Just Eat Takeaway is set to be acquired by investment group Prosus in a more than €4bn deal that will lead to the European food delivery company’s delisting from public markets.
The all-cash offer of €20.30 a share is a 22 per cent premium over Just Eat’s recent three-month high. It marks an end to a tumultuous few years for the Amsterdam-based group, whose shares surged during the Covid-19 pandemic but fell sharply as lockdowns ended.
For Prosus, the deal is its most significant transaction since chief executive Fabricio Bloisi took over in May with ambitious plans to double its market value.
Bloisi, who formerly led iFood, the Prosus-owned food delivery app that dominates his native Brazil, said on Monday the Just Eat deal was an “opportunity to create a European tech champion”.
Prosus, the investment arm of South African group Naspers, had sought Just Eat for years. In early 2020, it lost out to Netherlands-based Takeaway.com in a bidding war despite offering £5.5bn for the food delivery pioneer.
Since then, the group has been led by Jitse Groen, the Dutch entrepreneur who founded Takeaway.com in 2000. At the height of the pandemic-fuelled delivery boom in 2021, the company acquired US-based food ordering platform Grubhub for $7.3bn before selling it last November for just $650mn.
As part of cost cutting in December, Just Eat Takeaway delisted from the London Stock Exchange to focus on its Amsterdam listing.
Groen said on Monday that the group was now a “faster growing, more profitable and predominantly European-based business” and that the deal would “accelerate our investments and growth across food, groceries, fintech and other adjacencies”.
He said he and the company’s existing management team would remain.
Prosus previously bought a one-third stake in iFood from Just Eat in 2022. It plans to apply a similar playbook to the rest of the food delivery group by focusing on using technology such as artificial intelligence to improve its products and services.
Prosus also holds minority stakes in several other food delivery groups, including Berlin-based Delivery Hero, Chinese market leader Meituan and India’s Swiggy, which recently went public.