McDonald's hitches a ride on UberEats in Southeast Asia, starting with Singapore
The next time you're hungry for McDonald's, you'll have a second way of ordering a meal.
On Tuesday in Singapore, the fast food giant officially launched a delivery service with UberEats, allowing Uber's delivery drivers to pick up McDonald's orders in the UberEats app.
Singapore is the first country in Southeast Asia to offer the service, with Malaysia next.
The service has been on trial here for about a month, and on launch day, already covers 60 of McDonald's 133 restaurants across the country.
Singapore is the 14th pin on the map in a global partnership between McDonald's and Uber. It first kicked off in May in Florida, U.S., and has since expanded to 3,500 McDonald's outlets globally, in countries such as the UK.
In Asia, UberEats delivers McDonald's in Hong Kong and Japan.
McDonald's has been delivering in Singapore for 15 years already, so what gives?
The UberEats partnership makes sense for McDonald's in many countries, where it can't run the extensive delivery network needed to serve every city.
But in Singapore, McDonald's had already been operating a robust 24/7 delivery service since 2002, and hires 1,200 delivery riders to cover Singapore's small size.
And delivery sales continues to grow every year, too, the company said.
Kenneth Chan, McDonald's Singapore managing director, said the UberEats partnership is hoped to complement its own system, and it won't cut back on building out its network.
Chan added that the company intends to keep hiring riders.
UberEats' general manager for Singapore and Malaysia, Shri Chakravarthy, noted that there seems to be enough demand to sustain the two delivery services.
Although the service is just a month old here, and hasn't even been marketed yet, McDonald's deliveries have already become "significant" for UberEats' volumes, he said.
This pick up has also been seen in other countries' launches, where McDonald's deliveries have become 10 to 20 percent of UberEats' businesses already, he added.
For consumers, Uber hopes its faster delivery times of about 30 minutes will attract some over to its app. The menu items will remain the same price on Uber, just with its usual S$3 ($2.20) delivery fee -- although that's subject to surge pricing.
McDonald's own service charges a S$4 ($2.94) surcharge, and requires a S$10 ($7.34) minimum order. UberEats doesn't have a minimum order requirement.
Topics Uber
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
