SoftBank unit investing US$250m in GrabTaxi

Nikesh Arora, vice chairman of SoftBank Corp and chief executive of SIMI, said that in just two years, GrabTaxi had become the dominant player in Southeast Asia’s taxi-booking mobile-app industry. 

Launched in 2012, GrabTaxi now serves 17 cities across six countries in Southeast Asia, namely Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. 

Through this strategic investment and partnership with GrabTaxi, the SoftBank Group aims to build up its presence in Southeast Asia and maximise synergies with its network of Internet companies around the world.  

Anthony Tan, GrabTaxi founder and group CEO, said the company would leverage SoftBank’s expertise and group synergies across its mobile and Internet platforms to accelerate growth. 

With the total investment in the past 14 months amounting to almost $340 million, GrabTaxi says it is leading the region in terms of funding and growth. 

Though competition in Southeast Asia has grown considerably in the past year, GrabTaxi continues to dominate the region and maintain strong growth in terms of taxi-driver networks and mobile-application downloads. With more than 500,000 active users and 2.5 million mobile-app downloads to date, GrabTaxi has the largest network throughout the region.

Cheryl Goh, GrabTaxi group vice president of marketing, said growth remained a key focus for the company, which now had a considerable war chest to accelerate its expansion in Southeast Asia. 

“Our strong focus in this region also means that each of [the] six GrabTaxi markets stands to receive a significant portion of funding compared [with] larger players that have to stretch their funding much further. Clearly we don’t take our market-leadership position for granted, and this funding will ensure we can grow our leadership position as the industry evolves in the next few years.” 

In the 12 months since November last year, the number of taxi drivers in the network increased by almost 300 per cent to 60,000. Mobile-app usage grew by almost 500 per cent to 500,000 users currently, while downloads increased by almost 400 per cent to 2.5 million. 

GrabTaxi estimates that there are three taxi bookings made through their app every second across the region, which is almost an 800-per-cent increase from a year ago.