Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Strong Q2 operating performance: Revenue rose 15%, adjusted EBITDA increased 5%, marketplace GMV grew 15%, e-commerce GMV expanded 28% on a constant-currency basis, and the board recommended an 18% increase in the quarterly dividend.
  • Positive Sentiment: Kaspi’s new AI shopping assistant, Kasper, reached all Kazakhstan users within its first month; one in five eligible customers used it, 80% of conversations produced a product recommendation, and assisted shopping was materially faster than traditional product discovery.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company completed its acquisition of Rabobank Türkiye and secured the banking license, positioning it to launch consumer and merchant fintech products—including shopping loans, merchant financing, and savings—in Türkiye next year; its new shopping loan pilot already represented 0.4% of Hepsiburada GMV in June.
  • Negative Sentiment: Profitability remained pressured by elevated funding costs, Turkish investments, and higher regulatory reserve requirements; adjusted EBITDA grew 7% in the first half versus full-year guidance of approximately 15%, while net income was flat in Q2.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Full-year guidance was reiterated, including marketplace GMV growth of around 20%, TPV growth of approximately 15%, and average net loan portfolio growth of 15%; management expects lower Kazakhstan interest rates to provide a more meaningful earnings benefit from late 2026 and into 2027.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

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David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Thanks, Sammy. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm David Ferguson from Kaspi.kz. Welcome to our second quarter and first half 2026 financial results call. With me is Kaspi.kz's CEO and co-founder, Mikheil Lomtadze, and our deputy CEOs, Tengiz Mosidze and Yuri Didenko. As usual, Mikheil will take you through the financial and strategic highlights from the second quarter. I'll talk through the broader financials, and then we'll open the call up to Q&A. On that note, over to you, Mikheil.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Thank you, David. Thank you for everyone joining this call. Our financial performance for the second quarter is strong. The revenue went up 15%, adjusted EBITDA 5%. Considering the performance and the strong financial position of the company, the board is recommending to increase the dividends by 18% compared to the first Q dividend. Our core businesses continue to perform. The marketplace GMV plus 15% driven by the e-commerce, which is our strategic most important focus both in Kazakhstan and Türkiye. It's 28% growth on the constant currency basis. TPV, our major business in the payment, still continues to grow very nicely, around 13% growth quarter-on-quarter. Average net loan portfolio continues to grow strongly around 18% year-over-year. E-commerce is the area which we believe is extremely important for us.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

That's the final destination for our consumers and merchants, is where we can add the most of the value in terms of enabling the purchases and connecting merchants and sellers. E-commerce GMV has grown nicely around 28% on the constant currency basis year-over-year. The take rate continues to expand. The main driver of the take rate is the value added services, which we continue scaling, and that's about delivery and advertising. What is important is how engaged the consumers remain and how frequently they transact with us. The number of purchases per consumer continue to grow in both Türkiye and Kazakhstan, and the e-com purchases grew 33%, which is a very nice growth, and we delivered in excess of 76 million purchases in the second quarter.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

About 20% of our GMV is a 1P, that is 1P, mainly the e-grocery in Kazakhstan, which is the fastest growing e-commerce vertical for us, and the 1P in Türkiye, which is electronics, and historically has been a category for 1P in Türkiye. We are about 53% of our GMV in Kazakhstan and 47% in Türkiye. Again, both for us, the important priority is just continue building up our e-commerce capabilities and making sure that the delivery quality and the speed is improving. The value-added services are monetized, and we just continue working on converting the traffic and the properties that we have into the purchases from our consumers. Connecting merchants and consumers to each other successfully. E-commerce has been growing the take rate with the value added services.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

As you can see, the value-added services grew 49% on a constant currency growth and 27% real growth. Growing faster on the constant currency basis than e-commerce revenue. Again, just to reinforce the fact that we are extremely responsible in terms of growing those additional sorts of services and making sure that we deliver the value for the merchants and also, we make sure that our services are highly reliable on the delivery side and highly relevant on the advertising side. If we sort of promote something to our consumers that actually is something they really need, and we deliver value to both merchants and the consumers through this experience. We're also approaching this new stage of our company's development. As you know, Kaspi.kz has done a sort of reinventions of itself or transformations multiple times during its history.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We've started from financial services, then we expanded into the ecosystem of everyday services, and then we united all these everyday services in a single Super App. Now we're approaching the stage when we want to develop the personal AI assistant, which will help with everyday tasks to our consumers and to our merchants. On the 1st of July, we launched Kasper, which is the assistant for our consumers. We started with the one task now, which is actually enabling shopping. Kasper actually is built on our technology and is built on our data and built on our consumer experience, and it's in a single mobile application, so it's actually integrated in our Super App. Kasper, we call him Kasper, our new personal assistant.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

He can actually understand your needs, he can recommend the best products, he can engage in a conversation with you and ask the clarifying questions, compare different products, give you the reviews, and so on and so forth. It's enabled in voice and texts, so you can actually either type your task or you can record it by voice, and then Kasper helps you to find the right product for you among 20 million products in our Kazakhstan e-commerce platform. He can follow up with the smart questions, and then he can lead you to the right product for you, which you can after complete in our e-commerce. We have launched it in the 1st of July. We have been scaling during the month. Now it's available to everyone, to all our consumers in Kazakhstan. Has been very rapid sort of scaling.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

It's still early to give you any sort of detailed performance metrics, but I think the metrics we already have are quite encouraging. One out of five customers whom Kasper was available actually used it. Response rate is around three seconds; this just tells you that all the sort of investments we have done both in the compute but also in optimizing the speed have played off really nicely. You as a consumer get response really quickly, which is extremely important for any AI model and assistant. The consumers are looking for the products across pretty much the entire catalog. 22 product categories have been covered so far, which is pretty much our entire catalog, which just tells you that the Kasper is performing the tasks across a wide range of the products that we have.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

8 in 10 conversations, 80% of conversations actually end up with a product recommendation, 60% of those take customer through the specific product. If you are looking for vacuum cleaner, he will just guide you through the process, understand your needs, you basically have your product in the shopping cart. What is important is obviously the speed. With the Kasper is 50% faster than just a regular product discovery, 50% faster adding to favorites, 30% faster to the basket. Again, what we believe is that this sort of technology or this customer experience is leapfrogging all the traditional way of you to finding the products. You are scrolling, you are reading, you are analyzing the information on the screen, you are tapping buttons, and so on and so forth.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

You are spending much more time going through multiple stages of the product discovery and understanding the product that you need yourself. Kasper is actually speeding up this process. Kasper is helping to find the products faster, he's really is working on the task with you, rather than you sort of typing in the search box name of the product. Highly relevant, highly reliable, faster, those are the most important metrics for us at the moment. Our goal is to build the trusted assistant. Assistant is equal trust, which means that if you don't trust your assistant, you can easily fire him.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We treat Kasper like your personal assistant, our priority now is to build the trust, which means highly reliable, highly relevant service that actually helps you to buy a product, which is exactly the product that you need. This is our priority as we're scaling Kasper. It's just one month, those are really very encouraging metrics that we observe with the Kasper interaction of consumers with Kasper. This is just an example of the queries, which basically tell you how different it is interacting with the Kasper, actually the traditional search or traditional way to find the products.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

You usually type the product that you have in mind, traditional e-commerce or marketplace way to offer you a product is you are trying to give you a selection of the products, which you then are reading through, familiarizing yourself with the ratings, also narrowing down through filters and other navigation tools which have been developed over time. When customers are interacting with the Kasper now, they just give him a task. "I want to give my goddaughter a gift for her second birthday." "I want to have aftershave for consistency and effect that has a strong smell." "I want a sprayer that I can set up next to the house, it creates a cool mist." This type of interaction and the type of tasks which Kasper is getting and able to solve is really remarkable.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We're true sort of believers in this technology, which we have been developing already for quite some time behind the scenes and getting ready to scale it. It's really remarkable how consumers interact, how Kasper really helps. Those examples which you see here, they actually ended up in a real order. It's really important when you sort of think how customers do mission shopping, how they're focused on delivery, when give me the items which can be delivered within three hours. Solve this type of problem, which I have, like after double-sided tape, adhesive was left on the plastic window, what product will help to remove it? This is not the regular search. This is you asking someone to help with an advice. All those things are extremely encouraging for us. We're scaling Kasper as we speak in our e-commerce platform.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Again, our mission is to develop a personal assistant for everyday tasks, e-commerce and shopping is just the one task we're now focused on. In the future, we believe that Kaspi.kz can help with all other tasks across all our services in our Kaspi.kz Super App. Now I just would like to give you a bit of a demo. Some of you that actually watch the screen, I think it will be pretty cool. David, can we go to the demo? Kaspi.kz actually has a dedicated space in our e-commerce. You can basically type the task which you want Kaspi.kz to perform. For example, I need a vacuum cleaner. Kaspi.kz does basic analysis. He starts asking you clarifying questions. For example, what type of vacuum cleaner suits you best? He goes into the requirements.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

One of the things which is important for any vacuum cleaner is size of your apartment. He will ask you to clarify size of your apartment. He will ask you the budget. What's your budget within which you want to buy the vacuum cleaner? In basically couple of seconds, he pulls together for you different vacuum cleaners which are available in Kaspi.kz Shop. They're described in a simple language. He gives you a list of the vacuum cleaners, which are acceptable for you. You can ask him to compare specific models. He runs comparison. On one screen, you can see the main characteristics. You can compare the products. You can actually use your voice. You can give him task with your voice. This task can be actually something which is really cool.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

For example, in terms of added value, like which of these vacuum cleaners is best suited for a person with allergies? He gives you a selection of the products which fit this criteria explains why. If you see some technical term, you can ask him. For example, he's telling you that HEPA filter is important. You can ask him what is HEPA filter. He can tell you in a simple language what is HEPA filter. You select the vacuum cleaner you want, you push the button. That's it. You can continue through the checkout and actually buying the product. All the charts obviously stored, personalized and things like that. You can go back and forth. It's really very interesting. It's important development for us.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

As I've said, we are starting from the shopping experience because that's where we can add most of the value. Over time, we plan Kaspi.kz to expand in all our services in our super apps. Also the service is highly scalable, and when it's built on the high-quality data, can become highly relevant. Obviously, the Kaspi.kz is highly scalable to all our other markets, and the businesses. We'll be thinking about scaling him to Turkey as well. Another just a quick update. We have secured the banking license, so we've basically completed the acquisition of Rabobank A.Åž., and now we're building up our fintech capabilities. We will be investing around $300 million, as we initially said, just for the capital of the bank. We're scaling fintech products now, and we're building up the capabilities to roll them out next year.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We expect no material impact this year. Obviously, this is fintech and financial services is where we started. We're true believers that you can deliver the most value to your consumers and to your merchants when you actually combine capabilities of the fintech and the e-commerce together. That's something which is important strategically for us. This is something which we're extremely experienced and successful and we'll be rolling them out next year, the fintech products, both for consumers and merchants. We're not sitting idle, obviously. We have been working on launching the new shopping loan based on the consumer finance license which we already have in Turkey. We've launched the new shopping loan on Hepsiburada. Basically, flow is extremely similar to what you actually have in Kaspi.kz itself.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

You can actually select the products, and based on the product, you can select the monthly payment which fits best of your needs, and then you can proceed seamlessly through the checkout. This product we're piloting, and the new shopping loan is already 0.4% of the GMV in June. Again, we have been preparing ourself for quite some time. In any financial services, originating loan or financing customer is step 1. Actually, being paid back, it's more important than originating the loan. For all these months, we have been building up our risk management capabilities, rolling out risk management, which consists of the approval, managing the consumer, and also the collection process, like the entire loan journey. We have been implementing and rolling out now. Now we're comfortable with all the metrics, and we're piloting the new cash loan Basically on the Hepsiburada platform.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Again, we're strong believers that combining this around the consumers' and merchants' shopping experience and the fintech experience and the financial products will create a lot of value for consumers and merchants, and therefore a lot of value for the company. The products which we'll be focused on to roll out as we build the foundation for them will be products around shopping, around merchants, and you know all the products that Kaspi.kz has, right? We have shopping loan, BNPL, merchant finance, and the consumer finance product. Obviously, savings accounts and so on and so forth. You can expect us that next year we'll be launching those products in Turkey. Banking license allows us to do that. Technology, we're rolling out in Turkey, encourages and risk management, basically, all those things coming together very nicely.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We're very optimistic about launching financial services and fintech products in Türkiye. Back to you, David.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

All right. Thank you, Mikheil. Just to run through the financials, starting firstly with marketplace. Marketplace constant currency GMV growth up 15% year-on-year. As you saw, that's driven by e-commerce, GMV growth up 28%, with m-commerce and travel broadly flat, consistent with trends in the first quarter. Take rate increase 110 basis points to 12.1%, again, driven by e-commerce and specifically advertising and delivery. The revenue and EBITDA growth of 11% and 9%, that is reported growth, not constant currency, impacted by 21% depreciation of the Turkish lira versus the Kazakh tenge. That's the first thing to keep in mind. The second thing to keep in mind, 9% EBITDA growth, that differential versus revenue growth of that margin pressure, that's sort of the least pronounced we've seen actually for the last couple of years and despite the investments that we're making into Hepsiburada.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Moving on to payments. TPV growth up 13%. That's a slight moderation, reflecting a slight moderation in inflation. As inflation continues to come down, TPV growth will reduce accordingly. The take rate declines by seven basis points. Again, that is something similar to what we saw in the first quarter. Longer run trend, though, driven by changes in product mix in favor of Kaspi Pay. The result is reported revenue growth up 5% and EBITDA down 1%. The pressure on EBITDA is two things. Number one, it's the investment in Kaspi Alaqan, that's pay by palm. It's tech and product development spend. Number two, you should keep in mind the adjusted EBITDA excludes the interest revenue that payments generate. That interest revenue is up 15% year-on-year. That's not reflected in EBITDA but is reflected in net income, is net income accretive.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Then on to fintech. Firstly, we talked on our last call about strategically focusing on loans that generate more revenue. These are longer duration loans. What that really means is within the loan portfolio, the mix is shifting. BNPL, short duration, low revenue generating loan is getting smaller in the mix. Other loans, general purpose, merchant financing are growing in share with the mix. You're seeing decent loan portfolio growth up 18%, the mix changing in favor of higher revenue generating loans. Pricing is stable, the result is faster revenue growth, revenue growth above net loan portfolio growth and revenue growth up 23% year-on-year. That's the first point. The second point would be that you see that cost of funding remains an issue, up 150 basis points year-on-year in the second quarter.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

As some of you will have seen, Kazakhstan lowered its National Bank rate at the end of June, and we lowered on one of our products our deposit rate last week, effective last Wednesday, I believe. That was our first rate cut for over two years. It applies to our three-month duration product, which is around 30% of deposits. We lowered the rate from 20% to 19%. Clearly this isn't reflected in Q2 numbers. Some of it will be reflected in Q3. It's a three-month duration product, so it'll be reflected to a much greater extent in the 4th quarter and then fully as we go into next year. The bigger point to keep in mind is this isn't just about one rate cut.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

For the last several years on this call, we've been talking about how high rates have been a pressure on the bottom line. If inflation continues to fall in Kazakhstan, rates will continue to come down. You can see that growth in our deposits is strong, up 21%. Naturally, we will be able to pass those rate cuts through, and that will be very beneficial at the bottom line for us over actually not just one quarter, but potentially over the next couple of years. In the second quarter, EBITDA up 6%, though, versus the revenue growth of 23%. On the risk side of things, cost of risk, 0.7%. That's up slightly versus 0.6% in the second quarter of last year, but flat quarter-on-quarter. We would expect cost of risk to moderate slightly in the second half of the year.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

The NPL ratio, NPL coverage trends consistent with what we've talked about previously, as the portfolio mix shifts, particularly towards merchant financing and to a lesser extent, the car loan. These are products with a higher probability of collection; therefore, we keep those NPLs on the balance sheet for longer. A higher probability of collection means they require less coverage. This remains just a function of changing mix. If you look at the real-time credit metrics, you see whether it be first, second payment default on the left, or delinquency rates on the right, they remain low and stable. To wrap everything up for the second quarter, reported revenue up 15%, driven by e-commerce and fintech revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA up 5%, impacted by higher rates and investments into Turkiye. Net income, flat.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Again, reflecting those same pressures on EBITDA. You should also keep in mind that the regulatory changes that were announced last year, particularly higher National Bank reserve requirements, have been introduced in two phases. The first phase was last year, the second kick-up was in the second quarter of this year. You see that pressuring net income. As we go into next year, that is in the base as well. Just another way of cutting things up. I think this just very clearly illustrates where the pressure on profitability is coming from. It's coming from interest rates. We've always said that is cyclical. It now looks we're at the start of the cycle, that going from being a negative, from being a headwind, to being a tailwind. If you think about the investments that we're making into Hepsi.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

These things, tech and product spend, sales and marketing, they're not just Türkiye, they're Kazakhstan as well. Actually, you can see that in the context of Kaspi.kz, its earnings generation there, relatively small. That's whether you cut it from an earnings perspective or if you look at it from a dividend perspective, the cash that we're able to return despite these factors and despite these investments. On the guidance. Guidance reiterated. GMV up 17% as of the first half of the year. Guidance for the full year remains around 20%. We would expect faster trends in the second half versus the second quarter, driven by the timing of promotional events and other product initiatives. TPV growth up 13% versus the guidance of around 15%.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

There will be, assuming inflation moderates, that will be a downward pressure, although integration with Apple Pay should see us benefit from higher overseas volumes, particularly over the summer period. As we talked about, we've moved from TFE guidance to average net loan portfolio guidance, 20% in the first half of the year, guiding for 15% for the full year. EBITDA is trending up 7% at this stage in the year versus the guidance of around 15%. Overall, we're comfortably on track for where we expected to be at this point in the year. On that note, Sammy, let's open the call up please to Q&A.

Operator

Thank you very much. If you'd like to ask a question and you've joined the call via Zoom, please do press the raise hand icon on your screen. If you joined the call via phone, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from Gabor Kemeny. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Gabor Kemeny
Analyst at Bernstein Autonomous

Hello. Thank you for the presentation. Can I first ask about the fintech business, please? Indeed, a decline in your deposit pricing for the first time. I think you cut your deposit rates around two months after the central bank policy rate cut. Is this reflective of how you expect your pricing to evolve in light of the central bank policy rates, and can you share your thoughts on how your deposit pricing may evolve in the next few quarters? My other question would be just on a combination of this very quick deposit growth in the quarter, coupled with a drop in your deposit pricing. If you can elaborate a bit further on these trends, please, which clearly left you in a better funding position than you have been for some time. My final question would be on the marketplace dynamics.

Gabor Kemeny
Analyst at Bernstein Autonomous

It looks like Kazakhstan was growing more quickly this time than Turkey. Can you shed some light on how these respective markets are evolving? Thank you.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Mikheil, do you want to take actually all of those questions?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Yeah, sure. Hi, Gabor. Thank you for your questions. In terms of the deposit rates, in general, we're really focused always on acquiring the customers and delivering them the best product and experience. The previous actions which we really had resulted in a very strong customer and deposit inflow. In terms of our strategy for the pricing in the future, our general strategy really will remain the same. We just look at the dynamics, and if we believe that there is a relationship really strong, considering the market dynamics and the rates on the market, relationship between the way that we price our products and how we acquire customers. If we believe that there is a room to reduce the interest rate because these dynamics on the changing rates on the market allow us to do, then we will do it.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

There is no magical formula basically behind it. Our decision to reduce the rate was driven by basically these dynamics. What you could expect is that it's this specific product, which is the three-month savings account, around 30% of our deposit base. You expect the positive impact financially by the end of the year, as deposits churn. The duration again of deposits is three months. All the deposits will be repriced when the duration is finished, so basically in three months. In terms of the marketplace dynamics, again, we have a bit different strategies on the market. Our e-commerce is a priority, but in Kazakhstan, what we're doing is we're just developing a consumer experience based on the specific verticals. That's what gives us the successful growth on the e-commerce side.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We are also growing extremely fast on the e-grocery side, which is also helping both with the consumer engagement, but also profitability on the marketplace, but most important, the growth. In Kazakhstan, our strategy is just we're working vertical by vertical. Again, the electronics has not really recovered, just because of all the price changes and the conflict of the Middle East and things like that. Supply chain just too challenging, GPU prices and chip prices going up. You still see the growth because all other verticals are growing very nicely. Everything around clothing or car spare parts or home items and things like that. We're really happy with the way we're proceeding in Kazakhstan, and the strategy there is go vertical by vertical.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

In Turkey, our strategy, considering that we're just starting to actually launch the products for the consumers, especially on the fintech side, for us, it's extremely important to work on foundational things. Even though growth has been there, our focus has not been on the growth, right? Our focus really has been on the consumers. Consumer experience, net promoter score, merchant experience, delivery speed, which we have improved dramatically during the last 12 months year-over-year. Like consumer frequency of transactions increased 15% in Turkey. All those things. Basically, the strategy there, to put it in simple words, it's much better to have 1 million customers which love you rather than 3 million or 5 million customers which have just occasional shopping with you.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

The reason why we want this 1 million customers to love us is because next products which we will launch, they will use those products if they are in love with our existing consumer experience. In Turkey, the growth has not been the goal. We have grown nicely. Our goal is to make customers even happier and the merchants even happier. We're building the foundation for the phase of the growth coming next year. We just want to drive the adoption of the new products which we'll launch next year, especially on the fintech side.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Maybe I'll just add one-

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

I'll just add one, Gabor, on Turkey. When you're looking at its performance in the second quarter, I think you should look actually at order growth over the first half, because you probably remember there was a lot of retail disruption in Turkey in the first half, March, April of last year. That just sort of distort the comp quarter-on-quarter, both in Q1 and Q2. Probably if you look over a longer period of time, H1, where orders increased just under 18%, you get a bit better indication of the performance of the business this year.

Gabor Kemeny
Analyst at Bernstein Autonomous

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Maksim Nekrasov. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Maksim Nekrasov
Maksim Nekrasov
Analyst at Citigroup

Hello. Thank you for the presentation. I have a couple of questions. The first one is very simple. Basically, your first half EBITDA growth was around 7%, and was already trending above the full year guidance. While you mentioned the reduction in the deposit rates that should benefit you in the second half of the year. Simply why EBITDA guidance was unchanged, and how should we think about the second half growth and profitability? The second topic I wanted to ask about, maybe not surprisingly about AI, and the Kasper. I know it's quite early, but maybe if you can tell us about the early benefits you've been seeing so far or any measurable impact. Also, in terms of the costs and what level of investment, should we expect any significant costs related to that project? Yeah. Thank you.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Thanks, Maksim. Maybe I'll take the first question on the guidance, and then Mikheil can take the AI related question. You are right, we lowered the rate on the three-month deposit. That's around 30% of the deposit base last week, last Wednesday. It will take three months to fully reprice that. You're looking at the benefit really big starting to come through from the second part of November. Really only one full month this year. You're right, there is some benefit of it this year, but it's for a relatively short period of time. The full benefit of that, and actually potentially other rate cuts that we might see, will be felt from the beginning of next year.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

On the Kaspi.kz, do you want to, David, to pull out the slide?

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

Yeah.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

With the metrics. Yeah, great. In terms of the Kaspi.kz, here, we're just one month into it. Obviously, we have been working with Kaspi.kz ourselves for much longer. Our consumers across Kazakhstan, we have been rolled out now across the whole country on our e-commerce platform. Again, as I mentioned, the initial results are quite encouraging. You have the one out of five customers using, and most importantly, Kaspi.kz completes tasks much faster. Two times faster for consumer to add product to favorites, 30% faster to add to the basket. Those are very important metrics. The metrics that we're focused on now, they're all about trust. Kaspi.kz needs to perform the tasks which it is given, because the trust is the most important first phase for this type of service.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

This service, it needs to be giving you the recommendations and helping you and guiding you through the process in a highly reliable and highly relevant manner. We're quite encouraged with the Kaspi.kz's performance. In terms of the investments, we have done actually quite a lot of not only investments in terms of the building the data center, which we did last year, the modern data center which enables us enough compute. That actually is results in a number which you see, like three seconds for the response, which I think is remarkable. He can give you highly relevant recommendation when analyzing and going across such a wide range of the products that we sell in just three seconds. Then he can also give you some added value answers based on some of the tasks you actually give him.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

It's not just the product listing, but things around the product like reviews, delivery times, ratings, and so on and so forth. In terms of the going forward, we are not thinking about-- First of all, if you think about our competitive advantage compared to many other companies, is that we are operating in 20 million people market. When you think about scaling this type of service in a environment when you operate on a 100 million people market, you have exponential costs associated with rolling out such service. We can enable in a very cost-efficient manner to actually launch the service in Kazakhstan at reasonable costs. That allows us to develop the product, to train the models, and ensure that consumer experience is highly relevant and high quality at a very reasonable cost.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We're not really talking at the moment in terms of price per tokens or anything like that because we are transactional business. For us, what we will measure this functionality in the future is based on how much it actually costs Kaspi.kz to complete the task. Cost to complete the task, the task is enable the purchase. We're a transactional business. The reason why we have been successful historically is because we're always focused enable the transaction. We are not just a chatbot, we're not fancy lifestyle business, we are transactional business. We enable consumers to buy, pay, and shop. Everything that we do eventually results in a transaction. That's an extremely powerful business model. It actually gives us a competitive advantage because transacting means highly relevant information around the transaction.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

The reason why the Kaspi.kz has all the ingredients to be highly accurate is because the layer of the data he operates on is extreme accuracy. That's basically is the foundation both of our competitive advantage and also our ability to get this up and running at a very reasonable cost, and the cost will be measured against the transaction, which means complete the purchase. Highly scalable, which means we can deploy this technology in the future in other markets.

Maksim Nekrasov
Maksim Nekrasov
Analyst at Citigroup

Got it. Thank you so much. If I may add another question on the payments, there have been some news about the National QR system. I wonder if you can comment if you saw any changes or any impact and how should the investors think about the long-term impact on the payments business and possibly take rate in the future?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Well, our take rate, as we have said before, is trending towards what is the majority of the payment transactions, and that is actually the transactions which are through our payment system and Kaspi QR, which is priced around 0.95. That's the trend you actually observe. What we have done during the last, in the 2Q, we have introduced two things. We have introduced Apple Pay, which we didn't have before because we thought that Apple Pay was not really necessary for the consumers if we can build much better experience ourselves locally. We introduced Apple Pay and Google Pay. That introduction was driven by the fact that the ability to transact with Apple Pay or Google Pay when you travel, it was something which consumers really asked us quite a lot.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We have decided to launch that service; it brought us additional payment volumes when our consumers travel abroad. That had the positive impact. In Kazakhstan, it doesn't have such an impact, mostly for the international, because again, our consumers, the paying with Kaspi.kz Super App and this range, so we have what? About, I don't remember exact number, but whatever, 800,000 plus/minus points where you can pay with the Kaspi.kz Super App. Consumer in Kazakhstan is extremely happy, and merchants are seamlessly both transacting with each other through our technical capabilities, which we have built. Kaspi Alaqan, also the same, it performs really nicely, especially in the environment where the pay by palm is in high frequency. Sort of environments really. Has been performing really nicely.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

We actually scaled Kaspi Alaqan across the country now, during the last, what is it, 30+ days. We worked really closely with the National Bank of Kazakhstan. The priority of National Bank of Kazakhstan and us and all other players in the market was really to make sure that the payment system is highly scalable because of the volumes now on the market, but also highly secured. We have really successfully worked with them during the last, I would say six months, maybe, plus/minus. Really helped to build the secure payment functionality. That functionality is there, our consumers continue transacting with our merchants where they used to, we're getting additional volumes when everybody else is transacting with their mobile applications through our vast majority of our payments network.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Now we see both our consumers and other consumers transacting through the payment network, which is accessible for everyone. We're extremely happy that there is the wide variety of the payment methods as well from everyone. The consumers can choose, and as I've described before, they can choose the most convenient option. When you are traveling, you pay with Apple Pay. When you are in Kazakhstan, you pay with the Kaspi QR or the Kaspi.kz Super App.

Maksim Nekrasov
Maksim Nekrasov
Analyst at Citigroup

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Our next question comes from James Friedman. James, your line is open. Please go ahead.

James Friedman
James Friedman
Analyst at Susquehanna

Hi. Good morning. Good evening. Mikheil, in your prepared remarks, you alluded to some of the growth initiatives you're anticipating for Turkey next year. I realize now that's not the time, but next year maybe. Could you just remind us what some of those growth plans are for 2027?

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Hi, James. Our growth, the way we operate, again, is we're focused on things which are foundational for the merchant experience and the consumer experience. The things which will drive growth next year and are coming through this year are really around increase the speed of delivery. We have increased the speed of delivery roughly about quite substantially. That actually means higher speed of delivery means better conversion rates and the return of customers because they are happy with the consumer experience. The growth on the e-commerce side will just continue growing consumer engagement, mobile app usage, and all the ingredients of this, which is really about delivery and the user experience and so on and so forth. In terms of something which we believe will be fueling sort of long-term growth is the fintech products.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

The fintech products we are really excited about, just because that's where our experience is on the one hand. On the other hand, consumers really don't need to buy a TV set. Sorry, they don't need the loan. They need to buy a TV set. Once you are in e-commerce, in the marketplace platform where you actually see the consumer making the actual purchases for the items, this is the best place where the buying decision is happening. This is the best place to introduce the fintech product. Shopping loan, for example, which we have introduced the new shopping loan, which is 0.4% of GMV now. That's a new flow, which enables customers to finance their products seamlessly. There is a whole range of the merchant products, like merchant finance and things like that, which we have done in our home market.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Those would be the primary products which we will launch on the consumer and the merchant side. We will be launching the savings products because in order to fund your growth, you really need the savings. We do have incredible, simple, transparent products which are highly popular in our home market, and those are some of the ideas which we'll bring and technology behind it, because that's something which enables us to scale, we'll bring into 2027. To put it simply, there will be fintech products around consumer, helping them to fund the purchases, fintech products for the merchants so they can actually acquire some of the inventory, and the savings product, which will enable fintech to continue to scale long term.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

The fact that we have about $300 million investing into the capital actually gives us a very strong start because that's the funding which we can also use in order to start scaling the fintech products next year. This year we're just building up regular stuff. We just acquired the bank, so we've taken over operational control. Banking systems and things like that for local reporting purposes is something which we're building up. Everything else, we're very comfortable. Risk management, we already rolled out. The mobile application experience, we're already building up in the shopping mall.

James Friedman
James Friedman
Analyst at Susquehanna

Great. Thank you for that. This is the first time that I've analyzed the company that we've seen rates go in your favor, and I'm just wondering, how long does it take to get repriced to the market? What I mean is, in terms of consumer behavior, what have you noticed historically in terms of rate changes going the other way? How durable do you think that this cycle will be? Thank you very much.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

James, I just look at inflation. Inflation's been falling now for most of this year. If inflation continues to come down, National Bank rates, which are very high in Kazakhstan by historical standards, will continue to come down. If National Bank rates continue to come down, our deposit rate will come down. You should remember that when rates went up, we weren't the first player in the market to raise rates. When rates go down, it doesn't mean we'll be, I wouldn't expect us to be the first player in the market to lower rates. The long-term dynamic will flow through. I've said to investors before that any rate cuts this year just should give you increased confidence about earnings growth next year. That's the sort of time frame to think about things. Again, it's not about one cut.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

What you're looking to see is rate cuts, inflation falling, and for that to be sustained, rate cuts to fall, and for that to be sustained over a decent period of time, in exactly the same way this has been a headwind. You mentioned you've been covering us since beginning of 2024, it's been a headwind for pretty much all of that time, two and a half years.

James Friedman
James Friedman
Analyst at Susquehanna

Okay. Thanks, David. Thanks, Mikheil.

Operator

We currently have no further questions; I'd like to hand back to David for some closing remarks.

David Ferguson
Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz

All right. Sammy, thanks very much. Thank you, everyone, for your time today. Happy to follow up offline. We are in London and New York in early September, post-holiday period, happy to follow up in person. Thanks again for your time today. Keep in touch and have a good summer. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.

Mikheil Lomtadze
CEO at Kaspi.kz

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Operator

This concludes today's call. We thank everyone for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.

Analysts
    • David Ferguson
      Head of Investor Relations at Kaspi.kz
    • Mikheil Lomtadze
      CEO at Kaspi.kz
    • Gabor Kemeny
      Analyst at Bernstein Autonomous
    • Maksim Nekrasov
      Analyst at Citigroup
    • James Friedman
      Analyst at Susquehanna
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