Daily Briefing: Grab doubles down on food services for growth; Garlick Avenue bungalow for sale at $16.5m

And 330 childcare clinics across Singapore will raise fees in 2020.

From CNBC:

Ride-hailing company Grab is betting on its growing food delivery business to drive growth and profitability in the long term, a senior executive at the company told CNBC.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth in our food business,” Kell Jay Lim, co-chief of staff to the CEO and regional head of GrabFood, told CNBC. “We did have pockets of food delivery businesses throughout Southeast Asia already, but not across the region.”

The company says its gross merchandise volume for the food business grew 900% on-year in June 2019 from a relatively small base. GMV is a commonly tracked metric by e-commerce companies that measures the total sales dollar value of goods sold on their platforms.

For the same period, delivery volume grew seven times, according to Grab. Overall, GrabFood accounts for around 20% of Grab’s total GMV at the moment, compared to less than 5% in 2018.

Grab’s food business started in 2016, but expanded broadly across Southeast Asia last year after the start-up acquired Uber’s regional operations that included UberEats.

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