Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin is co-founder of the e-commerce site Lazada in Vietnam. Photo: Quinn Ryan Mattingly
A winter 2011 sat Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin the investment company Kinnevik’s head office at Skeppsbron in Stockholm. Opposite him sat Oliver Samwer, the man behind the German venture capital company Rocket Internet.
The two had been heard several times over the past year. Rocket wanted to recruit Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin to its team of ecommerce entrepreneurs with the mission to start and instantly scale up new operations in Southeast Asia.
The German was lured by Christopher Brinkeborn Bese Lens credit. The Swedish entrepreneur, who was running the little baby gadget chain Barnbutiken, had previously worked for three years on the financier Christer Gardell activist fund Cevian.
One of the job interviews was with the person who would later become known as Cevian man – a the two protagonists of the past decade’s most acclaimed insider tangle.
criminal suspicions, which triggered a crisis at the company, appeared shortly before Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin signed employment contract with Cevian. Six months later came the Lehman crash and many of Cevian’s shares plummeted on the stock market.
The new employee Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin Pallade pressure and stayed on activist fund until 2011.
Which country are you going to? You get to choose what you want
Oliver Samwer, known for his tough style of leadership, wanted someone who Pallade pressure.
– What country are you going to? You get to choose what you want, asked the Germans when they sat opposite each other in the office at the wharf.
– I want to go to the country that are least developed, in which you have no business at all, and I can be the first employees at the site, said the Swede.
Samwer said then will become Vietnam. Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin accepted. Before the meeting ended, he asked a final question:
– The Ho Chi Minh City, I’ll move to where or?
Samwer hesitated a few seconds too long, then said yes.
– I am quite sure that he had not a clue as to which city the idea was that we would start operations in said Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin today Breakit when he thinks back to the meeting.
Said and done. In February 2012 moved Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin to Ho Chi Minh City to start the site Lazada.vn. The idea was to build a sort of mini-Amazon, ie a company that would sell all sorts of items online.
His first task was to recruit staff.
– The first three months incised I certainly 16-17 job interviews per day. After four months we had 300 employees. Where I want to give a great tribute to the young talent in Vietnam. Much of the company was built by 250 talented students who came to us as trainees and did a brilliant job, says Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin.
A tough nut to crack in the beginning was what people really like to buy in Vietnam. E-commerce was hardly in the country. Moreover, there is in Vietnam almost total absence of reliable statistics on consumer behavior.
– We had no idea what colors people liked or how expensive gadgets would be, so we dare not buy in any store. Then we realized that a lot of physical traders had their catalog listed on their sites, even if they did not sell any products online. Then we chose simply to add up all of their products on our site. If someone ordered something we had to run down and buy it in town. In this way we avoid bearing the risk, although of course we lost a lot less money on each small purchase. When the competitors discovered that we did so was our motor cycle courier banned from competitors’ stores, so we had to start trading via the decoy, says Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin.
E-commerce in Vietnam is radically different from Sweden. Because customers do not want to shop without having first seen and squeezed the goods, must Lazada send out the motor cycle courier to their home.
Once the customer has checked that the item is okay, the payment is in cash. Only 5 percent of the Vietnamese are debit cards.
Lazada it took a while to find a workable model. But once it did, growth momentum – with a vengeance. It also meant tough challenges.
Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin says that the company several times came close to clap together.
Some times it was on the verge of collapse .
– Some times it was on the verge of collapse. When you run an e-retailer that doubled in size about every third month running, always a risk of a ticking bomb in the logistics unit. If you have the capacity to handle 1,000 orders per day, but constantly gets some orders too much, you gradually build up a delay that is extremely difficult to catch up. In the end, your only option is to turn to marketing, which in principle can lead to collapse if you run a business with enormous growth requirements. To avoid this, we have repeatedly sent down every single person on the staff, including myself, to the warehouse to pack the boxes, “says Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin.
Today Lazada 1000 employees only in Vietnam. The company is now also in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
Lazada turnover for the first half of 2015 approximately 1 billion. The losses are still very high, namely 1.2 billion during the first six months.
Among the investors are in addition Rocket Internet and Kinnevik, the British retail giant Tesco and Temasek, one of Singapore’s largest investment firms. When Temasek entered as owners in December, the company was valued at SEK 10 billion.
Christopher Brinkeborn Beselin has left the role of CEO to start his own investment with a focus on building the Vietnamese companies. But his heart still beats for Lazada.
– It feels pretty damn fun that it has become so well established. I do not care so much about the money but what really feels good is that Lazada has become a name that everyone in Vietnam know. Ask any taxi driver anywhere they have an eye, says the Swedish cofounder.
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