“Queen of the Internet” Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends Report

This Tuesday, “Queen of the Internet” Mary Meeker made her presentation onstage at Vox/Recode’s Code Conference in Scottsdale, AZ.

SEE ALSO: 9 Chinese Companies Made It onto Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report

Mary Meeker, founder of Bond Capital, former Kleiner Perkins general partner, and former head of Morgan Stanley’s global technology research team, releases the annual internet trends report every year since 1995.

Her internet trends report is seen as an investment Bible in the internet industry. It is also regarded as a stock picking guide. Her recommendations including AOL, Dell, Amazon, and eBay resulted in more than 10x return to investors.

Below are some highlights of the 333-page-long report:

• Internet Users Growth Slowed Down.
  The internet has over 50 percent global penetration. However, new growth remains harder to find. Adoption of smartphones, a major catalyst of Internet adoption over the past decade, may be plateauing, with new phone shipments declining for the second consecutive year.
• Countries in Africa, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific Region Have Potential
  The report published Internet population penetration rates in several regions: 48% in Asia Pacific, 78% in Europe, 32% in Africa and the Middle East, 62% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 89% in North America. This means that there is still significant room for improvement in Internet coverage in Africa and the Middle East.
• Internet Companies From the US and China Took the Lead
  The report released the list of the top 30 Internet companies in the world, in terms of market capitalization as of June 7. The list included 18 companies in the US, seven in China, and one each in Japan, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Sweden.
• Devices Time: Mobile > TV
  Digital media like streaming videos and listening to podcasts are taking up more of our time, as time spent on mobile devices finally eclipsed time spent watching TV. Over a quarter of U.S. adults are now online “almost constantly,” up from 21 percent three years ago.
• Mobile Phone: Social, Video, and Picture Sharing
  The report unveiled the top apps with the highest percentage of mobile users: Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitch.
  It can be seen that the user’s time on the mobile side mainly engages in three aspects of behavior: social, videos, and picture sharing.
• The Rise of China’s Short Video Apps
  As in previous years, the report specifically used a chapter to interpret the development trends of the Chinese Internet. According to the report, from April 2017 to April 2019, the average daily usage of short video apps in China has increased from less than 100 million hours to 600 million hours.
• E-commerce Growth Slows, but Still Remains Robust
  As a part of U.S. retail, e-commerce now accounts for 15 percent of total spending. The growth rate of e-commerce has slowed down, with a year-on-year increase of 12.4 percent in the first quarter of this year, while physical retail sales only totaled 2 percent of spending.
• Increased Privacy Concerns
  Privacy is a sensitive topic that cannot be avoided. The report emphasizes that people have become more concerned about Internet privacy than they were a year ago. The data shows that in the first quarter, 87 percent of the world’s network traffic was encrypted, compared to 53 percent three years ago.
• Cloud Computing Penetration Largely Increased
  The report uses Europe and the United States as examples. As of the first quarter of this year, the coverage of the PaaS platform and the LaaS platform were 37 and 49 percent, respectively, and this figure was 27 and 39 percent respectively last year.
• News From the Social Media
  According to the report, 43 percent of people now use Facebook to get news, 21 percent through YouTube, and 12 percent through Twitter. Social media can amplify trending topics.

Featured Image Source: Bond