Without any surprises, Huawei (including Honor) led China’s smartphone market with a total sales volume of 119.17 million units, followed by Oppo (76.37 million units), Vivo (74.64 million units), Apple (52.7 million units), and Xiaomi (47.96 million units). Half of the top 8 smartphone vendors suffered a decline in sales volume. The sum of the top 5 vendors’ […]
China smartphone market share in 2018
2018 was an especially eventful year for smartphone vendors in China. Tears were shed in the rather smaller players as Gionee confronted bankruptcy, Meitu merged into Xiaomi, and Smartisan was said to be acquired by ByteDance. After Xiaomi successfully went public, Huawei missed surpassing Apple in terms of global shipment by 2.8 million units. OnePlus became […]
Rising outbound travelers from lower tier cities in China
Chinese outbound travelers grew by 20% year-on-year in population, faster than that of domestic travelers, according to the report from Alibaba’s Fliggy. On average, Chinese spending on traveling went up by 9% year-on-year, faster than the growth rate of disposable income per capita (6.5%). Chinese outbound travelers set foot on 192 countries and regions worldwide in […]
Huawei turning its smartphones to POS machines
Huawei is turning all its smartphones to Point-of-Sale (POS) machines based on the NFC technology, which means potentially hundreds of millions of POS machines. Merchants only need to activate online billing service to receive payment without any traditional POS machine or QR code. Huawei Pay made its debut on August 31, 2016, under a joint branding […]
Watsons partners with NetEase in offline retail
The roughly 3-year-old NetEast Yanxuan co-branded with Watsons to form a sub-brand as a brick-and-mortar retail store featured with life aesthetics. It launched in Pazhou Poly Plaza, Guangzhou on January 19, 2019. Yanxuan, one of NetEase’s e-commerce platform, focuses on select daily living products since 2016. It’s the first on the original design manufacturer (ODM) model. […]
How China’s short video app Kuaishou grew its DAU by 40M in 5 months
China’s short video market saw explosive growth in the past year. The success of Tik Tok (or Douyin in Chinese) soon attracted Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba to join in the competition. In a short span of time, several hundred short video apps appeared in the market. In the short video market, competition is growing fierce […]
Cross-border e-commerce female shoppers trend 2019
China has grown to be one of the biggest markets for fashion where female consumers are a significant force. There are over 80 thousand SKUs of cosmetics products, which makes it harder for consumers to pick up the most suitable products by themselves. In that regard, content recommendation becomes popular with Weitao (part of mobile […]
China’s US$16bn cross-border e-commerce market overview in Q4 2018
China’s cross-border import retail e-commerce market grew by 36% to US$16.86 billion in Q4 2018. Tmall Global and NetEase Kaola together account for 56.2% of China’s cross-border import retail B2C market. China’s General Administration of Customs reported that the import and export cleared by customs’ cross-border retail e-commerce platform totaled 134.7 billion (US$19.82bn) in value […]
China’s best performing cities in 2018, led by Shenzhen & Chongqing
Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Guiyang have made it to the top 10 best performing cities in China for four consecutive years. Among them, Chengdu that topped the ranking in 2017 dropped to the seventh this year while Shenzhen moved up from the fourth to the top. Chongqing retained its second position since 2017. Shenzhen, dubbed […]
Top mobile video apps in China Sep 2018, led by Tencent Video, Tik Tok, Kwai
Market penetration of online video reached 80.4%, a 5.8% increase year-on-year. While the average daily active users decreased to 210 million. Both Tencent Video (116 million) and Tik Tok (118.7 million) saw the average daily active users of over 100 million in September 2018. Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Youku took the top three places with […]
Alibaba’s Tmall to incubate 100 new products for 10 billion yuan GMV in 2019
It is becoming trendy and vital for brands to make products debut on Alibaba’s B2C e-commerce platform Tmall. Tmall also makes great efforts to help brands speed up the average product incubation cycles from 18 months to 9 months. Tmall announced to input 100 million yuan worth of resources to provide a series of services […]
China online travel agency (OTA) market shares in Q3 2018
The online travel market in China grew by 9.3% to US$39.25 billion in Q3 2018, driven by the summer vacation and the mid-autumn festival holiday. 68.6% of transactions are generated from online transportation booking. Ctrip (37.6%), Qunar (19.78%), and Fliggy (16.46%) combined accounted for 73.84% of air ticket booking transactions. Ctrip led online accommodation with a share […]
New e-commerce regulations in China you should be aware in 2019
Individual agents (Daigou), who frequently promote products on WeChat Moment or sell products in live streaming and short videos, all share a new name “e-commerce business operators” as Taobao and JD.com since the new e-commerce policy comes into force on the first day of 2019. Under this new regulation, they need to make market entity […]
How Chinese consumers respond to price discrimination
Some Chinese tech companies are utilizing big data and deploy price discrimination to charge differently on different users. That is mainly demonstrated in three aspects: different prices for iOS and Android smartphone users, different prices for registered users and unregistered users, and different prices for more active users and less active ones. Empowered by internet […]
Secrets of wining low-tier city youth in China for FMCG brands
Low-tier city consumers are an increasingly important source of growth for the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry. For many brands, they are the make-or-break factor for their success in China. To win them over, brands need real-life data to understand what they’re buying and, more importantly, why. Low-tier cities youth: must-win consumer segment for many […]