#长文创作激励计划#
China's international market share. Like many of China's advanced industries, China's share of the global market is sizable. But due to the sheer size of the Chinese market, once the Chinese sales are withdrawn, its share becomes less large. This issue examines China's market share in a number of key digital markets.
search engine
China's domestic search engine market exhibits a huge chasm between mobile and desktop usage. As of the first quarter of 2020, Moudu controlled 84.7% of the mobile market, followed by WhatsMiner owned by Mouli Baba (7.4%) and Sogou (6.3%). The desktop market is more competitive, with Sogou narrowly ahead of a certain degree (43.6% vs. 41.3%), followed by a Tiger 360 with 6.2%. As Figure 2 shows, only one of the four companies had at least 1% market share in any region outside of Chinese mainland, and it reached that share in eight regions. At some point, the relative advantage in mobile search persists outside the domestic market, as seven of the eight regions have only a presence in the mobile search market, leaving one in Hong Kong, with desktop search traffic accounting for 1.0%. All but two regions (Tuvalu and Angola in Polynesia) are in East or South-East Asia.
Figure 2: Mobile Search Market Share in Q1 2020
Figure 3 shows that since the first quarter of 2015, a certain degree's position in the international market has not improved significantly over the past five years. While only North Korea and Macau appeared in 2015 and 2020, the situation is much the same: at one point, its international standing was largely limited to small nearby countries, and was not dominant in any one country. North Korea's mobile share has grown from 5.3 percent to 8.5 percent, but this has largely hurt Sogou's share, which had a 4 percent share in 2015. In addition, 5 years ago, the presence of a certain time in Polynesia (from 5 countries to 1) and desktop search (from 4 countries to 1 country) was much more important than it is now.
Figure 3: Baidu's mobile and desktop search market share in Q1 201527
Smartphones
Smartphones, while not a direct part of the digital economy, are increasingly important for how they are accessed. As Figure 4 shows, Chinese companies sell about a quarter of all mobile devices globally. Samsung and Apple are clearly in the lead with 31% and 25.9% respectively, while the third to fifth largest companies are Chinese: Mouwei (10.8%), Moumi (7.9%) and Oppo (4.3%).
Figure 4: Global smartphone market share in 2019 (Chinese companies in orange)
As shown in Figure 5, Asia has the highest concentration of Chinese mobile phones by continent at 36.1%, followed by Africa (35.6%) and Europe (28.3%). In contrast, Chinese companies have a much smaller footprint in the Western Hemisphere, with only 14.5% of mobile devices in South America and 5.6% in North America. Huawei accounts for the majority of Chinese mobile phone sales on every continent except Asia. It has the highest absolute market share in Africa at 18.6%, while in Oceania, it has the highest share of Chinese companies at 65.6%. This is followed by Xiaomi and BBK Electronics (which owns the Oppo, OnePlus, Vivo and Realme brands) with a 12.2% and 11.8% share of the market respectively. After Asia, Xiaomi accounts for 7.5% of the European market and 5.2% of the South American market, while BBK accounts for 5% of the African market and 4.2% of the Oceania market.
Figure 5: Smartphone Market Share of Chinese Companies by Continent in 2019
cloud computing
Cloud computing, a technology model that enables the on-demand delivery of information technology (IT) services such as applications, processing, and storage, has become a key enabler of the global digital economy. According to a certain Libaba, it dominates the Chinese cloud infrastructure market, accounting for 46.1% of the $10.7 billion market in 2019, followed by a certain news, Amazon Web Services and a certain degree in the United States. Globally, Libaba's revenue reached US$5.2 billion in 2019, accounting for 4.9% of the global market of US$107.1 billion. However, these figures suggest that a certain Libaba earned only $270 million of the $96.4 billion outside of China in 2019, with a market share of only 0.3%, compared to AWS's market share of 34%. Since first expanding its cloud services internationally in 2015, a certain Ribaba has focused heavily on the Asia-Pacific region, saying it is "in Asia, for Asia." Of its 12 overseas data centers, 7 are located in the Asia-Pacific region (Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo). Its interest in the region is not unique.
Baba and Tencent and US cloud providers Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft all have data centers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, while everything except Mba has a center in Sydney and everything except Mba has a center in Seoul. In addition, Google has three upcoming data centers in the region, Amazon has two, and Microsoft has one. Although Baidu has the largest market share in China's AI public cloud services market, its international expansion has been far from adequate (see Table 2).
Table 2: International Cloud Data Center Locations
Chinese companies have made some progress. Synergy Research Group found that in the last quarter of 2019, Libaba, Xun and Qodu ranked second, fifth and sixth respectively in public infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service cloud revenue across the Asia-Pacific region. Excluding China, Alibaba dropped to fourth place, with Tencent and Baidu dropping out of the top six. In Europe, the situation is even worse for Chinese companies, with none of them in the top six, both overall and in the largest markets: France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Gartner showcased significant growth in HUAWEI CLOUD's initiatives, which grew by 222% in 2019, ranking third in China and sixth in the world. Some estimates point to a slightly larger share. Gartner found that in 2019, Alibaba ranked first in the IaaS market in the Asia-Pacific region, increasing from 26.1% to 28.2%, and ranked third globally, from 1.4% to 9.1%. However, China accounts for the majority of the cloud market in the Asia-Pacific region, where the government only provides licenses to domestic companies and not to foreign holding companies. That being said, a certain ribaba has established itself in a number of markets in the Asia-Pacific region, namely Australia, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. In addition, Gartner showed significant growth in HUAWEI CLOUD's initiatives, which grew by 222% in 2019, ranking third in China and sixth globally. BAT members, as well as Huawei, have reaffirmed their commitment to large cloud investments in recent months. In April, a company announced that it would invest more than $28 billion in its cloud services over the next three years.
In May, it announced that it would invest $70 billion over five years on "new infrastructure," with a focus on cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. In June, the company announced a goal of reaching 5 million cloud servers by 2030, but did not make any specific investment. Alibaba Cloud says it plans to hire 5,000 engineers this year. It is estimated that Alibaba Cloud currently has about 3,000 employees, which means that the number of employees in Alibaba Cloud has more than doubled. Huawei plans to invest at least $200 million in cloud computing by 2020.
E-commerce
In the fiscal year ending March 31, Alibaba's domestic trade revenue was $10.4 billion, or 65% of its total revenue of $16.1 billion, while foreign trade revenue reached $1.1 billion. This represents an annual increase of 10.4 percent in foreign sales, which is only half of the 19 percent increase in Ali Baba's overall trade. It is worth noting that the vast majority of domestic trade in a certain riba is retail, with only 3.8% of domestic trade revenue coming from wholesale purchases. By contrast, more than one-third of international trade is wholesale, almost equal to domestic wholesale revenues (US$347 billion versus US$394 billion). This discrepancy may be due to the Indian government's import restrictions, which make non-wholesale international e-commerce procurement laborious or completely impossible. In the year to March 2020, customers spent more than $1 trillion in a certain Libaba ecosystem, 93% of which occurred in the Chinese retail market. The company did not disclose its purchases in the international market, but the total value of those sales, as well as other domestic services, must have been less than $66 billion.
In FY2020, 960 million consumers in a certain ribaba purchased goods or services, of which 180 million were international consumers. This proportion of international users is clearly not in line with the proportion of international retail revenues, suggesting that foreign users are buying much less than their domestic users. In fact, the average retail revenue per user is $60.25 within China and only $19.08 outside of China. AliExpress, the platform for consumer commerce foreign business, has made great strides beyond Chinese sellers, with sellers in Turkey, Russia, Spain, and Italy joining in 2019. AliExpress, which has become Russia's largest e-commerce site, formed a joint venture in late 2019 with telecommunications company MegaFon, social media and search portal operator Mail.ru and Russia's sovereign wealth fund, and a certain Libaba maintains a majority stake in the joint venture, but only 49.9% of the voting rights. Outside of Russia, international gains are mainly made through the acquisition of local e-commerce platforms.
For example, the acquisitions of Trendyol in Turkey, Daraz in Pakistan and Lazada in Singapore, together with investments in Indonesian and Indian companies. COVID-19 has given a foothold in many new markets, especially in Europe, where AliExpress saw a 20% increase in Spanish transactions and a 14% increase in Italy in the first quarter of 2020. AliExpress is now the fifth-most downloaded shopping app in France, the fourth-most downloaded in Poland, and the third-most in Spain. In the U.S., New York Governor Cuomo made headlines when he thanked the company for reviewing and delivering 1,000 ventilators to the state. In addition, it plans to recruit 100,000 social media influencers to promote AliExpress, mimicking its domestic strategy of closely integrating direct streaming and e-commerce. In particular, Taobao Live, a platform for sellers to promote their products online, has more than 800 million monthly active viewers. Similar systems have been published on Amazon, Instagram, and YouTube, but have failed to gain significant traction in the West.
Financial services
Chinese companies have been aggressively moving into the mobile payment space. Conversely, the sector is growing slowly in the U.S. in part due to the widespread use of credit cards. In 2019, the U.S. market reached $99 billion, with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay accounting for the lion's share. Supplier adoption has hindered growth as some retailers have opted to launch their own payment systems, making it difficult for consumers to rely on a single service like credit cards. The growth of WeChat Pay and Alipay is closely linked to foreign acquisitions both inside and outside the financial sector. For example, China's investment in Indian technology companies reached US$8 billion in 2019. Of India's 31 "unicorns", 18 have at least one Chinese investor, 12 of whom are from a certain Libaba and a certain news. Some of these are directly related to the financial sector, most notably the largest shareholder of Paytm, the country's largest mobile payment service valued at $16 billion. Paytm users have grown to 300 million, a tenfold increase from 2015, surpassing PayPal to become the third largest digital payment platform in Asia.
Indirectly, Libaba and Nexus have made extensive investments in India's digital economy, buying shares in a hotel information aggregator company, a shared services company, a logistics company and two food delivery platforms. They all took advantage of these transactions to expand the number of merchants that accept Alipay or WeChat Pay. In doing so, they circumvent a key problem in payment platform scaling: ensuring that there are enough suppliers to receive the currency in order for the currency to be valuable to consumers.
Of India's 31 "unicorns", 18 have at least one Chinese investor, 12 of whom are from a certain riba and a certain news. Alipay's international expansion is focused on bringing it to 56 markets by acquiring and leveraging the value of Chinese tourists through partnerships with global financial services companies. Chinese tourists spend more abroad than any other country, reaching $258 billion in 2017. This made it a lucrative proposition to facilitate shopping for Chinese tourists, facilitating a deal with Barclaycard, the UK's largest processor of credit card transactions, allowing merchants to accept Alipay without any new equipment. In Asia, acquisitions play a bigger role. Ant has bought minority stakes in digital payment services in India, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia. However, its expansion in the United States is limited by national security concerns. In 2017, Ant Financial attempted to acquire a U.S. cross-border payment service for $1.2 billion.
However, the deal was blocked by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. In 2019, Ant did everything in its power to avoid a repeat of the mistakes of the past, buying Britain-based WorldFirst, a company that facilitates global money transfer services, for $700 million. Shortly before the acquisition, WorldFirst closed its U.S. office, which opened just six months ago. 【To be continued】Please stay tuned for the next issue.