Microsoft has entered into a strategic partnership with Bukalapak, one of Indonesia’s leading e-commerce platforms, while Google and Temasek have agreed to invest USD 350 million in Tokopedia, one of the 6 startup unicorns in Indonesia. Both moves are seen to tap into Indonesia’s e-commerce industry, which is expected to be valued at USD 65 billion by 2022.
With the partnership, Microsoft will make a strategic investment in Bukalapak, which will adopt Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform. The partnership will address cloud infrastructure needs for Bukalapak’s 12 million micro, small and medium enterprises as well as 100 million customers.
Google and Temasek’s capital injection will bankroll Tokopedia post-Covid-19 expansion. Apart from servicing 7 million merchants and over 90 million monthly consumers through its e-commerce platform, Tokopedia also provides financial products such as digital wallets and loans. In the future, it aims to use location data for localized marketing promotions as it is already using Geolocation API to determine the exact location of its users.
Besides Microsoft and Google, Facebook and PayPal have also poured investment in Gojek, the largest startup and ride-hailing unicorn in the country, with plans to develop an e-commerce and payment business around its WhatsApp unit.
(Sources: Bloomberg; Google Cloud; Retail News; Search Engine Journal)
