Silver Proofs

Do silver linings exist?

Whilst the country languishes in dark and cold winter evenings, the lack of twilight and endless rain and bad weather has depressed everyone with the exception of Danish entrepreneur, Klaus Nyegaard. He is the Chief Executive of the online takeaway company Just-Eat. For this man, if the weather is bad, business is bound to be good as nobody really wants to get soaked buying food.

The Just-Eat website allows users to browse and order from the menus of thousands of takeaway delivery outlets including pizza and Indian food, and has grown steadily since its original launch in 2001. The company founders moved their attentions to the ‘takeaway hungry’ UK having begun the company in Denmark. The British penchant for having take-aways delivered to the door makes it the biggest market outside the USA for this kind of service. The logical choice was to start an operation in the United Kingdom. While it appears that trips to restaurants may be on the decline, the takeaway market is booming and the company’s growth is set to continue.

More than half of the 6,000 take-away restaurants listed on Just-Eat are in the UK with more than a million orders going through the Just-Eat platform every month. The figures were certainly impressive enough to encourage venture capitalists Index Ventures to close a £10.5 million funding deal with Just-Eat recently, allowing the company to reinforce its market-leading position in the UK and expand into further European markets. With over a thousand take-aways opening in the UK every year, Just-Eat is confident that there’s a growing and massive slice of the market ripe for the taking.

Just-Eat is an atttractive proposition financially for any investor, as it uses a simple scalable business model. The company’s revenue model allows for easy growth too, as payments are made directly to Just-Eat via their online payment service. The up-front money is then paid to participating restaurants twice monthly, less the 10% commission for Just-Eat. Cash flow is not a problem as the structure ensures that the company has plenty of money in the account at any given point in time.

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