Uber Technologies will acquire Foodpanda’s Taiwan business for $950 million in cash, as Foodpanda shifts its attention to other areas.
The transaction, which is subject to regulatory approval, is scheduled to close in the first half of 2025, the companies said in a joint statement on Monday.
In a separate arrangement, Delivery Hero will sell $300 million of freshly issued ordinary shares to Uber.
“We need to focus our resources on other parts of our global footprint, where we feel we can have the largest impact for customers, vendors, and riders,” said Niklas Östberg, co-founder and CEO of Delivery Hero.
According to Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, senior vice president of delivery at Uber, the Taiwan industry is “fiercely competitive” and the acquisition would help them develop in a region “where online food delivery platforms today still represent just a small part of the food delivery landscape.”
Foodpanda is one of Asia’s major online food and grocery delivery services, operating in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. Delivery Hero, based in Germany, purchased the company in 2016.
Foodpanda and Uber Eats dominate Taiwan’s meal delivery sector. According to data from insights platform Measurable AI, Foodpanda has a 52% market share by order volume in Taiwan as of August, with Uber Eats accounting for the remaining 48%.
According to the joint announcement, the transaction will be one of Taiwan’s largest international acquisitions, excluding those in the semiconductor chip industry.
In February, Delivery Hero said that talks to sell its Foodpanda company in select Southeast Asian markets had come to an end. Östberg told CNBC in the same month that the firm was “happy” to keep its Foodpanda operation in Southeast Asia “forever.”
– CNBC’s Ryan Browne and Dylan Butts contributed to this story.
