If you’re bored with the news on Go-jek all over the internet, well get ready to go offline because you’ll be hearing about them a lot more. Go-jek is showing no sign of slowing down to become Indonesia’s first billion dollar company, and is on the verge of expanding into a new horizon.
We’ve received reports from people familiar with the company, that Go-jek will soon launch its new effort to become Indonesia’s largest logistics company, in par with Tiki/JNE, RPX, and other top logistics companies in Indonesia. This report means that they will start doing in-city and inter-city package delivery service in Indonesia, a $10 billion dollar business by 2019 according to Transport Intelligence, a logistic research company.
The new product, dubbed Go-box, will be launched next month, according to our source outside the company who is familiar with details of the new service. Go-box will launch simultaneously in big cities all over Indonesia: Balikpapan, Bandung, Batam, Bekasi, Cirebon, Denpasar, Makassar, Medan, Palembang, Pekanbaru, Semarang, Solo, Surabaya and Yogyakarta, which covers more than half of the country already.
One of the most interesting thing about this new Go-box service, is that it will not adopt the same model with Go-jek where they partner with tens of thousands of ojek drivers. This time Go-box will partner with an existing logistic company where Go-box will leverage their technology platform and combine it with their partner(s)’ fleet power in order to optimize and maximize their penetration to the market. It’s still unclear whether Go-box will partner with different companies for each city or a single nation-wide partner, but it’s a very interesting model for Go-box to try and is definitely a new challenging horizon for the company to expand into. The company will share the profit they make with their logistic partner(s).
It is also interesting to see that Go-jek management decided to focus on the launch of the new vertical, Go-box, instead of launching Go-jek service in other big cities other than Jakarta, Bandung, and Bali where it is currently available. One of the possible reason for that decision is that the “ojek economy” aren’t as big in many cities as it is in Jakarta for a company like Go-jek to achieve scale. Market maturity in using apps and mobile internet infrastructure can also be another reason.
Just a few days ago, we also report the silent fundraising from Sequoia Capital into Go-jek, that might put the company valuation north of $200 million, making it one of the biggest startup in Indonesia from a valuation perspective. Go-jek is pretty protective with their internal numbers, mostly due to wounding competition with Malaysia’s GrabBike, but it is estimated that Go-jek now has over 60,000 drivers on their side and is growing very rapidly every day.
As the biggest archipelago country on planet Earth, Indonesia is a nightmare for every logistic infrastructure company. Indonesia is ranked 53 out of 150 countries in World Bank’s 2014 Logistic Performance Index ranking. And while timeliness, tracking and tracing ability, as well as competence of logistic operators are on par with other emerging countries, Indonesia’s customs and lack of infrastructure undermines overall logistics effectiveness, the World Bank report revealed.
With so many high-level issues surrounding the logistic industry vertical, it will be interesting to see how Go-jek’s technology platform can be used to help make the dispatching process more efficient and enhancing the whole delivery experience. And if this works, one can only imagine what other industry vertical they can expand into with their platform as a strong leverage. So many possibilities, and so many opportunities awaits.