 Welcome to the CNBC Africa debate, coming to you from Tianjin, the People's Republic of China, where we are obviously in session with the annual meeting of new champions. Over the next hour, we'll be focusing on the digital advantage and the reshaping of global competitiveness as a result of technological readiness. Joining me to engage in what promises to be a very robust debate, Rich Lesser, the Chief Executive Officer and President of the Boston Consulting Group Global, otherwise known as BCG. We're joined by Austin Okeria, who is the founder and CEO of a computer warehouse in Nigeria. And we've got Natarajan Shandra Sekaran, known to most as Shandra. He is the CEO and Managing Director of Tata Consultancy Services India. He's also a mentor of the annual meeting of the new champions. Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation USA, is next up. And she's also on the Global Agenda Council on Data-Driven Development. And finally, but certainly not least, Maurice Levy, who is the CEO of the Publicist Group. Thank you all very much for your time. Rich, let's kick off on the competitive landscape and how this is changing. Skeptics out there are saying that the digitization across all industries is perhaps marginalizing developing nations, taking into account resource constraints that could be validity in that argument. So I think a couple of things. First, the amount of change that's coming on the digital front is just enormous. And when you talk to companies around the world and developed and developing markets, they're wrestling with three dramatic changes right now. One is how they rewire their own companies, how they transform their own internal operations. One is how they leverage big data and analytics and really get to new insights in marketing and supply chain. And then the third is how they create new products and services for customers. And that message is a broad one. I think when it comes to the emerging markets, certainly there are challenges that opens up, but there's a lot of opportunities too. And the chance to be able to leapfrog ahead in health and education, the chance to leverage mobile and actually go ahead in mobile. I actually would look at it in a much more optimistic light and say for many emerging markets, this will be a chance to make progress in a relatively short space of time where the existing infrastructure and challenges might make it much longer to provide the benefits, help grow the middle class in different parts of the world. On that optimistic note, Austin, let's bring you in and look at the leapfrogging that developing economies can potentially do here. And I refer to an example like in PESA, which is a mobile banking solution. And that, the Kenya Central Bank released stats recently saying that adults entering the formal financial sector increased from 41.3% in 2009 to 66.7% in 2013, radical leapfrogging of the financial services sector due to mobile banking. I'm sure you've seen other innovations in Africa. Well, I think that the advent of the smartphones have enabled inclusiveness, especially in banking. Otherwise, in Africa, the only 20% of the population have access to bank accounts. But if you take Nigeria, for instance, a population of 168 million people, we have 130 million subscribers. And most of them are smartphones. So that provides a platform. The question is, what do you then do with the platform? And mobile banking is a way to provide financial inclusiveness because the mobile phone is pervasive. The story of PESA is a very good example for other African countries to follow. But I think that it was a chart of circumstances, in my view, rather than a planned, if you remember what happened in Kenya in 2008, and people couldn't go out. And then there was PESA, so they could spend it. And then after the crisis, everybody went and got PESA. The issue is that it's telecom operator led. So how does the bank regulate that? I mean, it's not regulated by the NCC. Banking is not regulated by the NCC. So in other countries, such as Nigeria, what has become difficult is how to make the process bank led. However, what has happened is that Nigeria has just launched the national ID card. And guess what? In collaboration with MasterCard, it has a chip that can allow you to do transactions, financial transactions. So that's a second level of... So this is a digital ID card? This is a digital ID card that has biometrics. And in collaboration with MasterCard, it has the opportunity to do financial transactions. So it's also to be used for your bank account. And that is really going to change the whole landscape of financial inclusiveness, because you have suddenly 130 million people with a card that it can use to do financial inclusiveness. The question now is the... I want to bring Chandra in here for a moment. If you don't mind, Austin, we'll come back. But if we can pick up on what Rich was saying earlier and what Austin has elaborated on is that the fast tracking of those developing markets because of new solutions, new technology, and they're not having to update. We're talking about developing markets now. They're not having to update existing technology systems. They can go straight into the best and brightest new solutions. Absolutely. I think the disruption and the possibility that you see with these digital technologies, we call them the digital five forces, which is the combination of mobile, cloud, social, big data, and robotics. I think it's just unbelievable. In developing nations, there are significant problems, whether it is in education, whether it is in health care, whether it is in governance, whether it is in reaching out to citizen services. Any sector you take, the problem that needs to be addressed is humongous. The significant impact in addressing those problems is going to come from these technologies. And I can see tremendous possibilities. For example, if you take India, the number of kids that you're going to educate over the next two decades is up to hundreds of millions. And how are you going to do it without these technologies, the number of teachers we need in physical schools, the infrastructure that we need, it's all huge. All those things will be bridged with these technologies. Mitchell, let's bring in here. Digital revolution, consumer revolution. Your response. Well, the point of technology is to improve human life or our businesses or our operations. So if it has any value at all, it should be improving lives. I wanted to step back for just a moment and see if I could talk a little bit about the possibility of leapfrogging, which is so powerful and exciting when it happens. And to ask maybe, it seems to me that the chances of emerging markets leapfrogging and building something new is highly related to the degree of innovation that's possible in the system, in the regulation relating to innovation. And so maybe I have a little bit of a skeptic in me, but I'm not sure that it's naturally leapfrogging. Seems to me that there are things that government and policymakers can do that would encourage leapfrogging rather than being left behind. And so that might be innovation. And then the consumer and individual revolution, so individual businesses and citizens can actually participate in that process. You make a very valuable point. Shantru, you want to respond? Innovation is not going to be products and services specifically for developing markets or developed markets. I think that distinction is going to blur. And you're going to have social context, deciding everything else. What you sell depends on the social context, not on the physical context anymore. Previously, everything that you offered to someone is based on the physical context where someone is. Now it is based on who someone is connected to. The social context will come into play, which essentially means that the divide between the developing and the developed nations will slowly blur. Mitchell, you satisfied on that front? Maurice, let's bring you in here and go back to a point that Mitchell's raised, and that is regulation. Speaking specifically about cross-border data, and where goods and services and people are consumed, there's this tsunami of data when it comes to border activity. Regulation, we know, is lagging technology. The question here is, can government ever play catch-up or are they always going to be on the back foot when it comes to regulation? I'd like first to say one word on leapfrogging, because I think that there is something which is extremely important. When you look at the evolution of the technology, we are on a mobile system. And the fact that you don't need any more of this very heavy infrastructure that has been what has created a gap between developed and developing countries, the developing countries can leap very quickly. And the people have all the information in one just small computer, which is called a phone. And you can maybe speak on, but what you can do is to have all the information. And this is leading to data. The issue we have today is that when you look at digitization, all the companies of the world have to think how to transform themselves in order to be in tune with the new world. You have a challenge to be heavy of the consumers. You have the kind of blurring of all the borders between suppliers and customers. And within the same organization, you have a blurring between all the department and the transformation of the companies are such that you have some companies who can be out of business in just five minutes because someone else has come with new ideas. When it comes to data, there is a lot of issues. One is who owns the data? Is it you as an individual? Or is it the company who has gathered the data? Then there is the issue of the compliance and the privacy. What should be the regulation on how to use this kind of data? And what can be done without hurting the privacy and the secret life of the individuals? Maury, sitting next to you is an expert on data, security on personal privacy. Mitchell, you sit on a number of different councils in this regard. Perhaps you can bring to the fore your thoughts on data, the security around it. And certainly the personal issue that Maury says is speaking about, who owns it? There's a couple different topics in there. There's the security piece and the sense of vulnerabilities and people hacking. And then there's the, we'll say, more positive infrastructure piece of the world we're trying to build. And both of those are young. And businesses and consumers were all new at how to live in this world. So there's a couple of things. One, on the security side or the breaches side, there's best practices. And it turns out that in the physical world, all of us, both as individuals and as business owners and organizations, have a whole series of best practices about how you keep yourself and your family safe. The same thing exists in the digital world, but we're new to it. So some set of breaches are inexperienced lack of attention. So that every one of us could actually do better at. Then there's the hardcore hacking, where either a criminal organization or some other large organization is intentionally using massive amounts of resources. Some of those can be dealt with. Some of those are still quite new. So the hardening of the system against the lack of experience or the lack of attention is actually in process right now. And the private sector, I think, will do a great deal in that because it's a very important aspect of life and therefore it's got business and profits. I want to come back to my question on government and regulation, but I'm going to put it to Rich here, Maurice, if you can just bear with me for a moment, in that the issue that Mitchell has raised is obviously the security one. And we've got to decide whether the economy, the world, is now incredibly vulnerable as a result of the digitization. We were chatting just the other day about Home Depot and potential breaches to their customer database. Your thoughts on the vulnerability going forward? So I think there's two separate points, and they're both really important. The first is the risk in the sorts of cyber hacking that we see going on will only go up. And the responsibility of companies and governments to put protections in place will be an enormous premium. And Maurice and I were recently in a meeting of CEOs, and it was so clear from the room that CEOs see as now literally one of their top three or four priorities to protect the company in a digital environment where so much more is at risk. I think there's a second thing about how data is used, and that's an interesting one. Because if you ask people, do you want this company to have all this data about you, you often get an answer that's pretty negative. But if you ask them, would you like this company to be able to bring you better, more relevant services to help you make your life more efficient? People want those benefits. And I think a lot of it comes down to the trust that companies earn, the clarity with which they set guidelines with their customers, the way they leverage the data in ways that allow people to feel enabled and supported and not taken advantage of. And I think in addition to the protection part of it, we'll see companies investing very heavily to build that level of trust with their customers. And that when they earn that trust, then they'll have a lot of license to be able to use data in that context. I want to get the government regulation question out of the way. Are they ever going to play catch up? Are they embracing the digital tsunami, or are they running for the hills? I think it's a bit of both. First and foremost, don't forget that the government themselves are also consumers and beneficiaries. So it's not as if they are locked in one side and trying to prevent. The question is they also have a responsibility to the citizenship. I mean, the debate on whether it was wise to put the financial chip on the ID card is still a jury that is out there. The issue is how fast can you make legislation? It is slow, because it's not a digital process. It doesn't have velocity. The parliament has to meet, and et cetera. So it's always going to lag, I think. Chandra, coming back to digitizing the supply chain, the advantages that you're seeing, you are speaking to companies across the globe from a title consultancy service perspective. How quickly are they managing to rewire? Are they in a panic? Are they in a panic about rewiring? I think, first of all, everyone recognizes the potential and the urgency that's needed in order to rewire. I think we basically call it a framework of three things. One is the huge investments that have happened in terms of the current systems, current procedures, processes, current way of doing business, the business models, business processes, et cetera, that has to be simplified. Unless otherwise you simplify it dramatically, then it's very difficult to reimagine the future. So you've got to do that simplification on the reimagination both at the same time. Once you do the reimagination, how do I do the business in the future? For example, the best example I give is workflows. How did workflows come about? Workflows was about taking a form from desk to desk, because the information was not there at the first desk, it went to the second desk, then to the third desk. And the hierarchies got built over a period of time. But today the information is real time. So work should not flow. Competitiveness of businesses, Maurice, the advertising industry being turned on his head because of digital innovations. You are collaborating with competitors, people that were previously competitors. New competitors have emerged and probably are emerging on a daily basis. The business landscape has changed dramatically. And the old established business has been transformed, and is going to be even more transformed. And if you look at our specific business, we are no longer competing only with our classic competitors. We are competing sometimes with BCG and collaborating with BCG. We are competing with Accenture and collaborating with Accenture. The world is transforming itself and the competition is a new landscape today. If you look now back to the question of data, I think it's extremely important to say that this is very helpful to understand the consumer and to target much more precisely the consumer. But at the same time, we should never forget that what moves a brand is the connection with the consumer. How you can connect with the consumer with a great idea, something which creates a bond, which will make that consumer loyal to the brand whatever happens. And this is something which will last while at the same time, all the things that we are seeing today is evolving at the speed never seen before. Timing, yes, Rich. I just wanted to build on that and then come back to something that Austin said about governments, which I think is really important. There's this natural tendency for governments to focus on the challenges, the risks, and all the rest. The opportunities are enormous. And just to put it in context or give an example, Saudi Arabia, so an emerging market, put in place an unemployment system for its citizens. So it's large, not large like China, but 40 million people in the country in nine months from the moment they made a decision till the moment they were able to make the first payment in a world where traditionally putting in those sorts of systems takes three to four years. And in the first year of that system, they were able to give benefits to a million and a half people. And they had 2 million people in Saudi Arabia going online to do e-training and develop their own capabilities and professional skills. The only way that was possible was to make it an online system, to get away from the traditional models in the developed world of tons of departments and paper shuffling from one place to the next. It was to put it online, check access and availability and the rights to different services or payments electronically. And that's how they were able to do it in less than a year and reach such a broad set of the population in ways that didn't just provide money but provided real benefits. That's the kind of opportunity we're looking at around the world. And I think it's as much of the responsibility of government to think about how to leverage this technology to benefit their citizens as it is to how to protect their citizens against misuse, which is a legitimate need as well. Well, the reason I threw to Mitchell earlier, or Mitchell earlier, about the consumer revolution is stats like the stat from McKinsey that 80% of all purchases are researched online, whether the purchase is actually made in store or online. But 80% of all purchases are researched online. If I was a retailer that hadn't adopted a digital trend at this stage in favor of allowing consumer to access that information around my products, then I would be quaking in my boots. Again, consumer revolution. Well, I think that it's inevitable that because of the velocity of providing goods over a virtual channel, it's always going to be pervasive. That is the future. The stores, in my view, are going to be more like a showpiece to have a look and feel. More purchases will be online. The question is, how do we keep up? And what is going to be a limiting factor really is going to be the logistics. I mean, I bought a nice neck pillow from Paris and delivered to London, 34 euros, and the delivery is 20 pounds. So that is a big challenge to online the consumer getting his retail products from online if we can sort the logistics products, the logistics part of it. Mitchell? Yes, I wanted to pick up on Maurice's comment about brand and loyalty and your piece about the consumer revolution, because one of the things that happens now is that your consumers, once they're online and engaged in research, are much more active or engaged in the brand and the loyalty and their response to it. So giant opportunity, also, if not tended to, can go bad very quickly. And so another aspect of the consumer revolution is that continuing engagement and the sense that the brand should be speaking to me and having a conversation with me. When that gets left out in favor of all technology, then very often your consumer revolution looks pretty messy. Let's talk about jobs for a moment, Maurice, just moving on to the fact that so many jobs are being automated, robotics are on the way. In fact, many are already in the system. You've got jobs being lost on one hand. And we've got a world where we are trying to create economic inclusion, financial inclusion. So we have to create jobs. Is the solution here to supplement the jobs that are being lost in traditional industries with digital jobs? This is a big issue, and I think that we have not yet found the right answer to that issue. We know that the old traditional company have to lose jobs because there is no other way if they want to keep up with the momentum and to want to keep up with the modernization of their industry. They can be out of business just overnight. You can see what's happening with Uber. You can see what's happening with a lot of companies. Think one second about just the travel agents. Travel agents are out of business. Now, who is going to travel agents to prepare a travel, a trip? No one. They are going to their computer, their mobile phone, and they are making the reservation, finding the right flight, finding the right hotel. They do that on their own. So there is a lot of things which are changing. And the transformation will be extremely difficult to manage because there is the weight of the past and the fact that we are not prepared for this kind of revolution. And there is the new millennials who are coming and looking at the door, and they want to have jobs, and they want to start up their own business, while at the same time, the people of over 50 are not prepared to change. So this is something which will be probably the most important headache for the head of states and the organization for the future. One thing which is also extremely important when we are speaking about the transformation is the fact that the business will not be run anymore as in the past. There is no such a thing as confidential information. We have to learn how to work transparently. Board meetings will be online tomorrow and everyone will have access. People will hack the information, and the most secret information will be available to everyone. And this will transform the way we are thinking about the business, and we have to be able to speak openly about our strategies, about each of our decisions, why we have decided to shut down that business very transparently instead of using the diplomatic word that we are using today, and which will be totally irrelevant tomorrow. So it is a huge transformation. And the biggest worry we should have is how to make sure that the people will have a job tomorrow. And clearly learning online, learning, learning, learning will be the key word for tomorrow. Austin, this resonates with you. Learning online. Chandra, I'll be with you in one moment. Given the project, that computer warehouse is just embarked on with the federal government of Nigeria's education department and also with the World Bank, where you have, just as early as July 2014, connected 27 universities, federal Nigerian universities, linking one million students and teachers into a research and education network. So that's two more reasons to point. Investment in STEM skills is where we're going. I think that we have to look at where the jobs are being lost and where the jobs are being created. I mean, Premier Li Ka-Cheng yesterday alluded to 10 million jobs being created in the first eight months in China. And in Nigeria, we've created 2.4 million jobs last year. And we talk about job losses. I think that anybody that is in a business that sustains itself on arbitrage due to information that only they can have, that business is threatened. And you have to cannibalize yourself to create the digital image of that business. I mean, consulting, for instance, they had a lot of information that people didn't have. But today, that is being leveled because many people can find information that the consultant can keep you. In fact, the supplier is your consultant as well. So if you talk about the research and education network, this is the first of its kind in Western Central Africa. And what that does is that it makes information ubiquitous and pervasive. So all the universities are connected, and they're connected to the global research repository. And they can get the same information that maybe Boston Group can get. And the whole point is to take that down to all the universities, polytechnics, and even down to the primary schools. Sanjoy, you wanted to come in earlier? I wanted to make three points. The first point is that before talking about jobs, we need to talk about business models. What is happening is business models are becoming irrelevant. New business models are becoming not only more relevant, the art of possible. What is the art of possible is just expanding dramatically. The second thing is that requires a completely new type of skills. On the one hand, we're talking about job losses. On the other hand, there are certain skills that we require, and there are not enough people because people are not trained. People are not educated in those skills. So the third point, that leads to my third point, which is fundamentally, there has to be a significant investment in STEM across the world. I think it's going to be a fundamental requirement. And on top of that, you can add all kinds of dimensions. Everything is getting linked to data. It's all about it's inside the world, whether it's health care, whether it's retail, whether it's industrial internet, everything is inside dependent. I want to pick up on that just with a personal anecdote. When I was researching for this debate, I got myself into an incredible panic around STEM skill education. And I've got a five-year-old and a three-year-old. And I said to my husband, I phoned him immediately and said, we have to leave South Africa. We've got to move to an economy that is investing in training in STEM skills at this age for our children to be relevant in the digital economy. He got me to calm down and we're now researching schools in South Africa with STEM scalability, which I know you were incredibly excited when your son came to you, who's in the 11th grade, going to 12th grade. And on his own back, you didn't force him at all. Kamen said he wants to go into computer science, which, again, is in the STEM field. My question here is if children, which is where my panic came from, if children in today's day and age do not have a foundation in digital, are they ever going to be able to compete globally? That's what I panicked about, Rich. So I would say two points. The first is absolutely the ability to be more comfortable in a digital world and to see the world through that lens will be at a huge unmet need in society. You know, when Ford identifies its greatest shortfall, it's software and systems engineers. When the United States looks at its shortfalls and job creation, it sits in that area. And that will be one of the most attractive places for young people to build careers. And it will be important to have that foundational knowledge, even if they don't specifically focus in computer science, but are in other fields, because almost all fields will become related to that. The second, though, is just to build on Chandra's last point. We have lived in a world for decades and decades where having knowledge was the huge source of value that you could create as an employee and that having knowledge disproportionately was the way you had a good job and are able to advance. And that is going away incredibly quickly. And the ability to create insight to start, as Austin was saying, where everybody will have the data. The data will be ubiquitous. It will be your ability to bring insight, your ability to make change happen around that data, your ability to drive that. Those will be the foundational skills. And our education system in many parts of the world is not geared that way. It's still geared around infusing knowledge into young people. And that is less relevant skill than working in teams, drawing insight, advanced problem-solving skills. And we're going to need a lot of change in the education system to keep up with what's going on. Austin? I totally agree with Rich about the education system that needs to be to adapt to, first and foremost, the smartphone have made a lot of our kids intuitively computer science adaptive. Because it is a digital device. We didn't have that. We were using abacus and then slide rules and things like that. But the issue is we always feel the wasting time when they are on the phone doing social media. I was pleasantly surprised that even though I thought my 13-year-old boy was wasting time, he came to me one day and today he's written a program, a game, that is loaded on iOS and on Android, downloaded by 1,000 people already. 13-year-old write a game. Where did he learn programming skills? It's intuitive to him. But the schools discourage them. Instead of trying to make that use of social media productive, they discourage them and still take them back to how we were taught, which is precisely what you're saying. Chandra, isn't this the key to everything? If we do not create those foundational skills for students in STEM skills, then we are going to fall by the wayside. Well, those economies that don't invest in STEM skills are going to fall by the wayside from a global competitiveness perspective, coming back to the global competitiveness report, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report of 2014-2015. Those companies that rank at the top from a competitive perspective are able to develop, attract, and retain skills. I wouldn't panic as much as you do, but the... I've got to bring a bit of drama in here. I'm a media person. I think STEM skill is absolutely needed. And in some nations, it's going the opposite directions. So there has to be a significant investment in STEM across the globe. But the second point I want to make is the education is transforming itself so dramatically. So it's not that you're going to learn everything in a university in a classroom. And many times, you're going to learn things as you need. It's not that you have studied calculus in school and that's what's going to come and help you later on. If you want to learn calculus tomorrow to solve a problem, you're going to learn it today. That's going to be possible. So the whole education itself, the way of learning, is going to transform. And teachers and universities have to go through the transformation as much as students and parents are to go through. Mitchell, plug-and-play solutions coming back to competitiveness amongst companies. Private sectors in developing environments or private sector companies could potentially now plug-and-play into global value systems. Is that happening already? Yes and no. There are certainly examples of it. You can pick almost any industry and find an example or two of it. So we're beginning to see that. We're also seeing global platforms rise really quickly and fall really quickly. And so in those platforms, we see less of the plug-and-play piece. Those are actually going the opposite direction where a global platform will be a single integrated vertical stack. And so in that setting, the place you can plug-and-play is very clearly defined for you. So we see a lot of that. There's a whatever computer you're using. So I would say in the areas of plugging into a predefined place in an integrated stack like your phone, that's multiplying. And we're seeing a few examples of the leak frogging, but not in the same number as we would hope to see going forward. Maurice, just keeping with that theme, what it enables companies to do is not to have to produce products and services from end to end. They can contribute to different pieces, and it goes back to your travel agent example. A travel agent portal, and then suddenly you've got a car hire service coming in, accommodation service coming in. Again, these plug-and-play capabilities. Clearly, when you look at what the future will be for what we can say today, because I guess that in 10 years time, no one in this room can predict what will happen. But what we can see that collaboration will be key. No one anymore can do everything on its own. You can see what's happening with General Motors, with a lot of company of the world. They are not doing anymore what they were doing, which was from A to Z, the whole chain of value. They have to rely on partners. It's the same when it comes to intellectual property. You look at what's happening in the development of all the features. There is a collaboration between Intel and Apple, with Apple and Samsung. There is competition and collaboration, co-opetition, because they are collaborating on the chips, and they are competing on the phones. And this is something which will be developing in the future. We can't expect to have one company doing everything at the same time. The other thing that I would like to point out is based on what Rich has said regarding information. Information is no longer something that has a value today, because it is accessible to everyone. The key question is have to use the information. And the skills is not so much to gain access to the information. It is how to select the right information and how to use it and how to share it. And sharing is probably one of the key words, not because of only of Twitter or Facebook, but it is one of the key words for the future, including within one company. How to share a job, how to share information, how to share the relationship with a client or with a consumer, et cetera. So we see that the world is pivoting. We say that in English. I don't know. And it is changing quite dramatically the way it will work. And I think this is a great opportunity for all the newcomers and also a big challenge for all the established company. Exactly to build on that last point. There are two things I would observe. One is the deconstruction of value chains has been something that we've been talked about now for almost a couple decades. But the more transaction costs fall, the more information is shared seamlessly, the more there's an ability to create many, many players who can participate in a system. And companies then have to think very strategically about where on the value chain do they build advantage? Do they need to compete? And how do they officially interact on those other elements? The second point is we are just watching an enormous growth of ecosystems that are building up in different ways. And how to participate in ecosystems will be one of the defining strategic questions that most companies face in the years ahead. And it started around iTunes and the ecosystem there. And then the iPhone and the apps there. Then Android. Last night, Apple announced two more, one around wearables, one around payments, that it's going to try to create. And we see that all the time. We were working for a utilities company. It wanted to offer new services to the home, but it knew it could never get its own devices into people's home. So it's how do we link into an Android home automation system? How will we be a part of that? How will we be distinctive? But not how do we think we can control it all ourselves? And that issue of participating in ecosystems, I think we'll be, I mean, we see it here in China, and Alibaba and Alipay, I mean, that's a key defining strategic issue. And Alibaba will be listing on the NYSE news art, so it's going to be one of the biggest ideas to live in. Add an enormous valuation. Absolutely. And well deserved. Business sophistication. If you look at investors now scrambling for digitizing emerging markets, what we're seeing is actually the enlargement of the investor pool and the diversification of the investor pool, which is a good thing, Austin. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, if you look at what we're going to have, what I find is on level. So you probably will see that there is a lot of risk. It's complex to attack the emerging market. But when you have done so much and the uptake in developed market is getting to saturation, you have no choice than to look for new markets. So the new markets today are in Africa and Latin America. And the key thing there for me is how to learn. You have the way of doing things that has worked somewhere else, but you can import that same template hook, line, and sink, and drop it onto another geography, another culture. And in all this, the key thing is how to learn new things, not how to learn something, how to learn to learn, so that you can quickly adapt to the way of doing business in that emerging market. Shantra, how do you interpret business sophistication? I think the way to look at it is that the possibility is just enormous. And so today we think that we're getting sophisticated. Before we realize it, we will not be sophisticated anymore because the envelope is just getting pushed further. The productivity that you will see is just going to be enormous. The possibility that you see is going to be enormous. The reach, the consumer that you can reach, the customer that you can reach, which you could never imagine you could reach before, is just exploding. With all of this, I think there's a lot of education required. There's a constant education required. And also there's no point in getting worried whether jobs are getting lost because we have a huge possibility to create a future. So what skills are required in order to create the future is one dimension. The second dimension is so many people are there and they have to be employed. What do we do? So this is the way to look at the problem and not say that is it going to happen or is regulation going to lag behind. And then it's coming. It's coming and it's happening. And there has to be a catch up. What is the danger to a company that doesn't embrace digitization? Finish. Finished. That's it. Doesn't make it through the tsunami. It's not going to make it because at the end of the day, if you look at what was breaking the news before, it was a newspaper tabloid. Today is social media digitization. If you look at where music was released before, it was record labels. Today, Beyonce releases on the apps on digital. And it's as big as if it was released on record label. So if you look at how much paper would print, I got it back from the World Economic Forum. And one of the books is as thick as this. But you also can get it on top link. It's difficult to carry the book. Easy to carry your phone with the top link. I believe that maybe the next three or four World Economic Forum, there won't be any prints. Everybody just has to find a way of getting it on top link. I'm multitasking already, trying to look at all the tweets coming through for the debate and listening to you. I should have about five devices if I was truly digitized. And just to build on Austin's point, we used to think about this digital revolution coming in the information world, the way we did newspapers or music or books. But actually, the physical products world is increasingly going the same way. It's the sensors that GE will put on aircraft engines. It's a Tesla. When you get in it, what's as exciting about it is not just that it's an electric car. It's the software. It's no buttons in the car. It appreciates and value. It appreciates. It gets more valuable every Sunday when they do an upgrade to it. I mean, that whole mindset of living in a digital world is going to be just as a 3D printing to print different parts of the product. I mean, those elements will be as important in the physical world as today we associate with the information world. Maurice, I know you want to weigh in. I just want to open to any questions from the audience at this stage. If there are any questions, please, if you could raise your hands. And we will deploy a roving mic. Thank you very much. If we could get a mic to the gentleman in the front and a mic there. Maurice, before we take the questions, you wanted to make a point? Yeah, I wanted to build on what has been said. I think that the people who think that digitization is just to think about how to better connect with the consumer or how to build a different marketing plan or advertising communication program are wrong. It's not enough. It is a necessity. It is something which is absolutely necessary for keeping up with the momentum. But it has nothing to do with digitization and transformation of the company. It has to be much deeper and to go deep in the organization and change the mindset of the CEO, the CFO, the C-suite, and the whole organization because it is a whole change in the way we have to work. And the decision-making gets closer and closer to the customer. You have mentioned outlets, et cetera. Think about how to sell cars. You will have much less big dealer program and outlets outside the cities. You will have something which will be much more virtual and people will build their own car tomorrow. So it's very, very complex and we should not stop. Print their own car. They were pregnant. It could even be impossible. No more supply chains. Yes, sir. Please go to your question. Thank you. Anushka, we're just seeing over the web for global shapers community in Sri Lanka. My question is on digital advantage and business sophistication for the second-tier firms. You know, in developing countries, a large proportion are small and medium enterprises who may not, unlike the large enterprises, be able to go to the BCGs and Accenture. How do you see that landscape shifting, giving that global competitiveness advantage to SMEs? Do you think that they'll be able to naturally adopt or acute governments do things? Is it incentives? Some types of deregulation? Creating the business climate for more SMEs to adopt this and become competitive with digitization. Thank you very much. I mean, if you talk about SMEs, then you talk about more of Africa, means small businesses are, even our big businesses are small in global standards. The good thing is that with today's cloud computing, the small companies have more or less the same advantage in technology as a big companies because they can work on a subscription model on a system. For instance, I'll give you an example. We provide an online system for small companies so that they can display their goods online and people can buy. We also give them a system for ERP. They don't have to buy it. They run off subscription from our own environment or our own system. And then we charge them monthly something small. Now that brings the discipline that you're looking for because then if you're going to do CRM or whatever, you don't have to invest in it. That immediately removes the advantage that the big companies had to buy technology that you didn't have. So today it's available, I would say more perversively, to small companies as well. Another question? Yes. Thank you, sir. Hi, this is Damneet Vasush from BCG. I have a question on the potential of digital as a leapfrogging opportunity for emerging markets. Yes, the user infrastructure exists in terms of phones, but what about the pipes and the local applications that are required to really enable this infrastructure to be used? Even today, 40% of smartphones do not use any internet. Users have their device, but they don't use it for digital services. Do you think emerging markets are paying enough attention to solving that part of the problem? The pipes, the spectrum, as well as the local applications? I was wondering, Shankar, I thought that was directed at you, but Austin's happy to take it, and you would like to? Sir, I think the way I look at it is that there is a lot of investment happening, and spectrum is a problem in most part of the world. Definitely in emerging markets, I can definitely talk for India, but having said that these investments are happening, as we see in technologies maturing, there's an area in which small cells and these technologies are coming in. So it will be a catch-up game, and we will never be happy, the content play is so rich, and most of the services are being offered free, so the demand is going to increase constantly, so you'll always be playing the catch-up game, but it will dramatically improve, it's my take. Austin, you want to add? Yeah, I think that if you look at the capability to consume, the devices are way up there. The problem, he's right, is the pipes. Without the connection, the last mile connection to the home, fiber to the home, then you cannot connect on, for instance, your SME can connect and do subscription business, then they need to have the physical thing in there, but if the pipes are there, and it's a problem in Nigeria, for instance, we have nine terabytes sitting at the shore, and less than 20% of it has gone to where it's needed, which is into people's houses, because we didn't think about the plumbing that is going to take into people's houses, we still have the old copper cables. Question is, how can we quickly bring the pipes? And what we've done in Nigeria now is to look for, there's a bid-out for companies to go to geographical areas and put the pipe and then interconnect the pipes. Before, you find people were picking and choosing, and everybody, of course, is going to choose Mumbai, Delhi, and then the rest are left out. So if you look at the research and education network which we have put in Nigeria, what that is doing is forming communities around those universities that can also tap into the STM-1 lines, a very big pipe that goes to the university. So all around the university, they make use of that pipe. And if we take it down to 500 universities, you can imagine the ripple effect. So the pipes are important, and I totally agree with the gentleman. So let's go ahead with your question. Could I actually, I'm sorry. I want to add a little bit on the content piece, which the local content which you raised, which I think we haven't addressed. So I think we're on the cusp of seeing large quantities of local content, both being enabled, being encouraged, and being discoverable and findable. Our original models, this is something that Mozilla's working on pretty significantly for, there's probably a lot of content that makes sense in a locale that's not relevant globally at all. And we'll never be discoverable or make sense to search a giant global database of apps. And so our role, we see our role, is to build an example of what that might look like, how it might work, what the creation tools are. So the ability to consume is step one, but the ability to create is where real value for locality exists. So we still feel a little bit like we're on the edge, as pioneers at Mozilla, because there's no clear revenue stream on this, and there's a lot of work to make it, but we see it coming, not just from ourselves, but from other systems as well. Yes, sir. Richard Jefferson from Cambia. I have a question about, mostly directed to Mitchell, about the importance not of pipes and not of digits, but in fact of the knowledge enshrined within that bit stream, and the importance of open web standards to ensure that knowledge doesn't disenfranchise many potential users. Could you comment on the essential nature of open standards to make use of the digital bit stream? Sure. I'll start by commenting again on creation on top of consumption, and that consuming is great, especially the things that are free and the apps that are free, but the real luxury in life is to create what you need, or to get what you need one way or another, and to be able to build. So for that piece, the role of interoperability in standards is really key, because otherwise you end up creating, but you're locked into a system where your neighbors may not be using it. And so this piece of standards, and the open web is another way of describing interoperability among systems, so among cars, for example. So this is a pretty key aspect. It's not very strong right now, actually. You know, we find in Mozilla that we continue to work on this, but it does not have the same focus as it did, say five years ago, when interoperability and open standards were key for everyone involved, difference between the web and the current system. So I would say I'm hopeful that the future is a return to interoperability in the computing environment of the future. If you imagine if your car and your health devices and everything is not interoperable and it's all siloed up, then life's gonna be difficult. So I'm optimistic, but it's hard work right now. Unfortunately, I'm running out of time. I've got a closing comments on the panel. Maurice starting with you, and perhaps we can look to the next wave of business sophistication in those closing comments. Maurice. Next wave is something that we will see coming from two kids creating something which will be a big disruption. So I'm very hopeful to see a lot of changes. And to the point which has been said by the global shaper a few minutes ago, I think that the beauty with this world is that everyone can change it. It's not something that the old established company will change. It is the youngsters who will come with new ideas which will be disruptive and will change our world. So that's the reason why I'm so hopeful. Mitchell, closing comment from you in terms of the next wave, what we can anticipate. Maurice, two children says two children potentially inventing something and disrupting the environment, the competitive landscape. So one other aspect of the next wave will be merging of ideas from different cultures and different societies into something really quite different. Because the infrastructure and the information and the standards and the interoperability and the communication and the globalization of the insight and the ability to make something new will allow us to have the next wave be some ideas coming from one part of the world and some from another so we end up with something that's really three steps out from what we can imagine today. One minute Shandra for the next three of you, unfortunately, so closing comments, sir. There is a huge possibility, so many opportunities, but there are four things that we need to address. Security, regulations, investment in education and training and then the fourth one is the leverage the globally connected world. Austin? I think anything that can be, that is being arbitrage now is gonna, because of information that someone has, someone that's gonna disappear. So banking for instance, the money shrinks as it's going from bank to bank, so that's gonna disappear, maybe Bitcoin. And rich, final comments, sir. Adaptiveness has gone up so much in terms of priorities for both small and large organizations and it used to be you did something really, really well, you drove it at maximum productivity, that was the key to success and increasingly the key to success will be able to sense the environment, respond quickly, have an organization that's constantly looking and learning and having cultures of experimentation. I think it's clear that the digital train has left the station, if you're not on it, you risk becoming redundant. You've been watching the CNBC Africa debate coming to you from Tianjin in the People's Republic of China where the annual meeting of new champions is currently in session. Thank you very much.