Just Eat Takeaway.com NV boosted its full-year forecast and said it’s continuing to recover from last year’s deceleration, led by operations in Northern Europe, the UK and Ireland.
(Bloomberg) — Just Eat Takeaway.com NV boosted its full-year forecast and said it’s continuing to recover from last year’s deceleration, led by operations in Northern Europe, the UK and Ireland.
The food-delivery company upgraded its 2023 guidance for adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to about €275 million ($302 million), from about €225 million previously. It also expects to turn free cash flow positive by mid-2024 and said it would begin a share buyback program of as much as €150 million.
“Our efforts to improve profitability are running ahead of plan,” Jitse Groen, chief executive officer of Just Eat Takeaway said in a statement on Wednesday.
Jefferies analyst Giles Thorne said in a note that the company’s guidance was a “material upgrade.”
Just Eat is among the food-delivery companies that experienced surging orders during the pandemic but have since grappled with a slowdown after restaurants reopened for in-person dining. Inflation has forced many to refocus on their bottom lines.
Rival Deliveroo significantly scaled back operations last year, exiting several European countries and said it would cut 9% of its workforce. Just Eat announced last month it would cut around 1,700 drivers in the UK and transition that market toward a gig-worker model that Groen had previously denounced.
Just Eat said it continues to actively explore the partial or full sale of Grubhub which it acquired in 2021 for about $7.3 billion. Last year, it wrote down the value of the US-based unit by €3 billion ($3.1 billion).
Orders fell 14% to 227.8 million in the first quarter, the Amsterdam-based company said in the statement. That compared to the 231.1 million average forecast from analysts in a Bloomberg survey.
The total value of orders placed on Just Eat’s platform last quarter fell to €6.67 billion, compared to an average estimate of €6.91 billion. The company said it expects the total value of orders to grow in the range of -4% to +2% year-on-year in 2023, with a return to growth skewed toward the end of the year.
(Updates with detail throughout. A previous version corrected the 4th paragraph to clarify orders fell)
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