Food delivery group’s board approves takeover by investor in German rival Delivery Hero. The food delivery business Just Eat Takeaway.com has been snapped up by an investor in its German rival Delivery Hero for €4.1bn (£3.4bn), just two months after it left the London Stock Exchange.
Just Eat’s board has unanimously approved the takeover by the South African-owned internet investor Prosus, in an all-cash deal six years after Prosusmade its first effort to buy the British part of the business. The deal will be worth €20.30 a share for holders of Just Eat’s Amsterdam-listed shares. That represents a 22% premium to its three-month high, but less than a fifth of its peak above €100 in 2020.
Just Eat has endured a bruising period as a listed company. Its valuation rose during the Covid pandemic, as people turned to food delivery while in lockdowns. Yet that boom has faded, and left a legacy of bad investments. The delivery company was formed in 2020 from a merger between Britain’s Just Eat and its Dutch rival Takeaway.com just before the pandemic. Prosus had tried to hijack that merger in 2019 with a hostile £5.1bn bid for Just Eat. The combined company was for some time a member of London’s FTSE 100 index, with a valuation of £15bn.
However, it made several missteps, most notably the disastrous acquisition of its US rival GrubHub at the height of the pandemic bubble. Just Eat in November said it was selling GrubHub for $650m (£514m), compared with a purchase price of $7.3bn. In late December, the company delisted its London-listed shares to cut costs, in a further blow to the UK’s international financial standing amid an string of departures from the exchange.
Fabricio Bloisi, the Prosus chief executive, said the purchase gave the “opportunity to create a European tech champion”. He said Prosus “already has an extensive food delivery portfolio outside of Europe” as well as “a proven track record of profitable growth through investment”.
Prosus is owned by Naspers, a South African company with interests across media, online classified ads, payments and education, as well as food delivery. Naspers’s success in the internet economy stemmed largely from a canny 2001 bet on China’s Tencent, which has risen to be one of the biggest tech conglomerates in the world.
Prosus owns 28% of Delivery Hero, 4% of the Chinese food delivery company Meituan, and 25% of Swiggy, an Indian online food company. Sign up to Business Today. Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning.
after newsletter promotion. Prosus said it wanted to follow the same growth path as another of its investments, the Brazilian company iFood. It claimed that its use of artificial intelligence “revolutionised operations” at iFood, and said it would aim to use the same tactics at Just Eat Takeway.com.
Just Eat has “profitable cash-generative operations, with considerable growth potential” in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, Prosus said. Jitse Groen, the Just Eat Takeaway.com chief executive, said: “Just Eat Takeaway.com is now a faster growing, more profitable and predominantly European-based business.
