German ecommerce startups expand to Asia

One German ecommerce startup after another is expanding its business to Asia. In less than a month time, fashion e-tailer Mytheresa, online discounter Lesara, property portal Lamudi and price comparison startup Run a Shop have announced they soon will be operating in Asia.

Run a Shop, a Berlin-based ecommerce publisher and price comparison startup, announced its expansion into Asia in January. In India it has started the price comparison portal Salefire.in. Although Run a Shop is already present in twenty countries, it’s the first time they have entered the Asian market. In an interview with Internet World CEO Marius Schulze says India shows the typical pattern of a BRIC country. “The first phase of digitization, one of fixed Internet, was skipped here almost completely as the most traffic and a large portion of our revenue in India comes from mobile devices.”

Property portal Lamudi, also based in Berlin, secured a second round of funding so it could expand in Asia and Latin America. The Rocket Internet-backed company has expanded across 32 countries globally with over 800,000 real estate listings. Over half of listings are in Asia and Latin America.

Lesara wants to respond quicker to trends
And online discount Lesara just announced it has opened its first operating business in Asia. It has opened an office in Guangzhou, China, so it could intensify the contact with business partners in Asia. This way it can quickly respond to trends and update the product line with a focus on fashion and lifestyle at very short time intervals. “For us, opening an office in China was the next logical step in the development of the company”, said CEO and founder Roman Kirsch.

At the same time, the Munich-based fashion retailer Mytheresa launched its Arabic website. It now delivers products to customers in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. “We are very pleased and proud to be able to have a fully mirrored and translated version of our luxury shop available for our Arabic customers. The Middle East is a very important market for Mytheresa.com and we hope we can offer our customers in this region an even better service and a more personalized shopping experience, now this website is live”, Thomas Müller, managing director of Mytheresa.com said. The online store already had websites in German, English, French and Italian.

So, what’s happening here? Is there something in the water in Germany? Or is it just the fact for the last couple of years Germany has been a great place for startups to flourish and now is the time to spread their wings? It seems it’s just that.

There’s a special website dedicated to the best and newest startups based in Berlin. And on the website Berlinstartupmap.com you can see where all local startups are located. And that’s just Berlin. In other cities like Munich, Hamburg and Cologne there are also other hot startups, ready to conquer the rest of the world…