Gojek and Grab Holdings Inc have been battling it out for years in the brutal business of ride hailing and food delivery. They’ve burned billions of dollars in venture-capital money (thanks, SoftBank!), and created hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout South-East Asia in the process.
Yet talk to executives at either company and they’ll tell you that the real future of their businesses isn’t shuffling people, food and goods across the disparate lands of South-East Asia. The big opportunity – read, profit – will come from all the other services they can tack on, such as payments, loans, ticket sales, supply-chain management, and advertising.