Good day, everyone, and welcome to Grab's third quarter 2021 earnings webcast. My name is Purvi Kamdar, Global Head of Investor Relations at Grab. Joining me today are Anthony Tan, Chief Executive Officer, Ming Maa, President, and Peter Oey, Chief Financial Officer. During the call today, Anthony will discuss our key business updates, Peter will share detailed insights with you on our third quarter results, and Ming will highlight some of our strategic and ESG initiatives from the quarter. As a reminder before we begin, today's discussion contains forward-looking statements about the company's future business and financial performance. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events and results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our Form F-4 registration statement and other filings with the SEC.
The discussion today also contains operating metrics and non-IFRS financial measures. The comparable IFRS financial measures are included in this quarter's earnings materials. For more information, please refer to our earnings release presentation, which can be found on our IR website. Should you have any questions after this webcast, please reach out to investor.relations@grab.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Anthony to deliver opening remarks.
Thanks, Purvi, and good day, everyone. Thank you for joining us today on our Q3 2021 earnings call. Before diving into our Q3 results, allow me to recap our top business priorities. We're focused on winning the hearts and minds of more users across the region through hyperlocal services, better user experiences, and better service levels. This will further strengthen Grab's category leadership across our key markets. We'll also continue to invest in the growth of our key business segments. We see tremendous headroom for growth in market penetration and total addressable market across our key segments. We're beginning to see early signs of mobility recovery in Q4 and are preparing to catch what we believe will be a wave of mobility recovery amidst an endemic-type environment. Finally, we continue to invest, innovate, and invent to reduce our cost to serve.
This will help us build scale, spin our flywheel even faster, and ultimately accelerate the expansion of our ecosystem. We're progressing well on all three of these priorities and making good progress on our mission to drive economic empowerment all across Southeast Asia in a long-term and sustainable way. In our Q2 update, we discussed the initial impact that COVID's Delta variant had on the region and previewed a challenging environment going into Q3. Now, as the pandemic intensified throughout Q3, we saw several governments in Southeast Asia ratchet up COVID-related restrictions, both in terms of severity and duration. Now, all eight markets in which we operate were affected, with six of them experiencing tighter controls. Vietnam in particular implemented stricter measures than most other markets, with the government strictly controlling ride hailing and food delivery operations.
Nonetheless, thanks to the resilience of our super app strategy, we delivered another record set of top-line results in Q3. GMV grew 32% year-over-year to reach $4 billion for the quarter, a record high for Grab. This was primarily driven by strong growth in our delivery segment, with deliveries GMV growing by 63% year-over-year to $2.3 billion. These results demonstrate how our business model enabled us to drive continued and strong growth, even against the backdrop of a highly volatile environment. In Q3, we experienced a further decline in mobility demand as a result of tighter lockdowns. However, strong execution in our delivery segment drove overall GMV growth and more than offset the decline in mobility GMV. In addition to strong GMV growth, the unit economics of the deliveries business improved year-over-year.
The region reached the height of lockdowns in August. Since then, we have seen a gradual easing of restrictions towards the tail end of the third quarter and into Q4. Southeast Asian markets have been amongst the last globally to abandon a zero-COVID policy. Borders are gradually reopening, domestic travel is picking up, and public spaces are cautiously resuming activities. This is all possible because of the growing vaccination rates across the region. We are optimistic about the road ahead in the coming quarters, with recovery of our mobility business in sight. Meanwhile, the super app will continue to be supported by our growing segments in deliveries, financial services, and enterprise. Our record GMV was achieved in spite of our operations in Vietnam being significantly impeded by severe government lockdown measures. These measures constrained where our driver partners could go and were often introduced with extremely short notice.
As you can see on this slide, mobility GMV was at or close to zero for the majority of the third quarter. This inevitably placed a strain on our operating performance. Thankfully, since the government eased restrictions in October, we've seen a sharp and rapid bounce back in mobility GMV. This rapid recovery reinforces our confidence in the resilience of our ride-hailing business in Vietnam and more broadly across the region. Monthly transacting users or MTUs were also impacted in Q3 by the movement restrictions which constrained operations in Vietnam. MTUs declined to 22.1 million versus 23.9 million in Q3 of last year. If we were to normalize MTUs in Vietnam, MTUs would have grown to 24.8 million in Q3 this year. This represents an increase year-over-year and a slight increase quarter-over-quarter in spite of broader weakness in the overall mobility segment.
We expect MTUs to gradually recover in the coming quarters as economies reopen. As I shared at the start of my presentation, winning the hearts and minds of more users across the region is one of our top three business priorities. Looking ahead into Q4, we're seeing Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam recover rapidly on the back of easing COVID restrictions. In the first 4 weeks of Q4, mobility GMV at group level increased by 26% compared to the first 4 weeks of Q3. At a country level, GMV recovery in Malaysia and Indonesia has been notably strong as well, growing 106% and 109% respectively in the same time period.
These strong rebounds in our mobility business on the back of easing COVID restrictions indicate that progressive region-wide reopenings in the weeks and months ahead will provide strong tailwinds to our mobility and financial services businesses. Grab is also well-positioned to benefit from a return to normalcy as economies in Southeast Asia reopen with vaccination rates improving. As of the end of October, vaccination rates in most of these countries had already exceeded where we anticipated vaccination rates to be by year-end. Since August, vaccination rates in countries such as Indonesia and Thailand have nearly doubled. In Vietnam, these rates have increased by nearly four times. Governments across the region have done a phenomenal job trying to get the region back on its feet again as quickly as possible.
On the back of this, governments across the region are beginning to ease domestic movement restrictions and gradually opening their borders to international and inbound travelers. As vaccination rates in Southeast Asia climb up, we remain cautiously optimistic on our outlook for the region. We believe governments will continue to reopen economies, albeit in a measured way as we head into 2022. Before I hand it over to Peter to walk you through our Q3 financial results, I'm pleased to announce that we will be strengthening our leadership team with the addition of Alex Hungate, our incoming Chief Operating Officer. Alex comes with over 25 years of global leadership experience in our related industries of financial services, logistics, and food services. Most recently, he served as the president and CEO of SATS, a Singapore-listed aviation services company.
Prior to that, he was the CEO of HSBC Singapore and also served in various leadership roles at Reuters. From January 2022, Alex will lead our mobility, deliveries, and financial services businesses, as well as our marketing, Grab support, and Indonesia Public Affairs functions. I'm confident he'll be a solid addition to our team as we embark on a new chapter in our journey as a public company. Now, our CFO, Peter, will share more on our third quarter 2021 results. Over to you, Peter.
Thanks, Anthony. I'm pleased to report a strong set of third quarter results in spite of the challenges we faced in the quarter. There are two main takeaways from our Q3 results. Another record quarter for GMV, TPV, gross billings, and GMV per MTU, led by deliveries. Secondly, we saw improved margins year-over-year across our mobility and deliveries business segments. Now, before I get into the numbers, as we continue to refine our disclosures in preparation for public listing, we have revised the reported operating metrics to be consistent with the amended registration statement with the SEC. These metrics include GMV per MTU, gross billings, and incentives, split by partner and consumer incentives. These are detailed in the appendix of this presentation. Now, let's go through the Q3 numbers. We achieved another record quarter in terms of GMV, gross billings, and GMV per MTU.
We experienced strong GMV growth of 32% year-over-year, despite the COVID impact to the mobility business in Q3, to reach a record $4 billion of GMV, which is a new record for Grab. This was driven by strong year-over-year performance across deliveries and our enterprise and new initiatives segment. Our GMV per monthly transacting user increased by 43% year-over-year as we continue to deepen engagement with users across our super app ecosystem. Correspondingly, our gross billings grew by 41% year-over-year to reach $616 million. Despite a challenging third quarter for our mobility business as a result of the renewed lockdowns across Southeast Asia, we delivered strong top line growth on a consolidated basis. Our diversified business has cushioned the impact of COVID on our top line, and we continued to remain resilient amidst lockdowns.
From a bottom line perspective, our adjusted EBITDA was negatively impacted by the mobility segment due to the lockdowns. Our total segment adjusted EBITDA was $33 million loss, declined by $43 million from the prior year, driven by the lower contributions from our mobility business. Our group adjusted EBITDA was a $212 million loss for the quarter, representing a decline of $85 million year-over-year, mainly due to increased investments in regional corporate costs as we continue to double down on technology and product investments for the future. Now despite the decline in total segment adjusted EBITDA on an absolute dollar basis, the margins on a segment level basis and the partner and consumer incentives as a percentage of GMV remain relatively stable as compared to the prior quarter, which I'll discuss in more detail in each of the segment updates.
As mobility recovers, we expect EBITDA trends to gradually improve moving forward. The next slide provides more color on the reconciliation of total segment adjusted EBITDA to the accounting net loss for the period. In this quarter, we generated a net loss of $988 million, which included regional corporate costs of $179 million and other income and expense of totaling $775 million. Regional corporate costs in the third quarter increased year-over-year on an absolute basis, but has declined as a percentage of GMV.
A large portion of the other income and expenses line are non-cash expenses, which include the following, $472 million related to the interest expense, of which $443 million is Grab's convertible redeemable preference shares, which we will no longer incur post the effectiveness of our business combination with Altimeter Growth Corp. $217 million of other income and expenses, which primarily consist of stock-based compensation and fair value losses on investments. Finally, $86 million in depreciation and amortization costs. The increase in net loss during the third quarter was driven primarily by non-cash expenses, of which a significant portion is expected to cease after our business combination. This next slide summarizes our key IFRS financials. Revenue for the quarter was $157 million, and our net losses was $988 million.
The decline in revenues from $172 million in the prior year period to $157 million was driven primarily by the decline in our mobility business mix. The increase in net loss from $621 million in the prior year period to $988 million was mainly due to an increase in non-cash items, which I just referred to earlier. As of the end of September 2021, Grab maintained a strong balance sheet of $5.2 billion of cash liquidity, an increase of $1.5 billion from $3.7 billion as of the fourth quarter of 2020. This increase in cash includes proceeds from the Term Loan B facility of $2 billion. We expect to further strengthen our cash liquidity and balance sheet upon the completion of our business combination with Altimeter Growth Corp, upon which we expect to receive an additional $4.5 billion in cash proceeds. I'll now dive deeper into each segment.
Let's start with deliveries. Our delivery segment continues to grow strongly. We generated GMV of $2.3 billion in the third quarter. This represents a strong 63% year-over-year improvement, underpinned by an increase in order frequency and higher average order values. Gross billings also grew strongly and increased by 74% year-over-year to $422 million. Revenue for deliveries was $49 million, which increased 58% year-over-year. Segment adjusted EBITDA for deliveries was near breakeven at $22 million loss for the quarter, which was a negative 0.9% as a percentage of deliveries GMV, an improvement compared to the negative 1.6% in Q3 2020. As a percentage of GMV, this has improved relative to the prior quarter, primarily due to the strengthening take rates, while incentives as a percentage of GMV remain relatively consistent.
Our deliveries margins remain stable despite an increasingly intense competitive environment. Overall, we are pleased with the growth in deliveries and continue to observe very strong trends in this segment. Now, within deliveries, we saw another stellar performance this quarter in the growth of GrabMart. GrabMart's GMV for the third quarter 2021 increased by nearly four times as compared to the prior year period and increased 78% from the prior quarter. We recently launched GrabSupermarket in Thailand, bringing total coverage of GrabSupermarket to now four of our key markets. Demand for GrabMart increased, and we continue to scale up our merchant selection across the various markets. The continuous success of GrabMart gives us the confidence that groceries will be one of our key growth levers as we will continue to invest in this segment. I think moving on to an update on the mobility segment.
We experienced subsequent waves of lockdowns across Southeast Asia during the third quarter, most notably in Vietnam. We generated GMV of $529 million, a decrease of 30% compared to Q3 2020. Gross billings declined by 22% year-over-year to reach $126 million. Revenues declined by 26% year-over-year to $88 million. Mobility adjusted EBITDA declined to $64 million, a 26% decrease compared to Q3 2020. However, margins as a percentage of GMV improved from 11.4% in the prior year period to 12% this quarter, driven by continued cost optimizations. While our performance for the mobility segment was undoubtedly impacted this quarter, we remain confident in the recovery trajectory as vaccination rates continue to improve and as economies start to reopen in Southeast Asia.
As you heard from Anthony, we are beginning to see a sharp bounce back in mobility GMV as countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia begin to ease restrictions at the start of the fourth quarter. In our financial services segment, we are seeing acceleration of growth in our top line despite the COVID impact on mobility TPV. We achieved our highest quarterly TPV of $3.1 billion in the third quarter and grew pre-Interco TPV by year-over-year rate of 44%. TPV grew in both on-Grab and off-Grab use cases, with on-Grab growth driven by strong performance in deliveries transaction.
For on-Grab TPV, penetration rates of GrabPay used to pay for Grab's mobility and deliveries transactions increased to approximately 70% versus 59% a year ago as a result of our proactive investments in the financial service offerings to drive cashless payments amongst our user base. Gross billings for our financial services segment grew by 17% year-over-year to $28 million, and revenues increased by 11% year-over-year to $14 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter declined to a $76 million loss from a $58 million loss in the prior year, while margins as a percentage of TPV improved from a negative 2.7% to negative 2.4%. We remain highly encouraged in the development of financial services as evidenced in the increasing penetration of our digital wallet for on-Grab services.
We continue to see a tremendous amount of headroom to grow penetration rates for financial services in this region, especially as the economies reopen, which we expect to drive further growth in on-Grab and off-Grab services. Finally, looking at the enterprise and new initiatives segment, GMV and gross billings both grew by nearly 4 times year-over-year to reach $41 million and $39 million respectively. Growth was driven by strong demand in our advertising offerings. We continued to focus on providing merchants with affordable self-serve advertising solutions through the GrabMerchant superapp, empowering them to reach more users and drive greater sales.
Revenue declined by 37% to $7 million, and segment adjusted EBITDA declined to $1 million in the third quarter, down 84% from $5 million in the prior year period, as we continue to reinvest in the business to increase our reach to more merchant partners. Finally, I also want to provide a brief update on our public listing process. We filed our initial registration statement on Form F-4 with the U.S. SEC on the second of August, and amended registration statements also on the thirteenth of September and on the eighteenth of October. We are in active communication with the SEC, and we expect to file another amended F-4 very soon. We will provide a further update to the market when our F-4 is declared effective.
Now, shortly after this, Altimeter Growth Corp will issue an extraordinary general meeting notice to its shareholders, and we will do the same to our shareholders, aiming to hold the EGMs as soon as practicable after Form F-4 effectiveness. Subject to obtaining approval at the EGMs, we will then be in the position to proceed to close the business combination with Altimeter Growth Corp and be publicly listed within a few days. To sum up the results from the quarter, we reported strong performance despite the tough operating environment, and we remain on track with our public listing process plans. With that, I will pass the time to Ming to cover our strategy updates. Over to you, Ming.
Thank you, Peter. Over the next few slides, I'll provide some color behind the numbers that Peter just shared, and give you an update on some of the key growth initiatives in our deliveries and financial services segments. We'll end with an update on our ESG work. In deliveries, Peter talked about our GMV growth of 63% year-over-year. This was driven by an increase in order frequency and average order values. We think this is just the beginning for us. We see a large opportunity across both online and offline demand for prepared meals and groceries, and our strategy is to be the go-to platform for anything that our consumers want to eat. At the top of the page, we started by focusing on our core business of restaurant deliveries, and there continues to be a large headroom for growth in this particular segment.
With penetration rates in Southeast Asia, that's approximately half of what you see in more mature markets like the U.S. and China. As we expanded our food delivery business, we launched dark kitchens to fill in certain gaps in the market to better serve areas where restaurant densities are low relative to consumer demand. We now have 68 dark kitchens in our network. It's the largest footprint in Southeast Asia, and we've also taken advantage of that footprint to start private label brands to capture opportunities that we see from the data that we're now collecting. Now, as cities start to reopen, we see dine-in and takeaway as a natural extension of our food delivery model. By offering dine-in ordering and takeaway options, we're giving consumers a lot more options.
At the same time, we're opening up a largely untapped addressable market of $171 billion by 2025 according to Euromonitor. Last but not least, our consumers sometimes prefer to cook at home or just want something to snack on, and we're addressing this part of the market through GrabMart and GrabSupermarket. Still very early days for us, but the market opportunity is extremely large. Penetration rates remain low at 1% compared to penetration rates in more mature markets of between 14%-18%. Now, stepping back, we'll continue to allocate our investments and our resources to build the largest, most reliable, and most cost-efficient on-demand delivery network, so when our consumers are hungry for anything, whether it's a restaurant meal, a home-cooked dinner, or just something to snack on, we want them to immediately think of Grab.
Next, we'd like to give an update on OVO, our financial services business in Indonesia. Now, as many of you know, OVO is the leading digital wallet in Indonesia based on 2020 TPV according to Euromonitor. We were also named as the most often used digital wallet according to a recent Kadence International survey just this year. A key driver to OVO's success has been its strategy to develop an open ecosystem from day one. This means providing the digital rails to support all platforms, not just the few, because we believe that being an open ecosystem is the best way to drive long-term consumer adoption. Today, OVO provides the payment rails for many e-commerce providers, including Tokopedia, Lazada, and Bukalapak. This quarter, we made a strategic decision to increase our ownership in OVO because we're confident in the business.
We're confident in the potential for OVO to be the most widely accepted online payments platform, and we're confident that OVO can accelerate our super app flywheel even faster. Now, if we transition to our ESG updates, we recently announced a partnership with Mastercard to provide our community of drivers and SMEs with access to digital upskilling and training opportunities. The goal of this partnership is to give underserved communities access to digital, financial, and business skills to help them better manage their personal finances and their personal businesses. We're rolling out training programs on topics including financial literacy and small business training. We're also rolling out digital upskilling courses, including a 10-week cybersecurity certification program.
Now, last year, in 2020 alone, over 1.7 million driver partners took part in our training programs, and we're expecting our partnership with Mastercard will help us further expand this figure and reinforce our commitment to driver welfare and our double bottom line. Finally, we've also created a nonprofit think tank called Tech for Good Institute. The goal of this think tank is to facilitate thought leadership across the entire region, improve policy design and decisions, and work with regulators and other stakeholders to address a number of key issues facing the digital economy across Southeast Asia. Our hope is that the Tech for Good Institute will bring together governments, regulators, and companies like Grab to improve the future of Southeast Asia through technology and, in the process, help us advocate for our mission to drive economic empowerment.
Now, before we close today's update, let me recap the key highlights from our third quarter results. Overall, we're pleased with our strong performance this quarter and are optimistic about the recovery that's ahead of us. We'll continue to focus on winning the hearts and minds of our users, drivers, and merchant partners by delivering best-in-class services that are hyperlocal and relevant. We'll continue to invest into the growth of our key business segments. These are very large market opportunities that will continue to drive growth in our core businesses. Finally, we'll continue to reduce our cost to serve as we accelerate the growth of our super app ecosystem. Thank you very much for your time today. A special thanks to our consumers, partners, and Grabbers, without which none of this would have been possible.
To find out more about Grab, please visit our investor relations website or feel free to reach out to anyone on our team. We welcome you to join us in driving Southeast Asia forward. Thank you.