Ozon Holdings PLC

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to OZEN's second quarter 2021 earnings call. Before I pass the floor to OZEN management, I would like to advise you that some of the information you will hear today may include forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs, assumptions, and information currently available and are subject to known and unknown risk and uncertainties, many of which may be beyond our control and actual results may differ materially. We encourage you to refer to the cautionary statements contained in companies press release issued today and SEC filings. During today's call, the company will be referring to certain non-IFRS financial measures and other metrics, reconsideration, and definitions of which you can find in company's press release published today. Now we'll pass the floor to CEO of Ozone, Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin, please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter 2021 results call. Before we go into our Q2 results, let me remind you that with the onset of COVID-19 from March of 2020, we faced extraordinary challenges as a business. But we managed to step up to the challenge and deliver goods to millions of customers across Russia in a safe manner. As a result, we achieved an unprecedented GNV growth of 188% in the second quarter of 2020. But this means that we are recycling the extremely tough comp this year. In the second quarter this year, our JV grew by 94% year-on-year. We nearly doubled the size of our business yet again. And it is even more impressive in the light of the extremely tough comps. And if we try to normalize for the high base effect of the last year and look, for example, at the two-year compounded annual growth rate, our JV growth actually accelerated from 124% in Q1 to 136% in Q2. Despite COVID restrictions gradually removed from Q3 2020 onwards, we continue to see strong demand for our services from consumers and no signs of the interest pittering out from the merchant side either. Speaking about our user base, the number of active customers has risen by 80% and exceeded 18 million. This means every seventh Russian is now using our platform. And the more customers use our platform, the more attractive we become for regional and national merchants. The number of active sellers more than tripled compared to the second quarter of last year, attracted by a large customer base, our wide logistics footprint, and our constantly improving proposition to the merchants. Growing merchant base drives greater assortment, which reached 27 million SKUs. This is more than double compared to the start of the year. A few words about infrastructure. We expanded our fulfillment and logistics footprint significantly in the last two months. We operate over 260,000 square meters of fulfillment space. Our infrastructure and processes enable us to achieve a great milestone of 1 million parcels shipped per day during Q2, of which 97% are steadily delivered on time. Greater fulfillment and logistics footprint enables us to store goods closer to consumers and ship them faster. This year we aim to nearly double our fulfillment footprint. Improving delivery time is one of our key priorities. We believe the faster we deliver goods to our consumers, the more convenient our service becomes and more customers will use our platform to meet their daily needs. We have launched same-day delivery in 30 cities of Russia. In cities where ozone has fulfillment centers, about 60% of fulfilled by ozone orders are delivered same or next day. But we're only scratching the surface. Russian e-commerce market is still quite fragmented. The top three players account for less than 30% of the market. The Russian retail market exceeds $450 billion, and with e-commerce penetration in Russia at around 9%, the market remains highly under-penetrated compared to 15-20% in other markets with similar internet penetration. So the opportunity is tremendous. We focus on building scale faster and not taking market share. To enable us to do so, we have stepped up investments in fulfillment and delivery infrastructure, talent acquisition in particular in IT, and customer acquisition. This should help us to cement our position as one of the leaders of the e-commerce in Russia. While we still see a lot of scope for growth in our core e-commerce vertical, we are also thrilled about our new verticals. Ozone FinTech is increasingly becoming an important lever, enabling Ozone platform to gain better traction with consumers and merchants. In our FinTech business, we aim to serve as many of the financial needs of our buyers and sellers associated with Ozone as possible. After acquisition of a banking license, our FinTech team is focused on creating comprehensive suite of digital financial services for our buyers, for sellers, and for our partners. Ozone Card, our flagship consumer payments product, has gained great traction with the customers, with over 1 million cards activated as of the end of the second quarter. This is more than double compared to 2020 year-end. In Q2, Ozone Card became one of the top three payment methods on Ozone platform. Ozone Card folders exhibit 60% higher frequency of purchases on the platform. Our B2B financial services products are gaining traction with our sellers. In Q2, we launched a flexible payment plan for the sellers. Essentially, this tool allows sellers to better manage their working capital and reinvest into scaling their business faster. Over 2,000 sellers already adopted this service within just two months after the launch. This service has increased loyalty of the sellers to our platform, in my view. Ozone Express is our quick service QuickShare's last-minute solution. We started to scale the business from the last year. After the launch in Moscow over the course of 2020, in Q2 this year we launched it on express operations in St. Petersburg. The format currently offers over 20,000 SKUs, over 50% of which is food. As I mentioned, the Russian retail market is worth over 400 billion US dollars and grocery is the single largest category within consumer retail. accounting for around half of the total retail sales. We believe eGrocery represents a huge opportunity on a standalone basis. However, for us, it is also an additional benefit. Grocery and FMCG categories generate traffic for the platform and increase customer order frequency and loyalty. Secondly, it aids Ozon to become a top-of-mind brand, assisting with the customer acquisition. As of the end of Q2, we operated over 35,000 square meters of the Dark Store fulfillment space. In the coming quarters, we will continue to scale Odon Express quite aggressively as we push into higher frequency model. Now I will pass the floor to Daniel Fedorov, who will talk about our operational performance and dynamics in our marketplace.

Thank you, Alexander. Good afternoon, everyone. I will provide you with a few comments on the performance of our marketplace, which is the core part of our business. Ozone Marketplace is the biggest driver of GNV at this stage. We demonstrated stellar growth of 155% year-on-year, boosting growth for the group overall. As a result, the contribution from 3P continued to climb higher. 3P share reached 62% up from 47% last year. The growth in 3P was augmented by the acceleration in growth of our merchant base. The number of active sellers on our platform exceeded 50,000. approximately doubled since the beginning of the year and increase of more than three-fold year-on-year. The sellers are attracted by logistics analytics and financial services that we offer and most importantly we provide our sellers with the access to a large user base of over 18.18 million customers which means that the merchants can generate more sales on our platform. I would like to point out that we have been gaining substantial traction with the merchants outside of Moscow and Moscow region. In fact, over 50% of our active sellers on the marketplace platform are from regions outside of Moscow. I believe that this demonstrates that our expansion of fulfillment, sorting facilities, as well as delivery infrastructure regions is very improved. The new commission structure introduced in February this year incentivized sellers to utilize and engage with our regional infrastructure more This should lead to faster delivery time for the customers, which, as we can see, drives great engagement on the platform and high frequency. Although the wide suite of services to our sellers were in the best position to cater for the needs of individual businesses. For example, we offer FBO and FBS as well as storefront mobile. In addition, we're constantly launching new analytical and advertising tools, as well as run seminars and big events for sellers to aid them in business development. Our marketplace performance is driven by powerful network effects from a very large customer base, which is now growing by nearly one million a month, and a constantly expanding merchant base. The latter resulted in us being able to offer the widest selection on the market with 27 million SKUs. This coupled with faster delivery and great user experience is supporting our 80% growth in active customers. As I mentioned, the larger customer base attracts more merchants, further propelling the flywheel effect. The growth in annual order frequency by 40% is something that we are very proud of, but we are not being complacent and acknowledge that there is a significant upside and room for growth. This is an interesting slide. As you can see from the data on the slide, is that the new cohort account for over one-third of ozone orders. What is even more interesting is that those new cohorts show higher refuges rate, which combined with improvement in the order frequency in the order cohorts resulted in 40 percent increase in the overall order frequency. and contributed massively to the tremendous 180% growth year-on-year. We increased fulfilling footprint and launched new fulfillment centers in the regions. We've made tremendous progress in building our sorting hub footprint as well. And there is a high correlation between open and fulfillment center in the region and accelerating order growth rate. closer goods are located to the consumer, the faster we can deliver, which results in higher rates of conversion and better order frequencies. The next slide in our presentation speaks to the same point. We expanded our logistics aggressively this year. In branded pickup points, we exceeded 15,500 by the end of the second quarter, 50% increase versus 10,000, which we had in operation by the end of last year. If we compare it to our network a year ago, it actually expanded fourfold. The scaling of the pickup points network was enabled by our franchise model. Today, we estimate that about 85 million consumers are able to get goods delivered with walking distance now. Now, I will pass the floor to Igor Gerasimov, who will discuss our financial results in more detail.

Thank you, Daniel. Good afternoon, everyone. I will comment on the financial performance. Let me recap. The group generated 89 billion rubles in GMV in the second quarter. As Alexander and Daniel mentioned, we delivered strong 94% GMV year-over-year growth on the back of the 180% orders growth. Although the average order value decreased, this has been driven by customers ordering on our platform more frequently. The strong order growth marks the beginning of our transition to high-frequency shopping model and becoming a go-to destination for shoppers online. Both cohorts and other rates have improved, which means more traction for the entire platform. The increase in the number of customers and higher frequency demonstrates that our strategy is working. Our marketplace commission revenue increased by 178%. as a result of the marketplace seller growth, which now accounts for 62% of GMV. Our advertising revenue showed strong growth of 105%. Sellers and brands are increasing their usage of our advertising platform and leverage other marketplace strong brand awareness to promote and grow sales. Our advertising platform now offers over 30 tools for promotion and every third seller uses our advertising tools. That should allow us to increase monetization of the platform going forward and we see significant potential in that revenue. Now, moving on to operating expense. Although fulfillment and delivery expense increased by 190% year over year, They remain largely flat Q&Q as a percentage of GMV on the back of high utilization of existing fulfillment and logistics facilities, upset by a ramp-up effect of our newly launched ones. Infrastructure expansion is instrumental to support frequency and GMV growth going forward. Sales and marketing expenses increased mainly due to depressed base of marketing costs in Q2 2020, when COVID-19 provided a tailwind. in terms of customer acquisition costs. In addition, in Q2 this year, we've made targeted digital advertising instruments that contributed to 80% increase in the buy base. But I would like to note that on cost per order basis, the sale and marketing costs slightly declined year over year. On technology and J&A costs, we accelerated talent acquisition, especially in IT. Those investments are essential in order to continue accelerated growth and support growing scale of our platform and IT infrastructure. This is important as the IT backbone together with our logistics footprint allows us to process and deliver three times more orders compared to second quarter 2020 and seven times more orders compared to second quarter 2019. We're also building teams in order to scale our new verticals, such as FinTech and Express. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of GMV was negative 2.3% in second quarter 2021 compared to negative 3.9% in second quarter 2020 and negative 6.5% in the first quarter 2021. The key drivers were, first of all, a full quarter of the new marketplace commissions after the adjustments which we have introduced in February 2021. Going forward, growing share of marketplace will become a more pronounced driver of the gross profit recovery from the second quarter 2021 levels. Secondly, our targeted investments into a selected number of high frequency categories of our 1P business. In the second quarter, we have been testing various pricing strategies to support the growth of 1P business and drive increase in the frequency of orders. We analyzed the efficiency of the investments we made, and we will be optimizing them over the course of the several quarters and stick to those which are most efficient. Over the next couple of quarters, we expect to see some improvements in the gross profit profile of our 1P business. Part of our EBITDA loss is attributable to Express model scaling up, which will remain one of our strategic priorities from now on. We accelerated investments into Express and we are prioritizing development of high-frequency model because it drives high customer value and it is more sustainable in the long run. As we accelerated investments into marketing and talent acquisition to support future growth, of core and new verticals, we believe it should be diluted over time as we grow scale across our platform. Now, moving to cash flow metrics performance. Cash flow was in slightly negative territory, mainly as a result of EBITDA loss, offset by healthy working capital dynamics. Working capital profile of our Commerce Division continues to fare well. Marketplace cash flow generation stays intact and positive for ozone group performance with the third marketplace share increase. On 1p working capital, currently we are doing some stock investments ahead of the high season, but we expect better performance in the year end. We invested $3.9 billion in capital expenditures in second quarter and we expect higher CapEx in the second half of the year. I'll finish up with our guidance. Our core platform Q2 performance and our trading performance in Q3 as well as express model growth so far gives us confidence that our ability to deliver higher growth and increase market share. We expect our order growth to remain strong for the remainder of the year and therefore we raise our GMV growth guidance to 110% for the full year. We also reiterate our capital expenditure guidance of 20 to 25 billion rubles for 2021. This concludes our presentation and operator suggests we move to Q&A now.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. And if you would like to cancel that request, please press the hash key. Once again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypads. And your first question comes from the line of Miriam Edusa. Miriam comes from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. First one just on the gross margin contraction. Sorry, I missed some of the commentary you made just then. Could you just go over again the drivers for that contraction and perhaps if you could sort of break down that sort of 360-bps contraction between the different drivers. What were the biggest ones, and how should we think about what that looks like in the second half? And then secondly, on the marketing costs as well. So you saw, I think, about 120-bps sequential increase there as well. So to what extent was this driven by some of the customer acquisition that you mentioned for Express, or to what extent was this a result of competitive pressures? Have you seen any increase in advertising costs? And then thirdly, if you could just comment on the, I think, 10 billion ruble loan that you took out in August, because clearly the cash balance is pretty solid. So if you could just explain what that is going to be used for. Thank you.

Sure, Miriam. So on gross profit margins, to give you some more granularity. As you probably remember, in February 1st, 2021, we have introduced a new commission structure. And therefore, second quarter of 2021 is the first full quarter when we operate on the new commission structure. We do not see any deterioration or weakening of our commission structure. And therefore, we expect it to remain relatively stable going forward. Another thing to note here is that we're growing share of marketplace operations in our GMV. we should see an uptick in our gross profit margins going forward as well, simply because of how fees are structured. The biggest contributor to the decline in gross profit margins QMQ were our pricing strategies and investments targeted at the growth of our 1P business. We're analyzing efficiency of the investments which we have been making over the course of the second quarter, 2021, and we see that they were paying off with higher frequency of orders and high GMV growth, both QMQ and year-over-year attempts, which looks especially strong, taking into account the high base of the second quarter of 2020. Going forward, however, we expect that parts of the investments will be optimized and therefore gross profit profile of our 1P business will be better versus the second quarter of 2021. On your question about marketing, we saw that our cohort performance is improving on a monthly basis and therefore we have been making investments in order to drive customer acquisition and we've managed to attract significantly more newcomers to our platform versus first quarter of 2021. And with such cohort performance from our standpoint, it is a relatively safe investment to make because with growing frequency and improving retention, this is evidently paying off. Nevertheless, as we see from our trading updates, share of marketing spending as a percentage of GMB will be decelerating in the second half of 2021. On the robo loan, so we basically just leverage an opportunity to get a loan at very decent rates. So it's just two percentage points above the tier eight of the central bank. And therefore, we just decided to use it in order to improve our capital structure. And it will be used mainly to finance our working capital. And it's mostly covenant free. It's a one year facility. which provides us with a sufficient degree of flexibility to manage liquidity on the Russian operational company's level.

Great, thank you. Just to follow up on the first one, could you give any color on the categories that you were making those pricing investments in?

Sure. Those investments were mainly... We have been targeting two categories, which attract most of the traffic and most of the customers. And those categories naturally are electronics and FMCG. Electronics is an important category to generate traffic. And FMCG is a very important vertical of strategic importance for us, which is driving frequency and creates long-run and stimulates the growth of the long-run adoption of e-commerce shopping.

That's great. Thank you a lot. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. And your next question comes from the line at Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thank you very much for the presentation. A couple of questions. Firstly, the broader question on cost. So most of the cost items as percentage of GMV increased in Q2 compared to the last year, which is obviously a factor of the high base effect of 2020, but also the increased Q and Q as percentage of GMV. Can you characterize how much of that was driven by the deliberate decision to invest into the long-term growth that will basically flatten the GMV deceleration curve in the long run and how much were driven by other maybe certain non-controllable factors like competition or maybe non-controllable factors like inflation, spike in average wages, etc.? And secondly, you did not change the CAPEX guidance for the full year. But as for the medium term, do you see more challenges in rolling out the fulfillment capacity given the high demand in the market, basically either for you or for the competition? And do you think that the market is ready to absorb hundreds of thousands of the fulfillment capacity construction per annum to be built out in Russia over the next couple of years? Thank you.

Sure, Slava. Thank you for your question. So the growth in year-over-year terms is mainly attributable to the fact that in the first half of 2021, we have been making deliberate investments into expansion of the infrastructure, both last-mile infrastructure and infrastructure of our fulfillment centers. Therefore, naturally, there is a significant ramp-up component as opposed to second quarter of 2020. because with the growth of 180% in GMV last year, our fulfillments were overly utilized amidst the spike of COVID. This year, I mean, mainly it is a reflection of the ramp-up. As a percentage of GMV, fulfillment and delivery costs remain relatively stable, Q&Q taking into account continued rollout of the infrastructure. I wouldn't say that any of the cost items as a percentage of GMV have been affected by competition or things like complicated rollout of the infrastructure is just a reflection of our ambition to support the growth frequency of buying and making sure that we're able to improve our delivery promise. And we aim to improve speed of our delivery in second half of the year. Fulfillment and delivery component also contains express dark source and courier feed. Therefore, it is one of the items, not that evident from our accounts, which is also contributing to the OPEX as a percentage of G&B. You have also asked about the difficulties in rolling out our fulfillment infrastructure going forward. The thing is that most of our fulfillment facilities are built to suit and therefore they have been contracted well in advance. Therefore, basically we have been expanding warehousing and fulfillment market for ourselves for a couple of years already. And we will stick to that strategy because we never saw that existing supply of the space on the market is sufficient to accommodate our demands and our technological requirements as well. Did I answer your question?

Yeah, maybe just a clarification. Would you envisage certain spike in cost versus what you thought before given certain inflationary trends on the fulfillment rollout or maybe certain bottlenecks that you envisage here?

I wouldn't say that any spike or change on the market conditions should dramatically affect us in the mid to long run. Potentially, tactically, there might be some spikes, although we do not see them that pronounced in our P&L and cost structure right now.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. And your next question comes from Kirill Panarin at Renaissance Capital. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Hi, everyone. A few questions, please. Firstly, any comment on current GMV trends quoted to date? Secondly, on competitive dynamics in Moscow, some of your peers seem to have made material progress in this region, so I just wonder if there is any impact on ozone's growth and margin in Moscow in particular. Any color on the trends here versus regions would be helpful. And lastly, just to follow up on 1P gross margin, I understood everything you said. I just wanted to ask, do you have sort of a sustainable longer-term target for 1P gross margin? That's it. Thank you.

Okay, so the first one. Yeah, so GEV trends, I think the way we look at GEV internally because of the volatility of the last year is on two-year key year. And we see on a two-year CAGR basis, the trends are quite stable. I think the trends that we indicated in the second quarter, they continue into the third quarter. Talking about Moscow and Moscow region, I would say that we don't see any issues there. It continues growing. Our original G&V is growing faster because we roll out a lot of infrastructure, but at the same time, we'll say that performance is healthy, especially on the back of rollout of our Express service. And as for the comments from some of the players, we see them rather controversial and a bit surprising. I would say that internally, we see that our Moscow area G&V is quite similar to the biggest GME number they report overall for the whole business. So we'll see.

Sure. And you had a question on 1P gross profit margin. In the long run, I mean, it's quite hard to guide on a relative metric because it is affected by the mix. And we're now focusing on two categories which have completely different profile of gross profit margins in fact. And electronics, naturally, gross profit margins are much lower because of the high average item value. While in FMCG, gross profit margins traditionally are way high. Just take a look at the gross margin of offline retailers like X5. Therefore, it's hard to tell where we will end up because it is subject to the sales mix. But obviously, it's safe to assume that we will be working on a significant improvement of our purchasing power and bargaining terms.

Okay, that's great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And your next question is from the line of Ivan Kim from Extellus Capital. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Yes, just maybe three questions from me, please. Firstly, on seller onboarding, it looks like you accelerated seller onboarding in the second quarter versus the first quarter. Do you expect that to continue? And what was the driver for that? That's the first question. The second question on Ozone Express, maybe you gave a useful stat on average daily order number But can you maybe share what's Ozonexpress as a share of Moscow GMV right now? And on the margin side, how long do you think it will take for you to approach purchasing terms of bigger grocery retailers within Ozonexpress business? And then thirdly, just on the fulfillment, so you said you want to double the fulfillment this year, right? which means, on my quick calculations, it's about 170,000 additional square meters in the second half. I just wanted to reconfirm that's correct. Thank you.

Okay, so the first one on the increased number of sellers, I think, I can't say not something dramatic has happened. I will highlight three things. First, we started doing much more public events and we had a major event in June for sellers where we basically embraced old sellers, new sellers, current sellers and someone who is thinking about marketplace and we already did one in Siberia just several weeks ago. So that's one. So I think we just became a bit more active publicly. Second, I would say that there is quite significant improvement in product and also in onboarding process. So the time of onboarding actually accelerated on average for sellers, especially in SBO model. And that helped basically the overall funnel. And third, I would say that with the development infrastructure, they actually opened up a marketplace for regional sellers. And a lot of sellers that joined platform during the second quarter were actually from regions. And that's just because we have fulfillments appearing in the regions, and also a drop of points for FBS sellers. So I think overall, all our trends are quite healthy. We, of course, want to continue increasing number of sellers, accelerating processes. accelerating onboarding time, so probably Trans should rather continue. But I think here what's also important is to develop sellers, to make sure that it's not just the platform growing, but each seller is growing and developing its business.

And on the other question, so for Ozonexpress, In the latest months, we see that share of Ozonexpress as a total GMV in Moscow for the group is over 10% right now, so it is becoming quite considerable. On the purchasing power, I mean, it's a function of several things, because We're trying to fast-forward growth a bit, I mean, in this category. Therefore, part of the impact which you saw is driven by fewer investments in order to attract more consumers and lock them on our platform. And purchasing temps is a bit different story. But I guess it's... I mean, the rule of thumb is that we need at least year or year and a half to build sufficient scale. in that category, but even then it will be varying in terms of the sales mix, because you need to build a depth of sales on per single SKU basis and with every single supplier. Did one follow your questions? On fulfillment side, as we've done this before. We plan to finish the year with approximately 500,000 square meters of total capacity. Yeah. This means operational. Yeah, I mean, not only committed, but already in operation.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Anna Kabatova at Alpha Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Yes. Good afternoon, and thank you very much for the call. Also, I have one question with regards to your CAPEX guidance. So based on one half number, like almost 6 billion rubles, it is expected that in the second half you will spend between 14 and 19 billion rubles. So my first question would be this difference, the range, it reflects your kind of flexibility in terms of projects and the pace of commissioning Or in some part it may reflect some cost inflation that you might be forecasting until the end of the year. because you tell us that more or less you have like fixed fulfillment capacity targets until the end of the year. So it would be great to understand like the mathematics and the nature of this CAPEX range for the second half. Thank you.

Sure, I'll try to explain. So our CAPEX guidance remains intact and indeed we aim to spend most of the funds in the second half of the year, especially before the high season and also before the New Year holidays. So we need to make sure that infrastructure is in place in order to support the GMV growth. And on the variability in guidance, The thing is that internally we think in terms of commitments, and for us it is crucial to sign legal obligations with our counterparts to ensure that this infrastructure and those objects will be locked and actually built. But CAPEX as a cash expenditure is a bit different thing because you need to actually bear this cost and your counterparty needs to be able to meet the deadlines, and plus you might renegotiate something and postpone the payments and therefore actual cash expenditure is a bit detached from the commitments which we have already executed with our counterparts. This is where the variability comes from. So therefore for us it's not, I mean, that big of a drama if some of the CAPEX will be spent in first quarters of 2022. For instance, it is crucial to lock the vendors and it is crucial to lock the developers into legal contracts with fines to make sure that your infrastructure will be built and launched on time.

Thank you very much. And as a kind of follow-up on this, could you speak a bit more about your negotiation process with your contractors, construction contractors? So during the year, you start negotiating the cost and the volume of new capacity to be built. in the second half by the end of the year. So how does it develop? So as soon as you finish and commence the projects and the objects, fulfillment objects that are already in your schedule, what's the next phase and when should we expect your updated CAPEX or your targets for the next year? Also understanding in general of this process how you work with with them Would be will be helpful.

Thank you So next year capital guidance will be provided to know if you call on the process of infrastructure so it depends on Lead time of the infrastructure objects with large fulfillment centers is 18 to 24 months. We have a long term plan and like how we see our GND growth and therefore negotiate and sign commitments, as I said, in advance to make sure we have capacity available in advance of the high season of the future periods. Smaller dark stores and sorting facilities are typically rented and available regularly. from different suppliers. So it's a much shorter period of time that we have to rent them.

Yes, thanks. That's clear. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Dimitri Vlasov at Wooden Co. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. So my first question would be on adjusted EBDA. So given higher than expected losses in the second quarter, maybe you can comment or provide some clarity on what adjusted EBDA margin as a percentage of GNV do you expect in the full year of 2021 versus the last year? That's my first question. And my second question on the CIS GNV contributions. So maybe you can, uh, provide some, uh, alone. What is the current shelf? The lowest GMV, the percentage of total, and maybe, uh, provide some, uh, follow up guidance of, uh, where that CS GMV to be as a percentage of total, maybe in the next couple of years. Thank you.

Sure. So on your first question, why not provide an explicit guidance on, uh, uh, therefore, um, We will not communicate precise targets, but it's reasonable to assume an improvement by the end of the year because of the scale effect, which will help us to value the impact of the ramp-up for the new infrastructure and plus taking into account the things which I have been communicating previously about gross profit margin and impact of marketing. On the share of Belarus and Kazakhstan are the percentage of total GMV. It's still low single digits, and we're at the very early stage of the developments in those markets.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Elena Junova, J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes, good evening. Thank you very much. First question is about the pricing strategy in 1P assortment. How did this actually work? I understand that you targeted two categories, but in terms of prices you targeted, were you trying to price match your key competitors or you actually aimed to bring prices below competition?

Sure. So, Basic strategy was as follows. You select a number of SKUs which are considered to be the best sellers in those categories across the whole competition. And you need to make sure that your pricing on those SKUs is best on the market and you can play with the promos with various marketing tools and instruments in order to see how it is paying off and how it ultimately ends up in your cohorts. What we have been seeing internally is that our pricing strategy in FMCG, for instance, has yielded improvement in cohorts for that particular category. Plus, when you attract people with this traffic assortment, you obviously hope that they will stick with your platform and buy more of the other stuff because this assortment works as some sort of acquisition channel. Similar strategy, which I'm sure you're familiar, is used in offline retail.

Yeah, understood that. Thank you. Then the second question, can you share with us what was the turn in your second quarter 20 customer cohort?

We can follow up with you offline because we do not have the metric in front of us. And I'm told by my team that we do not disclose that actually. Sorry.

Oh, that's bad. Another question, please. Can you share with us what was your GMV growth for the two categories you mentioned in particular, electronics and FMCG? Or maybe just, we understand it was higher than the average you reported, but by how much?

Yeah, I mean, so it's related to one business, therefore it's a bit different. So in electronics, the growth has been a little lower. 100% in FMCG. It's a blended effect of airport on marketplace and other categories, but it also has been above 100%.

Okay, understood. Then I have two more questions, and one of them is again on the EBITDA loss for the full year. I know you don't guide, but cell-side consensus according to Bloomberg is expecting 20 billion ruble EBITDA loss this year. What do you think about this number? Does that sound realistic to you or no?

Well, once again, we do not guide on exact EBITDA levels and I guess consensus also factors in a different GMV. Therefore, probably you need to adjust and come up with the new target for the full year. But the trends, which I have communicated, you will see them in the following quarters, i.e., gradual ramp-up of the infrastructure, especially in the top quarters, gradual improvement in the gross profit margins, gradual reduction of marketing spending.

What I don't understand, really, is... the infrastructure is ramping up, but at the same time, you're adding more infrastructure, and the new infrastructure you added still is dilutive. So wouldn't one effect affect the other?

It depends on the pace of openings. I mean, if you aim for higher growth and you need to support higher growth, you will need to be adding more objects in order to ensure that it works. Plus, infrastructure in our case is not a simple tool to process the volumes because our pickup points, for instance, generate JV by themselves and generate high frequency of focus. So it's also important to support the cohort's growth because naturally when you become closer to the customer, you will see an improvement in the retention and interactions with the broader platform.

Okay, and the final question, sorry, the most important one actually. So what do you plan as your pricing strategy in 1P in the third quarter? And what factors will be driving your take rate in the second half? If we can just summarize all the factors again. Thank you.

On take rate, we do not expect any dramatic changes versus the second quarter. The only factors which might be impacting that would be the mix of business models within marketplaces. but still it shouldn't be damaging for the bottom line. Because, for instance, FBS business model presumes that sellers pay less, but it is fair because we bear less operational expense, especially variable optics is being saved because you process less. But other than that, all things being equal, we do not expect any dramatic changes there. On the gross profit margins in 1P, we will be looking at what has been most efficient in terms of the customer acquisition and retention, and we will be optimizing inefficient strategies. Overall, I guess we should improve the gross profit margin on the blended level in the coming quarters, but if we see an opportunity to invest into a customer acquisition or retention effectively, I guess we will pursue it as well. Plus, our advertising revenue for the second half of the year should be going up because our marketplace team has been working on a number of tools in order to improve the monetization.

Thank you.

Thank you. If there are no further questions, please continue.

Okay. That's Alexander. So let me give some closing remarks before the end of this call. To sum up, our results demonstrate that we are making great strides to realize our mission to transform Russian economy by providing wider selection and greater convenience for the Russian consumers and then parallel opportunities for businesses already operating or migrating online. We want to thank everyone for joining our quarterly conference call and for your questions today. We look forward to updating you on the progress we make in our Q3 earnings call in November. Thank you and have a good day.