After two and a half years, the food delivery service Delivery Hero is selling its stake in its British industry rival Deliveroo at a loss.

The Berlin-based company threw its 68.2 million Deliveroo shares onto the market on Monday evening. The investment banks Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been instructed to place them with investors overnight, as Delivery Hero announced. At Monday's closing price of 1.22 pounds sterling, the shares are worth 83 million pounds (97 million euros). The sale shows that Delivery Hero is deploying its capital in a disciplined manner, the announcement said.

When Delivery Hero's investment in Deliveroo was announced in the midst of the coronavirus crisis in August 2021, the share price was almost three times as high at 3.56 pounds. CEO Niklas Östberg is estimated to have spent more than 300 million euros on it at the time. Delivery Hero explained at the time that it believed in the industry and had therefore invested in a leading company. Since Delivery Hero's withdrawal in 2019, the two companies no longer compete directly with each other in the UK.

(Report by Alexander Hübner. Edited by Olaf Brenner. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)