This was the most popular story in The Star for a few days after publication. Predictably, Singapore state media rushed to do PR for Grab. In contrast, rider usage drops and trends wouldn’t be a taboo subject for China state media. Nor would reporting on the working conditions of ride-hailing and delivery riders—another forbidden subject in Singapore.
By Susan Cunningham
The Star (Malaysia)
27 March 2019
When ride-hailing company Grab agreed to buy Uber’s South-East Asian assets a year ago, it seemed that its hardest and longest fought competition was finally over – at least in its seven markets that weren’t Indonesia.
In its home base of Singapore, Grab especially had a wide-open field, having raised US$4.64bil (RM18.9bil) in funding from the likes of SoftBank and DiDi Chuxing.
—Image credit: AFP/The Star
Its chief competitors were those taxi drivers who didn’t use the Grab app. The hailing apps from well-funded foreigners – German-Brazilian Easy Taxi and Britain’s Hailo and Karhoo – had been driven out by 2016.
Yet instead of surging with an influx of Uber’s former passengers, the number of “Daily Active Users” of the main Grab app in Singapore plunged after Uber withdrew from the city-state in May.
The number of such users fell from almost 171,000 on June 1, 2018 to 135,576 by Dec 1, 2018, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb’s data on Android phone users. That’s a loss of almost 40,000 Daily Active Users over the six-month period. MORE
Postscript: I should have mentioned that 75% of the Singapore smartphone/tablet market used the Android operating system during most of 2018. In Indonesia during the same period, about 92% of the market used Android.
Susan J Cunningham 