WeBuy Confirms It Has Acquired Chilibeli, Will Become "WeBuy Indonesia"

Startups social commerce from Singapore officially acquired Chilibeli for an undisclosed purchase price. Quotes Deal Street AsiaWeBuy CEO Vincent Xue said this acquisition was the right momentum because it was in line with WeBuy's expansion efforts into the Indonesian market.

"The resources that Chilibeli currently has, both from group leader, warehousing, and its staff are synergistic with our business. With power supply chain leaders WeBuy in the global, technology, product features, we will be the platform social e-commerce leading edge in Southeast Asia," said Xue.

Confirmed separately, Partner at Centauri MDI-KB Kenneth Li added that related parties have not determined further plans regarding Chilibeli's steps forward.

"Next phase has not yet been decided as the [acquisition] process has just been completed. Chilibeli was indeed acquired by WeBuy, but it did not stop operating. Later the operation will become WeBuy Indonesia," Kenneth told DailySocial.id.

In our previous report, WeBuy was rumored to be a strong candidate to annex Chilibeli. This news blows when Chilibeli is hit operational problems which was suspended in February. The reasons given to the public were server relocation and deep cleaning resources. Chilibeli also laid off a number of employees.

WeBuy is known to be expanding its market to Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Indonesia. WeBuy is targeting Indonesia because of its huge social media penetration and digital economy market. Meanwhile, WeBuy has been operating in Indonesia since September 2021.

For your information, WeBuy is a portfolio of MDI Ventures, Wavemaker, KB Financial Group, and Rocket Internet. Currently WeBuy serves as many as 3000 group leaders and 100.000 consumers from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Chilibeli was founded by Alex Feng, Damon Yue, and Matt Li in 2019. Chilibeli secured $10 million in series A funding in March 2020 led by Lightspeed Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Sequoia Surge, Kinesys Group, and Alto Partners.

Companies rely on C2M business concept (customer to manufacturer) in bridging fresh produce from farmers to final consumers in a number of communities. The concept is here to encourage logistics efficiency and ensure product freshness reaches consumers.

Challenge online groceries

Service trends online groceries who wears the model social commerce nor quick commerce growing in Indonesia. This is in line with the increasing market demand during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Amid the popularity of its services, online groceries will still encounter various gravel to increase its penetration in the market. One of them is the challenge of changing shopping behavior to online, especially for housewives who are still used to shopping at traditional markets

So far, the most widely adopted models are B2C and B2B. In the B2B segment, this model is considered more stable because there is certainty demand and supply with large orders and periodic requests. For example, the demand for fresh staples to the restaurant or hotel industry.

While in B2C, Tunnelerate Managing Partner Ivan Arie Sustiawan assessed that this model would be difficult to implement for platforms that have limited capital for subsidies in price wars and logistics. These two things are important elements to maintain customer loyalty considering that Indonesian consumers tend to like promos/discounts.

According to him, to win the marketonline groceries/agritech In B2C, startups need to build and implement the most sustainable and efficient supply chain model from upstream to downstream. They also need to think about a profitable assortment strategy for their business. "Don't sell everything to everyone for the instant or quick commerce where you do the self-fulfillment," he told DailySocial.id some time ago.