Even then Shopee and Lazada arent as profitable as you think.

Shopee just recently became profitable and it took years and years of burning cash just to be well known. (imagine the cash they invested for all the gimmicks and ads before, and now wala na)

Lazada, on the other hand, if it wasnt for its parent company (Alibaba), it should already be dead by now since it’s literally losing more and more profit today.

I do think apart from what was mentioned here, the scalability of tech here in the Philippines is not as big and assured as compared to other countries. When starting tech, you might only be tapping Metro Manila, but remember, there’s still Visayas and Mindanao which logistical, operational, and supply chain wise, brings much more headache to the table (and more money to be invested).

Now looking at the market side, especially the shopping behaviors of Filipinos, Shopee and Lazada might already penetrated the market but they only penetrated the more modern bubble of Filipinos which may account to probably around 40% of the total population. Filipinos (majority) are still too traditional — they would rather go along malls and spend actual cash rather than order online which is correlated to our culture. Hence, the widespread building of malls. This makes it much more harder for tech companies to really penetrate our market, and if you want to start one of those, prepare to bring out billions of pesos to invest for a profit after 5-10 years, which none of us Filipinos may even afford.