5 million consumers shopped with us in '23. And the average ticket grew slightly during the year to $29 now and then we've enabled 5.2 million purchases in '23, which is 3.3 times growth. There has been a lot of discussion about very few markets where this business has been profitable. So I think we just would like to put this discussion to that really. We told you last year that we would be focused on execution, delivering very consistent experience that results in profitability and efficiency. So this is the case study for Almaty. This is where we launched this service in last year. And as you can see, in just 21 months, we are now -- we grew the revenue 154%. In 4Q, we achieved net income margin of 6%. Now, 4Q is a good quarter for any retail, right, because it's sort of New Year, Christmas shopping. But still we were already profitable in the third Q, we were profitable in the second Q, as I've reported earlier, in the mid of last year. So, that basically is an extraordinary achievement by itself. And then in the fourth Q, we processed 1 million payments in the -- 1 million payments orders, sorry, in the fourth Q. And we served 10% of the population. So around 218,000 consumers made the purchase with -- in Almaty with our e-grocery proposition. So, we're very excited about this business and we're scaling now in Almaty and Astana, which are the two largest cities, and we will be entering the third largest city also during the year. So those would be almost half of the total retail trade in the country. And yeah, we're confident and comfortable that we can grow efficiently this business, deliver outstanding consumer experience, which actually results in efficiency and profitability for us. Tours, another example of our innovation last year. So we launched Kaspi Tours vacation packages marketplace basically end of 2022 and we're scaling through 2023. So now what we have is full functioning marketplace. So you can search a vacation, the 71% of all destinations, the most popular ones are actually Turkey, Emirates and Egypt. Then you can select the hotel. And we have about 6,000 offers of vacation packages in our app. You can read through all the details. And again, this is very important to keep in mind that this is a complicated user experience. So, you want to make sure that you present the information fairly, the consumers are happy, they make the decision right, but you can also connect to the operators which are on the ground, which once you arrive to the airport, you will be greeted and meet and they will check you in the hotel. And the good thing about this business is that it's -- in excess of 2,000 average tickets, which is very meaningful for the household budget, but also very good for us as an extension for airline and railway tickets. And then it's fully integrated with our payments and fintech platform, so you can seamlessly pay and, yeah, again the consumer experience is extremely important, especially the family vacation. And almost 90% of consumers rate the service as excellent. So, we have been scaling this last year, so happy to report that has been growing very nicely. So we grew during the year 185%. But what is actually important and we achieved 5% of the GMV of the travel business in a fourth Q. So we're just sort of starting but already quite a meaningful contribution. But what is important is also the take rate, right? The take rate of this service on average has been around 8.7% and that basically is the take rate enhancing business for us. But also again, it's a very natural expansion for the travel value proposition, for our consumers. We started with airlines, if you remember. Then we joined the train and now we moved into the vacation packages. So really excited about this business, we're continue growing this year. Postomats, that's another innovation which we have built during the last couple of years. Now we are almost 6,000, which was our target, if you remember. We are targeting this year 7,000 by end of 2024. We largely build the network. So, the network of automated parcel machines now is the largest last-mile network for e-commerce in the country. We grew 78%, the number of postomats and almost 40% of all the deliveries are now done through the lockers Kaspi Postomats. And that again, just to remind you, right, the economics of it are quite simple. Instead of delivering 70 parcels to individual apartments or the houses with a success ratio, actually is not -- it's -- you can have person is not there, consumer needs to talk to the courier for a comfortable time arrangement and so on and so forth, so it's not really that convenient as a postomat where you can actually go anytime you want. And consumers love this experience. We're scaling it and that is very important source of our competitive advantage. But also it's an important backbone now for our smart logistics platform which we're developing. So, if we look at the value chain of our logistics platform, we have taken the view that in order to deliver the parcels to consumers from merchants you don't really have to own that many assets, and really employ your shelf delivery people almost the same way like you don't really need to own the taxi and employ the taxi driver in order to provide the riding services. So we took the view that we are building the platform which manages the entire network. It gets all the people and the entities participating in the value chain actually connect. So, we have some of the -- we have technology which enables the whole process management. We have labeling, which is basically the entire same label sort of through the process, which is kind of extremely important for the efficiency. And then we have technology which is the machine learning, AI-driven technology in the middle, which basically makes sure that the routes are selected in the most efficient way. And then we have a front-end of relationship with the couriers where we have app which actually manages the courier experience. So all of that really has been providing a very strong result. So, we have grown 130% in orders, 88% of those orders free, and we deliver over half of those orders in less than two days. And again, this is probably the largest technology platform for delivery in the region. And we are enabling this without actually owning huge assets or employing directed delivery people. But we create a lot of jobs. So the infrastructure itself, if we go to the next slide, is actually quite impressive. So, we serve around 60,000 merchants, almost 6,000 postomats we have across the country. We provide the platform and technology for almost around 2,500 couriers. We have delivery stations in the cities. We have the pickup points for the merchants, so the merchants also can deliver their items that consumers can pick up. So we have line haul companies like airlines and big trucking companies. So, the whole value chain we manage is actually quite massive, 156 cities we deliver and the country size is huge, right? It's -- and we're still making this efficiently and continuously fueling our marketplace profitability. So just -- yeah, we're excited and we will continue developing that technology in order to enable even more orders delivered as our marketplace continues growing, in e-commerce specifically, which grew very nicely last year and continues to grow this year. As we continue thinking about the merchants, we are also delivering what we call sort of added value services for merchants. So this is an example of advertising which we have been carefully designing. So we deliver value for merchants. Merchants actually get the value in a sales increase at reasonable marketing costs. So, merchants can actually -- this is an auction based, right? So it's almost like Google ads or Amazon ads, very similar sort of functionality by nature. Merchants can launch the campaign, merchants can manage the campaign, select the kind of -- list the items which they want to advertise, they have analytics which they can decide on the efficiency of the advertising. And we have been scaling this quite carefully, again, just to make sure that the merchants get the value for it, for the marketing money they spend. And I'm happy to report that the growth has been very nice. David, can I have next slide, please? So, growth has been very nice. So as you can see on the advertising and the delivery, we have grown almost three times year-over-year, so 2.7 times growth on value-added services. Another angle to look at is take rate. So take rate is 1.4% additional take rate to seller fees from delivery, 0.5% take rate to advertising. So added value services now contribute 1.9% of the take rate on e-commerce. And yeah, we're just really at initial stage of monetizing value-added services and driving the growth. And those are just two examples of those on top of the B2B payments. The B2B payments now is becoming a meaningful contributor to our business and the bottom line. So as you can see that we have grown B2B to 2.1 times in '23. Now 2.4 billion worth of transactions and then almost 25 million transactions processed in '23. And again, this business is enabling the transaction when guys like Coca-Cola or Pepsi, Nestle, they're delivering their sort of packages, items to the convenience store, we're settling the invoices seamlessly between this convenience store and the brand or its distributor or its wholesaler. So, that is an extremely powerful business because we deliver a lot of value. We make these transactions seamless, almost like P2P payments for businesses. And that is our first service we launched on the B2B side of things. It still continues growing very nicely. But if you combine together the payments and now we're thinking -- we're scaling advertising and delivery, all those services for B2B would be also added value services. B2B services would be the first range of innovation from us. But they have delivered already a very nice growth and contributed to the bottom line in 2023. As we got focused on the classifieds, and I've mentioned to you last year that probably buying the car is one of the most important sort of household family decisions after buying the real estate, so we like this fact that now we can -- we're thinking about actually organizing the experience around that important household decision. So, we are building the car marketplace where we enable the transaction, which is the dream for any classified, right, can you get to the transaction actually from just advertising? And here is an example of how we're getting this transaction enabled through our seamless online car loan financing. We leverage our fintech, again, scaling very nicely. So, you can actually search for the car, you can select the car, you can immediately get approved, like -- which is an important functionality in our competitive advantage that we can actually approve seamlessly in seconds, high-quality financing and then you can pay all the fees that you need to pay around the car and its registration through our government, govtech platform, government services, and then you can pick up the car. So, that's the process which is very seamless, high quality, and yeah, so we are scaling now. Intention is to build the car marketplace. We're also piloting 1P car marketplace with very promising results. And yeah, I will just take the opportunity to talk about it later in the year, but really excited about building the car marketplace and actually different services around the cars that households can have. Yeah. To you, David, now.