Hong Kong-based on-demand delivery company Lalamove plans to provide same-day delivery service in the second half of this year.

It will launch the service in Bangkok as the first city to test the operation in June.

Santit Jirawongkraisorn, regional director of city operations, said that the new service would be a main engine to drive its growth aggressively.

“We choose to test the new service in Bangkok as, outside China, it marked the highest growth in 2016 in terms of usage and the service value,” he said.

In Thailand, only Kerry Express offers the same-day delivery service without providing on-demand delivery service like Lalamove does.

“It is not easy to offer the same-day delivery service. We have invested a lot in the technology to ensure that we can provide the good service at the competitive price,” he cited.

Santit also added that most of its clients in on-demand service are in food and beverage industry, but the same-day delivery will help attract a huge demand from e-commerce companies and online retailers.

Lalamove, originally founded in 2013 as EasyVan in Hong Kong, recently completed its Series B funding round of $30 million led by Beijing venture capital firm, Xianghe Capital, raising total funds of $60 million over four rounds.

Apart from the technology development for the same day delivery service, Lalamove will use the funding to expand its on-demand delivery services from current 45 cities to 100 cities by this year end. At present, Lalamove operates in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Taipei, Manila and 40 cities in the mainland China.

5 million downloads in 45 cities

To date, the Lalamove app has been downloaded 5 million times across 45 cities in Asia with hundreds of thousands of drivers benefiting.

Chanon Klahan, newly-appointed managing director for Lalamove Thailand, said that the downloads of the app rose six times to 210,000 users and the service value surged to 120 million baht ($3.43 million) by the end of 2016, which showed six-fold growth from the previous year. In Bangkok, it has more than 17,000 contract drivers on its platform.

“The company’s growth in Bangkok is expected to be higher than last year due mainly to the launch of the new delivery service and the customer-based expansion into other sectors,” he said.

Source link

DEALSTREETASIA Pte. Ltd. is a news and intelligence platform providing reports on investments, mergers, acquisitions, private equity, venture capital, investment banking and the business of startups across the Asian region.