NEW YORK: GrubHub Inc is gobbling up its smaller competitors, but trading them in for much, much larger ones.
On Thursday, the company said it would buy Eat24 from Yelp Inc for US$288mil in cash, well over twice the US$134mil Yelp paid for the smaller food delivery company when Yelp bought it in February 2015. GrubHub and Yelp are also agreeing to a five-year partnership that will see Yelp integrating GrubHub ordering into its own restaurant listings. When someone places a GrubHub order through Yelp, GrubHub will pay a “partnership fee”, which the company considers a marketing expense.