This market report gives an overview of the mobile payments landscape of Asia. It covers markets where Fortumo has coverage. These markets are Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Cambodia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
There are now 1.7 billion smartphones in the Asia Pacific region, compared to 500 million in Western Europe and the United States combined. However, most digital merchants have little knowledge about these markets which means their main focus is still on the saturated (few users entering the market) and expensive (from a user acquisition perspective) Western countries. But with companies like Google, Spotify and Netflix putting increasing focus on these regions, other merchants who want to stay competitive need to do so as well.
This market report aims to give merchants a better understanding of the Asian markets: what the local mobile landscape looks like, how to localize pricing to match user income, which payment methods to select in order to increase the amount of paying users and which devices to target. While revenue per user from these countries is lower compared to Western counterparts, most merchants have their focus elsewhere resulting in lower user acquisition costs. To showcase this, we have for the first time also included Google Play CPI (cost-per-install) costs from each country, comparing them to the US.
Data presented in the white paper has been taken from public sources of information as well as anonymized, aggregated data on payments processed by merchants using Fortumo’s Web SDK.
