SA’s takeaway online orders take off
Apps drive up profits at Mr D Food and UberEATS
THE days of playing broken telephone with restaurants, and waiting for your meal to arrive at the right address on a wing and a prayer, are fading fast as online ordering takes off.
And the battle for market share is hotting up between South Africa’s two largest services, Mr D Food and UberEATS.
At Mr D Food, previously known as Mr Delivery, online orders have soared to 95% of total orders for the year ending June 2017, compared with 20% last year. Its app has been downloaded more than 200 000 times in the past six months.
UberEATS, which launched in South Africa in September last year, had its app downloaded 100 000 times in its first six months of operation here.
Mr D Food head, Devin Sinclair, said part of its appeal was its cash-on-delivery payment option.
“For the South African consumer, being able to pay with cash is still a huge drawcard.
“We have a network of more than 1 400 restaurants, hundreds of drivers, and we deliver to over 1 900 suburbs around South Africa,” he said.
“With projections that there will be 20 million smartphone users in South Africa within the next three years, we anticipate continued exponential growth.”
Customers who previously bought from Mr D Food several times a year were now returning to its app several times a month, Sinclair said.
The business, which was bought by Takealot in 2014, has been rebuilt to embrace the move to mobile in an attempt to capitalise on the explosion of the global online food delivery industry.
Naspers, which has invested R960-million in Takealot and owns a large stake in it, has caught on to the global trend.
It has put more than $500-million (about R6.7-billion) into online food delivery businesses since May this year, $425-million (R5.7-billion) in Germany's Delivery Hero and $80-million (R1.07billion) in India’s Swiggy.
UberEATS is already a significant global player operating in 100 cities in 27 countries. “South Africans have truly embraced online food delivery. They are all about finding easy and reliable ways to discover the food they love at the push of a button,” Uber sub-Saharan Africa spokeswoman Samantha Allenberg said.
The service, which operates in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria, has more than 700 restaurants on its platform and aims to expand UberEATS to other cities in sub-Saharan Africa.
The company ventured into food deliveries after the success of its pioneering Uber rides app.
But senior analyst at capital market research and financial services firm Intellidex, Orin Tambo, said the growth of these two platforms locally did not necessarily translate to increased restaurant sales.
“The sales of listed restaurants are flat because consumers are cash-strapped. It all goes down to what is happening in the economy,” Tambo said.”
[Consumer] confidence is declining because the economy is not performing well.” — DDC