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Tag: foody

  • Grab now has more rivals than ever before in Vietnam

    Grab now has more rivals than ever before in Vietnam

    From an e-hailing app, Grab has made great steps forward, providing many different services. Most recently, it started the payment service GrabPay and lending service Grab Financial. The consumer lending market in South East Asia is very large. As estimated by the World Bank, about 2 billion people in the world cannot access bank services, and most of them are in Asia Pacific.

    The non-cash payment market, according to Grab, is worth $500 billion in South East Asia. An analyst commented that Grab is wise taking a ‘roundabout’ approach to consumer lending (it conquered the transport market first before aiming for the consumer credit market).

    Consumer lending is a fertile business field for Chinese e-commerce firms. The firms offer online payment apps to users to ‘learn’ about their financial capability.

    Grab, as an app, quickly attracted users, especially investors. Just within six years, Grab became an unicorn company, i.e. an unlisted technology firm with valuation of $1 billion and higher, in South East Asia. Analysts estimate that Grab is valued at $6 billion.

    The challenges

    The total number of Grab downloads has reached 95 million all over South East Asia. This could serve as the launch pad for it to conquer the consumer lending market.

    “GrabPay e-wallet will be used for both transport and food delivery services, two of the most used services in South East Asia,” said Jerry Lim, director of Grab Vietnam.

    However, the analyst said, by expanding its business, Grab would have to compete with more rivals who are ‘powers’ in their fields. In online payment, for example, it will have to compete not only with AirPay (Sea) and Alipay (Alibaba Group), but also with local firms such as ZaloPay (VNG) and MoMo.

    In Indonesia, Grab bought an e-commerce platform, Kudo, in April 2017. Grab believes that this is the factor which can help expand GrabPay. However, in Vietnam, Grab’s two big rivals – Sea and Alibaba — both have strong support from two popular e-commerce floors – Shopee Vietnam and Lazada Vietnam.

    Similarly, GrabFood has rivals in the food delivery sector, where Sea’s Now, which inherited the large custom from Foody, is the leader.

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  • GrabFood grabs pole position in Vietnam food delivery market

    GrabFood grabs pole position in Vietnam food delivery market

    Despite being a new entrant, GrabFood has experienced rapid growth in the online food delivery market. GrabFood recently announced that it has grown 25 times since June 2018, in terms of orders received. A survey by Kantar TNS in January 2019 found that GrabFood was the most often used food delivery service in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, as cited by 68 percent of respondents.

    The GCOMM market research company, which polled 600 people in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, said in a recent report that 98 percent were satisfied with GrabFood’s service.

    This was a surprising outcome, given that GrabFood is a new entrant in Vietnam’s food delivery market, which is witnessing fierce competition with the likes of Foody.vn, Now and Vietnammm all in the fray.

    Grab’s ecosystem with a large network of driver-partners has greatly contributed to this success. More than 175,000 driver-partners in 15 cities and provinces have joined GrabFood’s network within seven months. The problem of recruiting a huge number of partners, which demands a large recruitment team and financial resources and yet takes many years, has been overcome.

    Driver-partners also saw a 20 percent increase in income from delivering food and parcels, according to latest statistics from Grab.

    Instead of offering a slew of discounts and other promotional programs to attract customers, GrabFood competes based on creative strategies, adapting to the diverse demands and tastes of customers in the various regions. GrabFood has also focused on building a network of merchant-partners. According to a Grab representative, an expansion in the number of merchant-partners was imperative for further growth. GrabFood cares about its partners’ growth and wants to build a win-win relationship so that they can grow together, the representative said.

    For example, GrabFood has many exclusive menus of well-known restaurants with “GrabFood Signatures”. These co-created dishes and drinks are constantly in the top three of most ordered items at big partners like Gong Cha and MeetFresh.

    In addition, GrabFood has reduced the average delivery time to just 20 minutes, which means customers can enjoy their favorite food delivered fresh and delicious. This, in turn, means that merchant-partners can retain customer loyalty. At the same time, marketing campaigns undertaken in cooperation with GrabFood help them increase their customer base.

    The Grab representative also said that on average, merchant-partners earn up to 300 percent in incremental revenue within two to three months of being on the platform.

    GrabFood has the advantage of being a technology mobile platform to which smart functions have been integrated, including locating the nearest restaurants, updating status of orders and chatting with drivers via GrabChat.

    Cashless payment for food delivery via GrabPay by Moca has been beta tested in Hanoi, and will soon be expanded to all three cities GrabFood currently operates in.”Our goal is to become the number one on-demand food delivery service in Southeast Asia and Vietnam in 2019,” the representative said.At the beginning of 2019, GrabFood announced that it was expanding its network to 15 cities and provinces.

    “On the whole, Grab’s management has made good moves. Expanding into payments and food delivery are smart, synergistic moves,” said Nitin Pangarkar, Associate Professor, Department of Strategy and Policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School.

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  • Foody Vietnam sold to Singaporean firm

    Foody Vietnam sold to Singaporean firm

    Online restaurant directory Foody Vietnam has sold a majority stake to consumer internet group Sea Limited.

    Worth about US$64 million, the transfer was announced on a NYSE listing by Sea.

    Foody, which also accepts meal bookings and runs a delivery service, has announced that foreign entity Airview Investment of Singapore has taken an 82 per cent shareholding.

    Sea says it has acquired a Vietnamese food-delivery platform to help expand its payment platform AirPay, launched in Vietnam in 2014.

    “We intend to pursue strategic investment and acquisition opportunities in order to grow our user base, deepen our market penetration and further expand our offerings, including complementary services and products,” says Sea.

    Foody Vietnam was founded in 2012. Sea, valued at $3.75 billion, has already invested in Foody, as series-B investor in July 2015.

  • Popular Vietnam restaurant ratings website Foody to launch in Indonesia

    Popular Vietnam restaurant ratings website Foody to launch in Indonesia

    Foody, a Vietnamese start-up providing online crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses, mostly restaurants and hotels, will launch its website in Indonesia on August 10, news website VnExpress reported Monday.

    Dang Hoang Minh, a co-founder, was quoted as saying that after Indonesia his company would expand to some other Southeast Asian countries, possibly Malaysia, Laos, and Cambodia.

    The expansion plan was announced not long after Foody received a fourth round of funding since it was founded in 2012.

    US’s Tiger Global Investment is the latest investor to pump money into the young company, whose website now boasts around eight million visits a month.

    Foody had earlier got funding from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures and Pix Vine Capital and Garena of Singapore.

    But it has not disclosed any of the amounts.