Asia-Pacific still the largest B2C ecommerce market in 2014 - report

The Asian-Pacific online turnover grew by 44.1% to USD 770.0 billion in 2014. Even though it is expected that the Asian-Pacific growth rate will be cut by more than half to 20.2% in 2015, it will still be one of the fastest growing ecommerce markets in the world, according to a report issued by Ecommerce Foundation in collaboration with GfK, Global Collect, Ingenico and Asendia, ecommerce-europe.eu reports.

Within Asia-Pacific, China is by far the largest ecommerce market and even the largest in the world. In total, Chinese online sales amounted to USD 538.1 billion, which represents a growth of 63.8% compared to the preceding year. The region’s second-largest ecommerce market is Japan, with an online turnover of USD 135.5 billion. This makes Japan the fourth-largest ecommerce market in the world.

The B2C ecommerce markets of other countries in Asia-Pacific are remarkably smaller. Australia ranks third with an online turnover of USD 21.0 billion, followed by South Korea (USD 20.2 billion), India (USD 19.4 billion) and Indonesia (USD 2.9 billion). The country’s B2C ecommerce sales increased by nearly 58%. Together with China, it ranks high above the other Asia-Pacific countries in this regard.

It is interesting to see that, despite of the presence of some ecommerce companies, the Asian-Pacific internet penetration is on average the lowest of all global regions. Only 37% of the population is connected to the internet, while in other regions this percentage ranges from 56% to 77%.

Within the region. Japan has the highest Internet penetration (91%), followed by Australia (85%) and South Korea (84%) Of the emerging countries, China has the highest Internet penetration (49%), which is actually quite low for a country with such a huge ecommerce market. The Asian-Pacific countries with the lowest share of people being connected to the internet are India (18%) and Indonesia (17%). India and Indonesia’s internet penetrations have (nearly) tripled since 2009.

While the internet penetration is lagging behind compared to other regions, Asia-Pacific has the highest online share in the Gross Domestic Product (3.33%) of all regions. This so-called eGDP was in 2014 even five times as high as it was in 2009. The country with the highest eGDP in Asia-Pacific is China. At 5.19%, it even has the highest eGDP share of the world.