CEO replaces founder! This e-commerce giant keeps making moves

Recently, according to an announcement released by Tiki, a local e-commerce giant in Vietnam , its CFO Richard Pham was officially promoted to CEO, replacing the original CEO, Tran Ngoc Thai Son, the company's founder.

However, Son will remain one of the chairmen of Tiki Global, a Singapore-based investment company that owns 90% of Tiki.

It is understood that Richard Fan joined the Tiki team in 2019 and led the company's $258 million Series E financing. Industry insiders said that this round of financing directly pushed Tiki to the threshold of a unicorn company (valued at $1 billion).

However, the outside world believes that Tiki will not be able to maintain such a valuation.

As we all know, it is very difficult to raise funds independently when the external competition is so fierce, because many of Tiki's competitors have very powerful backers.

For example, Shopee has its parent company Sea behind it, Lazada has Alibaba behind it, and TikTok Shop has ByteDance behind it, and they can all provide a lot of support to their subsidiaries.

According to data provided by local statistics agency Metric.vn, the overall revenue of major e-commerce platforms in Vietnam reached 92.5 trillion VND, or about US$3.9 billion, in the first half of 2023.

Tiki only accounted for a small part of it - its revenue share in the first quarter of 2023 was only 2.2%, and in the second quarter it dropped to only 2%.

In comparison, several other e-commerce giants have a much larger market share. Among them, Shopee's revenue accounted for 63% in the first two quarters, and TikTok Shop also increased from 15.5% in the first quarter to 20% in the second quarter.

From this perspective, Tiki does not have much room to survive. Looking back at its development history, when it was first launched in 2010, it was just an online book-selling platform, similar to Amazon at the beginning. Some people in the local area also called it the Little Amazon of Vietnam.

In terms of business model, Tiki also intends to imitate Amazon, that is, to concentrate its efforts on one market. Although the progress will be slow, if it succeeds, it will lay a solid foundation for future development. Vietnam, as the e-commerce industry is in its infancy, has become the best choice for Tiki.

Tiki

CEO

Founder