The €33-per-share proposal lands at a slight discount to Friday’s price, but with Uber already sitting on a quarter of the company and DoorDash circling, the bid is the start of the negotiation, not the end of it.
Delivery Hero confirmed on Saturday that Uber has tabled a formal takeover offer for the Berlin-based food-delivery group, at €33 a share.
The price is, awkwardly for Uber, a 1.76% discount to where Delivery Hero closed on Friday, and it arrives roughly a month after Uber almost tripled its stake in the company to 19.5%, with another 5.6% held through derivatives. On any reasonable measure, this is the opening bid.
The numbers, according to the company’s statement, are an indicative proposal of €33 per share to all shareholders. The Financial Times put the implied price tag at about $11bn (€10bn). Uber’s chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi flew to meet Delivery Hero’s supervisory board chair Kristin Skogen Lund in person before the bid was filed, the FT reported.
Delivery Hero, for its part, said only that it remains “fully focused” on the strategic review already underway and declined to disclose further terms.
The strategic review is the reason any of this is happening on this timeline. Several of Delivery Hero’s largest shareholders have been pressing for it for months, and chief executive Niklas Östberg, who co-founded the company in 2011, announced last week that he would step down once a successor is in place.
The succession is targeted for the end of 2026, no later than March 31, 2027. The board has appointed advisors and opened the process; Uber has now put a number on the table inside it.
It is not the only number. DoorDash, sources told the FT, has explored a full takeover of its own and has separately expressed interest in Delivery Hero’s Middle Eastern business, Talabat.
Some shareholders have been arguing for a price closer to €40 a share. The combination of a slight-discount offer, a sitting blockholder, a parallel competing approach, and an ongoing succession review is the structural setup of a deal that gets renegotiated in public over the next several weeks.
For Uber, the logic for going hostile-adjacent is straightforward. Delivery Hero operates in more than 60 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, through brands including Foodpanda, Glovo, Talabat, and South Korea’s Baedal Minjok.
It is the largest non-US food-delivery footprint in the world and, with DoorDash already absorbing Deliveroo last year and Just Eat Takeaway having sold to Prosus for $4.3bn, it is also the last one of scale that has not been claimed.
A full acquisition would give Uber Eats a delivery network across the markets where DoorDash now competes most directly with it.
Uber’s capital allocation in 2026 has otherwise been pointed elsewhere. The company has committed roughly $10bn to its robotaxi programme, including a $1.25bn investment in Rivian for a fleet of up to 50,000 autonomous R2 vehicles, alongside partnerships with Wayve, Nissan, Lucid, Nuro and MOIA.
Khosrowshahi has framed the strategy, in successive earnings calls, as building “everyday utility” across mobility, delivery, and commerce.
Q1 2026 results showed gross bookings up 25% year on year and autonomous trips up tenfold. Bolting Delivery Hero onto the delivery leg fits the framing.
Whether it fits at €33 is the open question. Uber shares slipped 1.6% on Friday after Bloomberg first reported the talks. The 1.76% discount to Delivery Hero’s Friday close gives investors arguing for €40 a clear rhetorical wedge, and gives the German board cover to ask for more.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
