Just Eat Takeaway to lay off employees in France due to poor performance

As part of a larger worldwide restructuring effort, Just Eat Takeaway is laying off 390 employees in France as it attempts to turn around its recent decline.

In 2020, the Dutch competitor Takeaway.com and the U.K.'s Just East merged to form Just Eat Takeaway, a $7.6 billion business. Soon after, the newly combined company announced plans to buy Grubhub in the US for $7.3 billion in an all-stock deal that took more than a year to complete. The pandemic global lockdown, during which many investment resources were directed on assisting people in making better lives for themselves in an alienated society, was a major driving force behind this drive for food delivery.

The global economic crisis has caused many highly valued firms that grew as a result of the pandemic to collapse over the past year, although as things have started to slightly return to normal, many of these businesses are now seeing some sort of readjustment, according to TechCrunch. It's evident that the on-demand delivery sector has also been severely damaged by this, as everything from remote event providers to at-home wellness businesses are affected. In the aftermath of a vigorous expansion drive, the $12 billion fast delivery firm Getir, for instance, recently disclosed it was laying off 14% of its workers. A similar development involved the German company Gorillas, which also disclosed a wave of layoffs. And Gopuff this week disclosed its second wave of layoffs in the United States.

While Just Eat Takeaway dominates the food delivery industry in several European countries, it appears to be well behind Uber Eats and Deliveroo in France, with the former supposedly holding close to 90% of the market.

“Due to the challenging market dynamics in France and our ambition for sustainable profitable growth, we have the intention to restructure our operations in France. The strategic restructuring will consist of redundancies of staff in the Paris office and changes in the operations of our delivery business,” a Just Eat Takeaway spokesperson said.

Less than a year after acquiring Grubhub to get access to the American market, Just Eat Takeaway disclosed that it was planning to sell all or part of Grubhub. This was a result of the company's valuation collapsing; between the time it concluded the Grubhub transaction in June 2021 and the time it reported Q1 2022 earnings in April, its market cap had decreased by more than half. Its price has continued to plummet, and it is currently worth just over €3 billion, which is a startling 84 percent less than its peak valuation of €20 billion barely 10 months ago.

According to Reuters, 350 couriers and 40 office employees will be affected by the layoffs.

Adriaan Nühn, the chairman of Just Eat Takeaway, resigned from his position in May. Jörg Gerbig, the COO, also resigned from the management team after being under investigation for "possible personal misconduct."

But despite all of this commotion, there are some encouraging indicators. Just Eat Takeaway reached a significant agreement with Amazon earlier this month, which made it known that the company was buying a stake in Grubhub and will be marketing the service as part of its Prime membership program.