Lazada boosts marketing activities in Southeast Asia

Lazada boosts marketing activities in Southeast Asia

Lazada, the German online shopping mall, has secured new funds from Verlinvest, a Belgian consumer-focused investment holding company that has become its new investor.

Existing investors including Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kinnevik, Summit Partners and the Tengelmann Group have also participated in the financing round, which injected about US$100 million of fresh capitals into Lazada.

"We are thrilled to join Lazada as its investor and also partner with Rocket Internet, the largest investor in Lazada. Its business scale and achievement after one year of operation is highly impressive;" said Verlinvest chairman Fre'de'ric de Mevius.

Lazada's orders in Southeast Asia recently surpassed 1 million in number, and it is the fastest-growing online department store in the region, with operations in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Chanchai Akaravetwattana, the managing director of Lazada Thailand, said the firm recently launched an app that provides customers with a fast and intuitive shopping experience via their smartphones.

The app is currently available for Android users in English, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Thai.

So far there have been 5,000 downloads, and the figure is expected to reach 100,000 by year-end.

The app will be available for iPhones in August and then Windows.

Lazada plans to spend 100 million baht on marketing activities in Thailand this year. It has 140,000 customers and 3 million visitors.

Most buyers on its online mall are male, while IT products are the best-selling online products. The average value per order is 1,000 baht.

The company expects to increase its customer base to 200,000 for both web and mobile channels. Sales are forecast to rise four-fold to 1.5 billion baht.

Key growth drivers are surging domestic consumption, growing broadband access via both 3G and 4G on smartphones and tablets, rapid adoption of online shopping and a strong push by both international and local suppliers to increase online sales, said Mr Chanchai.

There were nearly 800 million smartphones in Southeast Asia at the end of last year, and the total is expected to reach 1.2 billion by 2016.

Of the total, 31% are Android-based phones.

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