ATR Daily: GoTo scores first profitable quarter thanks to fintech growth and TikTok
A growing loan business and Tokopedia alliance with TikTok made the difference
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GoTo scores first profitable quarter thanks to fintech growth and TikTok
GoTo announced its first-ever profitable quarter. The Indonesian company made a net profit of $9.9 million (171 billion IDR) in Q1 2026 thanks to its growing financial services business and cost-cutting around its core ride-hailing unit. Net revenue rose by 26% year-on-year to reach $309 million (5.3 trillion IDR).
It’s tempting to make a direct comparison to Grab, which just had its first full year of profitability, but there are notable differences between the two.
Grab broadly tightened its core mobility business to get itself into the black on a regular basis. GoTo’s profit is mostly derived from its growing fintech business and the income of its partnership with TikTok, which includes the Tokopedia business it retains a minority stake in.
GoTo fintech revenue jumped 58% per year to reach $110 million (1.9 trillion IDR), with total transactions on GoPay up 84% to more than 2 billion and its loan book increasing 59% annually. In comparison, GoTo’s core on-demand, mobility and delivery business units grew modestly by just 12%, 8% and 13%, respectively, over the same period. The number of rides actually fell slightly, GTV -3%.
Still, that growth is promising as Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing companies always sold themselves on the potential of fintech. The pitch was a daily super app that merits tech company multiples by offering strong payments, lending and more. Grab’s business doesn’t yet reflect that, but it remains materially larger than GoTo. Grab’s total revenue was more than triple that of GoTo last year. Grab also has a lot more cash on hand.
But, beneath the numbers, GoTo will have concerns around the lending business which is driving those impressive fintech numbers. The company says its credit quality has remained consistent, but there’s an increased risk of defaults rising since the loan book grew 59% annually.
Finally, it also has an unlikely ally in TikTok.
GoTo sold 75% of Tokopedia to ByteDance in 2023 but the agreement includes a commercial arrangement that generates income for GoTo each quarter based on Tokopedia’s GMV. That brought in $16.7 million (288 billion IDR) in the last quarter, that’s the most it has contributed to date and a 2x increase from Q1 2024. GoTo has reshaped its business to make it sustainable, but that extra income helped push it over the line with its first net profit.
Going forward, how GoTo manages that loan book and restores growth to its core business after rides fell will be interesting to watch. The company’s shares remain down 23% this year. Notably, management hasn’t raised its forecasted numbers on account of the current global financial situation.
Grab’s financials drop next week. As always, there’s plenty of speculation about if and when the two will finally join together.
A different kind of US-China tech gap
One of the obvious impacts of the Meta-Manus deal furore, even before China’s decision this week, is to keep China and international business apart.
This isn’t a new concept per se. Western companies have been doing this for the last decade at least.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla and other major tech names have adopted specific approaches, narratives, policies and products for China. That’ll happen when one single market accounts for a double-digit percentage of your overall revenue. Investors would be mad if you didn’t even try to grab a slice of that money.
Now, though, the concept has morphed and Chinese startups are figuring out what compromises they must make to take a slice of a big market that exists beyond the comfort of where they call home.
There’s a big difference, of course.
The US firms named above are all enormous, multinational businesses with established products, financing and more. AI has changed the landscape and now it is early-stage, non-US companies being forced to make decisions that should be far away from where they are now.
There’s no way a founder of a year-old startup can know exactly where their product will take off. That’s the frustration and beauty of the tech industry, most things fail and it is unpredictable. The current geopolitical tension would have made the creation of TikTok impossible, for example.
When ByteDance acquired US-based Musical.ly for as much as $1 billion in 2017 there was little fanfare. It took two years for any kind of review of the deal and, well, the rest is history with TikTok now among the world’s most influential, and profitable, tech platforms of today.
Now, China has ring-fenced its startup playground and investors are following suit. Bloomberg reports that a number of funds, including some backers of Manus, have constructed parallel fund strategies that use US and offshore vehicles to cater to different startups they want to fund and LPs who want to back them.
If this feels familiar, it is. A great venture capital unbundling happened in 2023 when Sequoia, GGV and other international funds broke their businesses and teams into standalone regional entities, ending their past focus on serving different markets from one brand.
It’s hard to imagine ZhenFund or Luminous Ventures, two Chinese firms that are said to have adopted this track, being able to pull it off based on the technicality of having distinct Chinese and non-Chinese funds. After all, isn’t that what Manus did when it moved to Singapore? That didn’t exactly help.
Perhaps, ultimately, the rationale is simple and China doesn’t want US VCs calling the shots over its companies. The US doesn’t want that either.
In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:
Tencent staff reportedly used Claude to evaluate and fine-tune its new Hy3 model, despite US restrictions and the firm’s head of AI being formerly of OpenAI [The Information]
But Goldman Sachs bankers in Hong Kong are now banned from using Claude [Financial Times]
India-based stock app Sahi raised $33 million led by Accel Growth at a valuation estimated at $200 million [The Economic Times]
The US wants to ban key equipment makers that supply China’s second-largest chipmaker Hua Hong Semiconductor in another bid to kneecap Beijing’s technology self-sufficiency strategy [Reuters]
In further evidence of that apparent push, China’s National Supercomputing Center says it can build a world-class supercomputer using only domestic CPUs, with no Nvidia GPUs or foreign parts—but the response is sceptical [Tom’s Hardware]
Truecaller, with more than 500 million users globally, is slowing in India, its core market of over 350 million users or about 70% of its base. Downloads in the country fell 16% year over year in 2025. [TechCrunch]