Yodel has been acquired by the newly established company YDLGP Limited, with the transaction amount undisclosed.
YDLGP is a new company led and created by Shift CEO Jacob Corlett, with participation from Hundle and the commercial bank Solano Partners.
About Yodel
Yodel has well-known clients such as Vinted, Argos, eBay, and Gousto. It makes over 190 million deliveries annually across 50 sites in the UK, making it one of the largest logistics platforms in the country.
For the year ended 31 December 2023, Yodel has continued to take market share with new clients, including Boden and Zalando. Yodel maintains a strong market position in the rapidly growing Customer to Anywhere (C2X) market.
About Shift
CEO Jacob Corlett founded Shift in 2017 when he was just 23. By the end of 2020, Shift had acquired Courier Direct, a logistics courier company with over 20 years of operational experience in Bristol, UK. At the same time, Shift also acquired JLF Moving Solutions, a moving and transportation company based in Staffordshire, UK, established for thirty years.
Furthermore, in June 2021, Shift announced the acquisition of Techlogico, a B2B specialist courier and transport logistics business established in 2013, for £750,000. As of April 2023, Shift was moving towards an annual turnover exceeding £100 million, with over 300 employees, having acquired Movinga, a home relocation technology company based in Berlin, on top of its previous acquisitions.
At the end of June 2023, Shift acquired Tuffnells, headquartered in Sheffield, facing bankruptcy. This acquisition by Shift saved over 2,000 jobs at risk and prevented many employees from being laid off.
The New Landscape After the Acquisition
With the acquisition of numerous companies in the logistics and transportation industry, the successful acquisition of Yodel means that Shift’s logistics operations will cover seven European countries, including the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland.
This acquisition is expected to prevent Yodel’s business from being disarrayed and consolidate its customer base.YDLGP plans to merge Yodel with Shift to create a more competitive logistics company with a broader national reach and build a super-scale logistics platform.
This merger will be centred around Shift’s AI-driven technology platform, with the Shift leadership team providing critical technological support and operational expertise to expand the business scale and market share further. The newly developed group will become a disruptive force in the logistics industry.
Yodel, Techlogico, Tuffnells, and other companies acquired in recent years will merge with Shift, all owned by YDLGP Limited, with Mr. Jacob Corlett, the CEO of Shift, being the sole director and principal shareholder of this new company.
“I am incredibly proud of what we have built at Shift in the last few years, rapidly scaling our tech-logistics platform, and M&A has been a big part of that success. Shift’s revolutionary AI-driven technology platform is at the heart of this merger, promising a future where efficiency and automation become the backbone of logistics operations. I look forward to working with the Yodel team and, with the support of YDLGP, continuing our journey of building and scaling logistics through technology.” said Jacob Corlett.