Prosus Sees Rebounding Classifieds Business in Half Yearly Results

International media and e-commerce business Prosus has released its results for the six months ended 30th of September with its classifieds business leading the way in terms of revenue and trading profit gains.

Highlights of the company's HY1 2022 include:

• Total group revenue was up 29% year-on-year to $16.6 billion
• Total group headline earnings up 2% to $2.3 billion
• Classifieds Revenue up 101% to $1.3 billion and trading profit up 139% to $108 million

Prosus operates the generalist classifieds OLX brand around the world as well as several specialist real estate verticals including Otodom in Poland and the Property24 brand which is dominant in much of southern Africa. Apart from that, the company also operates OLX Brazil as a joint venture with Adevinta and is a stakeholder in both EMPG and Encuentra24 after a flurry of deal signing in 2020.

Individually there was a strong performance from Russian generalist Avito which, having been denied the acquisition of leading real estate vertical Cian, raised revenues by 67% to $313m for the period at a trading profit margin of 48%. OLX Brazil also had a productive 6 months with Grupo ZAP (acquired in 2020) now fully integrated and bumping revenues up 40% to $193 million with trading profit for the segment of $44 million.

Traffic for Prosus' classifieds segment was stable at 317 million monthly active users while the number of paying listers across the whole network increased from 3.9 million to 4.2 million as the company looks to increase the monetisation of its key markets.

The report emphasised several trends Prosus is seeing across its classifieds business including increased specialisation and verticalisation of generalist platforms and the consumer acceptance of fully digital purchases. Prosus sees value in investing heavily in pay-and-ship services in generalist classifieds sites and will invest further in the segment to improve competitive positioning.

“OLX Group has shown resilience through the pandemic, emerging stronger, with healthy growth at its core. Our strong results are proof of this, with revenues and trading profit both up by more than 100% from a year ago. We have outperformed in our traditional classifieds business, as well as have significantly scaled our Autos transactional business, reaching the mark of U$ 1 billion in revenue since its formation, one and a half years ago.

We stay focused on building and scaling our trade ecosystems to provide the best user experience to our 317 million monthly users in each of our markets.’’ commented Romain Voog, CEO of Prosus Classifieds

Despite the reblossoming of its classifieds segment after a pandemic hit 2020, the company's results weren't enough to inspire investors this morning as Prosus' share price continued a downward trajectory it has seen since February. At the time of writing Prosus was trading at €76.2, 1.5% down from its opening price of €77.2.