Prosus to buy Just Eat for €4.1 billion as takeaway boom fades

Food-delivery platform Just Eat has been gobbled up by a Dutch rival. Now there could be further consolidation in the sector

Just Eat logo displayed on a smartphone
(Image credit: Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Two months after it left the London Stock Exchange, food-delivery company Just Eat has been “snapped up” by Prosus for €4.1 billion in cash, says Jasper Jolly in the Guardian. The deal represents a 22% premium to its three-month high.

However, the stock is still worth less than a fifth of its peak above €100 in 2020. The fall in Just Eat’s share price over the past five years was due to “several missteps”, notably the “disastrous” acquisition of its US rival GrubHub. A few months ago, Just Eat revealed that it was selling GrubHub for $650 million, a fraction of the purchase price of $7.3 billion.

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Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

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