Singapore Had a New Billionaire for a Few Hours Before Grab Slid

(Bloomberg) — “The stock will go up and it will go down,” said Anthony Tan, co-founder of Grab Holdings Ltd., moments after Nasdaq’s bell-ringing ceremony in Singapore Thursday night, the first such event held in Southeast Asia.

He was right on the money. Grab soared in pre-market trading in New York but after opening at $13.06 the shares tumbled more than 21% on their first day. The stock made its debut after the ride-hailing and delivery company completed its merger with the blank-check firm of Brad Gerstner’s Altimeter Capital Management, the largest deal yet to close for a special purpose acquisition company.

The slide wiped about $17 billion from the market value of the company and meant that Tan’s stake, initially worth more than a billion dollars, ended at $725 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Grab has yet to post a profit, but investors had largely welcomed the transaction, which raised $4.5 billion in gross proceeds. Those include $4 billion in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, marking the biggest U.S. public market debut by a Southeast Asian company. BlackRock Inc. and Fidelity International are among those that joined the PIPE.

The timing for going public though wasn’t optimal. The Covid-19 pandemic has severely hampered ride-hailing businesses, and the omicron variant is causing new limits on travel. Grab’s home country of Singapore banned entry from seven African nations last week, and the government said Thursday it had detected two imported cases of omicron.

It had already been a turbulent year for Grab. Its merger with Altimeter Growth Corp., announced in April, got delayed due to an audit of the past three years’ accounts, sending Altimeter shares for a wild ride. At the same time, the SPAC boom that’s attracted billions of dollars in the past couple of years has shown signs of easing amid increased regulatory scrutiny.

Tan, whose great-grandfather was a taxi driver, was inspired to start Grab while working on his MBA at Harvard Business School more than a decade ago. He gave up his family’s business, one of the biggest auto distributors in Malaysia, and instead started a taxi-hailing service then known as MyTeksi with his Harvard classmate Hooi Ling Tan. The project was later relocated to Singapore after raising money for a regional expansion and was rebranded as Grab in 2016. The company now also does food delivery, online payments and financial services.

Because of Grab’s share-class structure, Anthony Tan has 60.4% voting rights even though he owns just 2.2% of the company. If he fully exercises his stock options, his voting rights will increase to 66.11%, according to a recent filing.

Even with today’s slide, the deal has created considerable wealth for other key executives of the Singaporean company. The holdings of co-founder Hooi Ling Tan and President Ming Maa are now worth $224 million and $126 million, respectively.

But it’s SoftBank Group Corp., which poured about $3 billion into Grab through a series of investments starting in 2014, that has made the most from the listing. Its 18.6% holding is currently worth $6.1 billion. Uber Technologies Inc. and Didi Chuxing Technology Co. have stakes worth $4.7 billion and $2.5 billion, respectively.

While Grab has generated wealth, its loss widened to $988 million in the third quarter from $621 million in the same period last year as revenue declined about 9% to $157 million. The increase in losses was mainly driven by non-cash expenses, and a “significant portion” of such costs should drop after the business combination.

The ongoing pandemic also took a toll on Grab’s operations as demand for mobility services dwindled amid stricter lockdowns in Vietnam and restrictions across the region. Moreover, the company is facing growing competition after its Indonesian rival, Gojek, merged with e-commerce provider PT Tokopedia. GoTo, the combined entity, is preparing for an initial public offering at home and in the U.S. next year.

But Anthony Tan remains confident that things will get better for Grab as more people get vaccinated in the region and opt to pursue the strategy of living with Covid-19.

“We are confident about our business,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “The business is tracking well,” in terms of meeting this year’s target of gross merchandise value of $15 billion to $15.5 billion, he added.