The Indian restaurant aggregator Zomato on 21 January, announced it’s acquisition of Uber Eats, the food delivery app of Uber, the US-based ride-hailing giant. The all-stock transaction gives Uber 9.99% stake in Zomato. Zomato will not absorb Uber Eat employees, which means they will either be absorbed in Uber’s other verticals or could face lay-off, reports Business Today.
The entire deal cost Zomato Rs 2,485 crore. While Swiggy is ahead of Zomato in market space, Zomato along with Uber Eats aims at cracking Swiggy’s stronghold in the market. Uber Eats India tweeted a goodbye note stating that it will be taking a different route after its acquisition by Zomato and will not be longer available with immediate effect.
https://twitter.com/UberEats_IND/status/1219446378994290688?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal has stated that Uber Eats users would now become Zomato users and that the user experience won’t be compromised.
The Indian restaurant aggregator Zomato has earlier been in news several times for all the wrong reasons. Last year in an effort to grandstand it had tweeted that ‘food has no religion’ after a Twitter user called Amit Shukla had announced that he did not want a ‘non-Hindu’ deliveryman since it was the month of Shravan and it went against his faith. It had created a quite a storm, and Uber Eats, the food delivery arm of Uber, had further fuelled the controversy by expressing its support for Zomato.
Moreover, after facing severe backlash for delivering ‘moral science’ lectures to social media users instead of food, food aggregator Zomato was caught in a losing battle against its customers and partners.