Kaspi.kz (KSPI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Date

March 2, 2026 at 8 a.m. ET

Call participants

• CEO — Mikheil Lomtadze
• CFO — David Ferguson
• Operator

Takeaways

• Consolidated revenue -- Exceeded $8 billion for the full year, incorporating both Kazakhstan and Turkey business lines for the first time.
• Net income -- Flat year over year at approximately $2.1 billion, with reported 10% growth for the full year, at the lower end of previous guidance due to smartphone category weakness in Q4.
• Kazakhstan revenue growth -- Increased 15% in Q4 and 19% for the full year.
• Kazakhstan underlying net income growth -- 10% in Q4, and 13%-18% for the full year, reflecting resilience despite higher rates and taxes.
• Payments platform (Kazakhstan) TPV -- 14% growth in Q4, 19% for the year; Q4 transactions up 12%, full-year up 14%.
• Payments revenue (Kazakhstan) -- Grew 7% in Q4 and 12% for the year; net income increased 4% in Q4 and 13% for the year, with Q4 margins impacted by launch costs for Kaspi Alakan.
• Kaspi Alakan “Pay by Palm” -- Achieved registration by nearly 500,000 customers and adoption by almost 6,000 merchants in Almaty, with 10% penetration among connected merchant transactions within 90 days of launch.
• Marketplace platform GMV (Kazakhstan) -- Grew 12% in Q4, 19% for the year; smartphone GMV down 24%, but January data indicated recovery.
• Marketplace take rate (Kazakhstan) -- All-time high with 13.1% in Q4 and 12.7% for the year, driven by advertising and delivery revenue streams.
• E-commerce GMV (Kazakhstan) -- Rose 9% in Q4 and 16% for the year; ex-smartphones, growth was 27% for the year.
• E-commerce purchases -- Q4 growth of 70%-83%, indicating rising consumer activity despite smartphone segment headwinds.
• E-grocery GMV (Kazakhstan) -- Up 53% for the year, with consumer base nearing 1.4 million.
• M-commerce GMV (Kazakhstan) -- Down 4% in Q4 including smartphones (up 3% excluding) and up 7% for the year including smartphones (11% excluding); m-commerce take rate at 9.4% in Q4 and 9.2% for the year.
• Kaspi Travel GMV -- Increased 6% in Q4 and 14% for the year, with some take-rate expansion noted.
• Marketplace revenue (Kazakhstan) -- Ex-smartphones, up 21% in Q4 and approximately 30% for the full year; Q4 net income declined 7%, up 6% for the year, due to mix shift toward lower-ticket, delivery-intensive items.
• Fintech platform (Kazakhstan) TFE -- Grew 4% in Q4 and 13% for the year; segment pricing yield stable at 24%, cost of risk at 2.2%, nonperforming loan ratio reached approximately 6% and is expected to persist, due to improved recoveries.
• Fintech loan portfolio growth -- Up 27%-31% for the year; savings and deposits up 16%-18% for the same period.
• Fintech revenue and net income -- Revenue up 19% in Q4 and 20% for the year; net income up 49% despite impacts from higher interest rates, increased taxes, and stricter reserve requirements.
• Hepsiburada (Turkey) purchases -- Number of purchases grew 19% in Q4; engaged purchasers increased 19%, monthly active consumers up 15%, engaged consumer count 29% higher than prior period.
• Hepsiburada (Turkey) GMV and revenue -- GMV up 13% in Q4 and 7% for the full year; revenue up 18% in Q4 and 13% for the year.
• Next-day shipping coverage (Turkey) -- Improved from 47% to 63% over the year, strengthening logistics capability.
• Dividend guidance -- 850 Kazakh tenge per share declared for the last quarter, with management stating this rate is sustainable for the current year in line with pre-acquisition levels.
• 2026 guidance update -- Growth targets for GMV, TPV, and TFE now include Turkey; adjusted EBITDA guidance base at 1.6 trillion tenge, with targeted 5% growth.
• Marketplace GMV mix shift -- E-commerce segments (Kazakhstan and Turkey) comprised 54% of total Marketplace GMV in 2025, expected to rise to 60% in 2026.
• Strategic focus -- Company to prioritize frequent consumer engagement, continued Turkey development near EBITDA breakeven, expansion of value-added services in both main markets, and measured investment in new geographies and products such as fintech offerings and Pay by Palm.

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Risks

• David Ferguson stated, "as of today, no reduction in interest rates; higher taxes in Kazakhstan in 2026—this is not just a 2025 event. The bank tax only went up from January 1 this year, so that will add 200 bps to the tax rate. There are also higher National Bank reserve requirements, which will have an impact on the bottom line."
• Management noted that the smartphone category GMV dropped 24% in Q4 and persisted as a drag on Marketplace and Fintech segment results until showing recovery only in January.
• Launch costs for Kaspi Alakan, the “Pay by Palm” service, negatively impacted Payments segment net income margin in Q4.
• CFO Ferguson emphasized, "do not assume in this guidance any reduction in rates. That may be a difference between some buy-side expectations and ours."

Summary

Kaspi.kz (NASDAQ:KSPI) delivered consolidated revenue of over $8 billion and maintained annual net income near $2.1 billion despite macro headwinds and regulatory pressures. Management reported that Marketplace and E-commerce platforms sustained segment-leading growth and established all-time high take rates, largely driven by delivery and advertising monetization, while Fintech and Payments experienced slower revenue growth and margin compression. Turkey’s Hepsiburada platform accelerated purchase expansion and delivery infrastructure during integration, with strategy anchored around consumer engagement and breakeven EBITDA. Management committed to stable dividend payouts for the year and introduced updated growth guidance encompassing both Kazakhstan and Turkey lines, with a dedicated capital allocation framework. Operational focus was reaffirmed on cross-market product migration, merchant finance, rapid scaling of Pay by Palm, and continued reinvestment to drive future profitability, with leadership clearly articulating a measured approach toward further capital return and expansion.

• Fourth-quarter results were impacted by higher delivery costs due to a consumer shift toward more frequent, lower-ticket purchases, with management raising delivery prices starting January to mitigate direct margin pressure.
• Hepsiburada demonstrated higher order frequency and engagement metrics echoing Kazakhstan’s prior trajectory, as new logistics and next-day delivery initiatives contributed to rising user activity.
• Dividend guidance was maintained in line with legacy pre-acquisition levels, with management reiterating that higher Kazakh taxes and reserve requirements will constrain net income until these are fully absorbed in the cost base by year-end.
• Strategic remarks highlighted that value-added service revenues—particularly advertising—are sustaining multi-segment take-rate expansion despite soft smartphone sales, while investments in innovative offerings like Pay by Palm and new geography rollouts are prioritized over near-term profitability targets.

Industry glossary

• TPV: Total Payment Volume; aggregate value of all payments completed through the platform within a period.
• TFE: Total Fintech Earnings; the sum of revenue generated across all fintech products and services offered.
• GMV: Gross Merchandise Value; cumulative sales volume transacted via the marketplace within the defined reporting period.
• Take rate: Percentage of GMV or TPV retained by the platform as revenue, often through transaction fees or value-added service charges.
• Kaspi Alakan: Company-branded “Pay by Palm” biometric payment solution launched in 2025, rapidly scaling in Almaty.
• Hepsiburada: The Turkey-based e-commerce business acquired by Kaspi.kz, integrated into consolidated results.
• m-commerce: Mobile commerce; in-person shopping at brick-and-mortar merchants through platform-linked mobile applications.
• Ex-smartphones: Financial measure excluding the smartphone sales segment, used to assess core growth unaffected by specific category dynamics.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Mikheil Lomtadze: Sales reductions and a shortage of supply, some tax changes, minimum reserve capitals, and the high interest rate environment during 2025. In spite of those, if we include those factors, our consolidated net profit grew 10% and the underlying profit grew around 18% during the year. Next slide, in terms of the last quarter, considering all the headwinds, it was quite solid. Underlying performance and net income growth reached 13%. We have had reasonable growth across all our businesses. One of the most important metrics for us is consumer engagement, and one of those is monthly transactions per active consumer.

It is 77 monthly transactions per consumer, which we believe is a world-class indicator and very few businesses can have such consumer engagement. That is an important metric which, going forward, creates more value for the company. David will cover some of the verticals further, but in general, we are pleased with performance in a quite challenging environment in 2025. The biggest asset we have, or I would say the reflection of the quality of our products and services, is our brand. Our brand is the number one consumer brand in almost every category, and by a wide margin. Here you can see just some of the selected metrics which tell you how strong our brand is.

For example, mobile application installed on your phone: almost half of the respondents surveyed during the year have our mobile application on their smartphone, which is six times more than the nearest brand. The same sort of wide margin in payments, where we are 13 times the second brand; e-commerce three times; travel more than four times. We have a very strong position in cars, for example, nine times the nearest brand. That is an important asset. Notwithstanding what is going on in terms of external factors, which unfortunately are not entirely under our control, things we can control and execute on are reflected in consumers using our products, merchants using our products, and the brand indicators.

The trust that we have from consumers and merchants is extremely important for us and that is the reason to create value in the long term and a testament to the management being extremely focused on the quality of our products. Another example of how this quality is reflected in some of the innovations is the Pay by Palm, which Kaspi Alakan, which we just launched in under 90 days, and clearly we have unprecedented adoption. I think very few markets in the world can showcase such an adoption of an innovative service. We have now almost half a million customers in Almaty registered with Kaspi Alakan. Almost 6,000 merchants are accepting payments through it.

Ten percent of the transactions in the stores where we have merchants connected to Alakan. It tells you that Pay by Palm is truly changing consumer behavior. We have changed consumer behavior from cash to cashless, to mobile payments, then to QR code, and now to Pay by Palm. We believe Pay by Palm has a bright future, adoption has been remarkable, and consumer feedback has been remarkable. Everybody is really super excited, and achieving 10% penetration at merchants in just three months and having half a million customers—by the way, to put the half a million customers into perspective, this is almost a third of the population of the largest city of Kazakhstan where we started to launch.

We are only in one city at the moment and we are scaling city by city and across the board during the year. We are replacing the old network and installing new devices which are equipped to accept all kinds of payments and are purposely built for Alakan. As an innovative company, that is a testament of how consumers are using every next product. The penetrations we are achieving are unprecedented and remarkable, and in just three months having a third of the population in the largest city registered in the service is very encouraging. We are extremely happy and we are focused on execution and replacing the old network with new devices.

I also would like to walk you through some of the penetration numbers which we have across our services now. These are our key services. You do not have all our products and services here, but just to give you an overview: payments being the highest penetrated. We still believe that B2B payments have huge potential, and there is a range of innovations which we have been rolling out during the last year and some of the services we plan to do this year. E-commerce in general, we believe, will be the driver for growth. E-commerce is something where we create the most value for both the merchant and the consumer.

E-commerce is when a merchant is making the decision to sell something pretty much anywhere across the country and then hopefully in other countries, and then the consumer is making the decision to buy something. It is the front end of the consumer and merchant relationship. All the services around e-commerce like delivery, advertising, and value-added services around financing and payments—when a merchant sells it needs to get financing, when a consumer buys it needs to pay for it and the merchant accepts the payment—so the universe of our services is highly applicable to e-commerce. E-commerce is our important focus and it is a focus in Kazakhstan, and it will be a focus in Turkey as well.

Merchant finance has been the fastest-growing product. Advertising and delivery we are scaling very responsibly. We want to make sure that delivery is not going against the consumer in terms of the organic search, for example, so the results have to be highly relevant with high accuracy. We have very strong results and, as David will show you, the take rate has increased due to the value-added services of delivery and advertising which we have launched. On the consumer side, only half of our consumers use e-commerce. As we get more merchants migrating to e-commerce, especially from m-commerce, we will have more consumers, more selection, and more price competitiveness which we have been driving.

We are regarded as one of the lowest and best-price e-commerce platforms in the country. That drives liquidity and transactions. Of course, e-grocery, which we are scaling across the country, is the fastest-growing e-commerce business for us. Those are the things we will focus on during the year and they will drive our growth. Kaspi Delivery and Kaspi Advertising, being highly scalable, high-margin businesses, will contribute to our profitability. Next slide is about Turkey. I want to spend more time on our progress in Turkey. As you can see from this slide, our focus has been the growth of number of orders. We have been focused on growing number of orders through growing consumer engagement.

Consumer engagement in our case is a very simple metric which talks about the health of our services. We would rather have 1,000,000 engaged consumers which frequently transact with us, come back, and love our service than have 10,000,000 consumers which are one-offs because of a one-time promotion or other temporary benefit, after which they leave. We are focused on engaged consumers. Engaged consumers will drive the future of the business. That has been the playbook in Kazakhstan. It will be the same in Turkey. We have tested different parts of our models, and I am really happy that our expertise in technology, personalization, search, marketing, and improvements in delivery are yielding very similar results.

As an example, we have been growing our orders quarter-on-quarter, and in the fourth quarter we had 19% growth, which is a very high growth for some time for the company. In terms of other improvements which we have achieved during the year, our efforts around consumer engagement: engaged number of purchasers increased 19%. We are not focused on growing monthly active consumers, but we are happy that monthly active consumers grew 15% in the fourth quarter, which is a very good number. More important for us, the growth of engaged consumers has been 29%. Those are the consumers which repeatedly buy with you and generate value.

We understand the relationship between the quality and speed of delivery with customer happiness and the growth of the business. Next-day shipping coverage improved from 47% to 63%. These are not all metrics we are working on, but they give you a flavor of what we are focused on. Growing engaged consumers and growing number of purchases is for us a very important focus, which results in all the investments and the time we are spending on key components of that: personalization—meeting customer demands with the right product at the right time through the right channel—marketing, delivery quality and speed, and broadening the payment options. Broadening payment options means customers can buy more items more affordably.

All those things working together give us these results. We are very encouraged and focused on continuously bringing the Turkey and Hepsiburada metrics to Kazakhstan standards. If you look at and compare the Kaspi and Hepsiburada metrics, those give you a view of what we call engagement opportunity. If you think about it, compared to Kaspi, Hepsiburada active consumers are 11.8 million versus 7.4 million at Kaspi—so Hepsiburada has 1.6 times more consumers. However, GMV per consumer is 1.6 times less in Hepsiburada than in Kaspi. One simple metric that drives such a difference is frequency of purchases: in Kaspi, 24.8 purchases per consumer per year, and 6.7 in Hepsiburada—almost four times more in Kaspi.

What drives purchases, which translate into profits, is engaged consumers that come repeatedly; the cost related to those consumers is more efficient as consumers come back and there is limited marketing cost, and so on. Sixty-six percent growth of engaged consumers in Kaspi, despite its scale, continues to grow, and Hepsiburada has 29%—2.3 times less. Everything we do is focused on growing the number of engaged consumers and growing frequency of purchases and interactions, which will result in the economics and profitability going forward. Our strategy in 2026 is we will manage Hepsiburada and the Turkey business around EBITDA breakeven. We will continue targeted investments.

We also believe—if there is a question from investors: can you continue developing Hepsiburada and Turkey and at the same time resume dividends and return capital to shareholders?—the answer is yes. We are resuming that and we are comfortable with all the things we have tested, we are on the right path, and we will continue executing to deliver world-class services to consumers and merchants. David, back to you.

David Ferguson: Great. Alright. So thanks a lot, Mikhail. So let us run through the respective platforms. First of all, payments. In Kazakhstan, TPV growth of 14% year over year in the fourth quarter, 19% for full year 2025, so that is pretty much in line with the guidance of around 20% TPV growth for the year, driven by solid and consistent trends in transaction volumes of 12% for the fourth quarter and 14% for the full year. As we have talked about many times before, slight take rate attrition is the result of Kaspi Pay and Kaspi B2B lower take-rate products growing in share.

The combination of decent TPV growth with some take-rate dilution results in slightly lower revenue growth, 7% in the fourth quarter and 12% for the full year. It is just the natural flow-through. Overall, the more moderate rate of growth reflects the scale now of this business. The bottom line, 4% growth in the fourth quarter and 13% for the full year. Keep in mind, the fourth quarter was impacted at least in part by some of the costs related to the launch and scaling of Alakan. That will normalize as we go into this year. Moving on to Marketplace in Kazakhstan. Underlying growth strong: 12% in GMV growth in the fourth quarter, 19% for the full year.

That is after the effect of smartphones—ex-smartphones 11%—and that is slightly lower than the full-year guidance of 12% to 14% GMV growth. On that, there was no improvement at all in smartphone dynamics in the fourth quarter. GMV from smartphones was down around 24%, which is pretty consistent with the year trend. That is the explanation for Q4. More encouragingly, having been down materially since March 2025, the smartphones category did return to growth in January, and from March we have a favorable year-over-year comp. We do expect growth in Marketplace to normalize over the 2025 issue rather than a 2026 issue.

On GMV growth, if you look at purchases, purchases are very strong and consistent at 34% in the fourth quarter and 35% for the full year, so not really impacted to a material extent by the smartphone issue, and you see that demand is strong. As Mikhail talked about, you also see the ongoing trend of take-rate expansion. Take rates across Marketplace and specifically e-commerce hit all-time highs driven particularly by advertising and delivery—those value-added services. Specifically in e-commerce, the fastest growing part of Marketplace, 9% GMV growth in the fourth quarter, 16% for the full year. E-commerce is really impacted by smartphones for the full year. Ex-smartphones, 27% GMV growth in 2025.

Again, same point on purchases: if we want to look at real demand on the e-commerce platform, growth in purchases was up 70–83% for the fourth quarter and full year. It illustrates that demand is strong, and as we have said in prepared remarks, the competitive position of the e-commerce platform is unchanged. The smartphones issue was a very specific anomaly. Take rate hit 13.1% for the fourth quarter and 12.7% for the full year—again, an all-time high driven by advertising and delivery. Advertising grew 45% year over year in the fourth quarter and 64% for the full year.

We talked on our last call about some of the new advertising products that we launched at the end of last year and they will be helpful for sustaining decent advertising growth both this year and into the medium term. The other driver of e-commerce is grocery, which as Mikhail said is a fast-growing major product line. Growth really not slowing down at all: GMV up 53% for the year, and number of consumers now well north of 1,000,000, approaching 1,400,000. Continuing to scale very nicely, and we would expect grocery to keep posting very decent growth into the medium term. Part of the reason for our success in e-commerce is a result of the m-commerce business.

This is a bit more color on the dynamics within Marketplace. You can see migration of both merchants and consumers from m-commerce to e-commerce is taking place now at a very rapid rate. Two vertical examples: m-commerce GMV down 5% for shoes and clothing category, but e-commerce GMV up 103%; for the health and beauty category, m-commerce growth of 1% for full year 2025 versus e-commerce growth of 62%. Of course, this means lower growth in m-commerce, but the value even when m-commerce is not growing is that you have those relationships with offline merchants through m-commerce and other products and services that we offer.

We are their first point of call as they migrate their businesses online, and that is something pure online-only e-commerce players do not have. This is a material competitive advantage. That said, you should not assume that m-commerce is completely ex-growth. If we exclude the smartphone issue for last year, it still delivered 11% GMV growth—7% including smartphones, and minus 4% growth in the fourth quarter including smartphones, plus 3% excluding. M-commerce will be one of the things that drives growth in e-commerce and, longer term, m-commerce will naturally evolve around the more services part of the economy which does not migrate to e-commerce—restaurants, beauty salons, gyms—over the medium term.

M-commerce take rate strong and consistent, 9.4% in the fourth quarter, 9.2% for the full year. Clearly, the growth driver of Marketplace is e-commerce. On Kaspi Travel, this is also now a relatively more mature business within Marketplace: 6% GMV growth in the fourth quarter, 14% GMV growth for the full year with some take-rate expansion. The main driver now of the Marketplace business is the core e-commerce franchise and the value-added services around advertising, delivery, and financing for both the merchant and the consumer. The combination of decent GMV growth with strong take-rate improvement results in materially faster revenue growth—13–23% ex-smartphones, up 21% for the fourth quarter and up 30–30% revenue growth for Marketplace for full year 2025.

Net income growth was down 7% in the fourth quarter, but up 6% for the full year. Part of the reason for the decline in the fourth quarter is again the smartphone issue—net income growth would have been positive otherwise—but also a lot of the growth in purchases is being driven by lower-ticket size, frequently purchased items where the cost of delivery is a higher share of GMV. From January 1 of this year, we raised the price of delivery to protect against that, so that will be less of an issue as we move into 2026. Increase in the price of delivery offsets the dilution from growth in small-ticket items. Finally, moving on to Fintech in Kazakhstan.

4% TFE growth in the fourth quarter. Lower growth in Marketplace means lower growth in Fintech. 13% growth for the full year. Growth driven across all products, but as has been the case for several years, merchant and micro-business financing has been the growth driver of the lending part of the business. Fintech trends broadly stable over the year—pricing yield flat at 24% over the year and cost of risk broadly unchanged at 2.2%. We have talked about it on previous calls: the increase in the NPL ratio is a function of collections becoming more efficient; as we get better at collecting, the probability of collection improves, so nonperforming loans stay on the balance sheet longer.

That is the reason for the increase. We would expect it to stay broadly around the 6% level for the remainder of this year. Lower coverage reflects the growing share of car loans—a collateralized product requiring less coverage—and the growing share of merchant financing, the fastest growing lending product, which is lower risk. We would expect coverage to stay around that level, although it will depend on the exact pace of growth and the mix of different products. Loan portfolio growth was good both in the fourth quarter and for the year, up 27–31%. Growth in savings and deposits 16–18%, pretty consistent through the year.

Decent TFE growth with stable pricing translates into decent revenue growth, up 19% in the fourth quarter, up 20% for the full year. Net income growth was 49%. Fintech, like Marketplace, was affected by the smartphone issue; Fintech has been impacted by a material increase in interest rates over the course of the year, higher taxes, and higher National Bank reserve requirements. If you exclude those factors—which is the position we were in 12 months ago when we started the year—Fintech growth was around 18% for the fourth quarter and also 18% for the full year 2025.

That gives you a sense of the impact these external factors have had on performance, particularly in Fintech, over the course of the year. On Hepsiburada—Mikhail already talked about it. On the last call, we said a simple metric for investors to track the improvement in performance is purchases. Purchase momentum at the end of the year, up 19%, was dramatically better than at any other point during the year and actually for some time. Similar strategy to Marketplace in Kazakhstan: drive number of orders—frequency of purchase—things that we all buy on a day-to-day basis to increase relevancy and engagement on the platform, and that is clearly coming through and can improve further.

That is partly at the expense of ticket size. Frequently purchased items cost less, so you have slightly lower GMV growth. Just to be clear, the 13% and the 7% growth in the fourth quarter and full year respectively—that is the real growth; the 49% and the 45% is the nominal growth in the business. From our perspective, what is important is that the momentum—where this business finished the year from a top-line perspective—is in a dramatically better position from where it started the year, and we are still in the early days of the plan for Hepsiburada and for Turkey.

With take-rate improvement and with cross-growth in delivery revenue, that led to faster growth in revenue: 18% in the fourth quarter, 13% for the full year. Revenue momentum is starting to get up in real terms to much better levels at Hepsiburada. Of course, the improvements we are making have investment behind them, and the aim now is to keep the business at around EBITDA break-even and reinvest into improving the product and services, driving engagement, and driving growth to create a much bigger business. Scale with a highly engaged user base is what will drive the profitability of the business.

We will keep that strategy of investing to build a much bigger, much more valuable asset in the medium term. You can see the results are starting to come through, and we have a lot to continue working on. That wraps up the review of the respective segments. Here is just a summary for Kazakhstan: 15% revenue growth in the fourth quarter, 19% for the full year; 18–21% underlying net income growth—10% in the fourth quarter underlying, 13% and actually 18% for the full year. A clear indication of the impact higher rates, higher taxes, regulatory requirements, and smartphones have had on the business in 2025.

Including Turkey, revenue increased to just over 4,000,000,000,000 tenge—just over $8,000,000,000 of revenue for the full year. On the bottom line, net income for the full year was flat year on year—1,100,000,000,000 tenge, just around $2,100,000,000—and we have reinvested the profit growth into Hepsiburada. Net income growth of 10% for full year 2025 compares with the revised guidance for last year of 10% to 12%, at the lower end, reflecting again the absence of recovery in smartphones in the fourth quarter. Looking forward to 2026, a couple of points. Firstly, guidance as usual for GMV, TPV, and TFE; however, guidance now includes Hepsiburada and Turkey. Previously, last year’s guidance was Kazakhstan only. This year’s guidance includes Kazakhstan and Turkey.

To give you the base to work off, these are the GMV, TPV, and TFE numbers including Hepsiburada in 2025. Clearly, the bulk of Hepsiburada’s business is Marketplace; it goes into GMV, although there are components of Payments and Fintech as well. If you want to work out those components, compare these numbers with the respective segments for Kazakhstan that I have just run through. You can split out what is from Kazakhstan and what is from Turkey. The growth—again, we have been clear—the growth going forward for 2026 and the medium term will be driven by Marketplace GMV, so this around 20% is both Kazakhstan Marketplace and Turkey Marketplace. TPV and TFE, the same.

At the profitability level, we will guide on adjusted EBITDA. Here is the base to work off—1,600,000,000,000 tenge for 2025. With Kazakhstan and Turkey as a multi-country business—different interest rate environments and cycles, different tax levels, different regulatory changes—this, ex-distorting those things, is a better reflection of the underlying business and aids comparability between countries. We are looking for around 5% EBITDA growth guidance. One point beyond reinvestment in Hepsiburada: many investors talk about the benefit from interest rates potentially moving down this year. It is logical, but you need to keep in mind it has not happened yet, and we do not assume in this guidance any reduction in rates.

That may be a difference between some buy-side expectations and ours. It is reasonable to assume that rates can come down over the medium term and that would be a material benefit for us, but we are not there today. On Marketplace guidance—combining Kazakhstan and Turkey—we will guide for Marketplace as a whole. This gives you the 2025 reconciliation. We will split it as e-commerce—these are the two comparable businesses between Kazakhstan and Turkey. These relate to the metrics that Mikhail showed you. This is what we are trying to drive. These two components in 2025 were 54% of Marketplace GMV; we expect them to be around 60% of Marketplace GMV this year.

Then m-commerce, travel, and other e-commerce—the Kazakhstan-specific parts of Marketplace—we will have separately. This gives you a sense of how we will report from Q1 2026 and going forward. Here is the reconciliation from net income to adjusted EBITDA; we will not go through it line by line. If people have questions, we can take this offline. That generally wraps up our comments. We will now open for questions.

Operator: Certainly. Thank you, David. If you would like to ask a question, please use the Raise Hand button on your Zoom toolbar. If you are dialed in over the phone, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. Our first question today will be from the line of Luke Holbrook with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Luke Holbrook: Good afternoon and thank you for taking my questions. I am going to center mine on Turkey. The first is that you are obviously seeing more positive changes regarding the order trajectory, more same- and next-day delivery. In that context—two-thirds of orders now same- or next-day—is this a year where we could potentially see peak losses? Or do you see more investment required here to improve the selection and the delivery offering? By extension on that, my second question is on Rabobank and the $300,000,000 of investment. Can you be clearer on what that investment looks like and the type of products that we could expect to see and timing should the acquisition complete?

Then the final question, again centering on Turkey and the broadening of potentially e-grocery offerings. Where do you stand, particularly in light of Uber’s more activity with Getir and Trendyol’s Go in the sector, and whether you see it as a necessity at some stage for Hepsi’s proposition? Thank you.

David Ferguson: Alright, Luke. Thanks for the questions. We are all on the key. Moving on to e-grocery to Mikhail; peak losses, Rabobank, and Turkey.

Mikheil Lomtadze: Yes. Thank you for your questions. In terms of our strategy and investments, we will manage the Turkey business around EBITDA breakeven, which means that we will be investing into consumer engagement. Consumer engagement increases come from faster delivery, data and personalization so consumers can find their products. We are investing into technology and we are scaling technology out of Kazakhstan as we speak. We are making investments in organizing data in a way that it is 360 degrees around consumers and merchants, which enables us to deliver better quality services. Those are the investment areas.

When you think about what you call losses, we think we are investing into creating not necessarily a bigger business, but definitely a more valuable business which excites merchants and customers. That is our strategy for this year, and then we will see how it goes in the future. We will show you the progress through the year. Investments into things like delivery and marketing are targeting consumers, growing the share of engaged consumers which shop with us frequently.

In terms of financial services or fintech, we already have the capability to provide fintech products through the microfinance company subsidiary, which is a fully owned subsidiary of Hepsiburada, and some of the products we plan to launch notwithstanding the full banking license. When we talk about the banking license, that gives us an opportunity to launch a wider range of financial products, especially around consumers and merchants, both on the savings side and the lending side. $300,000,000 is an investment which comes together with the capital, and we are going through regulatory approval. As soon as we take specific steps on the products, we will update you in due course.

We do not like to speak about future products which we will launch, but one thing we can clearly say: the $300,000,000 which we are forecasting—we did say this last year—is already taken into account when we think about resuming dividends. On e-grocery, this is pretty exciting. The fact that Uber is doubling down on investment tells you that Turkey is an attractive destination and there are several companies entering the market. It is a testament to its attractiveness. We are not in a quick commerce business. That is not the business which we have in Kazakhstan either, at least at this stage.

We are focused on e-grocery, which is not about small-ticket fast commerce items, but about stocking your fridge with your household needs. Even though we deliver very fast in Kazakhstan, we are not in quick commerce yet. For Turkey, we will see. At the moment, the way we operate, the data guides us on what our consumers want. Based on what our consumers want, we develop those services. This year our focus will continue to be on the same things we worked on last year: growing engaged consumers, understanding what type of items our consumers want, and then working with merchants to enable this assortment. At this stage, we do not intend to move into quick commerce.

Luke Holbrook: Understood. Thank you. Just to clarify, there is no specific ring-fencing that this year will be peak investment in Turkey from what you have just said. It depends on ROI and trajectory?

Mikheil Lomtadze: The investments we are making—if you are asking whether our profitability in 2027 will be higher compared to 2026—if we see that the investment gives us frequency and consumers coming back, we will continue investing into those consumers. If we believe that making improvements in delivery and increasing speed retains those consumers and they come back to us, we will continue those investments. That is the way we have done it in Kazakhstan, and that is the way we plan to do it in Turkey. We tested all those elements during 2025 and we see how consumers and merchants are responding; we are very excited about it.

We have launched weekend deliveries which did not exist before, and that speeds up delivery. Temporarily you are running operations which can potentially process more orders, but you are starting for specific segments of consumers on lower volumes, and that means you are running a network not at full utilization. Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz has almost six to seven times more order frequency per consumer during the year. That gives you a huge scale on the delivery and logistics network, which gives you a strong return. At this stage in Turkey, we are building up that capability.

Utilization rates will not be as high as Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz during this year because we still have a long way to go increasing frequency of purchases. Whether investment will be in 2027 less than 2026, I am not going to give such a forecast or guidance, but what I can tell you is that what we are investing in will, we believe, bring growth and engagement of consumers in the future. Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz now is a ₸2,000,000,000,000 net income business, and at some point, it was minus ₸60,000,000,000.

There are no miracles, but we know the playbook, we know how consumers and merchants react, and we are excited about the opportunity to build a very loyal, engaged consumer base which is happy with our services.

Luke Holbrook: Understood. Thank you very much.

Mikheil Lomtadze: Thanks.

Operator: The next question today will be from the line of Gabor Kemeny, Bernstein Societe Generale Group. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Hello. This is Gabor here from Autonomous. To continue on Turkey, can you comment a bit further on the competitive environment? You obviously have one large competitor there, and a number of smaller ones. How do you perceive their behavior as you have been accelerating your volumes at Hepsi? That is the first one. Second one is we have an EBITDA guide. Would you be able to give us a flavor of how you expect the bottom line to develop with all those moving parts around regulatory changes, taxation, reserves, etc.?

That will be helpful to understand the dividend capacity of the business. To follow up on that, can you give us a flavor of the sustainable dividend payout going forward? Thank you.

David Ferguson: I will take the second and then pass it to Mikhail to talk on Turkey. We have declared 850 Kazakh tenge per share for the final quarter of last year, and we believe that is sustainable for the remainder of this year. You can extrapolate that to work out the total dividend for this year. You asked about payout ratios. 850 tenge per share was exactly the same as we paid in the final quarter just prior to the Hepsiburada acquisition. You can see what kind of payout ratio that was in 2024 and you will get a similar number for 2026. Clearly, it is an amount we believe will be sustainable going forward.

We are not looking to cut the dividend the next quarter. That is the main point. It should give people a decent level of predictability. We are giving guidance on EBITDA, so we are not going to give guidance on net income. Things to keep in mind at the net income level: as of today, no reduction in interest rates; higher taxes in Kazakhstan in 2026—this is not just a 2025 event. The bank tax only went up from January 1 this year, so that will add 200 bps to the tax rate. There are also higher National Bank reserve requirements, which will have an impact on the bottom line.

There are a number of factors that will weigh on the bottom line this year. Those factors should be in the base by the end of this year, and you get the upside and return to growth next year. Hopefully, we start to move in the second half of the year into interest rates moving down, which would be a positive for next year. But as I said, we are not there yet. That is as much as I can say.

Mikheil Lomtadze: On competitive dynamics, we very respectfully observe the competitive dynamics, of course, and that is not different in Kazakhstan or Turkey. At the same time, our priority is to focus on the high quality of products and services, which is the final product the company needs to produce for consumers to come back and for merchants to do business with you. That is where our focus is: operations, increasing engaged customers, and eventually increasing frequency of orders. That is what we are focused on. If you have specific questions, we are not waking up thinking about competition, and we are not going to sleep in the evening thinking about competition. We are thinking about consumers and merchants.

This is the way we have done business in Kazakhstan, and this is the way we do business in Turkey.

Gabor Kemeny: Enough. Thank you.

Mikheil Lomtadze: Thanks.

Operator: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question and you have joined the call via Zoom, please use the Raise Hand button on your Zoom toolbar. If you are dialed in over the phone, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. The next question will be from the line of James Friedman with SIG. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

James Friedman: Hi. Good evening. Good morning. I wanted to ask first, David, a modeling-related question. In terms of slide 19, is this fully pro forma? I am looking at slide 19 in the press release, the guidance slide where it says the guidance now includes Turkey. Is the 2025 number fully pro forma so we get the underlying period of comparison?

David Ferguson: Yes. The 2025 numbers include Hepsiburada. It is relevant for all segments, but particularly GMV. Number three, the only thing you need to keep in mind—and this is more when forecasting forward—is that we only acquired Hepsiburada at the end of January of last year, so it is approximately 12 months of Kaspi and 11 months of Hepsiburada. Those are the things to keep in mind. Other than that, this is the pro forma base to work from.

James Friedman: Got it. And then, Mikhail, in your prepared remarks, you mentioned that you would prefer to focus on frequency of use as opposed to the total number of users—so ARPAC as opposed to accounts on file. Can you elaborate on that as you migrate to Turkey with Hepsiburada?

Mikheil Lomtadze: First, 2026 will also be almost a full year we can make comparable. That will make everybody’s life easier. We can compare the consolidated business 2026 to 2025. That is good news for everyone because we acquired Hepsiburada only in January. In terms of how we manage, the customer growth was 15% in the last quarter, which is a great headline. However, our focus is engaged consumers, because those are the ones which make business work and repeatedly come back and interact with you and buy from you. You are right that those consumers buy with you, therefore you have less marketing costs and less operating costs to serve them.

That gives you very favorable economics at the consumer level going forward. We know how that worked in Kazakhstan, and it will work the same way in Turkey. We are also true believers in building different services around consumer needs, not just e-commerce, for example. Things related to fintech and others will be something we will also work on during 2026 and onwards. When you think about the scale of the business and how much network effects and synergies that can have, you can extrapolate the way Joint Stock Company Kaspi.kz has been doing. The comparison we gave you was only on e-commerce.

If you think about the breadth of services around the consumer and merchants and go beyond e-commerce, it is massive. I am not saying this will happen automatically. It will take a lot of work from us. But the opportunity at a total level around household needs of the consumer and the business needs of merchants is massive. We gave you something to compare within e-commerce—the pure e-commerce comparable piece—because that is where our focus is. We believe that if consumers are buying with you frequently and merchants are selling with you frequently, this is the combination from which you can build.

That is the point when a merchant makes a decision to sell and a consumer makes a decision to buy, and all the other services are built around that. It is much more difficult to make fintech into marketplace and much easier to make marketplace into fintech financial services.

James Friedman: Got it. Thank you. I will drop back in the queue. Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. This will conclude our Q&A today. I would like to hand back to David and Mikhail for any closing remarks.

David Ferguson: Does James have—he said he was going to drop back into the queue, but if James has another question, we can take it if you have any follow-up, James. If not, do not worry.

Operator: My apologies. We do have a follow-up question from the line of Gabor Kemeny also. Gabor, your line is open. Please unmute locally and proceed.

Gabor Kemeny: Thank you for taking my follow-up. On Fintech, the TFE growth, which you expect to slow down to 5%—can you give us some context there? I understand that you are not planning to change your pricing; the gross yield is expected to stay stable around 6%, so presumably pricing is stable. What is expected to drive the slowdown in lending?

David Ferguson: One thing to think about is TFE growth is linked to GMV growth in Kazakhstan. If you think about where the GMV growth is coming from, it is generally coming from lower-ticket items. The extreme example is grocery, which is less credit-sensitive. People are still using the same amount of credit to buy consumer electronics items, but that is now a slower-growing category within Marketplace. It reflects the changing shift in the Marketplace business. Actually, that is a long-run trend.

Gabor Kemeny: Perfect. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We have a follow-up from the line of James Friedman also. James, your line is now open. Please unmute locally and proceed.

James Friedman: Thank you. In terms of what you were calling out earlier, David, about the e-commerce versus m-commerce relative growth rates, can you talk about how that impacts the consolidated take rate overall?

David Ferguson: It is take-rate positive. E-commerce take rate finished last year at 12.7%, just short of 13%. E-commerce is faster growing and has a higher take rate versus m-commerce which is just under 10% take rate. Why? Because e-commerce lends itself to delivery, a clear value-added service that is not relevant for m-commerce. In m-commerce, you are going to the physical location. To date, the advertising products are all around e-commerce. The value-added services are linked to e-commerce. It is not to say you cannot have value-added services for m-commerce as well, and m-commerce take rate has consistently increased. But if you think about the two big ones we have talked about—delivery and advertising—they are really relevant to e-commerce.

It is a positive dynamic from a take-rate and revenue perspective.

James Friedman: Got it. Thank you.

Mikheil Lomtadze: I would like to make one quick comment on this. Even though it is a positive dynamic from the take-rate and revenue perspective, e-commerce is more operations-heavy than m-commerce. Delivery—we are investing into delivery. We are monetizing delivery on the merchant side, but the build-up of delivery, especially on low-ticket items, we are still investing. When you think about take rate, the potential is much higher. The services we develop around consumers and merchants have huge potential and deliver a lot of value for both. But profitability of e-commerce is less than m-commerce in the immediate term, because of the operational side of delivery.

In the long term, that will be different, but the immediate effect when you move GMV from m-commerce—which is an in-store experience—to e-commerce and you add operational costs related to delivery investments, take rate increases and revenue increases, but delivery decreases profitability. The margin of e-commerce at that immediate migration will be less, but the take rate and future potential are much bigger.

James Friedman: Got it. Thank you.

Mikheil Lomtadze: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. We have a follow-up from the line of Luke Holbrook with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Luke Holbrook: Thank you. I wondered if we could touch on agentic AI or agentic commerce, being the elephant in the room for e-commerce companies around the world. Your views on where we stand today regarding any partnership you have—large language models with ChatGPT—and considerations from your perspective that would be interesting to hear. Thank you.

Mikheil Lomtadze: Thank you for the call. That is a separate subject, maybe even a different call. In general, we are working on assistants to help our merchants do business more efficiently and help our consumers make purchases seamlessly, navigating with the help of a virtual assistant. We are already applying a lot of it internally and I think it deserves a separate call and separate discussion with you.

Luke Holbrook: Thank you.

Mikheil Lomtadze: We are developing this in-house, and I think I mentioned this to you in the discussion we had recently.

James Friedman: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. That will conclude Q&A. I would like to leave the floor to the Kaspi team for any closing remarks.

David Ferguson: Thanks, Harry, for the call. Thank you all for joining. Please get in touch with any questions. We are in the U.S. this week. Happy to take questions offline. Thanks everyone for your time, and speak to you soon. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

Operator: This concludes today’s webinar. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect from the call.

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