Gojek's Initiatives for Its Southeast Asia's Business Amid Pandemic

Gojek is one of Indonesia's digital startups in which business penetration reached regional. GoViet was launched in 2018, but GET was launched in 2019. Then, they arrived in Singapore. Previously, Gojek had the opportunity to test online motorcycle taxi services in Malaysia with a local player, Dego Ride.

Earlier this year the company has announced business plans, including strengthening its services abroad. Afterall, the Covid-19 pandemic puts significant pressure on businesses around the world, including Gojek.

DailySocial had the opportunity to talk with Gojek's Head of Corporate Communications, Audrey Petriny. She explained, the GET, GoViet, and Gojek business models are quite adaptable to the current conditions. Some services actually have a good impact on society. Gojek already launched food-delivery services and digital wallets in foreign countries, such as GET Food in Thailand or Go Food in Vietnam.

"Because people stay at home and place more orders in the past few months, we see ongoing resilience in the online trading business (food and package delivery), non-cash payments, and digital content. Consumers are increasingly interested in this digital habit, even before Covid-19. Nowadays, online services become a daily necessity," Audrey said.

However, there has been a decline in transportation transactions in the past few months. The biggest one is at the beginning of the pandemic in March-April 2020. Partners have decreasing orders. Various efforts were made to maintain the resilience of this business ecosystem and hope to recover quickly when entering a phase of adaptation to new habits.

"In March, we established Gojek Partner Support Fund to support partners’ income stability across markets. We have also implemented several other initiatives to provide financial or social assistance to drivers, including ongoing food distribution programs, financial partnerships to provide vehicle installment relief or low-interest loans and a consumer activation program to increase tips for driver partners," Gojek's representative said the initiative.

Cashless payment penetration

Similar to Indonesia, Gojek's overseas partners are increasing, not only the driver. They also embraced merchant to enliven the market locations provided in the application. Pandemic is actually seen as an opportunity to be more active in bringing merchants into the platform to keep the business going. Various programs have been performed to encourage the digitalization, including digital payment systems.

"We also make adjustments and introduce new services, such as GET Pay in Thailand for food delivery, delivery without direct contact, [and] to ensure that consumers' needs are safely delivered," Audrey continued.

Currently, Gojek has only applied digital payment services in Thailand (GET Pay). The plan to expand Gojek's fintech services has been scheduled, including in subsequent transit countries, such as the Philippines. In the Philippines, Gojek has already acquired the local company Coins.ph.

Another strategy is to increase promotion programs to maintain consumer demand while reducing the operational costs of merchant partners. The shifting of consumer's needs is answered by improving services, such as accommodating basic needs shopping through applications - including selling ready-to-cook food.

Being mentioned about the company's efforts to ensure its partners are safe from the transmission of Covid-19, Gojek team said that they have made various adjustments to the rules.

"To ensure driver partner's safety and hygiene, also to provide consumers with greater assurance, we provide online training and cleaning equipment for all partners. We also make amendments to SOPs. This includes sending food without contact to ensure proper physical and sanitary measures. for the driver's partner vehicle."

Independent brand

As previously reported, to accelerate the adoption of Gojek services abroad, the company plans to rebrand GET and GoViet to "Gojek", including to launch a single application. It was directly announced by the Head of International Gojek Andrew Lee.

In his statement, Andrew said this decision had been planned for several months and taken to facilitate the company to be able to increase the business scale more efficiently.

Previously, when launching GoViet and GET, the ex-CEO, Nadiem Makarim said that the local element was very important to advance business in a new country. He considers the use of different names more easily accepted by the local community. The assumption turned out to be different.

The use of a single brand and application has been applied by Gojek since its expansion to Singapore in late 2018.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian