Germany’s Delivery Hero has agreed to buy South Korea’s top food delivery app operator Woowa Brothers for US$4 billion and form a joint venture to take on heavyweights like Uber Eats in other fast-growing Asia markets.
The deal, announced yesterday by Woowa, is the biggest global play so far for a food delivery app, one of the hottest tech sectors around.
Woowa said the sale was “a survival strategy” in an intensely competitive market and also the biggest deal involving a South Korean Internet firm.
South Korea, with a dense population and a high smartphone penetration rate, is the world’s No. 4 market for online food orders. A huge jump in the number of single people living on their own is also propelling the boom in food delivery services.
Delivery Hero’s Yogiyo app ranks second behind Woowa’s Baedal Minjok, but the sector leader faces stiff competition from rivals such as e-commerce firm Coupang, backed by Japan’s deep-pocketed Softbank Group. Uber Technologies Inc’s UberEats restaurant delivery business pulled out of South Korea earlier this year, reflecting the intensity of competition.
“The [food] delivery market has been flooded with gigantic Japan-backed capital and influential online platforms, leading Woowa to factor in partnership as a survival strategy,” a spokesman at Woowa Brothers said.
South Korea’s online market for food delivery and pickup has more than doubled over the past five years to US$5.9 billion — bigger than Japan and Germany’s markets combined, and trailing only China, the US and the UK, Euromonitor data also showed.
Euromonitor expects the South Korean market to jump to US$9 billion by 2023.
It was not immediately clear whether the deal between the two leading players in the market would face antitrust hurdles.
Under terms of the deal, Delivery Hero is to acquire an 87 percent stake held by Woowa investors, such as Goldman Sachs, Singapore fund GIC, Hillhouse Capital and Sequoia Capital.
Delivery Hero is to acquire the remaining 13 percent owned by Woowa’s management in the future, a Woowa spokesperson said, without elaborating on a timeline.
Established in 2010 as a food delivery firm, Woowa Brothers grew fast to become the nation’s top online food delivery services firm, taking over 30 million orders per month, and expanded into the business of provided shared kitchen space for restaurateurs, as well as moving into Vietnam.
Founder and CEO Kim Bong-jin, 43, is to head up the newly formed joint venture with Delivery Hero, based in Singapore, to tap into the booming food delivery market in Asia.
Regional players like Singapore-based Grab and Indonesia’s Gojek are already well implanted.
The growing global food delivery trade has triggered a wave of dealmaking and rising valuations.
The purchase of Britain-based Just Eat is set to top the Delivery Hero-Woowa deal: Dutch firm Takeaway.com is in talks to buy Just Eat in a transaction that values the latter at ￡4.3 billion (US$5.52 billion), an offer that Dutch-based technology group Prosus recently topped.
For Delivery Hero, buying Woowa would expand its presence in the fast-growing Asia market even as Europe becomes more competitive.
Real estate agent and property developer JSL Construction & Development Co (愛山林) led the average compensation rankings among companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) last year, while contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) finished 14th. JSL Construction paid its employees total average compensation of NT$4.78 million (US$159,701), down 13.5 percent from a year earlier, but still ahead of the most profitable listed tech giants, including TSMC, TWSE data showed. Last year, the average compensation (which includes salary, overtime, bonuses and allowances) paid by TSMC rose 21.6 percent to reach about NT$3.33 million, lifting its ranking by 10 notches
Popular vape brands such as Geek Bar might get more expensive in the US — if you can find them at all. Shipments of vapes from China to the US ground to a near halt last month from a year ago, official data showed, hit by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and a crackdown on unauthorized e-cigarettes in the world’s biggest market for smoking alternatives. That includes Geek Bar, a brand of flavored vapes that is not authorized to sell in the US, but which had been widely available due to porous import controls. One retailer, who asked not to be named, because
SEASONAL WEAKNESS: The combined revenue of the top 10 foundries fell 5.4%, but rush orders and China’s subsidies partially offset slowing demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) further solidified its dominance in the global wafer foundry business in the first quarter of this year, remaining far ahead of its closest rival, Samsung Electronics Co, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. TSMC posted US$25.52 billion in sales in the January-to-March period, down 5 percent from the previous quarter, but its market share rose from 67.1 percent the previous quarter to 67.6 percent, TrendForce said in a report. While smartphone-related wafer shipments declined in the first quarter due to seasonal factors, solid demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) devices and urgent TV-related orders
STILL LOADED: Last year’s richest person, Quanta Computer Inc chairman Barry Lam, dropped to second place despite an 8 percent increase in his wealth to US$12.6 billion Staff writer, with CNA Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠) and Richard Tsai (蔡明興), the brothers who run Fubon Group (富邦集團), topped the Forbes list of Taiwan’s 50 richest people this year, released on Wednesday in New York. The magazine said that a stronger New Taiwan dollar pushed the combined wealth of Taiwan’s 50 richest people up 13 percent, from US$174 billion to US$197 billion, with 36 of the people on the list seeing their wealth increase. That came as Taiwan’s economy grew 4.6 percent last year, its fastest pace in three years, driven by the strong performance of the semiconductor industry, the magazine said. The Tsai
RSS