Uber Cuts 3,300 Jobs While Pushing Ahead With Its Delivery Hero Takeover
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Uber is cutting around 3,300 positions, roughly ten percent of its global workforce. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the restructuring in an internal message to staff, as the Financial Times reported. The changes are meant to “make Uber simpler and faster, and create more capacity to invest in our future”. At the same time, the acceptance period is running for Uber’s multi-billion-euro offer to shareholders of Delivery Hero, the parent company of foodora.
Fewer Management Layers, Almost No Remote Work
The overhaul mainly hits middle management. The number of management roles is set to fall by 20 percent, teams with only one or two members are being halved, and layers more than seven steps away from the CEO are being removed. According to TechCrunch, Uber is also merging engineering, science and delivery units, along with its previously separate delivery operations for restaurants, retail and direct channels.
Khosrowshahi points to growing complexity as the reason. Years of expansion, he wrote, brought “more layers, more co-ordination, more fragmented ownership” and left behind structures that made sense when the businesses were smaller. Uber is also bringing most of its remaining remote employees back to the office. Going forward, only about one percent of staff will work remotely on a permanent basis, and the hybrid policy requiring three office days per week will be enforced more strictly.
Investors welcomed the news, with the stock rising about two percent in pre-market trading. The shares are still down almost nine percent since the start of the year, partly because of competition from robotaxi players such as Alphabet’s Waymo.
Pressure in Delivery, Billions for Robotaxis
In its core delivery business, the picture varies by region. Uber Eats is gaining market share in the UK, France and Germany, while losing ground in the US to DoorDash. According to YipitData, DoorDash now holds about 64 percent of the US market, compared with 31 percent for Uber.
Uber has also pledged to spend more than 10 billion dollars expanding its robotaxi network. It plans to run autonomous services in at least 15 cities this year, competing with Waymo and Tesla. In London, Uber partner Wayve recently received permits from Transport for London for a commercial robotaxi service with a safety driver behind the wheel.
Delivery Hero: 41.50 Euros per Share, With the Deadline in Early November
The second major piece is the acquisition of Delivery Hero. After clearance from German financial regulator BaFin, Uber published its offer document and is offering 41.50 euros per share in cash, valuing the company at around 13 billion euros. That is roughly 108 percent above the share price before the talks became public in the spring. The acceptance period started in late August and ends in early November.
The minimum acceptance threshold is 50 percent plus one share. Through its own stake and a binding commitment from major shareholder Prosus, Uber already has about 53 percent behind the offer, Handelsblatt reported, which makes a bidding war unlikely. Merger control clearances in several countries are still outstanding, and settlement and cash payment are expected only in the second half of 2027. Uber has committed to refrain from a domination and profit transfer agreement for three years. If the deal closes, the number of markets where Uber offers both mobility and delivery would rise from 34 to 58.
Austria Is Among the 14 Exceptions
Uber is taking over most, though by no means all, of Delivery Hero’s markets. To address antitrust concerns, the Berlin-based group is selling its operations in 14 markets to financial investor SSW Partners for around 1.4 billion euros, according to Delivery Hero. The list covers Austria, Czechia, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Moldova, Norway, Sweden, Türkiye, Chile and Ecuador.
For foodora in Austria, that means a change of owner to SSW Partners rather than Uber. Delivery Hero says the businesses concerned will keep running on the same technical and operational backbone, with local teams staying independent. The sale is conditional on the completion of Uber’s offer. In its offer document, Uber explicitly states that it has no influence over SSW Partners or the Delivery Hero businesses moving to the investor.
That leaves Uber with the remaining 50 or so Delivery Hero markets, which generated gross merchandise value of about 42 billion dollars last year. Together, the two companies would form the largest food delivery business outside China. More background on the deal in our earlier report, “Uber schnappt sich Delivery Hero für 12,7 Milliarden Euro”.
