Bukalapak acquires price comparison major iPrice

Indonesia’s leading e-commerce company Bukalapak has acquired a majority stake in Southeast Asia’s leading price comparison platform, iPrice.

The move allows iPrice to accelerate its growth by leveraging the synergies between the two groups.

In recent years, Bukalapak has shifted its focus from competing head-to-head with other marketplaces to building or acquiring niche marketplaces and accelerating their growth. iPrice has been building a niche marketplace focused on price-conscious consumers for the last eight years, helping more than 100 million consumers across seven countries in Southeast Asia save money.

Bukalapak CEO Willix Halim said, “With Bukalapak’s extensive expertise in e-commerce and iPrice’s loyal userbase and proprietary technology, we are confident that we can unlock the platform’s full potential.” iPrice investors, including Itochu and Naver, welcome the deal.

The transition will now be accelerated by Bukalapak group’s footing in a diverse set of verticals opening up many new opportunities.

Co-founder of iPrice, Heinrich Wendel, said, “We are excited to join forces with Bukalapak and benefit from the group’s synergies. This partnership will allow us to expand our services to help even more users save money across new verticals, like Gaming, and geographies, like Australia.”

iPrice will continue to operate as an independent entity, maintaining its neutral position towards users, and working with a broad set of merchants and sellers.

iPrice Group serves more than 125 million unique users across eight countries/regions, including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong SAR, and Australia.

The company’s mission is to “Help People Save Money” by comparing prices, promotions, and seller discounts across its vast catalogue of 8 billion offers from thousands of sellers and merchants.

Bukalapak, on the other hand, is a group of tech-based companies and a technology super-enabler for Indonesia’s MSME transformation and various business verticals. It serves more than 110 million users and over 22 million Indonesian MSMEs through its various solutions.

With its more than a decade-long technology innovation for Indonesian consumers and businesses, Bukalapak is a tech enabler and fuel of Indonesia’s digital transformation engine.

As the first publicly-listed Indonesian technology company, Bukalapak is now focused on using technology to enable today’s digital lifestyles for both Indonesian MSMEs and Indonesians in general, across numerous verticals from marketplace, finance and fintech, offline to online, merchant solutions, and procurement.