In a country with a 21% internet penetration rate where the average citizen makes roughly US$3.26 per day, is it prudent to sell avocados for the equivalent of $7 online?
One Wharton School of Business educated entrepreneur has found that it is indeed.
Waseem Alim, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Silicon Valley veteran, recently moved back to his native Bangladesh and co-founded Chaldal, a Dhaka-based e-commerce company. The online platform provides users with the ability to get various necessities of everyday life – groceries, baby care, cosmetics and more – delivered directly to their house or office.
Emerging Frontiers’s Baldwin Berges recently spoke with Waseem about how a Dhaka-raised individual ends up at an Ivy League business school in Philadelphia, heads to Silicon Valley to build a product used by over 500,000 people, then decides to leave his career to move back to Bangladesh and co-found an upstart e-commerce business.
While Chaldal is competing in certain segments against Bangladesh’s ‘big names’ in horizontal e-tailing like HotOfferBD and ClickBD, they are carving out a decidedly more niche vertical by focusing on fast and efficient home delivery of daily essentials. Such a service undoubtedly lends itself more to the luxury spectrum in Bangladesh, but a growing number of entrepreneurs forming new businesses catering to this consumer class speaks to its exceptional potential.
Although still in nascent stages across the Indian subcontinent, grocery e-tailing has started gaining serious traction across the region in recent years. Most notably, India’s large online grocer, Big Basket, just secured a $32 million funding round in September 2014. Local mobile apps modeled on the likes of Instacart and Postmates, are also beginning to crop up across south Asia.
Bangladesh all too often makes headlines for all the wrong reasons such as ferries sinking, factories collapsing, or political instability. But what isn’t talked about is that the economy – set to register growth in excess of 6% in 2015 – exhibits many encouraging signs driven in large part by the country’s positioning as the world's second-largest ready-made garments exporter, and complimented by an expanding volume of foreign remittances. Recent government efforts in courting investors to diversify its manufacturing base into low-end electronics and automobile assembly could provide a further boost.
Most importantly though, as Kevin learned recently on his trip to the Digital World Tech Conference in Dhaka, the country has a growing technology scene that is seeing an infusion of investment from Silicon Valley and venture capital firms worldwide.
Yet Dhaka’s chaotic roads with seemingly endless traffic logjams coupled with frequent power supply interruptions are taking a toll on the country’s GDP, reducing growth by an estimated 1-2% annually.
But it can also be said that these structural problems allow businesses such as Chaldal to thrive, while also adding convenience to the lives of the growing consumer class in Dhaka.
The country might still be ‘off the radar’ for many – even the ubiquitous German start-up maker Rocket Internet only has one company (FoodPanda) here. But the future is bright for Bangladesh’s burgeoning tech scene. With the world's eighth largest population, an evolving economy, an engaged diaspora, and other basic ingredients needed to build the next South Asian tech hub all firmly present, success stories like Waseem’s will surely be multiplied in the very near future.
Here’s a nice video overview of other facets of Bangladesh’s tech scene.
“There will be experiential growth in smart phone segment in South Asia driven by India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh,” Rajiv Mishra, vice president communication and media, south west Asia, Samsung Electronics said.
“These four markets are important and emerging markets where per capita income is on rise and people want to shift from feature phone to smart phone,”
“If you compare the growth rate of these markets to any other developed market, you will find that the growth percentage is very high.”
The total mobile market which comprise feature phone and smart phones will now experience a major shift from feature to smart. Many companies who are in the mobile phone business, introduce added features, longer life battery and developed camera facilities to smart phones to stay competitive in the business.
Smartphones have an operating system which can run many applications, similar to a small computer, while remaining connected to the internet compared to so-called feature phones which are now in wide use.
Samsung says, its strategy is to keep on investing in development and research.
‘About 7 percent of our top line is on research and development (R&D) more than 14 billion dollars of our expenditure was on R&D, last year,”Mishra told.
“We have 36 research and development centers all across the globe and we have three centers in south Asia.”
He was speaking to LBO at the launch of Samsung’s newest smart phones, GALAXY S6 and GALAXY S6 edge which will be available in Sri Lanka from mid April 2015.
“Sri Lanka is an extremely important market for us, and it is growing,” Mishra told.
“If you look at Samsung strategy, we are everywhere in range of price, we start from 50 dollars or 100 dollars and goes to even 1000 dollars,”
“So a market like Sri Lanka is a match for us.”
Sri Lanka’s mobile phone sales reached one million unities in the third quarter of 2014 while smart phone shipment up by 100 percent which accounts for 20 percent of the total sales, a market report said.
“Sri Lanka mobile handset shipments continue to show consistent growth in both the Feature phones as well as Smartphone segments, making it among very few South East Asian markets where growth was seen in both segments,” said CyberMedia Research, a Market Intelligence and Advisory firm in its report.
The report says the market grew 11 percent in unit shipment terms, quarter-on-quarter (3Q CY 2014 versus 2Q CY 2014), and 43 percent growth year on year. Smart phones segment up 100 percent to 0.2 million units while feature phones up by 33 percent to 0.8 million units year on year.
In the smartphone market segment, Samsung leaders with a 20.6 market share followed by E-Tel with 17.7 percent market share.
Huawei accounts for 14.3 percent in the market.
Sri Lanka feature phone shipments reached 0.8 million units in the quarter. Nokia had a market share of 25.7 percent in the quarter, followed by Micromax (20.1 percent) share.
About 6.8 million people in the world use smart devices and about 20 percent of the population use smart devices in Sri Lanka data showed.
