Asian Startups and the Creation of “Super Apps”

SE Asian and E Asian companies (i.e. Gojek, Grab, Meituan-Dianping) have done exceptionally well on creating the superapp design which essentially lets high-frequency low margin businesses do lead gen for low-frequency high margin businesses. It’s about low/no CAC for follow-on revenue streams.

This is a list of non-exhaustive things you can do in WeChat. We are starting to see a few of these super-apps pop up at specific regions of the world, mainly East + Southeast Asia and Latin America. The main reason why these regions are prime for super-apps because of where they are in the maturity cycle of their domestic banking and commerce industries…which is always why I think the Next wave of consumer fintech startups will be in those regions of the world. The irony here is it’s way easier for companies to push massive adoption of these super apps (often times, most of them involve the handing of daily transaction payments of their users) b/c they have a non-mature and growing ecosystem. Launching a deep fintech product in Europe might be challenging because they a relatively more mature of an economic and financials system.

Superapps are great from us operators perspective but from the domestic government’s perspective, it bears the question (at least, this will likely be one of their many perspectives) as to how to strike a balance between concentration of financial, human and data capital to a few companies vs. promoting domestic entrepreneurial and innovation incentives b/c once this scale is tilted to one side for too long, it will create adverse effect in innovation incentives.

As a side note, I am optimistic about the decades-long prospect of ASEAN, esp Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore; formerly, on the young/growing demographics with growing purchasing power and more importantly, their willingness to spend on consumer goods and other asset classes and latter, sharing the APAC financial hub role with Hong Kong and Shanghai as China continues to mature their rule of law whether it be on the IP law, bankruptcy law (builds depth in their public and private credit market) end etc.