In our digital world, distance is reduced to only a few milliseconds. In the real world, flying to Australia and New Zealand is quite a stretch. However, it is definitely worth it: there is much to explore Down Under and there are many opportunities for Dutch Tech companies that want to invest in New Zealand and Australia and vice versa. These two mission reports, published today, aim to provide better insight into the trade opportunities between New Zealand, Australia and the Netherlands in the tech industry.
The fact-finding mission took us far away, to two countries with a total population count comparable to that of the Benelux, but much, much bigger in size. Both Australia and New Zealand are dealing with digital transformation, innovations and startups. This has been top of mind and has been a real focus in the last three years in both countries.
The challenges that come with that are very similar to Europe’s challenges. The availability of talent for instance, which can only partially be met by a locally trained workforce. Especially Australia attracts a lot of IT-staff from Asia, or works together with Asian companies to fill the gap. However, with such beautiful nature and landscapes, there is no doubt that both New Zealand and Australia will overcome this shortage in staff by attracting talent from abroad.
Digital Gateway to Asia
The Netherlands, with its excellent broadband connections to the rest of the world and home to one of the world’s largest Internet Exchanges, is close to 500 million customers in Europe, and therefore functions as the Digital Gateway to Europe.
Australia and its neighbour New Zealand, can both be seen as Digital Gateway to Asia. They have direct and vast connections, there is a large Asian community in Sydney and Auckland, many Asian companies are present and there is a lot of collaboration with China. Australia and New Zealand can also be great bridgeheads to expand towards Indonesia and the Philippines, two major growth potentials.
Australia
Australia main economic activities are centralized in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The size of (SME) companies is comparable to the Dutch market. Australia has more infrastructure in comparison to New Zealand, however access to broadband is still challenging. Current growth of online products and services is held back by the available connectivity.
The mature Dutch digital infrastructure provides the Netherlands with a competitive advantage. Dutch services and products might easily fill the gaps in the Australian online
market. On the other hand, Australians are open to exchange techniques, business ideals and other partnerships. For Australian companies wanting to expand to Europe, the Netherlands is the country worth considering. Well-positioned in the heart of Europe, it has a perfect (digital) infrastructure, a business friendly environment and nearly all Dutch speak English well. Especially with the current uncertainty in the market caused by Brexit, the Netherlands functions as gateway into the European single market.
New Zealand
For New Zealand, with its near 5 million inhabitants, the home market is fairly limited in size. This requires an international orientation, in order for companies to be successful. Almost every start-up company seems to be aware that the road to success leads through expanding abroad in a very early stage. To become a scale-up in New Zealand automatically makes you think and act international.
Therefore, New Zealand is an interesting place to go to; the government is happy to assist and has developed a customer centric, SaaS focused approach. It is the first government in the world partly running on Amazon Web Services. It has a strong focus on start-up and other tech companies. Tech Week is the most important event where the whole industry comes together.
New Zealand invests heavily in broadband networks in order to make sure that everyone is well connected and not left out. This is also a driver for growth of the tech sector. New Zealand furthermore works in innovative programs such as the ‘ D5 alliance ’. Together with countries like Lithuania, South Africa, Israel, South Korea and Australia they cooperate on all the aspects necessary to grow a healthy tech society, government, digital economy and digital infrastructure.
Download both mission reports on Digital Gateway.