Honestbee suspends services in Malaysia, owes thousands of ringgit to restaurant
If you’ve been depending on Honestbee to do your grocery shopping, there’s bad news guys.
The food and grocery delivery service has just suspended its operations in Malaysia yesterday (July 22).
And there’s a lot of unhappy customers. A restaurant in SS15, called Jibril took to Facebook to share their story with Honestbee.
Jibril states that Honestbee owed them a couple thousand of
ringgit over the past months of business. After no communication for a few
months, Jibril received a call from them to take back their tab and disappeared
again.
Instead of coming back with the money they owed, Honestbee
emerged with a letter stating that they’re temporarily suspending operations
from 22nd July 2019 onwards.
In regard to the payment, the letter states:
“We endeavour to meet our financial commitments to you, however at this moment our headquarters in Singapore is not able to provide a firm payment schedule. We would like to assure you that detailed timeline for the outstanding payment will be communicated as soon as it is available to us.â€
So it looks like Jibril can’t know when they’ll receive
their money for now.
However, this is hardly surprising as there was writing on the wall for some time already. They were reportedly running out of money and trying to sell its business, talking to Grab and Go-Jek about potential acquisition.
Then, the CEO and co-founder Joel Sng stepped down, followed by the departure of their Vice President of Marketing.
Marketing Interactive has also reported that Honestbee is having trouble paying the salary of their employees, and that’s AFTER laying off 10% of its global staff count in May this year.
Honestbee was founded in 2015, working with supermarkets and
retailers to deliver food and groceries to customers. Based in Singapore, it expanded
to 8 markets in Asia including Malaysia. However, it has been halting operations
in several of these markets, like Indonesia, Philippines and Hong Kong.
There’s no word yet when the Malaysian operations will resume but looks like it’s bees-ness is not as usual.
