Full Transcript: Grab Holdings Q2 2026 Earnings Call

On Monday, Grab Holdings (NASDAQ: GRAB ) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below. This content is powered APIs. 9% of revenue.

5 billion, with a record 54 million monthly transacting users. The company raised its full-year 2026 guidance, reflecting strong business momentum and the consolidation of Superbank and acquisition of Stash. Grab's Financial Services segment is nearing adjusted EBITDA profitability, anticipated in the second half of 2026. 7 times the rate of food deliveries, contributing to higher purchase frequency and basket sizes.

Mobility margins were maintained within the historical range despite elevated fuel prices, supported by a $7 million driver support program. 75 billion. The company is progressing with autonomous vehicle initiatives, including the upcoming commercial rollout of point-to-point autonomous services in Singapore. Grab is in discussions with regulators regarding the acquisition of Foodpanda Taiwan, expected to close by the end of the year.

Full Transcript Ken Lek, Managing Director, Strategic Finance & Investor Relations Good day everyone, and welcome to Grab Holdings' second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm Ken Lek, Head of Strategic Finance and Investor Relations at Grab Holdings, and joining me today are Anthony Tan, Chief Executive Officer; Alex Hungate, President and Chief Operating Officer; and Peter Oey, 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 20-F 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 a reconciliation of non-IFRS to IFRS financial measures. For more information, please refer to our earnings press release, remarks, and supplementary presentations available on our IR website. For today's call, Anthony will deliver opening remarks, after which we will open the floor for questions. com.

Do submit your questions ahead of time and we will add them to the Q&A queue. With that, I'll hand it over to Anthony. Anthony Tan, Group CEO & Co-Founder Thanks, Ken. Good day everyone, and thank you for joining us.

We delivered a record second quarter. 3%, our 18th consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA growth. 5 billion. And Group MTUs, monthly transacting users, reached another record high of 54 million, even as elevated fuel prices persisted across the region.

On the strength of the first half, together with the consolidation of Superbank and the acquisition of Stash, we are raising our full-year 2026 guidance, which Peter will take you through in detail. Before turning to the business, a brief update on our Board: as we disclosed on July 6, Dara stepped down from our Board effective that day as we continue to enhance our governance in connection with our proposed acquisition of Foodpanda's Taiwan business. Dara joined us in 2018 in connection with the sale of Uber's Southeast Asia business to Grab and has been a valued voice in our boardroom for eight years.

On behalf of the Board and everyone at Grab, I want to thank him personally for his contributions. We maintain ongoing dialogue with Uber in their capacity as a shareholder in Grab. On our core business, we continue to demonstrate our ability to drive on-demand growth acceleration, and we are confident that the structural long-term moats we are investing in today will continue to expand our competitive advantage. What stands out this quarter is the health of that growth, led by transactions and users, not price.

Three structural moats are driving it: regional penetration remains incredibly nascent, giving us a massive runway; our affordability initiatives are profitably unlocking new user segments and building new, durable daily habits; and engagement is deepening, with daily transacting user growth actively outpacing monthly transacting user growth. The clearest expression of our growth runway is groceries. 7 times the rate of food deliveries this quarter.

As we push deeper into planned everyday grocery occasions by enhancing the value propositions of our offline anchors Jaya Grocer and Everrise, deepening supermarket partnerships, and launching our own AI-powered Grab shopping agent, we are driving higher purchase frequency, growing basket sizes, and expanding our advertising opportunities, all while remaining disciplined in driving profitability expansion. Our Financial Services segment is also fast approaching adjusted EBITDA profitability, expected in the second half of 2026.

Our lending playbook—acquiring users at minimal CAC, underwriting with proprietary and behavioral transaction data, and funding loans with low-cost deposits from our digital banks—has enabled Financial Services to continue being our fastest-growing segment. 4 million customers, and in July we completed our acquisition of Stash, bringing a profitable AI-powered wealth platform and over $5 billion in AUM into our ecosystem. Underpinning all of this is our Grab AI Intelligence layer, which now processes trillions of tokens every month.

Our cost per AI interaction with driver and merchant partners has approximately halved versus a year ago, while monthly interactions grew tenfold, which is why we can deploy AI to every ecosystem partner rather than reserving it just for the premium tier, and why we can continue to treat AI as a margin lever. Internally, our engineers now coexist with autonomous coding agents as standard practice, cutting time to market by up to 30% year on year, while BRICS, our internal analytics agent platform, cumulatively saves our sales teams approximately 40,000 hours every quarter.

Ultimately, our second quarter results prove that our business model is successfully converting scale into expanding operating leverage. We enter the second half of the year with a disciplined operating posture and absolute confidence in our ability to keep compounding profitable, durable growth. Thank you. Let's open it up for questions.

Ken Lek, Managing Director, Strategic Finance & Investor Relations Thank you, Anthony. We'll now begin the Q&A session, and we encourage you to submit your questions throughout the webinar via email. P. Morgan, and Thuwe of Macquarie.

Question is on our revised, upgraded guidance—question for Peter and Alex. Peter, is the revised guidance mainly reflecting the consolidation of Superbank for 2H 2026? And second part for Alex: excluding Superbank's consolidation, were there any changes to the revised guidance based off our core business? Peter Oey, Chief Financial Officer Sure, great question.

What you're seeing in the second half shows momentum continuing from the second quarter. You saw great demand growth on our top-line business. Our on-demand business continues to grow at over 20% plus. Now, if you look at the number of rides, it was up 28% on a year-over-year basis.

So you see momentum in transactions, and you also saw momentum in the number of users now touching the platform at 54 million. I'll let Alex talk a little bit more about that because that's a really important core factor as to how we feel about the second half of this year. And the other thing that we're seeing is also you've got the Superbank and also the Stash consolidation into play. So you've got the on-demand business and Financial Services momentum, and you've now got the consolidation of Superbank as well as also Stash into the mix, which is the second pillar of our revised guidance.

Also at the same time, we are baking in some FX headwind into the business. S. dollar, and some of that also is mixed into the guidance itself. So I'll let Alex explain a little bit more around the momentum of the business.

Alex Hungate, President & Chief Operating Officer Thanks, Peter. Yeah, so the deliveries business accelerated again, this time to 24% year-on-year growth on a constant currency basis. Fintech is now moving convincingly towards profitability in the second half, which is what we had guided for. And finally, we're getting resilient growth of 18% from mobility despite the elevated fuel prices that we've seen since March.

So this guidance upgrade from the prior 700 to 720 does reflect the factors in the fuel price support that we provided for drivers continuing through the second half, and it also includes the FX headwinds of between 2% to 3% as Peter mentioned earlier. So basically, in summary, the core business is performing well and is in line with the prior guidance. And the new guidance includes the addition of both Superbank and Stash consolidation and these additional FX headwinds that Peter mentioned. Ken Lek, Managing Director, Strategic Finance & Investor Relations All right, the next question comes from Alicia from Citi and John of Daiwa.

Question is on our Financial Services business. For Alex: after the consolidation of Superbank and completion of the Stash acquisition, what is management's near-term focus for the Fintech business? Should we be expecting the loan book growth to continue? And as Superbank becomes more integrated into Grab's ecosystem, how should we think about the future growth prospect of Indonesia's Fintech business and profitability?

Alex Hungate, President & Chief Operating Officer Okay, yes. So first, we are on track to achieve profitability for Financial Services in the second half 2026. I remember it was back in September '22 that we promised this to the market, so we're very pleased to be delivering on our commitments. We are managing risk prudently, so we expect the loan book to exceed 3 billion by the end of this year, including now the Superbank book as well.

We are pleased with this consolidation of Superbank in May and then Stash just in July. Grab has obviously been collaborating with Superbank since it was founded in 2022, so we know the business very well, we know the book very well. In fact, it's been a clear focus on the ecosystem since the start for Superbank, so it enables us to lower the customer acquisition costs and improve underwriting because of the deep data science that we can do together with them. Since the app launched in 2024 June, Superbank's grown very rapidly.

So it had 1 million customers within the first year—that's 2024—and today has over 7 million customers with daily transactions of above 1 million. So with more than 60% of Superbank users also using Grab and OVO, it's very clear that that ecosystem strategy is working very well. Superbank's already delivering robust financials, so it's recorded its full year of profitability last year in 2025 already. Efficiency ratios since then have continued to improve.

7% in this quarter, and cost-to-income ratio is already now at 55% and continuing to decrease. Banks expect to continue driving this ROE improvement by end of 2026, and the cost-income ratios will continue to track down, probably hitting below 50% by the end of the year. The Stash acquisition, as I mentioned earlier, was completed in July. It's already profitable.

It's a good team—we like them very much—and they've got strong capabilities that they bring to the group. 5 billion. And the best thing about it, with the subscription model, is a very high retention rate with over 1 million active subscribers. So both good acquisitions, fully consolidated now, and helping us drive towards this second half breakeven for Financial Services.

Ken Lek, Managing Director, Strategic Finance & Investor Relations All right, so next question is for Anthony. Question is about Uber and Grab's relationship. Question comes from Divya from Morgan Stanley, Piyush from HSBC, Jiong from Barclays, and Hussaini from Maybank. Can you comment around Uber's proposed acquisition of Delivery Hero and how that could impact the competitive landscape in Southeast Asia through Foodpanda?

Anthony Tan, Group CEO & Co-Founder Thank you for that question on Uber. Specifically, we maintain ongoing dialogue with Uber in their capacity as a shareholder in Grab. As shared in our previous public filings, Uber is restricted from competing with Grab in our core markets until one year following a full sale of its Grab shareholding. Regardless of that, our markets have always been competitive.

Through the years we have demonstrated steady gains in category position across the region while driving profitable growth. At the same time, our competitive strength stems from structural advantages that are hard to disrupt. We have continued to deepen our penetration with a record 54 million MTUs as Peter shared, and we are seeing the highest level of DTUs on our platform. This is a result of our core focus on hyper-local execution and strong partnership with governments across eight distinct markets which led us to win in the region.

Grab Maps, for example, is one that we've shown hyper-local focus. We also continue to double down on our product-led strategy targeted around improving affordability and reliability for partners and consumers. Finally, we have a strong ecosystem flywheel that is reinforced by what Alex just talked about, our growing financial services business, which enhances the LTV of our customers from cross-sell across all our core services. Ken Lek, Managing Director, Strategic Finance & Investor Relations Thanks, Anthony.

Next question is on grocery delivery for Alex. So for Mart, are we hitting near the inflection point this quarter with further acceleration of user penetration and transaction volume growth? How should we be thinking about the growth trajectory of the Mart business and contribution to total GMV in one year's time? Question is from Alicia from Citi.

Alex Hungate, President & Chief Operating Officer Okay, thanks, Alicia. Yes, it's true groceries penetration is still nascent compared to deliveries overall, but of course it's highly complementary to our food business and an important part also of our fintech distribution channel. So Grab Mart users grew 42% year on year. But even then Mart still only consists of about 14% of our food user base.

So still lots of upside there. We spent the year really strengthening the foundations to create the best possible consumer experience. So leveraging both the offline anchors like Jaya Grocer and Everrise in Malaysia and also deepening our partnerships with leading supermarket chains in every country across the region. We've been able to put together a broad everyday assortment of SKUs.

And then we're also cross-selling organically using Grab More which continues to improve in terms of its effectiveness as a cross-selling channel. We've also introduced an AI-powered Grab shopping agent. So it's very, very convenient. It helps to build baskets for users and allows us to serve the recurring weekly shop better because of this easy automated basket-building capability.

7 times the rate of food deliveries this quarter. So we expect this kind of growth to outpace the overall deliveries portfolio and obviously therefore it will end the year a slightly higher proportion of delivery GMV. Longer term we can see that some of the global peers are reporting something like 30% or even higher for grocery penetration. So there's obviously lots of upside there when you compare against best in class outside of Southeast Asia.

And we'll continue to target that kind of a much higher growth for grocery going forward. Most importantly for us, grocery already drives more frequent user behavior than food alone. And that's really important because we see that frequency expansion and transaction growth coming through this quarter with MTU growth at 54% year on year. So that really shows that consumers like this smart service and come back with multi-year kind of frequency increases for us.

So we're scaling groceries deliberately, but we're doing it within our commitment to grow Deliveries margins year on year. And you can see in this quarter we did achieve that milestone also despite the large growth that we generated from groceries within the overall Deliveries segment. Ken Lek, Managing Director, Strategic Finance & Investor Relations Next question is from Jong from Barclays. It's in regards to Indonesia and the commission caps there.

A question for Alex.