Deliveroo’s shares perked up on their first open day of trading, although the improvement was clouded by a strike by hundreds of its delivery riders.
To coincide with the start of unconditional trading in the shares, Deliveroo riders went on strike to call for “fair pay, safety protections and basic workers’ rights”.
The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which organised the action, said that at least 200 delivery riders had gathered in London, while further “socially distanced protests” had taken place in York, Sheffield, Reading and Wolverhampton.
Claims that some riders are paid as little as £2 an hour contributed to a dozen institutional investors’ declaring that they would not invest in the initial public offering (IPO).
Last week, on their first day of conditional trading, the shares lost more than 30 per cent of their value in early trading before closing off 26.3 per cent at 287½p. Yesterday, the first day that Deliveroo customers who had bought up to £1,000 of stock could sell out, the shares rose by 6p, or 2.2 per cent, to 286p, still well below the 390p at which they were priced.
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It also emerged that Goldman Sachs, one of the company’s main advisers, had bought £75 million of shares in an attempt to prop up the share price.
The company has also been criticized for failing to name the three “anchor investors” it claimed had snapped up 30 per cent of the shares sold in the IPO. Assuming they each bought 10 per cent, they will each emerge with about 2.25 per cent of the total equity, below the 3 per cent level at which they would be obliged to declare their holdings.
Deliveroo, co-founded in 2013 by Will Shu, 41, a former Wall Street analyst, works with more than 115,000 restaurants in 12 countries and has 100,000 riders.
Greg Howard, a Deliveroo rider and chairman of the IWGB’s couriers and logistics branch, said: “I’m going on strike for my basic rights and those of all the other riders struggling to get by and support families on Deliveroo poverty pay.”
A Deliveroo spokeswoman said: “This small self-appointed union does not represent the vast majority of riders who tell us they value the total flexibility they enjoy while working with Deliveroo alongside the ability to earn over £13 an hour.”
