In the greater area of Southeast Asia – ten countries and a population of 600 million people – online shopping is becoming a mass phenomenon and Indonesia represents the most promising market. Like China a few years ago, reason is experiencing a rapid increase in web access and an epochal change is looming in the way of shopping of an emerging middle class. According to a recent report by investment bank USB, business-to-consumer e-commerce is projected to grow in Southeast Asia by at least five times its current volume by 2020.
For the moment, e-commerce has established itself most strongly in Thailand and the Philippines, but experts point out that Indonesia is the market that investors look most favorably on, despite the current modest volume of online sales. This hope is fueled by data on the steady increase in Internet users that are expected to reach 125 million by the end of 2015. The growth of e-commerce in Southeast Asia appears to have kickstarted the spread of affordable smartphones , causing many to get their first taste of the internet via a mobile phone screen. The rising star of Indonesian e-commerce is called Tokopedia, a virtual marketplace that allows users to open online stores and carry out commercial transactions.
In October, the site received a loan of one hundred million dollars from the Japanese investment bank SoftBank and the US company Sequoia Capital. But however optimistic the forecasts are, there is still a long way to go: in Southeast Asia, in fact, e-commerce currently accounts for only 0,2% of retail sales, against 8% in China and the 8,7% of the United States.
Attachments: The Bangkok Post article
