Fernando Madeira, Co-Founder & CEO, Terra Latin, America Latin America update
(photo by Adam Tinworth)
You should never tell a secret to Loic, as he asks you to come to LeWeb and share with anywhere. The secret is the digital revolution in Latin America. There is a lot of activity there, 1000s of entrepreneurs, plus lots of people using the web, how they interact is changing the rules. The economy, in the last 50 years, there has been loads of crises in LA..they know there is light at the end of the tunnel. They have built a different kind of economy.
In last 15 years, Brazil has been growing a lot. The new economics has been shared with the people. Min wage goes up 2.5x, 20m new jobs. Over 30m people escaped from poverty, a new emerging class. They are all consuming. They love electronics, they love chips. Brazil home digital US$ is 7k, US is only 2.5k Computers are important, mobile devices, especially phones. There are 90mm broadband connections. 492m million devices, from 69m in 2002. It is about news, information, entertainment, people creative about getting this, not just with data plan
There are 220m people in internet every month. From a quality perspective, 96% go on web daily, 86% more than once. They really embrace the internet. It is 41 hours monthly. 86% on social networks. 60% on video online. 82% on Terra (this guy’s company)., It’s social Live, video and music. Video is the killer app, it has changed dramatically in last year in Brazil and LA. TV used to be so important, it had elected presidents etc. But switch to online. 96% of classA/B watch video online. 31% watch TV series online
Terra tend to offer lots of content for free. The revenue is in advertising. Sonara, is a music service, with 6million users. They treat as a platform, So they have the service, they do live shows, they do festivals. Live shows at least once a week. They had 1.5m people watch Paul McCartney. They offer Terra TV, so people can watch TV for free. It also has a premium offering., they get to see more for money, first for free. They have a portal, with 100m visitors. Again premium offerings in this. They show the Olympic games, with lots of extra information. For London, will offer more channels, HD, more stats etc.
