Uber Is Getting Korea's Top Food Delivery App Because They Lost There — The Most Paradoxical Part of the Delivery Hero Deal
Uber's voluntary public tender offer for Delivery Hero SE has opened a clear path for Baemin (Baedal Minjok) to come under Uber's umbrella, in a deal valued at €41.50 per share and approximately $14.8 billion in fully diluted equity value. South Korea was explicitly listed among the 50 markets Uber is keeping directly — not among the 14 markets being carved out and sold to SSW Partners — because Uber Eats voluntarily exited Korea in October 2019, leaving zero horizontal overlap between the two companies in the Korean delivery market. The same horizontal-combination logic that forced the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) to require Yogiyo's divestiture in 2020 simply does not apply here, while new regulatory questions around membership bundling and data integration are now coming to the foreground. Uber executed this roughly €14 billion committed bridge at the precise moment its trailing twelve-month free cash flow crossed $10 billion for the first time in company history, pledging to maintain an investment-grade credit rating and keep gross leverage below 2x. The deal's structural logic rests on a cross-platform multiplier effect — users who use both mobility and delivery spend approximately 3x more than single-service users — and the combined entity would span 99 markets with $236 billion in 2025 pro-forma gross bookings. The KFTC's merger review, expected to focus on membership bundling and data combination rather than traditional horizontal overlap, will be the decisive variable determining how deeply Uber and Baemin can integrate in Korea.