Grab posts revenue rise as it slows hiring, pulls out of dark stores and GrabWheels

Grab has posted a revenue rise of 79% year-on-year on the back of GMV. Its mobility segment also recovered to 12.1%, while engagement with users also improved in the quarter with monthly transacting users (MTUs) up 12% year-on-year to reach 32.6 million, driven by strong mobility segment MTU growth, while average spend per user, defined as GMV per MTU, rose 16% to $155.

It added that cross-vertical penetration rates across the user base continues to improve, with 62% of MTUs using two or more offerings on the Grab platform in Q2 2022, higher than the 56% in 2021.

All of these come as Grab makes changes to its business, closing its GrabWheels support operations in Singapore and Malaysia, and merging its Indonesia GrabWheels operations with our car rental business in the market. On the deliveries front, it made the decision to close its dark store operations in Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines. “By streamlining our deliveries ecosystem, we will be able to scale deliveries more sustainably through a third-party marketplace model and, in Malaysia, via Jaya Grocer,” said the company in its latest financials.

In financial services, Grab is refocusing and streamlining its operations to reduce costs, grow synergies with its digibanks. Moreover, it also slowed the pace of hiring, streamlined some functions and reduced other overhead expenditure. On the GrabAds front, the unit also made several new hires to grow its team in June. It has hired Jennie Johnson, as the head of marketing, Kaia Lai as head of product for search and personalisation technology, Christina Lin as product marketing lead for ads and personalisation technology, Kareen Mendoza as regional financial services partnership lead, and Wong Yi Ling as head of sales operations.

In terms of expansion, over the quarter it expanded a pilot subscription programme, GrabUnlimited, to more markets. With GrabUnlimited, users pay a flat monthly fee to enjoy subscriber benefits and deals across our various services such as mobility, food and parcel deliveries.

“We have seen early encouraging metrics from GrabUnlimited in terms of increasing user engagement and order frequency. We believe GrabUnlimited has the potential to strengthen our superapp ecosystem by improving engagement and stickiness with users and be a key differentiator for us from monoline food delivery or mobility companies,” said the company.

Loss for the quarter was $572 million, a 29% improvement year-on-year, primarily due to elimination of the non-cash interest expense of Grab’s convertible redeemable preference shares that converted to ordinary shares in December 2021.

“We took action in the quarter to exit some lines of businesses that do not lead to long-term and sustainable growth. We will continue to optimise our cost structure in order to quicken our path to profitability,” it said.

Anthony Tan, group chief executive officer and co-founder of Grab said, “Our second quarter results showed that we can grow sustainably. We delivered strong revenue and GMV growth, while improving our unit economics and strengthening our category leadership position across key segments in the region.”

“Looking ahead, we are laser focused on accelerating our path to profitability. We will get there by doubling down on product innovation that increases user engagement and reduces our cost-to-serve and focusing on growing high quality transactions on our platform,” he added.

In June this year, Grab Singapore also took to relaunching HungryGoWhere and its accompanying social media channels a year after the food site shut down. The revamped HungryGoWhere brand aims to address the growing interest of diners to reconnect with the local food scene in much deeper ways. 

Related articles:

Grab rolls out GrabMaps: A bigger push into location based marketing for B2B players?
Grab consolidates financial offerings under new brand GrabFin
Grab SG breathes new life into HungryGoWhere, retains red hue