Major expenditure in e-commerce to continue

PETALING JAYA: South-East Asia’s Internet economy hits an inflection point in 2018 by garnering US$72bil (RM300.6bil) in gross merchandise value (GMV). E-commerce has been the fastest growing sector – reaching US$23bil in 2018 and expected to exceed US$100bil in GMV by 2025.

These were some of the insights revealed by meta-search price comparison website, iPrice Group in its first quarter report titled: The Biggest E-commerce Website and Apps in South-East Asia.

iPrice notes that as the most dynamic sector of the Internet economy, e-commerce is expected to become more saturated in the coming years – experiencing a decrease in compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) from 62% (2015-2018) to 34% (2015-2025) in less than six years.

“With the bulk of users in South-East Asia spending most of their time on mobile phones, we see more and more e-commerce players becoming a ‘mobile-first’ platform or in some cases ‘mobile-only’ – prioritising growth in the usage of their apps,” said iPrice Group’s president and chief operations officer Paul Brown-Kenyon.

He pointed out that e-commerce will see the addition of more players, seeking to gain a significant part of the market share.

This was evident as iPrice saw a major influx of investments into e-commerce such as from Alibaba Group, pumping an additional US$2bil into Lazada, Nasdaq listed SEA raising US$1.5bil to fast-track Shopee’s growth as well as other players entering the scene such as JD.com, Amazon and many others.

Local e-commerce companies such as Tokopedia, Tiki, Bukalapak and others are raising their bar to stay abreast with the increased competition in the next five to ten years.iPrice’s findings state a consistent message that the e-commerce sector still has much room for growth and that no clear winners have yet emerged.

“We also believe that the industry as a whole need to invest more resources to establish standards, grow the industry together while gaining a deeper understanding of its users.”

“In addition to this, we don’t believe any one player is going to win or lose South East Asia over the next one to two years, rather the question is which players have the right mindset, strategy and business models to capture the tremendous potential of the region in the next decade or so,” said Brown-Kenyon.

Thus together with App Annie Intelligence, iPrice has ascertained mobile e-commerce shopping applications with the highest monthly active users in the first quarter.

Below are some key findings:

> Lazada’s mobile shopping application leads with the highest average monthly average users (MAU) in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. The Alibaba-backed e-commerce was among the top apps as well in Vietnam and Indonesia, ranking second and fourth respectively.

> Shopee, ranked first in MAU for Vietnam, second place in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand, and third place in Singapore.

> Another prominent competitor is Tokopedia which ranks highest in average MAU in Indonesia. Tokopedia remains a prominent player as the company currently holds the biggest market share in South-East Asia’s largest country in terms of population.

> Chinese e-commerce apps such as TaoBao performed well in countries where there are more consumers proficient in the Chinese language. This was evident in countries such as Singapore and Malaysia where the app ranked fourth and third respectively.

> American-based e-commerce application remains highly relevant for South-East Asians as well. Amazon was actively used in the Philippines compared to Alibaba Group’s applications, ranking fourth above AliExpress (fifth place) and Alibaba.com (ninth place).

> In South-East Asia, Amazon officially launched its services in Singapore in 2017 with Amazon Prime Now and currently ranks ninth in the list of monthly actively used mobile shopping apps in the city-state.

> Other e-commerce apps which performed well in its home-country is Qoo10 (second place in Singapore), Tiki (third place in Vietnam), and 11street (fourth place in Malaysia).

> In South-East Asia, Tokopedia is the only e-commerce mobile application which is most actively used in its home country. The Indonesian e-commerce recently received US$1bil from existing investors, making it the most valuable startup in the country.

Across the six countries analysed, it is worth noting that Chinese and American e-commerce mobile apps remained popular and are actively used in the region with apps such as AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, TaoBao, and Alibaba.com.

Currently, iPrice compares and catalogues more than 500 million products and receives about 20 million monthly visits across the region. iPrice operates three business lines: price comparison for electronics and health & beauty; product discovery for fashion and home & living; and coupons across all verticals.

Source: TheStar