Hello, welcome to the Just Eat Takeaway.com first half 2023 results call. My name is Laura, I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note, this call is being recorded, for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press S zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Jitse Groen, to begin today's conference. Thank you. Thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this analyst and investor conference call to discuss the half year 2023 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. While we are all here, let me first start by addressing Brent stepping down for next year's AGM. Brent joined the company when we had 39 people work for us, and I believe that the revenue back then was only a couple of million € per year or so. You will see later in this presentation as well, that we now have 15,000 people in our offices, almost half a million couriers, and that the revenue of the business is over € 5 billion. There are not many people that made the same journey in Europe, and there are even fewer that can claim a large part of that success, and Brent, naturally, is one. I very much regret to see Brent leave. He was instrumental in large, well-known deals, such as the deal with Delivery Hero in Germany, the merger with Just Eat, but also he arranged the iFood deal last year, which made sure the company is now well capitalized and generally in a good financial shape. Running a large business is hard work, which is not always recognized by the outside world. We always say building a business is not a sprint, but it is a marathon. Brent will have been here for 13 years and will have run a very long marathon. I, of course, understand that there is life after JET, and I very much understand that there are other avenues in life for Brent to explore, and we are looking forward to the monthly barbecue we expect he will be organizing for us going forward. I owe you the world, Brent, and on behalf of everybody here, I thank you for your service to the company, and I hope that you can always look back with pride at what we have accomplished together. That having said, Brent would also be the first to conclude that the show must go on, and I am grateful to him that he will stay with us until the next AGM, so that we have ample time to find a worthy successor. This brings me to the start of our presentation. I would like to take you through the highlights of our performance in the first half of 2023, and how these tie into our ambition to create a highly profitable food delivery business. Joerg Gerbig, our COO, and Andrew Kenny, our CCO, have prepared a couple of slides regarding our investment in our delivery network, while simultaneously improving our delivery unit economics and our efforts to further enhance our consumer proposition by investing in non-food adjacencies. Brent Wissink, our CFO, will talk you through our cash position and free cash flow generation, as well as providing additional details of the financial results, group level, and for each of our operating segments individually. I will end the presentation with some concluding remarks, after which we will open up the call for your questions. Regarding the question and answer session, as a reminder, we will allow 1 question from each of the analysts. Before we dive into the details, I would like to set the tone for today's presentation. Our key messages are: that Northern Europe and the UK and Ireland returned to GTV growth in the second quarter of 2023, that our half year Adjusted EBITDA improved to € 143 million, that the UK and Ireland are on track to reach similarly high Adjusted EBITDA margins as Northern Europe, which was already at our long-term target of 5% of GTV, and then lastly, that we are fast approaching our positive free cash flow target. If you would please follow me to slide 6. I'd like to quickly remind you once again of our objective, which has been consistent since I founded the company back in the year 2000. We aim to build and extend large scale and sustainably profitable positions in our markets. In the following slides, I will provide more details to support this objective. Flipping to slide 7. As already explained in our first quarter trading update, the first quarter of the year continued to be affected by the pandemic comparison. The first quarter of last year had a high absolute number of orders due to a resurgence in COVID cases. We are encouraged that Northern Europe and the U.K. and Ireland returned to GTV growth in the second quarter of 2023. It is important to understand that these two segments, of course, represent the majority of our orders. In Northern Europe, year-on-year GTV growth improved to 4% or 3% at constant currency in the second quarter of 2023. The GTV growth was 0% in the first quarter of 2023. Major markets such as Germany and the Netherlands, saw sequential improvement in year-on-year order growth. In the U.K. and Ireland, year-on-year GTV growth improved to 3% at constant currency in the second quarter of 2023, while the comparable GTV growth was -1% in the first quarter of 2023. I'd like to highlight that absolute orders and GTV grew sequentially in the second quarter compared with the first quarter of 2023, which is, of course, not the normal seasonality pattern. The good result in the 2nd quarter for these segments also means that the 1st half year GTV growth of both Northern Europe and the UK and Ireland on a constant currency base has been positive. This development gives us confidence that the year-on-year GTV growth is on the path to recovery post the pandemic. On slide 8. North America and Southern Europe and ANZ are following the same improving trend. They are behind in terms of recovery compared with Northern Europe and the UK and Ireland. When correcting for the significant currency headwind, both segments did improve year-on-year GTV growth rates in the 2nd quarter from the 1st quarter of 2023. Lastly, in line with our previous guidance, the group's year-over-year GTV growth improved to -4% constant currency in the second quarter of 2023, from -8% in the first quarter. Moving to slide 9. On the left-hand side, you can see that the half-year Adjusted EBITDA for the group was € 143 million, which is a € 277 million improvement compared with the same period in 2022. On the right-hand side, the Adjusted EBITDA per segment on a half-year basis is provided, which clearly indicates that all operating segments materially contributed to our Adjusted EBITDA improvement. There's a couple of things I would like to highlight here. Northern Europe continued to demonstrate strong profit generation with an Adjusted EBITDA of € 191 million in the first half of 2023. The Adjusted EBITDA margin as% of GTV, was already at our 5% long-term target in the first half of 2023, with potential for further improvement going forward. Secondly, in the UK and Ireland, Adjusted EBITDA improved strongly to € 56 million in the first half of 2023, which is a significant step up from -€ 18 million in the same period last year, resulting in a GTV margin of 1.8%. The segment UK and Ireland is on track to reach a similarly high Adjusted EBITDA margin as Northern Europe, the improvements in the UK are driven by the decreasing cost per order of our delivery network. Joerg will talk about how we did this later. He will also share how we will further improve the UK CPO. To round off the slides, we were Adjusted EBITDA positive in three out of the four operating segments in the first half of 2023, representing more than 90% of our total GTV. Moving to the next slide. We are fast approaching the free cash flow target to turn positive in mid-2024. Brent will provide more details on free cash flow generation in this section. Given the importance of this subject, I want to quickly run you through the high level bridge from Adjusted EBITDA to Free cash flow before changes in working capital. After excluding items of recurrent nature, such as CapEx, leases, interest, and taxes, the company improved its free cash flow before changes in working capital and non-recurring items to minus € 60 million. A careful reader will have noticed that our interest costs have come down significantly as we see an increasing return on our cash position, which is held predominantly in money market funds. The € 62 million of non-recurring expenses can be divided in two buckets. First, exceptional items amounting to € 26 million, that we incur to improve our future earnings. For instance, by restructuring, reorganizing, and simplifying our business. Secondly, € 36 million related to a Denmark, UK tax dispute dating back more than a decade, which was paid in the first half of 2023. This, of course, predates the acquisition of Just Eat by our company. You may recall that we received a related payment of € 21 million by the end of 2022, and this is the reverse of that payment. Naturally, this payment will not be there anymore in the second half of the year, further improving our cash flow going forward. This brings us to our Free cash flow before changes in working capital, which was -€ 78 million in the first half of 2023. The reason why we exclude changes in working capital, is that in online food delivery, the working capital balance mainly relates to restaurant cash, and it can therefore swing significantly. In our case, between ±€ 100 million, depending on the day of the week that we close the accounts versus our payment cycle to restaurants, which is typically on a weekly basis. Brent will talk about this later as well. If you will now follow me to the next slide, you will see that this is a significant improvement from minus € 407 million in the same period of 2022. On the right-hand side, you see that excluding Drop Hub, free cash flow before changes in working capital was minus € 22 million in the first half of this year. On slide 12. Drop Hub, with a free cash flow of minus € 56 million, is also on a path to cash flow breakeven. In parallel to actively exploring a partial or full sale of Drop Hub, we have initiated a number of measures which we believe will lead to further improvements going forward. We have appointed a new CEO. We are realizing a $30+ million US dollar run rate saving from 2024 onwards through a restructuring, and we have established a path to free cash flow, breakeven at Drop Hub, even excluding any positive impact of a potential New York City fee cap amendment. On slide 13, we reiterate our short-term guidance. We expect GTV growth to be in a range of -4% to +2% year on year in 2023. As previously stated, a return to growth is expected to be skewed towards the end of the year, given the lower absolute order level of the second half of 2022, versus the first six months of 2022. Please note that this GTV guidance is based on reported GTV, which is expected to face a significant headwind from negative currency movements, especially the dollar from the second quarter onwards. We remain focused on profitability and expect to deliver a positive Adjusted EBITDA of approximately € 275 million in 2023. This guidance includes additional investments in food and non-food adjacencies, wage cost inflation, and reflects an uncertain macroeconomic environment. We expect free cash flow to turn positive by mid-2024. With that, I hand over to Jörg. Thank you, Jitse, and hello, everybody. Over the next couple of slides, I will give you an update on the operational progress we've made across our global delivery offering. We have scaled our delivery substantially in the past few years, and it remains a key part of our future growth story. We are focused on three key pillars to advance the business. First, platform consolidation, second, technology improvements, and third, expansion. First, we are simplifying our delivery model. Earlier this year, we decided to withdraw our Scoober operations in the U.K. This move has allowed us to focus on and further scale our Delco operations, i.e., our freelance operations in this market. This contributed to improved efficiencies and profitability. In fact, across all our markets, we continue to sharpen focus on our own models, Scoober, our employed model, and Delco, our freelance model, and therefore reducing further our complexity and dependence on third-party providers. Second, technology advances have been a vital lever in improvements we have made in our delivery operations so far and will continue to be a focus going forward. Pooling is a feature we have unlocked and that will further develop, contributing directly to efficiencies and bottom line savings. It's worth calling out that we are yet to deploy the full force of our pooling mechanism. For example, our multi-partner pooling feature is yet to be activated across many of our markets, meaning we still expect significant further upside, which is effective in reducing our cost per order. We are also getting better at understanding the impact on food and delivery experience for customers, which remains our top priority. On efficiencies, we are also improving courier performance through order flows and algorithm optimizations. Meanwhile, our investment in improved courier waiting times will deliver a more seamless experience for all our stakeholders. Third, to further support new and existing consumers, we are investing in the expansion of our delivery network. We are undergoing a targeted expansion in new zones and cities to grow population coverage and enable us to serve more customers in more places. While we usually cover almost all the population in a country with marketplace restaurants already, our delivery coverage still offers potential for expansion. In some of our markets, such as Germany, where we already have by far the largest logistical network, that means that we will actually almost double the population covered with our own delivery offering, maximizing customers' choice and partners' reach alongside our existing marketplace supply. The increase in coverage and choice leads to further density and scale that will have a positive knock-on impact on profitability of the delivery operations. Speaking of profitability, please follow me to slide 16. Across all our delivery offering, we are focusing on several revenue growth and cost-saving levers to enhance unit economics, which remains a strategic priority. From a revenue perspective, we continue refining and optimizing our consumer pricing strategy, including the interplay of service and delivery fee levels, which will be aligned with consumer expectations, with the aim to deliver great value to our consumers. At a time of rising inflation, we remain committed to being a very much affordable delivery provider for food and convenience for customers in all of our markets. Elsewhere, gross transaction value has improved through advanced upselling and expansion into new verticals with a higher average order value, which consequently improves our revenue per order, and we'll talk about some of these new verticals later on. On the cost side, the company is undertaking several strategic initiatives to enhance efficiency and optimize expense related to network expansion and service delivery. While expanding the network is crucial, it is equally important to enhance the quality and reliability of the existing coverage. This means we are looking to further reduce delivery times in many of our key cities and improve the interaction with our offering for consumers, partners, and couriers. As mentioned earlier, a major driver of our profitability improvements is order pooling, allowing couriers to deliver multiple orders as part of the same delivery. We have increased pooling rates substantially since the beginning of 2022 and continued to see a positive trajectory. Pooling is a significant lever for cost improvements, and in H1, we have really just began to unlock its potential. Significant levers remain to further improve unit economics. Please turn to slide 17 to zoom into the UK delivery operations. Our strategic improvements have yielded an impressive result, significantly impacting unit economics. In the UK, as we mentioned before, we've been simplifying and consolidating our platforms. Our share of Delco orders increased by 12 percentage points since the beginning of the year through the removal of Scoober and reduced reliance on third-party providers. We already achieved a notable 10% reduction in fulfillment costs in the first half of this year, which comes despite inflationary pressure on wages. The H1 2023 cost reduction exit rate in June. ... was even at 14%, reflecting that most of the positive impact of the simplification is yet to unfold in the second half of the year. Given we are delivering millions of orders per month with our delivery service, this reduction translates in € tens of millions in savings only in the UK. Highlights the effectiveness of our efforts in streamlining operations and leveraging technology to improve overall efficiency. Looking ahead, we remain highly optimistic about the profitability trajectory of our delivery offerings. By leveraging the levers outlined earlier, platform consolidation, technology improvements, and expansion, we expect this positive trend to continue in the second half of the year and beyond. I will now hand over to Andrew, who will talk about our commercial progress. Thanks, Joerg. Good morning, everybody. Over the next few slides, I'm gonna talk you through some of the strong commercial progress, particularly in grocery, but also some of the early learnings we've taken within non-food, which is undoubtedly an area we are excited about for the future. I will also touch on advertising revenue. Firstly, on slide 18, on the encouraging growth we are seeing in our global grocery proposition. You can see on the left-hand side, we now serve customers with over 40,000 grocery partners, adding over 10,000 new partners at 36% increase since last year. This is made up of national and international chains, thousands of independent grocery and convenience outlets, as well as the expansion of our dark store proposition in Canada and Germany. For example, in Canada, in recent months, we kicked off a partnership with Walmart, whose range is stocked out of our own fulfillment centers, Skip Express Lanes. These customers in initial cities such as Vancouver and Edmonton, can place their Walmart Now orders directly through our platform with delivery in under 30 minutes. The initial results have been very encouraging. I will come on to the UK in a moment separately. Elsewhere in Europe, where the partnership modeled by major grocers with aggregators generally is a little less mature than North America and the UK, we have continued to add and expand with other big players on our platform, including more stores with the likes of DIA in Spain, Shell, Getir, SPAR and Carrefour right across Europe, to name just a few. Each of these partnerships is progressing well with ongoing and future plans for expansion across numerous markets. It's also important, I think, to mention that alongside bringing new partners to the platform in this vertical, we continue to invest in improving our product and tech advances in this area. The demands are clearly very different from restaurant, and we now have a dedicated product and engineering team to support our ambitions in grocery. This team has been working on continued changes which are transforming the consumer and partner experience. Some of these product developments are more subtle and behind the scenes, whilst others clearly aid customers in their discovery. This year, we have enabled grocery partners to add more products to their range with better discoverability. That's through easy-to-navigate grid view categories, all significantly improving conversion on the platform. For partners, we've also made it easier to sign up and onboard as grocery providers with development in our integration and onboarding capabilities, image data banks, and more dynamic out-of-stock tooling. A lot more is planned for the months ahead. Moving to the next slide, I think it's worth spending just a little bit of time focusing on the UK and Ireland segment, where we've been particularly pleased with the progress and the momentum we have within this category. Here, the number of partners is growing very nicely, it multiplied by more than 5x in the last year and is up significantly since I last spoke about UK grocery at our full year results back in March. We now have many of the largest brands in the UK, from Asda, Sainsbury's, Co-op, Iceland, One Stop, Nisa, we're working to expand this offer further over the coming months. Each of these brands has scaled substantially since the start of the year. For example, we've onboarded nearly 1,000 Co-op stores, hundreds of Asda and Sainsbury's locations. The priority over the past 12 months was really to get it to a scaled offering, which we have now done. We have a comprehensive national offer that allows us to advertise and really push the vertical more aggressively to our close to 20 million UK customers. This is beginning to translate, as you see on the right side, into a larger GTV contribution, which is multiplied by more than 13x since our H1 update last year, and we've doubled the number of weekly grocery orders from the start of the year. We will no doubt talk in more specifics about the broader contribution in future releases as it becomes an even bigger part of the business. Most importantly, perhaps, is how the vertical positively interacts with the core restaurant business as well. We continue to see encouraging signs that our grocery proposition is a real driver of incrementality and frequency. In fact, we are seeing a notable uplift in order frequency from customers whose first order is within the grocery category, with these customers ordering close to twice as much per month as non-grocery customers. On the delivery side, expanding our proposition clearly helps our fleet utilization through higher order densities, allowing for more efficient networking operations and keeping our couriers busy, even away from mealtime peaks. Overall, the journey continues at full speed through 2023, and we're pleased with the progress. On the next slide, I just wanna talk very briefly about some early, but exciting steps we are taking within new verticals in non-food. We're very clear that there is a significant opportunity for expansion into adjacent non-food and retail verticals over the coming years, leveraging our millions of customers and importantly, our extensive logistic network to serve even more consumer needs, and essentially to cater for more on-demand, convenience-type moments. We've already launched with partners in multiple non-food verticals, including electronics and pharmaceuticals. MediaMarkt, for example, the number 1 European consumer electronics retailer, this partnership allows you to purchase anything from headphones to a games console, often in as little as 30 minutes, with products from the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft, Apple, and many more. In pharmacy, our first pilot in Europe was launched in April in Spain. This is proving successful with increasing orders, new customers, and a strong average transaction value. This is all, of course, just the beginning. Earlier this month, we also added Lush, one of the most popular European cosmetic players to our platform, with many more partners across various retail categories, expected to follow in the quarters ahead. Very early days in these adjacent verticals, but as we continue to work closely with our partners, to take learnings from these initial trials, we will continue to add more retailers and convenience specialists in the quarters ahead, and no doubt talk more about it in the future. On the final slide of this section, I will just briefly talk about our progress and plans for our advertising platform. Advertising has been a feature of our business for quite some time, we do see significant opportunities for continued growth in this area. This high-margin revenue stream was almost € 100 million in the latest half, annualizing a close to € 200 million run rate. The 33% increase in the current half versus H1 of last year, is driven predominantly by higher penetration of our advertising products with our partners, which fuels increased demand. It's important to note also actually, that these numbers exclude Grubhub, whose pricing model for advertising is different and is part of more of a tiered commission structure, though they too have powerful tools in place to maximize on platform advertising. Essentially today, our current advertising revenue comes predominantly from promoted placement, which enables us to work with restaurant and grocery partners to enhance their visibility on our platforms. This generates incremental demand with a proven high return on their spend. As you can see on the right-hand side, through our self-service platform, our partners can choose how much they are spending with us and how to set spending caps, et cetera. Additionally, we're working with FMCGs and major brands such as Unilever, Heineken, Red, and Red Bull, among others, who are looking to further utilize our app and website to promote relevant products to customers. There's a lot more we are working on in this space, and clearly, with grocery and non-food verticals, a lot more opportunities open up also. It is critical, however, that we do this in the right way, and that it not only supports a strong customer experience, but also generates a strong ROI for our partners. We will be thoughtful, but overall, we consider this to be a pretty nice and nascent area still, and one we are confident that we can continue to grow in a meaningful way in the coming years. I'll now hand over to Brent, who'll talk through the H1 progress we made across our group. Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. Before I take you through our financials, I want to come back on my decision to step down as CFO and resign from the Just Eat board as per the annual meeting in May next year. It has been a very tough decision after so many years, but I believe it's a time to consider other opportunities. I am very proud that I have had the opportunity to contribute to the success, and it has been an honor and a privilege that I could have been part of the Just Eat journey. I can thank a lot of colleagues, which I will certainly do in the next 9 months, but I stay committed until the last day. Now, I will start with the key financial metrics for the first half of this year. As you explained in the section, orders and GTV year-on-year trends improved across all segments in Q2, with GTV returning to a year-over-year growth in Northern Europe and UK and Ireland. Orders and GTV in the first half of 2023, compared with first half of 2002, were down due to the impact of the pandemic on these metrics in 2022, which is also reflected in the revenue development in the first half of this year. We are particularly pleased with the progress we made in the profitability during the first half of 2023. The investment we've made in our technology, foreign supply, and delivery network, as well as our focus on optimizing spend below fulfillment costs, drove sustainable gains in Adjusted EBITDA. Please move to the next slide, where we highlight the improvement of our Revenue less fulfillment costs. Revenue less fulfillment cost is a key metric for our business. By continuing to improve our unit economics, we can achieve a net generating, cash-generating business in the coming years. In the first half of 2023, our Revenue less fulfillment costs for order increased by more than 20% compared with H1 last year. The improvements came from both marketplace and delivery, and from both revenue and cost levers. In the first half of 2023, we generated € 1.2 billion of Revenue less fulfillment costs, a 7% increase compared with the last year, despite lower order volumes. The biggest driver for the improvement was the increased profitability of our delivery operations across most markets, with the most notable gains achieved in the U.K., as mentioned by Jörg earlier. Further optimization and improvements in Revenue less fulfillment costs is a key focus for the remainder of 2023 and beyond. On the next slide, we see the contribution of each segment to the € 143 million of Adjusted EBITDA in H1 2023, which is almost € 280 million improvement compared to the same period last year. We are very pleased that each segment demonstrated a significant step up in profitability and the overall improvement in the Adjusted EBITDA. Moving to the next slide, where we show the bridge between Adjusted EBITDA and IFRS net loss for the period. The net loss for the first year of 2023 was € 258 million, which is significantly reduction compared to the same period last year. The largest driver of this net loss position is the amortization of intangibles on the equity funded acquisitions of Just Eat and Grubhub. These amortizations are all non-cash items. On the next slide, we bridge H1 2023 Adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow. We have seen significant improvement in our cash generating, driven mainly by improved cash flow items within free cash flow before change in working capital and non-recurring expenses. Given the nature of our working capital cycle, where we receive the Gross Transaction Value ahead of paying our partners, working capital cash flows are positive over time, but are subject to volatility based on cut updates. This volatility is just a technical movement based on which day of the week the period ends and does not impact our operations. We therefore consider free cash flow, excluding working capital, to give a better view of underlying performance. The non-recurring items of € 62 million are related to the cash flows from the settlement of a tax matter and other exceptional items. The tax settlement was € 36 million and had to be paid in relates to the tax dispute between the Danish and the U.K. tax authorities that goes back to 2012, and has now finally been resolved. The other exceptional items mainly relate to, 1, restructuring costs for transition part of our UK delivery business to the independent contractor model. To be clear, the cost here related to redundancy costs and the cost of shutting down facilities, not operational losses. 2, to the initial costs connected with the restructuring and cost reduction program in the US. If we exclude the exceptional non-recurring items and the working capital movements, given they do not reflect underlying cash generation, we saw that our core activities were delivering minus € 16 million in the first half of 2023. Please follow me to the next slide, where I want to provide you with insight in the cash flow connected to our US business. This business has an oversized contribution on cash flows below Adjusted EBITDA. In the first half of this year, we achieved a free cash flow before non-recurring expenses and working capital movements of -€ 47 million, which is a material improvement compared to the same period last year, as Jits also presented in this section. As we continue to grow the Adjusted EBITDA of the U.S. business, as well as optimizing other cash flow items, we expect that this will trend towards positive cash flow in the future. To the next slide, where we show our cash flows should Grubhub has been excluded from the growth group. Here we show you that the cash flow before working capital movements and non-recurring expenses would have been over € 30 million plus, including those non-recurring expenses, the cash flow is slightly negative at -€ 22 million. As Grubhub continues to improve its cash flows, the whole group is well on track for the cash flow before working capital movements to turn positive by mid 2024. Please follow me to the next slide, where we show our liquidity and debt maturity profile. We remain well financed to execute our path to free cash flow generation. Our debt maturity profile is very manageable based on our current cash position and our progress towards cash flow generation. This strength allows us to make optimal long-term decisions, both operationally and with our capital structure. In terms of our capital structure, we continue to consider our capital allocations options, including share buybacks. We will take action to capture value should compelling opportunity arise after considering all factors. Relevant factors include the return on the current cash holdings, vary the very low coupon to be paid on the shortest dated bonds, and managing the maturity profile to maintain strong liquidity. This is also considered against the strong return we expect from buyback our shares at current prices. Let's move to the next slide. As announced at our Q1 trading update in April, we initiated a share buyback program up to € 150 million to improve future earnings per share. We were able to take this action as a result of our strong balance sheet and the increased visibility on free cash flow generation. The repurchased shares will be used to cover the company's obligations under share-based compensation arrangements, or will be canceled to reduce issued share capital. up to and including 21st of July, we have deployed approximately € 86 million to buy back 2.7% of our AC shares. Please turn to the next slide, where we look into each segment in more detail. North America returned to positive Adjusted EBITDA in the first half of 2023, despite the ongoing headwinds to segment profitability from fee caps in New York City. Even though our revenue declined due to the reduced volume, we achieved significant improvement in segment profitability due to a more efficient delivery network, through increased pooling and focused management on our operating expenses. In particular, in June, we announced a restructuring program resulting in a 50% reduction of Dropoff headcount, with 400 roles impacted. The Amazon partnership we entered into last year was extended for another year, which will strengthen Drop Hub competitiveness and represent a significant opportunity for future growth. Turning to the next slide. In Northern Europe, we grow GTV whilst increasing profits. GTV increased by 2% and revenue by 10% on a year-on-year basis. Adjusted EBITDA improved year-on-year by more than 50%, reaching € 191 million in the first half of 2023. The Adjusted EBITDA margin in the first half of 2023 was 5%, which means the segment has reached our long-term Adjusted EBITDA margin target, and we believe there is potential of further improvement. In short, we believe this remains the highest margin food delivery segment in the industry. On the next slide, we outline the performance of the U.K. and Ireland. For the first half of 2023, U.K. and Ireland increased GTV by 1% on a constant currency basis compared to the same period last year. The U.K. and Ireland significantly improved their Adjusted EBITDA to € 56 million in the first half, with a positive Adjusted EBITDA margin of 1.8%. The improvement was driven by, mostly driven by the improvement of delivery unit economics, as yes, as Jörg was also explaining earlier. We are very pleased with the progress made in the U.K. and Ireland's profitability, with its margin on track to reach those seen also in our Northern European segment. The next slide shows the performance of Southern Europe and ANZ. This segment contains many of our less mature markets, where we are making confident steps on our path to profitability. There is particular focus on improving unit economics in this segment. I would also like to call out Australia, which is now delivering positive Revenue less fulfillment costs, which has been a focus of investment for the last few years. Adjusted EBITDA losses decreased by 50% in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period last year. My last slide covered the head office costs, such as staff and project expenses for total support teams. The head office cost base decreased on a year-on-year base, which could also be seen last year, in the second half of last year. Head office cost expenses increased by 6% compared with the second half 2022, due to inflation related to cost adjustments and some positive phasing impact in H2 2022. We remain focused on disciplined head office expenses in the second half of 2023. With this, I will hand over to Jitse for the conclusion of this presentation. Thank you very much, Brent. I will continue with the wrap-up of this presentation on slide 39. Northern Europe and the U.K. and Ireland returned to GTV growth in the second quarter of 2023. In the half year, Adjusted EBITDA improved to € 143 million. U.K. and Ireland are on track to reach similarly high Adjusted EBITDA margins as Northern Europe, which already was at our long-term target of 5% of GTV. We significantly improved Free cash flow before changes in working capital in the first half of 2023. We are fast approaching our positive free cash flow target. To conclude, our ambition to create a highly profitable food delivery business is firmly on track. With that, operator, I would like to open up the call for questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Thank you. We'll take our first question from Silvia at Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Thanks. Good morning, everyone, and congratulations on the results. I'm going to ask one question on current trading, if possible. Since the growth trends sequentially improved in Q2 versus Q1, can you please comment about the exit rate in June, similarly to what you did for March at the time of the Q1 update, in terms of order and GTV growth, if possible? Thank you. Okay, Silvia, [Foreign Language]. No, well, generally, we do not comment on exit rates. We've given you obviously the GTV target for the year, which is very much in reach for us. We've also gave the comment that we have a headwind from currency in the U.S. We gave you of course, the growth numbers for the different segments. We're quite pleased that Northern Europe and the U.K. and Ireland actually grew in GTV, if you look at the first half of the year, because I think it's important to remember we came out of a pandemic. I know a lot of people look at cost of living prices, et cetera, but I think it's important to understand that this is a comparison still with a period in which people could not leave their houses, or actually were reluctant to leave their houses because there was an ongoing pandemic. Actually, us trading up from that situation, I think it's a very encouraging sign to us. We are aware, of course, that North America and Southern Europe and ANZ have a long way to go. The lockdowns also lasted a bit longer in those, in those areas, in actually in most of the countries. Generally, I think we're in a good situation. The targets seem very much in reach. We're of course, going to try our best to outperform as well. I think that's the only comment I can give on the current trading. Great. Thank you. Thank you. We'll move on to our next question from Christopher Johnen at HSBC. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Good morning, all. Thanks for the opportunity to ask a question. Just a general one on the progress with respect to the current portfolio. I know there's been no deal announced, the Grubhub one, or the talks at least, have been going on for a while. Maybe there's any sort of comment you can, you know, you can give as to where we stand. You know, I don't know. To be honest, I'll take anything. I'm just happy to hear your thoughts on where we stand. Yeah, look, as we already described, it's a complicated environment. I think we need to separate the state of the business, which is actually, you know, as far as we are entitled to comment on it, actually quite good. Our business is progressing well. We're not faced with similar challenges that other businesses might face in the business. We don't have, you know, a debt that we can't afford. We don't have high interest payments. We don't have any sort of financing issues. We're actually in a very comfortable position in which we can increase our investment, so that actually is good. If you look at the environment, there is still very little M&A going on. The U.S. situation seems to improve a bit if you look at it from an M&A perspective, but also from a valuation of U.S. businesses. I think that's encouraging. We do talk to people around Grubhub, so there are conversations ongoing. Unfortunately, these are complicated conversations still also because the fee caps are still in place. That makes it very tough to put a decent multiple on Grubhub because the swing factor is so dramatic. In the meantime, as we have explained, we are improving that business because we don't believe it should be a drag on our overall company. You've seen, of course, a difference in CapEx levels between the companies, but you've also seen the difference in EBITDA. We're making encouraging progress there. We're reducing the cash burn to 0, and in the meantime, we have ongoing discussions with interested parties. I appreciate that. I also appreciate the incremental color on Grubhub, to say that... Is there anything more you can say on the fee caps, though, now that you mentioned it? That's not part of my one question, sorry. The fee caps with there's two processes running there. There's a legislative piece in the New York City Council, or as you probably know, we don't control the New York City Council. That's pretty obvious. The second part is still an ongoing court case that also it is there. We're pretty confident that they will roll off, we just don't know when, and, you know, this is the U.S., it could happen overnight, it could also take a long time still. We are improving the business, and if the fee caps roll off, great, then, you know, the profitability profile of Grubhub starts to look like the rest of the business. That's fantastic. You know, it's difficult to control things that we don't control. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We'll take our third question from Miriam Josiah at Morgan Stanley. Miriam, your line is open. Please go ahead. Great morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Just on the EBITDA guidance, just wondering why you haven't raised your guidance, given you're clearly tracking ahead, and I think previously you'd said that second half EBITDA would be stronger than the first half. Just wondering where that additional investment is going into in the second half, or are you just simply being conservative? Thanks. Thanks, Miriam. Very good question. There's a couple of things obviously going on. Yes, indeed, we're doing quite well, our EBITDA is probably ahead of the market's expectations. We are doing 2 things presently. We are increasing our investments, we are increasing our EBITDA. I think that's a balance that we need to strike. We want to be absolutely the best business in this sector, we also need to grow, this is why we're making the investments in an expansion of our logistics network. You've seen probably a lot of announcements in countries in which, you know, you will see lesser cities being announced as delivery cities, the smaller cities in Denmark, the smaller cities in Belgium, additional cities in Holland. We are also expanding our footprint in cities, so for instance, where we would cover, you know, basically the urbanized part of Rotterdam, we would venture off in the suburbs, the harbors, et cetera. We think those are important expansions for us to make, also because we are delivering other things. We are also, of course, as Jörg and Andrew alluded to as well, we are investing in technology because you would understand that, you know, foods has the tendency to get cold. iPhone cables don't get cold, groceries usually don't get cold. We also need to invest in a technology to make sure that when we pull, we pull the right thing. We don't pull, we don't, you know, deliver the McDonald's order late, but we deliver, you know, as a second delivery, the iPhone cable, as an example. We're making loads of investments. Our target, to be clear, is approximately 275. It is not 275, it's approximately 275, it could indeed be a bit higher. We also don't know what's going to happen in the second half. We're making all these investments that should get us additional growth. I think one of the things that you need to take from this presentation is that we significantly reduced our operating costs, our CPO dropped. Of course, if you then start growing, also your conversion into profits increases, especially, of course, in segments that are already highly profitable. You know, we focus also on increasing our growth pace, and I hope that that is enough information. Yeah, that's very clear. Thank you. Thank you. We'll move on to our next question from Andrew Ross at Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Great, good morning, everyone. My question is back to Grubhub and to press you a bit harder on the path to free cash flow breakeven, should the Fee Cap Amendment not go your way. Can you just talk a bit more about the levers you have to do that? Obviously, there's a headcount reduction, it's part of the answer. What are the other tips and takes on how you get there? Perhaps talk a bit about kind of geographic footprint and maybe becoming a bit more focused on the Northeast. As part of the answer, can you give us a sense of timing as to how long it might take to get to free cash flow zero, you know, should you not get the fee caps? Thanks. Yeah, it's only a good question. I think you will probably conclude that we have done a lot of work on this in the legacy JET. Obviously, Grubhub was for sale, and therefore, we did not make the same changes in Grubhub in terms of, you know, looking at where to cut costs or where to, you know, improve technology, et cetera. There's quite some progress in the logistical network across the U.S., so actually that is a more efficient logistical network already. But the changes that we've made thus far were actually limited to legacy JET, and we're especially focused now on making the similar changes in the U.S. That should lead to a rapid decrease of the burn of Grubhub. Now, I'm not going to tell you exactly when that's going to be, but you've seen the progress in the last in the last year. That is good progress. Don't forget, this business actually shrank. Actually making that progress with a shrinking business, whether that's the entire business or the U.S. business, is actually quite remarkable. Of course, we're not counting on this business to continue to shrink. Also, you know, you can assume that when businesses start growing again, it also is quite rewarding for us. We're making those changes. Sometimes they're painful, like with the reduction of the staff, but they are necessary for the business. It's obviously very unfortunate that the fee caps are there. They make no sense. They need to go. In the meantime, we also need to run a business, you know, we've always believed that it's the first slide of our presentation, that food delivery businesses should be highly profitable. When they're not, that's a problem. Cool. That's helpful. Thanks. Thank you. We'll move on to our next question from Monique Pollard at Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, everyone. A question for Brent, please. Just on the CapEx in the first half was just € 81 million. Obviously, that's versus last year, € 240 million for the year. I know you talked about the CapEx being a bit lower in 2023, but just trying to understand, is 1H the run rate, or is there some timing in there that means the 2H CapEx should be larger? Well, you exactly would say we already said at the annual earnings call, that the CapEx would be less than what last year. We expect the CapEx for the second half to be a bit higher than it is in the first half. That is more, that is... I think that answers your question. Yeah, I think it's also comment on that there's a couple of moving pieces. Obviously, you would expect EBITDA to go up, CapEx. Mm slightly higher, in the second half, taxes to be slightly higher. I think with all these pieces, you probably come to a conclusion that the cash flows are improving. I mean, because you didn't mention again in this statement, the negative € 200 million Free cash flow, pre-working capital for FY 2023. You just reiterated the mid-2024 positive Free cash flow, pre-working capital. I think if you just extrapolate, and you guys are always much better at that than we are, you'll probably get to roughly the cash burn in the second half. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. We'll move on to our next question from Andrew Gwynn at BNP Paribas Exane. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, team. Just digging into the order momentum, I guess it's still relatively subdued if we're looking sequentially, not necessarily looking year-on-year, but sequentially. What do you think the drivers of that are? Do you think there is a cost of living pressure in there? Do you think some of the focus on profitability has weighed on the order momentum? Thank you very much. No, I think it's important to understand that we came out of a pandemic. As a result of coming out of the pandemic, you have less users than during the pandemic, that's why we have a step down in our markets. You know, the markets behave as, you know, how they were behaving before the pandemic or during the pandemic. Therefore, those markets should grow again. The cost of living prices, I know that everybody in the UK is talking about, that is not really a topic in continental Europe. On top of it, there's not really a lot of difference between the behavior of, let's say, the continent, the Northern European segment and the UK and Ireland segment. Even if you look at food prices, et cetera, let's call that the inflation or the increase of our ticket sizes, they are similar. There's not a big difference between the two segments. You know, these segments for us, they are actually looking quite good. We don't, we cannot measure any sort of different behavior from our consumers. We see that the amount of orders from our consumers is still high. Actually quite hopeful about the, you know, basically the progress of both segments. Just on the balance of the order growth that you're seeing, could you just talk about the split between, say, traditional marketplace, the QSR volume, and maybe grocery as well? Are we seeing a decent quality, to where we are seeing some order growth? Yeah, look, I mean, it's roughly the same sort of profile. Obviously, when we add more grocery, we're going to see an increase of the logistics share as a result of it, which is good because, you know, that's additional growth to our business. At the same time, you can also see that in the figures. Obviously, we're becoming much better at logistics, and therefore, actually, you know, it is a good development for us to be investing in additional logistics share. Also because, the margin on, of course, food delivery is very low, but you have a lot of volume, and you might have less volume in adjacencies, but the margins are much higher. For instance, you know, one of the popular items that we are selling for MediaMarkt in Germany is a PlayStation controller. Obviously you would understand that there's a high margin on a PlayStation controller that doesn't exist for a pizza. An emergency purchase. Yeah. Thank you so much. Take care. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Lisa Yang at Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Good morning. I was just wondering if you can elaborate a little bit on the recent market share trends. This improvement we're seeing sort of Q2, mostly sort of, you know, sort of market related and, you know, be easier as opposed to maybe market share change. Any color as well on the broader competitive landscape, have you seen, late, you know, changes, recently, any type of competition that could potentially could lead you to maybe be a bit more conservative on that H2 EBITDA guide? Thank you. Thank you. Let me comment on your second question because I did not catch the first one, but I'll get to the first one after that. Regarding competition, what we currently see is that especially in smaller countries or countries in which we are quite large, we have less competition. Whether that's, you know, parties leaving our countries, less grocery delivery players investing less, you know, in their business or less vouchering from, let's say, the major international players. You know, we've seen market share growth, for instance, even in countries like Holland, which would be a bit strange, of course, given we already have such a large portion of the market. In Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, we're doing fantastically well. Those sort of countries, you see actually a lot, not a little, a lot less competitive pressure. The competitive pressure in countries such as the UK, still high. Same thing for Canada and the US. Actually for us, given that we are, in most cases, also in countries like, you know, Switzerland, quite profitable, that's actually quite beneficial to us because it allows us to invest more money, for instance, in the UK. That's, that's good. We still believe that all these food delivery businesses, they need to show that their cash flows are improving. That will be very hard for a lot of our competitors, and therefore, we do expect some less competitive pressure going forward. Could you repeat your first question? Yeah, just quickly, the improvement in Q2, in the GTVs of all the trends, was that, some of your market share improving or stabilizing or underlying market being better? Okay. First off, I think in, especially in Northern Europe, our competitors are actually quite small, right? I mean, I think even talking about market share shifts would not be very appropriate because we're talking about such small shifts, and actually, as I said, in most countries, actually, that's moving in our favor, not the other way around. In the UK and Ireland, it's very difficult. I think you're always looking at the mixed picture. When we added McDonald's, we grew a lot and our ATV went down. You see the same thing now happening to a competitor.... That's not to say huge market share gains, it's just adding a very interesting food delivery brand to your business. Overall, I think it's also a bit of the wrong discussion. You know, in the end, it's about creating large profitable businesses, and for large profitable businesses, you need scale. If you look, for instance, at the UK, it is the largest food delivery business in Europe, and therefore it has scale, and that's the reason it will become highly profitable for us. Because we have such a large marketplace business in the UK as well. I think that's the thing to look at quality of the business, not at, you know, whether you're going to between Q1 and Q2, going to have a 1% share gain, because if that 1% share is not going to be profitable, what are you doing? You know, it's pretty obvious that, you know, food delivery needs to grow up and needs to generate profits. There was a time in which, you know, money was free, and we could all invest in growth of our business. That time is now behind us, and it's time for us to show people that our businesses can be profitable. That's what we're currently doing. All that, all that talk about, oh, you know, they lost or gained what, 5% market share, while you're already by far the largest food delivery business in Europe, just in the UK, I think it's a nonsensical discussion. What about in Southern Europe and ANZ, any comments there? The trends are still, you know, declining quite a lot. Sorry, what? In Southern Europe and ANZ, could you also comment on what's going on there? First of all, I understand there's a lot of focus on it, but I think it's important that it's a tiny segment for us. I mean, our big segments are the three other ones. In Southern Europe, obviously, these businesses are subscale. We've already said that, for instance, Australia actually is not subscale, it's a large business, actually, and the profitability is improving quite a lot there. Southern Europe, we need to keep on investing because they are subscale, and subscale food delivery business will not be profitable, so they need to be actually larger. We are facing, of course, competitors that don't follow the law, and that's very convenient because you put the fines below EBITDA, right? It's not included. But these fines need to be paid because, you know, it's the law. We're actually quite confident that going forward, there will be a change in competitive pressure in Southern Europe as a result of that. As said, this is not the lion's share of our business. The lion's share of our business is in Northern Europe, plus the UK and Ireland. Okay, thank you. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Giles Thorne at Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Thank you. It was a question on the impact of the scale of you're getting in grocery on strategy. The logic is now building for a launch of a subscription program in Europe and perhaps a dedicated FMCG advertising platform. It would just be interesting to hear your latest thoughts on those two things. Thanks. Sorry. I mean, subscription is something that we are investigating, I think the logic is not building in continental Europe, because most of our competitors don't have scale, so who are you offering the subscription model to? I don't think that that's going to move the needle too much for anybody. In our case, we've launched a subscription model in Canada. You've probably picked up on that. It's something that we are investigating for other places. I think it is important to understand that, especially in the U.S., also in Canada, basically, the costs are shifting to service fees. Yes, you have no delivery fees because of your subscription program, but you do have service fees, and I think everybody in North America would recognize that situation. It is something that can move, of course, or can lock in your customers, if you have a lot of them, and, you know, we do have a lot of customers, and that's why we think it's interesting. Is it going to materially shift the market share in continental Europe? No. Thank you. On an FMCG advertising platform? Yeah, look, we have deals with the Unilevers and the Heinekens of this world. We're doing our fair share in that. We're expanding the advertisement possibilities that we have, maybe you've picked up on our logos and images in our app moving. That's something that obviously is also sort of advertisement that we have. There's quite a lot of people on the topic, and we're increasing this revenue stream. It is part of, you know, the rest of the business, obviously. It's something that we've now disclosed so that people can form some sort of opinion on whether that's going in the right direction. Yeah, it's interesting for us going forward. Thank you. Thank you. We'll move on to our next question from Sreedhar at UBS. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Can I just talk about the U.K. and Ireland margin comments you made? I think you mentioned a couple of times, it's on track to reach a similarly high Adjusted EBITDA margin as high as Northern Europe. Very different markets. You've also just maintained that it remains very competitive in the U.K. What's your confidence, what's driving your confidence, and what are the metrics that you see as helping you? I know you've talked about it in terms of optimizing the delivery network and things like that. What else is there? It's still a very big gap between where Northern Europe is and where U.K. is currently. It's a big gap to close. Just help us through that, please. You could say it's a big gap, but we improved roughly that gap in one year. You can. Yeah. First of all, U.K. is an interesting case. We have a large, very profitable marketplace business. That's already generating quite a lot of profits. Those profits we've reinvested in building up a logistics network. The U.K. is a very special case in which we were running three different models. We're running two different models now, but we're running two different models since June. On top of it, we are improving the Delco model, which is our freelance model. We do a lot of logistical orders, and to be quite frank with you, we were very good at scaling it. We were not very good at efficiency two years ago. We are getting much better at it, and that's why actually you see now the U.K. increase the profitability quite a lot. It is a business that is far larger than our German business. People sometimes forget about the scale of the UK, but it's a far larger business, and you see the improvement of the margin already in one year. You've listened to Jörg as well. We are making very significant progress in the logistics network. For instance, multi-restaurant pooling, that's sort of thing. We did not have pooling last year, for instance, in the UK. There's all sorts of things that we can improve there. There's the density issue, there's replacement of these models locally, because obviously, if you go from an employed model to a freelance model, there's a big cost benefit there. There's loads of things that we're doing on the cost side, and it allows us, and I think that's the great news. I mean, you're looking at an EBITDA number. We are also investing more money in the UK. You might not have picked up on that one, but we are also increasing our investments. Also our competitive position increases because we have a more efficient delivery network. Got you. Where are you investing, and what exactly are you doing there in terms of your investments? In the UK, in particular? In the UK, yeah. Well, we are spending, you probably, if you watch TV in the UK, you probably see a lot of Just Eat. Yeah. We are investing a lot in our marketing, in the expansion of our network, in grocery, other adjacencies, et cetera. We're just becoming a more powerful brand because we're becoming a more efficient delivery player, while obviously not our entire business in the UK is delivery. It's a large part of the business, but it is a large part of the cost. If we reduce that cost, we have more money left to invest in the UK. Thank you. Thank you. We'll take our next question from William Woods at Bernstein. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Good morning. Can I just come back to take rates and the progression over the last year? It looks like they've come down in all regions apart from Northern Europe, with revenue growth behind GTV. What's driving this? Is this the shift back into marketplace in some regions, away from delivery, or are you seeing pressure from restaurants or mix of QSRs? What's driving the take rate decrease? Thanks. I think the take rate decrease would be a mix effect. I'm looking around the table now. That should be a mix effect. Just a very slight tickle. Yeah. Sorry, a mix effect of all of the marketplace, restaurants, QSRs, fees, all that kind of things. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, and we'll move on to our next question from Wim Gille at ABN AMRO. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Yes, very good morning. I saw in the slideshow that in the UK, Delco's share of total food delivery orders, or sorry, total delivery orders is now 67%. As I'm aware, you are also still in the process to actually replace Stuart with the Delco model. What's the gross profit uplift in percentage of GTV, if we move from Stuart to the Delco model in the UK? What percentage of the delivery orders was still done through Stuart in the first half of 2023? How fast can you actually improve profitability in UK and Ireland to catch up with the Northern European profitability? Yeah, that is a complicated question, I'm going to give you a complicated answer, if you look at the 67%, now I need to. That's probably still also Scoober in there. Scoober. There is, indeed, Stuart in there as well, and there's multiple movements. First off, our own logistical network, and that's a global change, is globally becoming more efficient because we are introducing things like multi-restaurant pooling, higher pooling percentages, better estimation of, you know, when we're going to be at the restaurant, handover moments, et cetera, et cetera. That is a positive movement that we have not only in UK, but also in Canada, Australia, et cetera. Part of why, you know, Australia is becoming more profitable is that. On top of it, yes, indeed, we are moving towards more Delco orders, and that is, at this point in time, the most efficient delivery network that we have in the UK. If you move there from Stuart or you move there from Scoober, that has a cost benefit that you can clearly see if you look at the, I think it's slide 17 of the presentation. You clearly see that actually, that is a movement that's very beneficial to our profits in the UK. A simple way of thinking about it is that, yeah, I mean, you probably know how many logistics orders we have in the UK on a monthly base. The impact, even if it's just GBP 1 on an order base, is huge. It's huge for our business. That's why we are making these giant leaps in profitability in the UK. You should expect that to continue. We are on a good track in the UK. We are actually quite excited about the road to further profitability over there. Thank you. As a follow-up on that, so the U.K. is already growing, and already throwing off significant profits in cash flow. When can we expect you to lean back in and actually start grabbing market share again in the U.K. rather than defending your current share? That's, that's a, that's a more complicated topic. We are investing more money in the U.K., so it's not that we are decreasing our investments, they're actually going up. Whether that's going to lead to more market share also depends on other people that are around. I think that's a difficult topic, and it is again, it's not the thing that analysts should be looking at. Analysts should be looking at the quality of the revenue, not about, oh, look, I can give you a very obvious example, Flash grocery delivery. A lot of revenue. Profitable? Probably not. Not in most countries, at least. I think, I think that's the obvious thing that people need to be looking at. You know, can you, can you turn all that revenue into decent profits? You know, we've I think we've proven in many countries, because we're talking about segments now, right? We have all these countries in which we're actually quite profitable, not EBITDA positive or just EBITDA positive, but profitable. People obviously take out the obvious examples such as Germany and Holland, but, you know, Switzerland's also highly profitable, Ireland's highly profitable. There's all these businesses that generate these profits, and it's not straightforward that all businesses globally in food delivery or in food delivery agencies are going to be highly profitable. I know that that's what people assume, but that's not the case. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, and we'll take our next question from Marcus Diebel at J.P. Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, everyone. Thanks again for the disclose on cash flow and still a very strong metric, the cash flow generation. That's very strong. Full stop. My question is on the profitability. Jörg, you highlighted for now quite some time, that pooling is a key driver of profitability increases. Indeed, you obviously gave the metrics, the 10% decline in CPO is quite impressive. We also saw, like I think you saw 17 times more orders are getting pooled now. What I'm asking myself is, how much further is there to go in terms of EBITDA contribution from pooling? Is that something you're obviously rather radical, have implemented over the last 12 months? Is there also some more scope to have pooling as a lever going forward? That's not entirely clear to me. That would be great if you could get some light on this. Thank you. Sure. You rightfully mentioned, we introduced pooling very successfully. Also, our partners are happy with the way how we are performing that. We have also very clear customer consumer metrics on the SLA side, which we're fulfilling here. So far, we mainly focus around the rollout of single restaurant pooling, basically meaning you're batching an order from the same restaurant, which means markets where you have a high density on an individual restaurant in terms of orders, you can batch a lot of orders. Other markets where there's maybe more a general density in the market than rather concentrated towards the restaurant, multi-restaurant pooling actually has a bigger impact. In terms of multi-partner pooling, we're still to roll it out in some of our markets, so especially in some of our larger markets. There's just, for example, we haven't really rolled out multi-restaurant pooling yet, so multi-partner pooling. This actually provides a further uplift to our efficiency of the logistical network. There's quite a bit still to come. Some markets are already running with multi-partner pooling, like in some of the markets, but like I said, the UK, for example, is still to roll that out. This is only one piece, I mean, one significant piece, which is still to come. There's even other things like courier performance, by changing the order flows, and also, like Jitse was alluding to earlier, the handover moment, basically the waiting time of a courier in the restaurant or potentially even with a consumer. We're optimizing as well by sending the order in the right moment, so the courier doesn't have to wait at the restaurant for too long. There's ample opportunity for further here. I think we just began to basically really optimize the delivery network. With the expansion, basically the third pillar, which I was talking about, you will also increase further reorder rates and scale, and that again, helps to actually build a more efficient and dense network, which will lead to further profitability improvements. There's quite a lot ahead of us. We're very, very optimistic to be able to further improve the unit economics here. Perfect. Maybe, in addition to this, there's no contractual issue with the restaurants. I mean, that some of them are not happy, or have a veto to multi pooling or so that you can, you can just do what you think in this context, what you think is right? You need to understand that this actually speeds up deliveries. People think it slows it down, but you need to think about this. Mm-hmm. We know when a courier is on his or her way to a restaurant. Let's say a courier is 7 minutes from a restaurant, we would still be able to accept another order for that courier. Because of that order, assuming that the restaurant can actually make that in 7 minutes, that order has actually a much quicker delivery than a normal order, because then you need to find a courier that's free and send that courier to the restaurant. Actually, it's a faster delivery, and I know that sounds really intuitive, but it's actually all these things that we're doing, they are great because they reduce our costs and they improve our service. That's obviously what we're trying to do, what we have done in the last year. This is also why you see that we can still maintain our investments in markets, and that's very beneficial to us, and we do expect that that's going to help us going forward. Yeah, okay, makes sense. Thank you. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Marc Hesselink at ING. Your line is open, please go ahead. Yes, thank you. Can you please give some more insight on what's happening on the cohort and the active customers? If I'm correct, the active customer additions have been quite similar over the last quarters. However, the churn on the especially the COVID customers, was much higher. We're still now down versus the half year ago. How is that trending? Can you increase that active customer base again in the second half of the year? Yeah. to be clear, that active customer base is 12 months. Therefore, any effect that you see, you need to make sure that you think of this. 12 months ago, obviously, you know, we're looking at last year, there's a bit of a lag in, you know, when you will see an improvement of that figure. Usually when you will see, you know, our orders pick up, that's also, you know, that is typically when you have new additions that are then compensating for the churn, roughly. Maybe let me rephrase it differently. The churn levels that you're seeing are still at an elevated level, or are they already more normalized? No, no, because I think it's very important to understand that these customers left after COVID, so they left last year. Let's assume you have 100 customers, you would drop to 90. It's not that they dropped further, it's just that they're not there anymore. You stay at 90, and then you grow from the 90. Obviously, if you look at an active customer number of 12 months, then you are looking at the situation of, you know, basically an average six months ago. On the churn, it was more like the absolute churn number being elevated because you had a lot of more new customers coming through COVID, but the relative churn number was actually doing very well. Okay, clear. You would say it's the normal behavior again, what you're seeing on a day-to-day? I think it's fair to say that Northern Europe, UK, Ireland, that looks pretty normal to us. That looks like, you know, we're back to relatively normal normal seasonality. We still have a way to go, of course, in North America and Southern Europe. North, you know, the lion's share of our business looks like it's in very good shape. Okay, clear. Thanks. Okay. I would like to round off. Thank you. Okay, you're going to round it up. Sure. No, there are no further questions in queue. I'll hand it back to Jitse for closing remarks. Thank you. I do see that that was my fault, actually, on this piece of paper. I would like to round off this analyst and investor call by thanking you for participating and for your questions. Should you have any additional questions or remarks, please reach out to our investor relations team. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. Continue to stay safe. You may now disconnect.