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Melissa Goh · · 8 min readHow Ninja Van is powering cross-border ecommerce beyond deliveries
When Chang Wen Lai founded Ninja Van as a last-mile delivery solution for his own menswear brand in 2014, he never imagined he would be helming one of Southeast Asia’s largest logistics startups. “Our plan was to have 20 drivers and call it a day,” the former Barclays trader quips.
Today, the express logistics startup has grown far beyond the 5,000 parcels it was delivering daily in 2015, processing a million packages a day on average across six Southeast Asian markets.
A Ninja Van delivery man / Photo credit: Ninja Van
With its latest capital injection of US$279 million, Ninja Van is turning its attention to the millions of microentrepreneurs and small businesses in the region. The company is expanding its first and last-mile logistics offering upstream to include overseas procurement, escrow services, and cross-border shipping services while building its business-to-business (B2B) service in Malaysia.
Lai declined to disclose the startup’s latest financials but says it has “never failed to more than double its revenue” every year. The company clocked around US$9.5 million in revenue in the six-month period between January and June 2017, regulatory filings show. Assuming an annual growth multiple was 2x at the minimum, the estimated topline was at least US$76 million in 2019. Ninja Van, however, didn’t comment on the projected sum.
An untapped opportunity
Southeast Asia is seeing a boom in online sellers, many of whom are tapping into various ecommerce marketplaces. Increasingly, however, they’re building their branding on social media and directly selling products to their followers.
Lai is keenly watching this social ecommerce trend as Ninja Van currently handles logistics for “hundreds of thousands” of small businesses.
| Global Logistics Performance Index (2012 to 2018) | |
| Country | Rank |
| Singapore | 5 |
| Thailand | 34 |
| Malaysia | 35 |
| Vietnam | 45 |
| Indonesia | 51 |
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With US$279 million in new funding, Ninja Van will be expanding its logistics offering to millions of microentrepreneurs and small businesses in the region, CEO Chang Wen Lai says.
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