Southeast Asian “super-app” Grab is working to restore service today, the company said. Customers across Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia have reported trouble using the super-app, with some voicing their frustrations on social media.
“We experienced a service disruption this morning that impacted a number of partners and users across the region,” the company said today. “While core services were restored by late morning, some people have reported intermittent issues since then. We are working hard to address these issues and apologize to all affected users for the inconvenience.”
Grab provides food and grocery deliveries, payments and ride hailing in 428 cities across eight countries. The timing of the outage is poor, as the company hopes to put the finishing touches on a $40-billion SPAC deal with Altimeter Growth Corp. (NASD: AGC) that was announced April 13. At the time it was hailed as one of the largest-ever deals with a SPAC and is also believed to be the largest-ever equity offering by a Southeast Asian firm. Once live, the shares are expected to be traded under the symbol “GRAB”.
According to the terms announced in April, Grab will emerge with a value of $39.6 billion and receive $4.5 billion in cash.
“This is a milestone in our journey to open up access for everyone to benefit from the digital economy,” Grab co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan said at the time. ‘This is even more critical as our region recovers from COVID-19. It was very challenging for us too, but it taught us immensely about the resiliency of our business. Our diversified superapp strategy helped our driver-partners pivot to deliveries, and enabled us to deliver growth while improving profitability.”
The super-app strategy has Grab believing it is in an ideal spot to assume dominance in a region with high mobile penetration. Several complementary services are offered in one place, and Grab said the number of users accessing two or more services has quintupled since 2019. The company said it accounts for approximately 72 per cent of total regional GMV for ride-hailing, 50 per cent of total regional GMV for online food delivery and 23 per cent of regional TPV for digital wallet payments in 2020.
The deal was expected to be completed by now, but has been delayed because of audits required for the last three years of Grab financials. Grab said it expects the deal to be finalized this quarter.