(Bloomberg) — Prosus NV agreed to buy Just Eat Takeaway.com NV for €4.1 billion ($4.3 billion), as the Dutch technology investor with stakes in several food delivery companies seeks to become an industry giant.
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The all-cash deal at €20.30 a share is a 49% premium to the three-month volume-weighted average price, the company said in a statement Monday. The stock closed at €12.43 on Friday.
The purchase marks an effort by Prosus Chief Executive Officer Fabricio Bloisi to find new sources of growth after an early investment in Chinese video game company Tencent Holdings Ltd. ended up dominating the company’s books and skewing its market value. Just Eat will add to Prosus’s food delivery portfolio, which includes stakes in companies with operations in South America, India and Southeast Asia. After a growth surge during the pandemic, food delivery apps have been hit by cutthroat price wars, which have driven industry consolidation.
Bloisi said his company has $18 billion in cash and could use as much as $11 billion on acquisitions and investment in technology, although it plans for now to focus on growth and closing this deal. “My plan after this transaction is to grow all our businesses faster — and we believe we can grow faster with Just Eat Takeaway,” he said in an interview on Monday.
Just Eat shares rose as much as 56% in Amsterdam on Monday after the announcement, the most on record. Shares in Prosus fell as much as 8.6%.
Prosus is an emerging markets investor, while Just Eat is a market leader in places like the Netherlands and the UK, “so there is no complementarity or synergies to be expected,” Degroof Petercam analyst Joren Van Aken said by email. “Maybe investors are questioning what Prosus’ added value is here.”
Amsterdam-based Just Eat operates in 17 markets including the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. The company has been been streamlining operations after a post-pandemic slump in consumer demand. It recently sold its US operation Grubhub for about $650 million, a steep discount from the acquisition price of $7.3 billion in 2021.
The acquisition will allow Just Eat to “compete more effectively against Uber Eats and Deliveroo, leveraging Prosus’ stake in Brazilian food delivery company iFood as a model to improve operations,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Tatiana Lisitsina said in a note.
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