Prosus deployed about $8.5 billion on acquisitions over the past year, including Just Eat Takeaway.com, as it moves to build a European business around food delivery, groceries and fintech. The money has gone into consolidation. The result is another platform designed to sit between people and the services they need, with a corporate hand on the switch.
The Platform Logic
The company said the deal spree formed part of its push to build a broader platform around Just Eat Takeaway.com. That’s the language of modern corporate power: acquire, absorb, centralise, repeat. What gets presented as strategy is really a bid to control more of daily life through one expanding commercial structure. Food, groceries and fintech are not being brought together for public benefit. They’re being bundled into a single business model that can extract value from each transaction.
Prosus said the strategy in Europe mirrors its approach in Latin America. That matters. It shows the company isn’t improvising; it’s exporting a template. The same logic that turns one region into a testing ground for platform expansion is now being applied across Europe, where the single market makes it easier for capital to move fast and stitch together new monopolistic arrangements while ordinary people are left to navigate the consequences.
Capital Moves, People Adapt
The company has spent roughly $8.5 billion on acquisitions over the past year. That figure is the real headline. It’s not just a balance-sheet detail. It’s the scale of the consolidation drive. In a Europe where workers are told to accept competition, flexibility and discipline, capital keeps doing the opposite of what it preaches: it concentrates power, buys up rivals and builds larger structures that narrow choice.
Just Eat Takeaway.com sits at the centre of that process. Prosus wants to use it as the foundation of a broader European business. Foundation is a neat word. It sounds stable, even civic. But here it means a corporate base for further expansion, one that can link delivery, groceries and fintech into a single apparatus. The more services are folded together, the more people are pushed into dependence on platforms they don’t control.
There’s no mystery in the method. The company buys, integrates and scales. The public gets a smoother interface. The owners get a larger machine.
Europe as a Corporate Playground
The strategy in Europe mirrors Prosus’s approach in Latin America, which tells you everything about how these firms see the world. Regions become markets. Markets become platforms. Platforms become the infrastructure of everyday life, but only on terms set from above. The people who cook, deliver, shop and pay are not shaping the system. They’re being fitted into it.
That’s the quiet violence of this kind of expansion. No riot police, no border fence, no ministerial speech. Just acquisitions worth billions, one after another, until the company can call the result a platform and present concentration as progress. The language is polished. The power is blunt.
Prosus’s deal spree is part of a broader push to build a wider business around Just Eat Takeaway.com, and the scale of that push makes the direction clear. More acquisitions mean more control. More control means fewer alternatives. In the corporate Europe being assembled here, the promise is convenience. The reality is dependence.