In race to enter Asia, Wrapp fires first salvo against Rocket Internet clone DropGifts

We’ve all heard of Rocket Internet’s blitzkrieg in Asia, and how the Samwer Brothers are beating Silicon Valley’s best startups to the punch by launching first in the continent — using an army of clones.

Some examples have included Zappos-clone Zalora and Amazon-clone Lazada.

Swedish startup Wrapp, which specializing in doing social gift exchanging, has also been Samwer-ed, and the result is called DropGifts.

But, instead of taking it lying down, Wrapp has launched into a high-stakes game of global expansion. In other words, they hope to beat Rocket Internet at their own game: Rapid execution.

Wrapp recently announced that they’ve opened in Taiwan. Bruce Chen, the company’s country manager, told ArcticStartup: “Taiwan is Wrapp’s beachhead for introducing our unique social gifting service to Asian markets where gift giving is culturally an everyday event.”

Digging at Rocket Internet, he adds: “Since we don’t own ecommerce businesses – and promise to never start one – we can assure Asian retailers a conflict-free, long lasting relationship built on innovation and real value creation.”

Japan appears to be next on their wishlist: Carl Fritjofsson, COO of Wrapp, was seen doing business there.

Ever since DropGifts announced their presence to the world, Wrapp has sped up their expansion plans. They are now in parts of Europe, and are aiming to move into the US, China, Japan, and Brazil.

DropGifts has already established a presence in several countries, having launched in Italy, the UK, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, France and Brazil. Their next destinations are India and South Africa.

A GiGaOm writer has observed that Rocket Internet has of late escalated their cloning aggressiveness. Instead of just targeting successful Silicon Valley startups, they are now copying nascent but promising companies too — Wrapp being one of them.