Gojek's $217 Million Vietnam Lesson: Four CEOs, Six Years and Indonesia's Glass Ceiling

In its first six weeks in Vietnam, Gojek claimed a third of the country’s ride-hailing market.

The company launched in Ho Chi Minh City in August 2018 under a local brand, GoViet, its riders in red jackets rather than Jakarta’s green. Within six weeks it reported 1.5 million app downloads and roughly 35% market share. For an Indonesian company making its first serious move abroad, against an entrenched Grab, it looked like vindication of everything the super-app model promised.

On 16 September 2024, the app stopped working. Six years, four chief executives and about US$217 million of accumulated losses later, Gojek left Vietnam entirely. At the point of departure the business represented under 0.5% of GoTo group gross transaction value and about 2% of its on-demand volume — a rounding error in the accounts of the company it was supposed to make regional.

The startup-failure newsletter The Runway Ventures, which has built a useful archive of Asian post-mortems, put the burn nearer $230 million and identified three causes: leadership it could not retain, an ecosystem that never worked without subsidies, and product development slower than its rivals’. That reading holds. What it leaves out is why an Indonesian company in particular kept making those mistakes.

The carousel

The leadership record is the part that still looks extraordinary.

The founding chief executive, Nguyễn Vũ Đức, and his deputy Nguyễn Bảo Linh left in March 2019, seven months after launch, moving sideways into advisory roles. Their replacement was Lê Diệp Kiều Trang, one of the most credentialled executives in Vietnamese technology — a former country director of Facebook Vietnam who had previously sold a wearables company to Fossil. She was appointed in April 2019 and stepped down after five months.

The post then sat vacant for months before Phùng Tuấn Đức, who had run operations since the launch, was promoted into it. He would not be the last. Vietnamese business media counted four chief executives across the six years, drawn from MoMo, Facebook Vietnam and the Cộng Cà Phê chain — people with little in common except that none of them stayed.

The consequence is more serious than instability. A market entry runs on a thesis: who the customer is, which product wins first, what the company will refuse to do. A thesis needs one owner long enough to be tested. Four owners in six years means four theses, each abandoned before its results came in, and an organisation that learned to wait for the next reorganisation rather than commit to the current one. Analysts at Fintech News Singapore reached the same conclusion, pairing the leadership gaps with delayed product launches.

Losing the local brand

On 3 July 2020 GoViet was rebranded Gojek Vietnam. The red jackets went green, the app moved onto the group’s single regional platform, and the Vietnamese identity that the 2018 launch had been built around was retired.

The official logic was integration: one technology stack, one brand, faster shipping of features developed in Jakarta. In practice it marked the moment Jakarta took direct control of a business it had originally chosen to disguise as local. By then the operation carried 150,000 driver-partners and 80,000 merchants, so the machinery was real. What it lacked was a reason for a Vietnamese customer to prefer it once the discount ended, and a locally-branded challenger had at least been an answer to that question.

The field it was actually playing on

Vietnam was never the soft target the six-week numbers implied.

Grab had arrived earlier and held the network effects. Be Group was domestically funded and eventually found profitability through subscription bundles rather than per-ride commissions. And in 2023, while Gojek was still deciding what it wanted to be, Xanh SM launched with roughly 100,000 VinFast electric vehicles built by the conglomerate that owned it. By late 2025 it had taken 51.5% of Vietnamese ride-hailing by gross merchandise value, against Grab’s 42.6%.

That is the competitive answer to the subsidy question. Xanh SM does not need a promotional budget to be cheaper, because it owns the factory that makes the cars and answers to a group pursuing an electric-vehicle strategy rather than a quarterly margin. Gojek, funded by investors who by 2022 wanted profitability rather than share, had no equivalent structural advantage to reach for.

A pattern, not an incident

Vietnam reads differently once the rest of the record is laid beside it.

Thailand. Gojek entered in 2018 under the brand GET, rebranded, posted losses through 2019 and 2020, and sold the business to AirAsia in July 2021 in a stock swap that left it with 4.76% of the airline’s super-app. Momentum Works, reviewing the deal at the time, treated it as a reasonable way out of a weak position rather than a strategic move.

The Philippines. Gojek bought the local fintech Coins.ph and applied to operate ride-hailing. The transport regulator rejected the application twice on foreign-ownership grounds. The market was closed before the strategy could be wrong.

Singapore. Still operating, in a city-state of six million.

Four foreign markets attempted: two exits, one regulatory refusal, one survivor a fraction of the size of home. Set against Grab’s eight countries, that looks less like a run of bad luck than a company which never became good at operating outside Indonesia.

Why the home market is the problem

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is not really about Gojek.

Indonesia has about 280 million people. It is the fourth most populous country on earth and by some distance the largest economy in Southeast Asia. For a domestic technology company, that is enough market to absorb every ambition it will ever have. Growth can come from the next island rather than the next country. A product can be built for one language, one payment system, one regulator, one culture of haggling — and still address a market larger than most European countries.

Compare the companies that beat Gojek regionally. Grab was founded in Malaysia and moved to Singapore: two markets of 34 million and 6 million, neither large enough to build a decacorn in. Sea Group, which brought Shopee into Indonesia and won, was Singaporean. Both were regional from birth because neither had a choice. Their home markets were too small to hide in, so they learned early how to enter someone else’s.

Indonesian champions never had to learn that, and the absence shows. Tokopedia, Gojek’s merger partner, never seriously expanded abroad at all; by January 2024 it had handed control to TikTok for $840 million. A market big enough to protect you from foreign competitors is also big enough to excuse you from ever becoming competitive abroad. That is the glass ceiling, and it is made of comfort rather than of any barrier outside.

The counterexample that proves the rule

None of which means Indonesian companies cannot globalise. One of them has done it more completely than any Southeast Asian technology firm.

Indofood began supplying instant noodles to Nigeria in the late 1980s through a partnership with the local firm Dufil Prima Foods, which now runs the largest instant-noodle factory in Africa. Indomie generates more than $600 million a year in Nigeria and has become one of the most-purchased consumer brands in the world. Nigerian children grow up on an Indonesian noodle and mostly do not know it is Indonesian.

The method is the interesting part. Indofood took a local manufacturing partner, localised the product to Nigerian tastes, built factories rather than downloads, and spent close to four decades on it. It did not attempt to be a category leader within eighteen months on the strength of promotional pricing.

Gojek gave Vietnam six years and four chief executives. Indofood gave Nigeria a generation and one partner. Only one of those is still there.

What it means now

The timing of the exit deserves noting. GoTo left Vietnam in September 2024 and posted its first quarterly net profit in early 2026. Retreating to Indonesia was part of how it became profitable, and management said as much: the strategic decision was to concentrate on operations with sustainable growth potential.

That worked, and it also narrowed the company. GoTo is now a substantially Indonesian business whose fastest-growing engine is domestic financial services rather than transport, in a market where the regulator has capped platform commissions at 8% on two-wheeled rides. Its growth options are almost entirely inside one country’s borders and one regulator’s discretion.

Meanwhile the market it abandoned is being taken by a company that owns a car factory. Grab, which outlasted Gojek in Vietnam, is now the one losing share there. The lesson Gojek learned in Vietnam — that you cannot hold a market on subsidies once the money stops — is the lesson currently being administered to its former rival.

For the next generation of Indonesian founders, the useful question is not whether the domestic market is large enough. It obviously is. The question is whether a company that has only ever won at home can learn to win anywhere else, and on the evidence of the last decade, that is a skill which has to be acquired deliberately, early, and long before the balance sheet demands results.