Takeaway in US$8bn deal

TAKEAWAY.com NV has won a months-long bidding war for Just Eat Plc, ending a contentious battle with Prosus NV and creating Europe’s largest food-delivery operation at a time of heightened competition in the industry.
Just Eat investors holding 80,4 percent of its shares have formally backed Takeaway’s all-stock bid, which values the company at about 6,1 billion pounds (US$8 billion), Amsterdam-based Takeaway said last week.
The new venture, which currently has a combined market value of about US$14 billion, will merge two European food delivery companies at a time of heightened competition in the industry, with rivals such as Uber Technologies Inc. facing off for a share of the fast-growing sector.
Following completion of the merger, Takeaway has pledged to explore exiting Just Eat’s 33 percent stake in Brazil’s iFood, in which Prosus also invested. Takeaway has said it will return about 50 percent of the net proceeds to shareholders of the combined group.
The new company, based in Amsterdam and listed in London, will be called Just Eat Takeaway NV and be the biggest of its kind in Europe.
A key battleground will be the UK, with Uber Eats and Deliveroo investing heavily in the country and expanding from the logistics of delivery — getting the food from the restaurant to your door — to launching rival marketplace platforms that concentrate on aggregating available eateries for users.
Takeaway’s victory also means it is buying back its first attempt at cracking the UK market. It launched in the country in 2012, but sold the business four years later to Just Eat, after struggling with growth.
The Dutch firm announced an all-stock bid for Just Eat in late July valuing the British company at about 731 pence per share, or ₤5 billion. Prosus, a spinoff from South African media giant Naspers, swooped in with a hostile cash offer in October, sparking the bidding war.
Following Friday’s announcement, Prosus chief executive Bob van Dijk said the company would pursue other alternatives.
“Just Eat is not an acquisition we wanted to make at any cost” he said. “While we have significant financial capacity we believe that our final offer of 800 pence per share was appropriate in light of the investment required.”
Takeaway chief executive Jitse Groen, who will lead the new company, was publicly irritated by the Prosus challenge. When asked about whether he’d have to raise his offer at an industry conference in November, he said “I don’t want to be the idiot that runs into a ratio that doesn’t make any sense”. — Bloomberg