Kilo, a Vietnamese marketplace that connects suppliers and retailers, wants to acquire 1 million new businesses by the next financial year, its founder and CEO said Tuesday (April 5).
In an interview with Financial Express, Kartick Narayan — who is the former CMO of Groupon — said Kilo now has 30,000 wholesalers and retailers doing business on its platform.
He notes Vietnam has an extremely fragmented and mostly unorganized retail sector, dominated by small neighborhood stores selling everything from groceries to fresh fish to pharmaceuticals to electronics.
“Vietnam has around 100 million people and 7 million small and medium enterprises,” Narayan said. “The retail density is extremely high and there’s one micro retailer for every four households in the country. So, this $180-billion market is really the backbone of the economy.”
Read more: Buy2Sell Expanding B2B in Vietnam with $28M Investment
Kilo offers local retailers and wholesalers the ability to manage procurement, inventory, pricing and promotions strategy, billing, and distributor networks from a single app. Narayan said the company had until recently focused on product development, but will now begin “making marketing investments through online and offline channels as well as form strategic partnerships to bring more businesses on board.”
He added that distributors only cover one half of the market, while the other has wholesalers whom the retailers need to connect with to access wholesale markets and find goods that they eventually bring back to their stores.
“With a platform like Kilo a lot of that heavy lifting is removed because the retailer can build a basket on the smartphone and spend more time in-store, talking to customers and improving sales,” Narayan said.
Other players in Vietnam’s B2B world include eCommerce platform Buy2Sell, which last year reported sales of $24.5 million for the first half of the year, a three-fold year-over-year increase led by purchases of food, cosmetics, home appliances, and other fast-moving consumer goods.
The company also reinvested $28 million into eCommerce development, allowing local sellers to log into its platform.
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