Rocket financials: Lazada on course for $1B in sales this year, 58% of shoppers now on mobile

(Image: unmodified version of photo by Flickr user Steve Jurvetson)

Rocket Internet released its H1 2015 financial report this afternoon, showing that the Germany-based startup factory saw strong growth from most of its global network of sites.

Rocket’s 13 core sites – the ones it dubs “proven winners,” including the likes of Foodpanda, Lazada, and Zalora – hit revenue of EUR 1.37 billion (US$1.53 billion) in H1, up from EUR 567 million (US$636 million) the same period a year ago.

The company is not revealing net profit or net losses for any of its startups, so it’s not easy to see if the fast-expanding ventures are managing to pull in any profit unless you consider the EBITDA figures.

Lazada booms

Lazada – which operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam – is on course to pull in about US$1 billion in annual gross merchandise volume (GMV) once 2015 ends. GMV is the value of items that shoppers buy.

GMV hit US$433 million in H1 of this year, which was up four-fold from the same period a year ago.

The store has about 5.7 million active customers, which is up four-fold from 1.4 million in H1 2014.

Lazada’s net revenue reached US$121.1 million in H1, up from US$64.5 million 12 months earlier.

The estore has now largely shifted from directly selling items that it stocks to having an open marketplace, more like the Alibaba model with Taobao and Tmall. Lazada now has 27,000 active merchants and about 80 percent of consumer expenditure is from the marketplace.

That major shift to third-party merchants means that Lazada can save money on storing its own stock and instead shift that capital to helping merchants with logistics to ensure speedy delivery in a region hobbled by fragmented and poor infrastructure. Lazada has “fulfillment routes” across Southeast Asia, moving sellers’ items to 62 last-mile distribution hubs across its six nations to try speed up deliveries. That also reduces costs for shoppers as it minimizes shipping by air, the company points out in the slideshow of data it published today.

Lazada today cited Similarweb data showing that the site beats local rivals in terms of monthly website visits. But with so much ecommerce happening on mobile and in apps, it’s not a good indicator of a site’s popularity.

Rocket addressed that shift to mobile, saying that Lazada crossed a milestone in Q2 2015 as more than half of the spending total came from mobile. Mobile GMW was 51 percent of total GMV in Q2, moving upwards further to 58 percent in August.

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