As early as 2011, the head of eBay’s Asian business, one of the world’s e-commerce giants, said in an interview with the media that the Chinese e-commerce market had long been unprofitable, and eBay had long since reshaped its business model in China, mainly to help Chinese sellers sell their products around the world. After the survival of the fittest, the Chinese e-commerce market has gradually stabilized. The “unprofitable” here describes that other overseas e-commerce platforms find it difficult to “get a piece of the pie” in China. Despite this, Chinese giants are still not satisfied with their current achievements, but have taken a different approach and set their sights on China’s neighbor, Southeast Asia.
In recent years, the e-commerce market in Southeast Asia has been booming, and consumers in the region are flocking to e-commerce websites from traditional offline consumption. According to research and forecasts by Google and Temasek, Southeast Asian e-commerce sales will grow to US$88 billion in 2025, compared to only US$7 billion in 2013. Obviously, Southeast Asia, which is still in its early stages of development, has a large and foreseeable growth space, and naturally became a “big cake” in the eyes of Chinese e-commerce giants.
Since Alibaba invested in the acquisition of Lazada, the Southeast Asian e-commerce market has become more and more tense. The competition among Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms is very similar to that in China five years ago. Lazada, which dominates Southeast Asia, does not have a high threshold and the competition is not very fierce compared to Tmall and JD.com in China. But it is such an e-commerce platform that has made its parent company Rocket Internet (German startup incubator) flourish in Southeast Asia in the past few years and has been injected with capital.
Singapore is the headquarters of Lazada and the starting point for Alibaba to seize the Southeast Asian e-commerce market. But not long ago, Amazon also established a distribution center in Singapore, which is Amazon’s first distribution center in Southeast Asia. Amazon directly took out its “trump card” and launched the Prime Now business with a 2-hour delivery. Foreign giants all want to establish a foothold in Singapore and start “making trouble”. Alibaba seems to have also realized the threat posed by Amazon’s entry into Southeast Asia, and took the lead in taking over Tokopedia, which JD.com wanted to invest in before, and accelerated the pace of “horse racing”.
Obviously, the “e-commerce war” in Southeast Asia is more interesting than the melee of domestic e-commerce platforms back then.