Global Marketing News – 9th March 2016
Lucrative opportunity for Canadian businesses revealed
Americans are increasingly buying items from Canadian ecommerce sites, indicating a lucrative opportunity for Canadian businesses.
PayPal reported a 20% increase in spending by Americans on Canadian ecommerce sites last year, with spending hitting 3.2 billion US dollars.
Cross-border ecommerce is expected to grow by a further 10% this year.
Vehicle parts were the most popular product category to be bought by Americans from Canadian sites, followed by clothing and software.
Cheaper prices as a result of the weakness of the Canadian dollar against the American dollar has been touted as the key reason behind the rise. Better availability was also cited as another important reason.
The American ecommerce market is worth 492 billion US dollars and has a digital buyer penetration rate of 76%.
Mobile video viewing hugely popular in Russia
Research by Cisco Systems has found that mobile video viewing is extremely popular in Russia.
There are around 122 million mobile users in Russia, with the average user totting up 1,816 MB of mobile data per month.
Over half, 54%, of that mobile data is going on watching videos online.
Mobile video viewing is set to become even more popular over the next 4 years. By 2020, mobile video traffic is expected to account for three-quarters of all mobile data traffic.
4G is also predicted to rise in the country between now and 2020. 4G data traffic currently accounts for just 17% of all mobile data traffic. By 2020, this is expected to be 65%.
Russia has a mature mobile market, with a mobile device penetration rate of 85%.
Adidas and Puma apply to launch ecommerce portals in India
The sports brands Adidas and Puma have applied to the Indian government to launch ecommerce portals targeting the country.
At the end of 2015, the Indian government sought to make it easier for foreign companies to sell their products via ecommerce sites.
The Indian government announced at the time: “It has been decided that an entity which has been granted permission to undertake SBRT will be permitted to undertake ecommerce activities.”
The Indian ecommerce market is currently worth 11 billion US dollars and is growing rapidly, with online sales expected to reach 220 billion US dollars by 2025 according to estimates by Merrill Lynch.
Baidu sees 33% increase in advertising revenues
The Chinese search engine Baidu has seen a 33% increase in its advertising revenues in the latest quarter.
Search advertising brought in around 18.7 billion yuan for the search giant in the last quarter, equivalent to 2.9 billion US dollars.
Around 642 million Chinese people are online, equivalent to 46% of the country’s population.
Baidu is the most popular search engine in China, where it has around 60% of the search engine market share.
Africa requires a whole new marketing strategy
And finally, companies targeting Africa need to adopt a different strategy to other markets, as people in the African continent are leapfrogging some technologies and going straight to others.
Many African countries have gone straight to cloud computing and wireless internet connections, allowing for rapid growth and allowing companies to escape the constraints of sub-optimal infrastructure.
The news comes as Africa Internet Group announces that is has raised 326 million US dollars in funding, putting its value at over 1 billion US dollars, making it Africa’s first unicorn company.
It plans to use the money to expand its ecommerce site Jumia.
Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.
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