Modernizing Trucking in Indo: Tiger Fang of Kargo

Description

Trucking in Indonesia is clearly ripe for disintermediation: annual logistics spend represents a massive 26% of GDP. The sector moreover is profoundly fragmented: 75% of trucking companies have 20 trucks or less, and a massive amount of the USD38b in annual trucking spend disappears into a labyrinth of middlemen. Tiger Fang, Co-founder & CEO at Kargo Technologies, joins us this week to discuss in greater detail this massive opportunity, and the attendant challenges that come with it. Having started his career in investment banking, Tiger early on developed an appreciation of the awesome power of "leverage" (financial leverage, technological leverage) in driving profound change into operationally intense industries such as logistics and e-commerce.  Tiger is a veteran of massive platform launches into new markets. He for instance built out Uber in Western China. At one point, provincial capital Chengdu was in fact Uber's busiest urban market globally. He also helped launch Rocket and Lazada operations into Thailand and Vietnam. Founded less than two years ago, Kargo has already deployed its "marketplace model", which aggregates supply and demand between Transporters and Shippers, initially across the dominant markets of Sumatra, Java and Bali (80% of Indo GDP) and beyond. Tiger believes Kargo to have one of the most robust R&D teams on the Indonesian tech scene, an achievement with which he credits co-founder and CTO Yodi Aditya. The two leaders view preserving a robust culture as critical to ensuring healthy growth going forward. While truckers are unlikely to become first adopters of cutting edge technology, Tiger has been pleased with uptake of Kargo's platform in Indonesia, and attributes it primarily to its effectiveness in reducing a trucker's down time, improving earnings power and, most importantly, easing working capital challenges for a sector that usually gets paid only 1-3 months after the delivery of goods. While COVID-19 has led to significant disruptions to the Indonesian trucking sector, Kargo's