Ride-hailing giant Uber‘s stock price jumped more than 5% on Monday following its purchase of delivery service Postmates for $2.65 billion.
Uber confirmed the deal in a Monday press release after a flurry of reports over the weekend.
The acquisition comes less than a month after Uber‘s talks to buy out Postmates rival GrubHub fell through, leading the European JustEats to acquire GrubHub instead.
The company noted it intends to keep the “consumer-facing Postmates app running separately,” but it’ll be backed by a combined merchant and delivery network.
According to Uber, this should ultimately lead to more consumer exposure for restaurants — and hopefully (for Uber) it also boosts the service’s overall market share.
[Read: Watch Tesla’s meteoric rise — set to techno-remixed Elon Musk tweets]
According to consumer analytics crew Second Measure, Uber trails San Francisco-headquartered DoorDash with respect to the number of meals delivered; 45% of the online orders in the US during May were delivered by DoorDash.
Published July 6, 2020 — 14:47 UTC