Indonesian ride-hailing company Gojek and e-commerce firm PT Tokopedia yesterday said that they are merging to form the GoTo Group.
The companies said the deal was Indonesia’s biggest ever, based on historical fundraising rounds for Gojek, priced in 2019 and Tokopedia, priced in early last year, which put the combined past valuations of the companies at US$18 billion.
The new company would provide services from ride-hailing and financial services to e-commerce.
Photo: Reuters
GoTo is backed by investors including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), BlackRock Inc, Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) and Temasek Holdings Pte.
The merger comes a month after Gojek’s largest rival, Singapore-based Grab Holdings Inc, said it would list in the US via a merger with a special public acquisition company (SPAC) that valued the company at US$40 billion.
Gojek co-CEO Andre Soelistyo is to lead the new company, while Tokopedia president Patrick Cao is to retain his title in the combined entity.
“Today is a truly historic day as we mark the beginning of GoTo and the next phase of growth for Gojek, Tokopedia and GoTo Financial,” Soelistyo said in a statement.
He said that the company intends to promote financial inclusion while providing “best in class” delivery of goods and services.
The merger of Gojek and Tokopedia comes as competition is heating up in Southeast Asia, where technology companies compete for the wallets of more than 650 million people.
GoTo’s rival Grab also provides ride-hailing and on-demand services across eight countries in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, while Internet firm Sea Ltd has made a massive push into e-commerce in Asia with its Shopee e-commerce platform.
Gojek was founded in 2010 by Nadiem Makarim as a call center for motorbike taxis, known as ojek in Indonesia. It has since expanded to provide not just ride-hailing, but also a variety of on-demand services, including food delivery.
Makarim stepped down as chief executive officer in October 2019 after taking on a ministerial position in the Indonesian government, and Soelistyo, together with Kevin Aluwi, were named co-CEOs.
Tokopedia was founded in 2009 by William Tanuwijaya and has expanded to become Indonesia’s largest e-commerce firm. It later expanded to provide financial services such as digital payments and lending services.
GoTo Group has more than 11 million monthly active users, the companies said, with its business encompassing 2 percent of Indonesia’s GDP of more than US$1 trillion.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to