Indonesian ecommerce platform Tokopedia just announced that it has secured a new funding round of US$1.1 billion, led by Alibaba Group.

The confirmation came after much speculation that JD.com – Alibaba’s main competitor in China backed by Tencent – was in talks with Tokopedia for a US$500 million round.

It was revealed to Momentum Works that Tokopedia had received multiple offers, and the Alibaba team came with the highest price.

Alibaba recently increased their holding of Lazada, another major ecommerce platform in Southeast Asia, from 51% to 83%, with a US$1 billion capital injection.

This would be a major setback for JD.com and Tencent for their effort to build a foothold in Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world. It is known that Tencent is leading a round of US$1.2 billion into Go-Jek that is yet to close.

Both Alibaba and Tencent announced their Q2 results in the last 24 hours, with Tencent increasing net profit by 70%, while Alibaba growing its net profit by 96%, both beating the expectations of the most optimistic analysts.

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Thanks for reading The Low Down (TLD), the blog by the team at Momentum Works. Got a different perspective or have a burning opinion to share? Let us know at [email protected].

 

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Jianggan Li
Jianggan Li is the Founder & CEO of Momentum Works. Prior to founding Momentum Works, he co-founded Easy Taxi in Asia, and served as Managing Director of Foodpanda. The two years running Rocket Internet companies has given him a lifetime experience on supersonic implementation, and good camaraderie with entrepreneurs across the developing world. He holds a MBA from INSEAD (GMAT 770) and a degree in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University. Unfortunately he never wrote a single line of code professionally - but in his first job he was in media, travelling extensively across Asia & Europe, speaking with Ministers & (occasionally) Prime Ministers. Apart from English and his native Mandarin, he is also fluent in French and conversational in Cantonese & Spanish. He tried to learn Latin (for three years) and Sanskrit (for six months) as well. In his (scarce) free time, he reads, travels, hikes and dives. Pyongyang, Tehran & Chisinau are among the interesting cities he has been to.