Org Chart: The people steering Lazada (update)

Org Chart maps out the people at the top of Asia’s most prominent tech companies. Who are the key decision-makers? How are the teams organized? What does it tell us about the company’s priorities? We continue this series with ecommerce major Lazada.

This article has been updated from the previous edition published on March 3, 2022
 
The top seat at Lazada Group is definitely not for the faint of heart.

In June, Tech in Asia broke the news about James Dong’s appointment as Lazada’s new CEO – the fifth person to hold the post in five years.

Since founder Maximilian Bittner left the ecommerce firm in 2018, Lazada has had a number of group CEOs, including Lucy Peng (2018), Pierre Poignant (2018 to 2020), and Chun Li (2020 to 2022).

In July, Tech in Asia reported that Magnus Ekbom, Lazada’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, was also set to leave the company. Ekbom was the last remaining executive from the original founding team of Rocket Internet.

Since our last Lazada org chart published in March, there have been several other departures and internal promotions.

This also highlights how Lazada is now at a crossroads: It may finally have achieved the stability to become Alibaba’s new growth engine.

It’s clear that Alibaba is taking more of an active role in its Southeast Asian ecommerce arm, especially amid the slowdown for Chinese tech firms. Lazada’s new heads for payments and logistics both come from Alibaba-linked companies.

Lazada seems to be making aggressive pushes into fintech lately. It recently led a US$168.3 million funding round in TNG Digital, which owns and operates Touch ‘n Go, one of Malaysia’s most popular e-wallets. Earlier this month, Lazada also bought 4.8 million shares of Indonesian e-wallet Dana.

Ecommerce and fintech are increasingly becoming two sides of the same coin. Lazada can’t afford to lag behind rivals: Shopee has ShopeePay and SeaBank, while Tokopedia has the GoTo Financial ecosystem.

See also: Making sense of TNG Digital and Lazada’s hefty investment in the firm

Meanwhile, the global growth in ecommerce, induced by the Covid-19 pandemic, seems to be fading, forcing even giants like Amazon and Shopify to make adjustments. In July, Amazon posted its slowest topline growth in two decades and Shopify laid off 10% of its workforce.

Last week, Sea Group withdrew 2022 revenue forecasts for Shopee, Lazada’s biggest rival in Southeast Asia, citing “increasing macro uncertainties.” At the same time, TikTok is casting its net wider in this region to turn loyal users of the short-video app into shoppers.