Grab touts food and grocery deliveries as ride-hailing slows - Nikkei Asia

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SINGAPORE -- Singapore-based digital tech unicorn Grab is working to put its home delivery service for food and grocery products in the black by the end of this year as it prepares to offer its shares on the Nasdaq stock market.

The Singapore-based company has a sales promotion app for restaurants that lets clients monitor the effectiveness of their advertising and increase their earnings.

"You're earning 10.5 times what you spent," reads a message in the app as a marketing representative from Plain Vanilla, a chain of five cafes in Singapore, checks up on the impact of the company's latest advertisement. The app shows a spend of 40 Singapore dollars ($27.73) helped lift sales by SG$440.

The platform also helps companies tailor their adverts to appear high in customer searches. In Plain Vanilla's case, that means including words such as "coffee" and "bakery." The app "does boost our sales and for me as a marketer, I am more confident in the results," says the Plain Vanilla official.

Grab has captured around half the market for food delivery services in Southeast Asia, according to a report by Singaporean consultancy Momentum Works. It offers its sales promotion tool to partner restaurants as an app or online free of charge. The tool lets restaurants access data by smartphone, such as daily menu-based sales and sales trends by time of day.

Before it began using Grab's app, Plain Vanilla could only analyze sales trends based on quarterly figures. Now it can hone in on customer trends through the platform, and has added an option menu that lets people order complementary items such as drinks.

With the number of COVID-19 infections still high in Singapore, the city-state limits restaurant dining to two people per table. For small and midsize restaurants, food deliveries help make up for sales declines. Grab's app also helps promote the digitization of their operations.

Grab receives commissions of up to 30% on deliveries of restaurant meals. It can earn more fees if the sales promotion app helps partner restaurants generate more orders. By bringing popular restaurants into its network, the app helps Grab maintain its share of the regional market for food deliveries.

For the business year ended December 2020, Grab had adjusted net revenue of $800 million from the delivery business, a fourfold increase from the previous year, thanks in part to strong stay-at-home demand. By contrast, revenue from its ride-hailing business fell to $500 million from $600 million due to restrictions on movement imposed in response to the pandemic.

When Grab announced in April that it was going public, it forecast revenue of $1.2 billion from the delivery business in the current business year, up 50% from the preceding year and a swing to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $100 million, versus a loss of $200 million in 2020.

But Grab is not focused just on food deliveries. In September, it began home deliveries of perishable foods in the Philippines and Thailand, after setting up similar services in Malaysia and Singapore. Through tie-ups with local farmers and suppliers, Grab offers next-day deliveries of fresh food ordered before 5 p.m. Grab already offers 20- to 30-minute delivery of groceries.

The market for online home delivery services is expected to keep expanding. Euromonitor International, a London-based market researcher, forecasts the gross merchandise value of online food deliveries in Southeast Asian countries will reach $28.1 billion in 2025, up from $9.4 billion in 2020. Over the same period, the total online grocery retail value is projected to rise to $11.9 billion from $4.1 billion.

Grab is also counting on synergies between its food delivery business and the one for groceries. According to the company, 85% of people who have used its grocery delivery service also have food delivered. At present, the company has only 5% as many grocery delivery customers as food delivery customers.

Grab plans to hold an initial public offering in the U.S. through a merger with an American special-purpose acquisition company before the end of the year. The merger values Grab at $39.6 billion.

Grab had grown on the strength of its ride-hailing business in Southeast Asia until the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2019. In April to June this year, its ride-hailing service saw adjusted net sales fall 13% from the previous quarter to $146 million.

But thanks to continued growth in its delivery business, Grab predicts adjusted net revenue of $2.2 billion from deliveries in the 2023 business year, up nearly threefold from 2020, bringing its EBITDA to $500 million. If the delivery service turns profitable this year as planned and continues to grow, Grab will be able tout its improving earnings structure to investors.

However, Grab's rivals in Southeast Asia are also fighting for a bigger slice of the rapidly growing delivery market. They, like Grab, are strengthening their marketing programs. Indonesia's Gojek, for example, is providing advertising tools such as a hyperlocal targeting feature to reach customers within a 4 km radius of partner restaurants.

Foodpanda, Grab's rival in Singapore and elsewhere, offers a marketplace for merchants to buy affordable ingredients from suppliers. The U.K.'s Deliveroo offers a loyalty program for restaurants that rewards customers if they place multiple orders with the same restaurant, helping clients expand their customer base.

While two to four companies look set to dominate the food delivery market in Southeast Asia, competition is expected to intensify in ancillary services for restaurants and other clients.

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