USA stock SPAC Encyclopedia | Valued at nearly 40 billion, Southeast Asia's "Uber" Grab is rushing to the US stock market tonight.

According to the latest SEC filings, Southeast Asia's online car-hailing giant Grab and SPAC company Altimeter Growth Corp. held a special shareholder meeting on November 30, with the listing plan officially confirmed. The company will be listed on Nasdaq on December 2nd, Eastern Time, under the stock code 'GRAB'.

Altimeter stated that the transaction valued Grab at nearly $40 billion.This is also the largest blank check merger to date.

According to SEC disclosure documents, as part of the transaction, Grab will receive approximately $4.5 billion in cash, including $4 billion from PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity), which brought together well-known investment institutions such as BlackRock, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley's Counterpoint Global Fund, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund management company, Temasek, and others.

Grab: known as the super app of Southeast Asia similar to 'Didi'

Business Overview

Southeast Asia's leading sharing economy giant Grab was founded in 2012, headquartered in Singapore, by Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling in Malaysia, both Harvard Business School classmates.

Based on 2020 GMV data from Euromonitor, Grab is the leading super app in Southeast Asia for mobile travel, food delivery, and e-wallet services.

Grab currently offers a diverse array of features, covering a wide range of areas such as mobile travel, food or grocery ordering, parcel delivery, online payments, access to loans, insurance, wealth management, and telemedicine services, with many functions consolidated into one app.

The company's market covers more than 400 cities in eight Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), serving approximately 0.65 billion people in the region. In addition to major cities, Grab is also currently attempting to gradually penetrate markets in small towns.

Currently, Grab also faces intense competition from industry rivals. The company's competitor Gojek plans to merge with the e-commerce company PT Tokopedia to expand its scale. At the same time, Grab's competitors also include many new entrants such as Delivery Hero's Foodpanda, Deliveroo, and the region's AirAsia Group Bhd.

In November of this year, Grab announced a partnership with the leading Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Lazada. Sellers on Lazada will be able to provide same-day delivery services to consumers in Singapore through GrabExpress.

Grab has always been considered one of the most valuable startups in Southeast Asia and has been favored by SoftBank. Since SoftBank led the investment in Grab in 2014, SoftBank has continued to increase its bets in almost every round. In March 2019, SoftBank Vision Fund invested a remarkable 1.46 billion USD.

Other well-known companies invested by SoftBank also include Ola Cabs in India, Rappi, Inc. in Colombia, Grofers India Pvt Ltd. in India, Gojek in Indonesia, DoorDash in the USA, among others. Apart from SoftBank, important investors in Grab also include Toyota Motor, Yamaha, Hyundai, DiDi, and others.

Financial Overview

According to Grab's third-quarter financial report disclosed on November 11th, Grab's GMV in Q1-Q3 increased by 32% year-on-year, reaching 4 billion USD. Delivery GMV increased by 63% year-on-year to reach 2.3 billion USD, both reaching historic highs.

The revenue for Q1-Q3 was 0.157 billion USD, a decrease of 9% year-on-year, mainly due to the reduced liquidity caused by severe lockdowns in Vietnam due to the pandemic.

Q1-Q3 reached a net loss of 0.988 billion US dollars, with Q3 loss increasing by 0.366 billion US dollars. The year-on-year increase in Q3 losses is mainly driven by non-cash expenses.

Altimeter: a SPAC launched by a high-performing venture capital institution.

The SPAC company Grab Holdings(AGCUU) that acquired Grab was founded by high-performing investor Brad Gerstner, raising 0.45 billion US dollars. It is a blank check company targeting the technology industry. The company went public in September last year at a price of 10 US dollars and is currently at 14.5 US dollars, with a 45% return.

Founder Brad Gerstner is an emerging hedge fund manager and angel investor, serving as a partner at the Boston billion-dollar hedge fund PAR Capital, and a board member of the public company Orbitz, with his fund mainly investing in the service industry.

The well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm Altimeter Capital founded by Brad Gerstner has impressive performance, having successfully invested in multiple well-known companies such as Expedia (EXPD), Uber (UBER), Snowflake(SNOW), Roblox(RBLX), among others.

Altimeter jointly led the pre-IPO funding round for Roblox, raising a total of 0.52 billion US dollars. Additionally, according to Crunchbase data, Altimeter was a major investor in the 79 million US dollars Series C funding round of the well-known cloud data software company Snowflake in June 2015, also being the second largest shareholder of the company.