Online food ordering market in Vietnam heats up

Online food ordering market in Vietnam heats up

At a big event organized by Go-Viet on December 31, Go-Viet CEO Nguyen Vu Duc said the app has 4 million customers and processes millions of orders each week.

“Go-Viet has broken all the world’s records in the growth rate of a new app. In the food delivery sector, we just launched the service one month ago, but we have outstripped long lasting eminent rivals, including the neighbor that everyone knows,” Duc said, referring to Grab.

Go-Viet and Grab are considered the two major rivals in the app-based service market.

Grab has denied this, saying that it remains No 1 in the food delivery sector in HCMC. Its service has been expanding and is present in 15 provinces/cities, just seven months after tits launch.

Grab cited a survey by Kantar TNS in November 2018 as showing that 54 percent of users chose GrabFood as their most regularly used brand in HCMC.

It also cited a report of GCOMM, also a market analysis firm, as saying that GrabFood is a bit better than the two major rivals, Foody’s Now and Go-Viet’s GoFood, in terms of consumers’ satisfaction about apps and delivery speed.

The satisfaction index was 4.46/5 for Grab, while they were 4.31 for Now and 4.1 for GoFood.

Vietnam is witnessing a boom in the online food delivery market. GCOMM found that 99 percent of surveyed consumers said they use online food ordering service at least 2-3 times a month, while 39 percent use the service 2-3 times a week.

To attract more users, all the existing apps have been trying to expand their networks. Previously, Now was considered the largest network with presence in 14 cities/provinces. But the record has been broken by GrabFood which now has branches in 15 cities/provinces just seven months after launching the service.

“We have the largest network of partners-drivers, so we naturally have advantages,” said Jerry Lim from Grab.

Meanwhile, GoFood joined the market later than the two big players and it only provides services in HCMC and plans to set up branches in Hanoi.

Commenting about the competitive edge of food ordering apps, an analyst said GrabFood, a subsidiary of Grab, can take full advantage of Grab’s ecosystem, including technology, partner-drivers, users and big data.

GrabFood has the highest number of shippers in Vietnam.