For years, I’ve wanted to go to Davos, and last week finally got my chance – sort of -- by participating in the so-called Summer Davos in Dalian. Wrapping up Silicon Dragon Shanghai, I caught a China Eastern flight to the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, exaggeratedly referred to as the San Francisco of China. It was unfortunately covered with thick smog rather than fog while I was there.
I was a facilitator for one of the World Economic Forum's workshop sessions, focused on the impact that digital Asian brands can have globally. Sadly, one of our key panelists, ex-
Leading the break-out groups on social media and mobile were documentary filmmaker and entrepreneur Tan Siok Siok, advertising exec Carol Potter from BBDO China, NTT DoCoMo board member and guest professor Takeshi Natsuno and Shang Junjie, a vice dean at Peking University. They huddled with session participants to mull over the success factors and readiness of Asian digital brands to go global, then reported their key conclusions, which I summarized for the full group. Here's some of the talking points.
While several leading tech companies from the region have gone global such as Tencent’s WeChat, Lenovo and Korea’s Cyworld, it is still going to be a stretch for most to go far beyond their national borders. Besides the obvious cultural and linguistic barriers, the general view is that there is a lack of managerial talent to help these brands expand internationally. Going regional is seen as more realistic, with China's search leader
Moreover, the consensus is that Asian brands overall are still regarded as inferior to their Western counterparts – a view I don’t necessarily agree with. The trend today is that Asian tech brands are leading some innovations in mobile and social media, partly due to the pace of change, fierce local competition, no legacy products, and huge, fast-growing domestic markets. That is quite the reverse of a decade ago, when the copy-to-China phenomenon of western tech ideas was full blown.
Ten years in the fast-moving digital Asia market is a generation elsewhere. You can check out more of our conclusions from the wall graphics that were drawn on the white board as each point was made and dissected.
These lively, interactive sessions are one of the hallmarks of the World Economic Forum, which attracts world leaders in business, politics, science and technology to its annual conference in the Swiss Alps. The summer Davos did not disappoint, although I was expecting a stronger China business leader contingent among the crowds.
It's clear that the host city of Dalian is definitely looking to the future. The conference was held in the city's ultra-modern, massive new conference center next to the sea and not far from a row of construction sites, a familiar site for China travelers.
