Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Jota, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining Allegro Group's earnings call and live webcast to present and discuss the first quarter 2024 results. All participants will be in a listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by 1 on their telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, then you may press star and 2. You may also type your questions on the webcast screen. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tomasz Poźniak, Investor Relations Director. Mr. Poźniak, you may now proceed. Thank you, Jota, and welcome to everybody on our call. It is again my pleasure to have with us today, Roy Perticucci, the CEO of Allegro, who will guide you through the business highlights of the first quarter, and Jon Eastick, our CFO, who will elaborate on financials and the outlook for the second quarter. Our results presentation is available for download from our investors' website at allegro.eu. You may also download these slides from the link available on the webcast screen. As a reminder, today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements. Our actual results could differ materially from the expectations expressed in the statements. Please make sure you review the full disclaimer on slide number two. Please note also that this presentation and the Q&A session are being recorded and will be available for a replay on our website at allegro.eu. With this, I would like to hand over to Roy. The floor is yours, sir. Thanks very much, Tomek. It's my pleasure to join you again. This is my eighth call as Chief Executive, to present to you the quarter two results for 2024. Before I step into the highlights, the financial highlights and an overview of the business this quarter, I thought it might be useful to share with you how I'm spending my time as we pivot from the seven priorities that we introduced during my first call in late 2022 to the longer-term priorities that I introduced to you in my last call with you. I think to be successful, we need to be really focused on the right set of capabilities. And I think there are... There are about four of these, some of which we've been traditionally quite good at and got right over a long period of time, and others that we're working on right now, and I think it's important to fire on all four of these cylinders, if you will, in order to achieve our midterm and long-term potential. So the first one of these, of course, is tech innovation or technical innovation, and I think this has been a long-term strength of Allegro. Right from the beginning, we've been known not only for tech excellence and, but also speedy adoption of new ideas as they appear in the market, and we are continuing to work on that one. And I think Poland actually is a great place to recruit talented engineers, which is also reflected, I think, of new arrivals into the country to build tech centers. The second is consumer loyalty or customer loyalty. I think one of the reasons why we've been able to follow customers over time is, and we've been applying technical innovation to serve customers better and better, and that has meant as particularly in Poland, we've done particularly well. We have quite a lot of customers who shop with us in total number, but also in terms of tenure. And what, I think, has also been very interesting is over a quarter of our customers shop with us every week. Increasingly, we see that encouraging customers to shop with us more frequently, introducing them to new categories that they might not have shopped with online, is an underlying power to growth. We see that also abroad, where outside of Poland, we haven't had that much difficulty of attracting new customers to our site. I think that's also because of the power of the marketplace. Over 2 million customers now shop with us in marketplaces outside of Poland, and now we're shifting also on international in encouraging customers not only to try us out once, perhaps at Christmas, but to shop with us as part of their weekly routine. And we'll be talking to you more about this in the coming quarters as well. Something I signaled to you already in my first call to you in September 2022 was investment returns. And when I say, speak of investment, I'm not only speaking about capital, but also human capital. Where do we spend our time? Where do we direct the efforts of those many talented software engineers that we have? And I think the results, the increasingly positive financial performance of the business reflects this philosophy of investing on returns. So we continue to do this, and it's not, I think, part of a program. It is really sort of, I think, the operating philosophy of the business and how we spend our time. Lastly is something new. I've sort of introduced this thought of continuous improvement in my first shareholders' letter. I mentioned it again at length in our, my most recent shareholders' letter. But operational excellence is on multiple levels. Clearly, in order to invest for returns, you do need to have a set of processes and an operating philosophy to make sure that every time you have investment decision, to make, that you make it using a consistent set of criteria. I think that bears out in both our capital expense performance and also our EBITDA improvement. But I think it also matters in terms of how you execute in the real world. Customers really do expect to get what they wanted, when they wanted it, with the promise that you've made to them, and I think we're getting good at that. But I do think this is an area that, unlike our technical innovation, is something that we need to continue to improve. So, as I said, we've got these four cylinders, if you will, these four capabilities, and we need to fire really well on all four of them, to be successful, both in the mid and the long term, and we have every intention to do so. I'm gonna move now on to the highlights, and, you know, I'm pleased to announce that, the adjusted EBITDA margin has improved by 37% year-on-year, backed by GMV growth of 10% in Poland and 8.9% for the group as a whole. Behind those numbers, of course, are a robust active buyer growth. In addition to the roughly 15 million customers that we have in Poland, up 4%, we've the group and set of buyers is now nearly 20. GMV per active buyer has also increased again. Steady growth, backed by that thought on loyalty and the things that we're doing, is up by nearly 6%, 6% at 5.8%, and the average transaction is PLN 3,000. Take rate is a solid 1.15%, up percentage points up to 12%, 12.2% overall on take rate and advertising continues also to show a solid growth, particularly in Poland, and is now 1.7% of GMV. EBITDA, as I already mentioned, is doing quite well, up 36.6% in Poland and 33% for the group. Probably the thing that we're most pleased with is leverage improvement, down from 2.8% last year to 1.4%. I always talk about that as if it's our mortgage. I think we've got the mortgage under control and overall, the very solid financial performance, cash flow, and leverage positions enable us to invest in growth, in a very targeted way, with quite a bit of latitude. So, as I mentioned in our last call, we've moved to a multi-year priority network. We've shifted away from the seven priorities, which was really, if you will, our rapid action set, to something to support us for the longer term. Really, they're not that major number of changes. I think the main one is, as I always mentioned in the capabilities discussion, we know that consumer loyalty, customer loyalty is really important for us and deserves to be treated as a separate priority. Equally, we talked about also focus on long-term returns and proper utilization of physical assets, and so we've split the low cost and reliability points as a separate priority. So those priorities have always existed, we've just separated them out, and we continue to work on sort of achieving the best combination of speed, reliability, and cost. I should also add, in terms of this, low cost and reliability point. The other thing that I think is different is implicit also in an international expansion, but also deserves a separate point, is the group-wide system architecture and software development processes. If your expansion of the marketplace outside of Poland is predicated on the idea that it's a light footprint, low-cost expansion, we, we also need to have a common set of systems, tech systems, for, for the entire group. We act as a group. We, treat each additional national market as simply an extension of our catchment area, 'cause we want to actually work as one organization in any of the new markets we go into. And to do that, a prerequisite is a common set of tech systems. So not a major change in the shift, I'm just reintroducing them there to remind you what I told you last time, and now I'm gonna sort of talk through some of the main points of each one of these nine priorities in isolation. So again, buyer loyalty and engagement, super important. We have 130,000 active buyers in Poland in Q1. Business-to-business buyers, one of the segments we introduced when we first talked about strength in Poland, continues to grow, up 20% year-on-year, thanks to awareness and sourcing campaigns, and there'll be more on this segment announced in the next quarter. Smart!, our loyalty program, again, that theme of loyalty continues to go from strength to strength. We're extremely pleased to have cleared the 6 million mark in terms of active users. Over 90% of Smart! users being also paying customers, which reflects, at least from my perspective, the considerable value that the program offers to them. We've prioritized a number of segments for growth, and supermarket and health and beauty in particular, I'm pleased to announce, is up 1.5x-2 x the overall GMV growth rate. Best Price Guarantee has grown to cover 730,000 items in Poland. Selection continues to grow, so I think overall steady progress there. In terms of our merchant program, as part of the rate change on the 29th, February, we've continued to simplify the rate card. About this time last year, we had no less than 230 lines in the rate card. I think that is hard for anyone to decipher, and we've brought that down to 47. That ought to be the only change we make this week. Again, merchants need to plan their business, and bringing it down and also sort of saying, there won't be that many changes, more changes this year, certainly not in the overall fee structure, is a good way to enable them to build their own business, which in turn helps us on the flywheel. The merchants are up to 150,000, or actually over that. That's 11% growth this year and reflects the expanding number of international sellers that participate on our platform. Our engines, both growth engines, like Smart!, sorry, like strong advertising and fintech, continue to grow. There's the robust pricing changes are holding up on ads, and we've actually even won, won recognition of our programs, in advertising outside of Poland, with the E-commerce Award as the Best Sales and Growth Solution from, from E-commerce Germany. The progress in fintech, I think, continues to go out of... with alacrity. The, we've launched Allegro Cash pilot, which, offers an integrated bank account, with the marketplace, which is up, which offers up to 2% cashback. Again, that theme about loyalty reflected in the new things that we're introducing in financial services. We've signed on a new financing partner in terms of Santander, with a revolving credit of up to PLN 3 billion, and in funding, and we've generated PLN 2.1 billion in loans in the quarter, 27% up year-over-year, driving the share of Allegro Pay Finance GMV up to 14.4%. Our philosophy in delivery is you don't need to do it all. You might not wanna do much. The key thing is can you optimize? Do you have sufficient choices to get the right combination of speed, reliability, and cost? We've launched also Mini Paczka, which lowers for small and light products the MOV down to PLN 30 and have expanded cooperation with the logistics partners, DPD and ORLEN. And again, also watch this space. I'm very pleased also in the progress in reducing costs, unit costs in our own operations that are quickly approximating the home delivery costs in particular of any of the other alternatives. Marketplace in Slovakia was four times faster and 1/5 of the cost of our Czech launch. Again, we emphasized at the time that we were spending time with Czech to get the various processes right, introducing into a new market, and that, I think, has gone exceedingly well. Slovakia was launched with a mass media campaign in March with a very similar to the offer, the one that we had in Czech Republic, in terms of share of off... So number of offers and the size of those relative to the next best proposition. We are doing quite well in that market, that country as we move in. Overall, in international, we've expanded our potential accessible market to 6 by 16 million, on top of the 38 million Poles. We now have 2 million active buyers, 1.3 million of those who are new to Allegro Group. That's 45,000 merchants, which is up 20% quarter-on-quarter. Those are local merchants, those as well. I think overall, our light footprint model, expanding to countries where we're likely to be welcome, is very important. Moving on to the Mall segment, we saw the Q1 management changes and revised turnaround plan approved, and we are accelerating to shrink selection to focus on margins. We're managing overhead quite tightly, which is down 13% year-on-year for the quarter, and headcount was reduced by 11% in April. I've already touched on, when I was introducing the new priorities, our work on the solid fundamentals, particularly on tech, and we've introduced group-wide procurement, and we've completed the group-wide unified workplace, as well as introducing the first elements of a common shared HR system. In terms of people and culture and ESG, the double materiality matrix identifying the top priorities for ESG metrics have been approved by the board. Probably one of the most exciting things, I think, in terms of incentives, quite unusual, I think, not only in Poland but across Europe, is we have a very broad-based incentive program. We offered 2.1 million shares to 1,300 managers and experts. That's our third year of vesting, and I think a very exciting development for most of our employees as well. At this point, I'm just gonna hand over to Jon, who's gonna take you through the financial results in detail. Thank you very much, Roy, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's really a great pleasure to be with you and to take you through what we believe is actually a really strong set of results and yet another very strong set, indeed. Moving on, as usual, I'll start my comments on the financial results with the Polish operations. You have, as usual, the key KPIs set out for your convenience on slide 14. Let me start with detailed comments by moving on to the next slide, and as you've heard from Roy, we're pleased to be reporting today that the Q1 GMV growth has accelerated. This is coming after, you know, operating during 2023 into fairly strong economic headwinds, so we're pleased to see this rebound. I'm pleased to say that when I look at these two key KPIs that make up the GMV performance, I can report that it's a very balanced growth that we can see here. Starting with the active buyers, we're up 4% in Poland year-on-year to 14.8 million active buyers, and 200,000 of that increase has actually come in the last three months, which is really impressive and a good dynamic, and a good start for the year. Similarly, on purchasing per active buyer, so long-term GMV, last 12 months GMV per active buyer, we've also done very well. It's 5.8% growth on an annualized basis. We've moved on to just under PLN 3,800 per annum per average buyer. And again, what I'm really happy about is to see that the rate has accelerated sequentially from 1.1% in Q4 to 1.4% coming through in Q1. So putting that together, we get to the GMV performance, which I mentioned accelerated. It's up by 150 basis points to 10% for Q1, so right at the top of our guidance range. The GMV came in at PLN 13.6 billion, and the fo... The focus sectors, as you've already heard from Roy, the supermarket and health and beauty categories, are again leading the growth, coming in at about between 1.5x and 2 x the average growth rate, across the categories. I think it's also really worth noting that, after several quarters of talking to you in great detail about how trending down is affecting the average selling price, during those difficult economic months, I can now tell you that, there's the first evidence of this trend unwinding in that, the speed of the decline in the average selling price has dropped back by about 3 percentage points, quarter-on-quarter. You can see that in the 11.6% items sold growth versus the 10% GMV, meaning there's only been 1.6% contraction in the course of Q1. So that could be the beginning of moving back to positive growth into average selling price over the course of this year. So moving on to revenue, and as you're well used to by now, our revenue is moving much faster than GMV. Revenue was up 22% at PLN 2.082 billion. Also, as you're used to, the main contributors are the usual suspects, the marketplace up 22%, the advertising, another strong quarter, 26%, and big increases in the other category, primarily coming from the expansion of Allegro Pay. The big story for the quarter is obviously around the take rate. Roy was commenting in detail about the changes that we've made. We decided to move the take rate change right to the beginning of the year, which means the monetization growth is flattered because last year, the increases were mostly in July. By moving it forward, as Roy was explaining, we're giving much more certainty to the merchant base as to what they can expect during the course of the year. The rate itself has moved up to 12.18%, which is up 1.15 percentage points on last year. Some of it's coming from co-financing changes in July last year, and the rest is coming mainly from co-financing, but also from take rate in that February increase. So moving on and looking at adjusted EBITDA, I'm really happy to report that that 22% revenue growth has dropped through to a really excellent 37% increase in our adjusted EBITDA in Poland. We landed on PLN 820 million of adjusted EBITDA, and our margin as a percentage of GMV has moved up to what is really an exceptional 6% level, and above our medium-term guidance target. I've already explained where the revenue's coming from, so you're on the left-hand side of the bridge, you can see how that has dropped down into the EBITDA. I'll limit my comments more to what's on the right-hand side and the cost development. In particular, the biggest item, as usual, is net cost of delivery. But if you, like me, have these figures committed to memory, you'll know that PLN 95.6 million is actually the lowest number that's been there for many, many quarters. And that's coming from the various initiatives that we're, we're running to manage the delivery cost. Constantly negotiating with suppliers for the best speed, reliability, and cost. The MOV changes we made way back when in, at the end of 2022 in the Smart! program, continue to bring benefits in that the courier share in the mix continues to go down. It was 5 percentage points down in Q1 on a year-on-year basis. Finally, as Roy was mentioning, we're up to 6 million Smart! buyers paying, and the vast majority of them are paying the higher subscription fee that we introduced at the end of 2022. So that means that there's a lot more subscription revenue being netted off against the delivery costs in that number. Overall, the unit cost per parcel is up 4.2% year-on-year. Looking at marketing and other SG&A, we're moving a little bit away from the Fit to Grow stance and making targeted investments, so those numbers are a little bit bigger than you've seen in the last few quarters. So moving on to the final slide on Poland, which is capital expenditure. We have flagged that we'll be investing more, but the increase in Q1 is very modest. It's only 4% up year-on-year. We're continuing to focus very hard on our ROI metrics and asset utilization, setting tough challenges for the teams. But nonetheless, we've managed to invest more in hard assets, PLN 36.9 million versus PLN 28.5 million a year earlier. We're spending a bit more on DCs and quite a lot more on IT projects, as Roy was describing. When it comes to capitalized development cost, we're tightening up considerably on gating processes around what projects we're working on. That's reflected in a lower amount of money being capitalized in the quarter compared to a year ago. We're also spending quite a bit of effort on implementing various new regulations, which is not capitalizable spending. So that concludes the Polish comments. Let me move on now to international, and I'll start with the legacy Mall segment, the business that we bought back in 2022. Key KPI is laid out on slide 20. The key story is all laid out on slide 21. And the main message here is that the losses that you see on the right-hand EBITDA bridge are contained, despite the fact that we continue to navigate a fairly strong rate of GMV contraction. As you know, we've been very focused on trying to move away from unprofitable selection and items which cost too much to market for us to make money. That means that we were on a steady downward trajectory in terms of the GMV of around about 30% year-on-year. But that's been inflated by a significant FX headwind from the strengthening Zloty versus the Crown, which the Zloty is actually about 13% stronger than it was in Q1 a year earlier. And that's actually pushed, therefore, the GMV decline down to 38% at PLN 493 million. And as I said, that's not really reflected in any way, shape, or form in the adjusted EBITDA. That's only down by PLN 5 million at PLN 58 million Zloty. The 33 million of decline in GMV margin is all coming really from the GMV. The actual gross margin is stabilizing as a result of the measures that we've taken. It's only down by 15 basis points year-on-year, and you can see the efforts that we're making to reduce marketing spending, and reducing other SG&A as we right-size rationalize the business. So let me then move on to our new babies, right? Our international marketplaces. And I'll move on to slide 23. But just to remind you, so the international marketplaces is allegro.cz, and since February, allegro.sk. They're both up and operational. And you can see the combined data in terms of physical KPIs on this slide 23. So starting with the active buyers, we're really very, very happy with the way that we've been able to acquire new customers who are making at least one transaction on the website. We're at 2 million active buyers after just 8 months from when we commercially launched the.cz website, which I think is really an exceptional performance in a country of 10 million people. It was up 26.8% QoQ, compared to 1.6 million at the end of 2023. Now, we don't have such great dynamics when it comes to traffic and items sold, and this is mainly because it's turned out that a lot of the traffic that we were seeing in Q4 was very much seasonal around the Christmas peak and the Black Week. And, the Q1 really should be in that context, I think, look, it makes more sense to look back to the comparison with Q3, which is a more typical demand environment, and there you can really see progress. The traffic came in at 63 million, the items sold at 3.9. And we continue to do better quarter-on-quarter in Q2, as I'll mention when we get to the guidance. Looking at those two marketplaces in financial terms, the GMV for Q1 was PLN 264.4 million. There you can see, versus that Q3 number, it's up considerably, which was, and in constant currency terms, bearing in mind that the Zloty has been strengthening primarily since September, it would have been more like about PLN 285 million, if the FX rate was exactly the same in Q3 versus Q1. Revenue has not declined versus Q4, anywhere near as fast as GMV, and that's because the take rate continues to move up. The adjusted EBITDA, and in particular, the margin relative to the GMV, which is obviously the number we're really focused on as we drive the business towards break- even, over the next few years, has improved 5 percentage points QoQ, from -26.6% to -21.1%. Less ATL spending, in particular, compared to Q4 in the Christmas environment, but also good progress on direct contribution margin, about 2 percentage points better than it was in Q1. And we're obviously looking to drive that quarter-to-quarter. So that's the international business, and there are slides there showing you in summary those KPIs and also the consolidated group KPIs. Let me limit comments on the group to the leverage situation, which Roy alluded to earlier in his comments. Actually, in Q1 alone, we're down almost 0.5 a turn to 1.38x our last 12-month adjusted EBITDA, which is obviously a tremendously fast rate of decline. That's partly coming from, or in major part, coming from the completion of the multi-quarter projects we've been running, to switch our merchants onto netting at source rather than billing in arrears. Over the course of the two quarters, 2-3 quarters, actually, that project was running, which finished in Q1, we've actually removed PLN 0.9 billion of receivables from our balance sheet and moved that money into our cash balances, and it's accountable for about 0.32x of the leverage reduction that you see since Q1 of last year, where we've come down from 2.84x to 1.38x. Now, the rest is obviously coming from the improved margins and the adjusted, and the adjusted EBITDA increases. Looking forward, now that that project is behind us, and by the way, I also mention it should also translate into much lower bad debt expenses as well, going forward. As we look forward, the leverage should continue to come down, but it should be at a much more gradual rate without this project in the numbers. So that concludes the comments on the financials, and that means I'm on to the last slide, and it means that it's time to talk about the Q2 outlook for Q2 2024. So let me, as usual, start with the Polish operations. We're expecting to see further progress in our growth rates, moving up probably another 100 basis points or so, to between 10% and 11% for Q2. That will obviously then feed through into faster revenue growth as well, a little bit quicker at 22%-24%. The take rate that we changed in February, obviously, will be present for a full quarter in Q2, but we also made a few adjustments in Q1 of last year around our discount schemes and that we had for merchants, and there's about a 20 basis point increase QoQ in the historical numbers as well. So that's why the 22%-24% revenue guidance. That then runs through into what we're expecting of an Adjusted EBITDA increase between 26% and 29%. Two things here to call out, one is that we are increasing our commercial investments in campaigns and also our marketing spending to help drive the growth faster. Secondly, the prior year comp, again, as a result, in this case, a result of the Fit to Grow initiative, is really starting to gain traction in the second quarter of last year. The comps are moving up in terms of margins. So the growth rate, although not 36.6%, is, I think, a very creditable 26%-29% and a very, very good result in itself. When it comes to CapEx, a bit more spending than in Q1. Various projects starting to pick up speed, so PLN 140 million-PLN 150 million. We also implemented our annual pay round in April, so amongst other areas, the tech teams are earning more money, which means there'll be a bit more capitalized development cost than there was in Q1. Now, moving on to international, and here the highlight is that the 3.6% year-on-year is suffixed with the word growth. We are now, for the first time, seeing the GMV growing in the international operations, which is obviously the combination of the international marketplaces growing quickly, together with the mall, at least on a constant currency basis, some slowing of the impact and importance of that impact in absolute terms relative to the international marketplace. So we've reached an inflection point. GMV is starting to grow internationally, and obviously, that's critical for our journey towards profitability over the next quarters and years. Now, in terms of revenue, we obviously still see significant contraction because we're swapping 1P GMV, which has got a lot of revenue content from retail sales for 3P GMV, which produces only commission revenue and take rate revenue. So that continues to decline. Looking at adjusted EBITDA, we're expecting between PLN 130 million and PLN 150 million loss across the international markets. Mall, again, we think we will contain the losses but we are investing more behind driving the international marketplaces, which, as I mentioned, they're up sequentially quite significantly on Q1. The CapEx, PLN 25 million-PLN 35 million in international. So that's my final comments regarding the outlook. Thank you for listening. I'm gonna pass back to Tomasz, who will take you through or introduce the Q&A segment. Thank you, Jon, and thank you, Roy. We are now ready to take questions from the public. Jota, the floor is yours now. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star, followed by one on their telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, then you may press star and two. Please use your handset when asking your question for better quality. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from the line of Cesar Tiron with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Yes. Yes, hi. Good morning or good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the call and for the opportunity to ask questions. I have three, if that's okay, but they're easy. The first one, can you please say a few more words on Allegro Cash, that pilot? What's the aim there? I just wanted to understand it better. Second question, on your take rate, is there still room to increase that, or do you think you've maxed out the increase after all these changes to rate cards and co-financing over the past couple of years? And then third question, it does look like the, I've asked that question in the past as well, but the cash seems to be accumulating on the on the balance sheet. Obviously, the company is de-leveraging. Have you thought about the uses of that cash? Would be used at the point to repay down debt? You know, do you want to return that to shareholders in some form? That would... It would help to have some comments on that. Thank you. Okay, so, I'll take the first two and then hand over to Jon. I think he'll probably also have some things to say about particularly the take rate. So, what we're seeing is, particularly since we have so much insight in consumer customer behavior, that we've been a fairly successful lender, and I think for any fintech business, there are sort of three major components. One is the ability to extend credit. This is the one that we've been working on. I would say it's a natural one to think about in a market, particularly like Poland, which is a, in its own advanced banking system. And the other two sort of major components about this is being able to hold some form of deposits and also, you know, have some form of payment scheme. ... and that's the direction we're going. In terms of for customers, and sort of standard consumers, is, you know, we have every intent to continue to carefully build out our service offering and what are the typical three components of financial services for consumer-facing services at least. I think I should emphasize, we have no aspiration, certainly in the short term, to be a bank. That's why we entered into the collaboration with Aion. We're doing most of the things that we do as banking as a service with their considerable support. And, you know, it's, again, and I think you've seen this in other areas of our business as well, the idea is not to build some very large capability and assume the consumers will come, but to actually learn over time and actually have a service and a service delivery capability that is appropriate to the scale of the business that we have at any one time. So much for Allegro Cash. I think, and you've seen this elsewhere around the world, you know, this is an area that has growth opportunity, and we're beginning to manifest that. Take rates. We are very focused on delivering value for customers, and customers also, and to some extent, include our merchants. And we always want to be a value service provider, and so I do think the fact that our costs of trading are considerably less than any of our benchmarks, and that this is a competitive advantage. So success fees, I sincerely hope that we make no further changes to those this year. Merchants have told us very clearly that they like simplicity, and also that we chunk up the changes as opposed to dribble them in, so that they can actually plan accordingly. I think buried in take rate, of course, are a couple of things. Also, some of our advertising is reported in the take rate number. And also included in the take rate number is also co-financing, and I do think merchants, in terms of co-financing, get a good deal twice. One, Allegro pays the majority of those costs for Smart!. And secondly, of course, as we negotiate delivery fees, that I don't think any individual merchant would be able to match in their negotiations, if they even are able to do some. So there may be some shift in how we split divvy that up, but I think on the others, we need to be cautious to assume that we can do... And frankly, I think there are other players in the market who do that more aggressively. I do think we should be very cautious about, you know, how much of a share we want to take from merchants' GMV. So there we go. I think those are the two points. Okay, thanks, Roy. Let me take the final question regarding the cash balance that we have, which is at PLN 2.9 billion, as you can see on the leverage slide in our materials. I think the first point to make here is to remind what we said about two months ago when we reported the fourth quarter, and we also issued some mid-term guide rails for your consideration. One of the things we said then was that we would aim over the medium term to keep the leverage at around about 1x our adjusted EBITDA. We also said that we wanna maintain financial flexibility, which I would equate with having cash balances on hand and also reserves or undrawn reserves that are readily available to us. Now, it's going to take us quite a few more quarters to get all the way down from 1.38x to 1x leverage. And that's because we don't have the turbocharging effect of the merchant fee project anymore. And in that period of time, what Roy and I anticipate is that we will be engaging with our board of directors, which some of you may have realized will have a few changes coming at the AGM in next month or towards the end of June. In that we have a new chairperson, and some other changes in the lineup. And we will expect to engage with them and discuss in detail exactly how we wanna flesh this policy out, in terms of what is enough financial flexibility, what that capital structure should ideally be looking like going forward. And obviously, the end product of all of that will be any comment around what shareholders might expect in terms of what we would do with any excess cash. Yeah, so it's gonna take us a few quarters to get down to that 1x, and I think we'll make everything clear by the time we get there. Excuse me, Mr. Tiron- Thank you so much. Are you done with your questions? Yes, thank you so much for your help. Thank you. It was very clear. Thank you. ... The next question comes from the line of Ross Andrew with Barclays. Please go ahead. Great. Morning, everyone. I've got two, if that's okay. First one is a short-term one. It looks as though there's some conservatism in your guidance around the growth slowing in June. Can you just talk a bit about kind of your thinking behind that, what you're seeing in terms of the Polish consumer, the puts and takes around whether you could do better or worse? And then the second question, and I hate to ask you, but the inevitable one about Temu. What's the latest in terms of what you're seeing, both in Poland and elsewhere? Your sense of how big it is, the impact it's having. Would really appreciate any kind of latest thinking. Thank you. Hello, Andrew. Thanks for the questions. I'll take the first one. Roy will take Temu. Yeah, I mean, we're trying to keep the guidance in round numbers. And we're guiding 10%-11%. What I would say is that in the first half of the quarter, we haven't seen the year-on-year acceleration that we were talking about month to month to month when we talked about Q1. We haven't seen that continuing into the first half of the quarter. It's kind of leveled off. And I don't know if you've heard, but about an hour ago, the retail sales numbers came out, actually, quite a bit slower growth. Still growth, four per... 4.1% in real terms, but quite a bit slower than the market was expecting. There are a few areas of uncertainty around some of the future of some of the inflation shields and various other measures that have been in place, that have been helping the consumer. And there may still be a little bit of caution there on the side of the consumer. I think the overall direction is good, but the momentum is not maybe in terms of recovery, is maybe not as dynamic as it was in Q1. So that's why we came out with this 10%-11%. So Temu, first of all, no need to apologize. It's the nice thing about retail, whether it's online or offline, is you can always see who the new competitors are. I'd say, this is not the first large, well-funded new entrant into the Polish market, in particular, for that matter, in Czech. You know, we always watch new entrants in particular because there's always something to learn. You know, every new entrant has a slightly different philosophy and may excel at something that you don't, so there's always something to learn. I think in Temu's case, of course, yes, it is having some impact. We can see this certainly in what we have to pay for marketing, for PPC in particular. You know, I think the fact that they're well-funded and also very marketing-oriented has affected, you know, if you will, our return on investment for marketing spend. And I assume that will continue in terms of how that affects our marketing costs. And we do see some shift of some customers in shopping, less so overall, I think, in sort of web-based, but certainly on app-based sessions. And we'll have to see how it develops over time. As I said, this is not the first time someone new is coming into the market, and our primary focus, even though it may probably sound like the party line, is to stay very much focused on consumers and doing the best we can to serve them, and I think we're doing that fairly well. Just to build on what Roy was saying, I think there's just two other aspects. I think we went into quite a bit of detail last time around that the value proposition of Temu is quite... well, it is gaining some traction in the market, but it overlaps much more with the proposition of players like AliExpress that have been here for 10 years than it does with Allegro's everyday shopping model. And we are doing surveys on a regular basis. We've been doing that for years, but we've, for the last few months, you know, been including Temu and Shein into those surveys. And what I would say is that it is kind of strengthening that thesis, right? That there is an upper limit to how much this particular value proposition may be able to take. And we're still seeing when we look at transaction share of transactions, our estimates based on these surveys are that the two together, Shein and Temu, are in the mid-single digits in terms of the segment share, in the market at this point in time. Cool. That's helpful. Thank you both. The next question comes from the line of Potyra Michał with UBS. Please go ahead. Morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two questions, please. The first one relates to the EBITDA guidance for the second quarter in Poland. If you just take the midpoint, it implies sequentially declining margin as a percent of GMV, so that seems to be against the seasonal pattern... at least of the last two years. So I just wonder, are you being cautious, or is there something else, please? The second question is around the staff, the personnel costs. There was a pretty material increase, both in nominal values and also as a percentage of GMV. If you could comment on that, and just, I'm just wondering if that's a new normal level or something specific to the first quarter this year. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the questions. I think the big points around the adjusted EBITDA are that, first of all, the comps are moving up pretty quickly as we get into the second and then third and fourth quarter, as all the positive effects of the Fit to Grow initiatives started to show up in the prior year numbers, right? So the first point is that the hurdle is getting higher. Secondly, we're planning for an increase in marketing and commercial spending, in particular. Partly alluding to your next point, the staff costs, the annual pay round took effect from April, so those increases will be present in the Q2 numbers. And obviously, if you've seen the corporate wages increases, you know, pay raises are actually still running quite high in the Polish economy. But no, beyond that, yeah, I think the only other aspect is that some of the spending that we were expecting to be in Q1 actually didn't appear in the final numbers as we were closing the books. And those projects, which are effectively slightly delayed, should start to appear in the Q2 numbers. But you know, we think this is still a very decent growth rate. The 6% GMV margin that we're seeing in Q1, you know, that is something of an anomaly. It's exceptional because of the decision we made to bring the take rate changes forward. We need now to, as Roy said, keep the rates where they are for the rest of the year, and we will need to absorb the residual effects of that, pulse of inflation. In particular, minimum wages are still going up strongly, and that affects the delivery companies, so as well as the salary increases in our own workforce, you know, at some point, we'd expect to be paying more, more for delivery, as, as, as the year continues. Thank you. So, Question was- Clarify. Yeah, on the staff cost, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things in there. I mean, you've got significant pay increases a year ago, right, when there was very high inflation at the time. So the pay rises happening in April last year are reflected in the year-on-year growth in Q1 of this year. The headcount is growing, not significantly, but faster than it was during the full-on Fit to Grow program, when we basically had a freeze. And finally, the... As you've seen with the EBITDA, the quarter started, or the year has started very solidly. And so the bonus accruals that we've made for the annual bonus were bigger than the ones that we needed this time last year. So, those things together are the main reasons for those numbers. Oh, and the final point, sorry, I almost forgot. You noticed that the capitalized development costs were a bit lower than Q1 a year ago. That money has to go somewhere, obviously, in those salaries, and it's in the P&L as staff expenses. Great, and, you know, congrats on the bonus accruals. That's all from me. Thank you. Way to go. Still nine months to go yet. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question comes from the line of Sebastian Patulea with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hello, everyone, and thank you for taking my questions. I've got three, please. Firstly, do you want to discuss the possibility of new competitive entrants in Slovakia and Czechia, maybe over the next one or two years, please? Is there any reason why these countries are more attractive to Allegro than other possible competitors? Secondly, do you see any possibility of partnering with Temu, and probably more realistically with Shein, where they can use Allegro's marketplace and access to customers as a front to access a much more engaged user base? And lastly, during the last conference call, you said that you're retaining some marketing flexibility in order to respond to competition. The results so they are very strong, and I'm more interested qualitatively in how much of that marketing flexibility did you use, please? Thank you very much. Would you please repeat the first question before... I wanna make sure I answer the question you're actually answering. I just understood it's about international expansion and markets, but the, I think there was more specific interest. Definitely. So I was looking if, from your point of view, if there's any possibility that two years from now or a year from now, we're gonna hear or we're gonna see some news that some competitors are entering, Slovakia and Czechia. And the question was followed by, is there any reason why these countries are actually more attractive to Allegro specifically than any other possible competitors? Okay, well, I can, I can probably definitely answer the second part of that question. I don't have a crystal ball, and even though it'd be highly illegal, it would be kind of fun to be able to listen in on what people and elsewhere in the world and other businesses are thinking. So it's difficult to sort of answer why they would go in. I do think that our region is one that is likely to get increasing attention over time, because I think overall, as a region, as a group of countries, we're all doing pretty well. Poland, I think, first and foremost, in that. So I can't predict. I think Temu's, you know, clearly is also going into some of the countries that we're in, certainly in Czech and in Poland. Why are these countries attractive to us? I think number one thing is a philosophical one. We want to go to places where we are welcome. And welcome is, I think, a factor of things. First one is, do we have something to offer that's not in, already available in the market? Most of these markets tend to have very fragmented e-commerce landscapes with relatively low internet penetration, and we do have a bit of experience in doing that. I mean, it's probably immodest to say, but there's certainly more than a grain of truth that we introduced Poles to e-commerce, and we certainly have been quite successful in introducing them to categories that they may not have been shopping online with before. And I think it's frankly not the best thing, but sort of something we can be very pleased about, if not proud about. Pride not being something we should aspire for. So, doing the same in markets that are close to ours or countries that are close to ours is, I think, a natural extension, and I think our experience is attractive. You know, specifically to either the Czech or Slovakia, we offer 10 x the selection, and by and large, with much better prices than that what they're used to. Furthermore, we're not actually interested in world domination, but maybe more like local collaboration, which means that also, compared to, I think, some of the larger players, we're not interested in doing everything ourselves. We're looking to build relationships, leveraging our relationships in Poland, merchants in particular, but also, you know, acquiring cooperation with local logistics players, suppliers, and something else, and that I don't think is the attitude of everyone else expanding abroad. And also, we recognize that we need to do this in a very low-cost way. You've seen our entry costs into Slovakia, in particular, that have already come down dramatically than our first investment in the Czech Republic. And I think the light footprint approach means that we can fill spaces, reach corners that not everyone can reach. Yeah. I do think other players have considerably larger tech loads just to open up a tech stack for a new country, and part of that is 'cause we don't open up a tech stack. We have the same tech stack everywhere, and then most of our incremental costs are related to shipping methods and payment methods and language. And, you know, the buzzword of the moment is AI, and I think one of the things that we are very pleased with is our AI capabilities have shown that we can translate from various languages, rather rare combinations like Polish to Czech, which is not the first algorithm you develop. We're cheaper than even Google can do it. You know, these are the sorts of things that give us advantages in these markets that perhaps by proximity, perhaps for a number of other reasons, we aspire to know a little bit more about than anyone else does, and most of these markets also tend to be smaller, and therefore, our light footprint approach, where we're also very eager to understand how things work locally, is more likely to succeed than some of the other elephants in the room. I think the final part of your question was about marketing flexibility, which I think we'd flagged previously. I think the short answer in Q1 actually is that we didn't increase spending all that significantly. I think in the bridge, it was about PLN 20 million incrementally year-on-year, so not dramatic. But we do anticipate spending more in the second quarter. One of the reasons for that is that the Smart! Week is a Q2 event. We've just had that, so a big shopping event equivalent to Prime Days for our Smart! consumers. But also, as we were discussing when we were talking about Temu, there is a lot of competition for share of voice with customers who are shopping, in particular on Google, but also on other social media platforms. We need to be prepared to defend our position. That's basically what we were alluding to in saying that we need more marketing flexibility. If I can please reask—thank you very, very much for the comprehensive answers. If I may please reask the second question, just 'cause Shein, for example, started to list some of their items on some marketplaces. And the second question was, do you see any possibility of partnering with Temu, but honestly, more realistically, probably with Shein, where they can use Allegro's marketplace and access to customers as a front to access a much more engaged user base? Do you see any possibility of that? Sorry, that I did not answer the Shein and Temu question in terms of selling on the site, but by all means, they're more than welcome to sell on our site. We, what do they call it? Welcome to all comers. Anyone who wants to trade in the marketplace, it's called a marketplace for a reason, and everyone is free to register and to transact on the site. We'd be very happy to have them. But the other thing that it sounds like there was another bit of the question that I missed. Can you repeat? No, I think, no, I think that was it. I was just looking for a more formal partnership or just, just the possibility of that, but, but you've answered the question, to be honest. Thank you very much. See, I said, Shein and Temu are free to join as merchants. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further audio questions at this time. I will now give the floor to Mr. Poźniak for any questions from our webcast participants. Thank you, Ira. We have a few questions that came online. The first one comes from Tomasz Sokołowski from Santander. Could you comment recent trading of BaseLinker Index, which pointed at 17% growth in Polish GMV in April? Your 10%-11% GMV growth guidance for Poland seems to be conservative in this light. Yeah. You know, BaseLinker tends to reflect a lot of the smaller players in the e-commerce space. And it doesn't, I think, correlate particularly well, their readings with how the overall market is moving. From what I recall, the Euromonitor summary for 2023 came out at... What was it? About 12%, if I recall, right? For growth in the previous year. So we were quite close to that overall. Monika's just double-checking the number. 9.6 for retail and 12.2. Monika's prompting me, 12.2 for the overall e-commerce segment. Yeah, and we were not too far away from that. So we don't watch it that closely, 'cause it's only a specific subsegment of the overall market. I think the retail sales that came out about 90 minutes ago indicate that a bit of caution is advisable as to what's happening in the overall economy. You know, the retail sales number was a bit underwhelming at 4% of real growth. So we're being a bit cautious, perhaps, but you know, let's wait and see. Thank you, Jon. The next question comes from Luke Holbrook from Morgan Stanley. Question concerns Smart!. Thanks for providing this closure. Do you see this as an opportunity to continue penetrating the customer base, given below 50% of actives are on Smart!? Active buyers. Of Active buyers. Of course. You know, so one thing we talk about from time to time is continuous improvement, and our Smart! program, like any other of our initiatives, can always be improved. And as I've alluded to before, there are things that we plan to do to make that offer more attractive. I do think it's fair to say that Smart! customers are also disproportionately loyal and create a substantial uplift in terms of what their average transactions are, you know, their average spend is in a year. So I think there is headroom to sort of continue to build out the program, particularly as we add more and more benefits to it over time. Thank you, Roy. And, next question comes from Adrian Kowollik from PKO BP Securities, asking for what was the main reason for the increase of GMV per active buyer in Poland and other countries? I think other countries was, is exaggeration, because we're not yet having that there, but, in Poland, it's true. The driver for the increase of GMV per active buyer. Yeah, thank you for the question. I mean, what I was highlighting was that there was a quarter-to-quarter acceleration in the rate of progress. I mean, the fact that it goes up is something that we've been enjoying for 25 years, right? So it's not surprising that it is moving up from quarter-to-quarter. It reflects literally, in our case, people's lifetime journeys, because most customers who actually, I think the magic number is do about 7 transactions with us, tend to never actually go to the point where they drop out of our base. So we're really talking about people's lifetime journeys and the economy in general when we look at that metric, but also all our efforts to loyalize and increase frequency. I think what you see really, though, looking at that, Q1 to Q4, is also the impact that I was trying to explain, that the decline in average selling price that was reflecting all, all this trading down and avoiding of discretionary spending in the course of 2023, that effect has slowed right down. And, it may well therefore be going on its way to unwinding completely, and we start to see in the next quarter's growth that's coming partly from volume and partly also from inflation in the average selling price. But we're not there yet, but it's a lot better than it looked in Q4. Thank you, Jon. Then the next question comes from Roman Reshetnyak from Goldman Sachs. Can you elaborate on your progress regarding locker rollout during Q1 and Q2 to date? Do you see further progress in utilization metrics, and how far are you from reaching positive net EBITDA contribution? Ah! Well, what I'd say is, no, we haven't opened an awful lot of lockers in this quarter. And again, our point is, you know, one of the themes I said right up front is we focus on return on investment. And when it comes to locker space, we were blessed with a couple of things. First of all, lockers are pretty cheap, and the second thing is, because they're so cheap, you can, it's an almost a step function. It's an incremental... It's almost a variable cost 'cause each one costs not very much. I don't think we disclose what the absolute cost is. So we don't need to open up lockers unless the ones that we have are full. So, you know, I think you can make continued assumptions that, like I said, our target is to get cost parity. By the way, when I say that, we have no intention to sort of have a massive network of lockers anywhere. Our point is simply to have choices, to optimize between those choices for the best combination of speed, reliability and cost. So, yeah, you know, as utilization goes up, unit costs come down, and that's how we think about it. We don't think about it in terms of EBITDA. You know, it's a cost line, and it's another opportunity for us to reduce overall our cost of shipping, and shipping is, I think it's still our biggest cost block on the P&L. So, you know, minimize unit costs means that its impact on the P&L decreases, and it's just then a question of what's the best solution? Thank you, Roy. And the last one, which, let me take it, it's a question about, you know, for the guidance for the second half of the year, which unfortunately, we have to deny regarding per quarter. We have just given guidance for the second quarter. We're not commenting the second half of the year. And that concludes the list of the questions received online from the webcast participants. Jota? Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling and have a good day.