In 2015 it makes sense to look East to when looking for opportunities in the tech market.
India and China have nearly 2.5 billion people living within their borders, and as smartphone adoption increases rapidly in these developing markets, the opportunities available for tech firms is huge.
Add fast-growing Indonesia into the mix, and recent Asian tech growth has created the world’s biggest tech market.
Debu Purkayastha, Entrepreneur-in-residence at Octopus Investments, has noticed that not only are the tech industries growing internally in some of Asia’s biggest countries, but they’re also starting to look outward to invest in other companies.
Purkayastha says: “Suddenly Chinese companies which tended to be focused on China are beginning to look out.”
“Indian startups are beginning to look out to acquire companies which is not something I’ve seen before.”
It’s maybe not surprising that Indian companies are widening their ambitions says Purkayastha: “In India, funding has gone through the roof.”
This increased funding has led to “all sorts of weird valuations” says Purkayastha, “but those will over time hopefully settle down.”
The tech growth in India has had wider effects as well: “One of the reasons I think Facebook ended up buying WhatsApp” says Purkayastha, “was because of what WhatsApp was doing in India and other countries.
“The threat that they were posing was quite rightly something that Facebook recognized.”
If a social media company, even one based in Silicon Valley, wants to own the lion share of the market, they’re going to have to look much further afield than USA and Europe.
Because of the appetite for tech, especially ecommerce and social media in India, Purkayastha even regards Asia as being Facebook’s “core market”.
Even if the “weird” valuations do settle down in India, it’s hard to see growth in the tech sector going anywhere but up.
As current generations become more tech savvy and mobile Internet becomes more widespread, the appetite for social media, ecommerce, software as a service (Saas) and much more will exponentially increase.
To hear more about the expansion of Asian tech growth, watch the video above.
