In Singapore, a preview of how Grab and Go-Jek will likely face off across Southeast Asia
A similar battle is being waged in China by strategic investors in the two Southeast Asian companies - Meituan and Didi
Two weeks after announcing a US$500 million plan to expand beyond its home market of Indonesia, on-demand services platform Go-Jek was onstage at a big Singapore tech conference telling investors, industry partners and government regulators about its story and what it had to offer.
Go-Jek, which started off as a motorcycle ride-hailing phone service in 2010, now operates across Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s most populous nation with a population of 261 million. It offers everything from rides to meal delivery to massage and home cleaning, all on demand, available through a super-app.
Founded by Nadiem Makarim, a Harvard MBA and ex-McKinsey alumnus, Go-Jek’s planned foray into Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines in the “next few months” will extend the competition with Singapore-based Grab to other markets in the region.
Indeed, a day before Go-Jek chief marketing officer Piotr Jakubowski finished off his keynote speech at the Innovfest Unbound conference, Grab co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan had been on the same stage announcing the set-up of Grab Ventures, an investment arm that will back start-ups, and an ambitious target of creating 100 million “micro-entrepreneurs” in the region.
Grab has created more than 6 million income-generating opportunities so far and the plan is to alleviate poverty and bring a “new economic reality to Southeast Asia” with its portfolio of companies and its ecosystem, Tan said in an interview with CNBC on June 5. In his presentation, Tan talked about Grab’s reach: 217 cities in eight countries, an installed base of a hundred million and over three million drivers.