Bukalapak Recruits A Team In South Korea, Helps Analyze Trends For Adoption

Bukalapak expanded the team in South Korea, by appointing Kim Juhee as Country Manager. Kim and his team are tasked with assisting in the analysis of trends and innovations that the company can adopt going forward.

Our main area is to support market development in Southeast Asia through acquisition of domestic brands and we plan to create new business opportunities through joint ventures, Kim wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Kim has a strong background in technology, through his career in a number of companies, such as NAVER, Oracle, and Dell.

Quoting from DealStreetAsia, Bukalapak did not expand its business to South Korea. According to Bukalapak’s Head of Media and Communication Fairuza Ahmad Iqbal, Kim was mandated to study local trends and innovations to be adopted within the company.

Basically we always monitor trends and developments in the technology industry around the world as our guide in developing all of our services and products, he said.

Bukalapak’s Steps To Expand the Business

Bukalapak’s steps are in line with previously announced corporate actions in order to expand the business beyond Bukalapak Partners. Previously, the company and Sembrani Kiqani were involved in an investment round in Yield Guild Games Southeast Asia (YGG SEA) of $15 million.

YGG SEA is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) under YGG, a blockchain-based game development startup from the Philippines. In order to strengthen its technology team, earlier this year the company opened an R&D Hub in Melbourne, Victoria.

The office became Bukalapak’s first international base for a research and development center, as well as marking bilateral cooperation between the two countries in the technology and digital innovation sector.

The research and development center is expected to give Bukalapak access to Victoria’s capabilities and pool of talent in technology and digital innovation, as well as opportunities for collaboration with various universities there.

Victoria is known as one of the centers of technology development and digital innovation in Australia. The state government allocates a budget to encourage technology development and digital innovation, including through international cooperation.

Founded AlloFresh with CT Corp and Growtheum Capital Partners

Next, enter the realm of online grocery with CT Corp and Growtheum Capital Partners to establish AlloFresh. The joint venture company will utilize 138 outlets and other ecosystems owned by CT Corp to serve orders for daily necessities.

Not only end consumers, Bukalapak Partners will be able to order their stock of merchandise through the platform, with more choices of up to 150 thousand SKUs.

President Director & CEO of PT Trans Retail Indonesia Bouzeneth Benaouda said, providing online and offline shopping facilities for consumers is the key in the future.

Although the gap between online shopping and total national retail spending is still wide, his party does not want to deny the choice of online or offline shopping. They chose to take both segments.

We don’t want to underestimate customers who still want their shopping experience to come directly to the outlets. Outside of Jakarta, this kind of shopping habit still exists and the portion is large. So in the future, both of them must go together. This is closely related to what we are doing together Bukalapak, he said.

Advantages of AlloFresh

Bukalapak President Teddy Oetomo continued, AlloFresh was here because of the spirit of collaboration which if done by one party alone would cost a lot more. Maybe it could be more than Rp1 trillion to get to this point, he said.

Teddy’s Rp1 trillion is the initial investment that was made for the development of AlloFresh. The majority shareholders in AlloFresh are Trans Retail (55%), Bukalapak (35%), and Growtheum (10%).

Teddy continued, so far many online grocery players have built their infrastructure from scratch. They have the technology, but it costs money and time to replicate existing infrastructure.

This condition is different from AlloFresh, because Trans Retail has been around for more than two decades to build a network of supermarket outlets throughout Indonesia.