Grab grew bookings and users by 5x year-on-year, and that’s not the staggering part

Taxis make up a huge part of Grab’s bookings. Photo credit: VasenkaPhotography.

Grab, a transportation booking service focusing on Southeast Asia, has grown its quarterly bookings by 5.3 times year-on-year, and its monthly active users (MAUs) by fives times in the same period.

The numbers, for the months of January to March, were disclosed at Softbank’s most recent earnings briefing for 2015. Softbank is an investor in Grab.

Softbank did not reveal raw numbers for the company, nor does Grab reveal its latest absolute figures. But we can derive an estimate based on past data. I previously calculated that Grab had around 43.8 million bookings on its apps in Q1 2015 (see this spreadsheet).

If this number is accurate, then Grab could be doing over 200 million bookings in Q1 2016. The caveat here is that bookings may be seasonal, which means Q1 might represent a peak of sorts for Grab. Annual numbers would be a better indicator of the company’s traction.

We also know for a fact that Grab had 620,000 MAUs in January 2015, which means it’s doing around 3.1 million users today.

Slide from Softbank’s presentation.

Assuming that the numbers are accurate and my estimates are approximately correct, we can figure out a usage rate, meaning, how often users on Grab book a ride.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. Grab’s bookings and users are growing at roughly the same pace. Yet it has much more bookings than users, which means that in absolute terms, Grab has grown its bookings faster than users.

So, not only are there more users on Grab, they’re much more active too. Plugging in the numbers we derived above, we estimate that Grab now gets over 21 bookings a month for every MAU, up from six bookings in the same period last year.

Grab doesn’t publicly disclose revenue numbers, so it’s much harder to get a handle on its financials. We know that it made US$2.72 million in revenue in 2014. So the current number is likely above US$10 million by now.

Another unknown is how Grab stacks up against its competitors, Uber and Go-Jek. Uber doesn’t disclose regional numbers, and Go-Jek hasn’t disclosed the number of bookings on its apps. We’ve reached out to both companies, and are waiting to hear back.