FT评论称Uber收购Delivery Hero的超级应用协同仍需谨慎看待

Uber’s super app ‘synergies’ deserve some suspension of disbelief
Companies buying rivals for inflated prices will almost always invoke the fabled revenue synergy: the idea that, as well as cutting overlapping costs, they can command higher sales than the two did before. Mostly, this is fiction. But for Uber’s acquisition of Delivery Hero for €13bn, it may not be.
The US ride-hailing giant is paying a heroic price for the lossmaking German group, which has built up a huge patchwork of food delivery businesses across more than 60 countries. Even factoring in a $1.6bn side deal to dispose of 14 of those, which would go to reduce the debt Uber takes on, it only stands to make a return of about 5 per cent on its acquisition, based on 2027 forecasts of profit compiled by S&P Capital IQ.
That is, of course, before whatever extra value it can create from the union. Uber thinks it can add $1.2bn to Delivery Hero’s operating profit, equivalent to about 30 per cent of its quarry’s operating expenses last year. But not all of it will come from shared IT and headcount reductions. Uber is also hoping that, by acquiring takeaway customers in places it currently offers rides but not food, such as South Korea and the Middle East, it can cross-sell its services to them.
That’s not entirely far-fetched: once a Delivery Hero customer can get rides and food in the same place, they might as well do so — and may do so more often. Uber reckons that its cross-platform users generate roughly 3 times the “gross bookings” and profit of single-product users. In other words, the more its customers open the Uber app, the more they are tempted to turn to it instead of, say, local restaurants and taxi services.
This idea is the heart of the so-called super app. But these mythical creatures, which in their most elaborate forms encompass rides, food delivery, financial payments, messaging and gaming, have so far failed to thrive outside Asia. That is partly because in Europe and the US each activity is a competitive battlefield of its own.
As consumer technology consolidates, however, there may be an opportunity to replicate the curated sprawl of companies such as south-east Asia’s Grab, or — the king of them all — China’s WeChat, owned by Tencent. Revenue synergies still deserve scepticism wherever the phrase appears. Super app synergies may actually be a bit less fanciful.