👉 Background: me&u and Mr Yum are both tech companies in the hospitality space.. with pretty similar stories. Both Australian-founded, raised tens or hundreds of millions, and have ambitious global planned to go global.

👉 What happened: After 5 years of fighting tooth and nail, me&u and Mr Yum decided to become one to create the world's largest ordering and payments platform for the hospitality sector. The hope is that by joining forces, they'll be able to expand into the US and UK markets... and hit profitability by 2024.

👉 What else: No one knows how much each companies was valued at because it was an all-stock merger. But, it's supposedly pretty close to a 50/50 split!

What's the key learning?

💡All-stock mergers are a unique beast in the world of corporate finance. Instead of exchanging cash for shares, companies swap their stock instead.

💡These all-stock mergers are generally great for acquirer because they don't need to reduce their cash reserves for the acquisition. But this can pose risks for the acquired:

• For example, Afterpay was acquired in an all-stock merger by Block for$39 billion in Block's shares. But Block's share price has dropped over 60% since this merger was touted.

💡But given me&u and Mr Yum are in the same industry, offer similar products, and appear to be splitting ownership almost 50/50, many of these risks may be mitigated.

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