The May bid was €33 and landed below the close. Eight weeks later it is €41.50, with 14 markets carved out to a New York firm before anyone asks about competition.
Uber has agreed to buy Delivery Hero for €41.50 a share in cash, a 26% improvement on the offer it put on the table in May, and roughly the number Delivery Hero’s largest shareholders said they wanted all along.
The two companies signed a business combination agreement on Thursday. The price values Delivery Hero at $14.8bn on a 100% basis, or $13.7bn adjusted for the stake Uber had already accumulated, and would create a platform spanning 99 markets with combined pro-forma gross bookings of $236bn in 2025.
Delivery Hero’s management and supervisory boards have unanimously backed the offer and intend to recommend that shareholders tender.
Prosus, the largest holder, has irrevocably committed its shares, which alone takes Uber’s total economic interest to around 53%.
That is a different picture from eight weeks ago. When Delivery Hero confirmed Uber’s €33 approach in May, in a statement that declined to disclose further terms, the price sat at a 1.76% discount to the previous close, several large holders were publicly arguing for something closer to €40, and DoorDash was circling with a full takeover of its own under consideration.
The board had cover to ask for more. It asked, and got €1.50 above the number the holdouts had named.
The more interesting piece of the structure is the part designed to keep regulators from ever having to say no. Delivery Hero has separately agreed to sell its businesses in 14 markets, concentrated where Uber Eats and Delivery Hero already overlap, to SSW Partners for roughly $1.6bn. That deal is conditional on Uber’s offer closing.
Uber will not take control of any of the transferred businesses, and SSW will run its own process to find strategic partners for them. Uber is, however, lending SSW most of the money to buy them, with SSW repaying over time, including out of any future sale.
It is a familiar shape: a divestiture agreed before a competition authority has been asked to consider one, financed by the acquirer, sold to a firm that will eventually flip the assets.
Whether European and Asian regulators accept the carve-out as sufficient, and whether they are comfortable with the vendor financing, is the live question in the deal and it will not be answered quickly.
The 14 markets are described only as those where the two businesses overlap. The offer timetable, the minimum acceptance threshold, and the regulatory filings still to be made are the details that will determine whether this closes cleanly next year or drags, and none of them was settled on Thursday.
For Uber, the strategic case is unchanged from May. Delivery Hero operates in more than 60 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, through Foodpanda, Glovo, Talabat, and South Korea’s Baedal Minjok.
It is the largest non-US food-delivery footprint in the world and, with DoorDash having absorbed Deliveroo and Just Eat Takeaway sold to Prosus, the last one of scale unclaimed.
Uber had already been clearing ground for it. It put five of seven planned 2026 European launches on hold while pursuing the target, and closed its Getir acquisition in Türkiye earlier this year.
The context that makes the price notable is where else Uber’s money is going. The company has committed roughly $10bn to robotaxis, including $1.25bn to Rivian for a fleet of up to 50,000 autonomous vehicles, alongside deals with Wayve, Nissan, Lucid, Nuro, and MOIA.
Dara Khosrowshahi has spent several earnings calls describing this as building “everyday utility”. Paying $14.8bn for the delivery leg while funding an autonomy programme is an expensive interpretation of the phrase.
Delivery Hero’s chief executive Niklas Östberg, who co-founded the company in 2011, announced in May that he would step down once a successor is in place, with the handover targeted for the end of 2026 and no later than 31 March 2027. He will hand over a company that no longer needs one.
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