Restaurant delivery giant DoorDash seemingly has a lot going for it.
It controls about two-thirds of the U.S. restaurant delivery sector and last year topped $10 billion in revenue. It posted a strong recent earnings report that encouraged investors and increased its market value to more than $83 billion. And it's adding new business lines that could serve as the foundation for many years of future growth.
But when an analyst asked DoorDash CEO Tony Xu this week whether the company's future growth would come more from attracting new customers or persuading existing DoorDash customers to order more frequently, he responded with a candid take on how far he thinks his company still has to go.
"If you took our oldest area of exploration, U.S. restaurants...we're still single-digit percentages of the U.S. restaurant industry sales," he said. "If you look at globally, that number would be even smaller."
"And then if you added the population point that you made," Xu added, "we are a speck of dust in terms of how penetrated we are. And I think, the answer is really both, in terms of penetration and frequency."
Whether Xu was trying to temper expectations or, more likely, encourage investors to believe that DoorDash's best days are yet to come, it served as a reminder of how the pure-play food delivery sector is still relatively nascent.
DoorDash, which launched in 2013 and went public in 2020, broke away from competitors like Uber Eats and GrubHub in the U.S. food delivery market partly by focusing on suburbs instead of big cities, where there was often less delivery competition and larger spending per order. Pandemic-era lockdowns also fueled massive growth.
In recent years, DoorDash has expanded into delivering from grocery stores and from non-food retailers, and has attempted to carefully expand its online advertising business in ways that don't degrade the customer experience.
"I think the most important thing of getting the product right is making sure that we can balance the needs of the advertiser with the needs of the consumer," Xu said on the earnings call, "because...the way I think about this is that a healthy marketplace always precedes and trumps an advertising business."
In its latest quarter, DoorDash had $2.9 billion in revenue, a 25% gain from the same period a year earlier. Net profit was $141 million, versus a $151 million loss in the year-ago quarter.
Over the past 12 months, DoorDash's shares have nearly doubled to $201.
Xu also cautioned that while he sees promise in DoorDash's new software platform, which provides tools for restaurants and retailers to take orders through their own websites and apps, the company is currently addressing mostly low-hanging fruit.
"[W]e're really only addressing a couple of problems with first-party delivery and first-party ordering," he said, "but obviously if you think about how do you become a digital powerhouse, you're going to have to do more than that."
