Grab Holdings Limited

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Grab's first quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm Douglas Yu, Director of Investment 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 regarding future events, including our 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 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. For today's call, Anthony will deliver opening remarks, after which we will open the floor to questions. As a reminder, we are accepting questions via our email at investor.relations at grab.com. Do submit your questions ahead of time, and we will add them to the Q&A queue. And with that, I'll hand it over to Anthony.

Great. Thanks, Doug. Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We set out to start 2026 strongly, and we delivered. Against the backdrop of our seasonally softest quarter due to Ramadan and Chinese New Year, on-demand GMB growth accelerated to 24% year-on-year, while group NTUs increased to 52 million. In financial services, loan dispersals grew 67% to exceed $1 billion for the first time, and we remain on track for our financial services segment to achieve adjusted EBITDA break-even in the second half of this year. We also delivered our 17th consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA growth, expanding our trailing 12-month adjusted free cash flow to $489 million. These results demonstrate the compounding nature of our strategy, which is increasingly being accelerated by our investments in AI. What truly sets our AI capabilities apart, however, is the proprietary data foundation we spent the last 14 years building to power them. Today, Grab operates as a system of record for local commerce across Southeast Asia. We capture highly localized, real-time data on how over 50 million users and partners interact across eight markets. Over the years, this has generated a proprietary data set of over 20 billion transactions. We feed these multimodal signals from hyperlocal mapping to in-store payment terminals into our AI grab intelligence layer to optimize our marketplace efficiency from dynamic pricing to last mile routing. Crucially, we paired this data advantage with our massive physical fulfillment network. That closed-loop system or ecosystem is our biggest competitive mode, which is why our AI investments translate directly into measurable financial outcomes. We are already seeing significant tangible returns on these initiatives. For instance, I'm pleased to share driver partners who adopted Turbo, our AI-powered driving mode in our GrabDriver app to optimize driver earnings and efficiency saw a 23% uplift in earnings per online hour compared to driver partners who have not adopted the feature. This has contributed to mobility transactions growth outpacing mobility GMV growth with transactions up 28% year-on-year. Within over a year of launch, our merchant AI assistant, Mine, has been adopted by approximately half of our active single-store merchant base, driving up 15% uplift in GMV for engaged users. This deepened engagement directly supports our ability to improve monetization, with average advertiser spend growing 44% year-on-year as merchants see increasing measurable returns. Following the launch of 13 new AI-powered experiences at GrabX this year, we are turning external AI interfaces into our newest growth engines. By acting as the essential fulfillment layer for Southeast Asia, we ensure that whenever customers use AI agents to navigate their day, those interactions act as top-of-funnel leads that drive transactions directly back to GrabX. We're also making steady progress on autonomous vehicles. In April, we successfully transitioned our private trials to full paying public operations. Our AIR service deployed in partnership with WeRide is the first autonomous passenger service ever deployed within a Southeast Asian residential estate. The fleet has clocked over 40,000 kilometers and has safely served several thousand public rides. That said, the adoption of AVs in Southeast Asia remains nascent. We see governments and regulators taking a measured approach in implementing AVs, which we believe is the right approach for our region. We will continue to incorporate AVs in our platform at a pace that reflects the trust communities place in us and our emphasis on customer safety. To be clear, we do not expect anyone to be able to deploy impactful disruption to our human driver network in the near future. Yet, we remain firm believers in the technology. This has shaped how we have made small investments ahead of the curve to forge international partnerships while doubling down on ensuring our Singapore pilots succeed. we intend to be the most experienced local hybrid AV and human operator in Southeast Asia. One able to amplify the efforts of any AV software player in bringing the smoothest, safest and most cost-efficient service when we eventually scale up in partnership with governments in this region. Now beyond AI and AVs, the structural health of our driver-partner supply base remains our top priority. When fuel price volatility emerged in early March, we acted decisively to protect partner livelihoods by deploying targeted fuel rebates and proactively engage regulators across our markets. In April, we also launched the Digital Earnings Tracker to provide driver partners with greater transparency over their earnings. In 2025, partners earned over $15 billion on our platform, up 19% year-on-year. Looking ahead, our record start to the year is a testament to the resilience of our ecosystem. Whether we are leveraging AI to drive greater marketplace efficiencies today or piloting the autonomous networks of tomorrow, our focus remains on compounding sustainable growth and out-serving our communities. Despite macroeconomic uncertainties, particularly regarding inflation and fuel prices, our platform is structurally stronger than ever. Against that backdrop, we reiterate our 2026 four-year guidance. Group revenue of $4.04 billion to $4.10 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $700 to $720 million. Our first quarter provides us with a strong foundation. In March, we announced that we are advancing our buyback mandate with a $400 million accelerated share repurchase program. This is a reflection of our conviction in Grav's long-term value at these dislocated prices. Thank you so much. Let's open it up for questions.

Thank you, Anthony. We will now transition to the Q&A session. As a reminder, for those of you who would like to ask a question, please submit an e-mail to our investor relations inbox and we'll take them to the queue as well. Our first and most asked question comes from the line of several analysts, Davey of Morgan Stanley, Benu of Bernstein, and Hugh of HSBC, as regards to the fuel crisis. So the question is, what's the impact of the ongoing Middle East conflict and higher fuel prices across your various operating countries? Has it started to impact business performance in the second quarter? And can you quantify the impact? And what is our strategy to manage long-term fuel risks? This is a question for Alex.