Just Eat Takeaway.com CEO Jitse Groen is really “quite a good deliverer of food in the Netherlands and Germany”. That says Pieter Taselaar, CEO of hedge fund Lucerne Capital Management, which owns between 1 and 2 percent of the shares of the meal delivery platform. “But when it comes to acquisitions and returns, he has no idea. He can leave me.”
On Wednesday, the Amsterdam meal delivery platform Just Eat Takeaway (JET), owner of Thuisbezorgd.nl, presented the figures for the first quarter of this year. CEO Groen announced that he would investigate what to do with JET’s struggling American meal delivery company Grubhub, which is unable to make a fist against competitors UberEats and Doordash. JET stressed that it is not yet clear whether, and if so when, Grubhub will be sold.
It was yet another disappointment for Taselaar, he says in a telephone response from New York. He is doing what fellow shareholder Cat Rock Capital already did last year: calling the management of JET to order, which in the eyes of the shareholders is doing too little to get the company back in the right direction.
Since announcing its acquisition of Grubhub in June 2020, JET has lost three quarters of its stock market capitalization and shareholder criticism has escalated. The company, which, like competing services, struggles to make meal deliveries profitable, is therefore the worst-performing share of the AEX index.
This week, Groen in New York will provide information and explanations to investors, including Taselaar. One of the topics on the table: an article from Bloomberg news agency, which reported last week that the company was organizing a four-day ski trip (‘Snow Fest’) to Arosa, Switzerland, for more than 5,000 employees, despite JET losing 1 billion euros last year. According to Bloomberg, the trip cost 15 million euros, an amount that JET called “exaggerated” on Wednesday, without going into what it would have cost. “To make you sick,” says Taselaar.
Taselaar announces that Lucerne Capital will vote against the reappointment of the supervisory board and financial director Brent Wissink at the JET shareholders’ meeting on May 4. Also Groen, who founded the company more than twenty years ago, does not have to return from Taselaar. “Both management and supervisory board have made serious mistakes,” says Taselaar. “The entire tent must be dismantled.”
Also read this interview with Jitse Groen: Takeaway CEO Jitse Groen: ‘You can’t beat us anymore’
What’s wrong?
Taselaar: „It went wrong when JET Grubhub [voor 6,4 miljard euro] bought. An acquisition that Groen was already working on when he was still working on a takeover of the British Just Eat a year earlier. He’s overfilled his plate. I don’t understand how Jitse Groen thinks she can run a company that is active from America to Australia with mediocre management. I don’t know what got into that man.”
Grubhub is now being put up for sale. A step forward?
“I’m happy that Groen admits he made a mistake by recruiting Grubhub, but he underestimates the urgency of the problem. We need to distance ourselves from Grubhub. And it goes further: Just Eat and its interests in Australia must also be divested. The company has grown too fast, without the infrastructure to grow with it.”
To what extent is Jitse Groen responsible?
“Jitse Groen is a megalomaniac. He has been very successful in the Netherlands and Germany and then thinks he can run the whole world. He is confident, he is stubborn and does not listen to opinions that are best for this company right now. He still runs Just Eat Takeaway as a start-up where he is the big boss. While this is a listed company. There are other responsibilities involved. That man can’t go on like this.”
Jitse Groen and Just Eat Takeaway did not want to respond.