Over time, the 31-year-old said, it became harder to justify the service’s costs as rival platforms like Grab and Foodpanda offered more food options and aggressive promotions that made “delivery fees way cheaper”.
“It was a no-brainer,” he said.
For Deliveroo, that kind of calculation among consumers became increasingly consequential.
On Wednesday, the UK-founded food delivery platform announced it would wind up operations in Singapore, following a “review of country-specific conditions” and focus on investing where it could see the “clearest path to sustainable scale and long-term leadership”.
Analysts said the move reflected the difficulty of achieving profitability in the city state’s crowded and geographically compact market, where intense price competition and overlapping coverage areas favour players with greater scale.