Slow down, Delivery Hero, I can’t keep up with all your news this week.
On the heels of multiple other announcements, the Berlin, Germany-based third-party delivery service said at the tail-end of yesterday that it is launching operations in Japan via its foodbanda subsidiary.
Through foodpanda, Delivery Hero will launch service in six cities to start: Kobe, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, and Hiroshima. The company said in today’s press release that it plans to expand its Japan presence “continuously,” though an exact timeframe for other cities was not mentioned. The foodpanda service will, in addition to providing restaurant meals, also deliver groceries and household goods to users.
Including Japan, Delivery Hero now operates in well over 600 cities around the world, either under its own moniker or via subsidiary brands like foodpanda. And, as I said a minute ago, the company has been on a bit of a tear in terms of of news announcements this week. On Wednesday it said it plans to acquire fellow delivery service Glovo’s Latin America business, which will add several countries to Delivery Hero’s already existing presence in that region. Also this week, the company announced a new partnership with World Food Programme to integrate a donations feature into all of Delivery Hero’s digital properties, making it easier for users to donate meals to those in need.
Even with the expansions in Latin America and Japan, and even though it’s the world’s largest food-delivery service outside of China, Delivery Hero’s lead is far from guaranteed for the long term. The entire food delivery sector, which has been a saturated market for a long time, is undergoing consolidation right now. Takeaway.com’s recent merger with Just Eat has formed another massive food delivery company, particularly since that newly formed entity swooped up Grubhub in the U.S. Also in North America, Uber Eats agreed to buy Postmates. Back in LatAm, Colombian heavyweight Domicillios.com merged with Brazil’s iFood earlier in 2020.
Delivery Hero isn’t immune to all this competition. In fact, the company cited this saturated market and extreme competition in April when it pulled foodpanda operations out of Canada. On the flipside, though, Delivery Hero also bought Woowa Bros.’ Baedal Minjok service to give itself a larger share of the South Korean market.
So whether it’s high-ranking spot in the food delivery world remains, the company is clearly expanding aggressively at the moment, and Japan won’t likely be the last country it lays claim to in the near future.
Leave a Reply