15 start-up failures in Asia this year
(Courtesy – www.techasia.com) Ensogo One of the most spectacular start- up failures this year was Ensogo, a network of ecommerce sites operating across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.
In May merchants began complaining they weren’t receiving the money for the products they’d sold through the site.
It all went south from there. Ensogo was blaming delayed payments to merchants on reduced manpower after it cut its team size. Customer complaints piled up.
In June, Ensogo’s Australian shareholders withdrew all support for Asian operations and the marketplaces went offline. Ensogo, part of Patrick Grove’s Catcha Group, listed on the ASX in 2013.
Various factors contributed to Ensogo’s collapse, but the most obvious one was that its concept, which relied heavily on discounts, deals, and flash sales, failed to generate loyal customers. Tripda A lot happened in the Rocket Internet universe this year. Its Southeast Asian ecommerce site Lazada was sold off to Alibaba and its online food delivery service Foodpanda folded into competitor Delivery Hero. Other operations were downsized or restructured.
Rocket Internet also counted some complete losses, for example, its carpooling app Tripda. It covered 13 markets, six of which were in Asia.
Rocket Internet claimed the app had “healthy user adoption,” but the main reason for its shutdown was the immense competition in transportation. “We confirm the decision to discontinue the operations of Tripda due to long- term monetization concerns and emerging competitive pressures,” the firm said. Sparklist Tripda wasn’t the only service to go. Rocket Internet also quietly said goodbye to Sparklist, a mobile classifieds app.
It had launched in Pakistan in November last year and expanded to the Philippines soon after, but by May this year the app was no longer accessible. Rocket Internet never confirmed the closure. Passport Asia In Singapore, Classpass- like fitness startup Passport Asia bit the dust in March. It offered unlimited access to gyms and fitness classes for a fixed monthly fee.
When the firm shut down, it sent its remaining members to rival startup KFit – which itself is struggling to make the unlimited-classes model work and appears to be getting into ecommerce with the acqusition of Groupon Indonesia and Malaysia.
The team behind Passport Asia insisted the closure of its gym membership plan doesn’t mean the company itself is dead. Part of the founding team has gone on to founding Kiddet, a marketplace for kids’ activities. Novelsys Also in Singapore, Novelsys, a hardware startup developing wireless chargers for phones ceased operations in January. It did ship 600 units of its product after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
“We developed a product we thought people wanted”.
However, issues remained. “We failed to build a scalable business,” co-founder Kenneth Lou concluded in a blog post. “We failed to find a product-market fit.” Kenneth said a big problem was that they’d developed a product they thought people wanted, not one that solved real and existing problems. TMI news portal In Malaysia, a very different kind of shutdown happened. News media por t a l T he Malaysian Insider ( TMI) went offline in March, after providing independent news coverage for eight years.
The news portal was part of The Edge Malaysia media group, which also operates business and property news sites. The Edge Group CEO cited financial issues as the main concern. News sites all over the world are struggling to find sustainable business models.
But TMI was in an especially difficult situation. The Malaysian government had blocked the site in February after it published a controversial article on corruption investigations into Prime Minister Najib Razak. No wonder it was having trouble to monetize. Partyphile In the Philippines, nightlife app Partyphile – backed by 500 Startups – decided to shut down in November after tragic events some months earlier.
Partyphile had pivoted from a guestlisting app to ticket sales for big music festivals. Growth was promising, according to founder Ron Baetiong. But then “shit hit the fan hard,” Ron wrote in a blog post.