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manager magazin Podcast: Do gorillas make more mistakes than the competition, Alex Brunst?

2022-04-15T07:23:48.768Z


The delivery start-up sector experienced an unprecedented boom in the corona pandemic. The most controversial among them: the Berlin provider Gorillas. In the podcast, gorilla manager Alexander Brunst answers the questions.


It is a growth story that is second to none: The Berlin start-up Gorillas has grown to 12,000 employees in just around two years and is said to be worth three billion dollars if the investors have their way.

The young company of founder Kağan Sümer (34) promises to deliver groceries "in minutes".

In the pandemic, that hit a nerve.

Internal documents that were passed to manager magazin confirm the rapid growth curves.

However, they also show that the rocket launch is anything but smooth: The rapid expansion is bought with losses in the millions - in some cases it is said to be up to 50 million euros burned per month.

The margins are razor-sharp and the competition looks a lot better in the eyes of the public than gorillas.

For example, the start-up had to fight hygiene problems in its warehouses, face its critical fleet of drivers and resist increasing criticism of the delivery times in the app store.

Top managers keep dropping out.

In the manager magazin podcast "Germany's digital hope" explains gorillas manager Alexander Brunst (38), from which mistakes one has learned.

Brunst emphasizes that gorillas are now on a sustainable growth path.

The company is not only slowed down by a lack of drivers in Germany.

According to the latest reports, Gorillas has itself pulled the ripcord elsewhere and halted expansion in the United States, laying off employees there.

The manager knows how difficult the path will be.

"It's not a market where you get margins of 40 or 50 percent," says Brunst.

"It's a business that is very operations-heavy and which is also designed to be excellent at what you do in order to survive in the long term because the pressure from the market is so great."

Brunst is confident: "We've been able to show that we're creating values ​​here that many critics didn't believe us at first."

He says: "It would be really surprising if there weren't this criticism. It was similar with Amazon in the beginning."

Amazon didn't make a profit for the first ten years "and then it was said: You can never run it profitably. Then it was said that Tesla was doomed and Tesla is now worth more than all German car manufacturers put together. And that's the same with us now."

In the podcast "Germany's digital hopefuls", mm editor Christina Kyriasoglou informs and discusses with her colleague Mark Böschen what chances the most important digital hopefuls of the German economy really have to advance to the top of the world.

You can subscribe to the podcast via manager magazin as well as on Spotify, Apple, Deezer and google.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-04-15

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