Grab Holdings Ltd Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Grab's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. I'm Douglas Eu, Director of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance at Grab. 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 our 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 material for a reconciliation of non-IFRS to IFRS financial measures. For more information please refer to our earnings press release, remarks and supplemental presentation available on our IR website. For today's call, Anthony will deliver opening remarks, after which we will open the floor to questions. As a reminder, we are accepting questions via IR and e-mail at investorrelations@grab.com. Do submit your questions ahead of time, and we will add them to the Q&A queue. And with that, I'll hand it over to Anthony.

Great. Thanks, Doug. Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We set out to start 2026 strongly, and we delivered against the backdrop of our seasonally softest quarter due to Ramadan and Chinese New Year. On-demand GMV growth accelerated to 24% year-on-year, while group MTUs increased to 52 million. In Financial Services, loan disbursals grew 67% to exceed $1 billion for the first time, and we remain on track for our Financial Services segment to achieve adjusted EBITDA breakeven in the second half of this year. We also delivered our 17th consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA growth, expanding our trailing 12-month adjusted free cash flow to $489 million. These results demonstrate the compounding nature of our strategy, which is increasingly being accelerated by our investments in AI. What truly sets our AI capabilities apart, however, is the proprietary data foundation we spent the last 14 years building to power them. Today Grab operates as a system of record for local commerce across Southeast Asia. We capture highly localized real-time data on how over 50 million users and partners interact across 8 markets. Over the years, this has generated a proprietary data set of over 20 billion transactions. We feed these multimodal signals from hyper-local mapping to in-store payment terminals into our AI Grab intelligence layer to optimize our own marketplace efficiency from dynamic pricing to last mile routing. Crucially, we paired this data advantage with our massive physical fulfillment network. That closed-loop system or ecosystem is our biggest competitive moat, which is why our AI investments translate directly into measurable financial outcomes. We are already seeing significant tangible returns on these initiatives. For instance, I'm pleased to share driver partners who adopted Turbo, our AI-powered driving mode in our Grab Driver app to optimize driver earnings and efficiency, saw a 23% uplift in earnings per online hour compared to driver partners who have not adopted the feature. This has contributed to Mobility transactions growth outpacing Mobility GMV growth with transactions up 28% year-on-year. Within a year of launch, our merchant AI Assistant, Mai, has been adopted by approximately half of our active single-store merchant base, driving a 15% uplift in GMV for engaged users. This deepened engagement directly supports our ability to improve monetization with average advertiser spend growing 44% year-on-year as merchants see increasing measurable returns. Following the launch of 13 new AI-powered experiences at GrabX this year, we are turning external AI interfaces into our newest growth engines. By acting as the essential fulfillment layer for Southeast Asia, we ensure that whenever customers use AI agents to navigate their day, those interactions act as top-of-funnel leads that drive transactions directly back to Grab. We're also making steady progress on autonomous vehicles. In April, we successfully transitioned our private trials to full paying public operations. Our AIR service deployment partnership with WeRide is the first autonomous passenger service ever deployed within a Southeast Asian residential estate. The fleet has clocked over 40,000 kilometers and have safely served several thousand public rides. That said, the adoption of AVs in Southeast Asia remains nascent. We see governments and regulators taking a measured approach in implementing AVs, which we believe is the right approach for our region. We will continue to incorporate AVs in our platform at a pace that reflects the trust communities place in us and our emphasis on customer safety. To be clear, we do not expect anyone to be able to deploy impactful disruption to our human driver network in the near future. Yet we remain firm believers in the technology. This has shaped how we have made small investments ahead of the curve to forge international partnerships while doubling down on ensuring our Singapore pilot succeeds. We intend to be the most experienced local hybrid AV and human operator in Southeast Asia, one able to amplify the efforts of any AV software player in bringing the smoothest, safest and most cost-efficient service when we eventually scale up in partnership with governments in this region. Now beyond AI and AVs, the structural health of our driver partner supply base remains our top priority. When fuel price volatility emerged in early March, we acted decisively to protect partner livelihoods by deploying targeted fuel rebates and proactively engaging with regulators across our markets. In April, we also launched the digital earnings tracker to provide driver partners with greater transparency over their earnings. In 2025, partners earned over $15 billion on our platform, up 19% year-on-year. Looking ahead, our record start to the year is a testament to the resilience of our ecosystem. Whether we are leveraging AI to drive greater marketplace efficiencies today or piloting the autonomous networks of tomorrow, our focus remains on compounding sustainable growth and out-serving our communities. Despite macroeconomic uncertainties, particularly regarding inflation and fuel prices, our platform is structurally stronger than ever. Against that backdrop, we reiterate our 2026 full year guidance. Group revenue of $4.04 billion to $4.10 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $700 million to $720 million. Our first quarter provides us with a strong foundation. In March, we announced that we are advancing our buyback mandate with a $400 million accelerated share repurchase program. This is a reflection of our conviction in Grab's long-term value at these dislocated prices. Thank you so much. Let's open it up for questions.

Thank you, Anthony. We will now transition to the Q&A session. Operator instructions were provided. Our first question comes from the line of several analysts: Divya at Morgan Stanley, Venu at Bernstein and Piyush of HSBC. Regarding the fuel crisis, the question is: what's the impact of the ongoing Middle East conflict and higher fuel prices across your various operating countries? Has it started to impact business performance in the second quarter? Can you quantify the impact? And what is our strategy to manage long-term fuel risk? This is a question for Alex.

Thanks, Divya, Venu, Piyush. This is a critical topic. As I said in my prepared remarks, Q1 results actually give us a good solid foundation entering the year. And as you saw from the slide pack, the demand trends in April have remained resilient. Our Mobility business in April has seen weekly average transaction volumes sustained at plus 32% year-on-year. And our deliveries business continues to see record-high daily transacting users in April. So it's a good start to the year. The business, in fact, is in a structurally more resilient position today than it has been through our history. Product innovations we have made have really targeted affordability and reliability. Group orders, for example, has GMV up 74% year-on-year, and we launched group rides at GrabX last month, which is a similar concept for sharing rides to reduce pricing for individual consumers. That's now available across all six of our core markets. GrabUnlimited, of course, is very good value for high-frequency customers, and it continues to account for one-third of our deliveries GMV. So all of these are highly affordable products, which keep the demand strong even when consumers are stretched. We're monitoring the fuel situation extremely closely, and of course, we will not hesitate to act further if needed. In the medium term, we are committed to accelerate the EV transition to reduce our driver partners' exposure to fuel price volatility. For example, in Thailand and the Philippines, we have a drive-to-own program that connects our drivers with OEMs like BYD and GAC, where we have deals of up to 70,000 vehicles available across six markets with access to financing so they can own those more easily. In Vietnam, we have secured preferential charging rates through our charging network partners, EBOOST and Charge+, which helps our drivers in the transition. And finally, in Thailand, I am pleased to say that our total fleet supply has crossed 30,000 EVs on the platform and demand for those from consumers is also strong, where they can select that EV option, and that demand has grown by over 35% year-on-year. So this fuel crisis has become an opportunity in the sense that it helps us to accelerate that EV transition.

Thank you, Alex. We will move on to the next question. The next question is on Financial Services and comes from Zhiwei of Macquarie and Venu of Bernstein. For the Financial Services segment, the loan portfolio showed a modest quarter-on-quarter growth, but there was a step improvement to your segment adjusted EBITDA. Could you describe the factors that led to these improvements? What can we expect in coming quarters and how do you intend to drive that? This is a question for Alex.

Thanks, Zhiwei, Venu. Yes, you're right. Strong EBITDA improvement in Financial Services, both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. That is the operating leverage that we've been talking about starting to come through very strongly now as we scale up our loan portfolio. Revenue growth accelerated 43% year-on-year and 38% on a constant currency basis. More than one-third of that incremental revenue dropped straight to the bottom line for Financial Services, demonstrating that operating leverage that we've been speaking about. The loan book growth is strong year-on-year. Importantly, the credit quality is improving alongside that. Loan disbursals grew 67% year-on-year to over $1 billion, but the growth was modest this quarter because of seasonal factors, and that's a normal factor for the first quarter. The ECL as a percentage of our gross loan portfolio has improved year-on-year, which shows the improving quality of our credit models. We've been proactive on risk management, tightening for some sectors. In other sectors where conventional lenders have stepped away, we've seen more opportunity. In Q1, we applied additional ECL overlays to account for macroeconomic uncertainty with that selective tightening also part of our change in the risk appetite. Looking ahead, we do have experience of managing these kinds of shocks to the macroeconomic situation. Our underwriting models have already been through a similar fuel price shock at the start of the Ukraine conflict, not to mention COVID as well. In both instances, our credit quality remained within our risk appetite throughout. So we continue to monitor the portfolio performance very carefully. We aim to generate healthy risk-adjusted returns for our loan portfolio and we are reiterating our second half 2026 breakeven target for Financial Services.

Thank you, Alex. The next question is another frequently asked question and comes from Alicia from Citi, Divya from Morgan Stanley, Zhiwei from Macquarie, Jiong from Barclays and Piyush from HSBC. Regarding recent news in Indonesia: Indonesia's cap on rider commissions to 8% — can you clarify if that is applicable to four-wheel drivers? What are the levers available to cushion the negative impact from lower rider commission? What's the likely impact on profitability due to the proposed change? What's the impact in the delivery segment, if any, from the proposed change? And can you help to quantify it? This is a question for Alex.

Okay. Thank you to all five of you for the question. Let me see if I can cover it section by section. It does appear that the immediate regulatory exposure is highly specific. The recent announcements are explicitly focused on O2O, or online drivers, who are our two-wheel ride-hailing partners. The four-wheel drivers earn well above the minimum wage, and so we believe that they're less of a concern for government and regulators in Indonesia. That said, we are engaging very proactively with the relevant ministries, and we are seeking absolute clarity on the technical aspects of how the decree will be implemented. It's essential, we believe, that together with regulators we shape a balanced implementation of this decree so that our Indonesia mobility marketplace remains healthy and that driver partners' earnings remain well supported. It's worth noting that two-wheel mobility, the O2O drivers that the decree referred to in Indonesia, is less than 6% of our total mobility GMV. We are therefore reiterating our expectations for Mobility margins to stabilize within the historical range and not to go outside of that range.

Thank you, Alex. We'll move on to a related topic. This question comes from Venu from Bernstein, Sachin of DBS and Alicia of Citi. In relation to the 8% commission cap in Indonesia, is the likelihood of consolidation now looking higher in Indonesia as well? Does the shift in policy in Indonesia change your near- to medium-term investment or resource and capital allocation priorities? This is a question for Peter.

Sure. I want to comment on specific M&A speculation, and I'll speak to how we view our position in this evolving landscape. Within M&A, we always take into account the regulatory environment — it's really critical. We want to work with the relevant agencies there, because there's always synergies and dissynergies that we could accrue from any transactions. As I've said in many quarterly earnings, we always have a very high bar when it comes to M&A transactions themselves. Specifically for Indonesia, and also for our M&A portfolio, we've always taken a very diversified approach, and you see that in the lines of our businesses and our continued product expansion. We're entering our ninth market, which also shows our geographic diversification. The lens we take is diversification and that's really important. Specifically for Indonesia, our strategy remains fundamentally unchanged despite what we've seen over the weekend and despite the policy developments. Our Indonesian Mobility business continues to grow double digits year-over-year and remains stable quarter-on-quarter in spite of seasonal headwinds. As I'm always reiterating, we're very disciplined in our capital allocation. When we evaluate any strategic opportunity, it's strictly through the lens of long-term shareholder value and how we can diversify our Grab business.

Thank you, Peter. The next question comes from Alicia at Citi and Wei at Mizuho. Given the step-up in partner incentives to offset elevated fuel costs, how does this impact demand elasticity and translate into revisions to your near-term financial outlook for mobility? Should we expect incentive levels to remain elevated? Or do you see offsetting levers such as EV adoption that could bring incentives back down in the second half and support the sequential EBITDA ramp-up implied by your full year $700 million to $720 million guidance? This is a question for Alex.

Thanks, Alicia, Wei. Great question. Q1 incentives were elevated for two specific reasons. One was the confluence of Lunar New Year and Ramadan within the first quarter, both creating acute supply pressures as usual during those two festive periods. The second factor was, of course, the fuel crisis. Towards the end of the quarter during March, we made a deliberate decision to support our driver partners with elevated fuel prices across some countries in the region. As we move into the second quarter, the festive-driven incentive pressure normalizes, but fuel remains an important variable that we're watching closely. The targeted earnings support will continue into the second quarter, but without the seasonal impact. We expect this first quarter to be a peak in driver incentives. We are reiterating the full year guidance of $700 million to $720 million for adjusted EBITDA, assuming that peak and not that it's a run rate, but more like a peak. We have multiple levers available, including more emphasis on advertising and Financial Services monetization to defend the overall margin trajectory if fuel pressures persist. In the medium term, if elevated fuel prices continue, we would have to pass some of the costs on to consumers judiciously because we want to maintain demand for our driver partners through this difficult time. Finally, it's worth emphasizing the impact of AI marketplace optimization this quarter was very powerful. We used it to manage, for example, incentive spend for consumers. You can see consumer incentive spend became more efficient during this quarter. Going into the full year, we will also have that capability to manage some of the volatility in incentive spend.

Thank you, Alex. The next topic moves into AI. This question comes from Divya at Morgan Stanley and Wei at Mizuho. On AI monetization, are you building toward a merchant and driver SaaS revenue stream that sits outside the current commission rate structure, or will it remain bundled into the existing take rate? What AI tools are you investing in mainly this quarter? This is a question for Anthony.

Thanks so much, Divya and Wei. Appreciate the question. Our approach to tools like the merchant AI and driver AI assistant coach has been to solve everyday problems that our drivers and merchant partners face. There's no reason why our partners should not have access to these tools that will enable them to grow their customers and earnings. If we get that right — the tools and the partnership — we build something competitors can't easily replicate and it creates high loyalty and high engagement, which results in them choosing us as their primary platform, not just because of the tech, but because of the trust and, of course, growing earnings for them. This has translated into concrete results within our ecosystem. On a year-on-year basis, not only do we see growth in a number of active merchant partners, but their earnings also grew 12% during the quarter. For our Mobility business, total active driver partners increased 4% quarter-on-quarter and 16% year-on-year to reach another all-time high in spite of macroeconomic uncertainty. So when we build these AI tools well and we genuinely partner and out-serve them, the economics tends to follow naturally.

Thank you, Anthony. Another frequently asked question is on regional corporate costs and related to AI. This comes from Jiong at Barclays, Wei at Mizuho, Divya at Morgan Stanley and Ranjan at JPMorgan. Regional corporate costs increased year-on-year to $114 million for the first quarter. Can you help us understand how much of the step-up is AI infrastructure costs, whether it's tokenization or cloud versus general inflation and FX? And how should we expect the AI spend to start translating into measurable cost savings elsewhere in the P&L that can offset this higher regional corporate cost run rate? This is a question for Peter.

Sure. Let me start by saying the step-up in the first quarter regional corporate costs was a conscious decision. We made that decision as a management team to invest in the AI infrastructure that we've been talking about for many quarters. Anthony just answered the question regarding AI and what we will be deploying to our partners and consumers. That underpins the Grab intelligence layer that we spoke about at the GrabX event regarding the 13 new AI experience features we're rolling out. We are investing specifically in the tokenization stack and the cloud capacity that powers those tokenization processes, which showed up in Q1. The early returns on those investments are important and we are already seeing them in the numbers. Anthony shared some of those on the driver side and merchant assistant where they're seeing impact on earnings, which is a critical part of a healthy ecosystem. If you look at adoption, the driver system adoption is now over 50%, and we generated over 1.25 million interactions in just two months since rollout. For merchants using the AI assistant, their GMV is up double digits year-on-year. These are the types of outcomes we want to see from the AI rollouts. If you strip out the AI investments and account for FX headwinds from currency movements, our underlying cost base remains lean and disciplined — that's how we run Grab. I'm not expecting further step-ups in regional corporate costs; we expect regional corporate costs to stabilize around the levels you saw in Q1 for the rest of 2026.

Thank you, Peter. The next question moves to share repurchases and comes from Ranjan at JPMorgan and Divya from Morgan Stanley. Grab announced acceleration to repurchase $400 million of shares at the end of March. Nonetheless, basic and diluted shares have increased quarter-on-quarter. What is the impact of dilution from stock-based compensation? And with regard to the share repurchase program, would you consider upsizing this given the current stock price?

Okay. If you step back, when we announced a $500 million buyback program earlier this year, we announced a $250 million accelerated share repurchase and an additional $150 million in contingent forward purchase on March 24th, so a total of $400 million was accelerated, which means execution in the market over a few trading days in Q1 itself. Both these programs are expected to be executed over the next four months, and we'll share more in the next quarterly earnings when we report Q2 results. In terms of share count, the repurchases would amount to roughly around 2% of our total share count, which will more than offset dilution from stock-based compensation. As a reminder, there's still another $100 million left in the buyback program, and we'll continue to have discussions around capital allocation with our Board.

Thanks, Peter. The next question comes from Wei at Mizuho on groceries. You mentioned GrabMart is only 10% of deliveries GMV, but growing 1.7x faster than food. When you look at the grocery TAM in Southeast Asia and the economics of the GrabMart model itself, where does GrabMart need to be to contribute meaningfully to delivery GMV by 2028 to underpin the $1.5 billion EBITDA target? At what point does grocery become margin accretive to the segment rather than a drag to blended deliveries economics? This is a question for Alex.

GrabMart is an exciting segment. The TAM is very large, arguably larger than food delivery altogether. We are doing a lot to accelerate product innovation, particularly on the front end with the AI-powered shopping agent, which we think will transform the ease with which consumers can create a weekly shopping basket and improve targeting for Grab cross-sell. By the way, GrabMore grew more than double digits quarter-on-quarter, which is a positive sign. Overall, MTUs going into grocery are growing 2.6x the rate of food MTU growth year-on-year, which shows it's expanding the top of our funnel — extra important in the age of AI for generating data and deepening long-term customer relationships. Order frequency for GrabMart users was 1.8x higher than food-only users, illustrating long-term value enhancement. Over the long term, the North Star is clear: global peers have achieved 20% to 40% mart penetration as a percentage of their deliveries business overall, so the model can scale. Regarding your three-year guidance, we expect GrabMart will maintain its current growth momentum and outpace deliveries growth, with higher basket sizes, engagement and lifetime value. That reinforces our conviction to achieve long-term sustainable economics as part of a comprehensive super-app LTV relationship powered by AI. We view it as part of the broader platform rather than a standalone vertical.

Thank you. The next question is on Financial Services and comes from Ranjan at JPMorgan. Two parts: first, deposits have remained flat quarter-on-quarter. What are the challenges Grab is facing in growing its deposit base? Second, on the loan book and securitization: would Grab consider securitizing its loan book to free capital to grow the business forward? The first part is for Alex on deposits and the second part is for Peter on securitization.

First of all, we do not have an issue raising deposits. We've been gratified by the trust consumers have in the Grab brand and ecosystem and our capabilities to protect their money. If you look at our deposit pricing, we are never the most aggressive in the market, and we are able to gather sufficient deposits to create the right balance sheet shape. There's no point having excess deposits, particularly in this yield curve environment. What you're seeing is careful management of deposit levels to optimize for P&L purposes. If we needed to raise more deposits, we're confident we can do that.

On securitization, it's a potential tool for us to be able to recapitalize and recycle on a long-term basis, particularly as the loan book grows. We have two parts of our lending book: the digital bank piece backed by customer deposits and our Grab Financial Services non-bank side, which is on-balance-sheet equity-wise. Our current priorities are scaling lending through our digital banks; we have deposits of roughly $1.6 billion and there is headroom in terms of the loan-to-deposit ratio to deploy towards loans. We are on target to get to a $2 billion loan book by the end of the year. Our priority is to make sure the digital banks' capital structure is efficient and deposits remain an important component. Long term, there could be options to recycle capital through securitization, but it's not an immediate priority right now.

Thank you. The final question for today comes from Piyush of HSBC regarding Foodpanda Taiwan: Foodpanda Taiwan recently announced an acquisition. Can you share the progress and what are the key milestones to watch and likely timings of those milestones? This is a final question for Alex.

Well, maybe a very brief final answer then, Piyush. Thanks. We're in the middle of the approval process with regulators. No real updates today, but we'll provide updates as soon as we get further feedback.

Okay. Thanks, everyone, for the questions. That concludes today's earnings call. I will hand over the time to Peter to deliver the closing remarks.

Thanks, everybody. There's a lot going on in Southeast Asia and at Grab. I hope you got a flavor of our performance. Q1 is off to a fantastic start for us across the financial fundamentals of our business. There were a lot of questions around fuel prices, which we hope we've addressed. We are leaning in and want to make sure our driver community are also benefiting, and we will be helping them along the way. We're continuing to accelerate EV adoption within Southeast Asia; it's a great catalyst for that. There were many questions around Indonesia and the 8% commission. To reiterate, our two-wheels business exposure in Indonesia is less than 6% of our GMV. We continue to reiterate our full year guidance for 2026. What makes us confident is the traction that we're seeing across our portfolio today. Thank you very much to all the Grabbers, to our driver partners and merchants for their support. Thank you to our shareholders for their support. As usual, the IR team — Ken, Doug and I — will be on the road over the next few weeks. We'll be in the U.S. and across Asia — Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. Please reach out to us if you want to meet or have a chat. We're more than happy to sit down with you. See you all next quarter.