ShopeeFood launches in Vietnam

Several weeks ago, we discussed about ShopeeFood’s aggressive push in Indonesia. Shopee’s food delivery company has since launched in both Malaysia and Thailand while continuing to recruit more delivery riders. In the past five months, the number of downloads for its ShopeeFood rider app, ShopeeFood Driver, has grown by around five times, exceeding 500,000 installments as of 18 August 2021.

And as of today (18 August), Shopee has rebranded Now, a food delivery platform under Foody (which Sea Group acquired in 2017), to ShopeeFood.

As we discussed in our Food Delivery Platforms in Southeast Asia report, Now is the leading player in Vietnam. It holds a slight edge over Grab, accounting for around 42% of the country’s food delivery gross merchandise value (GMV). 

With an estimated GMV of $0.7 billion, Vietnam is one of the smallest food delivery markets in Southeast Asia. It remains relatively undeveloped, which means that players will need to make long term investments. 

So far, the bigger companies such as Grab and Gojek have focused on larger markets such as Singapore and Thailand. The competition for food delivery is less fierce in Vietnam (we suspect that’s why Baemin is expanding so aggressively), giving ShopeeFood greater flexibility in experimenting with different features.

As ShopeeFood launches in Vietnam, it will also become Shopee’s first service offering with its own app. Will it still be able to interact with ShopeePay and other features in Shopee’s ecosystem? While Grab has reintegrated GrabFood, once a standalone app, into its super app, Uber has retained UberEats as an independent app. 

Which strategy will best allow platforms to achieve its end goal of drawing traffic and retaining users– how ShopeeFood performs in Vietnam will give us a better answer.