Global Marketing News – 5th January 2016
Baidu looks to South Korea for growth
The Chinese tech giant Baidu has held its first ever marketing event in South Korea.
The event took place in a café in the South Korean capital Seoul and promoted the Baidu-owned photo editing app Photo Wonder.
Photo Wonder allows users to edit images, add stickers and filters, and create collages. It has 200 million users globally, with 41% coming from South Korea, a higher proportion of users than any other country.
The event shows that offline marketing methods are still an important part of marketing when targeting South Korea, and can complement online techniques.
It also shows that Baidu is serious about turning its attention to South Korea.
A spokesperson from the company commented on the event, saying “[It] marks an exciting chapter of our business and we are open to offers for further collaborations with Korean companies.”
WeChat Pay expected to expand internationally in 2016
The research firm Morningstar has predicted that the Chinese app company WeChat will expand its mobile payments service internationally this year.
WeChat is the most popular social messaging app in China, with around 650 million monthly active users.
Its mobile payments service, WeChat Pay, has proved extremely popular in China, with 60% of Chinese users signing up to the service.
Morningstar has predicted that WeChat will expand its payments service to other Asian countries after noting that its parent company Tencent recently invested in the South Korean online bank Kakao Bank.
The most likely candidate markets for expansion are Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, with WeChat already having a strong presence in each of these countries.
Before it can expand into any new countries it will face challenges, however, such as obtaining licenses and figuring out a way to ensure transaction security.
Mexican online shoppers still fear paying online
Ecommerce has increased fourfold over the last 5 years in Mexico, but despite this online sales still only account for 2% of all retail sales in the country.
Mexican internet users are wary about making online payments and are therefore largely refraining from using online shopping sites, and are often using cash-on-delivery payment options if they do engage in ecommerce.
Rather than fighting this reluctance to pay online, many big name companies are instead developing their own offline payment options to ease customers’ fears.
For example, the ecommerce giant Amazon partnered up with the Mexican convenience store Oxxo last year, meaning that users could buy Amazon gift cards for cash in Oxxo stores.
A rival online store, Linio, announced that it would accept a variety of payment options, including credit and debit cards, PayPal, cash payments in Oxxo stores and cash-on-delivery.
MercadoLibre also allows users to pay for items at Oxxo and other physical stores, and also developed its own online payments system MercadoPago, which operates in a similar fashion to PayPal.
Online payments provider PayU sees big growth
The Turkish online payments provider PayU has seen growth in each of the 16 markets it operates in, with growth ranging from 40 to 80%.
Turkey, Russia, India and Colombia were its top 4 growth markets.
PayU has attributed the growth to the rise of affordable smartphones, increased understanding of ecommerce and a growing middle class in its target markets.
It has said it intends to continue its monumental growth rate by tackling fraud on its platform, improving the user experience and promoting ecommerce education in its target markets.
PayU is used by 10 million buyers and 160,000 merchants across 16 countries and supports 250 different payment methods.
UK is world leader in ecommerce
And finally, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has said that the UK is leading the world in terms of ecommerce.
In an interview with the BBC, he said that “Britain is the leader in e-commerce in the world, far ahead of the United States.”
Here at Webcertain TV we have previously reported on the strength of the British ecommerce market.
The UK has a digital buyer penetration rate of 88.2%, the highest in the world.
In 2015, the B2C British ecommerce market was worth a staggering 123 billion US dollars.
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Cal O'Connell
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