Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Kick-Starting a Software Export Business?

Posted by Cliff on from the code-that-crosses-national-boundaries dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I've been asked by my employer to come up with a business plan to sell a software product of ours overseas. We are a fairly well-known Korean telecom operator, but have little presence overseas, and this is our first internally developed software product -- an e-learning management system. We believe South Asia and the U.S. will be strong markets, and that the product itself is competitive feature-wise. What is the best strategy to use to break into overseas markets? How should we go about finding distributors, and what sorts of partnership models should we expect?"

2 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. Partners! by itwerx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I had a similar challenge a few years ago. Except that we wanted to get into almost a dozen countries!
    The biggest lesson we learned from our experience is that one should find a well-established company with a good reputation in that country to partner with.
    I could give you a whole list of reasons why, ranging from local name-recognition to political/industrial connections, but believe me, you don't want to do it any other way!
    Good luck...

  2. Business in South Asia by jsse · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm sure what you mean by South Asia refering to Korea, Taiwan, Japanese and Hong Kong, etc.

    I think I can help but first you must answer the following questions:

    1) Where is your company located? It matters to clarify the term 'oversea'. :)
    2) What kind of e-learning management system are you selling?
    3) You mentioned your company has a connection with a Korean telco. Does your software product has something related to mobile business? I'm not sure whether a Korean Telco could help you otherwise.
    3) To identify the best strategy, you must tell us your goal and your target customers. Say, you'd have completely different strategies in dealing with corporate and public customers.
    4) About finding of distributor, first you must answer 2)
    5) The nature of partnership that could give you maximum profit may vary from one market to another(e.g. telco might demand huge share of profit in partnership, depends on the degree of monopolization there), and again, you must first answer 2). :)
    6) Does your product support Unicode? Forget about South Asia market otherwise.

    If can't figure out any of the above then I think you should seek help from professional consultants, or approach the local Government directly. E.g. you could seek help here for the question concerning international business in Hong Kong. Probaly you could find info in doing business in China there.