Lazada acquires online grocery shop Redmart

Southeast Asia’s leading e-commerce website Lazada has made a done deal on bagging Singapore’s online grocery shopping destination Redmart, according to an official statement from various sources.

The new acquisition will allow the Alibaba-backed group to benefit on Redmart’s strong fulfillment service in Singapore, as well as expanding Redmart’s expansion and tapping onto Lazada’s seller base, third-party partners, and advanced technologies as it also has plans to offer its services to other countries. The amount of said deal was not disclosed, but business technology website TechCrunch estimates it to be around USD30PHP 1,761INR 2,542EUR 29CNY 218 to 40 million or roughly around Php1.45USD 0.02INR 2EUR 0.02CNY 0.18-1.94billion.

While the deal is said to be closed this holiday season, it is expected that Redmart will operate independently. “This partnership will help us to increase the scale at which we are able to deliver our mission to save our customers time and money for the important things in life… We are partnering with Lazada to serve our customers better,” RedMart co-founder and CEO Roger Egan said in a statement.

With Amazon entering the region next year, we’ll see a very stiff competition between these two giants in the region.  TechCrunch also reports that Amazon also tried to purchase the company as a headstart into its regional foray, albeit for a significantly lower amount which resulted in a call off. Amazon now is building its own network from scratch as a result.

Could we see online grocery shopping soon? Only time could tell.

With reports from 1, 2, 3