Tomorrow Begins Today: Tech Trends to Watch Out For in 2019 and Beyond
In the tech world, tomorrow begins today, driving innovation in more and more fields, and changing the lifestyles and patterns of societies. The Philippines is no stranger to these advancements. The past year has seen vast improvements in the way we advertise to customers, shop for groceries, and pay for our bills. But before we settle down to this new norm, we must brace ourselves for even more exciting changes awaiting us this 2019.
E-commerce set to be a P53 trillion industry
With the popularity of apps like FoodPanda, Lazada, and Shoppee, the online retail market is poised to grow to a volume of $996 million dollars or P53 trillion pesos this 2019 and 10.5% more in each succeeding year.
In 2018 alone, consumers spent an average of P3,958 or P4,605 per month on Android and iOS phones respectively. Food delivery, clothing, grocery, cosmetics and perfumes, and electronics were ranked as the top-selling categories, with Lazada, Shopee, Zalora and eBay making up 92% of ecommerce traffic. And that’s just from marketplaces alone.
E-commerce encompasses a wide array of businesses which are collectively changing the way Filipinos shop, so online trade groups, airline ticketing services and even music streaming apps will further bolster the industry from 1.5% of the Philippine retail market to the expected 5% in the next 3 years.
Why now?
E-commerce is not new to Filipinos, the concept existing since the early days of Groupon and Multiply, but why has it taken this long for the ecosystem to achieve its current pace of growth?
“The [e-commerce] industry skipped a key step in its development: infrastructure,” said W. Oliver Segovia, founder of the digital consultancy firm AVA Online Group, in his article Unfinished Business: Why E-Commerce in the Philippines is Falling Behind.
As the first phase in e-commerce market growth, infrastructure encompasses connectivity, consumer payments, and warehousing, among other components which were largely unavailable in the past, while the second and third phases, the establishment of platforms and growth of market verticals, advanced way faster.
It’s been 3 years since the time of writing and much has changed. The internet has grown more accessible to the public through cheaper rates, government policy and logistics services like Grab, Lalamove and Angkas are now available on-demand.
In the field of digital payments, eWallets like GCash, PayMaya and Coins.ph allow the 77% unbanked Filipinos to take part in e-commerce even without a credit card, and while some remain wary of using them for security and data privacy fears, the amount of e-money transactions has been steadily rising from P153 billion in 2015 to P158 billion in 2016 and P174 billion in 2017.
Into the future
What’s in for the online shopping scene in the next years? Expect more brick-and-mortar stores and SMEs to join the e-commerce ecosystem. Currently, the industry is largely dominated by foreign companies due to brand familiarity, but as more digital services seamlessly integrate e-commerce into consumers’ daily lives, the volume and market of online orders will increase.
Speaking of seamless integration, e-commerce will break down even more barriers in the customer user experience. From facilitating secure digital payments, technology will now find its way into users’ social media feeds where they can make purchases without even leaving the app, local companies will start adopting augmented reality to help users try on products without having to visit physical stores, and chatbots will elevate customer service to new standard.
Businesses burdened by cybersecurity threats
By 2021, there will be 27.1 billion devices connected globally transferring massive amounts of information across borders. But despite the value these data offer in advancing IoT innovations, the growing risk of security threats and breaches stand to hinder this growth.
Research shows that “One in three small businesses admitted to not having any cyber security strategies in place at all and more than three quarters said they have no policy for controlling access to their data systems.”
Attacks on websites of big brands like Wendy’s Philippines, Jollibee, and Cathay Pacific, as well as 68 government organizations, affect thousands of customers, exposing pertinent information from hashed passwords and location history to online conversations and voter registration numbers. The biggest breach incident to date took place in 2013 when 3 billion records were stolen from Yahoo reflecting the risk of digital transformation projects in a time when hacking tools are growing more sophisticated.
A price to pay
What exactly is lost in a cybersecurity attack? A recent study by Frost & Sullivan and Microsoft reveals that the Philippines stands to lose as much as $3.5 billion dollars due to cybersecurity incidents, covering direct losses from lack of productivity and fines, and induced losses from the negative impact on the broader ecosystem.
But the most important loss companies experience is the trust placed on them by their customers.
With media publicity surrounding security breaches and information campaigns by advocacy groups, people are growing more aware of their moral right to data privacy.
A survey by the National Privacy Commission, the group tasked to implement Republic Act 10173 or the Data Privacy Act in the country, revealed that 94% of Filipinos want to know how their data is being used when they make transactions online.
Foreign consumers are even more protective with 72% of 1000 British consumers saying that they would boycott brands involved in data breaches, and a UK-based teclo company experiencing a profit loss of more than 50% due to a cyber attack.
Into the future
Moving into a more connected future of smart homes and self-driving cars, the burden is on institutions to ramp up their cybersecurity systems which is easier said than done with systems costing as much as P400 to 500 million pesos. To ease this transition, the Department of Information and Communications Technology has launched the National Cybersecurity Plan 2022 which includes provisions and programs for predictive, detective, preventive and responsive strategies against cyber attacks.
More than the systems themselves, the government will be investing in education. The country is severely lacking in Certified Information Systems Security Professionals (CISSP), with only around 44 residing locally versus 189 in Thailand and 1000 in Singapore. Awareness campaigns and trainings will also be intensified to keep Filipinos from compromising personal and corporate IT security.
Building cities of the future with 5G
Rolling out worldwide by 2020, 5G networks are changing wireless technology — and the world — as we know it. Promising ultra high speeds and lower latency, 5G will pave the way for augmented reality, smart homes, and IoT to be implemented on a wider scale.
More importantly, this new technology facilitates the building of smart cities.
Alexandre Gonfalonieri defines a smart city as “one that uses technology to improve outcomes across every aspect of city operations and enhance the services.”
Having automated sensor networks tracking traffic activity, water use, home activity, energy management, and even environmental patterns, among others are just some ways 5G can help people make more data-driven sustainable solutions.
This is the future the government envisions for in two major cities. As part of its goal to build the biggest smart city in the world, the Manila City government has signed a consortium with companies from Southeast Asia, China, and Europe to build the New Manila Bay City of the Pearl, a “city-in-a-city” 407-hectare project expected to be self-sufficient with features like a solar canopy and stormwater recycling service.
Down south, the 10–000 hectare New Clark City will be designed with disaster-resilience and sustainability in mind. Patterned after urban planning in Putrajaya, Malaysia, New Clark City will have an underground utility corridor, integrated operations center, LEED-certified buildings, and a national government administrative center, among others.
Infrastructure woes
Construction for both cities will take three to four decades, and this gives local telcos just enough time to set up the necessary infrastructure for 5G. Globe and Smart are expected to launch the service in mid-2019 to 2020, but users should not expect optimum performance just yet.
5G differs from its predecessor because it taps into higher-band spectrums of radio waves, on top of low- and mid-band wavelengths already congested from use.
But while 5G’s wider channel bands enable it to offer speeds as much as 10,000 mbps, its low coverage area and building penetration mean that small cell sites need to be more densely deployed for better network stability.
As of now, the country is already lagging behind in infrastructure. The 17,000 telco towers serving millions of Filipinos is a stark contrast to the 70,000 already built in Vietnam, where a 5G trial is set to begin next month.
Into the future
There is no doubt that 5G will change the world. A latency decrease from 100 milliseconds to 1 millisecond will transform the way smart cars work, and the higher network speed also means that more data will be acquired than ever before with IoT applications.
But is the Philippine ready for 5G? Not quite, but we’re getting there. For one, the government has already started talks with foreign and local companies to facilitate the building of 1000 common towers each costing P5 million pesos.
Various 5G-compatible phones have also been unveiled at the 2019 Mobile World Congress such as the Huawei Mate X, Samsung Galaxy S10 SG, and LG VSO ThinQ. Considering the added cost and current network availability in the Philippines, it would be best for consumers to think twice before upgrading from their 4G LTE phones.
Conclusion
Over 67 million people have access to the Internet in the Philippines today, and the numbers are expected to rise even more with tech advancements emerging in the blink of an eye. The increased ease convenience and connectivity these offer, however, also bring more challenges.
To what extent will we have control over our personal information as data is becoming a more valuable commodity?
How can we empower more IT leaders in the younger generation, so our country can keep up with the global tech scene?
And finally, how can we ensure that no one gets left behind as we move into a world of AI and machine learning?
These are just some of the questions society needs to address. They are difficult questions that perhaps we will never be able to fully answer, but they are questions that matter nonetheless. And now more than ever, they deserve a place in every policy discussion, business meeting, and family dinner.
Tomorrow begins today, and we are just getting started.
Hello, I’m Gwen, an (incoming) engineering student passionate about entrepreneurship, youth empowerment, and personal development! Thank you so much for reading this article, and if you’d like to see more content, be sure to clap, share, and follow! See you!
