The service has already launched in 18 cities in the US, Canada, France, Australia and Singapore.
“People love being able to push a button to book a car and now they
can order great food with us too,” said Jo Bertram, Uber’s regional
general manager in the UK. “We’ll bring lunch, treats and dinner to
Londoners with the same choice, convenience and value we’re already
known for.”
More than 25,000 drivers are registered with Uber’s ride-hailing app
in London, and the company says it has more than 1.8m customers in the
capital.
UberEATS, however, is a separate app and will rely on couriers using
bicycles or mopeds, rather than car drivers, to deliver restaurant
orders.
The company declined to say how many couriers were registered to work
for the service, but said “thousands” had signed up in London.
Like rival Deliveroo, UberEATS will take a commission from
restaurants for every sale, while also charging a small fee — expected
to be £2.50 in the UK — from each customer.
Unlike other services, Uber will have no minimum price for orders.
David Reynolds, an analyst at Jefferies, said UberEATS’s expansion
was “discernibly bad news” for London-based Deliveroo, which runs
delivery order software for restaurants and transports meals with an
army of cyclists.
Many of the restaurant chains UberEATS has signed up to its service
in central London — including Pho, Comptoir Libanais and Snog — already
have contracts with Deliveroo.
Dan Warne, Deliveroo’s UK managing director, said: “The entrance of
competitors into the market shows that there’s huge demand for new
approaches to food delivery in the UK. Indeed, we believe we’re creating
a whole new market.”
Deliveroo operates in 40 UK cities and Mr Warne said he expected to
roll out the service in more than 20 additional cities by the end of
September.
“We see enormous room for further growth and innovation in this sector,” he added.
In November, Deliveroo raised capital to take its total funding to about $200m, making it one of Europe’s best-funded technology start-ups.
Last month, the app secured its biggest contract with PizzaExpress, signing up more than 200 of the UK restaurant chain’s locations.
Deliveroo is just one of multiple well-funded start-ups, however, in an increasingly crowded food delivery space in Europe.
One rival, the Berlin-based group Take Eat Easy, is backed by Rocket
Internet, the German start-up investor that has snapped up more than
€600m of equity in food delivery services across Europe and Asia.
Larger competitors include the UK’s listed Just Eat, which has a
market capitalisation of close to £3bn, and Germany’s Delivery Hero,
which has raised $1.4bn from investors. Both companies target the
cheaper end of the takeaway market.
Data from Euromonitor show that growth in home delivery and takeaway
food has outpaced that of restaurants each year since the financial
crisis. Between 2009 and 2014, the UK market for take away and delivery
expanded 2.7 per cent to £6.5bn, while the value of food bought in
restaurants fell 5 per cent to £17.1bn.To know more visit our site http://allindiayellowpage.com.