TOP STORY
Uber bids $14.8 billion for Delivery Hero, and Baemin sits on the keep list
Uber signed a business combination agreement with Delivery Hero on Thursday and launched a voluntary public takeover offer at €41.50 per share in cash. That prices Delivery Hero's equity at $14.8 billion, or $13.7 billion once Uber's earlier stake purchases are netted out. Uber already held about 24.77% of the voting shares and a further 11.74% of economic exposure through derivatives; Prosus has irrevocably committed to tender roughly 17%, which would lift Uber's total economic interest to about 53%. The offer needs 50% plus one share, is backed by a €14.2 billion bridge facility, and targets a close in the second half of 2027.
Uber takes 50 markets that booked $42 billion in gross bookings last year. Baedal Minjok — Baemin, Korea's leading food-delivery app — is among them, alongside talabat across eight Middle Eastern countries, HungerStation in Saudi Arabia, foodpanda in nine Asian markets, Glovo across 17 markets in Europe, Africa and Central Asia, and PedidosYa in 13 Latin American markets. The combined company would span 99 markets with $236 billion in pro forma 2025 gross bookings. Countries where Uber sells both rides and delivery go from 34 to 58. Uber told investors it is targeting more than $1.2 billion in annualized synergies within 18 months of closing.
The other half of the paperwork moves in the opposite direction. Delivery Hero has separately agreed to sell 14 markets to SSW Partners, a New York investment firm, for about $1.6 billion. Those are the places where Uber Eats and Delivery Hero already compete: foodora in Austria, Czechia, Norway and Sweden; Glovo in Spain, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Moldova; efood in Greece; Foody in Cyprus; PedidosYa in Chile and Ecuador; Yemeksepeti in Turkey. They booked $11 billion in 2025. Uber takes no control of them, and SSW says it will look for strategic partners once the deal closes. TNW reports that Uber is lending SSW most of the purchase price, repayable over time and out of any eventual resale. Uber first approached Delivery Hero in May at about €33 a share, valuing it near €10 billion.
Korea Context — How Baemin got here
Woowa Brothers launched Baemin in 2010 and grew it into Korea's dominant food-delivery app. In December 2019 Delivery Hero agreed to buy roughly 88% of it for about $4 billion. Korea's Fair Trade Commission spent a year on the review and approved it only on a condition: Delivery Hero had to sell 100% of Yogiyo, then the country's number two app, within six months. Together the two would have carried some 97% of delivery-app transactions. The order gave it six months, with one extension possible. Delivery Hero resisted, then complied, signing Yogiyo over to a GS Retail, Affinity and Permira consortium in August 2021 for 800 billion won, about $684 million at the time. If Uber's offer closes, the app Korean founders built will have passed to a German owner and then an American one inside seven years.
Reading Between the Lines
Six years ago the Korean regulator set the price of approval after the fact: sell Yogiyo, or the Baemin deal does not happen. The order ran six months and Delivery Hero took about eight to sign a buyer. This time the divestiture arrives already signed. Fourteen markets, $1.6 billion, a buyer lined up, all of it agreed before a single competition authority has been asked anything. Regulators in Brussels, Seoul and elsewhere still have to rule. What lands on their desks is a remedy someone else designed, on someone else's timetable, with the overlap they would have identified already carved out.
Notice which markets are missing from that carve-out. Korea is not in it. Uber Eats left the country in October 2019, so there is nothing here to remedy. Baemin therefore travels with the assets Uber keeps, and Uber has named Korea a core market and promised to keep investing in the brand, the people and the technology. Whatever that promise is worth, the KFTC's 2020 order is the reason there is a Korean market worth promising anything about. The agency broke up a 97% share and got a three-way fight instead, and Coupang Eats has grown into the third side of it. KED Global reported that Baemin and Yogiyo both posted their steepest monthly falls in transaction volume in February, with Coupang Eats still taking share. The regulator is about to rule on the sale of the market it made.
SECONDARY
Constitution Day is a holiday again, and the Speaker used it to ask for a new constitution
Korea took Friday off for Constitution Day for the first time since 2008. At the rotunda of the National Assembly on Friday morning, Speaker Cho Jeong-sik proposed drafting an amendment by 2027 and completing the country's tenth constitutional revision within the term of this Assembly. He would start with an advisory panel under his own office, then negotiate a special committee with the parties. His list of tasks opens with writing the spirit of the 1980 Gwangju uprising into the preamble and limiting the president's power to declare martial law.
Jang Dong-hyeok, who leads the main opposition People Power Party, did not attend; floor leader Jeong Jeom-sik went in his place, and Jang appeared at a street rally in eastern Seoul that afternoon. Cho had asked both parties on July 9 to finish organizing the Assembly's committees before Constitution Day. They had not. Article 130 sets the price: two-thirds of the Assembly, then a referendum that needs a majority of eligible voters to turn out and a majority of them to say yes. Lawmakers filed the last attempt in April, 187 signatures against a 197-vote threshold. It died in May. The PPP boycotted the vote and left the chamber short of a quorum, then filed for a filibuster against 50 bills including the amendment when Speaker Woo Won-shik convened another session the next day. Woo declined to table it and adjourned.
Korea Context — Why the date came back
Constitution Day marks the 1948 promulgation of the republic's constitution. It was stripped of holiday status in 2008, after the five-day work week took effect and business groups objected to the lost output, leaving it the only one of Korea's five national days that nobody got off. The Assembly voted it back on January 29 this year, 198 to 2.
SECONDARY
🔄 Tracking: Middle East · Continuing coverage
Sixth night of US strikes, and Qatar says it shot something down over Doha
US Central Command said late Thursday that fighter jets, drones and warships had hit dozens of Iranian military targets — coastal surveillance sites, air defenses, logistics — in a sixth consecutive night of strikes ordered by President Trump. Iranian state television and Fars reported hits near the port of Bandar Abbas; Mehr reported strikes near Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. CENTCOM also said its forces turned back three commercial vessels trying to run the naval blockade of Iran and disabled a fourth that ignored orders.
Early Friday, several bangs were heard over Doha and a government alert went to residents' phones. Qatar's defense ministry said its forces had thwarted a missile attack; the interior ministry said a child was hurt by shrapnel from the interception. Kuwait activated its air defenses the same night and sirens sounded in Bahrain, where Iran's army claimed a drone strike on US aircraft at Sakhir Air Base. Iran has not said whether it fired at Qatar, which has been mediating and which Tehran had left alone in recent days. Oil moved on the noise: Reuters reported WTI briefly above $80 after the bangs; it traded at $79.98, up 1.3%, as of 10:18 a.m. Friday in Seoul, back to where the previous session's loss began. Brent stood at $85.28.
Ukraine fired the man who rebuilt how it fights, and the streets objected
Zelensky removed a defense minister six months into the job and with a visible record, and wartime Ukraine answered with protests in close to 20 cities.
News that Mykhailo Fedorov, 35, was leaving the defense ministry broke on Wednesday, and President Volodymyr Zelensky formalized the dismissal on Thursday, six months after appointing him. Fedorov had come to defense from the digital transformation ministry, where he secured the Starlink network and scaled up drone production; in six months at defense he pushed domestic drones to replace Chinese-made ones. Listing what his team did, he named the shutdown of Starlink for Russian forces and the isolation of occupied Crimea.
Zelensky, speaking beside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday, put the removal down to a feud between Fedorov and armed forces chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, and said he had wanted unity and the sides had not found it. Fedorov's account is sharper: he says Syrskyi forced the issue with an ultimatum, and that bureaucracy and rigidity left him, as he put it, unable to see how to win the war in that configuration. Hundreds gathered near the Ivan Franko theater in central Kyiv on Thursday, chanting "Shame!" and holding signs reading that the Russians were celebrating. Euromaidan Press counted rallies in close to 20 cities that morning, most of the crowds young and all of them peaceful. Pavlo Yelizarov, a deputy commander of the air force, resigned over the dismissal and called it a great blow to the country's defense capability. By evening Zelensky had told the protesters they were right to demonstrate even in wartime. He said Fedorov would stay on his team in a role to be named later, and called his own decision an ellipsis rather than a full stop. He then passed over Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, the reported frontrunner, and named Yevhen Khmara, the acting head of the security service, as acting defense minister, to be put to parliament once the paperwork clears. It is Zelensky's fourth major reshuffle of the war; parliament confirmed Naftogaz chief executive Serhii Koretskyi as prime minister the same day, after Yulia Svyrydenko resigned a week earlier.
Reading Between the Lines
What Fedorov built is easiest to see from Moscow. On Wednesday Reuters reported that Rosneft, Gazprom Neft and Lukoil had gone to Indian refiners asking to buy gasoline. One of the largest crude producers on earth is shopping for finished fuel in the country that buys the most of its oil. The reason is a campaign of long-range drone strikes on Russian refineries, and Fedorov organized much of the capability behind it. Now read the replacement: Khmara has been running those same long-range strike campaigns. The strikes are not what Zelensky removed. The argument about how to run the ministry is.
Which is why the protests matter more than the reshuffle. Zelensky said the problem lay not only with the two men but with himself, since they spoke only through him. That is an honest description of a chain of command with one link, and he resolved it by cutting the link he could. Fedorov's supporters — soldiers, veterans, procurement reformers — read that as the anti-corruption agenda losing its minister, and one senior European official in Kyiv called the decision a shocker to CNN. Wartime governments usually get to defer these bills. Ukraine's arrived the next morning in close to 20 cities, and the president paid part of it by nightfall: the protesters were right, he said, and Fedorov would stay on his team. He made the appointment anyway.
Russia is asking India for gasoline
Fuel flows tell you more about a war's endurance than any front line does, and this one has reversed direction.
Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing sources, that Rosneft, Gazprom Neft and Lukoil have approached Indian state and private refiners about buying gasoline. Any volumes would move through traders rather than directly, the sources said. At least one tanker is already carrying Indian gasoline toward Russia. Diesel stocks are still adequate, but Reuters said Moscow could ask for diesel too if Ukrainian strikes take out more refining capacity.
Nayara, one of the Indian refiners, told Reuters it has not sold fuel to Russian companies and does not plan to, saying it is focused on meeting demand at home. Earlier this month oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri said Indian refiners do not sell fuel to Russia directly, while allowing that Russia could buy Indian fuel through traders. Both statements can be true at once, which is the point of a trader.
TSMC puts another $100 billion into Arizona on its best quarter ever
The bar for what a chipmaker is expected to spend inside the United States moved again, and Samsung and SK hynix are measured against it.
TSMC reported second-quarter net income of NT$706.56 billion on Thursday, up 77.4% year on year and its fifth straight record quarter. Revenue rose 36% to NT$1.27 trillion, or about $40.2 billion, against the NT$632.64 billion of net income analysts had expected. Chairman and chief executive C.C. Wei raised the 2026 capital expenditure budget to $60–64 billion from $52–56 billion, lifted the full-year revenue growth outlook from above 30% to slightly above 40%, and announced an additional $100 billion for Arizona — four or more fabs at 2 nanometers and below, plus advanced packaging. That takes TSMC's committed US spending to $265 billion.
Hold those two numbers next to each other. The company's entire global capital budget for this year, at the top of the new range, is $64 billion. The Arizona addition alone is a year and a half of that, and the running US total is more than four years of everything TSMC spends everywhere. Chips at 7 nanometers and below made 77% of wafer revenue in the quarter. And on the day TSMC announced all of it, its shares fell in New York along with the rest of the sector.
61% want prosecutors to keep the power the government has decided to take away
Korea dissolves its 78-year-old prosecution service in October, and the last unsettled piece of that reform is the one the public disagrees with.
Gallup Korea surveyed 1,003 adults from July 14 to 16 and published the results on Friday. Asked about the prosecution's supplementary investigation authority, 61% said keep it and 23% said abolish it on the principle that investigation and indictment should be separate; 16% withheld judgment. Among voters with no party affiliation the split was 63% to 12%. Gallup noted that Democratic Party supporters are not backing this measure with the energy they brought to earlier prosecution reforms. In the same survey, President Lee Jae Myung's job approval was 52%, down a point on the week, with disapproval at 37%, up two. Party support ran 40% for the Democratic Party and 26% for the People Power Party.
Korea Context — What is being abolished
On October 2 Korea's Prosecutors' Office ceases to exist. Its jobs split in two: a Public Prosecution Service under the justice ministry, which indicts and argues cases, and a Serious Crimes Investigation Agency under the interior ministry, which investigates. The open question was whether prosecutors could still run a "supplementary investigation" when police hand over a file that looks incomplete. In June the government settled on no. The Democratic Party filed the enabling amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act on July 9 and wants it passed before its August 17 convention.
Reading Between the Lines
A poll is a blunt instrument, but this one has a case attached to it. In May a high school student was killed in Gwangju. Police called it one thing; the prosecution's supplementary investigation found evidence pointing at something worse, and found that officers had allegedly worked to minimize the charge — the suspect's father is a police officer. The victim of the 2022 Busan roundhouse kick attack said the same thing about her own file last Sunday. Police recorded aggravated bodily injury; prosecutors charged attempted murder over the repeated blows to her head. Then a supplementary investigation during the appeal found DNA on her jeans pointing to a sex crime. Sixty-one percent is a number with two named cases standing behind it.
Korea Herald reported this week that the ruling party has slowed the drive, though three of its four leadership candidates still want abolition complete and irreversible. One of its own lawmakers has drafted carve-outs for voice phishing, sexual violence, stalking and abuse of disabled and older victims. That is an odd shape for a reform justified by the claim that exceptions are what corrupted the old system. And the exception habit showed up again on Friday morning, one floor away. The party's leadership voted by secret ballot to waive its own eligibility rules for two convention candidates. Both fights run on the same clock — August 17 — and both come down to who is allowed to decide when a rule does not apply.
The ruling party votes itself an exception to its own rulebook
Two days after candidate registration opened, the qualification rules themselves became the contest.
The Democratic Party's leadership met behind closed doors on Friday morning and voted by secret ballot to grant Rep. Song Young-gil and former Democratic Research Institute deputy head Kim Yong an exception to the party's eligibility rules, referring the matter on to the party affairs committee, spokesman Kang Jun-hyun said. Party rules give the right to stand in internal elections only to dues-paying members who joined at least six months before the exercise of that right and paid dues at least six times in the preceding year. Song left the party in 2023 over the cash-envelope allegations, was acquitted with the verdict final, and rejoined on February 27, which left him short of six months when registration opened on July 16. Kim's unpaid dues were his problem.
The two held a news conference at the Assembly arguing that time the prosecution took from them should not count against them. Song told SBS radio that the leadership had already granted him the right to run for public office and was now re-examining his right to run for party office. The leadership had met late the night before and failed to reach a decision. Moon Jung-bok, counted among Chung Chung-rae's allies, sat out Friday's vote. The convention is August 17.
One line — The six-month rule exists so nobody has to argue about it: count days, count payments, done. Friday's vote replaced the arithmetic with a judgment, and the party that made the exception is also the party that decided the missing days were unfair. The next candidate who comes up short now has a precedent to point at.
Lee wants December 3 on the calendar as People's Sovereignty Day
The president and the Speaker spent Constitution Day morning proposing the same date under the same name, from different buildings.
President Lee Jae Myung posted on Facebook on Friday, addressed to the people who defended democracy, restating his intention to designate December 3 each year as People's Sovereignty Day. He wrote that the martial law declared in the middle of the night on December 3, 2024 was a reminder that threats to democracy are not safely in the past, and credited citizens with proving the sovereignty written into the constitution through what he calls the Revolution of Light. He said much the same in a special address on the first anniversary of that night.
Lee said he had launched a presidential Committee of Light on Monday to collect and preserve the record of those weeks. Cheong Wa Dae holds a reception for citizens on Friday afternoon to mark it. Lee attached a photograph of the certificate of thanks that will go to attendees, which names the people who shared foil blankets on winter asphalt, the young people who held the ground outside the Assembly, and those who went to Namtaeryeong. Speaker Cho had promised the same December 3 designation from the rotunda that morning, and put limiting the president's martial law power second on his amendment list.
Record earnings, second straight day of chip selling, and Seoul shut for the holiday
All three New York benchmarks closed lower on Thursday. The Dow fell 105.67 points (0.20%) to 52,552.97, the S&P 500 lost 38.63 points (0.51%) to 7,533.77, and the Nasdaq dropped 387.28 points (1.47%) to 25,881.95. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 4.29%, after 2.08% the day before. TSMC's record quarter and higher capex guidance did not hold the sector up; Intel, Micron, SanDisk and SK hynix's ADR all fell with it. Elsewhere the data was fine: the Census Bureau put June retail sales at $768.6 billion, up 0.2% on the month, and jobless claims fell. UnitedHealth beat and raised. Alphabet dropped 4.4% on a reported delay to Gemini 3.5 Pro and Goldman Sachs fell 5.1%, pressing on the Dow together.
One line — The force that took 6.37% off the KOSPI on Thursday ran once more overnight in New York. Korean markets are closed Friday for Constitution Day, so there is no session in which to price it. Two days of it arrive together on Monday.
Two stocks and their leveraged ETFs were 96% of everything traded in Seoul
The KOSPI closed Thursday at 6,820.60, down 463.81 points or 6.37%, giving back the previous day's rebound above 7,200. Samsung Electronics fell 8.77% to 255,000 won and SK hynix 11.53% to 1,842,000 won, after rising 6.27% and 8.83% respectively the session before. It was the year's 37th sidecar — a temporary halt on program orders — nineteen of them sell-side and eighteen buy-side, which is the tell. Seoul Economic Daily counted seven circuit breakers this year as well, and noted the pace runs ahead of 2008. Morgan Stanley pointed to postponed and cancelled US data center projects, and traders also cited the IPO filing of China's CXMT, valued at $8.55 billion, as a reason to doubt the memory oligopoly. Foreigners sold 1.39 trillion won and institutions 2.37 trillion; retail investors bought 3.66 trillion.
One line — By Seoul Economic Daily's count, of 29.43 trillion won traded on the KOSPI on Thursday, 28.34 trillion was Samsung and SK hynix shares plus the sixteen single-stock leveraged and inverse ETFs built on them. That is 96.3% of the market in two companies and their derivatives. The paper puts the index's average daily swing at 2.44% from January through May 26 and 3.70% from the ETFs' May 27 launch through Thursday, and names the products a key factor. The exchange worked as designed on Thursday. The design is the question.
[UPI / Asia Today] The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that POSCO must directly employ most of the 378 current and former subcontractor workers in two suits at its Pohang and Gwangyang mills, finding they worked under the steelmaker's direction. Contractor employees have filed ten rounds of these suits since 2011; the eighth through tenth, with 1,177 plaintiffs, are still at trial.
[Bloomberg] Hyundai Motor Group is buying SoftBank's remaining stake in Boston Dynamics, around 10%, for roughly $325 million after SoftBank exercised a put option from the original agreement. Hyundai plans to put the Atlas humanoid to work at its Georgia Metaplant from 2028, sequencing parts on the line.
[UPI / Asia Today] Korea has secured 74% of its September crude requirements as the fighting raises the risk of disruption at the Strait of Hormuz, through which the country routes most of its oil.
[Newspim] Reuters reported that Iran has asked Yemen's Houthis to prepare to close the Red Sea oil route. That would make it the second corridor on the table after Hormuz.
[eToday] CJ CheilJedang is raising prices on 27 products by an average of 8%, following Ottogi and Sajo. The company points to the weak won and to raw material and packaging costs.
The Korea Meteorological Administration's 11 a.m. bulletin on Friday has the country mostly cloudy, with rain over the Chungcheong provinces, the south and Jeju, spreading into Seoul and Gangwon after 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday bring very heavy rain to the central region. Humidity stays high through it, so the apparent temperature will sit around 33°C even while it rains.
| | Fri 17 | Sat 18 | Sun 19 | Mon 20 |
|---|
| Conditions | Cloudy, rain
(north from evening) | Cloudy, rain | Cloudy, rain | Cloudy,
rain in places |
| Low | 22.3–27.8°C | 20–26°C | 21–26°C | 21–25°C |
| High | 27–33°C | 24–31°C | 25–33°C | 27–32°C |
Advisory — The heaviest rain is likely over the central region between the early hours and morning of Saturday. Instability is high enough that the KMA expects to issue heavy-rain warnings and emergency phone alerts. Sea surface temperatures in the Yellow Sea are running near 25°C, feeding more water vapor into the system. Gyeonggi Province activates stage-one disaster response at 8 p.m. Friday and has flagged closures at underpasses, campsites and riverside worksites, expecting 20–80mm an hour between midnight and midday Saturday. Stay away from underpasses, riverbanks and landslide-prone slopes. The holiday weekend runs through Sunday.
| Region | Fri 17 | Expected rainfall, Sat 18 – Sun 19 |
|---|
| Seoul, Incheon, Gyeonggi | From evening | 100–200mm (locally 300mm+) |
| Gangwon | From evening | 100–200mm (locally 300mm+ inland and in the mountains) |
| Daejeon, Sejong, S. Chungcheong, N. Chungcheong | 20–60mm | 80–150mm (locally 250mm+ in northern areas) |
| N. Jeolla | 5–50mm | 30–80mm (locally 100mm+ in the northwest) |
| Gwangju, S. Jeolla | 5–50mm | 20–60mm |
| Daegu, N. Gyeongsang | 5–60mm | 50–100mm in central and northern areas (locally 150mm+) |
| Busan, Ulsan, S. Gyeongsang | 5–60mm | 20–60mm |
| Jeju | 5–30mm | 5–30mm |
Korea took Friday off, and the decisions came anyway. In San Francisco and Berlin, Uber and Delivery Hero signed the papers that would hand Baemin to its second foreign owner in seven years, and pre-packaged the divestiture that regulators, Seoul's among them, would otherwise have demanded. In Taipei, TSMC booked its best quarter and moved another $100 billion to Arizona, which is now $265 billion — more than four years of everything the company spends anywhere — in one American state. In New York, chip shares fell for a second day, and the Korean exchange that lost 6.37% on Thursday was closed and could not answer.
At the National Assembly that morning, the Speaker proposed a constitution. Two-thirds of the chamber, then a referendum. No majority reaches that alone. The leader of the opposition was at a rally across town. Cho had asked both parties eight days earlier to finish organizing committees before the holiday; that is a far smaller ask, and it is still not done.
One floor below, the ruling party voted itself past its own six-month rule for two candidates. That is what a threshold looks like when the people who set it also get to lift it. Two-thirds cannot be lifted that way. It has to be bought from the other side, and on Friday morning the other side was not in the building.
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