It isn't hard to see why Uber wants to be the single app for everything. Piling rides, food, hotels, shopping and finance onto one platform — a 'super app', in industry jargon — offers a giant cross-selling opportunity and a rich seam of customer behavioural data. That, broadly, is the vision CEO Dara Khosrowshahi keeps describing. But the route he is now reportedly exploring — buying Delivery Hero, the €14bn German food-delivery group behind brands like Glovo and Foodora — looks like a complicated and expensive way to get there.
Start with the price tag. Delivery Hero biked almost €50bn worth of meals last year across roughly 65 countries, making it one of the last sizeable independent assets in a sector that has been rapidly consolidating — Deliveroo was acquired by DoorDash, Just Eat Takeaway by Prosus. Bid speculation has pushed Delivery Hero's shares to roughly double over the past month. That makes it hard for Uber to get anything like value for money. Delivery Hero's taxed operating profit this year — a rough proxy for the cash it might generate after reinvestment — is only about 2.4% of its enterprise value. To earn a reasonable 10% return, Uber would need to believe it could roughly quadruple Delivery Hero's operating profit to €2bn.
In fairness, there are ways Uber could juice those numbers up. One is simply to wait: Delivery Hero is growing and is forecast to reach €1bn of operating profit by 2028 on consensus analyst numbers. Another is to slash a chunk of the target's general and administrative expenses — personnel costs alone (excluding delivery staff) ran around $2.2bn last year
Uber wants to be the single app for everything in your life. But buying Europe's biggest food-delivery company to get there might prove that ambition is actually a weakness.
Uber is circling Delivery Hero, the €14 billion Berlin-based food delivery giant behind brands like Glovo and Foodora. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's pitch: build a 'super app' that bundles rides, food, hotels, shopping and finance into one platform — like China's WeChat. Delivery Hero would deliver scale (it biked nearly €50bn worth of meals last year across roughly 65 countries) plus a goldmine of customer behavioural data.
The problem? Delivery Hero's shares have already roughly doubled in the past month on bid speculation, and it's one of the last big independent players in a sector being rapidly consolidated — DoorDash bought Deliveroo, Prosus bought Just Eat Takeaway. Uber would be buying at the top.
This isn't really about food. It's about whether bolting on more businesses makes a tech platform stronger — or just bigger and more fragile.
Every app on your phone is fighting for the same thing — to be the one you open first, the default. The 'super app' war will shape what ordering food, hailing a ride, or paying a friend looks like by the time you're in college. It also previews a bigger question you'll face in any career: when a company stops growing its core business, is the right move to expand sideways into adjacent ones, or to double down on what made it dominant?
Super apps thrived in places like China and Southeast Asia partly because Western-style app stores and credit cards never fully took over there. Replicating that model in Europe and the US is unproven — and the historical graveyard of conglomerates (think 1970s GE-style empires) suggests bundling unrelated businesses often destroys more value than it creates. Watch for whether Uber raises its bid, how antitrust regulators in Brussels react, and whether autonomous-vehicle progress at Waymo or Tesla makes Uber's whole ride-hailing moat look shakier.