For the 113th episode of Burning Platform we host Gibu Mathew, VP and GM, Asia Pacific for Zoho. Like many other Zoho executives he boasts career longevity and a product development start in the company, He now has a field role in an important global location, Singapore.
One of our research agenda focus areas for 2024 is Re-globalization : “MNCs are rebalancing their country portfolios, there are new emerging Tiger countries growing at rapid pace, hyperscalers have made DevOps a global competency – and all this opens up new opportunities for software vendors and service providers, many of which have mostly focused on English speaking countries and back office functions”
I have previously interviewed Zoho regional leaders in the Middle East and Africa, in Latin America and in Europe (see here and here). So, I was excited to spend some time with Gibu at the recent ZohoDay event and I invited him to record the session below.
He makes several striking points
While most vendors include China, India, Japan, Australia, New Zealand in their definition of Asia Pac, Gibu’s territory is more focused on SE Asia, particularly the ASEAN countries and a few others like S. Korea, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Zoho does very well in these fast growing economies. Other executives focus on the other large markets.
Of course, with so many countries come the complexities of multiple languages, scripts, currencies and regulations. We discuss how Zoho internally prioritizes investments across so many applications, their platform and customizations unique to countries and his personal lobbying style within Zoho to ensure his regional customers are catered to.
He discusses how local economies are encouraging digitalization, especially in the SME sector. He discusses collaboration with agencies like IMDA in Singapore and DEVCON in the Philippines.
We discuss the advantages of being based in Singapore. The diverse talent pool, the impressive travel hub, the business friendly government, their incentives to do business with the region and a city state which redefines itself every few years with a changing globe are some of its unique characteristics.
It is a fascinating 25 minute conversation – as you can imagine we are talking about a wide range of markets - massive countries like Indonesia to tiny but affluent ones like Brunei.
