The conference is now being recorded. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for holding and welcome to the Just Eat Takeaway.com full year 2021 results. At this moment, all participants are in listen only mode and after the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Now, I would like to hand over the conference to Jitse Groen. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this analyst and investor conference call to discuss the full year 2021 results for Just Eat Takeaway.com. On our corporate website, you can download our press release and the slides for this analyst and investor conference call. I will start off today's presentation by taking you through the highlights of 2021, and I will share some additional background on the results of our investments in sustainable growth during the pandemic and how this has benefited our business. Brent Wissink, our CFO, will then talk you through the financial details of the results at the group level and for each of our operating segments individually. I will end the presentation with some concluding remarks, after which we will open the call up for your questions. My fellow board member, Jörg Gerbig, is also here to answer your questions on specific topics. Regarding the question and answer session, I have a housekeeping announcement to make. As already shared with the analysts, we have amended the process for our Q&A session to make sure that everyone gets the opportunity to ask her or his question and to avoid marathon sessions. Therefore, we will allow one question from each of the analysts, after which the analyst will be moved to the end of the queue. If we have sufficient time, you will get the opportunity to ask a second question once everybody has asked their top question. We do hope that this will improve the quality of our Q&A session and that this provides an equal and fair opportunity to each of the analysts. Now, please follow me to slide four. We served nearly 100 million active consumers by the end of December, an increase of 9% year-on-year. Our percentage of returning active consumers increased further to 67%, while the number of orders per active consumer grew to 2.9 x per month, mainly driven by our enhanced restaurant offering and investments in growth. This resulted in 1.1 billion orders, representing a GTV of more than EUR 28 billion in 2021. We generated revenue of EUR 5.3 billion, which is up 33% compared with 2020. Adjusted EBITDA on a combined basis for Just Eat Takeaway.com was EUR -350 million in 2021, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of -1.2% of GTV, reflecting our significant investment efforts. Brent will further elaborate on the financials in the financial section of this presentation. I am now on slide five. 2021 was a year of strong growth driven by our investments during the pandemic. Our business has accelerated with growth drivers above pre-pandemic levels. As Brent will explain in detail, we issued two convertible bonds and secured a bank loan in 2021, totaling EUR 1.4 billion. This has resulted in a strong cash balance of EUR 1.3 billion at year-end 2021 to finance our operational cash flows and business plan. With regards to portfolio management, we intend to discontinue our operations in Norway and Portugal to concentrate on leadership positions and profit pools effective as of April 1st of this year. I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank our talented and dedicated Norwegian and Portuguese teams who have worked tirelessly to build up our businesses in these countries. Finally, to reduce complexity and costs, we confirm that the last trading day of our American Depositary Shares on Nasdaq is expected to be the 11th of March, with trading on the OTC markets via a sponsored level one program expected to begin on 14th March 2022. On slide six, we provide our orders with a split for each of our segments, both excluding and including Grubhub. As you know, we only completed the Grubhub transaction in June last year, and as a consequence of that, the majority of our investments were focused on the legacy Just Eat businesses. Our investments resulted in order growth of approximately 100% during the pandemic that started early 2020. Now, if you follow me to the next slide, please. On the left side, you see our reported adjusted EBITDA for the combined businesses. We have peak losses in 2021, mainly driven by our investments in the historically underinvested legacy Just Eat businesses to reposition the business for online share gains. We've added a bar to show our January 2022 annualized run rate, which is EUR -240 million and already within our 2022 guidance of an adjusted EBITDA margin of GTV of -0.6% to -0.8%. We are working hard to generate further profitability improvements throughout 2022 and beyond. To show the strong underlying profitability of the combined businesses, we also provide the adjusted EBITDA excluding the mandatory fee caps in the United States and Canada. At the end of 2021, many of these fee caps have expired, but they remain in place in major U.S. cities such as New York City and San Francisco. As communicated previously, we filed lawsuits against these cities last year and believe that permanent fee caps are illegal. In Canada, currently, British Columbia is the only remaining province of size with a fee cap still in place. Excluding mandatory fee caps, our adjusted EBITDA for 2021 would have amounted to EUR -158 million, and the January 2022 annualized run rate would have been EUR -59 million. Now moving to slide eight. Profitability is in our DNA, and this is unique in us, in our industry. In North America, as shared in the previous slide, our strong underlying profitability was impacted by government imposed fee caps. Northern Europe was the most profitable segment in the industry with an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 256 million in 2021. In the U.K. and Ireland, we doubled orders in the past two years, and we are now on a clear path to profitability. In Southern Europe and Australia and New Zealand, high investments in leading positions also doubled the segment in terms of orders during the pandemic, with profitability improving going forward. On slide nine, we focus on the growth drivers that have improved above pre-pandemic levels. From the left upper corner clockwise, you will see that our new consumer additions peaked during the pandemic and are now back at pre-pandemic levels. The order frequency of our active consumer base is much higher than before the pandemic, and consumers also come back more often than before the start of the pandemic. Lastly, the average amount that the consumer spends on our platform per order is increasing, driven by a number of factors. I would like to emphasize that inflation is generally a positive development for our company, as it is a driver for average order value, which of course is the basis of both the marketplace and the delivery commissions. Turning to slide 10, we have already made great progress towards a profitable delivery business, and we have further levers to enhance this. The three main levers are revenue improvements in delivery costs and overheads and OpEx. Revenue is driven by increasing average transaction values, optimizing consumer fees, and driving new revenue streams. Improvements in delivery are mainly driven by scale and density, as well as tech innovation. In our markets, we typically have the leading market position, which brings consumer density. This is important to increase the number of drops our couriers can make per hour and reduce cost per drop. Continuous enhancements in technology are critical in our industry, and we are implementing enhanced demand management, further optimized order pooling, and efforts to reduce waiting times. Overhead and OpEx will be improved by automation and economies of scale. There is considerable operating leverage as we continue to increase volumes and revenues. Now, on slide 11, we repeat our portfolio management approach, which aims at focusing capital and management attention towards our highest potential markets for generating scale, leadership positions, and profit pools as our industry rationalizes. As a result, we feel obliged to discontinue our operations in Norway and Portugal as of the first of April. This would remove approximately EUR 10 million of adjusted EBITDA losses on an annual basis going forward with an immaterial impact on orders and revenue. With that, I hand over to Brent for the CFO update. Thank you, Jitse. For my first slide, I will reconcile the iFood results performance with our combined like for like figures. For transparency, the majority of this presentation will show figures on a combined basis, which includes Just Eat, Takeaway, and Grubhub in full for all periods shown. Our 2021 iFood results vary from our combined figures as iFood results only includes the results of Grubhub as of the 15th of June 2021, which was the date of the acquisition. Please see the notes in the press release for the exact explanation. Please move to the next slide, where we highlight the development of drivers behind the growth of orders and revenue. As indicated before by Jitse, we continue to improve our key consumer metrics. Driven by our target investments, we ended 2021 with an active consumer base of 99 million people, which is an increase of 8 million consumers compared to the prior year. Of these 99 million active consumers, two-thirds ordered more than once, a higher proportion than 2020. Finally, the average orders per consumers increased to nearly three times a month. We are very pleased with these figures as they show a continued increase of our customer engagement despite headwinds from the lifting of COVID restrictions toward the end of 2021. As a result of these KPI improvements, you can see our strong order growth on the following slide. We added 270 million incremental orders in 2021. Delivery orders grew by almost 70%, driven by investments in restaurant supply expansion and successful partnerships with global QSRs, as well as the price leadership strategy implemented across many Just Eat legacy markets in the first half of 2021. I would like to stress that our highly profitable marketplace business continues to grow, showing the competitive advantage that our hybrid model brings. Most of our orders are still marketplace orders, which provides us with a stable source of capital to reinvest into growth. Please move to the next slide where we show the positive impact of the improved growth drivers on GTV and revenue. We published our full-year GTV of EUR 28.2 billion in our January Q4 trading update. Here you can see that our revenue grew slightly faster despite the significant impact of government-imposed fee caps. On this next slide, you can see the trajectory of both our revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Revenue as a percentage of GTV increased in H2 2021 as we further optimized pricing. In the adjusted EBITDA, you can see that 2021 was an investment year. The key drivers will be explained further per segment, but were primarily related to expanding our delivery operations, our restaurant network, and investing in our brands. In 2022, we expected adjusted EBITDA to improve in both absolute terms as well as its percentage of GTV. Moving to the next slide, we bridge between the adjusted EBITDA and the loss for the period. Please note that this is an IFRS view with Grubhub included from the date of the acquisition. As visible, a large part of the bridge is due to non-cash items, such as amortization of intangibles and share-based payments. Turning to the next slide, where we explain our cash flow throughout 2021. As mentioned by Jitse, we secured a EUR 300 million bilateral term loan in December last year. This was offered at attractive terms and provides additional headroom in our cash position. The majority of our operating net cash outflow is directly linked to our operational costs, debt, interest, and capital expenditure, such as the internal tech development and offices. Following our convertible and debt raises this year, we are well funded for the future. Turning to the next slide, we have summarized the maturity profile of our debt and convertible instruments. This slide shows two things. First, we have nearly two years before the maturity of our term loan and first convertible. The maturity of our remaining debt and convertibles is quite evenly spread over the next six years. Second, the larger amounts are maturing later, which aligns with our expected progress towards a targeted adjusted EBITDA margin of 5% GTV. Considering these two facts, we are very comfortable with our current capital structure, which provides sufficient flexibility to reduce or refinance our debt through either operating cash flow generation or unlocking value in our balance sheet. Now, I will review each segment in more detail. Moving to our largest segment, North America, you can see we grow by 19% despite the headwind of the reopening of hospitality in the second half of 2021. When offices are back to full capacity, we will get a further bump in orders due to the fact that a large portion of Grubhub orders are business-to-business orders. Government-imposed fee caps had an impact of nearly EUR 200 million, materially impacting the profitability of this segment. We are continuing to challenge the legality of the restrictions on private enterprises to agree prices. As a result of these factors, the segment adjusted EBITDA was EUR -29 million in 2021. Now turning to the Northern Europe section. As we mentioned by Jitse, this is the most profitable food delivery segment in the world, generating EUR 256 million in adjusted EBITDA in 2021. This segment is at significant scale and continues to grow quickly. Despite the headwinds from the hospitality sector reopening, orders grew by 35%, and with increasing basket sizes, this translated into a GTV growth of 42% and a revenue growth of 43%. Moving to the U.K. and Ireland, which was our fastest growing segment, materially with material investments driving 52% order growth to almost 290 million orders in 2021. Investments were focused on price leadership, expanding the restaurant network, as well as the successful sponsorship of UEFA EURO 2020. GTV grew by 42% on a constant currency base, which is lower than the order growth due to a lower year-over-year basket sizes due to the increased mix of orders from QSRs and the effect of easing COVID virus restrictions, seeing AOV begin to trend closer to pre-COVID averages. Revenue grew by 57%, reaching over EUR 1.2 billion. After this period of significant investments and restarting growth in the U.K., we will now focus our attention on turning our scale into sustainable profitability. Now on to our Southern Europe and ANZ segments. Again, order growth was strong with nearly 40%, led by an exceptional growth in Australia, where our delivery orders more than doubled. Revenue growth outpaced GTV growth by 10 percentage points. We invested heavily in these underpenetrated countries, many of which were historically underfunded, primarily by delivery expansion, sales and marketing. As we focus on profitability improvement, we will continue to carefully assess the trade-off between investment and long-term value in these markets. Next, we see the financial results of iFood, which are shown on a 100% and constant currency basis. As Jitse also covered earlier, iFood is one of the strongest business in this sector, having a clear leadership position in Brazil, which is a large and attractive market for food delivery. iFood had another strong year in 2021, achieving 55% GTV growth on top of their stellar 2020. Adjusted EBITDA losses reflect the increased investment in grocery and fintech, where iFood has an opportunity to lead the large Brazilian market in these sectors. We recently participated in iFood's latest funding round to maintain our current shareholder holding, but remain open to disposing our stake should we receive an offer which reflects the value of this asset. With this, I conclude my section and hand over to Jitse. Thank you, Brent. Moving to the next slide of this presentation on slide 28. Our strategy is and has always been to prioritize long term growth over short term profits. 2021 was an investment year to restore and expand our leadership positions, in particular in the legacy Just Eat markets. Our adjusted EBITDA losses peaked in the first half of 2021 and markedly improved throughout the second half of 2021. This year we will start to see tangible benefits of these investments with adjusted EBITDA improving to a range of -0.6% to -0.8% of GTV, while delivering GTV growth in the mid-teens. We reiterate the long term goals of the group. Firstly, we expect to grow our annual GTV in five years by EUR 30 billion, which is effectively more than doubling our current GTV. Secondly, we will achieve an adjusted EBITDA in excess of 5% of GTV in the long term. We are confident that we will reach this objective by executing the strategy as outlined at the Capital Markets Day, focused on growing sustainable profit pools. We are one of the very few online food delivery companies already achieving this in some of our markets and have a clear plan on how to get there for the company as a whole. On the next slide, we would like to draw your attention to the seasonality analysis for our GTV growth rates, which are subject to tough comps and are expected to increase in the second half of 2022 due to atypical seasonality in 2021 because of the pandemic. Like you probably recall, our order growth in the second half of 2021 fell short of expectations exactly because of the lack of the usual seasonality in food delivery businesses, where we see the fourth quarter is typically the growth season, driven by shorter days and colder weather. However, the first two quarters of 2021 were much stronger than we usually see. This results in challenging year-on-year comps in the first and second quarter of 2022, and we therefore anticipate our relative growth rates to pick up in the second half of the year. I will continue with the conclusion of this presentation on slide 30. 2021 was an investment year resulting in strong growth and a reinforcement of network effects. We peaked losses in the first half of the last year, and we're increasingly focused on profitability going forward. Our business has accelerated with growth drivers above pre-pandemic levels, and we reiterate our 2022 and long-term guidance. We have a very strong cash base to finance our business plan and our maturity profile on our debt aligns with our expected profitability improvements. We continue to be open to selling our stake in iFood, and we will remain in discussion with several potential strategic partners to strengthen the U.S. position. With that, Operator, I would like to open the call for questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will start the question and answer session now. If you have a question or remark, please press star one on your telephone. As a reminder, please limit your questions to one. The first question is from Mr. Andrew Ross, Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead, sir. Great. Thank you. Morning, all. My question is just around the U.S. and the several strategic partnerships that you're exploring. I'm just wondering if you can give us a bit more color on, A, the types of people you're talking to, B, the kind of types of partnerships we're talking about. Is it just strategic? Is it financial as well? Then any kind of timeline on that right now? Thank you. Hello, Andrew. Thanks for the question. Can't disclose too much. Obviously, you'll understand that we are talking to both strategics and private equity. It's difficult, of course, to give you a horizon on that because it depends on what people are offering. Would you be willing to look at both a, you know, a JV or selling a stake or something like that, as well as purely a strategic benefit relationship? We are looking at all options, and our most important requirement is to strengthen Drop as a business. Cool. Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Joseph Barnet-Lamb, Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Please go ahead, sir. Excellent. Thank you. Your run rate adjusted EBITDA in January is currently on track for your guidance. Does that imply that given improvements in scale through the year, you will in fact be able to hit guidance and invest more than you currently are? Could you just talk a little bit about your priorities and that trajectory? Thank you. Thanks. That is essentially what we have always done. Obviously, we have a very profitable core of marketplace orders, and we are increasing the efficiency of our delivery network as well. This is how we've always grown historically. Now people have referred to that as us using the Dutch profits in Germany and the German profits elsewhere, et cetera. It's also important that, for instance, in the U.K., we have a very profitable underlying marketplace business that we invest in the U.K. itself. Yeah, we can do both, but it's not, that's not different to how we've done business in the past. Now, obviously, during a pandemic, we made use of the pandemic to grow faster and essentially just we became larger, and of course, our KPIs are now better. We invested more than I think what we would have been able to do without a pandemic. This is the way we've always grown. Thanks, Jitse. Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Giles Thorne, Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. I wanted to revisit the topic of subscriptions. For anyone watching the Uber Capital Markets Day, they're obviously very big on cross-selling and then using Uber One to bind that kind of behavior into something that's sustainable. I'm guessing, judging by headlines today about pushing into another 80 cities in Germany and the push into Egypt, that they're pretty confident it'll be effective. Jitse, you've been very clear before, you didn't think it was particularly a good idea for Europe. Has anything changed? No. It's not that I haven't said it is not particularly a good idea for Europe. If you look at our active user base, you've seen that is increasing quite significantly. It has increased quite a lot during the pandemic. That's not for most of the business using subscription, but our customers are very loyal, and they've become more loyal during the pandemic. We also have loyalty programs, but they're not subscriptions in most countries. Regarding the entry of other players in markets in which you have a very large market leader, we've always said that is nonsensical. Of course, you know, all the things that work for us in a country like Germany have not worked for us in smaller countries like Norway and Portugal. I think this is important, right? We are a huge European food delivery leader, but we apparently have struggled to become the market leader in smaller countries in Europe. That also shows you that it's super complicated to get something like that done, even if you have all the capital in the world to try to achieve that. Now, regarding subscriptions, we have it under investigation. I'm not saying that we will not launch it. You should also not think about us not having it, because we do have it in certain places, and in some places, we call it the loyalty program, but it is very similar to a subscription program. Maybe to add to that, obviously in the U.S., we have a subscription program with around 3 million subscribers, and ordering quite a lot by now, making quite a high amount of the order share by now. Like Jitse was alluding to, we have loyalty programs in almost all our markets, with which consists mainly of collecting points and then redeeming these points. In the midterm, we're trying to align these programs to come up with one joint program across the board to make it more aligned, and that could include both sides of the things, loyalty points plus subscription. Understood. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Andrew Porteous, HSBC. Your line is open. Yeah. Hi, team. I guess, you know, it's easy to see sort of how you've progressed in most parts of your business towards that sort of breakeven level or enhanced profits. I guess one of the big areas where you're losing a lot is that, you know, Australia, New Zealand market. Could you give us some color about the progress there, you know, what you're investing in and give us some confidence about an improving trajectory there? I think the question is fair. Obviously, we are in pretty good shape in countries like Germany, U.K., Holland, et cetera, et cetera. If you look at that segment, though, it's a bit of a mixed bag. We have a very sizable and pretty fast growing Israeli segment, still growing quite fast actually. There's Poland in there. That's also a great business. Oh, sorry, Poland is in the other segment now. If you look at Italy and Spain, those businesses are excellent. The only difference with a country like Holland and Germany is that the penetration is lower. That means that we are making quite some upfront investments to get to the same situation as we are in Germany and Holland. This is again very similar to what we've seen in the past in countries like Germany, because you all remember that between 2016 and 2019, we actually got quite some criticism on the investments in Germany because we were using the Dutch profits, as I just told you, to invest in Germany. Actually, that sort of investment profile is not something that is out of the ordinary in getting to such positions. I think it's important to understand that not every country and not every competitive surrounding allows you to get into that sort of position. You really need to look very carefully at, you know, how the countries are doing by themselves. Now obviously, we have announced leaving Norway and Portugal as a consequence of us looking very carefully at, you know, are we going to get the required result out of our investments. It was very clear that we were not getting those from Norway and Portugal. It is, for instance, very clear to us that we will get those results in Spain and Italy. That doesn't mean that those companies are not loss-making now. It does mean that they're loss-making, but the trajectory to profit is very clear to us, and it's again, very similar to what we've seen in the other markets in which we are making quite some profits. Does that answer your question? Yes. Thank you. Thanks. The next question is from Miss Miriam Josiah, Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Great. Thanks for taking my question. Just one on the fee caps, if you could just give us a bit of an update on where you are today with the legal proceedings? Also, could you share the revenue impact from fee caps in states where the cap has already been removed, just to get a better sense of the impact from that this year? Thanks. Thank you. I think the way we're going about these fee caps, of course, we felt the court cases. We are also talking to a lot of politicians, whether that's city level or state level, to try to resolve it in another way than through the courts that would have our preference. Very difficult to give you a timeline. It's very unfortunate. We would have loved to have been $200 million more profitable than what we are today, obviously. It is what it is. It depends very heavily where you are in the world or in the U.S. and Canada, to answer your second question. Our Canadian business, for instance, normalized, is actually very profitable. The fee caps in Canada were very closely tied to the state of emergency. That's a bit different from the situation in the U.S. They have fallen away apart from British Columbia and I think Nova Scotia, but I think Nova Scotia is very irrelevant for us, but those two provinces. The impact of that is pretty significant because actually you see the profitability go up quite rapidly when they fall away. That's of course because you know your costs are at the bottom half of your profile. The benefits of course are you know with scale are with you know incremental orders should turn into profits. That's a question that's difficult. It depends on the market, but obviously it's very good if those fee caps fall away. Okay, thanks. The next question is from Mr. Andrew Gwynn, BNP. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, team. There's some suggestion, I think, coming into Q1 that we're seeing some very, very soft trading, maybe even negative in a couple of markets. Within the guidance, which is the priority? Is it, sorry, the mid-teens growth or is it the EBITDA guidance? Thank you very much. It's a good question. They're both priorities. I think what's important to understand is that we have very good control over EBITDA because, you know, we choose to invest, for instance, in the U.K., actually quite significant amount of money to improve our position over there. The GTV growth, of course, is related to the comps, you know, and the comps are the comps. Still, it's very important to us also to hit the GTV target. I think it's pretty early on in the year to make any sort of claim of where it's going to end up with. We have good visibility. Again, the inflation actually works in our favor. Okay. Very clear. Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Rob Joyce, Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Hey, thanks very much for taking the question. I appreciate your comments that you've got very good visibility on the trajectory of profitability across your businesses. When you look beyond 2022, does this mean you can see yourselves being positive EBITDA in 2023 at a group level? If not, then when? Thank you very much. Very good question, Rob. Look, again, we fully control our profitability profile, and we can't really estimate whether our competitors are going to be more rational than, let's say, in the past couple of years. We would hope so, but we can't. We don't know. Therefore, we're going to be quite prudent. If we need to invest a lot of money in the U.K., we will do so. If our competitors are going to be more rational then, you know, we become more profitable. So I don't want to take a, how you call it, an advance on the future. I think the most important thing for you guys to understand is that we have quite some buttons and levers that allow us to change the profitability profile of the business. Okay. Is there any sign of competitors becoming more rational? Well, we had Deliveroo leave Spain. That was rational. To be quite frank, I don't see a lot of those movements. We do know, of course, that it's much more difficult to raise capital now than what it was in the past couple of years. It has to happen for the sector. I think that's pretty clear at least to us. Again, we're not counting on it. We have full flexibility in terms of the investments that we need to make in our most important countries. We'll have to see whether they're going to be more rational. I think this is a question for other people, not for us. Thank you. The next question is from Miss Monique Pollard, Citi. Your line is open. Hi. Morning, all. I just had a follow-up question on the fee caps, because, on that slide where you show your run rate of EBITDA losses of $240 million, and you show the difference including and excluding the fee caps. The January run rate for the fee caps is still at $181 million versus the $192 million in 2021. I'm just trying to understand that in the context, as you said, of most of the U.S. runs having come off apart from New York and San Francisco and the Canadian ones being off apart from British Columbia. Yeah, I can be very precise, actually. Of course, New York is a huge chunk of the fee cap in the U.S. for us, together with a couple of other cities. The Canadian fee cap actually was in place until January for most of the provinces because of course of the renewed, well, let's call it just how it's called, Omicron. Yeah. And have fallen off. Actually that was the case in January. In February, those fee caps were gone for most of the country. Okay, understood. Okay, thank you. The next question is from Mr. Sreedhar Mahamkali, UBS. Your line is open. Please go ahead, sir. Yeah. Hi, good morning. Maybe just on the U.K., can you give us some insight into your plans with respect to the three logistics networks, and how you're sort of migrating them to one or two, the timelines, and what might be the impact on delivery cost per order? How should we think about it? If you could help us there, that would be super helpful. Thank you. Yeah, I can take that. Currently, as you rightfully said, we have still three different models. We have deployment model, we have what we call Delco internally, and we have third-party provider, mainly Stuart. There's still ongoing contracts with Stuart, which we're mainly using in the larger cities. Also here we aim to get some efficiency gains in that one. Obviously there is a perspective to only run our systems at some point in time. We are aiming for that one. Also on our network as such, there is, as Sietse has alluded to earlier, a lot of operational gains we can make in the future, for example, by increasing share of pooling or stacking of orders, for example, which in the past might have been also challenging with some restaurant partners, but we're also working on that one that we're actually able to be allowed to do pooling with all our restaurant partners. That will increase efficiency of the network quite a bit. Also scale obviously contributes a lot to it. Once we're increasing the scale predominantly in a city like London, for example, the network will get way more efficient, and we've proven that in the past as well. With the rollout of major chains and huge growth, we have actually been able to decrease the cost of our logistical network on the Delco side by more than 10% over the last, let's call it 18 months. There is an effort. Third-party provider, there is still ongoing contracts which we have to honor, and after that, we will focus on our own systems mainly, with key focus on deployment model in the large cities. Also, we have the branding on the street, but there will be a mix of our internal models. Sorry, Jitse. Quick follow-up. In terms of ability to pool, what has changed? Is that with the larger sort of restaurant partners, McDonald's, et cetera, or is that much smaller than that in terms of partners who are allowing you to pool? There's a couple of developments there. We've always pooled since basically 2016, but we've been quite restrictive on it because, of course, food gets cold. If your network increases in density, you can do more pooling. You just have more movements in the same direction. Yes, we are working with partners such as McDonald's also to make pooling possible on the McDonald's network. Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Marc Hesselink, ING. Your line is open. Yes. Thank you. Can you talk about the directional trend of gross margins, given maybe the positive of increasing delivery fees, but on the other end, the negative still of the mix of more delivery orders? What do you expect there? I mean, if you look at, let's say for example, countries like Germany and the Netherlands, we were usually able to actually increase, even though we were increasing the share of delivery, and I'm now talking about EBITDA, the absolute EBITDA in the past. Now, there is obviously a continuously increasing share of logistics, which we're also foreseeing going forward because most of the restaurants which we're adding to the platform will be logistical restaurants and as compared to the current share of restaurants which we have on the platform. You also have the convenience bit, which will also mainly be on the logistical side. There will be continuous pressure from that one. We also, like we said earlier, we will also achieve efficiency gains. From the likes of pooling, optimization of the network and the algorithm. We believe that in most countries we will be able to actually increase the margin on that end. Because also if you look at where there was in the past a huge deterioration, it was mainly driven by a fast roll out of larger chains. By now we actually do have most of the large chains or all of the large chains in most of our countries. You wouldn't expect another, let's say, huge rollout like we had in the past. Like I've alluded to in our more mature countries like Netherlands and Germany, we were able to continue to improve the business also on a profitability base. Okay. The year-over-year improvement in the margin, as EBITDA, as percentage of GTV is not necessarily only the improvement in gross margin. It's just one of the components. It's one of the components because it's for sure that what you've seen when you invest in logistics, when we've done that. Now quite heavily since the last three years. That has put some pressure on the gross margin. What you see today is that we also we're gonna benefit from having a more dense network, economies of scale that we also see in the logistical network. Both logistical gross margin per order is increasing at the same time, and that's what we also pointed to, that is the fact that we also have a significant share of orders. Actually, the majority is marketplace orders, which is certainly bringing a very healthy gross margin on top of it. On the blended rate, we see a significant improvement. Of course, it showed the EBITDA improvement that you are referring to will come from both growth margin improvement as well as economies of scale with respect to the fixed costs. Because our fixed costs, for example, marketing, have already reached sort of a ceiling, which is not expected to increase significantly. From that angle, it comes from both sides. Okay. Thank you. The next question is from Miss Silvia Cuneo. Deutsche Bank, your line is open. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Can you please talk about the latest development in your grocery business convenience? We've seen many pieces of news around new partnerships with family offering, especially in Germany, U.S., and the U.K. The question is, what could this drive in terms of order contribution in 2022 and perhaps share of the return investment? Thank you. Silvia, I think and hope that's clear from the announcements that we made, that you'll see that we're still building up the inventory. You should expect more announcements regarding grocery and convenience. I think the thing that we're trying to accomplish is that we run it at a profit, and it might not be a profit now, for instance, if the whole logistical network in a country is still loss-making. It's for us not. There's no difference between a grocery convenience order and a food delivery order if we deliver it from a supermarket. Obviously, there's a difference if we build our own hubs, such as what we're doing in Canada, and we are taking a measured approach to it on a per country basis. I think in places where we can't get to a grocery partnership, it's more likely for you to see us build hubs. Doing that also will cause probably supermarkets then to also work with us on those hubs. We're doing quite some things there. The intent of the exercise is still to make a profit on it, just like we want to make a profit on all the delivery orders as well. You shouldn't think of this as something else than the expansion of our logistical network. To give some more color to it, you might have seen that, for example, in the U.S., we launched a national partnership with 7-Eleven, which are branded as Grubhub stores and basically delivering from over 3,000 locations here. We also have a subscription partnership, which we launched with Instacart in the U.S. If you talk about Canada, where we go very much into the dark store area, but we also have partnerships. We have over 1,700 convenience stores from partners live. We launched basically Skip Express Lane stores so far, with more than 30 by mid of the year. We're aiming this year to cover more than 70% of our active consumers with dark stores, our own dark stores. That goes very well, and it's very well received in terms of orders per day per store. It's above our expectations here. Like, we're making very good progress in North America on that segment. If you go to U.K. and Ireland, we've closed partnerships and announced them with Asda and Tesco One Stop. There will be coming up more things on that. Also very good progress in the U.K. and Ireland and also in Europe. We had several announcements, most recently on the partnership side. As Jitse was alluding to, in Europe, the focus is more on partnership side because we think with our assets that we have, and the assets then that partners bring in, we can actually scale up the business very fast, because there's a lot of partnership store we can deliver from, very fast. That's our preferred model. I also wouldn't exclude that we are selectively going in with dark stores in Europe. Thank you. Very clear. The next question is from Mr. Wim Gille, ABN. Your line is open. Yes. Very good morning. In the press release, you mentioned that the team is working hard to make 2022 a successful year for both the company as well as all the stakeholders, including shareholders. Obviously you're acutely aware that they are pretty united in their views. They not only want improved profitability but also accelerated core production. At this point in time, all your peers are under pressure, severe pressure. You basically own all the strategic pieces to make the puzzle better for all players in the industry. That will basically allow you to do share buyback at very attractive levels, et cetera. The question is, have your discussions with your counterparts on corporate action increased in recent months and at the right price? Are you now more willing to follow up on divestments to unlock some of the parts in your business? Thanks. Thank you. Let me give you a diplomatic answer. We are of course aware of everything that you said, and we are of course aware of the additional scrutiny on the sector. The things that are interesting to us, of course, evolve around what we believe are going to be the successful businesses. We've spoken about that, those businesses that are very large as opposed to the size of the population and those businesses that have a good profitability profile. We understand of course all the concerns of the shareholders, and I think it's safe to say that we are taking those things very seriously and we're looking at everything. Thank you. The next question is from Mr. William Woods, Bernstein. Your line is open. Hi there. Just a quick question around your ancillary, your advertising revenues. It looks like it's tripled from 2020 to 2021. How much of that is driven by including Grubhub in that disclosure? I suppose what's your perspective on advertising going forward? Thanks. I would just say that it has a lot of potential on our side. We've had advertising for quite some time. We have a big team on it, but I think Jörg's probably a better place to give you details. Yeah. We're having a lot of activities on that side. I mean, it ranges from bidding yourself up in the ranking, which it's partly automated with our partners up to gift cards, for example. We also, what we have as well is a Stamp Card Program, which is a huge benefit for the consumers. You have to see that in most areas, at least within the European operations, for example, in a country like Germany, more than 30% of our restaurant partners are allowing stamp cards. That basically means they are paying for a rebate to the consumer, and it creates loyalty with them. That's something that competitors don't have. Basically, through that Stamp Card Program, you get 10% discount every time you order. With our restaurant network ex the U.S., more than 20% of our restaurant partners are offering these sort of stamp cards, which is a huge competitive advantage which the other ones don't have. That commercial growth team is, on the one hand, generating additional revenue opportunities, and on the other hand, also trying to increase order frequency. Another area which we are focused on is with partnerships on FMCG brands. Such for example, we were most recently co-advertising together with Magnum, which is basically cooperating with us on the branding side and also trying to advertise together to actually increase obviously the revenues for their products, but together with us and that's also an additional source of quite some income for us. We also see huge potential going forward in that area. We also see expanding that business over the next couple of years for that part of the business. Thanks. The next question is from Mr. Nigel van Putten, Kempen & Co. Your line is open. Thanks. Good morning. I have a follow-up on a, yeah, couple of previous questions about the combination of fee caps in the U.S. on the one hand, and discussions you're having with potential partners, including private equity about Grubhub. It seems to me that reaching a deal is not easy or even possible as long as the courts have not provided clarity about the issue. Does it make sense to assume if you say all options are on the table, you're talking more specifically about potential partnerships towards grocery delivery? Or is it for the company as a whole still? If so, could you provide some color on the timelines, et cetera? Thanks. Yeah. I don't want to elaborate too much on it, but we are looking at everything that would make Grubhub a stronger business. There's quite a lot of U.S. players that can look through the fee caps, because I think there's broad agreement that they are probably not illegal. Yeah, of course, if they would fall away tomorrow, then that would be beneficial because it's just additional EBITDA. Thanks. The next question is from Mr. Georgios Pilakoutas, Numis. Your line is open. Thanks so much. Morning. Fee caps last year of $192 million. The run rate in January was $180. I think the run rate in the second half was more like $145 million. I'm just trying to get a sense for what's implied in your guidance for 2022. The fee caps are fully observed in our guidance. If they fall away, it's additional EBITDA. Can you give a sense on what the fee cap, is it $100 million of fee caps that you're assuming within your guidance and therefore if it's only $60 million, that's $40 million drop through? Can you give us kind of a starting point? We are assuming a continuation of the New York and San Francisco fee caps in the U.S. broadly. I'm sure there's some smaller ones, but they are not material. We are assuming in Canada only, was it British Columbia, to continue for some time. Just to clarify, is that more consistent with the second half fee cap run rate of more like $140 million? I think that's broadly right. Yes. Great. Thank you very much. The next question is from Mr. Clément Genelot, Bryan, Garnier & Co. Your line is open. Yeah. Good morning. On dark stores, are your comments regarding our possibility of opening your own dark stores in Europe is interesting. Do you think ROI would be higher in gradually opening them on your own, or whether in acquiring a small player in Europe with already established application, some dark stores and so on? Thanks. I think it's unlikely that we would acquire any players. I think the level of losses that most of these players incur are just unpalatable for us. Obviously, the benefit of us delivering grocery/convenience is that we already have a very sizable delivery network, basically everywhere where we operate. Therefore, a lot of the costs involved in the process, we already have absorbed in our company. It would not be smart for us to buy players. Even, of course, I mean, we've seen a couple of these things happen in the last half year, even if it's a fire sale of those assets. I think the cost level is just too high for us to entertain. Detailed. Thanks. At this time, I would like to give the word to Jitse Groen. All right. Thanks everybody. We'd like to round off this analyst and investor call by thanking you again for participating and your questions. Should you have any additional questions or remarks, please reach out to our investor relations team. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the event call. You may now disconnect your line. Thank you for joining, and have a very nice day. The conference is no longer being recorded.