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Comment by 0zymandias | Hacker News Reader

I am bullish on this as a recent shareholder. We are now in the consolidation phase of delivery service where fewer companies mean less competition, more efficiency and better economics.

This is where Dara’s strength is. He has a history of great dealmaking and acquisitions. I expect Uber to thrive as the industry consolidates.

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A more cynical take on this might be that it's hard to actually turn a sustainable profit in this market unless you have monopolistic pricing power, and hence, consolidation. Less of "the strong get stronger" and more of "the unprofitable become few enough to become profitable"

> A more cynical take on this might be that it's hard to actually turn a sustainable profit in this market unless you have monopolistic pricing power,

I'm not convinced even a sole provider would have pricing power in anything but a vastly smaller market than currently exists: food delivery doesn't compete with only other food delivery, but also with “drive there yourself takeout” and “cook (or at least heat up) food at home”, which limits the scope of pricing power.

Horizontally integrated food delivery is a natural monopoly even without abusing monopolistic pricing power

Or some kind of automated delivery. Or both.

I'd like to provide an personal take on this - this will be a bad deal until Uber can be a super app doing 100x more things than it's doing today. So maybe never.

Why? Because exactly in China there was consolidation of food delivery apps into like 3 or 4 of them from 100+. But all of them are still burning lots of money from investors, except one - Meituan-Dianpin which built on this super app (first think of it as uber+yelp+groupon+tripadvisor+more) handling all kinds of life needs from food to labor service. Yet this super app barely started making profits recently after grabbing so much aspects of daily life, while its food delivery unit is still burning money, though contributing to the profiting units like ads.

The American equivalent would be Google, as for myself and many others the Google maps reviews have long replaced yelp/groupon/tripadvisor, as it perhaps surprisingly tends to have the most accurate information about local businesses. But Google does not get into delivery because in America, the math doesn't work.

When I was in HK, I used foodpanda, it was super cheap, I think $10HK. Deliveryman shows up on a scooter, and has at least one other persons food with him. The density supports it. American cities are built somewhat differently where most middle-class people don't live very close to most of the restaurants they wish to order food from.

I think it has much more to do with the terrible math involved with doing delivery in such spread out regions. There being a super-app that does everything does not matter.

Also in America food takes much longer to be ready than in Asia. I don't know why but it does add up.

Remember JUMP? They were acquired for $200M like, a year and a half ago. As far as I can tell, they don't exist anymore.

Jump bikes still exist. Not sure what you're on about.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52832791

a few thousand of them exist, Uber had over 30000 destroyed: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dz94x/uber-acquisition-j...

I'm not sure where you're located, but the Jump bikes in Seattle are now operated by Lime (even though you still rent them in the Uber app for some reason).

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/jump-bikes-return-seattle-lime...

Uber paid $170 million for a stake in Lime haha. The math works.

Yeah, they are now under Lime operations

With the very recent Lime investment they laid off the NeMo (aka Jump) team and it’s product lines. The bikes were solid, rip.

This is the same model that Uber at large is following with the taxi service. The underlying premise is that if Uber can just get a monopoly they’ll finally stop losing a billion dollars every month.

I doubt that Uber will be allowed to monopolize this industry. And if they did, I doubt that customers would be willing to pay the premium.

I doubt the validity of the food delivery model anywhere but the most dense urban areas. And in those areas competition is fierce and regulators are quick to pounce.

Just because Amazon lost money for a decade doesn’t mean every single company will follow that same trajectory.

This merger might trigger an antitrust case. Although people who order stuff might have lower fees through economies of scale, restaurants and drivers could be negatively impacted (more of a monosopy). At some point we need to start considering gig workers as part of antitrust considerations.

Anti trust seems weak. 3rd and distant 4th place merging. Even weaker right now than T-mobile Sprint. Where other things like spectrum and infrastructure were big. They are one company now.

> fewer companies mean less competition, more efficiency and better economics

Can you explain this sentence? I always thought more companies, implies more innovation, and thus more efficiency.

Imagine a market where there is one food delivery company rather than ten:

a) at a restaurant, rather than having ten different delivery people pickup, One person can pickup ten orders.

b) 10x more consumers means that the average distance between deliveries shortens.

It’s not going to be quite this efficient but directionally more scale means more efficiency.

In addition, less competition means that Uber can charge more for their services.

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