Loh Wee Lee remembers a time when e-commerce was in its nascent stages. He was studying at Cornell University in upstate New York in the early 2000s. We couldn't always find what we wanted. As a student, I spent my fair share of shopping on Amazon, eBay and Overstock.com. He said it was convenient for a buyer to access sellers and inventory from all over the US.
It was not until the 2010s that e-commerce began taking off in Southeast Asia. In 2012, a German tech incubator Rocket Internet had entered the region with several e-commerce ventures, Lazada, Foodpanda and Zalora. The latter is now owned by Chinese tech giant, Alibaba, and is present in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
Lazada has grown from a fledgling e-commerce platform to one of the leading players in Southeast Asia. Since its inception, it has now had 150 million customers and 1 million active sellers on the platform.
In Singapore, customers can buy almost anything from the site, from groceries to electronic products, household items, and yes, bubble tea vouchers.
Loh joined Lazada Singapore four years ago after he helmed various senior management positions in Singapore-listed companies. He was previously a consultant with McKinsey Company. He said that e-commerce was definitely a fast-growing industry because I come from a corporate finance background. As a Southeast Asian and born and bred Singaporean, I thought joining Lazada would be an interesting way to contribute to the regional and local ecosystem. Prior to Loh's appointment in December 2021 as CEO of Lazada Singapore, he was chief of staff and head of the CEO Office at Lazada Group and Lazada Indonesia, where he was based for two years. Loh also speaks Bahasa Indonesia, which he picked up during his time in the country.
The first Singaporean CEO of Lazada Singapore has a clear vision for the local arm of the e-commerce giant, and he has a clear vision for his home country. He says that we need to be locally relevant. How can we serve the local communities in a consumer's perspective?