Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Shopee rolls out ride-hailing service in Indone...

Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Shopee rolls out ride-hailing service in Indonesia

Shopee

Southeast Asian e-commerce giant Shopee rolls out ride-hailing service in Indonesia

Rebbeca Ren

posted on December 22, 2021 1:23 am

In Southeast Asia, the war to become the top superapp is underway, with Shoppe, Grab and Gojek being the three biggest players.

Shopee, the e-commerce division of Singapore-based Sea Limited, has partnered with local taxi company Bluebird Group to launch a taxi-hailing service in Indonesia.

This new feature, called Taksi, is now available in certain areas of Indonesia, allowing users to book rides in the Shopee app and use Shopee Pay to make the payment.  

In August of this year, Shopee announced cooperation with Blue Bird to create BirdKirim, a logistics service that allows consumers to engage Blue Bird drivers for courier deliveries.

It is estimated that by 2025, Indonesia's online car-hailing industry will reach $5.6 billion. According to Statista, Singapore-based Grab has a 51% market share in the country's ride-hailing industry, and the remaining share is mainly owned by Indonesia's local decacorn Gojek. 

Started out as an online shopping platform, Shopee has now evolved into supperapp, offering various services including food delivery, digital payment, flight ticket booking, hotel reservations, and ride-hailing.

The concept of supperapp, which originated in China, is now widely adopted by Southeast Asian technology companies as key market growth strategy. By offering as many services as possible in one app, Tencent's WeChat and Alibaba's Alipay have developed a duopoly in China's consumer-oriented Internet industry.

In Southeast Asia, the war to become the top superapp is underway, with Shoppe, Grab and Gojek being the three biggest players.

Recently, Gojek has merged with Tokopedia, Indonesia's leading e-commerce platform, to form GoTo Group. The newly established group recently announced appointed underwriters to manage its $1 billion initial public offerings (IPO), which could take place as early as the first quarter of 2022.

According to the e-Conomy SEA research jointly conducted by Google, Bain and Temasek, the e-commerce value of Indonesia, the most populous country in Southeast Asia, is expected to reach $83 billion by 2025.