Home to over 663 million people, the ASEAN region offers one of the most promising markets for shared services. The growth of ‘sharing economy’ globally has been dramatic since early 2000s. Today, it is rapidly expanding across Southeast Asia, drawing the attention of tech-savvy consumers — with a global revenue projected to plateau at US$335 billion by 2025.
Often referred to as ‘collaborative consumption,’ this rising business model is undeniably attracting more and more Southeast Asian consumers. The outpour comes with one compelling reason — sharing services provides solutions to everyday problems that consumers have long been suffering from, particularly transportation and infrastructure chaos in major cities.
Generally, these innovative technologies help address inefficiencies in the market and underutilization of goods and services. Beyond this, the most successful shared economy business models have proven themselves as the biggest revenue accumulator, most dynamic job generator, and quite encouraging in fortifying old business enterprises and birthing new ones.
With governments overwhelmed by unprecedented disruptive innovations in the market, it is timely for business leaders, policy makers and state leaders to forge a collaboration to safeguard the potentials of this emerging business model. Especially that Southeast Asia, the world’s fourth largest internet market, remains a viable destination for internet-based and sharing services.
To address the vital role played by connectivity in achieving such progress, the ASEAN included it in its priority projects. Its connectivity plan aspires to succeed through a three-pronged strategy. It is geared to enhance physical infrastructure development (physical connectivity), boost effective institutions, mechanisms and processes (institutional connectivity) and empower people (people-to-people connectivity).
ASEAN’s rally towards building a sustainable infrastructure among its 10 member states could definitely benefit collaborative consumption since sharing services enterprises rely mainly on digital and physical infrastructure.
Due to the novelty of the ‘sharing economy,’ what can be said of its impact to the overall economy of our young ASEAN Economic Community? What are the next industries/sectors projected as most primed for this new way of living?
Integral to the development of this emerging market, today’s leading ASEAN game changers will tackle pragmatic approaches to harness the sharing economy’s potential and its implications to their fields by discussing their best practices and sharing how they have overcome hurdles in order to achieve a sustainable roadmap for the future.
ABIS 2017 is the biggest and most prestigious business event in ASEAN set to be a three-day conference presented by the ASEAN Business Advisory Council which will bring attention to the business, investment opportunities, global issues, and key strategic directions that impact on business opportunities for ASEAN member nations today.
To know more about this year’s ABIS, visit www.abis2017.com.
