Consumers in Southeast Asian countries love their phablets, and are also quickly taking to mobile commerce, or m-commerce, according to a new study by Furry, a mobile developer analytics platform within Oath.
The latest “State of Mobile” by Flurry drew its conclusions using data pulled from over 940,000 apps across 2.1 billion global devices, with 14,500 apps and 217 million devices from SEA in 2018.
State of mobile
M-commerce was identified as the biggest segment growth in 2018, with mobile shopping app usage having spiked by 240% in the last year. This is followed by health and fitness (170%) and business and finance apps (102%). In comparison, messaging and social media use declined marginally by 2%.
On the mobile devices front, Apple’s market share was found to have dropped by 12 percentage points, from 20% in 2017 to just 12% this year. In contrast, Samsung’s distribution grew slightly from 28% to 30%. Elsewhere, share of Chinese brands Oppo and Xiaomi grew by three and four percentage points respectively in the Southeast Asian market.
The research also found that phablet devices are especially popular in Southeast Asia, with almost three-quarters (73%) of devices used are large-screen mobile phones. Though the phablet is the fastest growing mobile phone segment globally, adoption in this region is outpacing growth in the United States, where its market share is just 48%.
“The level of competition between mobile apps has become brutal in Southeast Asia, though the decelerating rate of global growth could signal market maturity, saturation or simply the end of the app gold rush,” said Rico Chan, the managing director, of Oath in Hong Kong, Japan and INSEA.
“Retailers need to consider the pace of growth in m-commerce and work with app developers to meet the needs of consumers. Users now see their phones as more than a tool for snapping photos and catching up with the news headlines,” he said.
First published in CMO Innovation