History
Figures converted from Kazakhstani tenge at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.
How the Kaspi.kz Story Changed
The story that landed on the LSE in October 2020 was a single, simple line: a capex-lite, super-app monopoly in Kazakhstan compounding earnings at 40%+ with most of the cash flow returned as dividends. Five years later that line has been rewritten in three material ways — the company is now a two-country platform built around Hepsiburada in Türkiye, the headline KPI has migrated from net income to Adjusted EBITDA, and the dividend was switched off for a year before being restored at a lower payout. Management's predictability of delivery relative to guidance set at the start of each year held up cleanly from 2020 through 2024, then broke in 2025 when guidance was cut twice in seven months. The September 2024 Culper short report — alleging sanctions evasion and Russian-linked flows — never appears in any earnings transcript we reviewed, which is the single most revealing absence in the file.
The two anchors for every other tab. The current CEO, Mikheil Lomtadze, has run the company since 2007, when Baring Vostok backed him into a small Kazakh retail bank. The current strategic chapter — multi-country, e-Commerce-led, EBITDA-guided — began in October 2024 with the Hepsiburada announcement, not with the January 2024 Nasdaq listing.
1. The Narrative Arc
Lomtadze and Vyacheslav Kim are both co-founders, but the digital-platform Kaspi readers know today is a Lomtadze build. Kim acquired a traditional Kazakh retail bank in the early 2000s; Lomtadze joined in 2007 with Baring Vostok as a private-equity-backed turnaround and has been CEO continuously since. Every "delivered for the past decade" line in the FY2021 and FY2022 letters refers to his tenure — there is no inherited operator to credit.
The visible inflection points cluster in 2020 (LSE listing creates the public-market narrative), 2022–2023 (e-Grocery and Kolesa redefine the marketplace as multi-vertical), and 2024 (Nasdaq + Culper + Hepsiburada all in nine months). The 2025–2026 chapter is reactive — guidance defence, capital-raise to fund Türkiye, and a metric switch designed to neutralise the macro headwinds the new growth story is forced to absorb.
2. What Management Emphasised — and Then Stopped Emphasising
The clearest way to see how the story changed is the language itself. Below is the count of times each theme was the headline topic in the CEO letter / 1H–FY summary across the eight transcripts and three CEO letters we reviewed. White = absent; deep purple = dominated the narrative.
Three things jump off this chart.
Türkiye replaced Kazakhstan as the headline geography. "Kazakhstan digital transformation" was the central organising metaphor of every CEO letter from FY2020 to FY2022 — Kaspi as the agent of a sovereign-scale modernisation project. By the 1Q26 letter the phrase has effectively disappeared and the framing is "100 million-user company present in multiple countries." This is not a rebrand. It is a recognition that Kazakhstan's penetration story is now mature and that the public narrative needed a new horizon.
Three initiatives quietly died. The Azerbaijan classifieds business (Turbo.az / Tap.az / Bina.az), which was emphasised in the FY2020 corporate-information section, has not been mentioned in CEO letters since FY2021. The "formal letter of interest in the Humo payments system in Uzbekistan" announced in 3Q24 — talked up as international expansion — has never been mentioned again. The 1P e-Cars business, scaled aggressively through 2024 (~$455M GMV in 4Q24), was discontinued in 4Q25 with a single footnote.
The Adjusted EBITDA framing appeared in 4Q25 and immediately became the headline metric. It is not coincidental that it appeared in the same period that net income growth slowed to 1% YoY while underlying-ex-headwinds growth was 13%. The metric is defensible — it strips out tax-rate differentials between Türkiye and Kazakhstan and the bank's interest result — but it is also a guidance management tool that the company did not need when net income was compounding cleanly.
3. Risk Evolution
A few non-obvious patterns. Concentration risk is the one risk that genuinely got smaller over the period — Türkiye now contributes 50% of e-Commerce GMV per the 1Q26 release, so the dependence on Kazakhstan that risk-rated everything in the 2020 narrative is now structurally lower. Funding-cost risk is the one that got bigger on a like-for-like basis — Kaspi flagged it from 2022 onwards, claimed in mid-2024 that the cycle was turning, and was then surprised by the March 2025 base-rate hike that forced two guidance cuts. The internal-control material weakness has been a present-tense disclosure in every 20-F filed since the Nasdaq listing. It is mentioned consistently in the forward-looking-statement boilerplate, but never discussed at length in any CEO letter or call we reviewed. That is a risk that has not been actively managed in the public narrative.
The 2025 risk surface — smartphone import registration, the 10% tax on government-securities revenue, higher central-bank reserve requirements, the move of the corporate tax rate for banks from 20% to 25% starting 2026 — is a new flavour of risk for Kaspi. None of these are credit risks or market risks. They are Kazakhstan-state-policy risks landing on the most profitable parts of the income statement.
4. How They Handled Bad News
The Culper Research short report on 19 September 2024 alleged that Kaspi facilitated payments for sanctioned Russian entities and continued doing business with Russian citizens after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. KSPI fell 16.1% to $99.81 that day. By December a securities-class-action complaint had been filed. None of this appears in the 3Q24 CEO letter (issued exactly 28 days later on 17 October 2024), the 4Q24 letter, the 1Q25 letter, the 2Q25 letter, the 3Q25 letter, the 4Q25 letter, or the 1Q26 letter. The risk-factor boilerplate in each release lists "evolving nature of Kazakhstan's legislative and regulatory framework" but never names Russia, sanctions, or the litigation. The single observable response was a strategic one — the Hepsiburada announcement, agreed five weeks after the Culper report and presented as the long-sought "100 million-user" international diversification.
Reading the silence. Companies that have a credible counter-narrative to a short-seller report typically engage with it directly. The complete absence of any rebuttal — combined with the persistent material-weakness disclosure in internal controls and the still-pending class action — is the single most material narrative tell in this file. The bull case requires the reader to assume management's silence is signal of confidence, not avoidance. That is a judgment call.
The 2025 guidance cuts were handled differently — and much better. When Q1 2025 forced a cut from 20% to 15% net income growth, the CEO letter named all three causes by line (smartphone supply, higher rates, expected tax on government securities). When Q3 2025 forced a further cut to 10–12%, management introduced an explicit "underlying" disclosure that reconciled the headline number back to the 18–20% range originally guided. The CFO and CEO both held to that 18–20% "underlying" through 4Q25, where it landed at 18%. That is methodologically honest — investors can argue whether the carve-outs are fair, but the numbers do reconcile.
The e-Grocery profitability story is the other case where the language quietly shifted. The FY2022 letter described e-Grocery as a "multi-year project" that "won't make a big difference to our results this year" — a future profitability promise. The FY2025 disclosure continues to flag e-Grocery as a drag on Marketplace net income three years later, with no updated timeline for breakeven. That is not a denial; it is just an absence of accountability for an earlier promise.
5. Guidance Track Record
The table below covers every valuation-relevant promise we could pin to a transcript or filing during 2024–2026, with the actual outcome. Earlier (2021–2023) IPO-era guidance was met cleanly each year per the CEO letters — that part of the record is uncontroversial and counts for the score below.
The reported (non-"underlying") numbers above tell the visible story: clean delivery on the FY24 cohort, then a sharp break in FY25. Management's defence — that excluding smartphone-supply disruption, tax changes and the base-rate hike, FY25 net income grew ~18%, which is "consistent with the around 20% guidance we provided in March 2025" — is mathematically reconciled in the 4Q25 release. The argument is fair on the smartphone and tax items; it is more strained on the rate hike, since rate sensitivity is a structural feature of the fintech book that should be in the original guide.
Credibility score: 7 / 10. Three things prevent it being higher. (1) FY25 reported net income grew 10% against a 20% promise — the underlying carve-out is honest but reduces accountability. (2) The Culper short report has been answered with silence rather than disclosure. (3) Multiple early-stage initiatives — Humo Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan classifieds, 1P e-Cars, e-Grocery breakeven date — have been abandoned or pushed without an explicit accounting. Three things prevent it being lower. (a) FY24 was delivered cleanly across every platform line. (b) The 1Q25 cut was front-loaded with full attribution rather than dribbled out. (c) Hepsiburada cash payments, the Eurobond, and the Adjusted-EBITDA reconciliation all landed on the schedule promised.
6. What the Story Is Now
The story Kaspi is asking investors to believe in mid-2026 is materially different from the FY2020 IPO story in every dimension except the founder. It is a multi-country e-Commerce-led platform, where Türkiye is now 50% of e-Commerce GMV but generates a loss, where the headline KPI is Adjusted EBITDA rather than net income, where the dividend has returned at a 64% payout ratio rather than the near-100% of the LSE-era, where the cost of funding sits 220 bps above 2024 levels, and where the bull case requires confidence in Hepsiburada engagement metrics catching up to Kazakhstan's (currently 3.7x lower purchases per consumer).
De-risked since 2020. Country concentration. The Hepsiburada acquisition genuinely diversifies the geographic mix; even with Türkiye loss-making, the platform is no longer a one-economy bet. The Eurobond market acceptance — investment grade from both Fitch and Moody's, two oversubscribed dollar bonds — also gives the balance sheet a flexibility it did not have pre-Nasdaq. Engagement in Kazakhstan continues to rise (77 monthly transactions per consumer in 4Q25 vs. 60 in FY22).
Still stretched. The promise that Hepsiburada engagement will close the gap to Kazakhstan levels is the single biggest unverified assumption in the current narrative. The unresolved sanctions-related litigation is on the books. The fintech business — half of the company's net income for most of the decade — is now structurally squeezed by a 25% bank tax rate, higher reserve requirements, and a deposit-cost cycle that is at least a year off normalising. And 1P e-Cars being discontinued with a footnote in 4Q25 should make investors at least ask which of the other early-stage initiatives (e-Grocery breakeven, Kaspi Tours, B2B Payments mix) will be the next quiet exit.
Believe it / discount it. Believe Lomtadze's product execution in Kazakhstan — the cadence from Kaspi Pay to Postomats to Kaspi Alaqan pay-by-palm has been consistent for fifteen years. Believe the dividend resumption as a credible signal of cash flow visibility. Discount the "100 million-user" framing as a refreshed marketing line — it is currently 80% Kazakhstan-Türkiye, both economies with meaningful unique risks. Discount the silence on Culper until it ceases to be silence.