FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Failed talks about the sale of the company's activities in Southeast Asia put Delivery Hero 's share price under heavy pressure on Thursday. However, in view of a recent 7.5 percent slide in the share price, investors may still get off lightly when compared to the recent fluctuations in the share price due to the news flow on this sales process.

On Thursday, the share price remained well above the EUR 20 mark and thus far away from the record low of just under EUR 15, to which news of the stalled sales process had recently pushed the shares.

Negotiations on the sale of Foodpanda had been broken off, the food delivery service announced on Wednesday evening. This confirmed the latest speculation that a deal in South East Asia would not materialize due to differing price expectations.

According to traders, the latest company statements on the sales process still sounded quite optimistic, even though the market was already expecting the deal to fall through. According to one Borsianer, however, the recent statements that the cash inflow generated would be sufficient to repay the company's debts somewhat mitigated the fall in the share price.

A week ago, CFO Emmanuel Thomassin told the financial news agency dpa-AFX that he saw no time pressure to sell the business. "We don't have to sell Foodpanda, even if that would be an advantage for our liquidity". The manager was also responding to investor concerns that Delivery Hero's cash flow was not sufficient to service debts from its own resources.

UBS analyst Jo Barnet-Lamb expressed his disappointment at the end of the talks. However, he believes that investor confidence in the value of the Southeast Asia business is now higher than before the fourth quarter results. These had recently encouraged Delivery Hero investors. He expressed confidence that the company is unlikely to need access to external capital to support its debt burden in the near future./tih/ngu/jha/