Uber Is About To Swallow One Of Europe's biggest food delivery companies, and it's Already Restructuring To Avoid The Antitrust Fight

Uber is closing in on a deal to acquire Delivery Hero for approximately €12.5 billion, according to Financial Times reporting, and the structure of the deal reveals almost as much as the price tag itself.

This isn't a straightforward acquisition. Before the ink is even dry, Delivery Hero is reportedly planning to sell off entire pieces of its own business, specifically to avoid the kind of regulatory scrutiny that could otherwise sink the deal entirely.

That's the story here: a company restructuring itself in real time, specifically to make itself more acquirable.

The Numbers Behind The Deal

Delivery Hero currently carries a market value of roughly €11.6 billion. Uber's reported offer values the company at about €12.5 billion, a real premium, but not an overwhelming one, reflecting a deal price of roughly €41 per share according to the Financial Times' sourcing.

That €41 figure matters because it represents a meaningful jump from where these negotiations started. Uber first approached Delivery Hero back in May with an offer of €38 per share, a number that Delivery Hero investors reportedly viewed as too low to accept. The gap between that initial rejected offer and the current €41 figure suggests genuine back-and-forth negotiation over the past two months, rather than a quick handshake deal.

Delivery Hero confirmed on Tuesday that it was in advanced negotiations with Uber regarding a potential takeover, and according to the Financial Times' sourcing, an official announcement could come as soon as Thursday. Still, both the terms and the timing remain unfinalized and could shift before anything is formally signed.

Why Uber Wants This Specific Company

Delivery Hero isn't a small regional player; it's a genuinely global food delivery operation with significant presence across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. For Uber, acquiring that footprint would substantially expand Uber Eats' international reach in markets where Delivery Hero currently holds stronger positions than Uber's own delivery business does.

This fits a pattern we've been tracking closely across the tech and transportation sector: companies racing to consolidate market position and platform control before regulatory environments tighten further. We recently covered Uber's aggressive lobbying fight with Waymo over robotaxi regulation in Washington D.C., a fight fundamentally about who controls the platform layer of transportation as autonomous vehicles scale. This Delivery Hero acquisition reflects the same underlying instinct in the adjacent food delivery space: rather than compete market by market against an established international player, Uber is opting to simply acquire that international footprint outright.

For a company that's spent years building Uber Eats as a secondary business line alongside its core ride-hailing operations, absorbing Delivery Hero's international infrastructure, local partnerships, and existing customer relationships would likely be significantly faster than trying to organically build comparable market share in regions where Delivery Hero already dominates.

The Preemptive Antitrust Maneuver

Here's the part of this deal that's genuinely notable: Delivery Hero isn't waiting for regulators to raise objections. It's proactively restructuring itself to head off scrutiny before the deal is even formally announced.

Under the reported terms, Delivery Hero will split off part of its business, specifically selling its Turkish unit, Yemeksepeti, along with several European operations, to a separate investment firm. The explicit purpose, according to the Financial Times' reporting, is to limit geographic overlap between Delivery Hero's remaining business and Uber's existing operations, thereby reducing the antitrust exposure the combined company would otherwise face.

This is a sophisticated and telling move. It suggests that both companies' legal and regulatory teams have already mapped out exactly where their combined market share would trigger the most serious competition concerns, likely specific national markets where both Uber Eats and Delivery Hero currently compete directly for the same customers and the same restaurant partnerships, and are surgically removing those overlapping pieces before regulators even get a chance to formally review the deal.

It's a strategy that echoes something we've seen play out in a very different context: the 12 states currently suing to block Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition, specifically over market concentration concerns in film distribution and cable licensing. Uber and Delivery Hero appear to be trying to avoid ending up in a similar position, proactively carving out the parts of the deal most likely to draw exactly that kind of regulatory challenge, rather than defending the full combined entity after the fact.

Why Yemeksepeti Specifically

The choice to divest Yemeksepeti Delivery Hero's Turkish food delivery brand is a particularly interesting detail. Turkey represents a market where Delivery Hero has historically held a dominant position, and it's reasonable to assume that combining that dominance with any existing Uber Eats presence in the region would have created exactly the kind of concentrated market share that triggers close antitrust review.

By selling Yemeksepeti to a separate investment firm rather than folding it into the Uber deal, Delivery Hero and Uber are essentially saying: we know exactly where this combination looks most monopolistic, and we're removing that piece rather than trying to argue our way past regulators after the fact.

The same logic appears to apply to the unspecified "several European operations" also being divested, regions where the geographic overlap between the two companies' existing delivery networks was apparently significant enough to warrant preemptive separation.

What This Signals About Deal-Making In 2026

This transaction reflects something broader happening across major corporate consolidation right now: companies are increasingly building antitrust mitigation directly into deal structure from the outset, rather than negotiating a full acquisition and then fighting regulatory objections afterward.

That's a meaningfully different approach than what we've seen in some other major 2026 deals. The Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, for instance, proceeded through DOJ approval and shareholder votes before facing the current state-level lawsuit challenging it after the fact. Uber and Delivery Hero appear to be trying to avoid that exact scenario, building the divestitures into the deal before any formal regulatory review even begins, essentially pre-negotiating with anticipated objections rather than waiting to litigate them later.

Whether that strategy actually works, whether stripping out Yemeksepeti and select European operations is sufficient to satisfy regulators in the EU, UK, and other jurisdictions where both companies operate, remains to be seen. Food delivery antitrust scrutiny has intensified significantly in recent years across European markets, specifically, given ongoing concerns about platform dominance, restaurant commission fees, and gig worker treatment across the sector.

Neither Uber nor Delivery Hero immediately responded to Reuters' request for comment, and the terms and timing of the deal remain officially unfinalized. But with Delivery Hero having already confirmed advanced negotiations, and reporting suggesting an announcement could land as soon as Thursday, this deal appears to be moving toward formal confirmation relatively quickly compared to the months of preceding speculation about Delivery Hero's future.

Once officially announced, the real test begins: whether the preemptive divestiture of Yemeksepeti and the unspecified European operations proves sufficient to get this deal through the various antitrust reviews it will face across the multiple jurisdictions where both companies currently operate.

Uber is closing in on a roughly €12.5 billion acquisition of Delivery Hero, a deal that would significantly expand Uber Eats' footprint across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. The offer price of roughly €41 per share represents a meaningful increase from Uber's initial €38 per share approach in May, which Delivery Hero investors had rejected as insufficient.

What makes this deal particularly notable isn't just its size it's the preemptive restructuring happening before the deal is even formally announced. By selling off Yemeksepeti and several European operations to a separate investment firm specifically to limit geographic overlap with Uber's existing business, Delivery Hero and Uber appear to be trying to defuse antitrust concerns before regulators ever get the chance to raise them.

Whether that strategy proves sufficient will likely become one of the more closely watched regulatory questions in European tech and delivery sector consolidation this year.