Mary Meeker’s new internet report shows how China supersizes the web

The new report shows how amazingly present tech is in the everyday lives of people in China. Photo credit: SteveC.

Every summer, techies around the world look forward to the latest missive from KPCB analyst Mary Meeker. Her detailed 2016 Internet Trends Report, which dropped overnight, is worth seeing in full, but I’d like to focus on the China bits.

That’s because the report gives a great summary and overview of how China’s internet industry is so huge and so pervasive in everyday life – much more so than the US sector is for everyday Americans.

All eyes on China’s tech giants

With 688 million internet users, 50.3 percent of China’s population is now online. Most of their time spent on the web is dominated by the nation’s three tech giants – Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu.

In fact, the Big Three take up 71 percent of people’s time thanks to wildly popular apps and services like the WeChat messaging app (made by Tencent), the Taobao store (Alibaba’s), and Baidu’s search engine.

Rocking online shopping

If you think Amazon is huge in the US, it’s absolutely nothing compared to Alibaba in China. Alibaba’s two main stores, Taobao and Tmall, make it the nation’s biggest retailer – even though, technically, it doesn’t sell a single thing as its marketplaces are made up of third-party merchants.

Alibaba arch-rival JD makes it an ecommerce double gut punch to brick-and-mortar stores.

Here’s another view of that. Alibaba is close to 7 percent of all retail sales in China at a time when ecommerce as a whole closes in on about 20 percent of total shopping in the nation.

WeChat is for way more than just messaging

Digital money

Hitching a ride

Here’s the slideshow