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Malaysia Grab managed to oust American competitor Uber from Southeast Asia and take over the business after losing billions of dollars in the region. Grab was adaptable and launched new ideas and features to the 650 million people in the region.
Consolidation on the way
Grab was worth more than $ 15 billion the last time it raised fresh capital. They also have a competitor from Indonesia. Gojek has moved in and is worth more than ten billion dollars. Now the two companies are trying to agree on the terms of a merger.
On Thursday, the founder and CEO of Grabs confirmed to employees that the company is “in a position to make acquisitions,” according to a leaked internal email.
“There is speculation about an agreement with Gojek. The situation for us is good. There will be a consolidation in which we are better positioned to be the company that makes acquisitions, ”wrote Anthony Tan.
According to Tan, the company has recovered from the corona pandemic and activity has returned to the same level as at the beginning of the year.
From being a company that offered pure taxi services, Grab has become a supposed super application in which users can order meals in street restaurants and the best established restaurants, home delivery in stores, the Grabpay payment service and purchases online.
There has been a very high demand for these services in 2020. More than 200 million have downloaded the Grab app and work with nine million “partners”, from drivers to large financial institutions.
Founder rivalry
Japanese Internet and technology company Softbank has invested in Grab since its inception in 2012. Softbank is the world’s largest investor in start-ups. He also manages the Softbank Vision Fund with more than NOK 800 billion in investments spread around the world.
The company participated in a private placement with Norwegian information technology company Kahoot in October for NOK 2 billion. This week, Softbank increased its equity stake to 10.8 percent, giving the shareholder an opportunity to block a potential Kahoot acquisition.
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son is working behind the scenes as “Kirsten Giftekniv” to achieve a merger between the two competing companies in Malaysia and Indonesia. The objective is to list the merged company on the stock exchange.
According to sources at Bloomberg, Son is frustrated at the lack of momentum. The rivalry between the founders of the two companies, who have been concerned with growing and gaining market share, has led to a stalemate in negotiations in the past.
Investment of billions of dollars
There is very high activity in the Southeast Asian startup sector and new venture capital competitors are emerging. Facebook, Google and Microsoft have invested billions in Indonesian startups Gojek, Tokopedia, and Bukalapak during the pandemic.
Indonesia has the most startups with a value of more than a billion dollars. Indonesia’s internet economy has more than quintupled in five years, to $ 44 billion, according to a report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company. It is expected to triple by 2025.
The Sea Group trading platform in Singapore was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017 after raising $ 720 million from investors.
The company is now the most valuable company in Southeast Asia with a market capitalization of more than $ 90 billion, more than quadrupled during 2020.
– Sea Group has placed the region on the map. They have shown that Southeast Asian companies can be strong, grow and have a solid foundation, says Jefrey Joe of investment firm Alpha JWC to the Japanese business newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun.(Terms)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and / or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases via a link, which leads directly to our pages. Copying or other use of all or part of the content can only be done with written permission or as permitted by law. For more terms, see here.
