The Emerging Platform Economy Series No. 3
Report | November 4, 2016
The Rise of Asian Platforms: A Regional Survey
By Dr. Peter C. Evans
“The Rise of Asian Platforms: A Regional Survey” is the first comprehensive survey to examine platform companies across Asia. The regions explored include Northeast Asia, China, India and Southeast Asia. The survey identifies 62 major platform companies operating across Asia with a market capitalization of $800 million or more. The market value of the 62 companies now exceeds $1.1 trillion and has a powerful growing influence on shaping markets throughout the region and worldwide.
The survey explores how the most significant Asian platforms are shaping and impacting regional and global economies. Key areas of examination include:
- Top Asian platform companies in Northeast Asia, China, India and Southeast Asia.
- Asian platform sectors and types segmented by industry and multiplatform enterprises.
- Regional and global Asian platform linkages. Asian platform establishment and growth has not been confined to the countries in which they were established.
- An examination of platform consolidation. Mergers and takeovers in e-commerce, video media, and transportation.
- Asian platform innovation and creativity performance. Noteworthy areas are third-party payments, visual language, and artificial intelligence.
- Asian platform regulation – government facilitation and restriction of platforms.
The Emerging Platform Economy
What is the Emerging Platform Economy?
A platform business can be defined as a medium which lets others connect to it. Platform businesses can be found in a growing number of industries including social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn); internet auctions and retail (Amazon, eBay, Angie’s List); on-line financial and human resource functions (Workday, Elance-oDesk, Freelancer, WorkFusion), urban transportation (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar), mobile payment (Mahala, Square) and clean energy (Sungevity, SolarCity, EnerNOC).
Why this line of research?
What is the implication of platform companies like AirBnB, Uber, Car2Go, and Amazon on legacy, precedent businesses such as Hilton and Walmart? Once small and novel, platform businesses have grown substantially in recent years to become a much larger part of the economy. In addition, many platform businesses have moved from being domestic in focus to operating in multiple countries. Understanding the power and value of these multi-sided enterprise models in contemporary management will be the focus of this project. The CGE will build the first global database of platform enterprises facilitating several areas of analysis. It will support analysis of the scale of platforms in the global economy and the industry dynamics that they engender. It will provide the basis to ascertain platform companies’ relevance and impact to the enterprise and society on such things as payment systems, logistics, and transportation. Finally, it will also provide a basis for strategic management insights into the evolution of platform businesses on a global level.
