E-commerce spending in Southeast Asia is growing at a breakneck pace. This rapid growth in e-commerce activity helps to spice up revenues for leading online retailers in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and China will not be slowing down its hegemony on this field. With his own, very famous Alibaba, Jack Ma and his team are the biggest foreign acquisition in Southeast Asia, which has proven to have an effect on all the industrial value chain, from digital promoting, logistics, finance, insurance and healthcare.
Looking forward to 2017, China will not be slowing down its might, Jack Ma has ever used the terminology that if 2016 was an appetizer, then 2017 shall be the primary course for e-commerce in Southeast Asia. The game continues to be on.
1. The giant wakes up, Alibaba becomes more lively
Seven years ago, the Taobao Affiliate Program was launched to draw suppliers to supply e-commerce services to merchants on Taobao. They offered store operations and success services through Taobao and T-Mall, which allowed them to grow into two of the biggest platforms in China. Now in Southeast Asia, the approaching launch of the same program will create ample opportunities for all the ecosystem. They arrived inside 4 months and suddenly Lazada caught on. Full-service e-commerce firms are well-positioned to proceed to grow and achieve the $238 billion e-commerce opportunity in Southeast Asia.
2. Alibaba’s Cainiao network will speed up last-mile logistics consolidation
The Cainiao network created by Alibaba as an open platform for all last-mile delivery providers, partnering with other last-mile and on-demand delivery startups reminiscent of Ascend Group’s Ninja Van, Sendit and Skootar. Alibaba has already began rolling out Alipay and Ant Financial, and with Southeast Asia’s logistics ecosystem following China’s trajectory, it’s only a matter of time before the Caniao network rolls out.
3. New threats to Google and Facebook: the battle for the “first mile”
E-commerce giants like Alibaba and Amazon pose a threat not only to their direct competitors, but in addition to Baidu and Google. Why? Because they’re shaking up internet marketing. In China, the rivalry between Alibaba and Baidu has been occurring since 2009, which led to Alibaba blocking Baidu’s search engine spiders from crawling and indexing Alibaba’s sites. Alibaba has launched Alimama, its own self-service platform much like Google Adwords. Media company higher prepare. A brand new competitor enters the battlefield.
4. The introduction of Alipay will lead to consolidation in the web payments sector
Most online payment initiatives reminiscent of Omise, DOKU, Line Pay, Apple Pay don’t address the core problem in Southeast Asia – lack of credit and enormous underbanked population. most fintechs were created to cope with technology for technology’s sake.
In the absence of crucial thing, Alibaba used the final word Trojan horse technique to introduce Alipay and financial ants to the region. The marketplace offers an enormous user base and a distribution channel that’s the envy of most payment startups in Southeast Asia.
5. E-commerce 1.0 to 2.0
The presence of Alibaba and the rumored launch of Amazon in Singapore in the primary quarter of 2017 closes the window of opportunity for e-commerce 1.0, which recreates and sells other people’s products to mass audiences. As we enter 2017, e-commerce opportunities will increasingly shift from 1.0 to 2.0, where firms will base their competitive advantage not on traditional economies of scale, but on the mix of their pricing, selection, experience and merchandise .
6. Expect more casualties in a possible clash between Alibaba and Amazon
2016 was a very important 12 months of consolidation within the e-commerce space in Southeast Asia, reminiscent of Zalora, Cdiscount, Moxy, Rakuten, Redmart, etc. These will proceed throughout 2017, especially within the hyper-competitive E-commerce 1.0 space.
7. Omnichannel branding
In 2017, we are going to see brands change into smarter and use market presence as a start-up and short-term strategy. The long-term strategy is sales on to the patron through them brand.com sites where they own all customer data, control brand image and may offer features reminiscent of subscription commerce.
8. Business-based entrepreneurs will research insurance, finance and health care
As within the US and China, startups in Southeast Asia will step by step shift towards insurance, finance and healthcare. The basic concepts are the identical: using the Internet and technology to create markets or going on to consumers for non-physical products reminiscent of loans, life insurance and even data.
9. Companies are beginning to deal with Burma
With 53 million inhabitants, Burma is the fifth largest country in Southeast Asia. The business will explore recent geographic markets in Southeast Asia as large markets change into saturated, making greenfield markets like Myanmar more attractive. This country can be unique in comparison with its neighbor. Myanmar is basically accessible only on mobile devices, with an estimated 20% of the population using the web.
10. Darwinian economics will thin the herd of on-demand startups in Southeast Asia
Weak economic unit, platform leakage, and stronger economics are issues which have plagued on-demand startups over the past 12 months. The emergence of Happy Fresh in Taipei and Manila, Ventures-backed Tapsy in Thailand, Go-Jek in Indonesia are examples of the above problems. In fact, that is just the start of a natural strategy of eliminating all of the “me too” players in industries where an on-demand model doesn’t make sense.
11. Amazon is finally entering Southeast Asia
Yes, they entered this area. The game begins.
Source : techcrunch.com emarketer.com
