South-east Asia seeing huge direct-to-consumer shift in e-commerce, says Shopify’s Verma
The biggest trend happening in e-commerce in South-east Asia is the direct-to-consumer shift, accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis that has seen mass migration of consumers online in the region, said Arun Verma, who’s leading Shopify’s growth in South-east Asia and China.
How this translates t [...]
2020: Year of the Unicorpse, or the Black Swan with a Silver Lining?
By Rafael Aldon, Director, VenturesOne (Click here for the original post.)
"Question every assumption about your business" was the message to CEOs and founders from leading Silicon Valley VC, Sequoia Capital in their March memo, "Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020". Referencing Darwin's 'Survi [...]
Exploring Experiences wants to dance to a different beat in tours & activities
It didn’t take long even for a software engineer (who is also a dancer) who had never been involved in travel to realise that the co-dependent relationships between large OTAs and small independent businesses, such as those in the tours and activities space, were unhealthy and imbalanced.
His [...]
Post-Covid-19 will see a war for talent, says PageGroup’s Anthony Thompson
With
Covid-19 continuing to disrupt all aspects of life – professionally and
personally, Anthony Thompson, Regional Managing Director, Asia; Executive Board
Director of recruitment firm, PageGroup described the crisis as “one big battle
being played out at different times and scale in different [...]
How ScaleUp Malaysia went virtual to pick its 10 startups – RM2 million funded at time of Covid-19
Not only startups have to pivot at this time to find a product-market-fit but investors also have to improvise to seek out the businesses they want to back.
ScaleUp Malaysia, an accelerator which focuses exclusively on growth stage companies in Malaysia, had set a timeline of April 15 to pick t [...]
Hotelmize raises round B investment, expands in APAC with Hong Kong headquarters
Israeli travel technology startup Hotelmize has raised Series B investment to expand operations in Asia Pacific (APAC) and “capture the longterm promise of the region’s tourism industry”.
The round was led by Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund and Israeli-based Brilliance Ventures, which [...]
Three South-east Asia VC firms form #SupportStartups movement in South-east Asia
Three venture capital firms – Openspace Ventures, 500 Startups and Cocoon Capital – have launched a regional initiative that aims to uplift the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem by helping them boost their revenues. It does this by collating all promotional activities offered by startups acros [...]
There are no winners in all this, only survivors, say investors
BEACH
(Booking, Entertainment & Live Events, Airlines, Cruise Lines & Hotels
& Resorts) stocks have taken a hammering with the Covid-19 crisis. More
than $332 billion in value have evaporated over the past month, according to this analysis. Booking Holdings has seen a 37% drop,
Expedia [...]
How Findmyfare.com redeployed its travel consultants to medical services: “It’s about saving jobs”
In late January, Tushan Shanmugarajah, CEO and co-founder of Findmyfare.com, started seeing drops in sales to markets in South-east Asia. Thinking this was “something like SARS”, that it’d be contained, it switched marketing campaigns to Europe and the Middle East.
In
February, it ran a ca [...]
The WiT Podcast: Unity In Crisis – Episode 5: William Bao Bean, Partner, SOSV Capital and Managing Director, Chinaccelerator
It is said crisis unites and there’s no better time than now for unity as the travel industry undergoes its biggest test with the outbreak of Covid-19.
With most of the world on lockdown and as China and Singapore enter another round of their fight to contain the novel coronavirus pandemic by [...]
