When Gojek and Tokopedia merged in 2021, it was expected that they could leverage the latter’s e-commerce prowess with the former’s growing fintech business. This combination, after all, is what turned China’s Alipay into the first – and still one of the most successful – super apps. However, the Indonesian e-commerce and digital financial services markets are much more competitive than China’s were in their early days. There is less government involvement in Indonesia. No tech firms in Indonesia have been able to build the scale that Alipay did, which it used to buy up rivals or force them out of business.

With that in mind, despite the huge size of the Indonesian market, which offers ample low-hanging fruit and the opportunity to develop economies of scale, GoTo has not been able to achieve clear leadership in any of its key businesses. That does not mean its business model is unsustainable, but it does mean investors have to recalibrate what the company is worth.

Keep in mind GoTo originally sought a US$40 billion valuation for its IPO, before reducing that number to US$28 billion. To put the initial IPO target into perspective, the No. 3 bank in Singapore, UOB, has a market cap of US$40.6 billion. UOB is the No. 3 bank in Singapore and recorded a profit of US$4.5 billion in 2023. GoTo lost US$5.8 billion last year.

GoTo seems to be betting big on the integration of TikTok and Tokopedia, which it believes will lead to significant e-commerce synergies. There is a fintech angle as well: GoTo plans to launch a buy now, pay later product for TikTok and will likely aim to increasingly integrate its e-commerce and fintech businesses in the future. Though GoTo has the resources to build out installment payments and subsidize customers to build up the user base, Indonesia is saturated with such products.

Whether GoTo wants to call its core value proposition a super app or embedded finance, it still has to prove to investors that the bundling of disparate digital services can be profitable. The jury may be out on that for a while yet.