By MATTHEW VARI
Sunday, May 1, 2016 (PNG)
EXPERTS in e-commerce marketing platforms from APEC Business Advisory Council China were given a first-hand rundown of the state of internet service provided in the country and how adopting an outward e-commerce market would be a challenge locally, which raised many eyebrows.
During the question and answer session of the E-commerce in SME Summit held on Monday, ABAC PNG Member and CEO of Manufacturers Council of PNG, Chey Scovell, gave a snapshot of the issue of internet connectivity, cost, and reliability in the country and what requirements are needed to run standard e-commerce marketing operations.
“One of the areas like to ask about is the importance of the supporting infrastructure for e-commerce. A number of the speakers made reference to a report - within that report it is noted that Papua New Guinea is the second most expensive internet and one of the worst services,” Scovel said.
“It took me 17 minutes to download the DHGates application on Mobile and I wasn’t able to actually look at any of the products.”
“In terms of e-commerce working, what are considered industry norms within the industry?”
“I am an advocate for industry here, and when we are having dialogues with our government officials to encourage them to set a benchmark. What would be that benchmark, because certainly in my involvement with APEC a couple of years back, they used to talk about the average person having maybe 10 gigabyte a month in PNG?”
He said that many users at the high end are still using four or five hundred megabytes on average monthly at the high end of data, with the average user with less than 100mb along with chronic slowness of service also.
“For all these platforms seen today what would be the recommended levels of the speed and cost factor for it being a viable platform?” Scovell asked GoogleInc Executive Elodie Benoist.
Director for GoogleInc International, Ms Benoist said that with the e-commerce platform there wasn’t a particular benchmark- however the issues experienced with the internet in the country would be an issue going forward.
“I do not know any particular benchmark; I can tell you that 17 minutes sounds like pretty high- should definitely not be that long to download an app,” she said.
“But it does sound like a definite challenge in this country and obviously you have said I can agree with, that in order for e-commerce access, any opportunities first are to make it possible in this country.”
“I was just looking at the internet penetration in this country is under 10 percent which obviously is very very low, especially in a developing country you would expect it in the likes of 40-50 percent.”
She added, however, that despite a lot of room for improvement- the mobile space could be the main area to develop.
“A lot of markets, where PNG can be one of those, are skipping all the desktop internet penetration and going straight to mobile,” Benoist added.
ABAC China’s Trust and Safety Cross Border E-Commerce representative Daniel Scarpato added that despite the challenges faced in access and reliable internet- the country has the highest attention to develop a mature e-commerce ecosystem in a short span of time out of any other country that has ever developed an e-commerce system.
“Basically I know that country is going to be adding more internet takers in the future and there are a lot of efforts being made to bring internet to more of the population.”
“I think that it just has to do with the amount of people that have access to internet in order for the size of the market in Papua New Guinea before anything else can start happening, but once that happens as the speaker from Google said it is going to be very quick.”
“The second that large portions of the population get access to the internet so many kinds of different innovative models can be applied to the country,” Scarpato said.
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