(new: headline, closing price, classification of daily loss, further expert opinion)

FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - A surprising lowering of the outlook caused Hellofresh to suffer the biggest share price loss in the company's history on Thursday. After at times even more significant losses and the lowest level since 2019, the share price fell by 22.4 percent to 15.915 euros at the close of trading. As a result, the shares of the food box delivery company were at the bottom of the MDax, the index of medium-sized German companies.

The reduction of the annual targets just a few weeks after the presentation of quarterly figures cost the company a lot of credibility on the market. Hellofresh pointed to problems in its most important single market, the USA, such as the surprisingly low number of new customers in important weeks of the current quarter, including the days around the US Thanksgiving holiday.

However, the Group also has to deal with other problems: In Arizona, the ramp-up of the new production facility is dragging on. Hellofresh wants to produce ready meals there and has high hopes for the so-called Ready-To-Eat product line, which is set to become the company's largest by 2025. The water shortage in the desert state and a lack of staff are also making the production processes more difficult. And in Illinois, the planned maintenance of a production facility took longer than expected.

"Not the fourth quarter we had expected," commented analyst Nizla Naizer from Deutsche Bank. Although the reasons for the forecast reduction appeared to be of a temporary nature, she preferred to wait and see. She therefore removed her "buy" recommendation and now rates the stock as "hold".

William Woods from the analyst firm Bernstein Research is much more skeptical and rates the shares as "underperform". It is hard to believe that the reasons for cutting the targets were not already foreseeable a few weeks ago at the quarterly balance sheet. In addition, Hellofresh's management has admitted - although it considers the problems to be largely temporary - that the US cooking box business is weak.

Woods believes that this is more structural, i.e. a fundamental problem. The market is already saturated and customers change frequently. The business model as a whole is therefore proving difficult, which is also likely to be the case in 2024. For Thomas Maul from DZ Bank, the question also arises as to whether the weakness in acquiring new customers in the United States is due to structural reasons or merely the result of the gloomy consumer climate. He sees rising customer acquisition costs as the main risk in a highly competitive market.

With Thursday's price slide, the Hellofresh share has lost more than half of its value since its annual high of 34.36 euros in mid-September. For 2023, the share price is now down by almost exactly the same amount as today's loss.

During the coronavirus pandemic, food suppliers such as Hellofresh were still among investors' favorites. Restaurants were closed, people stayed at home, ordered ready-made meals or cooked a lot themselves. The share price shot up accordingly - from less than ten euros before the pandemic to almost 100 euros in November 2021. However, the biggest drop in the share price to date, at 15 percent, came a year earlier, when there was news of the first effective coronavirus vaccine from Mainz-based company Biontech.

Hellofresh went public towards the end of 2017 with an issue price of 10.25 euros per share./mis/tih/jha/gl/bek/he