Just Eat’s merger with Takeaway.com delayed
The £6.2bn merger between food delivery giants Just Eat and Takeaway.com has hit a hitch.
The “long awaited” £6.2bn merger between food delivery giants Just Eat and Takeaway.com has hit a hitch “days before the finish line” say Poppy Wood and Edward Thicknesse in City AM. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is to open an investigation into the tie-up to gauge whether the deal has reduced competition by stopping Takeaway.com from re-entering the UK market (which it left in 2016) as an independent firm.
The CMA’s move follows a protracted review of Amazon’s plan to take a minority stake in Deliveroo, Just Eat’s biggest British rival, notes Tim Bradshaw in the Financial Times. Both cases centre on “whether the deals would prevent a large new entrant from joining the UK’s vibrant food delivery market” and come as the global food delivery market is “consolidating rapidly”. Operators hope that “global scale” and less competition” will boost profitability.
Like Amazon’s investment in Deliveroo, Takeaway’s deal with Just Eat doesn’t look like an “obvious candidate” for regulatory scrutiny, says Karen Kwok on Breakingviews. But antitrust regulators are right to take a more restrictive view when it comes to technology-driven markets, which tend to have “winner-takes-all” characteristics. In any case, this new, more aggressive, approach is better than the “supine posture” the CMA adopted when it concluded in 2012 that Facebook’s Instagram purchase “probably wouldn’t substantially reduce social-media competition”. Antitrust wonks are finally “erring on the side of caution”.
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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.
Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri
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