Prosus-owned iFood buys Brazil’s Caju to expand food voucher footprint (updated)

Meituan

Tue 23:17

Updates to add deal's value in paragraph 2
By Luciana Magalhaes
SAO PAULO, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Brazilian food delivery app iFood, owned by Dutch investor Prosus PRX.AS, said on Tuesday it would buy Caju, a local corporate benefits company and player in Brazil’s meal and grocery voucher market.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by the firms. But a source familiar with the matter said the transaction was valued at 1 billion reais ($198.9 million). The amount was reported earlier in the day by the newspaper O Globo.
    iFood dominates Brazil's food delivery service, which faces increasing competition following the arrival of Keeta, a unit of Chinese tech giant Meituan 3690.HK. Beyond its core business, the company is also eyeing growth in the employee benefits market.
If approved by local regulators, the acquisition will double iFood’s presence in Brazil's corporate benefits sector, the companies said in a joint statement. 
The acquisition, executed through iFood’s corporate benefits arm, iFood Beneficios, forms part of iFood's broader plan to invest 24 billion reais ($4.79 billion) through March 2027, the statement said.
Brazil's expanding meal and grocery voucher market handles approximately 150 billion reais annually across more than 20 million consumers, according to Arthur Freitas, CEO of iFood Beneficios.
iFood Beneficios and Caju each process roughly 1.3 billion reais in monthly transactions, Freitas told Reuters in an interview. Combined, the two companies will serve approximately 135,000 corporate clients and 3 million active users, he added. 
The deal remains subject to approval by Brazil's central bank and antitrust regulator CADE, with closure expected next year, according to Eduardo Del Giglio, Caju's co-founder and CEO.

($1 = 5.0271 reais)

 (Reporting by Luciana Magalhaes; Editing by Oliver Griffin and Nia Williams)
 ((Luciana.NovaesMagalhaes@thomsonreuters.com;))