Our Co-Founder, Paddy with the attendees of the event
- GCamp invited experts from other parts of the world and held a large-scale event to help accelerator managers in Taiwan to strengthen their startup accelerator programmes with the focus on international market expansion
- Our Co-Founder, Paddy Tan was invited to share about scaling businesses and entry into Southeast Asia
June 20, 2019: BlackStorm Consulting was privileged to attend the “GCamp” event held on June 20, 2019, organised by Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic (經濟部中小企業處) and Institute For Information Industry (財團法人資訊工業策進會). G of GCamp represents Global, Growing and Going and it assists Taiwanese startups to become Taiwan’s potential new Unicorns.
Our Co-Founder, Paddy Tan with fellow speakers
Our Co-Founder, Paddy Tan was cordially invited as a speaker for the following sessions:
- Keynote Presentation: Corporate Acceleration! The Best Way to Scale Up the Business
- Panel discussion: Corporate Innovation x Acceleration x Success Metrics
- Workshop: Go-to-market – How to expand into Southeast Asia?
- Roundtable discussion to discuss related matters in a small group
Below is a quick summary of the event.
Keynote Presentation: Corporate Acceleration! The Best Way to Scale Up the Business
Our Co-Founder, Paddy was giving the keynote presentation
The art of scaling requires some mastery as companies do not grow by themselves. During the keynote presentation, Paddy Tan, Co-Founder of Blackstorm Consulting, mentioned that scaling a business is not equivalent to just growing a business, it is the firm’s ability to grow the revenue proportionally while keeping operating costs low. Key factors that need to be taken into account when scaling are understanding the target market, controlling the cash flow, having strong internal control and ensuring the team have required skills and attitude that support the growth. He also discussed about how one can scale their businesses through various methods such as: market penetration, introduction of new products and having new target market exposure.
Workshop: Go-To-Market – How to Expand into Southeast Asia?
The event venue with participants
This workshop was a masterclass specially catered to the managers from the accelerator. Many startups from Taiwan are looking into expanding or locate their office in Southeast Asia (SEA) region but do not understand the market environment of the foreign countries, particularly the rules and regulations. Hence, they are reluctant to move out of local market. The key reasons of the aforementioned problem are such as tedious planning, high cost and lack of know-how.
In this workshop, Paddy also mentioned the few key essentials – capability and capacity, talents, funds and market demand, which are required to scale into Southeast Asia. The projection of the statistical numbers in Southeast Asia will not tell you much about Southeast Asia. Because, Southeast Asia is one of the promising markets and yet a fragmented one. Paddy also mentioned a few key points to take note of while working with Southeast Asian partners. Other than Singapore, Southeast Asia is not well known for enforcing IP rights. To add on, fraud rate can be unexpectedly high in ASEAN as well.
Entering into SEA market can be difficult to some because to scale effectively in this region, founders need to be acquainted with different local user behaviours and problems, as well as identify some key barriers to entry such as regulatory hurdles.
Roundtable Discussion
Our Co-Founder, Paddy was participating in a roundtable discussion
There were a lot of questions being raised during the roundtable discussion. Some of the interesting questions that were being discussed are:
- How should one conduct a startup due diligence exercise?
- How can one measure the success rate of a programme?
- How can one utilise/host a Demo Day?
- How can one raise awareness for fundraising?
Our Observations
Throughout the event, we have observed that many Taiwanese startups are considering opening offices in Singapore for the SEA market due to reasons such as the strong IP protection, similarities in culture, larger pool of investors and the strategic gateway to other parts of SEA countries.
Most of the startups are working on frontier technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI). Many of them are seeking for local partners that can help them with the establishment of network in SEA, which will allow them to be more efficient in capturing a new market.
All in all, we advise startups who are keen to create or expand footprint in SEA to do more homework and understand the markets before executing as practices of countries within SEA can be very different. Rules and regulations of desired target markets have to be taken seriously as this is a common factor that confuses foreign companies. Getting local partners or help from local expert will greatly shorten the market-entry process, avoiding evitable obstacles.
About BlackStorm Consulting
BlackStorm Consulting (http://blackstormco.asia/) is a boutique growth consultancy firm that specialises in corporate strategy, profit management and investment management. We mainly serve clients in four sectors: FinTech, Gaming, Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT), and Manufacturing.
Our clients and connections are internationally present and range from small and medium sized businesses, MNCs, to government agencies.
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