Lazada, majority owned by China's Alibaba Group Holding Limited, is planning set up of more logistics facilities to expand its reach in the Philippines. The e-commerce site which has a strong presence in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, saw a huge market opportunity on the Philippines' booming e-commerce market over the next five years.
Lazada Philippines has more than 28 million monthly visitors. Of these, 23 million are active consumers of Lazada products from makeup, fashion, electronics, and other household goods. The Philippine site features nearly 30,000 merchants offering more than 80 million products.
The plan for Lazada's segment in the Philippines was made months after Alibaba Group Holding Limited invested an additional $2 billion in Lazada Group to push its diversification plans across, Southeast Asia. The additional investment also served as a push to deepen Lazada's integration into the Alibaba ecosystem.
Alibaba said at the time that the additional investment is a demonstration of its confidence on Lazada's business and growth potential in the Southeast Asian market. Alibaba considers the Southeast Asian market as a key to its success as well.
During the announcement of the Philippines expansion plan, Lazada Philippines chief executive officer Juan Pavez Spencer said the new logistics facilities are planned to be constructed within the next three to five years. First in the line-up is the fifth-generation warehouse in Clark, Pampanga. At present, Lazada Philippines' biggest site in the Philippines is located in Cabuyao, Laguna. The company has also short-tail warehouses in Cebu and Dave which both bear the bulk of the volume of orders across the country.
After the warehouse in Pampanga, next in the plan are warehouses in Central Luzon, North Luzon, North Mindanao, and the Visayas region. The CEO told reporters that Lazada Philippines has plans of tripling what it has accomplished at present in the coming three to five years. He estimated that e-commerce in the Philippines will grow up between 6 and 7 percent in the next five years.
For the meantime, Spencer said Lazada Philippines is aiming to double this year what it accomplished in sales last year, seeing that more Filipinos are becoming more and more engaged in digital selling and shopping platforms.
To date, Lazada Philippines has more than 2,000 employees, excluding the ones outsourced for its call centers.
Alibaba has just smashed its own record sales last year with its sales at the recently held China Singles Day sales on Nov. 11. According to Alibaba, sales made through Lazada had contributed largely to the success of the 11.11 shopping event on Sunday.
