Creative Idea Powerhouse

Currently, there are total of 24million Netizens in Philippines as per statistic shown in Year 2009. These number will grow to 28M by end of this year. 83% of the netizens are below 29 years old, or nearly 20M of them, or as big as total population in entire Great Manila.

If you were one of the retailer in Philippines, you must get aware on this. 20M of the consumer in a single marketplace; 20M of young Internet savy that will join the middle or high income group when they go into their career path; 20M of power consumers that can basically consume anything, any products, that they get close to. They are the new Generation Y consumers, and they are slowly overtake the 40+ consumers to become the strongest buying power in the entire Philippines retailing industry. Is your business ready to serve them and earn their big bucks? Is your past 20 years of old retailing experiences work with these Gen Y consumers? Do your traditional ads campaign reach them effectively?

SMilDS.COM is one the best crafted solution for the Philippines e-Commerce industry with the breakthrough in e-Payment and e-Logistic solution. It is aims to briedge the e-Commerce divide of the entire Philippines as overall compare to the neighbouring countries, and as well as USA and China. With the price of a cup of Starbucks Coffee a day, we allow the traditional retailers to expand their global e-Commerce into Internet.

The entire platform is design in so that even the current young graduates students or office clerk who know basic Microsoft Words can manage the e-Store without any hassel or trouble. It is now so easy for the merchant to have their products sell in Internet and ship to oversea from Philippines in a complete e-Commerce cycle.

To find out more, feel free to check out the slide below

When we were drafting our initial project plan for platform2u.com, our idea was simple, to build an e-commerce solution that enable the Internet entrepreneur. The buzzWord glocalization never came into our mind at all. All we aim for is our enthusiation to help the young Internet entrepreneur to find a point of start up and utilize their existing familiarity on Internet to earn their first fortune.

Throughout our journey, the plan and idea evolved, and the Big Picture slowly reveal. Our dream and vision become bigger and extended to a regional basis – to build a cross countries e-commerce platform that able to facilitate regional trade through internet.

I need to admit that to build a web shop or e-commerce for Malaysia is easy, but when we need to extend to a regional cross trading, many consideraiona come into picture. Localize payment gateway with local currencies exchange is a challenge; cross border logistic for micro or small sme with small quantity shipments is a challenge; to prevent and proactively reduce fraud case on e-commerce is a never ending fights against the non ethical buyers in internet. We know all these challenge and we need to call for a choice to go local or global. It is beyond the technology concerns of server loads, hardware and apps uptime, or language compatibility issues. We know that for the nex three year, there are one after another challenges that we can’t predict nor avoid awaiting us. We take the bold step to move on and build this platform, and fortunate, we have launched our first e-commerce 4.0 system in April 09, continue with a month later to launch in Hong Kong, and in next month in Manila, Philippines.

The buzzword glocalization came across our mind a month after we launch our system , during one of our business briefing session with our prospect merchant. I gave an example, if you sell something online and you have 100 agents or cross sellers selling your product online, you are doing a global business. And when your product is cross-sell by the 100merchants in their individual local webstore, with local look and feel website design, your product actually selling as localize one. On the term, this is glocalization… And SMiLDS.com is the enabler for this glocalization business, and we help Asia retailers to glocalize their business at every countries we presence. This is our vision and we will definitely make it happen!!

eBay has been the leader in C2C since its early startup day. The company slowly drive its direction to close to Amazon’s B2C and then to Alibaba’s B2B model, and soon we may see a complete new e-Business model that combine the B2B, B2C and C2C, the term I used to call as B2B2C2C.

eBay also the provider for the e-Logistic, where they try to launch the logistic service with UPS, but in totally different model with Amazon one stop distribution model. In the result, it prove to be more effeciency and effective be it in good time or difficult time, especially when recently Amazon just shutted down some of its disti warehouse and slashing workforces. Every year, Amazon spent at least 8 – 10% of their total revenue in maintaining the ‘efficient’ supply chain, which it is a challenging move when market turn bad. eBay strategy to provide end to end distribution will be the new model for SCM in e-Commerce industry that will be widely accepted by public and the darlings from the Street of Wall. Another focus for eBay in future will be the mobile marketplace, and I think iPhone will be one of the major platform that eBay will ride on to unleash its new market potential.

However, during last week trip to Hong Kong, I have the previlege chance to meet up with one of the pioneer in China Internet Market Analyst. He shared with me his personal opinion on the future trend and direction of China Internet marketplace and potential opportunities underminded still in China. One, as we are exploring, is the recently adopted 3G market in China, and another, will be the virtual mapping industry in China.

No matter what, we understand that China is a challenging yet fruitful market that we can’t neglect, and we must enter this market carefully. We will make sure our new office will soon landed in China, in Year 2009.

It is always my interest to follow through the email management concept and theory and this slide has given a very good and solid view on email management.

Many of the time we have over-manage our email account, emails and even email relationship. Just imagine, in traditionally, we have one address, and one mailbox. We communicate through postal mail and we manage only 1 mailbox address. In internet living, we sometime too greedy to manage up to 5 or 6 different mailboxes, and we are so desperately manage it by categorize it into different usage and assign specific time, day to go and pickup mails from different mailboxes. Funny huh?

Well, just a sharing and hope you not falling into email over-manage and get back to working track and performing effectively during this recession period. Do less email, more works.


“It will be very hard for China to achieve economic growth of 8% in 2009,” said Premier Wen Jiabao in Davos, Switzerland. Due to the global recession, China’s GDP grew by 9.0% in 2008, with the last quarter’s growth rate dropping to 6.8%, the lowest rate in past 7 years. After the global recession hit China, thousands of plants shut down, and most of the workers lost their jobs and had no choice but to return home. According to the data from the central government, by the end of 2008, 20 million migrant workers had lost their jobs. More job losses are expected in 2009, because more companies will enter difficult times due to the worsening global economic environment.

In the past, many factories and exporters rely on Alibaba to find their potential buyers, and Alibaba is proud to have this article ‘The Day when Alibaba does not exist in China’, reflecting how much the exporters rely on Alibaba in their trading businesses. However, it is worth to take a look in today China economy and ask, ‘the Day of Alibaba when the exporters one after another is shutting down’.

All these while, Alibaba has positioned itself as ‘unique positioning of B2B’ where they claimed themselves as the first and only ‘Made in China’ company that excel in B2B era, and has a great vision to help millions of China SME/SMI to go global. Indeed, Alibaba really has helped many of the China companies to transform the ‘Made in China’ goods to oversea market, and creating millions of potential global opportunities. However, when come to global recession or rather the great depression situation, will Alibaba’s magic still working? Thousands of its customers have claimed for shutdown due to ‘overstocked’ and ‘overproduced’ but can’t find the new marketplace to sell their products to. It will be worth while for the senior exec of Alibaba to take a look back, where personally I don’t see any additional value that this company can bring to China SME/SMI.

The market need a new business model for B2B, same goes to B2C or C2C. If we deep dive into the root of this economic recession, it is not easy to find that major of China’s products are shipped to United States, and thanks to the big brother who have always enjoying high GDP growth and spending behavior like they hate their money so much and can’t wait to throw it away in exchange of some fake identity, high ‘brand’, not necessary products. They are fortunate to have a mastermind guru name Steven Covey who teach them to grade ‘effective time management’ but forget to teach them ‘effective money management’; and to rank their spending as ‘urgent and important’, ‘urgent but not important’, ‘not-urgent but important’ and ‘not urgent and not important’, and obviously all their spending to boost GDP all these while are majority falled under ‘urgent and important’ to those Chinese Exporters. And obviously too, when these American start to realise their ‘urgent and important’ spending generator can no longer crunching out new credit line from their credit card, they start to move the spending in this category into ‘non-important and non-urgent’ and start to squeeze their pocket. They have then upgrade their ‘urgent and important’ spending to limit to ‘spending to find new job’, ‘spending to survive’, and of-course, ‘spending for Beer’.

Anyway, back to China here, once the American start to tide up their belt and pocket, they are stuck. No one else (or rather countries) like Amercian who can absorb almost everything China produce. Even Dubai, Middle East, Europe or Ausie are now badly damage by Amercian’s financial crisis and start to downgrade their spending pattern.

So what’s next? When 90% of China SME/SMI start to suffer from this spending depression, the China GDP will fall, and most of the exporters will face greatest joy in their live, to spend hard with their existing credit line they enjoy, and prepare to go bankrupt in next 3 – 6 months. 50% of the SME/SMI that growth up during great economy boom in Year 1999 to date and solely rely on exporting their products to oversea will sieze to be another new chapter for China Great Business History book. What will be the future of Alibaba when this happen, where its majority income are from SME/SMI? It will depend on the 40 robbers to decide.