Internet opportunity map for Southeast Asia

January 24, 2014 Leave a comment

Starting a business in Southeast Asia? Check out this opportunity map
January 22, 2014
by Nitin Mittal

Nitin is a senior manager of business development at SingTel-SoftBank InnoVentures.

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I was inspired by Ron Hose’s Philippines startup report and decided to work on a high level Internet opportunity map for Southeast Asia. The countries included in this study are Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines. I hope to add Malaysia and Vietnam in a later update.
Since there has been a lot of discussion about looking at Southeast Asia as a whole, I thought it became necessary to understand the opportunity landscape at the regional level. This map serves as a starting point for early stage entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out what to build. The good news is that most areas are at an infancy to semi-mature stage, offering an immense opportunity for entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia.
I reached out to my business network in the above countries to rate each of the Internet categories on a five-point scale – Saturated, Mature, Semi-mature, Infancy, and Non-existent. The ratings given by venture capital and Internet industry experts were country-specific. The individual country ratings where then combined (weighted average using population and GDP per capita) to get a Southeast Asia level rating.
The scores for each of the countries were based on top of the know-how of the experts and the averaging does not use other relevant influencing variables like internet, credit card, or smartphone penetration. In other words, this categorization is more of a first attempt to develop a general idea of the opportunities.
Entrepreneurs should try to identify the large pain points that customers in their markets need solutions for based on these categories. The categories should also help entrepreneurs figure out where a speedy adaptation of a successful business model and product will happen for this region and what is unlikely to work.

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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