Thu Huong Le · · 2 min readVietnam’s Be Group banks $60m loan to challenge Grab, Gojek
Vietnam’s Be Group, the biggest local rival to Grab and Gojek, announced today that it has received a US$60 million loan from Deutsche Bank.
Photo credit: Be Group
According to a statement, the loan facility could be extended up to US$100 million. The new funding will be primarily used to scale up its platform, which includes on-demand car and bike ride-hailing, food delivery, and digital banking through Cake by VPBank.
Launched in 2018, Be said it is now operating in 28 provinces and cities across Vietnam, having accumulated over 20 million downloads. Before Be, a slew of other apps were aiming to challenge the dominance of Grab, but none of them had gained much traction.
Be has also moved aggressively into financial services with the launch of digital bank Cake in early 2021. The ride-hailing firm said it will soon launch an instant-approval consumer lending product that will be co-branded with Cake.
See also: Is Vietnam late to Southeast Asia’s digital banking party?
A 2020 report found that Grab had cornered 75% of Vietnam’s ride-hailing market, competing mostly with Be as well as Indonesia-based super app Gojek.
In 2021, Grab took a huge hit from the fourth wave of Covid-19 in Vietnam, with its revenue slipping by 9% in the third quarter of 2021. The firm has also been recently under fire for imposing a heat wave surcharge.
Editing by Miguel Cordon and Lorenzo Kyle Subido
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