Just Eat takeover battle simmers as rival suitors clash
The company recently rejected a new bid from Prosus.
The takeover battle for Just Eat is heating up as a key shareholder accused Delivery Hero of undermining of the two rival offers.
The German food delivery company finds itself involved in the battle because it is 22% owned by Prosus and is, in turn, an investor in Takeaway.com.
Takeaway.com and Prosus, both of whom are based in the Netherlands, are vying to buy Just Eat, with Prosus unveiling an unsolicited $6.3bn offer in cash, or 710 pence per share. Just Eat, which had already agreed to an all-share offer from Takeaway last August, rejected the new bid.
In a statement, Just Eat shareholder Cat Rock accused Delivery Hero of selling down its 13% stake in Takeaway shares to keep them artificially suppressed and lower the attractiveness of Takeaway’s offer.
“Delivery Hero structured its share sales in a bizarre and uneconomic fashion that seems deliberately intended to depress Takeaway.com’s stock price in the run-up to the shareholder vote on a merger with Just Eat,” they said.
The aforementioned vote is scheduled for 4 December.
Prosus said that it does not control Delivery Hero nor its investment decisions and that it had not disclosed its interest in making an offer for Just Eat prior to its announcement.
“In our view, this [share] price reflected the market’s disappointment in the continued weak performance of the business,” the company said, pointing to Just Eat’s third-quarter earnings. “We intend to invest in the business in order to ensure it remains competitive.”
In its own statement, Delivery Hero said that “the decision to sell down Takeaway.com shares was taken by Delivery Hero’s management board independently in September 2019.”
“Delivery Hero had no knowledge of Prosus’s contemplated offer to acquire Just Eat prior to the publication of the offer,” the statement added.
