Benchmarking GoTo and Grab against global peers

Update (Mar. 27, 9:35 a.m. SGT): This article was updated to include the latest Q4 results from GoTo and Meituan.

How do GoTo and Grab, two of Southeast Asia’s dominant mobility and food delivery platforms, stack up against their listed peers globally?

In this feature, we compare the two tech giants to the US-headquartered Uber and DoorDash as well as China’s Meituan using the companies’ latest available financial data.

While Grab and GoTo are big fish in Southeast Asia, they are relatively smaller than their global counterparts by market value.

This gap extends to their revenue as well.

However, a direct apples-to-apples comparison is hard because the way each platform accounts for revenue varies.

For example, Grab’s net revenues are presented after taking into account incentives for drivers, merchants, and consumers.

In contrast, Uber records certain incentives as revenue reductions and others as sales and marketing expenses. This means that for the same amount of incentives, the US ride-hailing giant would record a higher net revenue than Grab’s, but also higher sales and marketing expenses.

Venture builder Momentum Works has analyzed how various platforms report key metrics, and the chart below is a good summary of how these firms measure up against one another when it comes to accounting for incentives.

Photo credit: Momentum Works

Operating profit allows for a fairer comparison between the various companies since this indicator will have accounted for the differences in both revenue recognition and sales and marketing expenses.

In the most recent quarter, none of the platforms reported a positive operating profit.