Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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KUALA LUMPUR (April 22): Grab Malaysia is shifting its focus to empower Malaysia’s small traditional businesses embrace and thrive within the digital economy to establish a sustainable economic ecosystem, as the nation contends with the Covid-19 pandemic and Movement Control Order (MCO).

In a statement today, Grab Malaysia country head Sean Goh said that considering the circumstances as a result of Covid-19 and the MCO, it is imperative for the nation to adapt and innovate to establish a sustainable economic ecosystem. Hence, Grab Malaysia decided to focus on helping its community of merchants thrive by growing their demand and, in doing so, creating income for thousands of delivery partners, Goh said.

“Covid-19 has taught us the importance of being adaptable and to embrace change. Therefore, we hope to continue working with the government on more sustainable efforts to make the digital economy a more viable contributing pillar in our nation’s economy.

“We saw very encouraging results from our measures to protect our merchants, drivers and delivery partners’ livelihoods during this financially turbulent time. Therefore, our partnerships with local governments and organisations will give us a larger stage to accelerate our support for small, traditional businesses and micro-entrepreneurs. We hope to help them, not only to serve the millions of Grab users, but also to leverage on our platform to serve their regular customers conveniently and efficiently,” he said.

According to Grab Malaysia’s statement, the combined impact from efforts like Grab’s Small-Biz Relief programme and the Local Heroes campaign has seen encouraging results on two fronts. 

Grab Malaysia said there are 30% more small, independent restaurants and hawkers that opened their doors to deliver food and a 25% increase in orders as a result of positive response from customers rallying around their neighbourhood local favourites.

Malaysia’s MCO, which was initially scheduled between March 18 and 31 this year, requires non-essential businesses to stop operations, while the public has been ordered to stay at home to curb the Covid-19 outbreak.

On March 25, Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said the government decided to extend the MCO until April 14, because updates from the National Security Council and Health Ministry indicated an increase in Covid-19 cases.

On April 10, Muhyiddin said the government was extending the MCO until April 28.

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