Despite improving losses, GoTo cancels IPO

🛒 Meet GoTo: GoTo is a digital ecosystem in Indonesia that offers on demand services, e-commerce market places/stores and financial services. It's backed by Softbank and the GIC (Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund)

📉 Better losses: GotTo’s underlying losses went from $233 million (3.7 trillion rupiah) to $59.3 million (942 billion rupiah) thanks to the company lowering operating expenses (like incentives and product marketing) while at the same time leveraging technology.

📣 Despite these better numbers, GoTo does not plan to push through with their IPO.

Here’s some more facts from GoTo:

• 🛍️ Gross transaction value (GTV) is up by 5% (this comes from good ecommerce and on demand services for price sensitive consumers)

• 📈 Gross contribution margin is up by 0.75%

• 💰️ Net losses went from $422 million to $151 million

Google and Yahoo’s new rules might make emails harder

🔒️ Spam risk: In October 2023, Google and Yahoo announced stricter rules like email authentication, single-click unsubscribes and low complain rates for marketers.

🔎 Authenticating needed: Emails need to be authenticated now with practices like DMAR, SPF and DKIM, all done for the protection of the receiver. Not following can result in being marked as spam.

Email marketing is great for ecommerce companies:

• 🪙 Every $1 spent on emails gets a return of $40

• 📧 Customers who receive promo emails spend 138% more

• ✅ It’s preferred by 86% of professionals

Alibaba powers up with Tencent and AI

👔 Corporate Collab: Both Alibaba and Tencent, some of the two biggest tech companies in China, have joined together in funding AI startups. They already backed up a company called Zhipu, a generative AI startup that wants to rival OpenAI.

🤖 Alibaba AI: Alibaba is also expanding its own AI model with Tongyi Qianwen 2.0, an upgrade that offers a step up in complex instruction, writings, reasoning, memorization and lessening hallucinations.

💬 Taobao bot: The first version of Tongyi Qianwen was already integrated with Taobao, with the chatbot giving product recommendations and support to users.