E-commerce marketplace Sendo enjoys $51-million investment

The funding round from new investors in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan was participated by all the existing investors, including SBI Group, FPT Group, eContext Asia, BEENEXT, and BEENOS.

Established in 2000, SoftBank Ventures Korea, a subsidiary of Japan-based SoftBank Group, is the famous name in the world’s Internet industry.

Daiwa PI Partners, an entity of Daiwa Securities Group, is Japan's leading financial investor specializing in private equity and debt investment.

SKS Ventures which is a global investment management institution invests strategically and globally in China, Vietnam, the US, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Nguyen Dac Viet Dung, executive chairman and co-founder of Sendo, said: "The funding would help the company expand the C2C platform Sendo, launch the B2C marketplace SenMall, and make SenPay the leading fintech platform in Vietnam.”

Dung emphasized that Sendo’s ultimate goal is to continue supporting hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese sellers and help create millions of jobs for the Vietnamese people. Having achieved the annualized gross merchandise value (GMV) of $330 million, the company is on track to surpass $1 billion of GMV in 2020.

Founded in 2012, Sendo is one of the four largest e-marketplaces in Vietnam in terms of GMV. Sendo currently serves 10 million products from 300,000 sellers to millions of buyers nationwide.

According to the latest data from the United Nations, Vietnam is one of the countries with a young population (average age of 31). The market research firm Nielsen Vietnam also revealed in a survey that in 2017, while 95 per cent of the population in urban areas owned a mobile phone, 84 per cent of them possessed a smartphone.

The amazing growth in the mobile phone market brings enormous economic potential, including the impact on e-commerce in the S-shaped country.

Although the e-commerce in Vietnam has a small scale, it has become one of the markets having the most robust growth in recent years. Specifically, the revenue of consumer goods through e-commerce accounts for 0.5 per cent of the market share, a growth of 69 per cent compared to the same period last year.

At the same time, thanks to the Government's proposal to promote non-cash payment for the period from 2016-2020 with the goal of cash payment ratio of less than 10 per cent by 2020, the e-commerce sector or online payment will be a thriving market from now until 2020.

According to Vietnam E-commerce Association (VECOM), the growth rate of Vietnam’s e-commerce in 2017 reached over 25 per cent and this rate could be maintained in the 2018-2020 period.