As Bangladesh’s economy opens up, the talent that has left to work overseas are returning. And they are bringing in training, education and different business models that they are exposed to

Investors looking for the next rising star in Asia can look to Bangladesh, a market that isn’t quite on the venture capital radar as of yet, often overshadowed by its more established peers such as India.

On closer inspection, Bangladesh holds great potential to become the next tech frontier, with a small but vibrant startup community working hard to make life easier for the everyday Bangladeshi.

Why Bangladesh?

Bangladesh has had incredible economic growth, with gross domestic product reaching 8 percent last year. Its wealth to-date has been built on two main industries – garment production and overseas remittance.

It is the 8th largest country in the world by population – with a total population of 170 million, living in a country which is only the size of the state of New York. It is not just one of the densest countries in the world, but Dhaka, with 20 million people, is one of the densest cities in the world.

The mobile penetration continues to rise, and mobile internet penetration with it – slating to reach 41 per cent of the population by 2025.

Urbanisation is happening rapidly, and Dhaka’s infrastructure is bursting at the seams. With traffic moving at 7 kilometres an hour and only 3,000 buses plying the roads, the city is in dire need of transportation that is efficient, safe and cheap.

While commuters in Southeast Asia are already familiar with Grab and Gojek, the concept of ride-sharing was completely foreign to Bangladeshis back in 2016.

The idea that someone will pick you up at your doorstep and drop you off at your destination was completely unheard of. The cultural issue of sitting on a stranger’s bike, in a moderate Muslim country, was also pronounced – especially for women.

2015 saw the emergence of ride-hailing solutions in Bangladesh. What this also led to was a cultural and mindset change on how people were ready to commute. It also led to more jobs and hunger to tech talent in the country. Other industries like ecommerce, food delivery, fintech were soon to follow.

Bangladesh has around 90.501 million internet users, as of August 2018. So, ecommerce has huge opportunity to grow here.

With the improvement of living standard and fast-pace of bust urban life shopping behaviour of the consumers have shifted greatly.

One of the growing opportunities is secured payment technologies. It is most crucial for creating a positive mindset amongst the people towards e-commerce.

The most popular mode of payment for customers is still cash on delivery (COD) for ecommerce transactions, as customers are usually uncomfortable completing their transactions by using Digital Payment methods.

Currently in Bangladesh, the volume of e-commerce transactions is about Taka 1700 Crore per year (US$260 million). Still, around 90 per cent of e-commerce transactions are done on COD basis. To get the most out of e-commerce, the amount of online payment needs to be increased.

The startup environment in Bangladesh is nascent but very active, with 200 startups slated to launch every year, most of which are in e-commerce and software development, in a country of 170 million people.

With government-led initiatives like Startup Bangladesh which was launched in 2018, it is encouraging to see more support for entrepreneurship as a viable career choice and in promoting Bangladesh as a global hub for tech entrepreneurship.

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Bangladesh is on its journey to become a Digital Nation. The “Vision 2021” of the present government aims to develop Bangladesh into a resourceful and modern economy through efficient use of information and communication technology.

Along with rapid internet adoption, tech savvy young generation, the commitment from the leaders is the most positive sign to build up a successful startup economy.

Key opportunity areas

Some startups have already made significant strides within Bangladesh. ShopUp, for instance, assists Facebook shop owners by providing services such as deliveries, shop management and loans. It secured an additional US$1.5 million^[5] in funding this year from Sequoia.

Deligram provides ecommerce service to rural consumers have recently secured 3 million in funding.

PraavaHealth, a telemedicine startup aiming to raise healthcare standards in Bangladesh, opened its first family health centre in Dhaka in 2017.

E-commerce is another pillar that is growing steadily in Bangladesh. Players like ajkerdeal.com or deligram.com, have in their own played a key role in growing the online experience, which again was nascent in this part of the world till a few years ago.

But as a fairly new entrant in Asia’s startup scene, some challenges remain. Bangladesh is an undercapitalised market – while there is abundant funding for seed stage and early-stage startups, later stage funding is hard to come from local investors.

Like for any growing industry, talent always remains an issue. Tech professionals always prefer their stable, high-paying jobs over joining startups, so good talent is hard to come by. Convincing them to make the switch is an uphill task.

Our startups are also very new to the nature of their work, figuring things out as they go along. That said, the startup community is closely-knit and are constantly sharing ideas. There isn’t a lot of competition as each startup is solving problem sets that are not only unique but are extensive.

And as Bangladesh’s economy opens up, the talent that has left to work overseas are returning. And they are bringing in training, education and different business models that they are exposed to.

Also Read: 36 crucial lessons I learned as a first-time manager

There isn’t a formal startup body that supports local founders as yet. But Bangladesh’s startup community frequently engages the local government in conversations about funding and investing in a local ecosystem.

A few local accelerators have also sprung up training first-time founders. The government is adamant in providing an environment for startups to thrive: it has built two high-tech parks, with three more coming on by 2020.

South Asia is increasingly becoming a hotspot for high growth, with growing interest from Chinese, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asian investors like Alibaba, Tencent, Openspace Ventures and more, who have been actively looking at South Asian startups, especially Bangladesh in recent years.

It only goes to show that it is a matter of time before Bangladesh achieves the success Southeast Asia is experiencing right now.

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The author of the above is Hussain Elius, CEO & Co-Founder, Pathao.

Photo by rabby ahmed on Unsplash

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PolicyStreet is joining the list of only 32 other Approved Financial Advisors in Malaysia

Malaysian insurtech startup PolicyStreet today announced that it has secured an approval from the country’s central bank Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) to conduct general and Islamic financial advisory (FA) business.

With the approval, the company can now source, aggregate, compare, customise and finally advise individual consumers and businesses of the best insurance products for their needs.

It is also able to work directly with all 47 life and general insurance and takaful providers in Malaysia.

In a press statement, PolicyStreet CEO Lee Yen Ming explained that the company initially wanted to apply for a sandbox programme, to trial the aggregation of insurance products. But it later discovered that it has fulfilled all the requirements for a full FA approval.

“With this approval, we are not bound by restrictions to advise customers on which insurance products to obtain based on their circumstances. We often find that insurance providers tend to have many competing products that cater to different segments of customers. For example, Insurer A might offer a life product suited for customers above 40 years old and insurer B on the other hand offers a more compelling life product for the younger customers aged below 30 years old,” Lee wrote.

Also Read: Malaysian insurtech startup PolicyStreet wins Seedstars Kuala Lumpur

“Aggregation will not enable us to advise the right products to different target customers but FA will. We want to advise customers without prejudice and we will marry technology and innovation to remove ‘fats’ in the ecosystem by driving transparency and simplicity in insurance,” the CEO stressed.

In two years of its operations, PolicyStreet said that it has underwritten over MYR400 million (US$100 million) in sum assured and sold more than 10,000 policies.

It has raised US$500,000 in seed funding from KK Fund and was a recipient of a government grant from Cradle Fund.

With this approval, the company is joining the list of only 32 other Approved Financial Advisers in Malaysia.

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Image Credit: PolicyStreet

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The new US$100M fund aims to invest in 60 new companies with an initial check size of about US$500K

Wavemaker Partners, Southeast Asia’s leading early-stage VC firm focussed on enterprise and deep-tech startups, today announced the first close of its third fund at US$60 million.

The firm targets to make the final close at US$100 million.

Blue chip institutions such as Pavilion Capital, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Temasek invested in the fund together with the family offices of the Co-founders of Microsoft (Vulcan) and Facebook (EE Capital). Other investors include Singapore’s Keppel Corporation, multi-family office Aglaia Family Office, and Lance Gokongwei, CEO of top Philippine conglomerate JG Summit Holdings.

The new fund aims to invest in 60 new companies with an initial check size of about US$500,000.

Also Read: Why Bangladesh is the next frontier for tech investment

Paul Santos, Managing Partner for Wavemaker Partners Southeast Asia, said in a blog post titled ​Conviction & Momentum​. “Most VCs in Southeast Asia invest in consumer tech, and we’re grateful to have had our share of consumer success with Luxola (acquired by LVMH) and Coins.ph (acquired by Gojek).”

“However, 88 out the 109 investments we’ve made since 2012 have been in enterprise and deep tech startups (about 81 per cent). This is where we’ve built our experience, expertise, and network. This is where our conviction and momentum have grown. With this new fund, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to continue to work with many of the best enterprise and deep tech founders in the region,” he added.

Wavemaker has built a wide-ranging portfolio across industry verticals (e.g. financial services, healthcare, food/agriculture), horizontal processes (e.g. HR, sales & marketing, cybersecurity), and technologies (AI, IoT, additive manufacturing). Companies that have received funding from the VC firm include Zilingo​, ThinCI​, Moka,​ and ​CashShield​. Other companies showing promising traction include L​ynk​, Wavecell,​ Red Dot Payment,​ ​Structo,​ ​Growsari,​ ​Igloohome​, and Silent Eight.​

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There was a significant drop off in visits between the first two platforms and Zalora

Three companies have consistently dominated the Philippine e-commerce market for the last two years since iPrice Group tracked e-commerce platforms’ monthly web visits and social media following in 2017: Lazada, Shopee, and Zalora.

Lazada scored a total average visit (desktop and mobile web) of 25,652,100 during the first quarter of the year, followed by Shopee with 15,373,900 and Zalora with 1,669,400. Argomall and eBay rounded up the top five list with 1,290,500 and 896,900 desktop and mobile web visits, respectively.

Lazada, Shopee and Zalora also emerged on top in a research done by iPrice Group in partnership with app analytics firm App Annie Intelligence on the most visited mobile applications in Q1 2019.

The question is why? And, perhaps, more importantly, how?

Lazada reigns supreme

While it is no surprise that Lazada’s hefty backing from giant Chinese company, Alibaba, has put it at an advantage in terms of having a solid war chest to support business strategies, the key to the company’s success lies in its ability to innovate and quickly adapt to its clients’ needs.

Lazada’s performance and its recent initiatives suggest that it understands its consumers: a fun, youthful generation adept in technology, constantly connected via social media, and always on the go.

To reach this market in the Philippines, the e-commerce company launched LazMall, in a bid to draw more attention to its mobile app with attractive shopping and entertaining content.

Launched in August 2018, we believe this additional feature played a pivotal role in helping it achieve the top spot in the country both in terms of total visits on desktop (and mobile web) and with the highest monthly active users on its app.

Harnessing the power of digital technology and pop culture appeal, Lazada created in-app games, i.e. Fruit Slash, Birthday Blast and Popping Balloons to keep users entertained for its week-long 7th birthday celebrations last March.

Winners were given redeemable vouchers as rewards. Also, the company staged a Super Party in Jakarta, Indonesia last March 27 featuring international popstar Dua Lipa and Ms. Universe 2015 Pia Wurtzbach.

It live streamed the concert to allow more customers from all over Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, to be part of the celebrations.

Lazada reported that by the time it wrapped up its week-long celebration, it had garnered over 318 million visits to its platform. The Super Party drew 12 million views both in-app and on television, while a total of 2.5 million people played the games.

Also Read: Why Bangladesh is the next frontier for tech investment

No wonder App Annie registered the highest monthly active users via mobile apps for Lazada in the Philippines in Q1 2019. Its e-commerce platform also ranked highest in terms of total average visits on desktop and mobile web during the first quarter.

Shopee catches up

Meanwhile, Shopee consistently plays second fiddle to its key competitor with roughly 15.4 million visits to its e-commerce platform in Q1 2019. App Annie also ranks it second in mobile app visits.

Despite being among the youngest platforms in the Philippines, Shopee has become one of the fastest growing e-commerce company in the country and in the Southeast Asian region.

It continues to expand its online catalogue of products from the current three million listings, according to Shopee’s regional marketing head, and does well in increasing its brand recall and maintaining its edge over other international and local players.

Shopee placed second in the most number of social media followers (14.4 million on Facebook, 294,400 on Instagram and 17,500 on Twitter) based on iPrice Group’s data.

This e-commerce player can be expected to catch up fast on innovations to increase its market share, as funder Sea is raising up to $1.5 billion to support its businesses.

Techcrunch reported last March that “Sea would use the capital for ‘business expansion and other general corporate purposes.”

Given that Sea’s main focus recently is Shopee, majority of the funds will likely be allocated to the e-commerce company.

Local faces for Zalora

Landing third place in the list is Zalora, as it tailors its marketing strategies to suit the Filipino fashion style and win more loyal followers.

More than just offering designs from global brands, it has partnered with Philippines’ fashion and social media icons Georgina Wilson-Burnand, Isabelle Daza-Semblat, Liz Uy, and Solenn Heussaff-Bolzico for an exclusive collection under the label, the__edit.

Interestingly, it grabbed second place in the most number of Twitter followers (29,000) and ranked third for Facebook (7,719,000) and Instagram (181,800).

Adopting a local face is a boost to the brand, allowing it to appeal to the novel Filipino aesthetics and fashion sense.

Popular US, Chinese apps 

Finally, securing the fourth and fifth spot as most visited mobile apps based on App Annie’s data are Amazon and AliExpress.

E-commerce empire, Amazon, has penetrated markets around the world. In the Philippines, customers turn to this company for products not available locally.

Similarly, Chinese e-commerce companies such as AliExpress are becoming prominent in the Asian region considering its proximity and its readiness to offer products not available in the Philippine market.

Its strong performance can also be attributed to the increasing popularity of Chinese sale events such as 11.11 or the Singles’ Day in November.

The Philippines has a total population of 107 million and 71% of which has access to the internet and social media based on Hootsuite and We Are Social’s 2019 digital report.

Also Read: Manny Pacquiao endorses celebrity-curated licensing marketplace

As the country further develops its technology infrastructure—increasing internet speed and connectivity—it promises exponential growth for e-commerce businesses to flourish in the coming years.

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Please click on one of the links below to view the data in detail for each country. More findings in the overall Map of E-commerce Report for Q1 2019.  

We are always happy to share our insights with our clients, the press, academia and more. Should you decide to utilise our data or visuals, please attribute us by including this sentence “From the Map of E-commerce, iPrice Group, April 2019” with a hyperlink to one of these URLs: 

Indonesia: https://iprice.co.id/insights/mapofecommerce/en/  

Vietnam: https://iprice.vn/insights/mapofecommerce/en/ 

Thailand: https://ipricethailand.com/insights/mapofecommerce/en/ 

Philippines: https://iprice.ph/insights/mapofecommerce/en/ 

Malaysia: https://iprice.my/insights/mapofecommerce/ 

Singapore: https://iprice.sg/insights/mapofecommerce/ 

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One trick? Don’t make them supply their own office supplies

To survive and thrive in the 21st century, many businesses are finding it necessary to pivot to a remote work model where their employees are free to achieve from the comfort of their living rooms.

Despite the increased reliance on remote workers we’ve witnessed across the market recently, some entrepreneurs and established corporate professionals don’t know where to begin when it comes to adapting the company structure for remote workers.

Attracting and retaining the best remote workers, in particular, is proving nearly impossible for some business owners.

Here’s how to make your business irresistible to remote workers, and what you’ll need to do to keep them around in the long run.

Give remote workers what they need to succeed

It should go without saying that you need to give your remote workers the tech they need to succeed, yet many businesses are still expecting remote workers to supply themselves with office equipment.

While this may seem like a nifty way of cutting down on the costs of doing business, you’re really harming yourself in the long run by restraining your remote workers’ ability to get their hands on the tech they need to stay in constant contact with you.

If communication isn’t regularly maintained, remote work schemes quickly break down, so it’s imperative that you invest thoroughly in the tech you’ll be giving to your employees.

You should take some time to read up on the best tech tools that are changing the world of remote work if you want to avoid wasting your money on a shoddy investment that produces lackluster results.

Sometimes, you’ll need to look at what others in the marketplace are doing to make the right call yourself and figuring out how other companies are outfitting their remote workers is a great way to get your own remote work program rolling if you’ve been having a rough start.

Besides giving employees the tech they’ll need to stay in touch with their managers and collaborate with one another effectively, you also need to focus on training them in necessary areas while fostering a positive company culture.

Learning how to train remote workers

You’ll quickly discover that training remote workers is fundamentally different than training traditional employees. Besides the fact that remote workers demand digital training procedures thanks to their distant nature, they’ll also need special guidance from managers when it comes to steering them towards profitability.

Learning how to train remote workers begins with modifying your existing training regime to accommodate a remote workforce and developing specific training regimes from there.

Also Read: Malaysia’s PolicyStreet gets central bank approval for financial advisory

All the money you spend training your workers will be wasted if you don’t have a positive company culture which values their efforts and makes it clear that their contributions to the team are highly valued, however.

This is why it’s imperative you don’t get too caught up in running constant training exercises and instead focus on instilling a culture of continuous learning where workers should never feel ashamed to ask for help or begin nurturing an underdeveloped skill.

You need to help them with the loneliness

If you really want your business to be irresistible to remote workers, you need to work hard to help them with the loneliness that’s a natural part of the equation when it comes to remote work.

Staying away from others and working from the comfort of your bedroom has serious perks, and not just their ability to avoid work injury.

Employees who are remote workers are often much more efficient than their traditional counterparts and must necessarily be self-starters who can manage themselves to some extent.

Nonetheless, remote work can be lonely and result in worker burnout much faster than traditional employment schemes, so companies that don’t work hard to destress their workers and make them feel appreciated will soon suffer the consequences.

If you’re committed to avoiding burnout culture and helping your remote workers succeed, you should take some time to learn about how you can help them avoid burnouts and retain robust social lives despite their remote employment status.

Also Read: Why Bangladesh is the next frontier for tech investment

Often, constant communication is the key to success, as managers who leave remote workers to wallow by themselves are effectively setting them up for failure. Making sure that your team leaders are still constantly engaging with your workers is one of the most important elements of making your business irresistible to remote workers, who will come to value the compassion your company demonstrates.

Finally, don’t think you can stiff remote workers just because they’re not in the office. Many entrepreneurs view remote workers as a means to trim down their workforce and save money, but the idea that you shouldn’t fairly compensate someone because they’re not working on your office but instead are at home is absurd.

Companies which stiff remote workers will soon have more than a strike on their hands – they’ll have a tarnished reputation. Keep your pay rates attractive and competitive, and you’ll soon find the doors of your business being flooded by remote workers seeking employment.

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Photo by Anton Shuvalov on Unsplash

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