In the meantime, the Gojek and Tokopedia teams worked side-by-side on the Indonesian government's relief effort to help workers hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Tokopedia attracted an offer from Bridgetown Holdings, a US$595 million SPAC backed by billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel and Hong Kong-based entrepreneur Richard Li Tzar-kai, according to a person familiar with the approach. China's largest e-commerce player Alibaba Group Holding and the world's largest technology-focused venture capital firm, the SoftBank Vision Fund, had pushed Gojek and Grab to merge but failed to overcome resistance from the companies' founders. The founders and their shareholders mulled other combinations among Indonesia's technology unicorns, but ultimately rejected them. A merger was first discussed about two years ago but failed to progress, the people familiar said. Still, both were protective of their respective data and customers. Photo: Reutersīoth Tokopedia and Gojek were founded over a decade ago and have worked together delivering packages along Indonesia's archipelago since 2015. Photo: Reuters alt=SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son is a big supporter of GoTo. SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son is a big supporter of GoTo. "Gojek and Tokopedia need to pick up the pace before Sea leaves them in the dust," said researchers at Kapronasia in a report, noting that Sea's market capitalisation has swollen to about US$117 billion, fuelling its expansion. Shopee also launched a food-delivery unit in Indonesia this year, in direct competition with Gojek. Tokopedia has been wrestling with Shopee, the e-commerce arm of Singapore technology group Sea, for market share. GoTo has over 100 million monthly active users. "The overlap between our customers is surprisingly low," said Cao. The group's myriad customer touchpoints will boost its ability to credit score customers, making it a desirable partner for financial service firms touting loans and wealth-management products.įor Gojek, the total addressable market of e-commerce in the world's fourth most populous country with 271 million people is far greater than that for ride-hailing. Users' experience will be more seamless via Gojek's e-wallet GoPay, the partners say.
The partners also expect user engagement to spike after gathering more services into one app.
#Tokopedia banner drivers#
If that is the beehive, then the bikes and the drivers that Gojek has are the bees," said Cao, who has been president of Tokopedia for five years. "If you want to provide the Jakarta experience to non-Jakarta cities, you need to build the fulfilment centre. Gojek and Tokopedia will pool their data sets and share customers to make the journey more efficient and expansion across the archipelago cheaper. Indonesia's 17,000 islands make speedy fulfilment of orders a logistical nightmare for e-commerce start-ups, often involving bikes, trucks, planes and boats. The pandemic also meant that merchants in Indonesia saw greater value in joining high-traffic digital platforms that could bring them customers even during lockdowns, allowing Grab and Gojek to scale back marketing. It plans to hold stock in GoTo post listing. The Singapore-headquartered private-equity fund was Gojek's earliest institutional investor and still has a meaningful stake in the company. "Competition has become more rational," said Patrick Walujo, the co-founder and managing partner of Northstar Group.
In the run-up to listing, Grab and Gojek have reined in subsidies to merchants across the archipelago, backing off from the cutthroat competition that has destroyed value for years at both companies. Gojek said in November that all of its branded services were generating a profit margin and that its gross transaction value (GTV) had hit US$12 billion, up 10 per cent year on year. GoTo could reach a similar valuation post-money, according to people familiar with the matter, more than double the combined US$18 billion valuation hit during Gojek and Tokopedia's most recent fundraising rounds in 20, respectively.Ī roughly US$40 billion price tag would reflect Gojek and Tokopedia's most recent financial performance and merger synergies, the people familiar said. That deal valued Grab at about US$39.6 billion. Singapore-headquartered rival Grab Holdings said in April that it would go public in the US via a merger with a SPAC backed by Silicon Valley's Altimeter Capital.