M&A deals

Vietnam’s e-commerce map has seen big changes over the last few years as many websites and marketplaces have left the market or have been taken over. Sources said another M&A deal, between Tiki and Sendo, would be wrapped up this year.

The e-commerce market has been led by foreign groups such as Alibaba, SEA, JD.com and Softbank. The powerful groups are holding large e-commerce sites or marketplaces such as Lazada, Shopee, Tiki and Sendo with big share proportions.

The first M&A activities in the e-commerce sector were seen in 2013, when nhommua.com merged with cungmua.com.

The e-commerce market is expected to witness competition between Tiki-Sendo, Shopee and Lazada, after Tiki and Sendo join under the same roof, slated for this year.

In 2014, FPT took over 123mua.vn which then belonged to VNG, aiming to improve the strength of FPT’s sendo.vn e-commerce site.

In 2016, the market witnessed a big deal: Alibaba took over Lazada in Southeast Asia, including Lazada Vietnam at the price of $1 billion.

Also in 2016, Central Group, through Nguyen Kim Trading, successfully took over zalora.vn and changed its name to robins.vn. At that time, Central Group held 49 percent of shares of Nguyen Kim, a home appliance retail chain.

Experts commented that the M&A deals in the field mostly were mostly technology groups or retail chains, such as Alibaba, Central Group and JD.com. They made M&A deals to acquire full ownership or acquire shares to eliminate rivals.

The purpose is to penetrate the Vietnamese online retail market within a short time. The biggest ‘aiming points’ for them in the last four to five years were the best known e-commerce brands – Lazada, Zalora, Tiki and Shopee.

Bleeding money

In late March 2019, robins.vn unexpectedly stopped sale activities. Its predecessor was zalora.vn, which was later taken over by Central Group and renamed robins.vn.

According to iPrice Group, robins.vn, specializing in retailing fashion products, had the highest number of accesses in Vietnam, 965,000 a month in Q4 2018.

Prior to that, in late 2018, vuivui.com, operating under the B2C mode, belonging to The Gioi Di Dong, a large mobile phone distribution chain, also stopped operation.

In 2019: Vingroup announced departure from retail business to gather strength on industries and technologies. Adayroi.com, its e-commerce website, was merged with VinID digital ecosystem.

Despite the departure of many big players, investors still continue pouring capital into the e-commerce sector.

In November 2019, Sendo received additional investment capital of $61 million. In June 2019, Tiki also successfully raised funds from new and existing investors, but did not announce the exact figures.

Mai Lan 

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