Vend Marketplaces Asa B

Good morning and welcome to our Q2 results presentation this morning here from Oslo. My name is Jann-Boje and I'm heading Investor Relations at Vend. As usual, we have our CEO Christian in our CFO PC with us to walk you through the development and key performance in the quarter. Following the presentation, we will have an analyst Q&A session with Microsoft Teams. And before I hand over to Christian, let me just quickly walk you through the disclaimer slide. So our presentation includes forward-looking statements, and please refer for the full text on this slide for more information. And with this, Christian, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much, Jann-Boje, and good morning, everyone. So, at the start of the year, I described Vend as now being a focused pure play marketplace company moving into full-scale execution. And our second quarter results demonstrate this execution through expanded profitability, accelerated cost management, and continued strategic progress. Group revenues ended at 1,696 million, that's flat year-on-year, or 2% up on a constant currency basis. Our four verticals increased by 10% in constant currency, and this was partly offset by the phase-out of transition service agreement revenues from the Shipstead split. Group EBTA increased by 16% to 674 million, with the margin expanding around 5 percentage points to now 40%. And this was driven by cost discipline and strong revenue development in real estate and e-commerce. Jobs continued to grow as monetization more than offset softer volumes. And in mobility, both Norway and our transactional businesses performed well, but Sweden remains affected by the ongoing platform stabilization, and Denmark by dealer adaptation to our new business model. On the strategic side, I will cover the platform transition and AI more in depth on the next few slides. But on costs, we're actively capturing the savings that our simplification and platform transition make possible, and we have now taken further steps ahead of plan. and we now expect OPEX excluding COGS to decline around 150 million year on year and this is up from the 100 million that we indicated at Q1 and PC will cover this more in detail. We also remain disciplined on capital allocation, and the first 2 billion tranche of the buyback program is well underway, and we had repurchased around 1.6 billion as of July 10th. So in summary, while parts of mobility remain challenging in the near term, the underlying health of our business remains strong, with growing revenues in the verticals, expanding margins, and accelerated strategic delivery. So moving on to the platform transition. In Norway, the Finn migration was completed on time. This was a back-end focused and more technical transition with no changes to the user interface or the product experience and this was delivered without any disruptions. And the legacy platform shutdown is also progressing well. Now, with FIN complete, the consumer-facing marketplace migration is essentially done with Tori, DBA, Blocket, and FIN. So if we then turn to Blocket specifically, we see key metrics continue to improve. User satisfaction, for example, has more than doubled from the post-transition low, and it's now approaching the pre-transition levels. And total blockade visits also continue to improve. And the private car listings recovered to minus 9% year on year. This is up from the minus 35% that we had just after the transition. And leads per visit in mobility are now up 26% year on year. And going forward, our focus remains on the private ads, on the app experience where we have the greatest engagement, but also increasingly on the sub-verticals. So what remains then of the transition that's fairly limited in scope? Bilbasen in Denmark, which is planned for 2027, and professional tools across our brands, most notably DealerHub. And completing this allows us to shift more of our resources from migration to new value-creating products and features. On AI, we continue to experiment broadly. We're also increasingly scaling the things that we see work. And the result is better products for our users and customers and greater internal productivity. And I'll just give you a few examples from the product side. In re-commerce, for example, natural language search is now available across all markets, improving the share of users who see relevant results. In real estate, we have now advanced the virtual staging or the redecoration feature. We have improved the AI assisted valuation, and we're continuing to experiment with conversational search. And in jobs, we're deploying AI matching application tools for both candidates and recruiters. And I'll show you a concrete mobility example on the next couple of slides. But I also want to comment on the productivity side. And these are some numbers from our internal survey from June that shows that 86% of our employees now use AI on a daily basis. 42% say that they save more than four hours per week from this. And we have doubled the number of employees who are building reusable AI solutions since our last survey in February. And all of this is managed, as we have said before, within our existing financial framework. But before we move to the verticals, I'd like to give you a concrete example of how AI is creating value in DealerHub. We sit on massive amounts of data, pricing trends, buyer behavior, competitive positioning, and we are now using AI to turn all of that into actionable insight on every single car on our sites helping dealers to spot underperforming cars and sell faster. This is live in Norway with good feedback and it's planned for Sweden in the second half. But let me give you a short demo of this. So this is DealerHub, and when a dealer logs in, they can see all their active listings sorted by priority. Here on the right, there's an AI summary for every car, also the recommended actions for that car. And let's click on this Volkswagen Polo at the top. You will see a side panel open with the daily AI review. This tells the dealer what's working and what isn't. Below that you can see the recommended actions. For this one it's renew the add and add missing equipment. And then before taking action, the dealer can check the data themselves, the historic performance of this car, a number of different metrics that shows how this car stacks up against the market in general to get a better understanding. And once the car dealer has looked through all of this and is convinced, he or she can go back up and with one click, renew, add. Confirm. Done. And then over to the next action. Add missing equipment. And done. And over to the next car. This is AI reviews in Dealer Hub. So with that, let's go to the regular walkthrough of the verticals, and as usual, we will start with mobility. In Norway, ARPA growth continued to be strong, up 19% for professionals, 13% for private. This was partly driven by the annual price increase, but also further boosted by packaging and improved upselling. Car volumes in both professional and private segments increased, although this was offset by a decline in the sub-verticals. In Sweden, the platform situation for car dealers is now stable, and as planned, we implemented a price increase on May 1st. As a result, professional ARPA increased 3% in the quarter. This is then the net effect of the price increase, but it was partly offset by lower voluntary spend from dealers, such as reduced upselling and add-ons, such as the bump as an example. Private ARPA decreased due to various mixed effects. And if we look at volumes, professional volumes increased 1% year on year, but pro-car volumes grew by 5% in Q2, and that was boosted by a particularly strong June. But as Dan said, offset by a decline in the sub-verticals. For privates, the picture improved in Q2. Car listings declined only 9% compared to the 26% drop that we reported in Q1. And in Denmark, the professional ARPA at 771 Danish kroner increased compared to the 644 that we reported in Q1. And this was supported by improved package splits and renewals. Private Arpa declined. This is due to the reversal of the free-to-list model of cars priced below 50,000 kroner that was done on DBA in September last year. And on volumes, the Danish market has improved compared to Q1, and the continued decline that you see now in professional volumes is primarily driven by dealer adaptation to our new business model rather than market conditions as such. And private volumes turned positive. This was also driven by the mentioned reversal to the free-to-list model. And the private volume is up 27% year-on-year. On to the financials for mobility. Revenues increased 6% in constant currency. Classified revenues also grew 6% in constant currency. Strong growth in Norway at 17%, partly offset by Sweden at minus 2%, and Denmark at plus 7%. Transactional revenues increased 13% driven by Netbil and Autovex. Advertising revenues declined 13%, and this was mainly driven by Sweden. OPEX, excluding COGS, increased 10%, primarily driven by personnel costs and marketing investments in Sweden, where we have elevated our marketing activity to support the blockade recovery, and it also reflects the continued investments in our C2B businesses. So overall then, EBITDA decreased 4% year on year to 365 million, resulting in a margin of 53%. Then moving to real estate, and in Norway, ARPA grew 16% year on year, with residential for sale, the primary driver, at 17% growth. And on volumes, residential for sale was flat year on year. This is a very resilient outcome, I think, reflecting sustained high activity in the Norwegian housing market. And total new approved ads were down 3%, but that was driven by the rental and leisure home segments. And then moving to Finland, and here following the shift to the fixed monthly pricing that we introduced at the beginning of the year, we are now tracking the number of offices as our primary volume metric, and ARPO, or average revenue per office, as our pricing metric. And in Q2, ARPO was up 5% quarter on quarter, driven by package upgrades and increased value-added services. We had 1,562 offices active on Oikotie, and that was stable quarter on quarter. So this means that real estate delivered another strong quarter. Classified revenues grew 13% year-on-year with solid growth across all segments. Norway contributed 15% growth with residential for sale then as the key driver. And Finland grew total revenues 18% year-on-year. And this was driven by the move to the subscription-based model in Q1. And also our transactional businesses, the rental businesses, continued to perform well, with revenues up 18% led by Casa and HomeQ in Sweden. On costs, OPEX excluding COGS increased 7%, reflecting continued investments to grow the business. EBITDA then reached 248 million, which is up 24% year on year, with the margin expanding to 58%. Moving to jobs, here we continue to deliver strong ARPA growth, with ARPA up 15% year on year in Q2. This was driven by two factors. First, Upsell products performed really well, and we also continued to refine our discount model. On volumes, new approved ads were down 9% year-on-year. This was partly due to timing of Easter, which fell differently from last year. But if we look at the year-to-date, the volume decline is 6%, which mirrors the publicly available figures from Statistics Norway, SSB. And then on the job financials, revenues increased 5% year on year, as the ARPA growth of 15% more than offset the 9% volume decline. OPEX, excluding COGS, increased 9%. This was driven by planned investments in the team to support continued revenue growth, as well as some temporarily higher consultant costs. This led to EBTA growth of 2% year-on-year, 275 million, and a margin of 58%.

And then finally, we have Recommerce.