Just Eat Takeaway, a European food delivery and ordering behemoth, has announced that it would sell its investment in Brazil’s iFood to Prosus for up to €1.8 billion ($1.8 billion).
A total of €1.5 billion in cash is on the table for the first deal, with an additional €300 million contingent on iFood’s success over the next 12 months.
iFood, which was founded in 2011 and is primarily focused on the Brazilian and Colombian markets, has raised nearly $600 million in funding to date, with Just Eat Takeaway investing across three separate funding rounds to secure roughly 33% of the company. The remaining shares were held by Dutch multinational conglomerate Prosus, a subsidiary of Naspers, and its Brazilian affiliate Movile; upon the completion of the sale, Prosus and Movile would be the sole owners of iFood.
Multiple of equity
Just Eat Takeaway, which was formed in 2020 as a consequence of a $7.6 billion merger of the U.K.’s Just East and Dutch competitor Takeaway.com, has indicated that the value of its investment in iFood has risen five-fold throughout the lifetime of the joint venture.
Last month, word broke that Just Eat Takeaway, based in Amsterdam, was cutting down in France, resulting in 390 layoffs. The company’s worth had dropped by more than 80% in 10 months. In less than a year after the finalisation of the $7.3 billion Grubhub purchase, Just Eat Takeaway announced that it was exploring options for divesting Grubhub as part of a larger effort to achieve “sustainable, profitable growth.”
The company “continues to actively explore the partial or full sale” of Grubhub, as was announced today, and plans to use the proceeds from the sale of iFood to bolster its balance sheet and make scheduled debt repayments.
In a statement, the firm said, “Just Eat Takeaway is focused on enhancing its profitability and on a prudent deployment of resources.”
Just Eat Takeaway has said that it anticipates the sale to be authorised by the end of 2022, pending stakeholder approval at a forthcoming Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM).