The rumor has been around for weeks: gorillas are about to be sold. At the end of the month, the express delivery service will run out of money. Gorillas always denied eagerly. On Monday, the Bloomberg news agency reported that the Turkish competitor Getir wants to buy the Berlin start-up. Final decisions have not yet been made and there is also the possibility that no transaction will ultimately take place. Although Getir and Gorillas did not want to comment on this.
What is certain, however, is that Gorillas was on the lookout for investors and, like all other quick suppliers, burned a lot of money from the start. This wasn’t considered a big problem as long as the services flooded various major cities around the world with their offers. But with the end of the lockdowns and the return of people to the office, the soaring of those who advertise that groceries can be delivered to your door in ten minutes also came to an end. It has also become noticeably quieter around gorillas.
The start-up had only entered the market in 2020, had raised 860 million euros a year ago and was valued at three billion dollars on this basis. Since then, the largest investor has been the delivery platform Delivery Hero and other investors the technology group Tencent from China, the US investment company Coatue and the Beijing-based investment company DST Global. But since the deal, Gorillas has had a hard time getting more money. In February of this year, Gorillas founder Kagan Sümer told Bloomberg that he planned to raise new financing of $700 million or more this year. He also wanted to make the business more profitable. But nothing came of both.
Instead, Gorillas examined financing options for a sale. A merger with competitors such as Jokr and Gopuff was also considered, it said. The background was the enormous monthly losses of up to 80 million dollars.
The start-up responded by laying off employees, withdrawing from countries and fine-tuning the cost structure. For example, gorillas raised delivery fees in some locations. In return, the drivers in the test cities delivered shopping baskets of above-average size free of charge. Sometimes individual drivers desperately advertised that customers were shopping for more than 25 euros. This is the amount for an average shopping cart – not enough to cover the costs for the drivers.
What the mirror reported: Gorillas is planning a kind of two-class system for its drivers. In the future, fast drivers who deliver a comparatively large number of orders during their shift should be able to choose their operating times first.
With the sentence: “We are in a phase of maximum uncertainty,” Gorillas manager Adrian Frenzel was quoted. “Over time, this will settle into a ‘New Normal’.” The New Normal could be when one express delivery service has taken over the other and only a few providers are left – as is emerging now. Since then, Gorillas’ new motto has been to stop expanding wildly into all sorts of countries. The focus is now on five markets: Germany, France, Great Britain, the USA and the Netherlands. Whereby gorillas also said goodbye to different cities in the individual countries.
The industry is therefore in the middle of a consolidation phase. The question is who will be left in the end. With the takeover of Gorillas, Getir would become the major quick commerce provider in Germany and Great Britain. At the end of 2021, Getir had already bought the British start-up Weezy. Getir raised nearly $800 million in March this year. The company, which was founded in 2015 and was considered a role model when it was founded, was valued at 11.8 billion dollars – many times more than gorillas.