From airline to super app
When the pandemic wreaked havoc on the airline industry, AirAsia doubled down on its digital strategy. Over the past year, the leading low-cost carrier in Asia has been building a regional super app—a digital ecosystem of products and services housed under a single application and user experience.
In July 2021, in one of the most noteworthy indications of its ambitions to date, AirAsia announced plans to pay $50 million for the Thailand operations of Gojek, an Indonesian tech giant that offers its own super app. Gojek will take a 4.8% stake in AirAsia’s super app business, which the deal reportedly values at about $1 billion.
The purchase is in line with the Malaysia-based company’s October 2020 announcement of its transformation from a “digital airline” to a “comprehensive lifestyle platform.”
Now, AirAsia offers some combination of ecommerce, food delivery, and ride-hailing services in several Southeast Asian markets—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand—via its super app, which saw revenues jump 39% year over year (YoY) in Q2 2021.