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Melanie Sanders is a Bain & Company partner based in Melbourne.
Kanaiya Parekh is a Bain expert vice president based in Hong Kong.
Hewie Kang is a partner in the frm’s Seoul and Shanghai offces.
Marc-André Kamel leads Bain & Company’s Global Retail practice
and is based in Paris. Jonathan Cheng is a principal in Hong Kong.
All are members of Bain’s Retail practice.
Copyright2018 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.The Future of Retail: Asia’s Ecosystems
At a Glance
Retail ecosystems—vast, interconnected communities of consumers, retailers and partners—are
becoming the norm in Asia, and will become an important part of the retail landscape in other
markets in the years ahead.
While retail ecosystems will take different forms and grow at different rates according to market
characteristics, retailers face a host of decisions about whether—and how—to participate.
We’ve identi ed the strategic options for retailers considering ecosystems and the factors that
will help them choose the best approach.
Retail executives seeking to understand the future of retail should take a close look at Asia. It has the
world’s highest rate of Internet shopping and the fastest growth in overall sales
(see Figure 1)
. We expect
around half of all retail growth will continue to come from Asia in the nextve years.
This boom has given birth to a concept with massive implications. Asia is home to the retail ecosystem:
vast communities of consumers, retailers and partners that are rapidly reshaping the entire retail land-
scape, forcing retailers to just as quickly make some fundamental decisions.
Amazon may have launched the world’srst proprietary ecosystem, but the concept has so far generated
its biggest momentum in China, where Alibaba and Tencent have within a few short years built open
variants of the ecosystem—a one-stop shop for consumers and a powerful way for retailers to reach
and serve millions of potential consumers.
Ecosystems start by combining a sticky set of consumer services like e-commerce, chat, streaming,
gaming, booking services and payments in a single platform or app
(see Figure 2)
. They attract a huge
customer base, which in turn becomes incredibly attractive to retailers looking for easy access to a
critical mass of consumers. A single, dramatic example: Tencent’s WeChat has one billion subscribers
and is transforming the retail experience in partnership with JD.
Plugging into an ecosystem also gives those retailers access to a host of hard-to-build capabilities,
everything from rich customer data analytics to extensive logistics networks to cloud services. This can
be a compelling and capital-light alternative to building and scaling their own capabilities.
The resulting scale achieved by ecosystem players provides both the capacity to reinvest and access to a
new set of prized competitive advantages
(see Figure 3)
. This, in turn, provides the basis for expansion
into new services, new formats and new geographies—such as Alibaba’s entrance into travel services
with Alitrip (since renamed Fliggy), its futuristic Hema supermarkets or its expansion into Southeast
Asia by buying a controlling interest in Lazada.The Future of Retail: Asia’s Ecosystems
Figure 1:
China, South Korea, and increasingly India, are at the forefront of digitalization in retail
Figure 2:
Ecosystems bene t both shoppers and retail partners
Source: Euromonitor
China
South Korea
UK
US
Australia
France
Japan
India
Malaysia
Indonesia
Thailand
Online retail penetration, 2017CAGR, 2013–17
20%33%
12111153
30
3119
169832
Source: Bain & Company
Shop
Game
Book
Recommend
Logistics
Payments
Data
analytics
Financial services
Cloud
services
One-stop shop for shoppersSolutions for retail partners
Demand generation
StreamNavigate
ChatSearch
TransactSocial mediaMarketplace。。。