Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Creating Super App to Rival Gojek & Grab | #Endgame ft. Tony Fernandes (Part 3)

Episode Date: September 20, 2020

Life comes full circle for Tony and AirAsia. The company was born out of the aviation industry calamity caused by the 9/11 disaster. It was one of the first airlines that utilized the internet and technology. Today with Covid-19 gripping the travel industry, his team is once again looking at new ways to evolve with tech—all with the spirit of creating a more connected and collaborative ASEAN.

You know, as much as they sound very differently from what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, but I can see you, I think, helping a lot on those two areas. Yeah. Well, I know, I'm a believer in ASEAN. So people are skeptical about ASEAN. But number one, the objective ASEAN was to keep peace, which it has. This is end game. Hey, with COVID-19, I know you talked about it earlier. You know, there's a growing degree of protectionism. Right, you talked about how you were resisted by some governments with respect to the open skies.

Are you more concerned now with the fact that there is a bit more protectionism because of COVID-19 or you think that's just going to blow over? I think it's going to blow over. Okay. I mean, I think you're going to get the national carriers trying. Yeah. But I think governments are sensible enough to realize that it's a combination of state and private. industry that's going to drive this. Yeah.

Certainly Indonesia is very pro-business. Yeah. I don't see a problem there. Good, good. Hey, can we talk about how you're trying to pivot from, you know, the airline and all that? I know you're tinkering with a few other thesis. Talk a little bit about that. Your payment, your catering and all that good stuff.

Yeah, so, I mean, you know, my, I learn a lot by meeting people. Yeah. Eurasia's been a wonderful experience and really a boy's own story. But I learned a lot from people like Patrick, Loyo, and I think Indonesia's led the way in the tech revolution. Right. And then I saw what Uber were doing, et cetera, but I was particularly amazed by Gojack. And Patrick's been my kind of semi-guuru on this whole tech.

tech side right and and then I expect obviously spent a lot of time in Indonesia and you know you have an amazing country I lived out in Indonesia for a while in SPD and so I started this pivoting before COVID I saw our biggest asset was our data sure right right 60 70 million in your customer base yeah all right and spread out throughout asian no one's got it so Coppedia is basically all Indonesian. Gojerk is basically old Indonesian. Grab has got some.

But Grabs data is basically food. Sure. And right hailing. I have very high resolution data. I have K-Y-C data. Yeah. I have possible information. I know who you are. And plus, buying a flight is a much bigger

ticket item. Sure. So there are class A or or class B at best. I mean, at worst. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. So I thought, you know, the two things that hit me. One is I have an incredible platform, but I'm only selling Air Asia tickets. And I went one day and I said, I want to sell everyone's ticket. I want to be travel loka, which I thought was a great company, even though they threw me out.

And please say hi to Perry and Pandu. And they're good guys, by the way. They're very smart. Yeah. great visit to her office and I thought well why can I be a traveloka right and I obviously got accelerated a bit when when travel ok and ticket and all these guys threw me out I remember George from Ticket saying oh my god we woken up the dragon he said he was nicely asleep in the cave like Game of Thrones and now we've woken him up

big mistake by us and I said to my guys I said let's not be assholes People are searching around before they buy an Eurasia to fit. We might as well put our competitors inventory on here as well because, and if they're better than us, then we deserve to be kicked. You know, and so I said, let's open up this platform. And so we're now, you know, our number one seller after Eurasia is Qatar Air and Turkish. Yeah. And then I said, I want to own my own hotel.

So on the 14th, we end our relationship with Expedia and we start contracting our own hotels and then we created some new products and then we've got into food delivery and we're doing it very differently we have a huge logistics company in terms of moving sure I go from A to B yeah and so I thought there was a huge opportunity in e-commerce of moving selling Indonesian goods in Malaysia Thai in Malaysia Malaysian goods in Indonesia was Tokoppedia is basically Indonesian Lazada is basically selling goods in their own country and shopping etc. There's no cross-border commerce, which of course has its own set of problems with customs and

all these guys, but you don't try, you don't know. And we just learned in the same way like Air Asia, I came into this business from the rock and roll industry and said, my God, these guys are wasting so much money. I feel the same way about tech tax. Yeah. I feel that I can do it more efficiently. I can have profit. I can have cash flow because I don't have to acquire customers. like they do. I already have this huge database. And I have a 30 million loyalty program. And I've invested on the data side to ensure that I understand and I can personalize the experience for everybody.

So, you know, we've got three, four kind of divisions. We have Ayrashu.com, the platform, which from an Indonesian perspective, we're heading down to be like Gojet, which I think is the greatest ASEAN tech company. You know, I think what Nadim and the boys have done is incredible. Yeah. We're talking about right hailing.

We're talking about- Yeah, we're not going to do right-haling. So, Gojet has pivoted itself on right-hailing. Sure. I'm pivoting myself on travel. Okay, got you. But then I do food delivery. I can do health.

I can do lots of things using my ecosystem, right? Okay. And we will do right-haling, but we'll be an aggregator of right-haling. Right. We won't start a right-haling. company that you know lose money very quickly yeah so air asia comm's our platform and then we've got teleport which is our logistics aisle okay which is basically what I'm trying to create there is an Amazon because I think e-commerce is all about

logistics if I you know that you order from me and you get the goods in one day's time you're gonna order from me yeah and if he comes with a professional delivery guy an air age of box you know people are missing the trick and then I think a lot of these platforms are treating consumers pretty well but treating the merchants pretty badly yeah and so I want to level the playing field with merchants and give them a better shot and you like on grad you can't select your own menu grab there's the menu for you grab keeps the data grab takes 35% in your income so I want

to try and change that and level it out. So it's so similar. And these guys have built huge, huge fixed cost. Sure. And tech debt. So we've obviously learned from them. We can do it cheaper and faster. And it's no different from when Arabia started versus Garuda or MAS that had huge legacy

systems. Are you going to do it on an end-to-end basis? I know you've already done a long mile. You're going to do the last mile to? Yeah. We're going to do the last mile as well. Okay. And we worked hard on making the last mile work.

You know, we've looked at Ninja Van, we've looked at Uber, we've moved to these people, right? Okay. And so we think they're better models. We've mapped out the entire postcode system of Jakarta. You want to be asset heavy or a lot? Asset light. Okay. Okay.

Enough in the, the true version of what Uber was supposed to be. Yep. Right? Is where we're heading. Yeah. And so yeah, we got Eurasia the platform, Teleport, which is e-commerce and logistics. And then we have the third part of the triangle,

which is FinTech, which is our loyalty card, and big, big life, and then big pay, which is big, yeah. Yeah, and then, you know, in the space of one year, we've got over 1.1 million customers in Malaysia. We're launching in Singapore on Saturday. We have a 20,000 wait list there already. Next up will be Philippines and we built a bank.

The others have wallets. We've built a bank. So if we get a banking license, we're ready to go. The others have to do all the KYC stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And digital banking is here. You know, we're going to, we're going to do the banking what we did to fly. You know, and when you deal with these banks like CYNB and stuff, you know, it's like Whoa, this is going to be fun.

Are you already doing financing or lending on your platform? We're just about to get our lending license in the next few weeks. Okay. Yeah. That's that's a moneymaker supposedly. Yeah. If you get the algorithms right. Yeah. Again, it's all about the data, right? And you keep the frauds down. The delinquencies down. Yeah. Correct. Correct. So and I don't want to be a loan shock, right? Charging 20%. And we want value. Yeah. We want to have. Yeah. We want to. to give value and we want to have everybody can fly yeah yeah and we want we want so many of these kids need access to capital but they can't get it right and uh we don't want to charge 20

interest or 18 percent or whatever we want to make sure that we get good information so we can keep the but then charge appropriately so people can survive so it's like our airline you know we strip away everything we give you a raw ticket if you want to add a fly you want to carry add food or you want to add baggage that's your choice but it's about giving everyone a chance to participate and so you know beyond this podcast but when you see everything the ecosystem all lives off each other it's like it's like a it's like a heart that everyone lives off each other and it's very symbiotic as opposed to parasitic and because of our unique culture we've been able to cross over all the politics and the barriers that exist

in some of these digital companies. Right. Hey. I'm putting. You know, many years ago, people laughed at us when we said we were going to be a big airline. And we began the biggest airline in ASEAN. Yeah. So, you know, people are saying, how can you compete with grab and go Jack and all these guys?

Number one, I don't think about competition. I think the market is mass. Yeah. And, you know, we just scratch a surface. But two, you know, we have our own ways. are doing things and we'll create a market just like we do with an image dude i i can see you as a big technology player in the next few years i think you're warfing from a music guy to an airline guy and sort of like doing sports in between and morphing into a tech guy i think you're going to be

big if you do this we will we always we always were a tech company yeah um if you think about it we were the first airline to use the internet no one used the internet before air is it to sell tickets we were the first airline to embrace social media. I was one of the first guys on Twitter. Yeah, right? I saw the power of social media before anyone even knew what it was as a CEO. And I got up to 1.5 million followers, and I thought, well, this platform is becoming evil. And Donald Trump just made it an area of hate.

Yeah. So I pulled out of that. And I was very against Facebook for how they treated Muslims in New Zealand. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. How they're allowed that. And what they've done in Myanmar is shocking to create the amount of hate against Rohingyas.

And what's what I've done to democracy? Yeah, correct. So I couldn't be a hypocrite and keep on it. So I pulled out of both those platforms. Instagram is fairly harmless at the moment. But yeah, so we're a tech company, but you know, people forget that, that we were in our first companies to get out there and use tech. But we're not as nimble as travel loco.

We don't think as quickly as that. And we don't have the cash that they have, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah. It makes you really more efficient. Yeah. Hey, I want to end the session, you know, with a few minutes of discussions on the future of ASEAN.

You know, it started off on a real good platform in 1967, right? And it's been, what, 53 years now? Yeah. How do you envision ASEAN in the next 25 years until 2045? You're creating a real big platform of technology, which I think will help a lot with two things, I think, financial inclusion and education. You know, as much as they sound very differently from what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, but I can see you, I think, helping a lot on those two areas. Yeah. Well, I know I'm a believer in ASEAN.

So people are skeptical about ASEAN. But number one, the objective ASEM was to keep peace, which it has. Yeah, right. You know, we've had many wars in between. It's been, it's been freaking peaceful for thousands of years, man, relatively speaking. Yeah. Yeah. So Asana succeeded in that. Yeah. Now it's going to make the leap into economic cooperation. Yeah. And we've had some success, that limited success. And I also believe it hasn't made the leap into cultural. There isn't an Asian culture what does it mean you know people know what it means to be a European but no one on the streets of Jakarta or Palo Lumpur feel us right you know I campaigned even for simple

things like an Asian lane in airports yeah to make people feel a little bit more special and stuff like that so we had a long way to go I think culturally it's very important to have even an ASEAN song contest and all these things and economics is still and COVID's going to have there are two ways you can go, Gita, and I hope it goes the way that I wanted to go, that ASEAN gets closer together, because

that's how we're going to get out of this market, this COVID situation quicker, as opposed to protectionism. And then, you know, as I've always said, you know, it's not about who's big and who's small. It's about

opening up the market. And Indonesia, for many years, feel that why should they open up the market because other people will take the market. But that's wrong. Indonesia is a leader in many areas. Right. You down from Indomni to cigarettes, through Lionair is a regional carrier. Yeah.

In the tech world, Travoloka is now the defecto expedia of ASEAN. Right. And so Indonesia should be looking beyond Indonesia and being the statesmen economically to drive Asyan into one. It shouldn't be saying, oh, no, we want to keep it closed because we're worried of DBS bank coming in. You know, Mandiria is very ahead of it, right? Yeah.

And every country will have its strength and weaknesses. And why should we allow Alibaba in, you know, every, every one of our fintech businesses, right? It should be an Indonesian company or a Malaysian company. Right. but we should be putting our resources together. Or a Singaporean, Thai or a Philippine, yeah. Correct. And everyone's got strengths.

And so we seem to be easier to deal with the Chinese and to deal with each other. Or to deal with the Indians. Why is that? Why is that or how is that? I've never worked it out. This easy divide and conquer culture. Yeah. You know?

I've never worked it out. You know, maybe it's from the sea games where we've just competed to be each other. I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me. Maybe it's, you know, I just don't get it. But I'm seeing more and more people talk about ASEAN. In Thailand, it's really topical. And there's ASEAN centers.

People are, you know, I think we created something. And to be fair, CIMV, try to do it as well with a bang. Yeah. And a few companies are. And there's so many easy ways of doing it. So I'm still optimistic that it can work. I've always said the Secretary General needs to be stronger. And the Secretary needs to have much more investment in there.

And we need to put down our defenses and trust each other a little bit. And unfortunately, what happens is the national incumbents are generally the guys who don't want us, yeah. Right, right. But I think Indonesia has more to gain from ASEAN than to use. Well, everyone else, I think, has to gain. Yeah, absolutely. And I think culturally, you know, there should be more Indonesian music sold here. More Indonesian dramas.

We have more Korean dramas. Right. Thai dramas are fantastic. Yeah. Why are they? You begin to see more and more Netflix. Yeah. How did how did where do Korea come from?

Yeah. So when we have so much great content. So I'm hoping, but there's a lot of work to do. Well, I never forget how. It needs strong leadership. These people like you to go up there and be the Assyan Secretary General. This show is about you, man.

Hey, I like how you broke down the barriers and the walls when you gave awards to the ASEAN Olympians. You know, when we're in Bangkok. I mean, that was breaking down the wall. You know, giving recognition to ASEAN, you know, personalities. Correct. So, I mean, we pushed it hard. Yeah.

And we, and people, the beauty of Aria Asia is we're as much Indonesian as we are Malaysian. If I walk down the streets in Jakarta, you know, people call me Pat Thoney and I'm as much in Indonesian as I am. Should I call you Patoni from now on? You can, my friend. It's a lot better than Tan Street, Tony. And if I'm in Thailand, people have the same feelings, right? Yeah, Kunti. They feel airasia is part of them.

Yeah. It's as much Thai as Indonesian, as Malaysian, as Filipino. And I feel it. I don't feel a foreigner when I'm in those countries because, you know, and I obviously had the worst experience of my life, which was losing an aircraft in Indonesia. and you can see when you have travesty, you know what people think about you. Yeah. And whether you really are part of a family or you're an outsider.

And QZ8501 made me feel very Indonesian, and I know Indonesians felt very comfortable with me. The same in Thailand when we had a very different incident of someone, a cabin crew having to bow down to apologize to a passenger. So I think ASEAN is there, and Eurasia has shown. shown. And if you fly on Air Asia, you don't know whether they're Indonesian, Thai, Filipino, whatever. You're right. I removed all the flags off of the crew. You're right. And, you know, I have to check with my own cabin crew manager. She's from Philippines or Malaysia or whatever. And that shows the power of ASEAN. So I don't know where we're going to go,

but it's all about leadership. If the leadership leads in the correct way and puts people first, ASEAN should be a priority. Yeah. Dude, it's been a real pleasure, man. It's like 90 minutes of fun. And I want to end the session with some rapid fire questions. And you answer. You know, when they told me it was two hours, I almost like, I went, wow, you're not being serious. You have to edit that out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's been fun. I want to ask you some rapid fire questions. You can, yeah, I think we should do another session with you. But you can answer with either long or short or buy or sell. All right. All right. Okay, ASEAN, would you long it or short it?

I'll say buy. I agree. Technology. Buy. Financial inclusion. Buy. Big pay is coming. Coal.

So. Carbon. Unfortunately, sell. Sail. Education. Bye. That future. F1.

Sell. EPL. The results just came out. EPL. I'm going to give you another one. EPL. Bye. Still.

Wow. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah. Okay. How about Indonesia? Indonesia. Bye. I'm not saying that because you're Indonesian. You know, I love the country.

I live there. It's got it all. It's got great music, great art, great fun. Right? I always see a country through its culture. Yeah. Right? Creativity leads to Traveloca.

I mean, Ferri is the most boring man I've ever met, but he's creative, right? and freedom democracy leads to creative thinking but it starts with the artistic field yeah it starts with being allowing you to express yourself and Indonesia is way ahead of any other country in Asian closely followed by Thailand yeah but Indonesia is less inclusive than Thailand Indonesia has a chance to really lead us you know so I'm big big buy, big buy, but it's going to need big balls and big leadership to really deliver on this

amazing country. My friend, that's fantastic. On that note, I want to end this discussion and thank you so much. Pleasure. All right. And let's keep it going, man, for Ozzy. All right. Keep dreaming.

Take care. We were on the stage, weren't we? When someone we first predicted this Assyam World Cup? Yeah. Wasn't it? Yeah, it was in Bangkok. It was in Bangkok or in KL, yeah. forgot.

Correct. I think you were in Minnesota then. All right, bro. Take care. Bye. Stay healthy. Thanks. Bye.

Tremant, that's Tony Fernandez. That's exciting, who've been about many things since the small to the future for Indonesia and ASEAN, 2045.

This is Endgame. This is Endgame.