Black and orange delivery backpacks belonging to the Ukrainian delivery service Rocket have entered Athens, the capital of Greece and Lille, a city of 230,000 people in the northern part of France, the company announced on June 23.
Rocket now operates in four international markets: Cyprus, the Netherlands, Greece and France. In Ukraine, Rocket delivers food in 28 cities and is among the top three delivery services that also include Estonian Bolt Food and Spanish Glovo.
Just like Glovo, Bolt and the American company Uber Eats, another big rival, Rocket wants to become a global business. The company said that it plans to continue its expansion and enter five more countries by the end of the year.
To choose which location is the best to launch its business, Rocket assesses different countries by the criteria recommended by the global auditor PwC, Rocket’s cofounder Aleksey Yukhymchuk said in his interview with YouTube channel Big Money. The criteria include the number of competitors on the market, the average restaurant receipt, the commission for delivery services, tax policy in the country, the ease of doing business and the popularity of delivery services.
Athens has a population of over 664,000 people and is the most popular travel destination in Greece — over 6 million tourists visited it in 2019. On the Greek market, Rocket will compete with big delivery businesses like the U.S. DoorDash and UberEats, Finland-based Wolt and local service Cosmic Delivery. Rocket said that it already partnered with “dozens of restaurants” in different parts of the capital.
French Lille is a small city but it is the center of the second largest agglomeration in France with a population of over 2 million. It is the third biggest region in France in terms of foreign investments. Among the popular delivery services that operate in Lille are the U.S.’s Uber Eats and the U.K.’s Deliveroo.
In an interview with the Kyiv Post earlier in April Rocket said that expanding globally is not easy for Ukrainian businesses. The company had to change its name from Raketa to Rocket when it started operating in Nicosia; it had to convert the prices from hryvnias to euros and adjust its app to payment systems used in different markets. The legislation and data protection regulation in Europe is also different and takes time to adjust to.
However, the company is eager to go abroad to avoid the risks of working in just one country, Yukhymchuk said.
