Air 21 Global President and CEO’s Welcome Speech at the Shopinas Launch

Good evening to all of you beautiful people. I’m so thrilled and honored by your presence here tonight. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I would like to thank my parents, Bert and Sylvia Lina for their unconditional love and support. For without them, we wouldn’t be here tonight to celebrate this launch.

Next, I would like to thank our Chairman, Bert and his boss, Sylvia, for believing in me and in this new venture that I have started. I hope to make you proud. I also hope to make you money.

I’d like to acknowledge all the members of the Lina Group of Companies who are here especially our key partners in Shopinas: Airfreight 2100 and Mail and More. Thank you for all your help.

Special thanks to V8, our software development partner: Bon, Virginia, Clem and Sheryl. Yay, we’re done with Phase 1. On to Phase 2!

To our key business partners and allies from the banking and e-commerce industries as well as the government sector, I welcome you. Thank you for joining us tonight as we look forward to working with you in our attempt to make the Philippines a competitive player in global ecommerce.

I’d also like to welcome our blogger friends. Thank you for gracing our event. We hope you write nice things about us on your blog or else we won’t invite you to our next event. Just kidding.

I’d like to give the warmest welcome to our merchants who are here tonight. You are the main reason why Shopinas came about. Whether you’re an experienced online seller or a complete novice, we hope that Shopinas will help grow your business beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.

And of course, I’d like to thank my team at Air 21 Global: Don, Becky, Rene, Micci, Pat and Argel. Thank you for your hard work, dedication and for the snacks in the office.

Tonight, we are actually celebrating the launch of 3 things: Air21 Global, Shopinas and Air21 iBayad.

What is Air21 Global? It is the new company we set up to expand the Air 21 brand beyond Philippine shores. Our strategy is to leverage technology and the Internet to achieve this goal. After all, once you are on the Internet, you have an immediate global presence.

Our initial efforts are focused on e-commerce. We envision Air 21 to be the logistics provider of choice for Philippine online businesses. To achieve our vision we developed two services: Shopinas and Air2 iBayad.

Shopinas is an integrated, end-to end ecommerce platform specially created for micro to small to medium businesses in the Philippines. Shopinas was inspired by three good friends of mine, Trina Castillo, Mona Fenix and Monix Manzano who are successful entrepreneurs. Trina and Mona who are here tonight both sell bags, while Monix sells natural personal care products.

As they shared with me their stories of how they run their business here in the Philippines, it struck me how time-intensive and tedious certain processes were, like getting and confirming orders, verifying payments and arranging for logistics.

Meanwhile, in countries like the US, there already are companies like Amazon, Yahoo and Paypal that offer ecommerce services that streamline all those processes and make it easy for anyone to start selling online. However, those services are not optimized for Filipino entrepreneurs.

With this, I connected the dots and asked our Chairman if we could develop an ecommerce system that would integrate an online storefront, payment gateway and logistics in one easy to use platform. He said yes, and he also said to go talk to Bon Moya. That’s what I did, 8 months later, here we are.

As we were developing Shopinas, it became clear to us that for ecommerce to take off, we need to have a payment system that would be able to process cash payments. Although we explored various options, we decided that it was best to build our own payment system, which was then named Air21 iBayad.

Air21 iBayad is a reloadable e-wallet that can be loaded with cash at any Mail and More outlet. It is the e-wallet system used within Shopinas, in the future, we look forward to offering this service to other e-commerce channels as well.

With Shopinas and Air21 iBayad, we hope to address logistics and payment, two of the main issues holding Philippine ecommerce from truly flourishing. With our partnership with SureSeal, we hope to address the trust issue as well.

It is very exciting times for us indeed. As we move forward, I’d like to ask for your continued support in our endeavor. To the merchants, we look forward to seeing your stores on our site. Your success is our success.

On behalf of Air21 Global and the Lina Group, I thank you all again for coming tonight. We hope you enjoy the evening we have prepared for you.

Now, may I ask all of you to stand up and join me for our prayer.