Southeast Asia’s Grab cuts a familiar path with partnerships in logistics and travel
- The new features will be rolled out across Grab’s Southeast Asian markets by the end of June
Grab, Singapore’s largest ride-hailing company, is making good on its vision to become Southeast Asia’s all-in-one app. Its latest investment in Singapore-based, last-mile delivery firm Ninja Van comes days after it introduced hotel and ticket-booking features to its app.
The investment into Ninja Van will see Grab’s current logistics service, GrabExpress, expand its offerings to include scheduled deliveries on top of on-demand deliveries.
The move is part of Grab’s mission to become a super app, a model first pioneered in China by Tencent Holdings’ WeChat, an app that allows its more than 1 billion users to do everything from messaging to ordering food and even buying discounted movie tickets.
Other Chinese internet platforms also offer super apps. Meituan, which started out as a group-buying site, later merged with restaurants site Dianping and now offers everything from restaurant reservations, food delivery and local services.
Apps that offer a variety of services is aimed at increasing the amount of time that a user spends in-app and to increase user stickiness, as well as to encourage the use of various services in its ecosystem.
Grab last week announced that it has partnered with online travel booking sites Agoda and Booking.com for hotel bookings on its app, as well as video site HOOQ to allow users to stream videos.
