Yemeksepeti: Growing and Expanding the Business Model through Data

In October 2016, Nevzat Aydin, co-founder and CEO of Yemeksepeti, the Turkish online food-ordering company, was looking over the company's quarterly results and projections for the upcoming year with his management team. It had been almost a year and a half since Aydin had agreed to sell the company's shares to Delivery Hero, the Berlin-based global leader in online and mobile food ordering, for $589 million. In 2016, the company had grown to include more than 13,000 member restaurants servicing six million users and achieved a 41% year-on-year growth. Yemeksepeti operated with an EBITDA margin of over 50%. Although the company had introduced other revenue streams over the years, commissions remained as the main source of income. Aydin believed that, while there was plenty of room to grow by taking market share from phone orders, much could be done by revenue diversification; the company simply had too much valuable data to be ignored. What should the company do to take advantage of its data analysis capabilities and the new technologies on the market? What kind of outside-the-box solutions could create additional revenue streams and vertical growth capabilities? What about the cohort analysis and data generated from order histories? He motivated the management team to come up with new ideas to put the vast amount of transaction data to use. The case describes potential avenues for a company to monetize its data and illustrates the pros and cons of each option. The case will help students think about how to prioritize growth over diversification and forward think with regards to new technologies and customer trends.