Winter in Sydney is very different from the winter portrayed in the Game of Thrones television series but I get the feeling that the competition for online consumers is going to get as brutal and bloody in the next year or so, and travel will be caught up in the quest for the Iron Throne.
In Sydney, even on a winter’s day, you can take a dip
The two days I was in Sydney, the sun shone and the sky was blue but storm clouds are definitely brewing in the game of ecommerce and travel, one of the biggest sectors, will not be spared.
Scale and might are going to matter even more as Chinese dragons and Asian unicorns battle with global elephants for market share in every sector of ecommerce.
Grab raising US$2.5 billion from investors including Didi and Softbank to defeat Uber in South-east Asia is one such play; Expedia investing US$350m million for a minority investment in Indonesian OTA Traveloka for a grab of the South-east Asian travel market is a travel-specific move; Alibaba investing in payment platforms in India (Paytm) and TrueMoney, Thailand, signs of the Chinese giant spreading its tentacles into an area about to be disrupted bigtime, with everyone eyeing blockchain technology as the next big disruptive force in peer-to-peer services.
At Techsauce held in Bangkok late July, investors remarked tongue-in-cheek that South-east Asia was becoming a Chinese colony. The American titans are not to be left out. The launch of Amazon Prime Now in Singapore, heralding its entry into South-east Asia, was so awaited by residents that the site crashed within 48 hours, and signs appeared saying delivery was unavailable. Rumours flew that Amazon had to resort to taxi drivers to cope with delivery orders.
e27 reported that Amazon set a new 24-hour download mark for Singapore, stating “the app was downloaded 2,500 times via the Apple Store on its launch day, which App Annie says is “at least as big” as Facebook’s highest day in 2017 (May 7).”
Whether this is the novelty effect " Singaporeans love to flock to anything that’s new and then move on to the next big thing " remains to be seen but it is clear Amazon will shake up the already cut-throat competitive ecommerce scene in this tiny city of 5.6 million consumers.
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