Online Sales in China exceeded USD 366B in 2016, almost comparable to e-commerce sales in the United States (360B in 2016). Note that online retail is “only” about 8.5% of the overall retail market in the United States. According to Fortune Magazine, Amazon was 34% of the US e-commerce market. However, China is an entirely different story. Amazon barely makes an appearance among the big e-commerce contenders. Taobao – an e-Bay like electronic market place owned by Alibaba commands a lion’s share of the China e-commerce market. Perhaps, even more, impressive is the scale of vertical integration of mobile payment systems with their corresponding e-commerce websites. For instance, the largest third-party payment system, Alipay, the mobile payment arm of Alibaba, has…
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Bloomberg has an excellent article on Retail Apocalypse, filled with some neat data visualizations, which I highly recommend. (Read the whole thing!) While media and political discussions have generally focused on the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs (e.g. Carrier, Rexnord, etc.) and the death of certain industries (coal, mining – which actually hire relatively fewer people than retail), I have always thought that there has been relatively little attention on Retail Jobs that have been lost in the past few years. For sure, Retail has been undergoing an accelerated sea-change due to the growth of e-commerce, historic suburban over-storing decisions, and the influence of changing customer tastes. However, at the heart of this crisis, is the loss of retail jobs and…
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