Just Eat sold at bargain price as takeaway boom fades
Just Eat is being taken over for less than a third of what it was worth during the pandemic, as a Covid-era boom in ordering in fades.
The Anglo-Dutch food delivery giant, which is listed in Amsterdam, confirmed on Monday that it had agreed to a €4.1bn (£3.4bn) takeover offer. At its peak in 2021, Just Eat Takeaway was worth £14.2bn.
It is being taken over by Dutch investment group Prosus, which is paying €20.30 a share. The buyout comes two months after the company dropped its London dual listing.
The price is a 49pc premium to the group's average value over the last three months. However, it is a significantly less than the €100 a share the business was trading at during the pandemic.
The end of the pandemic has driven a slump in takeaway orders, while a botched US expansion has also weighed on Just Eat Takeaway, as the company is officially known. Just Eat paid $7.3bn (£5.8bn) to acquire New York-based Grubhub in 2021, before selling it for just $650m in November last year.
Prosus previously attempted to buy Just Eat in 2019 for more than £5.5bn when it was a constituent of the FTSE 100. It lost out to Just Eat's Dutch rival Takeaway.com, led by entrepreneur Jitse Groen. The combined businesses were valued at £9bn at the time, but shares have plunged since then. The group's shares are down roughly 80pc from their highs during the pandemic.
Just Eat is battling for market share in the UK's fiercely competitive food delivery market, where its main rivals are Deliveroo and Uber Eats.
Mr Groen said: 'Prosus fully supports our strategic plans, and its extensive resources will help to further accelerate our investments.'
Prosus, which is valued at more than €100bn, has stakes in several of international food delivery businesses, including a 28pc holding in Germany's Delivery Hero and stakes in China's Meituan, Brazil's iFood and India's Swiggy.
The investment group is majority owned by the South African media conglomerate Naspers. Prosus was spun out from the group, which made hundreds of billions of dollars from an early investment in China's technology group Tencent in 2001.
Fabricio Bloisi, Prosus's chief executive, said Just Eat had the 'opportunity to create a European tech champion'.
The deal sent other food delivery stocks climbing across Europe as investors digested the deal. Deliveroo's shares were up 7pc in London, while shares in Delivery Hero, which is listed in Frankfurt, climbed 8pc. The takeover is likely to fuel speculation of further food delivery merger activity.
However, Prosus's shares fell 7pc in early trading in Amsterdam.
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