Bukalapak CEO Resigns Months Soon after Major Indonesian E-Commerce Firm’s Historic IPO Shares Drop

Shares of Bukalapak fell on Thursday soon after Rachmat Kaimuddin resigned as CEO a couple months after top the e-commerce firm’s historic first community giving on the Jakarta Stock Exchange.

Bukalapak reported it has appointed Willix Halim, currently the company’s main functioning officer, as interim CEO adhering to Kaimuddin’s resignation. Its shares fell as considerably as 4.9% in Jakarta buying and selling these days, touching an all-time very low of 430 rupiah.

The corporation produced historical past in August just after boosting $1.5 billion from its IPO, the country’s major-at any time maiden share sale. The shares to begin with rallied, jumping 25% on its very first buying and selling working day, but sentiment turned bitter swiftly as investors wondered how Bukalapak can compete versus much larger e-commerce players this kind of as homegrown GoTo, which was fashioned from the merger of Gojek and Tokopedia in May well, and Singapore-based rivals this sort of as Seize and Sea Group’s Shopee. The shares are now down approximately 60% from its IPO price tag of 850 rupiah apiece.

“The CEO’s departure confirms our fears about the company’s vulnerabilities,” Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, Singapore-centered head of client sector equity research at Tellimer, reported by means of text messaging. “The company is at finest a marginal participant with an unsettled administration group.”

Tiruchelvam initiated coverage of Bukalapak this month with a market score and goal price tag of 413 rupiah for every share. “Bukalapak is a peripheral participant that will be eroded by current market leaders Sea, Seize and GoTo,” he stated in his initiation notice. “As the fourth-biggest participant in Indonesia’s e-commerce market, Bukalapak has only 7% marketplace share, and it will be restricted by its deficiency of scale.”

Kaimuddin is leaving Bukalapak to function for the government two many years right after becoming appointed CEO in 2019, in accordance to the firm. The previous financier was tapped for the work mainly because the company’s buyers noticed him as the correct man or woman to staunch the move of purple ink and put the 11-yr-outdated agency on a path of profitability. 

Though the organization stays in the red, Kaimuddin is credited for bringing in bluechip buyers into the corporation. Bukalapak’s roster of buyers involves Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, China’s Ant Group, U.S. tech large Microsoft, Common Chartered financial institution and South Korean website portal Naver Company, among the other individuals.

“We have been incredibly positively amazed with the momentum and the amount of desire from both of those domestic and intercontinental investors,” Alvin Sariaatmadja, president director of Emtek, the most significant shareholder of Bukalapak, told Forbes Asia just before the tech unicorn shown.