Australia as the broker between ‘West’ and ‘East’
Australia needs to look North and embrace our position as the conduit between “West” and “East”. We have a unique competitive advantage — let’s use it!
Image: Business Insider
The Australian media is constantly hammering on about how the resources boom is rapidly coming to an end and how we need to embrace a knowledge economy and support more small business, etc.
I’m not so sure.
Sure, the knowledge economy is important and clearly this needs attention, but I’ve lived and worked here for 6 years in Enterprise Professional Services and tech startups and it seems inconceivable to me that we don’t see and leverage the obvious. We’re at a critical tipping point in history where the ‘East” is rising economically and rapidly competing with the “West”.
Australia sits in the fortunate and interesting position where we are neither East nor West. Geographically Australia is in Asia but behaves as if it’s in the USA or Europe. We try to walk a fine line between appeasing the USA for “protection”, holding on the the Monarchy in the UK for trade benefits and historical reasons and trying not to step on the toes of the mighty China over the pond.
This is unsustainable.
One day we have to take sides.
Or not.
What if Australia was the Switzerland of Asia? It already is in many ways as it’s geographically separated and carefully tries to stay in the middle.
Australia has a massive untapped natural resource.
Our proximity to Asia, our intimate understanding of the region , our “western” ways and understanding and a growing “Asian” population. If we harness this and become the broker between these two very different cultures and approaches to business, we will become the international clearing house of business over the next few decades.
To understand the size of the opportunities, look at what Hugo Barra, ex-product manager of Android at Google, now at Xiaomi, has discovered after a few months working in China.
Alibaba, which owns Taobao, a shopping site he said is TWICE the size of eBay and Amazon combined
During a Chinese holiday called “Singles Day” Taobao did more than twice the sales all US e-commerce companies did on Cyber Monday
the Chinese are incredibly educated with 8 million college grads per year — more than the US.
How can we ignore this massive opportunity?
Competing is futile. Let’s change the game to co-opetition…
I’m using quotes for “west”, “east”, “asian” as these are ancient but generally understood terms to get my point across ;-)
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