So hello everyone, and welcome to Talabat's analyst call for the fourth quarter of 2025. My name is Shadi Salman, and I head Investor Relations at Talabat. I'll 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 or the Raise Your Hand feature, in Zoom. As in the past, we will try to prioritize sell-side analyst questions and those being asked live. Please be aware that we are recording this webcast to offer a replay through our website afterwards at ir.Talabat.com, where a copy of this presentation can also be found. For any members of the media, please be reminded to share your questions separately with Talabat's Corporate Communications team, whose email is press@Talabat.com.
So today, I'm pleased to be joined by Toon Gyssels, our newly appointed CEO, and by Khaled Al Fakesh, our CFO. But before I hand over, a few housekeeping points. I'd like to draw your attention to our disclaimer, which is at the end of this slide deck. In particular, I would like to highlight the section on forward-looking statements, which cover such items as our financial guidance, future investments, and dividend policy. For today's agenda, Toon will kick off with a few words on his first 80 days back at Talabat, and then tag team with Khaled through financial highlights, business updates, and Talabat's key focus areas for 2026, which are part of the disciplined investment cycle that we announced today. So with that, let me hand it over to Toon. Over to you, Toon.
Thank you, Shadi. Thank you, everyone, for being on the call. I'm very glad to be here today. It's been 84 days at Talabat, and honestly, it, it's been a great time. I'm, I'm really grateful and humbled to be back and lead this fantastic company. Before diving into the presentation and the numbers, I wanna share what I've focused on these first few months, and what my priorities are going forward. 'Cause I, I started with a proper bottom-up immersion, spent a lot of time meeting people. Literally, I met close to 1,000 colleagues, reconnecting, understanding the business again, and hearing directly what's working well and, and what isn't. Also means I spent a lot of time in the operation, visiting the markets, meeting with partners, meeting with customers. It's been very insightful and energizing, and really for something that's very clear to me now.
You know, Talabat's no longer just a food company. We mean so much more to our customers already, and we're really uniquely positioned to become the everyday app for our region. And so for 2026, I defined few focus areas and big bets, and I've allocated resources behind them, right? First one is grocery acceleration. We need to double down on grocers. Historically, we treated it as a separate vertical, but now I made it really part of the core business. Second is new ventures, 'cause food and groceries, they will drive a lot of growth for us, right? For sure, for 5 years. But we also need to build what comes after that. So I've already set up a separate business unit focused on that zero-to-one innovation, and we got 3 ventures in the works already. Third topic is Talabat Pro, our subscription program.
This was a major driver of growth acceleration in 2025, and now we need to strengthen and elevate it. Move beyond free delivery and discounts to something more meaningful, while of course, still delivering real value to customers. Fourth, no surprise, AI, high on my agenda. At Talabat, we're already working in three areas there: in the core business algorithms, in AIO ps, and then, of course, towards the customer, ultimate personalization. And lastly, something that's very important to me is, you know, spending time on culture and with the team. 'Cause what I wanna do is I wanna bring back some of that early-stage energy to Talabat, bias for action, bias for experimentation, you know, allowing us to fail better and learn faster. And by the way, already seeing some early wins there.
You know, issues that were existing for years, we solved them in weeks, simply by empowering people and applying a bit of pressure. So in 84 days, created already proper momentum and working really hard to build the next phase of Talabat. So that as an intro, let's move to the Q4 results, which was very strong. Growing fast, growing profitably, returning capital. And then, let me talk about that growth first, 'cause we had 21% year-on-year growth amidst the quite dynamic operating environment, let's say. And growth did slow down a bit compared to the previous quarter and the first half of the year, but that was anticipated in our guidance, and I'll, by the way, I'll share a bit more on these dynamics later. Revenue grew faster, 26%. This is also constant currency.
The adjusted EBITDA reached $156 million, or 6.3%, and net income at $123 million, or 5%. By the way, if we adjust, for non-operating lines, net income was at $122 million, 4.9% of GMV. And then on dividends, I'm pleased to report that the Board has endorsed our recommendation, and an additional dividend of $219 million will be presented to shareholders for approval at the upcoming AGM. That brings the total dividends for the year to $421 million, which is 90% of reported net income, and that includes InstaShop, right? Our performance for the full year, in most cases, met or exceeded the guidance, and you will recall that we revised the guidance upwards in the year. But let me hand it over to Khalid.
Let me hand it over to go through the details there.
Thanks, Toon.
... Here we compare the full year performance against guidance, first shared in October 2024 ahead of our IPO. We reiterated this guidance in February 2025, and we revised it upward last August with our Q2 earnings release. We are pleased to report that we met or exceeded the majority of our key metrics, with both net income and adjusted free cash flow landing close to the guided range. Net income and adjusted free cash flow were within 2% of the lower end of guidance, reflecting strong overall performance for the year. The slight variance was primarily driven by the temporary 5 days administrative closure in Qatar in September, which had a moderate impact on growth in the markets during Q4 2025. Looking at absolute dollar figures, we exceeded or had the high end of IPO guidance for all metrics.
We have also included pro forma performance figures that includes the full year InstaShop performance. Recall that InstaShop was consolidated upon closing the acquisition at the end of February, and we excluded InstaShop performance through the year, through the year, both to avoid restating the IPO guidance and also to give us the time needed to integrate InstaShop into our financial planning processes. These pro forma figures will be re-referenced when we come to 2026 guidance later on this presentation, and our new guidance includes InstaShop. Talking about business now, back to you, Toon.
Okay, cool. So this page covers the six KPIs that we've been tracking since IPO. Shows the performance across these key core pillars at the top right and the ecosystem at the bottom. And they've all gone up nicely year-on-year, so I'll quickly talk about them. On core pillars, which are choice, experience, value, we increased the number of vendors on the platform, now reaching 84,000 vendors. We also increased the size of the fleet year-on-year, now hitting 157,000 riders. That's to make sure we have great experience, of course. Now, you might notice that we've slightly reduced the number of drivers versus the previous quarter. That's 'cause we had exceeded kind of the need. We grew the fleet more than what we needed at the time to just anticipate the heightened competition, right?
And now the fleet is in line with the service we need to give. The last one on the value, we also increased that in 2025. We brought $588 million in partner funded savings to our customers, and that represents 6.2% of our GMV. At the bottom, our ecosystem plays. Multi-verticality keeps growing a lot. Customers that order food and groceries now account for more than one third of our customer base and more than 70% of the GMV. Second, subscription. You know, in 2025, our subscribers grew more than 3x, and they now account for 25% of the customer base and 47% of the GMV.
Last, in our ecosystem, we always talk about the AdTech, which is a very valuable tool for our vendors, and these revenues have grown to 3.5% of GMV, which is more than half of our EBITDA margin. These KPIs show a bit the input of what we deliver towards the customers. In the next page, we can have a look at what's then the output on our customer base, and there, of course, we also continue to grow. Average monthly active users grew 19% versus the prior year, almost adding the same amount as the year before. We added 1.2 million. By the way, Egypt has really grown rapidly and is now the largest user base, with approximately 2.2 million active users, followed by the UAE.
And then on this page, if we also look at frequency, frequency also continued to grow. Our highest frequency segment, the top five, increased 5% year-on-year again. Now, the next page, I wanna talk a bit about the dynamics in competitive markets, 'cause that's obviously a question on, on everybody's mind, and we do see a bit of that deceleration of the growth in Q4, and this, this page covers that. So we see here an overview of UAE, Kuwait, Qatar. Right? Let's focus on those markets. And on the left side, you see the customer mix. So we have the high-value customers. They represent 39% of the customer base and 81% of GMV. And then we have the non-high value, which is the mid and low value, which is 52% and respectively 16% of GMV.
This shows also new customers, because we cannot classify new customers yet in one of these buckets. That's why they are reported separately. Now, what you see here is that the low-value segment has a bit of a reduced retention year-on-year, right? So it's a - 4%, and this shows that these are a bit the customers where we are losing some to the heavy discounting that exists. But what you see also is that our high-value customers, the retention is flat year-on-year, so they're very sticky. It didn't impact it. And actually, if you look at their frequency, their frequency is still increasing 6% year-on-year. And why is that? That's not just because we have the best offering and the best experience on food; it's also because of that ecosystem.
I wanna share a bit more on these dynamics on the next page. These numbers, by the way, on this page, is for Talabat as a whole, but of course, the same trends apply to these competitive markets we just looked at. What you see here is the improvement in the retention rate. On the left, you see a mono vertical non-subscriber, which means this is a customer that just orders food, and it is not on Talabat Pr o. As soon as a customer like that goes onto the subscription program, which is the purple in the middle, you get an increase of retention on 20 percentage points. So it's very significant, right? These subscriber customers, as I mentioned, this is now about half of the GMV that they represent.
But then if you have a subscriber customer, mono vertical, that starts to order also groceries or pharmacies or whatever it is, you see an additional uplift of 16 percentage points on retention. And I think this page illustrates really the, the effect of that ecosystem and why these customers, especially the high-value customers, they are so sticky. Now, these dynamics also give a great segue into introducing a bit these investments that we want to make in 2026. Next page. Because we've made the deliberate choice to invest in the future. We're going to invest more than $120 million to shape Talabat as, as an everyday app, truly embodying what quick commerce stand for. By the way, out of these investments, there is $75 million in OpEx, and the rest is CapEx.
Now, I want to start with saying that these investment cycles, that they're not new to Talabat. But when I came to the region 9 years ago to build Talabat, Talabat was a marketplace model. By the way, the whole world was marketplace model. But I wanted to build out that last mile delivery. That was my first big bet, and back then, nobody believed in it. Everybody said, "It can't be profitable. It definitely can't be profitable like marketplace, so you're just wasting margins." But Talabat did it, right? Talabat was the first in the world to show that delivery can actually be more profitable than marketplace, and that was the key to unlock crazy growth for us. Back then, when I joined, we did less than 50,000 daily orders, but with this unlock, we grew to over 1 million daily orders already, right?
So this is massive, and by the way, this is not the only time we made successful investments for future profitability. We did the same with Talabat Mart in 2019. Anyway, we're now entering a new investment cycle, and it'll broadly focus on three areas. One is Talabat Mart. I talked about that accelerated growth, and there is huge headroom for us to grow. Right today, we're at 1.5% of TAC, and in food, we're at 25%. So there is a lot of room to grow, accelerated growth, year on year, even. And it's important to highlight that we're also optimistic on the profitability of that business line. For example, today, Talabat Mart in UAE already delivers 7% AdTech revenue, which is double of what the average is, right?
So we're doubling down on this vertical, and the investment is to build infrastructure for the future, DCs, pack houses, and of course, also to increase the density of stores, to build out more stores. Second is Talabat pro. I talked about the retention uplift, but there is also a huge frequency uplift. By the way, it's this frequency uplift, 28%, what you see there, that drove the growth boost in 2025. We revised the guidance up, increased it by 10 percentage points, and that's because of this. Now, with rolling out such a subscription program, of course, you first tackle the high-frequency customers, because for them it makes most sense to become a subscriber. And when somebody already does 20 orders a day, bam, they jump to 26 orders a day, right? Today, we're covering 50% of GMV already.
So of course, now we need to convert lower-frequency customers. And to do that, we need to make sure the ROI of the program works for these customers. So we need to invest in the program, extend the value proposition, partly through partnerships, but also through better loyalty benefits. So that's the second area. And then there's more stuff, right? I mentioned earlier about these new ventures that we're building, and I'm very excited about that. But I just want to call out that these investments, that they're still small today. It's $2 million, right? It's just allowing us to do experimentation, figure out what works before we double down on it, and it's similar to what we did with Talabat Mart back in the days.
This gives a bit of flavor on that investment cycle we're entering, but I give it over to Khaled for the financials.
Sure. Thanks, Toon. So as before, our reported financials cover the Talabat assets perimeter as IPO'd, and also includes InstaShop performance starting from February 25. This effectively 15 months of Talabat the performance since inception in September, and 10 months of InstaShop since the consolidation. What we are presenting today are pro forma financials for Talabat, but excluding InstaShop. However, Talabat, including InstaShop performance for Q4, is included in the annex, mainly for the purpose for our outlook section later on. Going through our financial results, our Q4 results underscore the resilience of our platform within a dynamic operating environment. We achieved a robust 21% year-over-year GMV growth at constant currency, demonstrating our ability to maintain high-quality growth rates even as we reach a significant scale.
This performance is underpinned by a triple win in our core metrics: strong customer acquisition, increased order frequency, and expanded average order value. Revenue growth of 26% outpaced GMV growth due to the continued scaling of our grocery-integrated verticals, Talabat Mart, and Talabat pro and better AdTech monetization. This can be seen in the higher GMV to revenue conversion rate of 42% versus 40% last year. Talabat Mart GMV flows directly to revenue at a 100% take rate and now makes up 15% of GMV, compared to 12% in the prior year. As a percentage of revenue, Talabat Mart is 33% of total revenue, versus 28% in the prior year. Our strategic expansion into grocery and retail, led by the rapid scaling of our Talabat Mart, is successfully diversifying our portfolio.
While this shift naturally adjusts our overall commission rates to 13.3%, it reflects a deliberate move toward high-frequency, long-term growth sectors. Our AdTech verticals continue to demonstrate a strong growth, with margin expanding to 3.5% of GMV. Notably, this margin accretion occurred alongside robust GMV growth, proving that our advertisement platform is not just scaling, but becoming increasingly efficient as it grows. Our revenue quality continues to improve as we successfully transition toward a subscription-based model, Talabat pro. While delivery and service fee adjusted slightly to 8.9% of GMV, this was robustly offset by the rapid adoption of Talabat pro. Breaking down our GMV, we can see a diversification of our growth engine across both product verticals and geographies.
On the left side, our food vertical delivered a steady 12% year-over-year growth for the quarter and 20% for the full year. This reflected a more competitive landscape and some macroeconomic slowdowns in some of our markets. Our grocery and retail vertical grew much faster at 45% for the quarter and 47% for the full year. While scaling from a similar base, this performance underscore our successful capture of the consumer shift to quick commerce and increasing basket sizes. Now, moving to the right, GCC markets remain strong, growing at double-digit rate of 15% year-over-year for the quarter and 22% for the full year, driven by strong consumer tailwinds in our core markets, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman.
The GCC segment still makes up 80% of our total GMV, though this share will continue trending lower and the non-GCC segment growing faster. Yet the UAE, our largest market, maintained its robust growth trajectory, growing in line with the group's overall expansion, and Kuwait, our most established market, continued to deliver double-digit growth for both the quarter and for the full year. Our non-GCC markets continue to grow rapidly. This includes Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, and they are becoming increasingly important part of our growth story. As we mentioned earlier, Egypt now is our largest market by monthly active users and our third largest by GMV. This underscores both the scale we have achieved and the strong underlying demand in the market. We continue to see significant long-term potential across these markets.
In 2025, we expanded Talabat pro to Egypt and Iraq, bringing the program to all 8 of our markets and strengthening our value proposition and customer loyalty. Now, moving to our profitability and cash flow. Adjusted EBITDA grew 13% year-over-year for the quarter, reached to $156 million or 6.3% of GMV for the quarter. Gross margin this quarter were primarily driven by a product mix shift as our grocery and retail vertical, which has a lower margin profile than food. This shows up in the commission rates, which we mentioned 2 slides back, and which were 0.9 percentage points lower. Gross profit was also impacted by higher customer acquisition and retention costs as a percentage of GMV. Partially offsetting this, our AdTech margin improvement.
Our AdTech margin improved by 0.2 percentage points to reach to 3.5% of GMV and remains among the highest in the industry. Below the gross profit line, we continue to demonstrate strong operating leverage, where total OpEx to GMV ratio improved by 0.4 percentage points. Despite an increase in our marketing cost, both on the customer and the vendor side, our AdTech and SG&A margins reduced as a percentage of GMV. For our cash flow, adjusted free cash flow margin was slightly lower at 5.4% of GMV for the quarter and 5.9% for the full year. The lower margin mainly reflected accelerated CapEx during the quarter, directly toward the expansion of our Talabat Mart store network. That was partially offset by positive cash generation from working capital, again, related to the expansion of our dark stores.
For the full year, the free cash flow margin accounts for a new tax payment, especially the 2024 obligations paid and settled in Q3 this year. Looking further down the P&L statement, Talabat net income was 11% lower on year-over-year for the quarter, with a GMV margin of 5%, and 34% higher for the full year, with a GMV margin of 4.9%. This was mainly due to the base effect with deferred income tax in Q4 2024, that partially unwinds in Q4 2025, and interest income on a shareholder loan for the first nine months of 2024, that does not reoccur in 2025. Adjusting for these non-operating line items, adjusted net income was stable for the fourth quarter and up 15% for the full year.
This absorbed the higher corporate income tax, the higher income corporate income tax of approximately 15% in the GCC region, versus the effective tax rate of 9% in last year. Based on Talabat's strong performance and the net cash position of $591 million, the board recommended the dividend payout that Toon talked about earlier. Now, in this section, we will present 2026 guidance and its drivers. Before going through an overview of our investments for 2026, note that 2026 guidance now includes InstaShop performance, and so this guidance should be compared with the pro forma full year 2025 performance of Talabat, including 12 months of InstaShop we presented earlier on slide number 6.
For 2026, we expect GMV growth of 11%-14% at constant currency, based off the 2025 pro forma numbers we just mentioned. Similarly, we expect IFRS revenue growth of 14%-17%. Adjusted EBITDA is expected in the range of $510 million-$540 million. Net income in the range of $280 million-$310 million, and free cash flow of $370 million-$400 million. Now, going through those drivers. GMV reflects normalization at scale. 2025 was an exceptional year of high growth. As our base becomes much larger, reaching $10 billion in an annual GMV, an 11%-14% guidance remains a very high velocity growth rate for a market leader. We are seeing macroeconomic consumer spending headwinds in some markets.
For example, in Kuwait, we see consumer spending in 2025 slowed down by 4.6%, according to the central bank data, with slightly contracting population. In Qatar, inflation and consumer prices have seen an increase as well. Of course, we also seen a more competitive environment in our key markets, which slowed down growth by 3-5 percentage points for the group. Lastly, the growth guidance also factors in the dilutive impact of including InstaShop, which is growing at a slower rate and impacting the group growth next year by roughly 2 percentage points. Adjusted EBITDA includes investments on the food vertical to strengthen our competitive positioning, and most importantly, include our strategic investments in our ecosystem pillars to cement our leadership position for the future and position Talabat as an everyday app.
We are making investments into our integrated vertical, Talabat Mart, to build future capacity. We are adding many new stores to have more density and enhance our speed value proposition and building dispatch and shipping distribution centers to cater for the future capacity. Below EBITDA, these same strategic investments, some of which were made in the last quarter, 2025, would go to increase depreciation and finance lease cost ratios, again, as we ramp up new, new stores' utilization. Our free cash flow will mainly be impacted through the increased CapEx and higher tax payments made in 2026, in respect to the higher tax rate we booked last year. On the next slide, I want to explain the EBITDA bridge and give some context to what is market-driven versus investment, and what is long term versus short term.
Our starting point is model based on the same Q4 margin for Talabat, including InstaShop, of 6% applied to our GMV growth guidance. We have included these pro forma figures in the annex on slide 25. Then we expect 0.2 percentage points impact from the mix shift toward grocery and retail, which today is less profitable than food. Then we have added $55 million, or 0.5% of margin, that we will invest to strengthen our food leadership, mainly for highly competitive markets. These two factors would bring EBITDA to roughly $600 million, or 5.3% of GMV, which is the performance of our core business, taking into account the current competitive environment.
Now, as we mentioned, we have made a deliberate decision to invest for the future, and we have earmarked $75 million in OpEx investments this year. The bulk of these investments will go to T Mart to build the capacity for the future. This would give us capacity for the coming years and not require repeat investments, unless, of course, growth goes faster than we expected, which is also not a bad situation. Altogether, this accounts for the mid-range guidance of $525 million of adjusted EBITDA. With that, we can now move to Q&A.
Great. Thank you, Toon and Khaled. If you wish to ask a question, please use the Q&A feature in Zoom or the Raise Your Hand feature to ask it live, and we'll hand the floor over to you. So we have a few queued up. Let's start with Jo Barne t-Lamb at UBS. Floor is yours, Jo.
Hi, team. Yeah, it's Jo from, from UBS here. Thanks for taking my questions. I think when we think about the different buckets of investment, you said around $55 million is for strengthening our food leadership, which sounds like sort of defensive spending in the face of competition. I guess a couple of questions on that.
... firstly, where does that leave your marketing or spend levels, and how does it compare against what you believe your competitors are spending? Secondly, you clearly think that that is enough, but what assumptions have you made to underpin that? Do you assume competitive intensity remains at current levels for six months or for all year, where it goes up or it goes down? What are the assumptions on underlying intensity there? Then maybe finally, how do you view beyond FY 2026? You show a sort of shaded orange bar for long-term margin. Is FY 2026 the year of peak investment or, or what could we see beyond 2026? Thank you.
Let me tackle maybe the question on, on the competitive investments. And this $55 million, this is based on what we learned from Q4, right? So in Q4, we also invested to make sure that the high-value customers, they stuck around, and they actually increased their frequency. What we have not done is match the flat-out discounts for everybody and where we just burn money to buy orders. And it's the same strategy we want to keep for 2026, where we are investing, where we are making sure we target the incentives towards the customers that need it so that we can retain them. So the amount is based on the practices, what we did in Q4, and it also assumes a similar level of competitive dynamics for 2026.
Yeah, and maybe on the long-term margin range, I think what we just mentioned earlier is that we're investing to increase the volume, particularly on the gross and on the grocery and integrated verticals. And as Toon mentioned, if you look at the ad tech we generate in UAE, for example, is 7%. It's almost twice the size the overall ad tech revenue we have. So we believe, yes, there is still room for margin expansion on the long term as well.
Excellent. Thank you. So, to confirm, if we were hypothetically to see a step down in competitive intensity in the Middle East because of regulatory change or strategy evolution, et cetera, you could potentially do better. This is a continuation of the current level of competition throughout the year.
That's correct. Thank you for flagging this, Joe. I think it's important. We've never baked in our guidance any potential upside that comes on the back of rationalization driven by regulations. So if that comes, that would be something good and something we encourage and should be an upside for the guidance.
Excellent. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Jo. Next question from Luke Holbrook from Morgan Stanley. Over to you, Luke.
Yeah, good afternoon, everyone. Yeah, it's Luke from Morgan Stanley. Can I just firstly ask a little bit on more on the regulatory side? Like, where are we in terms of potential implementation in places like Qatar, Kuwait, Dubai? Obviously, we saw some guidelines published in Qatar and Kuwait at the start of January, but can you just give us a little bit of an update there? My second question is actually more on competition on the grocery side specifically, and from the existing incumbents in that market, from, like, Deliveroo, Careem, Amazon, Noon. Has that changed in the last quarter or dictated any of these additional investments that you intend to make into your dark store network? I think that would be very helpful to hear from.
And perhaps just final question, more of a conceptual one, but it, it sounded like from the question before, that if GMV was tracking above the top end of your guidance, you would look to potentially see EBITDA outperform, where, where we're basically sitting at on this guidance level. And otherwise, in other words, you wouldn't reinvest additional EBITDA to drive further GMV growth. I just wanna, wanna clarify how you're thinking about growth and profitability dynamics. Thank you.
Thanks, Luke. Maybe I'll tackle quickly the first one about regulation. I think we continue encouraging these regulations. In fact, we continue having these active dialogues with all the regulators across all of our markets. And in fact, what we've seen in our markets is even a faster traction, right? I think regulators are getting learnings from what's happening in Saudi, what's happened before in Hong Kong, and we would expect maybe positive development on that front. What I wanted to mention is that none of these potential positive development is included in our future outlook.
Luke, and on the, the second question on the grocery, the additional players that are doing grocery in the UAE, our plan is, is not based on that, and it is based on the region. But I do think that that increased entrants show how much traction there is in the market, and they probably saw that we were doing so well, and it is more that growth, right? If you look at our performance quarter-on-quarter, we're accelerating the year-on-year growth. So it is really, I think, a market where the consumer is now also shifting their behavior, and we're investing for the future to make sure that we can cater to that. I think on the last question, if we overachieve on GMV, how does that reflect back on margin or on what we guide?
I think we've deliberately given guidance on absolute EBITDAs, which we are committing to, which gives us a bit of flexibility when GMV increases, that we can still invest part of that in further growth.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Great. Thanks, Luke. Next question from Cesar at Bank of America. Over to you, Cesar.
Hey, thank you for the call and the opportunity.
I have two. I just wanted to make sure I understand that the $75 million-
... investment is, is a one-off? I mean, I mean, what, what, what is the ability of this repeated in, in 2027 and 2028? That's the first question. Second question, I wanted to, to ask you, how much-
You're breaking up a little bit.
I'll tackle the first question because we really can't hear you. The first question is about $75 million, how much of that is one-off? And a big chunk of that should be one-off, right? If we've built out the pack houses, the DCs, we've densened the network, we have the additional capacity for the future growth, we should be good. But to be honest, we might be accelerating growth even more, and then we do need to repeat some of these investments. But a large chunk of that, or actually the biggest, goes towards building the infrastructure, so it should be non-recurring.
Yeah. Cesar, do you want to try again for the second question? Yeah.
Yeah, thank you so much. I wanted to ask, can you remind us how much bank Delivery Hero per year services and how does that change in the future?
Sorry, Cesar, I think you are very breaking, so we can't... Maybe if you type your questions, we're happy to answer it also, but we really can't hear you well.
Yeah. Try typing them, and we'll answer them. Let's just move on to next analyst, Ankur Agarwal from HSBC. Over to you, Ankur.
Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity, and thank you for the presentation. So my question is that, should we expect any change in the group costs being paid to Delivery Hero in 2026? These costs obviously increased from 1.7% of the GMV in 2025, from 1.4%. Now that 30 basis points becomes important, right? Is the group going to support in the investment given the competitive landscape? So that's my first question. I have another one, but I think if you can answer the first one.
Sure. I would assume this question is for me, Ankur, right?
Yes.
No, I mean, listen, we've talked about group costs before, and we said we will definitely work on reviewing it. And what I can share is that we actually kicked off already the reassessment, which is a periodic review we do to our transfer pricing policy every couple of years. And that's already in the pipeline. This is what I can confirm, and we would expect potentially an outcome of it during this year. So once we have these outcomes, we will be in a position to share more about it. But what I can reiterate and reconfirm is now it's not a discussion anymore, it's actually work in progress.
Okay. So I think we can expect a downward move, more likely, given the competitive landscape and the investment phase that you are in currently, right, in the region?
I mean, if you are referring to the group costs, if there's any potential reduction of the group costs, it's also not yet baked in the guidance, obviously, right?
Okay, and maybe let's clarify that the group cost and the approach, it's not a commercial discussion. This is really driven by auditors to review what are the services we're receiving-
Exactly
... and what are we paying for that. So it's, it's an objective approach to it.
That's it.
It's not a commercial discussion between the group to support us in these investments.
Okay. My second question is, can you elaborate a bit more on the investments in Talabat Mart or dark stores? So how do you plan to allocate it within the GCC or outside? What proportion of the CapEx would get deployed, let's say, in the UAE on dark stores? That would be helpful.
Yeah, I mean, I can, I can quickly jump on this. So the $75 million is purely in OpEx, and there's an additional $45 million in CapEx, as well. I think this is across the board. What we were referring is that we, we are basically investing into two buckets within, within the T Mart. We already have a large network of stores, we already have the coverage, but we want to make sure that we increase the number of stores to have more density, so we can deliver even faster. Because I think speed is a very important element to see this switch in from offline to quick commerce. We, we've already seen great signals around this.
The second one, which Toon mentioned earlier, is like really building the infrastructure around the DCs, building the infrastructure about the pack houses to ensure that we have the right fulfillment centers. We ensure that we have the right supply chain that cater for this future growth. Now, in terms of geographical allocation, it's actually across the board.
Mm.
It's fair to assume that the markets where we are already leading in terms of GMV growth, like UAE and Egypt, will definitely have a significant part of this investment.
All right. Many thanks for the answers. Thank you.
Thanks, Ankur.
Great. Thank you, Ankur. Next question comes from Andrew Ross at Barclays. Over to you, Andrew.
Great, thanks for taking my questions, guys. First one is a short-term one about what you're seeing in Q1. It's kind of a few weeks into the quarter now, and I guess this is close to the peak of competitive intensity, so it'd be good to understand what you're actually seeing on a run rate basis right now. That's the first one. The second one is to follow up on Luke's question on regulation. Can you be more specific in terms of timing as to when you might expect the regulators in the UAE to enforce the guidelines, and then timing as to when regulations may be in place and enforced in Kuwait and Qatar? And then my third question is on InstaShop, which didn't grow year-over-year in Q4. Why is it not growing?
Is there a kind of a structural issue there around 3P versus 1P? But helpful to understand why the asset's not growing.
... Thank you. Maybe let me tackle the-
Yeah
... the last one first, and I think you touch upon half of the answer already, 'cause InstaShop is really a Dubai-based business, and it is that 3P model, right? And what we see today, the customer expectations have shifted more towards that speed, which is why the 3P model, especially in Dubai, is not growing so much for InstaShop.
Yeah, and maybe just to double down on the regulations. For example, in UAE, we would expect that the guidelines that was issued by the DET also to be aligned further at the federal level. Hopefully, it gets also enforced or implemented sooner than later. In Kuwait, I think the latest regulation came... Technically speaking, it's already in effect, but there's a 60 days, a bit of grievance, let's say, because there's a couple of things, and the regulation is actually good. Couple of things I think it needs to be refined. We've engaged also with the Kuwaiti governments, and they were more than happy to support, and they really understand our point of view. So we're having this active dialogue with them as well.
Looking in Q1, maybe two points. One is Q1 results will look very different than last year because of Ramadan, right? Next week, we start Ramadan, and this shifts a lot for us in the dynamics of the business. In terms of the trends, I think one thing to call out is that on the competitive nature, we have one more market where KeeTa launched, which is in Bahrain, and we've seen a bit of the same playbook there as in the other markets, where the smaller players get impacted immediately and get impacted a lot because they just have a food value proposition, and so they actually lose quickly on the back of that discounting.
But just to follow up on that, should we assume that the run rate that you've seen so far in Q1 is in line with your full year guidance, better, worse? I appreciate that Ramadan is going to make all of Q1 noisy, but it should be fairly clean up until now.
Yes, absolutely. So I think the guidance is also built on the latest trends that we are seeing in January and February.
Okay, thanks.
Thanks, Andrew.
Great. Thank you, Andrew. Next question from Maxim Nekrasov at Citi. Go over to you.
Yes, good afternoon. Thank you so much for the presentation and for providing a very realistic guidance. I just wanted to ask a couple of questions. So the first one, obviously, we, you know, we talked a lot about the KeeTa expansion, a lot of markets, but I think in the presentation you also mentioned talking about the growth expectations about the incumbents. So I just wanted to, if you can provide any color on the incumbent activity and how it has changed and evolved over the past year. And the second question is about the regulation that was, you know, that has been discussed quite a lot.
But well, in case that regulation is enforced in a lot of the markets, what is actual impact should be, even assuming, let's say, the gross margins would be, let's say, 0, right? It can go below 0 on the order. Is it rational to assume that like, the new entrants can double down on, let's say, marketing spend or just operate with a 0 gross margin for some time? Just would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.
Look, I think on the regulation, maybe I'll answer it differently. Today, there is a 50%-70% discount, which is quite steep and tempting people to try that out. Going to 0% gross profit is a radical change from that. So even if there are then ways where you can still spend on marketing, it would shift the behavior because you can't be offering these type of discounts anymore, right? So I think within the other ways to then push marketing, growth will still be hurt very much for them. That's my initial reflection on that. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think probably your first question was around the behavior of the new entrant. Just to clarify, we are competing with them less than one year, right? So you mentioned one-year entrant. They've been competing in our market since September last year.
No, more of incumbents. So existing players like Careem and Noon, and so on.
Look, the place you mentioned is very UAE-focused. What we see in most markets is the players that are food players without groceries ecosystem, they get hurt the most. That's one. Two, the players who are already quite discount active, let's say, get hurt the most. And what some of these players have done, especially here, they raised more money to be able to also offer these discounts, right? So I think that is a bit what-
Yeah
... what we've seen.
Understood. Thank you. And maybe just the final on my side, just on the Talabat pro investments that you mentioned. So what kind of enhancements to the program are planned, and whether you plan to be more aggressive, let's say, in terms of maybe lowering the price of the subscription or giving out, let's say, longer free trial or so on? Yeah.
So the pricing is not the immediate lever we look at to increase the ROI for the lower frequency customers, but we are thinking on how we can add more value into the program. Today, the program is partner-funded, in the future, if we grow it further in GMV, we might need to create a different structure there. So that's one. Two is bringing that additional value. We're also doing a lot of work through partners. We've done OSN, we've done Bolt. But we need to do structural, more deeper solutions there, which we then should also support with marketing, et cetera, to get off the ground. So that are a bit the investments we wanna do there, not necessarily change in pricing. Because today, for example, the ROI is already extremely good.
Great. Thank you, Maxim. Next question from Elena Jouronova at JP Morgan. Over to you, Elena.
Yes, hello. Thank you. I would like to go back to your GMV guidance for 2026. Quite honestly, considering the amount of margin investment you're doing in the business, 11%-14% sounds very low. Could you please break it down by your core food delivery in GCC, then non-GCC, and give us some idea about what kind of growth you expect for your 3P grocery business and 1P?
Look, let me maybe start with clarifying one point, 'cause these investments, the big chunk of it won't deliver growth now.
Mm-hmm
... let's talk about TMart. We got full coverage today, so we serve all customers already very fast. The fact that we're building additional stores will actually initially just dilute that growth or these orders over more stores. This is to cope with the capacity for the future, but today, these investments, they don't immediately deliver growth. So if you look at the 75, and you wanna see growth in that in 2026, it's growth that will come afterwards.
Mm-hmm.
If you then look at the investments that we do make this year, $50 million on competitive environment, look, that's a bit the continuation of, of the Q4. So I just wanna call that out because the investments we do are not that, significant as it might seem initially.
Yeah, just to add to what Toon mentioned, and we—to reiterate what we also mentioned earlier, you have to take into consideration the impact of InstaShop, which is around 2 percentage points for 2026, and also the fact that we've seen these economic headwinds in Kuwait and Qatar, which is also large markets we have. Kuwait is probably the second largest market we have, right? So all of this is taking into consideration. I think lastly, the most important, we are still adding more than $1 billion in terms of growth. So really, it's just a normalization we are—because we are growing from a much larger base.
Our GMV for last year, inclusive of InstaShop, is around $10 billion, and now we're growing to around $11.5 billion, if you look at the top of the range.
No, that's okay. Let's just, like, break it down by verticals. This is quite important. So fine, e-grocery, 1P versus 3P. You just mentioned that 3P does not seem to be working as successfully, so probably growth below what you've guided for, you know, the overall GMV. Then what about 1P, where you're investing? Can you give us your expected 3-year CAGR in this business? What kind of market share do you want to achieve? I do think we need some more color about what these investments in the groceries are gonna bring, if not this year, but then down the line. That's, that's kind of the first question, and then let's move to food delivery. Let's just first start with the grocery.
I just wanna clarify one thing, because the 3P is not growing very fast in Dubai, but that's just Dubai, which, whereas InstaShop, we have this business in many other markets, and for us, it's still growing very handsomely, right? So I just wanna call it out that it's not-
Mm
... confusing the message that 3P doesn't work, because 3P definitely works, and we also still see potential to expand that beyond the groceries and different verticals.
Yeah. And I think, Elena, listen, I understand your, your question, but unfortunately, we will not provide guidance by vertical or by country, we provide guidance at, at the group level. But if you look at the proxy, if you look at Q4, for example, it's, it's fair to see that the food deceleration because of the, because of the headwinds and because of the intensity. But the grocery business, which is one third of the business, is still growing fast, and all these investments would come beyond 2026.
Fast, like what? Can you quantify? You understand this is incredibly important. You see the share price.
We totally understand, but we can't provide guidance by vertical at this stage.
Fine. Let me ask another question on the core food delivery vertical. I've tried doing some ballpark math to come out with, you know, the 11% GMV growth guidance, and what I'm coming out with is around 5 to, I don't know, 5, 6, 5, 7% growth in GCC for food delivery, whereas the market probably grows 10%, with 5% population growth, give or take. What is your strategy? Are you protecting the market share? Are you happy to lose some market share? Are you generally fine with these kind of growth rates in GCC, or am I wrong and, in fact, the composition is different-
So-
And you probably expect to grow faster than 5%-7% in GCC, without Egypt?
Our strategy is to continue focusing on these high-value customers and to not buy orders at any cost.
Mm-hmm.
If that means losing some low-value customers, then that is okay. We continue focused on the high, and to some extent, the mid-segment customers, not just retaining them, growing them, growing their frequency over time. So that is our approach, and I think it's very well reflected in Q4, what we have done in Q4. I think when we look at the market, these headwinds macroeconomically that Khaled mentioned, will impact the yearly growth rates for the whole market quite significantly.
So you think the market is going to grow what in your core markets, GCC? What, what's the market growth you're penciling in, in your guidance for 2026?
So, sorry, the overall market growth.
Food delivery.
Food delivery.
Mm-hmm.
So for GCC, the food delivery market will grow less than 10%, is what we are expecting. And it depends on how, which markets you include. If you include Saudi as well, it's there. If you don't include Saudi, it's probably lower. Yeah.
Well, you're not in Saudi, so we really care about the rest. All right-
Saudi is the fast-growing market because the penetration is still very low compared to the other markets.
Can you please remind me, sorry, final question, on the e-grocery side, how do you see your margin build up with all of the investments, the growth in the market? Like, you know, over the next three years, where do margins for your 1P grocery go?
Sorry, Elena, can you clarify what do you mean by 1P grocery? The local shops, you mean? The-
Yeah. I mean, your dark stores when you own the inventory.
Dark stores.
Yes.
I mean, in general, if you look at the vertical. Let me talk about the vertical mix. In, in 2025, you'll see there is probably 0.2%-0.3% impact in the margin because of the growth of both the 1P and the 3P together, which they are growing at a similar, at similar pace. For 2026, we are expecting around 0.2%. If we are modeling maybe for the future, I think it's fair to assume similar mix, because both the 1P and 3P would, would continue growing, growing at a faster pace.
But something that, on that profitability that I want to highlight is this ad tech, right? In UAE, it's already at 7%, but today we're doing that with tools which are good, but not great. So we're investing quite a lot of resources, teams, engineers, to build the ad tech products really for that vertical. And this is something where today it's already at 7% for UAE. We see significant growth opportunity there, which will drive that margin better.
Okay. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Elena. All right, I think we've come to the top of the hour. I know there are some other questions still in the queue, but I'm afraid we'll have to cut it short just to stick to the time. So again, thank you, Toon and Khaled, for all the time here, and if you do wish to ask further questions, do reach out to us in the IR team at ir@Talabat.com. So with that, we'll say see you next time, and thank you. Have a good day.
Thank you.
Thank you.