KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, April 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Bukalapak, one of Indonesia's leading e-commerce companies, announced today that it has acquired a majority stake in iPrice, Southeast Asia's leading price comparison platform. Through this strategic investment, iPrice has the opportunity to accelerate its growth by leveraging the synergies between the two groups.
As e-commerce in Southeast Asia has been growing rapidly over the last decade individual verticals have become big enough to specialize in. Observing this trend, Bukalapak decided to shift its focus from competing head-to-head with other marketplaces, to building or acquiring niche marketplaces and accelerating their growth.
Over the last 8 years, iPrice has been building such a niche marketplace. Its relentless focus on the price-conscious consumers earned it a loyal place in Southeast Asia's shoppers' hearts. In 2022, it helped more than 100 million consumers across 7 countries in SouthEast Asia save money. Its proprietary technology surfaces the best deals and discounts from more than 8 billion offers in a market featuring a vast array of sale events and hard to navigate discount mechanisms.
"I've known David and the team for years and have always been excited about their work, then recently the opportunity emerged to work together more closely," said Willix Halim, CEO of Bukalapak. "With Bukalapak's extensive expertise in e-commerce and iPrice's loyal userbase and proprietary technology, we are confident that we can unlock the platform's full potential."
The team has always been the first priority for iPrice when finding a suitable partner to unlock future growth
iPrice investors, amongst them Itochu and Naver, welcome the deal. The rapidly cooling fundraising market of last year forced iPrice to scale back on several aspects of its business and downsize the team substantially. It transformed to explore new ways to grow the businesses cost-effectively. This transition will now be accelerated by Bukalapak group's footing in a diverse set of verticals opening up many new opportunities.
Heinrich Wendel, Co-founder of iPrice, said, "We are excited to join forces with Bukalapak and benefit from the group's synergies. This partnership will allow us to expand our services to help even more users save money across new verticals, like Gaming, and geographies, like Australia."
iPrice will continue to operate as an independent entity, maintaining its neutral position towards users, and working with a broad set of merchants and sellers.
About iPrice Group
iPrice Group is Southeast Asia's leading online shopping companion, serving more than 125m unique users across eight countries/regions namely Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong SAR,& Australia. With a mission to "Help People Save Money", iPrice aids shoppers by comparing prices, promotions & seller discounts across its vast catalogue of 8bn offers from thousands of sellers & merchants.
About Bukalapak
BUKA is a group of tech-based companies and a technology super-enabler for Indonesia's MSME transformation and various business verticals.
Building on our heritage serving more than 110 million users and over 22 million Indonesian MSMEs through our various solutions, and as the first publicly-listed Indonesian technology company, we are now focused squarely on using technology to enable today's digital lifestyles for both Indonesian MSMEs as well as Indonesians in general, across numerous verticals from marketplace, finance and fintech, offline to online, merchant solutions and procurement.
Utilizing our more than a decade long of technology innovation for Indonesian consumers and businesses, BUKA is a tech enabler and fuel of Indonesia's digital transformation engine.
For more information on BUKA, visit about.bukalapak.com
