Lazada says it is e-commerce leader in Southeast Asia with more than 50 million buyers

The company leads the competition in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines in terms of monthly active users

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Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of Lazada Group, last year invested US$2 billion in the Singapore-based company to accelerate its expansion in Southeast Asia. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:00am, 11 Sep 2019Updated: 11:33am, 11 Sep 2019

Lazada Group chief executive Pierre Poignant said the company operates the top e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia with more than 50 million active buyers annually, contrary to prior reports that painted the site as a laggard.

“We are growing at triple digits for the past three quarters, which has really sort of defined our position as number one,” Poignant said in an interview. “We’re very happy about the progress of where we are.”

His comments came as recent reports pegged rival platform Shopee, operated by internet company Sea, as the most popular e-commerce platform in the region.

Online shopping aggregator iPrice, for example, recently placed Shopee as having the highest number of monthly active users, downloads and site visits in the region as of the second quarter this year. Lazada, however, led in terms of monthly active users in four of the six major e-commerce markets in the region – Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines. Tokopedia took the lead in Indonesia, while Shopee was No 1 in Vietnam.

Pierre Poignant, co-founder and chief executive of Lazada Group, says the e-commerce company has been growing at triple digits for the past three quarters. Photo: Bloomberg

The Singapore-based firm is up against the likes of SEA’s Shopee as well as local firms such as Tokopedia and Bukalapak in Indonesia, all of which are fighting for market share in a fast-growing, billion-dollar e-commerce market.

Southeast Asia is a hotly contested region because its increasingly affluent population of more than 600 million people are relatively new to online shopping and come with a variety of different languages, customs and shopping habits. What works in one market does not necessarily work in another.