After being considered fragile companies, locked in a costly race for growth, low margins and permanent dependence on financial markets, European delivery platforms are capturing the attention of major global technology groups.
Uber Technologies’ offensive on Delivery Hero could mark a new stage in this transformation. The American group has just increased its economic stake in Delivery Hero to nearly 37%, after repurchasing the stake of the Aspex Management fund at a price valuing the German group around 12 billion euros. @Uber now controls 24.99% of voting rights, just below German regulatory thresholds that could trigger a mandatory takeover bid or enhanced foreign investment review.
This increase in capital comes at a time when the sector is already experiencing a wave of accelerated consolidation. DoorDash took over Deliveroo for £2.9 billion, while Prosus acquired Just Eat Takeaway.com for €4.1 billion.
In a few years, almost all of the major European delivery platforms found themselves absorbed, consolidated or weakened by groups with far greater financial and technological capabilities.
Delivery platforms have gradually become a strategic infrastructure for urban commerce in large cities. They concentrate massive volumes of data on consumption habits, control particularly dense logistics networks and orchestrate daily flows of payment, mobility and local commerce. Above all, they have an extremely rare asset in the current digital economy: daily frequency of use.
In the platform economy, this density becomes a decisive strategic advantage. The more restaurants, delivery people, merchants and consumers a platform concentrates in the same geographic area, the more it mechanically improves its delivery times, logistics costs, advertising capabilities and operational efficiency.
Delivery Hero until recently claimed a gross merchandise volume of 12.4 billion euros in a single quarter and a segmented turnover of 3.9 billion euros in 2025. Figures which begin to bring these commercial infrastructure groups together on a very large scale.
Artificial intelligence could further strengthen this dynamic. Delivery platforms already have immense volumes of data allowing them to anticipate demand, optimize routes, adjust prices in real time or even manage stocks and merchant operations more precisely.
The problem for Europe is that this consolidation comes at a time when American and Asian players already have much more integrated technological ecosystems. Meituan is now worth tens of billions of dollars and operates a superapp model integrating delivery, payment, reservation and local services. Grab Holdings and GoTo follow the same logic in Southeast Asia. Europe remains fragmented between national regulations, poorly integrated markets and particularly strict competitive doctrine.
For years, Brussels has mainly sought to limit concentrations in order to preserve competition. But in a global environment where platforms are now reaching colossal critical sizes, this competitive doctrine is gradually weakening European players, and transforming them into prey for groups with significant financial capacities.
Prosus now openly criticizes this approach. The group believes that certain European antitrust rulings have indirectly paved the way for a potential US takeover of Delivery Hero.
This criticism goes far beyond the scope of delivery and poses a much broader question: that of Europe’s capacity to maintain control of its everyday digital infrastructures, otherwise at the risk of gradually being reduced to a simple consumer market for large foreign platforms.
