Connectivity will help firms prosper as Asean integrates

“The common market would create one of the most populous free-trade markets in the world. By seizing opportunities provided by new technology, we will all gain,” Adaire Fox-Martin, president of SAP Asia-Pacific Japan, said in a World Economic Forum blog.

Fox-Martin foresees a bright future for Asean thanks to the free-trade agreement and the Asean Economic Community (AEC), which will create integration that benefits millions of businesses and people.

Asean experienced growth in the use of new technologies thanks to physical infrastructure improvement, and now technology is involving everybody, he said.

One beneficiary of this trend has been Pajak, a small village in the Philippines famous for its fine, handcrafted guitars. Thanks to budget airlines and the development of better infrastructure in the country, tourists and connoisseurs are able to visit Pajak to personally purchase the instruments. The buyers come away happy and the guitar makers are better off. 

In the near future, an online market and an industry can be created to connect local, self-employed craftsmen with hundreds of buyers in the region. Pajak is an example of the potential for a common Asean market – and how technology can help.

Fox-Martin said the planned railway network on the Indo-Chinese peninsula would facilitate trade within Asean and provide an easy way for locally-made products to reach Europe, the Mid-East and Africa. Enterprise resource planning applications can help better manage needs in this vast market, and software and sensors of the “Internet of Things” would provide intelligent support to help monitor and coordinate the railway in the future. 

More SMEs will move to the cloud, where they can share data with lower IT costs due to pay-per-use pricing. Employees can benefit from the flexibility of working from different locations.