Episode summary
How Grab Beat Uber: Inside the Rise of Southeast Asia’s Super App w/Grab's CFO Peter Oey
The Intrinsic Value Podcast
· · 1 hr 3 min · Hosts: Shawn O'Malley, Daniel Mahncke · Guests: Peter Oey
Summary
Peter Oey argues that Grab’s edge came from being intensely local in Southeast Asia, not from trying to copy a Western ride-hailing model. The company began with ride hailing in Kuala Lumpur, then expanded into food delivery, grocery, parcel delivery, digital wallets, payments, and micro-lending as customer needs emerged across eight markets and 900 cities. He says Grab won against Uber because it understood cash-heavy, fragmented markets and built around local realities like low credit-card penetration and dense regulatory complexity.
A major theme is the super-app flywheel. Peter Oey says more than two-thirds of users now use multiple services, which lowers customer acquisition costs, improves retention, and creates more data for cross-selling and advertising. That same data underpins Grab’s fintech expansion: the company began lending to drivers, then merchants, and now has three digital banks and a loan book of roughly $1.5 billion. He says NPLs stay below 3% and loans must clear Grab’s cost of capital.
He also frames the business as moving from growth-at-all-costs to disciplined profitability. Grab cut incentives, improved operating leverage, and kept headcount flat, helping margins swing from negative 22% in 2023 to positive 3% in 2025. Peter Oey says financial services should drive a meaningful share of the company’s targeted $1.5 billion in adjusted EBITDA by 2028, while AI and autonomous vehicles remain longer-term tools to strengthen the platform rather than replace it.
Key takeaways
- Peter Oey says Grab beat Uber by localizing hard: cash payments, driver recruiting, city-by-city operations, and regulatory relationships across Southeast Asia.
- Peter Oey says more than two-thirds of Grab users use two or more services, lowering CAC and improving retention through cross-selling and loyalty products like GrabUnlimited and GrabCoins.
- Peter Oey says Grab’s loan book is roughly $1.5 billion, NPLs stay below 3%, and lending must clear the company’s average cost of capital.
- Peter Oey says financial services will be a major margin driver as Grab targets $1.5 billion of adjusted EBITDA by 2028.
- Peter Oey says Grab’s profitability inflection came from cutting incentives, improving operating leverage, and keeping headcount flat while scaling revenue.
Notable quotes
“We started as a ride hailing company back then. Uh think about um raid hailing taxis. That's how we started in a city called Koala Lumpur”
“I think this is where our advantage was was that we came in with a different lens that we have to really localize our business”
“the first thing is the CAC cost. How the CAC cost can come down so much because once they're in your system, once you're in ecosystem”
“We started on the driver side because we felt that we know we have the most data is on the drivers”
“I think the power of the super app is being underestimated”
How the episode opens
Uber Eatats really became grabb food and that's how we started the delivery business and then we had co and so on we added more products grocery delivery and they just continued to evolve. Now the fintech side of the business is quite unique because that really came out of necessity because it was a very much a cashbased society Southeast Asia and we needed to solve cashless and how to do that is to really build this fintech capability in Southeast Asia where we built digital wallets, payment services um and that's how we started first and then we evolved to micro lending because we're building an ecosystem around it. So, you took time.
Hey folks, today Daniel and I have a very special episode following up on a company that was pitched just a few weeks ago on the podcast. And that company is Grab, Southeast Asia's leading super app. And the person we'll be speaking with is none other than Peter Owie, Grabb's CFO.
And with roots in ride hailing and an expansion into a really comprehensive ecosystem of delivery, mobility, and financial services, Grab has become an essential operating system for daily life across the region. And Grab is often compared to Uber, one of our favorite companies, but they differ in some important ways. And actually, it was Grab who won Uber's market share in Southeast Asia ultimately.
So, it's a company that has truly defied the odds in every manner and found innovative ways to bring a sophisticated set of consumer apps to emerging markets that are well much messier to navigate than the US and Europe from different regulations across eight countries to extremely dense traffic and just generally more informal economies. But with that backdrop, Peter, welcome to the show. It's a real honor to have you here.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- grab vs uber
- southeast asia super app
- unit economics
- fintech and digital banking
- grab ai and autonomous vehicles
Companies and tickers mentioned
- UBER
- Grab
- Uber
Watch the episode
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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