Jitse Groen, boss and founder of the Dutch delivery group Just Eat Takeaway, tried to calm down when presenting the figures for 2021 before he got specific. Losses, he said, peaked in the first half of the year. The company is now making “rapid progress towards profitability”. Then it got worse: The gastro-logistics company, to which Lieferando belongs in this country, made a loss of 1.044 billion euros last year, almost seven times as much as in the previous year. The shortfall was still 155 million euros.
Above all, it was expensive to maintain and costly to secure market share that pushed the company deep into the management red zone. In particular, the takeover of the US delivery service Grubhub caused a considerable loss. The actual business was going really well. After all, sales in 2021 rose by almost seven to more than 28 billion euros worldwide.
In Germany alone, the company recorded almost 50 million more orders, which increased Lieferando’s sales by 50 percent to 3.2 billion euros. In Germany, the orange-colored service is the market leader with a share of almost 98 percent, but the competition is growing. Above all, the US giant Doordash, which had taken over the delivery service Wolt in Europe, is likely to make life difficult for Lieferando. In addition, Uber Eats has just announced rapid expansion in Germany.
In addition, there is internal rumbling. Just a few weeks ago, Lieferando drivers took to the streets nationwide to demand, among other things, Sunday and public holiday surcharges and an hourly wage of 15 euros. Lieferando currently pays eleven euros per hour. In the takeaway organization chart, Germany is part of Northern Europe and, according to Groen, the most profitable part of the group. In 2021, 256 million euros were brought in here.