Lazada Malaysia wants to help its merchants expand to China
Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Lazada is looking into helping its merchants in Malaysia do business in China and overseas, as Malaysia becomes the fastest-growing e-commerce market for the company.
Lazada, together with Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao, will lead the establishment of Alibaba’s e-fulfilment hub in Malaysia’s Digital Free Trade Zone (DFTZ) announced last week. The DFTZ allows companies in Malaysia to conduct free digital trade with China, where a similar zone has already been established.
“Lazada is a part of the [DFTZ] initiative, we have a lot of local fulfilment capabilities and work with a lot of merchants. We want to help bring small and medium enterprises (SMEs) online and help them to succeed at doing cross-border business,” said Hans-Peter Ressel, chief executive of Lazada Malaysia in an interview with the Post.
Lazada started out as an e-commerce retail site selling items directly to customers, but later turned itself into a marketplace allowing brands and merchants to sell products on the platform as well. Today, about 15,000 merchants do business on Lazada’s platform in Malaysia.
“It is easier to scale up business online, enabling the merchants to expand to a regional or global audience. With the [DFTZ] here in Malaysia, and the hub in China – local businesses can sell to an additional 1.3 billion people,” Ressel said, adding that Lazada’s knowledge in e-fulfilment allows the company to help partner up with Cainiao and other companies to help operate Alibaba’s e-fulfilment hub that is expected to fully launch in 2019. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Lazada Malaysia, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary in the country, is currently Lazada Group’s fastest-growing e-commerce platform, overtaking the Singapore market. Lazada also has operations in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Last year, Lazada Malaysia recorded more than 100 per cent growth in sales, and Ressel expects the momentum to keep up in 2017.