The spread of the global epidemic has driven consumer demand to shift online, the penetration rate of e-commerce has accelerated, and the demand for cost-effective products is strong. In recent years, the global online retail format has developed rapidly. In 2020, global e-commerce retail sales are expected to exceed 4 trillion US dollars, nearly 5 trillion The compound annual growth rate reached 23%. From the perspective of penetration rate, the penetration rate of e-commerce in various countries around the world (defined as the proportion of online retail sales in the total social retail sales) is also increasing: the development of e-commerce markets in China and Europe and the United States is relatively mature, and the penetration rate has reached 21% in 2019; In developed countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, the penetration rate of e-commerce has also increased to more than 10% (before the epidemic); while developing countries such as Southeast Asia are still in their infancy due to restrictions on Internet infrastructure construction, representing countries such as Indonesia's e-commerce The penetration rate of merchants just exceeded 4% in 2019, and there is a lot of room for improvement.
Emerging market countries represented by Southeast Asia have benefited from dividends such as high economic growth, increased Internet penetration and younger population structure, and have nurtured an e-commerce market with more potential than Europe and the United States. Specifically, the GDP growth rate in Southeast Asia has reached 5%-8%. With the advancement of Internet infrastructure construction, the scale of e-commerce has continued to grow, with a compound growth rate of 35% in the past five years; however, the current penetration rate of e-commerce is still extremely low. The average is only 2.5%, compared to China (25% penetration rate of e-commerce as of July 2020), there is a lot of room for improvement.
The prominent features of Southeast Asia are geographical fragmentation and fragmentation, great differences in religion, language and culture among countries. At the same time, the contradiction between low customer unit price and high logistics cost has objectively increased the profitability of the traditional platform e-commerce standardized business model. Selection of products and customers become the key to business operations. From the perspective of consumer portraits, the demographic structure of Southeast Asian countries is markedly younger, and the number of potential e-commerce consumer groups is huge. At the same time, young people have established heavy social media usage habits (the average daily social media usage time in Southeast Asia ranks first in the world), and they are also keen to communicate. Sharing, combined with lower traffic costs (about 1/3 in Europe and the United States), creates conditions for the development of social media advertising product marketing. Currently, Facebook is the largest social media platform in Southeast Asia (with a market share of about 37%).
Cross-border e-commerce can generally be divided into two modes: platform and self-operated. Specifically, the platform attracts sellers to settle in by building a mall and earns advertising fees and commissions; self-operated merchants mainly earn the difference between purchases and sales. At present, Shopee (Tencent) and Lazada (Ali) are the representatives of cross-border e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, but they have not achieved profitability due to low unit price per customer and high logistics costs. The third-party seller model mainly completes product sales by entering the e-commerce platform. Representative companies include Anker Innovation and Zebao Technology. The main boutique strategy is deeply involved in research and development to forge brand value.
In addition to the centralized platform e-commerce, we have also observed the rise of new e-commerce models such as self-built independent stations/single pages. The essence behind it is the transformation and extension of transaction channels driven by the prosperity of social media and precision marketing. Specifically, the self-built independent station model is represented by SHEIN, focusing on advantageous categories, and deeply cultivating social media marketing and private domain traffic; the self-built single-page model is represented by Jikeyin, based on the thinking of "goods looking for people", relying on social media The media platform achieves precise marketing reach and conversion to high net worth target users. The advantages of flexible product selection, high conversion rate, light assets, and small inventory help the social one-page e-commerce model to show strong competitiveness and vitality in the Southeast Asian market.
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