The Better Than Cash Alliance conducted a study naming Indonesia as the leader in m-commerce.
The Better Than Cash Alliance released the results of a study it conducted which determined that Indonesia is the fastest growing mobile commerce marketplace. This is an impressive feat for the Southeast Asian country’s population of 260 million.
This led the authors of the report on the study to call the country a potential global tech business powerhouse.
The study credited the rapidly growing mobile commerce marketplace in Indonesia to the country’s rising middle class. The Indonesian population is also open to the adoption of new technology. This encouraged people to use their smartphones to shop and make their purchases. This has reached the point that the growth rate of m-commerce is the greatest there in the world and the study authors predict that Indonesia will become the next most important player in mobile shopping.
The study determined that the Indonesian mobile commerce marketplace is growing at 155 percent year over year.
The country is Southeast Asia’s largest economy. The report has called the country the third place for m-commerce after China and India. That said, the study also pointed to Indonesia for having a faster growth rate than those two leading markets and may be the next leader beyond those two countries in the not too distant future.
The researchers forecasted that by 2020, the Indonesian mobile commerce market will have grown to $130 billion. That represents an average annual growth of 50 percent, according to the Information and Communications Technology Ministry data. That said, the report suggested that the ministry’s figures could be rather modest compared to the nation’s actual potential.
Among the driving forces behind the growth in the use of mobile commerce in the country may have been the launch of the BBM Pay Instant Mobile Payments service from BlackBerry in 2015. The BBM messaging app already had over 55 million users in the country and with the added feature to allow people to pay for products and services with certain Indonesian merchants, it became a natural fit for many consumers there.
