Asian SaaS Stars: Opportunities, Market Outperformance, & Key Challenges

The Asian Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a highly fragmented sector filled with numerous innovative companies. Thousands of companies compete in the Asian SaaS sector. In this insight, we have included 105 companies, including 56 public companies and 49 private companies in Asia.

The 56 public companies have a total market cap of $367.2 billion won. The top 10 companies in this list have a total market cap of $298.1 billion won. Among the top-ranked companies, those from India and Australia stand out. India and Australian companies accounted for 8 out of 10 top-ranked companies in this list. We have provided the rankings of these companies on their market cap basis. We have included 6 major countries/regions in Asia including Japan, China, Australia, India, Korea, and Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand).

Keep in mind that although these 56 public companies all provide some sorts of SaaS related products and services, not all of them have a 100% SaaS business model. Rather, for most of these software-related companies, SaaS is becoming a greater portion of their incoming revenues. Among all the public companies, Atlassian Corp (TEAM US) (Australia) is probably the biggest pure-play SaaS company right now with a market cap of US$42.7 billion. The 49 private companies that we have included in this insight tend to be smaller companies but they tend to be more pure-play SaaS providers.

SaaS is becoming more important in companies, our homes, and in our lives due to the accelerating evolution of technology in terms of greater adoption of cloud-based services, smartphones, AI, Big Data, IoT, and increasing programming sophistication that reduces the need for human, manual labor. Adam Smith would be very proud of SaaS today, as massive amounts of global venture capital and start-up funding have tried to accelerate promising SaaS companies as the global competition has forced the very best companies to sprout in this highly competitive market.

In Asia, some of the best companies in the SaaS segment include Atlassian (Australia), After Pay (Australia), Xero (Australia), One Connect (China), Kingdee (China), Kingsoft (China), Douzone Bizon (Korea), Freee KK (Japan), and Rakus (Japan).