An airline’s super-app ambitions

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Hello readers,

It’s not a good year for airlines — we all know it. But AirAsia is surging forward with its plan to become a super app. Can it survive the initial loss-making baggage before reaping the rewards?

You can read the full article here (🔒) or scroll down for a summary.

Also, we’ve added some clarifications to an article we published some weeks ago about GudangAda, which you can check out here.

Moving on, here are your quick bytes for the day:

1️⃣ A former Amazon executive is now the new CTO of Indonesian ride-hailing giant Gojek. Last month was eventful for the Indonesian decacorn:

• It raised capital from Facebook and Paypal. You can check out our analysis here (🔒).
• Its video-streaming service Goplay raised capital independently (🔒), which should help in user stickiness.
• It unfortunately had to layoff 430 employees as a “long-term response to the Covid-19 pandemic.”

2️⃣ Why do we still have to do the writing when we have OpenAI’s new language generator now? The latest AI is able to generate short stories, songs, press releases, and even computer code.

3️⃣ Naver, the South Korean parent company of mobile messenger LINE and video messenger Snow, moves its data center from Hong Kong to Singapore.

4️⃣ To boost its Southeast Asian expansion, Chinese streaming giant Iqiyi hired three country managers, two of whom are from Iflix, which was acquired by Tencent (🔒) last month.

5️⃣ A Singapore real estate tycoon has plans to open 1,000 cloud kitchens across Asia.

6️⃣ China’s digital payment provider Alipay partners with Vodacom to create a super app in South Africa.

AirAsia takes off on its big idea

Ecommerce, digital payments, travel, online media – you want it, AirAsia’s got it (🔒).

Tesla’s rival zooms into the race