Kapsi.kz LSE.KSPI
March 18, 2021 - 8:49am EST by
Pluto
2021 2022
Price: 70.50 EPS 0 0
Shares Out. (in M): 192 P/E 13 0
Market Cap (in $M): 13,540 P/FCF 0 0
Net Debt (in $M): 0 EBIT 0 0
TEV (in $M): 0 TEV/EBIT 0 0

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  • Fintech
  • E-Commerce
  • Mobile Payments
  • Emerging Markets
  • Founder Operator
  • winner

Description

This one will surprise you. It is for all the VIC folks who are into dominant payment networks, e-commerce marketplaces, digital wallets, #1 Apps, cheap valuations and the lovely emerging country that got so famously promoted by Sacha Baron Cohen. With Kaspi one gets Kazakhstan's #1 App, the largest payment provider that is successfully cutting out the card networks, the largest e-commerce business, the largest online-to-offline business and the country's most innovative and profitable (ROE ~70%) financial service provider for consumers and businesses alike. The company will likely grow each major business at close to 100% this year leading to ~$1b in earnings and a ~13,5x multiple atm while it is paying out the majority of its income as dividends probably translating into a ~5% yield. 

WaWaWeeWa!!!

Given the origin of this beast, I guess many people here won't be able to invest, even though this business is of the finest quality, the people running it included (we think). However, taking a look won't hurt anyone. The least one gets out of this exercise is an interesting case study and a more accurate view of Kazakhstan's advanced digital developments, providing one with quite a different picture to the one Borat put into our heads ;-)... I certainly gained a heightened appreciation for the rapid digitalization and value creation that is likely taking place all around the world at the moment, no matter if we see it or not.

Talking about a case study, there is a good Harvard Business School case study about Kaspi (Link - October 2019) that has some very useful background information about the company and the key people involved. If you are wondering why a HBS case study about a company in Kazakhstan even exists - Basically, the whole management team went to Harvard at some point and Mikhail Lomtadze the operational driving force and basically co-founder (he holds 23% of Kaspi's share) of the business and Michael Calvey the founder of Baring Vostok (and 31% owner of Kaspi) met while studying at Harvard in 2002. Mikhail is also a member of the HBS Middle East & North Africa Advisory Board. So there is quite a connection to Harvard. 

Another great source of information is the company's IPO prospectus (link) which has compared to some other ones a treasure trove of information in it. The company went public in October 2020.  

On to the Business overview. 

The company reports in three major business lines, payments, marketplace and fintech. Each of which has more than one revenue line and of course, multiple features and services that make their users' lives easier. However, strategically the company is building two major platforms/ecosystems. A consumer-focused one and a business/merchant focused one, each of which enables payments, commerce, fintech solutions, plus additional services - and of course, facilitates an easy connection to the other platform. The advanced state of these platforms (of which I still have to convince you, I know!) and the fact that they are all provided by a single company creates tremendous value for its users and the company alike. 

Let's start with the convincing. Kaspi enjoys very impressive consumer engagement. Out of a population of ~18,5m people, Kaspi's total MAU in Q4 2020 reached 9,1m (+59%). Even more impressive is the company's DAU number of 4,9m (+155% YoY) leading to a DAU/MAU ratio of 54% or a DAU to population ratio of ~27%. And the company has not entered a mature growth state yet, all the metrics are still growing very quickly. They think they can get to 12m MAUs and get 80-90% DAU/MAU over time. Some international numbers DAU/MAU ratios for comparison.

   

   

The high engagement numbers are supported by a high frequency of transactions, not cat videos. A scenario I prefer, even though we have all learned that cat videos can also lead to a lot of dollars flowing your way... In Q4 2020 Kaspi's average monthly transactions per active user reached an impressive number of 28 transactions (which is 2x Squares Cash App number) growing +89% YoY with 92% of all transactions taking place on its single mobile app vs. 80% a year earlier.   

The company also has an excellent Net Promoter Score of 87,3 (based on a rolling 12m average per Q2 2020), so almost everyone would recommend their product. The high level of customer satisfaction also leads to a 98,2% active customer retention rate. 

Overview of the payment business

The largest of its platforms and customer adoption driver is the company’s payment/wallet business, which entered a kind of a next-level stage recently, after first moving the online transactions onto their proprietary network rails in mid-2019, followed by the rollout of its new QR code-based POS system starting in late 2019. The QR-code based system POS closes the offline payment loop for the company and enables it to offer an end-to-end customer experience without the need for a third-party payment processor or payment network. The launch of it also extended their acquiring operation from previously mainly online acquiring into the offline world. Adaption of their POS solution is rampant with payments volume moving from almost exclusively on third party devices at the beginning of 2020 (4% own POS) to 38% on their solution at the end of 2020, with 64% of the volume on their own devices taking place without a card. The remaining volume was own Kaspi Gold card 31% or 5% of other cards.

I find that absolutely impressive, but according to the company, it was just the beginning. The company is aggressively ramping the POS rollout and merchants are happily adopting it given the low take rates of 0,95% for QR-code based payments, 1,7% for their own Kaspi Gold debit cards and 2,3% for third party cards compared to existing POS alternatives like Halyks that are charging 3%. The mobile POS version is also free of charge for the first three months. They started to get serious last summer and plan to take the POS count (smart POS and mobile phone POS combined) to over 200'000 at the end of this year, which sounds very ambitious but becomes much more achievable if you take into account the overall position of the payment business.

The payment business already has a significant scale. Kaspi grew its total payment volume TPV in 2020 to 23'900b KZT (+177%) or 57b in USD, and the revenue-generating part of it, the RTPV to 6'239b KZT (+81%) or 15b in USD with RTPV at 26% of TPV. It is also by far the largest in the country, with a market share of slightly more than 70% in 2020.

From Kaspi's IPO prospectus: Kaspi.kz’s Payments Platform is the largest driving force behind Kazakhstan’s transformation from cash to cashless and digital transactions.  Based on NBK data, our TPV corresponded to a market share of 15% in 2017, 39% in 2018 and 65% in 2019 in total cashless and digital transactions (card payments, P2P payments, internet and mobile payments) effected in Kazakhstan. 

The chart (a year after roll-out) is even more impressive given that Kaspi still has a part of its TPV on the card network rails. 

Kaspi's laid the ground to this success already in 2012 with the launch of their e-wallet together with a bill payment option, their first revenue-generating feature in this business line. Prior to Kaspi's introduction of that feature, the bill payment processes handled by incumbent players were mostly manual, offline-based and inconvenient, and were accompanied by commissions. The digital solution was a massive time and money saver for people and became an instant hit. It is free for users, Kapsi only charges the merchants/utilities etc. Today Kaspi's bill payment services include 6,000 businesses plus various government services. In 2017 Kaspi introduced P2P payments roughly at the same time as the App launch, which took over as the driving force from then on and became the dominant TPV source at close to 80% of TPV. The app apparently was embraced super fast too, with almost 50% of transactions happening on the app 12m after launch. 

The P2P share of close 80% in TPV is very high and of course, not all of it is friends and family sending money to each other. There is a decent chunk of it, that concern an actual commercial activity that is simply not monetized yet. Except for a small portion (5%), the P2P transactions are unmonetized today. There is only a fee (0,95%) if you transfer money to local or international non-Kaspi Cards/accounts. However, Kaspi knows that from looking at its data that there are around 150-200k additional merchants that are using P2P to accept payments but have not switched to the Kaspi pay yet and another 100k beyond that, that use it less regularly for some informal commercial activity, like a personal fitness trainer, etc. They see their mid-term TAM at 400k merchants, and they think they will get to over half of that by the end of this year. 

To convince merchants to adopt Kaspi pay, the company has built and is building an increasing number of free or money-saving features for merchants that are only available if they are an actual merchant using Kaspi pay. There are cash and liquidity management tools, payroll tools, lending options, working capital financing at up to 20% of your GMV/TPV, they are also building a B2B marketplace for sourcing that merchants can only access (buy/sell) as a user of Kapsi Pay. Since last year you can also register as a business solely via the app. You can also do your taxes and there will certainly be additional services coming. On the other hand, the consumers who use Kapsi, want to collect their reward points and will increasingly dislike merchants who want to circumvent it using P2P where the consumers don't get their points. Depending on the category they also might want to use Kaspi's buy now pay later programs or other financing options, that will only be available if the merchants use Kaspi Pay. As a third force, you have the government pushing to formalize the economy to collect more taxes.  

Kaspi believes it can grow the payments business at +85-90% in 2021 and increase the net margin from 52% in 2020 to the high 50s in 2021. Take rate will decrease slightly to around 1,2% with more offline RTPV moving from Kaspi Red Cards to QR code-based phone payments. With an increasing share of volume happening on its own proprietary network Kaspi's GM increased by 10% points to 85% in 2020 and there is obviously additional leverage to be gained with more volume moving exclusively onto Kapsi's network. Given the position of the payments business, it is hard to imagine that margins won't move even higher in 2022 with additional growth in RTPV, since there is operating leverage to be gained below the GM. The payments business should earn around 250m USD in 2021. 

Kaspi provides us with a cohort view of the payment business, showing an exciting development that also points to a bright future, given how recently most users joined Kaspi. 

 

Overview of the marketplace business

Next up is Kaspi’s marketplace business. It got started in 2014 and is now the largest commerce business in the country at ~$2b GMV in 2020 (guided to grow to ~$4b this year) out of an estimated ~$30b in total retail sales. Kaspi’s business pure e-commerce business is also significantly larger than the #2 e-commerce player AliExpress, followed by Russian e-commerce player Wildberries. 

The company offers its users the ability to buy a broad selection of products and services online and offline. Revenue is primarily generated by charging sellers fees when sales are completed on Kaspi’s platform. The take rate is close to 8%. The company carries no inventory at the moment. It is purely a third party marketplace business, with some 3P logistics but no own logistics footprint (yet). If it should become necessary to carry inventory in the future, we think they will do it. They seem mentally prepared to do what it takes to drive it further and stay the #1 e-commerce player in the country. 

The marketplace GMV is split into three categories, but going forward only two categories e-commerce and m-commerce (together 94% of GMV in Q4 2020) will remain relevant. The original, but now almost irrelevant remaining portion concerns Kaspi’s in-store operations, which has a few self-operated Kiosks and setups at various large retailers (primarily electronics and home appliance retailers) throughout the country where Kaspi employees would help generate sales via the company’s financing solutions. However, the incremental sales lift and financing can increasingly come just via Kaspi’s App alone given its incredible uptake among the population. The instore business was still over 20% of GMV in Q4 2019, but only 6% in Q4 2020. My guess is this business will over time likely be fully replaced by Kaspi Red, which is the company's buy now pay later program (more on it later). 

Here is a GMV breakdown, that still shows a heavy focus on electronics, but a favourable trend to a shrinking reliance on that category. The reduction of electronics also led to an increasing take rate (electronics is set at the lowest rate of 5%) with higher take rate categories like clothing, garden, auto accessories etc. increasing in the overall mix. 

Kaspi’s merchant/store count doubled to 32k YoY but is not massive yet and they think they can give it another big boost this year. They are also planning to add many new tools to make their merchant’s life easier and help them increase sales.  Fortunately, the stores they have, already do a good amount of business with them. They estimate that active stores already generate approximately one-third of their sales through their marketplace platform. Which is one factor contributing to their incredibly high retention rate of active stores at 99.2% in the first half of 2020. 

The e-commerce business had a GMV of 378b KZT (+106% YoY) or 0,90b USD in 2020. In the prospectus, Kaspi provides an e-commerce market share statistic of 44% in 2019 based on ~1b estimated e-commerce market from Euromonitor and an overall e-commerce penetration of 3,4% for the country. In 2020 both figures moved significantly in Kaspi’s favour. 

Based on the company’s 2021 guidance their overall marketplace GMV could cross the 10% threshold of the total retail market. With the delivered e-commerce piece may be edging up to half of it, which would translate into a 5% penetration. If you combine that with Kaspi payment business, the company is digitizing the whole country incredibly fast now. However, saturation is far from being reached. Beyond that, we think they can also layer untouched verticals very easily onto its platform without spending anything on customer acquisition. The recently launched travel vertical is the perfect example, and according to the company, it is already going very well. They also hinted that they are busy working on additional offerings. They are in a unique position in their country to be able to do that, and they will take advantage of it. Every new service is immediately in front of more than half the population. Another tool that they can use to shape customer behaviour to boost new products and services, is their reward program and they are very explicit about using it in that way. Kaspi users can collect bonus points at 0,5% of purchases and they use the program to incentivise certain behaviours that they see as long term beneficial for them. The current focus is on boosting the offline acquiring operation.  

A bit more on the fulfilment side for the e-commerce piece. Kaspi provides a variety of fulfilment options, including in-store pick-up or delivery by the merchant or by Kaspi Delivery which is currently provided by 8 third party delivery companies. Based on a snapshot of the month of June 2020 from the prospectus, 44% of GMV was delivered by merchants, 31% delivered by Kaspi delivery and 25% was picked-up in-store. Kaspi Delivery was available in 73 cities at year-end 2020 up from 53 in 2019 and 36 in 2018. In H1 2020 45% of orders were delivered the next day and 60% in two days. Delivery volumes in Q4 2020 were up 142% YoY. Kaspi delivery is free of charge for local delivery (intracity) but there is a fee if it is shipped across the country. Merchant delivery is free of charge on orders above ~23$ and costs 2$ below that.  

The e-commerce business has at least over 400k SKUs based on Q3 commentary but should be closer to 700k by now based on our last IR call. This is not enough yet, but fortunately another area the company has a high focus on. I also suspect that over time brands will go more direct to consumers via Kaspi’s marketplace, than via local merchants who offer it on Kaspi. There are already some large international brands, like Adidas on Kapsi, but the area can see a lot of improvement too. They might have to create their own fulfilment capabilities first, for it to work well. Late last year the company introduced an advertising product at a 1% cost of GMV for merchants to boost their awareness.  

The mobile-commerce business is different from the e-commerce part. It is Kaspi’s solution to digitize shopping at offline merchants and takes much of the shopping into Kaspis app, even if the final shopping of goods and services happens in the store. It is kind of a Klarna/Afterpay but with the demand generation solely centred on Kaspi properties. The company compares it a bit to Wechat programs. I don’t know how fair the comparisons really are, but I think, I understand at least how it works. Anyways, the merchants are willing to pay a take rate because they get a significant sales lift by joining Kaspi’s ecosystem. 

The m-commerce business is closely tied to Kaspi Red. The company's buy now pay later program, where customers on the program get interest free three-months instalments but pay a subscription fee to join the program (with ~3m members). This also ensures that there is no workaround the transaction fee/take rate in the store because the customer wants to use Kaspi Red for their purchase. Kaspi has a dedicated section for merchants and consumers in their app. It is organised around popular shopping and lifestyle categories, which are not necessarily listed on their e-commerce platform. Such categories include, among others, supermarkets, restaurants, petrol stations, medical services and beauty salons. Stores will also increasingly be able to market certain offers to consumers.

The marketplace business is less penetrated in terms of users than payments. It reached 3,1m active annual consumers in Q4 or 17% of the population. China’s e-commerce players BABA and PDD have both crossed 55% penetration of the total population last year. So there is a high growth potential left to tap. The company also provides the marketplace cohorts, with all of them still growing nicely. However, every cohort slowed down a bit in 2020 with Covid certainly being the driving force. Especially in the mobile commerce business. Obviously less so on the e-commerce business that took off last year, but from a smaller base (36% mix in Q4 2019) to really meaningfully push all up.    

The business has incredible margins, with a net margin of 60% in 2020. Kaspi guides to 100% growth and margins in the 60% for 2021 which will likely bring earnings close to $250m this year.  

Overview of FinTech business

Lastly some information on the FinTech business. Kaspi has its origins as a bank, so this is the company's oldest business line. It went through some interesting evolutions over the year that are well covered in the HBS case study (which I highly encourage everyone interested to buy and read). I don’t want to recount it here. Today the lending operation is primarily supporting the commerce activity on Kaspi’s marketplace business, with BNPL at 50% of origination in Q4 2020 and taking share from the general unsecured loan business. Around 10% of the book are car loans. Kaspi has a loan providing agreement with the leading car auction site in Kazakhstan that is owned by Mikhail himself (unfortunately not by Kaspi, but better than if it were owned by someone else entirely). Besides the BNPL focus, they want to scale merchant finance to 10% of originations this year. Overall Kaspi provides around a third of the unsecured consumer lending in the country. For the foreseeable future if ever there are no ambitions for commercial lending or large ticket lower margin consumer loans like mortgages.  

This year will be the first year where the segment will generate less than half of the overall earnings (close to $500m) while still growing strongly and my guess is the segment's share of overall earnings will shrink further in the future. That being said the business in itself is also incredibly attractive with an ROE of 70%. It has an average yield of 32% on the mostly unsecured book which I don’t find unreasonable at all, given the rate environment and development state of Kazakhstan. What is absolutely amazing in that regard though, is their superior risk management that leads to a cost of risk of less than 3%! The company is very data-driven in everything that they do and it has absolutely fantastic data for their lending business. The amount of proprietary data they collect vs. let's say a "stupid" western legacy bank is absolutely massive. On top of the credit history, they have the bill payments, the accurate commercial and non-commercial transactions, for a growing part of the population, their savings history and their exact income situation. Plus they have the whole digital footprint, how you spent your time shopping, your geolocation history etc. I like this chart in that regard: 

 

 

The charts above show a continued improvement in their risk management over time with more and more data collection about their consumers (they started with their app only in 2017). It is not included here, but their delinquency rates in 2016 were still 6% vs. the 2% at year-end 2020.

The Company also shared this awesome data point in their prospectus, which shows the power of their risk models in another way. 

Based on the analysis of samples of our loan portfolio tested in 2019, in the absence of a wide range of proprietary data around daily lives of our consumers (such as credit history with Kaspi.kz, transactions and purchases, bill payments, behaviour on our Kaspi.kz Super App and volume of deposits), the delinquency rate (more than 90 days) would be approximately 14% as compared to our actual delinquency rate (more than 90 days) of 4.1%.   

I am certain they also do a world-class job at fraud prevention. For example, in 2018 they created a unique biometric user ID and equipped their ATM network with facial recognition that can detect fraudulent behaviour on the spot. They also scan the latest behaviour before a purchase takes place on their app. Which helps to eliminate a lot of fraud. Since the fraudsters for example won't be checking reviews and will show quite a different behaviour from a normal honest consumer. 

The majority source of funding is customer deposits with a loan to deposit ratio of just 65%. Deposits are around 80/20% term/current and 80/20% domestic/foreign currency. Kazakhstan has a peculiar law that forbids paying interest on current accounts. So Kaspi collects revenue by investing the cash in the e-wallet into treasuries but without a cost attached to it. They also book this income stream from the money in the wallet in the payment business. Back to lending. With the high focus on BNPL and unsecured consumer lending in general, the loan book has a very short duration, which is predicted to be less than 6 months at the end of 2021. The net income margin was 37,8% in 2020. The guidance points to a mid 30% margin in 2021 and a slightly lower yield with a larger BNPL mix. Earnings this year should be close to $500m, leading to ~1b for the company. Given their super high margins in combination with their risk capabilities I don’t worry at all that they will run into any trouble here. They will soon also have more than half of their earnings coming from their businesses with zero credit risk.

What is Kaspi worth?

With the discussion about the different business segments behind us, it is now time to talk about Kaspi’s valuation. Here is a link to the model (link) and the target price. If you don’t like it, I have to disappoint you. I won’t share a better valuation model here, because we haven’t really modelled out Kaspi’s future. However, I see it like Benjamin Graham once famously said: You don’t need to know a man’s weight to tell if he is fat or not. 

Kaspi is obviously very undervalued and I think its shares can easily double in 3 years, or do even better. Along the way we can collect fat dividends, the company has committed itself to payout the majority of its income twice a year. It paid out ~70% of 2020 earnings. My guess for 2021 ends up being a ~5% yield for the current share price. 

Some thoughts on risks, politics, macro plus some random stuff.

If you start digging you will come across an article like this one from Forbes (link) that has some weird owner history related to a guy called Kairat Satybaldy who is the former president's nephew in it. It is also in the prospectus He held a ~30% stake in the business from 2015 to 2018. With some articles claiming Kapsi had to make political concessions, but then he sold again prior to IPO because it would draw scrutiny from investors. With him now lurking somewhere in the dark but willing to get his stake back every minute. We think this is not true. 

The story we believe is true is the following, which we like much better. The one very relevant shareholder besides Mikaheil Lomtadze and Baring Vostok I haven't mentioned yet is Vyacheslav Kim. He is the only one born in Kazakhstan and the one everything started with when he first bought the bank in 2002. Baring Vostok and Mikhail entered the scene much later in 2007 with Mikhail still working at Baring at the time but he took on the Kaspi project. 

Back to Vyacheslav, we think he is also a super-smart guy who made lots of money already in his twenties when he started an electronics import business at the age of 23 right after the soviet union dissolved. It quickly became the largest electronics retailer with no local goods produced in the country (he no longer owns it btw) and made him wealthy which also provided him with the money to buy the bank in 2002 at the age of 32. 

He has also built up a strong network in the country and is a long term friend of Satybaldy. However, the financial crisis hit him and his financials were still not in great shape with the oil crash coming in 2014 tanking the economy in Kazakhstan that led to eventually breaking the dollar peg resulting in a 50% devaluation of the tenge in 2015. Satybaldy had lent him money to invest but Kim also had USD borrowings for other investments. He got a margin call on the debt which led him to transfer part of his Kaspi stake to Satybaldy in exchange for dollars to avoid overall chaos. They had an understanding that he would later buy it back again. So essentially Satybaldy helped him out and when Kim got into better shape again he bought it back in 2018. Satybaldy never intended to own Kaspi. He ended up being a shareholder for three years by accident. He won’t become one again unless he buys some in the open market and there were no political concessions made. Vyacheslav apparently refinanced and consolidated his debt with (we believe) Goldman Sachs at that time. He sold the most in the IPO and I guess he is in fine shape now, given how well Kaspi is doing. 

We view Vyacheslav Kim as a great asset for Kapsi. He is the one dedicating his time to relationships for the company. Something that is quite important in a developing country. It also enables Mikhail to focus 100% on the business. The duo apparently has a great relationship too. Kim sits in on important regulatory decisions in the country and has sort of an advisory position to the current president. 

Kaspi is viewed favourably by the government and the consumers love it. Kaspi doesn’t abuse their power and their north star is the NPS score, where even compensation is tied to. Without abuse, the risk that the government needs to regulate its profitability away is reduced by a lot. If you think about payments for example. They are implementing the second cheapest payment system in the world for their people, right after China. Kaspi also helps the government to increase tax revenue on the business and individual front and there are many government service integrations into the app. For example, you can register a car in the app with 1 out of 10 cars now being registered fully digitally on Kaspi. Another example is that apparently close to 70% of government covid relief money got distributed via Kaspi.

If I were in the government's position I would rather have a dominant local Kaspi to talk to than digital dominance by US or Chinese giants that won't care to listen to me.

Another risk is obviously the general macro situation as in any developing country. However, I think the economy is in relatively decent shape after it went through a de-dollarization over the last 5+ years and has a low external debt with foreign currency reserves above debt. We are not macro guys, but the data doesn’t point in a direction where a strong currency devaluation could become necessary any time soon. General macro weakness without a lot of currency devaluation will be more than overshadowed by their strong secular growth and will be more of a blip than anything serious.  

Below are some slides with some macro data from banking competitor Halyk Savings Bank, for a quick glance. Since Halyk is a large peer. I guess I say a few things about them. They are a competitor, but we think they can’t do much to stop Kaspi’s rise. Halyk is talking about digitizing its operations but this is not happening very quickly like for example with Sberbank. Even though much of Halyk’s footprint originally comes from Sberbank (pre soviet union dissolving), they are not as much on their toes. Halyk is listed (to check info) but majority-owned by the former president's daughter and son in law, who are luckily not very well-liked in the country. They live mostly or maybe almost exclusively abroad and have exploited the people in the country for a long time in the past. Related to that, we guess that the power of the former president and his people will shrink over time, but we don’t expect any miracles on that front. If there aren’t any massive steps backwards we should be fine with Kaspi.   

 

 

GDP per capita is roughly on par with Russia or China and Brazil, actually better than I would have expected. 

Longer-term we would love to see Kaspi replicate their success in other neighbouring CIS countries, that are not a focus of either US or Chinese tech players. It is still very early but they have entered Azerbaijan in 2019 and own the leading e-commerce business and the leading car and real estate online properties in the country with 2m MAUs. Which is already a decent start. They are also actively looking at M&A opportunities and are confident that they could build up Azerbaijan quickly. Seems still a bit far off, but who knows. These guys seem like a real deal, and if they also buy a bank and start to apply their technology with some force it could become noticeable in a couple of years. 

In general, the culture and the tech capabilities of the company seem awesome and the team around Mikhail and himself seem to be a real deal. The cultural takeaways from the HBS study are also confirmed in some former employee calls. In case you are wondering if this is a fraud, because the numbers seem too good to be true we think the chances are very very slim. It is also very hard to fake a #1 app downloads in a country and the characters don’t fit at all. 

Another thing that gives us confidence that the political situation is in order, is the fact that Mikhail, Baring or Kim are not selling out as quickly as they can. Especially Mikhail seems to be in it for the long haul and this is by far his largest chunk of wealth.

However, it is fair to expect Baring Vostok to sell down their stake with likely share offerings in the coming quarters/years. We don’t care if this is a drag on the stock short term but some people might, so there is this risk. However, on the flip side, this will create a large free float with a higher trading volume enabling larger funds to participate. The current volume is very low for a $13,5b market cap company. This should also be part of a potential catalyst.

I do not hold a position with the issuer such as employment, directorship, or consultancy.
I and/or others I advise hold a material investment in the issuer's securities.

Catalyst

More awareness from international growth investors along with larger free float and higher trading volume both of which should come.

We think the story is just too interesting, to not become wildly know among the tech crowd over time. 

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