Europe to get first online pizza service By Tom Burns in Madrid
Europe looks set for its first online pizza delivery service with the signing of an e-commerce alliance between Telepizza, a local dial-a-pizza company, and Terra Networks, the internet service provider of Telefónica.
Telepizza's venture with Terra mirrors similar ones in the US like Kozmo.com and Urbanfetch.com, which is considering a move into Europe.
These ventures offer customers the chance to order pizza and other products - such as videos - on the web, with delivery often by a fleet of motorcycles.
In the UK, Domino's Pizza, the country's biggest fast-food home delivery company, plans to expand beyond taking pizza orders over the telephone.
The Spanish alliance stitches together the leading domestic web site, call centre service - called Atento and controlled by Telefónica - and the dominant pizza delivery company.
Telepizza's 512 outlets account for 85 per cent of the fast-food-at-home market. The idea is that the carrier boxes attached to its fleet of 15,000 mopeds could carry other goods purchased through Terra's web site or by calling Atento.
Pedro Ballvé, the fast food company's chairman, said the Telepizza-Terra venture will aim to deliver products within an hour of their online purchase.
By September the new company will test e-commerce deliveries of some 2,000 goods, ranging from pharmaceuticals and flowers to compact discs and boxes of chocolate.
Telefónica said yesterday it had bought 5 per cent of Telepizza for just over E100m ($92m) through Atento.
Atento, Telefónica's unit, paid E9.32 per Telepizza share, a price that was up on the E9.27 level at which the company's value peaked in January last year.
The acquisition represented a 5 per cent premium on Telpizza's E8.90 closing price on Wednesday and the share price remained flat yesterday as Madrid's Ibex index lost 1.82 per cent.
Telepizza, whose shares have recently performed poorly after a dazzling stock market debut three years ago, hopes to recover its lost glamour through the e-commerce alliance with Terra.