Vasco Electronics conquers Asia. A Polish company with global success

Entering a new market always involves both great opportunities and significant risk. In such a case, the stage that people from the film industry would call “pre-production” is crucial – it is about analyzing the market and assessing one’s own potential.

What is the most important takeaway from the last twelve months? Vasco products are really needed in Asia. Residents of both China and Japan are eager to travel and often work in global companies. In both of these situations, they regularly encounter language barriers, because languages ​​and cultures really differ. We have alphabets and logograms, different sentence architecture, and differently trained speech organs. Vasco helps you overcome these difficulties effectively.

The development of our sales network proves that the need for precise and reliable communication is universal. In China, Vasco translators were initially only available at airports in Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Currently, they can be purchased in 43 sales points in 20 cities. However, we do not intend to stop there. We want to consistently prove that we are the market leader in electronic translators not only in Europe, but also around the world.

In Europe and North America, users focus primarily on functionality and comfort. It is not without reason that we are leaders in these markets. Our goal is to create solutions thanks to which people using Vasco translators can fully focus on communication and de facto forget that it takes place via the device. The best technology works so intuitively that you don’t pay attention to how it works, but to what it enables.

Europe eagerly imports technologies from Asia, so a European company that wants to start selling in Japan or China must completely change its thinking and look at business reality through the eyes of local customers and business partners. What helps us is how crucial the quality and reputation of European brands are in Asia. But that’s not enough. Effective functioning in Asia would not be possible using a single, global scheme. You need to adapt to local relationships and expectations – from sales channels, through brand communication methods, to business standards.

For example, in Japan, crowdfunding is a popular model for starting a business, which allows not only to obtain financial resources, but also to verify real market interest in a given technology or solution. And that’s what we did, entering this market in 2021. We cooperate with local specialists who help us combine the highest level of technology with running a business in accordance with local standards. We operate locally, while maintaining the global consistency of the Vasco brand.

When you enter Asia, your brand becomes truly global, going beyond the Western cultural circle. This changes the approach to the product, to communication with the customer and the overall approach to business – sometimes directly, sometimes as an inspiration.

Let me give you a simple example. You’re in Kyoto and want to eat something quick. Just translating the names of dishes on the menu is not enough, because you still don’t know what the local, often enigmatic terms mean. And this is where help comes in Vasco Assistant – our new solution premiered a few weeks ago. In such a situation, the Assistant will perform two tasks at the same time. Not only will it translate the photographed text, but it will also explain what a given dish is, what ingredients it is prepared from and what flavors you can expect. And there are more puzzles – in the Japanese railway you have to determine the amount to be paid depending on the length of the route. This will be explained on the boards next to the ticket machines – but the translator will be invaluable to easily understand the meaning and logic of these messages.

Globally, over half of the world’s population lives in Asia, and metropolises such as Tokyo and Beijing attract huge crowds of tourists. During large technological, business or educational events, it is often not possible to provide each conference or lecture participant with an individual translation device. We have created it for such situations Vasco Audience – a solution that allows each listener to receive a translation in their own language, from their own phone. We had the opportunity to present this translation system for conferences, lectures and training, i.e. Vasco Audience, in 2025 during the Expo in Osaka, Japan – just like our translators themselves.

Offline translations, which we are working on intensively, may also be a reference to Asia. Although today we provide Vasco users with unlimited internet for translations, there may be situations when this access will be difficult – a prime example would be long, intercontinental flights. And providing offline translations in popular language pairs is something we will offer to users Vasco Translator Q1 already in the coming months.

To sum up, everything we create starts with the expectations of customers and users. The experience gained during the development of the Vasco brand in Asia allowed us to understand even better that translation itself is only a starting point. We do not hide the fact that the first year of our presence in China was a period of intensive learning for us. But the result is our latest technologies and a better understanding of the global needs of our current and future customers.