The market size is as high as 62 billion US dollars! The three major e-commerce giants in Southeast Asia start the battle

Over the past five years, Shopee has risen at a visible rate in Southeast Asia. Data from App Annie shows that in 2020, Shopee's average monthly website visits in Indonesia were 90 million.

However, amid this impressive growth, Shopee’s other Southeast Asian competitors, such as Lazada and Tokopedia, have also begun to compete for a share of the region’s $62 billion e-commerce market.

Gojek and Tokopedia, two of Indonesia’s most valuable technology companies, are understood to be in talks to merge to create a company with a valuation of $18 billion.

The “super app” created by the two companies will be a one-stop application that can meet users' multiple needs, for example, from hailing a taxi to booking flights to digital payments.

The CEO of Singapore venture capital firm Momentum Works said the merger between Gojek and Tokopedia may be partly due to pressure from Shopee .

In Indonesia, Lazada announced in December that it would use the e-wallet service provided by Ovo, Grab’s official e-wallet partner in the country.

The partnerships highlight the growing relationship between Alibaba and Grab, which also share the same investor in Japan’s SoftBank Group.

Another Indonesian e-commerce platform , Bukalapak , is backed by Chinese fintech giant Ant Group and has a market value of US$2.5 billion. It has also taken some actions in the past few months.

Bukalapak announced a partnership with Standard Chartered last month to enhance its digital financial services offerings, and it also recently secured $100 million in funding from Microsoft .

Bukalapak is considering an IPO in 2021 , its chief executive Rahmat Kemuddin said .

While companies such as Shopee , Lazada and Tokopedia have become household names, analysts say the industry is still not mature enough as Southeast Asia is a complex market with different characteristics for each economy.

However, a joint report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Co said consumers in Southeast Asia have helped accelerate the development of digital services such as online shopping and digital media consumption.

Notably, this brings the total number of internet users in Southeast Asia to over 400 million, proving that the market opportunity for e-commerce remains strong in this region of nearly 700 million people.

Shopee Platform

Cross-border e-commerce market

Southeast Asia