40 Friday March 18 2022 | the times
Business
Getir, the six-year-old rapid delivery
service, has raised fresh funds at an
$11.8 billion valuation, greater than the
market capitalisation of Sainsbury’s.
Backers led by Mubadala Investment
Company, an Emirati sovereign wealth
fund, have invested $768 million in the
private business, one of a pack of
heavily venture-funded and generally
loss-making start-ups which provide
“ultrafast” grocery deliveries to
consumers.
The latest round brings the total
The online grocery joint venture
between Ocado Group and Marks &
Spencer has lowered its annual sales
outlook amid a faster than expected
return to pre-pandemic shopping
patterns and rising inflation.
Ocado Retail posted a 5.7 per cent
decline in revenue for the 13 weeks to
February 27, its first quarter, to
£564.7 million and said that it expected
revenue growth this year “closer to 10
per cent”, having only last month
forecast growth in the “mid-teens”.
The cautious update sent shares in
Ocado, which also owns a technology
business for third-party grocers, down
98½p, or 8.2 per cent, to £11.05.
Shares in M&S, its partner, fell 2.6 per
cent and rival food retailers had mixed
fortunes on the London Stock
Exchange, with Tesco down 0.1 per cent
and J Sainsbury up 1.2 per cent.
Melanie Smith, Ocado Retail’s chief
executive, said the value of the average
basket and “shape of the week continue
to normalise as we return towards the
rhythm of our pre-Covid lives”.
The average basket size was down 15per cent to £124, reflecting the easing of
pandemic restrictions compared with
lockdown in the quarter a year ago, and
the return to more office working.
It offset the increase in the number of
customer transactions in the quarter.
Average orders per week rose by 11.6 per
cent to 367,500 as active customer
numbers grew 31 per cent to 835,000.
Tim Steiner, co-founder of Ocado,
said: “People are still working from
home several days of the week, those
that were able to work from home, and
we think that is a basket booster. That is
getting offset at the moment by a bit of
euphoria that we’re all allowed out and
we can go to a restaurant.”Ocado suffers from return
to pre-Covid buying habits
Alex Ralph Ocado share price
£30
25
20
15
10
5
Source: Refinitiv 0
Q22020 2021 2022
Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1Getir fundraiser puts supermarkets
James Hurley invested in Getir, whose name means
“bring” in its native Turkey, to $2 billion
as it seeks to consolidate its position as
early market leader.
Getir offers thousands of items for
rapid delivery to customers. It was
founded in 2015 by Nazim Salur, 60, a
Turkish entrepreneur. It operates in all
81 cities in Turkey and has expanded
into 48 cities across Europe and the
United States.
It said that its app has been down-
loaded about 40 million times across
the nine countries it operates in
Getir delivers close to one million
orders a day, fulfilled from so-called
dark stores: centrally located shops that
hold stock solely for the purpose of
being quickly distributed by Getir’s
delivery workers.
Given that it is still in its early stages,
Getir’s latest valuation — about £9 bil-
lion — is likely to raise eyebrows in
some quarters. Tesco, Britain’s largest
supermarket, is valued at about £21 bil-
lion, while Sainsbury’s has a market cap
of about £6 billion. Morrison’s was sold
for £7 billion last year.
Many of the players in the rapid de-
livery industry are heavily loss-making,with promotions and discounting
funding their customer acquisition
amid fierce venture capital-funded
competition.
Getir has been the subject of recent
controversy over its financial links to
Vladimir Potanin, said to be Russia’s
richest man, who has played ice hockey
with Vladimir Putin. Potanin has been
called the mastermind of the “loans-
for-shares” auctions which resulted in
oligarchs securing state-owned Rus-
sian assets at bargain prices.
This month the Labour MP Margaret
Hodge named Potanin, 61, in a list of
oligarchs she called “cronies of Putin”.
Potanin has not been sanctioned and
last week criticised the Kremlin’s plans
to confiscate assets of foreign compa-
nies leaving the country.
Leaflets handed out in European
cities last week called on people to
boycott Getir, claiming that its “global
expansion is fuelled by Putin’s ice-
hockey buddy”.
The Russian investor Winter Capital,
which has been funded by Interros,
Potanin’s fund, has a small stake in
Getir. The high-speed delivery com-
pany said that Winter Capital did not
take part in the latest funding round.
Getir has said that it will reassess its
relationship with Winter Capital
should the fund face sanctions.
The Abu Dhabi Growth Fund, Alpha
Wave Global, the New York-based asset
manager, and Sequoia Capital, the
Silicon Valley venture capital firm, also
participated in the round.
In November, Getir bought its British
rival Weezy in the first sign of consoli-
dation of the emerging industry.
Jamie Blewitt, co-head of private
growth capital at finnCap Group, the
investment bank, said that Getir’s
bumper valuation was “clearly a testa-
ment to the consumer adoption that
Getir is seeing with what is still a
relatively new business model and
trend.
“The new investors coming on board
should give them that extra firepower
needed to win in the increasingly com-
petitive market and expand further
afield. The market is ripe for consolida-
tion so no doubt this capital will give
them additional options.”Behind the story
P
rivate companies with a
valuation north of
$1 billion used to be so
unusual that they were
given the “unicorn” tag
(James Hurley writes). These days,
thanks to a booming technology
industry and a flood of money
flowing into late-stage venture
capital, they are ten a penny.Rapid rise