This is MatahariMall’s gameplan to beat Rocket Internet

Lippo Group representative John Riady.

Lippo Group representative John Riady was notably missing from the invite-only Macquarie Indonesia Telecoms and Ecommerce Conference in Jakarta yesterday, attended by the who’s who of Indonesia’s tech players including the nation’s largest telcos and the government’s tech minister Rudiantara. Riady, who is heading up Indonesia’s latest ecommerce venture MatahariMall, would rather focus on getting the online store off the ground.

Last month, Indonesia’s Lippo Group put US$500 million into MatahariMall in hopes of building the business-to-consumer site that would eventually become the “Alibaba of Indonesia” – in the words of the firm’s public relations.

As the grandson of Lippo Group’s founder Mochtar Riady, John Riady is a high-profile figure in Indonesia’s business and media scene. He was a teenager during the fall of Suharto, the former dictator who presided over three decades of a corrupt and brutal regime. With an early interest in politics, Riady attended Georgetown University in the US, where he studied political philosophy and economics before returning to Indonesia to build the local English language media outlets GlobeAsia magazine and The Jakarta Globe newspaper. He later purchased Investor Daily Indonesia. But according to Riady, there is “no money to be made in media” these days, which is why he’s now shifting his focus toward ecommerce.

The investment was one of the largest on public record to go into an Indonesian ecommerce site. However, it’s important to note that MatahariMall is not really a startup – in the pure sense of the word – but rather a corporate venture. So it’s not accurate to say that the investment was the largest for a local tech startup. Homegrown consumer-to-consumer marketplace Tokopedia can still claim that title with US$100 million from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank.

See: 10 Indonesian startups with consistent funding and growth

Lazada isn’t a pushover

Riady says boldly that his firm is not intimidated by Rocket Internet, arguably the most aggressive tech startup player in Southeast Asia.

Rocket Internet’s Lazada Indonesia – which is likely the largest business-to-consumer ecommerce site serving the archipelago today – will now have an even larger capacity than ever to rake in the sales. Lazada Group’s CEO Maximillian Bittner just announced this week that Lazada would absorb the resources and personnel of Rocket’s consumer-to-consumer site Lamido. Earlier this week, we reported that Lazada Group has received US$686 million in funding, and is currently valued at US$1.25 billion. But with deep pockets of his own and hands in many local pies, Riady doesn’t seem to care one way or another.

“I don’t know what Lazada is doing. That doesn’t drive our strategy,” says Riady. “We’ve got a larger budget than them and we’ve got a better team […] They’re focused on nine different countries. We’re focused only on Indonesia. We’ve been selling to the Indonesian consumer for the last 40 years. We know exactly what they want, what they’ll buy, and at what price points.”

Riady claims that even prior to his site going live, which he says won’t happen until later this month, MatahariMall has been able to gather more types of items listed for sale (SKUs) than any other ecommerce company in Indonesia. “On the sourcing side, we’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of merchants who want to sign up to our platform,” says Riady. “We signed as many merchants within one week as it took other players to do in nine to 12 months.”

However, it’s important to note that when speaking about ecommerce, more than one SKU listing can exist for the same product on a platform if that product is offered by more than one vendor. For example, if both Hartono and another electronics store had iPad Air listings on MatahariMall, then that could count as two SKUs. Having said that, a high number of SKUs for a business-to-consumer site prior to launch can help give one an idea of scale, as well as how many partners Lippo Group really has.