honestbee Owes Many Local Firms Money, Including Prime Supermarket, FB, Google & Even Sushi Express

By
George Yang
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After researching on this topic, I went up to my boss and asked, “Boss, how many creditors do we have?”

He shook his head. “We are the creditors to many companies who haven’t paid us yet. Why?”

I then showed him the court document that detailed the number of creditors that have pressed honestbee for payment. “Is this normal?”

He said, “If that’s my company, I’d have bought a one-way ticket to Yishun.”

honestbee Sent Email to Ex-Vendors

By now, you should know that the mood in honestbee isn’t exactly…buzzing.

With cashflow problems and a whopping SGD$247 million debt, everyone’s wondering how the debt came about.

And on Sunday (4 August 2019), honestbee sent out an email to all their creditors to inform them that they’ve applied for some legal thingy that’ll allow them to postpone the repayment of the debts for six months, so creditors cannot seek legal recourse to demand for their money back until then.

And with it is a list of its creditors.

It turns out that while a bulk of the debt comes from its investor, millions of dollars are still owed to other firms that had provided services or products to the struggling startup.

Largest Unsecured Trade Creditors

Simply put, unsecured trade creditors are companies that have provided services or products to honestbee and have given them credit to pay later.

This is very common in business, with the credit term usually at NET30 or NET60 (to be payable within 30 days or 60 days).

Below are the top five companies that honestbee owed money to:

SHOPFIT (S) PTE LTD = $2,405,697.66

A check online reveals that the company supplies supermarket accessories, kitchen equipment and supermarket refrigeration equipment and systems. One can only wonder if habitat by honestbee is indeed profitable since it’s their only supermarket.

Amazon Web Services, Inc = $356,859.45

This is basically a hosting service for their app, website and maybe internal cloud storage. As Goody Feed is also a client of Amazon Web Service (commonly known as AWS), we do know that for them to rack up a bill of over $300K means that they’ve really lots of traffic or AWS gives them long credit term.

Of course, it could be that they anyhowly rent the server space because they’re too rich. We can never understand how rich people think.

Social Insurance – $345,451.75

We can’t find details about this, but this is a debt in Taiwan instead.

Park N’Shop = $294,024.23

Apparently, this is a supermarket in Hong Kong. As reported earlier, honestbee has shut down in Hong Kong, so they’ve not exactly left the market in goody terms.

Facebook Ireland Limited = $245,073.98

Don’t be fooled by its name: this is a debt in Singapore. Remember seeing all those “sponsored” content in your newsfeed? Yeah, they’re not paid. Yet.

In addition to these, there are other well-known companies in Singapore that have the honour to be honestbee’s creditors, like Google ($126K), Prime Supermarket ($109K), Sushi Express ($5k) and Shopback ($142K).

4 Statutory Demands Served & 34 Demand Letters Sent

For the uninitiated, a statutory demand is a “warning” from the creditor that if a debt is not paid or arranged to be paid, they will start court proceedings “sue until you bankrupt”.

A demand letter is not that fierce, but it’s still drafted by a lawyer from a law firm to request for the money owed, if not they might take legal action.

In total, honestbee has been served 4 statutory demands in July and 34 demand letters since May.

I don’t know about you, but all of a sudden, I can feel how stressful it is over there.

So, can honestbee do a Daryl Aiden Yow and rise from the ashes, or would they be an oBike and disappear with the hungry ghosts after the gates of hell have closed?

Stay tuned for the next episode of honestbee woes.

Watch this for a complete summary of what REALLY happened to Qoo10, and why it's like a K-drama:

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George Yang
Email: [email protected]