CAD software business in Japan, Korea, Taiwan

Launching a new 3D CAD software, CAD CAM or similar project in Asia and wondering where to start? Maybe my experience with the following CAD software project in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan will help give you some ideas.

It was January 2000 and I was in a Monday morning executive staff meeting when what I really wanted was to get on the phone to Toyota to close a new license + maintenance deal I had been working on for the past 9 months. The meeting was about a critical new product roll-out, so even Toyota needed to wait a couple of hours.

The next agenda item was New Business Development and Dave, the VP Product Marketing, stands up to make a presentation about the Asian launch of the company's new Web-enabled CAD CAM service "eCADNow"...

"eCADNow will be #1 in the Asian e-manufacturing market!" he states, "We have no obvious competitors and within 2 years will achieve overwhelming presence and brand image in the key Asian Internet centers of Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. eCADNow will be the Asian e-manufacturing ASP of choice!".

"Small suppliers will use broadband ADSL and fiber-optic access to eliminate high-cost occasional use of expensive CAD CAM CAE applications. Large manufacturers will use in-house hosted gateways to out-source entire e-manufacturing application areas." The CEO is nodding her head in agreement by this time.

"eCADNow will overturn Asia's existing inefficient distribution systems and redefine the way Asian companies access and use manufacturing applications. This is a phenomenal opportunity, computer aided design will be changed forever!" Dave finishes and we all look to the CEO to guage her reaction.

She looks at me, "Jim, I'm putting you in charge of the Asian eCADNow roll-out, Yoshi will take over the Toyota deal and I'll make sure you continue to get commission credit for it"

"So where do I start?" I grumbled as I returned to my office.

I was faced with an almost identical task when I started out to put together a new 3D CAD software venture at the turn of 1999-2000. At that time the 'dot-com bubble' was at its frothiest and in the Internet space almost anything seemed as though it would make a profit. After 7 years (at that time) of doing business in the Japanese 3D CAD software market, I decided to do some research in e-manufacturing in the rest of Asia and this site is one of the by-products of that research.

The intensive Web-based market-entry business research methodology used for the research has since been successfully used for several projects in diverse markets ranging from cosmetics and fitness supplements to sports goods and software, mostly for doing business in Japan. I originally decided to put this site online as an extension to my foreign executive doing business in Japan online resume site but decided to leave it here in the hope that it may be useful to other sales or marketing executives faced with the task of initiating new 3D CAD software, CAD CAM or other software business development in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea or elsewhere.

If you are interested in doing business in Japan, starting a Japanese company and entering the Japanese market then please visit the Venture Japan site which is gradually becoming the #1 online resource for those subjects.

If you are interested in the history of CAD software, CAD CAM and computer aided design in general, then a very readable history of CAD software and computer aided design is online at the CADAZZ site.

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