Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first Capital Markets event. It's a pleasure to have you all with us today. I am Tomaso Rodriguez. I'm the CEO of Talabat, and I'm pleased to have also the Talabat management here with me in Dubai, who will be providing you insights on this incredible business and future ambitions. I'll just start by introducing myself. As I said, my name is Tomaso Rodriguez. I've been the CEO at Talabat for the last five years, but I have around 12 years of experience in this industry. Before Talabat, I was at Grab. I started the Grab Food vertical in Southeast Asia, scaled it over 250 cities. And before Grab, I was at Uber, started as a launch lead in Europe in the ride-sharing business in 2012, and then became general manager of Italy and Greece.
And then in 2015, moved to Singapore to launch this new thing that was coming up back then that was called Uber Eats. Launched it across 13 markets in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. And I'm very excited to be here today. Before I introduce the management team, who will be here with me today, please take a second to familiarize yourself with this disclaimer. You'll also find it in the document that is available on the Delivery Hero IR website. The management team will introduce themselves in a short bit, but let me just talk about them a little bit. I think we have with us today Khaled, who's our rock-solid CFO. He's my partner in crime, and he's been driving Talabat performance over the last eight years. Then we have Jérémy, who's our CBO. He's been with Talabat for four years. He's a fantastic operator.
His dedication to growth and to serving our customers is second to really no one. And then we have Yi-Wei. He's so committed to Talabat that he asked me to make sure I say he's been here for four and a half years and not four years. And he's an inspiring product leader with strong commitment to customers and a big passion. And lastly, we have Wassim. Wassim has been with Talabat for seven years. He brings a lot of energy and enthusiasm to the conversation. He comes with a wealth of knowledge when it comes to grocery and retail, and he's always ready to roll up his sleeves and has a get-things-done attitude. We have a full afternoon ahead of us, and myself and these leaders will guide you through our journey and our future ambitions.
So in terms of agenda today, I will take you through a brief introduction of the company and key highlights. Then Jérémy is going to talk about the category, and then we're going to talk about products and service offering. We're going to have a short break, and afterwards, Yi-Wei, Wassim, and Khaled and Jérémy again will talk about more product and offerings in the market. Finally, I will talk about the management and ESG commitments, and last value, long-term value creation, and Khaled will wrap up with financials. At the end of the day, we're also going to have a Q&A session. So please, for the ones joining through our tool, you can submit your questions already now, and we will answer them at the end of the presentation. So let's start and dive deep into the company.
I think what really sets us apart, at least visually, is our color. Whenever you think of Talabat, whenever you look throughout from Oman to Egypt, you always see this splash of color in all the cities we operate in. And that's why we like to say we are the orange ones. Every kid in all the countries in our region, when they see orange, they think of food, they think of Talabat. At the same time, we're born and raised in this region. We've been around for more than 20 years, and that's why we like to say that we proudly deliver to the region that delivers. In terms of footprint, we're present in eight countries today, around GCC, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq. We do around $6 billion of GMV as of 2023, across two main channels: food delivery, grocery, and retail.
Few numbers to put Talabat in perspective. As I said, we are the largest platform in the MENA region, 6.1 billion GMV in 2023, but growing at a super, super fast pace. Our CAGR in the last eight years has been of 51%. At the same time, we have a very attractive margin profile, roughly 7% free cash flow in H1 2024, and we are highly cash generative. More than 90% conversion between adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. When it comes to Talabat's history, as I said, we've been around for around 20 years. We were born in 2004 in Kuwait, and I think the key highlight of this slide is really to show how our growth has been very organic. We expanded into new countries, we expanded into new verticals, slowly, little by little, and our growth has been compounding over the years.
If you see, it took us 14 years to get to 100 million lifetime orders, but at the same time, as of last year, we do more than one million orders a day, so this means that this growth is compounding over time, and we built very, very strong foundations to our business, so why do we believe this is a great company? There are seven main reasons. The first one, we operate in a very big market, and this market is also expanding very fast. Second one, we are the clear leader in every single market we operate in, and we have quite a big distance between the second player in every market, and this is important because this business comes with great network effects. The more you grow, the more these network effects kick in, and we are multi-vertical.
We don't just do food, we also do grocery, we do retail, and we have a subscription program that ties everything up together. We have great tech. Anyway, will talk more about it, and fantastic financial profile, and Khaled will talk more about it. And also, we have a clear strategy for our future, both in terms of growth and expansion of margins. So when we think about the market, why do we say it's very large and expanding? I think I like to reference to the market with a bit of a personal anecdote, probably. When I was a kid, I would just sit with my family at dinner around the table. My mom would cook, and you would either eat what she's cooking or you would go straight to bed.
I think modern families in this region, particularly, are just used to everybody placing their own orders and sitting together at the table, but everybody's eating their own thing, and I think in new generations, it's just so ingrained to them to take out a phone out of their pocket, push a button, and get something delivered. And this is different from probably my generation where we didn't grow up like this, and newer generations are so used to it already, and as these new generations come to fruition of these products, the markets will grow more and more and more in the future. The other reason about this region, why is it so fantastic for this kind of business, that urbanization rate is extremely high, 92%. The population is very young, like 72% of our population is below the 48 years of age, and internet penetration is extremely high.
Also, this region is super bound to convenience. People like to get things delivered, and there's an attention to the customer needs to make sure that we bring more and more convenience over time. In terms of category position, as I said, we're present in eight markets in the region, and we like to define our relative category share. So what I mean by that is that we are number one player in every single country we operate in. And by relative category share, we define the size, how many times are we bigger than the second player in that market. And as you see in this chart on the left, we're on average 3- 10 times bigger than the second player in every single market we operate in. And why is this important? Because it comes with very strong network effects.
So in a marketplace business like ours, it all starts with the partners. You start acquiring partners because this is the reason why customers will come to you in the first place. It's the same reason why someone will go to Netflix or Amazon Prime because they find the series of the movie that they like. At the same time, the more partners you acquire, you will acquire more customers. But then the more customers you have, the more partners will want to join your platform because they know you are the ones with the largest share of customers. And the more customers you have, the more orders go through your network, and the more riders you need. And the more riders you have, the more efficient fleet you have, the lower the cost to deliver your food, and the better the service to the customers.
As you grow, this network effect keeps expanding, the flywheel keeps turning, and this generates a very, very strong competitive advantage. When it comes to the value proposition we offer to our customers, I've always been told that to build a fantastic business, you need three things. One is product, the second one is operations, and the third one is marketing. And it has to be in this specific order. You can have a fantastic product, so-and-so operations, so-and-so marketing, and still make it. But if you have a bad product, good operation, and good marketing, you will not make it. And the fantastic thing about Talabat is we are excellent in all of them. And the reason being, we've been doing this for the last 20 years, and we've been building our selection over time, and our selection is really our product.
Our product is what we offer to the customers and means how many partners and what variety of partners do you have on your platform, so we have the largest selection in the region. In terms of operations, I'm talking about our riders on the ground and our fleet. We have the most efficient fleet on the ground, the largest fleet, and a very rapid and reliable service, and when it comes to marketing, we also have the best deals and discounts and opportunities for our customers, and the reasons we have that, while being the largest player, is that partners on the Talabat app, they know that the best way to grow is to funnel deals and discounts and affordability to our customers. That's why in the last 12 months, our partners have invested around $380 million in deals and affordability to our customers.
That's something you can have when you are the biggest and you provide real value to our partners. What is the result in terms of performance and acceptance of our products from our consumers? If you look at our cohorts, our group of customers since 2019, you'll see that every single year, our cohorts order more and more on Talabat. The 2019 cohort ordered twice the amount of food in 2020, 2.7 times in 2021, and so on and so forth. The even more interesting part is the chart on the right that shows you that our cohorts are accelerating over time. It took only 12 months for a 2023 cohort to reach the same number of orders that a 2018 cohort reached in around 36 months. That shows that the business is growing better every single year with better offering and better customer value proposition.
When it comes to partners, as I said, we're very obsessed by the number of partners on the platform. We believe selection, selection, selection is to food delivery as location, location, location is to real estate. So that's why we've been relentlessly onboarding new and new partners over the years. Between 2019 and today, our partner selection on the platform has been growing by 4.4 times. And also when it comes to local shops, we've been growing from 300 local shops to 9,300. What do these partners want mostly from us is growing. That's the one thing they most care about. That's why we built all this sort of ad tech services that we're going to talk about at length later on in the presentation that provide a great ROI to our partners. For every dollar they spend on our platform, they get on average $5 back today.
The third pillar of our ecosystem is our riders. We have the largest fleet on the ground, around 115,000 riders on the Talabat platform. These riders are mostly employed through a third-party logistics company, 90% of them are employed through a third-party logistics company, and in some markets like Egypt and Jordan, we have a freelance model for the remaining 10% of the riders. Riders have full flexibility and control over the schedule, but I think the one most important thing we care a lot about at Talabat is really safety, so we have category-leading safety kits for our riders. We go above and beyond what our regulations ask us to do in every market we operate in, and we build our own telematics system, which we're very proud about. The telematics system tracks the rider behavior on the road.
If the rider speeds too much or if they brake too much or they bend too much and things like that, and gives them a score at the end of every shift. If the score is high enough, they will get a bonus in their monthly payout. Another fantastic aspect of our business is that we are a multi-vertical business. In 2019, we decided to launch a new vertical that was called grocery and retail. What we observed over the years is that when a customer is a food-only customer, they place on average 3.8 orders on our platform per month. When a customer becomes multi-vertical, they start placing 13 orders per month on our platform, and this increasing frequency doesn't only come from the additional grocery order they place.
Most of it comes from more food orders, so meaning that the platform becomes more sticky and the frequency of the customer increases. On top of that, we have a subscription program that provides a lot of value to the customers that subscribe to it. Whenever someone signs up to Talabat Pro, their frequency increases by more than 20% on top of that. So we talked a bit about grocery and retail and as we'll talk at length about our offering there. But I just want to give a quick introduction to the vertical. We have two models we operate with. One is Talabat Mart, and the other one is what we call local shop. Talabat Mart is our own dark store offering. We have around 129 stores across the region. We deliver 24/7 in less than 30 minutes.
This is focused on your convenience buying and your weekly buying. This business has been doing phenomenally over the years, growing at a 76% CAGR in the last couple of years with the high gross margin, but also profitable on an EBITDA level. We actually are 2% EBITDA as a total region, Talabat Mart, and the best-in-class country is doing 8% EBITDA margin. We believe there's great opportunities to increase margins in this business, and we'll talk more about it, especially when it comes to fresh imports and white labels. On the other side, we have the local shop business. It's a marketplace business where we onboard grocery companies, flowers, health and beauty, specialty stores, and things like that. We have 9,300 partners on the local shop vertical. Also, this business is growing fantastically at a 64% CAGR in the last few years.
We're going to talk also about technology. Anyway, we'll expand more around it, but I would just say that we have a fantastic consumer app that everybody knows in the region, but this app is also powered by other apps like our rider app, our partner app, and our picker app, and everything is tied together by our data, and we are relentlessly focused on using our data to improve our technology every single day. Just as an example, we're able to predict our forecast of number of riders that we need in every single area of the city and every single time of the year with a very, very, very great accuracy thanks to the 20 years of data that we have around that.
And these are just a few examples on things that we've been doing in the last couple of years using more data manipulation tools like machine learning, AI, etc. We've been focusing a lot on personalization of the app to make sure it's crafted around every single person's needs. These personalization efforts brought us more than $40 million incremental EBITDA. As I said, we have this telematics solution for rider safety, which we're very, very proud about, that improved our rider's safety score massively. And lastly, we have state-of-the-art fraud control tools that prevent any abuse of our app. We have two R&D centers, one in Dubai, one in Cairo, around 440 product and tech-strong team. Khaled would also touch base on our financials, but let me tell you that Talabat has been building a very attractive financial profile over the years.
The great thing about Talabat, and it has been a consistent thing over the last 20 years we've been operating in the region, is that we've been focusing both on growth and profitability at the same time. If you see in the last two years, we've been growing at a 24% CAGR, and this year also, we're growing at a 23% year-over-year rate in the first half of 2024. At the same time, we've been producing 300 million of cash flow in 2023, and this year, we are increasing our cash flow projections by 64% in H1 2024 versus H1 2023. The last part we're going to touch base on is what do we have for the future?
And I think all the management team is really excited about the business that we've been building so far, but we're even more excited about the opportunities that we have for the future. The first one is growth of the market. We believe these markets will grow a lot in the years to come because we have these powerful tailwinds of new consumers coming to fruition and expansion into the addressable population. The second one, we want to deepen our category penetration, both on grocery and retail, but also new verticals. The third one is loyalty. So we want to turbocharge our loyalty products. It's growing very well so far, but also we want to there are a lot of initiatives that we want to pull for the future. And lastly, supply partnerships.
We, especially when it comes to ad tech, ad tech is a business that is going to grow a lot in the next years to come and that we believe is going to be a massive contributor to the bottom line. When it comes to category penetration, when you look at the region we operate in, we are around 150 million people served in the Talabat markets, of which we define addressable population roughly 71 million. If you remember from the slides before, our current monthly active users is just 6 million. So you see that there's a massive, massive opportunity to penetrate here. If you divide the number of orders that we do today by these 71 million people, you see that on average, we do 0.42 orders per capita per month.
Given that people eat three times a day, the headroom here is really 90 orders per capita per month. And even if you believe this is unrealistic that people will order three times a day, if you take a massive haircut to that and you say it's 20, it's still a 50x compared to where we are today. And this is just food. Then when you think about groceries, we're just about 1% penetration in the grocery business. And also new verticals and additional verticals we want to serve and we're already serving is just about 1% penetration. So there's a massive headroom to grow on the grocery retail part as well. The second piece of growth is going to come from our fintech and loyalty offering, our ecosystem offering. We are very excited about these two products, specifically Postpaid and Talabat Pro.
Khaled and Jérémy are going to talk more about them later, but I want to just give you a couple of highlights. Postpaid is a product that allows customers to pay for their food 30 days later from when they place the order. A lot of people ask me, "Why would you do that? Food is such a small ticket." But actually, what we really observed is that the week before pay week, there's a little reduction in demand of our orders. And as we rolled out Postpaid, we see that the customers using Postpaid, they increased their frequency by 14%, and our pay week cyclicality has been smoothened out. It's a fantastic product. It's a profitable product. We have an in-house scoring system.
We capture a lot of data on the customers, so we're very good about when it comes to scoring and understanding which customers are creditworthy or not. It solves a really big problem in the region, which is access to credit. Only 50% of the customers in our app pay using debit cards and don't have a credit card on file. We believe there's a fantastic opportunity to grow the business. It's only 2.2% penetration as of July 24, and it's growing at 250% CAGR. On the other side, you have loyalty. Loyalty is our Talabat Pro offering. It offers free delivery and other benefits to the customers who subscribe. It's also growing fantastically. It's like 130% on a CAGR basis. A customer that joins Talabat Pro increases their frequency by around 22%.
The great thing about this program is that it's a profitable program because the vast majority of the benefit on the Talabat Pro ecosystem are funded by the partners. Penetration of Talabat Pro is just about 7.6%, and when we compare ourselves to our global leading peer benchmarks like in the U.S., that should be around 48%, so we have ample headroom to grow the program. The last piece is our ad tech business, and it's a part I'm very, very excited about. If you look at our ad tech revenue, they've been improving from $84 million in 2021 to almost $200 million in 2023, but the even more exciting piece is that as percentage of GMV, these have been growing from 2.1%-3.2%. This meaning that ad tech is growing at a faster pace than our platform business.
When we compare ourselves to leading players in the ecosystem, we see that they have around 7% ad tech over GMV penetration, and that's what we're aiming for as well. There are several things we want to do to improve and to grow our ad tech penetration. One is automation, more automated tools to reach the long tail. Second one, more targeting. The vast majority of our ads today are not targeted, so targeted ads demand higher price and better ROI. Last one is algorithm efficiency, improving our bidding capabilities and things like that. The good news is that when it comes to partners, as we've been working relentlessly on these things, you see the acquisition cost for our partners has been reducing over the years.
As of today, for every single dollar our partners invest on the Talabat ad tech platform, they get $5 back in revenues. Just as a recap, we're operating in a super large and expanding market. We're a clear leader in every single market we operate in, and we have quite a big gap compared to the second player. We have powerful network effects, and we are a multi-vertical business, food, grocery subscriptions, amazing tech, very attractive financial profile. Lastly, we know what we want to do, and we have clear plans for growth of top line and expansion of margins. With that said, I will pass it over to our fantastic CBO, Jérémy.
Hi, everyone. My name is Jérémy Doutté, and I am the Chief Business Officer of Talabat. I started my career in 2006 at McKinsey & Company, where I spent four years.
After that, I had the amazing opportunity to build Jumia across Africa, where I stayed for seven years. We took the company IPO in 2019. Little did I know when I joined Talabat in 2020 that four years after, we would go through the same journey again. The reason why I joined Talabat in 2020 is because I love the service, and my family, my wife, and I were using the service so much. I also thought that my e-commerce background could maybe help building a slightly better service and a slightly better product. I also believed that the service had a great future in this market. I believe this market is very prime for the service that we deliver, and this is what I would like to cover with you now.
I believe indeed that we operate in a cheaper market, and I believe that in the years to come, these markets in the GCC region and in the non-GCC region are going to expand at a very rapid pace. Indeed, we do benefit from very attractive macro tailwinds. First and foremost, population. Population is a key driver. Our population has been growing very fast over the past few years, four times faster than that of Western countries. And the future is bright. In the years to come, we still expect that population to grow at twice the pace of the other countries. We also operate in markets where the average disposable income is very high. We also expect that disposable income to grow at about twice the pace of that in the Western countries. So we believe that we have so much headroom for growth in this market.
Also, two facts I would like to mention, which are not covered in those slides, but which are a reality for the people living in our region. First, we live in big cities, and they expand very fast. As I said, the population is growing very fast. So traffic is building up across our cities. What used to be a short drive to the mall or to the supermarket can now regularly become a 40-minute adventure. Second, people in the region value convenience, and people in the region are ready to pay for convenience. This is why Talabat plays such a crucial role in the life of my family and the life of the families around us and of so many people in the region.
So the more I focus on our mission, the more I think about what we do, the less I believe that actually we just deliver food. The job to be done is not only to be delivering groceries or retail products. I believe that the problem we're solving is to deliver convenience day in, day out to the people in our region. We also believe from other amazing demographics, which are really like a tidal wave carrying us out. First and foremost, our population, 71% of our population, is less than 40 years old. Everyone knows that those users are heavy users of technology and digital services that we deliver. Second, our population is very connected. 99% of our users actually are connected to the internet. And last but not least, our population is very urban. In a nutshell, we are very fortunate to have a population of digital natives.
This gives us so much headroom for growth. How much growth are we going to ask? How much growth? Well, we believe that our markets are vastly under-penetrated, and we believe that the headroom for growth is massive. In 2023, Talabat delivered $4.8 billion of GMV in food services. While this number is fairly material, this is just a 22% penetration of what we believe is the market. And that market is going to grow at a 14% CAGR in the years to come. While I'm truly excited by the opportunity in food services, we are even more excited by the opportunity in retail. In 2023, Talabat delivered $1.3 billion of GMV in grocery and retail. This is just a small 1% penetration compared to the total addressable market. We've been operating in the region for the past 20 years. We started in Kuwait 20 years ago.
Over the past 20 years, we have built what we believe to be one of the best, largest, most engaged, and digital active consumer bases across the region. The customers have been using Talabat for 20 years. They trust Talabat. They use Talabat, and they're loyal to Talabat. This is why my colleague Wassim, who is SVP of Retail and Groceries, and I focus a lot of our time, attention, and energy into exposing more of our customers to the retail and grocery services so that we can increase our share of wallets. Only 31% of our customers today, only 31% of the 60 million users that we have actually are multi-vertical users, which means that they use food and retail and grocery. We really believe that the potential for growth is massive.
We are all the more optimistic that the online penetration in grocery in our region stands at a small 3.5%, while the penetration in the U.S. is of 10.1%, and the penetration in China is of 13.2%. We believe that by applying a playbook, leveraging our scale, and continuously improving the customer experience, we can easily get to this benchmark. So this is a very important slide. We operate across eight markets: UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, and what we're essentially saying here is that in every market in which we operate, in every vertical in which we operate, either food services, grocery, or retail, we're the leading player, and we're the leading player by a wide margin. We sometimes, like in Oman, are 10 times bigger than our second largest competitor across both food services and grocery and retail. That means that our playbook works.
We focus on selection. We focus on experience, and we focus on value, and by constantly delivering on that value proposition day in, day out across all our markets, we can build those amazing category shares. There are actually three comments I want to make on this slide. The first one is, while actually I believe that those category shares are quite impressive, we actually are the only true regional player at scale. None of our competitors across the region actually operate at scale in more than two markets, two out of eight, while we are actually the leaders across those eight markets. Second, Talabat is actually an amazing turnkey solution for any brand which wants to grow into the region. We're currently talking to a lot of brands which are currently not present and operating in those eight countries, but they want to enter into those countries.
So they reach out to us because they know that if they want a platform to grow, if they want to hire a catalyst for growth, Talabat is going to get the job done. We also have examples of other companies, like in the UAE, which are currently operating. We have great relationships with them, and they want to expand. Every brand wants to expand. And so they talk to us in order to get intelligence, insights, and recommendations about which country to expand and how to expand, and we help them to do that. Last but not least, we also have examples of other brands in Egypt, in Kuwait, which also want to expand and come to the UAE.
Yet again, we can act as consultants, giving them an opinion about the relevance of their cuisine, the relevance of their meals, and what are the best locations for them to set up operations. What I want to say as well is that we believe that the potential in non-GCC countries, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, is massive. Look at this. The population, the total addressable population in this region, non-GCC, is three times higher than that of the GCC region. Also, the monthly orders per capita is 10 times less. This is, of course, normal because we've been opening those countries at the latest stage in the history of Talabat. But we highly believe that we can do at least as good as a job in those countries, which means that the headroom for growth in those markets is at least 30x.
Now, let me deep dive into the GCC countries. While we have built a large leading platform in the GCC countries, we believe that there is ample room for growth. This market is amazing, but look at that. We expect the markets to grow at a 7.8% CAGR in the years to come, achieving an amazing size of over $100 billion. I did mention before that we benefit from a fast-growing population in those markets, and this is true. Look, we believe that from 2015 to 2028, we're going to grow the total addressable population by about 25%, from 20 million customers to 25.5 million customers. But on top of that, we believe that we can increase the depth, the depth of our penetration.
We did mention that Talabat has convinced over 6 million customers across all regions to use the platform, but there will be 25 million customers in the region by 2028. We believe that by deploying a playbook, we can push even further the adoption of our services, and we can convince more customers to join the platform. This is just the beginning. The second lever we have, of course, is to increase frequency. Despite our very high segment share, which we are leveraging a lot, we can grow our frequency a lot. As a matter of fact, this is what we've been doing. Our average frequency in the GCC in 2023 was higher than the average frequency in the GCC in 2022. Yet again, in 2024, the average frequency of our customers is higher than in 2023.
Now, if we double-click and if we look at the frequency, if we de-average of our 10th customer percentile in the GCC, meaning our top 10% customers, those guys already order on average more than once per day. It is my firm belief that those customers are not outliers. It is my firm belief that those customers are early adopters. They're just ahead in the adoption curve and that other customers will follow along the adoption curve if we do our job. What does doing our job mean? It means that we need to continue to apply our proven playbook across all our cities, across all our areas at a hyper-local level, focusing on selection, choice, value, and experience.
It means that we need to leverage a program that we've put in place in order to increase retention of our customers and increase frequency of our customers via our fintech and loyalty programs. And last but not least, it means that Wassim and I need to work harder, even harder on scaling the grocery and retail verticals and making sure that the share of multi-vertical users across the platform increases. While I'm truly excited by the potential of our GCC countries, I am equally excited by the potential of Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan, which are non-GCC countries. It is amazing to see that the size of this market will also reach $100 billion by 2029. Also, we see that our penetration of the market is overall across food services and grocery and retail overall three times less than that of the GCC.
Our current frequency is about 10 times less than that of the GCC. Some of those countries were launched only very recently. Talabat launched in Egypt in 2020. Talabat in Iraq launched in 2021. This explains why those numbers are lower than that of the GCC. We are just at the beginning of the story, but we know the playbook. We build the playbook. We use the playbook, and we execute on the playbook in the GCC, and it has worked. I am highly convinced by deploying the same playbooks, taking into account local differences, will take us there also in the non-GCC markets. So what are we going to do? What is the plan? First, we're going to keep deploying our proven playbook at a hyper-local level, focusing and leading on selection, experience, and value. Second, we're going to keep expanding our loyalty programs in other countries beyond Jordan.
Our loyalty program, tPro, is currently not launched in either Iraq nor Egypt. We're going to keep growing grocery and retail verticals in those countries, which are currently just at an early stage. Online payment adoption is a key factor here, and this is just the beginning of the stories in those countries. We do see that when our users are starting to use online payment services, the service becomes more convenient, and the frequency increases. We're working a lot to make sure that this adoption increases. Last but not least, we're going to leverage geographical expansion. There's still a lot of cities in those countries, especially in Egypt, large cities of 100,000, 200,000 people in which Talabat doesn't operate yet. We've been focusing on the larger cities in those countries to make sure that we would deploy our playbook and create the network effect, achieving the right scale.
But it is, of course, our plan to be expanding to those other countries in the future. I would like to just take a pause here and highlight one thing, which is that everyone will acknowledge that the UAE and Qatar are very different countries and very different terrains than Egypt and Iraq. Yet, I believe that it is quite incredible and quite impressive that our teams have been able to deploy that playbook very well, execute seamlessly, and become the number one platform in every one of those markets. It speaks to the very high versatility of the Talabat teams, may they be our regional teams or our country teams, and it means that we have done something right. We are the operating model to deploy the playbook in any market and succeed. I want to talk about our customers.
Tomaso mentioned earlier that we operate a three-sided marketplace, like a triangle: customers, riders, and partners. Within that three-sided marketplace, the customers are really the engine of the marketplace, the engine which powers the rest of the marketplace. Why? They bring the revenues, which makes the flywheel spin. So we do spend a lot of time trying to attract an even greater, larger number of customers. As a result, between January 2020 and July 2024, the number of monthly active users on the platform has been growing at a 25% CAGR. What is all the more impressive is that while we've been growing at an aggressive pace, the size of this customer base, we also have been able to grow the average revenue per users from $16.5 in January 2020 up to $37.9 in July 2024.
While we're super excited about those numbers, I would like to highlight again our potential for growth. We saw in an earlier slide that we believe that the total addressable population in our region is of 71 million, 71 million customers. We're currently at six. So the headroom for growth is really, really massive. How are we going to keep growing that base of active customers? First, as I said, 31% of our customers only use multi-verticals, meaning that they use both food, grocery, and retail. Last but not least, our tPro program, which is an amazing program to increase the frequency of our users and increase the retention of our users to the platform, is only at a 7.6 penetration rate, meaning that we have a lot of headroom for future growth.
Not only have we been able to increase the size of our user base, but we also have been able to increase the quality of this user base. This is basically what this slide shows. What this slide shows is that from 2019 to 2024, the size of the cohorts that we've acquired every year has increased. If you look at the top bar here, 2020 is bigger than 2019, 2021 is bigger than 2020, etc. Every year, the customers we acquire, the newly acquired customers, bring more to the platform than the previous year. Not only that, but the quality of this cohort, of a specific cohort, increases year-over-year. If you look for some of the cohorts of 2022 here in brown, you can see that in 2023, that cohort brings 1.9 times more GMV than in 2022.
And it grew again in 2024 because it brought 2x times the GMV in 2024 than it did in 2022. How have we done that? How have we achieved that? We spend a lot of time thinking about how to perfect our product, how to improve our value proposition. What is the value proposition? Well, essentially, it is selection, experience, and value. And while it is quite easy, I believe, to understand what our customer wants, it is actually operationally extremely hard to get it right. This is why so few companies have gotten this craft right, delivering the right value proposition around selection, experience, and value. So if we step back and we think about this, we think, "Okay, what do the customers really want? What really matters to them?" Really, the customers are asking three questions. First, do you have the restaurants that I crave?
Do you have the shops that I use? And do you offer the products that I like? Second, around experience, the question is the following. Do you offer me a great promise? And do I believe that you're going to deliver on this promise? Third, around value, the question is, "I work a lot, and I spend a lot of time at work to make money. It's hard-earned money. Are you going to deliver value for the money that I spend on Talabat?" And we believe that if we can answer yes to the three questions, if we deliver an amazing value proposition around the three dimensions, we can lead the market. This is what we've been really focusing on over the past 20 years, acquiring leadership across every dimension, acquiring leadership across every dimension in every country where we operate. Let me start by deep diving on selection.
Selection is super important. Selection, I believe, drives conversion, and conversion drives growth. This is why we've been focusing so hard on expanding our selection, both the quality and the quantity of the selection. Indeed, our selection has been growing at a 30% CAGR between January 2019 and July 2024. Selection is a very strong competitive advantage of Talabat's. Indeed, as I mentioned, we have very strong network effects. We have the largest volume through our category share. We have the largest selection, which means that we can make the marketplace work, which means that any new restaurant or any new partner which is going to join the platform knows that he or she is going to be able to feed into this ecosystem. It is a very hard competitive advantage to replicate for competitors which are much smaller than us.
As I mentioned, selection drives conversion, conversion drives growth, and this is what we see here. We've taken the liberty to illustrate that through two countries, Egypt and Iraq. In Egypt, the partners acquired to the platform in 2023 contributed to 15% of the GMV of Talabat in 2023. This is really an amazing number. The reason why we're super excited is because actually we've only acquired so far 9,000 restaurants and partners in Egypt, where we believe that the total addressable market is of 80,000 restaurants and partners. So we believe that we have massive headroom for growth when we're going to acquire this inventory and bring on board to Talabat. The story is the same and is similar for Iraq. 19% of our GMV in 2023 came from partners acquired in 2023.
We've acquired so far only 3,600 restaurants and partners on the platform, and we believe that there is a total inventory in the country of 19,000. So we believe that if we keep focusing on improving our selection, delivering a great experience to our partners, bringing them the business, we have so much headroom for growth for those countries. I chose those two countries because they're recently launched countries, so Talabat. But the reality is actually similar for all our other markets of operations, maybe in UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, but also in Jordan. So we believe that by pushing on this selection, acquiring more inventory, this will really drive so much growth for the business. The second deep dive I'd like to make is around customer experience.
Customer experience, I believe, if delivered consistently, a great best-in-class customer experience is the key to turning an experience into a habit. So this is the key for Talabat to unlock frequency. When the experience becomes great, we really see across every market where we operate that the frequency starts to increase at a rapid pace. So when we talk about experience, what do we talk about, really? Of course, there are so many metrics we can look at, but I believe that three matter only. The first one is the selection that the customers see in the app. When a customer opens the app, does he or does she see the restaurants that she likes and the quantity she likes? Second, the other important dimension is the speed.
We've seen over the past few years that customers really appreciate being delivered faster, so we have been working on decreasing this delivery time. Last but not least is the reliability. What is the percentage of orders on time that we deliver? In order to increase the selection between 2020 and 2024, we actually worked on slightly increasing the coverage, meaning the radius of delivery of our restaurants and partners. What is truly amazing is that over the past few years, we've been increasing those delivery distances while actually decreasing by 17% our average delivery time and increasing our orders on time by 16%. What is the result? The result is what you see actually on the right of the slide.
It is the fact that we have nearly divided by 50% the contact rate, which in a way you can assimilate and understand as the complaint rate of our customers. We have radically improved the experience of our customers across the region in the past five years. Last but not least is value. Value is really important. This is the savings that we can deliver to our customers. I don't know any customer who prefers to pay more than less, so we focus a lot into delivering value for our customers, and you can see at the top of the chart here that in 2023, we delivered 4.6% of savings over total GMV, while in H1 2024, we increased that number to 5.9%. What does this mean concretely for our customers? It means that over the past 12 months, we've delivered a staggering $380 million of savings to our customers.
Through our very high category position, through our very high market share across the region, we have effectively become the de facto partner for the restaurants and the retail shops to grow in the region. When we talk to them, they tell us, "Talabat is really the best opportunity, the best channel I have to grow." This enables us to secure a high amount of savings to our customers, so much so that a third of the orders today delivered on Talabat are discounted by our partners, and 71% of our partners actually offer discounts to our customers. So as we said, we've been focusing for 20 years on selection. We've been focusing for 20 years on experience. We've been focusing for 20 years on acquiring leadership on value, which has resulted in us becoming the leader in the region. How do we measure that?
We know that our NPS is 20% higher than that of other regional players, and again, I want to emphasize that only one of our competitors operates at scale in more than two markets, while we lead in every market in which we operate, so in eight markets. The survey we've run shows that users rank us number one for restaurant selection and customer experience, an amazing 87% for restaurant selection and 84% for customer experience. This translates into Talabat leading across the brand funnel, both for food delivery and for grocery delivery. We land in brand awareness. We lead in preference. We lead in usage, and we lead across the entire brand funnel. I will now hand over the mic to Tomaso, who is going to deep dive into the two other pillars of the three-sided marketplace, the partners and the riders. Thank you.
Thank you, Jérémy. I think as you can see, we're all extremely excited about future growth opportunities and serving our customers better, but I think what's really important is that we are in this together with our partners and our riders on the ground, and so we need to make sure that we constantly deliver value to them as well. Right? So when it comes to our partners on the app, you see that we have, as I said, 64,000 active partners on the platform, and they're very well distributed across different categories. Right? So on top of global leading restaurants like QSRs, we also have regional favorite restaurants, boutique restaurants, grocery, and retail branches. So we have a very not just kind of depth, but also breadth of selection for our customers. So what do partners really care about when they join the Talabat platform?
The first thing, they want to have access to a sales channel, right? The largest sales channel in the region. The second one, they want to make sure that once they join the platform, they can also grow on the platform. Right? And the last one is experience. Our restaurant partners and our retail partners, they really care about their products and the quality of their products, rightfully so. And so we have to make sure that we deliver on the promise that we give them. So talking about sales channel, why does it matter why Talabat is positioned for that? As we said, we have the largest active customer base in the region, and so we give access to this customer base to all the partners that come in. But at the same time, we are by far the largest player in all key markets. Right?
As we said, our category share is between 3-10 times bigger than our second competitor in every single market we operate in. And this means that by joining Talabat, a restaurant has access to a much larger customer base than other options they could have. At the same time, as Jérémy was saying before, we are the only player that truly operates regionally. We're present in eight countries, and this matters a lot to our partners because through Talabat, they can also think about expansion both in other cities or other countries throughout their journey. We cover 80 cities, and in the last part is really growing their business and making sure we provide them the tools to grow. And that's why we've been focusing a lot on our AdTech business and our AdTech products.
As I said, for every dollar that is invested in AdTech today, our partners on average get $5 back in revenues. Talking a bit about AdTech and about growth opportunity we provide for our partners, you see over the years we've been developing several different tools for our partners to grow. These tools have different objectives, whether a partner wants to acquire a new customer or whether they want to increase the frequency of their existing customers, or whether they want to reactivate some customers that stopped ordering from them. We provide the right tools. As you can see, in terms of returns, we provide very, very good returns for the money invested to our partners. In terms of adoption, we're still at very low adoption rates.
As I said before, our AdTech business is a $200 million revenue business, and if you look at adoption, the headroom to grow is really, really massive. At the same time, we see the frequency and adoption of products increasing over the years. On average, a partner in 2021 was using roughly about one AdTech product. Today, they're using on average 1.4. And as a total, as we said, our AdTech revenue moved from $84 million- $194 million. But the even more interesting factor is the penetration in terms of GMV, from 2.1%- 3.2%. As I said before, this means that AdTech business has been growing much faster than a platform business. And when we look at where's the headroom there, global leading players are already at 7% in terms of GMV penetration. These $194 million go straight into the bottom line.
So you see, as this business expands, the potential and the margin expansion is really huge. At the same time, we constantly ask ourselves, how are we bringing good value to the partners that invest in AdTech with us, and if you see the growth of orders coming from AdTech has been much faster than the revenue increase, this means that the ROI has been improving for our partners, so let me go through a couple of examples of how partners can grow using adtech at Talabat. This one player, they're a fairly large player, around 1.4 thousand daily orders. They haven't invested in AdTech until 2023. In May, they decided to start using our one product that is our cost per click advertising product, and then in October, they started using also a deal targeting product. You see, the growth has been fantastic.
From January 2023 to July 2024, they've been growing 36%, all mostly driven through ads. And not only that is fantastic, but also their acquisition cost has been reducing. As they started using deal targeting, so more targeted deals to specific customers, their acquisition costs for their customers have been going down. So you see how adtech products at Talabat can provide both growth and also efficiency in acquisition. This is another example of another player that's been with us for many years. In January 2022, they already had eight branches active on Talabat. They have very amazing shawarmas and local grills and local food. This case is a case of expansion. So we've been working with them to expand their footprint within the country and open new branches.
We're providing them data and insight and information to find the right locations and the right product market fit for their new branches. But also, we expanded together through kitchens. So we have several cloud kitchens around the region, and we help brands to expand into new locations through that. Today, they're present in four of our cloud kitchens. They've been expanding branches together. And if you see their growth between January 2022 and July 2024, they've been growing 9x on our platform. So this was a true partnership of the two brands working together to achieve a very ambitious growth target. Lastly, I think partners, as I said, care a lot about experience. Right? And the passion that our partners have for their food is really enormous. And I'm Italian. I know about food passion, and I think it's really remarkable how everybody loves and crafts their food. Right?
It's important, and we have a big responsibility towards our partners in delivering the same quality and the same experience that they want to provide as in dining to their customers at home. Right? So we need to make sure we provide that reliable experience. Not only do we do that, but we also provide our partners with a lot of tools to know whether they're doing good or not and what can they do to get better. Not only do we give them analytics to look at their final conversion, how many people look at their menus, how many people click in their menus, how many people add to cart their items, but we also help them strengthen their menu, like for example, changing pricing or changing pictures or giving them insights to solve customers' complaints in a better way, etc., etc.
And so we have programs to show our partners how good they are compared to what the customers' expectations are. Right? I think in general, when we look at how do we deliver this experience to our customers, we have on average a higher NPS compared to our other platforms in the region, 20% higher, very reliable delivery, fastest and biggest fleet on the ground. And as Jérémy showed, all our experience metrics keep improving every single year. Let's spend a bit of time now talking about riders. As I said before, our fleet has been increasing massively over the years. Today, there are 115,000 riders on the Talabat platform, 90% employed through third-party logistics companies. We focus a lot on rider satisfaction and rider happiness.
We believe that it's extremely important that everything that riders really care about is addressed, and we deliver on the promise to our riders as well. That's why we constantly monitor what we call the rider satisfaction score. Through our rider app, we interview on a monthly basis our riders, and we ask them if they're happy about the pay, if they're happy about the safety conditions, if they're happy about the overall environment, etc. And we make sure that the satisfaction score is always very high. By working proactively on all these factors, the average tenure of our riders on the platform has been increasing massively. From 2022, the average tenure of our rider on the Talabat platform was 33 weeks, and as of July 2024, it's 61 weeks. So what do riders really care about? I would say mainly three things: earnings, safety, and respect.
When it comes to earnings, they want to make sure that whatever they earn on the Talabat platform is fair and competitive versus other opportunities in the market, and our riders on the platform earn on average 1.2x more than other options, that the payments are fast and transparent, and we're ranked number one in terms of speed of payments. When it comes to safety, of course, we want to make sure we do everything we can to have the best safety for our riders in terms of equipment, in terms of technology, in terms of heat protection devices, etc., and lastly, in terms of respect, we believe it's very, very important that customers appreciate the riders and also partners appreciate the riders, and we have a professional environment.
So when it comes to earnings, we've been working a lot over the past years to improve our technology, our density, to make sure that the efficiency of every rider is maximized so that the riders don't wait, don't have wait times at the restaurants, for example, or they're not idle, they're not getting orders. So that's how we have very precise fleet forecasts. We have stacking algorithms, and we have operational excellence to make sure that those things are achieved. And the result of that is that on average, a rider earns 1.2 x what they earn compared to other riders in the region. Why is that important? Because our riders have an income from the platform, but they also have an upside from the tipping. Our customers are very generous in tipping.
They have a cost of living, but what we need to make sure is that they have enough money that they can remit to their families back home. And so maximizing the remittance opportunity is really what's important for the riders. At the same time, we're rated number one for our transparency and fast and reliable payment cycles to the riders. And also, we have the best attractive payment terms for third-party logistics companies. When it comes to safety, there are several areas, several pillars we invest in when it comes to rider safety. The first one is really the hardware. We have top-tier safety kits. We go above and beyond what governments require in every single country we operate in, accident and health insurance for the rider.
As I said before, this telematics system that tracks the rider behavior on the road and creates incentives to stimulate safe driving on the road. The second pillar is trainings. We have a comprehensive suite of training programs for the riders. We have virtual trainings and physical trainings. And whenever a rider goes below a certain safety score, we send them for a retraining. Right? Some of these trainings include, for example, defensive driving to make sure that the riders know how to behave in potentially difficult situations. And also, we have new onboarded riders trainings where, for example, new riders get to deliver on smaller areas so that they can get confident with the areas they're delivering. Last one is our summer initiatives. When the weather is more hot in the region, there are several initiatives we do to make sure that our riders are comfortable.
We have these UV-protecting windshields on the bike to avoid overheating of the phones so that this doesn't put the riders in a dangerous situation having to put the phone in the pocket, for example. We hand out kits of thermal bottles and other amenities that can help throughout the summer, and also we have several buses and solar-powered rest areas across the region to make sure that they are air-conditioned, where riders can find also water and snacks to make sure that they're safe throughout their journey. When it comes to respect, I think this is a very important pillar as well. The first one is we hold ourselves accountable to very high standards when it comes to compliance. We want to make sure that we have the best safety standards. All the documents are checked, right-to-work, background checks, etc., etc. We also have Team Patrollers on the ground.
Team Patrollers are usually riders that get promoted to this career advancement, and they are on the ground to help other riders if they have problems, if they need support, but also to check that they're wearing all the safety equipment and that the bikes are in good conditions, etc., etc. On the other side, I think we want to make sure that customers appreciate the riders, also partners appreciate the riders, and we've been building tools over the years to make sure that this happens. On the customer side, tipping is probably the biggest lever, and we make sure we showcase tipping on the app to make sure our customers generously tip the riders. On the other side, on the partners, we recently introduced a feature for the riders to rate the partners.
So if they had to wait too much, if they were waiting in a shaded area, if they had air conditioning, if they were offered a bottle of water, and things like that. So we know which partners treat the riders well and which not. And of course, we integrate that in our account management practices with the partners to make sure these metrics improve over time. Lastly, I think riders appreciate a lot our flexible working model, where they can book up to one week in advance their shifts, and they can also extend the shifts to boost their earnings. With that said, we're going to have a short break of around 10 minutes, and we'll come back later on our grocery section with Wassim. Thank you.
It's working? Yeah, so welcome back. Let me first start by giving you a bit of a background about myself, so I moved to Talabat seven years ago. I left the corporate world behind, which I've been working in for 13 years, leading groceries, commercial, supply chain, operations, marketing, and e-commerce, and moved to Talabat seven years ago. I was based in Kuwait, so I got to see the story of Talabat building up, and it's one of the stories that inspired me, and I took a decision back then. I want to be part of a tech company that's actually rewriting how consumers behave and how consumers order, so I took the big bet and joined Talabat back then.
I started as an MD of Kuwait, then became the regional MD for Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain, and helped accelerate the growth of these countries, and then moved into launching and scaling the grocery and retail business that I had historical experience working on, and we launched it from scratch to where it is today. I'll double-click on the grocery and retail business and start with why did we move into this space in the first place, so in 2019, as Tomaso mentioned, is where we launched and started thinking about grocery and retail. We were thinking, how can we be relevant to all the ways that people eat? We were very dominant in food. People trust ordering their food from us, and it only made sense that the next best bet is our grocery business.
And from the data that you've seen presented before, grocery as a business vertical is bigger than food. And we all know that's where a majority of families spend their money. You spend your money on your grocery needs more than you spend money on your restaurants and your food requirements. Plus, the younger generation that's beginning to emerge, they also want the same convenience that they've seen in food trickled down to groceries. They don't want to wait for next-day delivery of groceries or a couple of hours' delivery of groceries. They want that immediate gratification of, "I want it now, and it's delivered." And we were the first to pick this up, and we were the first to launch the dark store concepts in the MENA region we operate in and pick up on this trend and be where the customers expect us to be.
The results have been phenomenal. As covered, our frequency grew by 3x from you becoming a multi-vertical adopter. Our monthly spend was growing. We were gaining more share of wallet. The consumer spend grew from 54 - 221, i.e., by 4x. On top of that, we started to see the add-on effect of stickiness and retention. Retention rate grew by 31% because customers were more used to using our apps across multiple verticals, across multiple ecosystems. There is the side of what opportunity do we have in the market? In addition to what Jérémy covered around the tailwinds that really helped the region, there are specific tailwinds that favor the grocery business, which helped us even accelerate our growth even further. I want to bring out two of these. One is consumer profile, and second is the cultural and seasonal drivers.
What do I mean by cultural profiles? The MENA region is very unique to the family setup that we have. First, they're big families. Second, it has a lot of youngsters within the family. What does that mean to us? Big families means bigger basket sizes, means they tend to order not one or two apples, not one or two bananas. They order in bulk, which means bigger values in terms of share of wallet. Second, because they have a younger population, it's also a frequency game. Customers, young people, want to nudge themselves on a late ice cream at night or a snack or a beverage, which also helps drive frequency. So basically, we were merging the best of two worlds: big orders, bulky ordering, which helped benefit unit economics.
And then for the younger generation, the frequency, the sensation of, "I can get my product delivered in 20 minutes at my doorstep," also helped us with the frequency game. These two combined helped us to really gain a good share of wallet of the grocery needs. Second, I think a strong tailwind that we have is specific to the region. It's the cultural and seasonal drivers. What I mean by this is that we have two major events that happen throughout the year that are very grocery-focused, which are Ramadan and Back to School. And we see the entire baseline of grocery sales is being reset in these two major events that happen every year. And this shows that we are a foodie area. We're a foodie country, and it actually helps us accelerate our growth.
This is all on top of the headroom that we actually have, which was also covered. We only have 1% penetration of the grocery industry that's also increasing. On top of that, the population is increasing, so it gives us a lot of headroom to really grow and accelerate. And us being one of the first movers into this space actually gave us the advantage of building on that. Now, how do we do it? We've seen Jérémy and Tomaso talk a lot about a proven strategy that serves our customer needs. And it's no different in the grocery and retail business. You focus on the choice, focus on experience, focus on value. You deliver what customers expect from you. Selection for grocery and retail is to help customers find the products that they need with the right vendors. Groceries and retail is not 50, 60 products per menu.
You're talking about hundreds of thousands of products, so the choice is vast, and we need to double down on ensuring that if you want a product, you can find it on our own app, and that's what we did. We went after partnering with the right vendors, getting the right products at step one. Step two is the experience. You're going to see in the subsequent slides that a grocery delivery or retail delivery comes with its own complexities, i.e., it's not you cook the food, driver picks it up. There's a lot of things that go in the background for us to actually deliver a seamless experience, and that's where we doubled down on how can we move that into an opportunity, into an experience that customers love and drives stickiness to our app. Third is value.
Everyone talks about whether you are a high-income person or a low-income person, you care for value. You care to ensure that whatever you're paying for is the value that you anticipate out of the service, and in grocery and retail, it's even more important, so we focused a lot on building the right fundamentals, ensuring we have offline parity, ensuring we leverage all the personalization that we've done to make sure you have a tailored promotion. Because, as I said, hundreds of thousands of products, how do we ensure we show customers what's really relevant to them? It's no surprise that us doubling down on these three main pillars leads us to being the number one category position in the leading markets we operate in, growing at an astonishing CAGR of 130% year on year.
Most important, what excites me a lot is the last number on the right, which is 28% multi-vertical customers, which means that 28% of Talabat food customers have only become multi-vertical adopters, i.e., they're ordering beyond the food vertical, which means just by focusing on our own customers where they're interacting on our own app, we can simply 3x the growth of the business that we're doing. So I want you to think just of two numbers. We can 3x the growth on the Talabat platform. On top of that, we've only penetrated 1% of the grocery business that's also growing. So that's a phenomenal headroom we have to double down on these verticals and grow. Now, a bit of a step back and for us to look at what type of operating models do we have.
We're going after, when we say we want to win the grocery and retail vertical, it means we need to win it end to end. To do that, we came up with two complementary operating models. What are they? First, the Talabat Mart, as Tomaso covered, it's our own dark stores. We operate the experience end -to -end, and we focus predominantly on two things: speed, i.e., convenience. Second, choice that's relative to speed, which means your impulse products, your snacks and beverages, etc., and your weekly needs because that's what you consume on a higher frequency. We have 129 stores in the region. They're all leased, not CapEx-heavy. We focus a lot on driving a differentiated experience to the rest of the grocery business that we have. Local Shop actually comes and complements this, where we focus on choice. Here I'm talking about wider choice.
So we have more than 700,000 unique SKUs listed on our product, on our app, and it keeps growing. And these are delivered from more than 9,700 locally loved brands and locally loved shops that help us expand our choice to our consumer. So pillar one is we focus on choice. Pillar two, as I mentioned, is the last pillar, which is value and affordability. Where we stand today, we have a 25% promo penetration into our order. And the great thing about this, this is 100% either funded by the CPG brands themselves or funded by the vendors, which means we're able to drive value by leveraging the network of partners and CPGs that we have. And the way we see these two models working is they complement each other to cover more customer missions, be it your daily needs all the way to your replenishment stock-ups.
Hence, we will gain over time a bigger share of wallet of what the customers actually spend on our app. Now, we touched base earlier about operations. Pillar number two, what does it mean to deliver a great operation? So delivering out of grocery and retail comes with its own complexity. We mentioned a vast amount of SKUs. We also have different stores with different vendors with different formats. How do we actually pick the products? We're actually competing with offline stores where consumers come in. They pick the product. Inventory inaccuracy. So there's a lot of challenges that we have. And I wanted to pick a few just to give you a bit of a flavor around not the challenges, but the opportunity that us solving these unlocks in terms of growth. Pain point one is the selection. Hundreds of thousands of SKUs, thousands of vendors.
How do we make sure the partners find the right customers and the customers find the right partners? And that's where we've spent on discoverability tools around that. Second is actually basket building. When you walk into a physical store, things are properly merchandised. You get used to the layout of the store. It's easy for you to shop. But in a digital world, that's different. You have 200 categories, 100,000 products, each sorted in a different way. How do you enable consumers to build baskets seamlessly so it doesn't become a chore? It becomes something you enjoy in building your baskets. Third pain point is actually fulfilling the orders.
I don't want to ask how much of the audience has actually placed an online order and you want to do your pasta today and you order your ingredients, 10-15 products, and then upon delivery, you notice one or two is missing. That really ruins your experience because of the out-of-stocks that this industry actually faces. So how do we go about solving all of this? Last but not least is the delivery options. Because we care about our customer-first company, we want to make sure that we deliver an amazing experience better than what you would if you were to do it yourself. So if you were to order temperature-sensitive products, how do we handle it throughout? How do we make sure we pick the best fruits and vegetables?
How do we make sure we pick the long-dated products to make sure that it's similar to you actually picking these orders in the stores? So these are just some of the challenges that we face. We're going to take a few of them to give you a bit of a flavor around how we're problem-solving these and how they are adding value both to the consumers and also to Talabat's growth story. We'll start with the obvious one, which is actually out-of-stocks. I remember in the earlier days when we launched our grocery business, we were thinking about it similar to maybe closer to food. Coincidentally, I was in one of the partners' stores and an order comes in, and then the rider comes in to collect the order.
And then the cashier tells him, "Can you go and collect it from the shelf?" So I see our rider trying to find the products in our shelves, has no experience on grocery products, what they are, couldn't find the product out of stock. So this let us really rethink. If we really want to deliver a seamless experience, we need to do two things. We need to own the experience, one. Second, we need to leverage technology. How can we? We're a tech company. How can we actually deploy technology to help unlock these? So since then, we've invested a lot with our picker apps, end-to-end inventory integration.
We've leveraged the data that we have in terms of AI machine learning to start to predict out-of-stocks, work with partners improving their stock positions, and really went into the value chain to a degree where we provide our partners with important data around how to keep their offline stocks even available so that we can actually cater for the consumers, be it online and offline. The results have been phenomenal. A 45% reduction in out-of-stock. Because the reduction out-of-stock is there, customers trust our service more. We're more reliable. Hence, we see an increase in the reorder rate. Customers actually are coming back at a faster rate than historically speaking because we're solving a problem that in this industry exists. We're doing that being a tech-first company, leveraging our technology to make sure it's sustainable and it is scalable. Second challenge is around basket building.
You're going to see some examples here that are a bit anecdotal or a bit, sorry, a bit intuitive. Really, building a digital experience, often offline experience, is not as simple as just put the products on the app. It's done. I'll give you an example. You walk into a shelf, you want to buy a product. You'll see most probably all the variants of the products, all the different sizes, all the different flavors next to each other. As a consumer, it's easier for you to select because it's physically merchandised. In the digital world, that doesn't exist per se. You'd find different products in different pages. Searching, scrolling becomes a challenge.
That's where we developed, for example, variants, which allows you to, from just one screen, be able to identify different variations of the product, be it variations in size, in color, in flavor, etc. And the objective of this is how can we make your shopping experience seamless. By what I mean seamless is less time on the app because you're on the app for convenience. If it's going to take you the same amount of time to build your shopping basket on the app, you'd rather go and get it from a physical store and come back. But because we're convenience-focused, we want to make sure that even building your basket on a digital platform is as convenient as getting it delivered to you.
This, for example, when we did this, we noticed a good uplift in our basket sizes because it becomes easier for consumers to add their products. Another is weighables. You don't go to the store and say, "I want to buy 500 grams of bananas in multiples of three, i.e., 1.3." You don't think like that. You say, "I want to go buy 1 kilos of banana, 1 kilos of apple." If you look at the majority of e-grocery players, it's always in multiples. Why? Because picking in free weight is a challenge. So that's something, as an example, we put our head through. How can we unlock the freedom to buy the exact quantity and the exact weight that you need? Because we want to make sure we deliver, as I said, minimum, same offline experience. Our ambition is even a better digital experience than the offline world.
That's where weighables comes in. We want to make sure that we deliver an experience that is seamless, convenient. You build your grocery basket, you build your retail basket as simple as you ordering from any restaurant, whatever products that you need. We see this as basket builders. These initiatives actually build our basket, get consumers to shop more products from us. These initiatives all lead to more unique products being shopped, more unique categories being shopped, more frequency within the grocery and retail vertical, which always has a cascading effect into more frequency in food, hence more value to the platform in totality. Third is discoverability. Unlike restaurants, there's a third dimension that comes into the grocery and retail business, which is the brands, the CPGs themselves.
Because then you have the vendors, you have Talabat as a digital platform, and then you have the CPG brands that also want to grow their products. So it's not only vendor X wants to grow, but it's the brands that sell within this grocery and retail business also want to grow. So we've actually spent also a significant amount of time trying to enable these CPG brands. One, for them to reach a better customer base and to reach a relevant customer base, leveraging our own build tool. Second, leveraging our first-party data. The reason why CPGs are interested a lot in us is because we are retail media, which means that we are closer to the transaction point of the customer. Customers transact on our website, on our app, not on a third party that then redirects them.
CPG brands have begun to notice that the closer you are in the journey to the checkout, the more likelihood you are to convert better. We work very closely with leading CPG brands on building this together, building where they can target customers throughout their journey, where it's relevant and where it makes sense to them. We've developed tools that revolve around product ads, targeted sampling, platform campaigns, and these all enable partners to reach the customers in an effective way. It enables customers to find the products that are relevant to them among hundreds of thousands of products, among thousands of vendors that we have.
Similar to the CPGs, we also look at our grocery partners, the vendors, and that's where we take a lot of learning from the food business and develop it, sponsored ads, product ads, to make sure that we also enable vendors to grow. So it's a multiplied effect. You grow the vendor, you grow the brands within the vendors, and this then grows your overall share of wallet and the business. And both these products come with very high ROAS, and we do see quarter on quarter more investment of our partners into these tools. I want to share with you two case studies around the impact of these tools that will give you a better understanding about how efficient and how effective they are. If you recall, I said we want to target customers throughout the journey where it makes sense.
This is an example where we worked with a leading CPG brand and introduced a swim lane that they can use to target customers during the checkout for products that you wouldn't think of buying, but they pop in your mind when you're at the checkout counter. It can be a gum, it can be a snack, it can be an ice cream, things that you don't think of buying, but because you see it, it triggers that impulse purchase that you did not plan for. We worked with this CPG brand. They invested with us on two tests, and I want to give two key highlights. Before looking at the impact, notice that there's been a reset in the baseline. Why? So first test where we showed this product, the baseline reset it, and you're at a higher baseline when the campaign stopped.
And then the second test, you're even in a much higher baseline than the previous test. Why? Because it has a knock-on effect. When you add that product into your basket, it becomes relevant. You start to see this more throughout your journey. It's top of mind. Then you start adding these products even without us nudging you to do it. So it's sustainable, it's scalable. And you can see the results on the right side, 50% uplift in sales quantity, 75% uplift in GMV, and most important is the basket penetration. So this item is available three times more in customers' basket as opposed to previously doing this campaign. Why is this a great campaign? Because it's a win for three people. It's a win for a customer. You're driving convenience to them in a way that is very intuitive, in a way that doesn't disrupt their shopping experience.
You're driving value to the partner because what you're enabling is the growth of that category. Partners are growing the category, growing their share within the category, so it's a win for them. It's a win for us in two ways. One is because basket size grows, it makes our unit economics more profitable. Second, the investment in this tool as a CPG retail ad goes directly to our bottom line. So double impact on profitability, and customer is a winner, partner is a winner, we're a winner, and that's why we want to double down on these tools because they're convenient, they drive value, and they're relevant to our customers, and most important, they're sustainable. They trigger a behavioral change. We don't believe in spike ordering where you boost orders, but then you go back to a lower baseline.
What we hear is, how do we make how do we matter to customers? How do we change the way they behave? How do we make it seamless to them? How do we make it very convenient to them? So we're focused a lot on delivering more value by making sure it's more convenient. Hence, a lot of our tools go around how do we change your behavior as a consumer to the better. Another example is of a different nature. This is not a CPG leading brand. This is a challenging brand, i.e., a brand that's shared within the category is very minimal, i.e., they just entered into the category, they launched a new product. How do we help them build visibility? Because, I mean, you don't create a new burger. A burger is a burger every day.
But in groceries, you have a lot of spend on R&D, right? New products being launched, new categories coming up, hundreds of thousands of products. How do we enable these CPG brands, challenging brands, to grow and drive value also to our consumers and fill a gap in the category that probably existed? So the light color is the organic sales of the product. The dark color is the upsell because of the promotion ads that they were running on our app. You can notice that when they start running the app, the ad, same thing. You see a boost in their promotional sales, but then the noticeable part is the gray area, the light area is reset. So their organic search or their organic sales now is even higher because consumers are more familiar to the product.
The investment that they did during April and during May and June is sustainable throughout the coming months. Not only that, the dark line that you see is actually their market share, which is their category share. How much do they represent in terms of the sales of this category is also at a higher base than where they started the investment. This means that our ad tools are able to grow the category, not via only major CPGs, but challenging brands. We're able to allow them to win more category share, and we're able to make sure it's sustainable and it's cost-effective for them. Hence, the tools that we're developing actually solve a problem as opposed to just simple ads revenue that we want to book. There's tons of examples like this.
Because the CPG is vast with multiple categories to work in, it gives us a room to really be creative around what tools do we develop to drive value to the consumers. This all has led to a very strong financial track record. Tomaso has covered the part on the left, how much we're growing in terms of CAGR, the profitability of our business, which we're super proud of to make sure that within three years of launching our dark stores systems, dark stores, we're able to be profitable at an EBITDA level, and we already have a country that's at 8% EBITDA margin from where we stand today. What I want to cover is what's our focus going forward. Is this actually just the tip of the iceberg, or is there more we can do?
So we go back to our recipe for success, which means the proven strategy that we have around choice, around experience, around value to drive growth going forward. So we have two main pillars for growth that we're doubling down on, on selection. These include more partners, more product categories, more assortment. Second is how do we create boosting campaigns for customer spend, which is how do we get customers to shop more unique products, more unique categories? We do it by catering for more occasions, for bigger baskets, etc., so that we grow our share of wallet from the grocery shopping. Every house shops more on groceries than they do on food. Target is how do we actually provide more occasions to enable customers to shop more of their share online with us. From a profitability perspective, we're also doubling down on high-margin areas.
We know Retail Media, for the reasons I mentioned, grows your basket size, goes to your bottom line, is a massive profitability tool, and that's something we're going to keep doubling down on and make sure it's more relevant to both our partners and our customers. Second is investing in high-margin products, which is imported ranges, private label products, our white label, fresh products because they come with a higher category margin as opposed to the others to ensure that the basket mix is of a healthy profitability game. Third is accelerating our tech development, which means that we keep reminding ourselves we're a tech company first. How can we use tech to change the way grocery business operates for the better?
We'll always make sure that we're developing our technology both on the back end to make sure our operation is more seamless and more efficient, also in the front end to make sure building basket sizes and shopping experience is actually enjoyable and basket building. Last but not least is the working capital. So I'm super proud to say that tMart actually contributes to a positive working capital impact. That's something we're going to keep doubling down on by first improving our infrastructure. So the stores that we open are strategically positioned where customers need them the most because we know where the volume of orders is coming from. We know where there's a gap in the market where we need to close. So we strategically invest where we only need to invest.
Second is we actually work with partners on improving our working capital, be it on the amount of inventory we hold, payment terms, and definitely the margins that we generate. And we see this will only accelerate and become better in the future. Last but not least is InstaShop, a loved MENA online brand that will soon join the Talabat family. So to give you a bit of an overview about InstaShop, it was launched in 2015. It's a loved grocery brand. They were one of the first e-commerce players or e-grocery players to move into the grocery space. Hence, they have a massive amount of partners, 8,800, 20 different subcategories that they work on. And because they've built an app that's so fixated on grocery and retail, they have 5x frequency per month, and they have a 73% month-on-month retention rate, which is amazing, which are amazing numbers.
This means that they've focused a lot on an app that actually caters for the occasion that they're actually developing. And they've been doing really well. 2023, close to $500 million in GMV, and they're already positive EBITDA. Now, what does that mean to Talabat? Three things. One, expanding partner network and choice network. Products available on InstaShop, vendors available on InstaShop, vice versa on Talabat, cross-listing and ensuring that we give consumers bigger choice, which is pillar one that we discussed, which is the most important pillar. Second is how do we optimize our operations, which actually will help our and InstaShop's profitability. Now we operate separate different operations, be it last-mile delivery, in-store picking. The plan is if we synergize these, we can deliver a better experience for the consumers, one.
Second, we can do it at a more efficient and effective cost than what we do today. Third, which is what excites me the most, is the product and tech synergies because they're a loved brand. They've been doing groceries for such a long time. There's a lot of learning that we can take on top of the amazing work that Talabat has done. So I see this as unlocking even our grocery and retail vertical much, much, much bigger and much faster. And we've signed a share purchase agreement with InstaShop that will materialize soon that will help us unlock all of these synergies and drive value to InstaShop, Talabat, and most importantly, our consumers and our partners. So this brings us to the conclusion of the slide. I'd like to hand it over to not only a CFO, but a very close person.
I've worked with Khaled for more than 20 years now in different industries and hand it over to him to talk about the fintech business. Thank you.
Thank you, Wassim. Good afternoon, everyone. I mean, it's what an energy, Wassim. It's almost difficult to beat this energy. Even the pointer is hot. Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Khaled Alfakesh. I'm the CFO of Talabat. I've been the CFO for the last eight years since 2016. In total, I have almost 20 years of experience in the field of finance and legal. And before joining Talabat, I actually was a pure corporate guy, a suited-up guy. Worked in Kuwait with one of the large holding listed companies where they have a diversified portfolio of businesses that varies between retail, FMCG, telecommunication, real estate, and more than 70 legal entities.
I had a senior role as a group financial controller. I was a pure corporate guy, and similar to Wassim, I was inspired by the Talabat story at that time and decided to take off the suit, took a bet, at least according to my wife, and leave a 12,000-employee company and join Talabat as a CFO, 100 employees at that time. I was super excited to associate myself for the future, and I can still see the same excitement every day. Probably you are wondering why the CFO is maybe speaking about fintech, and I think this is one of many things that I really love about Talabat, is how finance is actually embedded in the decision-making and how finance is embedded in the way we think about launching new products or new features that we want to make sure we launch it in a healthy manner.
I'll speak about two products which we have in fintech that we rolled out in the UAE. The first one is our Postpaid. I think Tomaso touched based on the Postpaid earlier, something we are super excited about because we believe that we are fixing a real customer problem. As mentioned, our business is cyclical. The week before the salaries, our customers' behavior starts to slightly change, and they slightly started to do less orders. And secondly, despite the fact that the online penetration in GCC is high and customers place orders and pay via cards, still 50% of our GMV is placed by debit cards, which implies that access to formal credit such as credit card is not there. We are a tech company. We have two decades of data, like literally two decades of data.
The team helped in building an amazing in-house capability that allows us to score our customers and to score their creditworthiness. We extended them a tiny limit that ranges between $50-$400. What we've seen is actually really amazing. The group of customers decided to use the service, which is for free, where we don't charge any upfront fee and we don't charge any late fee. This group of customers, their frequency on the app increased by 14%, which makes the program profitable and makes lots of sense from a financial point of view because the uplift we get on the gross profit is way above the default that we get on this group of customers because of our ability to score them. This program has been growing at 250% CAGR. Still heavily underpenetrated, almost 2% penetration in terms of customer base.
Of course, we know as a company our right to play. We are not a financial institution. So we had discussions, early discussions with financial institutions and banks, and they showed interest to take this credit risk on their balance sheet because it makes lots of sense to create an avenue for them to get into our customer base and start offering lending products such as microfinancing. The second one, which I'm also very, very excited about even personally because this saves me lots of money, is our co-branded credit card that we launched with one of the largest banks in UAE, ADCB. This is for the second group of customers who has access to formal credit. What's fantastic about this product is that you can get it online via our app. It's a fully digital application journey on our app.
Customers, they can simply apply for the credit card, do all the KYC verifications, and get the credit card that has a great value proposition. Customers, they get this card free of charge. They have a sign-up bonus of AED 500. They enjoy free delivery on Talabat. In addition, they get 1.25% cashback. Most importantly, they get 35% discount on 10 orders, inclusive of food and grocery, every single month. All of these benefits actually get redeemed on Talabat, which makes both products great for customers. We've seen really exciting results in terms of customers' loyalty, customers' engagement, and retention. We are super, super excited about this. Speaking about loyalty, we have the loyalty guy, Mr. Jérémy, so I'll hand it over to him. Now it's called. I love the ADCB card. I have it as well. It's also saving me a lot of money.
Thanks a lot, Khaled. I want to cover with you guys another pillar of our ecosystem strategy, which is our loyalty programs. First, our loyalty program is our tPro program. The tPro, the Talabat Pro program, is actually a premium subscription program for staying frequency and retention. This program was first launched on Talabat two years ago. The way we thought about this program is that we want this program to ring-fence our high-value customers on the platform. By paying a small fee, we have realized that the customers become much more committed to the platform. I guess they just want to increase their return on investment on the small subscription fee that they pay to Talabat every month. What is the value proposition on this program?
We first launched this program with offering free delivery, unlimited free delivery on a great selection of food partners, unlimited free delivery on tMart, and also unlimited free delivery on a few local shops. As we are launching the program, we realized that we had more opportunities to create a great value proposition for the customers, and this is where we decided also to add on top of that exclusive deals. This feature was launched a couple of months ago, and we realized that it is highly used by our customers. This feature offers tPro members-only discounts on a selection of already amazing deals. We've seen that this feature has allowed us to radically increase the amount of savings our customers can actually get from Talabat and hence make the tPro program even more interesting.
We also offer other benefits such as the reward points, which are points that you transact every time that you spend money on Talabat. If you're a tPro user in the UAE, you get 2x the amount of points on Talabat for every dirham that you spend. This value proposition has actually created a great product for the customers and for the partners. All the leading indicators that we look at show us that this is a very, very, very promising program, despite the fact that only 7.5% of the users are actually of the users of Talabat that subscribe to Talabat Pro. But we believe that the future is great. Our user base has been growing over 100% year-on-year this year. We see an accelerated adoption from the partners, and we see also an accelerated adoption from the customers.
We see also year-over-year an increase in return on investment for our customers. The program is working, and we see that the flywheel is spinning. Our plan for the years to come is to add even more features to this program, further enhance the value proposition of the tPro program for our customers, so we designed actually the Talabat Pro program to be a great program for our customers and especially our high-value customers. It actually appears that this program is also great for Talabat, so while we were launching the Talabat Pro program on Talabat, we realized that they had amazing benefits on our base of high-value customers. Not only did the customers actually increase their retention, so we are protecting a really ring-fencing, which was the first goal of Talabat, those high-value customers to the platform, but also, those customers become more loyal to Talabat.
Their share of wallet increases, and their frequency on the platform increases. The result of that is that actually those customers should become even more profitable for Talabat, where they were already very profitable because they are our high-value customers. We see that the gross profit per user on the platform increases by 32%. I want to highlight here that actually this program is also largely funded by our partners. We have massive room for expansion since we are operating just in six countries at the moment. We're going to launch it soon in Iraq and in Egypt. This program is also very liked by our partners. We recognize the value of the program. Since those customers will subscribe to tPro, our high-value customers, they realize that by joining tPro, they can selectively tap into the pool of the most valued customers of Talabat.
In a nutshell, tPro radically deepens the profit pool of Talabat. We are really excited about the potential of this program and the even bigger difference it can make for Talabat. We also have another loyalty program that we call the Rewards Program. We realize that some of our customers actually want to be recognized and acknowledged as being great customers of Talabat. This is why we launched the Rewards Program, which is a program whereby whenever you're spending money on Talabat, you get rewarded through some points in your wallets. It is fully integrated into the mobile application, and the points can be redeemed for a variety of amazing experiences and occasions: discounts, exclusive offers, raffle tickets, or even donations to charity. What we see is that the adoption of the program has been fantastic.
From December 2022 until now, in July 2024, 16% of our users were using raffles. Not only that, we also see that these programs actually drive also higher frequency of the users on Talabat. So we're really excited about that, the combination of the tPro program, the Rewards Program, and the fintech products. We believe that these are amazing tools to increase the retention and the frequency of our high-value customers. Our friend Yi-Wei, we now present to you how technology empowers everything that we do at Talabat.
My name is Yi-Wei Ang. I'm really excited to be here today. I'm the Chief Product Officer at Talabat. I'm responsible for the product, tech, data, and design parts of our organization. I've had, in the last 10 or 15 years, experience working in really big tech companies.
I started my career off at Microsoft, where I was a product manager, and eventually jumped into the startup space in Singapore, where I was the head of product at a company called TradeGecko, which was acquired by Intuit in the U.S., before moving to the region, where I was a VP of Product at Property Finder before I came to join Talabat. I joined Talabat because I saw a big opportunity: a company with an ambition that wanted to go beyond food and wanted to do so much more in the region than it had achieved in the past. And I was really excited to be part of the journey, and I've been here now the last four and a half years and really excited to see what the next decade at Talabat looks like. So today we're going to be talking about technology.
As you've seen in many different parts of the presentation, you see that tech has always been an underpinning of Talabat and how we operate. The best way to illustrate this is a bit of a history lesson. What you see here on the left is a little website that we used to have called Talabat, where you could go, you could see a bunch of restaurants, you could order from it, but we didn't even have our own delivery services to actually deliver to you. We relied on restaurants to deliver to you. Whether it arrived on time or not was beyond us. Over the 20 years, we've invested a lot in technology to take us from a food delivery player to substantially more.
Here you have a multi-vertical home screen where you can see customers can go from food to groceries to fintech to subscribing to our tPro product, all within one experience. That really illustrates the investment and commitment that we have to using technology to be the biggest flywheel of growth for Talabat. Why does that matter for our industry? The way I like to describe it to people is that we work in an industry where the minutes count and the seconds matter. To consistently deliver food, groceries, and retail products in 30 minutes or less is really no easy feat. A couple of key numbers to remember, right? We have more than 115,000 riders in our entire region, more than 64,000 partners, more than millions of consumer sessions every day. To coordinate all of that would be impossible unless we really, really invested in tech.
Not only that, you don't eat food linearly in the same amount every time and every day. You have our breakfast spikes, your lunch spikes, your dinner spikes. Compounded on top of that, special occasions like Wassim mentioned, like Ramadan and Back to School, where our order volumes really go through the roof. If we wanted to continue maintaining our service levels from our operations and from our tech stack, we really needed to invest in this. And we're really proud to have our ability to have 99.95% system reliability in Talabat and also near real-time transmission, which is the moment a consumer orders something from the app to when it gets to a partner, whether it's a grocer or a restaurant. So it takes a lot of investment to really make that happen.
And to illustrate our tech stack and how we've invested in it, the best way to see it is actually in the marketplace model, multi-sided marketplace model, which you've seen in many parts of our presentation today: the customer experience, the partner experience, and the delivery experience. And what I will show in this chart is actually how optimizing for one part of our ecosystem actually has a magnified impact in other parts of the ecosystem as well. Let me give you a few examples, starting with the consumer experience. In the customer experience, it wasn't too long ago that in how you could order food in the MENA region was that you would call up a restaurant, say, "Hey, I want a kebab and some falafel," and a guy would come over in his motorbike, collect cash from you, and that was a delivery experience.
But this driver had to handle a lot of cash. You would have to find that spare change to make sure that you had exact amounts of money to hand over to this driver, and it was a very clunky experience as a whole. So what do we do to improve that? We have an app that has integrated in many of our markets local online payment methods that allows for consumers to very seamlessly pay for their orders. So is it a great customer experience? Absolutely. Did we see growth from that? Absolutely. But at the same time, it also made the lives of our delivery partners much easier and our restaurant partners much easier. So there's a multiplying network effect that really comes from the investment in tech that we make.
Similarly, a second example is our investment in personalization and discovery, where when you open the app, if you're vegan, it would be not right for me to show you kebab restaurants left, right, and center in the app. We should recognize what are people's tastes and preferences and really optimize for that. So when we invested in that over the last two years, of course, we saw conversion rates go up. Of course, we saw growth from that. But more importantly, we also could invest and use the same technology in our partner products, where they can really target their ads to the right user base so that they can get much better ROI and return on investment on their ad spends. Let's move on to the partner experience and give you a few examples of that.
When you talk to some of these big partners that have hundreds of orders coming in every couple of hours, you realize how hard it is to run a restaurant business. And that's why we invest in things like POS integrations. So when you order food or groceries from your app, it goes straight into the operating system of that restaurant partner. It shows up in the kitchen. Things can move really quickly. And when the rider arrives to the door of that partner, it's ready to go. Now, why is that so impactful to the partner? They love it because it's a form of automation, which saves them a lot of operational headaches, but it's great for riders, and it's great for customers as well.
Customers have a much more reliable delivery experience, and riders, they can make sure that by the time they get there, they don't have to stand there waiting for 10 minutes for the food to get prepared. We talked about advertising solutions and how investing in personalization really helped our partners. And lastly is the concept of performance insights. When a partner opens up their partner app, they can see ratings from previous customers. They can see how quickly they're preparing the food and how consistently they're performing. And knowing this is great for them because we know that restaurants who perform operationally very well also grow with us on the platform, but it's great for customers as well. So you can really see the interplay between the different parts of our marketplace and how investing in tech in one place really impacts the others. Lastly is the delivery experience.
Our riders play a massive role in our customer experience. We invest so much in tracking and routing so that we know the fastest way for a rider to get from A to B, factoring things like traffic and many other factors. So that allows them to track exactly where they need to be to drop things off at a customer or where to pick things up in a partner very seamlessly. And that obviously helps with both the customer and partner experience. We invest a lot in rider staffing, forecasting, and have a great rider management capability, which ensures that we have the right supply and demand of riders in different parts of the city so that we can make sure that there's the right amount of coverage while optimizing for delivery time. And lastly, our riders love our mobile app.
The fact that they have a mobile app that allows them to track all the orders that are coming in, their earnings on the go, and their safety capabilities is a really big part of why our offering is so special. So hopefully you get to see a bit of an illustration of how the investments that we've made in different pillars of our tech stack have really created a network of impact that is very hard for other players to copy. Let's dive a little bit deeper into the three parts of our tech stack, starting with our consumer experience. Let's go with a few illustrations and graphics. This is a multi-vertical home. And like I said before, you can transition from food to groceries and other of our offerings very, very seamlessly. We also have a best-in-class food experience and groceries experience.
Why I called that out is because we've also come to learn over the years that we can't take a food lens to groceries and a groceries lens to food. They're really a very different shopping experience, and we need to optimize for each of these. It took years of optimization to get us to where we got to at Talabat. What have we been investing in? Well, we talk a lot about personalization, and we're continuing to invest in it because it's so critical. It's so important that when you open the app, depending on the time of the day, depending on your preferences, that we show you the right things. Why am I showing you an ice cream shop at 8:00 in the morning as you're about to leave to work?
It's much better for me to show you a coffee place and actually show you that your favorite drink is an oat latte and make it really easy for you to reorder that coffee. So our investment in personalization has really paid off a lot in many ways through our ad products and our consumer experience in the form of $14 million of incremental EBITDA in recent times. We've also invested a lot in targeted offers. That means when you open the app, perhaps you haven't tried a specific restaurant before. We make it really easy for you to see which restaurants you need to try, you haven't tried before, that really aligns with your taste. And through these targeted offers, consumers love it because it drives affordability, and our partners also love it because it's giving them great return on investment.
And the last thing that we do is that we're getting quite good at knowing how and when to move people from one vertical to another. So perhaps you're a food-only customer. You've ordered food from Talabat over the last five years, but you've never ordered from groceries before. So how do I transition you from a food customer to a grocery customer, a grocery customer to a subscriber, a subscriber to a fintech customer? The ability to move consumers to expand into our ecosystem and deepen their relationship with Talabat is something that our personalization engine has been able to offer. And it doesn't take very long for us to really understand our customers. On average, it takes about six orders on Talabat before we get to really understand you a little bit better and start serving you more and more relevant results across our consumer stack.
The second part of our investment is in our rider technology. As we know, we have so many riders on the ground that we need to optimize for, and we invest in three key areas in the rider tech. One is optimizing dispatch. The way to think about it is that the moment a rider gets to our partner, whether a grocer or a restaurant, it should be just about the same time as the restaurant has the food or grocery packed and ready to go. We want to really create that intersection where that magic really happens. And that's what optimizing dispatch means. And I'll tell you a little bit about why it's so complex and why it's so hard to get this right. We live in the GCC. We live in Dubai, and Dubai Mall is one of the largest malls in the country.
In Dubai Mall, from where the riders are parking their bikes to where the restaurants are, it could be a 5- 10-minute walk. So in order to optimize the algorithms for these specific cases of walk-in and make sure that that intersection and magic happens, it's a lot of work. Using data, we're able to really make that happen. Secondly is rider scheduling. We know at any given time where the supply and demand is based on historical forecasts and actual point in time and data points to tell us where we need to move riders. Knowing the supply and demand of riders is super key for us to ensure that we have a great consumer experience, partner experience, and also a rider experience. Lastly, safety and performance.
We believe that technology is at the heart of making sure that our riders continue to ride safely and can really represent our brand well. And I'll show you a little bit about how that shows up. So on the left here is a screenshot of what a rider sees on a day-to-day. They see where they need to go to pick up food from a partner or groceries from a partner and where they need to drop it off. Then they get to see their road safety score, which is how well they're doing against the metrics that we've set through our telematics system. And lastly is our rider wallet, which at any given time they can see how their earnings are materializing, including also consumer tips, which come through the app in an automated fashion to our riders.
The last area of investment that we make is our partner technology. What do our partners care about? They care. They have a lot of pride in their food. They have a lot of pride in their brand, and they want to grow with Talabat, and so we've invested a lot in our ad tech platform. We've talked a lot about personalization, and this is where it really comes to life. That improvement to return on ad spend over the last two years really has come from the fact that we've invested so much in personalization. We know, for example, what cuisines we should target for a specific vendor. We know exactly what areas we should target for a specific vendor, and that investment in personalization and that targeting capability is really key for our partner's growth. They're also able to self-serve.
The amazing part of our partner app, which you can see on the right side, is that at any given moment, if you're a restaurant grocery partner, you can go on and actually subscribe yourself to campaigns, buy ads, and do a bunch of things on the go. I didn't actually realize how important this was until I got to meet some restaurant owners whose lifeblood it is, whose passion it is to really build their brand and their restaurants. And when I saw them open the app a few times every night, you could really tell that they take a lot of pride in the operations that they have in their company, in their restaurants. And that's why having a mobile app on the go for these vendor partners really, really matters. And lastly, having great ROI.
We want to make sure that we have an amazing plethora of tools. Tomaso showed you some of those ad tools that serve different purposes between visibility and branding to a conversion optimization ad that delivers great vendor and partner ROI, no matter what kind of vendor you are or what stage of the journey you're at. And what is powering all of this? What is powering all of this is, as Khaled said, 20 years of data. Our data engine, we believe, at our scale, is truly the moat and network effect that we're focusing on. Today, we process 13 terabytes of data coming from our restaurant partners, our riders, our consumers, and we pull it all together. And pulling it all together and using AI and machine learning, we're able to deliver a superior customer experience, better partner monetization, and also much better rider safety.
Now, why is that so important for our growth? It's really important for our growth that we continue to invest in this because we need a highly scalable tech stack to look at where Talabat is going in the next five years. Today, we're able to have a highly scalable tech stack that can already handle 2x of our order growth. And what do we do? We invest in a unified tech stack, which means that all of our markets share one tech stack, and we're able to launch apps and products in different languages, in different regions, as we have in GCC markets and also in newer markets like Iraq over the last couple of years. We also believe in the power of speed and learning.
That's why we invest so much in optimizing for our release capabilities, which means that we get to release our product every day and we're in the app store every week. But we also focus a lot on experimentation and learning, which means as all of us and any of you open the Talabat app, you may see something very different because we're constantly experimenting and learning and taking what works for one set of customers and really optimizing that and making sure that we have learnings that can be spanned across all of our customer base. So we're able to run thousands of unique experiments every year. Lastly, a company of our size and our scale needs to take data security super seriously. And we comply with local regulatory standards and also industry standards to ensure that we take data security to an extremely high level.
Now, where are we headed? As we think about our tech investment at Talabat, there are five things I want you to focus on. The first one is, as we've shown a good amount of success in our playbook over the last couple of years, is the investment in data personalization and machine learning. Through personalization and marketing automation, we're able to take these AI-driven recommendations in new form factors through the app, whether it's on the consumer side or the partner side. We want to be able to optimize the timing, placement, and incentives of how we move people from one vertical to another and to also deepen their relationship with Talabat. To give you an example, we're starting to realize that people buy groceries at specific frequencies. You run out of milk at around the same time. You run out of bread at around the same time.
And we can prompt you through our algorithms to actually get you back into ordering. The second pillar that we're going to invest in is grocery and retail shopping and monetization. As we'll see demonstrated, we're in early days of groceries and retail, and we can expand so much more into the space. And how we're going to do that is we're going to first nail fresh and ultra-fresh experiences. Now, what I want you to think about is the moment of walking into a grocery store, picking up an apple, smelling it, feeling it, and seeing what that shopping experience looks like. We want to mirror that and mimic that inside of the product. And to be able to build trust for our consumers that they use Talabat for their day-in and day-out grocery shopping is a big priority for us.
We're going to continue enhancing and building our CPG ad solutions. As we'll see mentioned, it's so important for these CPG companies to see a big potential in being able to run ads on a point of conversion, and we see a lot of potential for Talabat to play that role, and lastly, to upsell and cross-sell different grocery products at the right moment in order to make sure that we continue to grow our share in grocery and retail wallet. The third investment space is in ad tech.
And in there, we're going to be investing in advanced targeting capabilities, which allows you to go from understanding people's life cycles to their preferences to their cuisine taste in specific areas, which allows vendors to really be very specific about where they want to grow and what kinds of customers they want to target to optimize for their return on ad spend. We're going to also launch bidding capabilities, which allows for us to match the supply and demand of ad density in different parts of our region. The fourth pillar of where we're going to invest in is our Talabat Pro product. As Jérémy talked about, we've come such a long way from offering free delivery to exclusive deals to bank partnerships over the last two years.
We're going to continue launching Talabat Pro in the remaining markets that we have and also deepening our value proposition to make sure that consumers just really get a great deal out of the Talabat Pro offer that we have. And lastly is fintech. We believe fintech to be an affordability driver. And as we've seen in the UAE, it's really, really working through our postpaid product and through our co-branded credit card product. And we hope to continue to replicate a lot of these successes in the markets that we also operate in. And as we know, when you invest in R&D, when you invest in technology, at the heart of it is the team that really makes it happen. And we're really proud that we are actually one of the region's largest tech employers.
We have two tech hubs, one in Dubai, which is our main headquarters, and also another one in Cairo, and it so happens that both of these are really fast-growing markets, so what that means is that our product managers, our engineers, our data scientists get to see, use, and actually talk to people using the product day in and day out. It's very different when you actually have friends using the product and telling you what's working and what's not so that you can get that quick feedback loop to improve your product all the time, and so that's a special sauce that we have to offer. We have an incredibly diverse team with more than 60 nationalities, with more than 20% female in product and tech, and we're really proud that our employees are actually our biggest advocates.
More than 15% of our new employees actually have come through referrals. So friends referring other friends into Talabat. We've hired from top-tier backgrounds, from top tech companies in North America, in Europe, and in Asia with very similar industries like ours, whether it's in e-commerce or in big tech. We have a very happy workforce. We're really proud of our employee NPS score that we've also consistently been a great place to work company. As a result of that, because of this talent that we have, we also make it a point to make sure that our tech talent continues to share all the learnings that we've had over the last 20 years with other players in the region also. We actively participate in conferences.
We're actively also grooming the next generation of tech talent in the region and really proud to have invested in all of this in Talabat over the last 20 years. So with that in mind, I'm going to hand back to Tomaso, who will talk us through our management ESG.
Thank you very much, Yi-Wei, for the very inspiring words. Management, I think as of now, you probably realize how passionate our management team is. And I will say this is really the word that brings all of us together. There is no single person in this team that doesn't really care about solving customer problems and really rolling up their sleeves and making sure we win this business and we grow and we solve more problems. I think when you look at our team, except for Pedram, who just joined as the CEO, we're extremely excited about him. He's bringing a wealth of experience in other food delivery companies across the world. But the rest of the team has been together between four to eight years at Talabat. So we're a very close group. We spend a lot of time together.
I consider them not only my colleagues, but my close friends as well. We really have a common passion on solving customer problems. When it comes to our company, we want to make sure that we do meaningful work. We do work that matters. We want to make sure also that people feel rewarded and that they feel happy to come to work every single day. When we measure our what we call employee NPS, the satisfaction score of our employee, it stands high at 44. People are exactly happy even more about things like autonomy, accountability, their freedom of opinion, etc. We're certified best place, Great Place to Work in five countries that we operate in. When you look at our metrics in terms of retention, in terms of tenure, in terms of attrition, we are top in class across all of those.
We also care a lot about the growth and the development of our employees. 36% of our senior leadership roles in 2024 were filled with internal movements. Also, more than 50% of our managers have gone through at least one leadership development program. And these programs are of various natures. We have programs around specific skill sets, but also some training programs to prepare the future managers into specific roles, for example, MDs or other leadership roles. We partner with most prestigious universities for executive leadership programs like INSEAD, Harvard Business School. And we have also women in leadership programs. And actually, one in three high-performing women in middle management roles have progressed and had a promotion in their career in 2024. I think the other thing we are super proud about is our diversity. We have more than 90 distinct nationalities working at Talabat at the same time.
This brings a wealth of diversity and opinions to the table that would be impossible to achieve without that. When it comes to ESG, we are very committed to positively impacting our communities we operate in. There are three main UN SDGs that we participate into. The first one is Ending Hunger, contributing to ending hunger. On this side, we're doing several things in terms of meals donations, reducing food waste, and increasing healthy meals. Since 2020, the equivalent of over 7.2 million meals have been donated through the Talabat app. The second one is Decent Work and Economic Growth. I think we spoke a lot about our riders, employment creation, but also safety and earnings and security for the riders. The third one is Reducing our Carbon Footprint. It's about biodegradable packaging. It's about EV pilots that we're doing around the region.
But also, we have an industry-leading comprehensive carbon report, not just on Scope 1, but also Scope 2 and Scope 3. The last pillar, we're very proud of how we use our technology for what we call tech for good. We help customers facilitate donation throughout our app to good causes in the region. As of now, since 2020, almost $20 million were donated to good causes in the region through the Talabat app. When it comes to our communities and our relationships with the government, we believe we have a very strong relationship with the governments in every single country we operate in. This is a win-win partnership. We're really invested in the mission that our governments have to foster growth and development of the region. And we participate proudly in that mission.
We want to make sure we're part of all the regulatory conversations to make sure that we impact positively our countries and our ecosystem. On the left side, I think when it comes to our community, there is a lot we're doing in terms of riders' well-being, as we discussed before, our summer together initiatives like rest areas, air-conditioned buses, etc., etc. Also, we have some sustainability-focused pilot projects, specifically when it comes to EV and biodegradable packaging. Also, we've been in partnership with the Jordan Food Bank to donate food parcels. And the employees themselves have been participating in the distributions of those. We're now going to have another 15-minute break. We'll come back with long-term value creation and financials. All right. Okay. Welcome back.
We're now going to move into our long-term value creation section of the presentation, and then we're going to have financials followed by Q&A. So I think we discussed a bit about this before, but as I said before, we are extremely excited about the future and the potential and the growth, both in terms of top line but also in terms of margin expansion that we have for the future. And there are four main reasons for that. The first one, I think we discussed a lot about our macro tailwinds and the secular tailwinds that we have ahead of us in terms of population penetration, but also growth of frequency in our customers. The second one is going deeper in more verticals: grocery and retail and other verticals we want to open up. The third one is loyalty.
Jérémy, Yi-Wei spoke about loyalty before, and there are several initiatives we have to turbocharge that pillar, and lastly, adtech. I think we discussed a bit about adtech for food, adtech for groceries, and there's plenty of potential there, so starting from headroom to grow, I think Jérémy spoke quite extensively about the growth of the population in our countries. I think when it comes to Talabat countries, the growth that we expect to be around 4x the ones of the Western countries, but also in terms of real GDP per capita, is 1.5 x the one of Western countries. The second very important thing to remember is our urbanization rate. In the GCC region, we have an urbanization rate of 92%, which is much higher than the average of 57% of the global average.
Of course, the higher urbanization, the easier it is for a service like ours to thrive. And lastly, the young population. 72% of our population is below the age of 40. And for these people, for young kids that come to fruition of this product, it's just so easy for them to take out a phone, push a button, and get something delivered. So we have the secular tailwinds that are going to boost our growth in the years to come. So we also discussed about our addressable population, right? We said we have 150 million people around in the countries we operate in, of which we define addressable 71 million, and we have 6 million active customers, right? So we have less than 10% of our addressable population that are currently monthly active customers on Talabat.
If you divide the number of orders we do today by these 71 million people, you get to an average of 0.4 orders per capita per day, per month, sorry, with a headroom to 90. If people eat three times a day, they eat 90 x a month. So the potential headroom that's 0.4 is 90. Even if we take a massive haircut that we say is 20, then this is still 50x to where we are today. But then when we look also at best-in-class businesses, it's probably the penetration of food delivery in China. The orders per capita per month there is around 2.9x on the addressable population. So you see that even comparing us to China, that, by the way, is still growing very fast, we are 7x potential headroom to reach that level.
Then if we only have six million active customers on a 71 million population, we should see our acquisitions continue to grow over the years. Indeed, that's exactly what's happening. If you look from 2019 to 2023, our acquisitions have been increasing year-over-year. In this timestamp, like you see that our acquisition has been growing at actually 19% CAGR on a year-over-year basis. A lot of the growth is coming from expanding the six million into the 71 million addressable population. At the same time, though, we're not just growing our acquisitions, also the frequency of our customers is increasing on the platform, right? To prove the point that the headroom is really these 90 orders a month, let's look only at our top 5% customers.
You would expect the top 5% customers to not grow their frequency so much because they're already ordering at a very high frequency. But actually, data shows us the opposite. Since 2019 to 2024, our top 5% customers have grown their frequency from 20 orders a month to 35 orders a month, and they're not showing any sign of diminishing, right? And this is a 14% CAGR in growth in frequency on the top 5% customers of the platform, right? And when we look at our markets, of course, there's a massive headroom in GCC, as we discussed, as Jérémy discussed in the past. But when we look at non-GCC markets, and Jérémy showed that there's a 100 billion market potential, our penetration there is extremely, extremely low. Only 0.13 orders per capita per month, right?
And the great news about that is also that in Egypt and Iraq, we only cover around 19%-42% of the largest cities. When it comes to GCC, our monthly orders per capita is 1.28. But if you look at UAE and Kuwait, which are our largest market, they're still growing extremely fast. UAE, which is our biggest market, is growing faster than the average of all the markets. And Kuwait, where Talabat was founded in 2004, we've been there for 20 years, is still growing at a double-digit year-over-year. And I talked about food so far, but when you expand the picture and you also look at the grocery business and retail business, we're just about 1% penetration here, right?
Groceries is where we're focusing a lot, but there's so many avenues and opportunities in other adjacent verticals that we want to expand into, like health and beauty, pharmacy, fresh, and flowers. As was said before, only 31% of our customer base today is multi-vertical. As we expand the number of multi-vertical customers, we should see a massive uplift in frequency. There's plenty of opportunities in every single angle you look for on acquisition, on frequency, on geographies, on verticals. There's ample opportunities to grow. The second pillar is really our loyalty systems and our ecosystem products. I think Khaled spoke a lot about Postpaid. I think on this chart on the left, you really see how the Postpaid product is solving a customer pain point. On week three, every single month, you see that we have a spike in Postpaid consumption.
Not only do we have a spike on week three, but we also see that the trend of the product is growing. It's growing at 250% CAGR, massive frequency uplift of 13% for every single customer that uses Postpaid and is profitable. Very good credit scoring algorithms, and we're able to make very good profits out of this program. Great news is that only 2.2% of our customers are today on subscription. As we said before, 50% of our GMV comes from debit cards, and so meaning the access to credit, formal credit through credit cards, is very low in the region. The other good news is that this program is only available in UAE, and we have four target markets already that we're going to launch with the product very soon. The other ecosystem product is Talabat Pro.
Jérémy spoke a lot about it, and I think the key numbers to remember really are customer retention. It's 25% higher for customers that join Talabat Pro. Their frequency also increases by 22% after they join the program, and this compounded creates a 32% gross profit uplift for every single customer that is on Talabat Pro. At the same time, how do we achieve this high profitability for the program? Because the vast majority of the benefit of the program is funded by our partners, and if you look at the past few months, we're growing the amount funded by the partners with 136% CAGR, and what's in it for the partners? We send them the best customers. Because to join Talabat Pro, you need to have a minimum number of orders you place per month to make up the money you spend for the subscription.
And so we tell them, "We send you the best customers," and so they're happy to give them the benefits. Actually, we have a retention of partners on the Talabat Pro program of almost 100%. Talabat Pro is only 7.6% of our customers that are on Talabat Pro. If we look at our peers in the U.S., who have been leading globally, they are 48% penetration of the program, so there's plenty of headroom to grow. In terms of geographical expansion, we are in six countries, and we are going to open up Iraq and Egypt very soon. The last pillar, which I think this is very important and these were all extremely excited about, is AdTech. As I said before, in 2021, $84 million of revenues in AdTech and almost $200 million in 2023. This goes straight into the bottom line.
It's digital ads, and it's been growing at a faster rate than our platform growth, right? When you look at penetration in terms of GMV, we moved from 2.1% - 3.2% in 2023. The global leaders are already at a 7% penetration in terms of GMV, and so there's a lot of potential to grow. At the same time, we've been reducing the acquisition cost for our partners, providing higher and higher ROI, and that's why our partners are investing more and more in AdTech. Today, for every dollar they spend on AdTech, they get back $5 in revenues. How are we going to grow our AdTech business? On the food side, I think three main drivers. The first one is automation.
As of today, there's still some minor processes involved so that we are not able to effectively target the long tail with our AdTech products, but our automation has been increasing. The self-service of our ads portal has been increasing from 26%-47%, and there's still a lot of room to improve that. The second one is targeting. Only 28% of our products today, AdTech products today, are targeted, right? So this means that those products have a much better ROI than the untargeted one, and they can command a higher price, right? So we're going to increase the number of AdTech products that are targeted, and that will improve our revenues, and the last one is on auction systems and bidding tools, so that this will create more dynamic pricing for AdTech and will improve the ROI for the partners and improve the revenues for Talabat.
When it comes to groceries, there's also a fantastic opportunity there. On the chart on the left, you see the penetration of sales of online in different categories in groceries, right? So you have food, you have grocery, but also health and personal care, which is something we believe has a lot of potential for the future, and also pet products, and you see how this penetration of online has been accelerating, and this, by the way, is the U.S., over the past few years, right? On the other side, you see the global retail media ad spending, right? This is a business that has been booming over the past years. It's been increasing a lot, and now we are $166 billion predicted for 2025.
Not only is this market growing at a 22% CAGR, but also the online penetration, the digital ad spending, has been increasing in penetration from 15% - 21%-22% expected in 2025. So Talabat is uniquely placed to capture a vast portion of this market in the MENA region. And Wassim spoke a lot about it and said how we can help the CPGs to target better customers because we're much closer to the customer to the moment where they have the high intent to purchase a product, and we have a lot of data around the customers, right, compared to offline retailer, right? And so I think we can reach the customer much better. We're close to the transaction, and we can drive a lot of efficiency for the CPGs in the way they craft their promotion, the way they craft their advertising.
Today, leading CPG investment ratio in Talabat is just about 2%. When we compare to typical CPG investments in similar opportunities, we believe we have a massive potential of at least 4x from where we are today. With that said, I will move to the most anticipated session of this capital market event. So I'll have Khaled cover our financials.
Thank you, Tomaso. So I think Tomaso, Wassim, the team, everyone was speaking about lots of exciting developments. Let's see how all of this actually translates into financials. I mean, there are so many things that we are proud of in Talabat, but one thing is, in particular, everyone is proud of, me personally, is what we have been able to build and continue building in terms of a very strong financial profile.
Talabat has a unique financial profile in terms of growth, leadership, profitability, and cash generation at the same time. As you can see, a 20-year-old company, since 2015, we've been able to grow our GMV with almost 51% CAGR for the last eight years, reaching more than $6 billion of GMV as of last year, 2023. This makes Talabat the largest platform in the entire MENA region. On top of this, we have a very strong financial profile. Our free cash flow margin is almost 7% of GMV, with more than 90% cash conversion from Adjusted EBITDA into free cash flow. I'll try to explain on the following slide, actually, how my colleagues and everyone at Talabat have been able to deliver these strong financial results.
In terms of growth, as you can see, we've been able to grow our GMV by 24% on average for the last two years, and similarly, 23% year-over-year in terms of GMV as of H1 2024. Our growth is mainly driven by order volume. That is fueled by an increase in customer frequency that we've been explaining about, and also our ability to expand our customer base. Our multi-verticality ecosystem strategy has been proven success. As you can see, our grocery and retail business reached almost 25% of GMV. For the non-GCC countries, it is also growing at a high double-digit growth, higher than the GCC markets as well. Something that's very important to highlight is that our core food business is still growing at double-digit growth, and our GCC countries remain the lion's share in terms of GMV contribution at 86% as of H1 2024.
This growth translates into revenue. As you can see, our revenue grew at a higher pace compared to GMV, amounting to 31% year-over-year growth as of H1 2024. This growth in revenue is mainly driven by our ability to expand our AdTech high margin, which Yi-Wei and Wassim touched base on, our ability to increase our delivery fee and service fee. Our tMart business has been significantly growing, where tMart share of revenue represents almost 27% as of H1 2024. GCC, of course, still remains the lion's share in terms of contribution at 85%. If you look at our revenue as a percentage of GMV, it's strong at 40% as of H1. Not only have we been able to drive growth and revenue, but we've been able also to expand our profitability and expand our margin.
We increased our margin by 33% year-over-year as of H1, reaching a strong 12.4% of GMV. There's a 1% improvement in margin, and almost one-third of this improvement comes from our AdTech high margin expansion and the continued ability for us to drive efficiency on logistics and operational cost. And that's also partially offset the change in the geographical mix between GCC and non-GCC, as well as the product mix between the two verticals, food, grocery, and retail. In terms of Adjusted EBITDA, we've been able to increase our Adjusted EBITDA even at a higher pace compared to revenue, at 70% year-over-year, reaching $231 million as of H1 2024. Of course, this is a result of our strong top-line growth that comes with a healthy margin. And Talabat, because of our leadership position, has relatively a low cost base that allows us to drive efficiency over time.
Our EBITDA margin as of H1 reached 6.7% of GMV. On this slide, I would like to take you through the trajectory between the gross profit and EBITDA. And this demonstrates that because of our leadership position and the unique financial profile, we have a strong operating leverage. If you see our marketing expenses, this shows a really careful balance between growth and efficiency. In fact, if you look at our marketing expenses that we call internally CARC, that refers to customer acquisition and retention, it's only 1.5% of GMV and been improving year-over-year. If you look at our IT expenses, that refers to R&D, it's relatively stable, and this shows our commitment to continue to drive tech and product innovation that we believe this is the main driver of growth and profitability at the same time.
Other income and expenses are mainly related to the group cost, and it's important to highlight that this group cost is a suite of products that have been built on and provided by Delivery Hero, such as the entire logistics tech stack. These products today are governed through an existing service agreement that is in line with the transfer pricing policy because both Talabat and Delivery Hero are taxpayers. Lastly, if you look at our—if you want to bridge the gap between EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA, we mainly adjust the share-based compensation, which is Talabat employees participate in Delivery Hero share-based compensation that is managed by DH, and it's relatively low compared to our peers globally. In fact, our ability to convert EBITDA into Adjusted EBITDA is above 95%.
Something very also important to highlight is that we operate in eight countries, and almost all of the countries, with the exception of Egypt, we don't expose our business into a foreign currency risk because seven out of eight countries, their currency is actually either pegged into dollars or pegged into a basket of foreign currencies. And our exposure is mainly limited to the Egyptian pound. And to put things in perspective, the Egyptian entity contributed as of last year to only 1% of adjusted EBITDA. As I mentioned, it's a strong, unique financial profile: leadership, growth, and profitability. So if you look at our bottom line, we've been able to double our profitability to reach $273 million as of H1. That's a 91% growth year-over-year and almost 5% of GMV.
This is mainly driven by what I have explained earlier in terms of healthy growth and healthy margin expansion, but also our ability to control depreciation because our business model is what we call an asset-like business model that does not really require significant investments in terms of CapEx, and also, I think in this region, tax burden is relatively low compared to the rest of the world. This is something I would see some smiley faces in the room because my colleagues, Tomaso, and everyone knows my view on profitability. I always say profitability is just a point of view. What matters is cash. So let's see how all of this actually translates into cash.
As of last year, we've been able to achieve almost $300 million in terms of free cash flow, and we've been able to grow this by 64% on a year-over-year basis as of H1 2024, reaching $226 million. Our free cash flow is almost 7% of GMV, and our ability to convert adjusted EBITDA into cash flow is more than 90%. Of course, this also translates into a strong balance sheet. Today, we sit on a cash position of almost $270 million and a net cash position of $60 million, and as you can see, there's a $122 million shareholder loan. This will be capitalized pre-IPO, which means that Talabat will have no debt on the balance sheet by the IPO date. Other than the $86 million lease commitment, there's zero debt on the balance sheet.
Tomaso mentioned that we are very excited about what we've been able to build, but more excited about the future. So I would like to take you through the outlook and the financial trajectory that we are expecting. So in 2024, we continue to experience strong consumer demand, improving order frequency, and robust growth in the grocery and retail business across all markets. Similar to H1 2024, we expect to achieve 22%-23% year-over-year GMV growth in the full year 2024. Total revenue is expected to grow at 28%-30% year-over-year, outpacing GMV growth due to further adoption of our AdTech products, higher delivery service fees, and our growing tMart platform. We also expect to achieve 6.5% Adjusted EBITDA margin, 5% net income margin, and 6%-6.5% free cash flow margin. In 2025, we continue to anticipate strong growth momentum across all markets.
We expect 17%-18% year-over-year growth in GMV and up to 20% revenue growth. Our Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be in the range of 6.5%-7% and net income margin of 5%-5.5%. Over the medium term, we expect mid-teens year-over-year GMV growth and mid-to-high-teens year-over-year revenue growth. It's very important to note that our guidance is based on conservative macro assumptions in the midterm. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to reach up to 8% in the midterm, driven by operating leverage and cost efficiencies. We expect net income margin of 5%-6% and free cash flow margin of 6%-6.5%, which is consistent with 24% and 25% levels, as our continued upside from operating leverage and cost efficiencies is partially offset by the change in country and product mix.
In terms of CapEx, lease payments, and change in net working capital, we expect such figures to remain at 0.2%-0.4% of GMV. Given our asset-like business model, we do not anticipate significant investments going forward. We will also continue to benefit from a stable, positive change in net working capital going forward as well. It's very important to note that our financial and guidance figures are presented in constant currency to ensure comparability across periods and do not reflect the potential impact of InstaShop acquisition transaction. Our effective tax rate over the medium term is expected to be at a range of 11%, which takes into account the newly implemented corporate income tax in UAE. And with regard to our capital structure, we do not expect to issue any financial debt in the near term.
We expect to maintain a strong liquidity position in the near term and retain flexibility in the future in case of any potential corporate activity, such as an M&A. For our dividend policy, we intend to pay a minimum dividend of $100 million in April 2025 for Q4 2024 financial results. We also intend to pay a minimum dividend of $400 million for the financial year ending December 2025, to be payable in October 2025 and April 2026. Following such distribution, we intend to pay dividends twice a year, first half financial result being paid in October and a second payment in April following the publication of the full year financial results, and we will be targeting a reported net income payout ratio of 90% over the medium term.
I would like to conclude that this is a 20-year-old company, two decades in the industry, still growing at 51% CAGR, 24% CAGR for the last two years, 23% growth on a year-over-year basis as of H1, 6.5% EBITDA, almost 7% free cash flow with more than 90% cash generation from Adjusted EBITDA into EBITDA. This is something that we are really proud of, and I would like to close with this one. Thank you so much. I think we'll have a short break, and then happy to answer any questions.
Awesome. Welcome back to our capital markets event. We'll now move into Q&A. Thank you very much to everyone who has been submitting questions. We try to dedicate at least 45 minutes to Q&A and try to answer as many questions as possible. So I'll start with the first one that probably is for Wassim.
You said in presentation that your team or business is already profitable. How did you achieve this, and what do you guys do differently from your peers?
Yeah, I think I can attribute this to four main drivers. One is our average basket size. So we're a lot fixated, as I mentioned, on how do we tackle different customer missions from low basket, high frequency, to high basket size missions like your bulk ordering, which allows us to actually have a higher basket size, hence better profitability. That would be one. Second is what I covered extensively when it comes to our retail media ad, which actually has a double effect. It has an effect on our targeting or accessing more of the customer's monthly spend and also the generated revenue from the ad itself that directly goes into our EBITDA.
So it has a double effect, improves basket size, hence profitability. And the retail media also is part of our EBITDA uplift. Third, I would say, is leveraging Talabat's scale because we focus our growth in retail by actually cross-selling customers from food to grocery retail because these are our customers. As we covered, we understand their behavior. How do we personalize the experience to be relevant to them? We know at what moment to target them to ensure that they also enjoy the great grocery experience similar to food. And this allows us to do it efficiently, effectively, and with a low, I would say, marketing or CAC expense relative to the others. And the last point, fourth, is we deal with our tMarts as retailers.
So we think of the business and we set it up as a retail business with the solid fundamentals from commercial contract negotiation with the CPGs and how we run it operationally to ensure that we don't have a lot of incremental cost for it to be very efficient in terms of how we scale it.
Awesome. I think I'll take the next one. Anyone, please feel free to chime in. Can you please comment on the competitive environment in your markets and what your differentiation is? So I think Jérémy showed in the previous slides how we've been building a very strong competitive position across the region where we are around 3 - 10 x bigger than every single player in every single market we operate in. That said, there are several competitors in the region. There are local competitors. There are global competitors.
There are international competitors that came in, and then they left the market. So we are used to operating in a competitive environment. I think what makes us really unique and really makes us win market and improving our category position constantly over the years is probably what Jérémy was talking about, which is our playbook to success, right? So on the first pillar, you have massive selection, greater selection in the markets. It is extremely expensive to acquire and grow that selection from scratch. The second one is the experience that we offer and the efficiency of the fleet and making sure you have a large fleet, very efficient. And also, operating a subscale fleet for someone that has to start from scratch is extremely, extremely expensive.
And on top of that, we have around, as we said before, $380 million in value and promotions, discounts that our partners pay through the Talabat app in terms of affordability for our customers, right? And also, that one is extremely hard to replicate. If you're not the biggest in the market, your partners will not see the value in investing in euros. So that creates a massive push to our marketing spend, right? On top of that, I think we are a really loved local brand. We've been around the region for 20 years, and everybody recognizes our color, our brand. And Jérémy showed the customer preference and the cohorts that we've been building over the years. Those are very, very, very hard to replicate. And we've been building and laying these foundations for the last 20 years. And that's just food.
On top of that, we have groceries, and Wassim spoke a lot about groceries, how we've been building a super strong groceries business that creates a big stickiness to the customers on our platform, our ecosystem value proposition, Talabat Pro, FinTech, etc. So extremely hard to challenge us on food. On top of that, we are already one step ahead with grocery and two steps ahead with ecosystem value proposition and local flavor to add on top of all of that.
I would like to add on top of that. I think, as you said, we've been operating for the past 20 years in the region, and over those past 20 years, I think Talabat has acquired a wealth of knowledge and also has been able to build an amazing team. I think our teams and the people who make it happen really are a very strong point of differentiation. I think no other of our competitors can match both the quality, the quantity, and the density of talent that we've managed to build both in the countries and in our regional teams.
That's absolutely true. And Jérémy, maybe a question for you. Please, can you comment on the current geopolitical situation? Does it impact our business?
First, I want to highlight that this is, of course, a very painful situation and that we are obviously very saddened by everything which is happening in the region, all the more that a lot of our employees actually come from those countries which are being impacted. However, as far as Talabat is concerned, we're quite fortunate. And I would like to mention a few points specifically. First, none of our countries' operations actually have been impacted by the conflict.
Of course, we continue to monitor very closely the situation, but so far, we've been very fortunate from that standpoint. Second, if anything, what has happened is that a lot of the populations living in the countries which have been impacted have been displaced. And many of them have decided to move to countries where we actually have operations. So we have seen an expansion of the populations, very fast expansion of the population in the countries where we operate, and hence a growth in total addressable markets. Last but not least, I want to highlight again that we've been the regional leader for the past 20 years.
So we've been able to develop very deep relationships with a large selection of local brands and a very deep and very likely the best selection of cuisines, local cuisines, and regional cuisines, which are usually preferred by the customers from the region. And as such, we have seen quite a fast acceleration of our top line and the acceleration of the top line of those cuisines over the past 12 months.
The next one, I think, still for you, Jérémy. I think we discussed a lot about this during the presentation, but maybe we can give a quick refresher on this topic as well, like growth rates on GCC versus non-GCC.
Yeah, I think we did invest quite a bit of time to cover those topics, but I agree that it's so important that we shall cover that again. First, of course, we're terribly excited by the non-GCC markets.
We have mentioned that in the presentation, but we would not be excited by high double digits year-on-year growth rates for top line. Of course, we're truly excited. We're all the more excited that we're really in the very early innings of a growth path in the non-GCC markets. Egypt was open in 2020. Iraq was open in 2021. So we believe that we have massive headroom for growth in those markets. If we step back, as I mentioned before, we're very confident in our ability to grow those markets. First, when we look at our market penetration, the market penetration still stands only at a third of that of the GCC markets. Furthermore, the frequency is only 10% of that of the GCC market when it comes to Talabat. Those markets are expanding fast. The demographics are great.
So not only are the markets expanding fast, but also penetration and the frequency within those markets is increasing very fast. We've been using our playbook to gain, build, and consolidate leading category positions in the GCC. And the playbook that we are using currently in the non-GCC markets, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt, is exactly the same. So we're very confident about our ability to grow. This doesn't mean that actually we're not confident about our ability to grow in the GCC markets. We are actually super excited about our ability to grow. Overall, at Talabat, we have 6 million customers, monthly active customers. We believe that by 2028, the total addressable population in our GCC markets will be about 25 million. So this is a kind of a 4x growth we can still push.
On top of that, you showed during your presentation, Tomaso, the frequency of the fifth customer percentile. As I mentioned also earlier, our 10th customer percentile across the GCC region is currently standing at one order per day per customer, right? So we see massive headroom for growth, and we believe that those customers are really early adopters, and we believe that if we keep focusing on deploying our playbook, selection, experience, and value, we will get there also eventually.
And I think it's not just a belief because also data supports us in the fact that if you look at H1 2024, our growth rate in UAE, which is our largest market, has been higher than the average growth of all the markets, and Kuwait, been around for 20 years, is still growing double digit.
So there's still a huge headroom both in terms of penetration, as you said, six million over 71 million addressable population, and frequency. We keep seeing the frequency increasing in our customers. So question, maybe Khaled, if you want to answer this one, and I can add if you want. Why Saudi not part of the perimeter? Would you move to Saudi Arabia with Talabat?
For sure. So if you look at Delivery Hero, I don't want to speak about Delivery Hero, but if you look at how Delivery Hero expanded through the years, they are a house of brand and expanding through acquisition. So naturally speaking, they used to have a majority stake in Hunger Station, our sister company in Saudi. And historically speaking, we've been operating as a standalone business as Talabat. As mentioned earlier, we own our own tech stack, our consumer brand, etc.
So, Saudi is not kind of carved out of the perimeter, but naturally is run as a standalone basis. But I think most importantly is that we believe, and we've been saying, that we still have massive headroom in terms of growth in the eight markets that we are operating in, 71 million in terms of addressable population, only 6 million in terms of active customers. And we are still growing at 23% after 20 years of operations. So we believe that we still need to focus on the markets that we are serving, increase our frequency, increase our customer base as well.
Absolutely. I think in general, 100% agree. And in the future, whatever creates shareholder value, we're always open to any opportunity. Do you plan to expand your geographical footprint? And what are the factors to decide that? Do you have any M&A plans? Jérémy, maybe?
So for sure, I'm excited by geographical expansion. We opened Egypt in 2020 and Iraq in 2021. But geographical expansion is not an obsession. Geographical expansion is a means to an end, which is creating value for our shareholders. And for me, geographical expansion is an investment, which I compare to other investments. So we're constantly assessing the investment opportunities that we have at Talabat in light of our short-term and long-term goals and ROI targets. So that being said, while using that framework, when we actually look at our current markets of operations, we do believe that there is room for geographical expansion within our markets. As I mentioned during the presentation, there still are a lot of 100,000 or more inhabited cities in the countries where we operate, where we have not started operations or where our footprint is very small.
There are also other opportunities of investments within our business. We can invest in some select areas in our cities, the cities where we currently operate, if we believe actually that this is going to yield the highest ROI. We can invest to support some partners, which we believe is a brand we believe is going to be great for Talabat, to acquire them and to support them to expand, whether in the UAE or in other markets. Last but not least, we can also decide to drive all investment and funnel all investment towards multi-verticality, retail and groceries, if we believe that this is the right thing to do.
We mentioned before that Talabat has a six million customer base, monthly customer base, out of a market of 71 million total addressable population, which means that there's still a lot of capacity and a lot of opportunities to invest into the current markets of Talabat to drive growth. We still have a lot of headroom for growth in our current markets. Regarding your last question about M&A, we, of course, opportunistically look at opportunities. And I think that we would consider those opportunities if they made sense, if they were to strengthen our core. But there is no specific plan about that in the near future.
Wassim, how big can we expect retail media to get?
Yeah. So retail media is one of our main drivers when it comes to prospective growth, as the case studies we showed.
Second is profitability because it goes directly to our bottom line. If you look at where we stand today, we stand at 2% penetration of GMV of our retail media. We saw best in class is 8%. So this gives us a room to actually grow it by 4x where it is today. That's one. Second, we already have leading CPG partners that we deal with that are already at that 8% mark, which means that by us expanding the amount of vendors that integrate with our or interact with our retail media, we believe that within the medium term, we can quadruple the amount of growth and investment we get out of the retail media ad solution.
Awesome. I'm very excited about that too.
Me too.
Khaled, Postpaid, what is the default risk and what's the plan moving forward?
Yeah, I think, as I mentioned, it's our tech team, and thanks to you and the team, we've been able to really score the creditworthiness of our customers. So in terms of a default, I would say it's a low single digit as of now. And as I mentioned earlier, if you look at the uplift we get from gross profit, it's way above this low single digit in terms of default. I just want to stress the point that when we build new features or new products, we know our rights to play. And we are not a financial institution. And we have lots of discussions with the local banking community and our partners. And they really expressed interest in offloading this onto their balance sheet.
Awesome. For Wassim again, exact timing of InstaShop closing, how would it impact your guidance?
Okay. So as mentioned, we expect to close the transaction in 2025. And I think it's important to remind you on the financials of InstaShop. It's a $500 million GMV already in 2023. And it's already a positive EBITDA. So we expect with the synergies that we've discussed, which is partner synergies, operational synergies, product and tech synergies, that this will start to materialize into cost efficiencies for us and also headroom to grow as we have common partner deals and we leverage the strength of both companies combined.
Just maybe to clarify further, because I think we've mentioned this earlier, if you look at our financial and our guidance, this does not include the InstaShop potential impact. And as Wassim highlighted, it's almost $500 million in terms of GMV as of last year. That's roughly 8%. And it's a strong brand, and they are profitable. So we would expect a positive development after the completion of the transaction. Yes.
Awesome. So I think we covered this in the slides, but probably quickly, Khaled, what percentage of customers are eligible for fintech postpaid today?
I would say today, the postpaid is still heavily underpenetrated. It's only in UAE, as we mentioned earlier, roughly 2% of our customer base uses it. But if you look at UAE in particular, actually, we white-label the majority of our customer base. So I would say probably like two-thirds of the customer base are already white-labeled, and they would be able to use the service if they would like to. Awesome. How much of your gross profit still for you, Khaled, is generated from GCC countries? If we look at GMV, as I mentioned earlier, almost 86% of GMV is contributed from the GCC countries.
In terms of gross profit, close to 90% actually contributed to GCC, and even it's higher in terms of Adjusted EBITDA.
Awesome. Jérémy, for you, why is your Talabat Pro subscription penetration so low? It sounds like a question I could ask you in a meeting. I like why it's like why you're ready. I'm ready.
I love tPro. Customers love tPro , and Talabat loves tPro . tPro is highly beneficial for the customers, highly beneficial for Talabat. So I see all the reasons for which why this product is going to be amazingly successful. This product is very young. It was launched in 2022. Actually, in 2022, we launched it just in the UAE and in Kuwait.
We launched it in three other countries, Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan in 2023, and only in 2024 in Oman, which means that there are still two countries, Egypt and Iraq, in which we have not launched tPro . Yet, the product is growing very fast. Over the past year, we've seen over 100% growth year on year in the user base. So the traction is really amazing. The product is scaling very fast. And on top of that, we are working at the moment on some really amazing features, which make us very excited and which make me think that the program is going to accelerate in the forthcoming months. Furthermore, tPro is a program that we've created for high-value customers, meaning customers with a very high frequency.
We've covered that extensively in the previous slides, but we work really hard to increase the frequency of our users across Talabat, across all countries. As the average frequency of our users grows over time, tPro is going to become even more relevant to a wider base of users. So we're very, very optimistic.
Awesome. And as you said, still growing 130% on a CAGR basis. And I think it's just a matter of time, and penetration is increasing according to plans, I would say. Oh, a product question. What is the most interesting tech product development you're excited about that will have near-term growth or profitability impact Yi-Wei?
At the risk of sounding a bit cliché, as you've seen in many sort of tech presentations over the last year, I really do think that we're at an inflection point in tech capabilities in the world of AI, machine learning, and personalization, and we've demonstrated that it's already yielding a lot of results for us. I want to show you sort of two examples of where I see this really coming to life in terms of growth and profitability. On the profitability side, a few speakers have mentioned the capabilities of adtech and how using our ability to target much more specifically, to personalize much more specifically, it allows a much better match of supply and demand of ads on our network, right? Meaning a partner is really able to be very specific about the type of customer they want to reach in a specific area.
And when you're able to target so specifically, it also allows you to command a very different price point for your ads. And so we see the efficiency of our ad ecosystems to be just much more efficient over the years to come. And I think that investment in data, AI, and personalization will really pay off there. On just sort of pure growth, I'm really excited to also see how we leverage data and personalization to also really cross-sell our verticals across the board, right? I truly believe that grocery shopping, for example, is a very habitual product, right? You have your ordering frequencies. You have your milk that you have to restock. You know when someone's finished their loaf of bread.
We can, at the right moment, sort of prompt people to come back to buy groceries on us and even perhaps offer a CPG incentive, perhaps, to connect the two products together. I really see a world where, by really understanding our customers so much better, we have just so much stronger of an offering that we can bring on the table that helps growth and profitability.
Awesome. Wassim, how much CapEx is required for tMarts? Are we buying the properties or leasing them?
As Khaled mentioned, we operate an asset-light model for our dark stores. They're all leased agreements. They're also strategically located. When we want to invest in opening a dark store, there's very strict requirements on the location. Is it close to the customer? Does it cater for our value proposition?
It's light asset and highly scrutinized in terms of where and how do we open them to ensure that we operate them effectively and efficiently.
Fantastic.
Just maybe to add, I mean, by definition, when we say it's dark stores, by definition, you can think about it as not only relatively low in terms of CapEx, but also in terms of how much you pay rent for a retail location as a per square meter. It's extremely cheap because you don't really need a prime retail location.
So it's not consumer front-facing. So you don't need it in a prime location. You need it in the right location that's closer to consumers.
Awesome. Khaled, maybe, can you please elaborate on the group costs paid to Delivery Hero?
Yes. As we mentioned earlier, the group cost is related to a suite of technological products that has been built and provided by Delivery Hero. As I mentioned earlier, without getting you into the details, but both entities are taxpayers where we have an existing service agreement that is in line with what we call transfer pricing guidelines, right? And these four services that make a lot of sense for us, for example, the entire logistics tech stack, where it serves, literally speaking, probably like 70 to 80 countries where we can tap into it. The framework is basically a percentage of the platform revenue. And we would expect this percentage to continue steady on the midterm. Maybe Yi-Wei can explain better than me on the logistics tech stack.
Yeah, I can explain. We get access through Delivery Hero, a tech stack on ads, on vendor, on logistics, on a variety of capabilities, and I think what's really powerful about that is Delivery Hero operates today in over 70 markets. We have so many learnings. You can take a learning of an experiment you'd run in logistics in Singapore, realize it's really working, and boom, overnight, sort of turn it on in the other 69 markets in which you operate. We see that as a real benefit. We talked a lot about data being one of the key strengths of Talabat and how we use it to really optimize for our experiences across the board. Imagine what happens when you have access to sort of learnings and data from 70 markets across tens of millions of customers around the globe.
I think it's through that that it really makes the Delivery Hero tech stack really make sense for us to be part of.
Awesome. How has the introduction of UAE corporate tax regime impacted profitability? And more importantly, is it incorporated in our guidance? I assume this is for me or you? For you. Or Yi-Wei, whoever is responsible.
No, I mean, if you look at the, as I mentioned earlier, I think the tax burden in this region is fairly low compared to the rest of the world. And the latest development when it comes to corporate income tax, hence what UAE incorporated, has actually impacted our results for 2024. So we don't see significant impact in terms of P&L.
And also, I think what's worth mentioning is that even post-implementation of the corporate income tax, we still have the ability to generate cash flow at more than 90% conversion from Adjusted EBITDA to cash flow as well, taking into consideration this latest development.
Awesome. And I think this is another question for you on, do you foresee potential effects or risk exposure going forward?
Yeah. So I think also I touched base this on the presentation. Almost seven out of eight of the countries that we are operating in, their currencies are pegged to USD or either a foreign, sorry, a basket of foreign currencies, right? Which makes our exposure into the FX volatility only limited to the Egyptian pound, right? So we wouldn't expect a major impact of this. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, Egypt represented almost 1% of our Adjusted EBITDA.
But also, it's fair to highlight that if you look at our financial statement or if you look at our results, there's this unrealized unfavorable FX impact that is related to a shareholder loan, which as part of the IPO process, we're doing the corporate restructuring. We wouldn't expect this potentially to continue on the P&L as well. So short answer, no major FX impact, sir.
Wassim, on the groceries, what is the upside on the, wait, what's the upside on the basket size and margins? Is there a difference between GCC and non-GCC?
Yeah. No, definitely, we have a massive opportunity on the basket size. As we said, we tackle different customer missions from the impulse buying all the way to their stock-ups. And the way we see our cohorts evolve is customers start using our grocery vertical for their impulse buying.
But then we see as these cohorts mature, the basket size starts to increase and they move more towards their stock-ups. So this is the normal trajectory of our cohorts. That's one. Second, as we try to unlock more missions and invest more into affordability and value for our consumers, we expect basket sizes to also evolve in line with that. And also, the basket size and the basket mix has an implication on margins because as you shop multiple categories, categories have different levels of profitability. Some categories are more profitable, some categories are less. So as consumers start to shop more categories, we also expect our category margin to improve. Third is, as our business also grows in volume, retail is a volume game.
The more volume you generate, the more leverage you have to negotiate better commercial terms with CPGs, which will also further enhance our profitability position, so the way we see it is basket size and margins more or less go hand in hand, and cohorts from the day we've launched till now shows that we're moving more towards that trajectory. On the question is, do we see a difference between GCC and non-GCC? Actually, non-GCC basket sizes are actually higher where we stand today than GCC basket sizes, so we see this evolution, so we expect families, whether they're in the GCC or not, to normalize and you'd purchase more or less the same products or the same categories. But we do see more, let's say, more headroom in the non-GCC countries in terms of growing their basket size.
But also, GCC is more of frequency because of maybe higher disposable income. But we expect both baskets to grow in parallel.
In general, I think also our strategy has been evolving from kind of a convenience-seeking impulse buying to more weekly shopping or monthly shopping, right?
Especially that we want to tackle this share of wallet. So how much can we transfer from that grocery share of wallet offline to the online and gain more share, whether that's through higher frequency, lower baskets, or lower frequency, higher baskets? The objective is to gain that share of wallet.
And I think the upside of being able to sort of cross-sell and upsell products inside of the digital experience is so much more powerful in our app than in a grocery store, right? You walk into a grocery store, the only thing that you can really do is sort of put products beside each other, shaving cream and a shaver. But with the data that we have over the years, we can see sort of what products people are buying together. We can have swim lanes of recommendations of things that you should try. And I think that's where our strength as a tech company can really play a role in sort of increasing basket sizes as well.
Beautiful. Another question. There's a lot of questions for the CFO, as usual. Considering your relatively higher growth in non-GCC markets and grocery and retail segment, can you discuss the evolution of your country and product mix in the medium term?
That's true. So I think let's look first at the geographical mix.
Yes, indeed, the non-GCC countries are growing at a higher pace, almost 50%, compared to GCC. But I would say we've been in those markets also, relatively speaking, for maybe an average of five years, GCC 15-20 years, right? So it takes a little bit of time to reach the same level. In terms of the product mix, right, or the vertical mix, the grocery and retail is growing at a high double-digit. But also, food is still growing at double-digit growth as well, right? So as I mentioned earlier, yes, 86% of GMV is still from GCC. We would expect, even on the medium term, still GCC would remain the lion's share in terms of both top line and bottom line. But what I would like to highlight is the grocery and retail margins because naturally, grocery and retail have lower margin compared to food.
But if you think about it, Wassim was just speaking about the average basket. The average basket is higher, and it will continue to grow. The retail media will also improve. So in terms of dollar value, how much we would be able to generate on an order from a grocery and retail compared to food, I would say on the medium run, it will be similar. So it makes lots of sense for us to invest in this vertical.
100%. And another question on projections. How should we think about the split between growth in order volumes and AOV?
I think more than 90% of our growth as of H1 was fueled by the order volume, right? And I think it's fair to assume that in our business plan, we would expect the majority of the growth still comes from volume rather by the expansion of the customer base or the increase of frequency. In fact, in our medium term, we were conservative when it comes to the macroeconomics impact. And then we are not assuming an increase in the average order value due to inflation.
Okay. I think this same question, how does your GMV growth guidance in the medium-term split between order volume and AOV? I think you just answered it. Can you discuss the change in growth outlook between 2024 and 2025?
What do you mean? It's not clear to me.
This is a question. Can you discuss the change in growth outlook between 2024 and 2025? I also don't understand the question.
Yeah. I think it's the same. If you look at because of non-GCC is growing at a higher pace, you would expect that the growth in terms of year-over-year percentage is slightly going down. But in terms of volume, in terms of value, actually, our growth is accelerating. Absolutely. Absolutely. We're growing more. And we are a much bigger company. So we're growing from a bigger baseline, right? So.
Absolutely. Sorry, Khaled. All questions for you. Can you discuss the evolution of Adjusted EBITDA margin over the medium term?
So we would expect our EBITDA margin on the medium term to reach to 8%, as mentioned earlier, right? And I think that's a combination of both a strong growth on top line and our ability to improve unit economics. But also, we are benefiting from our scale and, as I mentioned earlier, our operating leverage. So in terms of cost base, we would expect that our marketing cost, for example, would improve over time in terms of percentage of GMV. So because of this operating leverage, I would expect a positive development on our Adjusted EBITDA margin and increasing between 1% to actually increasing up to 8%.
Awesome. Can you clarify if the 2024 and 2025 financials include InstaShop? And if not, what is the approximate impact of InstaShop to GMV and EBITDA? How fast is InstaShop growing?
Yeah, I think we've touched base on this. All the financials and all the guidance does not include the potential impact of InstaShop. And as of last year, InstaShop represents almost 8%, $500 million in terms of GMV over $6 billion. But I think we'll be able to speak more about InstaShop in the coming probably weeks once we finalize the integration.
Awesome. In Talabat Postpaid, is there any interest, cost, or any other fee for the customers to use this benefit? I can answer this so I give you a breather. So no, there's no cost, fees, or payment that we ask to the customers for use of the service. But we see that just from the frequency of lift, the program is profitable. So this is fantastic news, but also tells us that there's potential massive headroom to growth in case in the future we will want to charge any of these fees. How are we doing on time? Or last question? Last question. Okay. Can you please, sorry, Khaled, can you please provide some details on the shareholder loan of $122 million and capitalization plans? What impact will that have on the current shareholding structure?
Yeah, for sure. So as I mentioned earlier, all the shareholder loan as part of the corporate restructuring will be capitalized by the IPO date. So Talabat will have zero debt on the balance sheet. And this will have a potential positive impact on our P&L because as part of our other expenses in the P&L, there is a line related to interest expenses for these shareholder loans that we will not pay onwards. So it's a positive development on the P&L.
Awesome. There are a lot of other questions, but unfortunately, we are running out of time. So I really want to thank everybody who attended this event and absolutely all the people that really helped prepare for this event. We really enjoyed preparing for it and also presenting. I hope we showed you that this is a really passionate management team and looking forward to future discussions in the coming weeks. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.