Kenneth Wisnefski, June 16, 2015
Unilever is borrowing a page from Amazon’s playbook with its plan to launch an ecommerce store on China’s JD.com to sell its Ponds, Dove and Vaseline brands and capitalize on the mobile shopping boom in the Asian country.
“The rate of mobile adoption, increase in mobile payment options and more manufacturers and designers bringing more products to the Chinese markets are all inextricably intertwined,” said Ken Wisnefski, founder and CEO of WebiMax.
“This should provide Unilever with a lot of valuable marketing insight into the preferences of the Chinese buying public, particularly on mobile where most of this buying will be taking place.”
As of last June, 527 million of China’s 632 million Internet users were mobile users, up 26.99 million over just the end of 2013.
Last year, 205 million of China’s 332 million shoppers were mobile, but the semi-annual growth rate of just those mobile shoppers was 42 percent – 4.3 times the growth rate of the total online shopping market in China.
“With that growth, companies like Unilever are seeing more demand for their products and more opportunities to bring different product lines to market in China,” Mr. Wisnefski said.
