Liquidity Public Markets

Delivery Hero Divests German Business To Dutch Rival As Food Delivery Matures

Berlin’s Delivery Hero announced today that it has sold its German operations to Takeaway.com for €930 million (USD$1.07 billion), essentially ceding the German market to its rival.

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Amsterdam-based Takeaway is paying about 508 million euros in cash and the remainder in equity for Delivery Hero’s Pizza.de, Lieferheld and Foodora businesses in Germany. Delivery Hero will receive an 18 percent stake in Takeaway as part of the transaction.

The deal, which is expected to close sometime in the first half of 2019, is an example of consolidation in an emerging space.

In a statement, Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg said the deal will make its company “better positioned.”

He added: “We will not only achieve but even exceed our revenue targets for 2019, notwithstanding the deconsolidation of the German business. At the same time we will hold a stake in Takeaway.com and have a significantly better cash position – the latter allowing us to reinvest at attractive returns.”

Takeaway.com Founder and CEO Jitse Groen, said the deal allows their firm to offer consumer and partner restaurants “a stronger proposition.”

It also allows Takeaway.com to operate on a significantly larger scale which is essential in building a profitable online food delivery business,” he said in a statement.

The acquisition nearly doubles Takeaway.com’s orders in Germany, but Groen believes there’s still plenty of opportunity still considering that “penetration of online food delivery in Germany is amongst the lowest in Europe.”

It appears that Takeaway is indeed picking up growing businesses. For the nine months ending September 2018, Delivery Hero’s German business recorded 23 million orders, Gross Merchandise Value of €462 million (USD$526.15 million) and revenues of €76 million (USD$86.55 million), which represented an increase of 13 percent, 16 percent, and 16 percent, respectively from the previous year.

Prior to going public in mid-2017, Delivery Hero had raised $2.6 billion, according to its Crunchbase profile. It had been active in the German market since 2010, according to its statement.

Delivery Hero is still a global business. Per its website, it operates in 41 countries (and more than 4,000 cities)  in Europe, the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region worldwide. Delivery Hero also operates its own delivery service in roughly 200 cities around the world..

The food delivery space is getting more investor attention as of late. Just yesterday, our Savannah Dowling reported that one of India’s leading food delivery companies, Swiggy, scored a $1 billion round led by South Africa-based Naspers with participation from a new investor, China’s Tencent, among others.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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