EBay Eyes China as Global Commerce Seen at $307 Billion

July 23, 2013 Leave a comment

EBay Eyes China as Global Commerce Seen at $307 Billion

Online sales of goods between countries will almost triple over the next five years as more people shop on the Web and merchants seek consumers across globe, a study commissioned by EBay Inc. (EBAY)’s PayPal found.

Cross-border Internet commerce between Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, U.K. and U.S. will jump to $307 billion in 2018 from $105 billion this year, according to a Nielsen study published today. The top categories of goods that will be traded includes clothing, shoes and accessories, followed by health and beauty products, and personal electronics, the report said.EBay, the world’s biggest online marketplace, has been seeking growth abroad by adding staff in emerging markets to compete in countries that are showing big increases in online commerce. About a quarter of marketplaces revenue and more than half of PayPal’s sales came from international operations last year. PayPal is investing more of its time promoting cross-border commerce with China, according to David Marcus, the unit’s president.

“If you look at the Chinese opportunities — there are 40 million small businesses in China and only 5 million of them are actually exporting goods online,” Marcus said in an interview. “So there’s a huge upside opportunity.”

The Chinese were some of the biggest shoppers for American goods, with 84 percent of them currently buying from U.S. websites, the report said. Nielsen Holdings NV (NLSN) analyzed the buying habits of more than 6,000 consumers in the six markets over the past 12 months.

An estimated $106 billion worth of international transactions will take place via mobile devices in 2018, up from $36.4 billion this year, the study said.

The U.S. was the top exporter to markets abroad, with 45 percent of those surveyed saying that’s where they shopped, followed by the U.K, at 37 percent.

PayPal was the top method of cross-border payment in the markets surveyed, with 79 percent of respondents saying they’ve used it in the past year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Danielle Kucera in San Francisco at dkucera6@bloomberg.net

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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