LAZADA, Southeast Asia’s largest online shopping mall, today disclosed that Verlinvest, a Belgian family-owned, consumer-focused investment holding company, has joined the company as an investor. Existing investors Holtzbrinck Ventures, Kinnevik, Summit Partners and Tengelmann Group also participated in the financing round that injected about $100 million of fresh capital into LAZADA’s German holding company.
“We are extremely happy to have finalized this investment round shortly after our 1st year anniversary and to again focus 100% of our attention on what we enjoy most: providing an amazing shopping experience to our customers” Maximilian Bittner, CEO of LAZADA, commented. “The interest in joining this round and its quick closing has exceeded all our expectations” he added.
“We are thrilled to join LAZADA as a partner of Rocket Internet and an investor, the company’s scale and achievements after only one year of operations are highly impressive. Given the management’s track record and the region’s macro outlook we are very confident in LAZADA’s future” Frédéric de Mevius, Chairman of Verlinvest, said.
LAZADA, which recently surpassed 1 million orders, has always maintained the customer experience as its main point of focus and invests heavily to provide superior services to its customers. This focus has resulted in a highly streamlined fulfilment process where currently 90% of all orders are shipped the same day and 85% of orders in metro areas are delivered within the next day.
However, to further improve delivery time and increase customer satisfaction the company will use a large part of the freshly injected capital to optimize its fulfilment infrastructure in the near future.
At the same time LAZADA announced the launch of its new mobile application that provides its customers with a fast and intuitive shopping experience using a smartphone. The application is currently available for Android users and an iPhone version is soon to come. “We are very excited to launch this mobile shopping platform that provides additional convenience to our customers allowing them to shop anywhere at any time” said LAZADA’s CMO Stein Jakob Oeie. “Mobile commerce is representing more than 10% of eCommerce in the US and we expect this to develop even faster in Southeast Asia where many users only have access to the Internet through smartphones” he continued.
The application can be downloaded from Google play here.
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