Uber Eats launches in Germany

Uber Eats will launch in Germany over the next few weeks. It will be the US company’s biggest entry to a new country since 2018. By launching in Germany, Uber Eats wants to challenge Just Eat Takeaway.

By launching its food delivery service in Germany, Uber Eats wants to break the “monopolistic stranglehold” Just Eat Takeaway.com has on the German food delivery market. The US company told the Financial Times that Germany is a strategically important country for them, as they strive for profitability for the first time this year.

“Europe in particular has been a bright spot for Uber Eats, both in terms of some of the growth we’ve seen, but also, frankly, in terms of the strengthening of our market position”, Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, Uber’s senior vice-president of delivery, explained. In the United Kingdom and Spain the company gained market share.

24 million people in Europe use Uber Eats

Currently, over 24 million people in Europe made use of Uber Eats to order meals last year. More than 126,000 restaurants across the continent work with this food delivery service and a total of 370,000 couriers deliver the meals to customers.

Just Eat Takeway’s commission rates are extraordinarily high.

But these numbers are about the whole of Europe. In Germany alone, Gore-Coty says, there’s only one player that dominates the market. He says Just Eat Takeaway’s commission rates are “extraordinarily high”. He thinks that means consumers and merchants are quite desperate for additional options, such as Uber Eats.

Just Eat Takeaway doesn’t seem afraid of Uber Eats

Meanwhile, Just Eat Takeaway doesn’t seem afraid of Uber Eats’ launch in Germany. Since Deliveroo withdrew from this market in 2019, there was no real competition for them left. A few months ago, Finnish delivery startup Wolt arrived in Germany, which led to Just Eat Takeaway’s CEO Jitse Groen commenting that this is “possibly the worst investment case that I’ve seen in the food delivery business thus far.”

Cat fight on Twitter

Today, he tweeted: “Interesting way of trying to depress our share price, @dkhos [Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi]. Now, when did I see that before?”. To which Khosrowshahi replied: “Advice: pay a little less attention to your short term stock price and more attention to your Tech and Ops.”

Soon, Groen answered back: “Thank you for the advice, and then if I may .. Start paying taxes, minimum wage and social security premiums before giving a founder advice on how he should run his business.”