Just Eat Takeaway.com NV

AEX:TKWY

Earnings Call Transcript 2019-Q2

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for holding and welcome to the Takeaway.com Half Year 2019 Results Webcast and Event Call. [Operator Instructions]I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Joris Wilton. Go ahead please, sir.

[Joris Wilton, Manager of Investor Relations]

Well, good morning, everyone. This is indeed Joris Wilton, but I think the intention of the operator was to hand over to our founder and CEO, Jitse Groen. Jitse?

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

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this analyst and investor conference call to discuss Takeaway.com's half year 2019 results.On our corporate website, you can download our half year 2019 results press release, the slides for this analyst and investor conference call and other related information.Although I do realize that all of you might be interested to hear more about our announcement related to a possible combination of Just Eat and Takeaway.com, I have to manage your expectations in this respect. This conference call and webcast will be focused only on our results, and we cannot provide further commentary on the possible combination at this point in time.I will start off today's presentation by taking you through the financial and business highlights of the first 6 months of 2019. Jorg Gerbig, the Lieferando Founder and our Chief Operating Officer, will provide an update about the integration of the German Delivery Hero businesses and the rollout of Scoober. Brent Wissink, our CFO, will then talk you through the financial details of the results at group level and for each of our 3 segments individually. I will conclude the presentations -- the presentation with a summary, after which we will open the call for the questions.On Slide 4, you will find the financial highlights for the 6 -- first 6 months of 2019. Our active consumer base now totals 16.7 million people, an increase of 33% year-on-year. This resulted in 71 million orders for the period, a growth rate of 70% compared with the first half of 2018. These orders represented a gross merchandise value of more than EUR 1.3 billion. The average commission rate modestly increased to 12.5%, up from 12.3% a year ago. This resulted in a gross revenue of EUR 185 million in the first half of 2019, up 68%, supported by the acquisition in Germany and demonstrating our strong revenue-generating capacity.The gross profit for the period was EUR 134 million. Marketing expenses only modestly increased by 12% to EUR 73 million, and marketing as a percentage of revenue improved in all segments during the first half of 2019, compared to the same period of 2018. As a result, the company reached its first half year of operational profit since our IPO in 2016 despite continued investments in each of our markets.Adjusted EBITDA for the company was EUR 1.8 million in the first half of 2019 compared with minus EUR 6.1 million in the comparable period of 2018. On Slide 5, I want to quickly take you through the business highlights. Jorg will provide more details on the German transaction, which we completed in April, as you probably remember. We have migrated all websites and apps, and the integration of the businesses is on track.Similarly, our teams are working hard to integrate the B2B technology developed by our new colleagues in Israel. This is a rather complex process, but we are making good progress on the matter. We rolled out our restaurant delivery services, Scoober, in 31 new cities, bringing the total to 69 cities across 10 countries.And lastly, inclusion in the AEX-Index on Euronext Amsterdam marked an important milestone for our company, only 2.5 years after our IPO.And with that, I will hand over to Jorg, our COO, to give you some more details on the integration of the acquired businesses in Germany and the rollout of Scoober.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

Thank you, Jitse, and good morning, everyone.Turning to Germany. We are very pleased with the progress of the integration of the DH Germany acquisition to date. Page 7 provides you an overview of the most important migration and integration steps of the transaction. We have announced the acquisition of the DH Germany business on December 21, 2018.Since shareholders had to approve the transaction, we could only complete the transaction on April 1, 2019. In the meantime, we were able to prepare for the migration. We identified 3 key objectives for the integration: First, to retain as many consumers as possible; second, to retain as many restaurants as possible; and third, high employee retention and satisfaction.We also set a few key principles. One company approach, i.e., moving everything to our central structure. Fostering an open communication, i.e., being open and honest about our plans to staff. Migrate first and integrate, i.e., moving everything to the Takeaway platform as soon as possible to become independent from external service providers and provide clarity to everyone in terms of way of working. And last, speed is very important, i.e., executing the migration as fast as possible to limit the phase of disruption and uncertainty for staff, restaurants and consumers.Having those objectives in mind, we started activating all restaurants, which we didn't offer to consumers so far right after the completion. We're able to convince more than 2,000 restaurants, or more than 80% of the nonoverlapping restaurants to join Lieferando, our Lieferando marketplace. So by the 8th of April, we could start with the migration of the Pizza.de website and app. As the Pizza.de web and app migration went successfully, we started migrating Foodora on the 12th of April and Lieferheld on the 15th of April. Since the Foodora app is global, we couldn't just update the app in Germany, but had to provide a pop-up in the app.Also on the 15th of April, we forced the Pizza.de update for those consumers who didn't update their app yet. On the 17th of April, we forced consumers to update the Lieferheld as well as the Foodora app. We also redirected the Foodora website.So by that date, 2.5 weeks after completion of the transaction, we had completed the full technical migration of Pizza.de, Lieferheld and Foodora platforms and the respective brands. For the brands, we also stopped advertising. This implies significant marketing synergies, and we are well on track to achieve the previously announced synergy goal of at least EUR 60 million in 2020.On Page 8, we are showing the order development for the various brands and the process of the migration. The orange color represents Lieferando orders, the yellow ones Pizza.de, red is Lieferheld and pink is Foodora. The peak represents Sundays when you normally have the highest order demand.You can see that after the forced update for Pizza.de, the loss of Pizza.de orders is compensated by additional Lieferando orders. The same you can see when the forced update for Lieferheld and Foodora took place. The chart very well shows that the peaks after the migration, with the exception for Easter, are reaching similar levels to before. This indicates that the loss of consumers was limited, if there was any loss at all. This is also confirmed by the year-over-year growth rate post the migration, which is in line with the combined growth rate prior to the migration.So all in all, we were able to achieve our goal of retaining as many consumers and restaurants as possible. The successful integration provides the ground for future growth in Germany, and there is still a lot of growth ahead in the German market.Page 9 shows the significant growth potential in all of our markets and especially also in Germany. Through GFK research, we know that 70% to 80% of the adult population in our key markets order food at least once a year. While in Netherlands, 29% of the population over 15 years have ordered with us at least once in the last 12 months. This value was only at 14% for the combined pro forma entity in Germany. This reflects the significant potential, which all of our key markets still have.Turning to our Scoober business on Page 11, which is a substantial part of our hybrid model. We believe it adds significantly to our network effects by providing wider choice to consumer and foots branding on the street. Orders by our restaurant delivery service, Scoober, represented 4.9% of total orders in the first 6 months of 2019, versus 2.3% of total orders in the first half of 2018. We rolled out Scoober in 31 new cities, most of which are in Germany, in connection with the acquisition of Foodora. Scoober is now active in 69 cities and 10 countries, and we are intending to expand to more new cities in the coming period.We are currently having more than 7,000 courier drivers, which are all employed, accordingly insured and in most cases, provided with a branded e-bike.I will now hand over to Brent Wissink for the CFO update.

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

Thank you, Jorg. As usual, I will start with highlighting the main drivers for our substantial order growth. Active consumers, returning active consumers and order frequency of returning actives further increased in H1. We achieved this through the rapid integration of the acquired brands in Germany and through strong organic growth.As can be seen, the strong upward trend in these metrics has continued in the first half. In particular, I would like to highlight that this is -- that this positive trend is continuing despite limited incremental marketing spend.If you turn to the next slide, here you can see the results of the improved metrics of the previous slide. The number of orders processed in H1 2019 were 71 million, an increase of 70% in comparison to H1 2018. Scoober orders as a percentage of total orders more than doubled year-over-year and reached 4.9%, mainly driven by the acquisitions and the rapid expansion into 30 new cities.If you turn to Slide 16, we show the total value of all food orders on our platform. Gross merchandising value, the total gross merchandising value grew slightly, slower than orders in the first half of 2019. This was a result of a lower average order value driven by more B2B orders in Israel as well as the growth in our Eastern European -- of our Eastern European business, both of which have relatively low basket values. At the same time, the average order value of our leading markets has increased.Now on Slide 17. As you can see on this slide, our revenue increased to EUR 185 million from EUR 110 million or 68% year-over-year. This growth is explained on the next slide.Slide 18 shows the breakdown of our revenue growth. We have broken down the various individual factors, which contributed to the growth. As seen in the bridge, the main driver of our revenue is our substantial order growth, which accounts for 63% of the growth. The decline in average order value was partly offset by the higher average order commission rate and the growth driven by online payments and other revenue.Please turn to Slide 19, where we can see the gross profit. Gross profit increased to EUR 134 million from EUR 87 million, a year-over-year increase of 53%. The gross margin percentage was 75%, which is 8 percent points lower than the last year. This decline was predominantly driven by the growth -- by the growing Scoober share. Our Scoober business has a structural higher cost base due to its logistical element, which is reflected in our gross margin development.The next slide shows cost per source. Our costs increased by 57%, mainly driven by staff cost and delivery expenses. We are pleased to report that our marketing spend in the first half of 2019 increased slightly by 12% compared to the corresponding period in 2018, demonstrating our economies of scale. Total marketing expenses as a percentage of gross revenue are now 40% compared to 59% last year.Now we will move to Slide 21. Adjusted EBITDA was EUR 1.8 million in the first 6 months of 2019, compared to minus EUR 6.1 million in the first half of 2018. This marks the first operational profit for Takeaway.com since the IPO in September 2018. Although being apprised of this accomplishment, management remains committed to continued investments in all markets in which we operate in order to maintain and expand strong market positions.Now I will move to the development of our cash position. Our cash position at year-end of 2018 was EUR 90 million and decreased to EUR 59 million at the end of the first half of 2019. The positive adjusted EBITDA added EUR 1.8 million to this, but was offset by the changes in cash flow from operating activities. The negative cash flow movement in operating activities was EUR 50 million was primarily caused by the acquisition of Delivery Hero Germany, consisting of opening balances for restaurant payments, additional consultant fees and staff-related expenses in relation to the acquisition.Excluding our acquisition, cash flow from investments consist primarily of investments in long-term assets and equity instruments and financing cash flow was mainly payments for lease liabilities and effects of exchange rate differences of cash held at foreign currencies.We showed cash flow from M&A activity separately. The cash flow on acquisitions was financed by the issue of the -- of ordinary shares of EUR 419 million and the issue of convertible bonds of EUR 244 million, both net of transaction costs. With these issues, we also repaid the bridge facility related to the acquisition in Israel of EUR 150 million.Now we will move on to look at our 3 segments in detail. First, Netherlands on Slide 24. We continued to make progress in our Dutch business and grew our orders by 18% year-over-year. The Netherlands was overtaken by Germany in the first half of the year as our largest segment in terms of orders.Gross merchandise value grew by 23%, much faster than the number of orders. It was due to the growth in the average order value, which was driven by 3 factors: First, it's driven by change in the VAT rate at the start of the year; secondly, from an overall increase in the average order values of portal orders; and thirdly, the growth of the Scoober orders, which generally have a higher order value.As we can see on the next slide, in H1 2019, the gross revenue grew by 24% compared to H1 2018. The commission rate increased slightly to 13.5% by H1 2019, compared to 13.3% in H1 2018. Absolute adjusted EBITDA increased by EUR 4 million year-over-year at the margin of 50%, which remains industry leading. The reduction in our EBITDA margin was a result of the fast growth of Scoober. Excluding Scoober, the Netherlands EBITDA margin would have slightly improved year-over-year.Now we will turn to Slide 26 to review Germany. In Germany, we completed the transaction and consolidated the acquired Delivery Hero Germany business as of April 2019. Orders increased significantly to 28 million from 15 million, a year-over-year increase of 85%.Average order value increased slightly year-on-year, in line with the inflation rate and to a lesser extent following an increase of Scoober orders, which typically has a higher basket size.Please move to the next slide. Gross revenue in Germany grew by 111% to EUR 83 million in the first 6 months of 2019. The main reason for the higher revenue growth compared to the order growth was the increased average commission rate. This is primarily driven by the standard commission rate increase from January 2019 and a higher share of Scoober orders, which has structurally higher commission rate.The EBITDA for Germany grew by 68% in H1 and EBITDA as a percentage of gross revenue improved from minus 53% to minus 8% compared to H1 2018, mainly as a result of reduced marketing cost per order driven by the acquisition of Delivery Hero, a Germany business. Despite the great results, the underpenetrated online food delivery market in Germany remains a significant growth opportunity for us.Finally, we move to the Other Leading Markets segment. Orders processed in the Other Leading Markets segment increased by 123% to 25 million orders. This is primarily driven by the acquisition in Israel and the strong growth in Poland. GMV grew by 99% year-over-year. The GMV and the gross revenue growth is slightly lower than the order growth due to the mix effect driven by the acquisition in Israel. Israel has a lower average order value and a lower average commission rate due to the nature of the B2B business. The Scoober order share in the Other Leading Market segment grew to 4.9% in H1 compared to 2.3% in H1 last year, mainly driven by our strategy to invest in Scoober for a more diverse restaurant offering to consumers.Proceeding to the next slide, our gross revenue increased by 82% year-over-year for the first half. The average commission rate decreased by 70 base points driven mainly by the growing share in Israel. In line with our strategy to build up skill and strong market position, we continued to invest in these underpenetrated market, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA of minus EUR 20 million.Now I hand over to Jitse.

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

Thank you, Brent. I will continue with Slide 31. Our strategy has been consistent for the past 19 years and will remain consistent. We are focused on expanding our market leadership positions as we believe that this is the only way to achieve higher margins as we have demonstrated in the Netherlands. We will do so by focusing on a single brand in each market and by investing in brand awareness, which will lead to improved marketing efficiency over time, one of the key levers in our profitability.We will also continue to evaluate our performance in each market and may divest or acquire businesses based on strategic fit and our market position.Our own developed technology is one of our key strengths, and we will continue to focus on the security and scalability of our back end as well as continuous improvement in our user interfaces.Finally, we will continue to expand both our restaurant offering and our Scoober business to add further value to our network and to offer an ever wider selection to our consumers.Now moving to the conclusion of this presentation on Slide 32. In the first 6 months of 2019, we have continued our strong order and revenue growth in all our markets, showing the effectiveness of our growth strategy. We successfully migrated the German Delivery Hero websites and apps and further integration is on track.The underpenetrated online food delivery market in Germany remains a significant growth opportunity for our company. In each of our segments, marketing as a percentage of revenue further improved in the first 6 months of 2019. As Jorg already explained, Scoober is an important part of our hybrid model. And therefore, we will continue to expand to new cities in the coming period. And last but not least, the first half year of 2019 marked the first operational profit for Takeaway.com since our IPO in September 2016.Having said that, we will continue to prioritize sustainable growth over profit and are committed to continued investments in all our markets.I would now like to open the call for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Mr. John King, Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

[John Peter King, Research Analyst]

Two, I guess, on Germany or just generally, how you see the business. Firstly, the organic growth that you've delivered continues to be impressive, but I think historically, in Germany, you've delivered maybe 40%, roughly around there. I think your view is always that you're taking substantial share from the competitor. And therefore, by implication, the market growth would have been below that. And I think you indicated that. So what's your view as the market growth of the business?And I suppose it would be fair to assume that going forward, that would be your expectation to grow in line with the market, given the competitive situation is as it is. So the first question, what do you expect the market to grow at?Second one around marketing spend overall for the business. How do you generally think about marketing? Do you match that relative to the amount of GMV you're generating or the orders? Or do you think about what the potential of the market has?

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

All right, John. Thanks for the questions. I'll answer the question on the marketing spend, and then I'll hand over to Jorg for the question about Germany. Marketing is very simple for us. We know that about 70% to 80% of the population in our largest markets orders food at least once a year. We know obviously that our penetration in all these markets is much lower, so it's actually quite simple. We need to get to the entire population that orders food, so basically the whole, which you would call, TAM.Now please don't mix this up with the artificial TAM of all the restaurants not delivering and I always struggle a lot with people who think that, that is the same TAM. I'm talking about the marketplace TAM. These are orders that are already happening. And of course, outside of that, there's a logistical TAM that we are also addressing. So that makes it slightly more complicated, but at least the penetration for us is so low that we spend our marketing money based on contact points with the local population. And -- don't ask me how we calculate that correctly -- exactly, but we try to reach the population of all the countries in which we are large, quite a number of times every week, and we feel that we are going to be at the level. You can also see that in the growth of the marketing expense that we actually are already achieving that.To give you an example, we are the third largest advertiser on television in Germany, I think, behind Lidl and Trivago. That is because we are a consumer brand, and we know that we need to reach people quite a number of times before they decide that they should not be ordering on the phone, but they should switch to our website. So as long as penetration is still below, say, 70%, 80%, we'll keep the marketing up.The marketing, if you look at the off-line spend, so basically TV and outdoor advertisements, we will keep at a level that is similar to today's level. Of course, there's inflation and we might do a little bit more next year than we do this year, but they won't change materially. Obviously, because we grow in size, the online spend increases because we simply get more orders because we have a larger brand awareness, we get more partners onboard, more restaurants. You can imagine that, for instance, the McDonald's contract in Germany gets us more customers. Also from that side, people tapping in McDonald's delivery, they will end up with Lieferando for instance in Germany. So that will continue to go up. Obviously, per order cost typically goes down, but the total amount will therefore go up. So that's the elaborate answer, and I will now hand over to Jorg for the rest of the question.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

John, yes, so to Germany, the -- we actually grew 22% on a comparable basis, if you compare our combined order growth as compared to the respective period in the prior year, if you add it up the 2 brands. So that is in line with historical combined growth rate because as you rightfully mentioned, we were growing in the high 30s with Delivery Hero Germany in the teens. And this is more or less comparable to that 22% number, which we reached.As you know, we don't give a specific outlook on growth, but the current level is always a good indication for the future growth. We also are becoming more efficient because we moved from 4 brands to 1 brand. But on the other hand, we also reduced the combined marketing spend for the company. So in the end, that gets me back to that the current level of growth is actually a good indication of future growth.

[John Peter King, Research Analyst]

Can I just follow-up? Do you have an idea what percentage of the customer base of the Delivery Hero brand has now already ordered on the Takeaway brand?

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

We don't give a specific number on that, but there was quite some overlap.

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

Yes. I mean I don't think that's what John's aiming at? John, this is a difficult question to answer. We -- actually, as you know, our business model works in such a way that our customers order x times per year. So it's very difficult within the year after we have completed the migration to say -- we can of course look at the percentage, but to say how successful actually the migration has been. And to further complicate the answer to this question, we would expect that the user behavior on Lieferando is different from the user behavior on the old Delivery Hero brands.I can give you a simple example. Pizza.de, for instance, was an old brand with low brand awareness in Germany, with not so many restaurants as Lieferando. So you can imagine that if you add to the offering, theoretically, those customers should be placing more orders, and we know that Lieferando customers order actually quite a lot.For us to verify that theory, we need to be at the end of the year because, obviously, we don't know how many times people in the future are going to order. We know what they have done thus far, but that's a very limited group since we've completed this migration in April.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mr. Marc Hesselink, ING.

[Marc Hesselink, Research Analyst]

First question, also on Germany. You just indicated that the growth rate that you've seen so far is a good indication. Could this also be -- if I remember correctly, in the past you also mentioned that the German market was not as developed as much by the market leader in the past. And now that you are the clear market leader, is that also an opportunity to be quicker in that education of the market and to really move people to the online offering?Second question is on the order category. Clearly, you're increasing the investments in that area. Could you explain a little bit more like what are you doing? And what is the opportunity where you're investing more?And final question is on Scoober, that percent increased again in the half. In the past, you talked about a target of 5%. So how do you think about that now going forward? I know you have ways of managing that, but just your view on how you think that will end up?

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

I will relay the first 2 questions, I think, to Jorg. I didn't quite -- did you catch the second question, Jorg, because...

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

The first one was on Germany.

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

The first I understand, Jorg. But the second one?

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

Second was on where the additional investment will be invested in which areas? Yes.

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

Okay. There we go. Okay. So let me answer the last question surrounding Scoober. The 5% actually that we mentioned, that was a question, I believe it was in 2016 when people asked us, okay, great, you've come up with this new thing Scoober. What do you think is going to be the percentage of orders that will be Scoober orders in the future? And [ vis-à-vis ] actually is growing really fast, but we assume it will grow to around 5%. That is something that seems correct because we're now at 4.9%, but obviously, this is a statement that we made about 3 years ago. It is growing, of course, much slower than in the beginning. We'll see further growth of Scoober.I think it's important to explain to you why actually we have Scoober because actually -- it's quite easy to generate a lot of logistical orders. That's certainly not our intent with Scoober. If you, for instance, would put a lot of high speed restaurants or whatever type of service restaurants on Scoober, we would generate a lot more orders than we're doing today, but we're very specific with the rollout because we do not need all these restaurants.As you know, we don't believe that in Europe and certainly not in Continental Europe, you can get Scoober or any logistical service to profitability. So that means that while generating orders with a logistical service is quite easy, certainly, if you then also hand out vouchers, which we by the way don't, that is not why we rollout Scoober. We have Scoober because we want to have a better offering for our customers, things that are not typically being delivered by marketplace. We add -- you may think of poke bowl restaurants, but also the QSRs. Those are things we add to the marketplace offering and that actually is a nice offering for the consumer.As a business model, it's a really poor business model. And that doesn't mean we are not rolling it out because we do that more efficient with this business model and we are actually quite comfortable with it because -- for instance, if you would look at the cities in which we have rolled out Scoober, in most of those cities we are actually by far the largest logistical player by now. It is something that is very visible. We like the visibility of it. And of course, there's also a certain amount of market protection when we rollout this service. And the most important reason, of course, is that customers like and then therefore, we need to do it.Now if, for instance, the absolute EBITDA in Holland would be damaged too much by this, we will be concerned. But as you can see, our absolute EBITDA actually goes up, while we are also the largest logistical provider in Holland. So that gives us quite a lot of comfort also because the growth of logistics is mostly opening new cities. And we aren't going to find another Amsterdam or Rotterdam in Holland. We are in the major cities. So if we open new cities, they are typically small, so growth, of course, will also not be as extreme as Scoober in the beginning in the major cities.So we are very proud of Scoober. We think it's a great service, but it's an add-on to our marketplace. The market-based model, obviously, is the best model in the world as far as you can protect that model. I think that's an important remark that I need to make. As you all know, money is very cheap nowadays. And there's a lot of investors pouring money into concepts that will never be profitable. Now we as a company cannot influence that. I mean investors need to take their own view on the world, but we can defend against it and that's what we're doing.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

Yes. I want to take the first question on education of the German market. As you know, the education of the market is mainly driven by 2 things. The offerings for the restaurant offering you have. And secondly, top of mind brand awareness.So as you go back, post the IPO, the first 2 things we did was, first, ramping up marketing costs significantly, predominantly in Germany to a level, which we think is satisfying and a satisfying level for us is defined by GRPs, so gross rating points. So how many times you're reaching your target group per month. And secondly, then we subsequently hire more and more sales force people to actually improve the offering to a level that we deem to see it as appropriate. That was then subsequently also reflected in our growth rate of high 30s slashed around 40% growth rate year-over-year.So we felt that we are actually at a level, which is satisfying to us in terms of the growth rate and that hasn't changed after the acquisition of DH Germany. I mean on the marketing side, we still feel that we are spending enough money, which is satisfying to us. And especially what Jitse said earlier, we are already one of the top advertisers in Germany, and it's almost hard to spend more money on advertising in an efficient way.And on the sales force side, we even got some more sales people from Delivery Hero Germany to the team. So also there, we feel we are at a good level to continue to educate the market in a very well way.On the second question with regard to any investment into other markets, that is at the moment predominantly Poland. We feel there's still a lot of growth ahead of Poland. Poland, obviously, one of our biggest markets, which exceeded the 1 million order mark already in 2018 and -- especially in Poland, but also in some of the other Eastern Europe markets, we are predominantly continuing to invest in marketing as well as Scoober and also in these markets because they are earlier stage, we continue to see significant investments going forward.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mr. Joseph Barnet-Lamb, Crédit Suisse.

[Joseph Barnet-Lamb]

Joe from Crédit Suisse. Three for me. So firstly, on German profitability, given European labor laws also takes time to obtain savings from headcount, was there any headcount reduction savings in the half? Or is it all marketing-based? Secondly, from an online advertising perspective, with the removal of Delivery Hero, can you quantify or at least help us understand the reduction in cost per click you're seeing? And then thirdly, maybe the only one that looked slightly, potentially slightly weak to me, was other orders. That may well have been just because we don't have all of the comps associated with Israel at 10bis. So can you help us understand if you did think there was any weakness in other orders? And if not, is there anything about seasonality at 10bis you can tell us.

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

Okay. Let me first answer your question on the German headcount. There have been voluntary reductions. We have not asked anybody to leave. But obviously, with the change of control, we actually run the company a bit differently, of course, in Germany. I mean we do already have a staff in Germany, we've been in Germany since 2008. There was a voluntary reduction. That is something that you will probably also would see coming through in the EBITDA at some point, but that wasn't the biggest reduction, obviously, which was marketing. And it wasn't only marketing, it was also the timing of the reduction because, obviously, while we had plans to migrate after the second week of April, if that would not have been successful, and it would have taken 5 weeks longer or 2 months longer. Obviously, we would not have had the result that we have had today. So it's an important timing aspect into it. And marketing, of course, in a consumer brand company always dwarfs anything else, especially when you are a tech company like we are. Then the second question, although we are not disclosing it, we saw a material improvement of the online marketing spend, but that's mostly, not necessarily, because you would see, for instance, a competitor fall away, it's mostly because of scale. Because obviously, if you get twice the orders from Google, Google will charge you more in absolute sense, but per order, they will always charge you less. That's how Google works. And then your question with the other leading markets. Israel is a B2B brand with a different growth structure and with a very small B2C component. Now obviously, we have quite a lot of B2C knowledge, and we're growing that quite fast. But for that to come through, it needs to become quite a lot bigger. If you look at the other segments of other leading markets, we have good growth in all of these markets. The majority of the costs ironically are in the smaller countries in that sense because it's -- you have to invest quite a lot in brand awareness, while, of course, these brands are still small. That was actually the same in Poland in, let's say, 2014 when we were doing 30,000 orders in Poland back then. We're now, as you have said, we're well over a 1 million. So you could say that we pay too much for these customers in 2014, but I think we're quite glad that we did it. So that's how we look at it.

[Joseph Barnet-Lamb]

So just one follow-up, Jitse, if that's okay. With regard to sort of the only voluntary headcount reductions thus far, can you help us understand how you expect headcount across the German business to trend through the second half? Could you see a meaningful reduction relatively soon? Or will it be more of a progressive process?

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

Depends on how you look at it, right? While, I mean, if you look at the apps -- if you would isolate the Delivery Hero people, of course, because people might not like the company or something like that, they would leave. Still, we need people, we grow very fast, right? So it's not necessarily that -- let's say, I give you a figure, and then you would come back in the second half, and you'll see that number actually going up, well, yes, because we're a growing company. Actually, we have 2 offices now in Berlin. We are going to bring that together into a new office complex. We actually have quite some plans to expand our staff in Berlin because, obviously, what we also have in Berlin is not only a call center in sales, we also have a material tech department over there, and we are a tech company, and we have the feeling that we're constantly behind on the development because everything goes quite quickly in this sector, and we need all the tech people that we can get. So I'm quite reluctant to give you a headcount reduction figure while, actually, we're growing the headcount.

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

Further attrition is not expected, but it's fair to say it is more growing.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mr. Wim Gille, ABN AMRO.

[Wim Gille, Head of Research & Equity Research Analyst]

First, on your take rate in the Netherlands at 13.5%, it was flat versus the second half of last year and only up modestly versus the first half of '18. Meanwhile, you doubled your logistics. And obviously, logistics has a much higher take rate. So based on very simple calculations, I come to the conclusion that the platform take rate actually declined by 30 bps. Can you give us a bit of feeling on what happened there? Also maybe regarding the growth there, is that predominantly driven by independent restaurants? Or did you also add quick service restaurants to the Dutch logistics operation? Also on Scoober, but then in Germany, Foodora was obviously 10% of the volumes, whilst your existing business was like 5%. So in the mix, we expect to see it trending more towards 7.5%. I know it's only as of the 1st of April, but can you give us a bit of feeling what happened on the Foodora Germany client base? Did you see a material attrition in that Foodora Germany client base? Or did the client base simply migrate and started to order more on the platform, i.e., more turning towards higher-quality revenues there?And then on the other region. You increased your OpEx by about EUR 3 million versus the first -- second half of last year. You already mentioned it's mainly investments in Poland, but can you give us a bit of feeling on whether that is related to an increase in absolute marketing spend? Or whether that is more operational costs to roll out Scoober?

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

All right. I will refer your first and your fourth question to Brent. To give you a little bit of an answer on the first one, though, actually, the commission rate slightly went up. As you also concluded, the average basket value between our marketplace and the logistics is not that big. So actually, the impact that you would assume on average commission rate is there, but it's not entirely what you think it will be. But Brent will give you more details on that one. If you look at our Scoober offering now, naturally, we did not start out as a logistical brand. And it takes some time to build up a successful logistical brand, and for the likes of McDonald's and Burger King, et cetera, to work with you. Actually, we see that basically all the independents and the QSR, they would like to work with us because we have the volume that they need. And of course, we have also the coverage that they need. We are everywhere. And while sometimes logistical competitors talk about being in 20 cities, I mean, yes, we should probably -- even give you the amount of cities per country because we are at a coverage of 90-plus percent of the territories in which we operate. So that also means that, for instance, if we work with the QSR that, in some cases, would deliver themselves, or in other cases, we'll use our logistical service, we can easily offer that, and we would always provide those QSRs with the most volume. So this is why we are the natural partner of QSRs and for independents. The question regarding Scoober Foodora. I've got to answer in a lengthy way. The reason that we have increased our logistics -- logistical orders in Germany was not because of Foodora. It was because we almost doubled in size. You have to bear in mind that, although I know it's a popular conception among analysts and investors to think that the logistical market is something else than the marketplace market, it's actually not. These are different restaurants, but in the end -- and we see that. I mean we have the natural example being Scoober percentage being at 4.9%. If you would give the consumer the choice between both marketplace and logistical restaurants in our area, 4.9% of the orders end up being logistics. We do not force the customers to make that decision, that's a decision by the customers. Why is it 4.9%? Well, for instance, logistical restaurants typically are more expensive, not necessarily in average ticket size, but in the amount of food that you get, typically feeds less people. There's expensive lunches, there's food for 1 or 2 persons, while, of course, if you order for EUR 20 at a Chinese restaurant, you get food for the entire family, right, so there's a big difference in what you get for the same amount of money. In any case, we did not expect the amount of Scoober orders to go up materially. It goes up a little bit because we've added quite a number of Foodora logistical restaurants, and because we've added those newly formed, they will get a new tag. And because they get a new tag, they are on top of our list. Therefore it's not going to be 4.9%, its's going to be higher because that's on top of the list. And of course, there's natural selection, but people are not going to scroll down. And if you look at our offering in Berlin, you would see 500 restaurants, you're not going to scroll down to the 400th restaurant to pick something. You're going to pick one of the first, let's say, 10. So actually, if you would -- we've analyzed the Foodora customers. We've seen that most of them are not strictly logistical customers. There's a higher tendency to order with logistical restaurants because those people live in the inner cities of large cities. That was the customer base of Foodora. Our customers, of course, are everywhere, including in the inner cities, so this is why on the whole of our company, it will never be a such a high percentage of logistics as these companies that are strictly in certain areas. So that was a bit lengthy. So I'll hand over to Brent for question 1 and 4.

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

Yes. Well, let me start with one, with the increase of the average commission rate in the Netherlands, which European is relatively low, given the increase of the Scoober percentage. I hope that's a good summary of the question. But we do not notice that development that you see. For sure, we see that the order form changed, which has a lower commission rate -- are rapidly increasing and also are part of the Scoober percentage, and that drops the margin a bit. With respect to the commission rate from marketplace restaurant, we do not notice a drop there. It's stable. We have not, as you -- what we have communicated before, we have not raised pricing over there. So that remains at the same level last year. However, the small increase is certainly caused by the increase of Scoober, as has also been reflected in the first -- in the text of the press release. With respect to the increase of our OpEx in other markets, that is -- actually, I can give you 2 reasons. First of all, it's certainly also because of the increase of our existing other markets. We have made some investments in these markets, which comes with higher expenses. But also, these markets, this segment, contains acquisitions which were not in last year. So that's also a reason for the increase of those costs in this segment. So it's not fully comparable in that sense.

[Wim Gille, Head of Research & Equity Research Analyst]

All right. And one follow-up question, if I may. I noticed that Uber Eats is hardly present in your geographic split, with the exception of Switzerland, where they're actually doing quite well, and also in Poland, where they are struggling a bit more, I think, to gain ground. But would it make sense to accelerate your logistics rollout in both Switzerland and Poland in order to cut the corner?

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

Well, we make a distinction within Poland and Switzerland. We are a very large company in Poland, far bigger than the #2, which is not Uber Eats. So our position in Poland is materially different. We are actually expanding our cities also in Poland. We don't really feel that this is strong competition to us, to be honest to you. If you look at Switzerland, we're a smaller company in Switzerland. So we do not have the market-based power that we would have in the other leading market in which we are active. So that's a slightly different story. But there also, we only roll-- we have only rolled out our logistics in Zurich so we're quite limited on the logistics as well. On top of that, it's not our hobby to get as many logistical orders as possible. You nowadays see logistical companies moving into delivering toothpaste. Well, I'm sure that people need toothpaste. But I -- we really struggled to see where that's a business model. It is not. It's a way to generate a lot of revenue, so that investors would reward you with a high value. But that's only our opinion.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Ms. Silvia Cuneo, Deutsche Bank.

[Silvia Cuneo, Research Analyst]

Because of time, I'll only ask 2. First one broadly on your view about consolidation in the market, without mentioning specific deals. I just want to understand, what is your thinking about in-market consolidation versus cross country, as obviously, the potential to generate marketing synergies should be more limited compared to the German case, for example? And then second question. On the outlook, can you please help us interpreting the comment about prioritizing sustainable growth of the profit going forward? Are you comfortable with the consensus mid-term expectations and EBITDA margin improvement. And just wondering if you expect to see any update on the back of the EBITDA beat. Thanks to the reduction of losses in Germany.

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

Thank you, Silvia. Well, regarding consolidation, we've always been quite, quite clear on it, we either acquire a #1 in a country that we feel that we can improve, or we would acquire a #2 in a country, or in the case of Lieferando, for instance, back then, a #3, where we have a reasonable expectation of creating something better than that #3 position because, as you know, it is our strong belief that only market-based businesses of significant size will render very high EBITDA or absolute EBITDA returns. So this is the way we look at the world, and all our acquisitions, save for the one in Israel, were along those lines. And the one in Israel, as you know, is a tech acquisition mostly. It's also the #1 in Israel. So it's not entirely -- not following those lines, but it was more a tech acquisition than anything else. So this is how we look at it. Is it important that these businesses are in the same country? Well, of course, it's helpful. At the same time, people that operate in the same country, they are probably aware of the fact that they operate in the same country, so they always ask for quite a lot of money, where maybe on a stand-alone basis, or maybe if we weren't in that country, we wouldn't have paid that amount of money for that business. So there's also a pricing element in that. We also know that there's quite a difference in the quality of businesses. As you know, there's a big influx of investor money into our sector because people believe you can make a lot of money in food delivery. And that is certainly true. But there are only a very limited amount of examples of that worldwide. So you would also understand where our preference goes out to in that sense. So that's just on consolidation in general. Then, as you know, we don't provide an outlook. Also, in general, though, the reason that we make money in Holland is that we can't spend more money on marketing. And maybe that doesn't sound like a great strategy, but that's how it is. So if we all of a sudden start making money in Germany, it's probably because we can't grow any faster, or at least we do not know how to grow faster than what we're currently doing. So that's -- the profitability of this company is a byproduct of our strong growth. It's not an intent for us to generate a lot of profit because you can imagine that with the marketing budgets that we have, we can easily generate a lot more EBITDA than we're currently generating. If we would, for instance, charge for logistics, we would generate far more EBITDA than we're currently generating. The EBITDA is not our target. We have a lot of latent EBITDA in our company that we're not releasing because we prefer growth.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mr. Rob Joyce, Goldman Sachs.

[Robert Joyce, Equity Analyst]

Three from me. So just following on from your last comment, I guess. I mean is it fair to deduct from the results that you actually were profitable in Germany in the second quarter of this year? And should we expect that for the second half? Second one, linked to that, I guess, if you are profitable, I guess, you're suggesting it will be a lot more to do on marketing. Just wondering why you think Germany is sort of growing at half the rate of the other markets, even though it looks like penetration on Slide 9 is pretty similar to those markets? And the third one, just if you could remind us now in terms of your core markets, Netherlands, Germany and Poland, how many multiples you are bigger than the next biggest competitor in those markets? And anything you've seen from them competitively would be great.

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

All right. Well, obviously, I can't answer your first question, Robert, nice try. But things look good in Germany. And I think that's the summary of how we feel about that country. It starts -- it's on its way to being a very, very large Holland. So we're quite thrilled with the progress we're making. Then if you look at the penetration and the growth level in Germany, well, first of all, if we currently compare our business to the combined businesses, last year, you don't really get an accurate picture of our growth, right? Our growth, as you know, before we did the acquisition, was quite high in Germany. And you could argue that it is now roughly 22%. Then having said, you're comparing the behavior of people on different websites that were also competing with each other with the behavior on our website, while, obviously, we have just put these people on our website. So we don't quite know yet how the eventual growth in Germany is going to look like. We can compare a couple of things, but that's not a comparison between the Lieferando in 2019 and Lieferando in 2018. So I would love to tell you what the growth is going to be in the future. But first of all, I can't. And even if I could, I would probably not do it. Does that give you that answer?

[Robert Joyce, Equity Analyst]

So 22% seems like a number you can do better than if you were running the whole thing for the...

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

Oh, that depends. If we're going to grow with 22% for the next 30 years, I'm not going to complain. So our growth is a mathematical formula, basically the behavior of existing customers, plus the behavior of new customers. So a slight movement in the behavior of existing customers. And this is why I also mentioned that the growth is not the growth. Can make quite a difference in a country. So I know that sounds a little bit strange, but we're adding a large number of new consumers every month in Germany. Obviously, after the acquisition, that went up quite a bit. But still, we need to figure out what the, let's say, growth at the end of the year is going to look like. Then how much bigger are we in the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. If you compare us to the number, let's say, the #2. That is a difficult question, but I think the competitor in Poland is the closest, and they are probably 1/4 of our size. And that is far bigger than in any other country. Just to give you a little bit of an idea.

[Robert Joyce, Equity Analyst]

Okay. Brilliant. And anything -- any competitive changes you've seen in your markets from the logistics players over the period?

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

It's very difficult to now -- we don't really see a lot of the logistical players in our markets. It depends a little bit on what market. We see a little bit more, for instance, in Poland, sometimes in Belgium. But you have to bear in mind, and I think this is also -- the difficult bit with assessing the size of logistical players, there's a lot of subsidies in those markets, a lot of vouchering, et cetera. So yes, I mean, we can also generate a lot of orders by handing out free food. But that's not sustainable. You're either hungry and you want to eat something and you're next to a customer, but let's say, if I would give you a voucher of EUR 10, then you're going to order because you have the voucher of EUR 10, you have to eat anyway, right? So it's a difficult thing to understand.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

As an interesting side note, with the acquisition of Foodora, we also started working with McDonald's in Germany. We also most recently started working with McDonald's now in Poland, for example. So that's also some news on the logistics side.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mr. Giles Thorne, Jefferies.

[Giles Thorne, Equity Analyst]

My first question was on 10bis and your ambitions in the B2B market. It's been a year now since you announced that deal. Could we have an update please on how you're going to export that technology into your European operations, the rest of your European operations? Second question is on Germany migration. And evidently, the early findings or the early impact of that migration has been fairly limited, and it feels, to me, we're in this utterly unprecedented situation where, as you switch off a platform, people actually don't have anywhere to churn to. So I suppose my question is, what is the likelihood that some of those users actually disappear altogether? It feels incredibly unlikely, and therefore, this will be the most successful migration that's ever happened in this sector. But it will be interesting to hear your perspective on that.Yes, I'm sorry, a final question, forgive me. A final question is a philosophical question. Were you had the option of viably and legally using gig economy labor for the purposes of delivering food, would you actually use it? And if you wouldn't, why not?

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

All right. First one with 10bis technology, we are quite far now with the technical integration of it. Bear in mind, though, it's an unproven business concept in Europe, and we would have to roll it out. So while we are making quite a good progress technically, then still, when the product is done, we need to roll it out. So it's not something that we can report on -- you should not expect that within a couple of months. Still something that we're building currently. Then Germany, you are right that we are quite happy about the lack of churn, we would like to think that we have something to do with that. I mean I saw what you gave as a reason for that. But I think we -- look, we have done a number of migrations in the past. One migration that you guys haven't really noticed, but it was very large, was actually the Lieferando migration to the Takeaway platform because that took us 1.5 years. That was a good way for us to understand what the dangers with the migration are, what the users do, why they do certain things, what the important things are for us in a migration. We learned a lot about it. And actually, that migration was far bigger than the migration in -- if you look at Delivery Hero because those were free websites. It wasn't one brand that we were migrating. So actually, we knew what to do, we did that. We're happy that it went all right. And actually, we were not expecting material churn because, let's be frank, we offer roughly the same product, and we have more restaurants on our website and we would like to believe also a couple of things that our customers would like. And of course, our visibility became larger. So we were not expecting material churn. Whether we haven't lost individuals? We don't quite know yet. Probably we did, but we probably also gained individuals because, for instance, McDonald's will put a [ Big Mac ] on their buildings and stuff like that, that obviously helps. But the end result of the migration was very successful. And I gladly take your compliment that, that was the best migration in the sector thus far. Thank you for that. Regarding the gig economy, let's be clear on what we like and what we don't like. If there will be a legal way of ensuring a person and paying social security and all that and taxes, we would gladly do it. I mean, obviously, it's easier and cheaper for our company to pay per drop. That is clear. Most of our competitors are doing it. They have a big cost advantage there. The issue is that we have is that in most of our countries, we are quite certain that this is not legal, or at least it is ethically, let's say, over the edge. And with that, I mean that we are currently worth roughly EUR 5 billion. We are a large company, and we cannot have people breaking their neck in front of our office and then telling them, we're sorry, you're an independent, and you sue us first, and then maybe we'll pay you something for your hospital fees. That's just not how we operate. That's not what we like. Now the arguments that people that say, no, this needs to be a per drop model would use is that, well, these laws are old fashioned. Well, the laws might be old fashioned, but they are still the law. So breaking the law and then telling people that actually that's the law's fault is a very strange concept for us. We do not break the law, period. If we would like to change something, the best way to do that is to ask politicians to change something, and then hopefully, something changed that is good for the company, but not the other way around. So that's the way we look at that. If we can legally employ people, fine, but -- and then we don't have a preference for the model.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

But also, another way of looking at it, I mean, your question basically assumes that the business model, which, in our mind, is fundamentally loss-making, would make a profit. But then in the gig economy -- so who is compensating for the losses you have in that business model. So you're basically assuming in the gig economy, either the drivers are being paid less or the government is getting less taxes and social security. Someone has to compensate in that equation for the profits you are making. And I cannot imagine that in the long run, the drivers are satisfied with less money being paid, because already, if you take Germany as an example, I mean, we're paying very decently and it's already hard to find enough drivers. And I also can't imagine that in the long run, the government will be fine with not getting any social securities from a certain amount of drivers or not getting taxes. So I don't think the gig economy is really solving that equation. I think the reason why this business model, potentially in some markets could work is rather the willingness and ability of consumers to pay a higher tip to drivers or higher average basket value, which makes the business model less loss-making. But I don't think shifting the losses to the drivers or the government is something which is sustainable in the long run.

[Giles Thorne, Equity Analyst]

That's all right. And it wasn't really about the existing operations. I think the die is cast on the gig economy in the continent. It was about other markets that you could have operations in.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mr. Bob Liao, Macquarie.

[Hai Thang Liao, Tech Analyst]

Just squeeze in one last question before the end here. Just on Germany, just trying to understand the sort of balance between the under-penetrated market and the fact that you're reducing marketing spend. I would have thought that there might be room perhaps to accelerate marketing spend over the long term? Is there sort of a short-term sort of integration, consolidation tactic going on currently? And is there a possibility that if you're actually seeing substantial under-penetration in that driven market, that you might actually have room to accelerate marketing again?

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

Well, actually, we haven't reduced marketing spend, if you look at the 2 companies combined. So the company, obviously, has gotten to be almost twice the size, but the marketing spend actually went down. It did not went-- it did not go down as an absolute amount for Takeaway in Germany, so it actually went up. You have to understand that we are getting every month a certain amount of new customers, and that's very predictable. We don't see a lot of -- talking about 10% more, 10% less every single month. If we put an advertisement on Google, and it says -- and you type in sushi, well, you're not -- you're looking for sushi, you're not looking for a refrigerator. So you want sushi. If we show you an ad there, it's highly efficient because you actually gave us what you needed, and we showed you the ad. The top of our marketing spend is basically, are we showing this advertisement 8x through the population or 9x. And you can understand that changing from 8 to 9 or 10 doesn't have an impact on the size of the population, it doesn't do too much in the new user acquisition for our company. And you would have to ask our CMO for the exact calculation of gross rating points, et cetera. But we try to reach the population of our countries quite a lot. I mean you can just check with somebody in Germany, I think they would be sick and tired of seeing our advertisements already. So we can't really -- even if we wanted to increase the amount of marketing too much because we -- let's say, even if we would be able to double our spend and we would be able to increase the amount of new customers by, let's say, 20%, the amount of new customers is only a subsection of our total orders. So you would not even notice as an investor that we have done that. So we don't believe that we can reduce marketing spend or that our strategy is materially different from, let's say, 1 or 2 years ago. It's the same, but the website is larger.

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

Yes, I also like to refer to the growth drivers. If you see the trend there, it's a trend going up, but it's going slow. And it's not because we don't want that to accelerate. If we would have a magic button to have people returning more often or ordering way more, we would immediately invest in that. But as Jitse was saying, we already maxed out on marketing more or less. And also that the trends are -- that's for the whole company, but that's a good reflection how it works in each market. It's a very predictable biz model, but it's going slow. So you cannot all of a sudden have it increased dramatically. That is just not how the business model is working.

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

I think this has 2 sides, right? It's difficult to all of a sudden change the growth pace, but it's also quite impossible to disrupt something that is the size of our brand.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

I think when there is still a lot of potential because, like we said, we pretty much feel we are at the right level of marketing spend. But we still have a lot of room to grow on the restaurant network side. While we feel in the Netherlands, we have a relatively high penetration of the restaurant network. In Germany, we still have a long way to go to get to the -- a satisfying restaurant penetration levels. And so I think driving the sales activity is still a big lever for growth in Germany.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Mr. Andrew Gwynn, Exane.

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

Just a very quick question, given the time. But just on the multi vertical, I must a little bit of effort during the period, I think with up high in the Netherlands. And we also see some moves with Glovo down in Southern Europe. So just wondering on your views there, any change to the strategy?

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

Well, it's almost -- you have to put yourself in our shoes, and we're looking at the world, and it's getting crazier every day. So basically, first, what we're getting is logistical companies starting to do delivery of, let's say, healthy foods on bikes, which we're pretty sure that people are willing to pay for. I mean we're not arguing that, that's not something that people will be willing to pay EUR 5 delivery fee for, or something like that. Then to keep up the growth, these brands would then go to smaller cities because, obviously, you started in the big cities and then you fan out to smaller cities. Because at some point, you don't grow anymore because there's only so many sellers you can sell in this with an area. So you go to multiple cities. And that's still all right. You can still probably make a profit on that. Then though, you discover that this has no scale because there's not too many people ordering salads. So what you would do is you would add QSRs and all that. Well, QSRs have low ticket sizes and they have quite a lot of bargaining power because they're McDonald's, or Burger King, et cetera. So what this does, it drives down your AOV and it drives down your take rate. So actually, this is now suddenly becoming a really bad business model. And certainly, at scale, it becomes a really bad business model because it's not so easy to -- we also have 7,000 drivers, it's not so easy to add new drivers to that because there's quite a lot of churn with the drivers. So you start doing that. Then you still need to keep up your growth because people are paying and investing quite a lot of money in your model. So you would say, of course, currently, we're not profitable. But at some point, we're going to invest in robots and drones and in dark kitchens because if you centralize the kitchen, then obviously, that's better. And we're not arguing that, that is not better, but it is better on top of a really bad business model, right? Of course, it's better that -- we always joke that it would be much better for all our staff to live above the office because, I would save quite a lot in time and in transport costs. This is the level of what we're looking at now worldwide. And now you're asking about multi-vertical. Yes, we're not arguing that you cannot -- there's no demand for people that want toothpaste or toilet paper or anything else that can be delivered within a short period of time. But if you would apply a decent delivery fee for it, the demand would drop because nobody is going to pay EUR 15 to get toilet paper. And maybe in the city center or London people are inclined to do that. But let's take a suburban German town.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

And most of the time, our issue with potentially getting the losses reduced from that business model is not that we have overcapacity. I mean, actually, we are, most of the time, lack of drivers. So like you would then even add further demand to a scarcity of driver population.

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

So just -- it is unlikely for you to see us move into that direction.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Ms. Silvia Cuneo, Deutsche Bank.

[Silvia Cuneo, Research Analyst]

Just a quick follow-up, given what you just said about the lower incremental benefit of increasing your marketing expense in Germany, and the fact the market is still so underpenetrated. Just wondering, what else can you do to increase market share? And how can you effectively respond to any potential competitor that may attract users with a different brand?

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

Well, first of all, we have -- to give you a frank answer, we have no idea what we can do to accelerate the new user growth in Germany, because if we would know, we would do it. So we don't know. Then the second question is, what would the competitors do? Well, let's say a competitor has the same ability to acquire customers, to acquire restaurants and has roughly the same network as us and the same brand awareness, and this is all very hypothetical because nobody will have that and certainly not on day one, and they are as good as we are, and I'm not saying that we're extremely good, but it is very difficult to all of a sudden become as good as we operate in a big country, like Germany. And let's say you will be able to match our new user addition. Yes, then we're was still a lot bigger than you. You will never be able to overtake us. You were going to spend a lot more money in marketing than we are, a lot more money in acquisition than we are because we have all these network effects already. It is a completely impossible exercise to try to overtake a marketplace that is so much bigger than anything else. And it's not that we make this up, I mean, we've had 30 competitors in Holland, including lastminute.com, that actually, at some point, both [ UrbanVibe ], this may be so familiar to some of you, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, Foodora, Deliveroo, Uber Eats and all these guys, and every single one of these is either now not existent anymore or they are small or, even worse, tiny. That is because of the network effect of this business model. And this is why we cannot all of a sudden double the new customer counts, but we can also certainly not be disrupted overnight, it's completely impossible.

[Jorg Gerbig, COO & Member of Management Board]

That's it.

[Operator]

There are no further questions.

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

Thank you, everybody, for this call, and I'm certain we'll see each other in the future.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, this will conclude the webcast and event call. You may now disconnect your line. Have a nice day.