In 2015, online-to-offline GMV grew 38% to CNY 335 billion (USD 51 billion) as Chinese consumers became increasingly enthusiastic about using their smartphones to book and pay for taxi rides, food delivery, movie tickets and other local services, according to the “2015 China E-commerce & O2O Summary Report issued by the market research cimpany IResearch, alizila.com reports.
Other factors driving ecommerce were strong gains in online shopping GMV. Despite being a more mature sector than O2O, online shopping sales grew 37% to CNY 3.8 trillion (USD 578 billion). Also, Singles Day promotions provided a boost to online shopping GMV.
China’s internet players like Alibaba Group invested heavily in O2O commerce in 2015, trying to build market share as the economic engine shifts from investment and exports to domestic consumption of goods and services. Growth in the country’s services sector overall was one of the few bright spots amid the country’s slowing GDP growth in 2015.
Meanwhile, O2O commerce and smartphone-enabled local services became a hotly contested battlefield driven by “an expanding mobile user base, numerous industries integrating offline shopping with online, and the growing popularity of the mobile-shopping sector,”, the source cites.
In 2015, the O2O sector was marked by mergers as companies sought to scale quickly: “Four mergers in the market occurred in 2015 including those between Kuaidi and Didi, Meituan and Dianping, 58 and Ganji, and Ctrip and Qunar,” iResearch reported. “Many O2O segments are facing a new round of M&A and reorganizing in preparation for 2016.” The research firm is predicting that China’s O2O sector will nearly double to CNY 626 billion (USD 95 billion) by 2019.
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