When Emerging Markets Lead The Way

This article is written by Clinton James, a Contributor Author at Startup Turkey.

Sebastiaan Vaessen is Group Head of Strategy at Naspers, a global internet and entertainment group and one of the largest technology investors in the world. Sebastiaan is responsible for group portfolio strategy, identifying new investment opportunities, corporate development, and special projects. He was present at Startup Turkey where he talked about emerging markets in today's world

While most investors are looking for the next Steve Jobs in countries like the US and Europe, Naspers believes that they might be hiding in India, Africa or Turkey. As one of the oldest companies in the business for more than a century, Naspers has become one of the largest investors in the digital industry among younger companies, with a main focus on market growth. It is clear that companies like PayU and other anonymous companies are building this post by Naspers.

It is often asked why people are enthusiastic about emerging markets. If you read every day, you find that most of the news remains on a global platform that generates a lot, like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and so on.

The top 20 e-commerce market websites have become more and more as they evolve and change with progress and competition. These companies are mostly mobile and the way they use the Internet may be different than usual. As an example, hundreds of thousands of Instagram users don't know that they can use it as an ecommerce platforms. Some companies get up to 40% of their sales from Instagram.

Online features mainly come from cellular transactions, which can be intimidating because of a very competitive environment. That does not allow opportunity to many copycat entrepreneurs as they are limited to how most people use a maximum of one or two similar applications for emerging markets.

Flipcard has taken a bold step in India to compete with Amazon, because traffic in India works 80% on cellphones, not desktops. Therefore, Flipcard was resistant to Amazon's power on the Indian market.

WeChat is a future Facebook Messenger feature, says Sebastian Vaessen, because people around the world can shop, order for buses and do banking in one mobile space. With 650 million users locally are resulted from this application and processed through WeChat compared to other local e-commerce platforms.

LetGo has an investment of 100 million mobile users to snap, post, chat and sell it as the four main steps of an e-commerce platform established in Turkey's Top 5 in the world of e-commerce.

With more than 200,000 loads and more than 80,000 truck drivers in Brazil, TrackPad has overcome problems in emerging markets where people are no longer fixated on billboards. Instead, they are connected by the driver to the next charge directly through the system. This has proven to be very successful because it has an impressive impact in less than 1½ years.

So why is this an example? Some investors are looking for copycats and get the most money there. The speed and acceleration of global technology is very fast, and the biggest costs for entrepreneurs come from the special needs of a growing market, where most regions are trammeled to see.