Just Eat shares pop on $7.3bn deal for Grubhub
Shares in European fast food giant Just Eat Takeaway are rising as investors take stock of its latest move to buy US rival Grubhub for $7.3bn (£5.8bn).
If completed, the all-stock deal would create the world’s largest food delivery provider outside of China.
Just Eat’s share price rose 3.4 per cent before midday today, hitting a high of 7,900p.
The deal will pose a blow to Uber, which abandoned talks to merge Grubhub with its own Uber Eats division after antitrust concerns were raised in the US.
Just Eat and Takeaway only recently gained antitrust approval for their own $7.8bn merger in the UK, after the latter beat out a rival bid from Prosus.
“It’ll be biting off far more than it did when acquiring Just Eat (only last year!), but the playbook will be the same,” Jefferies analyst Giles Thorne said in a note, describing the bid as “another opportunistic cross-border land grab” by Takeaway.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, pending regulatory approval.
In 2019 Just Eat Takeaway had annual revenues of €1.5bn, compared with Grubhub’s €1.2bn.
The two companies said the merger will create “a company built around four of the world’s largest profit pools in food delivery: the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany”.