Dealing with the CIA in Asia

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Dealing with the CIA in Asia

posted 20 Jan 2015, 23:06 by Peter Black [ updated 7 Feb 2015, 20:43 ]

Before the Central Intelligence Agency from the US gets worried, I have "hijacked" the acronym CIA to represent what I have concluded is the significant market opportunity sitting to the north and north-west of Australia. The opportunity has a potential ROI of 150 times!

I only became aware of the importance of this when attending a China investment session at the Asian Financial Forum where the representatives from China indicated one of their major market opportunities is the ASEAN region.

Having not looked at this for a while, upon researching ASEAN through Wikipedia I realised that it is 10 countries between China and Australia with a combined population of 600 million people (pictured). Then, as I am sitting in this session, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its World Economic Outlook, with one of the implications being that India appears to have more growth opportunities than China.

So, what we have is what I am terming the "CIA" region:

C hina with 1.4 billion people;
I ndia with 1.0 billion people; and
A sean region with 0.6 billion people

So, we have these developing markets of approximately 3.0 billion people immediately within our region - over 40% of the world's population - who want to catch up and grow quickly. Australia, whilst being a minnow in terms of a population of approximately 23 million people, has an abundance of resources needed for development. And there are approximately 150 times more population than Australia requiring our resources - tangible as well as services and technology.

The question therefore is what are we doing to leverage this opportunity?