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Nikki Natividad · · 7 min readPhilippine logistics scion wants to give Grab a run for its money
Before becoming a founder, Dino Araneta was the president and chief operating officer of LBC Express, one of the largest traditional logistics companies in the Philippines and his family’s business.
Bullish on the prospects of ecommerce, he stepped down in 2014 to start an ecommerce marketplace called TheShop. However, he shut it down as competing against Lazada and Shopee had become tough.
The stint taught him something: Ecommerce sellers face many pain points that are waiting to be addressed. The result was QuadX, a digital logistics company that caters to social commerce sellers in the Philippines.
QuadX founder and CEO Dino Araneta / Photo credit: QuadX
The company is making progress. “We’re going to end the year with over US$30 million [in revenue], pretty much on par” with last year, Araneta tells Tech in Asia.
Those numbers may seem underwhelming in 2020 – what is supposed to be a banner year for ecommerce due to the pandemic.
However, QuadX had lost about four months of cumulative operations this year due to potential and actual Covid-19 infections in its warehouses and among its riders, the founder says. In other words, it would’ve done a lot better if it was at full capacity.
Right now, the company has a blended gross margin of about 28% which can be credited to its asset-light approach of offering services to sellers.
Dandy Loquero, a rider partner for QuadX-launched KaberX / Photo credit: QuadX
“We never wanted to [just] be a logistics company,” Araneta says. “Our main goal was really to build future-preneurs. We wanted to give everyone a chance to go online and sell their products.”
According to the founder, he’s the only “logistics guy” in the entire startup. The rest of his team is focused on the technology and business side of things.
QuadX, nonetheless, started in the logistics space, which served as a jumping-off point for it to capture the social commerce opportunity in the Philippines.
Logistics with a twist
QuadX offers several services: ShippingCart and Xpost are traditional pick-and-pack operations. XPay is its e-wallet mobile app that serves as a complementary role in its ecosystem.
Riders are entrepreneurs too
Delivering for social media sellers
Keeping up amid a pandemic
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Doubling down on its crowdsourcing model, QuadX is raising money and eyeing regional expansion.
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