Grab Holdings Limited Class A Ordinary Shares 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Grab's second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm Ken Lek, Head of Strategic Finance and Investor Relations at Grab, 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. As a reminder, we are accepting questions via our IR email at investor.relations@grab.com. Do submit your questions ahead of time, we will add them to the Q&A queue. With that, I'll hand it over to Anthony.

Thanks, Ken. Good day, everyone, thank you for joining us. We delivered a record second quarter. Adjusted EBITDA grew 54% year-over-year to $168 million, more than twice our revenue growth rate, with margin expanding to 16.9% of revenue from 13.3%. Our 18th consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA growth. On-demand GMV grew 21% year-over-year or 22% on a constant currency basis to $6.5 billion. 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 date, 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, 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, we are confident that the structural long-term modes 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 modes are driving it. Regional penetration remains incredibly nascent, giving us a massive runway. Our affordability initiatives are profitably unlocking new user segments and building durable daily habits. Engagement is deepening, with Daily Transacting User growth actively outpacing Monthly Transacting User growth. The clearest expression of our growth runway is groceries. GrabMart grew at 1.7 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, customer acquisition costs, 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. We recently consolidated Superbank, which now serves over 7.4 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 BriX, 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.

Thank you, Anthony. We'll now begin the Q&A session, and we encourage you to submit your questions throughout the webinar via email. With that, our first question, coming from several analysts, Divya from Morgan Stanley, Alicia from Citi, Jiong from Barclays, Ranjan from JPMorgan Chase, and Zubayr of Macquarie. Question is on our revised guidance, our upgraded guidance. Question for Peter and Alex. Peter, is the revised guidance mainly reflecting the consolidation of Superbank for 2H 2026? Second part for Alex, excluding Superbank's consolidation, were there any changes to the revised guidance based off our core business?

Sure, great question. What you're seeing in the second half, it shows momentum continuing from the second quarter. We saw great demand growth on our top-line business. Our on-demand business continues to grow at over 20%+ now. If you look at the number of rides, was up 28% on a year-over-year basis. You see momentum in transactions, and you saw also in the 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. The other thing that we're seeing is also you've got the Superbank and also the Stash consolidation into play. You've got the on-demand business and our financial services momentum.

You've got now 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. We've got some of the currencies, our Asian currencies, unfortunately, taking some pressure against the U.S. dollars, and some of that also is mixed into the guidance itself. I'll let Alex explain a little bit more around the momentum of the business.

Thanks, Peter. 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. Finally, we're getting resilient growth of 18% from mobility, despite the elevated fuel prices that we've seen since March. 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 second half. It also includes the FX headwinds of between 2%-3%, as Peter mentioned earlier. Basically, in summary, the core business is performing well and is in line with the prior guidance. The new guidance includes the addition of both Superbank and Stash consolidation, and these additional FX headwinds that Peter mentioned.

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? 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?

Okay, yeah. First, we are on track to achieve profitability for financial services in the second half of 2026. I remember it was back in September 2022 that we promised this to the market. We're very pleased to be delivering on our commitments. We are managing risk prudently. 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. 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.