Tag: m-commerce

Masaya Ueno, the director of Rakuten Asia has released a promising prediction for 2015 trends.

Rakuten, the massive e-commerce giant from Japan, has now released an official statement that has revealed that it has brought in $1.1 billion worth of revenue in Singapore via mobile commerce channels.

The company therefore feels that the Singapore market is a tremendously promising one for next year.

The director of Rakuten Asia, Masaya Ueno, who is also the company’s Country Manager for Singapore and the Head of the Business Development Division, explained that the country’s tremendous 80 percent adoption rate of smartphones has made it ready for a great deal more growth in mobile commerce. Smartphone shopping is already quite common in the country but the company feels that there remains a great deal more room for growth to continue throughout 2015.

The larger smartphones, nicknamed “phablets” are being called a driving force behind this mobile commerce trend.

According to Masaya Ueno, “Apple’s entry into the Phablet market with the iPhone 6 Plus and the launch of other phablets flagships like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 will help to drive the adoption of mobile shopping is Singapore as well.”

At the same time, Rakuten’s forecast also explained that the focus on ‘mobile-first’ is also spreading throughout the Asian Pacific region, where many consumers use their smartphones as their exclusive method of accessing the internet. The prediction underscored the fact that this will be an important m-commerce factor in 2015, as it shows that the trend in mobile shopping will not be exclusive to Singapore, but will also have considerable potential in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Rakuten explained that this mobile technology trend should be telling retailers that they simply cannot think that they can continue to ignore this fast moving segment of m-commerce, as consumers throughout that region turn away from their desktops in favor of their smaller screen handsets.

The Rakuten prediction is that far more retailers will rapidly begin an investment into mobile commerce in both the marketing and retail efforts, and that this will be easily seen in all of 2015.

Alipay, the Alibaba smartphone payments arm, released a report to describe these digital shopping trends.

In China, the trend in mobile commerce has been a rapid growth this year, according to a report that was released by the smartphone based payments branch of Alibaba, Alipay.

The report detailed the way in which the less developed western region of China has driven mobile shopping.

The Alipay report showed that over half of the online transactions that occurred at Alibaba over the first ten months of the year occurred over mobile commerce. In fact, mobile phones were responsible for 54 percent of the online transactions using Alipay from January through the end of October. Comparatively, throughout all of last year, it had represented a much lower 22 percent of total online payments volume for purchases made online through the service.

The western, inland parts of China are easily the fastest growing areas being seen for mobile commerce.

The Tibet autonomous region, the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, and the province of Shaanxi were identified as the areas where mobile commerce was taking off most rapidly, at 62.2 percent, 58.3 percent, and 59.6 percent, respectively. Those areas are quite remote and lack a solid infrastructure of broadband internet service. Desktop and laptop computers are also still quite expensive there, making them less appealing than the far more affordable smartphone.

On the other hand, Guangdong province and the cities of Shanghai and Beijing, all well developed areas, saw growth of a much lower 27, 24, and 29 percent during that same period of time when it came to mobile shopping transactions.

According to expert in online shopping and the vice president of greater China for hybris AG (the enterprise software provider division of SAP AG software giant, based in Germany), Burghardt Groeber, who commented on this mobile commerce trend, “As mobile penetration in rural China far outpaces fixed-line Internet penetration and with continued upgrades to mobile network connectivity and the popularity of new devices, it is natural that consumers are rapidly taking up mobile shopping.” In China m-commerce is expected to reach $162 billion by the close of 2017.