E-Commerce

[winston]

Online retailer zulily soars 40%-plus over the past month.

[winston]

Chinese Firms 1Q-3Q Online Retail Sales Growth Up 6.9 ppts YoY

In the first three quarters of 2015, China's retail sales of online goods was up 34.7%, accounting for 10 of the total retail sales of consumer goods, 0.1 percentage points higher than that of January-August, the National Bureau of Statistics reported.

During the period, the growth of online sales of the major retail enterprises monitored by the Ministry of Commerce was 6.9 percentage points higher than that of the same period of last year.

Source: AAStocks Financial News

[winston]

Genuine Items Accounts for Only 58.7% of Online Purchase in China Last Year

China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) had tested batches of goods sold online and found that the genuine products represented only 58.7% in 2014.

Source: AAStocks Financial News

[winston]

China Online Retail Sales Up 34.6% YoY in Jan-Oct

In the first ten months of 2015, China's online retail sales amounted to RMB2.95 trillion, up 34.6% from a year ago, the National Bureau of Statistics reported.

Source: AAStocks Financial News

[winston]

How Investors Can Spot the Next Amazon

by Matthew Carr

The three C’s - critical traits that are imperative to any company’s survival in the modern economy:

1. Connectivity: An increasing number of consumers are doing their shopping on the internet - in the digital world. If any company doesn’t have a strong enough presence here, it is going to struggle to succeed. Especially as consumers continue to abandon brick-and-mortars and malls.

2. Content: Social media and blogging platforms are increasingly being used by retailers. Many of today’s most successful ad campaigns involve “shareable” content. Whether it’s a viral video, blog post or public endorsement from a celebrity. Companies that don’t embrace these new platforms are virtually guaranteed to lose market share.

3. Community: In the internet age, consumers are even more loyal to the brands they enjoy. They “Like” their favorite brands on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. They feel invested in that company’s history and even its success. Smart retailers are leveraging those relationships and turning them into sales.

These are the elements that modern consumers are keyed into. And the companies that will have the most success in the retail space hit on all three of these points.

Source: The Oxford Club

http://www.investmentu.com/article/deta ... 0JK_ZF96M8

[winston]

Online shopping could boost logistics

Lets talk about the e-commerce related sectors in China.

If you have shopped through Alibaba's Taobao and JD.com, you will probably like to shop further online. An article in Reuters said China's online shopping revenues are expected to double to 7.5 trillion yuan (HK$8.8 trillion) in 2018 from 2015, significantly higher than the overall GDP growth.

Online retail as a percentage of total retail in China has grown to 12.6 percent, and is forecast to reach 17 percent in 2018.

By comparison, US e-commerce sales accounted for 8.1 percent of total sales in the second quarter of 2016.

To cope with the growth of online shopping, ultimately there is the need to process, package, store and deliver the goods. It was forecast that warehousing space in China will grow 10 percent per year through 2020.

Private equity firms have invested US$12 billion (HK$93.6 billion) in warehouses and logistics businesses in China since 2013.

Carlyle-backed China Logistics Property (1589) was listed in Hong Kong in a US$459 million IPO (price at HK$3.25) in July this year. The company will spend 2.1 billion yuan in 2016 to add some 1.1 million square meters of new warehousing space.

With planned investments of US$1.8 billion through 2019, the company expects to build 34 new logistics parks, adding 4.5 million square meters of space. Net profit of the company grew 719 percent to 1.2 billion yuan in 2015. The share price had a breakthrough yesterday and went up 5.7 percent to close at HK$3.7, the highest since listing.

Kerry Logistics (636) is a laggard in the sector trading at HK$10.94 or 10 times PE. The share price has moved in a range of HK$10 to HK$14 since it listed at the end of 2014.

Source: Dr Check, The Standard

[winston]

Shopping Through Your Phone

On Black Friday, shoppers spent $3.3 billion online… and $1.2 billion of those purchases were made through their mobile phones.

Paying with your phone is safer because you avoid the current problem of revealing your name or credit-card number to whomever you are paying.

The secret is called "tokenization." When you pay with your phone, a one-time-use number – a "token" – is all that's created. Your name and credit card number are never seen, and therefore, they can't be stolen.

Every time you swipe your credit card, or type it in online, you risk getting hacked… You give up your name and your credit-card number.

You're telling me that you prefer having a much higher chance of getting your credit card hacked? And that you prefer the inconvenience of fumbling around in your pockets and your wallet with cash and change at the counter when you don't have to?

With "tokenization," using your phone is much safer than pulling out your credit card.

Source: Daily Wealth

[behappyalways]

E-commerce

The age of Amazon and Alibaba is just beginning

Rivals and governments beware

SHOPPERS will spend record sums online in the next few weeks—in China for Singles Day on November 11th, in America on Black Friday and around the world in the run-up to Christmas. E-commerce has been growing by 20% a year for a decade, shaking up industries from logistics to consumer goods.

Nowhere does debate rage more fiercely about what this means than in America, where thousands of stores have shut this year and where retailing accounts for one in nine jobs.

Astonishingly, online shopping has only just got started. Last year it amounted to a mere 8.5% of the world’s retail spending. In America the share was about 10%. Its effects on business and society will be huge.

Not just because retailing is a big employer that touches many industries, but also because its two greatest exponents, Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos, the founders of Alibaba and Amazon, have used it to amass a new sort of conglomerate (see our special report). The question is whether its creation will foster competition or demand restraint.

In the past two decades Alibaba and Amazon have added ever more services, from cloud computing to video. The firms’ businesses will reinforce each other as consumers and companies become more likely to use their platforms, and diverse sources of revenue and data power further growth.

As a result, the two giants sit at the centre of all sorts of activity. In America Amazon is showing, week by week, the havoc that an innovative e-commerce firm can wreak in a giant, mature market.

In China Alibaba is showing how dramatically one company can reshape business in a fast-growing economy. They will not conquer every industry they touch but, as they expand, few firms will change as many sectors in as many places.

Through one lens, this is a boon for competition. The e-commerce sites of Amazon and Alibaba lower barriers to entry by providing a simpler, cheaper way for small manufacturers to distribute goods and find potential buyers.

Local manufacturers are challenging multinational giants. Consumers benefit, as they can choose from more and better products than ever.

Yet as the giant e-commerce platforms grow, so does unease about their might. With access to cheap, patient capital, Amazon can make big investments, including in warehouses, artificial intelligence and other firms such as Whole Foods, a grocer it bought for $13.7bn this year.

Those investments, combined with the vast amounts of data on the consumers and businesses on its platform, mean that competitors struggle to keep up.

Amazon’s challengers should learn from China, where Alibaba’s rivals are teaming up. Tencent began as a gaming and messaging company. It now has a thriving digital-payments business and is the biggest shareholder in JD.com, Alibaba’s closest e-commerce competitor. JD is working with other retailers and tech firms, too. In August it announced that shoppers could buy through Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

Amazon’s would-be competitors might follow a similar path, by forging partnerships. Walmart (another investor in JD), for example, seems to be adopting JD’s tactics, making its products available through Google’s voice assistant to counter Amazon’s Alexa.

Facebook wants to make it easier for customers to buy goods featured in its ads. And Google, to the horror of some privacy advocates, is tracking consumers to help bricks-and-mortar shops see which online ads work. American firms may yet catch up with their Chinese counterparts.

Will that be enough to guarantee competition? Regulators must be vigilant. More mergers are now likely among both makers of consumer goods and retailers, as they seek the heft to battle Amazon. Deals between retailers and tech firms will complicate matters further.

Watch the giants

In antitrust cases America’s courts have tended to assume that new entrepreneurs would challenge profitable incumbents. But in America venture-capital funding for e-commerce firms is dropping, in part because investors think Amazon will be dominant.

This newspaper has argued that regulators should weigh the effect of mergers on the control of data as well as market share—especially for Amazon, given its existing power and range. Antitrust rules, as with so much else in the Amazon era, look as if they will need updating.

Source: The Economist

[winston]

E-commerce as a whole is growing at an astonishing pace

E-commerce business makes up 8.2 percent of U.S. sales and is growing at 15 percent.

Source: Benzinga

https://www.benzinga.com/news/17/11/108 ... i=58848589

[winston]

The Perfect Retail Apocalypse Fund

The ETFMG Prime Mobile Payments ETF (NYSE Arca: IPAY) is the best way for you to profit as you watch brick-and-mortar stores get sunk.

Launched in July 2015, it has already drawn in $237 million in assets. And its portfolio is stocked with the strongest players in mobile commerce.

Source: Daily Trade Alert

http://dailytradealert.com/2017/12/11/i ... ot-upside/