Europe’s stock markets were a sea of red early Wednesday morning, as soaring coronavirus case numbers threatened to trigger new lockdowns in countries such as France and Germany. But on the DAX, the index of the 30 biggest companies trading on the Frankfurt bourse, one stock was standing tall.
That stock was Delivery Hero, whose share price was up as much as 5% Wednesday morning, while the overall DAX was down over 3%.
The Berlin-based online food-delivery giant, which joined the DAX just a couple of months ago—it took the collapsed Wirecard‘s spot—is doing well during the pandemic. It released its Q3 results Wednesday, showing a year-on-year doubling of quarterly orders to 362 million. Quarterly revenues nearly doubled too, reaching €776 million ($913 million).
But the pandemic clearly isn’t the only driver of Delivery Hero’s success; this is the seventh consecutive quarter in which the company’s revenues pretty much doubled year-on-year.
“Delivery Hero continues to focus on expanding our business with several strategic investments, like our entry into Japan and the acquisitions of InstaShop in MENA and Glovo’s business in Latin America,” said CEO Niklas Östberg in a statement. “We are proud of the incredible growth trajectory that Delivery Hero is on.”
Delivery Hero said its “quick commerce” service—meaning the speedy delivery of groceries and household goods—is now available across 41 of the 49 markets in which the company has a presence, having launched in April this year. Overall, it said it is now partnering with over 30,000 shops and vendors. The company is also investing in hundreds of “Dmart” warehouses that it says could enable delivery times as low as 15 minutes in some markets.
Alongside its latest results, Delivery Hero updated the lower bound of its full-year revenue guidance from €2.6 billion to €2.7 billion (the upper bound stays at €2.8 billion).
It should be noted that Delivery Hero no longer operates in Germany itself, having sold off its German Lieferando brand to Anglo-Dutch rival Takeaway.com a couple of years back. This fact caused some controversy when Delivery Hero joined the DAX 30 this year, but membership in that club is based on market capitalization and trading volume, not German activity.
Delivery Hero’s share price has risen 107% over the past year, which is the kind of pop the rest of the DAX 30 can only dream of. The next-best performer is property firm Deutsche Wohnen, which had a 30% rise, followed by Deutsche Post at 27%. Wirecard aside (as it’s not there anymore), the biggest loser has been the pharmaceutical and life-sciences giant Bayer, whose share price has fallen 36% in the past 12 months (and nearly 3% Wednesday morning alone).
At the time of this writing late Wednesday morning, the continuing European stock market slump had seen the DAX fall 3.1%, France’s CAC 40 2.8%, Italy’s FTSE MIB 2.6%, and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 1.7%.
The trend looked set to continue into the U.S., where S&P 500 futures were down 1.4%—though that is also down to the looming U.S. Election and fading hopes for an imminent stimulus agreement.
