Adevinta ASA

OSE:ADE

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Operator]

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q2 Trading Update Investor Presentation Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you that the call is recorded today, Thursday, 15th of July 2021. And I would now like to hand over to your first speaker today, Mr. Rolv Erik Ryssdal, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, operator, and hello, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining today's presentation of our Q2 trading update. First of all, I hope that wherever you're located, you and your close ones are healthy and safe. Although the vaccine rollout brings a lot of hope and relief, we still need to remain cautious as the pace of the vaccination differs from one region to another and as we see the emergence of new variants. Therefore, at Adevinta, we continue to comply with the travel and gathering policies. So the management teams are connecting today from different places. But we do have the pleasure today to have on this call the whole new leadership team of Adevinta, the [indiscernible] team; as well as Paul Heimann, CEO of eBay Kleinanzeigen. We will discuss the last quarter's developments and performance for the old perimeter of the group. We still have, for the last time to make a distinction for reporting purposes. We will then give you more insight in some of the key assets from eBay Classifieds Group. We will not be able to provide any financial data at this stage, but would like to give you some flavor of the leading position, strength and opportunities before we can provide a bit more details at the Capital Markets Day that we will host in November. I will not go through the disclaimer, which I invite you to read. And I will start with an overview of the key highlights of the quarter before going into the details of the business review and Uvashni will do review of the financials. After that, Malte, Paul and Zac will go through their business section, and I will conclude with the outlook. So starting with the key highlights of the quarter. Of course, the completion of the eCG transaction is a major step. And I will get back to it a bit later, but we did not lose focus on our operations. We made significant progress and continued on the recovery path with further improvements across the board. The comparisons with Q2 2020 makes the performance very impressive with 36% organic growth but we also grew 15% organically compared to Q2 2019. In France, the market environment is improving, and some restrictions have been lifted. Traffic grew double digits. But we did notice a soft deceleration at the back end of the quarter due to the end of the third lockdown. Audiences in motor and real estate continue to be strong, but we see some softening on the supply side. Unsurprisingly, our holiday business recovered strongly with lifting of mobility restrictions. In May, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of Leboncoin. And what a journey that has been since the start. And I want to seize this opportunity to congratulate all the teams for the fantastic work they have achieved and are continuing to achieve. Leboncoin teams are relentlessly improving our solutions with new transactional futures deployed once again to improve user experience and efficiency. In Spain, since March lockdown measures were progressively lifted and the state of alarm was lifted on May 9. Although the rising number of cases more recently is concerning. GDP projections were revised upwards. We see encouraging trends in all verticals, although jobs are still lagging. We also noticed the competitive environment has intensified, leading us to accelerate investment to protect our market position. We had multiple product rollouts in the quarter, such as multi publishing products between InfoJobs and Milanuncios. In Motor, we improved content sharing between Milanuncios and [indiscernible] and developed the [indiscernible] using machine learning in Milanuncios. In Brazil, the coverage-related deaths started to flatten after the peak observed at the beginning of Q2. Though remaining higher than in most countries due to the slow vaccine rollout. This led to a gradual release of restrictions on social interaction and business during the quarter. Strong momentum continued in the real estate market due to low interest rates. We saw recovery in the motor market, both in production and car sales, though not yet at full capacity. On the product side, we further enhanced the digital experience in motors with vehicle history rollout and improved financing and insurance services. The integration and group as app is progressing well with associated cost reduction from bank office systems and sales operations. Now moving on to the Global Market. We finalized the divestment of Shpock, which was sold to Russmedia in accordance with the commitments made to the CMA in the United Kingdom. In Italy, we see the benefits of investments in both product and tech and marketing. We continue to enhance our transactional services and saw strong growth in traffic and content as well as increasing car dealer penetration. We will further invest in the second half to respond to intensifying competition. Willhaben in Austria continued its solid development in all operational metrics. Paylivery, the peer-to-peer payment and delivery service gained further traction and scaled with optimizations in the funnel to improve conversion rates. Encouraging developments in the jobs vertical confirmed the positive signs already observed at the end of Q1. In Ireland, we saw good traction in our mortgage business together with a continued strong growth in multiunit rental involved. In Motor, DoneDeal has significantly improved its average revenue per dealership driven by upselling and product improvement. In Hungary, our product and tech improvement started to deliver results as we saw a significant increase in the penetration in the use of our apps. We also observed a strong recovery in the jobs category, which has heavily impacted by COVID last year. Private motor contents and revenues, on the other hand, are still suffering somewhat, while we continue to grow well on the professional side in Hasznaltauto. I will now hand over to Uvashni for the financial performance section.

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Rolv Erik, and good afternoon, everyone. As Rolv Erik indicated earlier, we are reporting Adevinta operating performance, excluding the eBay Classifieds assets this quarter. We will fully account for eCG in our P&L and balance sheet as from quarter 3. Reported revenues amounted to EUR 213 million in Q2 of this year, up 36% compared to the same period last year; also up 36%, excluding the impacts of disposals, acquisitions and foreign exchange. This performance also supported by a favorable competitive base demonstrates further recovery across the board. When compared to 2019, revenues were up 15% on an organic basis. Online Classifieds revenues improved 39% compared to Q2 2020, where we saw a strong impact of the COVID-19 crisis. 6% of this growth is attributable to transactional services. This pay advertising up 35% year-on-year. EBITDA, including JVs increased 24% year-on-year to EUR 52 million. Revenue growth and benefits from divestments were partially offset by some of the one-off costs we saw in Brazil, with respect to the executive share scheme valuation increase, mainly due to the acquisition of Grupo Zap and the business growth we see. We saw strong investment in France on marketing as we previously guided. And an increase in personnel costs in the absence of government subsidiaries seen in the comparative period. Of course, the ramp-up of transactional services also contributed to lower margin percentage. Importantly though, excluding the negative one-off impact of the executive team in Brazil, the EBITDA margin would have been at 29.8%. Now let me run you through the financial performance for each segment, starting with France. Revenue is France grew 36% in the quarter and 32% compared to the second quarter of 2019. This includes the contribution from our margins. This demonstrates the rapid recovery as COVID-19 restrictions eased progressively through the quarter. Total classified revenues grew 35% compared to last year, of which 9% was attributable to transactional services, and it grew 41% compared to Q2 2019. We continue to see solid growth throughout the second quarter, especially in motor and real estate verticals, primarily driven by positive ARPA development. Holiday rental vertical improved significantly as a result of the relaxation of the mobility restrictions. We also saw growth in advertising up 46% year-on-year and are now almost in line with 2019 figures. We did see a softening in EBITDA margin to 46%. This despite the revenue goals. But as indicated earlier, it's mainly due to the strong marketing investment done in the second quarter, where we almost doubled investment compared to the low levels we had in Q2 2020. This was ascribed to wide -- nationwide campaign to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Leboncoin and of course, to promote the transactional services. The increased share of transaction services also impacted negatively on margin performance, but we expected this as the margins are slightly lower. We also increased personnel costs as we ramp up on hiring, and we did not benefit any further from the temporary redundancy support measures we saw last year. Overall, a very solid performance for France. Moving on to Spain. Revenues in Spain grew 45% compared to Q2 2020, up 4% compared to Q2 2019 and now above pre-COVID level. We also had also all-time high on a quarterly basis in Spain. Classified revenues were up 45% compared to Q2 2020 and 5% compared to Q2 2019, demonstrating a strong recovery in the vertical. We observed significant growth in motors revenue, also growing at double digits compared to Q2 2019. This was fueled by the combination of higher dealer penetration in the large clients, 2 million units and higher ARPD.The real estate market continued to recover in transactional volumes and was close to 2019 levels at the end of May. We saw significant recovery in jobs vertical despite the weak underlying market, and this was benefiting from the digitization of the small medium businesses in Spain. Display advertising grew 45% year-on-year, led by the increase in direct sales and was broadly in line with Q2 2019. The EBITDA margin in Q2 was slightly above Q2 2020 at 33%. However, you must remember, in 2020, we've cut heavily in marketing expenses and benefited again -- once again from temporary redundancy in the context of COVID-19. In Q2 this year, the revenue increase was offset by the reactivation of marketing spend and the increase in personnel costs to support and boost our market position. We expect marketing and sales [indiscernible] to further increase in the second half in response to increasingly competitive environment we see and observe.Now let's move on to Brazil. We continue to observe the depreciation of the Brazilian Real against the Euro compared to Q2 2020, impacting revenue growth, albeit at a lesser extent than we've seen in the previous quarters. Operational revenue in the Brazil segment increased by 141% in local currency, driven by the acquisition of course of Grupo Zap in Q4 2020. In overland to Brazil itself, revenue grew by 148% year-on-year in local currency. This includes the contribution of Grupo Zap. On a comparable basis, revenues grew 47% year-on-year and by 32% compared to Q2 2019. Classifieds revenues were up 44% compared to Q2 2020, led by motor and real estate verticals as well as by higher conversion in consumer goods. We saw strong performance in the motor revenues driven by price optimization and professional sales offering and significant growth in paying listers in the private segment. We continue to observe strong growth in real estate due to the cross-selling strategy with Grupo Zap and the gradual rollout of the triple bundle between Zap, Viva Real and OLX, further strengthening our position in the broker segment. Display advertising grew 41% compared to Q2 2020 on a comparable basis, driven by solid performance in indirect advertising. Transaction revenue also grew at double digits quarter-on-quarter. In Q2, cumulative EBITDA decreased by EUR 8 million when compared to Q2 2020. As previously said, negatively impacted by demand within long-term incentive. On a comparable basis, excluding Grupo Zap and this one-off impact, EBITDA margin would have seen an increase of 8 percentage points compared to quarter 2020, driven by classified revenue performance. We further invested in talent and reactivated marketing spend in the quarter. And finally, our Global Markets segment. The Global Markets portfolio saw positive growth of 19% compared to Q2 2020. Excluding the disposals, revenue grew 34% with strong performance in our main markets throughout the quarter led by Ireland, Italy and Austria. Classifieds revenues, including transactional revenues were up 29% year-on-year, excluding disposals. Revenues in advertising was up 44%, excluding disposals. The Q2 2021 EBITDA margin excludes disposals would be 40.5%, showing a decrease of 4 percentage points year-on-year. This is mainly driven by some investments and acceleration of marketing with the product and tech investments in Italy. Austria due to high personnel costs also saw some negative impact and again, once again receiving govern grants last year. We also had some unfavorable phasing of marketing. This was partly offset by strong performance in Ireland, fueled by revenue outperformance. To conclude, overall, good continued recovery across the portfolio for Q2, resulting in solid financial performance demonstrated in revenue growth, and despite some one-off impacts and investments to fuel further growth in absolute EBITDA as well. This concludes the financial section. And I now hand over to Rolv Erik.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Uvashni. Now we're going to spend some time on the new Adevinta. Because, as you know, since June 25, it is a very new company that has moved into a new dimension. It's only been a couple of weeks, but we're all very positive about the opportunities that we see ahead of us. Before we explore some of these opportunities, let me remind you of the final terms and conditions of the transaction. The total cash consideration paid to eBay amounted to EUR 2.5 billion, and we concurrently received EUR 278 million from Schibsted for the transfer of the Danish assets. We exceeded to funds raised in October in order to fund this amount and to refinance our debt. Adevinta is close to 540 million shares to eBay, of which 63% approximately are ordinary shares with voting rights, the remainder being nonvoting shares. The capital increase had, of course, a significant impact on shareholding structure. As you can see on the right-hand side of the slide, with eBay and Schibsted now being our largest shareholders. With the application of our bylaws and corporate governance principles, the composition of the Board has evolved consequently. The new members appointed by our 2 largest shareholders and new independent directors designated at the AGM that took place on June 29. Collectively, with the existing Board members, they bring in wealth, some international business expertise from diverse sectors, including media technology, digital innovation, integration and online marketplaces, which will help to strengthen Adevinta's foundation and support group to meet its strategic objectives. Then an important announcement yesterday, and following the announcement of the agreement between eBay and Permira, which will see eBay sell approximately 125 million shares to Permira. The shareholding structure and the Board composition of the Adevinta will change in the next coming months. On closing of that transaction, which is expected in Q4, eBay stake in Adevinta will reduce to 34% and Permira will own 10.2%. And then, of course, those shares will also be voting shares. Permira partner, Dipan Patel, will be appointed to the Adevinta Board of Directors. I must say that I'm very pleased to welcome Permira as a strategic shareholder in Adevinta. And we are confident that they will help us with their expertise to support our group in capturing further value for all our shareholders and ultimately add to our success in the global online classifieds, as the global online classifieds leader. I know Permira for some time, I'm impressed by their competence. We're looking forward to working together with them. And as you see on the map here, we are now a globally scaled pure player, the leading player in online classified with leading market positions in 16 countries. This will be reduced to 15 countries following the divestment of Gumtree and motors in the U.K. in the next few months. Altogether, our assets include 40 digital brands that cover a population of 1 billion individuals. We welcome approximately 3 billion visits per month on our platforms. We also say that our key assets remains our people. We now have a team of nearly 7,000 employees, including JVs, which 40% are working on the product and technology. Our organizational structure has also evolved to reflect the combined portfolio. We now have 4 operational segments it's France, it's Mobile.de, European Markets and International Markets. They will continue to be supported by transversal teams encompassing corporate functions, central product and tech teams as well as centers of excellence. So from eCG, we get the center of excellence in motors, user experience and trust and advertising and important global growth functions in product and tech. Fine-tuning our operational model between central and local teams will happen now with a strong focus on ensuring business and cost efficiency. In order to lead this organization, we have adapted the structure of the executive team, as you can see on this slide. I am very confident that this highly experienced team can take Adevinta to the next level and achieve excellent results. Now it's my pleasure to hand over to Malte, one of the new members of the team, who will run you through an overview of the business and the opportunity that lies in mobile.de. Malte, please take it away.

[Malte Kruger]

Thank you, Rolv Erik. Hello, and good afternoon, everybody. My name is Malte and I'm the CEO of mobile.de. Great to be here today, having the opportunity to present mobile.de, Germany's auto classified leader. In the next few minutes, I will give you an overview of the size of the business and deep dive into 2 exciting growth levels for mobile.de. Mobile.de has built a market-leading position in all key dimensions. Our market leadership is really coming to life through one impressive number. Our research tells us that our dealer partners are selling 50% of all their used cars through our platforms. But let's also look at some key operational KPIs, including our competitive positioning. We are leading in all key dimensions when looking at total number of listings, where we lead with a factor of 1.4 versus our closest competitor. Total consumer audience in M web and apps, where we lead with a factor of 3.2 and number of dealer partners. As you can see, we are leading versus old and new competition, and we strongly believe this sets us up for future growth in a very attractive market. Let us also have a quick look at our product offering at mobile.de. We have a huge focus on balancing all our customer needs to be the best marketplace for all of our customer groups. We are continuously investing into our core search flows to make car buying as easy and convenient as possible. To make this come to life, we, for example, focus a lot on personalizing the experience through the use of data. We are also focusing on features which help make car buying more transparent as, for example, 360-degree pictures of the car. Additionally, we also launched our new product offerings on top of our core business to serve unmet customer needs through expanding into the value chain.Our first business was our C2B offering. With this, consumer sellers have the choice to sell their car directly to one of our C2B dealer partners in his area. We do know that this is an attractive sourcing channel for our dealer partners. Thirdly, we launched our new financing offering around 3 years ago. Here, we offer 2 easy financing solutions to our consumers and dealers alike; one through our partner, Smava, the other one called dealer financing with captives and non-captives and our dealers. From a few examples of our product offerings, to our historic average revenue per dealer growth in our core dealer business. Until 2017, we had a one-size-fit-all subscription offering for our dealers who have delivered very good growth and dealer satisfaction. In January 2017, we launched our new 3-tier account model with the accounts compact, comfort and premium, where we offer dealers different value adds, especially more visibility and better brand exposure in the higher packages. As shown here, this upselling approach has worked very good for us, as we have upsold almost 50% of all of our dealer partners to our 2 higher packages, Comfort and Premium, where we charge significantly more than in the Compact package. This, as you can see in the right-hand graph, has helped to accelerate our average revenue per dealer at CAGR from 11% to 16%. What you also see that in 2020, our average revenue per dealer got hit by the pandemic, especially as we waived fees in April 2020 to support our dealer partners and did not do a price increase last year. For this year, we will see a higher average revenue for dealer growth again, especially in the second half of the year. We had no fee waving or similar pricing activity this year, and we also just communicated our price increase for most dealers, which is effective August 1st of this year. Countering that is lower stock in the market due to supply shortage, which impacts the number of dealer listings on our platform. This is a market phenomenon, not a mobile.de specific one. Let's now have a look at the exciting future for mobile.de through the length of the total addressable market in Germany, which has a size of EUR 260 billion. As the clear market leader, mobile.de is well positioned for future growth and has 2 major levers to capture this attractive market. And I will talk more about this in the next slide, but just give me a quick overview. Level one is mainly focused on capturing more share of wallet in the area of classified and dealer marketing spend. We will use our extensive reach, new product offerings and intelligent pricing and packaging to create value and capture this opportunity. Level two is all about expanding into the value chain providing consumers an easier, more digital way to buy or sell cars while supporting our dealer partners on the digitization journey. Let's double-click on growth level one. We believe we have very good growth opportunity in our core business as dealers in Germany are still spending a significant amount of marketing money, not unclassified. 34% of dealer marketing spend is still off-line and 24% with other online channels with lower ROI. Secondly, when comparing us to international peers like Autotrader U.K., as shown in the middle graph, there seems to be meaningful headroom as well. Whilst being excited about this benchmark, we need to take some market difference into account, which impacts average revenue per dealer. As in the U.K. market there, for example, are usually larger dealers with higher share of classifieds and online spends. With that said, we believe there is an exciting opportunity ahead of us, and we do have a clear path with 3 main pillars to capture this opportunity. Number one, we will continue to use our strong and unique partnership with eBay Kleinanzeigen driving quantity and quality demand to our dealers. Secondly, we will even better communicate our value and return on invest that we deliver to our dealers. And thirdly, we are constantly looking into our packaging and pricing approach whilst creating best value for our customers. These 2 offerings are an exciting growth opportunity -- sorry. From growth level one and our core dealer business, to growth level two and expanding deeper into the value chain. We started our journey into more parts of the value chain 4 years ago by offering a C2B product, where consumers, sellers can conveniently sell their cars directly to a qualified mobile.de dealer nearby and get their money right away. Consumers are starting their C2B selling journey with an online car valuation. And as you can see from the number of 550,000 car evaluations per month, this is adopted very well by our customers. Secondly, next to providing a financing offer for all of our listings with help of our partners, mobile, we have offered a deeply integrated financing solution for our dealers in partnership with our other banks to deliver highly qualified, preapproved leads and ready-to-buy consumers to our dealers. This so-called dealer financing offer is so far used by around 9,000 dealers and is offered on around 400,000 dealer listings. In total, we delivered more than 130,000 financing leads per month, growing rapidly. These 2 offerings are an exciting growth opportunity itself, but also important building blocks and capabilities to provide a more digital retail offering for those car buyers who wanted even more digital car buying experience. Research tells us that 16% of car buyers in Germany are looking for a more digitized experience and putting the already built C2B and financing capabilities in place, combining them even more seamlessly and building additional product is absolutely on our growth agenda. We do believe that we are perfectly equipped to serve these customer needs and to capture this opportunity. Secondly, we do see the trend from few ownership models to more usage models like leasing and car subscriptions. You can see impressive research numbers and expectations for these offerings on the right-hand side. We are testing our way into this as we speak. And also with these opportunities, we are looking to accelerate this journey organically or inorganically. So let's sum it up for mobile.de. Mobile.de is the clear market leader in Germany with a very strong brand, huge reach and most listings. We do see car buyers using our platforms at record levels in 2021. Although the overall car market and with that, our dealer listings are being hit by the pandemic with some supply constraints. We do believe that this is a short-term effect, which will rebound to pre-COVID levels in 2022 and onwards. There is good headroom in our core dealer business. And on top of that, there is additional even more exciting growth opportunity by expanding into the value chain and making car buying way more convenient and trustworthy. We're excited to use the scale of Adevinta and our strong European footprint to create even better solutions for our customers on all our motor platforms. With this summary, I close the section on mobile. I'm happy to hand over to Paul to talk about eBay Kleinanzeigen.

[Paul Heimann]

Thanks, Malte, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Paul, and I'm the CEO of eBay Kleinanzeigen. I'm pleased to be here today to give you an overview about Germany's largest online classifieds business. In the next few minutes, we will take a look at the size and the position of the business and elaborate on some of the key opportunities that we are working on. In the past years, eBay Kleinanzeigen has grown to be the #1 Germany-based Internet business. And it grew to be the #7 Internet destination in the country based on visits. Kleinanzeigen is a true German household brand with exceptionally strong underlying metrics. Our brand is widely recognized in the German population. 66% of German online users use eBay Kleinanzeigen mostly. Our customer base has grown to more than 40 million monthly users, out of which nearly 12 million, either list an item on Kleinanzeigen or reply to one every month. Looking at demographics we see Kleinanzeigen in particular, strong with younger users, below the age of 29, which was accelerated in the last 3 years by our very popular YouTube channel. Also very popular with younger users is the fact that trading on Kleinanzeigen creates a strong positive impact on the environment. Our users are saving 80,000 tonnes in potential CO2 emissions monthly by using our service. Let's take a look at a few more key KPIs. Our top level marketing KPIs and visits have grown significantly over the past years, with best-in-class awareness and consideration scores. Our large customer base incorporates more than 300,000 professionals of all kinds. from micro businesses to small and medium businesses to real estate agents, car dealers and companies that offer their jobs on our platform. We have more than 50 million classified ads live on the platform and our users are uploading more than 1 million every day. Over the past years, we have experienced tremendous growth in our inventory and activity metrics. On top, the pandemic led to a strong boost in 2020 with new ads, replies and visits growing up to 45% year-over-year. Our buyers and sellers exchange about 2 million messages daily to buy and sell thereof. And with more than 90% of our visits coming from mobile devices and more than 100 million app downloads, we are a fully mobile-oriented platform routing in our early and strong investments in our apps. Let's take a brief look at our product portfolio. Kleinanzeigen is what it is today also because we relentlessly focus on evolving our user experience. One key focus area has always been to allow customers to have a convenient and safe experience. Over time, we tailored our search and post experience towards individual categories, for example, real estate, clothing and electronics. We built an A+ like advanced auto completion that help customers to finish their listing in just a few seconds. We also recently integrated payments and escrow, which allows buyers and sellers to have an easy and safe transaction, fully within the Kleinanzeigen product experience. We also added profile badges to boost trust between users on our platform. Our batch system allows buyers to quickly understand the friendliness, trustworthiness and reliability of sellers. The badges are also used to show customers in a fun and engaging way, how they help save resources by selling and buying secondhand. When it comes to our offerings for professional customers, we added company pages to create visibility for SMBs and allow real estate agents to show 360-degree virtual tours to their buyers. This is a very small exert from many innovations we launched over the years to drive customer success. And with increased customer success, there also comes increased monetization. Let's take a look at the monetization development over time. If we take revenue per thousand visits, we see that Kleinanzeigen continuously grew its monetization levels. At the same time, comparing ourselves to our French sister company, Leboncoin, we believe there is significant headroom in further evolving monetization levels. Today, about half of our revenues are driven by advertising. While we see opportunity in further leveraging trends in the online advertising space, such as product listings. The bigger opportunity had lies in our horizontal, vertical and transactional propositions. We will drive growth, primarily on the back of 4 key drivers. First, we will continue to invest in our core horizontal products to further drive the user engagement on our platform. The second growth driver is the strong and rapidly growing position we have with small and medium businesses in Germany. On top of that, we started our transactional evolution with adding payments and escrow last year, which we view as a foundation for significant future growth. Lastly, we have 2 distinct vertical plays in real estate and in motors that we are rapidly evolving. Let's get a bit deeper on some of these growth drivers in the next few slides. Taking a look at the German SMB space, we see a serviceable market of EUR 620 million annually, which we address with our SMB subscription product called PRO. We have seen strong growth over the last years and believe this product is a great addition to our ecosystem. It allows SMBs regardless of their category to bring their offers online in an extremely fast and easy way. The pandemic has further accelerated the need for digitalization for SMBs, which resulted in great acquisition rates in 2020. We achieved an all-time high in acquisitions for PRO in April 2020 with 1,600 new customers. Until the end of this year, we will double subscribers versus pre-pandemic levels. Moving over to the right side. Our most recently added growth driver is the introduction of payments in escrow, which is our first step on our transactional evolution. We launched the product at the end of 2020, with the ultimate goal in mind to provide a fully transactional experience, including shipping, but also value-added services such as insurance and financing as well as services for professional customers. We are very excited about our transactional opportunity as we see driving customer success as well as business growth. And with that, let's take a look at our 2 strong vertical positions. Over the years, we have established a strong position in the German real estate space. We are operating in a market where agents spend about EUR 480 million to advertise their properties and classifieds. In this environment, we have room to be the #2 in traffic with 108 million monthly visits and are catching up on the inventory side with a total of almost 160,000 listings. We will continue to invest in our product and go-to-market capabilities and leverage our outstanding C2C market leader position to accelerate our expansion in this highly relevant market. As we heard Malte explain, we also have a unique competitive position together with mobile.de in the German motor space. Together, we are looking at value creation through accelerating our brand activities, further cross-listing of inventory as well as expanding in the motor C2B offering and bring it to eBay Kleinanzeigen. We are excited to keep accelerating the value we deliver to dealers with the combined power of the leading horizontal and the leading vertical. And with that, let's wrap up what we have heard today about Kleinanzeigen. Kleinanzeigen is a true German champion with massive reach and customer engagement. We have an impressive track record of driving growth with innovative product solutions. We have an amazing potential in further growing transactional services and our SMB subscription PRO. Lastly, we will keep growing our vertical place in motors and real estate, and we are incredibly excited to tap into all the learnings of the new Adevinta family. And with that, I close the section on eBay Kleinanzeigen and hand over to Zac to talk us through advertising. Zac, over to you.

[Zac Candelario]

Thanks, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Zac Candelario, Executive Vice President of International Markets. And I'm excited to be here today to provide an overview of eCG's advertising business with a particular focus on areas that we can leverage to create value for Adevinta. Before we dig into advertising, I want to step back and highlight the key strengths that eCG brings to the table. There are 2 ways we can create value through the combination of Adevinta and eCG. First, we can build on shared strengths; and second, we can leverage complementary strengths. ECG's complementary revenue mix highlights strengths that we can leverage across Adevinta. There are 3 broad areas we are focused on: Motors, our largest contributor to revenue, accounting for a bit more than half of eCG revenue, has been a strategic priority for eCG and a key area of global collaboration. We have been successful in exporting mobile.de's deep vertical expertise to enhance Motors products and go-to-market approach across eCG. Advertising, which accounts for 32% of eCG revenue, has been another key area of global collaboration across eCG. We've been successful in leveraging expertise, capabilities and partner relationships across markets to deliver on business objectives and quickly adapt to changes in the industry. And finally, centralized functions, centers of excellence and shared product and technology have enabled eCG to leverage its large scale to deliver best-in-class solutions to customers faster and at lower cost. In all these areas, eCG possesses strategic and tactical expertise, proprietary capabilities and strong relationships with partners and customers that we can leverage. Today, I will focus on advertising. Advertising plays an important role in eCG and Adevinta. It's 1/3 of combined revenue, and it complements our core classified business. Advertising extends our total addressable market beyond classified advertising revenue, enabling us to compete in the large display and search advertising markets through our own first-party products and through strong partnerships. Advertising also enables us to provide more solutions for more advertisers and tap into more budgets. In addition to our classified listing offering, advertising provides sellers more ways to promote their products and services. Advertising also creates opportunity for third-party advertisers to access our valuable audiences to drive sales and grow their brands. ECG offers a comprehensive suite of advertiser products. Display, which accounts for 55% of advertising revenue, includes banners and other formats consisting of text, images, video and audio through defined ad slots. eCG sells inventory direct as well as indirect, programmatic as well as nonprogrammatic. Direct display advertising is sold to advertisers and agencies through our sales teams and typically include access to our proprietary audience segments at a premium price. Advertisers use our products with performance and brand marketing. Indirect third-party display advertising is typically auctioned through fully automated process. Our inventory is matched to advertisers based on their targeting criteria and price is determined via first-price auction. Advertisers use this channel purely for performance marketing. Our display strategy focuses on growing first-party direct display business while reducing exposure to indirect third-party display. Product listing ads, or PLAs, which account for 36% of revenue, offer sellers a way to promote their products in between the organic search results. eCG offers both first-party and third-party PLA. First-party PLA include offerings for our own seller base, both SMBs and large retailers. PLAs are targeted on search queries. When a user clicks on a PLA, the user arrives on the landing page within our platform or in the case of our retail PLA products on the advertiser's landing page. Third-party PLAs are syndicated from Google and on click are directed to the advertiser's landing page. Our PLA strategy focuses on growing our first-party PLA business while reducing exposure to third-party PLA. Text ads, which account for 8% of revenue, typically appear on search result pages and are targeted by the search query entered by the user. Most of our text ads are syndicated from Google. Our strategy is to phase out tech and replace with PLA wherever possible as PLA provides a better user experience and better monetization. ECG has expertise, proprietary capabilities and strong relations with key industry partners that we can leverage. There are 4 main areas of focus. The first area is optimization tools and expertise. Our proprietary optimization tools and expertise help us in 2 main areas: one, balancing the mix of organic classified listings with advertising; and two, optimizing the yields from our advertising products. For example, we deploy proprietary experimentation and yield management platform that enables us to run multiple advertising experiments across web and app, measuring the impact on monetization as well as user metrics to ensure we optimize for sustainable results. The second area is PLAs. We have built up expertise in PLAs and have a proven track record of successfully building out first-party PLA offerings for running third-party PLA products in parallel. The third area relates to data. our marketplaces generate a wealth of data at scale. This enables us to provide unique data-driven targeting capabilities for advertisers that will play an increasing role in our business. With pressure on third-party trackers, we believe advertisers will increasingly look to work directly with publishers like us to access our first-party audience data. We have rich contextual shopping intent and logged-in user data as well as the tooling to offer these targeting capabilities to advertisers in a privately compliant manner. The fourth area is partner relationships. Due to eCG's size and dedicated focus on managing global partnerships with all relevant ad tech companies, eCG has been able to secure favorable commercial terms, which can be leveraged to cost at Adevinta. In conclusion, on behalf of all former eCG employees, we're excited to have joined at Adevinta, and we look forward to working closely with our new colleagues to build on shared strengths and leverage complementary strengths to create value for Adevinta. I will now leave the floor to Rolv Erik for conclusion and outlook.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

So thank you very much, Zac. Now looking ahead, we see an acceleration of the trends that support the development of the digital economy and the emergence of new business models. The new Adevinta enjoys an equal position in vertical and horizontal classifieds marketplaces, with highly complementary skills and expertise and unique global scale to accelerate innovation. We are in a good position to continue to lead in the sector to facilitate and enhance our user and customer experience in their digitalization journey and to benefit from the ongoing industry transformation. Sustainable growth opportunities will stem from further monetization in our existing markets, serving inherent operational leverage. In addition, our expansion throughout the transactional value chain will continue to enlarge our addressable market and represent a substantial incremental growth opportunities. We saw further recovery across the board in the second quarter, and we expect positive momentum to continue through the rest of 2021, albeit the volumes remain soft and uncertain in some of our markets in the shorter term. Now that the eCG acquisition is completed, we have entered the execution phase. Our key priority will be to deliver on the synergy targets that we announced last year. At the same time, we'll keep a strong focus on our operations. As the vaccine rollout progresses, we see restrictions reducing. Therefore, we expect work conditions to progressively normalize in the second half. We will continue to invest in the business to reinforce our positions and seize market opportunities in classified. And as we've said earlier, we will even accelerate market investments in markets where we face increasing competition. Our combined group strategic and financial objectives, will be communicated in the Capital Markets Day, which will be held on November 30 this year. So as we understand, your willingness to hear more about the new Adevinta and build estimates around it. We want to give you a time line on the next steps and oncoming communication. We will release our full Q2 report on August 30. The reason why it is not possible today is that we have to integrate eCG into our balance sheet at the end of the quarter. Early November, we'll provide you with like-for-like historical information for a new group. This will be key as Q3 will be our first set of combined results. And as I just mentioned, will host our Capital Markets Day in Q4 on November 30. Now I hope this presentation has provided you with some useful insights on key assets and expertise that has recently joined Adevinta. And please bear with us in the coming months as we will build an ambitious road map for the years to come. We look forward to presenting into our capital markets, but in the meantime, back to work, and we'll focus on operations. So that's it for the presentation for us today. I will now open the Q&A session and my colleagues from the leadership team and myself are available to answer questions. So operator, please go ahead.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] So your first question today comes from the line of William Packer, Exane BNP Paribas.

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

Firstly, could we have some quantitative or qualitative commentary on eCG's performance during the second quarter? I suppose the context of significant discounting in the second quarter last year means that my expectation is it's been a very big rebound, but any color there would be helpful? Secondly, thanks for the presentations on both mobile and eBay K. It seems to have some very substantial opportunities, particularly in Motors and Property, could you just give us some kind of feeling for how well invested these businesses are? Are the products ready and it's just a question of selling them. Do you need to set a larger sales force? Or are you well invested on that basis? And then finally, thank you for the additional detail on the eCG advertising business, very useful. Through the lenses of those 3 businesses, display, PLA and text, could you talk through the ongoing regulatory and technological changes facing the market? And how well positioned each business is?

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Right. So thank you, Will. So let me talk a little bit about Germany then I think that Uvashni could answer the first question and then perhaps Zac can comment on the third question. So yes, we are very happy with growth opportunities that we see in Germany, and we're very happy with the teams there. But of course, we have to develop also the products, and we'll continue to invest in that. So I think that yes, there are great opportunities, but we will also need to develop those products. Some are under development and well underway. But you will see us step up our efforts there. And both when it comes to product and tech teams and presumably also something on the sales front. So do you want to comment on the -- briefly on the first half for the eCG assets, Uvashni?

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, sure. And well, one of the issues and the reason why we haven't provided members is there was quite a different reporting regime within eCG versus Adevinta. So we are still doing those conversions. But from an operational perspective and from what we see on the underlying performance, we're definitely seeing a positive momentum and recovery through out the first half of 2021. Of course, there are, as Malte mentioned, some supply elements within Germany that come into effect, but it may impact revenues, but definitely we're seeing a positive momentum there coming off into the second half in Q2 as well. We anticipate on what they called operating income to come in on what we had anticipated. So further recovery there, definitely year-on-year growth from 2020 and 2019 as well. At a high level, we are confident and happy with what we see in terms of the recovery and the potential second half impact on the recovery within the supply space in some of the markets.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Right. So I think that answers questions -- question one. And then I think Zac, there was a question there on the regulatory interventions and how they will affect our advertising revenue.

[Zac Candelario]

Yes. So I think -- as we step back and you look at our advertising strategy, we're focusing on a couple of different areas. So first off, mitigating the impact of industry changes in the short term, but at the same time, evolving our advertising business for the long term. I think a key area of focus for us is mitigating the impact of stricter consent rules, whether that's equal choice or Apple's app tracking transparency. And at the same time, we're continuing to evolve our advertising business for long-term sustainability by focusing on growing our direct relationships with our advertisers in display and PLA and reducing our reliance on third-party data for targeting in our display business. I think one of the changes in the industry is a deprecation of third-party cookies. We see that as a growth opportunity for our direct display business as advertisers will need to work more directly with first-party publishers like ourselves in absence of third-party cookies. And I think we're in a good position to benefit from that situation given our strong first-party data. So that's how we're approaching advertising. It's mitigating any of these short-term impacts, working closely with the regulators in terms of consent rules and all of that. And also, adapting to changes in -- with tech companies, whether that's Apple's app tracking transparency or other changes that come up.

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

Just one quick follow-up for Uvashni. In terms of the Q2 '20 base, is it right to fix the eCG that most of the key motor assets had a month of discounting? Is that what we should have in mind? Or is that too conservative?

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

I think you would -- yes, I think that you could have that in mind because Q2 2020 was the tough period for that. So you can put that assumption in there. Well, remember in H [ 2021 ] or H1 2021, especially in mobile, there were some elements of supply. And therefore, we had to delay some of the pricing increase as well. But still some momentum there compared to 2021 -- 2020.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

So as Uvashni mentioned, what we're curious about is, of course, how the supply side will develop. As you know, with the limited amount of new cars to the market, there's also been a scarcity of secondhand cars. So we're curious to see how that will develop going forward. On the other hand, of course, price dealers have benefited from secondhand cars going up in price. All right. Operator, any further questions?

[Operator]

We have no further questions at this time. [Operator Instructions] And we have a second question coming through from William Packer.

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

Is it okay, if I ask another question with no other questions, I don't want to sort of...

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, of course.

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

Uvashni, could you talk a little bit about the kind of adjustments that we need to make to the eBay numbers for modeling purposes? Is there any initial view you can give us factors like share-based compensation when we compare Adevinta EBITDA to eBay classified group operating income. Just any guidance there will be helped as we picked up modeling half the business going forward? And I suppose the second question around display advertising again. Obviously, it's been a great quarter and rebounded quite hard. Should we think of that as ultimately a growth business? Is that something which can return to underlying organic growth? Or is it more about managing the decline as you transition more towards the transactional model?

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Sorry, Uvashni?

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Effectively, the -- effectively, what we -- what you have to do well remember the eCG previous stock at operating income. So effectively, none of the allocated costs that were -- would have been charged from eBay to eCG would have been included in that. And then, of course, yes, things like the share-based payments and some of the corporate cost allocations that you would get from central corporate as well. So those are some of the elements of the effectively, the adjustments one has to do to get to your EBITDA kind of equivalent number. So share-based compensation, effectively central costs that would have been allocated at, effectively the transitional costs that would have come from eBay to eCG previously.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

I'm sorry, Will, because I didn't hear the second part of the question, you broke up for me, just briefly. Could you repeat...

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

Sure, so let me repeat it. And I'm going to slip in 2 more. And if I have too many, you just stop me because...

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, okay.

[William Henry Packer, Executive Director of Media Equity Research]

The first question was -- is display advertising a growth business going forward once we recover from the COVID crisis, once we get through the technological changes? Or is it more about transitioning the generalist business to a transactional-based model? And I suppose my final question, would be regarding France. It feels like vendor lead monetization is an increasingly important battleground in most of the European property classified markets. How is the Leboncoin vendor lead product developing, especially in the context of your elevated competition towards Axel Springer having made acquisitions in that space?

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. So before you answer the last one, let me go back to some of the things that Zac said that we see that we have a number of opportunities to learn from eCG. And then he mentioned the PLA that takes advertising. I think that even with new regulatory environment, I think that we will have some advantages in being strong on first party data and contextual ads will come back. But in sum, I would think, yes, there is the growth opportunities, but I don't expect it to grow as fast as the classified revenues, it will grow. That's presumably not necessarily as fast as the other classified revenues, but we are optimistic that we'll continue to grow that business also. Then on the leads product [indiscernible], do you want any comments on that?

[Unknown Executive]

Sure, Rolv Erik. Hi, William, so globally, the market is under pressure on the offer side. Of course, you're right, there is some tension and the number of ads available is lower than the last year. It's why we have launched last year, at the end of the year. We have launched a lead generation offer to the real estate agent. And this offer is working well. We are quite satisfied at the beginning of this service launch. We will continue to accelerate and to expand this offer to the rest of the portfolio. And we will probably bundle some lease with other offers to -- because it's a good offer. And you're right, it perfectly right, this phenomenon is not only in France, this phenomenon is in the other countries. That we think now we have to solve this thing for our customers. But we believe also that it's a temporary period, and we continue to innovate and to develop a new product for our real estate, not only on the lead generation offer, but also the tools to manage their leads, quality of the leads, information data to KPIs to manage the efficiency of their ads. So I think that's also something important and long term we have to do.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

And I think we'll operator to the next question.

[Operator]

The next question comes from the line of Tom Jose from Neuberger Berman.

[Unknown Analyst]

I had 3 questions, if I may. With the announcement yesterday of Permira acquiring a stake in the business, a 10.2% stake in Adevinta from eBay. Are we to assume there's no change to the financing structure? Is it fair to say that this is an exchange of hands or an exchange of equity between eBay and Permira. And will they get a board seat or participation in the decision-making as a result of this, well, acquiring a 10%, 10.5% stake? Or is it a passive participation? My second question is, would you be able to provide Q3 financials on a combined basis now that the acquisition has closed, we do expect Q3 numbers on a combined basis going forward? And my last question, if I may, is on the disposal of the U.K. assets, whether it's Gumtree or MotorEasy, how are you progressing on those disposals? And once the disposals are made, would the proceeds be used to pay down debt? Or how are you thinking of utilizing those proceeds? Or would those be dividended up?

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. So I'll answer the first question, and I think I'll leave #2 and then perhaps also #3 to Uvashni. So the Permira transaction is a transaction between eBay and Permira. So it's not affecting the company's financing. And Permira acquiring 10.2% will be entitled to Board seat and the partner Dipan Patel will join the Board as soon as that deal is closed. I would like to repeat that I'm very happy to have Permira on board because we know them for a while, and we know they have deep competence in our space and in related spaces. And so I think it's very positive, and we look forward to working together with them. And yes, I think they will be an active owner, which is a good thing. Then I think...

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. In terms...

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Sorry. Go ahead, Uvashni.

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Sorry, Rolv Erik. Yes, in terms of your question number two, for Q3, we will have combined numbers. And we will be providing some historical information beforehand. So you have an idea of what that will look like. And then in terms of the...

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Q3, yes.

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, for Q3. So before Q3 results are out, we will give you some historical information on a combined basis, on a pro forma combined basis. And then for Q3, our report will be on a combined basis. And then on the U.K. divestments, those divestments are progressing in terms of what we would -- on track, in terms of what we would do with the funds, at this point in time, we said our priority will be to be leave as quick as possible. But of course, if there are other opportunities that may come along, we will investigate and do it within the limits of what we would require to do from an investment perspective. So right now, it's -- the expectation would be used to deliver. And no, there was -- the anticipation is not to divide up at this point.

[Operator]

We have one further question, and it comes from the line of Christopher Johnen from HSBC.

[Christopher Johnen]

Just one on the general disclosure going forward. You had 4 segments before. You're now adding 50 markets. I'm just curious how you view disclosure and the level of transparency going forward? Because obviously, I mean, clubbing together OLX and [indiscernible], for example, or Australia, they're at different stages. So I'm just curious how you plan to report on those, whether we will get more granularity on individual assets. I'm also thinking about eBay Kleinanzeigen. How -- what should we expect on this?

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Would you -- the expectation is, yes, we'll have the 4 segments. But at this stage, we know they are bigger assets within some of those segments. We will give a granularity on some of those big assets that will actually drive some of the overall performance in the segments. So similarly to what we do now with the markets, will start to unpack some of the material assets under Europe, some of the material assets on the international markets as well.

[Christopher Johnen]

And that will be on a quarterly basis, too. So we...

[Uvashni Raman, Chief Financial Officer]

Part of operation will be.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Right. Operator, do we have further questions?

[Operator]

We have no further questions on the audio line.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

And on the web?

[Operator]

Actually, we have one question that just came in through the web. It comes from Erik at Carnegie. And he is asking on the real estate opportunity in Germany, what stage are you in terms of monetization? Is it more or less free for agents as you ramp up the offering or have you started to charge for it?

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Well, I would say we're at an early stage, but I'll leave that question to you, Paul.

[Paul Heimann]

Yes, sir. Thanks for the question. So yes, we have a subscription product in place, actually also with a similar to what Malte described, a 3-tier account structure actually with quite substantial amount of real estate agents paying for the 2 higher-priced packages. So yes, we have started monetization in this space actually already a couple of years back. And it's also one of the areas where we are growing quite rapidly. And on top of that, I would echo what I also said during the section. It's also one of the areas where we are looking very much forward to tap into the strength of Adevinta with markets like Leboncoin being ahead of their growth curve in terms of real estate. That's certainly one of the areas where we will benefit a lot from the experience and expertise within Adevinta.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Paul.

[Operator]

There is a follow-up question on this one as well from Erik. Secondly, on the real estate opportunity in Germany is the number of visits 108 million, purely related to the real estate vertical?

[Paul Heimann]

That's a simple answer. Yes, it is. So this is not total visits, which would be substantially higher. This is only visits that are going into the real estate category.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Paul. Further questions, are there -- operator -- noting?

[Operator]

We have no further questions on either. Thank you.

[Rolv Erik Ryssdal, Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. Well, in that case, I think it's time for closing. And just by closing, let me repeat that we're very excited about the new Adevinta, obviously a lot of interesting opportunities. I Have -- we are ready to have -- to communicate with you. So if you have follow-up questions, please contact us. And then as we said, we've laid out the time plan for the rest of the year. which will then be concluded with the Capital Markets Day in November. That we're looking forward to tell you more about our ambitious road map then going forward. In the meantime, if you do have any questions, please contact us, and I will try to answer the best way we can. And so I think that's all for today. Thank you very much for your time, and I wish you a continued good day. Bye-bye.

[Operator]

Thank you. That does conclude your call for today. Thank you all for participating, and you may now disconnect. Speakers, please standby.