CJMY
Bukalapak, one of Indonesia’s leading e-commerce companies, has announced its acquisition of a majority stake in iPrice, Southeast Asia’s leading price comparison platform.
The strategic investment presents a great opportunity for iPrice to accelerate its growth by leveraging the synergies between the two groups. Bukalapak, observing the trend of individual verticals specializing in Southeast Asia’s rapidly growing e-commerce industry, shifted its focus from competing with other marketplaces to building or acquiring niche marketplaces and accelerating their growth.
iPrice, with its relentless focus on price-conscious consumers, has been building a niche marketplace for the last eight years. It helped more than 100 million consumers across seven countries in Southeast Asia save money in 2022. The company’s proprietary technology surfaces the best deals and discounts from more than 8 billion offers in a market featuring a vast array of sale events and hard-to-navigate discount mechanisms.
“I’ve known David and the team for years and have always been excited about their work, then recently the opportunity emerged to work together more closely,” said Willix Halim, CEO of Bukalapak.
“With Bukalapak’s extensive expertise in e-commerce and iPrice’s loyal userbase and proprietary technology, we are confident that we can unlock the platform’s full potential,” he added.
Heinrich Wendel, the co-founder of iPrice, expressed his excitement at the partnership, saying, “We are excited to join forces with Bukalapak and benefit from the group’s synergies. This partnership will allow us to expand our services to help even more users save money across new verticals, like Gaming, and geographies, like Australia.”
iPrice investors, including Itochu and Naver, welcome the deal. The rapidly cooling fundraising market of last year forced iPrice to scale back on several aspects of its business and downsize the team substantially. The company transformed to explore new ways to grow the business cost-effectively. Bukalapak group’s footing in a diverse set of verticals will open up many new opportunities, accelerating this transition.
iPrice will continue to operate as an independent entity, maintaining its neutral position towards users and working with a broad set of merchants and sellers. With a mission to “Help People Save Money,” iPrice serves more than 125 million unique users across eight countries/regions, namely Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong SAR, and Australia.
Bukalapak is a group of tech-based companies and a technology super-enabler for Indonesia’s MSME transformation and various business verticals. The company is building on its heritage of serving more than 110 million users and over 22 million Indonesian MSMEs through its various solutions. As the first publicly-listed Indonesian technology company, Bukalapak is now focused on using technology to enable today’s digital lifestyles for both Indonesian MSMEs and Indonesians in general, across numerous verticals from marketplace, finance and fintech, offline to online, merchant solutions, and procurement.
This acquisition marks an exciting time for both Bukalapak and iPrice as they look forward to unlocking new growth opportunities, building upon their current successes in Southeast Asia’s booming e-commerce industry.
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