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Uber has more than doubled its stake in Delivery Hero from roughly 7% to about 19.5%, becoming the largest shareholder in the Berlin-listed food delivery group, Reuters reported on Monday citing a company announcement and LSEG data.
The stake is worth around €1.7 billion at current prices, and Uber also holds options for a further 5.6% of the shares, which would give it a blocking minority.
The company said in a regulatory filing that it does not currently intend to raise its stake above 30%, the threshold that would trigger a mandatory offer to the rest of the register. Delivery Hero shares closed 5.6% higher on the news.
Uber's existing position on the Delivery Hero register dates to May 2024, when it agreed a $300 million share purchase alongside its $950 million bid for Delivery Hero's Foodpanda Taiwan business. Taiwanese regulators blocked the acquisition on competition grounds, and Uber paid a $250 million break fee when the deal formally terminated in March 2025, but the share-purchase agreement survived the collapse of the underlying transaction. Delivery Hero subsequently sold Foodpanda Taiwan to Grab in March 2026 for $600 million, $350 million less than Uber's original offer.
Most of the additional block on Monday came through purchases from Prosus, which is required by the European Commission to reduce its Delivery Hero holding to below 10% by late summer as a condition of its acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway. Uber had already taken a 4.5% block from Prosus in April for €270 million, and the 19.5% position disclosed on Monday reflects further accumulation from both Prosus and the broader market.
The move arrives six days after Delivery Hero confirmed that its co-founder and chief executive Niklas Östberg would step down by 31 March 2027, following an eight-week public campaign by Hong Kong activist fund Aspex Management. Aspex itself raised its stake to about 15% on 11 May, having pushed Delivery Hero to identify all assets where it is "not the best owner and operator" and to sell them through "competitive sales processes" rather than bilateral deals.
Delivery Hero's AGM is scheduled for 23 June. With the Prosus stake non-voting until disposed of, Aspex at 15% and Uber now at 19.5%, the practical voting register at that AGM is structurally different from anything Delivery Hero has previously faced.
Delivery Hero said it "welcomes Uber's additional investment as a further endorsement of its platform and Everyday App strategy". JPMorgan analysts said the move was "a clear endorsement of the strategic attractiveness of Delivery Hero's asset base for Uber", while noting that "Uber's ultimate intentions on further stake-building remain unclear".
For MENA, the implications could be interesting. Uber owns 100% of Careem Rides, the ride-hailing business it acquired for $3.1 billion in 2019, and retains a significant minority stake in Careem Technologies, the super-app business that operates Careem's food delivery, grocery and payments services across ten regional markets and is 50.03% owned by e&. Uber itself exited direct food delivery in MENA in May 2020, when it shuttered Uber Eats across Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE and folded the regional operations into Careem.
Uber's 19.5% stake gives it a structural position on any potential MENA disposal that comes out of the strategic review, with HungerStation the simpler candidate given that talabat sits on the DFM with a 20% minority float. Whether Uber would actually want either asset is a different question, given its existing exposure through the Careem super app.
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