(Reuters) – Ride-hailing company Uber will buy Delivery Hero's Foodpanda-branded takeout business in Taiwan for $950 million in cash, the companies said on Tuesday.
The deal comes as Germany's Delivery Hero looks to sell some of its overseas operations to improve profitability amid growing investor concerns about the company's cash position.
“We need to focus our resources on other parts of our global footprint, where we need to focus on our customers, vendors and passengers,” Delivery Hero co-founder and CEO Niklas Ostberg said in a joint statement. I think we can have the biggest impact.”
The company was also considering selling its Foodpanda business in some Southeast Asian markets as part of its business restructuring. The company announced in February that it had concluded negotiations regarding the potential sale of these businesses.
According to the companies, as part of the agreement with Delivery Hero, the company also agreed to purchase newly issued shares of Delivery Hero worth $300 million at a price of 33 euros each, giving it approximately 2.98% of the company's stock. It is said that he did.
Delivery Hero's share price closed at 25.32 euros on Monday.
Although online food delivery platforms are only a small part of Taiwan's competitive food delivery market, Foodpanda's business on the island is at breakeven in terms of adjusted core profit for the trailing 12 months to March 31. The companies said.
The business processed transactions worth 1.6 billion euros ($1.73 billion) in the same period.
The companies aim to complete the transaction by the first half of 2025.
(1 dollar = 0.9271 euro)
(Reporting by Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Subransh Sahu)
