Delivery Hero boss Östberg apologizes to shareholders
His company's shares have been flying low since last week. However, Östberg has stated that he intends to stick to his strategy.
The head of food delivery service Delivery Hero, Niklas Östberg, has apologized to his company's shareholders via the short message service Twitter. The company's profit forecasts for the current year were below expectations. As a result, Delivery Hero's shares lost over 30 percent last Thursday and continued their fall on Friday, closing down 11.8 percent.
"I'm really sorry for all shareholders!" wrote Östberg in his tweet, adding a sad emoji to the sentence. "We are in the same boat." At the same time, however, Östberg was ready to fight, promising: "We will not change our strategy because of the decline." However, the company will work even harder. The goal: "Prove that our investment strategy will pay off."
Östberg is under a lot of pressure. Delivery Hero is currently worth around the same as it was in November 2019. The company had benefited greatly from the coronavirus pandemic. Its share price peaked at around 140 euros last year.
Many investors had bet that customers would continue to order a lot of food and that Delivery Hero's success on the stock market would be sustainable. However, the share price had already fallen by the end of last year. The share then went into free fall. The Delivery Hero share is now worth around 39 euros (as of February 14, 12:45 p.m.).
Not all investors seem to have accepted Östberg's Twitter apology. One user writes: "'We're in the same boat,' says the man who doesn't even bother to come to his own shareholders' meeting." Another user of the social network describes the tweet as desperate.
Some analysts are also pessimistic about Delivery Hero's further share price development: the investment bank Barclays, for example, reduced its target price from 153 to 80 euros, as the Handelsblatt reported. UBS, on the other hand, maintained its buy recommendation and renewed its price target of 110 euros.
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