Deliveroo - ROO - Share Chat

Hi all, I’m new, go easy please. I’ve been accepted for £1000 deliveroo shares today. I’m a bit confused. I was asked if I had a broker when I signed up for the shares. I’ve got shares with freetrade and that’s it. I did not realise freetrade was adding Deliveroo UK to there portfolio. I signed up to there recommended broker. Did I make a mistake? Can I transfer my shares to freetrade wallet. Any advice would be very helpful please, as I’m a newbie to all this. PS I’m Uk based, which should be obvious to the experienced traders.

You didn’t do a mistake as such, any broker will do the job.

You can’t transfer your shares to Freetrade unfortunately

A friend who was opening his FT account asked about Deliveroo and I happily advised against it. The business model is just flawed and the valuation only relies on promises. It has no real viable product so to speak of. If they can’t even get profit with their current model (self-employed workers and basically nothing more than an app), then imagine what will happen when they have to start paying wages.

On earning £2 vs £13: If you only work in the busy hours, obviously you will make more money but in every business you have busier and less busier times. Only a conveyor belt is constant. Deliveroo should hire a fixed contingent of workers on a fulltime basis. That way, people will be able to make a decent living rather than doing 3 sidegigs. And in general, the idea of having food delivered to your door is that you are a lazy person. Just get up, walk a mile to your restaurant and get your food. I don’t understand why people need to have it delivered at their front door.

from a pure valuation point of view Deliveroo seems a good opportunity. At £5.6bn the company trade at around 5.0x the Revenues 2020, vs. 10x of Uber and 16.0x of DoorDash (the American “Deliveroo”).

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Will it be available for ISA accounts from the 7th April? Not particularly interested, but if price keeps on tanking, it may be worth a small punt…

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I’m surprised there’s no equivalent to Shopify for this i.e. offer an easy way for customers to make an online order and then fulfil delivery yourself. Maybe some sort of marketplace? Or is that the idea of JustEast (who delivers on their behalf?)

I believe so yes, once unconditional trading begins (on the 7th) it’s available for tax wrappers like ISA’s.

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It’s a shame that the 90s promise of the internet to make everyone into their own entrepreneur never came through and it’s a damn shame that there aren’t open and decentralised systems to replace the likes of eBay, JustEat, Uber etc.

I used to be very excited by https://openbazaar.org/ - which promised to kind of be an open alternative to Amazon, Shopify, etc but it’s never really taken off.

The siloed internet will doom us all!

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Restaurants don’t really want to handle delivery. It means they need more staff who are idle most of the time.

Guys why this stock is not in the ISA?

It’s under conditional trading for a week. Should be eligible for an isa next week.

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Actually, some of the restaurants near me used to used local taxi firms who were happy to deliver food during their quiet periods. I guess there’s parallels there to UberEats!

Exactly this.
A resterant owner doesn’t always want to mess around with hiring drivers (which will be different from hiring kitchen/FoH staff), figuring out how to price deliveries and how to get them out efficiently etc. I would bet that most resterant owners aren’t logistics experts and are more than happy to let a 3rd party service take that on for them. All they have to worry about is the resterant side, make the
food, hand it off to the courier. Nice and easy.

“Flopperoo” :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

My understanding was that many takeaways used to use (and perhaps still do) a very similar business model to Deliveroo of paying delivery drivers a few pounds per delivery. It’s not that the gig economy never existed before, conventional takeaways have done this for years, Deliveroo have just played a role in scaling it up and raising awareness.

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And in a bid to make themselves even less popular…

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There is a difference though. Deliveroo syphons off the money to highpaid executives and shareholders. The independent shop would provide a relatively steady income for 1 driver whereas Deliveroo floods the market with thousands of drivers who in effect compete with eachother to get business. Maybe a way to make income better for drivers would be the idea of a taxi rank: you get into a line and the first driver available does the delivery.

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This is an excellent point. It’s not that the gig economy is necessarily inherently bad, but the race to the bottom and its normalisation that simultaneously disenfranchises labour market participants of basic protections while seeking the absolve contacting businesses of their responsibility to provide these protections is the real problem.

Throw in the loss making nature of the business and the transfer of wealth and power from both the restaurants and drivers to the platform and its backers makes the whole thing just smell really bad - which is a shame because it doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t think even consumers particularly win, unless you consider delivery of tepid food of varying degrees of quality a win?

Maybe the negative sentiment by some of the UK’s big capital allocators and institutional investors is finally a rejection of this creeping normalisation of libertarian practices - I hope it is.

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I don’t believe this to be the case. Call me cynical if you will, but I don’t think institutional investors give a :poop: about the rights of workers or their pay being reasonable. They’re likely somewhat worried about possible future legislation impacting the path to profitability in the long-term. I think it’s mostly that they’re annoyed that the founder gets to out vote everyone for 3 years.

I don’t think the gig economy is inherently bad, either. For many, flexibility is likely a key reason they do such work. I’m unaware as to whether a “queue” of sorts exists with something like Deliveroo riders, or if it’s the first rider in the area to tap the button that signals availability. I doubt - though I won’t dispute if I’m indeed wrong - that they compete on price per delivery and effectively battle one another in a race to the bottom.

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