Earnings Labs

Grab Holdings Limited (GRAB)

Q2 2023 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 23, 2023

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. My name is Ellen, and I'll be your conference operator for this session. Welcome to Grab's Second Quarter 2023 Results Call. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Douglas Eu to start the call. Douglas, please go ahead, whenever you are ready.

Douglas Eu

Analyst

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Grab's second quarter 2023 earnings call. I'm Douglas Eu, Head of Asia Investor Relations at Grab, and joining me today are Anthony Tan, Chief Executive Officer; Alex Hungate, Chief Operating Officer; and Peter Oey, Chief Financial Officer. During the call today, Anthony will discuss our key strategic and business achievements, followed by Alex, who will provide operational highlights and Peter will share details of our second quarter 2023 financial results. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call to questions. As a reminder, today's discussion contains forward-looking statements about the company's future business and financial performance. These statements are based on our beliefs and expectations as of today. Actual events and results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including macroeconomic, industry, business, regulatory and other risks, which are described in our Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2022 and other filings with the SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. The discussion today also contains non-IFRS financial measures which should be considered together with rather than as substitutes for IFRS financial measures. A reconciliation of non-IFRS to IFRS financial measures is included in this quarter's earnings materials. For more information and additional disclosures on recent business performance, please refer to our earnings press release and supplemental presentation for a detailed second quarter 2023 financial review, which can be found on our Investor Relations website. And with that, I will turn the call over to Anthony to deliver his opening remarks.

Anthony Tan

Analyst

Thanks, Doug. Thank you for joining us today. Our second quarter results reflect our ability to execute strongly as we balance growth, category leadership and profitability. Our focus on expanding our marketplace through affordability initiatives as well as strengthening engagement through our flagship subscription program called GrabUnlimited continues to yield results. More people are using Grab now than ever before with group MTUs at an all-time high, growing by 7% year-on-year and 5% quarter-on-quarter. And at the same time, we further extended our category leadership across the region for ride-hailing and food deliveries. We continue to deliver a solid set of financials with revenues up 77% year-on-year. Even as we reduced group adjusted EBITDA losses for the sixth consecutive quarter. I also want to call out that our deliveries GMV had a record high this quarter. With the first half firmly in the rearview mirror, we look towards second half with confidence and optimism. There are three key areas I want to call out. Firstly, we expect to drive sequential growth in our deliveries and mobility segments. Demand is robust in July as we continue to drive key affordability initiatives to unlock a greater segment of the market to cater to more users while deepening engagement and loyalty with GrabUnlimited. Secondly, we expect to scale up new opportunities in financial services and advertising where we see strong demand potential and benefits for our overall ecosystem. In financial services, we continue to focus on driving up ecosystem transactions. Our lending business is growing strongly, yet in a prudent manner. For GXS Bank in Singapore, we've also seen a strong uptick in deposits despite minimal customer acquisition costs after opening up the savings account to more individuals and increasing the maximum allowable deposit per account. Ecosystem linkages are also healthy with one…

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Thank you, Anthony. I'll go deeper into the business and operational highlights by segment, starting with mobility. Mobility GMV and revenues in the second quarter continued to grow strongly year-on-year, with Grab further extending its category leadership across the region, while our segment adjusted EBITDA margins remained in line with our steady state guidance. Demand remains strong and we are seeing continued quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year increases in mobility MTUs, as well as average frequency per user, with the latter growing 12% year-on-year. International traveler demand continues to recover. We increased airport rides by 64% year-on-year to reach 77% of pre-COVID levels. Several months back, we made a strategic decision to focus on improving traveler experiences on the Grab app to capture the post-COVID travel rebound. We rolled out guest browsing and traveler homepages and continue to see meaningful traction from our partnerships with WeChat, Alipay and Kakao. Domestic demand also further normalized across our markets with mobility GMV now 85% of pre-COVID levels. When we compare mobility GMV levels between second quarter 2023 and the same period in 2019, several of our core markets such as Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have either reached or surpassed these levels. To support this growth in demand, we continue to focus on improving driver supply. In the second quarter, monthly active driver supply increased by 10% year-on-year with supply levels now at 84% of pre-COVID. We also announced the signing of an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares in Trans-Cab, Singapore's third largest taxi operator. This could further supplement our supply base in Singapore upon the expected completion of the deal. We also continue to drive product innovation to enhance the overall user and driver experience on our platform. We are enhancing the affordability of our services to cater to more users such…

Peter Oey

Analyst

Thanks, Alex. We're pleased to report another strong set of results across both the top line and bottom line. Our group revenues in the second quarter grew 77% year-on-year or 81% on a constant currency basis and 8% quarter-on-quarter to reach $567 million. We continued to record strong revenue growth across all segments of our business. Mobility revenues were up 29% year-on-year or 31% on a constant currency basis. and 7% quarter-on-quarter to hit $208 million. Our efforts to improve supply across the region have enabled us to capture the recovery in tourism demand and growth in domestic demand. Our deliveries revenue grew 118% year-on-year or 126% on a constant currency basis and 6% quarter-on-quarter to reach $292 million. This was primarily driven by a reduction in incentives and GMV growth. Financial Services revenue grew by 223% year-on-year or 230% on a constant currency basis and 6% quarter-on-quarter to $40 million, underpinned by improved monetization of our payments business and increased contributions from lending. Finally, enterprise and new initiatives revenues grew 95% year-on-year or 99% on a constant currency basis and 51% quarter-on-quarter to hit $27 million. This was supported by the continued growth in advertising revenues. Turning now to group GMV. We recorded year-on-year growth of 4% or 6% on a constant currency basis to reach $5.2 billion in the second quarter. This was supported by an increase in group MTUs, which achieved a new all-time high for the quarter. Our on-demand segments of mobility and deliveries recorded GMV growth of 11% year-on-year or 14% on a constant currency basis. Mobility GMV grew strongly by 28% year-on-year or 30% on a constant currency basis, and we remain on track to exit 2023 at precured GMV levels. Deliveries GMV bounced back towards growth and saw an increase of 4% year-on-year…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now start the question-and-answer portion of the call. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Venugopal Garre from Bernstein. Your line is now open. Please go ahead with your question.

Venugopal Garre

Analyst

Hi. Thanks a lot. Firstly, congratulations on the good quarter and thanks for the very detailed opening remarks. So quite a few of the questions do get answered. I still have two broad questions. Firstly, on food delivery, I was curious to know, given that we have seen a growth in this quarter. And I think the commentary also appears to be fairly decent wanted to understand that what is primarily driving this growth? How much of it is actually basket size driven? And also on the profitability side of the food delivery segment, I wanted to understand the broad thought process and sustainability of that given that we haven't really seen any market consolidation yet in the sector? And my second question is on your Digibank GXS with now having done a full-fledged launch in Singapore. When do we really expect it to start incrementally contributing to profits and also, I was curious to know that with the interest rates being offered on deposits last year was, I think, about 2.48% or 2.4%, which is actually quite low compared to the normal banking system, are we able to gather deposits? And what is the broader plan with respect to lending products around this? Any update on that would be great. Thank you.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Thanks, Venu. This is Alex. Let me take those -- both those questions. On food deliveries, it is sustainable because what we've been doing, the two things that I mentioned in the remarks, like driving using scale to drive down cost to serve and then passing that on in terms of affordability? And then the second part about deeper engagement, particularly using GrabUnlimited. Both of those are sustainable. We think they're working well and given that we're barely penetrated into single-digit penetration of the Southeast Asia market at this point, we think there's plenty of growth upside for us to continue to -- with that same strategy. In the quarter, there was an increase in spend per user, which drove the increase. And so we will continue to execute that strategy. You mentioned consolidation. We are the category position leader. Therefore, we do those scale advantages do accrue to us more than others. So we're going to continue to focus on execution and make sure that our customers benefit from those advantages. We're sticking to our long-term guidance on margin, which is 3% plus and you've seen that there's also the advertising business, which generates good margins on the back of growth in deliveries as well. So there's additional benefit financially from advertising on top of that. Let me turn to your question about the Digibank and the competition for deposits and then the breakeven. So I confirm what we said this time last year at the Investor Day that we expect the three banks collectively to breakeven in 2026. We're still on track for that. For deposits, we recently had the bank regulator raised the cap on deposits. So we were able to raise deposits very fast after that. So that happened in July and we were able to…

Venugopal Garre

Analyst

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Piyush Choudhary. Piyush, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Piyush Choudhary

Analyst

Yeah. Hi. Thanks a lot and congratulations to the management team for such a strong set of performance. A couple of questions. Firstly, on restructuring, can I confirm the $80 million annualized savings will be cash OpEx savings? And in addition to that, how much share-based compensation would come down or what would be the savings over there? Secondly, in mobility, similar to Trans-Cab, would you be open or looking for similar opportunities in other countries or was it a Singapore-specific strategy to solve the supply problem? And if you can give us an update on the competitive landscape and mobility, particularly in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, that would be helpful. Thank you.

Peter Oey

Analyst

Hi, Piyush. Let me take the first one and then Alex will take the Trans-Cab as well as the competitive landscape. So on the restructuring, your question is the $80 million cash savings. Yes, it is. And that's annualized for -- and of which 60% of that will hit regional copper costs from a savings perspective and 40% from -- across our business segments. And in terms of stock-based compensation, the second quarter, SBC was roughly about $65 million. Now there was some onetime reversal from -- in the SBC line, driven from the restructuring. So the way to think about our stock-based compensation on a go-forward basis, if you look at our Q4 number, roughly about $90 million will be below that $90 million mark, and that's a number that you could use from a modeling perspective.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Let me talk about the Trans-Cab. Yeah. In Singapore, the [Technical Difficulty].

Operator

Operator

Hi. Sorry, we can’t hear you.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Yes. Just let me pick up on your question on Trans-Cab. Do you hear me? So we are interested in leveraging the taxi license to drive down our cost to serve. So Singapore cost of vehicles is very high, as you know. And there is an advantage to taxi license holders that they can purchase at a lower COE. That will allow us to keep on doubling down on affordability and reducing cost to serve in Singapore. So those special circumstances in Singapore make this a particularly attractive proposition. It's not that we would be close to other such transactions, but we have a very high bar on M&A in general. And so, it would have to be a very attractive acquisition to reproduce the kinds of strategic synergies that we saw in the Trans-Cab situation. Competitive landscape, let me pick that up for. You asked about Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, in particular. I would say that it's the same playbook that we talked about for deliveries in many ways because we're seeing meaningful regional scale across all markets, and we're able to translate that using some of the great tech tools that we've built into better reliability and better affordability. No silver bullets, but a just a whole bunch of really powerful tech capabilities, which is creating advantages using machine learning, large language models like Anthony was saying earlier to help us serve customers better. And that means that we are improving our category position even further in mobility in markets like Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. So we'll continue to double down on that execution strategy because we think there's more to go and more customers to serve.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now take our next question from Pang Vitt from Goldman Sachs. Pang, your line is now open. Please go ahead, when you are ready.

Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon

Analyst

Great. Thank you very much for the opportunities and good evening the management on the call. Two questions from me, please. Firstly, I noticed from the market trends that your market share for the on-demand services have improved considerably in the quarter, especially in Indonesia, GMV holding up stronger than peers, while you also managed to deliver a margin expansion on a sequential basis. Can you share with us what have you done differently than your peers to achieve this? Are you planning to continue to your market share? Or will you try to expand your margins now? That's question number one. Question number two, with regards to your MTU. We are now at all-time high going into the month of July as well. Just want to understand what have you done to achieve this? Does new users come from Tier 1 expansion to continue to penetrate deeper into the metro area or have you already managed to successfully expand into an underserved reasons?

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

The market share -- thanks, Pang, for your question. The market share, I think I would refer to my earlier answers in terms of our playbook. It's our scale as category position leader together with the powerful platform capabilities that we've built. When I think of Grab Maps, it's a very powerful competitive advantage that other platforms don't have. You think about our payments platform, our ads platform all coming together, generating more and more data and allowing us to serve customers better and to help our partners and our merchants to earn more than they do in other platforms. All of that helps us to generate more loyalty and all of that helps us to penetrate deeper city by city. We have expanded in outer cities of Indonesia over the quarter. And we think there are plenty of more cities into which we can grow, so that is part of the growth. But I would say that we've also seen growth in the big Tier 1 cities that have been our traditional stronghold in Indonesia. So the growth has been balanced between both of these. In terms of margin versus growth, we are at already our steady-state margins for mobility. And so we don't feel that we need to go higher than that. We're comfortable with those as sustainable. So you'll see our focus continuing on driving to grow the market through greater affordability and better reliable services. Like I was saying earlier, we only serve a single-digit share of the total Southeast Asia market. So we feel that we still have lots of growth upside. MTUs are at an all-time high. We are confident that the affordability push is the main driver of that. So there are plenty of untapped segments both in the large cities and then the outer cities that we haven't been able to penetrate because up until now. So we feel like affordability is really going to help us to continue to grow MTU. So there's no magic to that. Again, it's more of the improving reliability and affordability, city by city and really pushing through optimized marketing. Not so much the promotion side. You can see we've refined our promotions even further and continue to optimize in this quarter as we have over the last 18 months quite consistently. So we've been able to do more of that. But this time, it's more about everyday low pricing, making our services more affordable, getting people to make them part of their daily routines.

Anthony Tan

Analyst

I'll comment beyond just the shorter-term MTUs, the longer term. Alex is completely, right? It's not just one or two silver bullets. We're looking at many 1% improvements, whether it's in affordability, whether it's in reliability, whether it's in better fulfillment. And we've seen that. This multipronged approach of fundamental investments into the basic, most fundamental 1% and many of these has helped us really become the most reliable and go to choice. Longer term, we are seeing this multipronged approach across services. So as we evolve the services, whether it's saver deliveries, whether it's car-pooling options, we're seeing it reaches a broader range of users. Then you alluded just now as well paying to the outer city expansion. You're right. Now with more affordable services, we can reach better and we have better product market fit out of city, but how do we do it? As we are driving costs, we're passing that savings on to our consumers. And then it's not just that, we also looked at increasing our product offerings and lending within the Financial Services segment and that really helps uplift our ecosystem partners. So all that plus this constant product innovation on affordability and reliability has given us that long growth while even margin expansion is taking place more engagement, more loyalty, as Peter talked about as well. So we are actually confident. We see still a large time (ph). We see tremendous headroom to grow. We see given our power of our ecosystem and scale our platform and a multipronged approach, we're going to grow that user base.

Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Thomas, please go ahead, whenever you are ready.

Thomas Chong

Analyst

Hi. Good evening. Thanks management for taking my questions and congratulations on a very strong set of results. My question first is about the macro environment, how is management looking into the macro trend coming into the second half? And also on the -- about our strategies on the reinvestment side, given that we are seeing other players in Southeast Asia are looking to reinvest to grow -- to drive the growth and gain market share. So that's number one. And then number two, regarding generative AI, we talk about the pricing in the prepared remarks. So I just want to get some color with regard to our generative AI and [indiscernible] strategies going into the future, should we expect there would be a big change in the Southeast Asia Internet sector. Thank you.

Anthony Tan

Analyst

Great questions, Thomas. Really appreciate it. So of course, let me comment on macros for second half. So the right thing to do for us is to closely monitor any risk on inflation, any macro weaknesses in the region. But overall, we remain confident in our ability to execute and continues to drive growth and profitability and why can we do that? Through our ecosystem advantage through our category leadership to our platform scale. And we will quickly adapt regardless of this ever changing, ever evolving macroeconomic environment. And you saw this in the second quarter, we grew MTUs, and Alex talked about this at an all-time high at around $35 million, while we narrowed EBITDA losses. So I can't overemphasize this. There's no secret, no silver bullet, just lots of fundamental little improvements. And we've talked about hundreds of little, but very important initiatives. Again, thanks to the Grabbers all out there, who are continuously driving for more affordability, more reliability, so we can pass on more savings to our users and our partners. And that's the only way to out serve all the people we serve in a sustainable manner. Now if I may quickly jump on your G AI (ph) question. The honest truth is for applications for AI specifically for Grab AI incredibly vast, (ph) it's what powers the user and partner experience in our app. And we've been very blessed. We've been at the forefront of this region with machine learning and AI. And we already thanks to, again, the -- all our wonderful tech teams that they have built the data infrastructure to continue to innovate, to continue to enhance our platform experience efficiently for the communities we serve. And specifically on generative AI. This will continue to play an increasingly important role in everything we do. Now today, we've already been using generative AI to augment our internal workflows and processes. I talked about it. It helps us debug. It helps us do data queries much faster. We talked about how it's helped to translate menus and improved our grab chat. For us, we will continue to leverage tech, we'll continue to leverage AI to unlock the operational efficiency out there while enhancing the overall user experience.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

And Thomas, maybe I'll just jump in on your question on reinvestment. There have been some statements about reinvestment on the e-commerce front recently. In our space, not so really, most of the competitors are focused on profitability and driving to profitability. So we haven't really seen that in our space. As far as we're concerned, as we said earlier, we're comfortable with where our margins are, very close to our steady state long-term margins in deliveries. And then we're already at our comfortable long-term sustainable margin for mobility. So we are actually focusing on affordability and growing the market.

Thomas Chong

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alicia from Citigroup. Alicia, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Alicia Yap

Analyst

Hi. Thank you. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions and also congrats on the solid results. I have two quick questions. Number one, if management can share a bit on the advertising business in terms of, for example, the numbers of paying advertising that you have? And what are the industry verticals that we're able to attract and contribute to the growth? And then also on the medium term, what is the GMV, a percentage of GMV of this ad revenue that you expect could reach. And then second question quickly, given all these improving GMV growth and also outperformance in revenue. Just curious that why management decided to keep the full year revenue target unchanged or is it just trying to be more conservative or leave a little bit room. So any color on that would be appreciated. Thank you.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Thanks, Alicia, for your questions. Let me take the advertising one. Yeah, the advertising performance is one of the highlights of the quarter. We are now at 1% of GMV for advertising. And we've done that by pushing our self-serve tools out to the very large long tail of merchants that we serve across the region. We're still -- we're not disclosing how many we've reached, but we're still, I can tell you at a very low penetration rate. So there's lots of upside that we can generate by continuing to push those tools out. We know that the [indiscernible] that we can create, as I mentioned, some of the key studies earlier is very attractive. And we're also improving the tools within that self-serve capability further as well, so that will help us. So far, we focus primarily on endemic advertising. You asked about the segments that we are focusing on. So endemic advertising, meaning the F&B merchants driving demand within the ecosystem. We can do further endemic advertising within the mobility side and potentially other verticals like financial services. So that's yet to be tapped, which will help us to grow a deeper penetration of GMV. And then as I mentioned, within food itself, we can also penetrate further. We do also serve brand advertisers, who are not endemic on the platform. So these are brand owners. You can see the selection as you use the Grab app. For those, we can't close the loop on the advertising. So we can't show them the performance of the ads that they place like we can for the endemic advertisers. But we still have a very attractive audience for them. So they'll go into our digital audience for the reach and for the first-party, ability to reach first-party authenticated users on the platform. So we're also attractive for them. For that audience, it's almost unlimited because they're actually targeting the demographic and the reach. So there's no particular constraint in terms of which segments when we have advertisers across a wide range from FMCG to auto, consumer goods, et cetera.

Peter Oey

Analyst

Alicia, on your revenue question, that's right. Yes, we're maintaining our 2023 revenue guidance. If you look from a year-over-year growth, it's about a 54% to 60% year-on-year growth on a headline basis. We're seeing good traction on the revenue front. July was also strong for us. What I can say is, we'll continue to update as we need to, but we're at this stage, we're maintaining our revenue guidance. We are looking strong, and we're probably going to be ending up probably at the upper end of the range, and that should give you some color and perspective on how we're tracking.

Alicia Yap

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney from Evercore. Mark, your line is now open Please proceed with your question.

Mark Mahaney

Analyst

Okay. Thanks I'd like to ask about GrabUnlimited and then about incentives. On GrabUnlimited, how do you think -- what's your framework for figuring out how big you think the GrabUnlimited base could be, the subscriber base could be? Like are there regions where you see the GrabUnlimited customers as 30% or 50% of total users? How do we -- how do we know how big that segment can be? And then on incentives, what I want to ask is, where do you think incentives can go long term? I know they've come down nicely year-over-year in almost every segment, although not in mobility. So just overall as a company, where do you think incentives can go, there at 8% now -- does that trend to 7% or 6% or 5% long term? Is that what you want to do? And then just explain why the mobility incentives kind of ticked back up this quarter, at least on a sequential basis. Thank you very much.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Yeah. Thanks, Mark. Let me take the GrabUnlimited question. GrabUnlimited is successful financially for us for two reasons. One is, it drives retention -- significantly drives retention. Of course, when we run the long-term value models, that's one of the biggest drivers of value for the platform. And then the other thing is that drives the GMV for customer further. So people spend more once they're in the program. There's a third lever, which is that it allows us to reduce the amount of promotion money, which is spent on promotion hunters, people that aren't really interested in loyalty, they'll just skip from promotion to promotion. So it allows us to filter those out as well. So net-net, it's an important driver of profitability. We don't believe that it's right for everybody. So we don't have a target of 100% penetration. We -- as you heard earlier, we're something like a third of the GMV now. So it's quite highly penetrated. There are some countries which are higher than that and some which are lower because they started at different times in the rollout. But it would be hard to see this representing the majority of our customers. So as it starts to grow, there are plenty of ways in which we can tweak it, the value packages that we offer, the subscription price that we offer in order to manage the loyalty and the retention that we're seeking to achieve without impacting our ability to target all segments those who naturally have the inclination to use us many, many times. And those that probably don't naturally have that opportunity that will use us less frequently. So we have to be able to cater for the whole market. Hope that's helpful. I think Peter is going to talk about the guidance on the incentives.

Peter Oey

Analyst

Sure. Yeah. So on mobility incentives, Mark, you highlighted that it was up 50 basis points on Q-on-Q (ph) perspective. Yes, we did some -- we did make some reinvestments in those incremental margins in mobility. And a lot of that is really driving platform efficiency. We talked about a lot of the new product used cases, especially around affordability, things like Grab Share, things like also the two-wheel that we launched in the Philippines and these are critical as we continue to enhance the marketplace given that demand is strong in mobility business. At the same time also, we're balancing the high incentives Q-on-Q with the margin. So we're keeping one eye on how we can make sure we enhance the platform efficiency but also making sure that the margin liquidity -- is equal, also maintaining our margin targets. As you can tell on mobility, we landed at 12.4% for the quarter. And that theme, actually, if you think through to your other question around how do we think about incentives and it's very similar in whether it's mobility or deliveries, it uses balance that we take between the marketplace efficiency regarding our platform while there will be some quarters where you may see incentives go up or down. But overall, we're balancing that on the other side with margin -- target margins, whether it's the 12% of mobility or deliveries of 3% plus. Hope that answers your question Mark?

Mark Mahaney

Analyst

Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Alex.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Thanks, Mark.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our last question today comes from Sachin Salgaonkar from Bank of America. Sachin, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Sachin Salgaonkar

Analyst

Hi. Thank you for the opportunity and congrats on a great set of numbers. Two questions from me. One, I wanted to understand how you guys are looking in terms of utilizing the cash on your balance sheet? Clearly, you guys mentioned that you have a high bar on M&A. And now that we are already very close to adjusted EBITDA breakeven. I just wanted to understand [indiscernible] there. And second, I wanted to understand a bit more on the delivery take rate declined a bit on a Q-o-Q basis. Anything to read here and directionally, how could one expect that to look at this going ahead?

Peter Oey

Analyst

Sure, Sachin. Let me take both questions. So on the cash position, as you can tell, we're -- we always take a very prudent approach in terms of how we deploy our capital. As Alex mentioned earlier, we do have a very high hurdle rate when it comes to deploying our capital. We want to do a particular transaction unless there's a high degree of conviction and also how you can enhance the long-term shareholder value. So we'll continue to take that approach when it comes to maintaining our capital allocation framework and will be prudent. Cash preservation is also critical and important for us. And that high hurdle rate will continue to be maintained. In terms of take rate, look, there's not a lot to read into it. Our take rate continues to be strong. There's obviously different mixes in terms of how a take rate can fluctuate from quarter-on-quarter. But overall, there was no big swings and we're on track.

Sachin Salgaonkar

Analyst

Got it. And sir, just a small clarification I wanted to get. There are some comments on the regional corporate costs. And I think one of the comments was regional corporate costs to improve going ahead. Do I read it correctly? Do you expect that to increase in second half or decrease?

Peter Oey

Analyst

What I said was the regional corporate costs will be lower in the second half versus the first half.

Sachin Salgaonkar

Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Peter Oey

Analyst

Thank you, Sachin.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This now concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Peter for any closing remarks.

Peter Oey

Analyst

Well, thanks, everyone, for taking the time to join our call today. If you still have questions, please feel free to reach out to our Investor Relations team or you can visit our Investor Relations website. Great. Thank you, everyone.

Alexander Hungate

Analyst

Thank you.

Anthony Tan

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

This concludes Grab's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.