It’s not often that any UK listed company suffers a share-price hammering for failure to embrace the advantages of bikes as business tools, but that’s exactly what happened on 17 June.
Just Eat, an online takeaway operation that made its London Stock Exchange debut in April and is now valued at nearly £1.5bn, revealed that it didn’t intend to run its own moped delivery fleet. Following prompt criticism of this decision by a Morgan Stanley stockbroking analyst, who said it would cost the firm market share, Just Eat’s shares fell by 3.6% to 407p.
While Just Eat management had said that meal delivery networks do not scale, Morgan Stanley’s view was that such a belief seems not to be shared by competitors in this booming sector like GrubHub, pictured, and Deliveroo. Their moves towards offering outsourced moped delivery services had the potential to generate profit margins of around 25%, the broker added.
Perhaps a speedy delivery of 50cc scooter brochures to Just Eat would now be a smart idea. Â
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