Many of the world’s leading technology brands suffer from a big credibility gap in Asia — one of the fastest growing technology and telecoms markets.
This week we’ve completed work on the Lighthouse Asia Pacific Index, which is a service for clients in that region that ranks the leading technology vendors according to their profile in research written by Asia Pacific analysts.
Of course, some of the firms that do best in Asia Pacific are headquartered there, including Fujitsu, LG, Matsushita and Telstra. However, most of the major US and European vendors of software, services and systems really struggle to win share of voice across the region. Indeed, most of the top six firms worldwide fail to get into the top 12 in Asia Pacific.
Interestingly, there are a number of the firms that do even better in Asia Pacific than in the rest of the world are telecoms firms, many of which are European. Over the last year, for example, the brands with a higher profile in Asia Pacific than in the rest of the world include Alcatel, Cisco Systems, BT, Ericsson, Motorola and Vodafone.
Telecoms firms now set the standard for analyst relations because of their larger deal size and longer sales cycles with operators, government and large enterprise clients. Other vendors should pay more attention to their strategies in the region.