Wolt Enterprize

Wolt is a tech company that specializes in food takeaway and delivery. It was founded in 2014 by Mika Matikainen, Juhani Mykkänen Elias Pietilä Lauri Andler and Oskari Pétas CEO of slush; Miki Kuusi. (Go-Grow, 2017)

The platform runs on an application which is available for (Figure 2) smartphonesand tablets running on IOS and Android operating

systems and customers have to sign up. In the beginning, the company focused on takeaways and in 2015, they started offering home deliveries.

Anyone can order food from all the available choices of restaurants willing to prepare the order.

The order will be delivered to the customers by the couriers working with Wolt as long as the customer`s location is within a specific and fixed delivery range. At the moment, Wolt is functioning and running in cities of 22 countries which are mentioned below:

• Azerbaijan

• Poland

• Serbia

• Slovakia

• Slovenia

• Sweden (WOLT, 2019)

Expansion of Wolt:

According to statistics, (NewsNow, 2019) Wolt has become popular due its expansion in Europe; investors have poured in €110 million to expand it to even more countries. The company started in Finland in 2014 and since then, it has expanded to 19 countries. With the recent investments, the expansion is expected to grow more. For example, in April 2017, they started delivery in a new city in Finland, Oulu. They were expecting and quote “a good demand”

but the demand was much greater than the expectations. (Passanen, 2017).

The new city launch was more of a rocket launch when the demands came flooding in during the new weekend (Passanen, 2017). Customers were already aware of the company due its presence in other major cities of Finland such as Helsinki or Turku. The demand was apparently way more than expected, as mentioned earlier (Passanen, 2017)

Financial Information:

Figure 1: Source: (Finder, 2018) (Graph 2)

From this figure above, the company`s sales in 3 years have gone from 0.2 million to 20 million, which is a major increase. It is obvious that the idea, the outcome, the creation and the overall process concluded successfully from an economical perspective was a success for the company and all parties involved. Therefore, the number of employees and independent freelancers have obviously also increased. The company started their business with 6 people and by June 2019 there were 450 freelancers. (WOLT, 2019) The latest funding size has been

€130 Million which is a substantial amount and 11 investors have been involved including 83North, Iconiq Capital, Niklas Zennström, Inventure Oy, Risto Siilasmaa, Ilkka

Paananen, Lifeline Ventures, EQT Ventures, First Fellow Partners, Highland Europe (Craft , 2019)

However, according to financial figures, the company has been accumulating more and more loss every year (Finder, 2018). The figures below show their profits in the previous years:

(Finder, 2018)

(Graph 3)

2.1.2. Courier partners:

Over the years, just like Uber, independent freelancers working for Wolt has become a popular place for many such as students, immigrants and people trying to earn extra outside of their usual jobs. It works well for many since they can choose their working hours. Moreover, since there is no time limit and the demand is reasonable most of the time, their earnings cover their needs.

(Image Source: Wolt.com) (Figure 4) How the delivery and earning model works?

In Finland, the model is the following one: a delivery would pay €4.3 up to 1.5 kilometers from the restaurant and after every 250 meters the rate would go up by €0.425

(partnersfinland@wolt, Personal Communication, Dec 04, 2019).

For example, if a customer`s order is from a location which is 2.7 Kilometers from the

restaurant, a courier would be paid €6.425. However, the distance is not measured based on journey taken by roads but instead it is measured in a straight-line displacement from restaurant to customer`s location and according to Wolt, this is the only measuring method they can use at the moment (Wolt, 2020).

Moreover, a courier is not bound to one delivery at a time and they can receive multiple pickups at a time and then deliver them in an order (Wolt, 2020). This is possible due to the cleverly designed system which decides based on location of the customer, time for preparation and the experience of a particular courier based on their past achievements (Wolt, 2020). If one or more customers are based in a similar location or one is on the way towards the next, the system would instruct the courier to pick both orders and drop them off one by one depending on whose location is closer (Wolt, 2020). This allows the courier to use one journey to drop multiple orders and the earning does not drop (Wolt, 2020).

For example, in case of Turku, a courier may pick up 2 orders, one from Burger King at

Aurakatu 12 and another from Kawaii (Aurakatu 6) 5 minutes apart. Then he`s instructed to drop

one off at Itäinen Pitkäkatu 19 and the next at Tilhenakatu 21, so the system decided to give instructions based on customer location. The courier also earns the full amount from both deliveries and the case would be the same if two orders are dropped in the same building 5 kilometers from the restaurant, he/she would earn €11.7 combined. On a normal day, a courier can expect to receive 3 deliveries per hour so that would go from €12.00 to €16 per hour on average during weekdays. Therefore, 8 hours of work could return €90-140 in earnings if demand is between normal and high.

The pay per delivery is even better during the weekends because the starting price jumps from

€4.3 to €4.7 and demand is considerably higher during the weekend especially Friday night and whole of Saturday. The weekend earning model begins at 18:00 on Fridays and ends at 22:30 on Sundays. So, due to the higher pay and increased demand, a courier can expect to earn

€15-20 per hour increasing the 8 hours return to average €160. However, since one is working as a freelancer, there is no health insurance, paid holiday, paid sick leave and retirement benefits, which means all these aspects have to be covered by the courier themselves.

Booked Hours:

Sometimes the work can be slow due to low demand; for example, at 8:00 AM on a Sunday or on a Monday morning, which is why couriers can book hours beforehand with guaranteed payment even with no deliveries. On weekdays, €8/hour will be guaranteed and on weekends the price will go up to €10/hour. Moreover, couriers have to be online and in the hot zone during booked hours.