Hello, everyone, and Welcome To Our First Quarter Results Call. It's a pleasure to be speaking to you again. I'm Shadi Salman, heading investor relations at Talabat, and I will also be hosting today's call. All participants are currently in listen-only mode, and we'll have a question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation. In the meantime, please feel free to use the Q&A feature in Zoom to post your questions in writing as we go through the slides. Written questions will come to me, and I will then read them out and have them answered live during the Q&A session. Please include your name and organization as well. You are also encouraged to ask your questions orally by using the raise-your-hand feature, and I will hand the floor over to you to announce yourself, your firm, and then ask your questions.
We will try to prioritize these live questions where we can. Please be aware that we are recording this webcast to offer a replay through our website afterwards. This will be within the investor relations section of our website at ir.talabat.com, where a copy of this presentation can also be found. A replay can also be accessed by using the same registration link used to register for this call. For any members of the media, please be reminded to ask your questions or share your questions separately with Talabat's corporate communications team. Today, I'm pleased to be joined by Tomaso Rodriguez, our CEO and the ChatGPT-generated action figure on the left, but I'm sure he was instantly recognizable, not least from the pasta, the Italian flag, and the orange hoodie.
We also have Khaled Alfakesh, our CFO, and a secret guitar aficionado, if ever he gets the time for it, of course. As host of the call, I have the luxury of not commenting on the last action figure on the right. Oh, and that's a bowl of Vietnamese pho, if anybody was wondering. Before I hand over, a few of the usual housekeeping points and agenda. I'd like to draw your attention to our disclaimer, which is at the end of the slide deck. It covers those items such as dividends, guidance, and expected synergies from recent acquisitions. For today's agenda, Tomaso, our CEO, will take us through key highlights for what was a strong start to the year and the continued implementation of our strategy, including a deep dive on InstaShop, which we acquired in Q1.
Following that, Khaled, our CFO, will go through our financial results in more detail, particularly the main line items that we have disclosed today within our pro forma results. This will then set us up nicely for Q&As. With that, let me hand it over to Tomaso.
Thanks a lot, Shadi. I just realized how your action figure looks more like Sean Connery than Khaled. But welcome, everybody. It's a pleasure to have you for our Q1 2025 reporting. Sorry for the excitement, but we're very happy about the results. A very strong Q1 2025 for Talabat, excluding Instashop, GMV grew by 33% on the first quarter of 2025, cut-through currency. Revenue grew at an even faster rate of 38% still at cut-through currency. And our adjusted EBITDA reached $140 million, which is a margin expansion of 0.2 % points to reach 6.7% of GMV. Adjusted net income also grew 24% on a year-on-year basis, which is a GMV margin of 4.8%. Lastly, at our latest recent annual general meeting, shareholders approved dividends of $110 million in respect to Q4 2024. These will be paid out to shareholders by the exchange on the 23rd of May.
We remain still on track to pay a minimum dividend of $400 million for the full year of 2025, which results in a dividend yield of around 4.5% based on the latest share price. We continue to double down on our proven playbook, which drives our growth strategy across three core pillars. First, we want to keep deepening our category penetration by strengthening our customer value proposition, grow demand through customer acquisition, as well as increased frequency. We also want to keep expanding our multi-verticality. For this call, as a key lever of growth, we will focus on how Instashop fits in our strategy of expanding our ecosystem beyond just food. Second, we want to increase our customer loyalty through subscription, bank partnerships, and fintech. We expanded this quarter, last quarter, our subscription program to Egypt, which has been our most successful launch of the product yet.
We're now live in seven out of eight markets on subscription. Iraq will be the next one. We're also exploring bank partnerships outside of the UAE, building on the success of our co-branded credit card here, which offers tailored benefits on the Talabat app, including a lighter version of our premium Talabat Pro subscription program. Lastly, in terms of supply partnership, we want to offer more ad-tech solutions for our partners, closer partnership with our partners and CPG manufacturers, and support our partners with dining and cloud kitchens expansions of our footprint furthermore. In terms of ad-tech, despite the industry-leading 3.5 percentage point margins this quarter, we believe there's still plenty of headroom to grow. Let's talk a bit about Instashop. We are very excited to have welcomed the Instashop team into the Talabat family as of the 25th of February this year.
Many of you are probably already familiar with Instashop, which is a leading on-demand delivery marketplace focused on grocery and retail. It was a very early entrant in the space already in 2015. That's four years before Talabat started our grocery and retail vertical and became a very loved brand with a very loyal customer base. Instashop was founded in the UAE, which still is their key market, with three quarters of GMV coming from this specific market, but also a very strong presence and growing presence in Egypt. It's a platform with more than 8,000 active partners, which is comparable to Talabat's local shop subvertical. If we have to look a bit at a few of the key highlights of Instashop, growth is very strong at the 16% level at constant currency, and we want to scale it much, much further post the acquisition.
It's a profitable company with improving margins, and there's further opportunities to improve those, and very attractive fundamentals with a very strong cohort and habitual users. Even more importantly, when we look at the overlap between the Talabat customer base and the Instashop customer base, we can see that out of the Instashop customers, two-thirds of them actually are not ordering grocery and retail on the Talabat platform. That's an incredible opportunity for us to capitalize on. Instashop has a very unique customer experience because it was built from the get-go as a grocery and retail brand and platform.
They have some very interesting grocery-native features, for example, a more product-first approach to start building your basket as opposed to a vendor-first approach, more dedicated filters, like, for example, the previously purchased one, a strong substitution algorithm that helps minimize the out-of-stock and maximize the item replacement for the customers. They have many more other aspects that are really focused on a native grocery experience. At the same time, the Instashop team and the Instashop platform share the same philosophy that we have when we focus on our customer value propositions. On the first thing, they have very high reliability, making customers trust Instashop for the weekly and monthly shopping, high convenience, and big assortment. Customers can find a wide range of products and partners on the Instashop app. Lastly, very high proportion of seamless orders.
This also has a very strong customer support for all the situations and the few situations in which something goes wrong. In a nutshell, we're extremely excited about this acquisition. We believe there's plenty of opportunities in terms of synergies, growth, and margin expansion. Now I'll hand it over to Khaled to go through our financial performance in more detail.
Thanks, Tomaso. Before diving into the financials, I would like to clarify a couple of important points. The first one is that today we published auditor-reviewed financial statements for Talabat, which cover the same asset perimeter that we had created as part of the corporate restructuring during the IPO process. Also, the financials include Instashop financial performance starting from 25th of February 2025, which is the date of closing the acquisition. However, the financial results that we are presenting today are pro forma financials for Talabat, excluding Instashop, to allow for a like-for-like comparison for our performance. We believe that this is necessary because our reported Q1 2025 financials do not include comparatives, given that the Talabat Holding PLC, which is the listed company, was only incorporated in September 2024.
Also, the exclusion of Instashop from the pro forma financials will allow for a like-for-like comparison to the historical financial accounts that we have shared as part of the IPO process. In summary, these financials have been prepared on the same basis as those shared during the IPO and in our Q4 full-year earning call as of last year. Also, for Instashop, we will show standalone financials for the full quarter along with comparatives to give better visibility on the results. The second point is mainly about the seasonality of Ramadan, which we have been asked a lot about the impact of it on the financial performance. In fact, we have seen this quarter that the overall demand growth overcomes the impact of a longer Ramadan in Q1 2025. It is also worth going through the various factors at play during the month of Ramadan.
Just maybe a refresher, Ramadan is the month of fasting that follows the Islamic lunar calendar and shifts forward 10 days every year. For this year, we had all 29 days of Ramadan fall within Q1 compared to 20 days in March and 10 days in April as of last year. Basically, there are two factors at play during the month of Ramadan. When it comes to food orders, food orders dip at the start of the Ramadan period and then gradually recover toward the end of the month. However, grocery and retail orders do the opposite, spike at the start of Ramadan and then partially normalize toward the end of the month. What does that mean?
It means that there's a net effect of a reduction in our top line and GMV with a higher share of grocery and retail vertical compared to the period before the month of Ramadan. Together with a stable cost base, this drives our margin slightly down. However, on the positive side, we have seen encouraging trends in the last couple of years. Basically, we are seeing an improvement in the dip of order that happens at the first day of Ramadan by 40% compared to what it has in 2023. That's mainly due to better operational readiness, anticipating consumer behaviors, anticipating partner operations that result in a smaller dip in our food orders. Also, we've seen a higher growth rate for our grocery vertical, which also benefits during the month of Ramadan.
Secondly, at the end of Ramadan, which is the Eid period, we see orders spiking again, and we see that we go back, actually, we return back into the growth trajectory for the period before the month. With that, looking at the financials, when it comes to Q1 result, it has been really a great start for the year with those numbers that we have published today that demonstrate the strong performance and strong momentum that we have. GMV grew by 33% on year-over-year basis on a constant currency due to stronger orders volume across all markets, as we also continue experiencing this stronger acquisition and stronger frequency in general. GCC remains the lion's share of the business, growing at double digits of 27% on year-over-year basis and contributing to more than 80% of GMV.
Also, when it comes to revenue, revenue growth continued to outpace GMV growth with 38% growth on year-over-year basis on a constant currency. That is largely driven by the increased share of our Talabat Mart GMV. Just as probably some of you recall, the Talabat Mart business is our own grocery dark stores, where the GMV flows directly to revenue at an effective rate of 100%. Also, we have seen an increase in subscription revenue, reflecting the enhancements in our Talabat Pro value proposition that Tomaso touched base on, as well as launching Talabat Pro in our Egyptian market. Coupled with strong profitability, our adjusted EBITDA reached $140 million, 6.7% of GMV. That's a 20 basis points margin expansion. This was mainly driven by an enhanced gross profit margin coupled with stable cost base as a percentage of GMV.
Similarly, adjusted net income grew by 24% on year-over-year basis with a GMV margin of 4.8% compared to 5% of last year. That is largely absorbing the increase in corporate tax in the region. Also, as probably some of you would recall, last year, similar countries, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, announced changes into the corporate income tax regulations, adopting a domestic minimum total tax rate of 15%. This means that the applicable corporate tax rate for Talabat entities in UAE moved from 9% to 15%. In Qatar, it moved from 10% to 15%. Kuwait and Bahrain moved from 0% to 15%. As a result, Talabat effective tax rate is expected to rise to a minimum of 15% for 2025 onward, with an impact of almost 0.6% of GMV during Q1 2025. Lastly, our adjusted free cash flow conversion remains strong at 96%, reaching 6.5% of GMV.
This is on the same basis that it's basically the same definition that we shared for the adjusted free cash flow as part of our IPO process and our IOM materials. When it comes to Instashop, we have completed the acquisition on 25th February as of this year. When it comes to Q1 results, to Tomaso's points, GMV grew by 16% on a year-over-year basis on a constant currency. Instashop has an adjusted EBITDA margin of almost 2%, $3.4 million. Lastly, Instashop has a positive adjusted net income of 1.3% of GMV and also a positive adjusted free cash flow metric as well. We believe that there is potential further improvement and margin expansion once those synergies that we've talked about would materialize in the coming few quarters.
Lastly, on this slide, just to present the guidance that we have previously shared as part of the IPO and also in our Q4 2024 results with a comparison to Q1 performance. We should note that it's never fully accurate to extrapolate out quarterly performance against full-year guidance due to seasonality, but some trends can be drawn. As we mentioned earlier, GMV grew by 33% on year-over-year basis, and revenue grew at a faster pace of 38% on year-over-year basis, both on constant currency. Adjusted EBITDA margins reached 6.7%, coming in the middle of the full-year guidance range that we have shared, which is 6.5%-7%. Reported net income margin of 4.9% versus 5% in the prior year, absorbing the increase in corporate income tax.
This is mainly due to—this is just below the full-year guidance, and this is mainly due to Ramadan seasonality that we just explained earlier. If we normalize for the impact of Ramadan, our net profit margin should fall within the guidance range for the full year. Given those strong results, we will likely revisit guidance in the next quarter if these growth and margin trends continue. With that, I'll hand it over back to Shadi. Maybe for Q&A now.
Sure. Thank you, Khaled, and thank you, Tomaso. If you wish to ask a question, please use either the Q&A feature in Zoom to submit it in writing, mentioning your name and firm, please. If you prefer to ask your question orally, please use the raise your hand feature, and we will give you the floor to speak. With that, let me maybe start off with Luke Holbrook at Morgan Stanley. Over to you, Luke.
Good afternoon, everyone. Can you hear me?
Yes, loud and clear.
Yeah, super. As you said, it's Luke Holbrook from Morgan Stanley. Congratulations on the strong top-line growth that you saw this quarter. I've got a few questions, if I may. The first is actually just on the regulations that we're seeing in Saudi Arabia, just this potential to introduce almost a minimum price that has to be charged by the largest platforms. I just would like to hear your view on the potential for such a situation to arise in the UAE or Kuwait. My second question is actually just on the guidance. I'm just interested that you're four and a half months through the year, you're clearly outperforming the run rate. I'm just interested to see what prevented you at this point from raising your guidance to narrow what potentially could be an outperformance here. My final question is just on the subscription offering.
It feels like over the last six months, you've been more aggressive in the way that you're trying to get more customers signed up onto that subscription service and platform. How many of your customers are currently on the subscription? Thank you.
Yeah, I can only quickly cover the guidance part. Yes, Luke, it's exactly—we've seen this strong growth, but I think as a management team, we believe that it's still a bit prudent for us just to look at Q1, sorry, Q2 trends, look at the market dynamics, and also, most importantly, the integration of Instashop financial reporting as well. That's why most likely in Q2, we will revisit guidance, but we just need more time to be more prudent, to be honest.
In terms of—maybe I can cover the regulation part. Of course, we're following closely with what's happening in KSA. I think in general, we don't see any option of—we don't see any movement in terms of adverse regulations happening in our region, our part of the world. At the same time, I think we believe that we operate in eight countries today in the region. I think what we welcome, though, is if there's any regulation around making sure that competitive practices create kind of a level playing field and make sure that no competitor takes advantage of any situation. I think that's something we definitely welcome. We believe the Saudi Arabia conversation could be converging towards that rather than any negative effect on the impact on the industry. Lastly, I think you asked about the subscription. Subscription is growing extremely, extremely strong.
As I said before, Egypt being a market that we launched more recently, but has been showing incredible demand. That was very reassuring because Egypt is also a market where we have a lower credit card penetration or digital payment penetration as compared to other markets where we operate. I think we saw a lot of customers actually adding a digital payment method with the purpose of subscribing to the platform and still also growing strong in all the other countries. We made a lot of announcements to our subscription product. Today on Talabat Pro, you do not just have free delivery, but you also get a lot of other benefits like specific deals and discounts on Talabat Mart or boosted deals on food, dine-out discounts. I think today the Talabat Pro subscription is really an ecosystem of benefit from our customers.
I said in multiple occasions before, we see customer stickiness improving massively, increase in frequency when customers use Talabat Pro. Our mission is really to keep enhancing these benefits and making our Talabat Pro program better and better. As we said before, we are also expanding our bank partnerships on that. We have some other very interesting things coming out very, very soon on Talabat Pro.
Thank you very much. That's very clear. Just you won't put a figure on the amount of customers on your subscription at this stage like you did at the IPO.
We did not share an update on that, but I will say that we did not see a reduction in growth momentum. Actually, we have seen the opposite. Probably our subscription product is growing faster now than it was growing before, exactly because of these announced benefits we have been adding over the last months to the program.
Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you, Luke. We have another question from Cesar Tiron at Bank of America. I do not know if you can—are you able to pose your question? I think I have handed over.
Yes. Yeah, can you hear me?
Yep, I can, yes.
Hi, Cesar.
Yes. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the call and the opportunity to ask questions. I have two, if that's okay. They're really focused on Instashop. Can you please explain—obviously, I've seen the slides, but can you please explain in more detail how to drive both revenue and cost synergies for Instashop? I mean, how big this business can become in a couple of years? And most importantly, can its profitability converge towards that of Talabat in the future?
Maybe I can touch the synergies. You can talk about financials a bit. Look, in terms of synergies with Instashop, there are several. I think there are a few commercial synergies and more structural synergies. I think in terms of opportunities commercially, there are several partners that are not on the Talabat platform and are in the Instashop platform or vice versa. I think we're planning to kind of normalize that as well as thinking about normalizing commission structures because we have similar same partners that have different commissions on Talabat or Instashop, right? Secondly, there is a fleet synergy. Today, Talabat and Instashop are operating two separate fleets. Of course, that is anti-economical as opposed to having one fleet, one more efficient combined fleet, right?
Lastly, I think there are a lot of opportunities of sharing more knowledge and ways of working and learnings across the two platforms. As I was saying before, I believe also Instashop can elevate a lot the way we do things also at Talabat because having had this native grocery experience that they've been building since the very early beginning, we have several data points that are very interesting for us. For example, the Instashop average basket size is larger than the Talabat average basket size, right? This is purely driven probably a bit by customer demographic, a bit by product and experience on the Instashop app. There is a lot we can learn from that to improve on the Talabat side as well. Of course, in terms of people and ways of working, there are definitely other synergies there too.
Maybe on the margins, you want to cover that?
I mean, Cesar, just maybe a refresher. If you look at the grocery and retail business as of last year, $2.1 billion, almost 25%. We said that all of it is split into 50/50 for the two channels, the local shops and the TMAR. If you look at the Instashop GMV, it's roughly under the 10% contribution. With that, we are adding immediately a massive jump into our grocery and retail vertical. With Instashop, almost one-third of the GMV comes from the grocery and retail, right? I think when it comes to profitability, number one, it's amazing that it's already profitable. The company is profitable at all metrics, adjusted EBITDA, net income, and free cash flow. We've seen a slight margin expansion of 0.3% from last year. They are already at 2% EBITDA margin.
I can tell you that our local shops is higher than this, and we believe with all these synergies, in the coming few quarters, we will be able to bring the profitability of Instashop in a similar level to our local shop offering. In general, we are very excited about it because of the customer base, because of the synergies that we can drive, and the addition to our grocery and retail offering in general.
Thank you so much. Is it possible to ask just a very quick follow-up question on advertising as well? Can you please share any progress you're making in having more automated process in advertising and how that potentially can help you to drive this advertising higher as percentage of GMV?
Maybe I can quickly cover the financials and Tomaso if there's anything on the product offering. If you recall, as of last year, we reported that our Ad-Tech is at 3.3% of GMV, almost half of profitability. Last year, EBITDA was 6.7%, and Ad-Tech is 3.3%. If you look at Q1 results, we've already published the numbers, and you can see that Ad-Tech also continues contributing to almost 50% of the EBITDA of the profitability, almost $74 million, and that's roughly 3.5% of GMV. We are seeing also an improvement when it comes to both volume as well as the margins of Ad-Tech monetization.
I think on tooling, I think this year, we're focusing probably on both sides of the Ad-Tech suite. One is the food partners, and the other one is the grocery and FMCG partners. I think if something, we're over-indexing a bit our product effort on the grocery side for this year. I think there's several good developments in terms of creation of new assets and new opportunities to invest on the grocery side and more announced products in terms of bidding and targeting specifically on the food side. The impact of this announcement is not immediate, though. It takes a bit of time to kind of materialize, and also the product development cycles are not super fast. Rest assured that this is our full focus when it comes to Ad-Tech because we definitely see an incredible opportunity there to expand the Ad-Tech revenues.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you, Cesar. Great. Thank you. We have a question from Yakob El-Rohaneim from Marques. Flores, hand it over to you.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me? Can you try again? We can just about hear you.
Yes. Can you hear me now?
Yeah, a bit soft, but we can hear you.
Okay. Thank you very much for the presentation. Just a couple of questions regarding the shared group costs. We're seeing that rise as a percentage of GMV and revenue. What is the reason? Is there a possibility that this is renegotiated with Delivery Hero? How dependent are you on their infrastructure? Who owns the underlying customer and operational data?
Yeah, I can quickly cover that. Maybe a refresher on the group cost. If you look at the group cost, Yakob, it's primarily related when it comes to the technology related to the backend services that we get from Delivery Hero, which is kind of like a commodity technology services related to logistics dispatching algorithm, basically the Rider app, also the vendor portal and the pickers app, right? Everything related to Talabat platform when it comes to consumer tech, when it comes to data, owning the data, owning the IP, owning the brand, that sits with Talabat. We already have agreements with Delivery Hero, and these agreements, they charge us based on arm's length basis, and that is 6% of the platform revenue. That's roughly 4.5% of the overall revenue because we exclude the TMAR.
If you look at the financials, you would see an increase in the group cost in terms of absolute value because the revenue is growing at a faster base. As a percentage of revenue, it remains steady because those agreements are already in place with no changes. Now, whether there is room to optimize, I think we have always said that as long as we are getting the benefits from these services, it is great. If there is a change potentially on those agreements, that is something set also with the management team and also with the independent board members in Talabat. As of now, the agreements, as is, just to be very clear.
Yeah. In terms of ownership of customer operations, etc., that's fully on Talabat.
Got it. Thank you. Maybe one last question. What was the growth year-on-year in Talabat Mart?
We did not disclose the grocery retail, but it's similar, if not accelerated, compared to the previous year. As of last year, we reported the full grocery vertical grew by 47% on year-over-year basis. Talabat Mart were at roughly 40% as well. We still see the high double-digit growth in Q1.
All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, Yakob. Next question comes from Aaron, Aaron Armstrong at Ashmore. Go ahead, please.
Hi, good afternoon. Congratulations on a good set of results, and thank you for taking the question. Question one would just be, where did the acceleration come from in the Q1 numbers? So GMV growing at 30% versus kind of guidance run rate at 20%. Where did that surprise come from? That's the first question. Secondly, just on the competitive side, could you talk about in light of the risk of new entrants coming into UAE, particularly Kita? What kind of preemptive measures or strategies have been put in place? And then finally, just on the Instashop strategy, could you talk about whether that will be maintained as a separate brand from the customer's perspective, a separate application, or how much integration there'll be with Instashop and the rest of the kind of Talabat application suite?
Yeah. If I can quickly cover the growth. Really, the growth across the board. As I mentioned earlier, GCC at 27% on year-over-year basis. Also, non-GCC is comparable to the previous year's growth that we showed, roughly between 40-50%. Both food is growing at double digit. Grocery is growing at double digit. The growth is mainly fueled by both metrics, the frequency and the acquisition. To be fully transparent, we are seeing also slightly more acquisition compared to the internal forecast that we have. That is also what is fueling the growth as well.
Good. In terms of competition, we've been having, we have a lot of competitors around the region already. I would say new entrants would not be big news. We had a lot of competitors before, a lot of competitors now. I think over the years, if you look like versus five years ago, probably today there are less than there were five years ago. We had Uber that was in the region, and then Uber Eats left. We have several local ones, regional ones, global ones. I think, of course, also we're all aware of Kita entering in our market. I believe that, of course, we have plans and measures in place, but I would say that the strongest defense we have is really about the strong business we've been building over the last 20 years.
Not only do we have the largest business fundamentals in terms of selections, operations, fleet, etc., but also the only weapon that really we're seeing most of the competitors using to challenge the players in the region is deals and discounts. I believe we're extremely strong there as well. Whenever you open the Talabat app across the region, we have a lot of deals and discounts and affordability options for our customers. As we mentioned many times, all of these are funded, or the vast majority of these is funded by our partners because they see a great opportunity to invest in the Talabat platform and get more visibility and more customer spec. We shared already that in 2024, we had around $500,000,000 of deals and discounts funded by our partners on the platform, and that number keeps increasing.
On top of that, we built an incredible subscription product. We see that the customers that are on subscription are extremely sticky. Our cohorts are extremely sticky and improving on a year-over-year basis. As Khaled was saying, the growth is coming from new acquisitions. Actually, our acquisitions are accelerating versus our plans, but also the frequency. When we look at our top, top quartile, top decile of customers, also the ones that are already ordering more than 30 and 40 times on the platform, they still keep increasing their frequency on a year-over-year basis. That really underlines how much this is a very sticky business.
Just maybe on Instashop also, I think on the plans. So far, what we believe is that, as mentioned earlier, it's a loved brand. They have a very, very good tech when it comes to the user experience, item first, the replacements flow. The plan so far is everything related to the consumer tech also on the brand. We will keep as is, at least for the coming couple of quarters because we want to harvest more the synergies on the operational commercial side and, most importantly, on the non-overlapping on the customer base. This is where we believe there is a major opportunity for us to cross-list customers and provide value proposition and create one ecosystem across both brands. Short answer, everything related to brand and the consumer tech would remain as is based on the existing plans as of now.
That's great. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Aaron. Next question from Dan Mikhaylov at Vergent Asset Management. Go ahead.
Hi. First of all, congratulations on a stellar set of results. I'd share two quick questions. The first one would be a follow-up on one of the questions asked about Instashop. You mentioned that they operate primarily in the UAE and Egypt. Would you plan to extend their network, their presence to other markets in which you operate? The second question I had was on the effective tax rate. This quarter is rather high. I think it's 17%. Does the IPO era guidance of 11% effective tax rate going forward still stand, or do you anticipate it will be closer to 15% or higher, Mid-teens? Thank you.
Yeah. I'll cover quickly the tax one. Thanks for reading the financials. It's always refreshing when people also read the footprints. Yes, it's indeed the effective tax rate as of Q1 is 17% because there's a portion related to withholding tax, primarily coming from the transactions between the Talabat UAE and Egypt entities as well. We're actually working on a couple of optimization levers, mainly using the treaty between UAE and Egypt when it comes to the taxation. We believe we can drive down the effective tax rate, but it will remain above 15% because, as I mentioned earlier, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar and Bahrain already adopted the latest minimum domestic top-up of 15% in line with Pillar 2. 15% minimum, that would continue with us, but we are trying to optimize the 17% down, leveraging these treaties between UAE and Egypt.
On Instashop, yes, three quarters of their GMV comes today from UAE, as we said, but Egypt is showing extremely, extremely good momentum and growth. Egypt is marketed so super well for Instashop. I think it's early to talk about expansion into new markets. I believe the focus right now is really getting the two teams together. I think Instashop has a really fantastic team, very, very talented people from Nicola, the CEO, and all the management team, etc. I believe the focus is really getting the teams together, realizing the synergies, building a much stronger business together. We also believe there are big opportunities to make Instashop even a stronger business in terms of, especially when it comes to top-line growth, which has been very good, but we believe it could be there's further optimizations that could happen.
After all of that is done, maybe we can think about other opportunities, but as of now, we plan to stay in those two countries.
Thank you. No more questions from my side.
Great. Thank you, Dan. The next question is from Dorian Gervais from Schanfeld. Over to you, Dorian.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Congratulations on a very strong start of the year. I just wanted to follow up on the potential regulatory developments for the sector. The range of measures being discussed by the Saudi regulator is very wide and goes from predatory pricing, but also self-preferencing, exclusivity, and commission rate structures. Which of these do you think the UAE regulator might consider exploring? Specifically, do you believe the UAE regulator would be open to addressing predatory pricing ahead of the May 2 entry, given the historically less interventionist approach compared to other GCCs? Thank you.
I would say that we have no insights whatsoever whether there's any thinking or on which specific items other regulators outside of Saudi Arabia may want to do. At this time, it would be pure speculation for me to answer that question, unfortunately.
Just maybe to chip in here, I think over the years, we've already built a very strong relation with all the government bodies across all markets, specifically in UAE, I would say. I think also, if you look at the history of how the UAE and the government of Dubai in specific launch regulations, they are pro-business. Whenever there's a new regulation, usually it comes with consultation from industry leaders, and we are definitely one of them. We are really not worried if there will be any regulations. We will definitely be part of those discussions ahead of them.
Understood. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Dorian. Okay. We'll go on to some of the written questions. Okay. Yakob, sorry, let's prioritize some other questions from other people. Amit Anand at 10B Capital is asking if there are more specific details around the cost synergies and if we will disclose these and the timing of those at some point. The second part to his question is whether EBITDA and net income margins will follow the same seasonality as in prior years.
Thanks, Amit, for the questions. I think when it comes to synergies, we are still actually quantifying those synergies. It might be also early for us giving a commitment whether we will disclose or not. However, in all cases, Instashop numbers are already consolidated as part of numbers, so we will continue disclosing those numbers. Any synergies will be also continuously disclosed as well. When it comes to seasonality, yes, we would expect the same seasonality to continue. However, to my earlier point, every year we are getting much better when it comes to anticipating the seasonality of Ramadan on the food side of the business, being more ready when it comes to the preparation on the ground. That would improve the dip of the food order. As I mentioned earlier, 40% improvement already compared to 2023. We would expect continuous improvement on that.
Also, the higher the grocery and retail vertical grew, the more that the seasonality impact would actually be normalized over time.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, Khaled. Another question from Ahmed Kamal at Azimut, mainly about cannibalization from, let's say, the grocery and retail business between Talabat Mart and local shops and Instashop. If there's any cannibalization we see going forward or whether they maybe cater for different needs. I think a lot of something to elaborate. When we look at the grocery landscape, I believe what we want to do is want to make sure that we cater for any and every customer need out there, right? When it comes to Talabat Mart, Talabat Mart offers you a very convenient way of getting your groceries delivered in 20 minutes from a wide variety of SKUs, and we deliver 24/7 from our dark store, right? Over the years, what we realized is also in the grocery business, also the brand plays a role, right?
Every customer has their own preferences when it comes to getting, for example, their bakeries or their fresh produce or their meat or their fish from specific groceries, right? That is why we have a marketplace that offers all the retailers out there the opportunity to be on the Talabat platform. We see the customer preferences go from Talabat Mart to, say, a Carrefour to Lulu to anyone else on our platform based on their specific needs or the specific moment, right? When it comes to Instashop, what we realized is that the overlap on the grocery customer base is just one-third. Two-thirds of the customers on Instashop today do not order on Talabat grocery and retail. Moreover, Instashop basket sizes are generally higher than our grocery vertical. I think it is a factor of selection.
There are some brands that are on Instashop and not on Talabat and vice versa. Customer demographic, Instashop value proposition and apps and UX/UI may have an appeal different than the one to Talabat customers. Lastly, I think how the app is built is, as we said before, grocery native with a lot of features and things that we're planning to adopt also on the Talabat app to enhance the value proposition for customers and ultimately increase the basket sizes, right? Maybe long answer, but the bottom line is really there are different customer demographics with different needs, and we try to cater for all of them with our offering.
Yeah. Maybe just also to add on, if you look at the growth rate, also the growth rate indicates the same, right? So what we shared also during the IPO is that both channels, which today split almost 50/50, were growing at 60-80% CAGR. If you look at last year, 47% growth is actually broken into 39% Talabat Mart and 55% local shops, right? So growth rate shows that both are actually solving for different shopping missions. We are agnostic to which channel to grow. We would leave it to the customers to decide, but we've seen the growth rates do not show a sign of cannibalization.
Great. Thank you, Khaled and Tomaso. We have a question here from Artem Yamchikov from Roamer Capital, really asking about Kuwait and Bahrain. They're seeing one of the competitors, one of our competitors from Saudi, has changed its behavior in the second half of last year, focusing more on profitability rather than aggressive growth. I don't know if we have any comment on how this is impacting our operations in Kuwait and Bahrain, or are we focusing on growth versus profitability, etc.? I don't know if we have any comments.
I think in general, we definitely always welcome rationalization when it comes to investments. We've been a rational player since years, right? We've been always trying to optimize for both growth as well as profitability. I think any rational business is something that we welcome. I think from our side, we continue pushing on our strategy when it comes to selection, experience, and affordability, and creating an ecosystem around it across all markets that we are operating in. There's nothing specific for Kuwait or Bahrain. It's the same playbook. It's the same strategy across the board.
Great. Thank you, Khaled. Maybe a final question before we wrap it up. Again, from Yakob, there is one name, Matrakas. He is asking about the trend in commission fees as percentage of GMV, specifically in the GCC. Anything to say on that? He is also asking whether this can be impacted by initiatives such as Talabat Kitchens and Dynam. I mean, I think we probably got an opportunity to explain how the Talabat Kitchens work. It is not exactly the same.
Maybe on the commissions or the take rate. On average, we are between 14-15% take rate. And on restaurants in specific, we are at, let's say, 17-18%. We do not see any pressure on commissions. In fact, we see an opportunity that commissions or take rates should actually expand over time. For the kitchen, maybe quickly how to explain how the kitchen works is we have roughly 25-26 kitchens across all of the markets, across some of the markets actually we are operating in. Those kitchens basically are used as an enabler for the loved brands that we have to expand geographically without actually incurring lots of huge CapEx. Think about it like a food court kind of where you can rent a space. It is fully equipped, already integrated with Talabat, and you can start your operation from get-go.
Great. Thank you.
Dan, I think there was also a question around Dynam, but I would say that Dynam doesn't impact our commission because it's such a small business still. It's a very nascent business that we're growing. We don't see material impact on commissions on that one.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, Tomaso. I think we're pretty much out of time. Of course, if you do have any follow-up questions, more than happy to get back to you on those if you send them to ir@talabat.com. With that, this would conclude our presentation. Thank you very much for attending, and until the next earnings results, have a good rest of the day. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much.