KEY POINTS
- Grab plans to pay US$1.5 billion for an initial 60% stake in Atome Financial, as it accelerates its expansion into digital lending across Southeast Asia.
- The company has raised its 2028 adjusted EBITDA target to US$1.7 billion, including US$500 million from financial services, but the first phase of the Atome deal is not expected to close until late 2027.
- Grab shares were down 56.6% from their September 2025 peak as of Sept. 16, while analysts debate whether its acquisitions and improving financial performance can translate into stronger returns.
Grab has a slightly strange problem.
The business appears to be getting stronger. Revenue is growing, profitability is improving and management has raised its longer-term earnings targets.
Its share price has been heading in the other direction.
Grab shares closed at US$2.87 on September 16, according to The Business Times, down 56.6% from their September 2025 peak of US$6.62.
So what is the market worried about?
One answer may be what Grab is doing with all that cash.
The Shopping Spree
Grab has been acquiring businesses as it expands beyond its original ride-hailing and delivery operations.
Its latest move is a particularly big one.
Grab plans to pay US$1.5 billion in cash for an initial 60% of Atome Financial, the regional buy-now-pay-later business.
The deal immediately gives Grab access to Atome’s 25 million cumulative users, 30,000 merchant partners and US$1 billion gross loan portfolio.
There is a clear strategic argument for doing this.
The Business Times reported Macquarie analyst Zhiwei Foo’s view that building equivalent underwriting capabilities internally would require considerably more time and capital.
Citi analyst Alicia Yap also pointed to the potential for Atome to strengthen Grab’s data ecosystem and increase transaction values in areas such as retail and groceries.
In other words, Grab is paying to get bigger in financial services much faster than it could by building everything itself.
The catch? The payoff could take time.
Buy Now, Profit Later?
The first phase of the Atome acquisition is targeted to close only in the third quarter of 2027.
Grab would then acquire the remaining 40% roughly two years later, subject to regulatory approvals, under a performance-linked valuation framework.
That means Grab is committing significant capital today to a business whose full contribution may not become apparent for several years.
Grab certainly thinks the opportunity is substantial.
Following the Atome announcement, it raised its 2028 adjusted EBITDA target from US$1.5 billion to US$1.7 billion.
It also introduced a US$500 million adjusted EBITDA target for financial services and said gross loans could exceed US$6 billion.
The Business Times reported that Grab is projecting financial-services revenue growth of more than 30% a year through 2028.
Those are ambitious numbers.
Now Grab has to deliver them.
And Then There Are Buybacks
Acquisitions aren’t the only place Grab is putting its cash.
The company also announced an accelerated US$900 million share repurchase programme. If completed, The Business Times says Grab’s total repurchases since 2024 would reach US$1.75 billion.
Grab isn’t short of money.
It had gross cash liquidity of US$7.4 billion and net cash liquidity of US$5.4 billion as at June 30.
But this is where the investment story becomes more complicated.
Grab is simultaneously using its balance sheet to acquire businesses and buy back shares.
Angel investor Der Shing Lim highlighted this tension in a recent LinkedIn post, arguing that the amount of cash being deployed on acquisitions and buybacks has contributed to investor nervousness despite stronger operating performance.
It is his interpretation rather than an established explanation for the share-price decline, but it points to a bigger question:
What produces the best return from Grab’s cash?
The Market Wants Proof
The analysts quoted by The Business Times were broadly positive about the strategic rationale for Atome, but that doesn’t mean they agree on what Grab is worth.
The Simply Wall St analysis supplied to CRAAK shows analyst price targets ranging from US$4.90 to US$6.25.
Even more interesting is what happened to Simply Wall St’s own fair-value model.
Its estimate fell from US$5.97 to US$5.82 despite increasing its assumed revenue growth from 19.98% to 22.78% and its assumed net profit margin from 15.7% to 16.4%.
Why?
Among the changes, the model reduced the future price-to-earnings multiple it applies to Grab from 32.37 times to 26.46 times and slightly increased its discount rate.
That US$5.82 figure isn’t a prediction of where Grab shares will go. It is the output of Simply Wall St’s valuation assumptions.
But the changes illustrate something important.
A company can grow faster and become more profitable without automatically becoming more valuable under a particular valuation model.
What investors are willing to pay for those future profits matters too.
The Toyota Question
There is another factor behind the share-price weakness.
Macquarie attributed Grab’s recent softness to Toyota Motor selling its entire roughly 5% stake, rather than deterioration in Grab’s underlying operations, according to The Business Times.
That potentially created a large amount of stock for the market to absorb.
Der Shing Lim made a similar observation in his analysis, noting that Toyota had been an investor in Grab since before its public listing.
If that selling pressure has ended, attention can turn back to the business itself.
And that’s where the next few years become interesting.
What To Watch
Grab’s Atome acquisition isn’t really a story about whether buy-now-pay-later is good or bad.
It’s a test of capital allocation.
Grab already has the customers, data, merchants and ecosystem. Atome potentially gives it a much larger lending operation.
The strategy is straightforward enough: combine them and build a much bigger financial-services business.
The difficult part is execution.
Can Grab integrate Atome successfully? Can it grow lending without compromising credit quality? Can financial services reach the US$500 million adjusted EBITDA target? And can all that happen quickly enough to justify the capital being deployed?
Grab has gone shopping.
Now investors get to see what it brings home.
Sources: Reuters Breakingviews, Grab’s wild shopping spree takes sensible turn (16 Sep 2026); The Business Times, Analysts back Grab’s Atome buy, even if earnings boost takes time to arrive (17 Sep 2026); Simply Wall St, Grab (GRAB) Stock Fair Value Edges Lower As Analysts Split On Superbank And Atome (20 Sep 2026); commentary by Der Shing Lim, AngelCentral.
CRAAK Originals are for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any investment.