Waresix Acquires Trukita, to Expand Business in "First-Mile" Logistics

Logistics startup Waresix today (17/12) announced its acquisition of Trukita; a startup that provides a marketplace portal to help users find freight and truck services for first-mile delivery. This is to expand the company's coverage, as previously known, Waresix only focuses on mid-mile logistics services.

After the corporate action, Waresix plans to accommodate all aspects of the supply chain through a technology approach, including truck management, warehousing, multimodal transportation, and vendor management.

In September 2020, Waresix also announced the fundraising up to $100 million or the equivalent of 1.5 trillion Rupiah of follow-on funding. Some investors participated in the last Series B funding, including EV Growth, Jungle Venture, SoftBank Ventures Asia, EMTEK Group, Pavilion Capital, and Redbadge Pacific.

"The acquisition of Trukita is in line with a strategy to complement our capabilities in mid-mile logistics services. This strategy allows us to combine our expertise and company network to expand our service range, as well as offer a more comprehensive range of services to our customers," Waresix' Co-founder & CEO Andree Susanto said.

He said that the acquisition of Trukita will increase the company's coverage access to more than 10 thousand trucks and hundreds of new customers, putting the company in the best position to seize more opportunities in the Indonesian port and sea logistics market to be valued up to $60 billion.

Meanwhile, Trukita's Co-Founder & CEO Ady Bangun said, "Trukita can now share the advantage of Waresix's technology, as well as warehouse and truck. This will improve our services to customers in a more holistic manner, and expand our service reach beyond first-mile logistics."

Waresix's Co-Founder & CEO Andree Susanto and Trukita's Co-Founder & CEO Ady Bangun / Waresix

Gaining profit despite pandemic

In early December 2020, we 8 funding that had been successfully booked by local logistics startups. Of course this is a breath of fresh air for the industry, especially the logistics sector is worthy of consideration because it supports various other businesses, one of which is e-commerce which contributes up to $32 billion of GMV for Indonesia's digital economy.

The logistics business ecosystem alone is quite complex, we previously published an analysis in 2019. Some business players such as Waresix eventually rests on more than one business model - apart from providing logistics transportation services, it also started to help business people manage warehouse to make it efficient for product distribution. Several other players have done the same thing.

For example, Shipper has done quite a movement, through its acquisition of Porter and Pakde, they expanded the scope of business in the realm of warehousing to facilitate online sellers in marketplaces and social commerce. SaaS players for omnichannel e-commerce such as Sirclo also have a similar scope of business now. This trend is a strong indication that every player in the ecosystem is trying to provide end-to-end services.

In Indonesia, spending on ground logistics is estimated to reach $290 billion by 2020. Apart from the large market, the number of commercial vehicle population (9.6 million units in 2019) has created intense price competition. However, the ratio of logistics costs to Indonesia's GDP has reached 24%. It means that this market is still very promising in terms of size.

Various logistical initiatives are also being intensified. Most recently, Paxel in collaboration with Blue Bird presents PaxelBig. It is a same-day delivery service with a capacity of more than 5 kg aimed at MSME players using the fleet owned by Blue Bird. The unicorns also strengthen their business in this segment. One of them is Gojek, which will finalize intercity shipping services through the JX unit as a joint venture with JD.id.

– Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian Header photo: Depositphotos.com