Last week Xiaomi brought its Redmi Note 10 series to China, with an altered Redmi Note 10 Pro model and the Redmi Note 10 5G, which is the same as the global version. Today it held the duo's first sale and that was a huge success. The company sold the available 500,000 units in an hour. Quick napkin math says that more than 8,000 units were ordered each minute. Source (in Chinese)
Nvidia kicked off the new month by unveiling its latest desktop GPUs - the RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti. As with past Ti iterations, the new cards represent an upgrade over the regular RTX 3080 and 3070 with more VRAM and improved performance to keep up with the latest Triple-A games. Both new graphics cards offer Nvidia staples like ray-tracing, DLSS, and Reflex technologies. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti key specs The RTX 3080 Ti clocks at up to 1.67GHz and brings 10,240 CUDA cores and 80 GPU clusters. RTX 3070 Ti has a boost clock speed of 1.77Ghz with 6,144 CUDA cores and...
When two of Indonesia’s biggest companies — ride-hailing company Gojek and e-commerce marketplace Tokopedia — joined forces as GoTo Group last month, a key highlight from the merger was that the last-mile delivery space is still a huge global trend.
In Nigeria, the e-commerce and last-mile delivery market is projected to be worth over $20 billion in the next five years. Big players like Jumia have considerable market share yet smaller platforms are increasingly carving out theirs. One of such is ride-hailing-turned-logistics company Gokada.
Gokada launched in 2018 as a ride-hailing company in Lagos, Nigeria. But in 2020, Gokada began offering logistics (Gsend) and food delivery services (GShop) after a ride-hailing ban by the Lagos State government affected its operations. Today, the company is combining all these services (which have operated independently in the past) into a single application.
“In September and October, we launched GShop which is the food delivery platform for Gokada. What we realized from our customers was that while they were using the Gsend and GShop separately, they came to us asking if we could put them together,” said Gokada CEO Nikhil Goel to TechCrunch. “So doing this is more like a transition from other things we were doing and making it easier for our customers to have all our services in one platform and create a super app.”
Gokada’s super app plans are coming off the back of an impressive year for the company despite a troubling first few months during the pandemic. As early as February, the company downsized and laid off more than half its staff after the ban on motorcycles in Lagos. It quickly pivoted to logistics and food delivery and hasn’t looked back.
This past year, Gokada has crossed over $100 million in annualized transaction value. It has also helped more than 30,000 merchants on its platform to execute over 1 million food delivery and e-commerce orders.
“Before Gokada ventured into ride-hailing in Lagos, people questioned us. When we entered the delivery space, it was the same question people asked. They said we didn’t have the experience. But today, if you look at it critically, we’ve changed this market in a different manner,” Goel said.
Goel, who took over the reins at Gokada this March after founder Fahim Saleh tragically passed on, has been instrumental to the company’s impressive growth so far. Per information shared by Gokada, the company’s volume growth has increased 3x in the last six months while revenue increased 10x within the past year.
Image Credits: Gokada
Before becoming CEO, Goel had three roles since joining the company in 2019 — VP of Rides, COO, and acting president. Previously, he also co-founded Indian edtech startup Classplus and worked as a general manager at Indian food delivery giant Zomato. His stint at Zomato and knowledge of the food-delivery and logistics space will be key to how Gokada pulls off its super app ambitions.
Although Gokada is only present in Lagos, the company is looking to launch its services across other cities including Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Ogun. And not only will the super app allow Gokada customers in these cities to access food delivery, e-commerce (medicines and groceries among other supplies), and logistics, but they will be able to use ride-hailing services.
The company plans to start with neighbouring markets to Lagos — Ogun and Ibadan. In the latter, there’s already a ride-hailing platform in the form of SafeBoda. The company, which is present in Uganda and Nigeria, employs a super app model in the East African country but offers only ride-hailing services in Ibadan, the only Nigerian city where it operates.
For much of last year, SafeBoda has enjoyed dominance in the southwestern city but Gokada’s arrival, especially as it plans to offer other services, might threaten its commanding position.
“We started with its ride-hailing service in Lagos. We were mostly known as one of the pioneers of ride-hailing in Lagos before the ban. So far, we’ve not ventured outside Lagos, and the reason for that has been that we wanted to remain focused on our new business here. And it’s evident that when you move across Lagos, you will see our delivery bikes everywhere on the road. But ride-hailing will always stay with us wherever we go outside the city,” the CEO added. Gokada is in talks to secure operational licenses for ride-hailing but has already acquired a NIPOST licence to mitigate future risks on the regulatory front and allow them to operate courier logistics services across the country.
While services in a super app can differ from one platform to another, payments is the defining functionality that ties those offerings together. For now, Gokada only provides a subset of that which is a wallet feature and a debit card option to pay for these services. On why this is the case, Goel said: “Before many of these companies like Grab and Gojek got into payments, they were providing other services. The idea for a super app is to provide customers with different services under one umbrella to ease their lives. That’s what we’re doing but we’re open to a payments play in the future.”
Unlike other markets in Asia, Africa doesn’t have clear leaders in the super app race. Therefore, Gokada will join a growing list of platforms clamouring for supremacy in their respective markets, a spot OPay seemed to be gunning for before shutting down its non-fintech verticals last year to focus on its payment services.
Line Corporation, best known for its messaging app, launched a digital banking platform in Indonesia today. This means Japan-based Line Corp. now offers banking services in three of its biggest overseas markets: Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan.
Line Corp.’s Indonesian banking platform is the result of a partnership the company struck in 2018 with PT Bank KEB Hana Indonesia, a subsidiary of South Korea’s Hana ZBank. Line Corp. agreed to acquire 20% of PT Bank KEB Hana Indonesia, making it the bank’s second-largest shareholder, and said it would work on online banking services, including deposit accounts, microcredit products, and remittance and payment services.
According to a report by Momentum Works, downloads of digital banking apps in Indonesia grew 7% in 2020, with apps from established banks like BTPN Jenius, OCBC Nyala and Permata leading. But Momentum Works also observed that “many Indonesian digital bank users tend to download multiple digital bank applications and explore around,” so a dominant player hasn’t emerged yet. Major tech companies like Sea Group, Grab and Gojek are also working on their own neobank services.
Line introduced banking services to its Thai users last October, as part of a joint venture with Kasikorn Vision Company, a subsidiary of Kasikorn Bank. In Taiwan, its subsidiary Line Bank Taiwan was granted a banking license earlier this year by the Financial Supervisory Commission.
The iQOO Z3 announced in China in March was supposed to arrive in India in early May, but plans were changed due to the second COVID-19 wave in the country. However, with the situation getting better, the phone maker today announced it will introduce the Z3 in India on June 8. The iQOO Z3 will come with the Snapdragon 768G 5G SoC at the helm, making it India's first smartphone to be powered by Qualcomm's 7nm chipset. And if the rest of the specs remain the same as the Chinese model (we say so because Indian iQOO 7 is a rebranded Neo5), you will get a 6.58" FullHD+ 120Hz LCD,...
Freight forwarding — the process of organising how and where items will be shipped around the world, and specifically the technology that underpins that work — continues to be a huge area of the logistics market, not least because of the huge boom in e-commerce in the last year, and because of the Covid-19-mandated need to simply be more efficient in how things are being moved around. Today, one of the bigger players in that space is announcing more funding to capitalize on the opportunity.
Sennder, a digital freight forwarder that focuses on moving cargo around Europe (and specifically focusing on trucks and “full truck load”, FTL, freight forwarding), has raised $80 million in funding, at a valuation that the company confirms is now over $1 billion.
The Berlin-based startup has been on something of a funding tear this year. In January, it announced a $160 million round, and this $80 million is closing out its Series D. Baillie Gifford has led this latest Series D extension, with Hedosophia, Accel, Lakestar, HV Capital, Project A and Scania all participating in the previous part of the Series D.
The funding makes Sennder, which has now raised some $350 million, one of the most well-funded of the freight forwarders, but it’s a hot area at the moment. Another player out of Europe, Zencargo, picked up $42 million just last month. Other competitors include the likes of Flexport in the US.
Sennder is growing organically, but it’s also making some acquisitions to scale up — a mark not just of the activity in the market but also the fragmentation. In May, it acquired Cars&Cargo to give it a stronger presence in France and Benelux. Other companies that it has acquired have included Uber Freight Europe and Everoad in 2020, and it also operates a JV with Poste Italiane, Italy’s postal service. Altogether it now has eight hubs in Europe.
The plan will be to make more acquisitions of this kind, the company said, to expand a network that now covers 12,500 trucks that it says works with ten German DAX 30 and eleven Euro Stoxx 50 shippers and is expected to move more than 1 million truckloads in 2021.
“We are delighted to have carried our momentum from 2020 into 2021, having already made one acquisition and signed several strategic partnerships,” said David Nothacker, CEO and Co-Founder of sennder, in a statement. “We look to expand our European footprint, bringing more carriers and shippers onto the sennder platform, while expanding our digital offering – such as SaaS. Acquisitions and strategic partnerships are part of this strategy – the additional funds give us the flexibility to capitalize on the right opportunities. Baillie Gifford has backed a wave of revolutionary tech companies; their commitment to sennder is a vote of confidence in our team, technology, and business model.”
Stephen Paice, Co-manager, Baillie Gifford European Growth Trust PLC, added: “We are delighted to join the sennder team on its journey to disrupt Europe’s logistics industry. We strongly believe its technology has the potential to create tremendous value for stakeholders and society in an industry plagued with inefficiencies and needless CO2 emissions. What’s particularly impressive, beyond the progress shown so far, is the purpose-driven and entrepreneurial mind-set instilled within the company. This will no doubt be an important factor for long-term success.”
While on stage at Computex 2021, talking about the new Radeon RX 6000M series of GPUs, AMD' CEO Dr. Lisa Su talked about bringing AMD's RDNA 2 graphics architecture to Samsung's Exynos chipsets later this year. Making its first appearance on a mobile SoC, AMD's RDNA 2 custom graphics will enable ray-tracing and variable rate shading on Exynos chipsets. Did you see that? "The next place you will find #RDNA2 will be the high-performance mobile phone market. We're happy to announce that we will bring custom graphics IP to Samsung’s next flagship mobile SOC, with ray-tracing and variable...
