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September 16, 2015

How Tech is Disrupting China and India

By Rich Tehrani, Group Editor-in-Chief, TMC

The number of tech companies doing well and being launched is greater than at any time in history. Facebook (News - Alert) recently crossed the $250 billion valuation mark only three years following its IPO – a record. Moreover, it’s actually disrupting Google (News - Alert) through its absolutely massive reach and the fact it’s woven into all our lives. Most recently, it’s launched an advertising network, has seen meteoric increases in video views, and now wants to get a piece of the music video business. Google – although still considered a search monopoly – has to fight the social media king in areas which were defensible just a few short years ago.



Google has its hands in so many markets you could actually consider it to have its own GDP on par with countries. And if the former can be disrupted, so can the latter.

China, for all its power and global dominance, will see massive competition from 3D printing. As the technology gets better, 3D printers at homes and in regional distribution centers and even delivery vans will take a bite out of China’s GDP. Couple this with decreased energy prices in the U.S. and more efficient factories due to the industrial Internet of Things, and you can expect pain in large parts of Asia in the next five to 10 years.

India, for all its muscle as an IT outsourcing powerhouse, is seeing its dominance in the market wane thanks to cloud. Companies are relying on the cloud to do a lot of the back office  work they used to rely on these companies for. Here is a salient excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:

David Smoley, AstraZeneca’s technology chief, said he expects to cut in half the $750 million the drug maker used to spend annually on outsourcing over the next two years. He said the number of people working on information technology also would drop by 50 percent.

Outsourcing accounts for around 20 percent of India’s exports of goods and services – a huge number, and one which is at risk of continued decrease thanks to tech disruption.

We are at an unprecedented time in history thanks to technology. If you happened to catch Hillary Clinton’s speech recently you heard her talk about how the “gig economy” is responsible for eliminating worker benefits. Once again, tech is disrupting something established – this time, the relationship between employers and workers. Sites like elance have been doing this for years, ditto for eBay (News - Alert), but it seems we have reached critical mass with the success of Uber, Lyft, and others.

In conclusion – tech does what it does best – it disrupts and allows new companies to take on established ones. By the time you read this you are likely also taking advantage of Amazon Prime Day – a fictitious holiday invented by Bezos and company to celebrate the company’s anniversary and offer deals better than those provided on Black Friday (News - Alert). Of course Wal-Mart was forced to respond – to essentially offer a major sale day on, get this, the anniversary of Amazon’s first sale!

And that, my friends, is how disruption works. It allows new companies and new technologies to do things that keep the leaders of established companies and now, countries, awake at night. Tech is agnostic – there are no sacred industries or monopolies. It will continue to change the way we shop, eat, ride, share, and purchase our products and services.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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