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After 20 years of bootstrapped growth, Melbourne-based e-commerce technology group New Aim is contemplating a potential ASX listing to pursue ambitions of establishing a new AI-driven ecosystem for the online retail sector.
New Aim is already among Australia's fastest-growing private e-commerce companies, even though most consumers may not be familiar with the brand.
“That doesn’t mean that New Aim is unknown as we are well recognised within the e-commerce industry in Australia and globally,” New Aim CEO Alex Ji tells Business News Australia.
“Anyone working in e-commerce knows New Aim.”
That includes Google, which Ji says recognises the potential for the company's AI-driven AirOxy platform to impact the e-commerce sector in Australia.
New Aim, which was founded in 2005 by two-time Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year Fung Lam essentially to facilitate the sale of goods on eBay, says AirOxy is the product of two decades of experience in the online retail space.
Ji describes AirOxy as the “horizontal” that connects the “business verticals” of e-commerce providers.
The new business pillar is being introduced more than a decade after New Aim made its mark in the sector by becoming a “business to many model” after launching its B2B2C platform Dropshipzone.
The platform was established in 2012 by Cecilia Chiu to service third-party suppliers and small-to-medium retailers listing their products online. Chiu, who is considered a co-founder of New Aim, is among the early adopters of dropshipping in Australia.
While Dropshipzone has been key to growing the New Aim business over more than a decade, Ji sees AirOxy as a foundation for the company’s next growth phase.
“We started as a very small business, just selling through eBay,” says Ji, who was appointed CEO from within the organisation earlier this year to drive the new strategy.
“But since then, we have scaled up to 30-plus different channels and over 7,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) covering over 400 different sub-categories.
“The latest transformation is not just about scaling up but also to transform from purely an online retailer to a service and platform provider.”
To facilitate this growth, New Aim is considering a potential ASX listing, although Ji says the company is weighing up several options to support the AirOxy rollout.
“We have always been self-funded in growing the business and have never taken any external equity to do this,” says Ji.
“Every year we put our profits back into the business to continue growing.”
New Aim now comprises three business units – its original direct e-commerce operations which cover the whole supply chain for e-commerce retailers, the Dropshipzone platform, and AirOxy.
Ji is forecasting growth, which is already "quite strong", from each of these business segments amid an increasing market share for the e-commerce sector since the pandemic.
New Aim sees a broader opportunity for the business to create an ecosystem for the e-commerce sector through the AirOxy platform.
The company’s focus on technology is reflected in New Aim's in-house IT and data team of about 70 from a total staff base of 400.
“Google knew about us before they began working with us, but they didn’t know how strong our technology was,” says Ji.
“They now recognise us as an e-commerce technology company, so we are moving to establish our reputation in this space.”
The plan for AirOxy initially is to provide e-commerce customers with an AI service that delivers high-grade analytics.
“AirOxy has commercialised what we have built over the past 20 years which is the tech foundation of our infrastructure,” says Ji.
“Previously we only focused on utilising this technology and the data to support our own business. But two to three years ago we started having an internal debate to provide this kind of service to the public.
“It would not only benefit us, but also the whole e-commerce industry - and the idea became bigger and bigger.”
Ji, who has a background in AI, computer science and data through a PhD degree from The Australian National University, compares AirOxy with Amazon’s AWS, a cloud-based service born from the group’s internal systems and launched in 2006 to deliver IT infrastructure for the broader market.
“At the end of last year, we released the first version of AirOxy to the public,” says Ji.
“The system was built by company co-founder Fung Lam and evolved over the past decade. We are now finetuning it to commercialise it for public adoption.”
AirOxy provides deep analysis of products being sold online by New Aim clients.
“It will tell you what the product looks like to the market – the potential customers, the potential market chant, and if there are any other products you can cross-sell,” says Ji.
“It covers everything about your business, from your customer, your market chant telling you what is doing well and what is not, and what potential opportunities you are missing.
“But this just the beginning. The big vision we have is to eventually solve one of the most challenging parts of e-commerce – which is the supply chain.
“For each vertical part of the supply chain, there are different tools to optimise them. But what is missing is the horizontal that links them all together.”
Ji points out that after 20 years in business, New Aim has managed “to link everything together” and this is being packaged in the AirOxy platform.
“With AirOxy, anything that happens in sourcing or shipping you don’t have to manually check; it’s already been linked together and we have proved the system internally.
“Our vision now is to provide a new infrastructure and ecosystem to empower e-commerce in Australia.”
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