Shopee, Lazada, and Bukalapak are the biggest employers in SEA ecommerce scene

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In November 2018, Google and Temasek updated their industry study stating that ecommerce in Southeast Asia will be worth US$240 billion by 2025. The updated figures upped last year’s predictions by US$40 billion due to exponential developments in online vacation rentals, online food delivery, subscription music services, and on-demand video.

The study also predicts that the internet economy in the region will reach US$72 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) by 2018. A big chunk of the valuation will be held by the ecommerce sector, valued at approximately US$102 billion by 2025.

But to reach that goal, the study also mentions that a bigger talent pool of internet economy professionals will be necessary to realize the industry’s full potential.

As such, we conducted a study to analyze the ecommerce workforce and find out if Southeast Asia would be able to reach its US$240 billion potential with its current state of employment.

We analyzed employee data and hiring trends of the biggest ecommerce players in the region based on our Map of Ecommerce’s Q3 data. This study was conducted through LinkedIn and covers Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Workforce growth is above industry average

By analyzing the hiring trends of Southeast Asia’s top ecommerce players, we found that their total employee count increased by 40.7 percent between Q4 2016 and Q3 2018.

Google and Temasek predicts that the internet economy workforce needs to grow at 10 percent to reach its full potential. But the growth rate in the ecommerce sector is much higher than the industry average. It is then a positive sign because digital companies usually face difficulties when looking for suitable candidates.

EcommerceIQ also conducted a similar survey, where Facebook Indonesia said, “[There are] a lot of great candidates out there. The thing is, sometimes the recruitment process and the interview questions are ridiculous, and those are eliminating the great candidates from the recruiter.”

Shopee, whose workforce grew by 176.8 percent in two years (from 1,384 to 3,831 employees in Q3 2018), supports this claim. Shopee’s growth means that it has been hiring an average of three people per day during the said period.

The company’s massive expansion took off when its parent company Sea Group (formally known as Garena) raised US$720 million between 2016 and 2018 and garnered an additional US$575 million after listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 2017.

Long-term ecommerce talents needed