Indonesia and Thailand are two critical markets for RIM BlackBerry worldwide. In Indonesia RIM has 60 shops selling and promoting BlackBerry products and accessories. BlackBerry usage is prevalent in Indonesia, an archipelago nation where mobile Internet access is more likely than fixed-line access of any sort. BlackBerry is the dominate platform for Internet and mobile gaming usage there. In Thailand the company has recently opened its first store and hopes to attract more customers to supplement the 60,000 units per month sold in the country already. Indonesia and Thailand are also key markets for online games and mobile games. All PC and phone vendors will want to secure solid market share in those two countries to participate in the online games market growth. 

Online payment solutions play a starring role in the world of online games and virtual economies. In the US we often equate online payment solutions with PayPal. In China and Southeast Asia that is not always the case. In Southeast Asia in particular the need for sophisticated payment solutions is supported by the fact that there are multiple countries with multiple currencies, banking systems, and language sets trying to cooperate as online gaming becomes regional rather than local. Three companies have gained fame in Southeast Asia for payments: Indomog (Indonesia), Cherry Credits (Singapore), and Mig33 (Singapore).  Singapore is the best positioned country in the region to act as the centerpoint for distribution of online games, so it is no surprise that two of these payments companies are headquartered there. Penn-Olson explains the business model of Mig33. Niko interviewed Mig33 and many other companies for our upcoming 2011 Southeast Asian Games Market Regional Report.

As Niko Partners has asserted many times, corporations and investors should not be as enthralled with large population and user numbers in Asia as they should be with the percentage of potentially paying gamers. In Southeast Asia we observe a far smaller population in general and specifically of gamers in Singapore as we do in the Philippines, yet per gamer the spending is much higher in Singapore. There is great potential for conversion of new gamers to being paid gamers. In China the rate is about 10-20% of all gamers are or will become paying gamers. Even if the other 80-90% start to pay pennies per year, when we are talking about hundreds of millions of people that adds up. Companies are posed with a strategic choice: invest in a market for its potential, or skip that market and just take any revenue from there as gravy. The Philippines may turn out to be a gravy market, but Vietnam and China, for example, are definitely worth the investment to build revenue.