Indonesia’s Emtek breathes new life into CarBay

Traffic in India. Photo credit: Lingaraj GJ

Emtek, one of Indonesia’s largest media companies, today announced a joint venture with CarBay, an automobile information portal created by India’s Girnar Software.

Under the terms of the deal, Girnar owns 70 percent of the JV in Indonesia, while Emtek’s subsidiary KMK gets the remaining 30 percent.

The JV takes over CarBay operations in Indonesia which will now be known as Oto. Oto will offer “car and motorbike research sections, providing exhaustive information about prices, specifications, features, pictures, reviews, and road tests of various models,” say the companies in a joint statement. They didn’t provide further details.

Girnar runs CarBay sites in a number of countries across the globe, as well as automobile sites CarDekho, Gaadi, and Zigwheels in India.

Emtek, on the other hand, owns TV stations, radio, and a number of digital properties in Indonesia.

Most recently, it became known as the company that’s taken over development of the Blackberry Messenger – Blackberry’s standalone chat app that still has an active user base of 60 million people in Indonesia, even though the once popular Blackberry devices have lost their allure.

CarBay isn’t Emtek’s first foray into ecommerce. It’s one of the major forces backing ecommerce startups like Bukalapak and Kudo.

Slow market

CarBay launched in Indonesia in 2015.

It tried to make its mark in a niche already crowded with rivals like iCarAsia and Rocket Internet’s Carmudi.

Unlike the two latter, CarBay wasn’t trying to connect automobile buyers and sellers for a transaction. It’s an information portal only, and Oto continues down this path.

Of the three, ASX-listed iCarAsia is perhaps the most established in Southeast Asia, with a footprint across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. The company’s shares, however, haven’t been performing well as the result of softer-than-expected revenue growth.

Carmudi is rumored to have scaled back its effort in Indonesia earlier this year. Rocket Internet’s Asia Pacific Internet Group, which Carmudi is part of, hasn’t confirmed this though.