Red numbers back in online supermarket outing: 45 million loss

This is evidenced by the company’s latest annual accounts, which were announced Friday via the Chamber of Commerce (KvK).

Online supermarket

The Dutch online supermarket was founded in 2015 by four entrepreneurs, including CEO Michael Muller. Three years later Picnic was launched in Germany. Last year, the company also became active in France.

Initially, Mueller predicted that Picnic would soon turn a profit, but that has turned out differently in recent years due to significant investments in growth.

Huge investment

New annual calculations also show that Picnic’s hedge margins narrowed somewhat in 2020. The alleged solvency fell from nearly 80 percent to nearly 56 percent. By the way this is still very powerful.

Moreover, Picnic boosted its shares last September, thanks to an injection of 600 million euros of capital from investors. This investment, of course, has yet to show up in the 2020 numbers.

This isn’t the first time investors have used Picnic’s money faucet. In 2017, they already invested 100 million euros in the company, and in 2019 they invested another 250 million euros.

Megaverlizine

Thanks to the huge amounts that investors have poured into the company, Picnic can afford to lose tens of millions of euros every year. In 2019, the delivery service recorded a loss of more than 49 million euros.

It hurts that that loss appears to be another €5.8m higher than Picnic announced at the beginning of last year. When compiling the most recent annual figures, it turns out that an arithmetic error – a “material error” – was made a year ago.

Rekenblunder

Finally, the annual accounts show how sales volume has evolved in the two separate delivery service markets.

In the Netherlands, Picnic sold nearly 80 percent more in 2020, with a turnover of 377 million euros. The turnover in Germany was 78 million euros, about 3.5 times more than the previous year.

The number of Picnic employees, counted as full-time jobs, increased from 510 to 937.