In this edition of Weekly Focus APAC: JD.com Powers Up First Logistics Site with 5G; Booking.com Lets Travellers Ride with Grab Integration; Alibaba Preps For 11.11 Shopping Festival; PropertyGuru Cancels IPO Plans; and Gojek Heralds 'New Era' Following CEO Departure.

JD.com Powers Up First Logistics Site with 5G

The Chinese e-commerce giant has launched its first smart logistics park, located in Beijing, that is powered by 5G networks.

Operated by its logistics business unit JD Logistics, the warehousing facility would help drive the company's Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) strategy.

Bandwidth delivered by 5G would enable JD to improve the efficiency of its IIoT fulfilment capabilities on a large scale, the company said. It also would support JD.com's monitoring system, which could detect and analyse any incidents in the warehouse in real-time.

It would enable real-tine monitoring of location and routes for forklifts and pallets, and facilitate preemptive alerts if something abnormal occurred. For instance, the monitoring system would trigger alerts when forklifts were parked in the wrong location or took abnormal driving routes.

Powered by 5G, the system would guide incoming vehicles to the most appropriate parking space or docking bay, and digital docking bay, where there was real-time monitoring of the loading and uploading goods.

Such applications would kickstart JD.com's plans to tap 5G technology to further drive new applications and higher efficiencies across the company's logistics operations.

Booking.com Lets Travellers Ride with Grab Integration

Booking.com travellers can now access ride-sharing services on the accommodation reservation mobile app.

A move made possible via its partnership with Southeast Asian mobile services platform Grab, the integration would enable foreign visitors in this region to make transport bookings in their preferred language and currency.

The service has gone live in Singapore and is slated to be available in Thailand and Indonesia by end-2019. It will be further extended to Malaysia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, and the Philippines by early-2020.

Grab is available in 235 cities across eight Southeast Asian markets.

The ride-sharing operator in April introduced a new 'Hotels' service on its app that allowed users to book hotels and other accommodation from Agoda. It had said then that accommodation options from Booking.com would be added at a later stage.

With the announcement this week, Grab customers now would be able to scour for Booking.com accommodation via the ride-sharing app and pay with its digital wallet, GrabPay.

The partnership aimed to "broaden and simplify" travel services for travellers in Southeast Asia and globally, according to the two companies. Booking Holdings is an investor in Grab, which is targeting to shore up more than USD$3bn (£2.34bn) in its fundings by year-end.

Alibaba Preps For 11.11 Shopping Festival>

The Chinese e-commerce giant says more than 500 million consumers are expected to partake in this year's November 11 online shopping festival, up by about 100 million from last year.

This year's one-day shopping bonanza also would feature more than 1 million new products and the participation of more than 200,000 brands across Alibaba's online marketplaces, including Tmall and Tabao.

In addition, thousands of merchants had moved to Tmall Flagship Store 2.0 in the leadup to the 11.11 event, tapping new features and tools to enable brands to better engage customers with rich, interactive content and an omnichannel experience, Alibaba said.

Brands, for instance, would be able to customise their flagship store to offer consumers an enhanced experience, personalising content and product promotions based on their customers' profiles.

For the first time this year, Alibaba said it would run a concurrent event in the northeastern city of Harbin, further driving its focus on China's less-developed cities. It noted that, in the last quarter, more than 70% of its new annual active consumers were from lower-tier cities.

PropertyGuru Cancels IPO Plans

The online real estate marketplace will no longer move ahead with its proposed initial public offering (IPO) on the Australian Securities Exchange.

While it had "strong investor support" from global and Australian investors, PropertyGuru said its board decided to halt the IPO plans due to "uncertainty" in the current IPO market. It stressed that it remained "positive" in its outlook regarding the company's performance.

In addition, it said no new funds were needed to support PropertyGuru's current business operations.

The company's chairman Olivier Lim said: "Despite strong engagement throughout the process with prospective investors, the board and existing shareholders have determined not to proceed with the offer. This decision took into account current IPO market sentiment.

"Over the last several years, we have built a team and business that has been committed to building transparency and efficiency in the Southeast Asian real estate markets. Our team remains committed to pursuing our mission, given the size of the opportunity available to us, and our track record of sustainable and profitable growth," Lim said.

Gojek Heralds 'New Era' Following CEO Departure

The Indonesian ride-sharing operator has marked a "new era" following the departure of its co-founder and CEO Nadiem Makarim, who left the company to become the country's education minister, and the appointment of Kevin Aluwi and Andre Soelistyo as co-CEOs.

Under the new structure, Gojek said Soelistyo would focus on corporate functions and the management of capital distribution, international expansion, and the payments and financial services businesses.

Aluwi would look after product development for the business as well as marketing, organisation development, and the transportation and food delivery businesses.

According to Gojek, the two new co-CEOs had been running the business alongside Nadiem for a number of years, ensuring the leadership transition would run smoothly.

Under the two executives' management, the company had grown to process more than two billion transactions a year and launched operations in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietna. The Gojek app also grew to become the most-used on-demand app in Indonesia, where its food and payments businesses had outpaced transport to become the largest businesses within the group.