Southeast Asia on radar of two Indian startups

By Aroonim Bhuyan Two Indian startups – one an e-commerce venture and the other a transportation solutions provider – are expecting to reap rich dividends from the Southeast Asian markets. While Zilingo is foraying into the fashion, lifestyle and beauty products market, Wings Travels Management is looking at exploiting the potential of the taxi aggregation market through a start-up mobile app called BookMyCab. The two companies are the only two from the services sector among six Indian firms that are participating in the four-day “Intermach and Subcon Thailand 2016” currently underway here. While Subcon Thailand is Southeast Asia’s biggest industrial subcontracting and business matchmaking event, Intermach is a machinery exhibition. “There are around 20,000 sellers of small fashion products here and Thailand has a major textiles market as well,” Poorva Gupta, vice president (financial and legal) of Zilingo, told IANS. Zilingo is primarily operating in Singapore and Thailand with technical backup from an office in Bangalore. The company is into order management and inventory management services, pricing and cataloguing. “Basically we are trying to enhance the online shopping experience by creating a type of artificial intelligence,” Gupta said. Zilingo is now planning to enter the Indonesian market after Singapore and Thailand. Mumbai-based Wings Travels Management acquired start-up Livemind Technologies that developed the BookMyCab mobile app around two years ago and is now planning to become the first Indian taxi app to go global. For that, it is looking at Thailand as the springboard and the country’s second largest city, Chiang Mai, as the starting point. “We will be starting our operations in Chiang Mai within 15 days,” Ashok Bhandula, Wings Travels Management’s chief operating officer, said. “We see Chiang Mai as a big market because the cost of living is low,it is a huge tourist hub and is developing into a major business hub as well,” he said, adding that operations would be launched in Bangkok as well soon. In Chiang Mai, Wings Travels Managament is selecting a series of tourist destinations and is offering its customers the options of vans, sedans, SUVs and tuktuks. Wings Travels Management is also the first Indian company in its sector to enter the market in Myanmar, which has embraced democracy. The company provided consultancy service to set up a local taxi aggregating company called Hello Cabs in Yangon, which has 40,000 taxis. Inaugurating the “Intermach and Subcon Thailand 2016” on Wednesday, Thailand’s Minister of Industry Atchaka Sibunrang said that the event would help show her country’s readiness for being the region’s centre of high technology sophisticated industries. “This year’s event has the answers that the Thai industry needs,” Atachaka said. “It provides the opportunity for entrepreneurs to inspect the latest technology and innovation that can help enhance production efficiency, look for new business opportunities, adopt new innovation such as automation system, internet of things, electric appliances for increasing competitiveness and value addition for products,” she added. IANS