The first-ever two-day hybrid event on 26-27 October 2022 aims to help sellers grow their brand on a global scale with the theme ‘Small Businesses, Big Ambitions’

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 5 October 2022 – (NASDAQ:AMZN) – The Amazon Southeast Asia Seller Summit 2022 returns for its fourth edition on 26-27 October 2022, with the theme ‘Small Businesses, Big Ambitions’ and a bigger focus to support sellers in Singapore to expand their businesses online, locally and globally. For the first time ever, the Summit will be held in a hybrid format – online via an Event App, and in person at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center in Singapore.

Sellers can expect to learn about the world-class logistics network and tools Amazon offers businesses to reach shoppers overseas with Amazon Global Selling (Day 1) and within Singapore on Amazon.sg (Day 2). Across both days, the Summit will include educational and advanced sessions on key e-commerce topics such as shipping and fulfillment, e-commerce store optimizations, sourcing, product research strategies, advertising, and brand building.

Attendees can also look forward to networking with Amazon leaders – including Anand Palit, Head of Global Selling, Southeast Asia, and Jan Lim, Country Leader, Singapore Marketplace – as well as successful Amazon sellers – such as Naoki Matcha and Pristine – and third-party service providers. Teams from Amazon Advertising, Amazon Global Logistics, and Amazon’s Seller University will also join the event.

Commenting on global e-commerce growth opportunities, Anand Palit, Head of Global Selling, Southeast Asia, Amazon, said: “I have seen big ambitions from businesses in Singapore. To help local sellers realize their potential and take advantage of cross-border e-commerce, we have set the theme for our Summit as ‘Small Businesses, Big Ambitions’. In these two days, we will push the boundaries to help local and small businesses discover innovative solutions, and use selling and advertising tools to build their strengths. Seller success is our success, and our mission is clear – to prepare and support local sellers so they can sustain their growth even beyond Singapore by selling on Amazon stores worldwide and thriving on an international playing field.”

Adding on about domestic e-commerce opportunities and selling online in Singapore, Jan Lim, Country Leader Singapore Marketplace, Amazon, said: “In Southeast Asia, Singaporeans form one of the highest proportions of digital consumers today and shopping online has quickly become a habit for many of us. As a growing number of people shop online, local businesses have more avenues to engage them and gain new customers. With Amazon.sg, local brands can access our increasing number of shoppers to build a prominent and sustainable presence in Singapore. I am excited for Day 2 of the Summit where we will cover how our tools and resources can help sellers tap on Amazon.sg to sell online and reach more customers in Singapore and beyond.”

Showcasing sellers’ success

The upcoming Summit will feature some of the new Global Selling seller ambassadors such as Naoki Matcha and Pristine, who have been successful on Amazon’s international stores and have leveraged Amazon’s services and fulfillment tools to scale their businesses globally.

“Having sold on Amazon since 2016 and being in a niche product category, we fully appreciate the importance of thinking globally from day 1. With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), we easily reach and deliver our products to customers in the USA and the UK despite being based here. We consider it a great honor to be invited as a Global Selling seller ambassador and look forward to sharing our experience. We hope to give back to the seller community and help inspire the next wave of globally successful Singapore brands,” said Samuel Loo, co-founder, Naoki Matcha, a homegrown business that offers a wide range of specialty matcha blends.

“We never thought we could reach customers in the US, Canada and the UK from Singapore, before starting our journey with Amazon. We are glad that we decided to expand beyond Singapore after seeing the large international customer base Amazon has. Today, we have loyal international customers everywhere, and we have been able to delight them from our home base in Singapore because of Amazon’s guidance and global network. Being a Global Selling seller ambassador is an affirmation of the progress we’ve made as a local business, and we would love to share our experience with other sellers at the upcoming Amazon Southeast Asia Seller Summit,” said Jeremy Teo, General Manager (North America & Europe), Pristine, a Singaporean home fragrance brand.

To address local sellers’ needs, the Summit has three core learning pillars:

• Be Inspired: With seller sharing and panels;
• Learn: The latest tips and tools to sell from Amazon leaders;
• Network: With other sellers, Amazon Seller ambassadors, and e-commerce service providers.

While Day 1 of the Summit (26 Oct) will focus on cross-border selling on Amazon.com and internationally, Day 2 (27 Oct) will dive into selling on Amazon.sg and in Singapore. Some key sessions include:

• Opening address by Kelvin Woon, Regional Director (US Southeast), Enterprise Singapore.
• Inspirational keynote by Tiffany Lung, retail analyst for Inside Retail Asia, on the 2023 outlook of Asian e-commerce trends and how brands can connect with consumers.
• Panel discussion with top Amazon.com sellers: Pristine, KeaBabies, and Naoki Matcha on ‘Building a Global Brand: Having the right mindset to succeed globally’.

For more information and event registration, please visit: https://sell.amazon.com.sg/seller-summit-2022

Appendix

New Amazon Global Selling Seller Ambassadors featured at the Amazon Southeast Asia Seller Summit 2022

Naoki Matcha is a homegrown brand that curates and offers specialty matcha from different tea regions of Japan. Offering a selection of various grades of matcha, the brand is on a mission to share knowledge about Japanese matcha and help customers enjoy matcha in different ways.

Pristine seeks to inspire rejuvenation with aromatherapy. With various products such as reed diffusers, scented candles and essential oils, Pristine is on a mission to consistently restore its customers back to their pristine condition – so that they can take on every day refreshed and with the clearest state of mind.

Hashtag: #Amazon

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About Amazon Global Selling

Amazon Global Selling helps businesses from anywhere in the world to launch a global business, reach Amazon customers around the world and build international brands. Through selling on Amazon online stores, sellers of different types and scale can reach Amazon’s millions of Amazon customers worldwide, including 200 million+ Prime customers in overseas Amazon online stores; and more than five millions of business and institutional buyers in the USA, Europe, and Japan.

For more information about selling on Amazon, please visit http://sell.amazon.sg

The new Traveller is digital savvy, strongly influenced by social media and more inclined to combine work and leisure in their travel.

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 5 October 2022 – A survey of more than 8,000 travellers globally, including 2,461 travellers in China, Indonesia and Thailand, reveals a growing appetite for overseas travel as countries reopen, that hasn’t been dampened by rising living costs.

Across the 3 countries polled in Asia Pacific, 71% of travellers in China and 56% in both Indonesia and Thailand, said that inflation had “no impact” to “moderate impact” in their decision when planning and evaluating the cost of travel. Respondents who cite a “moderate impact” also stated that cheap accommodation rates are not the most important factor when booking their travel.

The annual Changing Traveller Report 2022 by SiteMinder (ASX:SDR), the world’s leading hotel commerce platform, also found that about half of respondents – 48% of travellers in China and Thailand and 52% of travellers in Indonesia – intend to travel “internationally or domestically” over the next 12 months. Millennials (age 26 to 41) form the largest segment who plan to travel, accounting for 58% of travellers in Indonesia, followed by 56% in China and 52% in Thailand.

As the largest accommodation-specific traveller survey globally, insights from SiteMinder’s 2022 Changing Traveller Report showed that:

• Gen Z (age 18-25) are also the most likely to be influenced by the social media presence of the property they book, compared to other age groups. Thai travellers are the most influenced by social media, with 78% of respondents saying they are “very influenced” or “influenced” by the property’s social media presence in their booking decision, followed by 75% in China and 74% in Indonesia. In fact, respondents in every age group agree they are all influenced by the social media accounts of the accommodation they book.
• Bleisure continues to be a growing trend with 49% of Gen Z global travellers most likely to take a working holiday, followed by 46% of Millennials. 65% of Thai travellers, almost two in every three, are the leaders in bleisure travel, followed by 62% of Indonesia travellers and 47% of Chinese travellers. In fact, a quarter or more of travellers from every country surveyed in the report will be bleisure travellers on their next trip.
• Travellers are likely to change their perception of the accommodation provider if they have a negative customer experience when accessing and using the accommodation provider website, for example if the website is slow or the payment process is not secure. A high proportion of travellers – 89% in China, 72% in Indonesia and 75% in Thailand – said they are “very likely” or “likely” to change their perception when the accommodation provider is not using technology effectively.
• The use of AI and robots by accommodation providers to replace hospitality professionals is also well accepted with 86% of travellers in China, 85% of travellers in Thailand and 76% of travellers in Indonesia saying they are “very supportive” or “supportive” of accommodation providers using AI and robots to automate previous human work processes.

Sankar Narayan, Managing Director and CEO of SiteMinder, said, “We can see that optimism is returning from travellers to the tourism sector, and there is demand for travel as travel restrictions and health concerns abate across the world. Despite inflation and rising costs, travellers are reporting they are undeterred and do not intend to cancel their travel plans, which is a positive sign for accommodation industry resilience and travel globally, particularly in Asia.

“The long-awaited recovery of travel has also emerged with a new type of traveller, who has higher expectations from hotels and their travel experiences than ever. We can see that, more than ever, travellers now have ambitions to book, travel, work, connect, and experience the world with the greatest flexibility and security possible.”

The extensive report also extensively uncovers five key travel trends set to inform and inspire the accommodation and tourism industry:

1. The Macro-Travel Trend: The urge to travel is stronger than rising inflation
2. The Digital Influence Trend: Right now, travellers are the most winnable consumers on earth
3. The Bleisure Trend: Working travellers want the hotel of the future, today
4. The Trust Trend: Every digital touchpoint matters for the new trust-critical traveller
5. The Human Connection Trend: Tech-enabled travellers are not willing to compromise on human connection

Explore SiteMinder’s interactive hotel experience to gain more insights and to read the full report.

Survey methodology

Powered by Kantar, in August 2022, SiteMinder undertook a survey of 8,182 travellers aged over 18 years in August, 2022, in 10 markets, including Australia, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Spain, Thailand, UK, USA. Respondents were asked 25 accommodation-specific questions, and were split up by gender, generation, location (urban, suburban, rural), travel plans, work plans and the type of accommodation they plan to stay in next. The data was supplemented with reports and data from McKinsey & Company, Deloitte, Paysafe, and others.

Hashtag: #SiteMinder

About SiteMinder

SiteMinder Limited (ASX:SDR) is the world’s leading open hotel commerce platform, ranked among technology pioneers for opening up every hotel’s access to online commerce. It’s this central role that has earned SiteMinder the trust of tens of thousands of hotels, across 150 countries, to sell, market, manage and grow their business. The global company, headquartered in Sydney with offices in Bangkok, Berlin, Dallas, Galway, London and Manila, generated more than 100 million reservations worth over US$35 billion in revenue for hotels in the last year prior to the start of the pandemic.

Zero Trust Security helps organisations thrive in the era of hybrid work and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 5 October 2022 – Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ: OKTA), one of the leading independent identity providers, today revealed that a growing number of Asia-Pacific (APAC) organisations are embracing Zero Trust Security initiatives to overcome the challenges of today’s dynamic cyber threat landscape.

The State of Zero Trust Security in Asia Pacific 2022 report, commissioned by Okta and conducted by Pulse Q&A, found that the percentage of APAC organisations that had implemented a Zero Trust Security initiative had grown by 18 points from the 2021 figure to reach 50%. While the rate of Zero Trust adoption among APAC organisations (18% YoY growth) was lower than the global figure (31% YoY growth), almost all (96%) respondents in APAC have a defined Zero Trust security initiative in play or in plan for 2022.

The report also found that APAC organisations were slower to recognise the importance of leaving passwords behind in the quest for stronger security and identity and access management (IAM) to combat increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Of all organisations worldwide, those in APAC had the lowest adoption of passwordless access, with only 0.5% having implemented and only 10% planning to implement in the next 18 months.

There is a growing consensus among global organisational thinking that an identity-first approach to Zero Trust is not only paramount, but essential. This allows organisations to fully leverage identity and access management (IAM), by integrating it with other critical security solutions, into a powerful central control point for intelligently governing access among users, devices, data, and networks. The research found that 80% of global organisations consider identity as important to their overall Zero Trust security strategy, and an additional 19% say identity is business critical. APAC respondents rated the importance of identity to their overall Zero Trust security strategy at 83% while an additional 15% say identity is business critical.

While securing data, networks and devices continue to rank as the top priorities among surveyed organisations, a growing proportion recognises the importance of people to an identity-centric security model. The report found organisations in the APAC region place a greater emphasis on automating the provisioning and deprovisioning of employees and working on privileged access for cloud infrastructure over the coming 18 months. The responses forecast an increase from 22% to 76% adoption and from 43.5% to 88% adoption, respectively.

Nearly all APAC organisations acknowledge identity is key to Zero Trust Security

“By adopting Zero Trust Security, organisations can position themselves to overcome the challenges presented by hybrid work–including mobile and remote working–by adopting an identity-centric approach to network and resource access rather than relying on outdated security models based on the traditional network perimeter,” says Ben Goodman, SVP and General Manager for Asia Pacific, Okta. “Our research showed that while APAC organisations lagged behind their global counterparts in implementing Zero Trust Security, 98% of respondents recognised that identity was important or business-critical to that approach.”

Despite the concept of Zero Trust Security being discussed as early as 2009, many APAC organisations and leaders lack understanding about its benefits. This elevates risk in an environment of increasingly sophisticated security threats. However, most APAC organisations are acutely aware of the need to stop malicious actors from compromising their people, systems, and data to the extent that 75% of those surveyed prioritised security over the useability of business-critical applications and resources, unlike most of their global counterparts.

Of those APAC organisations that have yet to implement a Zero Trust Security initiative, 38% said they planned to do so over the next six to 12 months.

Unfortunately, as with many ICT projects, the global talent crunch presents a sizable challenge; 31% of APAC organisations cited talent and skills shortages as a challenge, followed by a lack of stakeholder buy-in and lack of awareness of Zero Trust Security solutions, both cited by 18% of respondents.

Investment commitments in Zero Trust Security Upheld

The report found that APAC organisations typically followed through on their 2021 commitments to invest in Zero Trust Security. Last year, 76% of organisations in the region pledged to increase their Zero Trust Security budgets moderately or significantly, and 82% of APAC organisations in this year’s survey reported a moderate or significant increase.

Zero Trust Security is a security framework based on the assumption that every user, device, and IP address accessing a resource is a threat until proven otherwise and requires organisations to implement rigorous security controls to verify anything that attempts to connect to the corporate network. The rapid take-up of mobile, cloud, and hybrid working has put pressure on organisations to replace increasingly redundant ‘castle and moat’ security models with more agile, holistic approaches centered on identity.

In the context of Zero Trust Security, identity is an actor–whether human or process–that wants access to data for purposes that include retrieval, deletion, and modification. With an identity-centric approach, organisations can give the right people the right level of access to the right resources in the right context, with access assessed continuously.

To complete the State of Zero Trust Security in Asia Pacific 2022 report–which assesses the maturity of identity and access management in APAC organisations and where they reside on the journey towards a full Zero Trust security posture–Pulse Q&A surveyed 200 security leaders across the region. The survey questionnaire covered the Zero Trust initiatives organisations had in place and how they planned to prioritise these over the near and long term.

Okta’s State of Zero Trust Security in Asia Pacific 2022 report can be downloaded here.

Hashtag: #Okta

About Okta

Okta is one of the leading independent identity providers. The Okta Identity Cloud enables organisations to securely connect the right people to the right technologies at the right time. With more than 7,000 pre-built integrations to applications and infrastructure providers, Okta provides simple and secure access to people and organisations everywhere, giving them the confidence to reach their full potential. More than 16,400 organisations, including JetBlue, Nordstrom, Siemens, Slack, Takeda, Teach for America, and Twilio, trust Okta to help protect the identities of their workforces and customers.

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA – Media OutReach – 5 October 2022 – After long months of behind-closed-doors technical development, the international Forex broker OctaFX finally announced its soon-to-be-launched native trading platform, OctaTrader. The much-anticipated inauguration will take place in the following months.

What to expect from the OctaTrader platform?

The OctaTrader platform is an entirely in-house project. The developers have paid particular attention to both appearance and functionality. Therefore the platform has a user-friendly interface and performs quickly and smoothly.

The platform’s primary purpose is to enable users to trade, deal with their account and money management, have a diverse range of tools for investment decision-making and analyse their trading—all within the same application.

The platform will be available for mobile users using iOS and Android devices as well as for web traders.

At the moment, the users in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore can already test the trading functionality and user-friendliness of the interface. In the next few months, the company expects to deliver the full functionality of the platform, and users worldwide will be able to try out a demo account themselves.

Maintaining its very own trading platform is in the company’s very best interest—to continue its streak of reliability, effectiveness, and transparency in providing its services. Looking back at 11 years of success, market expectations favour OctaFX’s chances of further achievement in that regard.

OctaTrader perfectly aligns with its company’s values

All of the above-mentioned aspects conform to OctaFX’s value framework. Upholding transparency—especially in the developmental stage—was vital in preparing the path for OctaTrader. Clients are being involved in the process. It is this mixture of data-driven and client-centred approaches that raise the probability of later success.

In that sense, the very first step was to find out if there would even be a significant demand for a native trading platform among OctaFX clients. The answer was a resounding ‘yes’—upon which enthusiastic development began.

The broker is long known for not hiding its avid focus on the clients’ investment goals. Helping to reach these objectives has been a crucial OctaFX value from the very start. Launching the fresh OctaTrader will be a new, deciding chapter in this company’s journey to further assist clients in their investment plans.

Although the upcoming trading platform is not yet ready for launch, this same commitment to transparency leads to the joyful announcement of its soon arrival in the first place. So keep an eye out for further updates.

Hashtag: #OctaFX

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About OctaFX

OctaFX is a global broker providing online trading services worldwide since 2011. It offers commission-free access to financial markets and a variety of services already utilised by clients from 150 countries who have opened more than 12 million trading accounts. Free educational webinars, articles, and analytical tools they provide help clients reach their investment goals.

The company is involved in a comprehensive network of charity and humanitarian initiatives, including the improvement of educational infrastructure and short-notice relief projects supporting local communities and small to medium enterprises.

On a side note, OctaFX has also won more than 50 awards since its foundation, including the 2021 ‘Best Forex Broker Asia’ award from Global Banking and Finance Review and the 2021 ‘Best ECN Broker’ award from World Finance.