Global-E Online Ltd

NASDAQ:GLBE

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Operator]

00:04 Greetings, and welcome to the Global-e Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2021 Earnings Call. This call is being simultaneously webcast on the company's website in the Investors section, under News and Events. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. 00:35 For opening remarks and introductions, I'd now like to turn the conference over to Erica Mannion at Sapphire Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Erica Mannion, Sapphire Investor Relations]

00:47 Thank you. Good afternoon. With me today from Global-e are Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Ofer Koren, Chief Financial Officer; and Nir Debbi, Co-founder and President. Amir will begin with a brief review of the business results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2021. Ofer will then review the financial results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2021, followed by the company's outlook for the first quarter and full year of 2022. We will then open the call for questions. 01:22 Certain statements we make today may constitute forward-looking statements and information within the meaning of Section 27-A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21-E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Safe Harbor Provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that relate to our current expectations and view -- views of future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, some of which are beyond our control. In addition, these forward-looking statements reflect our current views with respect to future events and are not a guarantee of future performance. Actual outcomes may differ materially from the information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those set forth in the section titled Risk Factors in our prospectus filed with the SEC on September 13th, 2021 and other documents filed with or furnished to the SEC. 02:25 These statements reflect management's current expectations regarding future events and operating performance, and speak only as of the date of this call. You should not put undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable. We cannot guarantee that future results, levels of activity, performance, and events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or will occur. Except as required by applicable law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise after the date on which these statements are made, or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Please refer to our press release dated February 16, 2022 for additional information. 03:23 Certain metrics we will be discussed today are non-GAAP metrics. The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for or superior to financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operating decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making. For more information on the non-GAAP measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release dated February 16, 2022. 04:18 Throughout this call, we provide a number of key performance indicators used by our management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release dated February 16, 2022. 04:35 I will now turn the call over to Amir, Co-Founder and CEO.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

04:41 Thank you, Erica, and welcome everyone. Today marks our third quarter as a public company and our first Q4 report. This is an exciting chance to reflect on what an unbelievable year we've had. We finished the year with the strongest quarter in the company's history, continuing our consistent trend of delivering growth and strong execution against our ambitious targets. During today's call we will review our Q4 and full 2021 results, update you on the exciting developments going on in the business and provide guidance towards what we expect to see in 2022. 05:21 Starting with Q4 results. I could not be prouder of the Global-e team for producing yet another record quarter, despite the tough year-on-year comp as we lap last year's COVID impacted holiday period. For the first time in our company's history we surpassed $0.5 billion in quarterly GMV, with $505 million generated in the quarter. Together with our strong execution in the previous 3 quarters, annual GMV summed up to $1.45 billion in 2021, delivering more than 87% growth versus 2020 GMV. Revenues followed a similar trend with $82.7 million of revenues in Q4 and $245.3 million for the full year, delivering roughly 80% year-on-year growth in 2021. 06:19 Thanks to our growing economies of scale and our continued focus on operational excellence. We managed to continue improving our gross profitability margin, which in Q4 reached 39.5% as a result of the topline growth coupled with the scale average, we more than doubled our gross profit in 2021, reaching $91.4 million, compared to $43.5 million last year, delivering a 110% year-on-year gross profit expansion. 06:53 We continue to reinvest across our business, as we rapidly scale up, but as always, we do it in a thoughtful and highly efficient manner, maintaining our cash generating model with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.3% for Q4 compared to 13.5% in Q4 of last year, and 13.2% for the full year of 2021, up from 9.2% in 2020. 07:26 We continue to witness an immense and growing market opportunity ahead of us, across all regions and market segments we operate in. Interest in our services remains as strong, if not, stronger than ever and we believe the effects of the COVID pandemic on merchants priorities and decision-making processes is largely permanent. 07:47 As we mentioned in the past, we do expect the gradual normalization of e-commerce growth rate to continue over the coming quarters as the impact of the pandemic wears off and shoppers around the world increase the percentage of their spend in physical stores. It is also worthwhile mentioning, that given our scale and the strategic relationships we have with a variety of logistics service providers, coupled with the fact that merchants tend to prioritize direct to consumer over other channels, to date we have not witnessed any meaningful impact from supply chain challenges or merchant inventory shortages. 08:26 Over the last quarter, we continued launching with many more incredible brands and continued expanding our relationships with prominent retail groups. During the fourth quarter, we launched yet more brands from the LVMH Group, this time Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin, Rihanna’s cosmetics brands, Yeezy-GAP, Kanye West’s much discussed fashion cooperation with GAP, also launched with us during Q4, as did the fast-growing sports clothing brand Navigation. 08:58 During the quarter, we also expanded our relationship with several of our merchants, serving more and more lanes for them. Among these, we can mention Cartier, Stussy, Suunto, the French brand The Kooples and the Spanish footwear brand Camper. All of which added additional key lanes to be operated by Global-e. In addition, the German audio equipment brand Sennheiser added the US, one of its largest destination markets to be operated by Global-e, continuing our growth in the exciting new vertical of consumer electronics. 09:34 Besides our strong momentum in the markets we already operate in, namely North America, the UK and Continental Europe, we also continued pursuing our geographical expansion efforts. We expanded our team on the ground in Tokyo, established a partnership agreement with the Japanese Global Digital Transformation Leader Trans Cosmos and now also have our first team member on the ground in Melbourne, Australia with the first reputable Aussie merchant already signed. 10:04 On the strategic partnerships front, our joint efforts together with Shopify to deliver the new native integrations remain on track. We recently met additional important milestones in the technical development roadmap and are gearing up towards general availability of the new integration once we complete the pilot phase. All the while, we continue to onboard new Shopify based merchants of various sizes on the existing third-party integration. As a matter of fact, some of the new brand launches, I mentioned earlier, such as Fenty Beauty, Yeezy-GAP and Navigation are all Shopify based. As is the remarkable direct-to-consumer healthcare apparel and lifestyle brand FIGS, which is the latest Shopify based enterprise merchant to launch with us just a couple of weeks ago. 10:54 I'm also happy to let the fans of the UK based Formula-1 racing team McLaren that you can now order your favorite merge regardless of where you are in the world, as McLaren recently implemented Global-e’s offering under headless Shopify based online store. 11:11 Finally, I would like to give you the latest update on the strategic acquisition of Flow Commerce we signed in Q4. We closed the transaction early in Q1 this year, welcome the team into the Global-e family and immediately went full steam ahead with integrating Flow’s team and capabilities into Global-e. The motivation for the acquisition was our strategic wish to better support emerging brands, as well as be able to provide our solutions to channels in white label form. As such, and based on Flow’s technology we recently established a new channels in emerging brands division. The division's first priority is to complete and launched the first channel partnership agreement, which is already signed with Shopify. And on which work is well underway by the former Flow tech and product organization, augmented now by personnel and know-how from Global-e’s teams. 12:08 In addition to pursuing various other white-label channel opportunities, the new division is now in the midst of formulating it's new go-to-market strategy and productizing additional aspects of our branded offerings. Taking into account Global-e’s know-how, scale and expertise in order to ensure we deliver the best experience for the worlds emerging brands. We expect this strategic work to continue over the next couple of quarters as we gear up to launch this exciting new offering towards the end of the year. 12:44 In parallel to our strong push into the channels and emerging brands space on the back of our Flow Commerce acquisition, looking ahead to 2022, we first and foremost plan to continue leveraging our clear market leading position to continue our accelerated growth across North America, the UK and Continental Europe, in all of which the market is still very much greenfield. As in the past, this will include signing up new merchants, expanding our relationships within brand groups and operating additional lanes for existing merchants, leveraging both our ultra-efficient direct sales channels and our growing list of strategic partnerships with the likes of DHL, Shopify, [Florina] (ph), Facebook and others. 13:32 In addition, we plan to continue investing into building our offering and presence in the APAC region, both directly and through local strategic partners such as the Australian Post Group. While we expect our existing markets to continue exhibiting fast growth well into the future, given the large untapped potential in the region we do expect APAC to start gaining a meaningful part in our activity mix in the coming years. 14:02 On the product side, over the last quarters we welcomed many new members to our expanding global R&D team. As we continue to reinvest into product innovation and the building of new capabilities as future growth levers. Over the course of the coming year, we plan to continue adding more localization capabilities to the platform with emphasis on further developing the granularity of our multi-local support features. Furthermore, we expect some of the value-added services we are piloting with such as demand generation for example to move towards full-scale deployment throughout the few next quarters, providing merchants of all sizes with yet another layer of differentiated services and support for the growth of their cross border business. 14:51 During 2022. We also plan to begin a few additional pilots of our new Managed Services offering towards a full launch next year. 2022 started well, both in terms of activity and in terms of new business coming in, and we are optimistic regarding what this coming year hasn't stopped for cross border D2C in general and for us in particular. As Ofer will describe in more details in just a few minutes time, we are guiding for strong GMV and revenue growth of 70% in 2022 at the midpoint of the range, representing our strong market leadership position and the vast and long runway that lies ahead of us. 15:37 With the conclusion of our first decade of operations already inside next year, we believe we are literally just at the beginning of this exciting journey. As we continue our relentless focus on flawless execution, on operational excellence, and above all, on delivering exceptional, consistent and long-term value to all our loyal merchants, the future looks bright with tremendous opportunities for long-term growth ahead of us. And we very much plan to continue seizing them effectively and efficiently as we have done to date. 16:14 And with that, I will hand it over to Ofer, our CFO to go over our financial results in more depth, as well as provide more details regarding our outlook towards 2022.

[Ofer Koren, Chief Financial Officer]

16:28 Thank you, Amir, and thanks again, everybody for joining us today for our quarterly earnings call. We are very pleased that we ended 2021 with another strong quarter of fast growth as we continue to execute well on all fronts. I'd like to point out again that in addition to our GAAP results I'll also be discussing certain non-GAAP results. Our GAAP financial results along with the reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings release. 17:00 As Amir mentioned, our rapid growth in GMV continued in Q4, as we generated $505 million of GMV, an increase of 66% year-over-year. While growth of the overall e-commerce market is showing signs of normalization, we continue to benefit from the large and fast growing direct to consumer cross border e-commerce market opportunity. In Q4, we generated total revenues of $82.7 million, up 54% year-over-year. Service fees revenues were $35.5 million, up 73% and fulfillment services revenue were up 43% to $47.2 million. The higher growth in service fees revenues compared to fulfillment services revenue was driven by the continued growth of our multi-local offering and the mix of merchant volumes generated on our platform in Q4. 18:02 Throughout 2021, our existing merchant base continued to stay and grow with us as reflected in our annual NDR rate of 152% and GDR rate of over 98%. At the same time, we continue to see significant contribution of GMV and revenue from the new merchants that have launched with us during 2021. We have continued to experience higher paced growth in our US outbound revenue as our strong momentum in the US continues. In 2021, US outbound revenue was up 108% year-over-year. 18:42 As Amir mentioned our gross profit continues to outpace top line growth as we continue to improve gross margins, leveraging our scale and improving efficiencies. In Q4 gross profit was $32.7 million, up 82% year-over-year, representing a gross margin of 39.5% compared to 33.5% in the same period last year, also affected by the higher share of service fees revenue. We continue to put efforts in leveraging our scale as we strive to further improve our efficiencies. 19:22 Moving onto operational expenses. We are committed to continue investing in the development and enhancement of our platform to further strengthen our current offering and support new initiatives -- the new initiatives Amir has mentioned. R&D expense in Q4, excluding stock-based compensation was $8.4 million or 10.2% of revenue, compared to $4.6 million or 8.7% in the same period last year. Total R&D spend in Q4 was $10.3 million. 19:59 We also continue to invest in sales and marketing and cultivate a very healthy and growing pipeline, while maintaining high levels of efficiency. Sales and marketing expense, excluding the amortization expenses related to the Shopify warrants and stock-based compensation was $6.7 million or 8.1% of revenue compared to $3.6 million or 6.8% of revenue in the same period last year. Shopify warrants related amortization expense was $29.4 million, including this expenses and marketing expenses for the quarter totaled $36.7 million. 20:42 General and administrative expense, excluding stock-based compensation and one-off Flow transaction related expenses was $5.8 million or 7% of revenue, compared to $2.6 million or 4.8% of revenue in the same period last year. This expense reflects the impact of additional expenses related to being a public company, including our D&O insurance policy cost. Total G&A spend in Q4 was $7.8 million. 21:16 Adjusted EBITDA totaled $11.8 million, representing a 14.3% adjusted EBITDA margin, increasing from $7.2 million or 13.4% margin in the same period last year. Net loss was $22.5 million compared to a net income of $4.3 million in the year ago period, a direct outcome of the amortization expense related to the Shopify warrants. Net profit, excluding the amortization expense related to the Shopify warrants was $6.9 million. 21:54 Switching gears and turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended 2022 with $509 million in cash and cash equivalents, including short-term deposits and marketable securities prior to the closing of the Flow transaction. We continue to generate cash with operating cash flow in the quarter at $24 million compared to an operating cash flow of $33 million a year ago. 22:21 Moving to our financial outlook and guidance for 2022. As you will see, the guidance reflects the strength and the continued momentum of the business. For Q1 2022, we are expecting GMV to be in the range of $446 million to $456 million. At the midpoint of the range this represents a growth rate of 69% versus Q2 of 2021. We expect Q1 revenue to be in the range of $74.5 million to $76.5 million. At the midpoint of the range, this represents a growth rate of 64% versus Q1 of 2021. 23:04 For adjusted EBITDA, we are expecting a profit in the range of $0.7 million to $1.7 million. For the full year 2022 we anticipate GMV to be in the range of $2.45 billion to $2.5 billion, representing nearly 70% annual growth at the midpoint of the range. Revenue is expected to be in the range of $411 million to $421 million, representing a growth rate of 70% at the midpoint of the range. For adjusted EBITDA, we are expecting a profit of $38 million to $42 million. 23:48 Our outlook for 2022 reflects the impact of the Flow transaction -- acquisition, which in 2022 is still expected to generate negative adjusted EBITDA as well as additional investment in personnel-related costs, sales and marketing and product development. 24:06 In conclusion, we believe that the opportunity ahead of us remains massive and that we are well positioned to capture it. We will continue to execute on all fronts to drive strong top line growth while leveraging economies of scale and continuing to generate cash. We are gearing ourselves up in order to continue to create value to our merchants and to accelerate our business momentum. 24:34 And with that, Amir and I are happy to take any of your questions. Operator?

[Operator]

24:41 Thank you very much. At this time we will be conducting our question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Will Nance with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

[Will Nance, Goldman Sachs]

25:27 Hey guys, good afternoon. Congrats on a nice quarter. I was hoping I could ask a question about how you're thinking about the opportunity with Shopify over kind of the longer term? And I'm wondering about how you're thinking about what's the lowest hanging fruit once the full integration gets off the ground and the partnership really starts ramping? And then when we look at Shopify today, there is a significant amount of cross-border volume on their platform already. So I guess when you look at that opportunity are you more excited to penetrate the existing cross border activity that's already on the platform? Or is it the merchants with no cross border footprint that you guys are excited to actually start for the first time and enable cross border? And I'm sure the answer is both, but I guess I'm just curious on how you think about the opportunity for -- the 2 different opportunities? Thanks.

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

26:14 Hi, Will. Thank you for the question. It's Nir Debbi. First of all, we are very excited looking forward to the general availability of our native integration for the enterprise product on Shopify platform. For this product we are aiming and focusing our efforts on merchants that currently have cross border activities, most of them. Typically, this would be larger merchants already trading well and trading cross border as part of it. 26:49 Looking further into the future as part of our enhanced, I would say, partnership with Shopify related to -- also to the Flow acquisition, we do expect to support many more smaller merchants; many of them would be new into cross border activities.

[Will Nance, Goldman Sachs]

27:13 Got it. That's helpful. I appreciate it. And just maybe one on margins, I wanted to ask about the fulfillment side of the business. I guess the implied take rate on fulfillment came down again and I assume that's largely a function of the multi-local offering that you discussed, I think this quarter and last quarter. And a lot of the outperformance this quarter came from the services side of the business. So I was wondering if you could maybe talk about expectations for fulfillment revenue growth relative to services revenue growth? And related, how to think about gross margins as we project through the year.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

27:45 So, hi. So first, thank you for the question. As you said service fee take rate has increased to over 7%, while the decrease in overall take rate was the result of the decrease in fulfillment take rate. And as you mentioned, one of the main drivers for that is the expansion of our multi-local offering for which we typically do not provide fulfillment services as the model is largely based on local shipping. However, the mix in Q4 also affected the take rate as it was bias towards higher average order value merchants. 28:27 We expect going forward for the multi-local offering to continue to expand. However, we don't expect the same mix effect in the coming quarters. And I think that is reflected in our guidance, which reflects an overall take rate of approximately 16.7%.

[Will Nance, Goldman Sachs]

28:49 Got it. I appreciate taking all my questions guys. Thank you.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

28:54 Thanks, Will.

[Operator]

28:56 Thank you. We have next question from the line of James Faucette with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

[James Faucette, Morgan Stanley]

29:03 Thanks. I wanted to talk about acquisitions. And I guess within acquisitions, how much are you contemplating Flow will contribute this year and how should we think about its impact on the overall P&L, including profitability? And as part of that, what are you looking at for incremental acquisitions? Are there opportunities? And then I have a follow-up.

[Ofer Koren, Chief Financial Officer]

Hi. I will start regarding the guidance and the financials. It's Ofer. Basically Flow is integrated into our guidance and they do represent over 5% of the topline. However, they are weighing on our adjusted EBITDA, mainly in the next 2, 3 quarters as Flow’s adjusted EBITDA is not positive yet. We expect that to improve over time as we leverage our scale and efficiencies, but basically that’s impact on the next few quarters. And regarding the higher level question, I will pass it to Nir.

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

30:29 Thank you, James. So, basically looking into the future, we do expect that in the next quarter we will be focused on integrating Flow as part of the Global-e offering, building, I would say, as a bridge of Flow into the emerging brands, native support of Shopify, as well as enhancing our capabilities towards better support for SMBs. We expect this to, I would say, yield growth and momentum looking forward as of 2023 onwards. So we do have high expectations for the acquisition. However, it will take us a few months to, I would say, align it in terms of R&D investment needed to get the platform geared for, I would say, high base growth.

[James Faucette, Morgan Stanley]

31:35 Great. And then separately you announced here on the call incremental brands from LVMH, Sennheiser kind of taking over their operations in the US, et cetera. When you think about the growth algorithm for this year and into next year, how much should we be thinking about waiting between new geographies, new brands and then just incremental services and capabilities that you are looking to rollout?

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

32:14 So as you've seen from the numbers that Ofer spoke about, we've seen in 2021 more than a 150% net dollar retention, which means our merchants are actually staying with us and growing with us. We expect that to continue going into 2022. So a considerable component of our growth would come out of existing merchants, continuing to grow with us. Some of it is organic growth, some of it is opening more lanes, as we mentioned in the examples now. But I would say the majority of the growth from, I would say, new GMV would come out of signing new merchants. We have a very, very robust pipeline, which continues to develop. We see it across our operations in USA, Continental Europe, UK and now also building up nicely in Asia Pacific and we expect in terms of new GMV a lot of it to come from new bookings.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

33:30 And James, this is Amir. I would just add on the back of that. As we mentioned earlier, we see very much of the opportunity in those markets that Nir mentioned, the US, Continental Europe and the UK to be still very much greenfield. Although as we've already mentioned, we are investing a lot of efforts and attention into growing into the APAC region. We do expect the majority of the activity over the coming years to still come from our existing territories as they continue to grow very fast.

[James Faucette, Morgan Stanley]

34:13 That's great. Thanks, Amir. Thanks, Nir.

[Operator]

34:18 Thank you. We have next question from the line of Samad Samana with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

[Samad Samana, Jefferies]

34:23 Hi. Great to see the strong finish to 2021. I wanted to ask the Flow question slightly differently. I guess -- I know you guys gave a specific revenue level when you announced the acquisition. So I was hoping for a more specific amount that you're assuming for 2022. And then could you tell us is Flow was growing at the same rate, better or slower than Global-e on a standalone basis.

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

34:55 Going into 2022 as we advised in the acquisition, we expect Flow to contribute to the growth, I would say, in line with internal growth. I think with some of the focusing and building and focus on the R&D, the internal growth of Flow should be a bit lower than Global-e itself, but not materially different. So this is our expectation for 2022 onwards. We expect that to accelerate as a division once everything is deployed, I would say, later this year and especially looking into 2023 onwards.

[Samad Samana, Jefferies]

35:45 Great. And then maybe Ofer. Just -- we're about halfway through the calendar quarter and I definitely appreciate that the company gives guidance. Could you help us maybe understand what you're seeing in terms of GMV seasonality for brands that have been with you for a while, just -- are we seeing kind of normal seasonal GMV trends for established merchants? Just any color you can give halfway through the first quarter from a seasonality perspective?

[Ofer Koren, Chief Financial Officer]

36:14 Yes. I think in terms of seasonality, we're seeing standard quarter if you compare it to previous quarters, to the previous 2 or 3 quarters. However, as we mentioned and I think this is very obvious. There is some normalization in the overall growth of e-commerce and that is also evident. Since we are able to add a lot of new logos to our platform and also execute on land and expand, basically we were able to generate very high growth rates. But overall market is normalizing as physical stores are reopening. And that is going back to the traditional balance.

[Samad Samana, Jefferies]

37:18 Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

37:21 Thanks, Samad.

[Operator]

37:24 Thank you. We have next question from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

[Brian Peterson, Raymond James]

37:31 Hi, gentlemen. I'll echo my congrats on the strong close to 2021. So I wanted to hit on some of the sales investments. So it looks like sales and marketing doubled year-over-year in 2021. I know that's going to be an incremental investment area going forward. Maybe help us understand stack rank where are those 2 or 3 incremental investments going? And how much or how productive are those today in terms of driving new merchant growth? Or is that going to be more felt in 2022 and 2023?

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

38:03 Sure. Thank you. Hi, Brian, it's Nir, and thank you for the question. Yes, we did invest quite a lot in sales and marketing versus what we did previous year. However, we are still below the 10% mark in terms of spend on sales and marketing out of revenues. However, the growth that we've seen have gone towards, I would say, 2 main focuses, one of them is establishing spearheads into new territories. We have people on ground in Tokyo, Japan building the pipeline and cultivating our relationship with a strategic partner on the ground Trans Cosmos, as well investment already in Australia. 38:53 In parallel to it, we've seen the market opportunity and the ability to capture higher growth as we've seen in the states, which is growing more than 100% for us. So we are doubling up our teams in order to enjoy the momentum. So it's an expansion across our gravity center, as well as establishing spearheads in different locations in the world where we define the high opportunity markets. We intend to continue and invest that going forward. But at the pace that will not -- will not be dramatically different in terms of the spend on sales and marketing out of revenues.

[Brian Peterson, Raymond James]

39:38 And maybe just a follow-up on that. If I think about the investments that you're making in Australia or Japan, how do we think about the ramp. I know it's early days. I know this is an unfair question, but just thinking about when those markets could make material revenue contributions? Thanks guys.

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

39:57 Sure. I think that we would see -- we would see GMV ramping up considerably in Asia Pacific as of 2023, but we do expect to see already GMV this year. So we have the first man on the ground in Melbourne, and on the back of it, we have the first reputable brand out of Australia already signed and expected to contribute already as of late Q2 and we expect more to come within the year and launch within that year. Most of the effect would come only in 2023, because they were launched later in the year, so most of the effects will come later in the year. 40:36 However, we do see a lot of the investment already bearing fruit is our bookings went considerably up through 20 21 versus 2020 and this is part of the push and momentum we are have into 2022 planning and result as lot of the growth would come from clients that already signed with Global-e.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

41:06 Yeah. And I would add on that, Brian, that are coming in strong into these markets, not just with our teams on the ground, but also with a couple of strategic partnerships that we've already signed and are already operating. So we expect that to also be a force multiplier and our ability to ramp up quite quickly in these regions.

[Brian Peterson, Raymond James]

41:34 Great to hear. Thank you.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

41:38 Thanks, Brian.

[Operator]

41:39 Thank you. We have next question from the line of Koji Ikeda with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

[Koji Ikeda, Goldman Sachs]

41:46 Great. Hi, Amir. Hi, Ofer. Thanks for taking the questions. I had a question on guidance here. So over the past few days, we've recently heard some other e-commerce companies or maybe the outlook was a little bit less certain and here you are with confidence giving ‘22 guidance, not only confident, giving it, but really a nice number here at 70%. So wanted to dig in a little bit on what you're seeing out there? Hearing out there from your customers that is giving you all that confidence to give a ’22 guide right now?

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

42:22 Yeah. So thank you for the question. This is Nir. Basically we have seen with our clients giving priority into investment in direct to consumer cross border and we've seen it with multiple clients, opening more lanes and investing more in penetration into new geographies, which are expected to continue going into 2023. In parallel, 2021 was a record deal for us in finding new business and new logos in and a lot of this effect would come into play only in 2022 and would contribute to this accelerated growth. We do see as we spoke about in previous calls, a lot of the effects of COVID that are here to stay, so the need for brands and the desire to go direct to consumer was accelerated through the pandemic, and this does not change. There might be certainly relief with shops being opened. However, the trend of brands, especially larger brands, moving into a direct to consumer on a global basis is not stopping and we see it in our pipeline. And this gives us, I would say, quite a lot of confidence building or planning into 2022 and onwards.

[Koji Ikeda, Goldman Sachs]

44:00 Got it, got it. Thanks for that commentary. I wanted to ask you a question on net revenue retention. 152% here in the fourth quarter or for the full year for ’21 and that's really off the back of a very strong pandemic, 172%. So I guess looking for some commentary, you don't have to give the exact numbers, but how should we be thinking about net revenue retention driven by customer cohorts pre 2020 versus customers that were maybe brought onto the platform more recently in 2021 and later 2020?

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

44:37 I think that generally speaking, we see the newer cohorts coming in a bit stronger compared to the previous cohorts. However, when you take a bird's eye view at it, as we previously said, we don't expect the pandemic figures to be the stable figures for the future. We do believe that if you look at our pre-COVID averages, we will be able to achieve that. So we don't think that we will hit a 170 or 160 or 150 every year. However, we are confident that we will have a strong NDR numbers moving forward.

[Operator]

45:34 Thank you. We have next question from the line of Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

[Brent Bracelin, Piper Sandler]

45:41 Thank you. Good afternoon. I should say good evening to team here. I wanted to go back to the optimism around GMV growth here, you're guiding to $1 billion of incremental GMV. Even if I assume 5% of that is tied to Flow, it looks like organic GMV growth could be well north of 60% again. And so, just as we think about the levers to growth, how much of this is just a luxury channel you're addressing that is really strong versus it sounds like there some new logos that are driving the optimism? Just could you double click a little bit more into the optimism here, maybe is there a big chunk of contribution coming from Shopify or do you think this is largely going to be kind of organic as you think about the construct of that GMV optimism you are guiding through here? Thanks.

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

46:42 Thank you, Brent. This is Nir. Basically our optimism is based on, I would say, the robust pipeline of new logos we see on the one side, which brings with it very larger brands wanting to do cross border and use also our multi-local offering across multiple geographies. And in parallel to it, we have a great pipeline of land and expand. We have discussion ongoing and advanced discussions with large brands already operating on our platform, looking to expand the operations with us and add to it the organic growth of our clients that even form, as aforementioned, from previous years cohorts still growing very nicely and the combination of all 3 levers actually bring us to a point where we do believe that even organically, as you mentioned, the 60% mark is a reasonable target for 2022.

[Brent Bracelin, Piper Sandler]

47:52 So it sounds like demand is there for sure. Go ahead, Amir.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

47:57 Yeah. I just wanted to add that, I think, in addition to that, we put a lot of effort and attention into also keeping the GDR high. So if you couple the growth of the existing and new cohorts with the fact that churn rates remain sub 2% consistently over quite a few years now, that is the other side of the growth algorithm, keeping -- making sure that our merchants remain very happy with the results that they're seeing and stay with us for the long term.

[Brent Bracelin, Piper Sandler]

48:38 Great to hear there. And then my last follow up here for Ofer. We do have some new mechanics as we think about the take rate Shopify, Flow. Should we assume these newer partnerships should be slightly lower take rates, same take rate, higher take rate? Just trying to think through the take rate assumptions as we start to ramp-up some of these Flow contribution and Shopify contribution and the wild card there would be the mix of multi-local, but just trying to understand the take rate assumptions for those 2 channels going forward? Thanks.

[Ofer Koren, Chief Financial Officer]

49:21 Yeah, Brian. Thank you for the question. Basically looking -- starting from the bottom line, I think that we are expecting in 2022 solid take rate at around 16.7%. And we don't expect the mix to change significantly. The current Shopify business or the Shopify partnership that we already had before the Flow acquisition, this tends to be at the very similar take rates to our overall average. And again, putting aside the multi-local which we mentioned a few times, we don't expect any additional impact on the take rate in 2022. Going forward into the future, once the Flow offering will develop and start gaining traction, that will have some impact. And we do expect lower take rate on that offering, but it will take -- it will take -- still take a few quarters until we see the impact of that.

[Brent Bracelin, Piper Sandler]

50:48 Very helpful color there. And thanks again for the call. Thank you.

[Operator]

50:54 Thank you. We have next question from the line of Scott Berg with Needham. Please go ahead.

[John Godin, Needham]

51:00 Hey guys. This is John Godin on for Scott Berg. Thanks for taking my questions. First, just on the Flow platform. Just curious if you guys could kind of frame-up the opportunity over the next couple of years between expanding Flow’s reach more internationally compared to kind of the increased go-to-market capabilities and accelerating penetration that can help you drive in the US?

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

51:28 Thank you for the question. It's Nir. Basically we expect that Flow would first deepened our partnership with Shopify. As part of the acquisition we signed -- as we announced an additional extension of our partnership allow us basically through the Flow platform to support additional elements of Shopify native cross border solution. And we expect that to give us access to many more smaller emerging brands and a new segment, we're not really focused on with our current solution. And this will also enable us to accelerate our smaller merchants solution with, I would say, a quicker deployment time, inability for a more productized approach Global-e current enterprise platform. 52:39 So, overall we expect it to, as I said, increase our footprint into additional verticals. A lot of it would come, as you stated, out of the states, but we believe that we are going to roll it out over the next -- over the next couple of years on a global scale.

[John Godin, Needham]

53:01 Great. And I was just wondering if you could talk about Europe specifically a little bit. Highlight maybe any demand trends you're seeing there? And curious if you're seeing kind of an additional migration of companies who previously were not operating in Europe on your platform now migrating on, given the VAT changes? Thank you.

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

53:25 Yes, we do continue to see an increased demand for our services, as the complexity of trading cross border in general continues to increase. It's not only the change in Europe with the IOSS regime now applies also to cross border sales, not only the distance selling within Europe. But -- and I can say it because we just did a summary for our clients recently. There were more than 30 changes in regulation cross border only in the last 12 months across different markets. So this overtime convinces merchants the time it takes to adjust the investment and the know-how of how to do it efficiently does not make sense doing it in-house, and we see more interest coming our way out of that. 54:29 In Europe specifically, based on the IOSS we do see more interest from cross border retailers looking into how they can leverage Global-e and avoid the need for registration, as well as enjoy additional capabilities related to international duty drawbacks and other, I would say, more complicated processes that Global-e enables.

[John Godin, Needham]

54:59 Great. Thanks guys.

[Operator]

55:03 Thank you. We have next question from the line of Josh Beck with KeyBanc. Please go ahead.

[Josh Beck, KeyBanc]

55:10 Thank you for taking the question. Maybe I'll just ask product focused one. Certainly it seems like multi-local has progressed really nicely. You talked about expanding some of the localization capabilities. So maybe just stepping back, can you give us some sense of how widely adopted the product is today and maybe over a multi-year timeframe? How to frame up where it could head?

[Nir Debbi, Co-Founder and President]

55:44 Yes. So the product is already well developed in terms of multi-local and it allows us to support already the 2 very large brands Jabra and Sennheiser and not only allows us to support them, it allowed us to also increase, I would say, and take additional chunk, a substantial chunk of their business, such as the US recently being allocated to us from Sennheiser. However, we do plan and we continue to invest highly in making it available in additional markets. So we continue to rollout additionally legal entities, additional operational and logistics setup in different markets. We are launching next month our first merchant out of the GCC region working out of UAE with support out of the free trade zone, as well as support from Mainland Dubai and we continue to continue this with the man on the ground now in Singapore, as well as other locations as well. So we do invest heavily and continue to deploy it. 57:06 On the back of it we had additional local carriers ability to support localized return in additional parts of the world, as well as a local payment methods and services for those specific domain. So we are -- I would say the product itself is developed. However, the rollout fleet has much more local specifics than the regular cross border approach and we are based on the demand we see from clients we are rolling out additional services and geographies.

[Operator]

57:48 Thank you. We take the last question from the line of Pat Walravens with JMP Securities. Please go ahead.

[Pat Walravens, JMP Securities]

57:56 Great. Thank you, and congratulations. Amir can we very briefly recap the conversation we had over breakfast [indiscernible] about the durability of this model. In particular like large brands you cant’s just rollout in every market with you at one time. Right? They have to do it over a period of years. Can you just talk about why that is?

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

58:22 Thanks, Pat. It's not that they can't, theoretically they can. And to be honest, some of them do. It's more a question of choice. And in many cases kind of their internal setups. So, as we discussed when we met in [indiscernible] typically the kind of small and medium sized brands will basically rollout the entire world in one go. The bigger brands typically do put in place kind of a gradual rollout plan and sometimes it's because they have local representatives or local distributors in certain markets where they want to run these contracts off before they internalize these lanes. In our cases, they have local setups underground of their own. And the first want to start with the markets where they don't have such setups and later on as they progress, rollout these markets as well. But there are always exceptions. And I think on the previous call -- in the previous quarter we mentioned aloe yoga, which went live with us, which is a big enterprise merchants and they went live with all markets in one go. So it's really -- there is nothing inhibiting them structurally from doing that. It's more a matter of choice and strategy on a per merchant basis.

[Pat Walravens, JMP Securities]

60:03 Yeah. And I’ll bet a lot of people in Israel celebrated when you do that with aloe yoga. Thank you very much.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

60:09 Absolutely.

[Operator]

60:12 Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, now we have reached the end of the question and answer session. And I'd now like to turn the call back to Amir Schlachet for closing remarks. Over to you, sir.

[Amir Schlachet, Co-Founder, and Chief Executive Officer]

60:24 Thank you. And on behalf of Ofer, Nir and myself and the entire Global-e team, I would like to thank you all for joining today and for your continued support and interest in Global-e. As the year 2021 comes through its conclusion, I would also like to take this opportunity and thank our merchants all around the globe for entrusting us with their business. And as always, none of this would have been possible without the unbelievable professional abilities and dedication of our teams around the world who put their hearts and minds day in and day out to make sure we deliver the best of Global-e. So, kudos to all of you. Goodbye all, keep safe and we very much look forward to seeing you again on our future earnings calls.

[Operator]

61:06 Thank you very much. This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.