Apples to Apples: Benchmarking Shopee, Grab, GoTo and other major tech platforms

As platform companies – the likes of Grab, GoTo, Sea Group, DeliveryHero, Uber, DoorDash, and Meituan – became new additions to the public equity market, we now often see, in headlines or in chatter, mentions of the quarter results of platform companies. “Company A has widened their loss” or “Platform B has doubled its users while improving on profitability”, for example. 

That was the driver for Momentum Academy to produce our latest report “Apples to Apples: Benchmarking Shopee, Grab, GoTo and other major tech platforms” 

Launching today, this report seeks not to prove which platform company is better (or worse) than its peers, but rather to put the differences in reporting key metrics in a clear, comprehensive and comparable way such that you can draw your own conclusions in an informed manner.

Some key insights in the report:

1. Differences in Total Payment Volume (TPV) depends on the breakdown of the businesses 

2. Platforms report user numbers with different definitions and across different time spans. There are some ways to make sense of these.

3. Cash is important

The measurement of cash, an indication of how long (and how flexibly) the platform is able to pursue further growth especially in the currently challenging capital environment, can be vastly different and challenging to compare in an apples to apples way.

4. A forecast of how platforms net cash liquidity will evolve over the next years