Chinese e-commerce giants now dominate Southeast Asia’s online shopping scene

alibaba Consulting firm Bain & Company said in a report Thursday that its and ByteDance’s TikTok shops are just part of a wave of Chinese e-commerce players that have quickly come to control about half of the online shopping market in several Southeast Asian countries.

In Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, Shein and P.D.D.Temu — according to the report, accounts for about 50% of the local e-commerce market, according to 2024 data. It showed that Chinese companies are also gaining a foothold in the growing online commerce market in countries from the United States to Brazil.

The findings come as Chinese companies accelerate global expansion despite slowing domestic economic growth and escalating trade tensions between the United States and China.

“Rather than being wiped out by tariffs, the internationalization of China’s retail industry is entering a new phase,” the report said. The paper’s authors noted that so far, Chinese sellers tend to perform better “in markets with lower online purchasing power.”

Bain noted that Alibaba’s Taobao is expanding its Singles’ Day shopping promotion to 20 regions this year. This means that the world’s biggest shopping event is no longer just about China, but competing markets are now key factors. Amazon.com promoted Black Friday sales.

It is not immediately clear how much promotion Singles’ Day has received outside China in the past few years. However, the increase is recent. Malaysia’s Taobao announced last year that for the first time it would promote its shopping events in English in addition to Chinese.

Alibaba’s international arm, called the “International Digital Commerce Group,” reported sales of 34.74 billion yuan ($4.85 billion) for the three months ended June 30, up 19% from a year earlier.

That was slightly more than the revenue brought in by the company’s cloud computing unit, but still far below the 140.07 billion yuan in revenue generated by Alibaba’s China e-commerce business, which has seen a slower growth rate of 10%. Similar to Amazon.com, sellers open accounts on Alibaba’s platform and sell directly to consumers.

One signal of how quickly Chinese sellers are expanding their online sales overseas is their funding numbers.

Fintech startup FundPark has facilitated $3 billion in loans to Chinese small and medium-sized businesses for overseas e-commerce in just over a year. Anson Suen, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC that it previously took six years to lend the same amount of $3 billion.

FundPark, which has received a $750 million loan from Goldman Sachs and HSBC, uses technology-based data analysis to assess how much small merchants can borrow. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $71 million to support new artificial intelligence-powered tools for “dynamic financing” to help retailers navigate rate uncertainty.

Part of the success of Chinese e-commerce companies is due to lessons learned in their home market of integrating live streaming, rapid product innovation and agile logistics, Bain analysts said.

In fact, Amazon closed its Chinese market in 2019 amid increasing competition from domestic players.

The country’s huge market has provided a fertile training ground.

With GMV of $2.32 billion last year, China’s e-commerce market is more than twice the size of the U.S., which had GMV of $1.05 billion last year, Bain said. GMV is a measure of an e-commerce platform’s sales over a period of time.

Bain said Indonesia was the largest market in Southeast Asia with $62 billion in total e-commerce transactions last year, while Thailand and Vietnam each had $30 billion in total transactions. The Philippines’ GMV in 2024 was $20 billion, while Singapore’s was much smaller at just $8.55 billion.

But it is far from a straight path to growth for Chinese companies in any market.

Bain said that in Singapore, Alibaba’s Lazada has lost market share to local incumbent Shopee, while Amazon. walmart Still mainstream in the US

While PDD, Alibaba and ByteDance split much of the Chinese market, the situation is very different in the US, where Bain data shows non-Chinese e-commerce players control nearly 95% of the market.

The US e-commerce giant also has a large international presence.

Amazon reported net sales of $100.1 billion in North America for the quarter that ended June 30, with international sales of $36.76 billion. This means the US e-commerce giant still generates more net sales than Alibaba at home and abroad. The US-based e-commerce giant is scheduled to announce its financial results on Thursday local time.

Walmart reported $23.7 billion in U.S. online sales and $8.3 billion internationally for the quarter ended July 31, up 22% from a year earlier, according to CNBC calculations.

—CNBC’s Victoria Yeo contributed to this report.