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Delivery Hero is one of Europe’s most successful online food delivery platforms. Established in 2011 in the German capital of Berlin, a decade later Delivery Hero posted annual revenues totalling €5.85 billion, with an active employee base of 45,445.

Delivery Hero was the brainchild of four entrepreneurs, who had a vision to build a truly global food ordering platform. Within a matter of months of launch, Delivery Hero secured partnerships in Australia and the UK. It then raised €25m in seed funding to acquire smaller food delivery platforms in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, before reaching out into the Asian market via South Korea and China.

By 2014, it was considered one of the three fastest-growing start-ups in Germany. Delivery Hero eventually went public in 2017 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, raising just under €1 billion from its initial public offering (IPO).

It’s just five years since Delivery Hero went public in Frankfurt. Anyone who invested during the initial IPO will have made a return of more than 61% as of December 2022. The Delivery Hero share price was one of the few to soar during the Covid-19 pandemic, as online food deliveries were one of the few crumbs of comfort for citizens during lengthy lockdown periods.

In January 2021, the price of Delivery Hero stock hit an all-time high of €137.20, but it’s been a difficult period since those highs. The impact of rising inflation, caused largely by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, has seen operating costs rise for partnered outlets, causing margins to be squeezed.

In 2022, Delivery Hero is said to have served approximately 50 million customers, which is only a modest increase on 2020 and 2021. However, as online food delivery services normalise post-pandemic, some feel that Delivery Hero has genuine growth and cash flow potential.

The online food delivery marketplace is becoming increasingly crowded, with a string of high-growth counterparts for Delivery Hero to do battle with. Its number-one rival would appear to be Deliveroo, which is a global behemoth when it comes to online food delivery partnerships. Although Deliveroo may have a more marketable brand than Delivery Hero, it’s true that the latter’s valuation exceeds that of Deliveroo.

There’s also the Just Eat digital marketplace for online takeaways, which was the original portal for food deliveries, founded in 2001. The London-headquartered firm has a much bigger workforce than Deliveroo, although Delivery Hero’s global team dwarfs both competitors.