Developing new programs to provide a diversified choice for customers, tying up with new partners, talabat has many things in the pipeline to expand further in Qatar. In an extensive interview with The Peninsula, Francisco Miguel de Sousa (pictured), Managing Director, talabat Qatar, explains the challenges faced during the pandemic times and gives an outlook of what lies ahead for the market leader.
How the Covid-19 pandemic changed your business last year?
As any other business in the world, we were certainly affected by the global pandemic. It has reshaped e-commerce and specifically food delivery services. We found ourselves in a position where customers were relying on us to safely deliver food, groceries, and medicines to their homes, and restaurants needed us to keep their business going. Needless to say, safety was of our utmost importance that is why we were the first in the region to introduce gloves, masks and sanitisers for our riders and solutions such as contactless delivery from the start. We were constantly liaising with governments to raise awareness about high industry safety standards and the importance of allowing food deliveries.
talabat has been focusing on scaling upwards even during the pandemic. We have diversified our offerings and integrated new verticals such as groceries, pharmacies, flowers and non food delivery. This resulted in an increase in our manpower accordingly, and will continue to do so, as the trend has demonstrated a real shift in customer behaviour, and our determination to continue offering our stakeholder the ultimate service.
Do you expect the growth in the delivery business to sustain in the future as markets open up?
Overall, consumers across all fronts have shown a progressive appetite on food and grocery delivery. As the economy begins to open up again, the convenience of delivery is still expected to play a huge role for businesses and consumers. This is why we continue to perfect the customer journey, and deliver to our customers whether they would be at home, the office or elsewhere.
Our focus as a company is towards speed, affordability and reliability: we believe these three components are important to address now and in the future, especially since our economy continues to grow.
How many outlets are registered with your platform regionally?
Today we have around 57,000 partners across the region and our teams keep onboarding new partners who are interested in our service, logistics and digital infrastructure.
What are the steps you took to protect your riders and the customers during the pandemic?
Safety is our number one priority. We’ve consistently been the first in the region to introduce enhanced safety solutions for our riders, such as gloves, masks, sanitiser as well as contactless delivery.
We also continue to place a keen emphasis on developing new practices. We’ve enabled a flexi-break feature, which means that whenever our riders need time to refresh, they can do so without questions asked, and we encourage them to do so. Our algorithms in our app also map out the safest and quickest way to a customer's location - meaning that they can also focus on the road, not needing to think about which ways to get there.
Currently, over 70% of the orders placed on our platform, whether they are delivered by talabat’s own delivery fleet or by the restaurant itself are delivered by cars, which increases significantly during the summer. We currently do not brand our cars - but approximately our fleet includes more than 2000 cars.
During the day that percentage is substantially higher, as we take our rider's well being seriously. If they are on bikes, we equip our riders with the latest safety and cooling equipment, and our shifts are shorter. Only in specific times of the day, and in specific areas, to avoid mass congestion, do we deploy our riders.
What are your plans for the Qatar Market? After talabat mart, any other expansions in the pipeline?
talabat is very proud to be present and invested in Qatar, with the aim to further collaborate with local entities and contribute to Qatar’s development. During the past few years, we launched impactful projects through partnerships with over a hundred local entities.
A project close to our hearts was our collaboration with Qatar Charity, on several major initiatives, such as Lebanon already shared, Sudan and lately Palestine. We have strong ties with major other charities as well such as Education Above All, Qatar Cancer Society and other NGOs.
We are also very happy to partner with local suppliers and launch our first “+974 Made in Qatar” export to Kuwait, giving the opportunity to several small businesses in Qatar to have their products sold on talabat Mart in Kuwait. Our next steps would be to start exporting to Oman, KSA, Bahrain, Jordan, and Turkey among others.
We’re in a fast growing and a fast moving industry, and it’s up to us to continue to be the pioneers and pace-setters in the MENA region. Every day we focus more on the customers. Win hearts and minds. If you win the hearts and minds of your customers, then your business will continue to flourish. If we look at talabat as a business and its future:
Food delivery will always be our core business, and it is important that we keep on innovating in that space for our ecosystem.
We’re continuing to focus our efforts on Q-Commerce, increasing talabat mart and dark stores into our other markets, investing in AI, data analytics and machine learning to operate predictive models. That’s a very important point as we are first and foremost a tech company, we have the biggest tech team in the region, working to improve our services.
We are planning to expand further and are hiring for specific roles, to better serve our customers and quickly adapt to their evolving needs. As a leader in the market, with a strong impact on the local communities, we are continuously working towards Qatar National Vision 2030 and are looking forward to welcoming FIFA 2022 in Qatar.
With many new delivery apps entering the market, what makes you different from others?
When we started the delivery business several years ago, no one believed it would become so successful. This comes with a major responsibility for us to be an example for so many local applications and disrupt business models through high tech.
In Qatar, we partner with several complementary businesses so we ensure the local business grows with us together. For example, we just tied up with the Ryde app, which is doing a tremendous amount of work on competing with Uber.
In our business it is not a matter of being first or leader, which we clearly are, in the market today. It’s about being faster, agile, young and fast-moving; we make sure that we’re always ahead of the curve and are constantly improving.
