May 6, 2025 • 16 mins
In late 2018, five years after launching fish-feeding company eFishery, Gibran Huzaifah found himself all out of cash. To save his business, the CEO started plugging fake numbers into financial reports. The brighter picture drew hundreds of millions of investor dollars. But his house of cards was doomed to collapse.
On today's Big Take Asia Podcast, host K. Oanh Ha talks to Bloomberg's David Ramli about the fall of eFishery and what it says about the risks of venture capital investing.
Read more: CEO Explains How He Faked Results in $300 Million Meltdown
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Five years after launching his tech company in Indonesia, Gabron
Huseeifa found himself in deep money trouble. The startup he built,
E Fishery, that lets farmers feed fish from their phones,
was just three months away from running out of cash.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This company had less than nine thousand US dolars in
its accounts. It had been trying to raise money unsuccessfully
from the region's biggest and smallest investors.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
David Ramley is a Bloomberg investing reporter based in Singapore,
and Gabron told David and a team of Bloomberg reporters
that back then in twenty eighteen, his company's one hundred
employees were counting on him, and he felt he couldn't
let his company go bust. On top of that, he
actually believed he had a good business. He just needed
(00:58):
more money and time to grow. But where was he
going to find the money? Gabron told Bloomberg he spent
a long time just staring at an Excel spreadsheet of
E Fishery's finances on his laptop. He thought long and
hard about what he could do.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
What he started to do very slowly at first was
he just started to play with the numbers. It was
almost the thought experiment. He just started tweaking the numbers
to what he thought investors would want to see.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
And once he started, he just kept going. Within an hour,
he had done what years of hard work couldn't turn
his business into a winner, at least on paper. He
hit the send button to show his investors and he
was certain he'd get caught. Only he didn't.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Actually, what happened was his existing investors were extremely excited,
while the others who had previously said but not really interested,
was suddenly extremely keen. He went from being someone that
no one wanted to being someone who was how did
for investment opportunities in the space of a few months
thanks to that one spreadsheet.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
So Gabron kept on faking the numbers year after year,
and investor's money kept rolling in. By twenty twenty three,
E Fishery had become one of the hottest startups in
Southeast Asia. It was valued at more than a billion
dollars and had raised millions from some of the world's
biggest money managers, including SoftBank, Sequoia India and Southeast Asia,
(02:29):
and Singapore's State investor Temasek, but the more money he got,
that bigger his lies became.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Once he tweaked the numbers, everything looked good on paper,
but the reality was he still didn't have those numbers,
so he had to come up with them. What happens
is the claims become too big and the expected growth
becomes too big for that method to work.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Gabron's house of cards eventually came crashing down after a
whistleblower report last November blew apart his entire scheme. Some
top investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars. A subsequent
internal investigation found that in the first nine months of
twenty twenty four, E Fishery claimed revenues of more than
(03:14):
seven hundred and fifty million dollars, while the true number.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Was just a fifth of that.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
David and his colleagues spoke to over twenty e Fishery investors,
staff and clients, and Gibraun himself to piece together this
insider account.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
I wanted to know what made this guy go from
being a relatively honest Phish farmer slash student to someone
who had cost investors hundreds of millions of dollars while
still living a relatively modest lifestyle. He doesn't have private jets.
He's driving a Hyundai Ionic five. What we're trying to
(03:50):
find out is how did he do it? But the
big question I thought was why.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
This is the big take Asia From Bloomberg News. I'm Wanha.
Every week we take you inside some of the world's
biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and
businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today in the
show The Rise and Fall of e Fishery, how did
a young entrepreneur from Indonesia create such a headache for
(04:19):
some of the biggest investors in the world and what
does it say about the risks of venture capital investing
in Southeast Asia. Gibron Huzaifah was raised near the slums
of East Jakarta. He's the son of a homemaker and
a construction worker. He did well in high school and
(04:39):
went on to study biology at the Bundum Institute of Technology,
known locally as the MIT of Indonesia, and that's where
he picked up interest in aquaculture.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
The reason why he took an aquaculture class is because
he heard the lecturer gave easy a's that's it. He
wanted an easy credit on his transcript, so he signed up.
But he actually got inspired, in his words, inspired by
the story of aquaculture in Indonesia and its potential.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Indonesia is the third largest seafood producer in the world,
after China and India. The fishery sector was worth around
twenty seven billion dollars in twenty twenty one, that's according
to a World Bank report. And young Gebron saw an opportunity.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
He wanted to be the Raja Leile, the king of
catfish in Indonesia, and so he hustled. He started speaking
with people who had hundreds of fish ponds and were
pretty big in the industry, and he asked them like,
what do you need? What is the issue? And they said,
you know, at some point, as you get bigger, your
issue becomes feeding the fish. Because feeding fish requires both
(05:49):
regularity as well as precision, and you need big farms.
It takes a long time to get from one side
to the other. It'd be great if I had a
machine that could do that for me.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So Gabron went off and made a prototype of an
automated fish feeder. The initial machine was scrappy. Imagine an
old school milkcan upside down with a spinner that's actually
a retrofitted CD player, spitting out fish food. For months,
Gabron traveled across Indonesia to rural villages trying to sell
(06:20):
his machine.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
He had the early prototype strapped to the back of
a motorbike and he would take that down various lanes
to the ends of nowhere and rural farms, going from
farm to farm trying to sell that machine to people.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
His persistence paid off slowly, some farmers began buying or
renting the machines. Meanwhile, Gabron enrolled himself into multiple startup
competitions in Jakarta, which gave him access to the venture
capital community, and that paid off too.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
His first pre Series A investments came from a highly
niche Dutch aquaculture specific and investment firm called Aquaspark, as
well as a local VC. The entirety of the pre
Series A was just seven hundred and fifty thousand US dollars.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
The money wasn't enough. The company was burning through cash.
Investors weren't buying Gabron's pitch for new funds, so he
went back to the well to his first investor, Aquaspark.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Aquaspark believed in the model enough that they were willing
to stump up one point five million dollars for his
Series A round, but it came with caveats. The first
two thirds of the money would be sent over, but
the last one third, five hundred thousand dollars wouldn't be
sent unless he could find other investors for the rest
of the round.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But how would he convince those other investors. They had
all turned him down already. When Gabron asked other Indonesian entrepreneurs,
he got answers that were vague and coded. Gabron says,
the way he heard it, the tip was essentially to
fudge the numbers.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
In twenty eighteen, as he's facing the conundrum between basically
losing everything in his eyes or fudging the numbers like
everyone else he speaks to in his community, and providing
exactly what the investors want to see, continuation growth and
a poff to actually making a sustainable business, he chose
the letter.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Gabron was sure he'd get caught, except he didn't. Investors
were keen to come on board. In the end, the
Series A round was a huge success. The company raised
more than four million dollars in total, but Gabron had
just replaced one problem with another. The investors he'd brought
(08:45):
on expected him to grow and attract even more investments,
so Gabron decided to keep faking the numbers. That created
a whole new set of math problems. That's after the break. Gebron,
(09:11):
whose Ipha, may have lied through his teeth about the
success of his e fishery business, but he still knew
how to tell a good story, one that hooked investors
big time. Here he is talking about his ambitions to
bring the company's tech to fish farmers all around the world.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
We're really excited about the future because we're pioneering this sector.
We're technically creating this category of fish tech, of aquaculture
technology that then has a really big upside on building
the market and building the sector even further. For us,
its sky is the limit.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
The story appealed to an investment community obsessed with the
idea of impact investing, a way to generate social or
environmental benefits while making money, And after the success of
that first round of funding, the money kept coming. In
twenty twenty two, after a flurry of interest SoftBank, Temasek
(10:06):
and Sequoia India pumped more money into the company, valuing
it at four hundred and ten million dollars. But the
more funds Gebron raised, the more creative he had to get.
To cover his tracks. He asked farmers to move their
existing business onto his platform in exchange for a commission fee.
He began to operate with two sets of books. David
(10:31):
You and the Bloomberg team spoke to Gabron extensively on
how it all went down. Did he tell you about
what was going through his mind as he was fudging
these numbers?
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Gebron told us that his moral compass was quite mathematical.
In his exact words, if the number of impacts that
I can create at a given time outsizes the potential
risk and damage that might be created, then it's still
a net positive and you should still do it as
long as it's a net positive.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
As evaluatestions got higher, Gabron found new and bigger ways
to make the numbers add up. That included setting up
at least five subsidiaries and thousands of fake accounts to
make artificial purchases for me.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
One of the key red flags was the lack of
impact that his business was having on the feed industry.
If you have tens of thousands of farmers who are
buying fish feed on your platform, that should have a
seismic impact on the fish feed industry of Indonesia. But
some of my sources were saying that they were speaking
to the fish feed providers, and they in turn were
(11:36):
very confused because there was almost no impact.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Last year, rumors began to surface on social media pointing
to inaccuracies in sales numbers, and then in November came
an allegation of financial misconduct.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
The real straw that broke the camel's back was a
whistleblower report that basically said the numbers that investors are
getting did not match up the real numbers inside the company.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
The report, sent to an E Fishery board member, brought
the whole thing crashing down on Gabron. In December, he
came clean to his colleagues and investors. He was suspended
and replaced, but the damage was already done. He had
inflated revenue by almost six hundred million dollars in the
nine months through September of last year. More than three
(12:24):
hundred million dollars of investor money was gone. Gabron denied
taking any of it. He said he agreed to speak
to Bloomberg to state publicly he didn't steal money, and
claims it was all paid out to employees, business partners,
and creditors. David E Fishery had the backing of some
(12:45):
of the biggest investors in the world. I mean, we're
talking about Japan's soft Bank and Singapore's Temasek. The accounting
firm Grant Thornton audited E Fishery's financial statements in twenty
twenty two. How is it that Gabron was able to
get away with this.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
And for so long? So I think something important to
remember is that Indonesia is an incredibly difficult market to
operate in because you don't have a single land mass,
you have seventeen thousand islands spread out. One key problem
was it's really hard to find these farms without E
Fishery support, and that in turn gave Gibron the chance
(13:22):
to quote unquote brief the local area managers about the
numbers that would have been expected to come out of
that part of the world.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
SoftBank, Temasek, and Sequoia, India and Southeast Asia declined or
didn't reply to Bloomberg's requests for comment. A spokesperson for
Grant Thornton said it's deeply concerned over the allegations and
is working to understand the full extent of the situation.
There was another factor that worked in Cabron's favor, a
surge and investor interest in impact investing with a particular
(13:54):
focus on his part of the world.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
At the time that E Fishery was getting a lot
of money from globally investors, Southeast Asia was incredibly hot.
E Fishery was a real gem. This is a business
that's doing impact investment work. It's helping farmers, it's using technology,
and I wouldn't say this is all impact investing. They
all thought profitable business, higher revenue growth, hockey stick projections,
(14:19):
emerging market. They all want to put an allocation into
Southeast Asia.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
The fallout from E Fishery has resurfaced questions about whether
the traditional venture capital model really works in emerging markets.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
There's a reason why you haven't seen the scale of
investing in Indonesia that you see in China or the US.
This really brings to question whether or not the unit
economics of Indonesia makes sense for a lot of business
models that have been brought there. The average middle class
citizen of Indonesia does not spend the same amount of
money in sheer dollar terms that the average middle class
(14:56):
citizen of China or Australia do.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Now, investors are still trying to figure out how to
wrap up the E Fishery business. Most of the staff
have been laid off. Many of the fish feeding devices
were sold to recyclers for about six dollars each, and
that's according to people familiar with the matter. The illusion
that Gabron built over thirteen years took less than three
months to collapse.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
And as for Gabron, at the moment, a lot of
his life looks much like it did at the start
of E Fishery. He's selling frozen seafood. He's trying to
help former colleagues create fish farming collectives so that they
can continue the business in some way, shape or form,
and he's trying to work out what his options are.
(15:42):
There is an investigation underway, so they could well be
more consequences for him.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wanha.
This episode was produced by Young Young and Naomi m.
It was edited by Patty Hirsch and Emily Cadman. There
was additional reporting by Olivia Poe and Forrest Makdar. It
was fact checked by Eddie Dwan and mixed and sound
designed by Taka Yasuzawa. Our senior producer is Naoli Shaven.
(16:13):
Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponzo. Our deputy executive producer
is Julia Weaver. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster Bower.
Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you like
this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big
Take Asia wherever you.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Listen to podcasts.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
It really helps people find the show. Thanks for listening,
See you next time.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Five years after launching his tech company in Indonesia, Gabron
Huseeifa found himself in deep money trouble. The startup he built,
E Fishery, that lets farmers feed fish from their phones,
was just three months away from running out of cash.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This company had less than nine thousand US dolars in
its accounts. It had been trying to raise money unsuccessfully
from the region's biggest and smallest investors.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
David Ramley is a Bloomberg investing reporter based in Singapore,
and Gabron told David and a team of Bloomberg reporters
that back then in twenty eighteen, his company's one hundred
employees were counting on him, and he felt he couldn't
let his company go bust. On top of that, he
actually believed he had a good business. He just needed
(00:58):
more money and time to grow. But where was he
going to find the money? Gabron told Bloomberg he spent
a long time just staring at an Excel spreadsheet of
E Fishery's finances on his laptop. He thought long and
hard about what he could do.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
What he started to do very slowly at first was
he just started to play with the numbers. It was
almost the thought experiment. He just started tweaking the numbers
to what he thought investors would want to see.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
And once he started, he just kept going. Within an hour,
he had done what years of hard work couldn't turn
his business into a winner, at least on paper. He
hit the send button to show his investors and he
was certain he'd get caught. Only he didn't.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Actually, what happened was his existing investors were extremely excited,
while the others who had previously said but not really interested,
was suddenly extremely keen. He went from being someone that
no one wanted to being someone who was how did
for investment opportunities in the space of a few months
thanks to that one spreadsheet.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
So Gabron kept on faking the numbers year after year,
and investor's money kept rolling in. By twenty twenty three,
E Fishery had become one of the hottest startups in
Southeast Asia. It was valued at more than a billion
dollars and had raised millions from some of the world's
biggest money managers, including SoftBank, Sequoia India and Southeast Asia,
(02:29):
and Singapore's State investor Temasek, but the more money he got,
that bigger his lies became.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Once he tweaked the numbers, everything looked good on paper,
but the reality was he still didn't have those numbers,
so he had to come up with them. What happens
is the claims become too big and the expected growth
becomes too big for that method to work.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Gabron's house of cards eventually came crashing down after a
whistleblower report last November blew apart his entire scheme. Some
top investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars. A subsequent
internal investigation found that in the first nine months of
twenty twenty four, E Fishery claimed revenues of more than
(03:14):
seven hundred and fifty million dollars, while the true number.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Was just a fifth of that.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
David and his colleagues spoke to over twenty e Fishery investors,
staff and clients, and Gibraun himself to piece together this
insider account.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
I wanted to know what made this guy go from
being a relatively honest Phish farmer slash student to someone
who had cost investors hundreds of millions of dollars while
still living a relatively modest lifestyle. He doesn't have private jets.
He's driving a Hyundai Ionic five. What we're trying to
(03:50):
find out is how did he do it? But the
big question I thought was why.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
This is the big take Asia From Bloomberg News. I'm Wanha.
Every week we take you inside some of the world's
biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and
businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today in the
show The Rise and Fall of e Fishery, how did
a young entrepreneur from Indonesia create such a headache for
(04:19):
some of the biggest investors in the world and what
does it say about the risks of venture capital investing
in Southeast Asia. Gibron Huzaifah was raised near the slums
of East Jakarta. He's the son of a homemaker and
a construction worker. He did well in high school and
(04:39):
went on to study biology at the Bundum Institute of Technology,
known locally as the MIT of Indonesia, and that's where
he picked up interest in aquaculture.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
The reason why he took an aquaculture class is because
he heard the lecturer gave easy a's that's it. He
wanted an easy credit on his transcript, so he signed up.
But he actually got inspired, in his words, inspired by
the story of aquaculture in Indonesia and its potential.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Indonesia is the third largest seafood producer in the world,
after China and India. The fishery sector was worth around
twenty seven billion dollars in twenty twenty one, that's according
to a World Bank report. And young Gebron saw an opportunity.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
He wanted to be the Raja Leile, the king of
catfish in Indonesia, and so he hustled. He started speaking
with people who had hundreds of fish ponds and were
pretty big in the industry, and he asked them like,
what do you need? What is the issue? And they said,
you know, at some point, as you get bigger, your
issue becomes feeding the fish. Because feeding fish requires both
(05:49):
regularity as well as precision, and you need big farms.
It takes a long time to get from one side
to the other. It'd be great if I had a
machine that could do that for me.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So Gabron went off and made a prototype of an
automated fish feeder. The initial machine was scrappy. Imagine an
old school milkcan upside down with a spinner that's actually
a retrofitted CD player, spitting out fish food. For months,
Gabron traveled across Indonesia to rural villages trying to sell
(06:20):
his machine.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
He had the early prototype strapped to the back of
a motorbike and he would take that down various lanes
to the ends of nowhere and rural farms, going from
farm to farm trying to sell that machine to people.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
His persistence paid off slowly, some farmers began buying or
renting the machines. Meanwhile, Gabron enrolled himself into multiple startup
competitions in Jakarta, which gave him access to the venture
capital community, and that paid off too.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
His first pre Series A investments came from a highly
niche Dutch aquaculture specific and investment firm called Aquaspark, as
well as a local VC. The entirety of the pre
Series A was just seven hundred and fifty thousand US dollars.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
The money wasn't enough. The company was burning through cash.
Investors weren't buying Gabron's pitch for new funds, so he
went back to the well to his first investor, Aquaspark.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Aquaspark believed in the model enough that they were willing
to stump up one point five million dollars for his
Series A round, but it came with caveats. The first
two thirds of the money would be sent over, but
the last one third, five hundred thousand dollars wouldn't be
sent unless he could find other investors for the rest
of the round.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But how would he convince those other investors. They had
all turned him down already. When Gabron asked other Indonesian entrepreneurs,
he got answers that were vague and coded. Gabron says,
the way he heard it, the tip was essentially to
fudge the numbers.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
In twenty eighteen, as he's facing the conundrum between basically
losing everything in his eyes or fudging the numbers like
everyone else he speaks to in his community, and providing
exactly what the investors want to see, continuation growth and
a poff to actually making a sustainable business, he chose
the letter.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Gabron was sure he'd get caught, except he didn't. Investors
were keen to come on board. In the end, the
Series A round was a huge success. The company raised
more than four million dollars in total, but Gabron had
just replaced one problem with another. The investors he'd brought
(08:45):
on expected him to grow and attract even more investments,
so Gabron decided to keep faking the numbers. That created
a whole new set of math problems. That's after the break. Gebron,
(09:11):
whose Ipha, may have lied through his teeth about the
success of his e fishery business, but he still knew
how to tell a good story, one that hooked investors
big time. Here he is talking about his ambitions to
bring the company's tech to fish farmers all around the world.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
We're really excited about the future because we're pioneering this sector.
We're technically creating this category of fish tech, of aquaculture
technology that then has a really big upside on building
the market and building the sector even further. For us,
its sky is the limit.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
The story appealed to an investment community obsessed with the
idea of impact investing, a way to generate social or
environmental benefits while making money, And after the success of
that first round of funding, the money kept coming. In
twenty twenty two, after a flurry of interest SoftBank, Temasek
(10:06):
and Sequoia India pumped more money into the company, valuing
it at four hundred and ten million dollars. But the
more funds Gebron raised, the more creative he had to get.
To cover his tracks. He asked farmers to move their
existing business onto his platform in exchange for a commission fee.
He began to operate with two sets of books. David
(10:31):
You and the Bloomberg team spoke to Gabron extensively on
how it all went down. Did he tell you about
what was going through his mind as he was fudging
these numbers?
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Gebron told us that his moral compass was quite mathematical.
In his exact words, if the number of impacts that
I can create at a given time outsizes the potential
risk and damage that might be created, then it's still
a net positive and you should still do it as
long as it's a net positive.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
As evaluatestions got higher, Gabron found new and bigger ways
to make the numbers add up. That included setting up
at least five subsidiaries and thousands of fake accounts to
make artificial purchases for me.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
One of the key red flags was the lack of
impact that his business was having on the feed industry.
If you have tens of thousands of farmers who are
buying fish feed on your platform, that should have a
seismic impact on the fish feed industry of Indonesia. But
some of my sources were saying that they were speaking
to the fish feed providers, and they in turn were
(11:36):
very confused because there was almost no impact.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Last year, rumors began to surface on social media pointing
to inaccuracies in sales numbers, and then in November came
an allegation of financial misconduct.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
The real straw that broke the camel's back was a
whistleblower report that basically said the numbers that investors are
getting did not match up the real numbers inside the company.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
The report, sent to an E Fishery board member, brought
the whole thing crashing down on Gabron. In December, he
came clean to his colleagues and investors. He was suspended
and replaced, but the damage was already done. He had
inflated revenue by almost six hundred million dollars in the
nine months through September of last year. More than three
(12:24):
hundred million dollars of investor money was gone. Gabron denied
taking any of it. He said he agreed to speak
to Bloomberg to state publicly he didn't steal money, and
claims it was all paid out to employees, business partners,
and creditors. David E Fishery had the backing of some
(12:45):
of the biggest investors in the world. I mean, we're
talking about Japan's soft Bank and Singapore's Temasek. The accounting
firm Grant Thornton audited E Fishery's financial statements in twenty
twenty two. How is it that Gabron was able to
get away with this.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
And for so long? So I think something important to
remember is that Indonesia is an incredibly difficult market to
operate in because you don't have a single land mass,
you have seventeen thousand islands spread out. One key problem
was it's really hard to find these farms without E
Fishery support, and that in turn gave Gibron the chance
(13:22):
to quote unquote brief the local area managers about the
numbers that would have been expected to come out of
that part of the world.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
SoftBank, Temasek, and Sequoia, India and Southeast Asia declined or
didn't reply to Bloomberg's requests for comment. A spokesperson for
Grant Thornton said it's deeply concerned over the allegations and
is working to understand the full extent of the situation.
There was another factor that worked in Cabron's favor, a
surge and investor interest in impact investing with a particular
(13:54):
focus on his part of the world.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
At the time that E Fishery was getting a lot
of money from globally investors, Southeast Asia was incredibly hot.
E Fishery was a real gem. This is a business
that's doing impact investment work. It's helping farmers, it's using technology,
and I wouldn't say this is all impact investing. They
all thought profitable business, higher revenue growth, hockey stick projections,
(14:19):
emerging market. They all want to put an allocation into
Southeast Asia.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
The fallout from E Fishery has resurfaced questions about whether
the traditional venture capital model really works in emerging markets.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
There's a reason why you haven't seen the scale of
investing in Indonesia that you see in China or the US.
This really brings to question whether or not the unit
economics of Indonesia makes sense for a lot of business
models that have been brought there. The average middle class
citizen of Indonesia does not spend the same amount of
money in sheer dollar terms that the average middle class
(14:56):
citizen of China or Australia do.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Now, investors are still trying to figure out how to
wrap up the E Fishery business. Most of the staff
have been laid off. Many of the fish feeding devices
were sold to recyclers for about six dollars each, and
that's according to people familiar with the matter. The illusion
that Gabron built over thirteen years took less than three
months to collapse.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
And as for Gabron, at the moment, a lot of
his life looks much like it did at the start
of E Fishery. He's selling frozen seafood. He's trying to
help former colleagues create fish farming collectives so that they
can continue the business in some way, shape or form,
and he's trying to work out what his options are.
(15:42):
There is an investigation underway, so they could well be
more consequences for him.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wanha.
This episode was produced by Young Young and Naomi m.
It was edited by Patty Hirsch and Emily Cadman. There
was additional reporting by Olivia Poe and Forrest Makdar. It
was fact checked by Eddie Dwan and mixed and sound
designed by Taka Yasuzawa. Our senior producer is Naoli Shaven.
(16:13):
Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponzo. Our deputy executive producer
is Julia Weaver. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster Bower.
Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you like
this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big
Take Asia wherever you.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Listen to podcasts.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
It really helps people find the show. Thanks for listening,
See you next time.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.