Global Marketing News – 20th May 2016
Chinese ecommerce sites fail to attract foreign buyers
The Chinese ecommerce market is failing to attract customers from across the world, as a new survey suggests that low percentages of people in other countries have ever bought something online from a Chinese vendor.
The survey, conducted by One Hour Translation and Google Consumer Surveys, looked at countries including the US, UK, Japan, Brazil and Australia, and found that only 15.5% of those questioned had ever shopped online from China.
Yaron Kaufman, CMO of One Hour Translation, said that “Chinese e-commerce sites are just beginning to take advantage of the UK market,” where just 11% of people have ever bought from the country.
Surprisingly, given the geographic locality compared the other countries questioned, only 4% of the Japanese have bought from China.
Smartphone sales on the rise in Venezuela
There is set to be a huge increase in sales of LTE smartphones in the Venezuelan market.
Having made up under 6% of all smartphone sales in 2015, a report from Pyramid Research forecasts that by 2020 sales of the advanced devices will rise to over 51%.
The total sales of all smartphones in the country is expected to drop by 200,000 units, to 2.6 million this year due to political and economic insecurity, but is then expected to rise to 6.5 million by 2020.
This increase in total sales and increased percentage of more modern smartphones, means that whilst last year 40% of phones had 2G, by 2020 only 8% will.
With a higher level of LTE phones in the country, this will ensure better connectivity and a more mature online market for businesses to target.
Apple to open developer centre in India
Apple appears to be increasing its focus on the Indian market, after announcing plans to start its first developer centre in the country.
Scheduled to open next year, the iOS App Design and Development Accelerator will be set up in the city of Bangalore, and will be designed to give support to Indian developers.
In a statement, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, said that the new facility was giving “developers access to tools which will help them create innovative apps for customers around the world.”
India’s smartphone market recently surpassed the US to take second place, behind China, with an estimated 220 million smartphone users.
This however is only around 5% of the country’s 1.2 billion population, leaving much room for growth and perhaps explaining Apple’s interest in the market.
Interactive video ads on the rise
Interactive video advertisements took a step forward last year, as results of data collected show that they outperformed pre-roll ads on connected TVs.
Based on video campaigns on its own platform, Innovoid have announced that in 2015 the completion rate of custom interactive videos was 94.5%, whilst standard pre-roll adverts only had a completion rate of 87%.
This trend was similar when comparing the percentage of the ad watched, interactive videos achieved 97%, whilst pre-roll adverts only reached 93%.
However, given its success, the format clearly still has its issues.
A separate study by Demand Metric, showed that over half of all marketers in North America said that interactive adverts were time consuming or that they had difficulty integrating it with other platforms.
Iraq shuts off entire internet to stop exam cheating
And finally, the Iraqi government has clamped down on cheating in the country’s school exams, by fully shutting down the internet nationwide for the duration of the tests.
After a three-hour blackout occurred three days in a row, the ministry of communications announced that all internet connectivity was to be shut down over the same period that 11 year olds across the country were taking their exams.
However, there is a high level of cheating during these particular tests as school is only compulsory up to the age of 11, and those who do not score highly enough are usually pulled out of school, effecting their prospects significantly.
Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, the ability to shut down Iraq’s internet was introduced to stunt the spread of information.
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Gemma Houghton
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