Asia Internet Growth
February 19, 2007 – 5:46 am by coachwei | Category asia | 2 Comments »I have been traveling in India for the past two weeks, spending the first 50% of the time being a tourist busy taking photos around Jaipur, Agra and Nasik and the 2nd 50% time working with some colleagues in Hyderabad and Delhi.
Asia in general is growing fast as we all know. In 2006, India’s GDP growth was 9.2%, only behind China’s 10.4%. Besides China and India, Japan, Korea and even Vietnam are all showing strong signs of growth and healthy economic prospect. I am truly impressed by the potential of India, and the fact that most people speak English is a huge plus. Or course, we all know India has shown strong growth partially due to IT. However, the significant growth drivers and opportunities for India are going to be infrastructure: highway, housing, real estate, transportation…there are so much inefficiency in these areas that one can imagine what the country can be once it has a transportation system like the US highway system.
Being an Internet guy, I spent some time looking for quantitative data related to the Internet. Here are some very useful statistics I found (according to online research firm eMarketer’s 2007 report):
Asia Online Sales
| Country | 2006 Online Sales | Market share | Projecgted 2010 Sales |
| Japan | 33.50 | 65.40% | 61.90 |
| South Korea |
14.00 | 27.30% | 28.80 |
| China | 2.50 | 4.90% | 18.00 |
| India | 1.20 | 2.30% | 6.40 |
| Sales in $ billion (including online travel); Source: eMarketer |
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Note that the above numbers include online travel (my contribution from the last two weeks includes buying tickets from India online travel site cleartip.com and spiceJet.com). Further, the growth of China is projected to be 700% over the next 3-4 years and India is around 500% - such growth rate is truly staggering. No wonder so many US venture capital firms are busy doing deals in China and India.
(Oh, one thing to complain is the ridiculous internet access charge from India hotels. These are good hotels. For example, Trident Hilton in Delhi charges Rs 225 =$4 US dollars for one hour, Rs 900 = $21 US dollars for one day. $21/day is almost the cost for an entire day stay at some low end hotels).
Unfortunately I don’t have similar statistics for US and Europe handy. It will be very interesting to compare these numbers. If you have such numbers, please post them here – it will be very helpful.
Asia Internet Penetration
| Country | Internet Penetration | Number of Internet Users |
| Japan | 65% | 86,300,000 |
| China | 10% | 132,000,000 |
| India | 3.5% | 40,000,000 |
I think the number of internet users in US is around 200,000,000 – US is still the number one in terms of users but I suspect that China and India are going to surpass US over the next few years.
2 Responses to “Asia Internet Growth”
Hi,
Great to hear that you enjoyed the trip to India. I remembered how expensive some hotels in India, like the “Taj” hotels were in New Delhi. On the other hand, you find really cheap productsl like beaded bags for only US$2 or so.
Yes, the ecommerce spending is growing year by year in Asia, and i just can't get enough of online shopping. I just wished that more US based merchants are willing to expand their delivery zones to more cities here.
Regards,
Fione
You can check more travel photos, and internet news at eOneNet.com Internet Marketing Asia blog
By Fione Tan - eOneNet(http://www.eonenet.com/) on Apr 21, 2007
This is super great, i am really glad we are talking about Asia here, it's my favorite continent. And most of all i am glad it's the hotel industry, this means they can become more competitive and and be comparable to Discount hotels in London for instance.
By gordwick on Jul 3, 2007