Kaspi.kz Reports Q2 2026 Results: Full Earnings Call Transcript

kz (NASDAQ: KSPI ) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below. This content is powered APIs. kz reported a 15% increase in revenue and a 5% rise in adjusted EBITDA for Q2 2026, with a board recommendation to increase dividends by 18%.

E-commerce GMV grew by 28% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, driven by growth in both Kazakhstan and Turkey, with a focus on enhancing delivery and advertising services. The company launched 'Casper', an AI personal assistant, aimed at improving the shopping experience by providing faster and more relevant product recommendations. kz completed the acquisition of Rabobank, securing a banking license and planning to invest $300 million to expand its fintech capabilities, with new products expected to roll out next year.

Kaspi's strategic focus includes enhancing customer experience in Turkey and Kazakhstan, with an emphasis on fintech integration to drive future growth. Full Transcript David Ferguson, Managing Director Thanks, Sami. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone.

kz. Welcome to our second quarter and first half 2026 financial results call. kz's CEO and co-founder Mikhail Lomtadze and our deputy CEOs Tangyisma Cities and Yuri Tidenko. As usual, Mikhail 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. So on that note, over to you, Mikhail. Mikhail Lomtadze, CEO & Chief Ecosystem Officer Yeah, thank you, David. Thank you for everyone joining this call.

So 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 +15%, driven by the e-commerce, which is our strategic, most important focus both in Kazakhstan and Turkey.

It's 28% growth on a constant currency basis. TPV, our major business in payments, still continues to grow very nicely, around 13% growth quarter on quarter on average, and the 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. That's the final destination for our consumers and merchants.

It is where we can add the most value in terms of enabling purchases and connecting merchants and sellers. So e-commerce GMV has grown nicely, around 28% on a constant currency basis year over year, and 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.

So the number of purchases per consumer continued to grow in both Turkey 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. About 20% of our GMV is 1P, and that is 1P mainly the e-grocery in Kazakhstan, which is the fastest-growing e-commerce vertical for us, and the 1P in Turkey, which is electronics and historically has been a category for 1P in Turkey. And we are about 53% of our GMV in Kazakhstan and 47% in Turkey.

Again, the important priorities for us are to continue building up our e-commerce capabilities and making sure that the delivery quality and the speed are improving, the value-added services are monetized, and we continue working on converting the traffic and the properties that we have into the purchases from our consumers—so connecting merchants and consumers to each other successfully. E-commerce has been growing the take rate with the value-added services. As you can see, the value-added services grew 49% on a constant currency basis 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 services and making sure that we deliver 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's actually 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. kz has done reinventions of itself or transformations multiple times during its history.

We 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. And now we are 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 first of July we launched Casper, which is the assistant for our consumers. We started with one task now, which is actually enabling shopping.

So Casper 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. So Casper — we call him Casper, our new personal assistant — and he can actually understand your needs, he can recommend the best products, he can engage in a conversation with you and ask clarifying questions, compare different products, give you the reviews, and so on and so forth. And it's enabled in voice and text, so you can either type your task or you can record it by voice, and then Casper helps you to find the right product for you.

You know, among 20 million products in our Kazakhstan e-commerce platform, he can follow up with smart questions and then lead you to the right product for you, which you can after, you know, complete in our e-commerce. So we have launched it on the 1st of July. We have been scaling during the month, so now it's available to everyone — to all our consumers in Kazakhstan. So it has been very rapid scaling.

It's still early to give you any detailed performance metrics, but I think the metrics we already have are quite encouraging. One out of five customers, where Casper was available, actually used it. Response rate is around three seconds. This just tells you that all the investments we have done both in compute, but also in optimizing the speed, have paid off really nicely.

So you as a consumer get a response really quickly, which is extremely important for any AI model or assistant. The consumers are looking for products across pretty much the entire catalog. So 22 product categories have been covered so far, which is pretty much our entire catalog. Which just tells you that Casper is performing tasks across a wide range of the products that we have.

Eight in 10 conversations — so 80% of conversations — actually end up with a product recommendation, and 60% of those take the customer through to a specific product. So if you are looking for a vacuum cleaner, he will guide you through the process, understand your needs, and then you basically have your product in the shopping cart. What is important is obviously the speed. Casper is 50% faster than just regular product discovery, 50% faster adding to favorites, and 30% faster to the basket.

So again, what we believe is that this sort of technology or this customer experience is leapfrogging all the traditional ways of finding products. You're scrolling, you are reading, you are analyzing the information on the screen, you are tapping buttons, and so on and so forth. So you are spending much more time going through multiple stages of product discovery and understanding the product that you need yourself. Casper is actually speeding up this process.

Casper is helping to find products faster, and he really is working on the task with you rather than you typing in the search box the name of the product. So highly relevant, highly reliable, faster. And those are the most important metrics for us at the moment. Our goal is to build the trusted assistant — assistant equals trust — which means that if you don't trust your assistant, you can easily fire him.

So we treat Casper like your personal assistant. And our priority now is to build trust, which means highly reliable, highly relevant service that actually helps you to buy a product which is exactly the product that you need. So this is our priority as we're scaling Casper. It's just one month, but those are really very encouraging metrics that we observe with the interaction of consumers with Casper.

This is just an example of the queries which basically tell you how different this interaction is with Casper compared to traditional search or the traditional way to find products. You usually type the product that you have in mind, and then the traditional e-commerce or marketplace way to offer you a product is trying to give you a selection of products which you then are reading through, familiarizing yourself with the ratings, and narrowing it down through filters and other navigation tools which have been developed over time.

So when customers are interacting with Casper now, they just give him a task: I want to give my goddaughter a gift for her second birthday; or I want an aftershave for consistency and effect that has a strong smell; or I want a sprayer that I can set up next to the house so it creates a cool mist. I mean this type of interaction, and the type of tasks which Casper is getting and able to solve, is really remarkable. We are true 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 Casper really helps.

And those examples which you see here actually ended up in a real order. It's really important when you think how customers do mission shopping, how they're focused on delivery: give me the items which can be delivered within three hours; or solve this type of problem which I have — 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.

So all those things are extremely encouraging for us. We're scaling Casper as we speak in our e-commerce platform, and 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, but in the future we believe that Casper can help with all other tasks across all our services in our super app. Now I just would like to give you a bit of a demo, so some of you that actually watch the screen, I think it would be pretty cool.

So David, can we go to the demo? Casper actually has a dedicated space in our e-commerce, so you can basically type the task which you want Casper to perform. For example: I need a vacuum cleaner. Then Casper does basic analysis and he starts asking you clarifying questions.

For example, what type of vacuum cleaner suits you best. Then he goes into the requirements. One of the things which is important for any vacuum cleaner is the size of your apartment, so he will ask you to clarify the size of your apartment. Then he will ask you the budget — what's your budget within which you want to buy the vacuum cleaner.

kz. They are described in simple language. He gives you a list of the vacuum cleaners which are acceptable for you. Then you can ask him to compare specific models and then he runs the comparison, so on one screen you can see the main characteristics and you can compare the products.

You can actually use your voice, so you can give him tasks with your voice. And this task can be actually something which is really cool 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 and explains why. If you see some technical term, then you can ask him — for example, he's telling you that the HEPA filter is important — and you can ask him: what is a HEPA filter?

And he can tell you in simple language what a HEPA filter is. Then you select the vacuum cleaner you want, you push the button, and that's it. You can continue through the checkout and actually buy the product. All the chats are obviously stored, personalized, and things like that.

You can go back and forth. So it's really very interesting. It's an important development for us. As I've said, we are starting from the shopping experience because that's where we can add most of the value, but over time we plan Casper to expand in all our services in our super app.

Also, the service is highly scalable and, when it's built on high-quality data, can become highly relevant. And obviously Casper is highly scalable to all our other markets and businesses. So, you know, we'll be thinking about scaling him to Turkey as well. Another quick update: we have secured the banking license.

We've basically completed the acquisition of Rabobank, 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. We expect no material impact this year.

But obviously, 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 fintech and e-commerce together. That's something which is important strategically for us. This is something where 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. kz.

You can select the products, and based on the product you can select the monthly payment which fits your needs best, and then you can proceed seamlessly through the checkout. 54% of GMV in June. Again, we have been preparing ourselves for quite some time. In any financial services, originating a loan or financing customers is step number one; being paid back is more important than originating the loan.

So 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. 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. Again, we're strong believers that combining around the consumers and merchants — the 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.

kz has. So we have pure shopping loan, BNPL, merchant finance, and consumer finance products, and obviously savings accounts, and so on and so forth. You can expect that next year we'll be launching those products in Turkey. The banking license allows us to do that, and the technology we're rolling out in Turkey — underwriting and risk management — basically all those things are coming together very nicely.

So we're very optimistic about launching financial services and fintech products in Turkey. David Ferguson, Managing Director All right, so thank you. So 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. 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, so impacted by 21% depreciation of the Turkish lira versus the Kazakh tenge. That's the first thing to keep in mind. And the second thing to keep in mind: 9% EBITDA growth. That differential versus revenue growth, that margin pressure, that's the least pronounced we've seen actually for the last couple of years, and despite the investments that we're making into Hepsiburada.

Moving on to payments. TPV growth up 13%. That's a slight moderation, reflecting a slight moderation in inflation. And as inflation continues to come down, TPV growth will reduce accordingly.

The take rate declines by 7 bps. So again, that is something similar to what we saw in the first quarter. Long-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.