Delivery Hero Se Unsp/Adr

Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you very much for joining our Q3 2024 earnings call. We would like to remind you that this call is being webcast and the replay will be available later today on our website. Joining me today are Niklas Oestberg, our CEO and Marianne Popp, Interim CFO of DeliverHero, who will walk us through the key highlights of our Q3 performance. Afterwards, we will be happy to answer your questions. And now, let me hand it over to you, Niklas.

Thanks, Christoph, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for listening in. Let's jump straight into the highlights. We continued on a strong momentum and accelerated our GMV from 7% in Q2 to 9% in Q3 in constant currency and excluding the effects of hyperinflation accounting. With the exception of Asia, all segments reported strong double-digit growth rates, bringing the GMV growth outside of Asia segment to 25% year-on-year. In regards to Asia, 2024 is a transition year, and we soon have all the fundamental pieces in place to grow sustainably. More on this later. Total segment revenues continue to significantly outgrow GMV with a 24% year-on-year growth. increase driven by multiple factors, including higher commission from own delivery, fast-growing DMART business, growing ad-tech revenues, as well as service and subscription fees. This also had a positive impact on our profitability and led to a further increase of our adjusted EBITDA, both in a year-on-year comparison as well as quarter-over-quarter. Europe was a big highlight in Q3. We are more than satisfied with both growth and the profitability development over there. The segment recorded positive EBITDA or adjusted EBITDA in Q3, with further earnings growth ahead. Lastly, our cash position remained at high levels of 1.65 billion euros, allowing us ongoing financial flexibility to continue to pursue our operational goals and countering potential comparative moves. For Q4, we expect to generate significant positive free cash flow. Now on to the next slide. So, as mentioned, healthy GMV growth. This was mainly driven by growing order volumes, and I think not much more to add on this slide. So let's move to the next slide. Here you can see strong revenue growth happening across the group, especially happening with MENA with 32% in constant currency, Europe with 27%, and integrated vertical segment with 26% year over year. Asia was slightly impacted by the fade-out of our pre-delivery for non-subscribers in South Korea, and America's segment generated 20% revenue growth despite the temper macroeconomic challenges in Argentina. Now, let me hand over to Mariam for more details.

Thank you, Nicholas, and a warm welcome also from my side. Let's dive straight into the Europe segment, which accelerated GMV growth from 19% in constant currency during the second quarter to now 21% driven by strong order growth. Revenue growth accelerated even faster from 22% in Q2 to 27% in 3Q. fueled by strong progress in ad tech, with NCR reaching already around 4% of GMV in the best performing countries. In line with the guidance we gave during the last trading update in August, we achieved a break-even on adjusted EBITDA level in Q3, with further earnings growth ahead. Let's now have a look at our MENA segment. GMV and revenues in MENA grew 30% and 32% year-over-year, respectively, both in constant currency and excluding the impact from hyperinflation in Turkey. We've been focused on building a strong multivertical offering over many years in MENA. We can now see how this has been paying off when it comes to customer loyalty and frequency. A particular highlight has been Saudi Arabia. We've seen a clear acceleration in growth and category share as we've been putting a lot of focus on this market in the last couple of quarters to strengthen affordability, selection, and service offering. Now onto the Asia segment. We saw a slight improvement in year-over-year developments in Asia during Q3. We have made many changes and improvements in 2024 to strengthen our ability to compete long-term. One of the recent changes was the rollout in Korea of our subscription program. The initial drop in category share since we started to charge non-subscribers delivery fee has stabilized. In a very short time period, we've grown our subscriber base very quickly and can see a clear increase in frequency. This bodes well for 2025. We will discuss Korea, in more detail later in our case studies. Lastly, I would like to highlight the merger of the Foodpanda, Foodora, and Yemeksepeti business teams into a new leadership structure. We believe by streamlining our leadership here, we can unlock further synergies and enable accelerated growth of our APAC business while optimizing our cost structures. Early results are very encouraging. Now moving to the Americas segment. America's business continued to perform really well this quarter, with GMV and revenue growth accelerating to 21% and 20% respectively, up from 14% and 13% in Q2, all in constant currency and excluding hyperinflation adjustments for Argentina. The strong growth is despite temporary macroeconomic challenges in Argentina, where inflation control measures weigh on consumers' purchasing power. Outside of Argentina, the Americas business has generated an even higher GMV growth of 26% in Q3, as you will see later in our case study. We also continue making significant progress on profitability. The segment reached adjusted EBITDA break-even in Q3, and we expect further earnings trajectory in Q4. Now on to integrated verticals. Our integrated vertical segment again accelerated its GMV and revenue growth to 32% and 26% year-over-year at constant currency, despite a 15% reduction in the number of demarts compared to the prior year. Half of the growth can be attributed to increasing number of orders, while the other half results from larger basket sizes. This is a clear indication that our DMARTs business has evolved from a more impulse-driven buying behavior and a focus on convenience store products to more planned purchases of larger shopping baskets that replace part of the weekly grocery shopping. The reduction in DMARTs was an outcome of our ongoing focus on profitability, allowing for increased store utilization, and leading to a quarter-over-quarter gross profit margin expansion of one percentage point for the DMART business to 5%. Further margin drivers were more favorable supplier conditions and growing ad-tech revenues. These efficiency measures led to an improvement in adjusted EBITDA loss of the DMART's business by more than 80% since Q1 2024. Overall, the integrated vertical segment is on track to generate a positive adjusted EBITDA by December 2024. Let's now have a closer look on the gross profit margin development of our platform business. The gross profit margin of the platform business remained largely stable at 7.3% in the quarter. The slight drop of 0.3 percentage points compared to Q2 was due to extending free delivery offers and targeted incentives connected to subscription rollout in Korea. MINA Americas and Europe continue a positive margin trajectory towards the long-term gross profit margin target of 10% to 13%, with MINA and Americas already exceeding the 10% level this quarter. As already mentioned, DMART's gross profit margin, which is not included in this illustration, expanded for the third consecutive quarter to around 5%. Let me now hand back to Niklas, who will take you through our case studies.

Thanks, Marianne. So I would like to quickly cover our progress in Korea. 2024 has, as mentioned, been a transition year where the team has done a tremendous job and improvement in our business. We have worked hard to drive customer experience and affordability in a sustainable way. Although we have taken a care hit in EBITDA during 2024 compared to 2023, we are now in a position where we can start investing into growth without negatively impacting our financials. Our main priority for next year is to turn the tide and grow our business and category share again. We aim to achieve this while we maintain or slightly improve EBITDA versus 2024. Let me now give you an update on Glovo, which has really shown incredibly strong development over the last two years. And before going into details of the performance, I would like to point out the huge opportunity we have here. Glovo is possibly the brand with the largest long-term potential within Delivery Hero. The 22 countries Glovo operates in comprise more than 600 million people, As you might remember, Global was leading in 7% of its GMB when we acquired the business three years ago. This number has now grown to over 80% while we improved EBITDA from negative 280 million in 2022 to positive since the middle of this year. Let's move to the next slide to drill deeper into its evolving category share. Glovo is today the number one in the largest part of its footprint, in particular in its two largest markets, Spain and Italy. In addition, we recently achieved category leadership in Poland. Since taking leadership in Spain in early 2020, Glovo managed to consistently grow its user base against competitors and kept its steady on a high level. The fact that the red line in the chart for Spain is flattening out should not be misinterpreted. Spain is still growing above 20% year over year. Italy was launched two, three years later than Spain and gained leadership in 2023. Poland was only launched at the end of 2019, but has recently gained leadership in the market with many international competitors. I should add that we generally believe that any monthly active user is under-representing our category position. Other sources are even more encouraging to us. Moving to the next slide, you can see the financial performance of the business. And here you see the strong leadership positions and how it's improving unit economics. leading to gross profit margin expansion of three percentage points from 2022 onwards. This, together with operating leverage, strict cost control, and post-merger synergies with Delivery Hero resulted in a massive profitability improvement of more than €280 million in adjusted EBITDA. Glovo has now reached breakeven, and started to contribute a positive adjusted EBITDA after group cost in Q3 2024. We understand there's a lot of interest in the Spanish rider topic. We hope to have news soon. We are not in a position to say more on this topic at this point in time. Moving on to the Americas. a region that, in my opinion, receives far too little attention. We see a lot of similarities to Talabat. It's a business with almost half the scale of Talabat, but besides that similar market position, similar gross profit, it's a multi-vertical product, and also here a very strong leadership team. We expect Perusia to develop into another Talabat in a couple of years. Already today, around 80% of the GMV is coming from strong leadership countries, which means that our category share is by far larger than the number two. This category leadership across the continent is particularly promising as it comprises a lot of emerging markets with significant untapped potential. With an estimated population growth of 7% from 23 to 29, and an estimate GDP per capita growth of almost 30%, the growth potential here is very large. As you can see on the slide, the average orders per capita in our America's business is 0.1 orders per month, whereas our best performing country stands at 0.32. in the region and 1.8 orders for our global best practice market. Looking at the financials, you can see the development of the last two years. The Americas has been growing at a CAGR of around 15%, despite strong macroeconomic challenges in Argentina. If you look at America segments outside Argentina, the GMV is expected to grow by an average of 26% CAGR since 2022. As you can see, the adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to improve by more than 5% this point from 2022 until full year 2024. The ongoing progress of this development is also reflected in the positive adjusted EBITDA for Q3 this year. As we expect profitability to develop positively in Q4 as well, we bring the entire segment closer to full-year breakeven. This positive development is also expected to go into next year. Now moving to an old slide, and here nothing has changed since last time, but we show this graph again to ensure that we show that we operate on track of previous expectations for Q4. So we still remain very committed to this and we'll get there. Now I turn it back to Marianne to give the full year guidance.

Thank you, Niklas. Given that we already had in the last month, that we're already in the last month of the year, we would like to give you more transparency on the expected outcome by updating and narrowing our full year outlooks. Since the top-line development in most segments is performing really well, we're confident that both GMV and revenue will turn out at the upper end of our guidance of 79% growth for GMV, as well as the upper end of the revenue guidance of 18% to 21% growth. Both growth rates for GMV and revenue are in constant currency and exclude the effects from hyperinflation accounting. We currently expect FX headwinds to be around 3% for the year. At the same time, we continue to face competition in Korea, which is why we deliberately decided to increase affordability and to reinvest in a great customer experience. This has a short-term impact on profitability, but should allow us to grow the business and regain category share next year. That said, these activities will have a slight unfavorable impact on the adjusted EBITDA which is expected to turn out in the lower end of the previously communicated guidance of 725 to 775 million euro. However, the generally positive development on adjusted EBITDA level should then ultimately translate into free cash flow generation for the full year. And I'm pleased to announce that we are raising our free cash flow guidance for 2024 from positive to 50 to 100 million euro. This is due to solid free cash flow development in the first nine months, which is driven by stronger focus on working capital, better terms of suppliers, less capex for demarts, and also faster earnings growth in lower income tax markets. As such, we expect to generate a significant positive free cash flow in Q4. We're now looking forward to taking your questions. Christoph, over to you.

Thank you very much, Marianne. Before we start with the Q&A, I would like to point out that we cannot answer any questions on Talabat today. This also applies to the Talabat Q3 figures that you can find in the appendix of this presentation. Beyond this, I would just like to ask you to limit your questions to one per analyst so that we can ensure that every analyst has the opportunity to ask a question. Operator, let's go.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and 1 on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star, then 2. Questioners are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and 1 at this time. The first question is from Joe Barnelamp, UBS. Please go ahead.

Excellent. Thank you very much for taking my question. So opening with one on Baemin and Korea. So when we think about Baemin's GMV growth through the quarter, could you give us some color on sort of the cadence of growth through the quarter and where it sort of exited or how it's traded since? You highlighted intentions to regain share in FY25 in Korea. Niklas, I think you said you hope to do that whilst holding or even growing profitability. Are you saying you expect FY25 versus FY24 Korean profits to be flat to up, or FY24 versus the current run rate of Korea? Because I imagine those two things are not necessarily the same. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Joe. We Yeah, put it this way. We had a very positive development. We remain very positive in terms of our expectations. We did have a dip in market share. Aligned was slightly better than what we communicated in our last trading update. And This also reflects a drop in year-on-year. There's a slightly larger drop in year-on-year than in category share. I should add that. So that means as you end of September, begin October or running October, you would expect lower year-on-year. We see very encouraging development among our subscribers. So we see increased order levels from our subscriber base. That's kind of what you expect. while we see a slight drop of frequency among our non-subscribers, which you would also expect because they have a higher delivery fee now. It seems like rather than those customers going to Coupang, it rather looks like they just order a little bit less on Beamin. So that's the trend that we're seeing. Since we improved economics through this step and also as we're growing the subscription base, we hope that this will be a good tailwind. But as I said, short term, of course, it meant that the significant portion of our customers ordered a little bit less frequency or frequent, but it still seems like they're loyal to our platform. So, yeah, you should expect a slightly lower GMV for Q4 than for Q3 based on that. But you should have a good tailwind coming into 2025. And as I said, our focus for next year is is that we can now start leaning in a little bit more, and our focus is clearly on growing both orders and GV, as well as our category share. And I think we are in a good position to do so without hitting our profitability, given the changes we have done to the business. In terms of your second question, so there is 25 will be better than 24. So, yeah, over the full year, 24, 25 will be same or slightly better than 24.

Excellent. Thank you very much, Niklas.

Thanks. The next question from Andrew Ross, Barclays. Please go ahead.

Great. Good afternoon, everyone. So just building on Joe's question there on career, if you're only expecting EBITDA to be slightly better than 25 and 24, There's just been a very large step up in monetization for the last couple of months. I guess that suggests that the investment back into the human career in 25 is going to be significant. Can you give us some color as to what the plans are there? Maybe beyond, for example, part of the club to kind of understand what the growth strategy and career is. And whilst we're on the topic, can you just give us some feedback from merchants on the monetization changes that you made? in the last couple of months. Thank you. You can repeat the second part, but acoustically didn't hear. Just feedback from the industry on the commission rate increases that went for months ago. Thank you.

Got it. Yeah, so I think we're in a position to further drive customer experience. I think we can also improve On the affordability side, there will be an additional investment into that affordability. We hope that we can push our subscription program to scale in continued fast fashion, scaling that club membership. There will be some investments there as well. Our priority is to start growing Korea. We think there's still a lot of potential in that market. And as we then grow, we also hope to scale profitability. Yes, that's the priority. In terms of CCB, so I think it's a very good initiative. We like it. I think good discussions. I think we will, I'm hopeful we'll find a good outcome. And for us, it's, of course, key that it's a level playing field. So we are hopeful that we will come to a good outcome. I think it's a great initiative, and I think constructive dialogues.

Thank you. The next question from Monique Polar, CT. Please go ahead.

Hi. Afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. Oh, actually, just one question. I forgot how many I'll have won. Could I just ask a question on the detail of the combination of Foodpanda, Foodora, and Yemic. How that works, you know, employees changing locations, what are the synergies in terms of, I don't know, central functions, and were they all already on one tech stack or on different tech stacks?

Thank you. Maybe you, Marianne, want to cover this.

Yeah, I'll start and then, sure. So, hi Monique. So, basically, yes, as you said, the technology platform Pandora is currently already being used by Foodpanda, Foodora and Yemex Hepati. And the changes now, they are being run under a new common leadership. So, operated from Berlin. led by Tarek Bartu, who is the former CEO of Talabat. And the idea really is to accelerate product innovation and speed up time to market. So the efficiencies will really come from going for speed, adapting to customer needs fast, improving customer experience, and doing that across all those three brands at the same time. And there's then also obviously an element of reducing complexity, not only faster decision making, but maybe also smaller, leaner teams. Not planning to relocate or really shift things around massively, but the center of gravity of the Pandora platform will remain in Berlin, basically. And to us, it's really a tool to extend category leadership and penetrate white spots in relevant countries by seeing these white spots better and being able to make decisions holistically across the three platforms instead of having each platform make their own decisions. So I'd say mostly speed and efficiency versus product introduction and some savings as well.

That's clear. Thank you.

And maybe I can add the outcome of this has so far been very positively received. And yeah, there is a clear cost implication that is positive for us, but I think the impact we see on speed of execution and also driving common product decisions and customer experience I think has been quite remarkable. I'll be shocked if we will not see a big improvement in particular in Asia from this. I can say the first one or two quarters have been positive.

The next question is from Giles Thorne. Jeffries, please go ahead.

Thank you. I guess it's picking up on that last comment from you, Nicholas. Looking at APAC, there's been a lot of evidence of commercial investments and commercial overhaul from FUPANA, but also a lot of evidence of your peers investing in the region. The angle I'm going for here is that the Talabat IPO, if it goes to plan, will give you increased optionality over your next move in APAC. So just your latest thinking on what you do next in APAC, that's my question. Thank you.

So I think... Generally, I don't think it impacted us much, the Talabat IPO. We tried to build an amazing business across the group. I think we got very distracted for more than a year in discussions, in M&A discussions last year. I think we really dropped the ball on execution. I think I'm very glad that we picked up the ball again, and now I really just want to focus on building a great business and Of course, we are always open to ideas or different partnerships, but that's not our focus. So far, we have not been approached.

And just to follow up on that and picking on one particular market, in Thailand we've got Lineman Wangnai raising or intending to invest $100 million into that market in 2025. Are we right to assume that you're willing to accept or copycat that type of behavior?

No, I don't think that we have to spend more money to grow faster. I think the setup in the business we have now is that we can grow faster and with better profitability. So I don't believe in this, you dump a bunch of money, and yes, maybe temporarily you grow your category share, you get some uses on rent, but it really is not a good strategy. I've seen it over and over again. I'll take Turkey as an example. We had two players coming in and dumping prices and discounts and all of that. We had a big hit in Yemeksepede, when that happened, partially also because we went back for migration. What you have seen afterwards is absolutely phenomenal. We have gained back every customer with interest, so we see a tremendous growth there, and our competitors are, yes, I think it's a very temporary strategy. I don't believe in it. You have to grow sustainably. Anything else is senseless and a waste of money. And I think good execution is what makes you grow. And I think now in Pandora, I think we have a super strong team and we're going to grow and we're going to make good economics. So we are definitely not just going to dump a bunch of stupid money here. But yeah, we really want to focus on execution. And if something happens in between, yes, we're always open to listen and so on. But our focus is really to build a great business. Thanks.

The next question from Christopher Yonen, HSBC. Please go ahead, sir.

Yes, thanks for taking my question. Mine is a little bit going back to the comment that you made about Glovo. I have to admit I was very surprised because you said that it's the brand with possibly the largest long-term potential. I mean, looking at the footprint, the opportunity at payment in Korea, the sort of big words you mentioned around Pity Dosia in Latvia. I'm comparing it to Talabat. I have to admit I don't quite get the global comment. I get that it's a huge market, but it's still a lot of European focus. So I don't know. Maybe I just didn't get it, but I'd be curious to try and understand where you're coming from on the global comment. Thanks.

Sure. So one way of looking at opportunities to look at what's the GDP that you're covering. I don't say it's the only metric, but the starting point is there. The more GDP there is in a country, the more potential for having customers with wallets able to buy through delivery. And if you look at Glovo, it's by far the largest GDP coverage in our group. way, way larger than Korea in terms of GDP. The fact is that Italy is larger than Korea in terms of GDP. And so if you look at the GDP coverage of Glovo, it far exceeds any other brand. And I think if you look at execution and growth here and acquisition velocity, it's very, very high. So that puts me in a position that I think that this probably is the brand with the largest long-term potential. Of course, it will take time until it's larger than Korea. It will take several years. But I'll be surprised if in the long term it is not the largest asset in our group, the largest brand in our group.

That's interesting. Can I quickly follow up on that? I think Korea is probably, correct me if I'm wrong, doing an average order frequency of around nine-ish, I would guess. I would assume it's a third in Italy. So, I mean, it'll take a couple of years. It will take maybe more than a couple of years.

And not Italy alone. I'm not saying Italy alone without Pace Korea, at least not for a very long time. But you see, though, the frequency of ordering in Italy is also very, very good. but I agree with not only Italy and Spain. We have a lot of good countries that are growing phenomenally well, great cohort frequency in our customer base. Based on that, I think the potential is the largest. It doesn't mean that it's going to be largest in the very short term. It's going to take a lot of time, but I think it's a tremendous opportunity Tremendous brand, and I'm super excited for the long term. I think similarly with PAYA, it's a very large opportunity, maybe not as large as global, but still very large. It's half the size, almost half the size of Calabat, with the same gross profit. You have seen it in the gross profit slide. And same... same development, it's just that it requires a few more years, and then hopefully it will be the same size as the Talabat, and when it's the same size as the Talabat, I would expect a similar profitability coming from there.

That's great. Thanks a lot for the call.

The next question from Annick Maas, Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon. I'm coming back to the brand merger and the cost synergies you've mentioned. Are you maybe in a position today to give us a numerical number as to what you plan to save in costs and how that's going to be spread out over the quarters? Thank you.

And brand merger, you're thinking of Fruita, La Fedora, Yemete, Sepedi?

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Right. And we will not merge the brand, just to be clear here. We still operate different brands, but the leadership teams have merged. And, yeah, that drives certain efficiencies. It also drives better execution because you bring the best part of every team. And, yeah, it makes you faster. And you use, I don't know, one set of tools instead of three sets of tools. In terms of efficiencies and cost, I don't know, Marianne, if you want to comment there. I think it might not be

something that we disclose but Marianne leave it to you yeah yeah I don't I think we disclose specific numbers but but you know we're obviously looking at SG&A in particular right both savings from having you know only one leadership team for that platform and And then also for certain functions, leveraging lower-cost locations, right? So not having all activities necessarily done from high-cost locations, but in particular using some of the Asian locations to have some function space there. So there's definitely also an SG&A angle here, some of which is coming already through this year, and some of that will happen next year or be annualized next year. Okay, thank you.

And I think right now, Marianne is pushing us hard, and we push also very hard to drive cost efficiency. And I think overall in the group, we have significantly kept a very tight and lean team approach. So you will see our GMV and revenue and so on going up, but you will see our costs being very flat in general, and I think you would expect that going forward too. But I would say the largest value of the synergies and things that we're bringing is actually the improvement in execution of the ads. So when we build, for example, the ad platforms and we're rolling out at the global or as we drive efficiency by moving also here at global and Korea into different logistic platforms, It's not necessarily the costs in the view you drive from an FTE point of view. It's actually performance uplift as well as the increase of efficiencies from those tools, and that is often rather seen in GMV revenue and gross profit.

Thank you.

The next question is from Silvia Cuneo, Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. That regards the crisis of GMB growth. You mentioned that border growth contributed two-thirds of the total GMB growth at the group level. So could you provide perhaps a breakdown of the contribution from increased order frequency versus user base expansion, if at all. We're interested in understanding the importance of your subscription initiatives in driving frequency and order growth versus how much potential for further customer penetration in your various markets there could be. Thank you.

And did you speak about a particular market or order growth?

Overall, Niclas, if you have any particular markets to call out, please do.

So I think in general we try to drive more value to the customer and find different ways of increasing frequency. Of course, subscription program is one that is a very helpful tool, but it's surely not the only tool. We Also, D-Mart is a good example. It's been incredibly good for our business. Not only that D-Mart is a very good, profitable business, or at least moving towards, but also in terms of customer loyalty. Same with many other things that we do. You have post pay in Talabat, and you have in a few other markets. You have loyalty points, and you have many other tools here. Our focus is to build a very good experience, and then we see increasing frequency. Generally, that is the case both with and without subscription, but subscription is in general helpful. I think the comment I made before in Korea is still true that we see an increase in frequency as customers adopt the loyalty program, and this is why we're also pushing Behrman Club more and are going to invest behind Behrman Club to make sure that we offer the best service and the most affordable service in Korea.

Okay, thanks. Do you have any comments about the potential to grow the customer base globally? It's been a while since we got a little bit of sense about the penetration of the delivery markets globally. Thank you.

Christy, sorry, I did not fully capture. I'm very sorry about that. Can you repeat?

I mean, is there much growth also coming from new users potentially, or it is now mostly about growing frequency of existing users?

Yeah, so I would say that the majority of our growth in the group is still through acquiring more customers. So that shows that we're very early in the phase. but the majority of our growth is still coming from order growth, from acquisitions. There's also frequency improvements that we see, and that's a more long-term, probably the largest driver of growth. But currently, we still have more growth coming from acquisition and increased number of customers, and I expect that to remain for the next couple of years. So, again, that shows that we're early stages in development.

As a reminder, if you wish to register for questions, please press star and one on your telephone. We have a follow-up question from Giles Thorne. Jeffries, please go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you very much for the follow-up. There's been press reports that you found a new CEO for Biomin, but nothing officially announced. So I'm just wondering, Nicholas, if you're happy to confirm that Austin Kim's joining. And if you are, what was it about Kim's time at Trendyol that appealed to you for this role?

So Austin is working with PJ's team on special projects put in this way. And I don't know, this is exceptionally good exceptionally good and of course his experience of Trendyol Go was very encouraging I love working with Austin but we have not reported on a CEO appointment in Korea yet but we will let you know as soon as we do appoint a CEO there And I also got a question here on the side regarding my comment on Korea. So what I'm saying is that the implementation of the club, meaning that non-paid subscribers or non-subscribers will have to pay delivery fee, there is an effect on year-on-year growth for Korea. So that's one. And there is an effect on year-on-year growth development. But as I said, there is a positive effect of the admin club. So as we grow the subscription base, we think that it will be a tailwind, so a positive win for us going forward.

Next question from Christopher Yonen, HSBC. Please go ahead.

Yes, thanks for allowing the follow-up. I would want to go back to Turkey if possible. I think what the sort of Taliban disclosure has shown is that probably Taliban was much more profitable than most people expected, but the implication is also that the combination of hunger station and Turkey in the segment were weaker in terms of profitability. So if my math is right, then Turkey is probably still maybe somewhat significantly loss-making on an EBITDA level. You have basically only had positive words about the development in Turkey. You know, I think you talked about very strong top line development. Can we pick your brain on the passive profitability here for that market? Thank you.

I think you can assume that the first half was negative and now we are back into driving profitability and yeah, we are there. So I would say Turkey is on a break-even basis on the platform side and that will continue to improve as we go into 2025. And, yeah, Harvey Station is profitable. Yeah. Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.

Thanks. Next question from Annick Maas, Ben Stein. Please go ahead. Hi.

Just looking at your long-term EBITDA margin of 5% to 8%, the guidance, And if I compare that to the Taliban, who are 7% to 8%, shall I just assume that you guys are way more conservative, or is there any reason why your range is what it is versus Taliban's? Thank you.

I think we set the target quite some time ago, and I think development has been good so far. Of course, if you look in the very, very long term, I hope that... When you get the position that we are in Talabat and that many of our markets also have, then you would expect possibly in the higher end of EBITDA margin. Of course, we also have to assume that there will always be some market that maybe earlier stage or maybe it's a comparative dynamic that will take the margins down a little bit and so on. So for that reason, I think 5% to 8% is a good guidance. But, yeah, in the very long term, I guess we have a little bit of room to do the upside. But, yeah, it will take time.

Okay. Thank you. Next question from Andrew Ross, Barclays. Please go ahead.

I just wanted to come back to clarify the commentary on career in Q4. Particularly you're saying the GMV in Q4 declined versus the GMV in Q3. I think I'm right in saying that normally Q4 would be bigger than Q3, just from a seasonality perspective in career, but currently if I'm wrong, can we assume therefore that the year-on-year decline is a bit worse in Q4 than in Q3? Or have I misunderstood that just to clarify what you mean by overall year-on-year decline?

Yeah, we only speak on a year-on-year basis to avoid any seasonality up or down. So, yeah, my comment is completely on a year-on-year basis. You would expect that it will be slightly down in Q4 versus Q3, given the move to taking away free delivery for non-subscribers. It also means that profitability is a little bit better in Q4 than in Q3. But, yes, year on year. Thank you. Cool.

Thank you. Thanks.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Oestberg for any closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, for listening in. And thanks to all the heroes. Keep delivering good results. Thank you very much.