Dear ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the half year 2021 results of HelloFresh SE. At our customers request. This conference will be recorded as a reminder. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participants have difficulties hearing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Dominik Richter, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.
Welcome everyone to our second quarter 2021 earnings call. The second quarter kept us really busy. It was a record quarter for us in many dimensions. The business has been coming out of the pandemic on a really strong footing, with fundamentally all underlying KPIs better than anticipated at the beginning of the year. Before we go into the highlights of the quarter, let me quickly refresh your memory on our vision and mission for HelloFresh. At HelloFresh, we often speak about our mission to change the way people eat forever. Cooking at home is such a massive category, with seven out of 10 dinners globally and five in 10 dinners in the U.S., which are being cooked and consumed at home. It's one of the biggest consumer spend categories and a massive total addressable market.
When we refer to our mission internally, it very often helps us to make decisions on the customer's behalf, such as making our product more affordable, investing in greater choice to allow everyone to eat better, and also which food suppliers we want to work with to really make a difference for our consumers. With the massive impact we have, we're on track for over 900 million meals this year. We fundamentally changed a lot of consumers' cooking habits and their experience, and allow them to eat better, cheaper, and more delicious meals than with traditional alternatives. While we have come closer and closer to fulfilling our mission, we've also made huge progress on delivering on our vision in the second quarter. As you'll be able to see with our forays into new geographies, we have broadened access to meal kits for consumers worldwide.
With the acquisition of Factor late last year, with Youfoodz in Australia in early Q3, we are firmly committed to also becoming a leading player in the ready-to-eat market. With the launch of the HelloFresh Market in Benelux and the U.S., we have further broadened our suites of products and increased our relevance to consumers, that we're on a clear trajectory to actually becoming the world's leading food solutions group, as outlined in our vision. Christian will talk later about our cash flow and around our cash balance.
With the cash balance that we have on our balance sheet, I can promise you that we will continue to focus relentlessly on making our value proposition to consumers better and better with more meals on the menu, better service levels, and more competitive pricing, because these are some of the dimensions that we'll be using to go after the huge home cooking TAM. With that, let's focus on the near past and cover some of the recent second quarter highlights for HelloFresh. First of all, we continued with our impressive customer growth rates. We grew strongly both year-on-year and sequentially to 7.7 million customers as the world has been coming out of the pandemic in all of our markets in the second quarter.
Order rates have stabilized sequentially at rates higher than pre-pandemic, also slightly lower than at peak COVID one year ago, very much in line with our projections. The second quarter also marked the highest ever net revenue quarter in the company's history, amounting to EUR 1.6 billion in a single quarter, an increase of over 66% year-over-year. We continued to deliver impressive profitability with EUR 158 million in adjusted EBITDA. That's a 10.1% EBITDA margin in a huge growth quarter where we added a lot of new customers. The team focused strongly on a number of TAM expansion initiatives, launching Norway as a new geography, Green Chef as a new brand in the U.K., and at the close of the quarter, we also acquired Youfoodz, the leading ready-to-eat player in Australia, giving us access to a lot more households globally that are actually now in our target group.
Finally, based on the positive trading year to date and the strong growth we've been seeing, we've updated our outlook for the remainder of the year. We now expect revenue growth about 10 percentage points higher than before, a massive upgrade to our internal projections, now expected to amount to between 45% and 65% in constant currency. As a result of the strong cash flow we have delivered, we will also aggressively go forward to roll out and scale up of our infrastructure, so we won't run into any capacity limitations in 2022 as we innovate for our consumers. Adjusted EBITDA is now expected to come in at 8.25%-10.25% for the full year 2021.
Let me quickly elaborate on two recent launches for HelloFresh that we conducted in the second quarter. We've been focusing more on the Nordics after a very successful launch in both Sweden and Denmark in the past, we are now also launching in Norway. Norway has about 2.5 million households to our overall TAM, has a strong e-commerce penetration and very high household income levels. We think it has all of the right ingredients to become a very successful geography for us as well. We're going to be fulfilling orders out of a new state-of-the-art DC near Oslo, providing Norwegian customers with a broad suite of products and meal kits. Secondly, we also launched Green Chef in the U.K.
It's the first international market for Green Chef. This is on the back of strong market share gains during and after the pandemic in the U.K., with the cheapest prices on the market for our HelloFresh brand. With Green Chef, we now offer a great alternative for health-conscious U.K. consumers, and it's the most sustainable meal kit brand in the U.K., allowing us to attract a new segment of the market that we haven't been able to tap into before, and that will allow us to expand our market share further. Now let's dive into our KPIs. For main metrics, we have actually added both sequential evolution as well as year-on-year and year-over-two-year metrics to foster a better understanding how we have improved across the board against pre-pandemic KPIs. Customer numbers set a new record in Q2 with an increase of 83% year-over-year and 220% year-over-two-year.
We even sequentially added about 400,000 new customers after already hitting a previous record in the first quarter. That outperformance was broad-based and a result of debottlenecking our capacity in a number of markets. If we look at segment trends, the U.S. including Factor grew by 93% year-over-year, and international grew by 75% year-over-year. Without Factor, both growth rates for our core HelloFresh brands would have been very close to each other. If you look at year-over-two-year numbers, you can see why we have been investing so strongly into capacity expansion and will continue to do so going forward. Within two years, we have basically tripled the volume through our supply chain while continuing to add a lot more complexity with a lot more choice for consumers and with the rollout of HelloFresh Market in some of our geographies in that period as well.
Our order rates also remained high and stabilized at the same levels we actually already saw in Q4 and Q1, our two most recent quarters, which were, by the way, much more strongly affected by the pandemic than the second quarter. It's been a great achievement and testament to the fact that our improvements to choice, service levels, and competitive pricing versus the supermarkets have been paying off. With about four orders per quarter, we have improved order rates by 8% compared to pre-pandemic levels, or based down from the peak COVID number of 4.3 orders that we saw last year in the second quarter when COVID hit most of our markets in a short period of time. A similar story can be observed for our average order value.
In Q2, average order value came down compared to last year's peak COVID quarter by about 6%, in line with our projections. However, AOV grew both sequentially compared to the first quarter of 2021 and has now stabilized on higher levels than pre-pandemic, about 3% higher than where we were two years ago. The root causes of that improvement can be traced back, number one, to our market offering that we have started to roll out in Benelux and in the U.S., and also to a higher AOV that we're seeing from Factor, the brand that we acquired late last year in the U.S. Putting everything together, we grew net revenues by 66% year-over-year in the second quarter. Both of our operating segments, the U.S. and international, contributed strongly to that impressive growth momentum. U.S. grew a little stronger with 76% in constant currency year-over-year.
A combination of easing capacity constraints and the addition of Factor, which has been performing really strongly for us. International grew by 55% year-on-year. Standalone, I think a really great result on top of extremely tough comps from last year. That top-line outperformance has been based on super strong fundamentals and sets us on a great trajectory for the remainder of the year. That's why we have upgraded our top-line outlook to bring forward additional investments in the second half of 2021 now.
Okay. It's Christian Gärtner here. Let me continue with our profitability metrics and start as usual with our contribution margin. Our contribution margin has remained broadly stable year-on-year at around 26%. This is a combination of, on the one hand, further improvement of our ingredient procurement expenses by circa 0.9 percentage points. On the other hand, an increase in fulfillment expenses by about 1.4 percentage points, driven by the rapid ramp-up of our production capacity. It is probably worthwhile to discuss both of these line items separately on a segment basis. Let's first talk about our procurement expenses. That's the light green line here on both of these charts. What you see is we have improved our procurement expenses in both segments since Q2 2019.
This, by the way, should hopefully provide some reassurance that we can cope well with a certain level of ingredient price inflation, which is something that a number of investors have cited in the board recently. Let's talk about our fulfillment expenses. That's the dark green line on this page. To understand the year-on-year comparison in Q2 2021, you have to keep in mind the impact of COVID on our fulfillment expenses in 2020 by segments. First, let's have a look at the left side of this page at our U.S. fulfillment expenses. Those were, in Q2 last year, heavily impacted by COVID-related inefficiencies. You see those fulfillment expenses increasing from 39% of revenues to 46% of revenues. What you see this quarter is a meaningful improvement versus these COVID inefficiencies last year, and those are somewhat offset by the impact of a fast production ramp-up.
In international, the picture is somewhat different. There, COVID-related inefficiencies were less of a topic last year. You saw that we even improved our fulfillment expenses in Q2 last year versus Q2 2019, primarily driven by higher capacity utilization across our network internationally. This year, there is no different to the U.S. There's no meaningful benefit from any elimination of those COVID inefficiencies, you still see the temporary negative impact from a fast production ramp-up, and therefore a quite meaningful increase, temporary increase, in our fulfillment expenses. There's also a certain mix effect within international. International, as you know, is a composite of 14 individual markets, there we realized somewhat faster growth in markets with a slightly lower contribution margin. Let's now come to our marketing expenses. Our marketing expenses as percentage of revenue were 13.7% in Q2.
While this is obviously up on Q2 last year, when we curtailed marketing meaningfully during the peak lockdown quarter, this is still below the range of 15%-17% we have guided for the full year. This is despite us continuing to grow customers strongly, as you've seen on a couple of slides before, from 7.3 million in Q1 to 7.7 million in Q2. When you put all of this together, so strong revenue growth, stable contribution margin, and a normalization of marketing expenses, this means for our EBITDA that we managed to slightly increase absolute EBITDA in the second quarter to EUR 158 million. Whilst our EBITDA margin is down from the exceptional level of Q2 2020, we've still achieved a level of 10.1% in the second quarter this year.
We have achieved this despite our significant capacity ramp-up and our continued investment into new markets and new verticals, such as ready-to-eat and HelloFresh Markets. When you look at our segments, you will see that both have done well from an EBITDA perspective. Both of our segments, it is here on page 14, have increased absolute EBITDA, and both segments have achieved an EBITDA margin well in excess of 10%. Okay, let's now have a look at our cash flows. We have further increased our cash position in Q2 to $933 million, up from $876 million at the end of the first quarter and up by $200 million from the $730 million we stood at the end of 2020. We did this through strong organic free cash flow. In Q2 alone, we generated cash flow from operations over $103 million.
Over the same period, we invested EUR 40 million into CapEx, a meaningful step-up versus Q2 2020. This is an area where you should expect quite some additional CapEx to come in H2 driven by the ongoing capacity expansion. We now plan with approximately EUR 200 million-EUR 250 million CapEx for the full year of 2020. Let me now conclude with our updated outlook for the full year 2021. Based on a strong revenue growth to date, we have increased our revenue growth outlook significantly again. Dominik had alluded to that earlier.
On a constant currency basis from previously 35%-45%, to now 45%-55%. Given the strong ramp-up in production capacity, we plan with somewhat higher fulfillment expenses now. We also plan to scale certain central functions, especially our tech and data teams, faster. This means we change our margin outlook downwards for the year to 8.25%-10.25% adjusted EBITDA margin, which still represents one of the best margin profiles you can get in the e-commerce and internet sectors. With that, we very much look forward to your questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it is your turn to speak, you can dial zero and two to cancel your question. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment please for the first question. The first question is from Fabienne Caron, Kepler Cheuvreux. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, everyone. Three questions from me. The first one, if we look at the 200 basis point increase in fulfillment cost, based on your new guidance, could you share with us how much is due to the ramp-up of the new DCs, the faster ramp-up? How much is due to the preparation of new DCs? As a follow-up to that, Christian, I think you said last time that in Q2 2022, you could have EUR 7 billion sales in term of capacity. How has this number changed, would be my first question. Second question, could you quantify the wage inflation that you saw in your P&L in the U.S.? The last one would be, do you have a view regarding the sales shape or the sales growth you expected for Q3 and Q4 this year? Thank you.
Hey, Fabienne. Okay. Those were actually four questions. Let me go through them one by one. The first one on the 200 basis points, how that breaks down. I think that the best to think about here is that this is broadly a run rate of all capacity expansion we've got in full flight, and that's to come now for the next couple of quarters. We're obviously not launching all of these fulfillment centers at exactly the same point in time. While some of those will be then already reasonably far down the track in terms of getting to the productivity levels where we're targeting, others basically come on stream.
This, let's say, 200 basis point impact is, I think, what you should assume as a baseline from existing ones and new ones to come now for the next couple of quarters into the second half of 2022. On the capacity impact, so with, I would say, two points to that. One is from all that we have in flight and are planning on top of that gets us to a theoretical production capacity of north of EUR 8 billion. On top of that, and that's quite important, what this also enables us, it creates enough flexibility that if we decide further down the road to treat the automation level in our fulfillment centers, and increase that further, that we have enough room, so to speak, to implement that while running our operation at the same time, not impacting our desired growth at those points in time.
On wage inflation in the U.S. and across our other markets, so there's a certain impact of that both in current trading as well as in the next couple of quarters. Having said that, the impact of that is definitely more modest than the impact of those capacity expansions that we try to highlight here. So if you think about impact so far, it's definitely inside of a point.
Let me comment quickly on the outlook for Q3 and the remainder of the year. I think as you see on the outlook, on our bullish outlook, and upgrades to guidance, we're quite confident that we can continue on a very successful path. Having said that, it's very clear that in Q3, much of the world has moved out of the pandemic, and we'll be seeing normal seasonality return as well as holiday season, people generally eating out more in summer. That is something that we have factored into our guidance. If you break that down, then certainly, we'll continue to see very strong revenue for the remaining two quarters and we'll continue to see strong underlying profitability. However, lower than initially expected, but which can really be factored back to the capacity expansion as Christian outlined.
We were starting the year expecting to grow 20%-25%. We're now at 45%-55% at our level. This is EUR billions more in sales. Obviously for that we need to ramp up capacity in a very quick fashion, and that will impact some of the numbers for the remainder of the year. With the updated guidance, we're very confident and comfortable that we can stay within that.
Okay, thanks a lot. The next question is from Marcus Diebel, JP Morgan. Your line is now open, please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, everyone. Maybe two questions to Christian. Thanks for giving the detail on the cost items. Maybe the first one on procurement. Clearly very strong performance. What is your view why you didn't have to do so much with cost pressure and inflation as some of your smaller peers? That would be interesting. Do you expect this to remain like this also going forward? The second question is again on fulfillment and the related impact on guidance. Could you just explain a bit more what exactly these costs really are? I'm coming from the space that say, okay, the CapEx was very much known and you roll out the capacity, so I don't fully understand why the corresponding OpEx that follows this CapEx, if that makes sense, wasn't in the initial guidance. Only that I understand what really these additional costs really are. Thank you.
All right, Marcus. Firstly on your point on procurement expenses, how we manage to just trade at those levels, despite some input cost inflation. Reason is that, as you know, we have some flexibility in our business model, in terms of menu selection, how we combine those recipes. We have very robust data tools behind that and that certainly helps. On that front, on top of that, given our scale, we are also able to, on a continuous basis, improve our procurement conditions. A combination of that we still find helpful to mitigate any meaningful impact from cost inflation so far. On your second point on the fulfillment expenses, what's really new and why this to go through what really the impact or the drivers are for a step up here is, I would say there are a couple of things.
When you think about when we ramp up a new fulfillment center, there is a quite meaningful upfront cost involved, where we hire new direct labor colleagues, line leads, site managers and so forth. All of these costs are produced even before we start to produce the first box. Once we start to produce the first box, it takes another three, four days or so until we get towards the productivity levels that we want. The faster we then do those ramp ups, the more you see these type of inefficiencies up front. That's what you see in some of the fulfillment centers we are about to ramp up or have as recently ramped up.
On top of that, given the stronger growth outlook that we have now than we had at the beginning of the year, but also still in April, we also pulled forward some of the expansion projects we initially had earmarked for 2022 and added actually a couple more on top of that. That cuts across both of our segments, across our U.S. segment as well as across our international segments.
Okay, thank you.
The next question is from Andrew Gwynn, Exane BNP Paribas. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Good morning, Christian, Dominik. Two questions if I can. Firstly, just on the margin outlook, obviously very early to be giving thoughts on 2022, but just to help us on our modeling, should we expect some of this to continue into the early parts of next year? The second question, just going back to the CapEx. Firstly, could you just repeat the figure for this year? Sorry, I missed it when you said it before. Secondly, again, just thinking about the outlook, to what extent should we be modeling in materially higher CapEx for maybe the next few years? Thank you very much.
On the contribution margin point, you should expect that we'll claw back of those 200, about 200 basis points that we're discussing here, that we will claw back quite a bit of that in the second half of next year. Until then, you should assume broadly that as a temporary drag on contribution margin, obviously with some seasonality underneath that, but structurally around about a 200 basis point drag into mid-next year. Second half of next year, you should expect us to be able to claw quite a bit of that back.
On CapEx for this year, we are planning with EUR 200 million- EUR 250 million as compared to the EUR 120 million- EUR 150 million we initially planned at the beginning of the year, which we then took up to EUR 150 million- EUR 200 million in April, May. Another +EUR 50 million on top of that roughly.
2022 CapEx is still a bit early, frankly, to guide, I would say, on the capacity, pure capacity expansion side, we will have made most progress by Q2 next year. The remainder of potential CapEx is really driven somewhat by what we decide on some of our automation projects, which is still a bit too premature to discuss at this point.
Okay, that's clear. Thank you. Then just, sorry, one more. Just going back to the seasonality. Obviously, we didn't see much of that last year. This year it's come back. I think if we look at 2019 as a guide, revenue in Q3 was pretty flat with Q2. Is that loosely what we should be thinking for this year or again, far too soon to really have a clear view? Thank you.
Yeah. On a like-for-like basis that you will see in Q3, revenue is somewhat down seasonally, which is on a like-for-like basis if you leave market launches and so forth aside. The reason for that is obviously that in July, August, essentially all of our markets except for Australia, it's peak holiday season, so our customers take two to three weeks off during that period. On top of that, we also, during July, August, dialed them back on any marketing activities and then all of this comes back in September. For the quarter, you typically see capacity utilization in our fulfillment centers lower and basically revenue is lower as well. That's what you should expect for this year as well. We see a return back to normal seasonality across most of our markets. Yeah, that's what you should expect.
Okay, great. Thank you very much. Hopefully you enjoy your holidays as well. Thank you.
You as well.
The next question is from Clément Genelot, Bryan Garnier. Your line is now open. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes. Morning, everyone. I've got two questions from my side, if I may. The first one is on Australia. Are you currently benefiting from a COVID tailwind in Q3 since the implementation of lockdown since some biggest cities, such as Melbourne and Sydney? My other question is on Canada. On Canada, according to Alexa traffic rank, HelloFresh incoming traffic has been materially lagging behind Goodfood since early July. Do you have any comment to make on this side or specific issues to highlight?
Over the last couple of quarters, massive margin. With regard to your first question on Australia, the coming back of COVID is probably a small tailwind on revenues, but it's also a headwind on some of our operations and margins. It's factored into the guidance already. We have seen that we have to pay higher wages to labor, have to over-hire so we can make sure that if certain people are not showing up for work, that we can still get a great product out to consumers. Overall, a very small tailwind on revenues and some small headwinds on our overall structure of operating costs that we'll see. With regard to Canada is actually the one market where we had the most market share gains over, if you look at the last 12 months.
I think we've expanded our market share in Canada by over 10 points in that period. If you see any of these trends reversing or traffic data reversing, then that should only be temporary. I think it's been the one market where we have gained market share the most and where we've actually also been very aggressive in our approach and where we have been able to win a lot of customers from other brands.
The next question is from Nizla Naizer, Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you. I will limit myself to three. The first is on the tech and data sort of investments you said you're making this year. Could you tell us in what specifically are you investing? Is this going to be part of your G&A cost? Out of the sort of revised margin guidance, how many basis points is applicable to the tech and data investments versus the fulfillment cost ramp-up? Secondly, on marketing for the full year, given that the run rate seems to be quite nice already, could the outlook for the full year be lower than the 15%-17% that you typically guide for? Some color there would be great.
Sure.
My last question is on HelloFresh Market. I mean, the U.S. seems like a massive opportunity. How much of sort of incremental revenue are you anticipating, for example, in the first year of rollout and what's the potential there?
In market.
Will you then roll it out to other European markets as well outside of the Benelux? Those are my three. Thank you.
Hey, Nizla. Let me take the first two. Tech investments, what does that represent and where does it show up? You're right, it shows up in our G&A. Effectively, what we are planning is to almost double the size of our tech and data teams between end of Q2 to end of 2022. In terms of impact on our margin profile, this will be a gradual build-up, obviously. When you think just about 2021, the impact is certainly inside of 1%, below 50 basis points actually. In 2022, the impact is somewhat higher. When we are closer to the full headcount runway that we are targeting there.
Your second question on marketing and that versus our full year guidance of 15%-17%, I think it's reasonably fair to say that right now we're more tracked towards the lower end of the marketing expenses as a percentage of revenues than the upper half. That's fair.
Let me add just on your question around technology and data teams, in which areas are we investing? For example, the fact that we've been able to offset any inflationary trends around our procurement costs is really down to the fact that we've been able to much better steer our suppliers, find some mutual benefits in how we source products together with our suppliers, which is all driven by some of the software solutions. Same with the rollout of our own logistics. We're creating a lot of software to be able to track and trace all of the deliveries that we're doing ourselves. We're launching new geographies. We're launching and scaling up the HelloFresh Market, which is a completely new logic in how we actually think about products, store products and inventory, et cetera.
Those are all things that require a lot of software development. But all of those systems have a very high incremental ROI. With regard to the question on HelloFresh Markets, I agree it's a big opportunity. At the moment, we're capturing with HelloFresh only about 5%-7% of our consumers' food budget on average. Whatever we can do to provide them with better solutions also for other meal occasions and increase our share of their food budget, that's obviously a big opportunity for us. It's still in the early phases, and if you look at the assortments, we've been starting in the U.S. with about 100 products. 100 products is obviously a lot less than where we want to be at scale. It's going to be a gradual ramp-up. It should show up in some way in our AOV.
In terms of overall contribution to net revenues, I think we need to see how much and how fast we can scale it, and that has some dependencies on our fulfillment automation, that has some dependencies on resourcing, that has some dependencies on our capacity in fulfillment centers. There's a couple of unknown variables, which is why I don't want to give out too granular guidance. Overall, certainly a big opportunity that over the next couple of years should add meaningfully to revenues, first in the U.S. and Benelux, and then also in other markets where we plan to roll it out.
Perfect. Thank you.
The next question is from Miriam Beeson, Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Great. Morning, everyone. Three from me. Firstly, on the active customer growth, if you could just give us a bit more color on the mix between new customer growth and reactivations. Secondly, on the procurement expenses, just to follow up here, if you could just confirm whether or not you put through any price rises in the quarter or whether you plan to do any before the end of the year, and where do you think you are now in terms of the gap between yourself and competitors on prices?
I see. Yeah.
Finally, just on new geographies, does the fulfillment capacity ramp-up bring forward any new launches in Europe? Can you just remind us on where you are in terms of the pipeline for new launches before the end of the year? Thanks.
Let me go for the first two questions. In terms of active customer growth, reactivations have stabilized in terms of gross additions at about the same level that we've seen in the previous quarters. As we come out of the pandemic, I think that towards Q4 and also Q1 next year, we're probably expecting reactivations to increase. For now, for the second quarter, for the last quarter that we had, it was more in line with what we've seen before, about mid-20%s in terms of percentage compared to the overall customer gross additions that we saw. In terms of price increases, and also price increases versus competition, we've actually seen almost all of our competitors increase prices, which we like because that makes us more price competitive in the direct comparison. We haven't done any large-scale price increases and will most likely not do them.
I think we've always seen that if we can have very competitive pricing, both versus competition but also versus supermarkets, that really helps us with the order rates of our existing customers acquiring new customers. Our goal is to opportunistically, we always look for opportunities to optimize pricing, but we don't plan any large-scale price increases like some of our competitors have done. Quite the opposite. We think price competitiveness is a key variable for consumers to buy meal kits, and if we can keep prices stable and optimize around the margin, that will make our product in relation to overall supermarket prices, which see inflation as well as direct competition, just a better deal for consumers, which is something that should contribute to our growth rates going forward.
Miriam, on your last point, new market launches, Dominik has spoke a little bit about Norway, which we just launched. For the remainder of the year, we will have Italy upcoming towards the end of the year and going into next year, the pre-launch for Japan. Hopefully by the end of October or thereabout, we can also close on our announced acquisition of Youfoodz, a ready-to-eat business in Australia. We will also be able to count that business into the HelloFresh family of growth going into next year.
Great. Thank you.
The next question is from Viktoria Petrova, Credit Suisse. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Christian. Thank you, Dominik. I have some small outstanding ones. First of all, obviously June was a pretty lockdown- free months. Where did those 400,000 incremental active customers came from in the second quarter versus first quarter? You talked about reactivations, but in general, probably it's an indication of incremental demand into the next quarters. Also in this context, do I understand correctly that your guidance upgrade of revenues for 2021 is also an upgrade of the second half? Was sort of, I don't know, EUR 1.2 billion-EUR 1.3 billion of sales per quarter. That would be my first question.
In terms of capacity, could you please run us through the open facilities in 2021, the facilities to be opened, as well as the volume, maybe in the number of orders type of capacity you are bringing on board so we just understand what those extra costs are run against in terms of incremental impact. Of course, it's extremely helpful that you talked about EUR 8 billion of overall sales capacity. Does it suggest that your EUR 10 billion of revenues 2025, 2026 target is also moved forward now? Thank you very much.
Let me start with the incremental customers. I think our outperformance on active customers was pretty broad-based. We've seen very good numbers in the U.S., and we've seen very good numbers and contribution from Factor, higher than we initially anticipated. I think with regards to international segments, especially in the U.K., we've managed to further expand market share. We've been really aggressive in the U.K. and as well as in Canada, the two markets where we do face some competition. In those markets in particular, we've actually stepped up our new customer additions to really make sure we can expand the market leadership position that we have. Overall, there were no countries which growth was extremely slow.
It was more that in those countries I just mentioned, U.S., U.K., Canada, that was probably leading the overall pack in terms of gross customer additions, then also falling through to net customer additions.
Viktoria, in terms of our upgrade to the full year revenue outlook, does that growth outlook, does that also imply an upgrade to H2? Yes, it does. You look at the midpoint, for example, of our upwards revised guidance and see how that compares, what that implies for H2 and how that compares also to consensus out there, which is still at the midpoint roughly or the upper half of where we've been before. You see that it also implies an upgrade to H2. On your other question on capacity, where exactly are we planning to expand incrementally? Let's first talk about what we've announced and done already in the U.S. We added two big sites on the East Coast, now dedicated sites on top of that for EveryPlate. In international, we added a big new fulfillment center in the U.K.
We recently launched our latest site in Australia and also expanded in the Netherlands and in Canada. Quite a lot of activity international as well. In terms of additional sites that come on top of that is in the U.S. there are two additional big sites planned, out of which we actually announced one already in Phoenix. Also on top of that, some expansion that we're planning for our non-HelloFresh U.S. brands. In international, there are also further sites planned. For competitive reasons, we would not like to say exactly in which geography or in which geographies that is incrementally planned to what we had communicated before. One thing that we, for example, also brought forward somewhat is a big German site where we now, this year already, will start and it will incur costs for that site as well.
To your last point, Viktoria Petrova, on whether we are also bringing forward our EUR 10 billion revenue targets from about 2025. The answer is for now, not yet. It's great that you keep us on our toes, but I think this is still a journey and right now we're well on track on the journey.
Thank you very much. If I may just ask one additional question. Your marketing expenses in absolute terms and as percent of sales are down quarter-on-quarter versus first quarter 2021. Is it probably a mix of seasonality and customer acquisition costs? Can you maybe very briefly comment on that, Hans? To what extent your customer acquisition increased, they probably increased in the second quarter, and what impact of seasonality it was and how you managed to keep it relatively low. Thank you very much.
It's exactly as you say. That is back to a more normal seasonal pattern where, as you know, in Q1, we typically are the most forward-leaning in terms of our marketing activities, and then during Q2, we then start to bring that somewhat back, especially when we approach the summer season, so from, let's say, mid-May onwards. In terms of the second part of your question, how customer acquisition costs have developed, I would say they've been broadly stable from Q1 into Q2.
Thank you very much. Thanks.
Ladies and gentlemen, just as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad now. The next question is from William Woods, Bernstein. William, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Just two from me. I suppose just on the revenue seasonality and your updated guidance, I think when I look at it looks like a pretty strong drop in revenue in the second half versus the first half. Can you just comment on how much of that is due to seasonality versus actually are you seeing some demand normalization in the kind of 2020 cohort? Secondly, just on discounting, I've seen revenue per meal trending down year-on-year. I suppose, how has discounting trended over Q2? How is it relative to FY 2019, and how are you seeing that going forward into Q3? Thank you.
With regard to revenue seasonality, certainly we've grown in the first half of the year by about 70%. Guide for the full year is between 45% and 55%. Implies that second half of the year, we're not going to be growing at 70%, but obviously lower than full year guidance. Nonetheless, I think it's both in relative as in well as in absolute terms, quite a big step up from what we had initially projected at the beginning of the year and then again in April. Something that overall I think is a very positive message. Thinking about revenue seasonality, especially in Q3, what we continue to see is very strong order rates from people that we have acquired in the past 18 months.
What we also see is that as people spend more time outside, less time in front of their laptops, computers, TV, that we also dial back on advertising. It's usually not a great time for us to advertise heavily in July and August. The, let's say, revenue seasonality that you will see in Q3 is, number one, that people have lower order rates because they have spent more time on the beach or in the mountains, wherever they make holidays. Secondly, because we take the foot off the gas in terms of advertising, because July, August just historically have never been good seasons for us, which again, can be explained with people being non-existing customers, but potentially new customers being away from their computers and phones and laptops, which they obviously need to see our advertising and then become a member.
William, especially on your second question on discounting/price incentives. As you know, price incentives are primarily targeted towards new customer acquisition. There you see a similar trend to what Viktoria just described on the paid marketing spend. Quarter-on-quarter, less overall price incentives that we've given in the second quarter versus Q1. Year-on-year, we worked with higher price incentives given that Q2 last year was obviously impacted by being the peak lockdown quarter, so to speak, where we reduced price incentives across the board also to household with the capacity we had available, which is more of the odd one out, I would say. From a sequential perspective in absolute terms, down the price incentives, all price incentives versus Q1 this year. In line with our paid marketing.
There are currently no further questions, so I hand back to the speakers for closing remarks.
Thanks, everyone, for attending the second quarter earnings call. We look forward to welcoming you and updating you on our Q3 performance in November. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect.