Stone Co is a Brazilian company that is attempting to build a payment and financial services suite for merchants in +5,000 cities. And they are targeting the country’s +8M small merchants, many of whom still operate in cash and do not get great services from traditional banks. That is a big, interesting and difficult idea. […]
Stone Company in Brazil is a really interesting contrast to Ant Financial in China. And to Square in the USA. All three companies are somewhat trying to do the same thing: To build out an alternative payment platform for SMEs. And then to add additional platforms and services on top of that. It’s a big […]
Jeffrey Towson discusses the Chinese smart home company Tuya in this podcast. He shares his five questions for assessing the viability of a specialty ecommerce company and discusses Tuya’s strengths and weaknesses. Tuya is a leading provider of smart home solutions, with over 200,000 customers in over 200 countries. The company has been growing rapidly, but it faces competition from other Chinese companies, as well as from global players like Amazon and Google.
Jeffrey Towson’s article “How Do You Identify Cultures and Management Teams that Outperform?” explores the challenge of identifying cultures and management teams that will outperform operationally in digital businesses. The article details the six levels of competition for digital businesses and the most common outcome metrics that indicate relative competitive strength. The article also highlights the role of people in digital operating basics and digital marathons.
B2B and enterprise software / services is a big, new frontier in digital China / Asia. It is far behind the West but it’s an area a lot of venture capitalists have been focusing on. There is the argument that the B2C story of the past 10 years is fading. I don’t really buy that. […]
Singles’ Day is not just about e-commerce. It is also about user-facing innovation, such as live-streaming, metaverse, and NFTs. It is also about merchant-facing innovation, such as R&D and financing. And it is also about physical assets, such as supply-side scale and building a barrier to entry.
In Part 1, I made a distinction between the development of cloud and enterprise software. There is a sweeping new cloud architecture emerging at the same time almost every B2B enterprise software and service company is trying to become a platform or ecosystem. It’s pretty crazy. For enterprise software and services companies, the price of entry […]
In the past months, I’ve been looking at companies are on the enterprise and cloud side. As opposed to the B2C side, which is where China / Asia tends to be very advanced. As part of this, I recently did a podcast about the fight for “dominant design” in cloud. Snowflake, Tuya and the Fight […]
In this episode of the Tech Strategy podcast, Jeffrey Towson discusses the fight for dominant design in cloud computing with Snowflake and Tuya. Towson argues that Snowflake is building three complementary platforms with four network effects, while Tuya is building a platform for the Internet of Things (IoT). Towson believes that the winner of the cloud computing wars will be the company that can build the most comprehensive and integrated platform.
A subscriber suggested I look at Russian ecommerce company Ozon Holdings (OZON). It’s outside of Asia Tech Strategy, but I thought it was an interesting company. And it raises an important question about why some countries develop so much faster than others in ecommerce. And that is really the key question for Ozon going forward. […]