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Indonesian tech platform eyes Cambodia
Indonesian Kudo, an app that connects merchants, combines payments and organises deliveries of retail products, is eyeing expansion into Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Kudo, part of the Grab group since 2017, already helps millions of offline Indonesians across the archipelago. Kudo is not a Grab consumer app, or ecommerce app, but provides marketing solutions to traditional merchants.
There are a lot of opportunities in Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, said Agung Nugroho, CEO and co-founder of Kudo, who added he could not provide a date yet for the company’s expansion into these markets.
“In the short term, however, we are focusing on the Indonesian market, but definitely there are many opportunities in Southeast Asia.”
Grab wants to empower millions of micro-entrepreneurs across the region, Mr Nugroho said.
Since joining the Grab family, the number of Kudo active agents has increased fourfold. Kudo has empowered more than 2.6 million agents across 500 towns and cities and become the gateway to the internet for Indonesian neighbourhoods.
Kudo developed a seamless and user-friendly platform for traditional retailers’ to maximise business performance and address key challenges through technology and new services, including airtime and mobile top-ups, bill payments, travel tickets, money transfers and registration of Grab driver-partners.
It provides the technology to reduce business costs and boasts features that allow traditional retailers to order supplies wholesale at very competitive prices. Those supplies are delivered directly to retailers, who have the opportunity to get micro-credit based on transactions, said Mr Nugroho.
He added that by leveraging Kudo’s agent network, Grab has managed to grow its network by more than 800,000 drivers and massively expand its reach from 12 cities to more than 200 in Indonesia.
Mr Nugroho said that traditional retailers have a lot of opportunities but lack access to the tools they need to be more productive.
“What Kudo does is to give more opportunities to traditional merchants in terms of sales in a digital way, offering cheaper prices for their inventory, giving them cheaper prices for their working capital and providing opportunities to recruit Grab drivers so traditional retailers can improve their livelihoods,” said Mr Nugroho.
“I think to a certain level that market has become saturated so we want to expand beyond Indonesia,” he added.
“Many drivers did not work prior to joining Grab. In Indonesia, more than 30 percent of agents had no income prior to joining our Kudo network,” said Anthony Tan, Grab CEO and co-founder of the Grab for Good 2019 Conference, held in Jakarta in late September.
For Grab, economic access is about enabling and empowering people to create sustainable livelihoods for themselves, said Mr Tan.
“Today, we launched our first social impact. It is estimated that Grab contributed $5.8 billion to Southeast Asia’s economy in the 12 months to March this year, fuelled by our micro-entrepreneurs,” Mr Tan added.
He said, “Our business model hinges on how well small businesses and micro-entrepreneurs perform on our platform. Without them, we won’t have customers. It is in our interest that our micro-entrepreneurs do well economically.”
Mr Tan said that for small and medium businesses, economic access means the ability to scale and gain access to capital. In Southeast Asia, this is especially crucial given that SMEs contribute almost half of the region’s gross domestic product, but face difficulty accessing loans from traditional financial institutions and lack the know-how of bigger companies to go digital.
“Companies like Grab are in a position to help SMEs innovate, and we can partner with financial institutions to create financial services just for SMEs,” he added.
Source: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50651257/indonesian-tech-platform-eyes-cambodia/