Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg speaking at the Noah tech conference in Berlin on June 13, 2019.
Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Delivery Hero published preliminary financial results on Monday, a week earlier than planned, that showed the company grew sales in line with its guidance last year and is forecasting stronger profitability in 2024.
The results, which are unaudited and based on preliminary information, are being released by the company early in a bid to push back on investor flight last week over the food delivery giant’s asset sales strategy.
Here’s how the company did:
Revenue: 10.5 billion euros ($11.3 billion) in annual 2023 revenues, versus 10 billion euros expected by analysts, according to LSEG data
Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization): Delivery Hero says adjusted EBITDA “exceeded” 250 million euros ($269.4 million). Analysts had forecast adjusted EBITDA of 254.3 million euros, per LSEG
Delivery Hero said group GMV (gross merchandise value), which is the combined value of overall orders on its platforms, grew 6.7% year-over-year to 12.3 billion euros in the fourth quarter of 2023, and by 6.8% to 47.6 billion euros in full-year 2023.
Total segment revenue increased 15.7% to 3 billion in the fourth quarter. Full-year sales came in at 11.1 billion euros for the full year, up 15.7% year-on-year.
That matches company guidance for “around 15% YoY [year-over-year]” growth in 2023.
Adjusted EBITDA, which is Delivery Hero’s measure of profitability, totaled more than 250 million euros in full-year 2023, Delivery Hero said, and the company reported adjusted EBITDA margin of 0.6%.
Delivery Hero said the results were driven by healthy order growth in many of its geographies.
Most notably, Delivery Hero also gave some rosy guidance for 2024, with the delivery company forecasting group GMV growth of 7-9% for the year, higher than its performance in 2023.
Delivery Hero said it expects segment revenue growth of between 15% and 17% in full-year 2024, and an adjusted EBITDA of 725 million to 775 million euros.
The company is also forecasting positive free cash flow for the year.
Delivery Hero said it would publish additional preliminary numbers for the fourth quarter in a trading update slated for Feb. 14, when it was originally due to report numbers.
It comes after Delivery Hero shares lost more than 26% of their value last week, slipping to their lowest price since 2022, as investors reacted to a mix of news surrounding portfolio asset sales.
On Tuesday, Delivery Hero said it would sell all of its 4.5% stake in British food delivery firm Deliveroo for £76.8 million ($97 million), a value far lower than the price it paid for the shares in 2021.
Then, on Friday, Delivery Hero shares sank sharply after a report said the company had ended discussions to sell certain assets within its Southeast Asian food delivery business Foodpanda to Singapore’s Grab.
Delivery Hero denied the report, putting out a statement saying that any rumors that negotiations for the potential sale of the Foodpanda assets had collapsed were “false,” and that talks are ongoing.
Delivery Hero is one of the largest food delivery services globally with more 2.2 billion users.
It competes with the likes of American giant DoorDash, Britain’s Deliveroo, Anglo-Dutch firm Just Eat Takeaway.com, Singaporean company Grab, and Indonesia-based Gojek.
CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, speaks during the launch of the supercomputer Gefion, where the new AI supercomputer has been established in collaboration with EIFO and NVIDIA at Vilhelm Lauritzen Terminal in Kastrup, Denmark October 23, 2024.
Ritzau Scanpix | Mads Claus Rasmussen | Via Reuters
Nvidia is replacing rival chipmaker Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in artificial intelligence and a major shift in the semiconductor industry.
Intel shares were down 1% in extended trading on Friday. Nvidia shares rose 1%.
Nvidia shares have climbed over 170% so far in 2024 after jumping roughly 240% last year, as investors have rushed to get a piece of the AI chipmaker. Nvidia’s market cap has swelled to $3.3 trillion, second only to Apple among publicly traded companies.
Companies including Microsoft,Meta, Google and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), such as the H100, in massive quantities to build clusters of computers for their AI work. Nvidia’s revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, and has at least tripled in three of them. The company has sginaled that demand for its next-generation AI GPU called Blackwell is “insane.”
With the addition of Nvidia, four of the six trillion-dollar tech companies are now in the index. The two not in the Dow are Alphabet and Meta.
While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors.
Intel said in a filing this week that the board’s audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August.
The Dow contains 30 components and is weighted by the share price of the individual stocks instead of total market value. Nvidia put itself in better position to join the index in May, when the company announced a 10-for-1 stock split. While doing nothing to its market cap, the move slashed the price of each share by 90%, allowing the company to become a part of the Dow without having too heavy a weighting.
The switch is the first change to the index since February, when Amazon replaced Walgreens Boots Alliance. Over the years, the Dow has been playing catchup in gaining exposure to the largest technology companies. The stocks in the index are chosen by a committee from S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Charles Liang, chief executive officer of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, June 5, 2024. The trade show runs through June 7.
Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Super Micro investors continued to rush the exits on Friday, pushing the stock down another 9% and bringing this week’s selloff to 44%, after the data center company lost its second auditor in less than two years.
The company’s shares fell as low as $26.23, wiping out all of the gains for 2024. Shares had peaked at $118.81 in March, at which point they were up more than fourfold for the year. Earlier that month, S&P Dow Jones added the stock to the S&P 500, and Wall Street was rallying around the company’s growth, driven by sales of servers packed with Nvidia’sartificial intelligence processors.
Super Micro’s spectacular collapse since March has wiped out roughly $55 billion in market cap and left the company at risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq. On Wednesday, as the stock was in the midst of its second-worst day ever, Super Micro said it will provide a “business update” regarding its latest quarter on Tuesday, which is Election Day in the U.S.
The company’s recent challenges date back to August, when Super Micro said it would not file its annual report on time with the SEC. Noted short seller Hindenburg Research then disclosed a short position in the company and wrote in a report that it identified “fresh evidence of accounting manipulation.” The Wall Street Journal later reported that the Department of Justice was in the early stages of a probe into the company.
Super Micro disclosed on Wednesday that Ernst & Young had resigned as its accounting firm just 17 months after taking over from Deloitte & Touche. The auditor said it was “unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management.”
A Super Micro spokesperson told CNBC that the company “disagrees with E&Y’s decision to resign, and we are working diligently to select new auditors.” Super Micro does not expect matters raised by Ernst & Young to “result in any restatements of its quarterly financial results for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, or for prior fiscal years,” the representative said.
Analysts at Argus Research on Thursday downgraded the stock in the intermediate term to a hold, citing the Hindenburg note, reports of the Justice Department investigation and the departure of Super Micro’s accounting firm, which the analysts called a “serious matter.” Argus’ fears go beyond accounting irregularities, with the firm suggesting that the company may be doing business with problematic entities.
“The DoJ’s concerns, in our view, may be mainly about related-party transactions and about SMCI products ending up in the hands of sanctioned Russian companies,” the analysts wrote.
In September, the month after announcing its filing delay, Super Micro said it had received a notification from the Nasdaq indicating that its late status meant the company wasn’t in compliance with the exchange’s listing rules. Super Micro said the Nasdaq’s rules allowed the company 60 days to file its report or submit a plan to regain compliance. Based on that timeframe, the deadline would be mid-November.
Though Super Micro hasn’t filed financials with the SEC since May, the company said in an August earnings presentation that revenue more than doubled for a third straight quarter. Analysts expect that, for the fiscal first quarter ended September, revenue jumped more than 200% to $6.45 billion, according to LSEG. That’s up from $2.1 billion a year earlier and $1.9 billion in the same fiscal quarter of 2023.
Peopl walk outside Steve Jobs Theater at the Apple Park campus before Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.
Nic Coury | AFP | Getty Images
Apple will buy Pixelmator, the creator of image editing apps for Apple’s iPhone and Mac platforms, Pixelmator announced Friday in a blog post.
Pixelmator, a Lithuanian company, was founded in 2007, and in recent years has been best known for Pixelmator and Pixelmator Pro, which compete with Adobe Photoshop. It also makes Photomator, a photo editing app.
Apple has highlighted Pixelmator apps over the years in its keynote product launches. In 2018, Apple named Pixelmator Pro its Mac App of the year, citing the company’s enthusiastic embrace of Apple’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, such as removing distracting objects from photos or making automated color adjustments.
“We’ve been inspired by Apple since day one, crafting our products with the same razor-sharp focus on design, ease of use, and performance,” Pixelmator said in its blog post.
Apple does not acquire as many large companies as its Silicon Valley rivals. It prefers to make smaller acquisitions of companies with products or people that it can use to create Apple features. Neither Pixelmator nor Apple provided a price for the transaction.
Pixelmator said in its blog post that there “will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time.”
Earlier this week, Apple released the first version of Apple Intelligence, a suite of features that includes photo editing abilities such as Clean Up, which can remove people or objects from photos using AI.
Apple has acquired other popular apps that received accolades at the company’s product launches and awards ceremonies.
In 2020, Apple bought Dark Sky, a weather app that eventually became integrated into Apple’s default weather app. In 2017, it bought Workflow, an automation and macro app that eventually became Shortcuts, the iPhone’s scripting app, as well as the groundwork for a more capable Siri assistant.