KUALA LUMPUR: The youngest son of banking tycoon Tan Sri Quek Leng Chan, Quek Kon Sean, is diving into the e-commerce sphere with an online shopping website called GEMFIVE, which will be launched on May 18.
“We are the first home-grown online marketplace that is eyeing the regional pie. We are launching in Malaysia first and we are looking to go into Singapore and Indonesia sometime early next year,” said the 34-year-old founder and chairman of GEMFIVE, Kon Sean.
“The trend is just quite obvious. We did a 2.5-month market study and then we decided to go in October. We built the team in November … so between November and now, is the execution stage,” he told pressmen during a media preview of GEMFIVE yesterday.
GEMFIVE chief executive officer Moey Tan said over US$1 billion had been invested across the Southeast Asian e-commerce industry since 2013 and that the region’s market could be valued at US$100 billion (RM361 billion) to US$200 billion in 10 years.
“In Malaysia, we expect online retail to make up 0.5% of total retail spend in 2015. It could increase to 5.1% in 2020 and 8.1% in 2025,” said Tan, adding that in the next three to five years, the team targets to have a presence in most Asean countries.
“We would like to drive more than 50 million cumulative page views in the next 12 months,” she said.
“Our difference is we will have curation (someone to sift through the site to select the most relevant content). We will build up a sufficient database that will then springboard [us] to personalised shopping. We realise that in such a mobilised and transparent world, personalised engagement is very critical to make the differences between GEMFIVE and the other sites. In our strategy, to be different, we will invest to build up our business intelligence engine,” she added.
As consumers leave digital footprints across websites, mobile apps and social media, Tan said one has to know how to harvest this data and engage customers on a personal level, continuously, and on subjects that are relevant to them, to be the winner of this game.
“We know that from consumer research, close to 79% of online shoppers are very unhappy with current e-commerce sites, because they found that organisations ask them repeated questions. The winning strategy is for us to build up and harness the transactional data so that we can engage them on a personalised level,” Tan stressed.
The GEMFIVE website has five categories — fashion, electronics, home and living, beauty and health, mothers and children. Tan said the site has close to 250 to 300 brands offering about 15,000 items.
“Every day, we will add new items to our site to keep it dynamic,” said Tan.
She said that the investment into GEMFIVE so far is less than RM5 million, and the group expects a gestation of two to three years before breaking even or becoming profitable.
Kon Sean, meanwhile, acknowledges that while competition will always be there, the main focus of the team is really on the untapped digital retail space.
“It is not about who the immediate competitior is. Everybody’s share is so small [now]. It is about what it should be,” he said.
Before GEMFIVE, Kon Sean was attached to his father’s banking business, the Hong Leong Financial Group, but left it over a year ago to focus on strategy and investments of Hong Leong’s private arm.
GEMFIVE is operated by GuoLine eMarketing Sdn Bhd, which is owned by the private arm of the Hong Leong group. The team comprises 60 people, with management heads who have over 15 years of experience in marketing, branding and Internet platform designing.
Tan herself, who has over 30 years of experience in consumer business, marketing and branding, was previously Hong Leong Bank Bhd’s chief operating officer for group consumer banking.
This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on May 6, 2015.