Lazada and Grab go head to head over online grocery delivery

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Hello readers,

This week, we published a story about online grocery delivery in Southeast Asia (the first of a two-parter), which became the fastest-growing ecommerce category in 2020.

The region’s online grocery space is in its early days, and many platforms are still struggling to become profitable. But last year, the sector experienced an unexpected windfall as Covid-19 put most Southeast Asian countries under lockdown. Both Lazada – via its RedMart unit – and Grab have upped the ante in markets like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

It will be interesting to see how the competition plays out because Lazada and Grab are cutting more into each other’s turf with this new push.

In the coming weeks, we will look specifically at RedMart’s operations and business model and explain how the brand became an integral part of Lazada’s online grocery play.

— Nicole Jao, journalist at Tech in Asia

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