Siripa Jungsawat, the newly installed managing director of Foodpanda Thailand, has vowed to grow the business beyond the food delivery platform by driving towards quick commerce (Q-commerce) for groceries and health and beauty products by capitalising on its customer database.
Ms Siripa took up the leadership position at Foodpanda Thailand as the company marked its 10-year anniversary of conducting business in Thailand. Ms Siripa is the first female managing director of Foodpanda Thailand.
Ms Siripa is the former Thailand country manager of financial tech giant Ant Group and former general manager of ride-hailing operator Uber Thailand.
In Thailand, Grab dominates the food delivery segment with a 50% market share in terms of gross merchandise value, followed by Foodpanda at 23% and Line Man at 20%, according to a study by consultancy Momentum Works in January 2021.
"Online food delivery in Thailand still has room to grow," said Ms Siripa, who replaced Alexander Felde as managing director. "We are still in the early stage compared with developed countries that make orders frequently with a large amount on each order."
"I hope to bring a fresh perspective in our strategies based on Foodpanda's core mission of delivering food and groceries to millions of people," she said.
According to her, food delivery involves technology that can engage customers and there is still much more room to grow in the future.
The global online food delivery market is expected to be worth US$130 billion this year and the growth would double in the future, she said.
She said her first priority is turning Foodpanda into a winning brand for customers, going beyond just food delivery and diversifying its business by reaching out to quick commerce for groceries, health and beauty products as well as household and living items.
According to her, Foodpanda remains unprofitable but the firm will continue to make an investment by capitalising on core technology to attain customer understanding.
"We want to gain customer insights about their choices of products in each province and catch up with customer trends in the fields of health and food," she said.
Foodpanda aims to level up its ecosystem by increasing the number of food delivery partner drivers from 100,000 at present to 145,000.
According to Ms Siripa, food delivery is now crucial for people's daily lifestyles.
"We want to attract customers to use our services more frequently and order more types of items and enter into a subscription-based pandapro package to gain more discount and redeem points for discounts," said Ms Siripa.
