Lazada raises $250M to fuel Southeast Asia’s online shopping spree
Southeast Asian e-commerce store Lazada.com has just raised a massive $250 million in a funding round that should help to secure its status as the “Amazon of Asia”.
The fresh round means Lazada has now raised about $736 million since its inception, while its value is pegged at around $1.25 billion.
Lazada, which claims to be the “largest online shopping mall” in Southeast Asia, was founded by the German incubator firm Rocket Internet AG. It’s an Amazon-esque site that sells apparel, books, cosmetics, electronics and more, and has become hugely popular in the six countries it operates – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The amount of money involved is yet more evidence that the cloud computing phenomenon is not just focused on North America – for a company that only focuses on Southeast Asia, $250 million is a serious amount of money.
Lazada’s CEO Maximilian Bittner said in a statement the money will be used to “enhance the shopping experience” for the company’s customers. It intends to expand and improve on its IT systems, logistics infrastructure and payment solutions in each of the countries it operates.
Lazada claims gross merchandise volume (GMV, essentially ‘sales’) on its various websites and mobile apps have increased by 50 percent since June 2014. The company saw a GMV of $91.4 million in the first six months of this year, which suggests its July to December GMV is somewhere around the $180 million mark.
Whatever way you look at it, that’s enormous growth in the space of just five months, something Lazada attributes to its recent shift to a marketplace model for third-party merchants, similar to how Amazon.com operates.
photo credit: Adam Tinworth via photopin cc
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