I am done with Grab
He noticed something small. Lately, whenever he needs a ride, he almost never opens Grab first. His finger finds Xanh SM on its own, like a new habit, while Grab is still sitting there on the screen, nothing wrong with it, only no longer the first thing he remembers
For a consumer product, he thinks this is the scariest signal. A brand is not necessarily losing when it drops a few points of market share. It starts to have a real problem when people no longer think of it in the moment need appears
Xanh SM is no longer a small rival
If you look only at four-wheel ride-hailing numbers, the story has already gone quite far. According to Mordor Intelligence as cited by VnExpress, in Q4 2025 Xanh SM accounted for about 51.5% of the total transaction value in Vietnam’s four-wheel ride-hailing market, while Grab sat at 42.64%. A gap of nearly nine percentage points is large enough that this is no longer a few promotions or one lucky quarter
Of course that number does not mean Grab has lost the whole Vietnamese market. Grab still has motorbikes, food delivery, payments, and a much wider ecosystem. At the group level, Grab even just announced that 2025 was its first full year of net profit, which means this is not a company running out of strength or standing on the edge of failure
But people do not open a financial report before they call a car. They only open the app that makes them feel safer in the first few seconds
What Xanh SM is selling is not only a ride
Grab grew up on a very beautiful model. They gathered hundreds of thousands of independent drivers into one marketplace, then used software to connect the person who needed to go with the person who had a car. That model is light on assets, scales very fast, and once completely changed the taxi industry in Vietnam
The weakness of a marketplace sits inside that same strength. When most of the experience is created by independent individuals, quality always has a certain amount of swing. This car is clean, the next one may be older. This driver is gentle, another may make the passenger uneasy. An algorithm can optimize waiting time, but it is hard to make hundreds of thousands of people feel the same
Xanh SM took a heavier road. A more uniform electric fleet, driver images that sit closer together, and a more tightly controlled experience slowly form a very simple expectation: if last time was fine, this time will probably be fine too
When the price gap is not too large, that stability becomes a kind of advantage that is hard to see on a feature list. Users do not need to know what sits behind it, the fleet, the operating process, or the capital structure. They only remember how it felt to step into the car
The most dangerous market share lives in the user’s head
Ride-hailing is a product with almost zero switching cost. There is no photo album to carry over, no friend network to rebuild, and no important data that would make someone stay with Grab for a few more years. Installing another app takes a few minutes. Switching from one app to another takes a single tap
So what keeps Grab in place is not the app. It is habit
For years, Grab almost turned its brand into a verb. People did not say call a ride-hailing car, they said call Grab. That is an extremely large asset, because every time need appears, users open the app automatically, before a rival even has a chance to show up in their head
Xanh SM is quietly taking that asset away. Each ride that is good enough does not only bring the revenue of that trip. It also raises the chance that next time the user opens Xanh SM first. Ten rides like that in a row can change a habit that has lived for years
At some point, Grab can still sit on the phones of millions of people and no longer sit in the first place in their memory. He thinks this is the kind of market share loss that is hardest to win back
I am done with Grab
He does not think this is a story of a Vietnamese company beating a foreign company, or of users needing to support someone out of pride. Consumer business is much colder than that. Users do not owe any brand their loyalty. They only return to the place that makes their life more comfortable
Grab once did that to traditional taxis. They brought an experience that was better often enough for Vietnamese people to change how they called a car. Now Xanh SM is doing something quite similar to Grab itself, only this time the fight is happening on the same phone where Grab once held the best seat
He has not deleted Grab. Maybe one day the price will be better, the car will arrive faster, or the product will change enough for him to come back. For now, that app has lost the most precious thing a consumer product can own: the user’s natural reflex
And if more and more people also start calling Xanh SM without thinking, the question worth watching may no longer be how many percentage points of share Grab is losing, but how much time they still have to win back a habit that has already begun to change hands
❤️ cowriter aethery