Letter to readers: Can Mitra Bukalapak woo skeptical FMCG giants?

Dear readers,

We’ve been keeping an eye on Southeast Asia’s business-to-business ecommerce market, which has seen a dramatic uptick in venture capital money in recent years.

Last week, our Indonesia reporter Putra Muskita uncovered a roadblock faced by Mitra Bukalapak, ecommerce unicorn Bukalapak’s attempt to take on the market.

Co-founder and ex-CEO Achmad Zaky with a Bukalapak partner / Photo credit: Bukalapak

It’s facing pushback from Sampoerna over how it has priced and distributed the major cigarette maker’s products. You definitely need to check this story out if you’re curious about the unseen challenges in this space.

We’ve been consistently covering B2B ecommerce for a while now. Here’s a selection that might interest you:

• A look at GudangAda’s unprecedented numbers (we’ve added some clarifications to the story as well, which you can check out)
• A low-key $300m company plans to disrupt Indonesia’s supply chain ‘mafia’
• Troubles at Zilingo, which is facing job cuts and internal culture issues.
• A list of prominent players and what’s driving the revival of the trend.

Moving on, our Singapore reporter Melissa Goh published a long read on AirAsia’s super-app ambitions. While the move might sound unusual, it’s not that far-fetched as airlines are already more multifaceted than people might think. In reality, they’re a transportation, logistics, food and beverage, media, and retail business rolled into one.

For AirAsia to even have a chance to achieve this feat though, it needs to solve its cashflow woes first as it climbs out of the pandemic.

Some of AirAsia Group’s main businesses / Table: Tech in Asia

Speaking of super apps, a reader noted that any contender that doesn’t include a popular chat feature as a trigger won’t work, with WeChat being an example.

While I agree that it is a key cog, we’re also seeing how other super apps that don’t have chat, like Meituan-Dianping and Alipay, are succeeding in China.

The main ingredient, I think, is encouraging high-frequency transactions and interactions that form the basis for everything else. Chat is certainly a big one (and this makes Whatsapp aspirations intriguing), but who’s to say ecommerce and food delivery can’t form the basis for a super app?