Getir has put an end to several weeks of rumours with the announcement of Gorillas as its latest acquisition. This is a huge unification alliance in the instant grocery delivery space. It is now official and confirmed across channels that Getir has closed the acquisition of Gorillas; it’s major competitor.
Nazim Salur the founder of Getir in a confirmatory statement expressed his sentiments about convenience services and the company’s direction:
“the super fast grocery delivery industry will steadily grow for many years to come and Getir will lead this category it created 7 years ago.”
Getir kicked off in 2015 in Turkey. Since then, the company has flourished as people increasingly began ordering groceries online especially as the aftermath of the post Covid 19 lockdown restrictions. This restriction is what companies like Getir, Flink, Gorillas and other companies offering similar services have leveraged upon introducing a new model for grocery deliveries.
The conventional protocol involves reservation of delivery slots for the next day but the newly introduced model involves instantly processed orders via the apps of these platforms. This works similarly to what is obtainable with food delivery services like Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat Takeaway where customers access the app, select their choice items, make their orders and track this order using the app.
The Covid-19 pandemic helped these services grow at an exponential rate and helped companies secure massive financial breakthrough. Companies offering these services surreptitiously organized clusters of dark stores in dense cities to facilitate instant deliveries within the hour mark.
Apart from the huge operational costs incurred by these companies, incentives to life customers such as promo codes, and reduced delivery fees also gulped a fortune from these companies. However when restrictions were lifted, and venture capital funding gradually faded out, many cities placed restrictions on active dark stores. The implication of this downturn for the industry in 2022 has included pullbacks, layoffs and targeted consolidation moves.
Getir announced a 14% cut of its global staff in May 2022 and this move affected over 4,000 members of staff. Getir is not restricted to Turkey its home country but is active in the U.S as well as some European countries including France, U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Spain Portugal and Italy.
Just like Getir, Gorillas went through a layoff phase in early 2022 which promoted a redirection causing the company to channel it’s focus to some specific markets (Netherlands, Germany, U.S, and the U.K.
Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times values the combined group at $10 billion. During the highest point of the grocery bubble, the two companies were judged to be worth $11.8 billion (Getir) and $3 billion (Gorillas). With this recent collaboration, Gorillas investors will swoop up 12% of Getir’s capitalization table.
Since there is an obvious overlap between Getir and the newly acquired Gorillas, there will likely be some layoffs in certain cities where the two companies are presently active. This readjustment may also require reducing the number of their existing dark stores.
As originally reported in (https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/09/instant-grocery-app-getir-acquires-its-competitor-gorillas/)
