Deliveroo IPO: Can It Deliver More Than Just Your Lunch?

The U.K.-based online food delivery company is going public at the end of the month. The Deliveroo IPO is expected to be the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) in almost a decade. Backed by Amazon, and seeking a valuation of £8.8 billion ($12 billion), this IPO is something to get excited about.

According to CNBC, Deliveroo says it will use the proceeds of the IPO to continue to invest in innovation and push deeper into on-demand grocery deliveries.

With all this excitement, let’s see what our alternative data has to say about Deliveroo’s online performance.

Key takeaways:

• Deliveroo is seeing strong year-over-year (YoY) growth in site visits (79% in 1Q21)
• Just-eat.co.uk has the largest online market share (SoM) in the U.K. and continues to gain share
• Deliveroo.co.uk has stronger brand recognition than just-eat.co.uk

The U.K. food delivery market

Deliveroo is capitalizing on a growing food delivery market. The sector as a whole is experiencing strong growth, largely due to the coronavirus pandemic, and all players globally are seeing the benefits.

In the U.K., Deliveroo’s core market, the industry average website traffic growth to food delivery sites was 78% YoY in the week ending March 12.

Deliveroo vs. the competition

In the U.K. just-eat.co.uk dominates the food delivery market, with more monthly visits to its site than deliveroo.co.uk and ubereats.com combined.

Deliveroo may have increased competition in the U.K., but its traffic growth looks promising.

Despite flat YoY growth in Q1 20 (-0.2%), YoY growth in site visits accelerated in 2020, reaching 79% YoY in 1Q21, a 10 percentage point (ppt) increase from the previous quarter.

Brand strength beating the competition

Never mind the seemingly smaller SoM than just-eat.co.uk, Deliveroo’s brand is robust. Deliveroo.co.uk received more than 82% of visits directly and from organic search in the U.K. in 1Q21, indicating solid brand strength. In comparison just-eat.co.uk is more reliant on paid advertisement, receiving 15.4% of traffic from paid search in 1Q21, 4.7 ppt higher than deliveroo.co.uk.

Download the Full Deliveroo Analysis