Last week, Grab Singapore made headlines when it revealed that it had acquired popular Singaporean eatery 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 manage their businesses more efficiently. The addition of Chope products and facilities provides more synergies for our business partners, helping them capture online revenue. -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 the food outlet closed in 2021.
HungryGoWhere’s new logo aimed to address diners’ growing interest in reconnecting with the local culinary 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 ensure its content curation consistently meets what consumers are looking for, HungryGoWhere is also lately leveraging insights derived from super app Grab data, such as popular food trends and places visited in Singapore, among a variety 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 ride-hailing category locally, the question is what its plans are for the future of itsArray, especially with Chope and HungryGoWhere now in its assets.
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 should be an app that runs the ecosystem and where everything you need is there,” Kaushal said, adding that dining out is a common occurrence in Singapore and that Grab Maximum Maximum probably needs to have a bigger share of the business through possible providing more similar services.
“For example, if someone makes a reservation for a place to eat through Chope, Grab has this data and can offer more interconnected services, such as inviting them to take a Grab taxi to their place of eating and, after meals, pay the price. GXS bank virtual account card, thus adding price to its users,” she said.
He added that at the moment, Grab Delivery is only an online service, but with acquisitions it can offer more offline opportunities and secure a new source of profits.
Kaushal said:
Also Grab to extract more knowledge from its existing user base and leverage its own knowledge.
Prantik Mazumdar, president of TiE Singapore, added that Grab will most likely gain 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, it 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 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 your application for cross-domain functions.
He added that after the acquisition, Grab will have to decide whether it will retain independence from 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 app or whether they will stick with the available options.
“As a visitor, I would prefer to keep either of the features in the short or long term to take advantage of 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 corporations 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 such as Chope supply them with an effective way to expand their service offerings. The challenge, however, lies in acquisition, yet in integrating those corporations and their generation onto the Grab platform. offering a 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 instant or valuable insights into food behavior and information about places to eat.
“Once well integrated, Grab will be able to improve value for visitors, not only on the call side but also on the source side. This, in turn, will allow them to generate more sources of income and potentially their monetary health,” he said.
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