aCommerce will go public in 2020

aCommerce, a Southeast Asia e-commerce enable, aims to be the first Thai startup to place an IPO in 2020 to strengthen the brand and promote Thai export goods.

Paul Srivorakul, aCommerce CEO and co-founder, said the company is in a decision making to place an IPO on either the Singapore Exchange or the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET). A conclusion will be done next year.

An IPO aims to change its startup status to be a listed company making itself trusted for customers, especially the global brands.

To strengthening its role of regional player, aCommerce plans to expand business to Vietnam in next year, followed by Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, to compete with companies from China and Singapore that entered the Southeast Asia market.

A great deal of Chinese goods entering to Thailand via the giant e-commerce platform, he said, adding that Thai companies must be more active in online overseas market as today the local sellers in aCommerce’s platform who do export has less than 1%.

“This is an opportunity of aCommerce and we will invest more in technology as today we spent more than 40% or revenue in research and development focusing on automation and consumers behavior data system making it intelligent and personalized,” he said.

This paves the way for data management partners which eventually will enable brands to better manage their customers at every online channel, do personalized marketing.

From now on, the cross-border e-commerce and business-to-business (B2B) will be increasing alongside the competition of large business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplace and social commerce. All will encourage the e-commerce of Thailand to grow 8-10% by next year, from 5% today.

If the company can do place IPO, it will be the first Thai unicorn startup who is a listed company, valued at US$1 billion.

Founded in 2013, aCommerce has been growing from a startup to be a medium business with orders from over 260 customer brands in five countries including Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. The company has more than 1,200 employees, five offices 16 warehouses in those five countries, shipped more than 13.19 million orders.

aCommerce previously recived US$3.1 billion from leading investors such as  Emerald Media, BlueSky, DKSH, Inspire Ventures, Sinarmas  and NTT Docomo.