Good afternoon. My name is Emma, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the DoorDash Q4 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. We ask today that you limit yourself to one question and one follow up. Thank you. Andy Hargreaves, you may begin your conference.
Thank you, Emma. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us for our Q4 and full year 2022 earnings call. I'm very pleased today to be joined by Co-founder, Chair, and CEO, Tony Xu, CFO and incoming President and COO, Prabir Adarkar, and VP of Finance and Strategy and our incoming CFO, Ravi Inukonda. We'll be making forward-looking statements during today's call, including our expectations for our business, financial position, operating performance, our market, guidance, strategies, our investment approach, and the consumer spending environment. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Many of these uncertainties are described in our SEC filings, including Form 10-Ks and 10-Qs. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law.
During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of such non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, may be found in our letter to shareholders, which is available on our IR website. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to our GAAP results and are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Finally, this call is being audio webcasted on our IR website, and an audio replay of the call will be available on our website shortly after the call ends. With that, I will pass it to Tony for some brief remarks, and then we'll go into questions. Tony.
Thanks, Andy. Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Typically, we just dive right into the Q&A. For today's call, I wanted to say a few words at the top about Christopher, Prabir, and Ravi. I'm sure many of you have seen the news that we're naming Prabir President and Chief Operating Officer and Ravi as CFO as Christopher retires from operating roles and day-to-day management. In his 7+ years here, Christopher, or CP, as we call him internally, has helped to shape our business and our culture. He infused an operator mindset across the company and coached an entire generation of our leaders. On a personal level, I will miss him. I've learned so much from him and consider myself lucky to count him as a business partner and friend.
Today's news is a chance to celebrate CP's 33 incredible years as an operator and what he has helped us build. It also shows the strength of our systems and the amazing team we have built at DoorDash. Prabir and Ravi have been with us for more than four years and have mastered every aspect of our business. Both are without equal in this space, and I'm excited for what they'll achieve and what we'll continue building together. Over our near 10 year history, DoorDash has been fortunate to have had a remarkably stable and high quality leadership team. Nonetheless, everyone on our team has a succession plan. We knew that CP wouldn't always be here, and we've been ready for this possibility for some time. We're always developing our bench of talent as well as our systems and processes so that the right people can step up when ready.
We operate in a very complicated and dynamic space, and the understanding of nuance and the ability to translate this intuition into pragmatic judgment takes time. We're lucky that we have two people we've been grooming for a while and a group of operators behind them to continue executing with excellence without skipping a beat. Prabir and Ravi are also excellent stewards of our unique culture. I want to thank CP for everything he's done and congratulate both Prabir and Ravi. I'm super excited for what's ahead because, as CP likes to say, we're just getting started. With that, I'll turn it back over to Andy, and let's get started with your questions.
Emma, we can go to questions now. Take the first question, please.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, press star followed by the 1 on your telephone keypad. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Your first question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.
Great. Thanks for taking the questions. A couple of questions. First, Tony, the guidance paragraph in your press release noted ongoing significant investments reflected in the outlook. Can you update us on what the largest areas of incremental investments planned for 2023 are? Which businesses are getting additional capital and are showing promising, you know, growth and scaling potential? Second one for Prabir. Congrats on the new roles. There's definitely some uncertainties around, you know, potential regulation in markets like New York City. I know the proposal is delayed until sort of the end of the month, but how are you thinking about the impact on your business currently, and kind of, you know, what have you factored into the preliminary 2023 outlook? Thank you so much.
Hey, Deepak. I'll take a stab at, you know, both of those questions and, you know, feel free, others to chime in. You know, I think your first question was really just around, you know, how we were thinking about our capital allocation. You know, to start, I think it's important to just level set on our philosophy for investing, which has stayed the same ever since we've been a public company, and really has been the same since day one in building DoorDash. Which is our goal is to maximize long term profit dollars. That both has a scale component to it, as well as a unit economics component to it. To me, both of them are very important, and it's most important to get the sequencing right so that we are allocating capital in the most efficient ways.
When you look at, you know, this allocation for whether it's 2023 or in the years to come, a lot of the investment is going towards in building our categories beyond restaurants, both in the United States as well as globally, as well as our operations outside of the US as we're now live in 26 countries. I mean, I think it's been remarkable the progress that we've seen so far in both the share gains as well as just the level of product market fit that we've achieved in both of these dimensions. You know, with new categories, we're now the largest platform with the most amount of partners outside of restaurants in North America.
We've gained share in the majority of our international markets and, you know, our Wolt business overseas in Europe is growing much faster than peers. We're seeing a lot of progress there, and we're doubling on that momentum. At the same time, we're very observant about our unit economics and a lot of that, you know, progression is reflected in, you know, some of the guidance that we shared, you know, for 2023, but also in what we expect to see on a go forward basis as we continue to improve the efficiency of our operations in addition to the quality of our product level. Anything anyone else wants to add on this first question?
Yeah. Tony, it's Prabir. Maybe I'll add a little bit then Ravi can take the New York City question. Deepak, I mean, Tony alluded to, you know, the strategy to continue investing behind building out our new categories as well as international. you know, we've put up significant proof points that are quite encouraging in terms of our progress in building scale. just a couple of data points. Last quarter, we had said our US convenience and grocery business, this is in Q3, you know, had GOV growth of over 80%. That business grew 60% year-on-year in Q4, so still continues to grow at meaningfully higher growth rates compared to the restaurants. Our third-party US grocery business grew 100% year-on-year both in Q3 and Q4.
In Wolt, as we [inaudible] to on our shareholder letter, on a constant currency basis, has grown 50% year-on-year, which is again, significantly faster than its European peers. I take these as positive proof points in terms of not just product market fit, but our ability to drive scale on the platform. In addition, we've got proof points of continued improvements in unit economics. We talked about our third-party convenience business. In fact, earlier in 2022, we said it would get to breakeven on a variable profit basis in 2022. In Q4, we did exactly what we said we were gonna do. We got to variable profit breakeven. Our third party grocery business continues to improve its margins.
You know, to be clear, we have a long way to go, but as we continue to improve the products and the product experience, we believe we can continue to drive outsized growth in all of these areas we're investing behind and continued margin improvement. Ravi, do you wanna take the New York City question?
Thanks, Prabir. Thanks, Deepak, for the question. On the New York City impact, we've been thinking about this for a while now. The impact from a cost perspective is included in our EBITDA guidance going forward. We actually have a number of levers from an operational perspective that we can put in place, including passing on any fees to our audiences to ensure that we can meet our profitability expectations.
Got it. Thank you so much for the answers. Really appreciate it.
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
Thanks for taking my questions. It'll be two. The first one on the DashPass member number. You know, another strong quarter period of growth. Can you just talk a little bit about sort of the biggest drivers of that DashPass adoption growth and any update on spend per member across the DashPassers? The second one is to sort of look at the 2023 guidance. Can you just sort of give us a little any breakdown at all how we think about the GOV and the EBITDA from the core US restaurant business as opposed to all the emerging, faster-growing businesses in the each of those two pieces? Thanks.
Yeah. Maybe I'll start on the DashPass question, Brian, and then Ravi can chime in on the 2023 guidance question in terms of what's driving the growth there. Really, look, the DashPass growth has been remarkably consistent over the course of this past year. We exited 2021 with 10 million subscribers. We're exiting this year with 15 million, and the pace of that growth has been consistent despite a variety of competitor offerings from both of our competitors in the space. What that goes to is just evidence, to me at least, that the combination of selection, price, and quality that we offer through our program is resonating with customers.
In terms of what's driving the growth, it's not been partnership driven as some of our competitors might be. That's a competitive strategy that others are using. The majority of our growth, at least as far as our DashPass program goes, is from our own channels as well as through traditional performance marketing channels. It's not partnership driven. These are organic channels that ultimately drive the growth that we've seen in the product. Second, the pace continues pretty consistently. There's a lot of room to grow. If you think about the size of the DashPass program at 15 million subs, it's still a far cry from other programs, whether it's, you know, the number of Netflix members or Prime subscribers.
There's a lot of room for us to continue growing and we're happy with the pace of growth historically, and we're not seeing any signs of that slowing down.
Thanks, Prabir. Let me take the question on the guide. We are not breaking out any specifics, but our US restaurant business is the largest business. It's gonna be the major driver both on the top line as well as the bottom line. As we talked about in the shareholder letter, we do expect to increase margins both from our US restaurants as well as all of our investment areas going into 2023.
Great. Thank you both.
Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.
Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe if I could focus on Wolt. Can you talk a little bit in terms of multipart on elements of the subscription base of Wolt and what you see as an opportunity set there, as well as some of the competitive dynamic and how you've stayed in investment mode in Wolt and what's that meant for a mixture of growth and possibly taking market share in some of those key markets for Wolt? Thanks so much.
Hey, Eric, it's Tony. Yeah, I'll get started and others can chime in. You know what? I think the thesis for Wolt has remained remarkably consistent. You know, when we met the team, you know, two years ago, you know, we were first struck by how similar we were as operators and how we thought about just building businesses. At the same time, what we were really impressed by from a business perspective was just the superior level of retention and order frequency it had achieved with its product relative to peers. I think that's, you know, that remains to be, you know, what we've seen today in the data as we've now, you know, been partners for a couple of years now, where you just see the constant progression of its outperformance on a relative basis.
It's just coming from those cohorts getting larger that retain at higher levels who order and engage more often. That effectively the geometric sequence of growth that is what you're seeing, you know, on a relative basis. It actually isn't, you know, that much yet attributed to, you know, its subscription products or anything else, which actually, you know, lends to its future potential. I mean, there's a couple of things that we're pretty excited about. One is just how under penetrated it is in most of its geographies. In even its, you know, most mature or established markets, Wolt actually serves a fraction of the actual population. Second to, you know, the premise of the question, there are quite a lot of products that Wolt hasn't yet introduced.
In most of these markets, you know, I think there also doesn't really exist that much e-commerce in terms of its behavior relative to some of, you know, what you see here in the United States. I think there's a lot of opportunity across a variety of vectors for growth.
Just on the competitive dynamic question, I mean, you asked the question of market share. You know, third-party data, particularly in some of the countries where Wolt operates, isn't clean. If you just simply look at their constant currency growth rate of 50% and you compare it to, you know, the European peers or European divisions of more global peers, the, you know, the Wolt business is growing significantly faster. You know, to me, that suggests market share gains despite the fact that we don't have precise third-party data to back that up.
Your next question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley with UBS. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Kind of try to bundle a few into one. You've historically talked about, you know, your guidance philosophy being, you know, you give a range, you're not really targeting to, like, beat the high end or hit the high end. It's more a function of are there things to invest in that look compelling. If you find things to invest, right, you don't end up hitting the high end. Is that still the way that you guys think about guidance philosophy? How do we think about, you know, the growth opportunities you see perhaps into 2023 versus prior years, especially as you kind of get more comfortable with Wolt in a few markets? Thanks.
Yeah. Hey, Lloyd. I mean, on the question of guidance philosophy, the way we guide and the way we run the business, I mean, none of that's changed, right? We've said historically, you know, the way we run the business is try to maximize scale and put as much on the top line as possible. We're investing in that regard in order to maximize scale. Now, as far as the EBITDA guidance goes, the guidance range is really meant to create a sense of discipline so that we ensure we can try to fall within the range. Now, precisely where we fall depends on the exact investment opportunities available, and their returns versus our expectations.
To the extent, as you pointed out, you know, investments are available, and we like the returns relative to our payback thresholds, we will invest. In recent times, what we've seen is we've outperformed on the top line, where there's been strength in consumer metrics. You've seen our MAU metrics, you've seen our DashPass numbers. That has contributed to incremental top line that has helped us get closer to the top end of the EBITDA range despite a healthy level of investment. You know, that's just to clarify where we've landed in the range. The objective, A, you know, the philosophy has not changed in terms of how we manage the business and invest for growth. B, our objective is not to try to beat the EBITDA range, but to try to land within it.
Your next question comes from the line of Michael McGranahan with Bank of America. Your line is now open.
Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking my question. I recall back earlier in 2022, you gave a number that you had 80,000 net new restaurants and merchants, I think in Q2. I was curious how that's tracking at this point as we get into a more potentially recessionary environment. Do you have kind of an underlying assumption for how that will track in 2023? I guess, how important is it to continue to drive new restaurant and merchant sign ups? Thank you.
Yeah. Hey, Michael. We've continued to see, you know, growth in the selection on the platform, and that's true both for restaurants, and that's also true for non-restaurants. Actually, you know, I'd say there's kind of a confluence of two external factors, and in addition to just, I think, the team's great execution. One, you just see more and more physical retailers digitizing their entire business, which both is a tailwind to our marketplace of joining the marketplace for the first time. I mean, if you looked at, you know, some of the brands that we onboarded in 2022, a lot of that even diversified beyond restaurants into the grocery sector with additions like Sprouts or Raley's. We announced, you know, all these earlier this year.
You have, you know, additions in the retail category, whether it be Sephora or Dick's Sporting Goods. A lot of these retailers are digitizing more of their business and coming online to get that incremental business from the largest local commerce marketplace. The second kind of thing that's happening is the fact that because they're trying to digitize their entire operations, these retailers, they are also partnering with our platform products as well, products like DoorDash Drive, DoorDash Storefronts, where they're, you know, they're trying to run more of their business in a fashion that both, I think, takes advantage of the convenience economy, but also I think, just creates a better business model for themselves, right?
Where they can make more productive use of their square footage by adding more and more sales, into a fixed space. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing, you know, quite a lot of additions, nonstop, you know, candidly, both on the restaurant side as well as on the non-restaurant front.
Mike, just one technical point is that, you know, one out of five restaurants goes out of business each year, right? This is a moving target. There's constantly new restaurants that are appearing that we need to make sure we're staying ahead of. You know, the sales team is always busy, and they're always putting up bigger and bigger targets in order to make sure that the selection that's available on our platform is fresh.
Got it. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein. Your line is now open.
Hey there. Thanks for taking my question. I had a couple, please. In the S1, you had provided some really helpful disclosure around contribution margins expanding for mature cohorts. Since then, there's, you know, been some changes, labor, regulatory, but also kind of you scaled up more, you have more subscribers today. Just wondering if that 8% threshold that those cohorts got to, is that still the right way to think about kind of mature cohort profitability for the business today? I had a separate question on new verticals. Are they acting as a new customer acquisition channel, or is it more a function of engaging the existing customer base? Thanks.
Nikhil, maybe I'll take the first one. The cohort level margins, they're healthy and they're progressing well. We showed you last quarter the total contribution profit for the US restaurant business, which is essentially the aggregated performance of all of the cohorts. If you take a step back, the contribution profit of our core business has consistently improved over the past few years, despite post-COVID reopening, despite Proposition 22, which is, you know, a regulatory shock to the system, inflation and other things. This is really the output of this focus on improving the efficiency of our logistics network, improving our defect rates and so on.
We could, y ou know, the purpose of that disclosure was to try to provide a simplified view into the progression that we've seen to the cohort margins, but on an aggregated basis, and to give you a sense of the incremental margins we're seeing in the US restaurant business that are, you know, in line with what we've said historically. Can you remind me of the second question, please?
Yeah, sure. Just on the new verticals, are they acting as a, you know, channel for new customer acquisition altogether, or is it, more about engaging the customers you already have ?
I got it. Yeah. Yeah. It's two things. It's strategically important for two purposes. First, we see a growing number of new customers starting with non-restaurant categories. Yes, it is a source of customer acquisition because there might be customers out there that didn't find the restaurant they were looking for, and now they find DoorDash interesting because their favorite grocery store, their favorite convenience store is on the platform. Yes, you know, a growing number of new customers start their journey with DoorDash with the new non-restaurant categories.
Second, at least, this is based on early signals, the work we've done, at least so far, preliminary, seems to suggest that customers who order from both restaurants and non-restaurant categories have an increase in their order rate, which is a product of retention and order frequency compared to those that are single category. Both of these things are important reasons for us to continue building multi-category in order to be all things local commerce for our cities. The last point I'll make is we're seeing increasing adoption of our new verticals amongst our MAU base. We've said in Q4 last year, 14% of our MAUs had purchased from non-restaurant categories. That number in Q4 this year was 17%.
We're seeing steady growth, which is increased adoption, in a larger base year-on-year of MAUs.
Thanks, Prabir. That's helpful.
Your next question comes from the line of Bernie McTernan with Needham. Your line is now open.
Great. Thank you for taking the questions. I guess maybe it's a clarification. I just wanted to make sure I got you right, Prabir, that you said 15 million DashPass subscribers at the end of the quarter. That'd be similar or against the 10 million last year. If you could just discuss the payback period on those subs and if the cost to acquire them has been consistent over the last year or two.
First question. Yep, 15 million is right. 10 million at the end of 2021 increased to over 15 million at the end of 2022. Payback period we've not disclosed. We continue to run efficiently. Those payback periods are not materially different this year than they were earlier on in the year. If what you're asking me is, has competitor cross-selling bundles made it harder for us to acquire DashPass subscribers, we haven't seen any noticeable impact so far. I think I said earlier, the pace of DashPass subscriber growth has been relatively consistent each quarter. On top of that, you know, we tracked the number of new customers that joined the industry. Our share of new customers joining the industry has been consistent this past year.
In fact, has actually increased towards the back half of this year. Both of these data points give me comfort that we haven't seen a noticeable impact from any cross-selling.
Great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with JP Morgan. Your line is now open.
Thanks so much for taking the questions. I just had a couple about the 2023 outlook. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about KPIs, just kinda how you see them evolving across AOV and frequency, and I guess in particular on baskets that were referred from some other issues about customer plans. Secondly, can you talk about gross margins a little bit, some of the tailwinds and perhaps headwinds for next year, and do you need that to expand to drive higher EBITDA margins? Thank you.
Hey, this is Ravi. Let me take the question. On the first piece, on the 2023 guidance itself, in terms of KPIs, our goal is to continue to drive both monthly active users as well as order frequency. We continue to see strong signals in our retention, which has stabilized over the last several months. Newer cohorts continue to come in at order frequency higher than what we've seen earlier in the year. To your second point, Can you repeat your second question? Or the growth question?
Some of the gross margin puts and takes, do you need that to expand to drive EBITDA margin expansion?
Sure. Yeah. On the gross margin piece itself, if you actually break apart the gross margin, core DoorDash gross margin, excluding Wolt, actually increased on a year-on-year basis. That was driven by improvements in Dasher cost as a percentage of GOV, as well as credits and refunds. Some part of that was offset by the higher insurance costs that we've seen in the business. On a consolidated basis, gross margin declined because of mix shift towards Wolt. Looking ahead in 2023, we do expect gross margin to be higher than Q4 levels.
Great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Michael Morton with SVB. Your line is now open.
Hello. Thank you for the question. A question on new vertical businesses. If you look at something like package pickup, it suggests that the time sensitive nature you face in core restaurants could be lower, right? Maybe higher levels of batching. I was wondering if you could speak to any of the early demand trends, then unit economics you're seeing on some of these new verticals like package pickups compared to prior new verticals. Then just lastly, if maybe any update on non-restaurant GOV growth would be great if you could. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Maybe I can take it's Tony. I'll, I can take the first part of the question and, you know, someone can answer, I think the grocery question, which we disclosed before. On the package piece, I mean, we're obviously very excited about what we can build. I mean, think about it. We have three million Dashers that come to the platform every 90 days, and we have, you know, the most sophisticated logistics systems for last mile. You know, when I think about the opportunity, it's quite immense just because, you know, most last mile systems were built during a time when, frankly, there wasn't e-commerce, right? Which means that a lot of the setup isn't really well suited for doing true last mile deliveries.
And that's actually why we think there's quite a lot that we can do that if we can deliver ice cream in 10 minutes or, you know, pizza in a similar period of time, we can certainly deliver something that is less perishable with greater time. To your point, there's lots of opportunities to make the logistics really efficient. We're quite excited about what this can be. I do think that over time, in addition to becoming the largest local commerce marketplace, we'll also be the last mile infrastructure in most cities globally. It's just gonna take quite a lot of time to get there. You know, the package piece is seeing quite a lot of demand, but it's pretty early, I would say, in terms of, you know, how it works.
I think it really is a good example of how we, you know, try to solve customer problems at DoorDash. You know, a lot of why we got into that business was really seeing some of the requests from customers come in to support and then, you know, acting upon it and running experiments and then, you know, seeing if we can actually build a product that customers love, and then we'll actually consider the scaling, you know, afterwards. It's still in the period of finding and achieving product market fit. That's really where that, you know, experiment is right now. We have many of these experiments across, you know, the board at DoorDash, and that's one of the reasons why it's so fun to work here.
On your question on new categories growth, I think I mentioned this earlier in the call, but I'll reiterate it. You know, our US convenience and grocery business grew, you know, roughly 60% year-over-year in Q4. Our US grocery business grew roughly 100% year-over-year in Q4. Our Wolt business grew 50% on a constant currency basis. Again, these are attractive growth rates that we're happy to post.
Thank you so much.
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Fitzgerald with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Maybe a related question. Tony, you have large and growing, you know, lakes and data sets, which is maybe the most important driver of AI and machine learning models, and it's certainly front and center in the press nowadays. I wanna know if you could talk a little bit about how you think these processes impact your business and how you leverage them, you know, on a daily basis.
Yeah, it's a great question. Like, look, I'm actually really glad that AI is having its kind of mainstream moment, you know, these days. I think there is, you know, quite a lot of potential here. I do think a lot of it is actually, you know, couched in the way that you described it, which is that the importance of the data and taking that data and to translate it into pragmatic product, you know, products that actually solve customer problems, right? Like, that's kind of the key. For us, we've actually been, you know, working with different AI in each of our products probably for the last three years or four years now. You know, some of it, you see in the ranking and the recommendations product we use with consumers.
A lot of it you see, you know, behind the scenes with logistics. You see that now also in our support products. I mean, it's really getting used across the board, in other words. You know, I think it's very hard when I think you're at the precipice of a technology, you know, to figure out the exact application in which it's gonna really realize the technology's full potential. We certainly see all of these, you know, benefits, give small improvements that then compound over time. When you're at the scale that we've achieved in our business lines, it really adds up. I really think that this is gonna be a big push for us on a go-forward basis, or a continued big push, I should say, on a go-forward basis. It's something I'm super excited about.
Your next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali with Truist Securities. Your line is now open.
Great. Thank you very much. Prabir and Ravi, congrats. I guess a two-part question. One, the macro around the consumer seems to be a bit wobbly right now between a strong employment and dwindling balance sheet. I was wondering if maybe you can comment on what you've seen so far in January and February. I know you've already guided, and the guide looks really good, If I look at the guide for the year, it seems like you're not really assuming much of an improvement Q1 to Q4, at least from a GOV standpoint. Maybe can you just address what you're seeing right now and kind of what you're baking in in terms of your guide for the rest of the year in terms of, you know, sequential growth?
Cool. Let me take this one. If you look at our results, we've consistently driven double digit growth rate in GOV over the last seven quarters. In fact, our revenue is actually outpacing our GOV growth rate. When you look at the core consumer input metrics, we're just coming off of a record quarter in terms of Monthly Active Users as well as DashPass subscribers. I think what we're seeing in the business is order frequency of the newer cohorts continues to be higher than the older cohorts. Retention of our newer cohorts has been pretty stable for the last several months. To your question on Q1 itself, it's off to a great start. We're seeing continued share gains since the beginning of the year, That's what's baked into our guidance for the rest of the year as well.
Got it.
Just to add on the full year comment, Youssef Squali, it's Prabir Adarkar. I mean, look, as Ravi Inukonda said, we're seeing strong consumer metrics currently, right? Both in Q4 and strengthened to Q1, and so you've got high visibility into the first half of the year, which is why you're seeing a strong Q1 guide. You know, for the full year, particularly as you talk about the second half, you know, there's uncertainty around macro issues, and we're trying to bake in that uncertainty in our full year outlook because, you know, it's not about a lack of confidence in the fundamentals, it's about uncertainty on the macro conditions.
Yep. Super helpful. Thanks, Prabir.
Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.
Thanks so much for taking my questions. Two please. Delivery Hero has made significant investments in its `1P convenience product. Can you help us size the investments of your 1P convenience product? Secondly, on corporate, the significant opportunity, can you just update your progress in terms of making more corporate relationships in corporate ordering? Thanks so much.
Can you repeat the second question? Sorry. It was muffled.
I'm thinking about the old Seamless opportunity with corporate. Just having a more of a corporate relationship and office ordering as more people are back in office.
Yeah. I can take both of those questions. It's Tony. I think the first question was around DashMart. We haven't broken out, you know, the investment piece behind the investment budget for DashMart, but here's, you know, kinda how I've thought about, you know, DashMart, which is, you know, first I think it's important to acknowledge that it's not a standalone product, right? It's a feature built on top of the largest local commerce marketplace that has the most number of consumers who are the most engaged, and also the most number of Dashers, none of whom we have to reacquire. The second comment, which makes it just much more capital efficient from an investment perspective, relative to a standalone effort.
The second comment I'd make here is really the purpose behind the investment. If you think about, you know, where non-restaurant delivery is today, you know, things like grocery delivery take, as an example, it really hasn't achieved the full potential of what we believe the category could become. I mean, at the end of the day, the customer's looking to get everything they ordered inside their cart. They're looking for it at prices that are relatively the same as what they would expect to pay in store. Obviously, they expect the delivery with greater convenience than if they were to do it on their own. Today, you know, that's not what the current day products offer.
At the same time, you know, we have to make sure that we can work together with retailers to bridge both the short-term challenges of working with, third-party retail infrastructure that isn't optimized, nor was it designed for delivery. Create and invent a new model, in which we can co-create with retailers such that we can move the industry forward and actually solve these customer problems to achieve the full potential of grocery delivery or non-restaurant delivery. That's really the purpose. We found quite a lot of different use cases once you've actually mastered the basics of retail, which we're still learning how to do. We're only about 18 months into the effort, but we really like what we see.
I think it's important to understand just from a capital efficiency perspective, how different it is relative to, you know, doing it on a standalone basis. I think your second question was around corporate orders. I agree. I mean, I think that obviously it took a bit of a hiatus during, you know, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic where, you know, obviously, you know, offices were shut down and people were less confident about how work would be done and so on and so forth. That's actually when a lot of, you know, our team was able to very quickly pivot into building products that would actually solve for workers at home.
As, you know, all of us kind of got more accustomed to the idea of working remotely or not in the office. Especially now as people are getting back into the office, I think things have stabilized effectively in this post-COVID world. I definitely think that that's a big opportunity moving forward.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Steven Fox with Fox Advisors. Your line is now open.
A couple questions. First, you mentioned in the letter, how you're managing for better affordability with your customers. Can you talk a little bit more about that and whether that brings you under like an inflation curve we would think of broadly or how do we think about that going forward? Similar question on there was a paragraph talking about how you've gotten more efficient. Obviously you're gonna get more efficient this year too, on some of the things you mentioned, but like how does that curve look this year versus last year in your minds as it contributes to EBITDA? Thanks.
Sure. Maybe I'll take the first part of the question, which I believe was around affordability, and then I'll let Ravi take the second part on the efficiency side. On the affordability side, yes, I mean, we've, you know, as disclosed in the letter, you know, we've taken down transaction costs for consumers by about 8% in the past year. We're always trying to drive this down, right? We're always trying to drive this down as we add selection, improve delivery times, improve the accuracy and the quality of those deliveries. Obviously we're trying to do more than one thing at the same instance.
When it comes to affordability, you know, certainly DashPass has been a big driver, a lot of the affordability gains, you know, for our customers, especially as we continue to see consistent adds into the DashPass, you know, program. At the same time, you know, we're working on quite a lot of other initiatives as well, you know, to make sure that we can keep making the service more and more affordable. Certainly, we're trying to beat, you know, inflation, but hopefully we can do much better than that, especially as we find more creative ways in delivering more and more value back to consumers.
Let me take the second one on, efficiency. For us, when we think about efficiency, it always starts with improving product quality. When we improve product quality, the retention of the platform goes up, whether it's consumers or Dashers. When the retention goes up, we don't have to spend as much on retaining existing consumers and Dashers, which drives leverage on our sales and marketing. The second advantage we have when we improve product quality is the fulfillment cost per order goes down, whether it's support costs, Dasher costs, or credits and refunds. Also, in addition to that, as the product quality goes up, awareness increases, which makes us the ability to acquire consumers and Dashers at attractive prices even more attractive. The combination of these three factors is what's driving the efficiency you're seeing in the business.
In our belief, there's a lot more room for us to continue to improve product quality, which will further drive efficiency gains, and our goal is to reinvest that efficiency back into driving scale in the business. Some of the efficiency gains that you see are included in our EBITDA guidance going forward.
Great. That's all very, very helpful. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Ronald Josey with Citi. Your line is now open.
Great. Thanks for taking the question. Prabir, congrats on the promotion, President Ravi, in your new role. I wanted to maybe follow up, Prabir. I think I heard you say three peak grocery was up 100% in Q4. I think that's the same growth rate as in Q3. Talk to us about how the use case is evolving here. Is grocery and DoorDash primarily still top off? Are you getting Sunday orders? Any insights there would be helpful. We're now a few months post the restructuring at the end of November, would love to hear insights on the savings, but perhaps more importantly, just progress in operationally around efficiency and while still building and launching new products, how that's going internally. Thanks, you guys.
Yeah, maybe I can start on both of those questions and then I'll let others, you know, add to them. I think Again, on the first part with respect to, you know, grocery, yes, it continues to perform and continues to take share. You're right. I mean, the entry into third party grocery really for DoorDash has been in solving this top up use case, right? Where you can think of it almost as being the express aisle in many ways. That was a way to familiarize ourselves with consumers, you know, as we kind of moved outside of the restaurant category. I think it was certainly something that worked.
I mean, you see it in the gains in share, but you also see it in, you know, the improving profitability of that business. At the same instance, you know, we've certainly been working a lot on creating more and more an item based shopping experience at DoorDash. That takes lots of work on the back end around catalog and many things. I think that's also now showing promise where we can solve both the use case of the top up, where I think we're quite advantaged with our logistics network, as well as just how consumers perceive us. Also the stock-up use case, where people are buying, you know, bigger and bigger carts, you know, for their, you know, more staple items.
We're now, you know, seeing both of these types of use cases, even though we entered the category with more of a top up use case. On the second question, you know, I'll let you know maybe others chime in on some of the numbers, but from an efficiency perspective, you know, certainly that was a really painful decision, right? I think it's helpful to have some context here of how we got there, where, you know, over the last three years, the business revenues have grown about 7x . You know, we were really trying to catch up to that growth, so the headcount grew about 4x .
We're playing catch up, but then we kind of didn't get it exactly right and kind of got a bit ahead of our skis on the hiring. That made certain things a bit cluttered. Certainly we needed to make sure that we right sized the organization so that we're set up great for the future, which we feel very confident about. From an execution perspective, we actually feel like it's made us more focused, you know, on the most important things. As a result, by, you know, decluttering some of the, you know, management layers as well as maybe coordination meetings that were once quite a large cost to the system, you know, we're getting a lot better. It doesn't mean we're perfect. We have many things we have to figure out.
We're still, you know, building many things as we continue to innovate beyond restaurants, as we expand internationally, and as we expand beyond our marketplace and build these platform products. We're always gonna keep investing and invent new products, but we have to, you know, do it with a more focused base.
Ron, before Ravi talk about the risk here, I just wanted to confirm. Yeah, in Q3 of last year, Q3 2022, we said the grocery business had grown over 100%. In Q4, it grew roughly 100%, just shy of 100%. Those numbers are right.
Thanks, Prabir.
Just on the leverage itself, yeah, we do expect to drive leverage on our operating expenses in 2023, and that's been included in our EBITDA guidance that we've given.
Thanks, Ravi.
Your next question comes from the line of Brad Erickson with RBC. Your line is now open.
Yeah, thanks. Just two follow-ups, I guess. One, on the health of the consumer, you touched on it earlier being, I guess, broadly stable. Just curious if you look at Europe, I think, you know, some others have commented that it may actually be getting better or maybe even accelerating at the moment. Just curious if you're seeing that too and what you've assumed as a trajectory there for the full year guide for Europe. Just one clarification on the grocery and convenience. Is there any, the 60% growth you've called out, is there any meaningful delta there between the organic growth rate, and the 60%, or are they basically about the same? Thanks.
On the first question, you know, we haven't broken out in bold, but we are projecting strong growth for next year. The one caveat I will make, Brad, is when you look at Q1 has the Omicron comp issue, which I suspect you're hearing from other companies as well. Q1 of last year had this spike because of OMICRON , you'll see that in the growth rates for Q1 this year. You know, that doesn't change our optimism and confidence in the full year outlook for Wolt. On your second question, I didn't understand what you meant by organic growth. For us, you know, the entirety of our convenience and grocery business, that growth rate is all organic.
I'm not sure if that's what you were asking, or perhaps I misunderstood the question.
Yeah, no.
[crosstalk] Just to add to that, I think the numbers that we were giving out were just US, so that was organic.
Got it. Thank you.
This concludes our Q&A for today and for today's conference call. Thank you so much for attending. You may now disconnect.