When I talk with people about Asia in general – and specifically China – there is this widespread idea of a dystopian universe, quite backward and clogged in smog. But when I fly back to Italy, I find myself in a country that no matter how advanced fancies itself to be, seems hell bent on making growth impossible at an infrastructural level, regardless the enormous quantity of talent, creativity and entrepreneurship.
This is where the idea of this monthly space comes from. We want to share a perspective of what happens in Asia Pacific, provide a slightly wider context to the – partially truthful, let’s be honest – dystopian perception, and maybe offer interesting stimuli to the Italian creative and entrepreneurial universe.
China, the DIY Country.
This piece from CNBC, appeared on my Twitter feed the other day: consultancy PwC officially acknowledged how China has moved beyond its copycat reputation. It’s a statement that brings to the news what was investigated in the book “The End Of Copycat China” back in 2014. There is no space to talk about the radically different idea of “copying” in Chinese culture (and many people have done it way better than I could), but it’s a good starting point to see where this alleged copying is taking the country.
To do this, there is no better example than WeChat: what was dismissed as a WhatsApp rip-off is today China’s OS, through whom you can chat, interact with brands, build a business (via in-app applications), and exchange money. WeChat pay is used by 93% of the people for offline purchases in Tier 1&2 cities in China.
WeChat is just an example, Alibaba has his own digital paying system that is just as big, and in today’s China paying digitally is so normal even beggars accept mobile payment. Yet, these figures and the beggars factoid are not mind-blowing for their sheer size: they are because of their impact on the overall economy of the country.
Think about smartphones: by 2020 China will have a 70% penetration of smartphones (from less than 50 in 2014), thanks to the growth of affordable brands like Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi and Huawei. The diffusion of hardware paired with the breadth of services offered via software is a massive opportunity: mobile devices and ways to seamlessly collect payment make everyone a potential entrepreneur, even in the most remote and rural regions.
Suddenly, no business model is too niche: recently, in Beijing, I hired someone to go and stand in line for me at a busy restaurant through WeChat. This anecdote is just a small example: China’s Prime Minister Xi declared that technology has created 70 percent of all new jobs in 2016. On top of that, estimates indicates that one third of China population will be self-employed by 2036.
This is a development partially created by what we mistook for censorship: by protecting its own companies and their growth, as they did with WeChat versus WhatsApp, the Chinese government has created the conditions for new infrastructures to be imagined where there was none – or where obsolete legacy ones existed.
On the other hand in Italy, creating a startup (already a hard talk in itself) means facing the additional challenge of widespread institutional disinterest: just take a look at the differences between Shenzhen (a city) and our whole country. There’s a Chinese expression that claims “do it yourself for your own prosperity”. Seems like the Chinese government is doing exactly that: giving people the opportunity to “do it” by themselves, whatever that means.
I think this is the point Italy could take out of this China example. You don’t have to physically build infrastructures to be successful, neither from a political nor from an business perspective: you just need to invest in an ecosystem that can think about how to to design those infrastructures differently. The outcome could be surprising.
About Luca Vergano:
Luca is a strategist. He has worked on marketing, comms and product & service design strategies in agencies like R/GA, TBWA\ and Leo Burnett. His work includes brands like Uber, Apple, Adidas, Nikon, McDonald’s, P&G and Unilever. He’s been based in APAC for the past five years