7/31/2025

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. My name is Faith, and I'll be your conference operator for this session. Welcome to Grab's second quarter 2025 earnings results call. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a questions and answers session. I'll turn it over to Douglas Yu to start the call.

speaker
Douglas Yu
Director, Investor Relations and Strategic Finance, Grab

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Grab's second quarter earnings call. I'm Douglas Yu, Director, Investor Relations and Strategic Finance at Grab, And joining me today are Anthony Tan, Chief Executive Officer, Alex Hungate, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Peter Owee, Chief Financial Officer. 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 other 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 are 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, remarks, and supplemental presentation available on our IR website. And with that, I will turn the call over to Anthony to deliver his opening remarks before we open it up for questions.

speaker
Anthony Tan
Chief Executive Officer, Grab

Thanks, Doug. Grab delivered yet another strong set of results in the second quarter, with Group MTU scaling to another all-time high. Meanwhile, on-demand GMV accelerated to 21% year-on-year in U.S. dollars growth or 18% year-on-year growth on a constant currency basis. These top-line trends combined with our continued cost discipline delivered our 14th consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA growth, while trailing 12 months adjusted free cash flow expanded to $229 million. This performance was powered by product and tech-led innovations which drive our ecosystem flywheel faster and enable us to outserve everyday entrepreneurs across Southeast Asia. Growth continues to be demand-led, with on-demand transactions outpacing GMV as we increase our focus on rolling out more affordable services and expanding the addressable market with more price-sensitive users. We also continue to scale up our financial services business prudently, with total loan dispersals across GrabFin and our digital banks reaching close to $3 billion on an annualised run rate basis in the second quarter. At the same time, credit risks remain within our risk appetites. Looking ahead to the second half, Grab remains well positioned with our investments solidifying our resilience in the face of potential macroeconomic uncertainties. As such, we expect to sustain this growth momentum to accelerate on-demand GMV growth rates relative to 2024. We will also maintain discipline on costs to drive profitable growth and free cash flow generation. With that, I now open the call for questions. Operator?

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now start the questions and answers portion of the call. Please press star 1 to ask a question and we'll call on you for your question. When asking questions, please limit to two questions per person. Thank you. We will now start. Your first question comes from the line of Pang Bitayamunokun from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

speaker
Pang Bitayamunokun
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Good morning, management. Congratulations on a good quarter and a strong growth as a relation. Two questions from me. Number one, with the uncertainty in the macro environment and what's happening in Thailand and Indonesia, as well as Trump tariffs being implemented and negotiated, How are you thinking about the outlook for Grab and for the countries you operate in? Are you seeing any weakness in consumption right now? That's number one. Number two, immobility. Number of transactions was 23%, with significantly outpacing growth in MTUs. What strategies have you successfully implemented to drive this increase in frequency of usage? How should we anticipate this trend evolving in the future? Thank you.

speaker
Anthony Tan
Chief Executive Officer, Grab

Thanks, Pang. Great question. And you're right, it is top of mind, the macro environment for all of us. Good news, Pang, is we have been leaning into affordability since 2023 with our first initial product launches of affordability like saver deliveries, saver transport rides, which now has become even more critical with the ongoing uncertainty in a global macro landscape. Nonetheless, we believe we are very well positioned on this front, Pang, because of our product-led investments that continues to solidify our resilience. As you saw from the slides we shared, it drove the ecosystem flywheel faster, and it really positions us as a counter-cyclical company. Over the past two years, we have enhanced affordability, we've enhanced reliability of our services, And that further deepens user engagement and retention, and brings new users to the Grab ecosystem. You saw this with the all-time high of MTUs. You saw this with another quarter of profitable growth, and how our growth has re-accelerated to 21% year on year. Now, moving forward, we'll continue our track record of working very closely with governments and regulators to ensure that our partners and users can navigate this period of uncertainty well. For example, in Indonesia, we participated in the pilot phase of Makan Bergizi Gratis, which is a free nutritious meal program, very important for the Indonesian government. As part of this initiative, we delivered nutritious meals to over 1,500 students across seven elementary schools across many parts of Indonesia. And we collaborated with nine local MSME merchants in these areas to provide healthier meals, but also foster greater brand loyalty among our student customer segments. You talked about Thailand as well. Thailand, you know, we are actively working with the government to support the tourism sector. That's very important, especially during this time for Thailand. We established actually a private public tourism task force to contribute to the grand tourism year 2025. And this builds on the existing partnership we've had with tourism authority and transport authority Airports Authority in Thailand. So looking ahead, we are confident our strategy of focusing on user and partners with a very user and partner centric lens for product development will continue to drive sustainable and profitable growth for the business. And this you will continue to see and that's why we are confident to say that our expectations for on-demand GMV growth in 2025 will accelerate from that of 2024 levels. and our adjusted EBITDA in the second half being substantially stronger than that of the first half.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Okay, thanks Anthony. Bang, let me take the second part of the question about mobilities. Because we know there's untapped growth potential in Southeast Asia, we did choose to reinvest the benefits of our scale economies to drive broader accessibility and increased platform usage this half. And as a result, as you said, we saw this growth of 23% year-on-year in mobility transactions, which we think is a good return for our mobility flywheel because it attracts new user cohorts and improves retention. And that, of course, creates more demand for partners so they can improve their utilization and driver earnings. So that supports better reliability and lower prices, and that in turn attracts even more users. So it's a great flywheel impact. Overall mobility, MTUs grew 16%, and GMV still continued to grow strongly at 19% year on year, 16% constant currency. And of course, in our case, because we're multivertical as an ecosystem, the benefits of having new users come in extends to the broader gripe ecosystem, because then we can cross-sell into deliveries and financial services. So it's a broader benefit for us than it would be for a single vertical player. There's not been much trade-off on profitability. If you look at the numbers, we still grew EBITDA profitability on an absolute dollar basis, year on year and quarter on quarter. And we're still growing our higher margin, high value rides, which now have reached double digit as a percentage of mobility GMV this quarter. So that helps us to balance off on a margin basis. So the margin this quarter was 8.7% for mobility, very close already to our steady state margin target of 9% plus. So we think this is a very sustainable strategy going forward, and we'll continue to lean into growth.

speaker
Pang Bitayamunokun
Analyst, Goldman Sachs

Thank you.

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alicia Yap of Citigroup. Your line is open.

speaker
Alicia Yap
Analyst, Citigroup

um thank you um good morning management congrats on the subject quarter uh two questions uh first on um delivery business just wondering uh given the growth of the grab food for one the share saver all will result in potentially lower blender aov will this volume have a lower margins um so if excluding the contribution from the advertising revenue can you walk us through how you balance between the faster volume driver of the GMV grow versus the lower ASP and the margin trend. Second question, with the launch of your autonomous vehicle shuttles in Singapore recently, how soon do you think a commercial rollout of the AV vehicles in your market across the Southeast Asia will take? Any updates also on the partnership front to boost your innovations in this space? Thank you.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Hi, Alicia. This is Alex again. Let me take the question on deliveries, growth and margin. You know, we really believe that ASEAN has still so much upside in digital consumption. So on the delivery side, we also decided to invest into product-led growth. Deliveries GMV accelerated to 19% year-on-year on a constant currency basis because of these product-led initiatives. So there was user acquisition from those affordable products that you mentioned. It's been strong, but we've also seen strong growth from what we think of as viral products, such as Dine Out, family accounts, group orders. And those are proving very effective in attracting new users through network effects and shared experiences. So we've got a combination of those viral products and the affordable products bringing in new MTUs. So the GMV from all of these new product initiatives that we announced at GRABx earlier this year is growing three times faster than the existing products. and now accounts in total for a third of deliveries GMV. In addition, as you well know, we've got Grab Unlimited, which is now the largest paid loyalty program in Southeast Asia, driving almost five times higher spend and three times higher order frequency for its members. And we've reached new record highs in paid subscriber count there. So that's also a big impact on the health of our ecosystem. And then finally, I'd just like to mention one of the other products that was launched at GrabX, which is GrabMore, which enables users of food to bundle food and grocery orders into a single transaction. So that's helped us with drive higher growth rates for GrabMart this quarter than for our core business, which is another quarter where that's been the impact. So there's lots of upside on GrabMart also. So overall, you mentioned Savor. CONTRIBUTED 34% OF DELIVERY TRANSACTIONS IN Q2. THAT'S VERSUS A NUMBER OF 28% FOR PRIOR YEAR FOR COMPARISON. SO IT HAS GROWN IN TERMS OF NUMBER OF TRANSACTIONS. HOWEVER, IF YOU LOOK YEAR ON YEAR, OUR SEGMENT MARGINS HAVE CONTINUED TO EXPAND 34 BASIS POINTS, IN FACT, FROM 1.5 LAST YEAR TO 1.8 THIS QUARTER. SO WE ARE ABLE TO STILL IMPROVE MARGIN DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE the affordable products are accounting for a higher percentage of transactions. So what I would say is like margins will move from quarter to quarter, but overall we're still, we've still managed to grow absolute EBITDA in this segment by 50% year on year. Medium term, I think we can expect the margins as we scale the business to reduce the delivery costs and improve monetization. particularly through the growth of advertising, which this quarter reached 1.7% GMV penetration. So that's continued to show a deeper penetration there. And that will improve with scale in terms of its attractiveness to our advertising clients. So we still believe that we will reach margins of 4% plus in steady state. So there's no change in our longer-term outlook. Thanks.

speaker
Anthony Tan
Chief Executive Officer, Grab

On the AV question, Alicia, thank you so much. And you're absolutely right. Very, very top of mind for us. In fact, we are leaning heavily into the AV opportunity or what we think of as the driverless AV opportunity across Southeast Asia. We are in a prime position to support the AV transition over the next few years. We have a very significant role to play via a hybrid fleet, hybrid meaning both driverless and drivers fleet. When you think about our right to win, we think about number one, we have and continue to build strong relationships with AV players as well as OEMs across the world. our scale, our network across the region that allows us to provide the best in class utilization rates, which is very important, as you imagine, because these cars, you have to make sure utilization rates are high to make the unit comics work. Third, the brand trust and a long track record of safety and of working constructively with regulators and governments to really continue to ensure community safety, passenger and driver safety is one that people really care about. And lastly, as you know, Alicia, we also build our own mapping tech with very rich local data sets that provides millions of real-world driving hours, real-world user pickup, drop-off, points, patterns, traffic flows, heat maps, across highly complex Southeast Asian-specific urban environments. So that really positions us well. We also have several pilots we planned at the moment. Earlier this month, we announced the A to Z partnership with the Korean full-stack AV manufacturer. Now that culminated in the announcement of the first autonomous electric shuttle bus in Singapore. Now, in Philippines, we are working with regulators closely and property developer Megaworld to launch a pilot study on drone-powered commercial delivery. So really, I just want to thank A2Z, Megaworld, Kevin, and all the regulators across the region to work closely with us to roll out and think through the implications and how best to do it in a safe, affordable way. So now, As we think about the communities we serve, we are always focused on safe, affordable, convenient services for all our customers. So looking ahead, what are we going to do? One, you can expect to hear new partnerships with more global AI and driverless AV partners. We'll continue to explore potential high-value new job opportunities that this sector could create. for the communities we serve. Expect to hear more pilots to understand the operational conditions for different driverless vehicle services in the region. And of course, we want to continuously work with regulators to improve transport connectivity using and leveraging the innovative technologies together. All in all, we are leaning in in the AV path moving forward.

speaker
Alicia Yap
Analyst, Citigroup

Thank you.

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Dija Gangangar from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

speaker
Dija Gangangar
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Thank you very much and good morning. So my first question is just getting some more details on competition by market and segment. Specifically, if you can comment maybe on, you know, the mobility GMV growth was a bit slower in second quarter versus first quarter, and the trip fares were down about 4%. Which markets specifically are we seeing some slowdown in? And if you can help us contextualize this trip fares being down 4% and how to think of it going forward. And also Vietnam specifically, if you have any comments on a new player entering food delivery, if you're seeing any more competition there. So that's my first question. And my second question is just on capital allocation, especially after the raise of the 1.5 billion CB. I mean, beyond the obvious M&A that has been on and off for a long time, what are the other segments that this capital can be deployed into? Do you have any updated thoughts on buybacks? Thank you.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Hi Divya, Alex here. Thanks for your questions. Let me take the first part. We have chosen to lean into reinvesting the scale economies from our ecosystem back into volume. So the AOV drop of 4% in mobility is something that we have decided upon ourselves rather than being driven by competitive activity. We think the returns have been good. So, you know, a transaction growth of 23% means that we're creating future growth pipeline. And the reason we've taken this stance is because of the potential in Southeast Asia. A lot of the growth has come from new users and higher frequency in tier one cities. And we are also growing in some of the smaller cities using the auto adaptive technologies that we've developed, which means that we can manage small cities without having team members present in those cities. That gives us lots of cost efficiencies. So our strategy is to continue to drive that growth, the top-line growth. The margin tradeoffs, as I mentioned earlier, are not considerable. We think that it's a good tradeoff to make, and therefore it's sustainable. Market by market, always, you know, there's always competitors in every market, and the market dynamics for different competitors go up and down, but I think Overall, we're about 3.5 times larger than our next largest competitor in the region. And that means that our scale economies are quite considerable. And that's why we've been reinvesting in AI and other capabilities, which mean that our efficiencies and the savings we can pass on to consumers are much higher than those of smaller competitors. So we think this is a sustainable competitive strategy, no matter whether From time to time, there might be surges in competitive activity in particular markets.

speaker
Peter Owee
Chief Financial Officer, Grab

Ed, if you're on your capital allocation question, our stance has always been consistent. We take a very prudent approach when it comes to capital allocation. So what do we look at? We always want to create, generate, share all the value on a long-term basis. And if you look at where we've been deploying our capital, it's really fueling the growth of our business through organic growth. And that's going to be P zero for us. There's going to be high top of the list for us. And you're seeing that playing out in this result, which is fueled by the previous deployment of capital, who was all the product innovations and the tech innovations that we've been doing. And that will continue. That will continue to fuel the growth that we're going to see in our business as we move forward. Now, with that being said, with M&A, we're always on the lookout. with a strong balance sheet and with the recent capital raise, it does give us that strategic flexibility. And that flexibility is important because M&A comes and goes. So we'll be continuing to scour the market in terms of what's available, but at the same time also, the bar is just so much higher when you compare it to the organic growth that we're continuing to prioritize over our business today. Now, in terms of buyback, we did complete the $500 million buyback. It was done concurrently with the recent convertible note that we raised. There's no plans for new buyback programs. That's something that we'll continue to explore with our board. But in these quarterly earnings, there's nothing for us to announce. Again, it's all about, for us, prioritizing the right sort of capital management in our business. And when we have a new buyback, we'll definitely share it with all of you.

speaker
Dija Gangangar
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Thank you very much.

speaker
Peter Owee
Chief Financial Officer, Grab

Next question.

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Piyush Chaudhry from HSBC. Your line is open.

speaker
Piyush Chaudhry
Analyst, HSBC

yeah hi good morning management team and congrats on uh good set of results uh two questions please um firstly on delivery segment uh what's the outlook of uh consumer incentive spending as it remains at around seven percent of gmv into q um alex you talked about the midterm margin outlook but should we expect the pace of margin expansion in delivery segment to be slower going forward due to these new product launches and focus on driving user engagement. Second question on mobility, if you can share, what's the contribution mix between premium rides and affordable rides? How has that proportion changed over the last one year because that dynamics have an impact on the margins? Thank you.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Thanks, Piyush. So first one on the deliverer's product investment. We'll continue to see opportunities there for further product investment. I can tell you that in terms of the medium term, for the next two quarters of this year for deliveries, we do expect the margin to improve from the current quarter. So we see sequential improvement in margin for the rest of this year. So hopefully that's helpful for you all with your model. Ads penetration will obviously contribute to that. Typically, third and fourth quarter are big quarters for advertising. And as you can see from our results, both the self-serve ad channel penetration and the sales force sold directly to enterprise larger clients both continue to grow. And so we're very bullish about what Grab has to offer as a retail media network to advertisers, given our first party data and the closed loop effectiveness that we can show to those advertisers. We are committed to the 4% steady state margins in the longer run as well. So just confirming all of that. Moving to mobility, the mix between saver and premium. Saver now is about one third of mobility transaction. So we're continuing to scale that, particularly in the lower tier cities. But we're still seeing growth in numbers of users, attracting new users into Tier 1 cities, and higher frequency both in Tier 1 and in the smaller cities. So we're consciously focusing on affordability so that we can continue to drive that frequency and growth of new users into the ecosystem. On the premium end, We're also continuing to grow at the same time. So it's not just the affordability summit which is growing. Premium now is in double digits as a percentage of transactions. And we expect that to continue to grow with the advanced booking and other features that we've been launching recently. We've done a lot of work with airports around the region so that we can get better access into airports. And therefore, we can balance that margin between the affordable products and the high value products for the less price sensitive users. So I can reiterate that we are committed to the 9% steady state mobility margins, which as you're probably aware, would remain industry leading when you look across the world. Thanks, Piyush. Next question.

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from John Shaw of Barclays. Your line is open.

speaker
John Shaw
Analyst, Barclays

Thank you very much for taking my questions. First, I have a follow-up around autonomous driving, or sorry, more like a robo taxi. I don't know if you prepared the remarks and also earlier, you talked about the trial for the the shuttle bus in Singapore. Given what Uber is doing in RoboTaxi around the world, what Didi is doing in China, I was wondering if you can comment about what's her plan for RoboTaxi in the region. My question, the first is around the regional cost. I was hoping Dieter perhaps can comment about expectations for the regional cost. for the second half of this year and and I have another question around the grant mark. Could you talk about sort of a longer term? How do you anticipate a TAM for grant mod vis-a-vis more traditional food delivery? And can we expect the long term margins for

speaker
Anthony Tan
Chief Executive Officer, Grab

the market business to be close to the above four percent target as well thank you so much hey thanks thanks jung so i'll take the av one uh and well good news is uh darren so with uber we we have a good sense of what's uh happening and uh and you're right uh we see also a lot of AV action taking place also in China. And we've actually seen experience, gone there multiple times to experience these actual robotaxis on the streets. Now, As I talked about the partnerships, I have nothing to announce today, but we can assure you that we are really looking very seriously at how to expand pilots across the region. We are talking to a number of partners and we will announce more when we are ready. And, of course, all this is done very closely with the government. But, you know, you can foresee in the next amount of months you will hear more announcements on this.

speaker
Peter Owee
Chief Financial Officer, Grab

On your question around regional corporate costs, so what you saw in the second quarter in the increase, which is roughly about a 9.5% Q and Q increase, if regional corporate cost is pretty much on tandem with the strong on-demand GMB growth momentum in the second quarter. If you look at the on-demand GMB, it was growing at 21% on actual currency, but our regional corporate cost was growing at 9.5%. So it's actually growing much slower than our top-line business growth overall, which is what we're actually driving. We're driving operating leverage in the business And a lot of the cost that's tied to the increased queue on queue, it's pretty much a variable cost. You're looking at more cloud costs, software costs, as you would expect from just the volume of growth that we're driving, the transactions in our business. Our transaction was up 23% on a year-over-year basis. Now, as we think about moving forward overall, your corporate costs will probably be somewhere around that 10% to 12% increase on a year-over-year basis. What's important, though, is driving operating leverage. And I would expect that somewhere around 100 to about 150 basis points of margin improvement in terms of regional corporate costs as a percentage of revenue, which is really critical as we drive that cost efficiency throughout the business, both on variable as well as on fixed costs. So hopefully that gives you a bit of color on corporate costs. And I'll turn it over to Alex on Mark.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Thanks, Peter, and thanks, John, for the question. I'm glad you've asked us about GrabMart because this is an area where the TAM is very large, potentially, much larger than the food delivery market in the longer run. Online groceries is still barely penetrated in Southeast Asia, probably less than 5% penetrated. And it's a context where many of our countries in Southeast Asia have a very low penetration also of the modern retail offline business. So the user experience is not great. So the chance to leapfrog that with a digital Mart experience is strong. Mart is only currently less than 10% of our deliveries business, but already growing faster than food deliveries. So it's about 1.5 times in terms of growth rate. And the NTUs for Mart are hitting all-time highs this quarter. So it's a very active and growing user base now. Shows the potential of the digital experience. We're taking a partnership first approach. As you know, we own Jaya Grocer and we just purchased Everise in Malaysia. So we have an offline online experience there, which is probably the leading edge of the customer experience that we're developing with the O2O opportunity. That's working well. We can extend that to partnerships in other markets. And the goal there is to make sure we can replicate the very best customer experience that we can And already in Jaya, we're heading towards 15% online penetration of GMV, which is great and shows what can be done. That's an industry-leading number, so it's obviously attractive for partners in other markets to work with us to try to get to those types of levels of online penetration. In terms of margins, currently the margin is embedded within our overall expectations for the deliveries margin, which, as we talked about earlier, is 4% plus in steady state. is a huge ads opportunity for Mart. Many of the FMCGs in Southeast Asia find it hard to get strong data on their sales because of the multi-tier distribution of the rather traditional retail environment here. So we're able to give them first-party data, which they find very valuable. So as we work with the FMCGs, WITH OUR DIGITAL FIRST APPROACH FOR MART, THEN OF COURSE THAT'S SOMETHING VERY ATTRACTIVE FROM AN ADS PERSPECTIVE AS WELL. SO THE PENETRATION OF 1.7% FOR WHO DELIVERS FOR ADS IS SOMETHING THAT WE THINK WE CAN IMPROVE UPON, PARTICULARLY FOR MART. THANKS, XIONG. NEXT QUESTION.

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Thank you. Your next question is from Mark Mahaney from Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

speaker
Mark Mahaney
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Thank you. I just wanted to ask about the advertising revenue. You got that 236 million run rate, I think, and that 45% growth. Just talk about the sustainability of that growth and then think about or talk about the long-term ceiling or marker for where advertising as a percentage of GMV could go. Thank you very much.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Thanks, Mark. Yeah. You can see that the advertising business has doubled a couple of times over the last couple of years. So you can see that we're growing super fast. There's an exponential impact in here that I should explain. One is the number of advertisers that are actually trying Grab as a retail media network for the first time continues to grow. We're still at less than 50% penetration of our merchant base in terms of those that have tried us. So there's still upside there in terms of expanding the penetration of our merchant base. And because their return on advertising sales is averaging eight times, we know that it's a great product for them and it can help them grow. So as the retention of those that do try us is very high, and therefore we're getting that exponential impact of existing advertisers spending more while we grow the penetration at the same time. So the penetration year on year grew 42%. So that's the first part of the exponential. And then those existing advertisers on the self-serve platform also increased 31%. So really good opportunity for us there. Advertisers, as you know, want reach. So the bigger we get, the more attractive we are on a cost per point basis as well. So the pricing on the network gets larger, gets higher as we get larger, simply because all they care about is the returns ultimately to their investment. So this is why you're seeing those kinds of exponential growth rates on advertising. If you look across the world, penetration of advertising to GMV in various markets can get much higher than where we are today. We're seeing examples of 2% penetration, 3% penetration, even 4% penetration, particularly when you get into the mart type of ecosystems. So I think depending on our different verticals, including mobility, by the way, where we've now introduced ads, we see opportunity to increase advertising penetration much higher than the current penetration that we have of 1.7%.

speaker
Mark Mahaney
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Thank you very much.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Thanks, Mark.

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Next question, please. Thank you. Your next question is from Ranjan Sharma at JPMorgan. Your line is open.

speaker
Ranjan Sharma
Analyst, JPMorgan

Hi, good morning, and thank you for the presentation. My first question, I know a lot has been said about deliveries and the margins. But I can get a bit deeper into it. If I remove the ad revenues, then the delivery EBITDA X ads seems to be a bit softer. Now, I appreciate that you're doing a lot of growth investments and you're seeing tremendous expansion in your monthly transacting users and new services. But is there a point where we should think that the underlying delivery EBITDA X ads could start inflecting upwards? Or do you see the focus on the near term or the midterm as well will be on growing the business rather than monetizing it to its potential? Second, on fintech, since no one has asked, let me ask, tremendous growth in the loan portfolio. If you can help understand where you're making these loans. Thank you.

speaker
Alex Hungate
President and Chief Operating Officer, Grab

Let me take both of those. On the deliveries, we do see considerable upside in penetration and volume in Southeast Asia in the medium term. We think that the current strategy leaning into growth and reinvesting the economies we're getting from our scale is sustainable. We haven't had to make considerable trade-offs in margin. We don't see the advertising upside as separate from the margin of the business. We see them as a combined opportunity. And as I mentioned in the response to Mark on the last question, the return to advertisers is what's key. So as we get more scale, the returns to them improve, and therefore the value of our advertising inventory increases. So scale itself or the delivery segment, including Mark, is an important driver or value for advertisers and therefore we don't we don't separate it from the deliveries margin so we'll continue with this strategy uh as you can see it's created a an acceleration of um of our of our deliveries growth and there's and southeast asia is a region where there's still lots of untapped potential so uh we want to we want to drive further into that moving to your second question on financial services it's the first time that we've given an outlook for the loan book size. So I hope that's helpful for you all. So we've said that by the end of the year, we'll hit 1 billion. We're at about 700 million in the end of quarter two. And the reason why we're very confident that we can exceed 1 billion is because of the very strong product lineup we have both for GrabFin, our fintech arm, and for the digital banks. So For the first time, we've got personal lending products available for all three banks. We've got BNPL available through GrabFin in multiple markets. And as of the middle of this year, so going forward for the full second half, we have the supply chain financing capability that we got by acquiring the validus business in Singapore, which has now been rebranded GXS Capital. through GXS Bank. So we've been financing SMEs through the supply chain, in other words, with a well-managed risk profile, because it's based on the risk of larger corporate off-takers. And it's a very good fit with our ecosystem. So that's a capability that not only will we grow in Singapore, but we'll start to expand across the region as well. If you look at the numbers carefully, the one billion represents an acceleration half on half. So the half on half growth was 32% in the first half, and one billion would see us reaching 41% in the second half. And that's because of this product lineup that I mentioned earlier, and also our increasing faith in the system data advantage that we have for underwriting and distribution. So our credit models are performing well. The performance, the Gini coefficients that we're managing to generate are significantly higher than they were when we first started this journey. And we're getting more and more capabilities there as we ingest more data fields from across our ecosystem. I can reiterate also the breakeven target. So for financial services overall, we expect to breakeven in the second half of 2026. And for the three banks, we expect to breakeven in the fourth quarter of 2026. So our approach overall is high growth. This is still the fastest growing business that we have, but we remain focused on balancing risk management as well as scale as we grow this business.

speaker
Peter Owee
Chief Financial Officer, Grab

Rajan, also just to add on that deliveries margin, if you look at some of the countries that we operate in today, a majority of those countries are already in the zip code of 4% to 5% deliveries margin. And it's been very consistent throughout many quarters now. So we have some work to do in terms of closing the gap on some of the other countries, which we're very focused on. Also, at the same time, we're balancing the underpenetration of deliveries, which Alex spoke about, which we feel that we're balancing with also feeling that growth on the top line as we bring new users into the platform. And also with advertising scaling up that Alex also spoke about, uh we feel that we're confident we can get to a margin improvement in deliveries but also we're not going to sacrifice the growth that we're seeing at the same time also it's a balancing act well we've got some countries already north of four percent we're also balancing us overall as an ecosystem as a business a deliveries business we also want to make sure we're also fueling that 20 growth rate that we're seeing across deliveries All right, so we're going to wrap up the call here. So thanks very much, everyone, for dialing in. Anthony, Alex, and I really want to express our appreciation to all our drivers and to all our merchant partners and all our customers and users and shareholders for really just continuing the trust in Grab. Thank you also to the Grab team for a great quarter. Looking forward to delivering a strong second half TOGETHER WITH OUR IR TEAM, DOUG, KEN, AND I WILL BE ON THE ROAD OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS. WE'LL BE ATTENDING VARIOUS IR CONFERENCES ACROSS U.S., HONG KONG, AND SINGAPORE IN THE COMING WEEKS. SO IF YOU WISH TO MEET UP, PLEASE REACH OUT TO ANY OF US HERE. WE WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOU IN PERSON AND CATCH UP THEN. THANK YOU FOR THIS MORNING AND FOR DIALING IN IN A DIFFERENT TIME ZONE. APPRECIATE IT. AND WE'LL TALK OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS. THANK YOU, EVERYONE.

speaker
Faith
Conference Operator

Thank you. This concludes Scribe's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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