Doing Business in Emerging Economies
What are Emerging Economies?
The emerging economies are countries like Iran, Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, Argentina and China. Zara hails from Iran, or Persia. She tells us that Iran is the original name, then it became Persia only to revert to Iran.





 
Zara Zamani - her background
Zara's official forename is spelt Zahra, but she has gone by Zara since aged 12. She is just 32, but Zara runs 2 companies, each with 3 business sections.

Zara was born in Iran. She is very proud to be from Iran too. When she took up her studies, she studied in Malaysia, Iran and the United Kingdom. She currently is studying part time in Sweden. Then studied electronics and petroleum engineering. After that, Zara took up business law and business management and later ended up in innovation sciences.

Zara has always been working. She started her first business aged 7 and was privileged to work in a multi-cultural environment. Zara worked as a field engineer in the oil and gas industry where only 3% of the workforce was female. After more than a decade away from Iran, when she returned, she discovered Iranian ladies were not allowed to work on oil and gas rigs. This limitation created an opportunity for Zara Zamani. She became an entrepreneur.
How did Zara get into the travel business?
She decided to travel around Iran, to get to know her country better. It became obvious there was a desperate need for travel technology and infrastructural technology in this emerging economy. The market gap was identified and that is how she got started - in travel technology.

Here's a snippet from her http://www.egsdigital.com website


Watch Zara Explain The State of Travel Technology in Iran
Graham Arrowsmith asks Zara Zamani about the state of travel technology in Iran.

http://thenext100days.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Zara-Zamani-the-problem-of-travel-technology-in-Iran.mp4

 

Iran is actually attracting visitors. Despite sanctions. See this link to an article in The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/middle-east/iran/Galleries/Irans-travel-highlights/

It is also one of the cheapest destinations for tourism in the world. The political issues do prevent tourism. Beyond the political, there are so many other barriers, similar to other emerging economies, than limit innovation, certainly when it comes to technology.
Huge opportunity for business in this emerging economy
Her travel business required many international agreements. Zara wanted to give travel services abroad access to Iranians. And to tourists coming to Iran.

There is no Expedia. Right now, there is basically NO competition. That's a feature of an emerging economy.

If you are prepared to innovate, then there is huge opportunity.

Right now, a lot of the innovation is INNOVATION IMMITATION. This is the first phase to generating original innovation.
What are the characteristics of emerging economies?
These are the things that make it a dream investment:

They have a large population of young educated professionals.
A huge population of young ICT users. (information and communications technology) - which means if you have a tech solution, users will be onboard quickly.
Very little competition. Had Expedia been present in Iran, Zara would have had to send her CV to loads of companies!!
Market growth is very rapid.
There is an expanding middle class. This means more purchase power by people.
Operation costs are much lower.
There is a higher return of investment (especially important for entrepreneurs).

The emerging economies are reaching originality
This idea of imitation has almost reached originality in emerging economies. Her booking engine business was required by people in Iran. But, Zara realised that copying Expedia is NOT good enough. She has localised her business. Innovation PLUS culture.

You have to know what EXTRA the local people need.

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