Technology conglomerate Prosus is selling out of Delivery Hero because the European Commission made it part of the price of buying Just Eat Takeaway for €4.1bn. Simple as that.
The group was allowed to do that deal only after agreeing to lower its Delivery Hero stake, lose influence and sell within a fixed period. This is not some sudden burst of discipline from Prosus, and it’s not management deciding Delivery Hero no longer fits the story. It is a forced exit. Mobility group Uber, by contrast, chose to buy.
And Uber did not buy cheaply. It agreed to pay €20 a share for 13.6-million Delivery Hero shares, about 4.5% of the company, for total proceeds to Prosus of roughly €270m. Prosus says that price was about 22% above Delivery Hero’s one-month average. For a seller under regulatory orders, that is good execution. The market normally punishes forced sellers. Buyers know there is a clock. They wait and squeeze. Prosus avoided that.
On April 17 Delivery Hero closed at €21.19. The mean analyst target was €27.37. The median was €26. So, Uber bought below the Street’s average view of fair value, even after those targets had already fallen hard over the previous year. Prosus got a premium to the recent market price. Uber still got in below consensus value. Prosus sold well under pressure. Uber still thinks it found value.
It has scale, money and room to wait. It does not need a speculative trade to save it
Delivery Hero, frankly, was not an easy sell. The company was easy to mock: cash burn, subsidy wars, grand promises and profits that always seemed one year away. But by March 2026, Delivery Hero had reported full-year 2025 gross merchandise value (GMV) of €49.2bn, total segment revenue of €14.8bn, adjusted ebitda of €903m and free cash flow of €250m. For 2026, management guidance was for GMV growth of 8%-10%, revenue growth of 14%-16%, adjusted ebitda of €910m-€960m and free cash flow above €200m. These are the numbers of a business that has made it through the worst.
The older numbers still matter because they show how sharp the change has been. On a reported basis, revenue rose from €8.6bn in 2022 to €9.9bn in 2023, €12.3bn in 2024 and €14.1bn in 2025. Reported ebitda improved from negative €1.15bn in 2022 to negative €451m in 2023, negative €24m in 2024 and positive €305m in 2025. Operating income was still negative €261m in 2024 but turned positive in 2025 at €93.7m.
Still, nobody should pretend Delivery Hero is an attractive business. The balance sheet is one reason the market has stayed wary. At the end of 2024, Delivery Hero had about €2.1bn of cash and €4.6bn of debt, leaving net debt at roughly €2.5bn. Total liabilities were €8.4bn against equity of about €1.8bn. Tangible book value was deeply negative. The company has improved fast, but it is still leveraged, still heavy with intangibles and still not simple.
That is exactly what makes Uber’s move interesting. Uber is by far the better business. In 2025 it produced $52bn of revenue, $8.7bn of adjusted ebitda and $9.8bn of free cash flow. It has scale, money and room to wait. It does not need a speculative trade to save it. When a company like that pays a premium for a mid-single-digit stake in a smaller, messier peer, the obvious question is not whether Delivery Hero is perfect. It is what Uber thinks it is really buying.