Today, WalktheChat selected nuggets of insights from 5 industry reports published during the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!
Live-streaming triples WeChat conversion rates in female apparel
The success of Taobao live-streaming has been widely covered in recent tech news. Hosts such as Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya are now emblematic of massive impulse purchases.
But live-streaming is not limited to Taobao. Youzan revealed data showing a 21.2% conversion rate from live streaming: triple the category average.
Other categories such as beauty and childcare also perform well on WeChat live streaming.
However, categories which are less subject to impulse-purchases such as education, baked goods or fruits & vegetables (for which buyers are more likely to wander around Pinduoduo for a great deal) see a decrease of performance when using live-streaming.
Youzan’s report also shows a less positive trend: almost two thirds (63.8%) of female apparel buyers didn’t buy twice for the same store. This result is most likely due to the impulsive nature of social purchases.
There is however a core of loyal social buyers, with 11.6% of customers buying more than 5 times from the same store.
More than 100 million daily viewers for Kuaishou Live Streaming
Short-video platform Kuaishou announced that daily live-streaming viewers exceeded 100 million on the platform.
Another indication that live-streaming is going strong.
The live-streaming craze started on specific platforms such as Yingke. These platforms have since lost their appeal, but live-streaming has migrated to short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, e-commerce platforms like Taobao, and social networks such as WeChat.
Youku platform still popular among younger users
Youku, a video streaming platform, recently released a report showing strong engagement among users born after 1990, which represent a major share of the total time spent on the platform.
Post 90’s users, however, represent a very large segment of the population: some of them are about to turn 30 years old. Interestingly, Youku didn’t segment its user base further, which might show a lack of engagement toward users born after 1995 or 2000. These users would be more likely to have switched to platforms such as Douyin or Kuaishou.
Youku also claimed that the top-100 million users on the platform spend an average of 1 hour per day watching videos.
Tmall still dominates cross-border e-commerce platforms
According to a report from Analysys (易观), as of Q3 2019, Tmall Global still dominates cross-border e-commerce sales with a 34.1% market share. It is followed by Netease Kaola with a 26.2% market share, the two leaders thus taking up more than 60% of the Chinese cross-border e-commerce market.
The market share of Xiaohongshu has been relatively stable. Although the social commerce App managed to significantly grow its user base, it is failing to convert this engagement into sales.
Aliyun seized 43% of China’s cloud computing market
According to a report published by IDC, as of H2 2018, Aliyun had seized 43% of China’s cloud computing market.
Tencent Cloud is a late-follower with only 11% market share.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), which completely dominates cloud computing outside Mainland China, only managed to grasp a meager 6% of the Chinese market. The AWS solution for Mainland China is separated from the main AWS dashboard and requires a special application.
Conclusion
These industry reports show a quickly-evolving Chinese Digital Ecosystem.
Live streaming is taking China by storm, becoming a core feature of Taobao, Kuaishou, and WeChat. Incumbents such as WeChat and Youku have to quickly adapt, or run the risk of losing the interest of younger users.
Meanwhile, some large tech giants like Alibaba remain very entrenched in some booming segments such as cloud computing and cross-border commerce.