Delivery Hero has agreed to sell its Foodpanda delivery business in Taiwan to Singapore-based super-app Grab Holdings for $600 million in cash, a deal the Berlin-based company described as "a key first step" in an ongoing strategic review supported by JPMorgan. The proceeds will go toward repaying debt.
The transaction, announced on Monday, marks Grab's first expansion outside Southeast Asia and gives it access to a Taiwanese business that generated €1.5 billion in gross merchandise value and positive adjusted EBITDA in 2025. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. A previous attempt to sell Foodpanda Taiwan to Uber for $950 million was blocked by Taiwanese regulators.
For MENA, the sale is worth watching less for what it does to Delivery Hero's Asian footprint and more for what it signals about the parent company's direction, because Delivery Hero's Middle Eastern empire, the most profitable part of its global business for years, was built in large part on the back of Foodpanda.
Foodpanda never actually operated under its own name in the region. When the Rocket Internet-backed group entered the Middle East in March 2013, it launched under the brand Hellofood in Saudi Arabia, alongside 24h.ae in the UAE and Otlob in Egypt. In August 2016, Foodpanda merged Hellofood with HungerStation, the Dammam-founded food ordering platform built by Saudi entrepreneur Ibrahim Al-Jassim (now CEO at Saudi q-commerce unicorn Ninja), creating a combined operation spanning over 2,000 restaurants across 30 cities in the Kingdom. The merger made Foodpanda's Middle Eastern business profitable, only the second region in its network to reach that milestone.
Months later, in December 2016, Delivery Hero acquired Foodpanda outright. The Hellofood brand was absorbed into HungerStation, the Foodpanda name disappeared from the region entirely, and Delivery Hero inherited the infrastructure, the team and the market position that would become the foundation of its MENA dominance.
What followed was a decade-long acquisition spree that made Delivery Hero the single largest acquirer of technology startups in the Middle East, spending over $1.2 billion on regional deals between 2015 and 2020. That includes Yemeksepeti in Turkey ($589 million, 2015), Carriage in Kuwait (reportedly around $100 million, 2017), Zomato's UAE business ($172 million, 2019) and InstaShop in Dubai ($360 million, 2020). By 2019, Delivery Hero's MENA and Turkey business was generating close to $800 million in annual revenue, nearly half the company's global total, and was the only region where the group had posted positive EBITDA for two consecutive years.
That empire produced two major brands that still anchor Delivery Hero's regional presence: Talabat, which the company took public on the Dubai Financial Market in December 2024 in a $2 billion IPO (retaining an 80% stake), and HungerStation, which continues to operate in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Carriage's operations were eventually folded into Talabat in a consolidation move.
The Taiwan sale is the first concrete action under a strategic review that Delivery Hero initiated after a period of sustained pressure. Its share price has been volatile, Talabat's stock on the DFM has fallen more than 56% from its IPO price, and the company has been managing a debt load that the Foodpanda proceeds are now being directed toward reducing. CEO Niklas Östberg called the divestment a move to "crystallize considerable fundamental value" for shareholders.
The question the review raises for the region is whether further asset sales could eventually touch Delivery Hero's MENA holdings. Talabat is publicly listed and Delivery Hero's 80% stake is its most liquid regional asset. HungerStation, where Delivery Hero fired Al-Jassim and the entire leadership team in a dramatic episode in 2019, operates under full Delivery Hero control and has had a more turbulent trajectory. Neither has been named in any divestiture discussions, but the framing of today's deal as a "first step" in a JPMorgan-supported review leaves the door open to further portfolio reshaping.
It is a quiet irony that the Foodpanda brand, which planted Delivery Hero's original flag in the Gulf as Hellofood over a decade ago and provided the deal flow that turned the region into the company's most profitable market, is now being dismantled on the other side of the world, one territory at a time, while the parent company weighs its options on everything else.
