Adevinta Reports Mixed Q1 and Upcoming Retirement of CEO Ryssdal

The international online classifieds operator Adevinta has released its Q1 results. Notable points from the company's update to the market include:

• Quarterly revenue of €387m, up 5% y-o-y
• EBITDA of €125m, down 3% y-o-y
• Average Revenue Per Agent at Leboncoin up 14% y-o-y at €520
• Longtime CEO Rolv Erik Ryssdal to retire by February 2023

Rolv Erik Ryssdal to step down

Perhaps the biggest news in Adevinta's missive to the market was that long-serving boss, Rolv Erik Ryssdal will retire as CEO and leave the business by February 2023. Ryssdal has been with the company since 1991, and led the spinoff of Adevinta from Schibsted and the
acquisition of the eBay Classifieds.

Commenting on Adevinta's Q1 performance, Ryssdal said:

"As anticipated, our first quarter performance follows the trend that we observed at the end of 2021, delivering a solid 6% revenue growth in a challenging environment. Our Classifieds revenue grew 7% year-on-year, demonstrating the resilience of our business model and strength of our market positions...

I remain very positive about the many opportunities that we have ahead of us for 2022 and beyond. Despite the current challenging environment, I remain confident we will achieve the financial targets that we set for this year and our mid-to-long term targets".

Mixed fortunes for core and international markets

In France, Adevinta has a solid market position in the classifieds industry via Leboncoin and Avendrealouer among others. The segment generates around 30% of the company's revenues and is reported separately to the rest of Adevinta's European ventures.

The first three months of 2022 saw traffic to the company's French marketplaces increase 34% on 2019, pre-pandemic levels. Although real estate listings volumes were down 11% year-on-year, the 7% revenue growth in the country was mainly driven by the real estate vertical which saw double-digit growth in revenues as a result of the good performance of subscription packages.

In terms of real estate assets, Adevinta's European reporting segment includes Spanish portals Fotocasa and Habitaclia, Irish portal Daft as well as generalist sites Markplaats (Netherlands), eBay Kleinanzeigen (Germany) and Subito (Italy) and others.

In Q1, Spain was the standout market with a 16% year-on-year rise in revenue. There was also a notable uptick in the real estate sector for eBay Kleinanzeigen where the number of professional clients was up 18% year-on-year.

The other segment of note is Adevinta's International division which saw revenues fall 8% overall compared to 2021. The drop was chalked up to a 16% drop in advertising revenues and a 4% drop in online classifieds revenues. In terms of advancements in the real estate vertical, Adevinta reported the rollout of a de-duplication feature on its flagship Brazilian portals Zap and VivaReal which are run as a joint venture with Prosus.

Journey toward the transaction continues despite divestments

In November 2021, Adevinta announced its 'growing at scale' strategy. The company is increasingly focussing on its core European markets and doing so is divesting from others.

Company top brass recently made decisions to divest from Australia (Gumtree AU, Autotrader and CarsGuide) and South Africa (Gumtree South Africa) as well as Belarus (Kufar) and Mexico (Vivanuncios). Adevinta expects to sign deals for South Africa and Australia by the end of the third quarter.

To coordinate company efforts toward becoming a more transaction-driven business, Adevinta established its 'Transactional Transformation Team' in March. The team's role will be to understand their transactional business, priorities, opportunities and needs with the focus initially on core European markets.