Grab Holdings Limited

Hello and thank you for your patience. Today's call will begin in approximately two minutes time. Hello all, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Lydia, and I'll be your conference operator for this session. Welcome to GRAB's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings results call. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I'll now turn it over to Douglas Yu to start the call.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to GRAB's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. I'm Douglas Yu, 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 fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the call to questions. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements about future events, including our future business and financial performance. These statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations. Actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties as described on this earnings call in the earnings release and in our form 20F and our filings with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements. We will also be discussing non-IFRS financial measures on this call. These measures supplement but do not replace IFRS financial measures. Please refer to the earnings materials for reconciliation of non-IFRS to IFRS financial measures. For more information, please refer to our earnings press release and supplemental presentation available on our IR website. And with that, I will turn the call over to Anthony to deliver his remarks.

Thank you for joining us today. 2023 was a pivotal year for Grab. We set out to achieve a number of big milestones. and we delivered on our key goals. Our mobility business, which was severely impacted by the pandemic, exceeded pre-COVID levels as we exited 2023. This was done through focused product investments into our key affordability initiatives and targeting traveler demand. In deliveries, we drove a re-acceleration of our deliveries GMV, executing upon three consecutive quarters of sequential growth post-COVID normalization. In the fourth quarter of 2023, deliveries GMV re-accelerated to grow 13% year on year, setting us up strongly for 2024. At the same time, Delivery segment adjusted EBITDA margins expanded by over 160 basis points year-on-year as we continue to drive marketplace efficiencies and grow our category leadership position across all our core markets amid reductions in incentive spend. And finally, at a group level, we achieved our bottom-line goals. We turned group-adjusted EBITDA profitable since the third quarter of 2023 and also achieved adjusted free cash flow and positive net profit for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2023. These outcomes were achieved by driving intense scrutiny and discipline on costs while innovating relentlessly to deliver top-line growth. While net profit benefited from an accounting accrual reversal, more importantly, our adjusted EBITDA continued to grow quarter on quarter. This showcases our ability to deliver strongly on the bottom line, which we are committed to improving in the coming years. Importantly, we took strides towards profitable growth while staying true to our mission, empowering everyday entrepreneurs. During the year, we generated over $11 billion of earnings for our driver and merchant partners, which is an all-time high. And our average driver earnings per transit hour also grew by 14% year-on-year, while also onboarding over 700,000 new merchants in a year itself. We achieved this by driving win-win solutions such as hyper-batching and just-in-time allocations, all of which enabled us to improve the productivity of our driver partners, enhancing their earnings potential while reducing our cost to serve. For Grab, improving lives and livelihoods is not just the right thing to do, but makes financial sense for us too. Only by helping our communities to thrive can we also thrive alongside them. Looking ahead to 2024, this is a year where we will build on our foundations and double down on the following key priorities. First, we will deepen our engagement with all our users by focusing on value creation through product innovation. One such initiative is Grab Unlimited, the largest on-demand paid loyalty program in Southeast Asia. We are confident that we will be able to drive further uplifts to customer lifetime value by stepping up cross-selling initiatives and service differentiation for our users, which will lead to improved usage frequency and retention rates. We've already demonstrated this in 2023 via the cross-sell of Grab Unlimited to our supermarket Jai Grocer in Malaysia, which resulted in net new MTUs onto the Grab platform. We've also seen strong traction with our Malaysian digital bank, GX Bank, which was launched in the fourth quarter of 2023. It's the first digital bank out of the five licenses granted in Malaysia to launch. GX Bank has seen more than 100,000 customers sign up in just the first two weeks, of which 79% of depositors were existing Grab users. Our loans dispersals for GXS Singapore also grew quarter and quarter, and over 80% of GXS customers have ecosystem linkages to Grab. Second, we'll continue to expand the top of our funnel. We'll do this by increasing our appeal to travelers, harnessing strategic product partnerships, such as with WeChat or Alipay, or expanding our product portfolio to provide not just affordable solutions, but also high-value offerings. I'm particularly excited about one of our new launch products, family accounts. This feature allows users to add their loved ones to a group account. enabling users to share payment methods with potentially new to Grab users, for example, family members or elderly parents, while allowing them to keep track of each other's rides for peace of mind. We'll further leverage generative AI to drive productivity enhancements. For example, we've now developed our own in-house LLM-powered marketing tool which has enabled us to reduce content generation time from 99 hours to just 90 minutes while raising output quality. And furthermore, our pilots also show an improvement in click-through rates as compared to content generated manually. So this not only drives significantly greater throughput, but also enables us to stay lean and disciplined from a cost management perspective. Savings can then be reinvested into more technology to drive greater long-term growth for the platform. This is only one of the many GAI initiatives that we are currently working on that we are proud to share with you today. Now, from this tree, we won't stop here. As a leader of this company, I'm constantly looking at ways where we deliver greater impact and bolder growth by investing and incubating brand new tech-led initiatives. When successful, these initiatives will be transformative for Grab. Our leaders have all been empowered to drive this step change for us, to reap the fruits of this labour in the subsequent years. In executing such initiatives, we'll be strategically patient, but tactically impatient and always remain good stewards of capital. As part of this push, we expect these initiatives to accelerate revenue growth rates in the mid-term after 2024, building on the solid foundations we are establishing this year. Peter, our CFO, will elaborate later. Finally, on creating shareholder value, we see a clear path to steady group-adjusted EBITDA growth and to improve upon our adjusted free cash flow generation in the years to come. With the progress that we have made on profitability, with a strong balance sheet in place, we are announcing two capital market-related activities today that have been approved by our board of directors. Firstly, we plan to repay our remaining Term Loan B debt facility, which we expect will save us around $50 million in interest expenses annually. Secondly, we are announcing our inaugural share repurchase program of up to $500 million, which Peter will share more on later. In closing, We are incredibly excited about what Grab will embark on in the years to come. Southeast Asia is a fertile ground for us. We're now the largest on-demand platform in the region at a scale that is over three times larger than our next closest competitor, and yet there's still a lot for us to achieve for our partners in this region. Having operated in the region for over a decade, we are now best positioned to deploy our significant local knowledge, data insights, scale and technology to solve the region's many complex problems, including accelerating financial inclusion for the underbanked. We will also remain relentless in innovation to unlock new possibilities for our users and partners, while ensuring we continue to focus on growing our bottom line and shareholder value over the long term. I'll now hand over to Alex, who will cover our fourth quarter operational highlights in more detail.