Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Lazada conquers local online shopping industry


Whenever I am looking at lazada.com.ph/ I could not contain my excitement on how it resembles the popular online shopping website amazon.com. Amazon.com was one of the first websites where I had my first taste of online retail shopping. I bought a lot of stuff from them during the heydays of online shopping when it was just getting into the consumer’s consciousness. I shopped at amazon.com before despite the fact that the company is located outside of the country. I did it because of the unique shopping choices that they offer and the great price tags on the items. It was simply awesome although it is not without its disadvantages; I am located outside of the United States which means that delivery time normally takes more than what it is supposed to take. That is why ever since I started shopping in amazon.com, I have been really wishing and hoping that they branch out here and set up shop in the country so that the delivery time frame will be much faster and there would be lesser delays. I got that wish granted with the coming of Lazada. Although it took on a different form because it was not actually amazon.com but close to it which is fine as long as it is a local company. There is an awesome company behind the existence of Lazada here in the Philippines and that company is Rocket-Internet.

Rocket-Internet is a Berlin Germany based online venture builder that has been making waves in the world e-commerce industry and dominated it for more than a decade and still counting. The company has been very successful in carrying out their business concept which is to replicate profitable online business ideas from U.S companies and transforming them into their own venture. That brilliant process of creating a company out of an existing business model is aptly called business cloning. It works really well as the success of Rocket-Internet shows because it takes away the guessing game in the operational process and allows the new start-up company to be profitable within the crucial first two years in the business.  Rocket_internet has been doing that process since 1999 and has built over 100 market leading companies ever since in 40 countries worldwide.

The company also operates 25 offices internationally which includes the Lazada Philippines headquarters in the Makati Central Business District. They now have over 50 active portfolio companies; companies like Zalando, Wimdu, Mizado, Zalora, Linio and a whole lot more are just some of the names that you might have already heard of.  Rocket-Internet also employs around 17,000 employees overall which is a total of the employees in their main headquarters combined with those in the portfolio companies. The company is poised to be the amazon.com of Southeast Asia and the Philippines. There is no doubt that is going to happen in the very near future as Lazada have already hit the 1 Million sales mark and still going up as they progress more and more and the market acceptance is also going stronger.

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