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<title><![CDATA[Tej Kohli]]></title>
<link>/profile/tej-kohli/tkohli162/rss20/</link>
<description><![CDATA[Tej Kohli is an international businessman and philanthropist, with a diverse portfolio of commercial and charitable operations in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and India. His business interests range from e-commerce and IT, to real estate and reconstructive and cosmetic surgery. The Tej Kohli Foundation supports under-privileged children in Costa Rica, and funds and promotes corneal transplants to alleviate blindness in India.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Finding the gaps in the global market]]></title>
<link>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/business/youth-business-enterprise/9898308/entrepreneur-tej-kohli-globalisation.html</link>
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<pubDate>Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:45:55 EDT</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[As the world gets smaller, and customers and investors are no longer dictated by geography, the desire, and indeed the need, to build a business with truly global value is becoming increasingly important.
Globalisation has changed the way we think about business in many ways. And it has served to iron out some of the differences between national cultures and business practices. In the cities of the Middle East, we may find traces of the great caravanserai and the souks that characterised the great trading past, for example, but modern business is conducted very much according to international standards.
And so, in many ways, building a business with global value depends on the same planning and processes as building a local company. Whatever your plans for business, the first step is to work out what you are good at, focus on that and then identify a gap in the market, and how you might best fill it.
If you take a global view, there will be more gaps available to fill. Mobile phone companies, for example, looked at the fixed-line infrastructure in the developing world and jumped in, disintermediating traditional telecommunications companies in the process. Take up of mobile phones across Africa and East Asia has been phenomenal as a result.
But business success also depends on constant engagement with the latest developments in your industry. Those mobile phone companies are indulging in an arms race to get the latest consumer gadgets out to western customers; but in developing markets, where banks have never managed to develop a viable business case for establishing basic banking and transaction services to the rural poor, they are involved in a very different proposition.
As a result, in Kenya, Afghanistan, South Africa, India and countless other countries, mobile phone companies have developed essential mobile payments and transaction services to unbanked customers – and have achieved a degree of penetration that far exceeds that in any Western nation.
The story of the mobile phone companies illustrates yet another point about the development of a global business: not every market wants or needs the same thing. Clearly, there is little market for heating systems in Abu Dhabi or air conditioning in Greenland. And if you are selling DIY tools, then you should probably focus on markets with a thriving real-estate market, plenty of resales and a culture of home improvements.
It all comes back to making sure there is a real opportunity, and whether you can stimulate real demand for your offering. However, it can get more sophisticated than that. My business provides e-commerce and payments solutions, and it has shown some very interesting differences in behaviour.
For example, if you want to expand your online business to European countries outside the UK, France and Germany, then you may need to think of a very different business model.
These three countries account for 75 per cent of all online sales in Europe. You need to do very careful market research to decide whether there is a demand for e-commerce in your chosen destination. Is there still a strong expectation that goods will be paid for by cash, or are cards acceptable? Will you have to deliver your goods with the invoice, and invest more in debt collection? Do you have facilities to accept debit, credit and prepaid cards? What are the different fees and charges? These types of details are easy to overlook, but make a difference between a successful and unsuccessful business.
Then there are the legal, structural and cultural differences across countries and regions that need to be managed. Some are obvious: if you are in Delhi and need to communicate with Dubai you need to allow for time-zone differences, even language differences. Some would argue that you need to allow for language differences if you’re in London and trying to talk to New York. Elsewhere, Brazil has a complex method for withholding tax that doesn’t fit with the standard purchasing cycle used in the US or the UK. And in Europe, Germany’s works councils are much more firmly entrenched at senior level than the UK’s trades unions.
However, if you focus only on these obvious factors, you may miss more important differences. The reason that Brits and Americans sometimes feel they are “divided by a common language” is because the words represent alternative ways of thinking and different ways of doing things – from working lunches to organising credit.
In fact, for all the similarities in the way we do business around the world, there are important differences that remain. For this reason, choosing the right people to work with becomes even more important in a global business.
I have always believed that success is built on choosing the right people and nurturing their talents. That doesn’t change if you have global ambitions. In fact, it becomes even more important. The bigger the company, the more you need to delegate, and the more you need to trust the people that work with you. When you have a global perspective, you have to make sure you have people in place who understand both the local laws for conducting business, and that they understand the locally accepted practice.
Finally, I believe that harnessing the power and ideas of young people is the key to business and economic success. Business is driven by technology and younger people – who have never known a world without computers and who will have completely different expectations from their ageing parents. When we consider that when Nasa first sent a man to the moon, it had less computational power available to it than an average Western student has in their laptop bag, we understand how vast the change has been, and how inspiring the possibilities could be.
As fresh thinkers with new ideas, courage and confidence, young people play an important role in any business. Shutting out their voices because they lack experience is a big mistake for any company that wants to achieve longevity. Trying to force them to fit your mould damages your prospects and theirs.
We can also extend that metaphor to young economies. As we saw with mobile phones, developing countries often leap straight to the latest innovation without developing legacy systems and processes. They, too, have fresh ways of thinking about business problems, unencumbered by traditional thinking or the need to make the most of existing investments.
Building a global business is about personal discipline, hard work, planning, focus, innovation and flexibility. But more than anything else, it is about listening. It’s about taking on board new voices and new ideas from people who are separated from you, either by years or by distance, and then building a company that can take those voices out to your customers.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Network For Victory]]></title>
<link>http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/network-for-victory/</link>
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<pubDate>Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:26:26 EST</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Network For Victory]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Building global technology companies of the future]]></title>
<link>http://www.bdaily.co.uk/opinion/12-10-2012/building-global-technology-companies-of-the-future/</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.bdaily.co.uk/opinion/12-10-2012/building-global-technology-companies-of-the-future/</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Oct 2012 06:39:49 EDT</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[What will be the defining features of successful global technology companies of the future? It’s a question that I believe all of us in the IT world must address if we are to continue forging successful businesses and expanding the possibilities of human endeavour.
Not only are the capabilities of technology changing rapidly, but so is the world in which it will be used. New markets are opening up and driving demand. Younger people, who have never known a world without computers will have completely different expectations than their aging parents. When we consider that when NASA first sent a man to the moon it had less computational power available to it than an average Western student has in their laptop bag, we understand how vast the change has been and how inspiring the possibilities could be.
So how to harness this potential? The maxim that businesses should focus on what they are good at will still hold true. When we look forensically at their business models, the big global technology companies of today have a remarkably narrow focus. It may first appear that they have a multitude of offerings and services, but most activity stems from a few core principles. That will not change.
What will be new, however, is the need for relentless focus on collaboration. Of course technology developers have always taken a strategic approach to information sharing: Microsoft and Intel have long worked closely to develop chips and operating systems with optimal mutual functionality, for example. But the need to collaborate is going to become the defining feature for every aspect of IT. Technology companies will therefore face a twin challenge: to maintain the internally focused effort to produce the best possible solutions and to look externally to see where partnerships and alliances may be formed.
E-commerce is perhaps the clearest example of the present. Developers of mobile telephony and payment applications are coming together to change the way that goods and services are paid for. We’ve already seen huge successes in Kenya, South Africa and India with regard to these types of schemes. New collaborative approaches are being launched in established markets in the US that effectively turn phones into credit cards. This is real disruptive technology, changing the way that people think about established processes, and at the same time bringing a whole new group of customers and prospects into the market. The new ideas and demands that come with them will continue that process of disruption and change.
What’s more is that collaboration is going to be global. Countries that used to be referred to as emerging markets have now arrived. Other developing economies are taking their place. Old certainties about who leads the world in innovation are about to be shattered. No-one can be sure where the next solution will come from, but developers in South Korea and Brazil are as likely to avail themselves of the opportunities as those in Silicon Valley.
The underlying factor in all this is those young people with their unprecedented computational power. Members of this generation have been sharing ideas all their lives. They expect that technology is limited only by what they want. There is no science fiction for this generation: only future fact.
Therefore countries that have the right educational infrastructure, and the right attitude to developing their young people will be the ones hosting the most successful global companies. And those companies that recognise the need to engage, enable and embrace this generation and their ideas will be the successful businesses of the future.
To illustrate the point, this generation is used to having entertainment and information at its fingertips. It is fully conversant with the power of mobile technology. This is the generation that understands that mobile phones can be used as payment methods as well as cameras, and these are the entrepreneurs that understand that an iPad can be a POS device as well as a magazine reader. They don’t want to wait to make purchases or gain access to online services. They have learnt that banks aren’t infallible – and that there are plenty of alternative ways to make purchases and access goods.
All these experiences mean that this generation is transforming the way commerce operates. They are open to using the Square Card Reader, PayPal Local, MocaPay, Dwolla and FaceCash in the US, or Redecard from Brazil’s Itaú Unibanco among many, many other alternative P2P payment methods. These services and the expected explosion in NFC-enabled mobile payments have brought the power of e-commerce back into the bricks-and-mortar stores and created a new way of paying for goods and services. When we consider the arrival of Facebook Payments and payment services from Apple, as well as Google Checkout and Google Wallet it is clear that old forms of commerce are changing fast.
There has never been a greater need for state-of-the-art payment gateway software to facilitate these hassle-free online transactions, such as that produced by Grafix Softech. Just as there has never been a better time for entrepreneurs who want to build global technology companies of the future. The trick is to take advantage of a world that is transforming itself with technology.]]></description>
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