1) Unit of analysis and geographic scope of an industry –
The unit of analysis is done by examining the factors that enable the development of the Internet-Ecosystem and the barriers that are impeding more than 60% of the global population.
Today, Internet is present in all regions of the world. The geographic scope of the internet industry is wide. As per given in the case, the countries are divided in 5 different groups:
Group 1- Africa and Asia- Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania.
Group 2- Egypt, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.
Group 3- China, Sri-Lanka and Vietnam.
Group 4- Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey.
Group 5- Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States.
Given that a large number of the world’s population is using the internet (or in other words is ‘online’), on the other hand, more than 60% of the world’s population still remains offline. 2) Market potential –
Without a significant change in technology, the growth rate of worldwide internet users slowed from an annual growth rate of 15.1% from 2005 to 2008 to 10.4% from 2009 to 2013. At the current stage, an additional 500-900 million people are forecast to join the internet-family by 2017. However, this still leaves up to 4.2 billion people offline.
The market potential is to look after into areas like- Income of the people, the literacy rate, infrastructure, governmental support and investment.
The more high the income of people, more they will spend on the internet services. Likewise, there is more demand of internet services where the literacy rate is high. Also if there is good availability of the infrastructure, the easier it is to extend the network-coverage for the companies that are providing the services and the better the governmental support the better will be the opportunity for the investors to invest into