Ride-hailing giant Grab posts first profitable quarter, announces $500 million share buyback
A attendee walks past a banner with a Grab logo before a bell-ringing ceremony as Grab begins trading on the Nasdaq, in Singapore, on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021.
Ore Huiying | Bloomberg | Getty Images
SINGAPORE — Grab posted its first-ever profitable quarter, raking in $11 million in profit, the Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant said in its fourth-quarter earnings report Thursday.
This compares with a $391 million loss recorded in the same period a year ago. The boost was “primarily due to the improvement in Group adjusted EBITDA, fair value changes in investments, and lowered share-based compensation expenses,” the company said.
Revenue for the quarter hit $653 million, exceeding LSEG analysts’ estimates of $634.86 million.
Losses for full year 2023 came to $485 million, down 72% from $1.74 billion a year ago.
In addition to ride-hailing, the company also provides financial services like payments and insurance, as well as deliveries for food, groceries and packages.
“We exited [2023 with] mobility exceeding pre-Covid levels. We are seeing a very strong demand in the mobility space,” Grab CFO Peter Oey told CNBC in an exclusive interview on Friday, adding that tourism is “growing very much.”
“If you look at the deliveries business, we have another record 13% year-over-year growth. We have now more users on our platform also at the same time. So we have really strong momentum,” he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”
Grab announced Thursday it would be repurchasing up to $500 million worth of class A ordinary shares for the first time.
Grab was largely unprofitable during its years of operation, having amassed billions of dollars in losses since its inception in 2012.
In the initial years of business, tech startups tend to prioritize growth over profitability, which usually means burning a lot of cash. But with global macro uncertainties slowing growth, they have been forced to renew their focus on profitability and be more prudent with costs.
During the fourth quarter, total incentives — which include partner and consumer incentives — were further reduced to 7.3% of total value of goods sold, Grab said in its report. That’s compared to 8.2% in the same period a year ago “as we continued to improve the health of our marketplace.”
Grab had been doling out incentives to attract drivers and passengers to its platform but that’s tapering now as the company moves to drive up profitability.
On whether Grab would reach a time where it wouldn’t need to incentivize people to stay on the platform, Oey said incentives will “always be a lever” for the business.
“I don’t think we’re going to see a world where there’s no incentive whatsoever,” he told CNBC, adding that incentives help “to make sure we have enough supply” of drivers and attract price-sensitive customers.
For 2024, Grab expects revenue to come in between $2.70 billion and $2.75 billion, lower than LSEG analysts’ consensus of $2.8 billion.
Grab’s shares closed 8.41% lower on Thursday. Its share price has plummeted 75.8% from its $13.06 opening price in December 2021, when the firm first listed on the Nasdaq.
Mike Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, speaks at the Nasdaq headquarters in New York on March 28, 2025.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
CoreWeave shares fell about 6% in extended trading on Tuesday even as the provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure beat estimates for second-quarter revenue
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: Loss of 21 cents
- Revenue: $1.21 billion vs. $1.08 billion expected
Revenue more than tripled from $395.4 million a year earlier, CoreWeave said in a statement. The company registered a $290.5 million net loss, compared with a $323 million loss in second quarter of 2024. CoreWeave’s earnings per share figure wasn’t immediately comparable with estimates from LSEG.
CoreWeave’s operating margin shrank to 2% from 20% a year ago due primarily to $145 million in stock-based compensation costs. This is CoreWeave’s second quarter of full financial results as a public company following its IPO in March.
CoreWeave pointed to an expansion in business with OpenAI, a major client and investor. Also during the quarter, CoreWeave acquired Weights and Biases, a startup with software for monitoring AI models, for $1.4 billion.
In May, management touted 420% revenue growth, alongside widening losses and nearly $9 billion in debt. The stock still doubled anyway over the course of the next month.
CoreWeave shares became available on Nasdaq at the end of the first quarter, after the company sold 37.5 shares at $40 each, yielding $1.5 billion in proceeds. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was trading at $148.75 for a market cap of over $72 billion.
A CoreWeave data center project with up to 250 megawatts of capacity is set to be delivered in 2026, the company said in the statement.
Executives will discuss the results and issue guidance on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
WATCH: Citi’s Tyler Radke’s bullish call on CoreWeave, upgraded to buy
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) invites Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to speak in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on “Investing in America” on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
The Trump administration is still working out the details of its 15% export tax on Nvidia and AMD and could bring deals of this kind to more companies, the White House’s Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
“Right now it stands with these two companies. Perhaps it could expand in the future to other companies,” said Leavitt, the White House’s spokesperson.
“The legality of it, the mechanics of it, is still being ironed out by the Department of Commerce, and I would defer you to them for any further details on how it will actually be implemented,” she continued.
President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he had negotiated a deal with Nvidia in which the U.S. government approves export licenses for the China-specific H20 AI chip in exchange for a 15% cut of revenue. Advanced Micro Devices also got licenses approved in exchange for a proportion of its China sales, the White House confirmed.
“I said, ‘If I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I’m giving you a release,'” Trump said Monday.
“We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets,” Nvidia said in a statement this week.
Trump said the export licenses for AMD and Nvidia were a done deal. But lawyers and experts who follow trade have warned that Trump’s deal may be complicated because of existing laws that regulate how the government can charge fees for export licenses.
The Commerce Department didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The H20 is Nvidia’s Chinese-specific chip that is slowed down on purpose to comply with U.S. export relations. It’s related to the H100 and H200 chips that are used in the U.S., and was introduced after the Biden administration implemented export controls on artificial intelligence chips in 2023.
Earlier this year, Nvidia said that it was on track to sell more than $8 billion worth of H20 chips in a single quarter before the Trump administration in April said that it would require a license to export the chip.
Trump signaled in July that he was likely to approve export licenses for the chip after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited the White House.
The U.S. regulates AI chips like those made by Nvidia for national security reasons, saying that they could be used by the Chinese government to leapfrog U.S. capabilities in AI, or they could be used by the Chinese military or linked groups.
The Chinese government has been encouraging local companies in recent weeks to avoid using Nvidia’s H20 chips for any government or national security-related work, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
WATCH: Access to Nvidia’s H20 won’t hand China an AI advantage: Analyst
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike