Garena aims for Thai e-commerce leadership
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SINGAPORE-BASED Garena recently launched Shopee, its consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace platform focused on social commerce, in Thailand with the aim of making it the leading e-commerce player by the second half of next year.
Garena, which has evolved from an online-game publisher to a broader Internet business, has launched the C2C platform here to capitalise on the rapid growth in the number of social-network users, mobile-phone users and e-commerce in Thailand, said Terence Pang, regional managing director of Shopee.
To become No 1 in e-commerce in the Kingdom, Pang said it needed to have between 15,000 and 20,000 orders per day over the Shopee platform.
“Currently, there are almost 1 million [Shopee] users in Thailand, included sellers and buyers. Since we are a C2C e-commerce platform, our users can be sellers and buyers. We aim to have between 1.5 million and 1.8 million users by the end of this year,” he said.
C2C e-commerce is a rapidly growing market, with the strongest adoption trend being among people buying and selling on their mobile phones.
To promote Shopee in Asia, Garena plans to spend US$40 million to $50 million (Bt1.43 billion to Bt1.79 billion) on marketing in seven markets – Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand – through to the middle of next year.
Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia are the top three markets for Shopee, Pang said.
“In Thailand, ShopSpot is another player in C2C e-commerce, but it is not our direct competitor.”
