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Brussels forced Prosus out of Delivery Hero. Uber did not have to do a thing.
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That is the first fact to keep in mind, because it changes the meaning of the whole trade.
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Prosus is selling because the European Commission made it part of the price of buying Just Eat Takeaway for â¬4.1 billion (+- R79 Billion). It was allowed to do that deal only after agreeing to cut down its Delivery Hero stake, lose influence, and sell within a fixed period. So this is not some sudden burst of discipline from Prosus. It is not management deciding Delivery Hero no longer fits the story. It is a forced exit.
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Uber, by contrast, chose to buy.
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And it did not buy cheaply. Uber agreed to pay â¬20 a share for 13.6 million Delivery Hero shares, about 4.5% of the company, for total proceeds to Prosus of roughly â¬270m (+-R5.2 billion). Prosus says that price was about 22% above Delivery Heroâs one-month average. For a seller under regulatory orders, that is good execution. The market normally punishes forced sellers. Buyers know there is a clock. They wait. They squeeze. Prosus managed to avoid that.
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But letâs not overpraise the price. It was good for a forced seller. It was not obviously full value.
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On 17 April 2026, Delivery Hero closed at â¬21.19. The mean analyst target was â¬27.37. The median was â¬26. So Uber bought below the Streetâs average view of fair value, even after those targets had already fallen hard over the previous year. Prosus got a premium to the recent market price. Uber still got in below consensus value. Both things can be true at once.
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That tells you a lot about both sides. Prosus sold well under pressure. Uber still thinks it found value.
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To see why, drop the old caricature of Delivery Hero. For years, the company was easy to mock: cash burn, subsidy wars, grand promises, and profits that always seemed one year away. That picture is now out of date. By March 2026, Delivery Hero had reported full-year 2025 gross merchandise value of â¬49.2bn, total segment revenue of â¬14.8bn, adjusted EBITDA of â¬903m, and free cash flow of â¬250m. Quick-commerce GMV reached â¬7.5bn. For 2026, management guided to gross merchandise value growth of 8% to 10%, revenue growth of 14% to 16%, adjusted EBITDA of â¬910m to â¬960m, and free cash flow above â¬200m. Those are not the numbers of a business in distress. They are the numbers of a business that has made it through the worst and now has to prove the improvement can last.
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The older numbers still matter because they show how sharp the change has been. On a reported basis, revenue rose from â¬8.6bn in 2022 to â¬9.9bn in 2023, â¬12.3bn in 2024 and â¬14.1bn in 2025. Reported EBITDA improved from negative â¬1.15bn in 2022 to negative â¬451m in 2023, negative â¬24m in 2024 and positive â¬305m in 2025. Operating income was still negative â¬261m in 2024, but turned positive in 2025 at â¬93.7m. So 2024 was the year the turnaround came into view. 2025 was the year it stopped looking like wishful thinking.
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Still, nobody should pretend Delivery Hero is a clean business. It is not.
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The balance sheet is one reason the market has stayed wary. At the end of 2024, Delivery Hero had about â¬2.1bn of cash and â¬4.6bn of debt, leaving net debt at roughly â¬2.5bn. Total liabilities were â¬8.4bn against equity of about â¬1.8bn. Tangible book value was deeply negative. The company has improved fast, but it is still leveraged, still heavy with intangibles, and still not simple.
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That is exactly what makes Uberâs move interesting. Uber is the better business by miles. In 2025 it produced $52bn of revenue, $8.7bn of adjusted EBITDA and $9.8bn of free cash flow. It has scale, money and room to wait. It does not need a speculative trade to save it. So when a company like that pays a premium for a mid-single-digit stake in a smaller, messier peer, the obvious question is not whether Delivery Hero is perfect. It is what Uber thinks it is really buying.
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The lazy answer is that this is just a financial investment. That answer is too thin. A stake like this buys access. It buys time. It buys a better seat in the room. It lets Uber watch more closely while Prosus is being forced to leave. Maybe that leads nowhere. Maybe it leads to a regional partnership, selected asset deals, or something bigger if regulators ever make that possible. The point is not that a takeover is imminent. It is that Uber bought more than stock. It bought options.
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That matters because Delivery Hero owns assets that are hard to build quickly: local scale, merchant networks, quick-commerce infrastructure, and customer habits in markets that matter. Uber can compete for some of that. In other places, it would be faster and cheaper to buy, partner, or carve. This is not Uber paying up for a mess. It is Uber paying up for a network that already exists and has already done much of the painful clean-up.
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The Bill Ackman angle helps explain the mindset. Ackman has made Uber one of his biggest bets on the view that it is an underpriced compounder with strong free cash flow and better capital allocation than the market gives it credit for. You do not need to swallow that whole to see the relevance here. If Uber now thinks of itself as a disciplined allocator of capital, this stake is not random clutter. It is a chosen move.
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Prosus, by contrast, is not moving freely. Its stake drops from 26.3% to 21.8%, and more sales are coming. That is not a rebalance. It is an exit carried out under orders. Delivery Hero once sat inside Prosus as part of a broader food-delivery ambition. Now it is an asset to be sold down because Brussels forced a choice.
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To Prosusâs credit, it handled the first step well. Selling a large block at a premium to a strategic buyer is far better than dribbling stock into the market and hoping for the best. But the revealing part of this deal is not that Prosus sold. It had to. The revealing part is that Uber wanted to buy before the rest of the selling has even finished.
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Prosus is solving a regulatory problem. Uber may be starting a strategic process.
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That is why this deal matters. Not because it proves a takeover is coming. It does not. It matters because a stronger buyer just paid above the market price, but below consensus value, for a company the market still prices with too much suspicion and not enough imagination. Prosus is being forced out. Uber is moving closer. That is where the story begins.
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