If one didn’t know Deliveroo’s stock market history, a take-out price of £2.7bn for a barely profitable food delivery app would seem a decent piece of business from the seller’s point of view. The qualification, of course, is that the likely 180p-a-share offer from DoorDash of the US stacks up poorly against the 390p at which Deliveroo listed in 2021.
The moral of the numbers, though, is surely only that the flotation, or IPO market in early 2021 was infected by Covid-19 silliness. Almost everything was listed at over-inflated prices in a weird period when fund managers seemed to have lost the ability to say no to smooth-talking investment bank promoters.
