\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s the Swiss Army Knife business model of offering everything and anything through just one app, but usually involves the consolidation or merging of multiple other apps.<\/p>\n Boasting more than 1 billion users, Alibaba\u2019s AliPay is one such example, but the app is currently locked into an expansionist turf war with Tencent\u2019s WeChat Pay, which also claims to have around 1 billion users.<\/p>\n Both want to be the sole super-app of China \u2013 a market of 854 million internet users as of June this year, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.<\/p>\n Cambodia\u2019s 2019 census, the preliminary findings of which were released this June, shows just 15.28 million \u2013 not quite the same market size as China, but that hasn\u2019t stopped financial technology (fintech)\u00a0 players from gearing up for the super-app arms race.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a buzz word of the industry and you have to be careful about that,\u201d says Matthew Tippetts, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of Clik Asia \u2013 a local digital payment service aggregator set to begin operations next year.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Sexy idea\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the right way, because I don\u2019t think there is a right way, but personally, am I a fan of the super-app concept? No, I have trouble seeing the value to users, but it\u2019s a very sexy idea,\u201d he muses.<\/p>\n The appeal of charging headlong into super-app stardom is growing, along with Southeast Asia\u2019s predilection for all things digital.<\/p>\n A 2019 study by Google, Temasek and Bain & Co found reasons for optimism \u2013 between 2015 and 2019, 50,000 new people were joining the internet every single day.<\/p>\n Out of the 360 million internet users in the region, 90 percent of them get online using mobile phones.<\/p>\n About 90 percent of all Cambodian exports of organic rice to the EU last year belonged to Amru Rice Cambodia.<\/p>\n Chan Pich, general manager of Signature of Asia, who last year exported 1,500 tonnes of organic rice to the EU, said demand for organic rice in the European Union grows about 15 percent every year.<\/p>\n \u201cCambodia\u2019s organic rice is sought after in the EU because it has good quality and real traceability,\u201d Chan said.<\/p>\n According to Chan, a tonne of organic jasmine rice fetches $1,500 while organic long-grain white rice sells for about $950 per tonne.<\/p>\n E-commerce users shot from 49 million in 2015 to 150 million in 2019 and, over the same period, ride-hailing users in the region grew from 8 million to 40 million. So clearly, there is money to be made and even though Cambodia\u2019s market is small \u2013 access to a region that is all too happy to kneel at the altar of apps sends dollar signs flashing in the eyes of would-be super-app creators.<\/p>\n Ride-hailing giant Grab for example, which declined to comment when approached by Capital Cambodia, has only existed for seven years, but now \u2013 with more than 10 services, 2.8 million drivers completing in excess of 6 million rides every day \u2013 is valued at almost $14 billion.<\/p>\n Of that, $1 billion was generated in 2018 alone, with many expecting to see double that by the end of 2019.<\/p>\n Does this just signify the increasing appetite for taxis in Southeast Asia?<\/p>\n Of course not.<\/p>\n Grab rebranded in 2016, going from GrabTaxi to just Grab. This cleared a path for them to venture into uncharted territory \u2013 providing food delivery, grocery delivery, hotel bookings, tickets for events and even on-demand video services.<\/p>\n GrabFood launched in 2018 \u2013 across 200 cities in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and their home-turf, Malaysia.<\/p>\n In short, they\u2019re making rapid gains in the super-apps arms race \u2013 even if many of these services are yet to be rolled out in Cambodia.<\/p>\n Go-Jek, the Indonesian rival to Grab, is 9-years-old, offers more than 18 products and is thought to be valued just short of $10 billion, but has failed to find a foothold in Cambodia the way that Grab has.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re Grab and you\u2019ve got billions to make it work, chances are you\u2019ll make it work, because they\u2019ve got the money to do so,\u201d explains Tippetts, who says there is an obvious connection between ride-hailing and food delivery, but remains sceptical of Grab\u2019s ability to branch out beyond these things.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are things like GrabFood, which really does work well together [with Grab\u2019s ride-hailing] and I think all the delivery companies \u2013 when it comes to food delivery \u2013 are going to have a problem with Grab,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Remarkable growth<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n One such food delivery service is Meal Temple \u2013 a home-grown food delivery app that has seen remarkable growth in Cambodia of late, growth that could face disruption when GrabFood launches in the Kingdom.<\/p>\n \u201cCurrently Meal Temple is active in Cambodia and Laos,\u201d explains Maxime Rosburger, the founder of Meal Temple Group.<\/p>\n \u201cWe made an investment in Myanmar\u2019s food delivery Freshgora in June and now we are busy launching the service in Bhutan under the name Drukfood and we have two more countries in the pipe which should be active before end of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n When pressed about going up against giants such as Grab, Rosburger remains confident.<\/p>\n \u201cOur focus is on the Asian frontier markets where big players have not entered yet and can hardly enter because of their cost structure,\u201d he says, stating that Meal Temple is willing to join the fray and is aiming for the super-app model to increase stickiness of the service and better scale up their operations in each country.<\/p>\n One Cambodian company already referring to itself as \u201cCambodia\u2019s first super-app\u201d is Nham 24, which is not just offering ride-hailing and food delivery services, but also couriers, groceries, online shopping and flower delivery services.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Fighting for small cake<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Founder and CEO, Borima Chann, says he wants to avoid an arms race.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make any commercial sense for each player to build their own super-apps and keep fighting for the small cake,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cI believe consolation or the merging of key local players are the best options for a Cambodian super-app, some discussions have already taken place between founders and I believe some good progress will be seen sooner or later.\u201d<\/p>\n Chris McCarthy is chairman of Eurocham\u2019s ICT Committee and CEO of MangoTango Asia \u2013 one of Cambodia\u2019s leading digital agencies that dabbles in everything from market research and strategy, to creative work and production across a range of mediums.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst thing is, I think Cambodia will go cashless faster than people think,\u201d reflects McCarthy.<\/p>\n \u201cThe infrastructure is there; it\u2019s more a question of adoption \u2013 it took China 15 years to go from all cash to today, where 90 percent of urban transactions are via mobile digital payments \u2013 Cambodia will surely be faster.<\/p>\n \u201cAbout super-apps in Cambodia \u2013 for sure there will be a battle, as there is in many Asian countries,\u201d he predicts.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Desktop real-estate wars\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThe super-app wars are funny, to me they seem like a new flavour of the desktop real-estate wars of the 80s and 90s, in which rival PC makers hard-wired third- party apps and services into their operating systems, or as default icons on the desktop (think AOL vs CompuServe in the early days, \u2018bundled in\u2019) and that all ended with the US Justice Department\u2019s anti-trust ruling against Microsoft\u2019s attempt to integrate their Internet Explorer browser into the Windows operating system, so super-apps are fighting an old war and creating the same casualties.\u201d<\/p>\n The benefits of the super-app, he says, are fairly self-evident; high-quality user interfaces to online services, versus the many individual services and apps that are hard to use, or \u201cseem like they were designed by a fish\u201d.<\/p>\n McCarthy goes on to note that super-apps, by definition, are built with a robust user-experience at the heart of them \u2013 giving users a sense of familiarity across the range of services offered.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Winners and losers<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course, in war there must be winners and losers \u2013 the arms race to create Cambodia\u2019s best-loved super-app will be no exception. Innovation will see some players rise to the top while others will fade into obscurity.<\/p>\n \u201cAs for the casualties, those tend to be consumer choice, business innovation and, ultimately price, because [with] consolidation of market power \u2013 that doesn\u2019t have to mean the end of innovation, just a shift in vision by startups,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen people do build competing services, it\u2019s often in the hope that WeChat or Grab or Flipkart will buy them.\u201d<\/p>\n However, this optimism is not shared by all of the players in the game.<\/p>\n Tomas Pokorny is CEO and co-founder of Pi Pay \u2013 one of Cambodia\u2019s most popular cashless payment services \u2013 and serves as community committee chair for the Cambodia Association of Finance and Technology.<\/p>\n For Pokorny, there is no super-app in Cambodia \u2013 at least not yet.<\/p>\n \u201cIt could happen in Cambodia too. There could be a super-app player that makes it, but before you can become that, you need to be everything, everywhere for everyone,\u201d he argues, noting that around 80 percent of payments in Cambodia are still carried out using cash.<\/p>\n Pokorny sees major barriers to the super-app model in Cambodia \u2013 particularly in the form of the market size and the limited amount of finance available for such a venture.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t believe that AliPay has made back all of the money it invested \u2013 it invested such a sheer amount of money, it will take a long time to get it back, but it will get it back in the long run \u2013 in the brand value, the brand recognition \u2013 once it goes public, whether in China or anywhere else, then it can get it back,\u201d he says, citing Uber as an example.<\/p>\n Uber, he explains, was running at a loss, but went public with an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in May this year. After doing so, they were able to recoup their investments for their shareholders, but in Cambodia this would prove tricky.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you justify somebody in Cambodia saying we will build a super-app, we will acquire 80 percent of the market \u2013 how are they going to make that money back?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you say we\u2019re not going to make money doing it, we\u2019re going to build it and go public like Uber did, how much money will you make on going public in Cambodia? In a market of 16 million people? It\u2019s a question of return on investments that will always be there. Is the Cambodian market big enough to justify not only the building of a super-app, but the execution of a super-app \u2013 to actually be a super-app, not just have the technology,\u201d Pokorny points out.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Consolidated services<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n His argument rests on the idea that a super-app isn\u2019t truly super until it\u2019s acquired a large majority of the market and provides a range of services that are used universally \u2013 indicators that he doesn\u2019t believe have been reached by any of the players in Cambodia.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyone can build the technology for a super-app \u2013 everyone with it can say they\u2019re a super-app, but until you have that big market share, you are the number one player and you provide those consolidated services, you can say what you want, you are not a super-app.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The next evolution of app-based services could see Kingdom follow China\u2019s path<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"Matthew Tippetts, CEO of Clik Asia.","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"tomas](\"https:\/\/capitalcambodia.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Tomas-Pokorny-Pi-Pay-CEO-Siv-Channa.jpg\")