Just Eat serves up tasty numbers but who's going to be head chef?

With an American activist snapping at the company's heels despite its recent performance, acting CEO Peter Duffy says he doesn't want the job

Takeaway company Just Eat has delivered a sharp rise in sales (AFP)

Just Eat has just reported results that should have put Peter Duffy at the top of the menu to replace departed CEO Peter Plumb. Trouble is he doesn’t want the job.

The company delivered a 44 per cent rise in sales in 2018, while pre tax profits came in at £102m against a £76m loss last time. Its preferred measure for earnings (underlying EBITDA) showed a rather more modest improvement of 6 per cent to £174m. But that was still more than handy given that this is a fast growing business facing considerable competitive pressure, notably from the likes of Deliveroo and Uber Eats, that’s investing heavily in what it does.

Duffy has also been credited with an improvement in margins, despite that competition, and while the shares fell today, they’ve been run up strongly over the past few weeks, so don't read too much into that.

The company’s acting boss is even confident that he can make money from offering a delivery service. As well as matching customers to takeaways, which handle their own deliveries, Just Eat wants to grab a bigger slice of that marketplace.

As such, it’s muscling in on its rivals’ territory, working with branded restaurants to deliver food.

Making money from doing that is not easy. But Duffy reckons the company can do it all the same, promising profits from Canada this year, and Australia and the UK further down the line.

That’d be quite the trick.

Despite its achievements, however, the company finds itself in the cross hairs of a US activist investor, in the form of Cat Rock. It thinks Just Eat should pursue a merger with Dutch rival Takeaway.com (in which Cat also holds shares) and give control of the combined business to the latter’s CEO Jitse Groen. Who's not much keen on the idea.

Activists would be a good thing if they addressed corporate governance issues, silly pay packages for executives, and the like and sometimes they can have a positive impact on under performing businesses with bad bosses and boards.

However, they’re just as often in the business of floating short term financial engineering, or deals like this one, with a view to getting a quick buck and getting out, regardless of the long term consequences for the businesses they target.

Most acting CEOs who cooked the sort of meal that Duffy has with Just Eat would have been confirmed in the top job and handed a fat bonus as well as all the takeaway food they could eat by now.

But he wants to go back to his old job looking after customers. One does rather wonder if the trouble being created by Cat Rock has played a role in that. Even if it hasn’t, it’s serving up an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction.