Next big growth wave to come from Asia, not necessarily China: Yahoo
By Jonathan Peeris, 938LIVE | Posted: 10 November 2009 1858 hrs

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SINGAPORE: Internet search giant Yahoo said its next big wave of growth will come from Asia but not necessarily just from China and it said there are also ample opportunities for growth in emerging countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and India.

Yahoo is already big on the internet and it's looking to get even bigger among internet users especially in Asia.

Industry players are predicting that growth in internet use in Asia will expand a compounded 19 per cent by 2012.

Speaking on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in Singapore, Yahoo's CEO Carol Bartz said the company has seen non-US internet use grow by 11 per cent in the last 12 months, nearly four times faster than the US itself.

Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo, said: "This whole area is a bigger opportunity than any other area for growing users and that is the focus on this area - to grow users. We go where the population is, where the economies are growing and that is a strategy that has certainly worked in the past for the company and in my previous experiences, so we'll continue with that."

Yahoo said it's focusing on growing the number of users in emerging markets like Vietnam and Indonesia.

It defines emerging countries as places that have an internet penetration of below 20 per cent of the country's total population and broadband access at less than 10 per cent.

For more developed markets like Singapore and Korea, Yahoo intends to move into new technology, such as providing applications and platforms for mobile phones.

Carol Bartz added: “When we think of the future, we think of a lot of things. We think of 4.1 billion mobile phones and this is from the very high end iphones, blackberry, to what is called the class F phone which is a 20-dollar simple phone. “And we would like to have Yahoo access on all of those phones. In fact, we support 1900 different phone platforms. We have 100 carrier agreements around the world.

Yahoo also hopes to get a piece of the estimated US$73 billion spent in offline advertising in Asia last year.

That includes billboards, print ads and television commercials.

Yahoo believes the potential for bringing this content into the online space is enormous. - CNA/vm