Trillion-RMB Market for E-commerce Livestreaming in China: Report by KPMG and AliResearch

KPMG and Alibaba’s research arm AliResearch on Oct. 12 jointly issued the report “E-commerce Livestreaming towards a Trillion Market”, predicting the market scale of e-commerce livestreaming will reach 1.05 trillion yuan in 2020 with a massive growth from 438.8 billion yuan last year.

The report also anticipates the penetration rate of livestreaming for e-commerce in the social commerce market will increase to 8.6%.

E-commerce livestreaming is expected to continue to grow rapidly with a scale of nearly 2 trillion yuan and a penetration rate reaching 14.3% in 2021, according to the report.

As analyzed by KPMG and AliResearch, livestreaming sales not only boosts domestic consumption and refresh the traditional economy, but also create new forms of employment and alleviate rural poverty through 1.4 million livestreams from rural e-commerce businesses.

As shown in the data published by China’s Ministry of Commerce, more than 10 million livestreams for social commerce were held across the country with nearly 50 billion viewers, representing swift growth since it became popular back in 2016.

With the expansion of the livestreaming commerce industry, a growing number of multi-channel network service (MCN) organizations were born to compete for influential livestreamers and traffic. The MCN agencies are also troubled by the narrow ways of traffic monetization, which is advertising commission in most cases.

With the double-eleven online shopping extravaganza underway, top Chinese livestreamers including Austin Li and Viya have listed the double-eleven discount information on their Weibo accounts as well as their livestream platforms on Taobao.

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The double-eleven festival, also known as the country’s annual Singles Day on Nov. 11, saw $2.85 billion in transactions generated in livestreaming sales on Taobao, taking up approximately 7.5% of the total sales of that day in 2019.

Entrepreneurs have also joined the cohort to become livestreamers and some of them have even become internet celebrities. Yonghao Luo, the founder of Smartisan, even paid off 400 million out of his 600 million yuan debt at the end of 2018 through profits made from his livestreaming platform “Make a Friend” on Douyin.