The Economist Nails it

We (as in the Western world) keep on yacking about growth across the board –  # of apps, how many iPhones are out there and how swell it is that Foursquare has so many users (only 2 million which is about only 4.8 % of the total population of California coming in which comes in around 43 million peeps). Aren’t we great.

But, we are so severely lop-sided in our thinking that we forget about the rest of the world which is growing by leaps and bound and using technology in a way that took us 10 years to get to as users… and the people that are making that happen are not technology superstars….they are publishers, industrialists, and some might say old world money syndicates. (yea, I have been dying to use that word)

A recent article in the Economist revealed these “new online giants” and after reading the article, we felt it worthy of a mention here along with a few exerpts about the new world order  – it wont look like you think it does. -- JLH

• THEY may not have the name recognition of a Google or a Yahoo!, but they can claim to belong in the same league. The websites of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) account for more than 70% of page-views on the Russian-language internet.
• These firms are making their presence felt beyond their home markets. Between them they have invested in dozens of internet firms around the globe. The most adventurous of the three, DST, has already moved west—and paid top dollar for stakes in fast-growing American companies, notably Facebook, the world’s biggest social network.
• DST was created in 2005 when two Russian internet investors, Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger, pooled their interests in mail.ru, a Russian web portal. Today the firm controls many of the country’s leading websites and boasts an interesting mix of owners, including Goldman Sachs and Alisher Usmanov, a Russian billionaire, who holds 27%.
• Naspers is nearly 100 years old and publishes the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest newspaper. It is one of the most ambitious old-media companies anywhere in its move online. It still makes most of its sales—28 billion rand ($3.6 billion) in the year to March—from print and pay-television, but it uses the cash to buy online firms.
• These firms are finding promising internet companies in countries where Western investors rarely dare to go.

Talk about a take over & it’s all China

This just in from a new report Pyramid Research, by 2011, China will overtake Japan to become Asia’s largest fiber market, with 25.9 million fiber access lines in service at year-end 2011, versus Japan’s 25.2 million.

According to Pyramid, now that the country has completed its infrastructure “initiative”, is that one of the main drivers behind the rapid rise in fiber is a strong commitment from the government to deploy the technology.

According to Daniel Yu, Senior Analyst at Pyramid Research migration to higher speeds, and thus higher-priced, fiber-optic connections, will ensure continued growth in China’s fixed service revenue.

Ok sure, but here is the number that you need to pay close attention to: The industry as a whole expects to spend $22 billion over the next three years deploying a fiber network, increasing total ports from 20 million to 80 million. That’s a whole lot of investment which means the industry is and will continue to grow. Doors opened!

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Tags: Asia, China, Fiber Optic, Japan, Optical fiber, Pyramid Research, Telecommunication