The ongoing tariff war offers a surprising growth opportunity for start-ups like Sourcy Global, as brands turn to new solutions to cope with the challenges, says Karl Chan Ka-ki, founder of the AI-powered sourcing platform.
The business-to-business e-commerce platform saw an increase in the inflow of North and Latin American customers recently, in part driven by the trade war, Chan said in an interview with The Standard.
He said higher levies had a limited impact on his clients, because most of them are small and medium-sized enterprises selling unique and niche direct-to-consumer products at relatively high prices on e-commerce platforms.
Product costs only account for around 20 percent of total costs, which means a 30 percent rise in tariffs would only lead to a 6 percent hike in the sellers’ final toll, he explained. Around 80 percent of his clients are in Southeast Asia, while the rest are mainly in America, the Middle East, and Hong Kong.
Unlike most competitors who flood buyers' screens with countless products to drive purchases, the Singapore-based company uses artificial intelligence developed with the City University of Hong Kong to distill their demand through chats and make recommendations on top-selling products from verified suppliers accordingly, Chan said.
Most products sold on the platform fall into four categories that are fragmented and characterized by fast-moving trends: home and living, beauty and cosmetics, baby and mom, and fashion. Sourcy deploys AI to discover features of popular products or emerging trends from social media and larger rivals, noted Chan.
It scrapes data from platforms such as TikTok and Amazon, consolidating all the reviews and analyzing the features and attributes of products, before turning into specifications and recommending solutions to clients, he said.
All of these are being done nonstop by agentic AI, which is also adopted to help suppliers onboarded to the platform update products and inventory – information will be extracted from conversations and added to the database automatically, Chan noted.
The entrepreneur expects the company to break even this year and to raise US$10 million (HK$78 million) in a new round of fundraising.
AIDEN HE
