Vietnamese E-Commerce Platform Tiki.vn Received $44M from JD.com

Vietnamese e-commerce platform Tiki.vn recently announced it received $44 million in financing from JD.com. Tiki.vn said it would use the new financing to train staff, optimize logistics distribution and market its distribution service TikiNow.

Founded in 2010, Tiki.vn is a business-to-consumer e-commerce platform in Vietnam. Originally, it only sold English books, then developed into a comprehensive e-commerce company. Consumers can pay through MoMo, a third payment platform, on the site.

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Tran NgocThai Son, Tiki.vn’s founder, returned Vietnam after studying in Australia. He found it was hard to buy English books in Vietnam, so he quit his job and founded the site with $10,000. In 2012, the company received an investment from Cyber Agent Ventures, a Japanese Internet advertising agency. In 2013, Japan’s famous Sumitomo also invested in Tiki.vn. Last year, it received $17 million by from VNG, a Vietnamese Internet group, and it accounted for 38 percent of Tiki’s stock.

In Vietnam, the biggest challenge for e-commerce is undoubtedly logistics. Compared to developed countries, Vietnamese infrastructure is not yet mature. If companies want to do business-to-customer business, they need to have their own warehouses, payment systems and delivery teams. This year, Tiki also invested heavily in online payment and Fintech technology.

Alibaba invested in Lazada, the largest e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, which is based in Singapore and has branches in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Lazada.vn controls more than 30 percent of the Vietnamese market. Last month, JD.com invested $500 million in Thailand to set up two e-commerce projects to compete with the Ascend’s TrueMoney.

The war between Alibaba and JD.com has spread to southeast Asia.