Asian Urbanization Creates Opportunities For ICT Suppliers

With increasing urbanization, Asian cities will undergo rapid transformation, creating opportunities for vendors that align themselves with city-level objectives. City opportunities are growing faster than national opportunities as there is a strong need for investments to improve city infrastructure along with increasing pressure to make cities more accountable, transparent, and independent. Also, an increasingly Internet-savvy population demands better citizen services. Two categories of opportunities in Asian cities are emerging for information and communications technology (ICT) vendors: in low-to-moderate urbanization (LMU) countries and in high urbanization (HU) countries. LMU cities will focus on basic task automation, while HU cities will focus on more efficient ICT infrastructure. Cloud computing, virtualization, mobile apps and devices, geographic information systems (GIS), analytics, social media and collaboration, and security software will be common and provide substantial opportunities to vendors. Vendors need to shift their emphasis from national governments to city-level opportunities to maximize the potential business benefits.