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Tag: Southeast Asia 500

  • GoTo taps new CEO in step toward game-changing Grab takeover | Fortune

    GoTo Group appointed a new chief executive officer to replace Patrick Walujo, a move that’s expected to speed the takeover of Indonesia’s largest internet company by Grab Holdings Ltd.

    Chief operating officer Hans Patuwo will take the helm from Walujo, the company said Monday. His appointment—which requires shareholder approval—comes after GoTo co-founders and prominent investors including SoftBank Group Corp. pushed for Walujo’s ouster over a dismal stock performance.

    The change-up marks an about-face for GoTo, which in January said Walujo, 50, would run the company for years to come. The former investment banker helped usher the Indonesian ride-hailing and delivery giant to its first profit over a two-and-a-half-year tenure as CEO. But the company lost more than 40% of its value over the same period, and he also opposed a takeover by Singapore’s Grab.

    Shares of GoTo climbed as much as 6.3% in Jakarta Monday, giving the company a market value of about $5 billion. Grab, traded in New York, has a market capitalization of $20 billion.

    “The transition could signal a pivot towards operational focus and revive the long-stalled proposed Grab-GoTo merger,” Citigroup Inc. analysts Ferry Wong and Ryan Davis wrote. 

    Patuwo, 49, is now set to steer a company mired in a persistent funk, grappling with a global shift towards artificial intelligence and preparing to revive talks with Grab. The likelihood of a takeover—after years of on-and-off discussions—is increasing after Indonesia’s government said it’s talking to the two companies about a deal.

    The country’s sovereign wealth fund, Danantara, is set to get involved in a plan to combine the companies. The fund began exploring a minority stake in a combined entity early this year, people familiar with the matter said in June.

    Its involvement could smooth concerns that consumers will lose out in a marriage of the country’s two biggest ride-hailing providers. “Danantara’s possible minority stake in a potential combined entity would serve as both a symbolic and structural safeguard of national interest,” and would assuage monopoly concerns, the Citigroup analysts wrote.

    Patuwo joined the company more than seven years ago from an Indonesian conglomerate, according to his LinkedIn profile. He started at the ride-hailing arm Gojek, building relationships with drivers and merchants and expanding its network across the country. Patuwo then moved to head payments and financial services.

    Among other leadership changes, GoTo said it’s appointing co-founder Andre Soelistyo to the board of commissioners. In Indonesia, company commissioners typically function as a separate body from directors, serving as a sort of steering committee on matters including corporate governance.

    Soelistyo, who headed the company before he was replaced by Walujo, helped carry out the merger of Gojek and e-commerce firm Tokopedia that created Indonesia’s biggest internet company. Previously, he was an executive director at Northstar Group, Walujo’s former private equity firm.

    GoTo shareholders will vote on matters including the leadership shift in an extraordinary general meeting on Dec. 17.

    Olivia Poh, Bloomberg

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  • Grab CEO Anthony Tan suggests drivers could upscale to ‘new kinds of jobs’ as the firm prepares to launch robotaxis next year | Fortune

    Ride-hailing firm Grab will roll-out robobuses in its home city of Singapore in early 2026, building on its large investment in autonomous vehicle technologies.

    Grab co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan made the announcement Tuesday during the company’s quarterly earnings, covering the three months ending Sep. 30.

    “Grab will continue to build new partnerships with more global remote driving and AV leaders, participate in more pilots to understand the operational conditions for different driverless services, and be part of the regulators’ efforts to improve transport connectivity through driverless technologies,” Tan said in prepared remarks. 

    Grab ran a successful pilot of autonomous vehicles in September, rolled out in partnership with WeRide, a Chinese robotaxi operator. Earlier this year, Grab announced it would make a “strategic equity investment” in WeRide, to be completed in the first half of next year. 

    Then, in late October, Grab also invested in U.S.-based May Mobility, another provider of autonomous vehicles. May Mobility started to provide commercial rides on robotaxis in the U.S. earlier this year. 

    In an Q&A with analysts, Tan called the investments part of a “long-term strategy to lead the adoption of AV and remote driving across Southeast Asia.” Yet he admitted that self-driving vehicles may have a steeper hill to climb in the region, due to lower labor costs compared to developed markets like the U.S. or Singapore. “It will require considerable time for the unit economics to reach parity with human drivers.”

    Tan also suggested how Grab might upscale its current human drivers as it explores self-driving vehicles. “We see new kinds of jobs emerging. For example, drivers could be remote safety drivers, data labelers; they could change LiDARs, cameras, and so forth.”

    A bumper quarter

    In its most recent quarter, Grab reported revenue of $873 million, 22% higher than the same period the year before. The tech company reported double-digit growth in all three of its business areas: deliveries, ride-hailing and finance. Ride-hailing revenue grew 17% year-on-year to $317 million, deliveries grew 23% to $465 million, and financial services had the fastest growth at 39% to $90 million. 

    The company also hiked its profits forecast for the full year; it now expects $480 million to $500 million in adjusted EBITDA for 2025. 

    Still, Grab shares fell by 4.7% in U.S. trading on Tuesday, perhaps due to low growth in profit for the current quarter. Grab reported $17 million in net income, just slightly more than the $15 million reported a year ago.

    During the earnings call, Tan also re-affirmed the firm’s commitment to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its workflow, to enhance both “internal efficiencies and external innovation”. Over 98% of Grab’s engineers now use AI to code, which accelerates their development cycles. 

    AI technology has also boosted user experience on its apps, Tan added, with visually impaired users benefitting from its boosted speech recognition abilities, which now recognizes speech across regional accents with a 90% accuracy rate, up from 46%.

    Angelica Ang

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  • DBS CEO Tan Su Shan’s one big lesson for getting through Trump’s tariffs: ‘Diversify’ | Fortune

    DBS CEO Tan Su Shan took on the top job just before an economic storm struck. The veteran of the Singapore-based bank, Southeast Asia’s largest, assumed the role in March, just a few days before U.S. President Donald Trump slapped steep tariffs on much of the world economy. That posed a challenge for DBS, which serves clients across China, Southeast Asia, and India. 

    Her response to an uncertain economy? Diversify. “If you only sell to the U.S., you have to diversify,” Tan said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday.

    Last week, Trump threatened to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese goods by Nov. 1 in retaliation for Beijing’s expanded export controls on rare earth minerals. The U.S. president has also slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil and India, two other major non-Western economies. 

    On Tuesday, Tan suggested that Trump’s broad-based tariffs could be forging new links between these different economies. “China and India, historically, are not that close,” Tan said. “This might actually create more opportunities for Chinese and Indian companies to do more together, certainly on the supply chain.”

    Earlier this year, China and India agreed to resume direct flights, which had been suspended since the COVID pandemic. Relations between the two economies had been cool since deadly border clashes in 2020. 

    “It will take time to build trust [between India and China],” Tan said Tuesday. “But the opportunities are there.”

    CEO: ‘Chief energy officer‘

    Tan is DBS’s first-ever female CEO. She’s also No. 1 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Asia ranking and No. 6 on its global MPW ranking.

    Yet Tan downplayed that accolade on Tuesday. “I don’t know how I feel about the word ‘powerful,’” she noted. “It really is the team that gets stuff done.”

    “It’s my job as a CEO to be the chief energy officer, to give energy to the team and make sure that everyone is headed in the right direction,” she said. 

    Learning from an airline

    On stage, Tan also recalled her early years at DBS. The institution is now Southeast Asia’s most valuable company and winner of countless awards for good digital products and customer service, but when Tan joined DBS in 2010, the bank had a decidedly different reputation. 

    “We were the worst bank,” Tan recalled. “Worst bank for customer service, worst bank for the longest queues, worst bank for product.”

    The bank, led by then-CEO Piyush Gupta, found inspiration in Singapore’s flagship carrier, Singapore Airlines. (Both companies boast Temasek, Singapore’s state investment company, as a major shareholder.)

    “We were all marshaled to Singapore Airlines’s headquarters by the airport and taught how to offer good ‘service quality,’” Tan explained. “Our first learning was: How do you give good service, and how are you respectful, easy to deal with, and dependable?”

    DBS has now grown from a staid government-linked bank to a leader in the country’s banking sector. When Tan joined in 2010, DBS generated 7.1 billion Singapore dollars ($5.5 billion in current exchange rates) in total income. That figure had grown to 22.3 billion Singapore dollars ($17.2 billion) last year. 

    DBS shares are up by almost 35% over the past 12 months; Singapore’s other “Big Three” banks, OCBC and UOB, are up by 11% and 7% respectively. 

    This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

    Nicholas Gordon

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