A consortium of three Japanese have invested an undisclosed amount to acquire a 33 per cent stake in the Vietnam e-commerce company Sen Do Technology JSC – the owner of Sendo.vn and 123mua.vn.
The consortium of companies that have invested in Sen Do Technology includes, SBI Holdings, econtext ASIA and BEENOS Inc.
The company is said to be valued at around $13 million, which puts the size of the new investment at $4.3 million.
However, Dung refused to disclose the specific amount of money received by the company in this round of financing.
Speaking to local media, Nguyen Dac Viet Dung, CEO of Sen Do, said that the newly acquired capital will be used to support Sen Do management capability, give the customers more options and much better shopping experience.
In particular, a new training policy for the network of sales will be implemented along with the development of human resources, expansion of the list of goods, etc.
Supported by the three strategic investors, the company is hoping to take the revenue up by almost 200 per cent by next year; though the profit will come in only after two or three years, once the process of business expansion and re-investments is over, said the officials at the company.
Ryosuke Hayasshi – deputy general of overseas business of SBI Holdings and Teruhide Sato – CEO of Beenos will be joining the board of directors at Sen Do.
Sen Do Technology JSC was founded by The Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technology (FPT) in 2012. In July 2014, Sen Do bought 123mua.vn, one of Vietnam’s biggest e-commerce site. Sen Do is currently selling over two million goods at about 70 thousand online shops, annually.
The deal seems to be part of this year’s general trend of investment in the e-commerce retail sites, across Asia. Barely a week ago South-EastAsia e-commerce major Lazada Group, raised $249 million financing by a group of investors led by Singapore wealth fund Temasek Holdings. In October, Japanese investment major Softbank investment picked up a $627 million stake in the Indian online retailer Snapdeal (which has raised $950 million is several round of funding this year). Days before that, Sequoia and Softbank had provided a $100 million funding in Indonesia’s leading e-commerce marketplace, PT Tokopedia, in what is considered the largest ever investment received by an Indonesian startup.
According to a White Paper on ICT Vietnam 2014, as quoted on the company’s blog: Vietnam ranks third in Southeast Asia, seventh in Asia and 18th in the world in terms of internet users, with over four million users logging in per day. “Revenue array of e-commerce in Vietnam has reached 2.2 billion in 2013. It is expected that this figure will reach $ four billion by 2015,” said the Sen Do website.
