Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., in its biggest overseas acquisition to date, said Tuesday it would pay about $1 billion for a controlling stake in Singapore e-commerce startup Lazada Group, betting on growth in populous Southeast Asia.
The acquisition of Lazada—which sells everything from rice cookers to smartphones and operates e-commerce platforms throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam—comes as Alibaba has been using its $3.7 billion in free cash flow to expand into e-commerce, logistics and media, as well as entertainment both at home and abroad.
You may recall back in 2014 I wrote about Lazada’s operations in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest market. (I snapped the image above at a Lazada warehouse outside Jakarta.) The nut graf:
Challenges are par for the course at Lazada Indonesia, founded in Jakarta in 2012 and partly funded by Rocket Internet AG, a Berlin-based tech incubator that went public last month. Indonesia’s e-commerce market is still small, and Lazada had to build a lot of what it needed from scratch. But the company is plowing ahead so it can get a head start in the country over international giants like Amazon.com Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and eBay Inc.
Lazada already gets more visitors than any other business-to-consumer site in Indonesia, according to data from research firm SimilarWeb. Lazada’s site saw 6.6 million visitors a month, compared with 3.9 million for Alibaba’s marketplace website AliExpress.com and 2.2 million for eBay, according to the most recent data available from brokerage UBS.