SINGAPORE, 5 AUG 2026 — Grab's second quarter was a record by almost every headline measure. Revenue rose 22 per cent to $997 million, adjusted EBITDA rose 54 per cent to $168 million, and profit for the period reached $235 million, up $215 million on a year earlier.
The segment that produces most of the profit, mobility, became slightly less profitable — a change the company explains in its release.
Two segments, two directions
Grab measures each segment's profitability as adjusted EBITDA against that segment's gross merchandise value — not against revenue. On that measure the two on-demand businesses moved in opposite directions.
| Deliveries | Mobility | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $531m, +21% YoY | $331m, +12% YoY |
| Segment GMV | $4,249m, +24% cc | $2,214m, +18% |
| Segment adj. EBITDA as % of GMV | 2.3% | 8.6% |
| Direction year on year | improved 45 bps from 1.8% | declined 9 bps |
| Transactions | — | +28% YoY |
All figures are Grab's own, from its Q2 2026 results release. Note the denominator: Grab reports segment adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of segment GMV, not of segment revenue. Dividing EBITDA by revenue instead produces much larger numbers that are not comparable to anything the company publishes.
Mobility remains roughly four times as profitable per dollar of GMV as deliveries, and it is the larger contributor to group profit despite being the smaller business by revenue and by volume. But its margin is going backwards, and deliveries' is improving.
The choice of denominator matters. Dividing mobility's profit by its revenue, rather than GMV, would yield a margin near 58 per cent — making it look like one of the world's most profitable transport businesses. It is not. Revenue is what Grab keeps; GMV is what passes through the platform. The company reports against GMV because that is the base its economics scale with, and any comparison that quietly switches denominators will flatter it several times over.
Why mobility's margin slipped
Grab does not bury the explanation. Mobility transactions grew 28 per cent while mobility GMV grew 18 and revenue grew 12 — volume rising faster than value, and value faster than what Grab collects.
The release attributes this to two deliberate choices: enhancing affordability, and recalibrating driver incentives to strengthen supply. It also records committing over $7 million during the quarter to support on-demand driver earnings amid what it calls the ongoing fuel crisis.
The company accepted the margin decline, and the nine basis points it cost is small against the 28 per cent transaction growth it accompanied. Average monthly active driver-partners grew 19 per cent to an all-time high. Cutting prices to riders while raising support for drivers is a classic use of margin to secure both sides of a market, and a defensible one in a strong quarter.
Financial services is the number that changed most
The lending business is where the year-on-year comparisons stop being incremental.
The loan book tripled in twelve months. That growth is the clearest evidence that the financial-services arm is now a lender, not just a wallet, but it also means credit quality now matters more than growth. A portfolio that has gone from $781 million to $2.3 billion in a year has not been through a full cycle, and disbursement is still accelerating.
Grab attributes the revenue growth partly to consolidating Superbank in June. We reported on Grab taking majority control of the Indonesian digital bank; this is the quarter in which that shows up in the accounts.
What the profit figure includes
The $215 million year-on-year jump in profit, to $235 million, is much larger than the 54 per cent rise in adjusted EBITDA, and the two measures are not describing the same thing.
Adjusted EBITDA excludes one-off items by construction. Bottom-line profit does not, and consolidating a bank in June is exactly the kind of event that produces a one-time accounting gain. Anyone comparing this quarter's profit growth with previous quarters should establish how much of the $215 million improvement is operating and how much is the consolidation before drawing a trend from it.
The adjusted EBITDA margin move, from 13.3 per cent to 16.9, is the cleaner signal because one-time gains cannot affect it.
The guidance, and what it assumes
Grab raised full-year expectations on both revenue and adjusted EBITDA, and authorised a further round of share buybacks.
The chief financial officer, Peter Oey, attached a qualification to the raise that is worth reading carefully. He described it as reflecting "the strength of our underlying business alongside the consolidation of Superbank and the acquisition of Stash".
That is the company saying, in its own release, that the higher guidance is not purely organic. Part of it is arithmetic: consolidating a bank and acquiring a business adds revenue that was not in the previous forecast, without anything improving operationally. The word alongside is doing the work, and it is a more candid formulation than most raises get.
Group chief executive Anthony Tan led on users and on what he called the Grab intelligence layer, which he said is "now embedded across every layer of our platform, lifting driver and merchant-partner earnings, while improving our operating efficiency". The efficiency claim is consistent with the margin move; the release does not quantify the intelligence layer's contribution separately, so there is no way to test how much of the improvement it accounts for.
The balance sheet behind the buyback
Net cash liquidity stood at $5.4 billion at 30 June, up from $5.0 billion at the end of the prior quarter, and adjusted free cash flow over the trailing twelve months was $450 million. Grab also says that as of July it had fully executed its accelerated share repurchase agreement and contingent forward.
A company adding to its cash position while completing one buyback and authorising another is not stretching to return capital. That is the context in which the new authorisation should be read: it is funded out of a growing surplus rather than out of the operating improvement the quarter is being reported for.
Guiding EBITDA to grow at roughly twice the rate of revenue says the operating leverage visible this quarter is expected to hold. The composition question sits underneath it. If the highest-margin segment is the one whose margin is drifting down while it spends on affordability and driver supply, then group margin expansion has to come from deliveries continuing to improve and from financial services approaching breakeven.
The mobility decline can be read a second way. A platform that lowers prices and raises driver support during a fuel crisis is protecting supply at the moment supply is most expensive to keep. If fuel costs normalise, some of those nine basis points come back without the company doing anything. If they do not, the spend becomes structural. Nothing in the release says which the company expects, and the guidance implies it does not think the drag gets worse.
Both were happening this quarter. Deliveries improved 45 basis points on GMV, and financial services revenue grew faster than either on-demand business. Whether they keep doing so at the rate the guidance implies is the thing to watch, and a $750 million buyback alongside it says the company is confident enough to return capital rather than hold it.
