Southeast Asia’s Ride-Hailing War Is Being Waged on Motorbikes<br />Go-Jek, which started its main app in 2015 and is in only Indonesia at the moment, is counting on people coming back to its services again<br />and again as it competes against both Uber and Grab, a Singapore-based ride-hailing company operating in seven Southeast Asian countries.<br />We just move that much faster.”<br />Southeast Asia, a region of 600 million people that is adding more internet users each month than anywhere else on the planet, has become a magnet for tech investment —<br />and one of the toughest battlegrounds for Uber, which is under pressure to curb its losses around the world ahead of a planned public offering.<br />JAKARTA, Indonesia — On a recent morning driving his motorbike for one of Asia’s fastest-growing tech start-ups, Nasrun picked up<br />and dropped off four schoolchildren, an office worker, medicine from a pharmacy, some dumplings with peanut sauce, a few documents and an order of Japanese food, the last of which he took to a woman at the Indonesia Stock Exchange.<br />“The playbook was clear.”<br />It is no accident that Jakarta has attracted so many companies<br />that help people get around — or that help them avoid having to get around in the first place.<br />The two men work for Go-Jek, a $3 billion Indonesian start-up whose maximalist approach to the ride-hailing business has put rivals like Uber on notice,<br />and gotten the attention of American investors and Chinese internet titans alike.<br />“It is a super growth market,” said Brooks Entwistle, chief business officer in Asia for Uber, which on Friday announced<br />it had agreed to form a joint venture with a Singapore taxi company to strengthen its competitiveness in the region.
