China’s Alibaba Group Holding has invested an additional $634 million into Singapore-based e-commerce subsidiary Lazada to drive additional growth and compete against TikTok and others in the Southeast Asian market. TikTok, which is owned by Chinese technology group ByteDance, has announced that it will acquire a 75 percent stake in Tokopedia, an e-commerce unit of Indonesian technology company GoTo. This would allow TikTok to re-enter the Indonesian online shopping market following the ban on e-commerce transactions via social media.
Founded in 2012, Lazada is a leading and fast-growing e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia that provides consumers with access to a wide range of offerings from local SMEs as well as regional and global brands. In 2016, Alibaba Group acquired a majority stake in the company and integrated it into the Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, which also includes AliExpress. In March 2022, the platform reached the milestone of over one million monthly active sellers.
With the latest financial injection, Alibaba’s total investment into the subsidiary this year amounts to over $1.8 billion.
