Last week, Grab Singapore made headlines when it revealed that it had acquired Singapore’s popular place-to-eat booking app, Chope, for an undisclosed amount.
“The vast majority of merchants on our platform are small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the same resources or expertise as the big restaurant brands,” said a Grab spokesperson when contacted by MARKETING-INTERACTIVE.
“Our purpose is to help them operate with equipment that allows them to grow and run their businesses more efficiently. The addition of Chope’s products and facilities provides further synergies for our business partners, helping them capture revenue online. -Offline opportunities,” the spokesperson added.
The acquisition comes just two years after Grab Singapore relaunched HungryGoWhere and its accompanying social media channels, a year after Food closed in 2021.
HungryGoWhere’s new logo aimed to meet diners’ growing interest in reconnecting with the local food scene in a much deeper way.
The new logo maintains its name and its iconic red hue, a nod to its long heritage as a platform for culinary discovery on the F scene.
To make sure that its content selection consistently meets what consumers are looking for, HungryGoWhere is also lately leveraging insights derived from data from the Grab super app, such as popular food trends and places visited in Singapore, from a diversity of other interests and preferences.
Don’t Miss: Grab Acquires Singapore Restaurant Reservation App Chope
While Grab already owns a very large percentage of the food delivery and ridesharing category locally, the question is what are its plans for the long term for itsArray, especially with Chope and HungryGoWhere now under its belt.
Update your own data
According to Nishant Kaushal, founder and CEO of ADNA Research, this may simply be because they are looking to capture a larger component of the price chain as a super app.
“A super app needs to be an app that drives the ecosystem and where everything you need is there,” Kaushal said, adding that dining out is a big thing in Singapore and Grab Maximum Maximum probably needs to have a greater share of the activity through possible providing more similar services.
“For example, if someone makes a reservation for a place to eat through Chope, then Grab has that data and can offer more interconnected services, such as inviting them to take a Grab taxi to their place to eat and, after the meal, pay for the GXS bank virtual account card, thus adding price to its users,” Said.
He added that Grab Delivery is currently only an online service, but with acquisitions it can offer more offline opportunities and secure a new source of profit.
Kaushal said:
Also Grab to extract more knowledge from its existing user base and leverage its proprietary knowledge.
Prantik Mazumdar, president of TiE Singapore, added that Grab will most likely win food platforms such as Chope and HungryGo, where it can increase its market share and penetration in a highly crowded SEA area that includes other players such as Quandoo, OpenTable, EatApp, Yelp. , Resy, Oddle, Tock, Odette and Eatigo.
“Chope had an extensive network of restaurants in Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Phuket, Bali, Jakarta, Shanghai and Beijing and this is an opportunity for Grab to consolidate its market position with successful deals in a tight market. he said.
He added that with Grab’s monetary strength and generation platform, this could pose a “serious threat” to other restaurant booking platforms, as their consumers would have much more consolidated options within their application environment.
That said, Mazumdar said that Grab’s ambition for the region’s super app is “extremely ambitious” and complicated in a fragmented market like Southeast Asia, where “there is no ‘homogeneity’ and where it would take a lot of domain expertise to attract and have interaction users to use their app for multi-domain functions.
He added that after the acquisition, Grab will have to decide whether to retain the independence of the Chopper logo, given its strong awareness of the logo in the region and also the ease it presents through its local integration with Google online searches. whether they will fully integrate it into their application or whether they will stick with the available options.
“As a visitor, I would prefer to keep any of the features short or long term to capitalize on the popularity of the Chope logo and cater to other visitor behaviors,” he said.
Mazumdar added that regardless, Grab will need to perform a thorough deduplication of restaurant and visitor data in its formula across GrabFoods, HungryGoWhere, and now Chope and get a realistic assessment of the size of its combined restaurant and visitor database.
Based on this, they would be renegotiating reservation commissions with the restaurants to increase their profit and margins, to justify the acquisition.
Potential challenges
That said, few companies outside of China have cracked the code to create a super app, according to Ranganathan Somanathan, co-founder of RSquared Global Ventures.
“While Grab develops some answers in-house, acquisitions like Chope’s offer them an effective way to expand their service offerings. However, the challenge is acquiring and integrating those corporations and their generation into the Grab platform. seamless and meaningful user experience,” he said.
He added that with those acquisitions, Grab can gain a significant percentage of the food discovery and reserve market, giving them valuable and instant insights into dining habits and places to eat.
“Once well integrated, Grab will be able to generate value for visitors, not only on the request aspect but also on the source aspect. This in turn will allow them to generate greater profits and potentially improve their monetary health,” he said.
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