Competition heats up in third-party merchandise, food delivery market

After operating for a year in HCM City Lalamove, a logistics company headquartered in Hong-Kong specialising in same-day delivery and courier services, came to Hanoi Wednesday.  A day earlier Grab had released its food delivery app, GrabFood, after a period of testing.  The food delivery market looks extremely lucrative, and businesses want to cash in, industry insiders said.  “By 2020 Vietnam will have over 50 million customers shopping online,” Phillippe Rambaud, head of Lalamove’s Hanoi market development division, said. “This will be a large market for on-demand delivery services.” Nguyen Duc Loi, CEO of Lalamove Vietnam, aims to have 10,000 contracted drivers on a permanent basis.  Grab Vietnam CEO Jerry Lim said GrabFood’s growth has been very impressive, with the number of its contractors increasing eight-fold in just a month of testing in Hanoi.  “GrabFood is the next major step for Grab in becoming a super-app which meets all the essential needs of people’s daily lives,” he said. “The way each individual service interconnects and complements each other allows us to build an ecosystem that delivers real benefits not only to our customers and drivers but also to our business partners and vendors,” Jerry Lim added. Go Viet has launched Go Send as a complementary service, but also aims to develop it into a super-app like Grab. It also plans to launch a food delivery service later this year.  Last year Go Send delivered over 800,000 fashion products and handled 2.3 million food orders for 203,000 small-scale online vendors.   But… [Read full story]