Welcome back, fellow logistics enthusiasts!
April's here, and the industry is still moving fast, in some cases, literally within the hour. Amazon is rolling out 1-hour delivery across the U.S. and opening dark stores in London, Joybuy just went live across six European markets with same-day as its default, and FedEx is borrowing from the 3PL orchestration playbook we've been tracking for months. Meanwhile, Delivery Hero posted its best financial results ever, but is facing a shareholder revolt at the same time. We're unpacking what that means for the company, and for the European delivery landscape.
And as always, you'll find the latest MotionTools release notes at the bottom.
Let's get into it.
📢 What the industry was up to
⚡️ More speed, more options
Joybuy officially went live on March 16 across six European markets (UK, Germany, Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg) with same-day delivery as its headline proposition. Order before 11am, get it by 11pm. Free delivery on orders over €29. Over 100,000 products from brands like Apple, Samsung, and Philips, fulfilled through JD.com's own JoyExpress network from 60+ warehouses across Europe. We did a full deep dive on JD.com's European strategy last month; you can read it here.
Amazon is pushing the speed floor from both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., it launched 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options across hundreds of cities for over 90,000 products. The new tiers are powered by Amazon's Same-Day Delivery facilities, which handle picking, sorting, and dispatch under one roof. In the UK, Amazon is building out a network of dark stores for its Amazon Now rapid delivery service, promising groceries and household essentials in as fast as 30 minutes. Four sites are now live across London.
FedEx launched SameDay Local, a new U.S. service offering two-hour and same-day delivery at checkout. Rather than building its own last-mile fleet, FedEx is partnering with OneRail to orchestrate a network of over 1,000 local delivery providers: AI-matched to the right vehicle and route for each order. It's a legacy carrier adopting the same 3PL orchestration playbook we've been tracking for a while now.
💰 Where the money's going
Amazon acquired Rivr, a Zurich-based robotics startup whose four-legged wheeled robot (described by its founder as a "dog on roller skates") can climb stairs to reach doorsteps. The acquisition signals Amazon's interest in what Rivr calls "General Physical AI" for last-mile delivery: robots that can handle the real world between the van and the front door.
The drone delivery company Zipline just added another $200 million to its Series H, pushing the round to $800 million at a $7.6 billion valuation. They also just locked in a national-scale contract in Rwanda for its Platform 2 drones. We covered their initial $600 million raise back in February; the fact that they needed to top it up just two months later tells you how fast things are moving.
Edeka increased its stake in Picnic to roughly one third, up from 28%, as part of the delivery service's €430 million funding round. Germany's largest food retailer has been deepening its bet on Picnic for years. Edeka CEO Markus Mosa sits on the board, and the company relies entirely on Picnic for its online grocery strategy. Meanwhile, Picnic Germany co-founder Frederic Knaudt is leaving after eight years, with Picnic co-founder Michiel Muller taking over.
📖 Delivery Hero built a global delivery empire. Now it may have to break it apart.
On March 26, Delivery Hero published its FY 2025 numbers: adjusted EBITDA up 30% to €903 million, €250 million in cash generated for the second year running, and €2.7 billion in liquidity. On paper, that’s a company heading in the right direction. But just six days earlier, the stock had fallen to €14.80 — a record low. And in between, the company’s third-largest shareholder called for the CEO’s removal.
How does a company post its strongest results yet and face a shareholder revolt over its strategic direction at the same time?
An empire built by acquisition
Delivery Hero was founded in Berlin in 2011 and scaled into one of the world's largest delivery platforms through aggressive M&A. The biggest bets: Woowa Brothers (operator of South Korea's Baemin) at a $4 billion valuation in 2020, and a majority stake in Spain's Glovo at a €2.3 billion valuation in 2021. Add Talabat in the Middle East, Foodpanda across Asia, and PedidosYa in Latin America, and by 2021, the company was operating in dozens of countries across four continents.
The stock peaked at €145.40 in January 2021. The pandemic had turned food delivery into essential infrastructure, and Delivery Hero was one of the global category leaders. Five years later, roughly 90% of that value is gone.
Shareholders force a reckoning
That kind of decline doesn't go unnoticed by investors. Under growing pressure, Delivery Hero announced a strategic review in December 2025 and retained JP Morgan as advisor. Three months later, the situation escalated.
Strong assets, broken structure?
On March 13, Hong Kong-based Aspex Management (9.2% stake, third-largest investor) sent a letter to CEO Niklas Östberg warning of "further value destruction." Their argument: Delivery Hero lags peers like Uber, Grab, DoorDash, and Meituan on profitability, the conglomerate structure may be destroying value, and the company may not be the best owner of several of its assets.
The underlying tension is hard to ignore. Talabat operates at multi-billion-dollar scale, Baemin has returned to growth, and Glovo continues to expand in Europe. Yet the group trades at a fraction of what those assets might be worth individually. That gap is the core of Aspex's argument.
And it widens once structural costs are taken into account. Glovo’s shift to employing roughly 15,000 riders in Spain adds significant ongoing cost. At the same time, regulatory pressure is mounting: Spanish labor enforcement and a €329 million EU antitrust settlement have already pushed total fines and provisions into the hundreds of millions. Meanwhile, Prosus, the largest shareholder with roughly 27%, has committed to significantly reduce its stake as part of EU antitrust conditions.
The first action steps
Ten days after the first letter, Delivery Hero agreed to sell its Foodpanda business in Taiwan to Grab for $600 million. Östberg called it “a key first step.” Aspex responded that the deal showed value had been “significantly eroded” and, a day later, sent a second letter to the supervisory board calling for wholesale management changes.
By the end of March, Bloomberg reported that Prosus is considering selling roughly 10% of its stake to Aspex, potentially making the activist the largest shareholder.
The first asset sale is underway, the largest shareholder is under pressure to reduce its position, and the market is watching what comes next. Whatever shape the company takes—leaner, broken up, or under new leadership—the implications will extend well beyond its own stock price.
Why this matters beyond Delivery Hero
Glovo's regulatory experience is worth watching, not just because of Delivery Hero. The EU Platform Work Directive requires all member states to transpose its rules by December 2026. The regulatory direction is set, and the costs are real for every delivery operator in Europe.And if Delivery Hero does restructure, the logistics layer gets renegotiated too. When integrated platforms fragment, local infrastructure becomes more important, for 3PLs and delivery operators, that's a structural opportunity.
More broadly, the 2010s playbook of acquiring globally and worrying about profitability later is hitting its limits. What's replacing it appears to be more regional, more partner-dependent, and more operationally distributed.
🤝 Community Update
On April 21, our founders Patrick and Marian will attend the 15th Logistik Dinner hosted by the Hamburg Senate in the Hamburger Rathaus. The event, organized by the Logistik-Initiative Hamburg, brings together over 300 leaders from across the logistics industry and includes the award ceremony for the HANSE GLOBE 2026 — Hamburg's international prize for sustainable logistics.
It's one of those rare evenings where Hamburg’s logistics ecosystem is in one room (and a pretty stunning one at that). To our Hamburg community: if you'll be there too, reach out to Marian on LinkedIn, we'd love to connect with you!
🦾 Shipping better technology for a world in Motion
Feature highlight: Smarter Auto-Dispatch
We've introduced a smarter auto-dispatch system that better balances delivery speed and driver productivity. Instead of dispatching tours at a fixed time before the scheduled pickup, the system can now deliberately delay dispatching by a configurable or dynamic duration after a booking comes in. This gives the stacking engine a fair window to find suitable stacking candidates for every booking, regardless of when it was placed, while not unnecessarily delaying the delivery.
Additionally, the stacking engine now handles scheduled time differences more intelligently, while taking into account which ETA was promised to the customer/merchant
Quick view of other updates:
- Webhook event filtering now available in the Dashboard
- Improved driver location update efficiency
- Automated route estimate backfill
- Booking Details page improvements
Upcoming Deprecations:
- Updated filter naming on the List Users API endpoint
