Just Eat Takeaway.com NV

AEX:TKWY

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q1

[Operator]

Good morning, and welcome to the Just Eat Takeaway.com Quarter 1 2021 Analyst Trading Update Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to Mr. Jitse Groen, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this analyst and investor conference call to discuss the first quarter 2021 trading update for Just Eat Takeaway.com. On our corporate website, you can download the press release and the slides for this analyst and investor conference call. In this brief presentation, I will be taking you through the highlights for the first quarter of 2021. And in addition, I will show some further details on the mix of the 200 million orders that we processed during the quarter and how the impressive growth of our delivery business boosted the growth of our highly profitable Marketplace Orders. As usual, we also included some market share data for the U.K. and added Australia as well to show the outstanding performance down under. I will end the presentation with some concluding remarks, after which we will open up the call for your questions. Brent Wissink, our Chief Financial Officer; and Jörg Gerbig, our Chief Operating Officer, are also here to answer your questions. The start of the year has been very strong, with the first quarter orders growing 79% to 200 million, resulting in our fourth consecutive quarter of order growth acceleration. Our U.K. Delivery Orders grew at an impressive 695% year-on-year, driven by restaurant additions and our price leadership strategy. Total Delivery Orders were 69 million, up almost 200%. Gross merchandise value, GMV, amounted to EUR 4.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021, up 89% on a constant currency basis compared with the first 3 months of 2020. We are also very proud of the acceleration in 2 of our highly profitable markets, with 77% order growth in Germany and 55% in the Netherlands, which is displayed on Slide 3 in more detail. In these graphs, you can see that the continued strong growth in orders and GMV is across our operating segments. The renaissance of our U.K. business is apparent, but the high growth as well as the large absolute scale of our operations in Germany are reemphasizing once again why we believe this is simply one of the best food delivery markets on the globe. Canada and Rest of World are showing increasing scale, both in terms of orders as well as GMV. The Netherlands, not too long ago the largest part of our orders and GMV has become much smaller in the mix despite its continued strong growth. Just Eat Takeaway.com is in excellent shape in every segment. On Slide 4, you will find a split of our Q1 order growth between Delivery and Marketplace. Marketplace and Delivery contributed almost equally to our order growth. Just Eat Takeaway.com's Marketplace Orders are highly profitable, while the Delivery Orders are priced very competitively, following the company's price leadership strategy, allowing for future adjusted EBITDA gains. In our delivery network, Just Eat Takeaway.com's average delivery fee is a mere EUR 1.66. A delivery fee increase of only EUR 1 would increase adjusted EBITDA by approximately EUR 70 million on a quarterly basis or approximately EUR 300 million on a yearly basis. We would, of course, in this case, still have lower delivery fees than most of our competitors. Moving to Slide 5. The first quarter of 2021 marks our fourth consecutive quarter of order growth acceleration. At the end of the first quarter of 2020, at the start of the pandemic, we saw a negative impact on our orders. However, during the first lockdown at the start of the second quarter, our business recovered, followed by accelerated order and AOV growth. We initiated our investment program, which led to further growth in the third quarter despite lockdown relaxation. We invested significantly on the back of the strong momentum, which, combined with the second lock down across our markets, led to a further order growth acceleration in the fourth quarter. Our highly successful investments, in particular in the legacy Just Eat markets, drove further order growth acceleration in the first 3 months of this year. Now please follow me to Slide 6. The U.K. was the fastest-growing segment and our main growth driver. New partnerships were signed with household brands such as Leon, Tortilla and Chipotle, as well as coffee chains, Starbucks and Costa, adding to Just Eat's growing restaurant supply. Just Eat U.K. processed 64 million orders in the first quarter of 2021, up 96% compared to the same period of 2020, while our Delivery Orders have surged nearly 700% in the same period, multiple times faster than the growth of our U.K. competitors. In London, Just Eat achieved triple-digit total order growth. The result of our investment program are clearly visible. Also in Australia, we have seen an outstanding performance with a further acceleration of order growth despite relaxations in COVID-19 restrictions. In the first quarter, we delivered 205% order growth, and as a result, we have expanded our market share. On Slide 7, you can see that our relative market share in the U.K. has remained stable during the pandemic. I will come back to this in the next slide as well, but it is good to realize that in a fast-growing market, this, of course, means that the gap in absolute orders with competitors has widened further. In the Google Trends graph, you may notice an increased share for one of our peers, impacted by news flow around their IPO rather than consumer-related trends. Our market share can also be seen in the relative share of credit card transactions in the U.K. Based on this information, you can see in the right-hand graph that the absolute gap with our competitors has increased during the pandemic. As mentioned previously, we anticipate this gap to widen further in 2021. It is important to note that our competitors' orders include both grocery and white label orders, ours do not. On Slide 9, you see that the wider gap has been realized in spite of a significant increase in discounted orders with our competitors. In particular, the #3 has increased discounting significantly in the past few months. Based on our experience, most of these discounted orders are good at creating short-term top line growth but do not create sticky user behavior. Almost all of these orders would not have been placed if there would not have been a voucher granted to the consumer. In March, we signed one of the most extensive partnerships in the history of UEFA, building on our landmark UEFA EURO 2020 sponsorship. Just Eat Takeaway.com is proud to support 12 UEFA competitions across women's, men's and youth football, including the Champions League. This long-term partnership will give us the rights to TV and stadium advertising, a unique player escort experience for children and chances for customers and those visiting affiliated restaurants to win tens of thousands of tickets. The sponsorship will add to our reach and will further establish Just Eat Takeaway.com as a leading household brand. It is a unique opportunity to reach the entire population around the time when fans are enjoying their favorite food. Our study is to pair our premium household brands with the most premium sport events on the planet. It is especially important for us to sponsor both the women's and the men's tournaments. Our brand is for everybody and sports will be too.I will continue with the conclusion of this presentation on Slide 11. The first quarter of this year marks our fourth consecutive quarter of order growth acceleration, driven by both marketplace and delivery. We continue to see strong results from our significant investments in the legacy Just Eat markets. The renaissance of our business in the U.K. is unfolding with the U.K. being the fastest-growing segment in the first quarter. Our Delivery Orders grew to 23 million orders for the quarter, up 695% against the same period in 2020. In the first week of April, the businesses in Denmark and Norway were successfully migrated to our Continental European IT platform. This change will allow for more efficient delivery operations, for instance. We will continue to invest heavily in our business to drive further growth and market share gain. The investments will further strengthen our market positions. And as a result, we expect an acceleration of our order growth for the full year 2021 compared to the 42% order growth that we reported in 2020. And then last but not least, we remain excited to complete the transaction with Grubhub, which is on track and anticipated in the first half of 2021. We are in excellent shape. The start of 2021 has been strong, and I am convinced that this only marks the beginning of our journey. And with that, operator, I would like to open the call for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Mr. Joseph Barnet-Lamb of Crédit Suisse.

[Joseph Barnet-Lamb]

Yes, it's Joe Barnet-Lamb from Crédit Suisse. I have the usual 3. So firstly, you've reiterated your FY '21 order growth guidance after a strong 1Q, but can you give us a little bit more color with regards to cadence of growth through FY '21 and perhaps early trading in Q2 '21? Obviously, comps are getting harder, but investment benefits are ramping. Secondly, I wondered if you could update us on your views with regards to grocery delivery and how that view is evolving. There was a news article this morning alluding to a private investment made by you, Jitse in a start-up in the space, and that just made me wonder if your views were perhaps changing. And then thirdly, you referenced data on vouchering. To be very clear, what proportion of your orders are vouchered in the U.K. in, say, 1Q '21? And how does that compare with 1Q '20?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Sure. Thank you. Let me start with answering your last question. We voucher about 1% of our orders, it's actual data from our business. Then to your first question around trading this quarter, we've had strong trading throughout the first quarter. Depends a little bit on where you are in the world, but more or less equal in the first quarter. You have to realize that corona hit halfway through March in most of the European markets and end of March in the U.K. So I hope that, that answers that question for you for the first quarter. For the second quarter, we are still seeing strong order growth. Also, of course, because the pandemic has not subsided in most of the world, but you also see significant growth in Australia, which, of course, the amount of contagion is actually quite low. Then to your remark around grocery, I have made a personal investment in a grocery business. It's important to realize though that this is a high basket value next-day delivery service. So it's not related to our sort of business in which people would like that food within 0.5 hour or 40 minutes tops. Our stance towards grocery has not changed. We, of course, see a lot of influx of players that want to get into, let's say, that last mile for grocery delivery or grocery delivery in within 10, 20 or 30 minutes. We think that, that space is very crowded. In some cities, there are now 6 players active. We think the opportunity is relatively small, especially because it's currently being driven by people not being able to go out. So obviously, the demand would now be higher than what it would be in a normal situation. And I think on top, it's a very difficult business case. It depends a little bit on the model. I just mentioned the company I have a private investment in, yes, high baskets, next day, you drive routes, you can see how that will be profitable. If you are looking at short routes, there's a couple of ways to do grocery. I think it's important that for our company that we are doing some tests in a couple of our countries. We are looking at the opportunity. We will not invest a lot in it. If we can run it at a neutral gross profit, then we're fine. We don't want to lose money in it, also especially because it's such a crowded space. I'm not arguing that there won't be anybody left at the end of the competition between the 6 players, for instance, and then, of course, on top of it also some of our competitors. But it is very crowded and not everybody can win. And in this case, we are very much focused on something else because this is not the same sort of business. I think it's very important to understand that the consumer choice is not between ordering a carton of milk or a pizza. That's not how this works. The choice for our customers is always that they want to eat something prepared now. It's not something that they are going to be able to make themselves. So it doesn't really contribute to our network effects. We do see the benefit, of course. I mean, as a separate business, it makes some sense, but you should not expect us to sink our EBITDA into it. I hope that answers the question.

[Operator]

Next question is from Mr. Marcus Diebel, JPMorgan.

[Marcus Diebel, Research Analyst]

Two questions from my side. The first one is on marketplace. Actually, quite impressive growth in the quarter, it suggests that some cannibalization issues have been rather low or not really existent. If you could just tell us a bit more about marketplace, why it has been so strong, i.e., is it a mix of still you signing up a lot more new restaurants also in that segment? Or is it just higher order frequency? And then the second question is on the delivery business. If you could just, yes, help us a bit more understand how you think about this, about the end game here? I mean you're clearly very aggressive in terms of the commission -- sorry, the delivery fees that you're charging and you gave us this sensitivity if the delivery fee would potentially increase. But how do you actually think about it? Is the end game that competitors start to rationalize a bit more or -- and then you would think about raising it? Or do you plan to go that way for as long as it takes? But I would be -- I find it helpful if you could understand -- or let us understand a bit more how you're thinking about the end game. And at one point, you might consider changing this? I understand it's obviously competitive reasons, but more maybe higher level give us an understanding how you think about it, that would be very helpful.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Of course. So thanks, Marcus. First question then around the Marketplace Orders. I think what is important is that when we started doing logistics, and this is already 5 years ago, we did this as an add-on to our marketplace business. We've never thought it would replace the marketplace business, because I think it's important to understand that pricing on the marketplace model, also of the food itself, is a lot more competitive than in the logistical model. And it is logical, right, if you go to a restaurant, the food is typically cheaper, than when you order a pizza with Domino's. Just to put it very bluntly. What we have always been about is adding choice to consumers, whether that's marketplace or delivery is actually not so relevant. The more important thing for us is that we offer the consumer everything that the consumer wants to order. We happen to have started as a marketplace business, which is -- I don't think we have to talk about that for a long time, but it's the model that's actually quite profitable. We have always liked the delivery business or logistical business because it brings us more choice, and therefore, it increases the frequency of our customers. Now the economics of logistics are worse than the marketplace model. It doesn't matter where you are globally, and it's very logical in the first instance, you sent through an order, there's an electronic message and the restaurant delivers. In the second instance, you also do that. But on top of it, you also have to physically do something. That makes that model an inferior model to the marketplace. The gross profit, though, can be the same between both models, but you should not forget there's additional cost. You have to hire your couriers, or in the case you use freelances, you also need to get the freelancers, they don't just come to you. There's actually quite a lot of costs incurred below the gross profit. And that's why, in the end, the profitability of delivery in Europe is going to be worse than that of marketplace. If you have scale though, and we have that scale, we're a huge business, then we can get to gross profit positive on those Marketplace Orders. We're not doing that though. We're investing a lot into -- sorry, in Delivery Orders. We're not doing that. We're investing a lot in it to grow that business, and we'll get that to gross profit positive at some point in the future. And that ties into your next question, but let me finalize. The first, it doesn't cannibalize because we have the entire offering. And they -- these models don't really compete with each other. If you have a similar quality restaurant, the marketplace restaurants will always win because the pricing is lower. The pricing is lower because the location is cheaper. There are no waiters. There is -- there are no fancy -- there's no fancy furniture, et cetera, et cetera. So the cost of marketplace restaurants is lower and therefore, the marketplace restaurant will get more orders. And also if you investigate our orders per restaurant and the orders per restaurant in any market, there are far more orders being sent to marketplace restaurants than to delivery restaurants. So no, we have no cannibalization. Actually, both models reinforce each other. Of course, one of the remarks that we made in the merger with Just Eat is that the thing that we were focused most on is a reduction of churn. There was churn of Just Eat because there was no McDonald's on Just Eat, there was no salad bar on Just Eat. And therefore, you lose customers. Losing customers is bad because you don't lose 1 order, you lose 15 orders a year. We stopped the churn completely. And actually, it's going -- it's rapidly going down and that's also part of why the business is growing so far. To your endgame question, well, the endgame in all the countries has always been the same. I'm not going to predict when the same situation in the U.K. will start to rise as what we have seen in Germany in the past. But thus far, in all the countries, you have the same endgame. You end up with one really large player and several small ones. The problem with being small in the marketplace business is already that profitability will be hard. The problem of being small in a delivery business is that it will be harder. So I think that's important. What we're doing in the U.K., we're targeting the orders that are currently with the competitors. If you deduct the grocery orders, the vouchering and all the other nonsense, you get to about 13 million orders that are up for grabs in the U.K. Those are logistical orders. We're after those orders. Important to understand, though, that if you send 30 million orders to Just Eat, they won't all be logistical because Just Eat has many marketplace restaurants as well. It might be heavier in delivery than the current Just Eat mix, but a lot of these orders will be Marketplace Orders. We're very much targeting customers that churn from Just Eat and then now are coming back to the network. So this is also why all of a sudden the U.K. is the fastest-growing segment. It's not the pandemic, it's the pandemic plus the investments, plus the reduction of churn, plus the expansion of our network, and we are expanding the network both in marketplace and in delivery.

[Marcus Diebel, Research Analyst]

I mean just to follow up, I think many of us on this call we also met the competitors several times at conferences, and they are clearly now very well-funded as well. And from my point of view, it doesn't seem that there's any intention to rationalize, yes, but it's only my personal view. But do you think that this strategy going on for potentially a couple of more years is definitely the road you want to take?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

No. I think actually I'm quite excited that more of these players come to market because they will have to show their figures. And I can almost guarantee you that they're not going to be as good as ours. So I don't think it's so easy for competitors to just -- even if you raise a lot of capital, you need to realize that a lot of these competitors are heavily loss-making. And they are heavily loss-making in a situation in which these competitors already on the logistical piece are far more expensive than us. So you face a choice here, you can lower your delivery fees and incur further losses or you can keep them where they are and reduce your market share. That's the choice that you have as a competitor. And we have been at the stock market since 2016, the markets are unforgiving. There will clearly be scrutiny on what our competitors are doing. You should also not forget that the tide is turning on the business model of our competitors. If you look at Italy alone, we are quite certain that our competitors will be fined hundreds of millions of euros. Only for Italy. So you can imagine what that will do to other markets. But that's our assessment of the situation. I realize that our competitors might not agree, but that's the way we see the world.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Mr. Andrew Gwynn, Exane BNP Paribas.

[Andrew Philip Gwynn, Senior Food Researcher & Analyst of Food Retail]

Two questions, if I can. So first, obviously, we've seen pretty decent growth coming out of Germany and the Netherlands, generally 2 very profitable markets for yourself. So I think in the full year results, you guided to an EBITDA loss of about EUR 60 million to EUR 80 million. So I'm just wondering if we should sort of revise that figure. Second question, as you mentioned it's sort of over a year now since the pandemic, clearly, many of the restaurants have suffered significantly. I'm just wondering how you see that supply landscape, so thinking about the independent restaurants. Are they now reshaping themselves? Are we seeing them emerge much stronger from the crisis? Or actually, are they still feeling sort of [ pretty battered ]? Thoughts there would be very welcome.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Yes, thanks for the questions. We've said that what we're currently seeing is in line with Q4. So we haven't changed the outlook for the profitability of the business. So that's the same. That's your first question.

[Brent Adriaan Wissink, CFO & Member of Management Board]

I think maybe on the strong performance in Netherlands and Germany, although it might be a surprise to the market, this is a highly predictable business. So that was included in the guidance that we've given.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Then to your second question around the pandemic and what we believe will happen. We believe that the marketplace will continue as is because it's marketplace, it's dependent on the amount of users that we have. We have more than 60 million users, 6-0. They order a specific amount of times a year, and they will continue to do so. On the logistical side, we do believe that opening restaurants is naturally bad for the logistical business or for the delivery business. But that happens to be the business that's growing almost 200% for our company. So we can take a hit there. That's all right. But we do believe that that's going to have an impact on market shares globally. And that's -- players that have a significant marketplace business, that they should benefit from that situation. If you ask me about the health of restaurants. Now naturally, the restaurants that we serve on the delivery model, they've had it difficult in this year. They have become dependent on the delivery model. In most cases, actually in Western Europe, the governments have supported the restaurants. It still doesn't make it good, but at least bearable for a lot of the restaurants. So most of the restaurant business is still intact. If you look at the marketplace restaurants, yes, they have grown significantly. So it's a bit of a mix. We've historically been more dependent, of course, on marketplace than on delivery. But we've seen in most of the larger cities in Europe that our offering to our consumers has doubled or sometimes tripled, and we don't believe that any of those restaurants are going to return to not having a delivery service after the pandemic. That will be a waste of revenue.

[Andrew Philip Gwynn, Senior Food Researcher & Analyst of Food Retail]

Okay. That's clear. And presumably implicit in that view is that as some of that government support unwinds, you actually think the majority of your supply base should be pretty solid. They've traded well through the crisis. There's obviously some who haven't, but generally you're going to be looking at a good level of supply.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

I think marketplace will be unaffected because they haven't asked for government aid because it wasn't necessary for them. Delivery, it depends very much on the sort of chain. There are obviously examples of QSRs that had a difficult time, but also of local heroes that had a difficult time. But I would say that everybody that's still standing by the end of this crisis should make it also in the normal scenario.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Mr. Wim Gille, ABN AMRO ODDO.

[Wim Gille, Analyst]

Yes. First, a few questions on Scoober and then on your road map for putting additional countries on the platform. So on Scoober, obviously, you have good momentum rolling out that business model in various countries. When -- or is it still the expectation that you will have all of the delivery in Europe run on the Scoober model? And how long will it take you before you have probably the former Just Eat businesses have rolled out the Scoober model across Europe? Then I also noticed that you are rolling it out in Australia and New Zealand as well, putting people on the payroll there as you should. What does it -- why did you choose to do that in Australia and New Zealand, given regulations and local market practices over there? And what does it imply for Canada, which sort of is on the same IT platform? And then the third question would be on, let's say, the road map to merge all of your European footprint onto the main platform. On top of mind, you have now done Swiss, France, Denmark and Norway. What's the road map and which countries are to be following in the coming quarters? If you can give us a bit more feeling there.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

I'll move backwards with the answers, and then I'll also ask Jörg to give you some more color around Scoober. But let me start with that platform question. We -- when we merged the business, there were quite a lot of platforms in legacy Just Eat. Our first aim is to reduce that to 3. We're not that far removed from that situation. We're trying to expedite that so that we can go to one platform quickly. But that's a big puzzle and it's a dangerous thing to do, right, we don't want to lose customers in the process. We've been fairly successful with doing it in the countries in which we have already done it. But you see every time with any migration, that there's always a little bit of an issue somewhere in the system. And it's always unexpected and it's always something that you can fix, but you should not have too many of those things when you launch a country. So we're very careful. The intent is, of course, to have one product. And if we have one product, we're going to be more cost effective, we're going to be more innovative and we're going to simply be better at what we do. So every reduction of every country should bring us closer to that goal and should make the company stronger. Then regarding your question, first, around Australia and New Zealand. Well, we've said always that we value a couple of things. We value that we properly take care of our people in the sense that we want to ensure our people, that we want them to be able to make a decent living. It depends a little bit on where you are in the world whether that's possible and also sometimes whether something is permissible. And we've said about the freelance model in Europe, that it is highly unlikely that this will still be in place in, let's say, a year from now. You see that in Spain and Italy, the government now is forcing all the players to move to an employment model within 2 months from now, which is actually quite specific, as you would understand. If you look at the situations in Canada and Australia, they are different. Also, our assessment of those models is that take Australia that it's legally permissible to work in this way. It, however, falls short of what we want to offer as an employer to our people. You still deal with health care and that sort of questions, insurance. That, of course, the couriers would take themselves, but in most cases, forget to take. And that's something that we want to correct. The situation in Australia is complicated because if you want to hire somebody, you need to adhere to something that they call awards in Australia. The current awards in those -- in that market are not suitable for this work because, yes, it doesn't exist yet, right, according to that system. And what we have said now is that we want to talk to -- I think it's called Fair Work Ombudsman to come up with such an award so that we can actually employ our couriers in Australia. And the first test for that will be in Sydney in the CBD and we'll expand that from that position. But again, we need a little bit of help from government to get that done in Australia. And again, it's not the intent per se to hire people, but we do want to give the minimum of benefits to our workers. So that at least we feel good about our business. And we're large multinational and I do believe that we need to be responsible, whether that's towards our couriers or we invest great amounts of money also on packaging, environmentally friendly packaging, we have e-bikes. So we also try to reduce the carbon footprint. We do a lot of those sort of things, and we think it's very important. Then to the European situation, there are a couple of countries in which we are still in the transition to a worker/employment model. Italy, as I said, the government is asking from all players in Italy to move to an employment model. We will be done with that in 2 months. And well, let's see what the competition is going to do. But we have committed ourselves to 2 months from now. We still have freelancers in Ireland parts of the U.K., and I think that's it in Europe. And we're, of course, working our way towards changing the model. If you look at the U.K., we have opened zone 1 and zone 2 in London. We're expanding that footprint. We've opened Birmingham. We are opening Liverpool either tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and we'll be opening several other cities also during this year. We are a big business, of course, in the U.K., so it will take us some time. But we will get to a full worker model in the U.K., and we're investigating also for employment in the U.K. So I think that's important. Jörg, can you give some more color about the Scoober expansion in Europe?

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

Sure. So right now, we are already in over 160 cities in 13 countries with the employed model. And as Jitse was mentioning, in London, we've increased our coverage. And I guess some of you guys are living in London, so you would probably have seen by now our drivers on the street. It was also partly resulting in that triple-digit growth rate you saw in London. Birmingham was rolled out. Liverpool is about to start. And there's quite some more expansion in the U.K. coming over the next quarters, for example, also like some of the other bigger cities like Manchester, Nottingham and so on still coming this year. So if you look at then some of the other countries, France was also a very strong focus of the rollout of the employment model, with especially Paris being very much transitioned to the employment model. Lyon was started. Bordeaux and Toulouse and quite some further cities will we added. And we're aiming to employ close to 5,000 couriers by the end of the year in France. Italy was mentioned. There was quite interesting movements in Italy with also us signing an agreement, a CBA, basically with the largest unions, which was very well received in the press and also obviously with the unions. And we are changing those cities very fast to our employed model given the regulatory environment in Italy. This is very crucial. We've already done so with a few cities, and the remaining will be done in the next 30 days. But also in the remaining areas where we already had Scoober for a longer time, such as, for example, Germany or Netherlands or Belgium, we're continuing to roll out new cities. So Germany will also be one of the focus areas to roll out quite some new cities. We started in a city called Bochum today. And in the last few weeks, we've also added a few more cities to the portfolio. So as you see, basically, across all the areas, we're continuing with our rollout. And as was said earlier on the call, we really see it as a good way to fuel our networking effect, add choice to it and have our whole system and the network effects benefiting from it.

[Wim Gille, Analyst]

And maybe a follow-up, a country we haven't heard much about Israel. But obviously, they are doing quite well in terms of vaccinations. So what do you see in terms of, let's say, consumer behavior? How's the B2B doing in Israel? And how's your B2C model running in Israel?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

So yes, we've expanded B2C significantly during the pandemic. And we see B2B coming back now. But it's a little bit too early to tell, right? They're ahead of everybody, but it's not that -- they're now all in bars, et cetera. They do much better than us Europeans, but it's also not the end of the pandemic yet over there.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

And on the logistics side, it was basically the fastest-growing logistics businesses we had globally, it was definitely growing very well in terms of the B2C side of things.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Ms. Silvia Cuneo of Deutsche Bank.

[Silvia Cuneo, Research Analyst]

I have a couple of questions. First, on the U.K. Delivery Orders that grew at an impressive rate, so that penetration is currently close to 36%, up from 25% in the prior quarter. Do you have any indications to say around where do you expect this percentage to go, perhaps based on what is the penetration in cities where you've rolled out Scoober for a few more months, for example, like in London? And secondly, for the group delivery business, the average delivery fee decreased to EUR 1.66 in Q1 compared to 2020. Can you please share some color about what percentage of Delivery Orders is coming with free delivery within the mix and perhaps what delivery markets have driven this decrease?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Thanks for the question. Regarding the free delivery, it's difficult for me to say what proportion it is. It can't be too high because the free delivery is mostly in places like London, is currently in Birmingham and I think there was another place in the U.K., but it's not in the whole country. Neither do we have free delivery, for instance, in Holland and Germany. We have low delivery fees, but not free. There's a couple of countries in which we have it for various reasons, but certainly not in the whole network. And also, for instance, in Canada, we also -- in some cases, we do have free delivery. But in most cases, we actually charge for delivery. Regarding the logistical share, well, that's not really the way we look at it, right? I mean what we're trying to do is market repair. There's about 13 million orders. If you would take out the white label, the grocery and the vouchering, it will show [ 13 million ] orders in the U.K. with our competitors and we won those orders back. That's the way we look at the business in the U.K. We don't do anything different in the U.K. as opposed to, for instance, Germany or Australia or Holland. The difference, of course, is that Just Eat in the past has allowed these customers to go to the competition because the competition had restaurants and Just Eat didn't. So we have repaired a lot of that. We have a lot of the restaurants now that the competition has. And of course, on top of that, a huge marketplace database as well. And that allows us now to claw back a lot of the customers, and we're doing that. The mix for us is not so important because we control the pricing, of course, on the logistics. If we would not like the mix, we can always increase the delivery fee a little bit. But for now, we are very happy with the market share gains that we see in the U.K. That's the most important thing that we're doing. And in the end, Holland and Germany are a great example of it. We run a huge logistical network in Germany, a huge logistical network in Holland and we are very profitable. I'm not talking about EBITDA profitability. I'm talking actual profitability. We're a very profitable business in those countries despite doing a lot of logistics. And because we are doing the logistics, we did not lose customers to competitors that were doing only logistics. Because obviously, if you do only logistics, all the customers are going to make only logistical orders. And in our case, people make sometimes a logistical order, but for the most part, they place the orders with the marketplace businesses. So we look at this very differently. We see that we have had a huge increase in the Marketplace Orders in the U.K. Now those are highly profitable. And we incur a temporary loss on the logistical orders because we see that we are gaining massive market share in the U.K. and that's why we're doing it.

[Operator]

Next question is from Mr. Sreedhar Mahamkali of UBS.

[Sreedhar Mahamkali]

I've got one follow-up and 3 short questions. The follow-up was on the fines in Italy. You previously talked about a very small fine for yourselves as part of that EUR 730 million industry level fine. Is there any update? Have you been given a notice by which you need to pay by or have you paid? Any update there, that would be super helpful. And secondly, I guess maybe this is more for Jörg. I think there was one slide in your presentation and the full year results that talked about like a case study, Berlin delivery improvement efficiencies and things like that, drops per hour rose 20% in 2020. Is there anything you can say in terms of the U.K. efficiencies that you perhaps have gained over the past 3 quarters? Any trajectory there, that will be very helpful. And secondly, sticking with the U.K. Do you see anything on the horizon in terms of the U.K. regulation, where food delivery couriers might need to move to work or employee model? And then finally, Scoober. Just a quick follow-up there. While it's the right thing to do, you've also previously hinted at some benefits to the business, such as less churn from the drivers and so on and so forth. What are you learning with the expansion of the network on the operations side of things? Are those benefits coming through? If you could just give us a bit more detail there, that would be super helpful.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Thanks for the questions. I will defer the second question to Jörg around the delivery in Berlin and the efficiency in the U.K. I'll take the rest. Let's start with your question around Italy. So the thing that's out in the media is that the Italy government or actually, to be more specific, the Labour Inspection has imposed EUR 730 million in fines. We've said before that we expect that because, previously, Just Eat in Italy was on the freelance model. Although it was small, we were on the freelance model over there. We are expecting a couple of million of the EUR 730 million. So the rest, yes -- again, this is public sources. So the rest must be with the competition. In terms of social security, because you should not mistake the efforts that the Italian government is making here. This is not one government agency, these are all government agencies in one attempt to do something about the situation in Italy. So social security, we are looking at something between 0 and EUR 10 million. And again, our logistical business in Italy was tiny. It was not very large. And especially, of course, this is going to be a clawback for the last couple of years. So this is why, for us, these amounts are rather low. But for the competition, they're going to be high. And we don't know for back taxes yet. But again, it was a small business for us. It is not now. It's now a large business growing fast. And of course, we're changing it to the Scoober model. Regarding your question about U.K. regulation. Well, we haven't seen the government move yet in the U.K. We have seen, of course, the court cases. It's very clear in what direction things are going. And I think with all the attention to the model of the past couple of weeks, I think it's very difficult for the U.K. government not to do something about it. So we are expecting something. It might still take a year, but the chance that the U.K. is going to be the only country in Europe that doesn't take regulatory action seems rather slim. Then regarding your question about the Scoober network. Help me again, what was it?

[Sreedhar Mahamkali]

Sorry, it was just -- I think in the past, you've hinted at some benefits to the businesses with lower private churn. What are you learning with the expansion?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

So if you pay taxes and social security pensions, et cetera, you are likely to pay an individual courier 30% to 50% more, talking now about Europe. There are benefits, though, of course, because your couriers can only work for you. That's a big benefit. You can, of course, make use of the visibility of the model. A lot of people see the couriers in the streets. So they give a good brand impression to your customers. Because these people are ambassadors of your brands. They do show up at people's doorstep, right? So we train them. We even wash the clothes. We provide all the materials, the bikes, e-bikes, et cetera, et cetera. We also require that people use bikes, right, or something at least that is electrical, e-bikes or e-mopeds, et cetera, because we also want to have a good reduction of, let's say, the carbon emissions of our company at the same time. So those are all benefits. What is beneficial, of course, also is that the churn is lower, right? And it's difficult to calculate those because if you see people in the freelance model say, "Oh, we're hiring 5,000 couriers." Yes, that's not what they mean. It's 5,000 people fill out the form. And they might show up or not, right? So it's very difficult to compare the amounts of couriers that you would have and what the churn on the 5,000 people is. So that's a difficult comparison to make. But we do have some benefits from it. I think, though, the bigger benefit for us is just that we are a very big business. And therefore, the marketing cost per order, for instance, is much lower for us than what it would be for the competition. So that's more our benefit than to say the benefit for the network, because I'm quite confident that Scoober is more expensive. But yes, I mean if the regulatory situation changes, at least we don't have all the back taxes to pay and all the other fines. So in the end -- and we'd have no court cases as well. So that is also quite helpful. Okay. That leaves the...

[Sreedhar Mahamkali]

Just quickly. On the Italian fine. There is no time line, there is no deadline. There is no date [ there. ] It's free to pay back...

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

No, no. No, there are deadlines. I mean there's a deadline to -- for everybody to now -- I think there's 2 months left to change the model. So that's a deadline there. And there are payment deadlines as well. But difficult for me to say, but they're short. They're not -- it's not next year or something. They're quite short. Jörg?

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

Yes. Yes, on the case study in Berlin, you've rightfully pointed out. Obviously, last year, from Jan to December, we had a 20% increase in utilization, basically drops per hour per driver in Berlin, while at the meantime -- at the same time, actually decreasing the fulfillment time by 6%. In the U.K., we're still running actually both models, as you know. On the freelance model, it's really hard to give you a number on utilization because they might also drive for other people. So like it's hard to really come up with a utilization number. But with regards to our Scoober model in the U.K., we're still in ramp-up phase. And usually in ramp-up phase, you're actually having lower density, lower scale and you're also not necessarily going straight for the most efficient processes, but you rather want to guarantee a smooth rollout. So at the beginning, when we ramp up Scoober in a certain city, you usually see [ financial ] efficiency which might be something like 40% less than the actual efficiency at scale. And we also have similar numbers in London. But we actually have seen over the last couple of months already efficiency improvement of about, let's call it, roughly 10%. But still the business is very much focused in the U.K. around setting up the business right first and having a smooth rollout, improving processes. And then when it comes to scale, really improving for efficiency. And generally speaking, given we have the density, we have the amount of orders on our network and we have the systems, we should be best placed to have the most efficient network in place in the U.K. and therefore, we are very much well positioned here.

[Operator]

Next question is from Sarah Simon of Berenberg.

[Sarah Simon, Analyst]

I have just 2 short questions. Just on the question about -- because you said that only 1% of your orders are vouchered. When you're talking about vouchers, is that a number that's comparable to the discounts chart? Because obviously, there's vouchers and then there's discounts and restaurants. I'm just interested if those numbers are comparable? And then the second one was if we look at your average basket size in the U.K., it's obviously gone down year-on-year, whereas one of your competitors is obviously showing a significant increase in the basket size. Can you just talk about what's behind that change for you?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Sure. Last question is rather simple. We are now the largest or one of the largest partners of McDonald's in the U.K. and therefore, the basket size of those orders is lower than the rest, and that's what you see. And that's true for most of the QSRs. And of course, most of the orders are obviously QSR, so that's the impact on basket size. You can also compare it with the #2 in the U.K. Their basket size is materially lower than ours, and that's because a lot of their orders are actually McDonald's orders. So this is also where you see the same effect. Then to your question, if I understand it correctly, you want to know whether the vouchering is the same as discounts from the restaurants?

[Brent Adriaan Wissink, CFO & Member of Management Board]

It's comparable to the...

[Sarah Simon, Analyst]

No. So you said that 1% of your orders are vouchered, but that's obviously not the same as discount. So if I think about my e-mail every week, I get Tasty Tuesday. I think it's Tasty Tuesday from you guys, and I get a 20% discount from someone else on another day. Are you including those discounts? When you show that chart of discounts of the competitors, are you including vouchers and discounts there? Or is that just vouchers?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

That should be just vouchers. What you just mentioned for us on the Tuesday, those are fully paid by the restaurants.

[Sarah Simon, Analyst]

But the chart is just vouchers rather than restaurant discounts.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

The chart should be both, but we know it's mostly vouchers for the competition.

[Operator]

Next question is from Mr. Giles Thorne of Jefferies.

[Giles Thorne]

I remember a couple of years ago, in this forum, picking up on the agreement with AH in the Netherlands to deliver hot sandwiches. And asking if it was a segue into grocery and you said words to the effect of, "Why would I scale a loss-making exercise?" And now today, you're talking about grocery and running at breakeven. So it feels like you've begun -- you've traveled a long distance. Do you now view grocery as strategic? So tell me if I'm right. Tell me if -- I'm sure you're telling me if I'm wrong. But it would be just interesting to hear you expand on that a little bit, please. Secondly, and I'm sorry still sticking with grocery. Today, we've had Sainsbury's and Deliveroo increase tenfold their partnership here in the U.K. Now I'm assuming that Deliveroo and Sainsbury's are acting rationally. And therefore, the customer likes it and it makes money for Sainsbury's and Deliveroo, again, assuming they're actually rationally. So I wanted to know why are we excluding grocery to the market share conversation? And frankly, come the completion of the Grubhub acquisition in the U.S., that's going to be an even more pertinent question. And then lastly, there were voices within this sector, and I'm not just talking about Deliveroo now, but there are other voices who say marketplace will disappear. They say that a logistics platform can be cheaper and a better user experience for both restaurant and consumer, and that over the very long term, again, the local pizza restaurants using their cousin to deliver the food will just disappear. What do you think about that?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Okay. Well, let's start with the last one. Where is the proof that the marketplace will disappear? Yes, where is this happening?

[Giles Thorne]

No, the comment was there were voices who think it will happen over the long term, over the long term.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Yes. But I also would like to think -- I mean -- look, I mean, these are typical remarks from people that do not have a marketplace. And you've seen also on Slide 4 of this presentation, the marketplace is actually growing. It's not disappearing. And the reason it's not disappearing is because we can all pretend that we are bankers living in the city center of London, but the general population cannot afford a GBP 30 lunch every day. Impossible. So the pricing point and the type of orders with marketplace are very different from logistics. These are pizzas on Friday, Chinese food on Sunday. And then for the whole family, GBP 20, you eat for 2 days. That doesn't remotely sound like ordering a lunch in the city center of London for GBP 30. So these are 2 very different occasions and user groups actually for this model. There is no proof on earth that marketplace will disappear. Now of course, if we would not have entered into logistics and you would have allowed the low interest rates and all the investments in logistics to build up a network so that, for instance, Just Eat would not exist anymore, then yes, I can see the theory fall out. But that happens to not be the case. Actually, as you can see, we are taking market share in the U.K. It's not the other way around. Regarding logistics being cheaper, that's laughable because the only profitable logistical business that I know is our Canadian business. And the reason that the Canadian business is profitable is, first of all, because there was no marketplace or at least there were very little marketplace restaurants in Canada and Canadians are paying for the logistics. They are paying on average $10 more than a German or a Brit on marketplace. So again, the difference in price is very important. So logistics is almost everywhere loss-making, especially in Europe. So to even suggest that it is cheaper than something that does not exist for us in the marketplace, because there is no delivery for us, it's not even part of the equation. That's crazy. I mean, marketplace is just sending a message to a restaurant. Same thing for logistics. But unfortunately, on top of it, for logistics, you need to actually deliver the food. So you would understand that that's a lot more effort. Regarding whether we see grocery as strategic. No, we don't, because a carton of milk is not in competition with a poké bowl. I think it's very important to distinguish these businesses. Although, of course, if you add it to the service, I can see that there are some network effects, but it's not the same meal occasion. It's not a competition for, "Hey, am I going to cook my own food or am I going to order in?" That's not in the minds of our customers at all. Our customers want to order something and they do not want to cook, let alone order groceries and then cook. So that's not the same thing. Then strategic, well, just -- I like game theory a lot, right? So take the London market, there are now 6 players that are offering grocery delivery within 10 minutes. Now that will shift to 20 minutes because if you have a lot of people go to your hubs, you cannot make the 10 minutes anymore. But okay, 20 minutes. On top of it, you have the logistical players doing grocery, which is not so crazy. So if you ask me about the Sainsbury's-Deliveroo deal, yes, maybe you can make some money if the prices are high enough. I'm not saying that you can't do that. I'm just saying that this market seems a little bit crowded. So you're going to have, I don't know what -- apart from the grocery change, right, they're also still there, you also have a lot of people after the same customers. And we do not know how big this market is. It might be small or at least it might be much smaller than food delivery, and then you have 8, 9 people compete for it. Well, sorry, I'm not going to sink our investors' money into such a battle. I don't think it makes an awful lot of sense because even if you would win it, the question is how big is the opportunity? So I fully understand that if you -- if there's 5 of these very fast delivery players coming in, it makes some sense to bet on whoever is best of the 5. So that's not the discussion. The discussion for us is, is it strategic? So I think you're asking the right question. Well, we would say no. Would we like to make it a little bit more complicated for everybody? Well, yes, maybe yes. So then for neutral gross profit, if we would offer some grocery chains. We are big. So we would be a big player in that sector immediately if we do that. It could make sense. But then again, it needs to be a good deal. And we've spoken to many grocery stores of this [ Earth ] and if they keep the prices where they are and they do not charge a markup, it doesn't make sense for the grocery chain and it doesn't make sense for us. So I think that's important to also note. So if you say also that we made quite some journey, that's not true. That's not an accurate depiction of what happened for us in the last 6 years. We have entered logistics because we like the proposition towards our customers. We have doubted the profitability. Now what we're telling you today is that we believe that we can get to gross profit positive, which is not the same as EBITDA positive. I think that's also important. But don't forget, we're doing 200 million orders. We're doing 200 million orders, and we're not gross profit neutral and we're not EBITDA positive. That should say something about this model. It's not so easy to create profits with logistics in Europe. It is much easier in Canada and the U.S. But Europe, I mean, show me the proof that anybody is making money with logistics because there is none.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Mr. Marc Hesselink, ING.

[Marc Hesselink, Research Analyst]

Yes. First, on the dynamic, the building blocks behind order growth, so order frequency and active customer growth. How has that been evolving? And the acceleration that we've seen over the last couple of quarters, are they both accelerating or is one of them stronger? And maybe also looking ahead on that, if now the COVID measures ease off, how do you see that going forward? Second question is on iFood. Do you have an ongoing discussion still there? And is there a funding round coming up for that asset? And thirdly, a follow-up on grocery. These players are talking about a EUR 30 basket size. What do you see in your best market test and your market intel, is that a reasonable level for the basket size for grocery?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Thanks. I would defer the question around iFood to Brent, let me take the grocery basket size question. EUR 30 sounds like a lot for, let's say, missed items to be quite frank. But again, you should ask a grocery specialist. We're not. That's a -- it's a difficult question for me to answer. Just also to say on that last question about us excluding grocery for market share, we don't. We give the full figures, including the grocery and we make a remark that grocery is actually in there. Then the question around the order frequency and -- sorry, the second thing -- second KPI that you mentioned?

[Marc Hesselink, Research Analyst]

Yes. So the order growth, obviously, the building books behind it are the order frequency and increase in active customers. We've seen an accelerating trend over the last couple of quarters. Is that on both of those metrics or there are difference between those? And how you expect that to evolve when the COVID measures ease up?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Sure. So first of all, these are not the most important things that are actually currently going on. We are seeing a huge reduction in churn. I think that's important. And we are seeing a whole customer group shift to more frequent use of the platform. That's actually what we're seeing. And that, of course, translates into a higher order frequency, although that's a marginal increase. It's always a marginal increase between the U.S. because the user group is very back with 60 million customers. And, of course, yields a larger active customer base. But of course, it's very important that the amount of people that order more frequently is bigger. We see -- what we see happening after corona is that, for marketplace, there should be no reduction because that's mostly based on the amount of customers that we have. And think again of the occasions, right? So these are Friday evening pizza, Chinese food, et cetera, these are not our daily moments. Logistics is more daily. But of course, then restaurants will be open. So we do expect a reduction of the demand for logistics for us, but also for the competitors. But that's, of course, the business that's growing 200% for Just Eat Takeaway, so we could easily counter a such reduction of demand because it's growing still so fast. So this is also why we have high confidence in what we're saying about the full year.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

And maybe adding to that, it's also a bit market dependent where the growth is coming from. So like in markets which are further penetrated, such as the U.K., maybe a bit more is coming from increasing reorder rates, because there's not so many new more customers to grab base. There's quite some still, but like not comparable to markets where the penetration rate is below 10% or around 10%. There, obviously, a lot more of the growth is coming from adding more new customers to the active customer base. So to give you the example of U.K. versus Rest of the World, so U.K. would probably be a bit more skewed towards increase in order frequency. And Rest of World, which are usually a bit more of the lower penetrated countries, there it's a bit more skewed towards the addition to the active customer base. That's how you can also see it a bit.

[Marc Hesselink, Research Analyst]

Okay. Clear. Maybe then a follow-up on the reduction of churn. Is that something you see throughout the platform? Or is that then a stronger trend in the former Just Eat footprint?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

It is much stronger in the former Just Eat footprint, but we see it everywhere. I mean because of COVID, we have tremendously increased the restaurant count on our network, both marketplace and logistics. So we just have more restaurants. And then, of course, the churn goes down because if you are looking for, I don't know, poké bowl and we don't have the poké bowl, you might leave. But we do have the poké bowl, right? So this is why the churn actually goes down quite rapidly. And especially in the case of Just Eat. Where Just Eat did not have too many of the logistical restaurants, then yes, of course, the effect is going to be much stronger. And also because we are now well cheaper than the competition in the U.K., then yes, we got a lot of people back that went to the competitors in the past years. And of course, if people come back to the network, they are not only ordering logistics, they're also ordering marketplace. I think that's also important. This is also why you see that Marketplace Orders are also growing very strongly.

[Brent Adriaan Wissink, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Maybe on your question about iFood. Well, their calendar year runs from March to March. So we are currently finalizing the budget. This company is growing quite rapidly, as you've seen at the end of the year, and that is expected to continue at higher rates. Well, we -- as said, we are in the process of determining the budget and also determining and improving the plans and possible investments. As you've seen in the -- over the last years, we've always been prepared to fund the company. The total funding of the company declined over the years. So it was -- and this year, well, depending on the outcome of the [ base ] and the plans and the ambitions, we are certainly prepared to fund that company, and it's likely that they will require a small investment again. But we believe it's worth doing it because of the rapid growth of that company.

[Marc Hesselink, Research Analyst]

Okay. And at the same time, you're also in discussion on potentially divesting?

[Brent Adriaan Wissink, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Yes, our -- we have expressed our intention, and those intentions have not changed. So we are open receiving offers from parties.

[Operator]

Our next question is from Mr. Adrien de Saint Hilaire of Bank of America.

[Adrien de Saint Hilaire, VP & Head of Media Research]

Thanks for squeezing me in. I still have a few questions, if you don't mind. So first of all, you gave us the number for Australia, which grew 205% in the first quarter. The rest of the world grew 64%. I think Australia must be the biggest country in that mix, so can you tell us like which countries are actually dragging down the overall growth Rest in the World? Secondly, so you're going to be sponsoring the EURO 2021, the Champions League, I mean what payouts or returns do you expect in terms of orders or GMV from that sponsorship? And then maybe a last question about the U.S., I'm completely mindful of the fact that there isn't that much that you can say before closing. But where do we stand in terms of time line? Is there any chance of slippage given that we're now mid-April and you want to like get this done by the end of the first half? And related to this, very theoretically of course, but if we were to be in a situation where fee caps were to be kept in some of the key cities of Grubhub, is that something that may lead you to reconsider the transaction?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Thanks. Well, time line is first half. So we won't get into a discussion around fee caps. I think that's the easiest answer. Regarding the other questions, the global growth, I think the largest, actually, I would say, is Poland or -- no, I think it's Australia and then Poland. So those are the 2 largest in Rest of World. I think it's important to understand that this has a number of countries in it, countries with very high growth, such as Belgium or Poland or Australia. But also countries that were hit quite a bit by COVID, and that did not have the same growth trajectory as the rest of the business. For instance, Israel, we are -- most of our business in Israel is not a consumer brand, it's a B2B brand. Now with all the offices close, of course, that the business has suffered. I wouldn't call it dragged down. It's not so bad. But it's a mix of several countries. So it's difficult to exactly pin out what country is growing slower and with country is growing faster. But there's a lot of -- there's also the market leader in -- Austria in there. There's Switzerland, Denmark. It's a big group of countries. It's also a big segment for us. So therefore, 64% is actually quite satisfactory if you look at the mix between those countries. And Australia wasn't always the largest there, right? It's growing so fast that it has become the largest. So I think that's also important to understand that there's a mix shift now also because of the growth of Australia in that growth number. The second question around the sponsorship. We have not calculated in any upside. We're a rather conservative company. But we do anticipate that a lot of people are going to watch EURO 2020 and, of course, Champions League and Europa League. For any Americans on the line, this is the Super Bowl on steroids because this is a Super Bowl every week. So these are big events. But yes, we are conservative. But obviously, we expect a lot for our brand and for the brand image. And we also think that this should help the countries in which we are weaker. So for instance, France, we're not a strong #1 as we are in most of our other countries. Of course, the effect will be far stronger because all of a sudden you are on TV multiple times every day, and you are connected with the large brands of this world and the largest football tournaments. So we do expect a lot from it, but it's difficult to quantify.

[Adrien de Saint Hilaire, VP & Head of Media Research]

Super. If I can squeeze in maybe one quick follow-up, if I may. So you gave us like a broad group number for the delivery fee EUR 1.66. I would be grateful if you could give us a number excluding Canada, because I'm sure the number in Canada will be significantly higher than EUR 1.66.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

Yes. I mean I can jump in on that. It's not that much different actually from that. It's just below EUR 1.50 if you're to exclude it. So it's not so much different.

[Operator]

Next question is from Mr. Georgios Pilakoutas of Numis Securities.

[Georgios Alexandre Bela Pilakoutas, Analyst]

Just one, please, on Australia. Just wondering if you can kind of give us a bit more detail. I think there was some helpful disclosure in the slides around the split between logistics and marketplace. And as we are kind of reopening, how you're seeing both of those businesses, respectively, performing. Clearly, very encouraging that the strong growth has maintained at the group level, though.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Thank you. Well, Australia is a market in which logistics plays a larger part than, for instance, in the U.K. or in other European countries. The reason for that is that simply the marketplace restaurant pool is not as large as in Europe. It is still a sizable chunk of the business in Australia. So it's not like in Canada where there's only a handful of marketplace restaurants, but -- so it's a pretty big chunk. It's also growing for us, right? It's a growing business for us as well in Australia. But yes, the logistical model is more important there. It is -- it has better economics than in Europe. So I think from that perspective, it's -- that's quite helpful. And yes, we've made great inroads in the restaurant supply in Australia over the past year. So for instance, we've added Domino's, and Domino's is a marketplace restaurant with 800 stores, I believe, and McDonald's. So obviously, if you -- those are the big QSRs. But we also added a lot of local restaurants, local heroes, et cetera. So in the restaurant supply part of what happened in Australia is actually quite important. But yes, of course, it requires quite some investment because a lot of it is logistics. At the same time, the whole investment piece around Australia is about market share. And we think it's important to be the absolute largest player in Australia before anything else. But yes, I mean, it's a fantastic business for us now. I mean you need to remember that if you would have spoken to us beginning of last year, we probably would have said that the situation doesn't look so great. And as you probably know, we even wrote off Australia. So you can imagine how fast the turnaround has been.

[Georgios Alexandre Bela Pilakoutas, Analyst]

No, that's really helpful. Just to confirm, I guess, kind of you haven't really seen any difference between marketplace and logistics growth given the supply dynamics.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

No, there's a growth difference. But yes, we also -- we are in a pandemic, right, so if we would not have done the things that we have done in terms of investment in the legacy Just Eat business, we probably would have not been able to expand our market share in most of the Just Eat markets. I think it's important, because in the end, of course, a restaurant that has no more dine-in capabilities because the government has shut the restaurants down is benefiting more from a lockdown. Well, benefiting is the wrong word, but at least generates more orders in a lockdown than a business that can still operate under a lockdown, which is a delivery business. So obviously, logistics grows faster, especially in our case if we did not have these brands on the website in the first place. So you go from 0 to 100 in a very short amount of time. You've seen that also and especially in the U.K., but you see the same thing in Australia.

[Operator]

Next question is from Ms. Sherri Malek of RBC.

[Sherri Malek, Director of European Internet Research & Analyst]

Just one quick follow-up on the U.K. Just looking at Marketplace Orders, they've been broadly stable since the start of the pandemic, so Q2 last year. Should we expect logistics then to drive all the growth in the market for the rest of the year? Or do you expect marketplace to continue to pick up?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

It's a good question. So I think what's important to understand about our business model is that, usually, when there's no pandemic, it grows season by season. So our growth is usually mostly autumn, winter. That's the usual pattern that we see. So it's not so unusual that you see all of a sudden an increase and then a situation of stability compared to the previous quarter, but of course, a growth compared to the last year. So that's rather normal. So you should not expect the growth to only come from logistics in the U.K. And actually, to turn that around a little, we would expect logistics to suffer from, of course, the end of the pandemic. And also you should not forget that because of what we just told to you about the reduction of churn, so we do see a lot of the ex-Just Eat customers coming back to Just Eat that went to other players, those players came back. For instance, take the McDonald's example. People came back to order with McDonald's and now, again, they're placing their 15 orders a year with Just Eat. But if you come back for McDonald's, your first order is going to be a logistical order. So a lot of the Marketplace Orders are still going to happen in the upcoming months. So there's a lot of, let's call it, additional pressure or additional growth to logistics that in a normalized situation -- but again, we are doing many things at the same time, right? We're in a pandemic, we are investing and we're adding a lot of restaurants. So there's a lot of things moving. But in a normal situation, and let's call Germany or Holland normal, actually, you should see a very healthy behavior from all these customers. And that could mean that actually the logistical share, while still growing a lot, will not grow as fast anymore in the future, at least [ potentially ] in terms of the relative share of the total orders.

[Operator]

We have a question from Mr. Ioannis Pontikis of Morningstar.

[Ioannis Pontikis, Equity Analyst]

Probably I'm the last one standing here. Two for me, please. The first one is about delivery times for the orders you deliver as a platform. How do you stack against competition in the more mature markets like the Netherlands? In Amsterdam, it seems that there is a bit of a gap and maybe understandably so as you're still rolling out the service. But I wanted to ask whether you see any fundamental differences in the way you set up the delivery service versus the logistical players being a structural region for slower delivery. Or this is just a matter of time for you to close the gap? And then the second one is about grocery again. I'd like to pursue a bit more on this, if I may. You've talked about this not being a priority at the moment. So this is more of a theoretical question. One of your peers recently talked about grocery being a great customer acquisition tool for them, for their food delivery business as well. Since you're offering QSR orders, which presumably are loss-making, the majority is sort of a customer acquisition tool for you, why is grocery any different?

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

Thanks for the question. Yes, you're talking about the gap in Amsterdam. Our delivery times throughout our network are 30 minutes or less, including in Amsterdam. So I don't understand which gap you're talking about. I mean we're probably the fastest even in Amsterdam. But yes, if you combine it with the marketplace restaurants, of course, we don't control the marketplace delivery times. But for the logistical network, and we are as fast as everybody else, so I don't see any gap. Regarding -- and this is for the whole network. I mean, same in Canada, same in Australia as well. So there should not be a difference. Grocery, it's not -- guys is not the same thing. We could also sell iPhone cables. I'm sure that people will buy iPhone cables, that's not a question, but it doesn't help our network effects. It's not the same occasion. If you would go to our website and you're looking for a poké bowl and we do not have the poké bowl, actually, what will happen is that you will go away because we don't have the poké bowl. That's the network effect. But there's no network effect between somebody looking for a carton of milk and then accidentally ordering a poké bowl. That doesn't exist. So it's not the same business. This is the same thing as us combining with Vodafone. Yes, we could sell a lot of phones, but are you -- is that the same occasion? It's not. So it is just risk/reward for us. I mean do you really want us to invest EUR 2 billion into something that might, in the end, not be anything? I mean that's a crazy thing for an investor to ask us especially because we're so careful with money. It's just not a logical thing for us to do. Now if, on the other hand, we can invest a little bit in grocery because we can keep it at the gross profit neutral and it makes some sense, then, yes. I mean I can see the attraction to customers and I can see how we can get some more orders from it, but I don't think there's a lot of network effect between the same occasion. That's just not the case. And then if you need to spend your money, you better spend your money. And this is why -- actually, we also showed the graph to you, including groceries. Yes, I mean, for us it's completely fine if you think that those markets are the same. But what is actually happening is that relative to what we are doing, everybody else is shrinking. I think that's the more important. And it's then, in the end, some players are larger than us in selling iPhone cables, then so be it. But again, I think we need to get to the back to basics here. Isn't the intent that food delivery companies, at some point in the future, create profit?

[Operator]

We have no further questions, sir, please continue.

[Jitse Groen, Founder, Chairman of Management Board & CEO]

I would like to round up this analyst and investor call by thanking you for participating and your questions. Should you have any additional questions or remarks, please reach out to our Investor Relations team, and I thank you.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the Just Eat Takeaway.com Q1 2021 Analyst Trading update call. Thank you for your attention. You may now disconnect your lines.