The mother of all clones, Rocket Internet, a Berlin-based internet company that specializes on ripping off successful internet companies and scale it locally, has indicates that they’re expanding to the SEA region. As Sarah Lacy puts it, they are the worst kind of entrepreneur. There’s no commitment or belief in what they’re building if memos like that one above are to be believed– they’re just shallow profit-seekers.
And shameless as they may be, it’s not stopping them to expand to Asia. Our friends at SGEntrepreneurs just posted the news that Rocket Internet is launching Zalora (Zappos-clone) in Malaysia and is soon launching in Singapore. It just comes naturally that the clone-meister will soon enter Indonesian growing internet market.
And so they are.
Rocket Internet recently hired a few key people to run their operations in Indonesia. According to LinkedIn, they already have a few position filled and still looking for more. They now have a VP of Digital Products and Internet Marketing, and according to Twitter they’re looking (rather desperately) for an Internal Recruiter for a “Fashion E-Commerce Giant”.
These subtle activities clearly indicates that Rocket Internet is expanding aggressively in Indonesia. So I tried to look up the Zalora.co.id (based on Malaysia and Singapore’s Zalora.com) and rocket-indonesia.co.id domain name record, unfortunately it doesn’t show anything significant. But, a reverse IP lookup reveals that the domain Zalora.co.id shares the same host with Zamoda.com. It’s possible that Zamoda is the Indonesian version of Zalora in Malaysia and Singapore.
So far, that’s the information I can gather. We’ll update more news about Rocket Internet’s activities in Indonesia.
Wow great update 🙂
Support Rocket!!
only looser who afraid to be cloned~
Interesting post, but one small correction: it’s true that rocket is good at identifying and cloning (as you call it: ‘ripping off’) the internet’s best concepts, but its true specialties are execution and exit.
Yea.. I’ve heard pretty much the same thing. I understand they will be making more than 1 ecommerce platform and indeed to go into other verticals besides just fashion.
I don’t see the problem in copying a concept. If being an entrepreneur is only about creation, tons of people wouldn’t have launched their company.
And let’s remember that according to every economical theory, the theory of the entrepreneur is to “create and maximize profit”.
As Heinemann (Rocket MD) says, Germany did not invent the car but nobody complains that they build BMWs – much as Zappos is a wonderful business, if they don’t have the bandwidth to bring the proposition to Asia then Amazon can’t complain if others move first and well.