BREAKING: LivingSocial Indonesia CEO Adrian Suherman Resigns

We have confirmation that LivingSocial Indonesia CEO Adrian Suherman has resigned. His resignation is effective as of today. We haven't had any insight into where Adrian will land, but Adrian's replacement is Rolf Monteiro who currently serves as Sales Director of Livingsocial Indonesia. Rolf is from Holland.

Adrian Suherman joined LivingSocial Indonesia since it was first established as DealKeren. Previously, Adrian worked at business consulting AT Kearney and has a postgraduate education from Stanford University. As CEO of a company with the earliest deal deals/group buying business -- in August 2010, along with Disdus -- Adrian has the task of educating the market to know more about this business. DealKeren itself is a company that owns the parent Ensogo -- active in Thailand and the Philippines. Under his leadership, DealKeren became the market leader leaving its competitors behind.

At the end of June 2011, Ensogo was acquired by LivingSocial which is one of the giant daily deals from the United States. As part of this acquisition, DealKeren changed its name to LivingSocial Indonesia and changed the appearance of its website to the LivingSocial theme. Nevertheless, LivingSocial Indonesia still tries to carry local values ​​by displaying the background of natural scenery in Indonesia.

In 2012, although daily deals have started to become popular, it seems that the market's interest has started to weaken. It is proven that even though the number of deals is increasing, the fans are not as enthusiastic as they used to be. Only 1-2 deals can sell up to thousands. We also learned that LivingSocial closed its branch offices in several cities to focus the team centrally. When we try to look at deals in other cities-- for example Yogyakarta, Surabaya, or Bandung--there does not seem to be any differentiation between the contents of the deals and Jakarta. This means that there are not many local deals (outside Jakarta) available.

When holding a press conference to change DealKeren to LivingSocial Indonesia a year ago, Adrian claimed that LivingSocial Indonesia has 65% of the daily deals market with an income of around $250 thousand (and continues to increase). At that time deals from two ice cream companies sold almost 15 thousand vouchers. At the moment this figure is practically impossible. The saturation of the market and the decline in income could be the trigger for Adrian to look for new challenges.

[photo via Kontan]