Hello, and good morning. Welcome to the third presentation of our New Food Conference. Many of you know the company that will present itself from own experience as it is the leading, or one of the leading operators of internet platforms for ordering and delivering meals. The company will be presented by Barbara Jeitler, who is Director of IR. Usual housekeeping issues: 30 minutes presentation, including Q&A, and talking about Q&A. If you have any questions, please enter them into the chat box on the lower right-hand corner of your screen. We do cover Delivery Hero, and I will also supply you with a link to the research in a second. Without further ado, it's all you, Barbara. [Foreign language] Ladies and gentlemen ... We seem to have some technical difficulties.
I do apologize for this. I will get in touch with Barbara, and we will have her back online shortly. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. I see the screen again. Do you see anything?
Yeah. Thank you, and welcome back, Barbara. You disappeared for a little while, but that's not bad because, of course, it increases the suspense for your presentation. We are very excited to hear you in our life and in color. Once again, the floor is all yours.
Thank you so much. Hello again from my side. My name is Barbara Jeitler. I'm Director of Investor Relations for Delivery Hero. I did not plan for a dramatic entrance, but here I am, happy to present the company to you now. Let's have a quick look. I will give you an overview of the company, our business model, where we see long-term value creation, our profit and cash situation, and then I would finish with our outlook for the year. We are headquartered in Berlin. We have over 42,000 employees worldwide, and we operate in around 70 countries, but not in Germany anymore. Our business model is that we are a globally leading delivery platform and operating on the three pillars, namely marketplace, on-delivery, and dark store business, which I will explain in a second.
We have been publicly listed since 2017, and we have a well-diversified international investor base with our biggest shareholder, Prosus, who holds just short of 30% of Delivery Hero. We are operating in Europe, MENA, Americas, and Asia with a bit more than 10 brands. In 2024, we achieved a GMV of $48.8 billion and revenues of $12.8 billion. While we focused in the beginning of the existence of Delivery Hero on growing organically and inorganically, this focus has shifted recently in the last years towards increasing our profitability. We managed to achieve an EBITDA break-even in 2022 and have increased profitability ever since and managed to have a positive free cash flow for the first time in the history of Delivery Hero in 2024 of around EUR 100 million. Here you see the history of Delivery Hero, founded in 2011.
As you can see, we were quite active with M&A activities in the years ever since. We acquired PedidosYa in our Americas brands in 2014, talabat, and foodpanda in 2016. Our biggest country is South Korea, pardon me, South Korea, the Woowa Brothers. We acquired in 2021, and the last biggest acquisition was Glovo in 2022. Last year, we had our IPO of the subsidiary in MENA named talabat. It was the biggest tech IPO in 2024 and the biggest in the MENA region. Here you can see our global presence. We are able to serve over 2 billion people. Our biggest operations are in South Korea, but we are also active in other markets in Asia.
The MENA region is very important for us, but we are also active in Americas, which is sometimes a bit of an overlooked market for our investors, which I come to more detail later. We're also active, of course, in Europe and in some markets in Africa. Our business model, we operate on the three pillars, namely platform, on-delivery, and quick commerce. With the platform business, we provide the platform to restaurants and shops where they can offer their services or their food, but they are responsible for delivering themselves. The second pillar is our on-delivery, where we provide the delivery as well. Roughly 80% of our orders are facilitated by our on-delivery right now, and it's also our preferred model of operation because then we can guarantee service quality end-to-end.
We can also work on improving efficiency via, for example, stacked orders and also with the logistics in the background. The third pillar is quick commerce. Most of it is groceries, but we also offer pet food, flowers, coffee, pharmaceutical products, you name it, everything you could potentially need within an hour of delivery time. Most of the time, it's even 20- 30 minutes only. Of course, our focus is to deliver fast, easy, and to your door. You can see an overview of the pillars. Don't get distracted too much by the numbers. It basically says that we have a gross profit margin of 7%-10% for all our pillars. The main difference between marketplace and on-delivery is, of course, that with on-delivery, we can charge more commission fee, we can charge delivery fee, but, of course, we also have higher delivery costs.
The difference between platform and integrated verticals basically boils down to that we have higher basket sizes with integrated verticals, meaning when people order groceries, then it is usually around EUR 22 of basket size value. When they order food, it is around EUR 13 for group-wide average. Speaking about the gross profit margin, you can see that our MENA and Americas gross profit is the yellow and the green line, are already around 10%, while Americas only hit profitability on an adjusted EBITDA level in Q3 of 2024. MENA is already a highly profitable market. What is the big difference? MENA has around 3x the GMV of Americas. As soon as Americas can catch up to this GMV level, profitability on an EBITDA will follow suit. You can see that in Europe, the gray line, we had a bit of a dip in Q4.
That can be explained by some provisions and also the move to an employment-based model, employment-based rider model in Spain. In Asia, the whole food delivery industry moved to a tiered commission model, and that impacted profitability as well in Q1, but we expect to improve profitability in Q2 again with CPO optimization. Overall, you can see that the profitability level increases more or less consistently over the last couple of quarters, and we expect more profitability going forward. Just a quick overview of how we operate. We are active in around 70 countries, but most of the, or a lot of the technology is being developed centrally, which we then provide to our countries.
Let's say the rider app, the backbone of the rider app, the logistics, the quick commerce, the picker app, that's all being developed in Berlin and other central offices, while the local execution, when it comes to how the front end of the app looks like, where the buttons, the colors, and of course, promotional activities, this is with our local teams as they know the markets best. Let's move on to our long-term value creation, where we see that coming from. What makes us so confident that we will continue to grow and improve profitability going forward? As we can see in our history of existence, the longer the customer stays with us, the more they order and the bigger the basket sizes become. This is basically what you can see here with that the cohorts are getting bigger and bigger over time.
Of course, our peak was during COVID in the year 2020 and 2021, but even afterwards, the monthly average number of orders per active customer has edged upwards more or less consistently. Here you can see what I find very interesting, the average monthly order volume per capita in our markets. It is for the biggest markets. It is still below two. The most order-intense markets, so to say, are in Europe, MENA, and Asia. If we manage to increase our average order value, our order volume of our lagging markets to the average of our group, that will unlock a GMV value of around EUR 200 billion in the long term. Even with the high-performing markets, you can see that there is also still room for improvement. Like in theory, you could order every day, and this is like two times a month right now.
A bit more details on where we operate and our market positioning. Our biggest market is South Korea, as I mentioned before. We also operate in 10 other Asian markets, and this makes about half of our GMV volume per year. The second biggest region is MENA, where we operate in 10 markets. There is our talabat business in eight markets, then Turkey with our Yemeksepeti brand and Saudi Arabia with our Hungerstation brand. There was also recently more focus on Saudi Arabia given the entry of Meituan, the Chinese food delivery player, where investors feared that they would take a lot of market share in a very short time. That has so far not really materialized for us. They mainly grabbed low-value customers with their heavily discounted and free delivery offering, which are for us mostly customers that cost us more than they bring.
If Meituan can turn them into profitable customers over the long term, they can try. We are also active in Europe and Americas, with our in Europe with Glovo brand in South Europe and foodora in Northern Europe and PedidosYa in Americas, where we're active in most of our markets apart from Brazil and Mexico. As you can see, we are number one in most of our markets, and that's very crucial with food delivery as this is an industry where the winner, if not takes it all, the winner takes most. If you're the biggest app, then restaurants want to list their offers with you. The customers want to use your app because the offer is the best, and riders want to work for you because they can get more orders per hour compared to other apps.
This is also important when it comes to advertising revenues. As again, the bigger you are, the more profitable or the more interesting for restaurants it is to place ads with you because then they can also get more customers through the ads. Also, when you look at how much Google can charge for their ads and how much Bing can charge for their ads, you see how important it is to be number one or a strong number two in the market. Our main AdTech products are CPC and Joker. CPC increases the visibility of the restaurants, and the vendor only has to pay if the customer clicks on the ad. The Joker is like a pop-up banner where restaurants can place their discounted offers or their special offers. We only get AdTech revenues when the customer actually places an order.
This is important for customer acquisition. We also have other AdTech products, but those are the main ones. We expect to achieve advertising revenues of over EUR 1.5 billion in 2025, and our long-term target is to have over 4% of AdTech revenues in terms of GMV. In Q1 and in Q4, so Q4 last year, Q1 this year, we already achieved AdTech revenues of 2.9% of GMV. Where will the growth come from? Mostly from Korea and Glovo, where we more recently introduced the AdTech product, and there is still a lot of room for improvement or catch-up. We also see since we introduced the AdTech product how strongly it has grown since. As I said in the beginning, our main focus in the early years of Delivery Hero was to grow organically and inorganically.
Our recent lead, we have focused more on increasing our profitability. As you can see, we managed to uplift our EBITDA by over EUR 1.8 billion in the last four years. This is even despite a marketing spend of EUR 2 billion annually. We expect that this profitability increase will continue going forward and reach a percent of GMV of 5%-8% in 2030. We also achieved a positive free cash flow of EUR 100 million in 2024 and anticipate substantial free cash flow generation going forward. A quick overview over the year 2024. We managed to increase our GMV by 8%, and outside of Asia, it was even above 20%. We have total segment revenue of +22%. This is coming from increasing on delivery share, increasing AdTech products, and also the Dmarts business, so the quick commerce business.
Our adjusted EBITDA improved by EUR 439 million to EUR 693 million. As I said, free cash flow for the first time positive in the history of Delivery Hero. With the talabat IPO that I mentioned at the beginning, with the proceeds of it, we managed to lower our net debt by over 50%, and our leverage ratio is now at 2.7 net debt to adjusted EBITDA. In April, we also received a breakage fee or termination fee from the Taiwan transaction where we tried to sell our Taiwan business to Uber. In last year, in the beginning of this year, we also bought back some convertible bonds. With the substantial cash flow generation we expect over the next years, we aim to further reduce net debt and leverage even further. Now, last but not least, the outlook for this year.
We guide for a GMV growth of 8%-10% this year, total segment revenue of 17%-19%, and adjusted EBITDA of around EUR 1 billion and a free cash flow of over EUR 200 million. This is it from my side for now. I'm happy to take your questions, and I'm glad that it worked out.
Welcome back. We have questions we already have, and I'm going to dive in with the first one, which is concerning your key region, which is Korea. Can you give us a little bit more insights as to what the growth drivers in that area will be? Is it scaling AdTech or own delivery, or what are the levers that you see to continue growth or increase growth in Korea?
That's a fair question. There's also a lot of focus on South Korea recently. You probably know that we have been under pressure from Coupang, who entered the market like two years ago, and we managed to stabilize our market share since November. What we are working on in the background a lot is to improve our logistics. This is where we had a bit of a gap to Coupang. I said at the beginning that we have like around 80% of own delivery share group-wide. This is lower in South Korea, and we are working on increasing this share. What we also did recently is like we have marketplace and we have own delivery, right? In South Korea, these were two different, not apps, but you had to navigate yourself, and this was not very customer-friendly. Now we integrated those under one view. That sounds marketing, but it's actually really important.
The less clicks a customer has to make, the more they will order, in short, because people are impatient. There will also come growth from AdTech revenues. As I mentioned, this is rather new in South Korea, so we only introduced it like two years ago or so. We are still like below group average when it comes to AdTech revenues, and we see that this will also be a strong growth contributor there. I mean, I could go on, but these are the main drivers.
It already answers the question, how big is your AdTech business in Korea and Glovo markets as percentage of GMV? 7% you said for Korea, right?
No, no, no. No, 7% is that would be nice. Group-wide, we have right now 2.9%, and Glovo and South Korea are still below this.
Okay. Thank you. If you look at the AdTech business in general and the slide regarding scaling the AdTech business, you are already in the scaling phase and have passed the rollout phase, given the numbers that you see going to be produced this year. I think that underlines that because one of the questions was whether you are still in the rollout or the scaling phase. It looks like you are already in the scaling phase.
It depends a bit on the markets, but generally, we introduced it in most of our markets, the AdTech product. We are already in a very good position in the MENA region, but there is still room for growth, especially in our global markets and South Korea and also actually in Americas.
Americas is for now still a rather smaller region for us, but it's growing really strongly, and we have very good market positions there, and that's also like a good playground for ad tech revenues. Yes, more scaling than introducing, but it really depends a bit on the markets as well.
Great. Thank you. Could you give us an overview about the rider transition in Spain? When do you think the announced transition to an employed model will be completed, and what do you expect the outcome of the court rulings to be?
For those who are not so familiar with Delivery Hero, just that you know, we are active in 70 countries, and we are only in Spain as much under scrutiny when it comes to our rider model. We have a very left-leaning government there who wants us to employ all our riders.
We tried to negotiate with them already for several years, and then in December last year, we decided to move proactively to an employment-based model as we did not want to be in this legal limbo where the government has a very strong opinion on that we should employ our riders, but we check with our lawyers and also external lawyers if it is legally fine to have a freelance model. We proactively moved to an employment-based model so that we can later in court litigate the reclassification letter we expect to get from the Spanish government. With the outcome, I mean, we have built contingent liabilities and not provisions for the Spain case because we expect that the outcome in our favor will be more than 50%. Otherwise, we would have to build provisions.
Of course, I cannot guarantee it, but we have already some low-level court cases that are being ruled in our favor in other markets as well. We are convinced that the freelance model is the proper one to operate in this market.
Okay. Thank you. Next question is regarding the restaurant acquisition, how that currently works. Is that basically a sales game in an increasingly consolidated market, or do you have key differentiators compared to your competitors in this space?
Restaurant acquisition. We have employees that basically only work on acquiring restaurants. It's important to have key restaurant chains, like for example, McDonald's, Burger King, and local specialties. This is something you need to have on your apps. Otherwise, customers do not want to use it. This is definitely a focus.
Of course, it's very important to have the best offering, but also in a way that the food arrives at the customer's place in a short period of time so that they don't wait for too long. This is definitely something or one of the key pillars of our business, to have the best offering in place.
Okay. Thank you. Talk about valuation of Delivery Hero. If you look at the valuation of talabat compared to Delivery Hero's entire market cap, you see a massive disconnect. Why do you think that is, and what do you think the market is missing about the rest of the group's asset?
There are two or three focus areas for investors that impact our share price. One is it's very important for us to come back to growth in South Korea.
It's our biggest market, and we have been under pressure from Coupang over the last one or two years. Some investors are sitting on the sidelines and wait for this to happen. It's like a show-me case. This is one important point. The second one is that when Meituan entered the Saudi market, investors were really worried that this has a major impact on our profitability in the area that has so far not materialized. We perform continuously strong. Actually, Meituan has already announced that they will launch in Brazil as well. They are spreading their focus a bit more. Also, this is a show-me case because Meituan only entered in September. Of course, it's only like half a year or a bit more than half a year.
They want us to prove that we can keep being profitable and grow strongly in the MENA region. I guess this is like there's, yeah, sorry.
I'm sorry that I have to interrupt because we're unfortunately out of time. The next meeting, Schloss Wachenheim, is already just around the corner, and I've posted the link in the chat. We still have some questions that remain unanswered. I do apologize for this, but the 10-minute Q&A session is really short. I hope you understand. Sorry. Thanks for the insights, Barbara. Much appreciated. I think we all learned quite a bit about Delivery Hero. Thank you so much.
Thank you.