It is definitely one of the most extraordinary success stories that the European tech and internet industry has to tell. In 2000, the Dutch student Jitse Groen founded Thuisbezorgd.nl – a website that could be used to order home deliveries in Amsterdam.
20 years later, the company is called Just Eat Takeaway and takes over the US competitor Grubhub for a whopping 7.3 billion dollars – and buys the delivery service Uber and Delivery Hero away from their faces. Grubhub’s share price jumped sharply, while Just Eat Takeaway gave way briefly, but recovered again.
Just Eat Takeaway, formerly known in Austria under the brand Lieferservice.at and today under the brand Lieferando as Mjam’s main competitor, is emerging as an international delivery empire that is second to none. It wasn’t until April that the authorities gave the go-ahead for a $ 7.8 billion merger between Takeaway.com and British rival Just Eat. The fact that the British-Dutch company is now snapping the US market leader Grubhub is a strong signal for Europe and its tech scene. The acquisition still has to be approved by the competition authorities, and the transaction is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2021.
Winner eats it all
Jitse Groen is now the head of a global company that claims to be the largest food supplier outside of China – there are two giants, Ele.me (Alibaba) and Meituan-Dianping (with Tencent as an investor). Just Eat Takeaway is available in numerous markets and has a total of 155,000 restaurants connected. With Grubhub, you now gain 300,000 restaurants in 4,000 US cities. Together they now want to reach 70 million customers.
The new giant now sees itself as the market leader in the four most profitable food delivery markets worldwide: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany. Because the art of the supply market is to make profits and to prevail against the competition – Groen’s “winner takes it all” strategy should work. The German competitor Delivery Hero, where Mjam is one of them, had to experience this firsthand. After a tough struggle with Takeaway.com, the German startup by founder Niklas Östberg has sold its German business to the Dutch and is concentrating on expanding into Asia – such as India or South Korea.
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