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Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Singapore Diary - Part V (and last)

Merlion Statue
Day 11 at NUS revolved around Real estate market and Prof Lum Sau Kim from NUS gave insights to the real estate is market growth in APAC which is expected to be twice the size of Europe market by 2031. Singapore government is a major player in providing housing to most of the population. Most of the people just buy property here and keep it as safe investment rather than putting it out on rent. On a side note, the estate brokers or developers make the money the same way as they do in India (by offering attractive interest rate at appreciated property price).

Next session was on Integrated Media Communications by Prof May Lwin, NUS. I was always amused how a child identifies chocolates so quickly and here I learnt that children have 200% more identification and sensory powers than normal adults which explains the behavior.

The last session of day was quite interesting where Mr. David Shaw talked about the challenges in marketing communications, how things can go wrong and how simple mistakes can lead to major implications. He revealed interesting marketing campaigns which went wrong and what should be done to prevent it. For example, an advertisement on Van for 'STARBUCKS' is displayed as 'SUCKS' when the van door is open :) or a Turkish Airlines advertisement on escalator looked like a plane falling down or how taking the customer for granted lead to loss of millions of dollars when that customer released a music album highlighting the incident on YOUTUBE.

Day 12 began with talk by My Anshuman Gupta, CEO, Strontium who talked about his journey, the challenges he faced in setting up a company, and how he created a space for himself in a market dominated by big players. He talked about some innovative marketing like putting logo instead of brand name, packaging in yellow color, targeting products for cars etc. Lesson for any start-up is to find fortune at bottom of pyramid. Next we had interaction with Prof Nitin Pangarkar who talked about strategies of Asian companies. How Kodak failed to capitalize on its competency with the introduction of digital cameras or how FAVNE has captured more than 60% of market in Robotics. In the evening we had meeting with Prof Sekhar for delivery of Smart City Project and he was very impressed with the work done by us. He also put forward the opportunity to continue working on this project after the immersion program and we gladly accepted the proposal.

Day 13

EPGP V Cohort


All Smiles
Last day of our exciting international immersion trip began with a photo shoot (required for brochure ;)) for the whole batch at NUS campus. Afterwards we had an interesting chat with Mr. Cecil Leong on challenges in business Environment and strategies which should be adopted to mitigate them. We also had pep talk by Mr. Ajay Jaiswal on wealth management and Christina Lim from Ocean Health on her journey to entrepreneurship. Our journey at NUS culminated with certificate presentations and a small gift by NUS. Afterwards, we went to Siemens building to see the advancement and research they have made in smart cities. We also had some fun with a working model towards building Smart sustainable city.

With this our journey to this interesting land of opportunities came to an end. It is really a wonderful country with so many opportunities and which has become a financial center without any natural resources or good weather. They do face challenges but those are anticipated and are dealt well. During the night went for shopping for some toys at Mustafa center, which is only place in Singapore which run 24*7. Its journey towards becoming shopping hub for locals is one of the many success stories hidden in streets of Singapore.

Some memories....



 
Ice Kachang - Expression says it all :)
Let the race begin
The tour ends
 

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