And as regional startup ecosystems develop, they may possibly chip away at some advantages that Singapore’s ecosystem and its startups have.
Citing the likes of Vietnam and Indonesia, a World Bank report last year noted that Singapore’s neighbouring countries “have created their own startup ecosystems”, thereby increasing the regional competition.
“A startup attempting to scale from Singapore into a neighbouring market will now find more difficulty than it may have faced in years past,” the report added.
Dr Wong reiterated that as neighbouring startup ecosystems mature, more funds may start to flow there instead of Singapore.
“Then why do I, as a founder, need to come to Singapore to tap the venture capital funds? I can go directly to the target market,” he said.
“MATTER OF TIME” BEFORE MORE SINGAPORE STARTUPS MAKE A MARK INTERNATIONALLY
Despite the relative success of Singapore’s startup scene, questions have been raised about the small number of homegrown startups that are able to go toe-to-toe with international brands.
Some experts said that it may just be a matter of time.
“The growth phenomenon within the local startup scene took place only in recent years and more time may be required for those with global ambitions to start venturing beyond, especially into less-known markets,” said Mr Chiu of KPMG.
Mr Lim of XS APAC added: “A company like (homegrown startup) Razer has been around for almost 20 years, and we could maybe now call it a global brand.”
Mr Lim believes that given more time, many more Singapore startups can go global.
People also need time to gain the necessary experience to scale their businesses, the experts pointed out.
“We have not had (that many) experienced executives who have built and scaled global teams, global programmes, global services,” said Ms Sai of Unravel Carbon, who attributed this to the relative nascency of Singapore’s startup ecosystem.
“So there’s that lack of depth of experience to help these new generations of companies to do the same — to scale globally and to serve tens of millions of users.”
Having said that, some companies go global from the get-go.
“We started venturing out to Europe, the US and China markets in the very early days,” said PatSnap founder and CEO Jeffrey Tiong.
“We serve customers who invest a lot in R&D (research and development), and the US, Europe and China are the few countries that have huge R&D expenditure.”
Mr Tiong added that to go global, startups need to offer innovative solutions that stand out from the pack. “If the solution we offer is not especially differentiated, then it is hard to compete with other players… in the US, Europe, Japan and China,” he said.
However, Mr Ku said sometimes, going global might not require a company to offer cutting-edge solutions. Citing the examples of Razer and Secretlab, which are both gaming peripheral companies, he noted that startups can use good marketing to penetrate a niche market across the globe.“For Singapore, it’s hard for us to create a mainstream global success, for example, cell phones. We just don’t have a big home market,” he said.