While consumers’ online purchasing in the GCC has taken great strides over the past few years, business-buying or procurement has not caught up as rapidly, according to senior director of Moglix, Piyush Malviya.
The Singapore-based online business-to-business procurement platform recently expanded to Abu Dhabi and Dubai with the ambition of solving the region’s procurement challenges, the result of outdated practices.
“While the consumer-tech is benefiting from digital technologies and innovations, business-tech is still largely unchanged from what it was ten years ago. Business procurement still follows the same procedures of getting multiple quotations from the market and going through all the administrative work,” said Malviya.
“Buying one simple item for a corporation probably requires a days-long process, whereas buying the same thing for personal use would be done online with the product delivered to you the next day,” he continued.
Launched in 2015, Moglix is looking to bridge that gap between business and consumer buying and introduce technology to business procurement, explained Malviya.
“Over the years, we saw that we could deliver a very significant impact on the way companies do procurement and introduce a lot of efficiencies in their procurement procedures,” he said.
Following their success in India, the company’s further growth plans were slowed down by the onset of coronavirus, to which Malviya said “we got some time to reflect on our long-term initiatives due to the pandemic”.
“When you are a fast-paced company like us, you don’t get time to sit back and think of long-term initiatives, but the pandemic gave us time to reflect on that,” he explained.
Moglix turned unicorn in May with a $120 million Series E funding round, at a valuation of $1bn, led by Falcon Edge Capital and Harvard Management Company. Malviya said one of the biggest objectives of the funding is expansion to the Middle East, where large-scale business procurement still faces several challenges.
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For the next year, Moglix is “very much focused on the UAE”, said Malviya.
“When it comes to the Middle East, I would say business-buying is more interesting for us than the consumer-business alone because the population is limited when compared to Southeast Asia markets; but the opportunity in business-buying is huge,” said Malviya.
“There are forward-looking companies who want to adopt our processes in their procurement. At the same time, the region’s businesses have not invested in their supply chain development as much as Western economies and there is still a lot of fragmentation. This is why we thought that our expertise in these categories would be useful for solving these challenges in the Middle Eastern market,” he continued.
For the next year, Moglix is “very much focused on the UAE”, said Malviya.
“The most important value-add would be the technology adoption on procurement. We want to help the country move to the new generation way of buying: You cannot live a double life of buying an item for personal use from Noon and then signing-off with a pen and paper the same item for your business,” he explained.
Following this stage, Moglix is eying expansion in the GCC starting with Saudi Arabia. The online platform will also be deploying more of its solutions in the region, such as procurement options for the construction and manufacturing sectors.
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