By Jennee Grace U Rubrico

Malaysia-based online courier services company EasyParcel is open to expanding its services to Brunei, Clarence Leong, the company’s chief executive said.

Leong said that given the number of online shoppers in the sultanate, it would make sense for EasyParcel to operate in Brunei.

The company currently operates in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore.

“Everyone’s buying online, so the market is at least there. It doesn’t mean that the size is small. But this is a normal practice, so there’s a potential,” Leong told B2B in an interview.

He also said that the decision to enter Brunei would depend on the market’s reception. “If someone wants us to be here [Brunei], we’ll be here.”

Leong said that EasyParcel will also have to find people in the country who believe in the company’s business model.

“A lot of times, people ask the question, ‘why EasyParcel, and why we don’t go direct [to logistics companies]?’  Why do we need to go to the middleman and then we get the benefits? So we need a team that actually believes in what we do and only then can we actually think further,” he said.

“Talent is the thing that built [the business] to where we are today. These people actually believe in what we do.”

EasyParcel’s business model is to connect small-scale merchants like Facebook and Instagram vendors with logistics companies to give the sellers access to cheap shipping rates.

Through its website, the company pools the courier demands of small vendors and generates enough volume to get cheaper shipping rates for them from its logistics partners.

“If you’re a [seller], you might not just be sticking with company A. You might want an option of A,B, C, and D. How are you going on board with A,B,C, or D with the best price?  Because you definitely have to commit to a certain volume to reach that. With a normal business I don’t think you can do that,” Leong explained.

Leong said EasyParcel does not think of logistics companies as competitors, but as partners.

“We consider them our partners… We are always the platform where you can choose multiple [courier services]… [but] they are all our partners because they are the ones who would actually be doing the work. We are just linking customers to them. In the end, it’s still their job,” he said.

Leong also said that EasyParcel at the moment enjoys monopoly in the region for its business model, adding that this is the time for the company to expand rapidly.

He also said that there had been initial plans to expand to more markets in Southeast Asia, but that at the moment, the company’s focus has shifted to growing the business deeper in the markets that it is already in.

“We actually receive a lot of enquiries coming from other countries, like the Philippines, even Vietnam, Cambodia, but I think for now, we want to focus on four [existing markets] because it’s not easy to manage different language. That’s the most difficult part,” he said.