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E-commerce inSoutheast Asia continues to grow by leaps and bounds. The region’se-commerce industry is expectedto reach $89.67 billion in 2022, an increase of $15.31 billionfrom last year’s $74.36 billion.
Only four countries are expected to growfaster than Southeast Asia’s combined figures in 2022, andtwo of them — The Philippines and Indonesia — belong to theregion. It is this growth that e-commerce aggregator Society PassInc. (NASDAQ: SOPA) plans to capitalize on, and both theaforementioned countries are already part of Society Pass’s businessplan.
Benzingarecently talked with Chief Marketing Officer Rokas Sidlauskas todiscuss the company’s business, its target market andmore.
Society Pass’s Vision And Sidlauska’s PerspectiveAbout The Company
Society Pass, also known as SoPa, is an acquisition-focusede-commerce holding company that is looking to become the goliath ofe-commerce in Southeast Asia. The company operates in six verticals:loyalty, lifestyle, food and beverage, telecom, digital media andtravel.
SoPa isbuilding what it says is a next-generation loyalty program acrossmultiple verticals — a platform where users are rewarded for theirdaily and ordinary activities such as ordering food, purchasingclothes and buying travel tickets.
Sidlauska, who just joined the team at SoPa on the1st of September, was attracted to the company because of the loyaltyprogram project, CEO Dennis Nguyen’s drive to see it come tofruition and the opportunity to work with talented people to create aproduct that rewards customers.
The company operates in Vietnam, Indonesia,Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. SoPa looks to expand into othermarkets in Southeast Asia. Demographically, SoPa’s target market is15- to 50-year-old tech-savvy individuals predominantly living inurban areas where the company operates.
“There are around 575 million people wholive in the markets that we operate in now. This market is rapidlygrowing economically, is young and technically engaged, which justhighlights how promising of an environment this is for SoPa to bebuilding our operations in,” Sidlauska said.
According to Sidlauska,the challenge with loyalty programs is that they are company-centricor vertical-centric. Being company-centric in nature means you canonly redeem points through a specific shop while vertical-centricimplies they can only be used in a certain industry.
Other challenges includedifficulty in redeeming points, ensuring their validity andtransferring them from one person to another. Sidlauska believes thatwhat SoPa is building will resolve these challenges and allowcustomers to use their points across differentverticals.
The Problem SoPa Is Looking To Tackle
SoPa is looking tocreate a win-win environment whereby customers are rewarded for theirloyalty to certain brands and services on a daily basis while anopportunity is created for brands to connect with this loyal customerbase and increase their revenue.
The company’s unique selling point is the rewardthey offer for all transactions in the SoPa loyalty program. Forinstance, customers can buy a ticket via a travel agent and thenredeem those points in their local market by ordering food.
SoPa’s management teamincludes the CEO, who has over 25 years of experience in the businessand finance world. Some of the company’s ventures are run byoriginal founders, such as Leflair Group CEO Loïc Gautier and JohanesChang who runs NusaTrip Indonesia and has over 20 years of experiencein the travel and leisure industry.
Commenting on the challenges they are overcoming inthe next 12-18 months Sidlauska said, “There are a number ofchallenges of various levels of complexity. Tokenomics or the pointsystem is something that requires a lot of effort to ensure thateconomically it makes sense for all ventures and companies that willtake part in this loyalty program. Additionally, there are sometechnological challenges such as making sure that all companiesconnect to this system and communicate flawlessly.
“There is a lot ofwork to be done, but we are very happy to be on this journey and lookforward to delivering a world-class product to the market in Q1 of2023.”
About The CMO
Sidlauskas joined SoPa in September after spendingseveral years working in different managerial positions in the digitalhealth space. He has spent the last 11 years in Asia, working invarious management roles mostly in e-commerce and digitalbusiness.
Aftercompleting his Bachelor of Arts degree in European studies andpolitics at the University of West of England in 2008, Sidlauskasstarted his career as a regional sales executive at Ulysses Systemsbefore joining ding.com, formerly known as Ezetop, in 2010 as abusiness development manager.
He has also worked as a business developmentmanager for The Legal 500, vice president of sales for Ensogo, vicepresident of international business development for Passport Asia,director/venture lead for CMG.ASIA. Sidlauskas’s most recent rolebefore joining SoPa was as head of product development solutions atHello Health Group, one of the leading digital health companies inSoutheast Asia.
As a loyalty and data marketing ecosystem,Society Pass operates multiple e-commerce platforms across its keymarkets in SEA. Its business model focuses on analysing user datathrough the expected launch of its Society Pass loyalty platform andcirculation of its universal loyalty points, which seamlessly connectsconsumers and merchants across multiple product and service categoriesto foster organic loyalty. Since its inception, SoPa has amassed over1.6 million registered consumers and over 5,500 registeredmerchants/brands on its platform. It has invested 2+ years buildingproprietary IT architecture with cutting edge components toeffectively scale and support its consumers, merchants, andacquisitions. Society Pass provides merchants with #HOTTAB Biz and#HOTTAB POS – a specialized POS technology solution, a comprehensivesystem for payment, loyal customer management, user profile analytics,and convenient financial support packages for small and medium-sizedenterprises. In addition, SoPa operates Leflair.com, Vietnam’sleading lifestyle e-commerce platform, Pushkart.ph , a popular grocerydelivery company in Philippines, Handycart.vn, a leading onlinerestaurant delivery service based in Hanoi, Vietnam, and GorillaNetworks , a Singapore-based, blockchain/web3-enabled mobile virtualnetwork operator. For more information, please check out:http://thesocietypass.com/.
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Dennis Nguyen: Founder, Chairman & CEO
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