Shopee enters Indonesia’s food delivery market

Since 2020, there have been rumors that Shopee is about to enter the Indonesian food delivery market, but it has not been clear whether Shopee intends to import traffic for food delivery or build a tripartite food delivery platform that includes riders on its own. Shopee has always been quite subtle in what they want to do, and usually appears with a bang when competitors least expect it. On the food delivery front, we wont’ speculate, but we would like to share the following photos that our community members shared with us last week:

Shopee Indonesia has also released a video about ShopeeFood on YouTube. The tune retains Shopee’s previous style

It also seems that Shopee is currently recruiting and training riders.  Our community members checked out the ShopeeFood rider app on Google’s Android store. It has more than 100,000 downloads and more than 6,000 reviews at 9 March 2021.

In addition, we found out that ShopeeFood is also setting  a daily reward of up to 50,000 rupiahs (about US$3.5) for riders if the riders can maintain a certain level of performance and (interesting) good reviews from users:

In their Instagram post for riders recruitment in Jakarta at the beginning of January 2021, ShopeeFood stated that registration needs to provide relevant documents such as ID card, driver’s license, bank book, and non-criminal certificate:

We understand that the attractive rider packages have attracted many riders who were originally Grab and Gojek. We are now seeing more and more riders in orange uniforms and green helmets. 

What’s the prospect for Shopee Food

According to our recent report on Southeast Asian food delivery platforms, the Southeast Asian food delivery market will reach US$11.9 billion in GMV in 2020, and Indonesia is the largest market-US$3.7 billion. Jakarta, as an area with a concentrated population, high consumption power, and high Internet penetration rate, has always been one of the key battlefields for burning money in industries such as ride-hailing and food delivery.

The Indonesian food delivery market has been dominated Grab and Gojek – and we do see interesting market dynamics. GrabFood started from scratch in 2018 and squeezed GoJek’s market share from 90 % to less than 50% in the past two years.

Shopee is not actually a new player in the food delivery field. It had entered Vietnam in 2015 through its investment in Vietnam’s food delivery platform Now (previously called Foody). According to our report, Now was slightly ahead of Grab- it had the largest market share in Vietnam in 2020. 

We do expect more action in Indonesia, where Shopee undoubtedly has a greater ecology and influence.

This article was first published in our Momentum Works Chinese on WeChat. Translated by Momentum Works team.