According to Garena, here’s how to conquer the Southeast Asian market

Garena’s Group President, Nick Nash. Photo credit : World Economic Forum

Starting with its gaming platform in 2009, Garena has steadily added feature extensions on its original platform by continuously making incredible breakthroughs in ecommerce, messaging and payments. Through these, Garena, a Singapore-based startup, has demonstrated both its outstanding capability and stronghold in Southeast Asia.

Its substantial robustness and competitiveness, however, comes as no surprise. By learning from its costly mistakes in the past, Garena has geared its business lines toward the right track within less than a decade of its operations.

Based on the talks delivered by Garena’s Nick Nash, there are four key issues of importance when attempting to conquer the Southeast Asian market; internal consolidation, pixel-level localization, pursuit of profit growth and integration of data. With these in mind, Garena is working to strengthen its business structure and complete a sustainable ecosystem here.

Internal consolidation

Instead of blindly diversifying your business lines to unrelated businesses, tightly integrating existing products should be top priority.

Undoubtedly, when immersing in a competitive landscape such as that in Southeast Asia, creating a coherent differentiation plays a vital role. The source of differentiation, nevertheless, should value add to one’s core business mission, rather than detract from it.

Garena, for instance, has no plans to launch new products since it has reached the maximum number it is able to handle, largely by paying attention to the optimization of existing business. The strategic focus, in fact, is to deepen its business in a compelling way and create a synergy between its various arms.

“Nowadays, you don’t find many families with four children or more. It’s challenging to have that many children and to give each of them as many resources and as much time as if you had three or less,” Nick shared at the RISE Conference. “Managing more than three business divisions is a similar dilemma.”

Pixel-level localization

Due to segmented geography and complicated historical issues, the alliance of Southeast Asian nations doesn’t significantly alleviate the burdens of operating businesses across countries. There exists diverse differences in cultures, lifestyles, and even shopping habits among not only countries, but neighboring cities. As a result, it becomes a challenge to appeal to customers from different countries.

Most notably, the low-resolution strategy, termed internally in Garena to describe the superficial understanding about a market, will not work efficiently in Southeast Asia, and could lead to putting in more effort and getting fewer results. Instead, resorting to a high-resolution strategy, or the ability to meticulously pinpoint the invisible distinctions, makes marketing campaigns more productive and helps marketers better discover potential demand.

Inevitably, the latter is far more costly in the short term. In the long-term, however, that could be the only way to capture the customer’s heart and cultivate loyal consumers.

Obviously, having noticed these obstacles, Garena has acted accordingly in response to them.

Pursuit of profit growth

Revenue and Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) are conventional measures that indicate the performance of a business, and are often used by investors as key indicators for investment.

As a result, it’s easy to fall into the trend of blindly chasing after the sheer volume of either revenue or GMV. These two metrics, in the eyes of Garena, do not necessarily represent the translation of cash flow and profitability for the company’s future projections. In other words, a company’s real progression is only reflected in profit growth.

Integration of data