5 business trends and opportunities for technology businesses and Start-ups in Indonesia

Wavecell, the Singaporean cloud communications provider, participated in Echelon Indonesia 2016 (05th-6th April). The Jakarta event lasted for two days of conferences, pitches, and networking with the finest players in the Indonesian technology ecosystem.

Wavecell met with local companies to find out about their activities and the needs inherent to the Indonesian market. The company pinpointed five key trends that Indonesian businesses can look-out for in 2016:

A Huge Market with Various Needs: with a population of 260 million and a changing society, modern Indonesian companies are more and more switching their traditional customer communications habits to adapt to the new behaviour of a population averaging 27 years old. Getting the grips with real-time automated communications is essential in that regard and is what most businesses in Indonesia intend to achieve. According to Odin’s report on SMB Cloud Insights™ research for Indonesia, more than 4 million small-medium businesses in Indonesia are using cloud services. We believe that this is set to expand quickly within the next few years.

As Indonesia shifts away from a traditional approach of communications (e.g. landlines, emails, call centers), ensuring quality real-time communications is a competitive advantage that cannot be neglected. Integrating cloud-based services for SMS, Chat, and Video calls to cater to new customer support models is on the rise within the start-ups and enterprises environments.

Local pain-points solving: among the participating companies, a consequent number of them adopted the mission to solve pain-points related to the local territory on a national or regional scale. Such companies include Grab, Go-Jek, Porter and numerous others. They aim at facilitating daily struggles such as personal transportation or shipping goods.

These companies value quick and versatile interactions with their customers to offer efficient services. Automating and optimizing such interactions, thanks to the services provided by communications API provider, is vital for such businesses to scale and cater to a growing base of customers.

Online-to-Offline business models (O2O): the sector is burgeoning globally, and Indonesia is far from being left behind. From 100 start-ups pitching mobile applications aggregating laundry (KliknKlin) to YESSBOSS and its concierge service, or all the transportation apps stated above, it was clear that a universal purpose among companies participating in the event was to bridge the connected and disconnected worlds.

Automated 2-way SMS messaging is an excellent medium to trigger interaction between the online world: applications, servers, website and individuals who do not always have a permanent data connection.

Marketplaces for The Mass: from immemorial markets to modern e-commerce Marketplaces, Asia has always been a thriving place for those forms of commerce. HappyFresh, MatahariMall, Bukalapak, and Tokopedia, are some of the big names in the Indonesian market and as a matter of fact, they were the subjects of much attention during Echelon Indonesia 2016. Whether their business model is about B2B, B2B2C, to sell groceries or fashion products, all those companies exist to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers on a large scale thanks to technological platform.

If nothing will ever replace the warm greetings from an exuberant merchant on its stall, at least modern marketplaces can make use of modern communication methods to generate more sales on a bigger scale. Expanding their reach to more customers by swiftly using real-time communications (e.g. 2-way SMS, Voice or Video) contributes to deliver a global better customer experience.

Bridging the gap between rural and city areas: based on statistics from the World Population Review, there are over 10 million inhabitants in Jakarta’s agglomeration. With 53.7% of the total Indonesian population living in urban areas, it would be easy to target this accessible market and forget about the 130 million inhabitants living in rural areas. Kioson, who pitched in the final of the qualifiers, is a start-up that aims to provide connected PoS devices to rural retailers and SMB in Indonesia. They offer training services to enable traditional merchants over the country to make the most of modern technologies.

More than 70% of businesses we spoke to in Echelon Indonesia 2016, agreed that 2-way SMS is an integral component of their communication strategy thanks to its nature of being read almost instantaneously. SMB Cloud Insights™ research for Indonesia found that unified communications such as ‘hosted business voice’ and ‘collaboration applications’ is the ‘second-largest category of the Indonesian cloud market (Rp4T or $324M USD) and is poised for expansion.’ Most of the companies met during ECID2016 are willing to explore the possibilities of embedded and automated cloud-communications in hopes of offering a better customer experience.

These trends confirmed Wavecell in its willingness to open an Indonesian office that will spearhead the company’s expansion into Indonesia to better serve this vast and dynamic market. Within 2016, Wavecell already established its foothold in the Philippines and Hong Kong and will expand to Indonesia and Thailand.

We simplify global communications such as SMS, Chat, and Video interactions. Our strength lies in offering cloud-based multi-channel communications to developers and enterprises. Our partners can build better services by integrating our APIs and SDKs. They can leverage Wavecell's platform to power real-time communications within applications. Wavecell ensures first-class connectivity to 200+ countries while maintaining high security standards on the platform.

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This release was published on openPR.