Build Your Internal Strengths

During Secutech Taipei Show, in April 2010, a company’s sales director approached me and he invited me to visit their HQ in Beijing to explore the collaboration opportunity on face recognition technology. When I finally paid my visit and stepped out of their HQ in June the same year, my instinct told me that they were not the right company we should be working with, even though they had just been listed on Shenzhen Stock Exchange early that year, and their initial share price skyrocketed. 

Their flamboyant marketing approach didn’t make me feel they are a company with strength. I  was less impressed when I later read in a magazine about how their CEO put up a frivolous show before the media by smashing an ice-sculptured apple to assert their confidence and smashed an iPad with their tablet products. 

It seemed like they discovered a gold mine when Kindle was proven to be a huge success in 2007, the sudden upsurge of demand of eBook readers in China tremendously uplifted the sales of their eBook readers as well. 

Unfortunately, their sales slumped last year. And in reverse their tablets were 'smashed' by Apple and to add salt to injury, their eBook reader sales dropped sharply due to the lack of ebook contents to support users like Amazon has. To make matter worse, their biometrics division was never really took off.

I have always believed that companies without internal strengths would have a short life-span. A lot of companies just bet on sales and sales strategies to grow their business, the rests to them are just costs, so the lesser the better. Many short-sighted businessmen are hoping to maximize profit, hence they cut down budget on trainings, administration and technical supports, not to mention the investment for the future i.e R&D.

Once, I met this typical businesswoman who said that every square foot of an office space counts when she visited our office, shaking her head in disagreement. For her, maintaining a cozy working environment should never be a consideration.

When Amazon.com hemorrhaged in its first ten years, why were the investors not losing their faith, and continued to support the company? Simple, because everybody knew that it was just a matter of time for the company to make a turnaround.

And when Amazon starts to make profit, everybody believes it would continue to make profit forever (or at least it seems so). My perception is, other tech giants may one day be losing their momentum, but not Amazon, because they had built an internal strength that could almost last them forever.

You can't talk about Apple without talking about the iPad, iPhone and iPod, however for Amazon, it's a different case. Even without its Kindle or Kindle Fire, Amazon will continue to expand mammoth-like, swallowing any merchandise that may come their way. Their internal B2C platform encompasses with layers after layers of service system that they built over the years, has become a fortress for them to stand for any challenges, and selling anything that they want, from a toilet roll to an airplane.

After in-depth analysis and a long list of comparisons, we have decided to choose Amazon as our cloud computing platform partner to jumpstart our SaaS for TimeTec Cloud. In general, we are confident to select Amazon as a partner, that is famous for their customer service. Go figure!

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ