Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup will close its popular e-commerce site adayroi.com by the end of this month, completely withdrawing itself from consumer retail, after selling its retail component Vincommerce (VCM) to Masan Group, one of the country’s largest FMCG companies.
In an official statement, Vingroup said that adayroi.com will be merged into VinID to build a new online-to-offline model retail. VinID is an app that primarily serves customers of supermarket chain store Vinmart and convenient store chain Vinmart+, platforms that will be also combined with Masan in a share-swapping deal.
Adayroi came into operations in August 2014. According to the latest statistics from iPrice, its monthly web traffic in Vietnam for Q3 2019 is around 6.4 million users, falling far behind other competitors such as homegrown marketplaces Sendo, Tiki, and regional players Shopee and Lazada.
Vingroup said the closing of adayroi.com is a necessary step for Vingroup to restructure and focus on high-tech and manufacturing ventures. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Vingroup’s chairman Pham Nhat Vuong expressed his ambition to sell electric vehicles to the US by 2021 with a potential USD 2 billion investment.
According to the Southeast Asia e-Conomy report 2019 by Google, Temasek and Bain, Vietnam’s e-commerce market could hit USD 23 billion by 2025. Despite the potential, competition in this space is fierce as e-commerce players are in a race to attract more users to spend online, while overcoming logistics challenges.
Currently, about 70% of e-commerce activities in Vietnam come from consumers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.