Hello and good afternoon, everyone. We hope you are well, and thank you for joining today's Q1 2022 Trading Update Conference Call. We trust you have all received the press release and the presentation which we published this morning. As always, the documents are available on our website. We would like to remind you that this call is being webcast, and a replay of the audio webcast will be available later today on our website. With me today, we have Niklas Östberg, CEO, and Emmanuel Thomassin, CFO of Delivery Hero, who will take us through the most relevant aspects of our Q1 performance and share further details on our outlook and the path to profitability. After that, we look forward to answering your questions. Now let me hand over to you, Niklas.
Thank you. Hey, everyone, and thanks for dialing into today's call. We've had a fantastic quarter in every sense and looking forward to sharing this with you in this call. Before going into the numbers, let's reiterate some in-depth material around our cohorts and GMV targets. Starting with our vision, as you know, we are very focused on always delivering an amazing experience. We are obsessed by building the best service, and we believe we have a superior service in most of our markets. If we then go to the next slide, this becomes clear. Those who invest into us, they invest into the largest food platform in Asia, ex-China. The largest food platform in Middle East and Northern Africa, the largest food platform in Northern, Eastern, and Southern Europe, the largest food platform in South America, ex-Brazil, as well as the largest quick commerce player globally.
From that perspective, we believe we are the safest bet for those believing in food delivery and quick commerce. Going to the next slide, we like to reiterate the incredible stable cohorts in over 50 markets with up to 20- years of history. This slide gives an aggregated view. In my opinion, this is the strongest argument for being an investor in the food delivery industry. We have updated numbers to now include also the Korea business. Starting with the left-hand side, every year we add another cohort, and every cohort generates a higher GMV per year as time passes by. If you look at the 2017 cohort in light red, you can see that the GMV spend of that cohort in year two was already 1.7 times the size of that year.
In year three, it was 2.1, the size of the year one, et cetera. What you can see is that the newly acquired cohorts generate a higher GMV than the customers who we acquired the year before. You can see that in 2020, we acquired an exceptional number of users, which also was partially driven by COVID. We are now back to a more normal environment and yet continue to experience a general improvements in cohort frequency and size every year. In the upper right-hand side, you can also see how every new cohort is performing better than previous one. This is amazing and pretty unique for our industry. What I love the most, though, is that the incredible straight lines of the cohorts, even slightly upwards, if you look very closely, I would say.
Those worried about competition will get or should get comfort by looking into these charts carefully, as the lines wouldn't be this straight if people multi-homed or moved away every time they get a voucher. As you can see, the cohorts are incredibly stable. The stability of the cohort also means you have an enormous amount of long-term predictability. When you asked how we come to the EUR 200 billion -EUR 350 billion GMV in 2030, this is the underlying data. We know the development of the cohorts, and we can predict acquisition levels reasonably well. On the bottom right part, you can also see how cohorts improve in frequency. Here again, you see the uptick during COVID, but it's consistently and fundamentally upwards.
Also, I would like to add that the average number of orders per active customers of 4.9 on a monthly basis is higher than any global peer that I've seen reporting. Still, this level of orders per month is very low, and especially as we're launching new verticals and locations. Next slide gives you a better understanding of the constant improvement of order behavior of our customers. Existing cohorts have stronger loyalty and order more frequently over time. If you look at our 2016 cohort, they were ordering 2.4 times per month in the first year. In year six, this number has already increased to 6.3 per month. So a clear improvement over the years. What we also experience is that the new cohorts especially exhibit a higher order frequency than previous cohort.
This becomes visible if you look at the columns of the table. The 2016 cohort ordered 2.4 times per month during the first year, whereas in 2021, cohort's ordering three point one times a month. Based on this table, you can see how the business has a strong underlying growth ahead of itself. As the cohorts mature, as you said. As we set our 2030 GMV target of EUR 200 billion-EUR 350 billion, we base it on our cohorts. However, the graph below that we show here is just a sanity check that there is enough potential. In order to reach EUR 200 billion GMV, we would need to reach approximately 0.54 monthly orders per capita next eight years. Today, already seven markets have achieved this level.
Top seven markets had an average of 1.4- monthly orders per capita last year. The top seven countries include markets from Asia, Middle East, and Europe. Should add that none of these countries were at 0.54 only a couple of years ago. They also keep developing. Before getting started with the financials of Q1, I would also like to give everyone a view on the current COVID impact on the next slide. Here you can see our estimated quarterly impact from COVID pandemic on our GMV growth. In 2020, we had a circa 5% tailwind on an annualized basis as per our own estimates. Some countries were positively impacted while others were shut down.
In 2021, the year-on-year tailwind continued and added another circa 6% growth to our analyzed AOV year-on-year, in particular in the Middle East as it had lockdowns in 2020. In particular positive, of course, as mentioned, is the Middle East as there were no complete lockdowns timing as in 2020. In 2022, we expect very limited COVID tailwind, meaning and I hope so as well, I would say. That also means that we lapse 2021 positive effects causing a circa 9% headwind. As you all remember, Q2 and Q3 were particularly strong for us in 2021. On the right-hand side, you'll find an estimate of normalized growth rates.
The extraordinary high growth rates in 2020, 2021 are not only due to COVID, but can be explained by our high progress strategy, including fast rollout of own delivery and significant push of affordability in Southeast Asia. During this year, we believe our COVID adjusted GMV will be more moderate, so between 33% and 36% in 2022, which is a reflection of the much larger size we have today versus the last few years. In absolute terms, though, we keep growing at record rates. Now let's move to Q1 key highlights. First part is on the GMV. We had a very strong GMV in revenue development in all five segments. We definitely gained market share in all these places. We achieved this while generating record high contribution margins across the group, both before and after vouchers.
We also managed strong top-line growth while continuing to work on various profitability levers. Minimum order value and dynamic pricing have been introduced in 90% of our markets. We have optimized our partial targeting and made further progress on upselling. We have successfully also tested services which will be rolled out in selected countries in coming months. I'm also very pleased to share that we reached breakeven on adjusted EBITDA level in our Asia segment in March. While this is before allocation of group cost, I still believe this is a clear milestone given the heavy losses in the past. This happened ahead of plan, and we are now in a much stronger position to build on our leadership position in the region.
On top of that, we have introduced new pricing scheme for own delivery in South Korea with a clear positive impact on unit economics ahead. This was done, I should say, end of March, I think 21st or 22nd of March for part of Seoul and actually in April for the remaining part of the business. This was not the reason for moving to EBITDA in the Asia segment, just to make that clear. This will obviously create additional tailwind going forward. We have also seen promising first results from our subscription offering, pandapro, in the APAC region. I will speak more about that and why that is a good tailwind both for growth as well as on profitability.
Last but not least, we have strengthened our balance sheet position by securing additional financing totaling EUR 1.4 billion, following the placement of a EUR 1 billion term loan. Our cash position stood at EUR 3.5 billion at the end of 2021 on a pro forma basis. In addition, we arranged a RCF of EUR 375 million, which adds even further flexibility. Moving on, I should say, we feel very confident with that level as we're now moving forward with increased improvement in cash flow month after month, quarter after quarter. We therefore think that we have a strong position with that cash balance. We are no longer reporting orders as this has become increasingly contradictory to our business objectives of increasing GMV and profitability. Historically, we focus a lot on driving awareness and usage.
We have exceptional reach, and it's more about driving profitability or profitable growth. Our focus is therefore to turn loss-making orders into value orders or cut them altogether. We have made the switch internally already three quarters ago. We still want to make sure that for transparency, we have provided information about basket size growth in markets where there has been a change. From there, anyone can back calculate our order growth. It's just that we don't want to measure ourselves against a KPI that goes against our focus to drive profitability. In terms of GMV, we had very strong GMV development in Q1. We believe we had around 3% positive tailwind from COVID, but 2021 had an even higher COVID tailwind. Overall, a very strong quarter, but in general, we will have to push much harder.
We have to keep pushing hard, as you said, to hit our growth targets, while EBITDA should be significantly easier. Revenue did even better in Q1. We totaled more than EUR 2 billion in the quarter, resulting in revenue growth of 52%. Now let me hand over to Emmanuel for a deeper dive into our Q1 financials. Emmanuel?
Yeah. Thank you, Niklas, and good afternoon, everyone. Let me start with our performance of each of our business segments. Our platform business in Asia performed extremely well in Q1, reaching GMV of nearly EUR 7 billion and segment revenue of EUR 928 million, which corresponds a growth rate of 35% and 50% year-over-year, respectively. Part can be explained by the rollout of the basket size and delivery fee initiative, which pushed our AOV by more than 10% compared to in Q1 2022. South Korea has made strong growth progress, while we also successfully launched our promotion campaign by late March in Seoul Metro and early April nationwide for Baemin One delivery service. Just as a reminder, as we offered promotion pricing until recently, our unit economics for our own delivery were negative.
This should now improve quickly. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, we successfully introduced our subscription service, pandapro, which result in higher order frequency, a larger basket size, but also increase the customer loyalty and ultimately strengthen our leading position. Last but not least, we have also reorganized our operations in Thailand and achieved gross profit after vouchers in January. In Q2, we will launch pandapro, and we will participate in the government payment scheme. On slide 14, you will see the strong growth in Q1 in the MENA region. GMV reached EUR 1.9 billion, a plus of 32% year-over-year at constant currency. Payment revenue came in just short of EUR 500 million, corresponding to our 50% increase year-over-year at constant currency also.
Within the segment, talabat benefits from healthy customer behavior and generates 37% GMV growth on a constant currency basis in Q1. The advertising revenue at talabat already reached 2.3% of GMV. HungerStation achieved a high penetration of vendor-funded deals among their key account, which strengthened the leadership position in Saudi Arabia. The situation in Turkey remains challenging with additional headwinds from bad weather like snowstorm and weaker macro environments in Q1, but also fierce competition. Over the coming months, we will migrate some Yemeksepeti to our Pandora Tech platform, and this should improve the customer experience and also enable us to gain more traction as the new tech platform is significantly stronger than the current one.
This means the user interface will be more customer friendly, and we'll be able to offer new service like pickup, dining or loyalty program and become more targeted in terms of marketing. Now turning to our Europe on slide 15. GMV in Q1 total EUR 707 million, only a modest 4% year-on-year growth. However, this is significantly influenced by the divestment in the Buygrounds. On the like-for-like basis, excluding the Buygrounds in Germany, GMV grew by 17% year-on-year, despite the lifting of COVID restrictions. Advertising revenue or NCR grew by 52% year-on-year and now stand at 2.1% of GMV compared to 1.6% in Q1 2021.
Now I would like to briefly comment on operations in the Americas on slide 16. Here you can see that the business had another successful quarter, growing GMV by 33% year-on-year to EUR 558 million, while segment revenue grew by 39% year-on-year to EUR 149 million. We continued to optimize their unique economics in the region, which includes minimum order value, cross-selling, and delivery fees. This propelled their average order value by 19% year-on-year to EUR 11.1 and drove gross profit by order to a record high. Argentina, one of the largest countries in the region, even reached breakeven on adjusted EBITDA level before central cost allocation. We will continue to push for profitability and plan to roll out their service fee in Chile and Argentina in the coming months.
On slide 17, you will find the steady progress of the integrated vertical segment. Both our GMV and segment revenue more than double in size year-on-year, reaching EUR 410 million and EUR 374 million respectively. As we constantly adjust and optimize our product assortment, the baskets, the size grew by more than 22% in Q1 to EUR 13.7. Going forward, we will continue to invest in new Dmart's opening, although at a smaller scale than in the past years. In Q1 2022, we launched our 48 new stores, which is significantly less than the 213 stores opened during Q4 2021. The last three quarters have been the peak of our investments in terms of openings, impacting both CapEx and OpEx.
This follows a clear strategy to build coverage and now drive our GMV per store to drive margin improvement and allow the business as a whole to be more profitable. On slide 18, in addition to that, what I just mentioned, we also work on the profitability to our own delivery business. You can see here that the contribution margin before vouchers remained above 6%. In MENA, the contribution margin has improved slightly, while Europe has turned positive again since the closure of Germany. Now all four regional segments are showing a positive margin again, and we expect further improvement throughout the rest of the year. As you can see on Slide 19, the fully loaded contribution margin after vouchers has reached a new record high and has turned positive for the whole four segments.
We explained in the past that we constantly work on reducing our voucher intensity, and as such, we are happy to announce that vouchers as a percentage of GMV have declined by another 10 basis points quarter-over-quarter to 3.2% in Q1 2022. For the remainder of the year, we expect the level of voucher to decline even further. In addition, I would like to take this opportunity to refer to our advertising revenue or the so-called non-commission based revenue or NCR. In Q1 2022, advertising revenues stood at 2% of GMV, up from 1.9% in Q4 2021, and 1.6% in Q1 2021. All these numbers exclude Woowa still. These high margin revenues are exclude from the contribution margin, as you can see on this slide.
That's a very important element. Now on Slide 20, we provide an overview of our large investment portfolio in the global food delivery space. As we have discussed their strategic rationale quite extensively in the past, let's have a quick look at the valuation. We can see that the value of the portfolio has slightly declined from EUR 2.1 billion to EUR 2 billion since last quarter. This is primarily due to the recent stock market turmoil and the impact this had on the valuation of our public assets. This investment portfolio will serve as an additional source of liquidity if and when desired.
For instance, we have recently divested a portion stake in Rappi for worth $250 million while continuing to hold a stake of around 5%. Furthermore, the portfolio consists of liquid assets worth around EUR 550 million. On Slide 21, we present an overview of our pro forma cash position following the announcement of the EUR 1.4 billion debt financing, including our revolving credit facility. At the end of 2021, we had cash and cash equivalents of EUR 2.5 billion, and adding the proceeds from the term loan we issued this month, our pro forma cash stood at EUR 3.5 million at the end of last year.
The term loan offering was met with strong demand in the U.S. debt market and significantly diversified our funding source by accepting a new source of long-term capital. Furthermore, we have agreed a RCF or a revolver credit facility of EUR 375 million with a group of our banks, which provides even more flexibility. Against the background of more than EUR 3 billion in cash, a large investment portfolio that we can turn into additional cash if needed, and our plan to reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven in 2023 on group level, we view our cash needs as ample and covered and overall planning our reasons. Now let me hand back to Niklas. Niklas?
Thank you, Emmanuel. We already shared some information on our Dmart business a couple of weeks ago when we issued our term loan. However, as some of you may not have had the opportunity to participate in these calls, we wanted to briefly touch on this topic again. We regard quick commerce as a massive long-term growth opportunity, which is highly complementary and synergetic to our platform business as outlined on Slide 24, I believe. First of all, the continued development of Dmart will drive even more new customers towards all our business verticals with upselling opportunities between them. This will then drive order frequency and customer engagement. In addition, we can already see today the positive network effects. As soon as existing platform customers try our Dmart service, they start to order food more frequently.
As food and groceries will be delivered by the same driver, we can also leverage our existing food delivery fleet, which reduces the average delivery costs. With a higher network density, we can also reduce the delivery time. On the next slide, I'll take you through the most relevant unit economics of the business. This slide shows what happens to economics when we increase orders per store. In those countries where we have reached over 500 daily orders per store, you start improving unit economics. Looking at the left-hand side, you can see that we then do less free delivery in markets where we have reached target order levels. We have also slightly longer delivery times.
In a few comparator markets we operate, we obviously deliver much faster than what you see here on this slide, but you can see that we can adapt here. You can also see that we can offer a larger SKU set as the store turnover is faster. Now, more importantly, looking at the right-hand side, the product margin between, in this case, best-in-class countries and Dmart's overall is about the same. Both are still between 5% and 10% below long-term targets. You can see that we charge slightly higher delivery fees as we optimize a bit less for growth when we have reached our target order level. You can also see that delivery costs are 4.6 percentage points lower as we stack more. This also means a slightly lower delivery times as mentioned before.
You then have picker cost, which are four percentage points lower as we have better utilization of store personnel. We also have lower other costs like store manager. There's also less waste as turnaround times and SKU predictability is higher. When you add all this up, we achieve 8.9% positive gross profit before vouchers versus -6.3% in the other markets. This is again why we need to invest to drive orders per store. This is also apparent when looking at voucher share, which is 2.3% versus 5.7%, resulting in an even larger bottom line difference. During 2022, we plan to drive more countries towards the 500 orders per store. In our best stores, we are already at 1,000 daily orders per store.
Five hundred is by no means the maximum, but it is the level at which we make good profitability. Now let's have a closer look at the margin development of the best-in-class Dmart in the next slide. The business in these countries is on the verge of breakeven. This was achieved through an increase in the average basket size of 21% year-on-year and a GMV per store of 33%. I spoke about orders per store, but what is truly relevant is of course the GMV per store, or both that you have a utilization of staff, but also that you drive even more importantly, that will drive GMV. With an increase of 33% year-on-year, you can see how we have improved our unit economics here.
The main other driver is larger product assortment, which possibly also impact order frequency and drove basket size. In turn, higher order volumes result in better purchasing condition and higher product margins. Better unit economics and scale then led to significant improvements in adjusted EBITDA before vouchers, as mentioned. One important side note here, the best performing country within this bucket already generates an adjusted EBITDA margin before vouchers of more than 6%. So clearly within the 5%-8% that we have in our food delivery business. As mentioned here in the Dmart already one country has gotten there much faster than any food delivery country got there. Obviously, also partially driven by or significantly driven by the scale they already have. Coming on to the advertisement side.
Like to highlight the advertising revenue or what we call NCR, non-commission revenue, but advertising is a bit more accurate. As you already know, we have started to monetize our platform's audience through different ad products, which enable our restaurant partners to improve their visibility through some of the following products. First, cost per click or CPC. These are various premium listing options to increase restaurant visibility on the platform with an automatic renewal of monthly ad bookings. The vendor only pays if the customer clicks on the ad. The second product is Joker, pop-up banner or visibility through a banner with a discount offers displayed to customers. Here, the restaurant only pays when the customer places an order. This tool is highly focused towards new customer acquisition.
The value of this is both for consumer to get a good deal and for the restaurant to get a new customer, for us to make more, significantly more margin. We have various other products like offering restaurants the opportunity to highlight their certain dishes and other ad product features. All in all, we believe there is really a huge earnings opportunity ahead of us outlined on the next slide. What you can see here is that since 2019, advertisement revenues have more than tripled to EUR 288 million in 2021. However, last year, ad revenue stood at only 1.7% of GMV, and this did not even include Korea.
In Q1 2022, advertising generated 2.0% of GMV. We plan to reach 2.5% of GMV, including South Korea by 2024-2025. This would result in over EUR 2 billion of almost 100% margin revenue. In the long term, we expect advertising revenue to represent between 3%-5% of GMV. Now on to the next slide, where I'll share more details on subscription service, pandapro. We launched our subscription service, pandapro, in early 2021 in the APAC region. Since then, we have managed to acquire already more than 1 million subscribers in over 10 countries.
pandapro customers pay a monthly subscription fee and in return benefit from selected free delivery, discounts and other attractive deals, both in food delivery and quick commerce. These customers exhibit significantly higher order frequency and have higher baskets. Customers of pandapro become more sticky as a large portion of the subscribers order food only through us. This makes subscription a great customer retention tool. During the recent months, we managed to convert more and more subscribers from monthly to half year or even yearly subscription as the service offers great value to customers. Subscription services are being rolled out globally. On the next slide, we illustrate the impact from pandapro on customer behavior. I must say it has taken us a long time to optimize our subscription program, but we are now super happy with it.
The challenge with it is to make sure it's attractive enough for users, but still generating similar economics on GMV basis and not only per customer. We now believe we have a good program in place. As you can see here, with that program, monthly order frequency of the customers increases by 59% after you sign the Panda Pro subscription. In addition, they tend to order larger baskets, which results in GMV boost per customer of 81%. These customers add a lot of value to our platform. On the right-hand side of the chart, you can see how fast we gain traction with this service. At the beginning of the year, we started at close to zero, and within a short period of time, we achieved more than 1 million subscribers only in Asia, and this excludes Korea.
Going forward, we might also introduce subscriptions in other countries, or actually we are introducing subscription. In most markets, there is some sort, but I think we are most happy with this program, and it's a minimum that we're implementing. Now, turning back to Emmanuel for the outlook section. Yes, Emmanuel.
Thanks again, Niklas. Now coming to outlook. Q1 performance on GMV was, as you've seen, very strong, and we also end up ahead of our adjusted EBITDA compared to our budget. However, it's too early to change any guidance, and we maintain our previous guidance for 2022. I said the business has done better than planned on EBITDA, so that we are more confident than ever that we will be breakeven for the platform business, including central cost allocation for the full year 2022. GMV is expecting to reach between EUR 44 billion-EUR 45 billion and revenues between EUR 9.5 billion-EUR 10.5 billion. Furthermore, we expect our platform business to generate positive adjusted EBITDA on a full year basis in 2022.
Adding investment up to EUR 525 million in Integrated Verticals, the adjusted EBITDA margin on group level is expected to range between -1% to -1.2%. At this point, I think I would like to reemphasize once again that adjusted EBITDA is not an output factor for Delivery Hero, but rather an input factor. We are the ones that will decide on the targeted growth and associated investments. Therefore, we feel a very high level of confidence with this guidance metric. I would also like to remind you that in 2022, the vast majority of the negative adjusted EBITDA at Delivery Hero will come from less than 10% of the GMV. Let me also share some thoughts with you on Integrated Verticals.
We understand the Dmart unique economics very well and have a concrete plan for the business. That means that we have visibility and control on the EBITDA burn here, and we are already profitable in some countries, so that we know how to get there. Given the market environment, and as we have seen less competition than we expecting in quick commerce and our Dmart improving the unique economies rapidly, we may end up spending less than the up to EUR 525 million guide previously, but we will revert on this when we have more visibility. When it comes to Glovo, the company confirmed that the business had continued to perform very well despite significant GMV loss in Ukraine. GMV growth in Q1 was above budget and over 85% year-on-year.
Consequently, the market share gains have been dramatic as well. Despite challenges in Ukraine, the team remained confident to reach GMV if the full EBITDA guidance is utilized. However, they might also choose to invest slightly less than previous guidance if markets remain constructive. For the first quarter, they performed slightly ahead of EBITDA budget as well. A further encouraging remark on EBITDA is that Spain has turned profitable before group cost, and this shows that the playbooks works. Finally, as a reminder, the transaction is not closed at this stage, and we expect the closing to take place early Q3 2022. Now on Slide 35, sorry.
We also confirm our guidance of reaching adjusted EBITDA of between EUR 0 and EUR 100 million for the platform business, including Glovo in Q4 2022 after group cost, as well as a positive adjusted EBITDA for the entire group, including Glovo in 2023. Our confidence in this is very high, and our group profitability may even come a few months earlier, which we don't want to guide towards this right now. Now on the next slide, and for those that were wondering how the profitability will continue to develop after 2023, I will ask you to take a look on the Slide 36. Here we explain how we can achieve a long-term adjusted EBITDA margin target of 5%-8% of GMV.
As outlined in our previous goals, we have many levers to reach this target. Some of these are related to revenue, such as increasing delivery fees, minimum order value, introducing service fees and dynamic pricing, organic increase in commission rate, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of room to reduce costs per order by better utilizing rider fleets through Dmart's Logistics as a Service or by slightly increasing stacking or negotiating lower payment fees with our payment providers and better purchasing conditions with our suppliers. The combination of increasing revenues and improved cost structure is planned to drive gross profit from the 5.1% achieved in 2021 to a range of 11%-13% on the long term.
I would like to mention that without Woowa, the gross margin would already be above 7%. When it comes to marketing, we obviously have a lot of room to flex up and down. The larger the platform gets, the lower the customer acquisition cost. Given the size of the opportunity, we have remained the marketing cost at 2% of GMV, while our largest markets are already below 1.5% of GMV. The OpEx include restaurant sales, which also drops as platform gets larger and we see more self-signups. A lot of CapEx will reduce as we drive operating leverage at scale. However, we kept overall OpEx at 2% as we expect technology and product will still remain a big portion. Also here, our best-in-class markets are already below 1.5%.
This combination of all these efforts will bring our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin to GMV to the targeted 5%-8% range. We hope that you find this deep dive helpful, and we are now looking forward to answering your questions, Crystal?
Great. Quick remark from my side here before we start with the Q&A. As we would like to give every analyst the opportunity to ask a question, I would kindly ask you to limit your questions to one only. Now, let's kick it off for the Q&A. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their touch tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. Again, in the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question only. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selections. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. First question is from Giles Thorne from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Thank you. My question's on Korea, and it's probably one you could anticipate. Namely, I'd be interested to get some color on churn dynamics in both consumers and restaurants as the promotional pricing has ended. I appreciate something you touched on today and in the update on fourth of April, but given its importance to the overall full year outcome, it'd be useful to get the latest color. Then if you could weave into your answer what your own delivery unit economics are looking like today, that would be helpful too. Thank you.
Sure. Hey, thanks, Giles. Yeah, Korea, there's no churn in users because we haven't increased any fees for them, really. Also for the restaurant side, we haven't seen any. I don't know, very minimal, I would say, churn there. Not more than we've seen in an average month. Therefore there has been very good results. We also didn't expect churn. Of course, it's much nicer to see that being the case. Overall we believe that we have slightly increased our market shares lately, but yeah, we remain significantly larger than the number two and number three.
In terms of the churn economics, we don't disclose exactly, but I think I have stated before that we increased the unit economics of delivery with roughly between EUR 1.2-EUR 1.7 or EUR 1.8, if I'm not right, per order. Overall, the unit economics is now slightly higher, if I'm not mistaken, than for the marketplace business. Marketplace business is still the majority part of our business. Yeah. Still helpful.
Okay. Some of the inevitable negative press we've seen coming out of Korea from your favorite English language newspaper that.
Mm-hmm.
Are calling for a boycott and, you know.
No.
Collection rather than delivery. That's.
No. We haven't seen. I think I'll ask the team, and I was meeting with the team just the other week or last week. I think they referred to exactly the same churn as you have in the restaurant industry of roughly 3% per month. That is just because you have restaurant churn and because they turn the business or change ownership or other reason, and there was no increase, right, at least material increase. We have not seen that. The press, of course, if you have a few hundred thousand restaurants on your platform, and of course if you increase price, then if 1% of those restaurants are unhappy, then you're speaking about three or a couple thousand restaurants. And surely one or two of them would come to the media.
Overall, we think it's been, I don't know, very well perceived. We have also done it very carefully. We have a very strong connection to the restaurant association. They are very happy with the change that we made. Everyone understands that we cannot operate on promotional pricing forever. We have seen absolutely no negative effect on this.
Understood. Thank you.
As mentioned before, we have roughly 3% COVID positive impact, I would say, this year. Last year was a little bit more positive, so net effect is still negative impact from COVID, but there was a slight positive. I would say Korea was one market where there was a slight positive impact in Q1. So that I would assume will go away, but not because of orders or pricing.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Next question is from the line of Rob Joyce from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Thanks very much for taking the questions, and thanks for that incremental detail in the release. Just one from me, sort of maybe sort of higher level one. Given the increased focus of your strategy, and particularly the guidance on profitability now, did you or would you consider extending the KPIs in the long-term incentive plan to operating metrics that beyond revenue growth?
Look, I think. Yes. In general, we have not drastically changed our plan. Our business has come to the side where profitability makes a lot of sense and driving additional levers makes a lot of sense. This was already our plan back, I don't know, a few quarters ago. We have not reacted to the market environment. Of course, it's helpful and we might guide a little bit more towards that, but the plan was already to get to that profitability during this year, full year for the platform, including the Integrated Verticals next year. I don't think it has changed.
I think overall, the incentive structure that we have is very much in line with our shareholders, that we wanna drive shareholder our share price. In the long term, I think we're doing that. I'm generally not opposed to being creative, but incentive structure, but I also find it a little bit careful because it's very easy for us to produce EBITDA. If you wanna produce EUR 1 billion or EUR 2 billion of EBITDA in 2022, I think we could do that. But it wouldn't be right for the shareholders if we would pull all the levers we can, increase a little bit commission, drive, I don't know, EUR 0.50 more in pricing. So delivering 5 minutes or 10 minutes lower, that would save us another few hundred million EUR.
Of course, we could easily drive that profitability. I would find it a little bit dangerous if management teams are incentivized to drive profitability because that could easily be achieved while driving long-term share value is harder and requires a little bit more diligence for the long term. Therefore, I think the current setup is probably the right one. Having said that, I'm so in the boat of having shares in this company, and as you all know, I bought significant amount of stock also during the downturn now. I think we're all in the same boat with or without an EBITDA incentive plan.
Okay. Thank you.
Next question is from the line of Joseph Barnet-Lamb from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Excellent. Hi, team. There are lots of drivers of order headwinds within the industry. One is proactive focus on economics. Niklas, you alluded to a potential willingness to walk away from orders that were loss-making. How much of your 2021 order base could conceivably fall into that bucket? Just some discussion or any color you can give us on the impact on group orders from proactive steps to improve profitability. Thank you.
I think it makes very little sense for the business to drive non-profitable orders. Yes, of course, sometimes you may accept one customer doing one order that you don't make money on. We will continue to do that. But if you see a customer is continuously ordering with vouchers or with incentives or very small baskets and long distances or any other way that makes that order continuously loss-making or that customer loss-making, then for us, I think the only way that makes sense is that you have to find a way to get that customer to either order with a high delivery fee or no voucher or lower delivery distances, or you actually prefer that customer not to order at all. That's a little bit more a trade-off.
I think in general, that's not material part of business because we have also not done that in the past, that we describe bad orders, and that would have been silly. I would say there is probably a possibility that you're increasing GMV with, let's say, 5% because you're some of them you push up to become value customers, and therefore you push GMV a little bit, and you might lose, I don't know. You might lose like 10%, 5% of orders, you might boost GMV with 5%, maybe even, I don't know, 5% and 10% or so. That means effectively you might be in the order of magnitude 15 or so percent as you're making that transition. If you look at this time, there is by no means that we.
I'm happy to be very transparent on that. It's just that we don't think it makes sense to measure ourselves in orders. If you look now, we guided or we disclosed the increase in AOV for the segments where there was a change. If you look at Asia, GMV has been increased with roughly 10%. In Integrated Verticals, it's more than 20%. I think the same was with Latin America, around 20%. You can assume that or making the back of the envelope basket size will have increased with 10%-15%. Looking at growth, you would then also expect order growth to be substantially or consequently 10%-15% lower.
I don't think that deviation will be much larger than that. I think, yeah, it's probably a little bit more of a transition. In order of magnitude, maybe 5%+ in GMV, 10%+ or 10%- in orders.
That's helpful. Thank you, Niklas.
Thanks.
Next question is from the line of Andrew Ross of Barclays. Please go ahead.
Great. Good afternoon, everyone. Mine is a short-term question, just looking at Slide 8 and the helpful headwind you've provided from the pandemic through the year. It looks like that headwind is more in Q2 than Q1. Can we just get a sense of how much you're growing in April and kind of roughly what we should expect in Q2? I'm thinking that low 20s% GMV growth looks like a sensible assumption based on that chart, but tell me if that sounds stupid. Thank you.
As mentioned before, I try to be helpful, and the reason why we put this graph is to make sure that we don't set a guidance so that people miss expectations for the next quarter or Q3, Q4. I'll try to add more disclosure there. We grew 30% or 31%, I think, this quarter. I think there was probably a 3%, and it was a 3% positive impact of COVID. As I said before, there was an even more positive impact in Q1 last year. Therefore, the net effect is that we probably had a 5% headwind.
In the next quarter, we have roughly, I'm judging here by the charts, so please forgive me if there's 1% or 2% wrong, but there is roughly 10%, 11%, 12%, maybe 12% impact negatively year-over-year effect on Q2. That would expect that you should have in the order of magnitude, it should be, and then maybe 20 in that. If you are 24%-27% this year, Q1 was of course better. Q4 will be hopefully better, and others will be slightly lower than this 24%-27%.
I'm just-.
I hope this didn't confuse you more than it helped. Yeah.
That definitely helped. Can I just confirm that you're actually seeing that in April, or is that something that you may see in May and June?
April is a tricky month because we have Ramadan starting 10- days earlier every year. This month, it was completely in April. Order growth was maybe slightly higher than what you said there. I think we can expect in May and June that I know that there will be in that order of magnitude, what you said.
Thank you.
Next question is from the line of Monique Pollard from Citi. Please go ahead.
Oh, hi. Afternoon, everyone. One from me, it's on the Dmart. Really useful to get that EBITDA margin improvement over time for the best-in-class Dmart. Just wanted to understand, now that you have that formula, that you know you can deliver the break-even profitability, do you think the path to getting there will be successively quicker for the other stores? I'm thinking particularly about that, given the product margin that you've highlighted for your best-in-class stores is actually slightly lower than the overall product margin that you have, and that seems to be sort of sequentially improving.
Yeah. I think in general, we have been very happy over the last couple of months with our development, as Emmanuel also mentioned in his reviews. I think overall, we probably tracked it a little bit faster than expected on margins. And we don't want to change guidance here. We will do that when we feel that we have more visibility. Overall, we feel very positively about it. There are a number of levers that we can pull. I know you said product margin is of course one, that is still significantly lower than what it should be long term. We could of course increase the margin easily by just increasing pricing, but that's not what we want to do.
We increase margin by actually pushing procurement and purchasing power, and that's the main driver for this 5%-10%. That of course takes a little bit longer time. The reason why I think we're also performing a little bit better than planned on margins and EBITDA is that the growth has been a little bit higher than what we anticipated. As I said before, we're pushing hard to get to that, let's say 500 orders per store because then we can. When we get there, we can be a little bit less bars or a little bit better on the pricing and so on, a little bit more stacking, et cetera.
As order levels were a little bit higher than planned also means that we moved a little bit faster on orders per store or even more importantly is GMV per store. That was also another aspect that basket increased a little bit faster than what we anticipated as well. The combination there, the growth in order per store as well as the GMV has been positively helping our business. It's a little bit too early to give a new guidance or updated guidance on this. I don't want to say that it comes faster or quicker. I can say though that the investments that we did last year was a lot about building new stores, building new coverage areas.
The investments this year is really to drive orders per store. The more orders we drive to 500 or more orders, the more orders will be in the profitable segment. That should mean that the profitability will improve every quarter, and the cash flow will improve even faster every quarter because we get better procurement capabilities and purchasing powers and being able to move a positive working capital to a negative working capital. EBITDA should improve every quarter, every month, every quarter, from the Q3 - Q4 - Q1 level. We were roughly the same levels there. That should improve quarter on quarter and cash flow improving even faster.
Okay. Understood. Sorry, just to follow up. On the product margin, though, the improvement in that product margin, is that all driven by better procurement or is it some of it mixed, like you pushing more SKUs that have a better product margin with suppliers?
Yeah. We do both, and that is why it takes us a little bit time because you change your SKU sets, it takes some time to get the right SKU set, know what customers want, what are the items. This is not on a global basis, but sometimes can even be on a local basis. Some product of course global, but many of them local favorites. The more we know the right SKU set, the more we start building ability to improve also margins on those product items. We can start also testing a little bit on price sensitivity on different products. Milk might have a higher price sensitivity than a chocolate bar, as an example.
The more data we have, the better we can actually assess that price sensitivity by SKU. Of course, if you have 3,000-6,000 SKUs, that also takes a little bit of time to optimize to perfection. I think a significant improvement there or gradual improvement there. The other one is procurement because the more orders per store you have and the better procurement capabilities you have because for someone to supply your store on a daily basis is not very attractive for a supplier if you don't have enough orders or if it's just a few items. The more items we sell on a store, the more possibility we have to improve that. Additionally, we're building distribution centers to even further improve our procurement capabilities.
It becomes cheaper for our suppliers to distribute to one place, and then we distribute to our stores. That way we can significantly improve our procurement capabilities to be more in line with a retailer. I would say currently we are. Our procurement capability is still somewhere between 6%-9%, I would say worse than a wholesaler or retailer, a strong retailer. That shows us we still have more than 5% margin to improve just on procurement side.
Thank you.
has been a little bit of both.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks.
Next question is from the line of Marcus Diebel from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. If we have only one question it is. It's basically, in a nutshell what you were saying, you were increasing service fees in some of your markets. Overall, maybe with the exception of Turkey of course, would you say in your number one markets, market shares are at least stable or even marginally increasing? Is that really a right bottom line of previous comments?
Yeah. I would say that there are three markets out of 72, if I include global, there are three markets where we have lost market share. Sorry, five. Probably five markets out of 72 that we have lost market share. Out of the remaining markets, I would say that we have gained market shares in most of them, and some of them have been stable market share. We have Turkey is one market where we have lost market share. I think people think that we lost market share in Saudi Arabia. I don't think that is the case if you look at the last 12 -months. I even believe that we've marginally increased market shares over the last 12 -months. There are a couple of other markets. I don't want to go into detail, but a couple of smaller markets where we have lost a little bit of market share.
Okay.
The majority have been increasing and some of them have been stable, I would say.
Yeah. Just as a follow-up, you feel that obviously your measures, again, increasing service fees is something you can do kind of without expecting that the competitors in those markets have to follow. How you feel like.
I think.
You can push those through without losing market share.
Yeah. I think in general, the market has become very rational. Everyone wants to increase service fee. Everyone wants to add delivery fee. Everyone wants to save a little bit. I don't know. This goes for everyone. This is true for everyone. This is true for Coupang, that's true for Grab, that's true for, I don't know, Just Eat, that's true for, I don't know, whatever other competitor we have. Uber, we compete in two or three markets as well. That's true for everyone. I think in some places they have been faster. In most markets, they have been faster implementing service fee. In some markets, we might be ahead, but I would expect that the competitor follow through. If they don't, then we might prioritize other markets for it.
We will be rational, but of course, we will also monitor what a competitor does, and if we feel like they try to take advantage of it, then we will adopt and adjust and move it in other markets. There are enough markets for us where we can do it in. We don't plan or budget on doing this in all markets. The fact is that we don't even plan to do it or budget for it in any markets. Anything we do is actually incremental to our EBITDA. We have no rush to implementing service fees, and we will do it where we feel like competition is concerned.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks, Marcus.
Next question comes from the line of Miriam Josiah from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. It's just on the own delivery contribution margin. If I look at the chart, it seems to be sort of broadly stable, perhaps ex-Europe. So how should we think about the improvement going forward? Is most of that going to come from service fees or what are the sort of key levers there for the rest of the year? Thanks.
I think there are many levers and a service fee is just one, but we also have long-distance delivery fees. We have it on the voucher side, being more targeted, reducing, getting better. The AI, I don't know, part of vouchering, making sure that there is no one who can order multiple times with it or any fraud protection you have there or anything else that would be also improve the margin. There is definitely a possibility for further stacking. We continuously do that to improve the cost side of things. You may have a little bit on commission work because we sign up more restaurants, and as you sign up more restaurants, they're going on slightly higher commissions. There's a gradual continuous improvement.
There was for a while a slight reduction because we added some key accounts, but now those key accounts are on board and we add more independent restaurants and therefore the average will gradually also then move up, especially since there's a churn in the restaurant industry. There are so many levers I could continue probably for another few minutes. I wouldn't say that the service fee is not the reason for what has gone up in the past, and it will not be the reason for going forward. Of course, it's very helpful when it does or when we do.
Thank you.
Additional bonus, put it this way.
No, that's helpful. Thank you. Just as a follow-up, what the percentage of orders that you batch today or where do you think that can get to?
I don't have the latest numbers. I don't want to say something wrong here. I have a number from a few quarters ago. I apologize for this, but it's still low. We deliver on average in something like 23 or 24 minutes, I believe. There's a little bit different market mix here, but in order of magnitude, we deliver very fast, faster than I think anyone else does. We still manage to do some proportion of stacking. I would say it's low two digits. Where can it go long term? The more density we build and the more we grow and you can probably get to a hopefully, I don't know, maybe a 50 +.
If you look at Meituan and others, they stacked probably more than 50%. The stacking is not one order. It might even be, I don't know, two or three extra orders. I don't dare to say anything here, but I think it's quite substantial amount of stacking that can be done if you just allow yourself a couple of minutes lower on delivery.
Great. That's helpful. Thank you.
Thanks.
Might I kindly remind everyone to please stick to one question at a time. The next question is from the line of Andrew Gwynn from Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Yeah, I was gonna ask on Turkey actually, but I'm gonna come back to the guidance. Obviously the message here is things are going pretty well and indeed ahead of the guidance. So why not upgrade? Thank you.
Emmanuel?
Yeah, no, fair point. You know, we don't want to upgrade because fiscally this is very early in the year. We see very good development as I mentioned before. This is from our point of view, too early to upgrade the guidance. We did so for the integrated vertical. As was also mentioned in my statement before, also there, we moved it up to EUR 525 million. We're seeing that the development of the KPIs and the fact that we have slightly reduced the number of openings of DMarts. We see that, you know, there's room for improvement, but this is quite too early in the year to confirm. That's the reason why. We had a very good first quarter, all in GMV, in revenues, but also EBITDA wise.
Anyone who knows me and knows Emmanuel, there is no one who hates more than to disappoint. I never wanna disappoint. We are probably both a little bit, yeah, conservative and also what we tend to want to have a little bit flexibility. I know maybe that's not the time to do that, but we don't know. We don't know what the future tells. Right now everyone is constructive. Right now the market is looking for profitability. Right now every company is doing that. Who knows what happens in one, two, three, four, whatever quarters. We don't want to be sitting in a position where we have to optimize the business in a way that we don't think is the right way.
Therefore, we generally always keep a certain amount of flexibility and so on to respond if need be. If markets remain such as they are, then maybe there is some room. We're still only in April, so we like to making sure that we feel 100% certain that we can. Before changing any guidance, we would want to be 100% sure or even more so that we can.
Maybe if I can add a personal note. The last two years have been quite tremendous in terms of new events taking place. You know, we talk about corona, and that's why, you know, I think it's fair to be prudent. We had a very good start, but I think we should be prudent. That, as Niklas said, this is probably also our DNA. That's why, you know, we mentioned it today, but we didn't feel like, you know, we have to be prudent as we start. We are just at the beginning of the year, looking what happened the last two and a half years.
Okay. That's all very fair. Is it substantially better or subtly better?
I think what Emmanuel said is probably true. Like, I think we were EUR 23 million ahead of budget in Q1, on EBITDA. I think on orders we are on target, on plan. Then on EBITDA, it was EUR 23 million ahead. If you're gonna be EUR 23 million ahead every quarter, is that EUR 23 million gonna grow into more, or are we gonna use that EUR 23 million because there are comparative pressure or other things? I don't know. That's why we're keeping the guidance as it is. Yeah.
Okay, great. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Next question is from the line of Silvia Cuneo from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I have a high level one on the market. Can you please share some thoughts about how you're seeing user demand evolving as bills start increasing due to inflation? Do you see the risk of lower demand as ordering food delivery becomes more expensive, somewhat with service fees, delivery fees, et cetera, that could partly explain the lack of guidance upgrades today? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks. I think in general, if you look at the growth that we're having, I think it's still very strong. Overall, we wouldn't have that strong growth if our cohort or anything would be weak. I think so therefore, we remain having very strong cohorts. There are GMV growth and even order growth kinda signals that, especially if you make it adjusted for kinda COVID and lapsing the COVID impact of last year. I don't think there is a lower demand. If so, we would have already seen it. The only lower demand is that we're lapsing a year that was very good. If you look at Europe, we grew 70% on a like-for-like basis.
I think Deliveroo grew with something similar or maybe slightly less. I think Just Eat a little bit less, too. That is generally a little bit less than what we would normally have expected. Again, we had a very strong COVID tailwind last year, so I think the growth is still very strong, even in places like Europe, where it was the weakest of all. No, we don't see a change. The business, the cohorts, everything is so predictable. It's so straight that I could be pretty high certainty tell the amount of GMV this year, next year, the year after, the year after that, and the year after that, assuming there is no COVID that temporarily increase or decrease orders. Yeah.
Nothing on that.
Anything to add?
Maybe on inflation, because we had countries with high inflation before. If you look at Argentina, hyperinflation. Also we've seen the situation in Turkey. What we saw on the food business is that basically, yes, it impact maybe the overall behavior of the consumer. But on the food business, very lightly, if any, because basically, the transaction value for a food transaction is not as important as you will buy for other goods. I will think here about buying TV or other goods. I think the experience that we made so far is that inflation or hyperinflation even have some impact on the macroeconomic. But for our business, the restaurant is passing the inflation or the increase of the price to the consumer.
We take the fee, and basically, people have to eat, and continue to do so, I think, inflation or not. It remains to be seen. This is another new view that we are facing. That's why we remain cautious. So far, we don't see any impact on that specific point, inflation.
Inflation is generally more in our benefit because we charge on the food value, while our costs are not increasing as fast as probably the food cost is increasing. Now the question is demand gonna be lower if generally there is increased cost for consumers. Emmanuel mentioned a couple of scenarios, but of course, those markets have been used to inflation, hyperinflation for a long time. I give you another example. Take Greece during the crisis. The country went through. It was not inflation, but the country went through enormous amount of unemployment rate. The country went bankrupt and our orders have never been stronger in Greece than it was during that time. People stopped going out to restaurant and start order in because it's still cheaper to order in than going out.
That's the only explanation we have. Even in such a disaster scenario, I think you've seen that food delivery is generally very strong and countercyclical in that sense.
Okay. Thanks for confirming.
Thanks.
Next question is from the line of Sreedhar Mahamkali from UBS. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Yeah, good afternoon. Well, thanks for taking my question. Niklas, probably start with an observation or maybe a bit of feedback, stating the obvious, I guess, but also not looking to create a debate on this call, but most of us were surprised that the order disclosure was stopped. Fully understand some of the rationale you outlined already, but it's fair to say that most of us struggle with it. Just a bit of a feedback. My question is on the Dmart, please. The top seven countries versus all of the 42, I'm curious if you can explore a little bit more. Is there anything specific about the nature of these seven markets that you're able to get up to 540 orders per day? How long has it taken to get there?
I guess more importantly, how much closer do you think you could get to for the entire segment for orders per day by the end of the year? What's the sort of path there? Is it end of this year, end of next year? How do you see that path? Thank you.
Maybe still a remark and then we were a little bit surprised that it would be a big thing because we have over the last few quarters kind of reduced the importance of orders. We also excluded it in some of the graphs in the past or in the past quarter mainly because we don't really look at it ourselves, and we actually create the opposite incentive to what we actually wanna do, which is to drive profitability and profitable orders. We have no problems with, as I said, in that people know our order growth and we say average baskets in a couple of segments or in three segments where it was changed. Therefore everyone can back calculate order growth.
It was as I said, let's say 10%-15% lower than on GMV, as baskets increased. In terms of Dmart. Differences, I would say the, there is a slight difference in age of this, but there is also slight differences in number of customers that lives in those areas. There is a little bit more density there. As you move out of density, there is a slightly less. Having said that, the growth of those that are outside of that, and also as we built, we kind of split certain stores into two store to cover a slightly larger area and then so on. Therefore there has been over time then a little bit reduced, customer density there, but the growth on orders are significant.
It's just that it takes a little bit longer maybe to drive it there, but it's clearly happening. Other than that, we know actually you've seen that the prices are not higher, the margin is not higher. It's just that we decide to do a little bit more promotions to get the orders up. We have also not the picker utilization, store manager utilization and so on. But other than that, no.
And, and on the overall-.
I should add that.
Dmart stores.
Thank God I should add, we have a lot of customers already. We don't have to acquire them very extensively. Of course, there's a slight cost of getting customers to be multi-vertical, but at least we don't have to go out and do advertisement. That has already happened in the past, and that's why it's also very synergetic to our business. Yeah. Sorry.
Sorry. I was just following up on like what's the path? How long do you think would it take you to get the portfolio of stores closer to five? Is it 12- months, 24- months?
I don't want to give now an extra guidance that. If you look at the growth of our Integrated Verticals segment, of course there will also be growth in the places where we already have high utilization. We might have to even increase number of stores. In this case, increase number of stores to 48 stores in this quarter. Let's assume there will be something similar in the next couple of quarters. You see that the growth continues to grow with the per quarter with EUR 60 or so million in GMV.
It's based on the slide, you can see how the growth is trajectory, and you can assume that the new store opening is probably more in line with Q1 than what it was in Q4, Q3, Q4. That should hopefully give you some guidance on where the average order per store will move.
Thank you.
Average GMV per store. Thanks.
Next question is from the line of Jürgen Kolb from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Just a brief one on the order data that you will not release. Maybe you could on a quarterly basis then indeed release average basket sizes per region as a you know so that there's the quarterly trading statement at least has a little bit more regular data that you're showing to the market, which probably then includes also the idea that you have to go more after GMV and be more profitable, just as a suggestion.
The question really on Dmart again, Page 26, when you say the best performing country already generates an EBITDA to GMV margin of more than 6%, I was wondering if you could share maybe a little bit more details about this specific market. Was it really the first one that opened, or is there any specific that you would call out of this country which just maybe had a positive, better-.
Right.
You know, impact than the others?
Right. It's not the first store to open. The first store opened in Turkey, and of course, Turkey is the only market where we have true strong competition, and therefore that is not the market where we are making the best-in-class. All the other markets, there is very limited offering from competitors, if not none. The good markets are the one that are profitable are a little bit earlier stage in that sense. The main difference is actually not for that country in particular. It's not that the margin is high, it's not that the delivery fee is exceptionally high, it's not that the cost is exceptionally low. It's that have a lot of orders per store.
The order density per store is high. It's still increasing, but it's high. We don't have to promote it anymore because the awareness in that neighborhood or sorry, in that country is there. There's less of, I don't know, there's less of kind of vouchers, reduced delivery fee. There is probably a little bit less of this 10 -minutes type of delivery promise. There's nothing else there. I mean, all markets will get there. I don't see a reason why not all markets will get there. The question is more what is this a service that everyone can have access to today, or is it more of a premium service that we offer? Because we can...
There needs to be either a slightly higher margin than the store or some delivery fee in order to make the economics that we target. I think in most markets this is a mainstream product, but of course in some low-cost countries this could be more of a premium service and therefore a little bit less reach, at least for the next five or 10 -years. The question is not if it's gonna be profitable or not. It's gonna be profitable and probably more profitable than our food business. It's more how big is it getting.
Very good. Thank you so much.
Thanks for the feedback, by the way. It's yeah, we are way more open to think about basket because basket increase in basket makes sense. Increase in orders is actually against what we're trying to do here. Thanks for the feedback.
All right. Thank you.
Next question is from the line of Andrew Porteous from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. I guess just echoing those comments around sort of the order disclosure. It would be I guess I can understand why you've changed the way that you've run the business and I understand the reasons for that. But at the same time, investors can sort of do the work and see the improvements you're making even if you continue to give us order numbers. So it would be helpful to continue to get them. I don't see what you gain from taking them away. In terms of the question, I was really sort of trying to drill down on some of those seven best in class Dmart countries. Could you give us a little bit more color there on the profile of those markets?
I'm just wondering, you know, are they markets where naturally you'd get sort of higher average basket and a little bit lower cost and maybe they're sort of not economics that every market can get to. Are they, you know, more MENA focused, a bit more Asia focused? I don't know. If you give us more color that would be helpful. Then perhaps if you could just talk a little bit about the operations. Do you still get direct supply from suppliers or do you still have to deal with wholesalers?
Yeah, no. There's, as I alluded to before, there is not that they have better margins or that the delivery fee, as you can see here, is substantially lower. The delivery cost is lower. It is a slightly lower delivery cost, but that is more because we deliver slightly slower and a little bit more stacking. The difference is really, I don't know, as I said, that, yeah, we can have 1% higher delivery fee, since we have a little bit more volume, can have a little bit more advertisement. We can have a little bit lower delivery cost because we can deliver slower, a little bit more stacking. More importantly, we have 4% difference because picker cost, because you get double number of orders on the same number of staff. So, that is the difference there.
That's why that is half the difference. Same with other costs, which mostly includes things like shrinkage, where we don't have enough product items and so on. Those are the main differences. The question, sorry.
No, that was on direct procurement. I mean.
Yes.
If you can access directly the suppliers or not?
Mm-hmm.
I mean, I can start to answer if you want, and you can.
Please.
It really depends on the volumes and the countries. What we see is that we have more and more inbound calls, so basically large names, reputable brands that are calling us to get in touch with us to negotiate or to see how to partner. Yes, there are more inbound calls than at the beginning as we started this industry. There are also regions where you do have to reach very big volumes in order to be directly in contact with the suppliers. This is not one rule for the market or for globally. This is much more regionalized, and sometimes you do have to get to a very high level in order to get directly into contact with the suppliers.
As I said, there are more and more inbound calls, and there are meetings taking place also like in Berlin, to negotiate or to see how to collaborate directly with the big brands.
Yeah. I would say we do most of the sourcing ourselves. We have discussed with partners who have bigger volumes than us, who have massive retail distribution and bigger volume. They are willing to find deals with us that we will use their procurement capabilities, but of course, then we're limited to their inventory, or at least we need to buy more than 80% or so from their inventory, and only have 20% kind of unique inventory. When we do that, it would be a clear benefit on price. That would save us somewhere between 6%-9% instantly from today to tomorrow improvement in procurement capabilities, in the cases where we have seen this. Maybe not all markets, but at least in those markets that we have had those discussions.
Of course, it limits us a little bit in our flexibility. I should also add that the 6% gross or EBITDA margin country that we mentioned here and the best-in-class seven countries which are already significant gross profit contributing in line with our food business. This is before advertising or like before any substantial advertising revenue. We believe still that advertising revenue for this business is more between 5% and 8%. One of our competitors, at least in this space, already claims to be at 8%. You have an additional 5% on that margin. The product margin is 25% as is shown here. We do believe that we can find ways of improving that to 5%-10% as well.
You have essentially an improvement of 10%-15% on the margin bottom line that can be improved over time by procurement as well as advertising revenue. Coming back to rural, this is why we are so overly enthusiastic about this industry and why we think it makes so much sense for our business to do it. We understand that now we have built out the reach and coverage, we don't have to go wild on investment into more stores until we have proven the concept. Now it's more about making sure that we get the number of orders per store, so as we can also prove to you and the rest of the world that we are incredibly good in this and it makes a lot of sense for our business.
Once we get there, I don't know, this will be also highly profit contributing. The business model itself is, in my view, at least as good as the food delivery business, if not better. There are even more margins and more levers to pull here than the rest. Yes, I hope, and of course, I'll be judged by it. I hope this is very similar to the logistics business a few years ago. No one has taken as much negative feedback and anger as when we start pushing our own delivery earlier and before our competitors, because it was diluted to our profitability. We still did it because we thought it was the right thing for the long term. The same with this business model. We think it's right for long term.
It's not very long term either until we're getting there. I hope I'm right, and you can judge us by the results, and I hope we can prove this sooner rather than later.
That's really interesting, Color. Thanks.
Thanks.
What do you think determines whether it's a premium niche business or something much bigger?
Yeah. I think in most markets, it's probably not. I think in some markets, it's probably a little bit more of a niche business. In those markets, we also have the store concept where we don't have to build the stores. We have something like 100,000 stores today or vendors today. We have a good coverage of both grocery as well as other retail items in our platform. Since we think grocery is so important, we want to offer the best service. We think this is the best service, and it cuts a lot of cost as well. It could be that in some markets, it's more of a premium service. In most markets, probably more mainstream, but it will take a long time. The same with food.
The reason why we have been growing every year for the last we have some brands been for 20 -years and has not stopped grow is because the cohort is stable. That means every month or every quarter there is growth in our business. That will happen next year, that will happen year after year, it will not stop. The cohorts are what they are, and that's why there's a constant growth in this business. Anything else is that you're executing poorly or there is a reverse of pandemic or something else. But if you execute okay, there will be a constant growth of the business for 10, 20 -years.
Food, I know people order food also 20, 30 -years ago via phone, and it's taken us this long, even in U.S., it's taken U.S. a market that is highly online affinity, 20 -years of food delivery and still DoorDash, Uber, Grab, or at least two of them are actually growing, if not three, despite being around for so long, and they will still be growing in 10 -years. It is a slow adoption and change of living and behavior that has taken this long. Anyone believing that there is from today to tomorrow, everyone will order grocery online or order quick commerce instantly, they will be very wrong. This will still grow very fast in 20 -years from now. Hopefully faster growth than food delivery, but it takes time to build the behavioral change.
That's why it might also be a little bit niche for the next years, but it's gonna be a mainstream in the long term.
Thank you.
Next question is from the line of Sarah Simon from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yes, Niklas, I've just got one question. I'm only allowed one question. It is that basically you talked earlier about not having to acquire the customers for the grocery business. Can you give us an idea of what percentage of your food delivery customers are ordering through your quick commerce business today? And maybe you've got an example of your best-in-class market and then across the average in the countries obviously where you've got quick commerce. That would be helpful. Thanks.
I don't wanna give too much this new disclosure. I also don't have the exact number, but in order of magnitude it's I don't know, 20 to I don't know, 20 in some cases where we've been around. Food has been around shorter and quick commerce has been around longer. It's even in the 30.
Okay, great. Thanks.
Thanks a lot, Sarah.
Perfect. Thank you. That was the last question. Niklas, would you like to close with some final remarks?
Cool. Thank you everyone for attending the call. I know it was very long. I'm sorry for that, but we felt it was important to answer all your questions, and we're happy to follow up with further questions. We know it's very challenging times. We try to do our best by showing transparency on cohorts and user behaviors and Dmart and subscription and ad tech and all of that as much as we can. We believe we have a fantastic business. I hope that the market will realize that too. I think we're in a great direction and I hope it will be a good year. Thanks for your support and listening today.
Thank you everyone.
Thank you all for attending.