“The sad fact is that Singapore’s Kiasu culture is highly ingrained in all the key GLCs of that country.
Any new IT company or technology solution provider trying to penetrate into the market of Singaporean GLCs will be faced with a challenging, Kiasu-induced cartel market situation; whereby only a handful of powerful and deeply entrenched IT companies like SAP continue to have an iron-grip monopoly of the market.”
This was an unusual revelation from an upcoming Malaysian-based IT company that recently relocated its marketing headquarters to Singapore, in bid to ease its expansion into the ASEAN region.
After a relatively easy streak of building a strong customer base in Malaysia over the last decade, this local enterprise solution provider came face with what seems to be an impenetrable wall of selling into Singapore-based GLCs.
The CEO of the company was lamenting over a continuous supply of cigarettes, how different the reality was from Singapore’s image of practicing high professionalism in the private corporate and public sectors.
He said that for many ‘migrating’ Malaysian companies, transparency and corruption-free practices are the key cornerstones of doing business in Singapore.
No doubt this is still true to a large extent, he says. However this ‘transparent and corruption-free’ advantage is being nullified by the stranglehold imposed by legacy IT brands and vendors who try their hardest to protect their ‘rice bowl’ with certain tactics.
“You cannot believe how tightly guarded the access network to the decision-makers are. These (IT vendor and appointed Singaporean reseller/ parther) folks even monitor any free time of the clients under their watch – making sure that they don’t have half an hour to spare to meet or even chat with the competition!”
Due to this kiasu-culture of the employees within these key Singapore GLCs, new entrants are simply cut off without a fighting chance to introduce and sell better, cheaper technologies.
The Malaysian CEO also opines that the strong Singaporean Kiasu-mentality extends to baby-boomer Singaporeans who having spent decades of their lives being familiar and experts in specific IT brands, become non-receptive to acquiring new IT business solutions, knowledge and skills.
“It really doesn’t help that there is a big lacking of REAL business solution technologies in Singapore. People should not be confused with the seemingly thriving base of Internet-based technologies and startups here – which are aplenty.
“I can say that all the good IT enterprise solutions that you can find here are mostly imported, and none originated from any Singapore-based research or was developed by the local tech market here.”
IT BYTES BACK! says: This certainly impedes the progress and competitiveness of the market across the Causeway. In comparison, doing business in Malaysia and penetration of other domestic markets such as Indonesia, is much easier than trying to sell into Singapore – which is closely guarded to the nigh by a default system of highly kiasu, incumbent IT vendors and reseller partners.
