After Chinese tech titan Alibaba acquired Lazada in 2016, cracks started to form in the online marketplace’s leadership structure. 

This could be attributed to the shuffling of key leaders and the parachuting in of Alibaba management, who were seen as executives without a strong grasp of the Southeast Asian market. For example, Maximilian Bittner, CEO and co-founder of Lazada, left in March 2018 and was replaced by Lucy Peng, who was also the company’s chairman at the time. Peng is one of Alibaba’s 18 founders and was executive chairman of Ant Financial, the firm’s fintech affiliate, from 2016 till she became Lazada’s CEO.

In turn, these fissures drove Lazada to make multiple missteps in its attempt to expand across markets.

But what pushed the then-king of Southeast Asian ecommerce off its throne was how its rival Shopee took advantage of a moment of weakness and made a timely strike against Lazada. As the underdog, Shopee leveraged a centrally controlled hierarchy and an unapologetically Sinicized (or Chinese-influenced) work culture while managing to remain nimble. The Singapore-headquartered upstart expanded and eventually toppled Lazada from its position as the undisputed leader of the region’s ecommerce scene.

In this episode of The Playbook, we unpack the pros and cons of a homogeneous work culture and how Shopee successfully emerged as a Southeast Asian ecommerce giant.

Watch the rest of the series here: 

The Playbook: Shopee Episode 1

The Playbook: Shopee Episode 2