Update #6 - China E-Commerce, Shopping Festivals, and Vigo
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We update you on the most essential news from Asia in tech, media, and business—the things you need to know that you probably haven’t heard in Western media.
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China to Become World’s Biggest Retail Market This Year
Leading research firm eMarketer predicts that China will finally overtake the US this year to become the world’s largest retail market. In 2020, China’s retail market will be $5.07 Trillion and the US retail market will be $4.89 Trillion.
eMarketer still predicts that both China and the US will have a decline in overall retail sales this year, but the US will shrink by a larger margin. Interesting side fact—the eMarketer report also says that 83.6% of China’s total retail ecommerce market is made up of Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo.
All the Chinese Shopping Festivals - Singles Day, 618, and Double 12
You might be aware that China hosts a bunch of really huge online shopping festivals. These are often bigger than their Western counterpart festivals like Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Amazon’s Prime Day.
For example, Alibaba’s 2019 Singles Day had $38 Billion in sales, which is more than the $24 Billion in sales from all of the major US festivals combined.
Keep an eye out for JD’s 618 Festival that officially begins this Thursday, as 618 represents June 18th. That said, promotions and sales are already happening right now in the lead up to the festival!
Bytedance Shuts Down Two of Their Overseas Apps
This month, Bytedance has shut down both Vigo and TopBuzz, apps that were created to cater to audiences outside of China. Vigo was a video-sharing app most popular in the Indian market, composed of actually two versions—Vigo Video and Vigo Lite.
One way to look at this is that Vigo was overlapping with TikTok, which is doing really well in India right now. In India, Vigo had about 5 Million users while TikTok has around 200 Million. TopBuzz was a news aggregator app for international audiences, a foreign equivalent of Bytedance’s Chinese app Jinri Toutiao.
Bytedance is pretty much an app super factory. While you could consider these experiments to be failures, Bytedance’s explicit business strategy is to pump out tons of apps and see what works. So we will be seeing likely dozens if not hundreds more apps from Bytedance in the future.
