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

Today when we having the discussion with one of the editor from local business magazine, something came up at my mind, the yet another buzz word ‘glocalization’ – the combination of the globalization and localization.

I first notice the real big MNC been practicing these, by seperating the operation and management of individual countries into regional, and let the local management team to handle the day to day works base on local culture and organization structure. HSBC, one of the pioneer in introducing glocalization concept, global expertise, local presence sort of stuffs.

When I try to look back into e-Commerce, how many of the big players in Asia really successfully crossing their own countries borders and expand to oversea market? Rakuten is one of the millions who does that up to now. It has been in Japan for a very long time – 10 years, and really step strongly before it make the bold decision to expand its Rakuten Ichiba out to oversea – particulary Taiwan. Who else in this region has ever ‘try’ before? Is that the local market is ‘big’ enough for them, or it is very difficult for these players to take the bold decision to move out? Lelong has passed its 10th year presence and look back, it is still Malaysia boleh only company in Malaysia. That really make us think again, is that being the largest in Malaysia good enough for us? My answer is NO for sure.

Our vision, in Platform2u.com, is to realize the e-Commerce dream in Asia, to be the largest e-Commerce Platform provider that from Malaysia, and cross over to the entire Asia countries. It never be easy. After landing our foot print in Hong Kong, follow by next in Philippines during this coming July, it is the time we take a bold and aggresive move again to reinforce our marketplace in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Glocalization, will be the spirit, the value, the core of our entire e-Commerce attempt. Be the global e-Commerce provider to help all the SME and SMIs to find the new global marketplace, and continue to help those SME and SMIs to localize their presence each and every countries we establish our foot print. It sounds imposible to help all our SMEs and SMIs to be glocalization companies in past, but during today interview, I have the new insight, yes, we going for glocalization model, to help all our partners merchant to transform them into glocalization companies – IN ZERO ADDITIONAL COST to them. It is a new thing where even Rakuten won’t able to achieve easily, but we will try. When Rakuten bring over few hundreds merchants from Japan to enter Taiwan market, they work very closely and hard to help those Japanese firms to have a local presence in Taiwan through their glocalization attempt, but I believe our model will make a different from Rakuten, easier, faster, and more dynamic.

Glocalization – it will be our brand new focus…. We wish to be to first in China to introduce Glocalization e-Commerce, are we able to buy enough time on this? Is our speed fast enough then the speed of Internet? Let’s the result reveal end of this year 2009…

Platform2u.com was established in October 2008 by a team of young and ambitious technopreneurs. The company was formed with the vision to provide a complete end-to-end e-commerce platform to the Asia industry by easily setting up online-businesses and trading in the global marketplace. In a short span of three months, we have obtained the MSC status from Malaysia Government in early January 2009 to recognize for our innovative research and development efforts in e-Commerce era. In April 2009, when Platform2u.com was just seven months old, we are proud to launch our brainchild, SMILD(S), the fourth generation e-commerce solution to the public. Being young and energetic, SMILD(S) was well received and we were pleased that in a glimpse; our community grew to several hundred merchants and still growing.

Platform2u.com’s mission is to become the Pioneer and Enabler as well as a being a professional Service Provider in a brand new Business-to-Business-to-Consumer-to-Consumer (B2B2C2C) platform in Asia Internet Retailing industry. It has been our vision to be the Top 5 Internet Retailing platform in Asia Pacific Region and to build our very own Malaysian brand and make a stand in Asia. As our motto says “We will definitely make it happen!

Mary Meeker, an analyst from Morgan Stanley, been revaling the Tech Trends since early 2008, has recently revealed the latest Tech Trend - 20 Mar during end of last month. Nothing realy suprises the market - Recession, crisis, Online Ads market shrinking and so on.

One pretty encouraging factor from this trend, is that Online Retail is equal penetration with 'EMAIL', both have 70% of the penetration rate. Beside, at the very ending of the slide there is a very strong words for e-Commerce - BIG DEAL!!


However, the one key problem for the Tech Trend, that direct related to Asia Retail exporters, is the slowdown of retail industry in US and Europe. Asia exclude Japan, are majority exports oriented. These big giants MNC are highly rely on the consumer market in US & Europe to consume their products. For the past 20 years, US consumers been consuming junk goods from everywhere of the world, and producing tons and tons of ‘deleted items’ in their ‘un-recyclable bin’. Today, these groups of consumers ‘hold back’ on their crazy spending behavior, and the entire supply chain immediately halted.

While many middle-men ‘distributors’ buying ‘cheap’ goods from Asia and ‘resell’ in ‘high-value’ to US and Europe, today I bet that there are many of these middle-men have filed for Chapter 11. Many of them have more than enough inventories on hand but no moving market. The exporters, on the other hand, are too halted with over productions in their warehouse (it is a good news for those who implement JIT – Just in Time production model) and very bad news for those who always anti-US mfg theories.

Many of the SME/SMIs in Asia, especially in China, are rely on Alibaba to be the center-link for them to export. Today, the alarm hit directly to Alibaba and all its customers. Will Alibaba survive this round of winter? With the burden of its hundreds thousands of SME/SMIs relying on this platform to seek for new contract. How will Aliaba react, and will its ‘internal consumption and internal marketplace’ will be the ultimate solution to its millions of consumers? Only Alibaba know…

Erick @ Techcrunch posted an article today cited the predictions on Tech industry for Year 2009 pertaining to emails he received from Wall Street Analysts. Two companies analysts, J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan, for instance, predicts Yahoo and Microsoft will finally strike a search deal, video advertising on the Web isn’t working, retail bankruptcies could actually help e-commerce companies, and that M&A activity will pick up in the second half of 2009 (but the IPO market will be dead until 2010). Barclays’ Doug Anmuth believed that both Yahoo and eBay will make major strategic moves this year to try to right their businesses, distribution wars in search will break out between Google and Microsoft, and there will be consolidation among the 300-plus ad networks out there. Both believe that performance-based advertising will continue to rise in importance, good luck to Facebook and wish the company can finally turn the entire e-marketing model.
Erick also reveals six of the ‘make believe’ predictions he received and listed below:

Imran Khan’s 2009 Tech Predictions (J.P. Morgan)
1. Potential search deal likely between Yahoo! and Microsoft
2. Net Neutrality should become an important mainstream issue
3. Challenges in monetizing video advertising should persist
4. Mobile usage should continue its strong growth momentum, but mobile advertising will likely be challenging this year
5. Possible bankruptcies in brick-and-mortar retail should create opportunities for eCommerce companies
6. M&A consolidation activities could potentially resume during 2H’09 (IPO market is dead until 2010)

Doug Anmuth’s 2009 Tech Predictions (Barclays Capital)
1. Yahoo and eBay will make major strategic decisions
2. Performance-based advertising will be more important than ever
3. Increased Competition For Search Distribution Via Toolbars, OEM Deals, and Partnerships
4. Proliferation of Smart Phones Will Drive The Mobile Internet
5. Small Strategic Acquisitions Will Re-Emerge
6. Ad Networks To Consolidate

Personally, due to my nature of business background, I am particularly interested in Imran’s prediction on Retail industry. I will share out my opinion on this in later post, but I believe that the traditional Brick-and-mortar retail will still survive, for at least another 2 years, but the retailers need to take immediate action to revisit their operation and profit model. The ‘look alike prediction’ will be there will be many new e-commerce store comes online, which caused the e-retailing industry to continue blossom and enjoy steadily growth for the next 5 years. More technologies will be invented to focus on how to convert visitors from online portal to become consumers. Social commerce will be a big hit also if Apple Apps, Facebook and other social networks implement their online micropayment model. Best wishes for e-Retailing in 2009!