Grab Holdings Ltd. has acquired restaurant reservation platform Chope for an undisclosed sum and will take over its operations in Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, The Business Times reported on Monday.
Chope staff will join Grab's offices in a couple of weeks, BT reported citing an internal email it had seen from Grab head of deliveries Ngiam Xin Wei. No roles in Grab will be made redundant as a result of the deal and Chope's team will remain as a unit under Grab's Omnicommerce business, Ngiam said.
Taking over the near-profitable Chope won't dent Grab's positive-adjusted Ebitda, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu wrote in a note. Chope's 10,000 merchants will bolster GrabFood's ecosystem of over 200,000, boosting outdoor dining advertising sales, he added.
Grab's latest acquisition underscores its dominance in ride-hailing and online food delivery in the region. Grab and Indonesian rival GoTo have this year revived discussions about a merger of their core businesses, as they battle it out in the Southeast Asian market of hundreds of millions of people. – Bloomberg