Grocery delivery battle in Vietnam: David versus Goliath?; The e-grocery war may witness another ‘David vs. Goliath’ story in the foreseeable future – with Loship being natural Davids, fighting against larger and more established competitors who seemingly have all the advantages of strength, size, and resources. e27
Sea Group surpasses DBS Group to emerge as Singapore’s most valuable listed firm; NYSE-listed Sea was valued at US$54.2B compared with DBS’s US$38.6.5B as of July 22; Sea managed to narrow its net loss to US$280.8M for Q1 from US$689.6M last year; Sea operates 3 main lines of business Garena, Shopee, SeaMoney. SGSME
‘Acceloration’: What happens after disruption; Acceloration is the accelerated collaboration phase that occurs after the initial disruption phase; If we peel the layers of the onion deeper, we find many examples of leading companies that, although looking like disruptors in the first instance, are actually not; Instead, they are accelorators. e27
How to build customer trust even amidst a recession; Loyal customers are more likely to stay with your brand regardless of changing market rules and operational conditions during the lockdown; The loyal audience is a self-fuelling organism that generates increasingly more returning customers. e27
‘We’re imagining a world where any commerce can happen just by phone conversation’: iKala CEO Sega Cheng; He hopes iKala commerce can handle all channels, social platforms, stores, all kinds of e-commerce platforms you have in your hand; “That’s the direction that we’re going”. e27
Indonesian fashion e-commerce platform Sorabel to shut down by end-July; In Feb, it shuttered its Philippines unit Yabel; Sorabel has so far raised US$27M in four rounds from Gobi, Golden Equator, etc.; The firm had achieved break-even and was on its way to be profitable. e27
Hiip secures bridge funding led by Vulpes Special Opportunities Fund; The Singapore-based influencer platform plans to take advantage of potential acquisition opportunities that have arisen as a result of COVID-19; Hiip claims to be helping 500 brands to connect and work with more than 10K social influencers based on Big Data and AI. e27
Is ethical hacking the next big thing in the talent market?; Organisations are starting to place more emphasis and investment on cyber security by hiring more ethical hackers; They are highly sought-after and receive attractive renumeration which can go as high as US$81K annually. HRM Asia
Startup investments in SEA nearly double despite COVID-19; As per a DealStreetAsia data, the value of fundraising deals rose 91% y-o-y to US$2.7B; The number of transactions climbed 59% to 184 for April-June quarter, up from 116 in the same period last year. Nikkei Asian Review
HSBC, MDEC ink MOU to drive digital leap for Malaysian businesses; They will identify targeted investments in tech, healthcare, electronics, manufacturing, education from China, the US, the UK, Japan; The agreement also includes providing advisory and other banking services to businesses. Bernama
How Malaysian companies can accelerate beyond basic digitalisation; The digital economy contributed 18.5% to the nation’s economy in 2018 with a CAGR of 8%; Majority of companies is skewed towards digitisation, in which 73% inferred digitalisation to be the use of IT system (30%), converting manual to digital (27%) and use of data (16%). Tech Collective
What Ant Group’s upcoming IPO means for the SEA startup ecosystem; For the region, this will trigger even tighter competitions among local e-payments companies, especially those with ties to Chinese tech giants; The group is making big moves in foreign markets such as Indonesia. e27
COVID-19 triggers supply chain and logistics transformation, but there are still gaps, says Marc Dragon of Reefknot Investments; He elaborates on how the recent US-China trade war has led industry players to consider how their businesses are being run. e27
ESG, NRF commit US$29M to National Innovation Challenges (NIC) in Singapore; Startups and firms will work on 28 challenge statements focusing primarily on solutions that leverage Big Data analytics, automation, sustainability and post-COVID-19 efforts. The Straits Times
How Machine Learning (ML) is changing mobile app development; With ML app development, companies are better able to realise and set their goals; Developers are able to recognise a quicker way to develop an app; Users find it easy to operate a ML-based app. Tech Collective
Does profit matter more than impact?; There are many entrepreneurs who may be crossing the money and ethics line without really knowing it; You don’t have to choose ethics or money; Just put ethics first, hold your intention to help others as front and centre, and create products or services that people love. e27
Building your startup’s customer advisory board (CAB); The idea here is that you’ve a feedback loop from customers back to your product where you build, you go get feedback, you iterate; CAB should consist of about 3-6 customers, who should be luminaries or forward thinkers in the market you are serving. TechCrunch
gojek’s VOD service GoPlay expands to interactive live-streaming service; It allows users to interact with one another, buy food and watch in better screen resolution within one platform; GoPlay Live would cover more events soon, including reality shows and online public movie screenings. The Jakarta Post
Japan’s credit card firm JCB partners with Shopee to offer online merchants enhanced payment options; It will be first implemented in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam; A report found that the SEA internet economy soared to US$100B in 2019 after more than tripling in size over the previous 4 years. Vietnam News
Vietnam digital economy could be US$30B by 2025; The nation has 96.9M people but 145.8M mobile phone subscribers, 68.17M internet users, 65M social network users; A survey says Vietnam will obtain US$162M more in GDP in the next 20 years if it successfully carries out digital transformation. OpenGov
Ant Group unveils new blockchain brand AntChain; Currently, over 100M digital assets are uploaded onto AntChain on average every day; The group also unveiled an all-in-one workstation that reduces the deployment time of the company’s blockchain-based solutions by as much as 90%. FintechNews
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