Alex Hungate
Analyst · Alicia Yap at Citigroup
The first one on consumer behavior, we haven't seen yet any signs of consumer weakness. Of course, we’re monitoring very closely. This last quarter, we had delivery MTUs continuing to grow sequentially, particularly with a strong performance from GrabMart demand in March. April trading update for you, we're trending healthily in line, I would say, with our expectations. So we do expect a rebound in quarter-on-quarter of growth rates across mobility and deliveries for quarter two. At the same time, of course, because of the new flow, we continue to work closely with government partners to support local economies, particularly making sure our marketplace is healthy, so that we continue to generate the earning opportunities for our partners on that platform going forward. I would just make an observation that, in the past, where there has been a turndown in economic conditions, the platform kind of works on a self-adjusting basis in the following way. A number of new drivers will join the platform as a cushion against potential job losses, et cetera. And therefore, we tend to get an improvement in supply conditions, which in turn will reduce surge at key moments, therefore encourage more consumption, more use of the platform by consumers. So you can see it's kind of a self-correcting, almost counter-cyclical approach that we see from the platform during those types of downturns. But so far, no signs of downturns. So we'll keep monitoring that. The second question is about the GrabX product day where we talked about harnessing AI to improve user and partner centric services going forward. We called it AI with Heart for those of you that missed it. So a lot of the products that we launched did have affordability in mind. So it very much relates to your first part of your question. So we are positioning ourselves to continue to grow through any kind of a weakness in the macros. For merchants, for example, we've used the merchant assistant to add something like 70,000 menu items without human intervention. So that's merchants scanning and generating descriptions now. So, 2.8 million different items if you go across all merchants. And then we’re using Ride Guide to help the driver earnings to improve. So we've got now already a quarter of a million drivers using this feature on a weekly basis. And we have seen from those drivers, higher income, higher productivity. So it keeps the marketplace healthy, even under different difficult conditions. I noticed that you asked about margin weakness from this push for affordability. We don't actually anticipate a margin loss from these new products, and we're not seeing it so far. And let me explain why. Because something like Shared Saver, for example, which is a lower cost for consumer and therefore drives good volume improvements, is actually amortizing the same delivery cost across multiple customers by inviting multiple people to join the same order. So it's actually no extra cost to Grab or to the marketplace. And even GrabFood for One, which has a lower cost per meal, is actually benefiting the merchants from allowing them to batch up a lot of meal production into the same cooking batch. And as some of you know, I used to be in the food industry, so I know that this is much more cost effective and more productive for merchants to cook in large batches and then we generate the demand for those special offer meals at that particular window and they're able to package up the large batch into multiple meals and sell them all together. So, in that case, we're amortizing the merchant's cost into a very productive production batch for them and there's no additional cost to grab also. So you can see that that kind of approach is just making the marketplace more efficient, but it should not put pressure on our margins. The key point for us is that we want to drive the penetration of our annual transacting unit users up further, so our MTUs, our monthly transacting users, increases. And then within that, we want to continue to drive up our daily transacting users as well, so these kinds of affordable products and viral products that we announced at the GrabX will help us do both of those. On margin, we're going to continue to focus on balancing this with the growth, but the key focus for us obviously is driving absolute profit growth and it's just worth just remembering that we we're now in our 13th quarter of improving EBITDA in a row, so you can see that that's very much a focus for us.