In February this year, Korean media reported that Delivery Hero was in contact with potential buyers regarding the sale of Baemin, South Korea’s largest food delivery platform. More recently, further Korean media reports on the identities of potential bidders have drawn wide attention across Friends of Momentum Works.
This commentary is written by David Oh (Korean: 오세진), who previously served as CIRO of Woowa Brothers, the operator of Baemin, and later as CIO for Asia at Delivery Hero following Woowa’s acquisition.
Published with the author’s permission. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of Momentum Works. You can find the original commentary here.
Original title: Baemin Is on the Block – And the Real Question Is Who Can Actually Beat Coupang
Delivery Hero has quietly sent deal teasers for Woowa Brothers – operator of South Korea’s dominant food delivery app Baemin – through JPMorgan, approaching names including Alibaba, Meituan, an Uber-Naver consortium, and DoorDash. The reported asking price is around ₩8 trillion – nearly double what Delivery Hero paid in won terms for a 100% stake back in 2019, though no official figure has been confirmed. With roughly $7.1B in debt on its books and a string of asset sales already underway, Delivery Hero needs a clean exit from its most profitable market.
A quick look at the numbers explains both the appeal and the complexity. Baemin’s 2025 revenue crossed ₩5.28 trillion (~$3.5B), up 22% year-on-year. But operating profit fell 7% to ₩592.9B (~$400M) – the third consecutive year of decline from a 2023 peak of ₩699.8B (~$470M). The culprit is well known: Coupang Eats has relentlessly chipped away at Baemin’s dominance through the Wow membership flywheel.
Why most bidders face real constraints
Markets initially viewed the Uber-Naver consortium (70:30) as the most realistic buyer – Naver’s membership program already offers users a 10% discount on Uber rides, an integration that is already live. But Naver is currently deep in its Naver Financial–Dunamu (Upbit, Korea’s largest crypto exchange) merger work, leaving limited bandwidth for a concurrent mega-acquisition. Today, Naver confirmed receipt of the teaser letter while publicly stating it is “not currently reviewing anything.” Beyond capacity constraints, Korean regulators are actively tightening platform laws – and adding food delivery on top of search and shopping would expose Naver to serious antitrust scrutiny it likely wants to avoid.
Could Uber go it alone? The track record gives pause. Uber Eats entered Korea in 2017, but insisted on its global app UI/UX without adequately adapting to local culture and ordering behavior – and exited by 2019. Korea’s delivery consumers have among the highest expectations in the world. Capital alone doesn’t win here.
DoorDash has a clear M&A playbook: acquire only where you can be #1. After buying Deliveroo, it exited Hong Kong and Singapore without hesitation when the math didn’t work. In a market where Coupang Eats is already running neck-and-neck with Baemin in Seoul and Gyeonggi, DoorDash’s calculus almost certainly doesn’t add up.
The most threatening candidate (in my opinion): Meituan
I see Meituan as the most serious potential buyer – and the one candidate that could genuinely threaten Coupang’s dominance if a deal were to materialize. Three reasons.
Firepower. Meituan held cash and short-term investments totaling approximately $23B at end-2024 – a ₩8 trillion (~$5.4B) deal is well within reach.
Proven execution. What sets Meituan apart is not simply the size of its capital deployment – it’s the discipline behind it. Meituan is well known for taking its time before entering any new market: studying local dynamics, consumer behavior, and the competitive landscape in depth before committing. Its Hong Kong entry is a case in point – the company reportedly spent over a year preparing its local strategy before Keeta’s launch in May 2023. The capital followed the strategy, not the other way around. That sequencing is what makes the results stick. Keeta reached #1 in Hong Kong in just 10 months, capturing 44% order market share by March 2024 – and after Deliveroo’s exit in April 2025, its position is now uncontested. In Saudi Arabia, launched September 2024, Keeta broke into the top 3 within months. By November 2025, Keeta was processing ~700,000 daily orders across the Middle East – and in Dubai, it topped the App Store food & drink rankings on launch day (September 27, 2025), taking on Talabat directly. The playbook is consistent: build a deep local foundation first, then deploy subsidies at a scale incumbents cannot match, dominate supply, and optimize toward profitability. It works – and it is a template that could translate to Korea.
Strategic fit – and the limits of what we can know. Korea is one of the world’s most mature and resilient food delivery markets. For Meituan, which has methodically expanded Keeta across GCC markets, acquiring a proven delivery platform in a premium East Asian market can be a natural next step on paper.
That said, whether Meituan is genuinely interested in Baemin is impossible to verify from the outside. And even if the interest is real, the obstacles to a successful acquisition are significant. Regulatory scrutiny from the Korean government would be among the highest hurdles – the political sensitivity around delivery platforms, data sovereignty concerns, and the downstream impact on hundreds of thousands of restaurant owners and riders make this a far more complex approval process than a standard M&A. The fact that Baemin’s cap table has long included Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Goldman Sachs PE Hong Kong, and GIC provides some precedent for Chinese-affiliated capital in the Korean market – but it does not guarantee a path to regulatory clearance. Meituan may be the most threatening candidate on paper. Whether they are a willing and viable one in practice is a different question entirely.
Why Baemin still commands premium attention
The global comparison is instructive. A food delivery platform generating ~$400M in annual operating profit – peaking closer to $470M in 2023 – is a genuinely rare asset globally. For context, Grab’s entire deliveries segment, spanning six Southeast Asian countries, generated $196M in Adjusted EBITDA in FY2024, and $285M in FY2025. Baemin, operating in a single market, comfortably outearns one of the world’s most recognized delivery platforms on an absolute profit basis.
Talabat, the MENA leader that delivered $497M in Adjusted EBITDA in 2024 on $7.4B GMV, posted operating income of ~$355M and net income of $346M – both still below Baemin’s operating profit on a dollar basis.
It is also worth noting that DH has already extracted approximately ₩1.5 trillion (~$1.0B) in dividends alone during its ownership period – a testament to the platform’s consistent cash generation. At ₩8 trillion (~$5.4B), a buyer receiving stable annual returns recoups their investment within a decade, and that’s before any platform value appreciation. Last but not least, Korea and Taiwan stand out as virtually the only markets in the world where food delivery has continued to grow steadily even after COVID – a characteristic that makes Baemin’s underlying franchise unusually durable.
The variable nobody is discounting enough: Coupang
Whoever ends up buying Baemin will inherit a fight that is already being lost on one front. Coupang Eats has already reached near-parity with – and in some areas may even be surpassing – Baemin’s market share across Seoul and Gyeonggi, backed by its 40M+ Wow membership base and a recent expansion of free delivery and its Own Delivery (OD, faster delivery) service – now extended even to non-Wow subscribers. As Baemin searches for a new owner, DH’s current C-level executives are also scheduled to step down by end of March next year – meaning the sale process and a leadership transition will collide at exactly the same moment. Whether Baemin’s local Korean team can maintain the focus and responsiveness needed to counter Coupang’s relentless offensive during that window is one of the most underappreciated risks in this deal. Baemin’s chronic strategic blind spot under Delivery Hero was an inability to respond in time – to Wow subscriptions, to unlimited discount campaigns, to Coupang’s relentless product cadence. The next owner will face that same test from day one.
One more variable: Aspex’s urgency
There is another force that may shape both the speed and the terms of this deal – Aspex Management, which has rapidly emerged as Delivery Hero’s most influential shareholder. In March 2026, Aspex publicly demanded that DH’s CEO sell non-core assets rapidly or face management replacement. Then on May 11, Aspex acquired a 5% block directly from Prosus at a 22% premium to the 30-day VWAP, lifting its total stake to approximately 15% – and the DH CEO announced his resignation shortly after. With Prosus’s remaining ~17% stake subject to EU voting restrictions*, Aspex effectively controls the strategic agenda heading into DH’s AGM on June 23, 2026.
Aspex’s message has been consistent: identify assets where Delivery Hero is not the best owner, and sell them fast. The question now is how aggressively Aspex will push for a Baemin deal – and whether it will accept a discount to the asking price in exchange for speed and certainty. With debt pressure mounting and a governance reset underway, DH may increasingly prioritize execution over price. That dynamic could shift the negotiating calculus significantly in favor of motivated buyers.
The outcome of this deal will do more than transfer ownership of a food delivery app – it will help determine who controls the data, logistics, and daily commerce of 50 million people, and on whose terms Korea’s platform economy enters its next chapter. For whoever wins, the harder work begins the morning after the deal closes.
Sources: Korea Herald (May 14, 2026), Aju News (May 14, 2026), Bloomberg, Reuters, Woowa Brothers filings, Meituan Annual Report, Talabat FY2024 Results, Grab FY2025 Earnings (Feb 12, 2026), Measurable AI, TechBuzzChina, Momentum Works (The Low Down) | KRW/USD rate: 1,492
*Editor’s note: In August 2025, as a condition for European Commission antitrust approval of its acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway, Prosus committed to waiving the voting rights and board nomination rights attached to its stake in Delivery Hero, and to reducing its shareholding to a single-digit percentage within 12 months.
