The shape of the Asian mobile consumer market changes every six months it seems, wavering from consolidation to fragmentation, and back.
New mobile services, spanning the gamut of entertainment, social networking, news, and utility services seem to emerge all the time. Mobile video and apps have become a dominant part of the content consumption experience across Asia, every day. Mobile giants stalk the marketplace, often at risk of being attacked for market share by new home-grown upstarts.
Innovation and financial muscle in Asia’s mobile market has now spread to the rest of the world. Tik Tok has emerged from China, and spread across the world, and new mobile platforms such as shopping app Temu (owned by Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo) are spending large sums of money to break into the US market.
Every major mobile app wants to be a super app now. The term “super app” is often credited to BlackBerry founder Mike Lazaridis, who used the expression in a speech at Mobile World Congress in 2010. “Super apps are applications that once you start using them you’ll wonder just how you lived without them,” he said.
The Rise of the Global Super Apps
The whole world is watching China and the Asian region for evidence of what connects with the exploding Gen Z and Millennial audience, and to see who will win the super app race. Some of the other new super app contenders include WeChat, AliPay, Careem, Gojek, Meituan, Grab, and Momo.
There are billions of dollars up for grabs. As VentureBeat noted recently:
“The more utility a super app can provide consumers in one place, the better the overall experience. As consumers come to trust super apps to solve more of their problems, their brand loyalty and overall spending will increase in parallel,” said VentureBeat, adding that: “Brands have an opportunity here to gain more attention — and share of the wallet — from each customer.”
Unlike Europe, or North America, the Asian mobile consumer defies easy categorization, because the approximately thirteen Asian markets speak multiple languages, and mobile is the dominant form of Internet access. In old Europe and the US, desktop Internet usage still holds out versus the mobile screen.
If you had to define the Asian mobile consumer, you could say they love mobile gaming, have embraced the concept of the super app, and use their mobile device a lot more than people in Europe or the US. Mobile analytics firm data.ai said in its 2023 State of Mobile report that of the top ten smartphone-obsessed nations, seven were in Asia.
In the firm’s measurement of which nation’s residents spend most time on their phones, Indonesia came out on top with 5.7 average hours a day, while the peoples of Singapore and South Korea surpassed an average of five hours per day in mobile apps in 2022. Australia, India, Japan and Thailand lagged these markets by a small margin. Residents of China came in 18th place and spent an average of 3.6 hours a day.
In addition, Asia has large sleeping giants. Indonesia and Vietnam together claim about 270 million mobile users, and are ripe for further growth as new middle classes form in those countries. The global pandemic was a trigger for mass digital uptake in Asia, and mobile platforms are expected to grow, not decline.
The Next Wave of Internet Users Are Here
According to the e-Conomy SEA 2021— an annual publication by Google, investment company Temasek and market researcher Bain and Co. — 40 million new internet users came online in 2021, bringing internet penetration in Southeast Asia to 75 percent.
The challenge for advertisers and their technology partners is to expertly target the right audiences across a diverse mix of app and web platforms, across the Open Internet. This involves the tricky tasks of mobile advertising targeting, optimization, and conversion, across both mobile apps and web.
Related: How Advertisers Win with a Mobile-First Strategy: Guide to Mobile Programmatic Advertising
It also involves breaking down the behaviours and habits of mobile audiences in each of these markets. China, Japan, and India still sit well above Southeast Asia for user growth and consumer ad spend on mobile, even if some of the Southeast markets rank higher in time spent on mobile per day.
On that metric, the one brand that overshadows all of them for time spent is Tik Tok. The app has taken considerable growth from Meta, and other mobile advertising players such as Snap. This is no surprise as Asia has proved time and time again that it will jump quickly on to new consumer technology formats.
In 2012, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pivoted his company from a focus on desktop, to mobile, consumers in Southeast Asia followed. In some markets in Asia, Facebook and Google mopped up more than 70% of online advertising spend.
The key growth area in mobile is gaming as people across all demographics seek to be entertained by their mobile devices. There are more than 1.3 billion mobile gamers in the Asia-Pacific region, according to research firm Statista, easily eclipsing Europe’s 550 million. Moreover, their 2021 report says that for the past few years, China, Japan, and South Korea have consistently ranked within the global top five countries for mobile gaming revenue.
Tik Tok is Winning the Race for Eyeballs
In the meantime, advertisers will continue to chase audiences in the new hot properties. Last month, Seth Kean, CEO of ROI Influencer, a New York–based social media analytics company, told Fortune. “Marketers care about large audiences, targeted audiences, engagement, and sales, and view TikTok as a valuable partner for each goal.”
The giants continue to reap huge profits in Asia. In the latest quarter, Apple may have experienced a slowdown in Greater China, but its overall sales in the Asia-Pacific region rose more than 15 percent, the brightest growth spot for the company this quarter. Once the company fully commits to AR and VR, that growth will likely accelerate even further.
This year, and maybe for the next few years, the winner is clearly Tik Tok. Still, innovation in technology-based entertainment does not stand still.
Expect to see more innovation at the mobile hardware and software layer in the next few years, underpinned by machine learning, AI, and Augmented Reality. Some analysts speculate that 3D imagery will take over the Internet. Asia will be ready to adopt it.
