Looking ahead, Gogoprint has plans for further regional expansion and hopes to break even in two of four markets
Gogoprint, a Thailand-based internet-driven printing company is expanding into Malaysia this week with hopes of also tapping into the Singapore market, Founder David Berghaeuser told e27.
“For us, we looked at the different markets and everyone is going to Indonesia. But we made a pretty informed decision to go to a more developed market such as Malaysia,” he said.
“What we also found is what is interesting about Malaysia is it is very close to Singapore, so you can actually ship from KL to Singapore overnight. For the printing industry it is very interesting, because printing in Singapore is around two times more expensive as compared to Malaysia,”Berghaeuser added.
Berghaeuser said that if Gogoprints can excel at cross-border logistics, there will be a lot of rewards for entering Malaysia, but being within shouting distance of Singapore.
Also Read: Thailand’s InVent makes first US investment in VR advertising startup Social Nation
In a world in which the Internet has delivered a major blow to the printing industry, Gogoprint helps companies minimise their waste and make better use of their resources.
What the company does is essentially aggregate requests from a consumers, SMEs, and corporate clients into one ‘batch’ for the local printer. This allows for printers to leverage the full capacity of their machinery — which is often extremely expensive.
The sweetspot client for Gogoprint is SMEs because they are customers that traditional printing companies tend to overlook. The printers either don’t have the infrastructure or make expensive investments with the goal of wooeing a large corporate client.
“We see our mission in building a platform where we can sell those smaller customers on scale, very efficiently with very fast delivery times,” said Berghaeuser.
The company does have larger clients like Jameson, Booking.com and Lazada.
Gogoprint has raised a mid-six-digit seed round and boasts over 20,000 different printing combinations on the website. It has about 30 employees spread between Thailand and Malaysia and is growing at about 25 to 30 per cent month-on-month.
Berghaeuser, who played a key role in bringing Zalora to Thailand, says the most orders comes from business cards but flyers and leaflets bring in the most revenue.
Also Read: After demise of My Laundry Box, Thailand’s WashBox24 steps in to fill the void
When expanding, Gogoprint could enjoy a situation that is alien to Malaysian and Singaporean startups. Malaysia and Singapore both have vibrant and relatively mature ecosystems, so often when companies try to expand across Southeast Asia, adapting to foreign markets can be especially difficult.
But ease of doing business in Thailand is more difficult (for example, foreigners have to navigate strict ownership laws). So, in some ways, expanding into Malaysia may have certain reprieves (like the fact that english is widely spoken in Malaysia).
“But in Malaysia there are more foreign companies, it is easy to enter the market. So we can see these tradeoffs between more developed and more acessable markets,” said Berghaeuser, speaking about an expectation of competition in Malaysia.
Moving forward, Gogoprint has plans for further regional expansion, wanting to enter at least two more markets in the next year or so. In that timeframe, Berghaeuser said he hopes two of the four markets have reached break-even or have gotten close.
But, the first step is Malaysia, and that journey kicks off this week.
—
Photo courtesy of Gogoprint
The post Thailand’s Gogoprint expands into Malaysia, sees potential in Singapore market appeared first on e27.