PETALING JAYA: Ninja Van Malaysia is focused on expanding its value-added services this year, driven by the positive expected macro trends for e-commerce growth.
Ninja Van Malaysia CEO Adzim Halim (pic) said the core business is “quite stable” and its main focus this year is onboarding more shippers onto its value-added services, namely Ninja Direct, Ninja Mart, Ninja Fulfilment.
“A lot of them will be smaller shippers, they will not be like big names ... a lot of these value-added services will be focused around SMEs (small and medium enterprises),” he told SunBiz.
He said the company aims to assist online sellers to expand their reach beyond Malaysia through cross-border logistics and offline via Ninja Mart.
“Selling within Malaysia is really just the first step for a seller. You’d want to sell online cross-border because you want to expand your market. But what happens after you’re done with the whole online thing? You will start looking offline.
“So we want to be there for sellers. We want to help these online sellers to expand to overseas through cross-border logistics as well as offline,” he added.
Adzim said that in the second half of 2020 until the first half 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, Ninja Van experienced “accelerated e-commerce growth” and volume increased exponentially.
“We saw the volumes double and triple over the course of a few months, as everyone was stuck at home ordering goods, and when everyone was working, people were constantly ordering. Volume went up, the number of merchants also went up.”
However, he said, 2022 was a “correction year” for the company and “growth was muted” as the economy opened up and consumers deviated from e-commerce and started buying more on retail and travel.
“Basically a lot of spend went back to normal things, last year was a bit of a crushing year for us, a little bit muted. But we’ve started to see signs as of this year that we’re now returning back to normalcy,” Adzim said.
In terms of market share in Malaysia, he reckoned that the company is in top three in courier logistics for last-mile delivery, ranging from 20% to 30%.
He is optimistic on the outlook of the e-commerce market as the economy recovers from the peak of the pandemic and returns to normalcy.
“We know that the e-commerce penetration is going to increase because volumes are going to grow. Therefore, logistics demand will continue to increase for both domestic and cross border ... and I’m starting to see the signs of the market picking up again,” Adzim said.
The Ninja Van group has built a presence across Southeast Asia, mainly in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.
