Our thoughts on the Google Temasek Bain Southeast Asia e-conomy report

This article was originally published in Chinese on Momentum Works’s WeChat platform. Translated into English here. 

Last week, Google, Temasek and Bain released the 2022 instalment of the “e-conomy Southeast Asia” report.

In a market where reliable foundational research on digital economy has been scarce, the Google Temasek “e-conomy” franchise has been a good resource on trends covering ecommerce, digital media, travel and other related digital industries.

There has been a lot of reporting on the report in Chinese media, and we shall not repeat it. If you are interested, you can download the original report here.

Here we just share some thoughts about the report:

1. Bain did bulk if not all the work behind this report – you can see the rigour of a professional consulting firm;
2. Bain also produces Southeast Asia Digital Consumers, or SYNC Southeast Asia, report together with Meta. The two reports are consistent in methodology and insights;
3. In the disclaimer of the report, the authors specified that Google internal data is not used for the report. Instead, publicly available data such as Google trends were used extensively;
4. As major tech companies in the region are gradually becoming public – there is now finally solid data support for GMV estimate and predictions;
5. As in how to make the best use of this report – founders should definitely cherish it as a good resource of storytelling to investors and employees;
6. Companies need to be careful not to use this report to set internal targets – Southeast Asia digital economy market has a lot of friction, and most companies in the sector do not yet possess enough operational capabilities to overcome such friction;
7. Managing partners of investment funds can read this report in detail – they have pretty good market trends analysis and interpretations;
8. However, Obtaining insights from reports (including Momentum Works reports) will never be able to replace being in the market (observing or operating).