Singapore-based ride-hailing service Grab has been ramping up its presence in Southeast Asia through varied means. It has taken the route of expansion by debuting in Myanmar, rolled out new services, raised funds and seems to be in process of securing process. Also, the company, has started making acquisitions, the first being an Indonesian O2O e-commerce startup named Kudo.
Hoo Ling Tan, one of the co-founders of Grab, told Reuters that they are open to making more acquisitions in the future. She said,
We’re always on the lookout, whether it’s for public partners, private partners, inorganic partnership and growth or organic growth.
The company believes there is see a promising future in mobile payments as much as it is in transport. This is the reason they have been strategically moving ahead and hence the take over of Kudo. Tan talked about the kind of deals the company is looking forward to ink, saying,
Anything that will get us to the dominant position of the number one mobile wallet payments system in Southeast Asia.
She told the number of users of the GrabPay service, the digital payments platform, has doubled in the past eight weeks. However she chose to remain tight-lipped when it came to revealing exact figures. Tan quoted the market size for payments industry in Southeast Asia is $500 billion a year, while for transport the number is $25 billion for transport.
The company has raised $1.45 billion till date and aren’t looking to raise funds immediately. She said,
We still have a lot of it left.
A Straits Times report said that SMRT Corporation, the public transport operator in Singapore, was in talks with Grab to sell its taxi business. Tan tagged the news as a speculation, but added that they are constantly on the lookout for good partners. She further told that the number of daily rides on the platform has doubled to 2.3 million rides a day in the past six months.
Grab recently introduced taxi-sharing service in Singapore again via its cab-sharing service GrabShare. It competes fiercely with Uber in the region, and the rivalry has been intensifying with the passage of time.
