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The head of Prosus said the EU is limiting his plan to invest as much as $15bn in Europe following the technology group’s €4.1bn takeover of Just Eat Takeaway, in the latest warning against the bloc’s approach to antitrust issues.
Fabricio Bloisi said he was “willing” to invest more in the food delivery sector as part of Prosus’s goal of creating a $100bn European tech champion, at a time when US rival DoorDash has just bought Just Eat’s UK-based competitor Deliveroo.
But he said that plan was being held back by Brussels, which only approved the Just Eat deal after Prosus committed to selling down its 27 per cent stake in Berlin-based rival Delivery Hero as well as giving up its seat on the company’s board.
“We just made an acquisition [of Just Eat Takeaway], we committed to invest $10bn to $15bn in Europe, and the recommendation we got [from EU competition authorities] was to divest. We should be investing $10bn, but my goal is to divest now,” said Bloisi.
His comments come amid mounting calls by European companies, such as telecom groups Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom, for Brussels to loosen its merger rules to help them better compete against US and Chinese rivals.
The concessions made by Prosus — the investment arm of South African group Naspers — were made after EU officials raised concerns that the deal could lead to price rises for consumers in markets where Just Eat operated alongside Delivery Hero’s subsidiary Glovo, such as Spain, Poland and Italy.
Bloisi, who previously headed up Brazilian food delivery app iFood, said the process showed that EU officials had not yet listened to the recommendations of Mario Draghi’s 2024 report into European competitiveness. This suggested reforms to areas such as merger controls to allow the creation of “European champions”.
The report also specifically pointed to Europe’s weakness in the tech sector for the bloc’s lagging productivity compared with the US. Only a handful of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European.
“[The Draghi report] says we need local champions. This is not the mindset of the European Commission today; the mindset is ‘let’s look at our competition internally’. I think this is a big mistake,” said Bloisi. “I think the European mindset has to change, or we are to become irrelevant in terms of technology.”
Despite pledges to move quickly to act on the former Italian premier’s recommendations, only 11.2 per cent of Draghi’s ideas had been implemented a year after his report was published, according to the European Policy Innovation Council, a Brussels-based think-tank.
In September, Draghi himself hit out at Brussels’ “inaction” over the past year, warning that it threatened “not only our competitiveness but our sovereignty itself”.
The Commission said that Prosus’ acquisition of Just Eat, as originally proposed would have “decreased JET’s incentives to compete with Delivery Hero in the five Member States where both companies are active.”
It added it is currently reviewing merger guidelines following the Draghi report. “We are also reflecting on novel issues encountered in specific cases and broader trends that are relevant for the productivity and competitiveness of the whole European economy.”
Prosus — which has also recently acquired La Centrale, a motors classifieds platform in France, for €1.1bn through its subsidiary OLX — is expected to continue expanding its portfolio in Europe in sectors ranging from food delivery to classifieds.
Analysts had suggested that Prosus’s future dealmaking plans might have involved the acquisition of Delivery Hero, which also owns brands such as Foodpanda and Talabat.
However, any deal would now face even more scrutiny in order to be approved due to the concessions made to secure approval for the Just Eat deal. Bloisi declined to comment on his future M&A ambitions.
Additional reporting by Barbara Moens in Brussels
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