The region, home to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Lazada and Tencent Holdings Ltd.-backed Sea Ltd., will see a 63% increase in e-commerce gross merchandise value from 2019 as home-bound consumers picked up groceries and essentials from the likes of Lazada’s RedMart and Sea’s Shopee. Online shopping is now forecast to hit US$172 billion by 2025 versus a previous US$153 billion estimate, the research showed.
Southeast Asia’s sizzling-hot internet economy cooled during the pandemic but spending online should bounce back rapidly and triple to more than US$300 billion ($404.31 billion) by 2025, research from Google, Temasek Holdings Pte and Bain & Co. shows.
The value of transactions in four key areas – e-commerce, travel, media and transport and food – should grow just US$5 billion to about US$105 billion in 2020, when many consumers turned to mobile shopping for the first time but lockdowns hammered spending on trips.
