Japan-Based CrowdWorks Eyes to Invest in Southeast Asia

Japan-based  crowdsourcing platform CrowdWorks, which has gone public last December and looked for freelance designers, tech employees, writers, and many others ever since, has planned to broaden their investment scope outside Japan, particularly Southeast Asia. The company will rely on its Japanese company’s network in doing so.   

As Bloomberg reported, CrowdWorks’ CEO Koichiro Yoshida is currently learning the possibilities of acquiring minority shares of companies in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia per this year. CrowdWorks may connect Southeast Asian freelancers with their clients in Japan, namely Toyota, Softbank, and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

Yoshida estimated that the global crowdsourcing market’s going to reach $8,2 billion of annual valuation while in Japan, the total valuation is estimated to reach $536 million.

He commented, “The Japanese market is in its initial phase. We’d like to enter the market in the U.S and Asia to benefit our network towards Japanese companies.”

Despite the fact that the company’s gone public, CrowdWorks has yet made any profit. The team expected that it will start coming by the end of this year, hence they plan to undergo such expansion.

In Indonesia, there has been two local crowdsourcing platforms being established since the past year, which are Sribulancer and Projects.co.id. The corwdsourcing market in Indonesia is glooming, marked by Sribulancer’s milestone of paying its freelancers up to Rp 300 million only in two months, not to mention its achievement of netting 3000 freelancers with 100 job postings per last November.

Will CrowdWorks  be interested in investing at those local crowdsourcing platforms? We’ll see.