Just Eat forks out £360m to gobble up Hungryhouse and SkipTheDishes

Just Eat will fork out up to £240m to gobble up its main UK rival Hungryhouse from Germany's Delivery Hero and for afters has tucked into Canada's SkipTheDishes for up to £120m.

The FTSE 250 online takeaway food group will spend an initial £200m cash on Hungryhouse plus £40m cash subject to performance between signing and completion of the transaction, funded through existing balances and credit facilities.

Hungryhouse, which operates on a similar model to Just Eat and will immediately create an enlarged customer base for the existing restaurant partners, would be expected to add EBITDA of between £12-15m, excluding one-off exceptional transaction and integration costs of around £1m, assuming ownership and integration for the full 2017 reporting year.

Just Eat said it expects the addition of Hungryhouse to be accretive to earnings per share in the first full year of ownership.

Chief executive David Buttress said the combination of the two businesses should also generate "compelling economic benefits of scale, with high operating leverage driving material synergies".

Canada's SkipTheDishes, which is felt to be highly complementary to Just Eat's existing Canadian operations, with limited geographical overlap between the two companies, will be acquired for an initial CAD$110m (£66.1m) split into an immediate C$100m cash and C$10m of shares in 12 months' time, plus up to a further C$90m (£54.1m) cash if certain strict financial targets are met.

"Given an outlook for continued, strong order growth over the medium term, as SkipTheDishes scales significantly across Canada, Just Eat expects the acquisition, net of one-off exceptional transaction and integration costs, to be moderately dilutive to EPS in 2017 and 2018 before being EPS accretive thereafter."