Grab Holdings Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. My name is Ellen and I'll be your conference operator for this session. Welcome to GRAB's second quarter 2023 results call. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind and would like to revoke your question, please press star followed by two. I'll now turn the call over to Douglas Yu to start the call. Douglas, please go ahead whenever you're ready.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to GRAB's second quarter 2023 earnings call. I'm Douglas Hu, Head of Asia Investor Relations at GRAB, and joining me today are Anthony Tan, Chief Executive Officer, Alex Hungate, Chief Operating Officer, and Peter Owee, Chief Financial Officer. During the call today, Anthony will discuss our key strategic and business achievements, followed by Alex, who will provide operational highlights, and Peter will share details of our second quarter 2023 financial results. FOLLOWING PREPARED REMARKS, WE WILL OPEN THE CALL TO QUESTIONS. AS A REMINDER, TODAY'S DISCUSSION CONTAINS FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS ABOUT THE COMPANY'S FUTURE BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE. THESE STATEMENTS ARE BASED ON OUR BELIEFS AND EXPECTATIONS AS OF TODAY. ACTUAL EVENTS AND RESULTS COULD DEFER MATERIALLY DUE TO A NUMBER OF RISKS AND UNCERTAINTIES, INCLUDING MACROECONOMIC, INDUSTRY, BUSINESS, REGULATORY, AND OTHER RISKS WHICH ARE DESCRIBED IN OUR FORM 20F FOR THE YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2022. and other filings to the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. The discussion today also contains non-IFRS financial measures, which should be considered together with, rather than as substitutes for IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation of non-IFRS to IFRS financial measures is included in this quarter's earnings materials. For more information and additional disclosures on recent business performance, please refer to our earnings press release and supplemental presentation for a detailed second quarter 2023 financial review, which can be found on our investor relations website. And with that, I will turn the call over to Anthony to deliver his opening remarks.

Thanks, Doug. Thank you for joining us today. Our second quarter results reflect our ability to execute strongly as we balance growth, category leadership, and profitability. Our focus on expanding our marketplace through affordability initiatives, as well as strengthening engagement through our flagship subscription program called Grab Unlimited, continues to yield results. More people are using Grab now than ever before, with group MTUs at an all-time high, growing by 7% year-on-year and 5% quarter-on-quarter. And at the same time, we further extended our category leadership across the region for ride-hailing and food deliveries. We continue to deliver a solid set of financials, with revenues up 77% year on year, even as we reduced group-adjusted EBITDA losses for the sixth consecutive quarter. I also want to call out that our deliveries GMV hit a record high this quarter. With the first half firmly in the rearview mirror, we look towards the second half with confidence and optimism. There are three key areas I want to call out. Firstly, we expect to drive sequential growth in our deliveries and mobility segments. Demand is robust in July as we continue to drive key affordability initiatives to unlock a greater segment of the market to cater to more users, while deepening engagement and loyalty with Grab Unlimited. Secondly, we expect to scale up new opportunities in financial services and advertising, where we see strong demand potential and benefits for our overall ecosystem. In financial services, we continue to focus on driving up ecosystem transactions. Our lending business is growing strongly yet in a prudent manner. For GXS Bank in Singapore, we've also seen a strong uptick in deposits despite minimal customer acquisition costs after opening up the savings account to more individuals and increasing the maximum allowable deposit per account. Ecosystem linkages are also healthy with one two GXS customers linking their accounts to the Grab wallet. For advertising, we hit a milestone with advertising revenues scaling up to 1% of our deliveries GMV and achieving an annualized revenue run rate of over $100 million. Looking ahead, we will continue to increase ads penetration and improve the monetization of our ads platform. Third, we continue to focus on driving tech innovations to unlock greater operational efficiencies while enhancing the overall user experience. Generative AI will play an increasingly important role in these efforts. For example, we've been using generative AI to augment internal workflows and processes so that grabbers can debug codes and conduct queries faster. For our users, we also introduced LLM-powered features such as translated menus and improved grab chat translations. Overall, we remain optimistic on our longer-term growth prospects and are committed to operating a business anchored on sustainable growth. Southeast Asia is still under-penetrated across our products and services, and we see plenty of headroom to serve beyond the 1 in 20 users and the millions of driver and merchant partners in the region that are on our platform today. And we will aim to do so sustainably as we track towards becoming Southeast Asia's largest and most efficient on-demand platform that enables local commerce, mobility, and access to financial services. I'll now hand over the time to Alex to cover our second quarter operational highlights in more detail.

Thank you, Anthony. I'll go deeper into the business and operational highlights by segment, starting with mobility. Mobility, GMV, and revenues in the second quarter continue to grow strongly year on year, with Grab further extending its category leadership across the region, while our segment adjusted EBITDA margins remained in line with our steady state guidance. Demand remains strong, and we are seeing continued quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year increases in mobility NTUs, as well as average frequency per user, with the latter growing 12% year-on-year. International traveler demand continues to recover, We increased airport rides by 64% year on year to reach 77% of pre-COVID levels. Several months back, we made a strategic decision to focus on improving traveler experiences on the Grab app to capture the post-COVID travel rebound. We rolled out guest browsing and traveler homepages and continued to see meaningful traction from our partnerships with WeChat, Alipay, and Kakao. Domestic demand also further normalized across our markets with mobility GMV now 85% of pre-COVID levels. When we compare mobility GMV levels between second quarter 2023 and the same period in 2019, several of our core markets such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have either reached or surpassed these levels. To support this growth in demand, we continue to focus on improving driver supply In the second quarter, monthly active driver supply increased by 10% year on year, with supply levels now at 84% of pre-COVID. We also announced the signing of an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares in TransCab, Singapore's third largest taxi operator. This could further supplement our supply base in Singapore upon the expected completion of the deal. We also continue to drive product innovation to enhance the overall user and driver experience on our platform. We are enhancing the affordability of our services to cater to more users, such as rolling out carpooling options in Malaysia and Indonesia, building on the successful relaunch of Grab Share in Singapore and the Philippines, and integrating Grab's product and tech into a relaunched Move It app to enhance our two-wheel offering in the Philippines We are also focused on improving driver productivity to enhance their earnings potential, a key example of which is our Grab Navigation app within Grab Maps. This feature is now utilized for one in two bookings, and based on data from driver partners who have utilized Grab Navigation, we saw improvements in trips per transit hour and fulfillment rates as compared to third-party apps. As a result of our efforts, we've seen the proportion of surge to mobility rides being further reduced by 460 basis points year-on-year and fulfillment rates increasing by 733 basis points over the same period. Driver earnings per transit hour also increased by 9% year-on-year and 4% quarter-on-quarter, while quarterly retention rates of our active driver partners is healthy at 90%. Over the rest of this year, we expect to drive a continued increase in demand from travelers and local commuters. As such, we reiterate our expectations for mobility to exit 2023 at pre-COVID GMV levels while we maintain segment-adjusted EBITDA margins at our steady state. Now, moving on to deliveries. Last quarter, there were questions about the growth prospects for deliveries. We said that we expected a rebound in growth in the second quarter, with continued sequential growth in the second half. We are pleased to report that Deliveries GMV grew 10% quarter on quarter to reach an all-time high, while at the same time we continue to expand our segment-adjusted EBITDA margin. The year-on-year growth was the result of two main initiatives. First, we focused on reducing our cost to serve and driving key affordability initiatives to better serve our users. To improve driver efficiency, we continued to enhance our batching technology and expanded just-in-time allocation to more markets to further reduce driver wait times when picking up orders at merchants. For the quarter, trips per transit hour for our driver partners further increased by 8% year-on-year, while driver wait times at our merchant partners reduced by 52% year-on-year. Second, we continued to deepen engagement with our user base, primarily through Grab Unlimited, our subscriptions program. Grab Unlimited subscribers have grown to account for approximately one third of deliveries GMV in the second quarter and spent 3.8 times more on food deliveries than non-subscribers. Grab Unlimited subscribers also had average retention rates that were approximately two times higher than non-subscribers over the first half. In addition, in Malaysia, the Jaya Grocer loyalty program has been a key lever in improving customer retention and engagement. In June, members of the loyalty program represent 36% of the total customer base and on average spent 1.4 times more than non-members. For our merchant partners, we continue to focus on deepening engagement levels and helping them increase their earnings potential. As our marketplace grows, so do our merchants, and we are pleased to see that the median earnings for our deliveries merchants increased by 5% quarter on quarter. We've also announced the beta launch of GrabFood Dine-In across several markets, providing our merchant partners with the ability to cater to our users' dine-in, self-pickup, and delivery needs within a single platform. For users, dine-in allows them to pre-purchase dine-in vouchers, view restaurant menus and consumer reviews, as well as book rides to restaurants. Looking ahead to the third quarter, we expect to drive further GMV growth to achieve yet another quarterly record high, and we expect to drive growth sequentially into the fourth quarter as well. In fact, I can share with you now that our performance in July continues to be robust with deliveries MTUs at its highest point this year and GMV growing month on month and year on year. So we are optimistic on growth. At the same time, we are driving this growth in a sustainable manner as we progress towards our steady state margins of 3% plus for deliveries. Next on to financial services. During the quarter, revenues grew year on year and quarter on quarter as we executed our strategy to focus on platform for both payments and lending. 43% of our financial services revenue was generated by Grab's lending activities. Total loan disbursements grew 47% year on year. We focused on lending to our own ecosystem where we have deep data insights to better manage and control credit costs, while providing positive uplifts to our ecosystem. I'm also pleased to share that regulators allowed our digital bank in Singapore, GXS Bank, to increase total deposits. So in July, GXS increased the maximum deposit amount for individual savings accounts to 75,000 Singapore dollars from 5,000 prior. And at the same time, we opened up the GXS savings account to more eligible individuals in Singapore. As a result, we've seen a strong uptick in deposits with minimal to no customer acquisition costs. And at current levels, we are able to adequately finance our loan book. Furthermore, Ecosystem linkages are healthy with one and two GXS users linking their GXS accounts to Grab. While we have reduced segment adjusted EBITDA losses year on year on the back of cost savings in GrabFin, we did record a slight increase in losses quarter on quarter. This was mainly driven by an increase in Digibank investments consistent with what we had shared during our investor day last year. Where we expected Digibank losses to peak in 2023, this year, before reducing to reach breakeven by 2026. For GrabFin, our spend was flattish quarter on quarter with the increase in variable expenses attributed to a higher cost of funds to support platform payments being offset by further savings and overhead expenses as we improved operational efficiencies. Finally, on our enterprise and new initiative segment, year on year revenues nearly doubled while segment adjusted EBITDA also tripled The strong performance was attributed to advertising, underpinned by our efforts to increase advertising penetration among our merchant partners and to improve monetization. So we hit a new milestone in the second quarter with advertising revenues, as Anthony mentioned earlier, comprising around 1% of our delivery's GMV and attaining an annualized revenue run rate of more than $100 million. We remain confident in our advertising services and in driving value uplifts for our merchant partners and other top brands. For instance, in a brand list study conducted for Lotteria Vietnam, a fast food restaurant chain belonging to the Lotte Group, we were encouraged to see the brand recording a 9.3 times return on ad spend, as well as increases in ad awareness and purchase intent by 13% and 8%, respectively, after completing a full funnel campaign inside the Grab app. In another example, Amazon Singapore ran a campaign with Grab Ads during Black Friday, which resulted in a unique reach of 1.8 million users in Singapore, along with a 16% increase in ads awareness. So as we look to the rest of 2023, we are focused on continuing our growth trajectory and our path to profitability while maintaining or improving our category leadership position in ride hailing and food deliveries. I will now turn the call over to Peter to review the second quarter financial results.

Thanks, Alex. we're pleased to report another strong set of results across both the top line and bottom line. Our group revenues in the second quarter grew 77% year on year or 81% on a constant currency basis and 8% quarter on quarter to reach $567 million. We continue to record strong revenue growth across all segments of our business. Mobility revenues were up 29% year on year or 31% on a constant currency basis and 7% quarter on quarter to hit $208 million. Our efforts to improve supply across the region have enabled us to capture the recovery in tourism demand and growth in domestic demand. Our deliveries revenue grew 118% year on year or 126% on a constant currency basis and 6% quarter on quarter to reach $292 million. This was primarily driven by reduction in incentives and GMB growth. Financial services revenue grew by 223% year-on-year, or 230% on a constant currency basis, and 6% quarter-on-quarter to $40 million, underpinned by improved monetization of our payments business and increased contributions from lending. Finally, enterprise and new initiatives revenues grew 95% year-on-year on 99% on a constant currency basis and 51% quarter-on-quarter to hit $27 million. This was supported by the continued growth in advertising revenues. Turning now to Group GMV, we recorded year-on-year growth of 4% or 6% on a constant currency basis to reach $5.2 billion in the second quarter. This was supported by an increase in group MTUs, which achieved a new all-time high for the quarter. Our on-demand segments of mobility and deliveries recorded GMV growth of 11% year-on-year or 14% on a constant currency basis. Mobility GMV grew strongly by 28% year-on-year or 30% on a constant currency basis, and we remain on track to exit 2023 at pre-COVID GMV levels. Deliveries GMV bounced back towards growth and saw an increase 4% year on year or 7% on a constant currency basis to $2.6 billion. This was also a new record for our deliveries GMV. Moving on to segment adjusted EBITDA. Total segment adjusted EBITDA was $172 million in the second quarter. improving from a negative $19 million in the same period last year. Segment margins improved 366 basis points year-on-year and 26 basis points quarter-on-quarter. We continue to deliver reductions in total incentives as a percentage of GMV, which declined to 8% in the second quarter from 10.4% in the same period last year. Deliveries segment-adjusted EBITDA grew to $69 million representing an EBITDA margin of 2.7%. This is an expansion of 404 basis points year on year or 10 basis points quarter on quarter. In the second quarter, the majority of our core markets continue to have margins exceeding the 3% steady state target. In mobility, segment adjusted EBITDA grew 31% year on year to $163 million in the second quarter. EBITDA margins were 12.4% in the second quarter, broadly in line with our steady state margin target of 12%. For financial services, segment adjusted EBITDA improved to negative $75 million, representing a 35% year-on-year improvement, but declined 8% quarter-on-quarter. As Alex mentioned, this was mainly driven by increased levels of investments for our Digibank operations. Finally, for enterprise and new initiatives, segment-adjusted EBITDA tripled year-on-year with margins expanding to 30.3% in the second quarter from 9.7% in the same period last year. The increase in profitability is mainly attributed to our efforts to improve monetization of our advertising services and to deepen advertising penetration with our active merchant base. For the second quarter, our regional copper costs improved to $192 million as compared to $214 million in the prior year period and $216 million in the prior quarter. On a year-on-year basis, we drove cost optimization across several line items. Our variable expenses declined 31% year-on-year from increased operational efficiencies specifically driven by lower cloud costs and direct marketing costs. Staff costs, which accounts for slightly over half of our regional corporate costs, declined 6% year on year and 13% quarter on quarter. This was driven by lowered headcount levels across various functions and a reversal of fixed costs recognized from the restructuring exercise conducted in June. On this latter point, we estimate that the restructuring exercise will result in $80 million of annualized cost savings above the adjusted EBITDA line. 60% of these cost savings are expected to be realized in regional corporate costs with the remainder in the business segments. Looking ahead, we will continue to be disciplined on costs, and we anticipate regional corporate costs in the second half of 2023 to improve from the first half. As a result of the strong top line growth and greater focus on profitability, group adjusted EBITDA improved to negative $20 million, representing a year-on-year improvement of $214 million. Group adjusted EBITDA margins also improved to negative 0.4% for the quarter. With a focus on driving cost optimizations and profitable growth across our business, we are well on track towards achieving group adjusted EBITDA breakeven. As such, we are revising up our breakeven timeline to the third quarter of 2023 from our prior expectations of the fourth quarter of 2023. Moving on to IFRS loss, we reported a second quarter loss of $148 million, representing a 74% improvement from a loss of $572 million in the same period last year. This is due to improving profitability on a group adjusted EBITDA basis, lowered shared base compensation expenses, and lowered fair value losses on investments. On the back of the restructuring exercise we announced in June, I do want to call out that our IFRS losses in the second quarter also included $50 million of restructuring charges. Correspondingly, some of the reduction in our shared base compensation expenses were due to reversals of expenses from the restructuring. Turning to our balance sheet, our liquidity and cash position continues to remain strong. We ended the second quarter with $5.6 billion of gross cash liquidity, which declined slightly from $5.8 billion at the end of the prior quarter. Our net cash liquidity was $4.9 billion at the end of the second quarter, as compared to $5 billion in the prior quarter. As we look to the rest of 2023, we remain focused on driving towards profitability while scaling the business sustainably. In deliveries, we are confident that GMV will grow sequentially in the third quarter. Demand continues to hold up strongly as our strategies to increase affordability and improve engagement continues to benefit the marketplace with GMV growth momentum carrying to July. While we are optimistic on growth, we will also balance this sustainably as we drive towards a need-term steady-state segment-adjusted EBITDA margin target of 3% plus. Similarly, with mobility GMV recording another strong quarter, we aim to capitalize on the sustained growth tailwinds and are confident of sequential growth heading into the third quarter. We remain on track for mobility GMV to reach pre-COVID levels by the end of this year. while maintaining steady-state segment-adjusted EBITDA margins of 12%. As mentioned earlier, we are also tracking well towards achieving group-adjusted EBITDA breakeven in the third quarter of 2023, earlier than our prior expectations of the fourth quarter of 2023. With all segments performing strongly on adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter, we are revising up our full-year group-adjusted EBITDA target to a loss of between $30 million and $40 million. This is an improvement from our previous guidance of negative $195 million to $235 million. At the same time, we maintain our 2023 revenue expectations of 54% to 60% year on year growth to hit 2.2 billion to $2.3 billion. In conclusion, we delivered another strong quarter where we executed on the top and bottom line with now a clear line of sight to achieving our profitability milestone. As always, Anthony, Alex, and I would like to thank Grabbers for their hard work in making these results possible, and we want to express our deep appreciation for our driver and merchant partners. While there's still a lot of work ahead of us, we are confident that our strong balance sheet, cost discipline, and strategies will enable us to continue to grow our business and marketplace sustainably. Thank you very much for your time and we will now open up the call to questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now start the question and answer portion of the call. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad and we will call on you for your question. Please limit yourself to two questions per person. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Benny Kapol Gare from Bernstein. Your line is now open. Please go ahead with your question.

Hi, thanks a lot. Firstly, congratulations on a good quarter and thanks for the very detailed opening remarks. So quite a few of the questions do get answered. I still have two broad questions. Firstly, on food delivery, I was curious to know, given that we have seen growth in this quarter, and I think the commentary also appears to be fairly decent, I wanted to understand that what is primarily driving this growth? How much of it is actually basket size driven? And also on the profitability side of the food delivery segment, I wanted to understand the broad thought process on sustainability of that, given that we haven't really seen any market consolidation yet in the sector. And my second question is on your Digibank GXS with now having done a full-fledged launch in Singapore. When do we really expect it to start incrementally contributing to profits? And also, I was curious to know that with the interest rates being offered on deposits Vinod Busjeet, Ph.D.: : Last I saw was I think about 2.48% or 2.4% which is actually quite low compared to the normal banking system, are we able to gather deposits and what is the broader plan with respect to lending products around this or any update on that would be great Thank you.

Alex Blanche- Thanks for know it, this is Alex, let me take those both those questions on food deliveries. It is sustainable because what we've been doing, the two things that I mentioned in the remarks, like driving, using scale to drive down cost to serve and then passing that on in terms of affordability. And then the second part about deeper engagement, particularly using Grab Unlimited. Both of those are sustainable. We think they're working well. And given that we are barely penetrated into single-digit penetration of the Southeast Asian market at this point, We think there's plenty of growth upside for us to continue with that same strategy. In the quarter, there was an increase in spend per user, which drove the increase. And so we will continue to execute that strategy. You mentioned consolidation. We are the category position leader. Therefore, those scale advantages do accrue to us more than others. So we're going to continue to focus on execution and make sure that our customers benefit from those advantages. We're sticking to our long-term guidance on margin, which is 3% plus. And you've seen that there's also the advertising business, which generates good margins on the back of growth and deliveries as well. So there's additional benefit financially from advertising on top of that. Let me turn to your question about the digibanks and the competition for deposits and then the break even. So I confirm what we said just last year at the investor day that we expect the three banks collectively to break even in 2026. We're still on track for that. For deposits, we recently had the bank regulator raise the cap on deposits. So we were able to raise deposits very fast after that. So that happened in July, and we were able to raise deposits very fast. In fact, since then, as you probably noticed, we've reduced the interest rate on our savings account to slow down the rate of new deposits coming in. So it seems like our brand, our ecosystem, and the ease of use of our banking app have all contributed to that success. So we'll continue to double down on all of those things. as we seek to grow the bank, not just in Singapore, but in the second half, we expect to launch in Malaysia and Indonesia as well. You asked specifically about the lending product. The lending product in Singapore that we've launched is called FlexiLoan. It has a market-leading NPS score. So we're very happy, the customers are very happy with the product. With this product, we are now growing our loan book steadily. redeploying those deposits that we've raised. And so as we deepen our credit models, we'll be able to progressively accelerate the availability and the marketing of that loan in Singapore. We've been able to thus far lend to both traditional bank customers and also to the underbank that are part of our ecosystem. So we're very pleased that this is helping us also to pursue our mission to serve the underbanked in Southeast Asia, and we expect that that market segment in particular will be very large when we move to markets such as Indonesia. Thanks, Sunil. Hopefully I covered all of your questions.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Piyush Chowdhury. Piyush, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Thanks a lot, and congratulations to the management team for such a strong set of performance. A couple of questions. Firstly, on restructuring, can I confirm the 80 million annualized savings will be cash OPEX savings? And in addition to that, how much share-based compensation would come down, or what would be the savings over there? Secondly, in mobility, similar to trans cap would you be open or looking for similar opportunities in other countries or was it a singapore specific strategy to solve the supply problem and if you can give us an update on the competitive landscape and mobility particularly in singapore thailand and indonesia that would be helpful thank you right now pierce let me take the first one and then uh alex will take the the trans cap

as well as the competitive landscape. So on the restructuring, your question is, is the $80 million cash savings? Yes, it is. And that's annualized for, and of which 60% of that will hit regional corporate costs from a savings perspective and 40% from across our business segments. And in terms of stock-based compensation, the second quarter, SBC was roughly about $65 million. Now there was some one time, reversal in the SBC line, driven from the restructuring. So the way to think about our stock-based compensation on a go-forward basis, if you look at our Q4 number, roughly about $90 million, we're below that $90 million mark, and that's a number that you could use from a modeling perspective. Let me talk about the transaction.

Yeah, you know, Singapore, the cost of Bitcoin... Hi, sorry, we can't hear you.

Yeah, just let me pick up on your question on TransCap. Do you hear me? So we are interested in leveraging the taxi license to drive down our cost to serve. So Singapore cost of vehicles is very high, as you know, and there is an advantage to taxi license holders that they can purchase at a lower COE. THAT WILL ALLOW US TO KEEP ON DOUBLING DOWN ON AFFORDABILITY AND REDUCING COST TO SERVE IN SINGAPORE. SO THOSE SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES IN SINGAPORE MAKE THIS A PARTICULARLY ATTRACTIVE PROPOSITION. IT'S NOT THAT WE WOULD BE CLOSED TO OTHER SUCH TRANSACTIONS, BUT WE HAVE A VERY HIGH BAR ON M&A IN GENERAL, AND SO, YOU KNOW, IT WOULD HAVE TO BE A VERY ATTRACTIVE ACQUISITION TO REPRODUCE THE KINDS OF STRATEGIC SYNAGES THAT WE SAW in the trans-CAB situation. Competitive landscape, let me pick that up for you. You asked about Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia in particular. I would say that it's the same playbook that we talked about for deliveries in many ways, because we're seeing meaningful regional scale across all markets. And we're able to translate that using some of the great tech tools that we've built. into better reliability and better affordability. No silver bullets, but just a whole bunch of really powerful tech capabilities, which is creating advantages using machine learning, large language models, like Anthony was saying earlier, to help us serve customers better. And that means that we are improving our category position even further in mobility in markets like Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. So we'll continue to double down on that execution strategy because we think there's more to go and more customers to serve.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

We will now take our next question from Pang Vip from Goldman Sachs. Pang, your line is now open. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Sure. Thank you very much for the opportunities and good evening to management on the call. Two questions for me, please. Firstly, I noticed from the market trends that your market share for the on-demand services has improved considerably in the quarter, especially in Indonesia. GMV holding up stronger than peers while you also managed to deliver a margin expansion on a sequential basis. Can you share with us what have you done differently than your peers to achieve this? Are you planning to continue to expand your market share? or will you try to expand your margins now? That's question number one. Question number two, with regards to your MTUs, we are now at all-time high going into the month of July as well. Just want to understand what have you done to achieve this? Does new user come from Tier 1 expansion, so continue to penetrate deeper into the metro area, or have you already managed to successfully expand into an underserved region?

The market share, thanks, Pang, for your question. The market share, I think I would refer to my earlier answers in terms of our playbook. It's our scale as category position leader together with the powerful platform capabilities that we've built. When I think of Grab Maps, it's a very powerful competitive advantage that other platforms don't have. You think about our payments platform, our ads platform. all coming together, generating more and more data and allowing us to serve customers better and to help our partners and our merchants to earn more than they do in other platforms. All of that helps us to generate more loyalty, and all of that helps us to penetrate deeper city by city. We have expanded in outer cities of Indonesia over the quarter, and we think there are plenty of more cities into which we can grow. So that is part of the growth. But I would say that we've also seen growth in the big tier one cities that have been our traditional stronghold in Indonesia. So the growth has been balanced between both of these. In terms of margin versus growth, we are at already our steady state margins for mobility. And so we don't feel that we need to go higher than that. We're comfortable with those as sustainable. So you'll see our focus continuing on, you know, driving to grow the market through greater affordability and better reliable services. Like I was saying earlier, we only serve a single-digit share of the total Southeast Asia market. So we feel that we still have lots of growth upside. The MTUs are at an all-time high. We are confident that the affordability push is the main driver of that. So, um, there are, there are plenty of, um, untapped segments, both in the large cities and then the outer cities that, that, um, that we haven't been able to penetrate because, uh, you know, up until now. So we feel like affordability is really going to help us to continue to grow and to use. So there's no, there's no magic to that. Again, it's more of the, you know, improving reliability and affordability city by city, and really pushing, um, through, uh, optimized marketing. Not so much the promotion side. You can see we've refined our promotions even further and continue to optimize in this quarter as we have over the last 18 months quite consistently. So we've been able to do more of that. But this time it's more about everyday low pricing and making our services more affordable, getting people to make them part of their daily routines.

I'll comment beyond just the shorter term MTUs, the longer term. Alex is completely right. not just one or two silver bullets. We're looking at many 1% improvements, whether it's in affordability, whether it's in reliability, whether it's in better fulfillment. And we've seen that. This multi-pronged approach of fundamental investments into the basic, most fundamental 1%, and many of these has helped us really become the most reliable and go-to choice. Longer term, we are seeing this multi-pronged approach across services. So as we evolve the services, whether it's saver deliveries, whether it's carpooling options, we're seeing it reaches a broader range of users. Then you alluded just now as well, Pang, to the outer city expansion. You're right. Now with more affordable services, we can reach better and we have better product market fit to our city. But how do we do it? As we are driving cost, we're passing that savings on to our consumers. And then it's not just that. We also looked at increasing our product offerings and lending within the financial services segment. And that really helps uplift our ecosystem partners. So all that plus this constant product innovation on affordability and reliability has given us that long growth while even margin expansion is taking place and more engagement more loyalty as peter talked about as well so we are actually confident we see still a large time we see tremendous headroom to grow we see given our power of our ecosystem and scale our platform and a multi-pronged approach we're going to grow that user base thank you

Thank you. Our next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Thomas, please go ahead whenever you are ready.

Hi, good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my questions and congratulations on a very strong set of results. My question first is about the macro environment how is management looking into the macro trend coming into the second half, and also about our strategies on the reinvestment side, given that we are seeing other players in Southeast Asia looking to reinvest to drive the growth and gain market share. So that's number one. And then number two, regarding generative AI. We talked about it in the prepared remarks, so I just want to get some color with regard to our generative AI and LLM strategies going into the future. Should we expect there would be a big change in the Southeast Asia internet sector? Thank you.

Great questions, Thomas. Really appreciate it. First, let me comment on macros for the second half. The right thing to do for us is to closely monitor any risks on inflation, any macro weaknesses in the region. But overall, we remain confident in our ability to execute and continue to drive growth and profitability. And why can we do that? Through our ecosystem advantage, through our category leadership, pro-platform scale. And we will quickly adapt regardless of this ever-changing, ever-evolving macroeconomic environment. And you saw this in the second quarter. We grew MTUs, and Alex talked about this, at an all-time high, around $35 million, while we narrowed EBITDA losses. So I can't overemphasize this. There's no secret no silver bullet, just lots of fundamental little, little improvements. And we've talked about hundreds of little, but very important initiatives. Again, thanks to the grabbers all out there who are continuously driving for more affordability, more reliability, so we can pass on more savings to our users and our partners. And that's the only way to out-serve all the people we serve in a sustainable manner. Now, if I may quickly jump on your GAI question. The honest truth is for applications for AI, specifically for Grab, AI is incredibly vast. It's what powers the user and partner experience on our app. And we've been very blessed We've been at the forefront in this region with machine learning and AI. And we already, thanks to, again, all our wonderful tech teams, that they have built the data infrastructure to continue to innovate, to continue to enhance our platform experience efficiently for the communities we serve. And specifically on generative AI, this will continue to play an increasingly important role in everything we do Now, today, we've already been using generative AI to augment our internal workflows and processes. I talked about it. It helps us debug. It helps us do data queries much faster. We talked about how it's helped with translated menus and improved our grab chat. For us, we will continue to leverage tech. We will continue to leverage GAI to unlock the operational efficiency out there while enhancing the overall user experience.

And Thomas, maybe I'll just jump in on your question on reinvestment. There have been some statements about reinvestment on the e-commerce front recently. In our space, not so really. Most of the competitors are focused on profitability and driving to profitability. So we haven't really seen that in our space. As far as we're concerned, as we said earlier, you know, we're comfortable with where our margins are, very close to our steady state. long-term margins in deliveries, and then we're already at our comfortable long-term sustainable margin for mobility. So we are actually focusing on affordability and growing the market.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Alicia, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, thank you. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions and also congrats on the solid results. I have two quick questions. Number one, if management can share a bit color on the advertising business in terms of, for example, the numbers of paying advertisers that we have, and what are the industry vertical that we're able to attract and contribute to the growth? And then also on the medium term, what is the percentage of GMV of this ad revenue that you expect could reach? And then second question, quickly, given all this including GMV growth and also outperformance in revenue, just curious that why management decided to keep the full-year revenue target unchanged? Or is it just trying to be more conservative or leave a little bit room? So any colors on that would be appreciated. Thank you.

Thanks, Alicia, for your questions. Let me take the advertising one. Yeah, the advertising performance is one of the highlights of the quarter. You know, we are now at 1% of GMV for advertising. And we've done that by pushing ourselves SERVE TOOLS OUT TO THE VERY LARGE LONG TAIL OF MERCHANTS THAT WE SERVE ACROSS THE REGION. WE'RE NOT DISCLOSING HOW MANY WE'VE REACHED, BUT WE'RE STILL, I CAN TELL YOU, AT A VERY LOW PENETRATION RATE, SO THERE'S LOTS OF UPSIDE THAT WE CAN GENERATE BY CONTINUING TO PUSH THOSE TOOLS OUT. WE KNOW THAT THE ROAS THAT WE CAN CREATE, AS I MENTIONED SOME OF THE CASE STUDIES EARLIER, IS VERY ATTRACTIVE, AND WE'RE ALSO IMPROVING THE TOOLS within that self-serve capability further as well. So that will help us. So far, we focus primarily on endemic advertising. You asked about the segments that we're focusing on. So endemic advertising, meaning the F&B merchants driving demand within the ecosystem. We can do further endemic advertising within the mobility side and potentially other verticals like financial services. So that's yet to be tapped, which will help us to grow a deeper penetration of GMV. And then, as I mentioned, within food itself, we can also penetrate further. We do also serve brand advertisers who are not endemic on the platform. So these are brand owners. You can see the selection as you use the Grab app. For those, we can't close the loop on the advertising. We can't show them the performance of the ad that they placed like we can for the endemic advertisers. But we still have a very attractive audience for them. So they'll go into our digital audience for the reach and for the first party ability to reach first party authenticated users on the platform. So we're also attractive for them. And for that audience, you know, it's almost unlimited because they're actually targeting the demographic and the reach. So there's no particular constraint in terms of which segments when we have advertisers across a wide range from FMCG to auto, consumer goods, et cetera.

Alessio, on your revenue question, that's right. Yeah, we're maintaining our 2023 revenue guidance. And if you look from a year-over-year growth, it's about a 54% to 60% year-on-year growth on a headline basis. We're seeing good traction on the revenue front. July was also strong for us. What I can say is we'll continue to update as we need to, but we're at this stage. We're maintaining our revenue guidance. We are looking strong, and we're probably going to be ending up probably at the upper end of the range. That should give you some color and perspective on how we're tracking.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney from Evercore. Mark, your line is now open. Please proceed with your question.

Okay. Thanks. I'd like to ask about Grab Unlimited and then about incentives. On Grab Unlimited, how do you think – what's your framework for figuring out how big you think the Grab Unlimited base could be, the subscriber base could be? Are there regions where you see the Grab Unlimited customers as 30% or 50% of total users? How do we know how big that segment can be? And then on incentives, what I want to ask is, where do you think incentives can go long term? I know they've come down nicely year over year in almost every segment, although not in mobility. So just overall as a company, where do you think incentives can go if they're at 8% now? Is that trend to 7% or 6% or 5% long-term? Is that what you want to do? And then just explain why the mobility incentives kind of ticked back up this quarter, at least on a sequential basis. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mark. Let me take the Grab Unlimited question. Grab Unlimited is successful financially for us for two reasons. One is it drives retention, significantly drives retention. Of course, when we run the long-term value models, that's one of the biggest drivers of value for the platform. And then the other thing is it drives the GMV for customer further. So people spend more once they're in the program. There's a third lever, which is that it allows us to reduce the amount of promotion money which is spent on promotion hunters, people that aren't really interested in loyalty. They'll just skip from promotion to promotion. So it allows us to filter those out as well. So net-net is an important driver of profitability. We don't believe that it's right for everybody. So we don't have a target of 100% penetration. As you heard earlier, We're something like a third of the GMV now, so it's quite highly penetrated. There are some countries which are higher than that and some which are lower because they started at different times in the rollout. But it would be hard to see this representing the majority of our customers. So as it starts to grow, there are plenty of ways in which we can tweak it, the value packages that we offer, the subscription price that we offer. in order to manage the loyalty and the retention that we're seeking to achieve without impacting our ability to target all segments, those who naturally have the inclination to use us many, many times, and those that probably don't naturally have that opportunity that will use us less frequently. So we have to be able to cater for the whole market. Hope that's helpful. I think Peter's going to talk about the guidance on the incentives. Sure, yeah.

So on mobility incentives, Mark, you highlighted that it was up 50 basis points on a Q&Q perspective. Yes, we did make some reinvestments in those incremental margins in mobility. And a lot of that is really driving platform efficiency. We talked about a lot of the new product use cases, especially around affordability. things like Grab Share, things like also the two-wheel that we launched in the Philippines. And these are critical as we continue to enhance the marketplace, given that demand is strong in our mobility business. At the same time, also, we're balancing the high incentives queue on queue with the margin. So we're keeping one eye on how we can make sure we enhance the platform efficiency, but also making sure that the margin is equitably EQUAL ALSO MAINTAINING OUR MARGIN TARGETS. AS YOU CAN TELL IN MOBILITY, WE LANDED AT 12.4% FOR THE QUARTER. AND THAT THEME, ACTUALLY, IF YOU THINK THROUGH TO YOUR OTHER QUESTION AROUND HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT INCENTIVES, AND IT'S VERY SIMILAR IN WHETHER IT'S MOBILITY OR DELIVERIES, IT'S THIS BALANCE THAT WE TAKE BETWEEN THE MARKETPLACE EFFICIENCY REGARDING OUR PLATFORM, WHILE THERE WILL BE SOME QUARTERS WHERE YOU MAY SEE INCENTIVES GO UP OR DOWN, But overall, we're balancing that on the other side with margin, target margins, whether it's the 12% of mobility or deliveries of 3% plus. I hope that answers your question, Mark.

Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Alex.

Thanks, Mark.

Thank you. Our last question today comes from Sachin Selgaonkar from Bank of America. Sachin, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for the opportunity and congrats for a great set of numbers. Two questions from me. One, wanted to understand, you know, how you guys are looking in terms of, you know, utilizing the cash on your balance sheet. Clearly, you guys mentioned that you have a high bar on M&A and now that, you know, we're already very close to it, just a little bit of a break even. Just wanted to understand, you know, out there. And second, I wanted to understand a bit more on the delivery take rate, you know, declined a bit on a QQ basis. Anything to read here? And actually, how could one expect to look at this going ahead?

Sure, Sachin. Let me take both questions. So on the cash position, as you can tell, we always take a very prudent approach in terms of how we deploy our capital. As Alex mentioned earlier, we do have a very high hurdle rate when it comes to deploying our capital. We won't do a particular transaction unless there's a high degree of conviction and also how you can enhance the long-term shareholder value. So we'll continue to take that approach when it comes to maintaining our capital allocation framework. We'll be prudent. Cash preservation is also critical and important for us. and that high hurdle rate will continue to be maintained. In terms of take rate, look, there's not a lot to read into it. Our take rate continues to be strong. There's obviously different mixes in terms of how a take rate can fluctuate from quarter on quarter, but overall there was no big swings, and we're on track.

Got it. And sorry, just a small clarification I wanted to get. There were some comments on the regional corporate cost, and I think one of the comments was regional corporate cost to improve going ahead. Do I read it correctly? Do you expect that to increase in second half or decrease?

What I said was the regional corporate cost will be lower in the second half versus the first half. Got it. All right. Thank you.

Thank you. This now concludes our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Peter for any closing remarks.

Well, thanks everyone for taking the time to join our call today. If you still have questions, please feel free to reach out to our Investor Relations team or you can visit our Investor Relations website. Great. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

This concludes Grab's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.