YuuZoo, a Singapore-based company that creates customized social networks for clients around the globe, has completed a reverse takeover of Contel, a declined hardware firm listed on the Singapore Exchange. The deal was announced last month. This gives YuuZoo a backdoor into the stock exchange, bypassing the traditional, complex IPO route which could take more than a year.
In a reverse takeover, a public company acquires a private company, only for the shareholders in the private company to become majority owners of the combined entity. The main purpose of a reverse takeover is to gain easier entry into the stock market.
This maneuver, while seemingly rare amongst web and mobile companies, is quite common in the corporate world. Examples have included The New York Stock Exchange, which was acquired by Archipelago Holdings, and Atari, which was bought over by JT Storage. Read more
Travel startups have been unimaginative when it comes to how they want to disrupt the industry. Most of them are consumer-facing apps that help consumers discover, book, or search for deals — essentially variations on the ideal neighborhood travel agent.
In this vein, Tripconomics is doing something entirely different. Rather than targeting the crowded consumer market, this Singapore startup is hoping to uncover what it sees as a hidden gem: the world of corporate travel management.
As I understand from co-founder Keson Lim, a corporate travel veteran, the industry is dominated by large corporate travel agencies that handle global accounts on large retainers.
These companies, which have call centers around the world, typically service corporations with revenue above USD 250 million (think brands like Energizer, HSBC, and Prada), handling flights, hotels, insurance, and visas.
For ‘smaller’ firms with ‘only’ tens of millions in revenue, they usually manage their travel arrangements and expenses in-house. That’s the crowd that the startup is targeting.
In a nutshell, Tripconomics is a web tool for corporates to manage the travel expenses and plans of their employees. The user can manage travel profiles for staff of different seniorities, setting useful details like budget limitations. Read more
The DS3 family. Teik Guan is wearing a yellow shirt. Photo: DS3
For twelve years, Tan Teik Guan has been carrying the weight of the company and its employees on his back, first as DS3‘s CTO and then as CEO in 2006.
One wrong move could affect not just his 50 employees but also their families. It’s a huge burden to bear, especially since a startup lacks the stability of a large company.
“I didn’t just have my own kids to think about — all my employees are like my children,” he said.
But his reprieve finally came. In April this year, the management successfully sold the Singapore-based IT security firm to Gemalto, a multi-national corporation in the same industry. DS3 has been making profit by selling authentication software to banks.
While the specifics of the deal cannot be disclosed, he and the other co-founders, Zvi Efroni and Kelvin Teo, are happy with how it turned out.
For Teik Guan especially, who left his cushy government job to join an unknown company as the first employee post Dot-Com bust, the rewards were especially sweeter.
“Oh my gosh, it was a huge burden off my back,” he said. Read more
Singapore startup Gametize has launched a new app that focuses entirely on consumers. Called Lifeplay, it adopts all the consumer-focused features that were in the previous version of GameMaki, leaving the new iteration of the latter as a part of the company’s gamification platform for enterprises. Read more
Flocations, a Singapore startup that got a lot of attention for its online service that lets users search plane tickets by price, has quietly changed direction. It is now a meta search engine for tour packages.
The company currently has 1,068 packages from 10 travel agencies on its website, which is more than the 368 listed on inSing.com, one of Singapore’s largest lifestyle portals. The move, while keeping the startup in the travel and tourism space, is certainly a drastic turn.
Flocations raised USD 570k from TNF Ventures and SingTel Innov8 recently. They were also a graduate and investee from seed accelerator JFDI.Asia, which ran its first bootcamp in 2012. Read more
Empty rooms have always been a problem for hotels, especially during off-peak seasons. Besides the lost revenue opportunities, hotel operators have to contend with fixed costs like staff wages, insurance premiums, and marketing expenses.
One way to solve this problem would be to match unfilled inventory with a market of last minute vacationers. We already know that this market exists. Hotel Tonight, a San Francisco based startup, has developed a hotel booking mobile app catering to spur-of-the-moment travelers. It appears to be doing very well, having raised a USD 23M Series C round in June last year.
Now, Hong Kong startup HotelQuickly has brought a similar concept to Asia. Launched in March this year in Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the iOS and Android app has almost 200 hotels available for booking. It isn’t the only one getting into the act — CheckInTonight is also hoping to attract vacationers to book accommodation on its platform.
There’s no better time to capitalize on an idea like this. While Hotel Tonight is expanding outside of the United States — Europe, and not Asia, appears to be its next destination. This leaves a possibly unmet demand in Asia, as we’re certainly seeing a lot of intra-Asia travel to hotspots like Bali, Phuket, and Singapore.
HotelQuickly fits a classic ploy that has been honed to perfection by opportunistic entrepreneurs: Find an idea that is working well in the West, figure out if it’s viable in Asia, and replicate the idea there. The exit strategy is also clear: Hope that you get acquired by a competitor or a larger travel site.
While it’s challenging to recreate a Facebook or Google in parts of Asia, the hospitality sector, which is riding on Asia’s thriving reputation as a vacationer’s paradise, holds a lot of potential for replicating ideas.
HotelQuickly’s five co-founders know this game very well — two of them were from Rocket Internet after all. Christian Mischler was the former COO of FoodPanda while Raphael Cohen was the managing director of FoodPanda Vietnam.
Tomas Laboutka (CEO), Michal Juhas (CTO) and Mario Peng (CFO) round up the rest of the team, which has so far raised USD 500k from private investors in US, Europe, and Asia. The team can’t reveal names yet as they’re still in the midst of fundraising.
Tomas tells me that the idea to do this startup first emerged in July last year. From then on, the company hired a team of developers that worked remotely from Brazil, Pakistan, and Thailand. While having a team in disparate locations was challenging, the arrangement sped up execution by taking advantage of varying time zones to work around the clock — sort of like passing a baton.
Getting the development process down pat is important for a tech-oriented startup like HotelQuickly. Its mobile backend compares rates and displays the hotel rooms with the best value on the app. Payment on the app has to be as seamless as possible despite the lack of an ubiquitous payment gateway across Asia.
Then there’s the matter of developing a web platform for hoteliers to indicate the rooms they have available and the rates they’re going for. The platform also facilitates real-time or delayed money transfer from the startup to the hotel, with the company collecting a commission before passing on the rest.
With the technology is more or less in place, the startup can start devoting some effort to marketing the app. It has set other parts of Asia in its sights.
Scripps Networks Interactive, an international media company, has announced today the acquisition of the Asian Food Channel (AFC), a Singapore-based food-focused pay television network with about 8 million subscribers in 11 markets. Terms of the acquisition were undisclosed.
Including AFC, Scripps now has three lifestyle television brands that are distributed in the region — Food Network and Travel Channel are the other two.
“Asia and the rapid growth in pay television households throughout the region hold great promise for Scripps Networks Interactive and its international ambitions,” said Kenneth W. Lowe, the company’s chairman, president and CEO.
“Acquiring the Asian Food Channel significantly expands our presence in key growth markets and provides us with a solid foundation on which to build a growing lifestyle media business in the region. The channel aligns perfectly with our lifestyle programming focus.”
The AFC runs 24 hours a day, seven days of week and broadcasts a mix of Asian and international video content. It also has a stable of originally-produced programs. Its main revenue source is advertising and fees from pay television operators.
AFC is founded by Maria Brown and Hian Goh. Maria serves as the CEO of the company while Hian is the managing director.
Derek Chang, the recently appointed managing director of the Asia Pacific region for Scripps Networks, will oversee the management and integration of AFC in addition to managing the expansion of Scripps Networks’ other properties in the region.
In rapid fashion, Qoo10 has become a major e-commerce marketplace in Asia, processing SGD 278M (USD 224M) in its five countries last year, up from SGD 150M in 2011. However, it’s still a smidgen of the USD 175B worth of global transactions that are taking place on eBay — roughly equivalent of what China’s Taobao was processing in 2012.
The company makes between three to six percent off every transaction. To fund future expansion, it is gunning for an IPO within two years on the Nasdaq.
Singapore is Qoo10′s second largest market in terms of users and sales performance. The company’s top market is Japan, which has 1.7 million users, or twice that of Singapore. The gap is considerably less in terms of transactions, with Qoo10 processing 35,000 in Japan and 30,000 in Singapore. However, if country size is taken into consideration, then Singapore is the company’s most active market.
Qoo10 is also operating in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
The company behind the marketplace, Giosis, is a joint venture between eBay (49 percent stake) and Ku Young Bae (51 percent). Ku, who also founded GMarket, sold his South Korean operations to eBay before working on Giosis and rebranding all international GMarket sites to Qoo100.
More stats on Qoo10
Traction in Singapore:
|
|
Founding to 31 December 2010
|
2011
|
2012
|
Accumulative
(As of March 2013)
|
|
Sales (SGD)
|
6.4 million
|
34.6 million
|
91million
|
160 million
|
|
Transactions
|
770,000
|
3 million
|
6.5million
|
12 million
|
|
Members
|
88,000
|
270,000
|
430,000
|
900,000
|
|
Sellers
|
5,000
|
10,000
|
30,000
|
53,000
|
Number of employees: 450 (40 in Singapore)
Overall total sales from mobile: 20 percent
Downloads for Qoo10 app in Singapore/World: 500k/1 million
Growth rate in Singapore: 20 percent a month (fastest among all countries)
Registered Singapore users in March 2013: 900,000
New registered users a day since January 2012 in Singapore: 1,000
Profile of Qoo10 user: 27 years old on average, 75 percent female
Pageviews in Singapore: 90 million
We’ve been hearing more about online private sales in Singapore lately, with companies like Reebonz offering members-only discounts for branded fashion items and ImpulseFlyer doing the same thing for boutique and luxury hotels.
ChateauAsia is bringing the same concept to wine. The one-year-old startup, which is operating in Singapore and Hong Kong, works with French producers and importers to sell wine at discounts of between 20 percent and 50 percent.
The website’s backend tracks the tastes of its customers, and one day, the company hopes to match them with a database of French wines and their characteristics so that it can offer recommendations. Read more
Vistaprint, the sixth largest public-listed printing company in the United States, has just gone small by launching a simple-to-use website builder called Vistamobi, which is targeted at micro business owners in developing countries in Southeast Asia.
It’s a novel product, especially because it comes from an unlikely source — a firm more well known in Europe and the US for printing namecards than mobile innovation.
But the powers that be at Vistaprint are embracing entrepreneurship from within. Vistamobi is created by a lean four-man team stationed in Singapore, headed by Maliha Quadir, digital director for global emerging markets. Revenues are not a concern for the team at this point; they are more intent on acquiring users, getting feedback, and iterating.
Vistamobi is unlike Wix, Yola, and Weebly in two important ways.
First, it is built from the ground up to be mobile friendly, an important feature in emerging markets since many people have mobile phones as their first and primary computing device.
An illustration of this can be seen on Vistamobi’s desktop and tablet interface. Whenever an update is made to their website, users will see a preview in a virtual mobile phone screen. In this view, they can pick from a variety of mobile phone makes that are popular in their countries.
Second, Vistamobi websites are optimized for low bandwidth, which again is crucial since Internet connection speeds in these countries leave much to be desired. As such, the websites that can be created are designed to load fast and take care of the basics.
The product is catered to micro business owners and SME bosses who don’t possess HTML knowledge and don’t how to use more advanced CMS systems like WordPress, let alone customize it to their needs. But it does cover the basics: Created websites are responsive, possess analytics, and are SEO-friendly. Some limited customizations are available, although custom URLs aren’t enabled yet.
Some interesting use cases have arisen which step beyond retail and e-commerce businesses. Since soft launching in Indonesia about a month ago, consumers and students have started using Vistamobi to create their own sites. Student boy bands are getting in on the act too, adding links to SoundClould on their websites.
It seems that people still do want their own .com despite the advent of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Vistamobi has so far launched localized sites for India and Indonesia. While it is targeting emerging markets in South Asia, Maliha says that they are also looking at catering to business owners from developed economies, who may desire more bells and whistles.
Despite the availability of so many easy-to-use website builders out there, tech companies still believe there is room in the market for another product.
Infinite.ly from the Philippines, for example, believes it can ride on the wave of new Internet users that are joining the pile in the emerging economies. While it doesn’t have clear differentiation, its founder says that it is just at the beginning of its product roadmap, with vertical-specific features being part of the mix.
Another new website creator to watch out for is Burpple’s Pages — which enables restaurant owners to create their own websites in a snap. What’s special about Pages is that it leverages on Burpple’s mobile social network to promote the restaurant’s food.
It also has F&B specific features like interactive menus as well as online reservation, takeaway, and delivery options.
These companies are responsible for just a slice of the action in the online presence-building space. With the next Billion users slated to come from Asia, it’s no wonder many firms, from startups to MNCs, are hoping to win over business owners in this part of the world.
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