A Brief Note from the CyberAgent – Net Impact

On March 7, 2012, Jakarta was visited by a couple of guests who are no strangers in the IT world. Most of them are already well-known and probably are quite respected in the business all over the region.

The representatives of these companies presented at Net Impact event held by CyberAgent Ventures at Hyatt Hotel, Jakarta. This event was the first to be held in Jakarta. The panelists were from GREE, Tencent, Sina Weibo, DeNa, NCT Corporation, Teamobi/Green Mobile Corporation, VNG Corporation and of course from Cyber Agent itself.

Rama has written an opinion piece regarding this event while this article is my impression of the whole event. Eventhough I was a bit late (missed 3 speakers) there were several notes that are quite useful as an input to the tech industry in Indonesia.

The term that was often said in the presentation yesterday was "platform". Almost all of the presentations that I attended explained about their products and services which developed into a platform and opening their services for other parties in the expansion/development of the their primary service/product.

If the product was originally developed as an individual or one item, then it was developed into a variety of other services and became a more complete and diverse service. For example, Tencent, Sina Weibo, NCT Corporation and VNG Corporation developed their services into platforms. Weibo provides API and opens partnership with media, business and third parties. Then NCT Corporation was originally a music service that then developed into another type of service such as matchmaking, e-commerce, social networking, payment, etc.

The average companies that attended were quite big in their respective countries; they developed services to be big with a variety of additional services and tried to acquire more users for a single service, which will be directed to other services. This include the service in game segment, like VNG Corporation from Vietnam that started out as game publisher then developed other services, a derivative for platform development.

For Asian Markets, especially China, this could be the speed to provide continuous service and largely will be the unique character and culture of the market, this also means that knowing the culture of the target market is significant to become the king at the local level where services are located, especially for services targeted to local market. On the other hand, this may also be associated with the clones or those who have heavy competition, such social media or music segment where different similar services are available.

Massive approach, both of how to obtain user and developing new services, is quite evident in several presentation that I observe yesterday. Research and ownership of knowledge of local data, market knowledge, local problem solving also become an important part in providing their services.

Unfortunately, the presentations lacked detailed information about strategies from the companies in attendance and from the speakers. Generally, they only explained about their products in general and less detailed information about their strategies in dealing with competitions or in developing services, like NTC Corporation that develops music service in Vietnam, how they managed to penetrate record label is one of many things that I actually wanted to hear, especially as a study to beat our local market.

The presentations would be useful for those who want to enter other Asian market because from the data of Internet development that was presented serves the variety of things that we’ve seen, such as increased mobile growth, a growing internet penetration as well as information on user behavior in each section.

Broadly speaking, each company also opened up opportunities to cooperate with various parties including third parties from Indonesia (except CyberAgent, Gree and DeNa because I didn’t attend their presentations), only QQ from Tencent that clearly preparing to enter Indonesian market.

In one of his presentations, Sean Zhang, Director of Tencent Mobile Global, said that this year they will start to work on Indonesian market and they will be targeting feature phone users, a number of reasons – just like the reasons other companies are using – is feature phone has a great market. Tencent assumes that in Indonesia, despite the increasing growth of iPhone and Android users as well as BB users but Nokia and feature phone users are still the largest.

There is an interesting thing in Tencent’s presentation yesterday, this could be related to Chinese market and associated with service monetization; they do not take maximum profit per user bur rather to emphasize on large user quantity. Interestingly enough, although China has its own uniqueness, this could be information that Indonesian market could learn from.

On the other hand, yesterday’s event is interesting due to various Asian companies well known in Indonesia presented in the event. Some of which are also opened up to cooperation opportunities with local service. Tencent even opened its door to cooperate with universities. This could be a sign that competition will increase fiercely but the opportunity to use existing platform is also available.

But everything confirmed that the IT, web and mobile industry continue to find developments and new era that could make the industry more dynamic, of course competence is to be the main foundation as well, because quality of service and company performance become the capital in the face of competition.

Futher developments, both of Asian companies as well as company development and startup from Indonesia, will be interesting to be observed.

Disclosure: DailySocial is a media partner of Cyber Agent – Net Impact event.