[HN Gopher] DoorDash to acquire Deliveroo
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DoorDash to acquire Deliveroo
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-05-06 06:27 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| colesantiago wrote:
| Most startups in the UK have either:
|
| 1. Sold to a foreign buyer
|
| 2. Shut down
|
| 3. Relocated to the US
|
| 4. Are stagnant
|
| The UK is up for sale (at a discount)
| fakedang wrote:
| You could say the same for traditional businesses. Or real
| estate. Or the farmlands. Even the political parties (for the
| princely sum of 50,000 quid).
|
| The UK is up for sale.
| graemep wrote:
| That is how globalisation is supposed to work.
|
| British companies have bought plenty abroad too:
| pydry wrote:
| it works great until you realize that your country's most
| strategic economic assets are in the hands of a strategic
| rival or shut down.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| And yet the UK attracts twice the VC investments the next
| European country does.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Is it because of the language?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Banking and incorporation laws.
| Argonaut998 wrote:
| First FreeNow and now Deliveroo. So much for European
| independence from US companies. It's a wonder why these sales
| were approved in this climate.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| Deliveroo is a UK company. It doesn't matter to the EU. It's
| also very much non strategic so I don't see why it would be
| blocked either way.
| graemep wrote:
| The GP said European, not EU. Its a concern in the UK too.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| There is no such thing as European independence. Europe is
| a continent, not a political entity.
|
| The EU is a political entity which happens to be
| reconsidering its independence from the US. The UK very
| much is not and is kowtowing favours hoping to get a good
| deal.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Unfortunately the current UK government has about as much
| backbone as a jellyfish.
| fy20 wrote:
| And Wolt.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a wonder why these sales were approved in this climate_
|
| The EU and UK have no good options at the merger level. If they
| block the sale, it trashes the start-up ecosystem. If they let
| it through, an American company buys a local one.
|
| The fundamental problem is the paucity of new-firm formation in
| the EU and UK, the scaling barriers they face that American
| compeitors don't, and the increased culture of risk-taking in
| America that lets its firms pay more for acquisitions. The last
| can't be addressed. The first two probably can by the EU. (The
| UK is not a viable sovereign entity in these regards.)
| jjallen wrote:
| Yes as an American who's loved in Europe for six years or so
| the risk taking and desire to start and do things a little
| differently is just night and day more than it is in Europe,
| generally speaking.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I'll never forget how jealous the Dutch coffee shop owner I
| met was of Americans.
|
| Dude worked at a bank - respectable white collar job acc.
| to his Dutch friends and family. He picked up a passion for
| coffee and wanted to open his own shop. His loved ones all
| thought he was nuts to leave a stable job for a maybe.
|
| I'm sure there's a degree of that in the US, but we have a
| lot more "just try stuff" in our cultural myths than the
| Europeans tend to. Guy felt like his options were keep a
| job he hates or be disowned by everyone he knows.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| Perhaps his friends and family were just being
| reasonable? Leaving banking to start a coffee shop is a
| drastic, risky move. Passion doesn't pay the bills or
| fund retirement and I'd legitimately wonder if someone
| was having a mental health crisis if they told me that
| was their plan.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| No-one's approval is required apart from the company's board...
| pzmarzly wrote:
| FWIW there still are some popular European alternatives left,
| such as Bolt, Glovo or JustEat
| Spivak wrote:
| > We'll cover more than 40 countries with a combined population
| of more than 1 billion people, enabling us to provide more local
| businesses with the tools and technology they need to thrive,"
| said Tony Xu, CEO and Co-founder of DoorDash.
|
| This makes zero sense to me for a logistics company specializing
| in local to local deliveries. Being bigger in a given geographic
| area grants some benefits of scale and efficiency but being in
| Seattle and Bangkok there's really no difference than two
| separate apps. Just with the nature of the business you probably
| want this to be as local as possible so the profits aren't
| siphoned out of your community.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Being bigger in a given geographic area grants some benefits
| of scale and efficiency
|
| And dictating terms to local restaurants and delivery workers,
| with the threat of shutting them out of the largest market.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Both my local Indian and Chinese use justeat. I don't select
| them because they're on justeat, I use justeat because it has
| them.
|
| If they changed to another platform then I'd simply move to
| that platform. Of course these companies did deliveries far
| before techbros decided to "disrupt" the industry.
| like_any_other wrote:
| That's great. Wanna bet the future of your family business
| on the great majority of consumers acting like you, and
| only a negligible number being steered by convenience and
| habit?
| Marsymars wrote:
| Based on what I see on my local Uber Eats, it's mostly
| delivering food from low-quality ghost kitchens and
| McDonald's to people who can't be bothered to find
| anything better.
|
| I'd find it too depressing to run any kind of family
| business that involved food delivery.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you've made your restaurant dependent on any deliver app,
| you've already made a fatal mistake in a cutthroat industry.
|
| It doesn't take great effort for a restaurant to do good
| without being on these apps. But some owners want to pay
| 15-20% of their gross revenue to a megacorp for the rest of
| their lives rather than invest a few hundreds or thousands in
| getting their own customers. We see the same thing in a ton
| of industries.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| People often travel outside of their town. Having the same app
| in the next place you are offers some benefits for the users.
| And potential for earnings.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| As an example, US has Uber and Lyft and Mexico has Uber and
| Didi. When someone from Mexico goes to US, they probably wont
| have Lyft, and someone from the US won't have Didi. So Uber
| gets most travellers' business automatically.
|
| Likewise even though Uber in Japan is (almost) all taxis and
| not actual Uber drivers, most global tourists have Uber and not
| something like Go that's specific to Japan. So they are
| profiting off almost all the taxi rides from Western visitors.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| Note that Deliveroo's Hong Kong business was sold to Foodpanda a
| few weeks earlier. So it looks like DoorDash only wanted to buy
| certain markets.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| It makes sense that they wouldn't buy the HK business.
| Operating in HK essentially means entering the Chinese market,
| which feels like a bold responsibility for Doordash to take on.
| Better to let a company that's better positioned to buy out
| that part of the business.
| Raed667 wrote:
| It is inevitable for DoorDash to make tipping an even more
| annoying and intrusive part of Deliveroo. I can't wait to see how
| europeen users react to that.
| pluc wrote:
| These things are _omnipresent_ in European capitals, it 's
| quite striking. It might be inconvenient but it's not gonna
| stop people any more than the privacy concerns of the apps do.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I live in France and use Deliveroo (or UberEats some rare
| times) maybe once a month.
|
| There is already a tipping UI in the app, but it is not
| intrusive, nothing as aggressive as what you'd experience in
| the US where you're inclined to pre-tip even before the
| delivery happens.
|
| As for the capitals, yes it is becoming a thing but from my
| personal experience it is limited to touristy places
| nmstoker wrote:
| Will be interesting.
|
| Back when I used Deliveroo, tipping always led to worse
| delivery success rates so I gave up.
|
| They suddenly became really bad recently, which is unfortunate
| as they generally had the edge on Uber Eats (total charlatans!)
| omneity wrote:
| International operations? Is DoorDash entering new markets?
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