Uber plans to gobble up delivery rival Postmates in $2.6 billion deal

Enlarge / Bicycle couriers making deliveries to Uber Eats customers in São Paulo in April, 2019 (a year before the novel coronavirus pandemic).

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Uber is trying again to acquire a food delivery rival after it wiped out on its last attempt earlier this year. The company said today it plans chow down on Postmates in a deal valued at $2.6 billion.

The companies announced the all-stock transaction this morning. Uber said the companies’ businesses are “highly complementary,” as they have different customer bases in different parts of the country. Uber in its press release praised Postmates as “an early pioneer of ‘delivery-as-a-service,'” a truly spectacular buzzword jam for our era.

What Uber probably wants, though, is for someone to deliver it a profit. The company lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter of this year (period ending March 31), after losing $1.1 billion each in Q4 and Q3 and a whopping $5 billion in the quarter before that.

The COVID-19 pandemic crashed the ride-hailing half of Uber’s business. Demand for rides dropped by 70 percent in recent months, as people stopped going anywhere for several months and have remained understandably leery of sharing an enclosed space with one or more strangers on the rare occasion they do. Uber laid off 6,700 workers—about a quarter of its global full-time workforce—across two rounds of job cuts in May.

Food delivery businesses, on the other hand, have seen increased demand

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