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To those acquainted with the e-commerce industry, Albert Lucius is no unfamiliar name. The CEO and co-founder of the Indonesian Online-to-Offline (O2O) startup Kudo has contributed greatly to the expansion of Indonesia’s e-commerce industry beyond the country’s major cities. Under his leadership, Kudo looks set to continue on the path of rapid growth, especially in the light of its recent acquisition by Grab.
While change is inevitable given this development, it has also opened up wider opportunities for Kudo to grow even further. As such, Albert’s fireside chat at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017 this November is highly anticipated.
He will be sharing more about how bringing cashless payments to the masses will transform the marketplace, and also give insights to Kudo’s transition into a new phase post-acquisition. This acquisition marks the first investment of Grab’s recently announced ‘Grab 4 Indonesia 2020’ master plan, a commitment to invest US$700 million in Indonesia over the next four years to help the archipelago achieve its goal of being Southeast Asia’s largest digital economy in 2020.
A heart for economic empowerment
When Albert and his co-founders established Kudo in 2014, the vision they had in mind was for the financial inclusion of offline consumers living in harder-to-reach locations. Through their O2O platform, they have brought a wide range of goods and services to consumers in these tier three and tier four cities that were previously thought inaccessible. Three years down the road, Kudo now has more than 500,000 digital entrepreneurs on its platform, spread across 500 cities and suburban districts of Indonesia.
Kudo was not Albert’s first move towards economic empowerment for the lower-income groups – in 2009, he founded KrisKros, providing web-marketing services to SME businesses also specifically geared towards low-to-middle income communities in Indonesia.
Moving forward
Grab co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan (l) shakes hands with Albert Lucius, co-founder and CEO of Kudo.
Following Grab’s recent acquisition of Kudo, Albert shared that the two firms share a common vision of enabling Indonesians in all socioeconomic circumstances to benefit from the growth of e-commerce. Together, they have plans to create 5 million micro-entrepreneurs in Indonesia by 2018 and use their combined market advantage to expand their reach through Indonesia. By bringing cashless payment solutions to more Indonesian consumers and additional opportunities to earn income for merchants, Grab and Kudo work towards building SEA’s universal mobile payments platform.
The relationship between the two firms looks to be mutually beneficial, as Grab taps into Kudo’s massive network of agents – the largest in Indonesia – to bring more drivers and users onto the Grab platform, while Kudo can ride on Grab’s support to rapidly expand their agent network.
What’s next for Kudo?
As Kudo enters a new phase of growth and development, many are excited to see how exactly their O2O platform will be integrated with Grab’s emerging mobile payments platform, GrabPay, and its impact on the digital payments ecosystem following the 80 percent month-on-month growth of GrabPay Credits since its launch in November 2016.
Be among the first to learn about Kudo’s latest plans for the coming new year by hearing straight from the horse’s mouth at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017! Albert will be holding a fireside chat on November 1 where he will share more on his personal experience of going through the acquisition, as well as Kudo’s plans for regional expansion.
Tickets to the conference are now going at 15 percent off, and you can grab yours when you key in this code ‘tiajkt15’ at checkout. This deal lasts only till 22 September, 2359hrs (GMT +7), so hurry!
This post After Grab’s acquisition, what’s next for Kudo? appeared first on Tech in Asia.
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