Alexander Charles Hungate
Analyst · Morgan Stanley and Venu of Bernstein
Thanks, Divya. Yes, you started to -- even in the question, you started to kind of outline how we feel about this. So first of all, AVs are still in the early stages in Singapore. So we've already clocked over 100,000 kilometers in local trials, and we have plans to expand our fleet here in Singapore by fivefold. Currently, we're growing it to 50 vehicles, and we're preparing to launch the commercial autonomous ride hailing on the Grab app in the coming months. So the steady state model divides into basically 3 specialized layers. There's the AV OEM, the technology provider, and they develop and license the autonomous driving stack with the remote guidance software that's necessary to make that run. Then there's a fleet owner or financier. They fund the capital expenditure. They take the capital -- they take the depreciation through their P&L and balance sheet. And then they manage the depot charging, the cleaning, the maintenance. And then there's the orchestrator. So that's primarily Grab, platform orchestrator, demand aggregator. In some cases, Grab can also get involved in depot management where necessary to get things running. Now the -- our track record in Southeast Asia has been to develop relationships with those fleet owners and fleet operators, okay? So we can continue that model. So we ourselves remain primarily asset-light under that model. But the fleet operators who in -- who currently are using conventional vehicles, so not AV, but the standard driver-driven vehicles. We will work with them to transition into this new world. In some cases, with our banks, we can help them with financing as well. And so we can add capacity as demand grows. So although at the start, where AV is currently a very young technology, and we are developing the capabilities to understand how they interact with the ride-hail platform, what kind of depot management and fleet management capabilities are needed as we scale to massive asset deployment, hundreds of billions or maybe trillions of dollars of AV asset deployment in the long run. Then we will combine a ride-hailing technology with its new hands-on AV experience. And then we'll be able to optimize the integration with the OEM to get the optimum integration of demand and fleet management, working with regulators, those technology partners and the communities on the ground as we always have. Now let's focus specifically on Southeast Asia because AVs cannot handle Southeast Asia transportation alone at the moment with a lot of weather, huge extreme tropical monsoons, et cetera. So there are lots of operational edge cases where the technology is still developing. And then more -- probably more significantly, even once the technology can overcome those, the cost displacement curve for human drivers in Southeast Asia is going to be many, many years. So it's not like North America where the driver cost per hour is much higher than it is here. In most of our markets, it's going to be a very long transition, probably a decade, something like that, where there's drivers and AVs working side by side. And that's obviously where the platform orchestration is critical. So we'll have a hybrid dispatch orchestration, load balancing between AVs, human drivers, some passengers will need assistance. So they'll have preferences for human drivers. Other passengers might have preferences for AVs, but that's all going to be orchestrated through the app. And those passengers, of course, are not just using mobility. In the Grab app, the Superapp, they're using all our other services as well. And you can see from our numbers that the intensity of cross-sell between food, Mobility, Financial Services and now GrabMart and GrabMall as well is very intense. So the customer relationship is very much intact with Grab. So we're confident that our goal of scaling AVs with fleet partners across Southeast Asia in the coming years in this asset-light model in complement with the human driver fleet is something where -- which will just enhance the position of our platform as the orchestration layer across all of those partnerships.