Delivery Hero Se Unsp/Adr

Welcome to the Delivery Hero Q1 2026 Trading Update. Today's presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. For those of you who have joined the Zoom webinar, you can use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen at any time to join the queue to ask a question, and you will be called upon during the Q&A session. If you've dialed in, please press star 9 to enter the queue. If you want to withdraw your question please lower your hand using the raise hand function in the zoom app or via the telephone press star 9. I will now hand over to Andrea Ferraz Estrada to begin the presentation.

Hello, and welcome everyone to our Q1 2026 earnings call. I'm joined today by Niklas Esberg, our CEO, and Marianne Popp, our CFO. Together, they will present the key highlights of our Q1 2026 results. Following their presentations, they will be delighted to address any questions you might have. One reminder before we begin. Talabat will release its own Q1 results on the 12th of May. As a separately listed company, Talabat is bound by its own disclosure obligations, so we won't be able to comment on its specific financials today. We kindly ask that you direct any Talabat-specific questions to its results call. And now, over to you, Niklas.

Thank you, Andrea, and welcome, everyone, also from my side, and thank you for joining us today. We have three key messages for you. First, growth is accelerating. Group GMV grew 8.8% like-for-like in Q1, up from 7.9% in Q4. Quick commerce, now at 18% of GMV, grew 30%. As the number of consumers engaging in quick commerce increases, overall growth accelerates. The result of this everyday app strategy is visible in our group numbers, but also in countries like Saudi Arabia, where we have been seeing an acceleration in growth since the end of last year. Second, profitability is on track. The investments we've made in recent months are supporting higher profitable growth, which makes us confident in our ability to achieve adjusted EBITDA in the upper end of our 910 to 960 million euro range with free cash flow comfortably above 200 million for 2026. Finally, our strategic review remains our top priority. We've agreed to the sale of Taiwan for 600 million US dollar, and we are on track to close that transaction in H2. More work streams concerning the strategic review are ongoing, including asset evaluations and operational efficiencies. In the meantime, we would like to share an update on our everyday app strategy. This is the framework that guides us every single day. We built one of the most capable delivery platform in the world with 1.5 million vendors, 60 million monthly active users, and over 80 fulfillment centers. Our goal is to continue our transformation from restaurant delivery into an everyday app. We are evolving our platform to be the first point of contact for consumers' daily needs, spanning not just for food and groceries, but household essentials, health and beauty, as well as electronics and lifestyle goods. The Everyday App is a habitual, high-frequency platform that consumers reach for every day, and that is the long-term strategy. As we shared at our full year release, our priorities for 2026 are clear, and Q1 demonstrates that we're executing against each one. We're strengthening our leadership positions, You can see that, for example, in the performance of Saudi Arabia, in which we're now starting to see category share increasing one and a half years after a new comparator entered the market with deep discounts. Secondly, our quick commerce expansion. We are now at 18% share of GMV, delivering growth of 30% at an increasing large scale. Thirdly, we are accelerating our AI initiatives, automating 85% of first-line service contracts, rolling out AI agents for sales and support, launching conversational ordering. Internally, our engineers are integrating AI agents and tooling to maximize development efficiencies. But let me start with the strategic review. The strategic review is the top priority for the supervisor board, for the management board, and for me personally. I really believe that the everyday app, Roadbus, has transformative potential and the strategic review helps us unlock it. Three things we want to achieve with the strategy review are, one, we want to go deeper, not broader. We want to operate a tighter geographic footprint where the playbook works and build a stronger comparative mode there. Two, we are sharpening our focus in geographies where we lead and delivering the best customer experience across many verticals there. This will translate into more growth, higher margins, and consequently higher cash flows per share. Three, strengthening the balance sheet and optimizing our capital structure. To get there, we have engaged advisors to evaluate specific assets, and in parallel, we are working on operational efficiencies, organizational improvements, and a capital allocation framework. This is how we compound strong operational performance into long-term shareholder value. We intend to share an update with you on this by early June. Let's continue with our platform update. Today, we believe to have the strongest tech platform globally. Except Korea, it operates as one unified platform with unique localization capabilities for each brand. This gives us the best setup for operational leverage and localization. Some examples, our tech stack has transitioned into an everyday app that is yielding significant results with 55% of GMV now generated by customers engaging across multiple verticals. We lead in customer experience with 96% of markets where we deliver as fast or faster than our competitors. And we keep getting better. And this example of that is that we are delivering an 8% reduction in rider waiting times at restaurant and 50% year-on-year growth in priority deliveries. That engagement converts into loyalty. 43% of our group GMV now comes from subscribers with significant growth still to come. We have further accelerated our development velocity as we have doubled down on AI development. We recently revealed our autonomous AI coding agent, HeroGen, which can handle the entire software development life cycle without human intervention. Engineers and product owners can just describe a feature in natural language and have it deployed in our app end to end. Anthropic has published a case study on it, and Google had us present at their Google Next or Google Cloud Next event last week. It already has an annual coding output equivalent to 130 engineers and is growing double digits per week. We also built an internal global AI platform, which has added capacity of 108 data scientists. And AI innovation is happening across the company. The new gen AI ad ranking model has delivered a 7% increase in return on ad spend as just one example. It's also 30% faster for our data scientists to deploy model changes. Now let's move to the next slide. QuickCommerce is the clearest proof. The everyday app is working with 30% growth in Q1, and critically, it's broad-based. Our strongest regions are growing even faster despite their large scale. That tells you the market is far from saturated. Asia is still only at 7% penetration, and the cash up is inevitable. Moving to KSA. In our last set of results, we committed to strengthen our leadership across geographies. We wanted to share our experience in Saudi Arabia where we have successfully adopted to a new very discount heavy market entrant with limited impact to our business. As most of you will be aware, a discount driven comparator entered the Saudi Arabia market for the first time in September, 2024. They spent a considerable amount of capital providing their services and the goods practically for free. Instead of discounting our offering, we focus on building a superior customer experience. We strengthen our subscription program to ensure our value or our best customers would be rewarded for their loyalty. 61% of our GMV now comes from customers who are part of the program. We improved vendor selection by adding more quick commerce options, our own dark kitchens, and ensuring we continue to lead on the restaurant offering by working with vendors to encourage deals on our platform. By doing so, we have significantly strengthened our value proposition. The share of vendor funded deals has increased by eight percentage points year on year, elevating the affordability for our customers at no additional cost for us. And lastly, service expansion. We have launched a broad range of services, including group ordering, meal for one, curbside orderings, and new loyalty initiatives, all designed to boost consumer engagement. The results is that growth has accelerated since the annualization of Kita's market entry, and margin impact has been limited. Furthermore, we have started to gain category share compared to Q4 2025. And also here, one clarification on the Iran conflict. It supported the order development with an extra high single-digit growth in March, but GMV growth in KSA was above 20% also prior to the conflict. The playbook is working independent of external factors, and it's the primary reason we are so confident in the performance across the group, including Halabat. Let me now hand over to Marianne, who will guide us through the financial highlights.

Thank you, Niklas, and a warm welcome from my side as well. We started 2026 with a very robust first quarter, characterized by an acceleration of order growth to 10%, up from 9% in Q4 on a group level. Notably, South Korea returned to positive order and GMV growth in Q1, building on the outstanding fundamental work we've done over the last two years. At the same time, momentum across our other segments remain consistently strong. GMV growth similarly outpaced Q4, reaching 9% compared to the previous 8%. Revenue grew by 18%, exceeding order and GMV growth on the back of the ongoing scaling of our own delivery logistics, particularly in South Korea. Furthermore, our high margin ad tech business, our attractive subscription programs throughout the group, as well as the excellent performance of our D-Marts business contributed to this development. Let's have a look at the performance on a segment level, starting with Mina. Mina also showed re-acceleration relative to Q4. Strong top-line performance has been broad-based across hunger station and Talabat markets, with particularly strong growth in quick commerce. Our efforts to drive engagement through a strong subscription program, targeted offers, and broader vendor selection are working. Saudi Arabia is now seeing the highest level of subscriber penetration within the group, with subscriptions at 61% of GMV, and Taliban is following suit. Palabat recorded healthy GMV growth throughout January and February, and as the conflict emerged in March, we observed a shift towards elevated eat-at-home consumption and heightened grocery demand. The business also benefited from the timing of the eat holiday. It's key to note that the underlying operational trend, however, is backed by strong order growth, thanks to the expanding subscriber base and multivertical customers, as mentioned before. We continue to progress on our plant investments in the region. We are monitoring geopolitics closely, keeping a close eye to ensure we're able to react if geopolitical changes lead to a change in performance. Moving on to Asia. Our largest segment, Asia, is also seeing very positive development. We have completely rebuilt the Korean operating model over the last two years, and investments have started to pay off. We've seen order growth since year end 25 and this momentum continued in Q1 26 and also translated into GMV growth on a like for like basis. Demand in APAC remained resilient as well. And overall, this led to further acceleration of GMV growth in Q1 26 for the whole Asia segment. We continue to invest in the business, and as such, we drive the further rollout of our own delivery logistics. This has resulted in an increase of the own delivery share for the Asia segment of 12 percentage points to 77%. The further expansion of the subscription program in Korea is another growth driver. In Q1, 50% of GMV in South Korea could already be attributed to subscribers. Another growth lever in Asia is quick commerce, which demonstrated exponential GMV growth of 27% year on year. Special campaigns, growing inventory, and expansion of local shops are drivers to get customers on board. Let's move on to Europe. In Europe, our transition to an employment-based rider model in Spain, which we completed in July 2025, created some transitory headwinds, leading to a temporary moderation in GMV growth for the segment. However, we are already capturing growth gains in Spain, driven by enhanced operational execution and improving the customer experience. As these operational efficiencies compound and the effect of the change in rider model annualizes, we expect them to translate into accelerated top-line growth in H2. Subscription continued to ramp up and there is significant untapped potential with only 22% of GMV coming from subscribers yet. QuickCommerce reached a record high in active users this March, propelled by optimized vendor selection and increased availability. Our European ad tech business achieved standard performance and posted group-leading 34% revenue growth. This momentum was broad-based across our entire European footprint. Notably, the AppTech integration within Glovo is scaling at a rapid pace, and we see substantial runway for continued expansion. Now continuing with the Americas business. Order growth accelerated further to 25% in Q1, with 13 out of 15 markets growing above 20% year-over-year. This broad-based momentum is driven by extraordinarily strong growth of 34% year-over-year in our quick commerce business and a compelling subscription offering which reached 37% of total orders, which strengthened our value proposition across the Americas. In terms of revenues, we sustained strong momentum this quarter with revenue growth surpassing 20%. Our ad tech business continues to outpace the overall top line, delivering 33% growth and representing substantial upside potential for the future. Alongside this, we are successfully scaling fintech as a complementary engine for long-term growth. Now, on to integrated verticals. We continue to see an excellent trajectory in our integrated verticals business, achieving 28% year-over-year GMV growth. South Korea and the Americas were key contributors here, showing accelerated top-line momentum versus the fourth quarter. It is worth highlighting that with very few new store openings in Q1, this growth was fundamentally organic and driven by higher utilization across our existing fleet. We saw an even more impressive revenue growth of 32% fueled by strong ad tech performance, which is already contributing annualized retail media revenues of over 100 million. Our strategic investment plans for scaling our DMATs footprint remain firmly on track. Let's now have a closer look at the outlook for 2026. Q1 has started strongly with growth comfortably within the guidance range. While we remained mindful of an uncertain geopolitical backdrop, the solid start to the year and positive results from investments in MENA, Asia and QuickCommerce make us confident in our ability to deliver adjusted EBITDA in the upper half of the guidance range of 910 to 960 million euros. That's it from my side. Thank you all for joining. We're very excited about the path ahead and appreciate your ongoing support as we build on this quarter's strong results. We're now looking forward to taking your questions. Andrea?

Thank you, Marianne. Before we enter the Q&A, I would kindly ask you to limit your questions to one per analyst. This way we can ensure that every analyst has the opportunity to ask a question. Operator, please go ahead.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our Q&A session. For those of you who have joined the Zoom webinar, if you have a question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Once called upon, please unmute your audio and ask your question. If you have dialed in, please press star nine to enter the queue and star six to unmute once called upon. Our first question comes from Andrew Ross with Barclays Capital. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Great. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. My one is to follow up on the comment you made in the prepared remarks there, Nicholas. We might hear more details about the strategic review in early June. Wondering if you can give us a bit more color as to how that update might look. Is it realistic we could be at the point where asset sales are actually announced, or are we not close enough for that to look likely? And if not, what kind of things might we expect to hear? And I guess in terms of the timing of it, you know, your AGM is June the 23rd. I think there's a month before that for people to put agenda items onto that AGM. So curious as to the timing of this update in early June and kind of any other messages you have to shareholders into that AGM in general. Thank you.

Thanks, Andrew. So I think any asset disposal or M&A transaction, we will update as they come. So we will not wait for a review or we will not time it with a review or similar. So I think that should be seen separately. I think what we want to give a little bit more clarity on is things that we're working on, which are potentially outside of asset disposal. All operational improvements, all other strategic decisions that we're taking, That will be the focus. So it will be more the other aspects of it. So I don't think they should be expected that we are going to announce any asset disposal. That will come when it comes. It's a high priority, but not for this review. We may update on how we're thinking around it, but that will be it. And in terms of... AGM, yeah, no, it will almost be six months. It will be a little bit more than five months since we announced the strategic review. We have completed our assessment. We have started to take certain actions. We have, as you know, engaged advisors. We are looking into certain concrete actions. And we want to share a little bit more around that in this strategic review, but it's not connected to ADM.

That's helpful. If I could just clarify one thing on your comments on asset disposals. Are you saying that it's unlikely there would be any asset disposals before early June, or just simply that there's no reason to think you'd announce one on that specific day in early June, but we could, in theory, still see one before that?

I cannot comment on timing on any dispersals. So I can't either confirm nor contradict that. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks.

Our next question comes from Joe Barnett-Lam with UBS Limited. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Excellent. Thank you very much. I understand revenues in GMV did a little bit better than expected in 1Q, but obviously to raise profit guide to the upper end of the range, having only announced that range 35 days ago, I'm keen to understand what's changed. Has there been a shift in required investment levels, maybe in MENA or Korea, a step change in economics somewhere? Just any colour you can give as to what's changed over the last 35 days would be fantastic. Thank you.

Maybe I start and then you can chip in, Marianne. So as we announced our full year results, that was roughly two months into the year. So effectively two months into our investment cycle that we mentioned that will double down on quick commerce in Middle East, in particular Talabat, as well as in Korea. So there were two months into that investment cycle which means that you only effectively have roughly one month of returns. Now we have two and a half months of returns. So we can see a little bit more of what the returns have been. And I think so far we have seen tremendous, very good results on the quick merge side when we look at acquisitions frequency. So we have great momentum there. We have seen very positive results in Korea, continued progress, I should say. And we have seen very good results also in Middle East and in particular in Talabat, where we already start seeing certain category momentum in our favor, despite very recent launches by a discount provider. So I think... We have significantly more data on the returns now versus one and a half months ago. So that's why we feel confident that we're going to land in the higher end of the range. Yeah, I hope that helps a little bit.

Yeah, it's very helpful. Thank you very much, Niklas. Sorry, go on, Marianne.

No, nothing much to add on my side. I think Niklas captured it really well. I think it's really that, you know, the result of that better visibility we have at that point, right, versus where we were a few weeks or a few months ago. And I think in particular, you know, how the growth that we're seeing and that we've seen in the first quarter starts to translate in terms of profitability. So I think that's really the, you know, how we bring it together and kind of came to the conclusion that we're confident on the upper half of the range.

Our next question comes from Marcus Deerbell with JP Morgan. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Yeah, hi, everyone. So very solid results. The question comes, why don't we see now a time for maybe starting a share buyback program? I mean, previously, from a data point of view, you want to stick conservative on the cash side. But given that we likely end up at the higher end of the ETR range, the business contracts could go on well, and there are some You have to place it actually on the other side. Why is that not a good time to buy the shares?

Thank you. Are you going to cover?

Yeah, I'll take it. I think as we've also previously discussed when we talked a bit more about capital structure on previous calls, I think for now it's not a plan that we have. But I think what's really important for us is that we are set up from a capital structure point of view, from an liquidity point of view. With a lot of flexibility, with a lot of optionality, you will have seen us buy back convertible bonds in the last few weeks and therefore address the debt maturities we've had for 26 and 27 to give us basically visibility all the way into 2028. So that's really been the priority to make sure that we are set up in a flexible way and have a number of options available. So I think I would say the shareware back is one of the tools that we have in our toolkit. And then we, you know, very much value having it in the toolkit. But, you know, for now, we've decided not to activate it yet.

Okay, thank you.

Our next question comes from Xavier Lemime with BofA Global Research. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thank you for taking my question. Just one actually on Asia, because you mentioned stepping up investment, which is great, and you're seeing also the like-for-like trends recovering, Patricio, can you help us understand a bit more the kind of typical lag you've got between making the investment and seeing the traction with customers? So when you start to get the volumes up, is it already started? As you mentioned, you've seen already, you've got a bit more data now, but can you give us a bit more granularity on that?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, what many people think is that we step up investment and initially or directly we see a response into growth. That's unfortunately not what happens. If you take the example of stepping up investments, acquiring new customers, then the customer acquisition is just a very small portion of our monthly orders. Increasing acquisitions will just very marginally increase our growth. However, it has a compounding effect as we add more and more and more customers and they order more and more frequently. So we have a very easy way to see how the returns are coming from those investments. And that's why we see that the investment we've done so far will play out really well in terms of return and why we also feel comfortable with second half of the year. As well as 2027. So when we speak about things like customer acquisition has a very long payback period, but very high payback period. If you speak about building up on a demarch and so on, it has a little bit time to first set up the store and will have a negative impact or mostly the investment impact very initially. And then you even see there, it will take a few months before you have any return of that at all, potentially even more. So there are different investments. If you wanna invest into vouchers, then you have a very immediate impact. And you will see instantly. And if you would do vouchers, we would easily be able to boost our order volumes. But that's not what we do. And we have seen other players doing these vouchers, deep discounts. Those customers are literally useless. So we don't see any repeat behavior when they give a customer a deep discount. So therefore, that's nothing that we believe in. But that would have been the very fast return, instantly get the customer to order, instantly drive GMV. But again, that's not our strategy. Our strategy is to build the best customer experience, building loyalty, building service. And those are the investments that I've done. So many of those investments will be returns of multi-year returns. but you will start seeing some of the impact already this year, but it will also flow into 2027, 2028 and so on. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Giles Thorne with Jefferies. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thank you. It was a question on career, please. Nicholas, it'd be interesting to hear what you think the upside to your consumer value proposition would look like if you can move Korea in vendor funding to be as well developed as one of your best in class markets? I've always had the impression that it's a bit behind. So understanding how much the consumer can benefit from developing that would be useful.

Yeah, it's very, very large. It's a huge opportunity. So I don't know if I want to put a number here, but Yeah, I imagine you will be able to give another 5%, 6%, 7% more value to your customers. Of course, that is hugely valuable. Alternatively, we don't have to spend that voucher's discount on that. So that will be a saving of several percent, potentially, that will flow directly into your EBITDA. So, of course, it's an enormous opportunity. I think you're right. We haven't leveraged that opportunity enough yet. We are moving slowly, carefully on some of those topics, but yeah, big opportunity. Same big opportunity when it comes to certain logistic efficiencies and huge opportunities in ad tech. So we think there's a lot of opportunities. We are executing on those opportunities, but Given the size of the business, it's still happening gradually, but we start seeing that playing out. So even if it grows fast, it's still a big opportunity and it will take some time until fully there. We are also not, as you know, we are not fully integrated into global tech stack in Korea. That is, of course, a big disadvantage. Some of the tools that we have, like global incentive service and so on, are not on our platform. And that is a big disadvantage, both for growth and profitability. We hope that, yeah, that's where we stand today. So big opportunity.

Thank you. And just to follow up on that, around the execution risk and around the timing, it's quite noticeable that you've signed a lot of framework agreements and memorandums of understanding with various restaurant trade associations in Korea over the past 18 months. How should we interpret that? Is that laying the groundwork for vendor financing?

Yeah, I think we have been, the team has done a tremendous job to build, to revive the Bermuda brand and make it a loved brand. That was one of the key priorities of Austin, to build a loved brand. And of course we have had some, Very positive momentum, partially also by our comparative mistakes, has been partially helpful. So I think we're getting there. And part of building a love band is to make sure that all stakeholders are happy. And that's what we've been doing. We act very actively to make sure that all stakeholders are part of how we're building and building this together. And that's why we are moving a little bit slower than probably what, we normally would do. We take everyone along the journey. And I think that's long term the best way to do it. But yeah, short term, and of course, we could have been driving more profit, but that's, I don't know, long term is better for our profit generation by making sure that building a love brand among all stakeholders.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Monique Pollard with City. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Hi, afternoon, everyone.

I had a question just on the quick commerce penetration. So obviously massive improvements in the quick commerce penetration year on year and in terms of its share in the group, but very different regional dynamics that we see between the different regions. And interestingly, the region, some of the regions with the highest penetration also showing the highest growth. So what I was trying to understand is more a sort of medium to long term question, which is, do you think that, Nicholas, a lot of structural and cultural reasons why, you know, the penetration in one region can't be read across to another, like MENA can't be seen, let's say, as the gold standard that everyone can move towards? Or do you think there can be a lot more conversion in that quick commerce penetration over time?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And what we see is that the markets where we started off, where we prioritized this first, are the ones that are large. If you take the example in the Middle East, that's where we started building multivertical. Same with APAC. That's where we started building. While if you take Asia, that was not really a priority. And in Korea, it was not even a priority at all. So... While Korea has only prioritized, or we have only really been able to prioritize this over the last months, this is clearly behind. But we see the growth is accelerating, great momentum. So I think that is changing. I think in terms of, yeah, no, I don't think there is a cultural difference there, except that if a... to our platform 10, 15 times a month, then of course it's a little bit easier to upsell them on the day of ordering other things than the restaurant food. While if your customers only come in two, three, four times a month, it takes much longer to building that penetration and getting them to try something. So that's why if you look at Europe, it's just going to take longer to kind of influence them. So that's why we also see kind of the best growth in our markets we've already have high penetration share. And you can even see that in our country level, like there are some markets that are even at about 50% now and they grow really fast. So I think it's just about how we prioritize and how frequently we already today interact with our customers.

Really helpful.

Thank you. Thanks. Our next question comes from Joe Barnett-Lan with UBS. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thanks very much. Yeah, I just wanted to circle back around to Saudi, where obviously we've seen great growth and EBITDA trajectory as well. I think you also said that you sort of gained category share Q1 versus Q4. Can you help us understand what you think the driving factors behind this have been? I mean, obviously, your competitive response has built, but we've also had sort of regulatory change there. I'm interested if you've seen any shifts there. in your competitors sort of approach and any color you can give that you think is driving that, that improved performance on your side. Thank you.

Yeah, so many factors here. One is, of course, everything that we build adds up and accumulates up. While on the other hand, what I mentioned before on the return question is that if someone just gives Varsion a discount, yeah, you build volume very fast. You have a very quick so-called return in terms of getting more GMV, more orders. But the sustainability of that return is very short term. So you might never get more order of that customer unless you keep doing it. So you can easily get like 500,000 daily orders and stuff like that. And we have done it too. But how do you build from there? Because you have to spend a lot of money to get those 500,000 daily orders to come and order again next day and order them next day. So in order to keep growing that, you just have to increase your burn. And at some point, you come to burn levels that are just not sustainable for anyone. If you stop your incremental spend, you are going to decline as a company. That's what we see that once they stop or no longer increase their burn, then there's trouble because there's nothing sustainable in that order and that business. I think that is one reason. And of course, if you pull back a little bit on that spending, it also means that some of those customers who might have been low value customers, us, move to somewhere else to order, they will obviously come back if they don't get the deals anymore. So you have someone educating the market and potentially building that frequency. But if they can't sustain the discount vouchers, those customers will eventually come back to us. over time. Then, yeah, the regulatory side, of course, that can also be a contributing factor that you're not allowed to do price dumping and predatory pricing. So that's helpful. But I'm not even sure if... if that is really the limiting factor. It could be, but I also think anyone who looks at the return of the investments, would you see that it's just throwing money out of the window and there is no return on the investments that is made. So, At some point, when you look one, one and a half years, someone will look at returns and probably come to the conclusion that this is nonsensical. And why would you keep investing in things with bad return? So I would also assume that at some point, there might also be reduction investments based on kind of seeing the true returns that they will have. So that might be another reason, but hard to tell.

Thanks, Niklas.

Our next question comes from Wolfgang Specht with Berenberg. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Yes, hello, good afternoon. One additional from my end on the legal side. Can you give us a quick update on the judicial situation in Italy and the legal challenges in Spain? Any changes over the last months?

Do you want to cover, Maria?

Yeah, sure. So I would say as we've disclosed in the annual report, you know, you have basically all the visibility there and there's been, you know, no further updates since then. I think you mentioned Italy. I mean, there, obviously, the work continues, right, with... which we've been engaged in over the last months, but nothing further to point out there, and I think same in Spain. So the visibility that you have is the latest.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Our next question comes from Giles Thorne with Jefferies. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Thank you. A question for Marianne, please. How much of the costs associated with the tech hub in Singapore are linked to Taiwan, i.e. how much are you paying to people in Singapore can be removed or how many of the headcount in Singapore can be removed? Thank you.

I would say overall, and this is not particularly linked to Singapore, there's obviously services provided to the business in Taiwan, as we do provide to all the platforms we operate in, the countries we operate in. So that will be on the product side, on the tech side, etc. You know, we will obviously take that into account as we transition the business. And again, don't expect that to have, you know, overall an impact, right? So we will basically be addressing some of those issues You know, some of those over time as we transition the business over. But, you know, I wouldn't link that specifically to Singapore, right? Because, you know, services being given to Taiwan might be a broader base and just coming specifically from Singapore. But overall, you know, as we mentioned, you know, there's obviously, you know, costs associated with the business in Taiwan, which we will address over time.

Thank you very much. Let me add to that. So there is very little of the tech work that is done for Taiwan directly. So there is a point there that we are losing some of that scale. Having said that, we are going to run the tech platform for... up to one year after the deal closes in H2. So there will be a very long time for us that we keep having to service Taiwan. And as you know, we are being compensated for maintaining that service to grab in this case. And yeah. After that, we keep driving growth in our business and making sure that we have a good leverage on the work that we're doing. So we are confident that by the time we no longer service Taiwan, we will be at an appropriate level of investment for the size of the business. at that point in time when it comes to APAC, Turkey, as well as Europe or Fedora, which are the three brands which are operating on one platform. And Taiwan is a small portion of that platform. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Annick Maas with Bernstein. Please unmute your line by pressing star six and ask your question.

Hi there. My question was with regard to the 100 million annualized advertising revenues you published in Integrated. I was keen to understand how much driving advertising was really a priority for you in this segment, or respectively, if we should think about this as a very nascent opportunity and much more advertising revenues to come in the next quarter. Thank you.

Yeah, so we have over the last years really prioritized our ad tech actions and development when it comes to the restaurants and the food side. And I think we are a couple of steps ahead of our peers in sophistication and returns that we can give to restaurants and to ourselves. When it comes to the other side of the business, when we speak about groceries and retail and so on, it's much more early stage. We think that if the restaurant side, I think we've said between 4% and 5%, a long-term advertisement revenue, and in many places we're already there. When we look at, if you take the DMART side of the integrated verticals, we think that percent is significantly higher. And for the... non-D-Mart side, but on the quick-commerce side, non-D-Mart, it is higher than the food, but lower than the D-Mart, putting it this way. And here we have been doubling down a lot starting at the end of last year. So we put a lot of the teams focused away from the restaurant side, but more evolved into more people on the NMR side. So, so CPG companies and so on can do that. And I think we're doing very fast progress there. So we expect that by the end of the year, we'll be in a very, very good position to drive and already now driving it very fast, but it's going to grow even faster next year, that revenue side. So we are early stage on the side.

Our last question comes from Andrew Ross with Barclays. Please unmute your line and ask your question.

Great, thanks for having me back in. I wanted to ask about trading in the Middle East. You mentioned in remarks that there had been a high single digit percent boost in March at the back of the Iran conflict. Is that still persisting? It would be kind of interesting just to get a sense of what's happening on the ground there. And I guess as a follow-up, any other comments you want to make in terms of thinking about growth into Q2 more broadly? And I guess I'm thinking out loud in career that you might start to lap up against the moment where you stabilize chair on a sequential basis, but maybe any other comments? Thank you.

Yes, so March was a high single-digit uplift, as mentioned. April, we had rather a little bit tailwind from moving school starts, so schools got moved a little bit, and I would say it was a slight negative in the first half of April. So two or three weeks, they're a little bit less. And then the last couple of weeks, we are completely back to normal. So now we're back to where we were prior to the war. And hopefully we can keep having positive momentum from there as more people coming back to the regions and so on. But right now, it's neutral impact. So back to normal, I would say.

This concludes the Q&A session. I will now hand back to Niklas Ostberg for closing remarks.

Yeah, thank you everyone for listening in. While the strategic review remains our primary focus, our operational performance continues to excel. Growth across Asia and MENA has accelerated and our investments into deepening our offer are progressing exactly as planned. The everyday app strategy is delivering clear results, evidenced by the exceptional growth in quick commerce. Furthermore, the integration of AI across our day-to-day operation is significantly accelerating our pace of innovation. We are highly encouraged by the momentum as we remain dedicated to executing our core strategy and concluding the strategic review. So thank you everyone for listening in.

This concludes today's call. Thank you everyone for joining. You may now disconnect.