GoTo outspent rivals to win Indonesia's super-app race, then cut 12% of staff

Indonesian super-app combining Gojek's ride-hailing, food delivery and payments with Tokopedia's e-commerce marketplace, formed by their 2021 merger.

That outspending rivals on talent and incentives would let GoTo lock up Indonesia's super-app market before investors demanded profitability.

Gojek and Tokopedia merged into GoTo Group in 2021, backed by Alibaba and SoftBank, combining Indonesia's dominant ride-hailing and delivery app with its biggest e-commerce marketplace at a roughly $15 billion valuation. In April 2022, GoTo listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, raising about $1.1 billion in its IPO.

GoTo kept spending through the pandemic boom: from January to September 2022 it spent $720 million on its roughly 10,500 employees, more than double the same period in 2021, and routinely offered pay premiums up to 50% to poach talent from rivals — on top of perks like five-star-hotel isolation stays for COVID-positive staff. By July 2022 it had already burned through $287 million of its IPO proceeds, and rising US interest rates chilled Southeast Asia's venture funding. GoTo's Q3 2022 net loss widened 75% year-over-year to 20.3 trillion rupiah ($1.29 billion).

On November 18, 2022, GoTo laid off 12% of its permanent workforce — about 1,300 of roughly 10,500 employees — citing "increasingly challenging global economic conditions." Some employees learned of the cuts from Instagram before receiving official notice. GoTo's shareholders approved a plan to raise more capital by selling a 10% stake via private placement, though at the post-layoff share price that stake was worth about $1.47 billion, a steep discount to the IPO price.

Pandemic-era investors rewarded growth over profit, so GoTo overstaffed and overspent on the bet that demand and cheap capital would keep climbing indefinitely.

Fed rate hikes and a global VC pullback hit Southeast Asia's best-funded 'pandemic darlings' hardest in late 2022, forcing blue-chip decacorns like GoTo to reverse course fast.

IPO cash burned faster than planned — a quarter gone in three months — leaving little room once quarterly losses widened 75% almost overnight.

Outspending rivals to grab market share works only as long as capital stays cheap — when rates rise and investors pivot to profitability, the same aggressive hiring becomes the first thing to cut.

As of the November 2022 announcement, GoTo remained Indonesia's largest listed tech company, pivoting toward monetization tools like the GoPay Coins rewards program and a GoTo Plus subscription pilot that had signed up more than 50,000 subscribers. It continued pursuing additional capital through a shareholder-approved 10% private placement, while analysts pressed it to raise fees and scale back subsidized competition with rivals like Grab.