“From a modest team of around 100 people, we now have almost 8,000 employees in Southeast Asia.”
Chew said 125 million Indonesians make up the majority of the app’s 325 million monthly users in Southeast Asia, and greater than two million sell their goods on the TikTok store in Indonesia, the region’s largest economy and most populous country.
Users sell a wide selection of tech, fashion, home and other goods on the platform.
Why copy Western TikTok bans? For most of Asia it’s “just one other app”
Why copy Western TikTok bans? For most of Asia it’s “just one other app”
Chew’s comments got here after Singapore-based consultancy Momentum Works released a report on Thursday detailing how the TikTok marketplace leveraged its legions of users to expand its business in 2022 after testing the waters in Indonesia a yr earlier.
While lagging behind older rivals Shopee and Lazada, TikTok Shop saw the fastest growth rate, increasing its gross merchandise value (GMV) – the entire value of products sold, including canceled, returned and refunded orders – sevenfold to $4.4 billion last yr with just $600,000 in 2021.
“You can think of it like TikTok, which already has a captive audience that comes on board for entertainment, trying various ways to convert them and their attention into purchases and GMV,” said Weihan Chen, head of analytics at Momentum Works .
From Indonesia, TikTok Shop “aggressively expanded into five additional Southeast Asian markets, a lot of which boasted large TikTok user populations,” and invested in improving its e-commerce capabilities, Chen added.
TikTok is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance.
Overall, the GMV of the region’s nine leading e-commerce platforms was valued at nearly $100 billion in 2022, up 14 percent from the previous yr, led by Singapore-based Shopee and Lazada, a subsidiary of China’s Alibaba group. .
The report showed that Shopee, a unit of Singapore-based Sea Ltd, brought in $47.9 billion, up 13%. Lazada was a distant second with $20.1 billion, up from $21 billion in 2021.
Indonesia stays the most important e-commerce market in Southeast Asia, generating 52% of the region’s total GMV.
The report shows that the return to offline shopping after the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions has led to a slowdown in e-commerce sales, but is predicted to proceed to grow.
It noted that the region may gain advantage from the expansion of Chinese brands and manufacturing corporations into other countries as they reduce their dependence on the US market and avoid growing competition at home.
“This could be a real game-changer for the e-commerce landscape in Southeast Asia, which has long suffered from a lack of diversity in goods,” it said.
