Tag: Expansion

Singapore – Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform Sprinklr has announced its Singapore expansion with a new Research and Development (R&D) center to support its continued business growth.

The company said the new facility in Singapore will strengthen Sprinklr’s position as a CXM provider, affording it an expanded opportunity to support valuable brands in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, including Samsung, Gojek, StarHub, and Changi Airport Group. 

The new R&D center adds to Sprinklr’s two other existing R&D centers, which are located in the United States and India. The new R&D center will start recruiting and investing in engineers, sales, customer success, and recruiting support across APAC.

Ang Chin Tah, vice president and head of Digital Industry Singapore (DISG), commented that Sprinklr’s expansion during these challenging times demonstrates the company’s confidence in Singapore as a strong business hub, with world-class R&D and engineering talent. 

“We welcome the addition of the R&D center to our tech ecosystem and look forward to the exciting job opportunities it will create for Singapore and Singaporeans,” added Ang Chin Tah.

Meanwhile, Pavitar Singh, chief technology officer of Sprinklr, said, “At Sprinklr, we are working to define the future of customer experience management every day. We’re thrilled to open an R&D center in a ‘forward-thinking’ city, accelerating our ability to develop visionary technologies that help brands create human experiences at scale.”

Florian Zenner, senior vice president of Sprinklr APAC and Japan, also said, “Singapore is a global hub for innovation, with world-class talent to help Sprinklr meet the growing demand from enterprise customers for advanced CXM. We’re excited about this R&D center to strengthen our relationship with the Asia Pacific and support our continued international expansion.”

Hong Kong – Uber Eats in Hong Kong has expanded to Tsing Yi, an island in the urban area of Hong Kong.

Elisa Janiec, general manager of Uber Eats Hong Kong, said that they are thrilled to introduce Uber Eats to Tsing Yi, as they believe that delicious food is a convenience that everyone across Hong Kong should enjoy.

“My team and I are committed to investing with our partners and the F&B community to unlock more innovative and delightful food choices for Hong Kongers,” said Janiec.

The island Tsing Yi is packed with eateries and food stores. Uber Eats will be bringing a line-up of local favorites such as local cha chaan teng from Bun Hui Cafe or Daniel’s Restaurant, Chiu Chow deli from Yummy Yummy, and chicken pot from Luk Kee, among others. All-time favorites are also available, such as Saizeriya Italian Restaurant, Nam Kee, Tamjai, and Bafang Dumpling. Meanwhile, as food delivery grew to become an integral part of Hong Kongers’ daily lives amid limited physical contact, Uber Eats has observed a shift in its users’ eating habits. 

Hong Kong recently celebrated 2021’s stay-at-home Chinese New Year holiday last February 12 to 16, and during the celebration, Uber Eats recorded a 50% year-on-year increase in order volume. 

Furthermore, as Hong Kongers further adapts to the new normal, the food delivery platform has observed an 800% increase in healthy food orders during the dine-in restriction periods, as people are ordering more from vegan, vegetarian-friendly, and healthy restaurants available on the app. Another consumer behavior shows on Uber Eats’ data, where Hong Kongers are starting supper at 6:00 pm, and are generally ordering 22% more food items to enjoy with their family in the comfort of their own home, which employees rarely do before the new work-from-home set-up.

APAC – EternityX, a Chinese AI-empowered marketing technology platform, has announced a new office opening in Sydney, Australia, as part of its overall strategic expansion across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

EternityX is a Chinese AI marketing technology platform that uses multi-dimensional audience profiling to understand audience needs throughout the consumer journey, reaching them through premium sites and apps programmatically. The platform helps marketers build a business intelligence strategy targeted at increasing the brand-consumer value and maximizing campaign effectiveness.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, the new Sydney office adds to its current operations, which currently spans Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou in China as well as New York and Singapore. The Sydney location will pursue business growth and strategies across APAC, focusing on connecting brands and consumers through cross-border, cross-culture e-commerce and service offering initiatives, such as advanced education, between China and Australia.

The company expansion is led by Richard Andrew, managing director of Southeast Asia and Australia, and will be locally managed by Luke Bussell, director for ANZ. In line with the expansion, EternityX has also appointed Tony Skvarc as the sales director for ANZ to work alongside Andrew and Bussell on Chinese consumers and data-driven campaigns.

Founder and CEO of EternityX Charlene Ree stated that the planning of EternityX expansion in Australia is an important strategic market and one of the key cornerstones in expanding across the APAC region, as 2020 has been a difficult year for businesses of different sizes navigating through the pandemic.

“Australia has a vibrant community of 1.2 million Chinese Australians. With this move, we strengthen our position as the cross-cultural and cross-border bridge connecting regional and global brands with not only the mainland China market, but with local Chinese communities abroad,” she said.

Meanwhile, Andrew commented, “The Chinese media landscape is complex and ever evolving and companies need help staying on top of the best ways to reach their targets.”

EternityX has already performed campaigns for brands such as Richemont Group, LVMH, Hilton, L’Oréal, as well as P&G, and HSBC.

Singapore – AnyMind Group, a company that produces software in direct-to-consumer, cloud manufacturing, entertainment, marketing, and HR, has announced its plans to connect its various offerings and to build a runway for future expansion.

AnyMind Group has renewed its vision, and now aims to “make every business borderless,” through removing borders and barriers for organizations whether it be geographical, online and offline, industries, platforms, and mediums.

Having launched, developed, and acquired brands across various industries such as marketing, entertainment, and direct-to-consumer, the company aims to offer end-to-end solutions from brand building, product manufacturing, and marketing.

Commenting on this development, Kosuke Sogo, CEO, and co-founder of AnyMind Group discussed the company’s plans to expand its offerings. 

“Having grown and established strong offerings across multiple spaces, we are looking to move into a position to connect our various offerings to form one of the first end-to-end brand enablement platforms. Apart from leveraging on our individual products, we’re moving towards helping businesses and individuals tap on a comprehensive solution to seamlessly turn previously-siloed data into action, in the future.”

“True to our underlying philosophy of Growth for Everyone, we can enable businesses and individuals to become borderless, from brand establishment,product creation, marketing, selling, and very soon, fulfilment.”

In addition, the company will be renaming its flagship brands in influencer marketing, and influencer management, and advertising. 

In a nutshell, said brands will now be renamed to carry the word “Any.” CastingAsia, its influencer marketing platform will now be called AnyTag. Meanwhile, its influencer management network CastingAsia Creators Network has been renamed to AnyCreator. 

The AdAsia brand on the other hand, which includes AdAsia Digital Platform, the AdAsia Premium Marketplace and AdAsia360 will be discontinued, with the AdAsia Digital Platform software being renamed to AnyDigital and its publisher platform names, AdAsia360, FourM360, and Acqua360 to be consolidated under the name AnyManager.

Sogo said, “In line with becoming an end-to-end brand enablement platform and longer-term plans to expand out of Asia, we have renamed our products to fit in with the wider AnyMind Group branding and to position ourselves for future growth through a unified branding strategy.”

Singapore – With a goal towards a larger ad market target, Singapore-based ad-tech company Adzymic has joined hands with branding and ad-tech firms in Thailand, Hong Kong and Japan to bring its full suite of dynamic creative solutions to advertisers. This comes after the company’s  expansion to Australia and India in 2019.

One of the company’s flagship advertisement solutions is the ‘Dynamic Creative Management Platform’ which functions as advertising transformation of physical to digital media, such as banners, carousel ads and social display ads, allowing advertisers to create ads without the need for coding experience. The company also offers a ‘Smart Tag’ technology, which enables advertisers to create personal ads through behavior tracking, machine learning algorithms, and updates.

For Hong Kong and Thailand, the company has officially tied up with Maadtech Global, a programming integrator solutions company, while also partnering with another Thai firm Spikebrand, a branding solutions company. Meanwhile for its Japan expansion, a collaboration has been forged with Atlas Associates, a local-based ad-tech startup focused on social networking site (SNS) management tools.

“Asia is expected to surpass North America as the biggest ad spender globally by 2021. 4 Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand are very exciting for us, both from a creative and growth perspective. They are known for their incredibly creative ads, and together with our partners’ local knowledge and network, we will deliver high impact campaigns with brands and agencies,” said Kenniess Wong, co-founder and executive director of Adzymic.

Adzymic, since its founding, has been involved with large brand partnerships, including DBS, Sony Pictures, Toyota and Esplanade Singapore. 

Singapore-Digital analytics company Contentsquare has recently announced its organizational expansion within the Asia Pacific (APAC) region by establishing several regional offices and appointing two new executives to aid in the company’s operations.

The company upholds its provision of services, including customer behavior, behavior analysis through billions of anonymous web, mobile and app interactions, transforming this knowledge into advisories that increase revenue, engagement and growth.

Its new regional offices are located in the cities of Singapore, Tokyo, Melbourne, and Sydney. 

Following this endeavor, Contentsquare has also employed two key executives for the overall operations of the group. David Bochsler, a former senior head at Microsoft, has been hired as the regional managing director for APAC operations, while Frazer Adnam, former head of CRM Marketing for Deliveroo and later on Afterpay, joined as ANZ Country Manager. The company said the expansion endeavor is part of its goal for the year to specifically expand within the APAC region, which it hopes to stay in the longer run. 

“When I first saw the Contentsquare platform, I was just so excited about the technology. I was the decision maker on the brand side that Contentsquare would have traditionally sold to. I thought, ‘this solves problems that I literally would have needed five people to solve.’ From someone who had been working in customer experience roles for a long period of time, I was completely fascinated by what I saw was going to be the new wave of customer experience technology,” Frazer Adnam, country manager for ANZ Contentsquare stated.

Meanwhile, David Bochsler, Contentsquare’s APAC managing director commented, “Contentsquare is perfectly positioned for substantial growth in Asia. It caters exceptionally well to those very large mature, highly data driven organizations but also caters to those people that are just getting their feet in the water as far as understanding what their online visitors are doing. It’s the first time I’ve seen any technology that’s shown me what’s inside that black box of customer behavior online. It allows brands to finally understand why their digital visitors behave the way they do”.

Taiwan – Global mobile ad tech company Adludio has announced that it has pivoted to tap into Taiwan’s rapidly-growing mobile gaming fanbase with the expansion of its operations to the region.

Adludio is a mobile advertising platform for delivering interactive creatives using gaming engine and artificial intelligence technologies. Following its launch in 2015, it has grown its presence across US, Europe, and Asia.

According to Adludio’s data, Taiwan is an emerging key market for mobile advertisers as the count of mobile phone connections in the country total 28.43 million, equating to 1.19 connections per person. Similarly, its gaming market shows great potential as it is expected to grow to $2.8 billion by 2021, with mobile games accounting for 60% of the revenue.

Benjamin Pavanetto, managing director for Asia commented on the growth opportunity the expansion offers, “Taiwan’s high internet penetration and fast-growing economic development makes it an ideal market for brands to effectively reach audiences digitally. The projected growth in Taiwan’s gaming industry also shows potential to create effective consumer engagement through gamified advertising.”

Meanwhile, Adludio’s Founder and CEO Paul Coggins said, “It is truly an exciting opportunity for us to expand into Taiwan. Taiwan is a market with extremely active mobile users, and Adludio’s mobile-first offering will bode well with creative and bold clients looking to increase their mobile performance and engagement.”

According to Coggins, the company is already working with clients such as LG, Audi and Cartier in Taiwan.

The Taiwan team will be led by Pavanetto who relocated from Singapore this year, alongside Adludio’s sales manager in Taiwan Clayton Chao.