Just Eat/Takeaway.com: another serving of trouble
“Just when you thought the most tortuous meal in history was finally over”, along comes the Competition and Markets Authority with “an extra course”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. The UK watchdog has intervened to postpone the £6bn merger between Just Eat and its Dutch-listed counterpart Takeaway.com just a day before the deal was due to be completed. The “CMA foodies” – who are already investigating a $500m investment by Amazon in Just Eat’s rival, Deliveroo – want to gauge whether the tie-up would prevent a new entrant breaking into Britain’s increasingly lucrative food-delivery market.
The CMA’s intervention “has prompted predictable outrage” from interested parties, said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. But come on – the watchdog “couldn’t simply wave through a deal of this size”. Just Eat is already Britain’s No. 1 food-delivery service and this combo would create “a titan” processing 360 million orders a year. Central to the CMA’s investigation is whether Takeaway.com, which exited the UK market in 2016 “after racking up big losses”, would have re-entered off its own bat were it not for the Just Eat deal – the Dutch firm having since grown into “one of Europe’s largest names”. The CMA has hitherto “been all too happy to wave through deals that have gone on to be detrimental to the consumer landscape”. Quite right to examine this one.
Still, what a saga, said Jennifer Marston on The Spoon. It all underscores how fiercely competitive the food-delivery market is, “with demand for off-premises orders set to drive restaurant sales for the next decade”. Takeaway.com remains confident that clearance on the merger “will be obtained”. We’ll have to wait and see if there’s “a longer, more complicated battle on the horizon”.