Singapore-based super app Grab Holdings Limited announced Tuesday that it is targeting to achieve breakeven on a group adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) basis by the second half of 2024, as it accelerates its path to profitability.

Grab said in a statement that for the second half of 2022, the group adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $(380) million, a 27 percent improvement compared to the first half of 2022.

With a focus on sustainable growth, Grab also announced that it expects group revenues to grow strongly between 45 percent to 55 percent year-on-year in 2023 on a constant currency basis.

Grab also expects to reach breakeven for its digibank operations by 2026.

“We’ve been firing on all cylinders to improve our profitability trajectory and deliver growth in a sustainable manner and the new targets we’ve shared today reflect that. Ten years and ten billion journeys later, we still feel like we are barely scratching the surface in our mission to drive Southeast Asia forward,” said Anthony Tan, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Grab.

“We believe there is a huge runway of growth ahead of us in serving this region and we are well positioned with our resources to capitalize on the vast opportunities,

“We plan to leverage the power of the superapp ecosystem as a competitive moat to strengthen our leadership in the region, even as we continue to optimize our costs. We will drive towards becoming Southeast Asia’s largest and most efficient on-demand platform that enables local commerce and mobility,” he added.

According to Grab Chief Operating Officer Alex Hungate, the group is driving growth through strategic initiatives like GrabUnlimited, GrabForBusiness, groceries, local partnerships, and advertising.

“At the same time, we are rolling out proprietary technology to enhance the efficiency of the platform for our merchants and driver partners. Finally, we plan to focus our fintech services on our ecosystem where we can serve customers uniquely well and create a platform for the launch of our digibanks,” he added.

The group’s segment adjusted EBITDA margins for mobility have recovered back to their expected steady state of 12 percent as of the second quarter of 2022, and it is accelerating deliveries towards segment adjusted EBITDA4 breakeven by the second quarter of 2023 and steady state margins of 3 percent and above.

Meanwhile, its driver-partner levels are today at approximately 77 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

In the near term, Grab is focused on rebuilding supply to meet the recovery in mobility demand, at the same time scaling tech and product innovations to maximize the productivity of every second of available driver time through more efficient batching, supply positioning, and reducing waiting time.

According to the group, just-in-time allocation is a new initiative rolled out in 2022 to improve the accuracy of estimates on food preparation time, and allocates orders to drivers to ensure they arrive closer to or only after the food is ready for collection.

In July 2022 alone, this eliminated approximately 12 million minutes of driver-partner wait time from our network compared to February 2022, when it started this initiative, freeing up driver capacity to fulfill more orders and increasing their earnings potential.

Grab plans to continue to build tech-driven efficiency that allows driver-partners to make shorter stops, deliver larger batches, and increase overall productivity.

As of August 2022, Grab has seen 19 percent higher batch rates, as well as an 11 percent increase in trips per transit hour6.

Bringing together the best of the various services Grab has to offer, Grab has expanded its pilot monthly subscription program, GrabUnlimited, to five countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

For a flat monthly fee, users enjoy benefits and deals across various services on the Grab superapp, including mobility, food and parcel deliveries.

Grab sees this unique, ecosystem-wide program as a key growth lever and competitive advantage over monoline providers.

Its early adoption has shown greater user engagement and retention, larger basket sizes and increased order frequency.

Average GrabFood GMV8 from GrabUnlimited subscribers is 2.4 times higher than from non-subscribers, with subscribers also transacting 2 times more on average compared to non-subscribers.

Grab’s plans for GrabUnlimited are to further strengthen the value proposition of the Grab platform by integrating more services into the benefits, and to tap on Grab’s vast network of brand partners to offer specially curated experiences.

Grab also aims to leverage partnerships to drive growth for grocery and mart deliveries in a cost-sustainable manner, as a key growth initiative to support its goal to build the largest and most efficient on-demand platform for mobility and deliveries.

Following its acquisition of a majority economic interest in Jaya Grocer in Malaysia, Grab has entered a strategic partnership and investment into PT Trans Retail (Trans Retail), part of a leading consumer conglomerate group CT Corp and one of Indonesia’s largest hypermarket chains.

The strategic partnership aims to accelerate the expansion of on-demand grocery delivery while creating better grocery shopping experiences for consumers in Indonesia.

Trans Retail operates a network of over 110 hypermarkets and supermarkets, under the popular brand Transmart, across 28 Indonesian cities.

The strategic partnership is expected to see deeper integration between both companies, where Trans Retail will integrate all of Grab’s core services into its grocery stores, while Grab will leverage Trans Retail’s hypermarket infrastructure to scale on-demand grocery delivery at lower costs.

For example, Grab is closing its existing dark stores and moving operations to Trans Retail’s facilities, leveraging its vast retail footprint, warehousing capabilities, and purchasing power to enhance its current groceries and everyday essentials on demand offering. This is also expected to reduce Grab’s operating costs.

Grab is also now 100 percent self-sufficient with GrabMaps, with Grab services in all eight countries now fully powered by Grab’s own map tech and location-based intelligence.

Grab estimates this move to avoid tens of millions of dollars in potential third-party mapping fees every year.

Grab’s 2Q revenue rises 79 percent on higher mobility and deliveries contribution