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Jean Iau

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, sales director Sabir Ansari relied on Deliveroo almost daily for burgers and pasta delivered to his door in Singapore.
Over time, the 31-year-old said, it became harder to justify the service’s costs as rival platforms such as 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 say the move reflects 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.


Deliveroo told This Week in Asia that the whole Singapore team would be impacted by the closure of its office in the city state.
Local media outlet Business Times reported in 2022 that the company had around 80 employees in the city state at the time.
“We regularly review operational performance to ensure we are investing where we see the clearest path to sustainable scale and long-term leadership. We have concluded that the level of investment required is not aligned with our long-term strategy,” Deliveroo said.
“While we are proud of what the team has built over the past decade, we took a disciplined decision to refocus our efforts on markets where we see even stronger opportunities to reinvest for long-term growth and sustainable scale.”
Subscribers seeking refunds should contact Deliveroo’s customer care team, it added.
The announcement drew dismay from some users, who said the app was more intuitive than its competitors and praised its customer service.
Project manager Elena Lin, 35, who had been a Gold member since May 2022, said she “liked the Gold membership free delivery for orders above S$15 and I feel it’s a pity because Deliveroo had a better user experience than Grab and Foodpanda”.
Deliveroo has been retrenching in parts of Asia in recent years. It exited Hong Kong in 2025 after nine years in the city, following earlier withdrawals from Taiwan in 2020 and Australia in 2022, as it refocused on its core markets in Europe and the Middle East.
In Singapore, Deliveroo faced stiff competition from regional super app Grab, which is headquartered in the city state, and Foodpanda, which is owned by Berlin-based Delivery Hero.
According to a report by Singapore consultancy Momentum Works last month, Grab Holdings’ share of Southeast Asia’s food delivery market rose to 55 per cent last year, up from 53.8 per cent in 2024.
Its market share was particularly high in Singapore at 69 per cent and in Malaysia at 67 per cent, the report said.

Singapore’s tightly clustered urban market leaves little room for smaller players in the food delivery space, according to analysts.
Nitin Pangarkar, associate professor of strategy and policy at the National University of Singapore’s business school, said prepared food prices in Singapore were relatively low because hawker alternatives were widely available and eating out was common.
“It is a difficult industry to achieve profitability unless you have a very good market share,” he said.
Lee Wee Kiat, assistant professor at Nanyang Business School, said delivery platforms were fundamentally driven by order density, with profitability depending on sustaining a high volume of orders within a given area.
“In Singapore, the market is highly competitive and geographically compact. This means the coverage areas across platforms naturally overlap. In a small, dense city, every platform ends up fighting in the same area and it is harder to be profitable,” Lee said.
“Grab’s broader ecosystem can potentially help it maintain higher demand and stronger network effects, which makes discounting more feasible and more effective.”
Seshan Ramaswami, associate professor of marketing education at Singapore Management University, said Grab was better positioned to compete across transport and delivery because it was a super app that bundled services such as ride-hailing, payments and food delivery into a single platform.
“In oligopolies with very few competitors, in a fairly commoditised business like food delivery, it is common to have very fierce price competition. Consequently, smaller players find it tough to make profits and leave the industry or are acquired by a bigger player,” Ramaswami said.


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Singapore

A Deliveroo rider in Lai Chi Kok, Hong Kong, in 2025. The UK-founded food delivery platform has been scaling back in parts of Asia in recent years, including Hong Kong, as competition intensifies in the region. Photo: Sam Tsang

A Deliveroo rider in Hong Kong in 2025. The company has been scaling back in parts of Asia, including Hong Kong, amid intense competition in the food delivery market. Photo: May Tse

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Cars queue up at the Woodlands Checkpoint to cross the Singapore-Malaysia border. Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Vehicles form a queue to enter the Woodlands Checkpoint in Singapore. Photo: AFP

A traditional night market in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Many Singaporeans travel across the border for cheaper shopping. Photo: Shutterstock

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Syazni Nabilah Che Kamarudin, her husband and their five-month-old daughter don traditional Chinese attire for Lunar New Year celebrations. Photo: Syazni Nabilah Che Kamarudin

Teachers and students write Lunar New Year couplets at a school in Kuala Lumpur on February 7. Photo: Xinhua

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Singapore is set to launch a national space agency to cement its status as regional innovation hub. Shutterstock/Nasa

Minister-in-charge of Energy and Science and Technology Tan See Leng announced that the city state will set up a national space agency in April. Photo: Jean Iau

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Michael Schoellhorn, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space, delivers a keynote address at the Space Summit on Monday. Photo: Reuters

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Singapore’s tourism board is inviting US-based singles to be paired by “aunties” for a chance to win a four-night trip to the city state. Photo: Shutterstock

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This Week in Asia

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Asia

Southeast Asia

The platform’s departure has underscored the challenge of turning a profit in a dense, tightly contested market


The platform’s departure has underscored the challenge of turning a profit in a dense, tightly contested market.


What Deliveroo’s Singapore exit says about the city state’s food delivery wars

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The platform’s departure has underscored the challenge of turning a profit in a dense, tightly contested market

The platform’s departure has underscored the challenge of turning a profit in a dense, tightly contested market