On Tuesday, shortly after Grab unveiled its third-quarter numbers, the Southeast Asian tech giant’s top brass took to LinkedIn in celebration.
President and COO Alex Hungate penned a message calling the quarter “record-setting,” crediting the team’s “incredible momentum.” CFO Peter Oey’s social media team added a fun twist, posting a video of him delivering an AI-generated poem celebrating Grab’s Q3 performance. “With the great momentum and rhythm we had in our Q3 2025 performance, a poetic delivery seemed fitting,” Oey said.
This wasn’t the first time Grab beat its own records, nor the first time it turned a profit. But it marked another milestone: after years of cash burn, Grab has firmly moved past survival mode to sustain a steady rhythm of profitability.
Grab reported a record revenue of $873 million during the period, a 22% increase from a year earlier and more than a five-fold growth compared with the same quarter four years ago, the year it listed.
Net profit came in at $17 million in Q3, a 13.3% growth over the same three-month period in 2024 and a striking contrast to where the company stood just four years ago. In the third quarter of 2021, Grab recorded a net loss of almost a billion dollars in a span of three months.
From cash burn to cash cushion
After establishing a strong profitability trend, Grab’s third-quarter results told another story: one of improving liquidity. Free cash flow and cash reserves followed earnings growth, which executives said reflects the strength and sustainability of the company’s fundamentals.
“We maintain our expectation to drive a full year of adjusted free cash flow expansion,” Oey said in the earnings call.
Grab recorded a free cash flow of $203 million in the third quarter, its highest to date and the second consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow. On a trailing 12-month basis, free cash flow reached $283 million, up $185 million from a year ago.
Grab’s gross cash liquidity, which includes cash on hand, deposits, marketable securities, and restricted cash, stood at $7.4 billion at the end of the third quarter, slightly down from $7.6 billion in the previous quarter but up from $6.1 billion a year earlier. Net cash liquidity, which factors in loans and borrowings, came in at $5.3 billion compared with $5.7 billion in the prior quarter.
Improving free cash flow gives Grab breathing room, a luxury it didn’t have in its cash-burning years. With operations now generating excess cash, the company can fund expansion and new endeavours from its own pocket, instead of relying on investors or debt.
How Grab plans to spend
In its earlier years, Grab’s guiding principle for capital allocation was prudence, a necessity when every dollar counted with no extra money to spend. Now, with a growing cash pile, the company looks to still keep a careful hand, showing that even in a stronger financial position, it’s choosing caution over aggressive spending.
“Grab has not made any large acquisitions yet, despite rumours about Goto earlier this year. We think this implies that they are still being prudent with their capital and will likely stay the course with their capital allocation discipline,” Kai Wang, Asia Equity Market Strategist at Morningstar, told DealStreetAsia.
Aside from stake acquisitions in food players earlier this year, including Cambodian delivery platform Nham24 and East Malaysia’s Everrise, Grab is placing bigger bets on autonomous vehicles (AVs), viewing them as a long-term growth pillar.
Just last month, Grab announced a multi-year partnership with May Mobility—a leading AV technology company. The partnership includes a strategic investment by Grab in the AV firm to back its expansion beyond the US and Japan.
This followed a strategic equity investment in WeRide by Grab in August this year. WeRide is a global autonomous driving technology firm, aiming to accelerate the deployment and commercialisation of robotaxis and shuttles in Southeast Asia.
Both partnerships are intended to integrate AV technology into Grab’s network, enhancing service quality and safety.
“We have been investing in some of the longer-term bets we are looking at such as autonomous vehicles, and we have deployed capital in making those critical investments,” Oey said in the earnings call. “These make sure that we are the pioneers in terms of autonomous vehicles here in Southeast Asia, but overall, as a framework, M&A is a very high bar for us,” he added.
The CFO also said Grab has been actively using its capital to deploy loans for its financial services arm.
Loan disbursements in Q3 grew 56% from its year-ago level to $886 million. The company expects the loan portfolio to exceed $1 billion by the end of the year. “This is a great use of capital for us, generating returns above our average cost of capital, and we will continue to recycle these loans through the balance sheet,” Oey said.
Playing the long game
Amid its broader capital allocation, financial services remains the only one of Grab’s three main business segments yet to turn a profit, though executives expect it to reach profitability by mid-2026.
“We view financial services as a meaningful driver of Grab’s revenue growth, but it has not yet generated positive profit,” Morningstar’s Wang told this publication. “While we see no immediate credit risk, we are monitoring the portfolio closely, given the potentially higher credit risk in Southeast Asia, which could affect future profitability.”
For its Grab autonomous vehicle strategy, however, Grab acknowledges it will take a significant amount of time before this becomes a viable business.
CEO Anthony Tan noted that while their AV investments are deliberate, adoption in Southeast Asia is expected to be gradual. “Labour costs in Southeast Asia remain significantly lower than in the US, and Singapore is still a small subset,” Tan said. “It will take considerable time for unit economics to reach parity with human drivers.”
“With a strong balance sheet in place, we will continue to maintain a prudent stance on capital allocation and execute according to our framework, prioritising investments in areas of profitable growth while growing our adjusted free cash flow,” Oey said.
