Emerging markets, emerging challenges: Navigating your way through the telematics market maze in Asia Pacific

“Web search is a dimension that everyone is exploring. I see a lot of experimentation.” – Nick Pudar, VP of planning and business development, GM OnStar

While telematics services, navigation, in-car infotainment and ITS are all making their mark all around the globe, it has had the greatest impact – and will continue to do so – in Asia Pacific.

From Japan, which has the world's leading market for car navigation, to Korea where the main advances in portable navigation are found to China and India, where rapidly escalating standards of living promise to create the world's fastest-growing markets for both automobiles and telematics, Asia Pacific is the place to be.

In Korea, “the government has identified telematics as the second-fastest source of growth within the mobile telecommunications industry, and is going to spent 134.2 billion by 2007 to develop core technology, build industry clusters and train people.” – Source Telematics market strategic analysis, KOTBA

Despite all of its promise, however, the telematics market also faces some of its most daunting challenges. From technical standards to consumer preferences and from economics to social structure, the region presents a dizzying mix of wildly divergent cultures, behavior and challenges.

How to cover the market when its countries and consumers are so widely divergent is the greatest challenge for marketers of telematics services. Keeping up with so many sub-markets is a challenge in itself, and deciding which opportunities to pursue and how is overwhelming. How do you structure an offering for Japan or Australia, among of the world's richest and most modern countries, and make it work for the emerging economies of India and China as well? What of the unsolved technical issues, from wireless bandwidth challenges to the risk of trying to predict which device type (embedded, PND, PMP, DMB, SmartPhone) will come out on top? Will government programs and policies help or hinder? And how is anyone going to make money?

Find out here