Grab Holdings Ltd. said it incurred a second quarter loss of $572 million, an improvement from last year’s $801 million loss, partly as a result of $173 million non-cash expense from the revaluation of Grab’s equity investments.
Revenues for the period grew 85 percent to $321 million from last year’s $179 million.
“Our second quarter results showed that we can grow sustainably. We delivered strong revenue and GMV [gross merchandise value]growth, while improving our unit economics and strengthening our category leadership position across key segments in the region. Our deliveries segment continued to grow, despite tougher year-on-year comparisons and as dine-out trends moderated food delivery demand. 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,” Anthony Tan, group CEO and co-founder of Grab, said.
“In the quarter, we took action to streamline our organizational cost structure. We optimized our fixed costs, shut unprofitable lines of business and continued to taper incentives as a percentage of GMV. As such, we are pulling forward our breakeven timelines for our core food and overall deliveries segment and narrowing our 2022 revenue guide to the upper end of our previously announced range. In the second half, we see slower GMV growth but an improvement in EBITDA [earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization] compared to the first half due to our cost measures and strategies for growing sustainably,” said Peter Oey CFO of Grab.
GMV grew 34 percent year-on-year on a constant currency basis to $5.05 billion from last year’s $3.87 billion on mobility segment recovery as countries reopened and international and domestic travel resumed.
Engagement with users also improved in the quarter with monthly transacting users up 12 percent 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 percent to $155.
Cross-vertical penetration rates across the user base continues to improve, with 62 percent of MTUs using two or more offerings on the Grab platform in Q2 2022, higher than the 56 percent last year, the company said.
In the quarter, the company expanded a pilot subscription program GrabUnlimited, to more of markets. With GrabUnlimited, users pay a flat monthly fee to enjoy subscriber benefits and deals across our various services like mobility, food and parcel deliveries.
“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,” the company said.
“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 optimize our cost structure in order to quicken our path to profitability,” it added.