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Industry Players on the bottom of the pyramid and the Asian market ‘crisis’
-Hans Wijeyasuriya and Dumindra Ratnayake on the Asian market and the bottom of the pyramid Its not the financial crisis that has reduced profits in South Asia. Sri Lanka is a very good case study. This happened because policy makers did not understand the market. We have one too many operators. Our base stations have [...]
Helani Galpaya on the Bottom of the Pyramid
What we know The BOP is a large group of people, we know they have low income. They can only spend a limited amount on communication. Their income is also irregular. So they can’t spend at a constant rate. We know they have phones. Almost all of them have used phones at some point and [...]
Grameen Phone at the ‘Base of the Pyramid’
- Sulatnur Reza, GrameenPhone, Bangladesh The BOP are the people that make up the base of the pyramid. Therefore i like to refer to them as the base of the pyramid and not the bottom. At 5.3. bn people, its a huge potential market. In Bangladesh we have 150 mn people. Quite substantial. A lot [...]
Potential for mobile 2.0 services at the BOP
In a study conducted among 579 million people in emerging Asia it was discovered that people are reluctant to use these services because they seem too complicated. Most people tend to download ringtones etc from their PCs and then transfer them to their mobiles. Cost is also a factor that limits Mobile 2.0 applications from [...]
Understanding the Bottom of the Pyramid
Understanding people at the bottom of the pyramid and targeting them in a business and telecom sense is important. Communication and information produce positive benefits to poor people, and there is evidence to prove this. But there are also negatives to this. Communication info can communicate to economic well being. It also contributes substantially to [...]
AgInfo to AgStrategy – The role of information in making agriculture markets more efficient
For any market to succeed it needs to be efficient. Transaction costs in this part of the world in agri markets are very high. It is the information search cost that has caused this. ICT must step in here and reduce the cost of obtaining information; allowing farmers to have more access to information and [...]
Ashok Jhunjhunwala’s questions on M-commerce viability
AJ: If mobile trasactions have a huge role to play in smoothening the income of the bottom of the pyramid some form of loan is required at a cost below microfinance. How do you do risk assessment? Harsha de Silva: You have hit the nail on the head. This is where the revolution will take [...]
Mobile Money: Harsha De Silva
Understanding the volatility of cash flow of poor people is important in assessing the mass appeal of Mobile Money. M transfers must be used to smoothen consumption and expense. We need to consider how a poor person who skips meals can use technology to avoid it. The urban poor live in congestion while another group lives [...]
New Approaches to Regulation; Creating Better Markets
Adam Smith said that the invisible hand rules the market. That may be true in a world of perfect competition but it doesn’t hold in the world we live in. Markets arise spontaneously from the institutional framework. There are three main transitions that happen when markets change or develop; Feudal to industrial, communist to post-communist, emerging to developed. [...]
How can researchers speak to the corporate world?
The challenges of conveying research results to corporate leaders are substantial. Questions that need to be asked are; how to better communicate the importance of research results to senior managers? Does in fact evidence get used within companies? and if so what type of evidence considered to be evidence? and how are decision with regard [...]
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