The AMI-Partners Blog

Beyond the country-level ICT market-size opportunity forecasts that analyst firms publish throughout the year, a lot of our clients also work with us to dig a couple of layers deeper to uncover city-level market-size opportunities. In our recent analysis of ASEAN markets, we uncovered a significant finding: SMBs in 16 key cities contribute more than 60% to total IT and communications spend in the ASEAN region. Specifically, the top three cities in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam respectively, plus Singapore, contribute the lion’s share of SMB ICT spending in ASEAN.

This is interesting for me as many of these markets, except perhaps for the city-state of Singapore, are very large geographically and have complex business and cultural subtleties unknown to the outside observer. Given that there are varying ICT maturity levels across various cities in each country, targeting SMBs in a random manner across the whole countries will not be very effective, especially if vendors with limited resources and budget want high-impact results within a compressed timeline.

ASEAN, home to more than 7 million SMBs, is hot. The region is experiencing relatively fast growth in terms of ICT adoption and spending compared with other regions around the world. It is definitely a market that ICT vendors should not neglect in their global growth and expansion plans, especially since there is tremendous pressure now to achieve revenue targets in the midst of the global slowdown. Even though the ASEAN region is expected to experience lower growth in 2009 compared with previous years, well-informed vendors can still grow by leveraging on intelligence and insights from deep research and analyses to craft a focused go-to-market approach targeting key city markets.

With the crisis in full play, ICT vendors will need a realistic geo-expansion strategy and laser-sharp decision-making in order to effectively enhance their footprint in the ASEAN markets. This is certainly one way to ward off any lingering effects of the global crisis in 2010 and beyond.

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David Yew is the Vice President for Asia Pacific at AMI-Partners and can be reached at dyew@ami-partners.com