BayBrazil & Zendesk present:
Brazil in 2016
When: Wed, January 27, 2016, 6pm-9pm
Location: Zendesk headquarters at 1019 Market Street, San Francisco, CA
Pre-registration
Brazil is in its worst recession in decades.
The country’s GDP is projected to contract by 3.7% and, in these 12 months through mid-December, consumer prices jumped 10.7%. Adding pressure to the crisis, both Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings downgraded Brazil’s sovereign debt to junk status. The challenges for the incoming year aggravated in early December, when a Congressman allowed impeachment proceedings against President Rousseff to move forward.
In contrast, entrepreneurship is booming in various Brazilian states with a surge in startups that are receiving funding from both local and international VC firms.
Some of the largest Silicon Valley corporations are paying attention. The Launchpad accelerator opened recently by Google includes Brazil as one of its target markets to offer training and funds to mobile startups.
Despite the gloomy economy, the smartphone industry grew in the third quarter of 2015 showing a 48% increase in mobile devices sales.
Brazil maintains its place as top market for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. WhatsApp alone has 100 million active Brazilian users. And, there have been a few firsts in these past months: the country was the first to get Twitter Moments outside the U.S., and Xiaomi, the Chinese maker of Redmi2, chose Brazil for its first smartphone launch outside Asia.
From 2013 a number of US-based companies have successfully opened operations in Brazil including Airbnb, Coursera, Eventbrite, Evernote, Salesforce, Spotify, Uber and our event host Zendesk.
Will this trend continue in 2016?
What are tech leaders expectations?
Will Brazilian Congress focus on the needed reforms to fix the economy?
Join us on January 27th to discuss the Brazilian economic outlook and learn how tech companies plan to navigate the challenges of 2016.
Rodrigo Velloso, Director of Gaming Partnerships at Twitter
