A Growing Market

This article is written by Mohammad Eslim, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Christopher M. Schroeder is an American entrepreneur, advisor and investor in interactive technologies and social communications. He has written the first look at startups in the Arab World, the best-selling “Startup Rising — The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East” released in August 2013 with a new edition in 2015 and one in Arabic in 2016. It was published by MacMillan/Palgrave, with a foreword by Marc Andreessen.

It was not until recently that Turkey became a strong country in every term the word strong can reach. Strong economic system, strong education, many working opportunities, new industries that resulted in having export to many countries around this regional area of the Middle East and east Europe and west Asia. 

And however much we can find it a great news as it is the start of a strong emerging market in the Middle East, not all countries believed that it could happen at first. One of the most regular questions that come up when talking about this market is what percent of the GDP this tech entrepreneurship represents.  

Of course a question like this is predictable due to the economic realities of our time, but it’s also probably due to the less importance they see in researching new emerging anything when it first appears. For instance, I often wonder if anyone researched what economists thought were the macro-economic ramifications on GDP of the automobile in 1910 or the airplane in 1920, shipping containers in 1950, air conditioning in 1960, internet in 1992 and mobile in 2001.  

All of those new businesses entered the market without much research on the GDP yet they came on top of the marketplaces of each’s market. They simply didn’t think much of it but they were completely wrong. There is an under-appreciated opportunity that is being built here and it is often taken for granted by people there.

When there is a discussion about the wonderful things that can be arranged and built from this very new market in Turkey, it’s met surprisingly with back-looking views. They view it like this: we will for sure participate in the market if it is big enough, certainly not if it is as big as China then we will be handed our behinds, but it has to be more beneficial for us in….and so many self-benefit terms. Ramiz Mohammad, the founder of flat-six labs and the accelerator across the whole Middle East region, says that they often think of markets as ours as if it’s consumers only and not as innovators. 

Foolish they are when they think a market as this new one will not has an impact on theirs. We know Alibaba and how it grew so large even the United States was affected. It’s an unproved theory that Alibaba made a psychological impact on the market in the United States. If I spoke about global technology markets ten years ago we would be literally talking about the US where on the other hand Samsung, Sony and few others were the one-time great global hardware making companies from Asia. Up until recently there were very few software companies or software enable companies that were launched anywhere away from the west. 

As a matter of fact we are expecting this market to be led by the entrepreneurs and innovators there to a new era, an era of unprecedented, problem-solving and innovation for your markets on your own terms. Such opportunities rise the middle class and demand for transparency and quality products and services are only going to expand and exponentially increase, but well-executed products and services will become a regional and I believe global phenomena which will bring a competitive advantage for the markets here.

https://vimeo.com/141519449