Seven years after opening its first store in Italy, Domino's Pizza is reportedly departing with its tail between its legs.
The last of the chain's 29 Italian stores has shut down, according to a Bloomberg news report.
The company opened its first stores in Italy in 2015 with ambitious plans.
It was planning to open 880 stores and control about 2 per cent of the Italian pizza market by 2030, Italian CEO Alessandro Lazzaroni told Italian economics and finance news platform Money.it in 2019.
"There's a lot of pizza, but there's not a lot of delivered pizza,'' Domino's chief executive Patrick Doyle said at the time.
"So there may still be an opportunity.''
However, the rise of delivery services such as Deliveroo, Just Eat and Glovo took away any advantage the American company thought it would have, according to a report to investors in 2021 by their Italian franchise holder ePizza SpA.
Many shops on Domino's Italian website were marked as permanently closed on Wednesday, while others did not appear to be accepting orders.
Domino's Pizza has over 18,500 stores worldwide in at least 90 countries, most run as franchises.
The greatest number of stores, outside of the United States, are in India, followed by the United Kingdom and Japan.
