1. In the Top 20 internet companies, there are 9 China companies there.
Five years ago, there were only two China Internet companies in the list, Tencent and Baidu. This year, there are 9 and it is close to the United States, which has 11 companies.
2. China Online Entertainment growing rapidly, new retail is worth to pay more attention. The report shows that the China Mobile Internet (Data) usage is rapidly expanding. Compared to 2 years ago, the mobile media/entertainment daily time spent has increased by 20%. The online short-form video leaders in the market are Douyin (Tik-Tok) and Kuaishou, and the other important part which you should look at is mobile games. The team-based multiplayer mobile game leads the game time spent in China. Meanwhile, from the Game Revenue point of view, China is the number 1 in the market.
In addition, the report tells that the major changes in the Chinese Internet are "retail innovations" which is spreading from online to offline, reshaping the retail experience.
3. U.S. technology companies = largest + fast growing R&D + capex spenders. The report pointed out the major investment directions of U.S. technology companies. Specifically, the three main points driving the growth of U.S. technology companies are competition, R&D spending, and capital expenditure.
4Among them, the well-known US companies including Amazon accounted for more than 40% of the annual R&D investment.
Social media is the best way to promote products. The report points out that social media is enabling more efficient product discovery/commerce. The data shows that 55% of users had bought the product online after social media discovery.
This basically confirms a major trend: whether products are promoted at inbound or outbound, the ability to gain exposure in social media will become the key to business growth.
5. "Subscription" becomes the strongest growth point for sales growth. The report pointed out that internet users behavior and preferences have also changed, mainly because the proportion of purchases product via subscription model has increased significantly. The report cited the numbers of subscribers for Netflix and Spotify have grown rapidly (Netflix: 25%, Spotify: 48%). This means that if you are selling products online, but you haven't tapped on "subscription" services, you're basically out.
6. Video + Social + Gamified Become New Marketing Approach. The report pointed out that since the second half of 2017, the merchants began to adopt more videos when promoting and selling products, and they motivated the consumers to purchase by adding social and gamification elements. Therefore, if you haven't tried videos or live streaming sales, you should start quickly.
7. The big number and high growth in on-demand jobs. The report analyzes the impact of new technology on the employment market and believes that technology makes it easier for people to find freelance jobs. At the same time, from job seekers point of view, “flexibility” has become a key factor in part of the consideration. Therefore, in the past year, the growth rate of freelancers was three times faster than the total labor force; at the same time, the demand for on-demand work was large and growing rapidly. So will you become a freelancer in the near future?
8. Data-Driven personalization is the trend. The report emphasized the importance of data, especially data is the important driver of customer satisfaction. Specifically, data-driven personalized services are becoming the core competitiveness of products and services. The data will tell you more story customer queries, preferences, and interest. It will help to drive the engagement and customer satisfaction. So it will be very important to become a “data+strategic talent” in the future.
9. AI is emerging from Internet leaders. The report shows that although companies currently invest less in AI, but rapidly rising spend priority. In addition, the report believes that using AI service platform for other will become the emerging Internet leadership. For example, AWS AI platform can provide others with easy data processing and data collection services.
10. Lifelong learning will be more important. The report specifically mentions that lifelong learning has become an important trend, and machine learning, deeper learning, mathematical thinking and learning how to learn have become the world's highest demand in 2017. According to data from Coursera, the number of online learners increased significantly, it has 33MM registered learners. From the corporate point of view, AT&T shows employee re-training engagement is high. $1B allocated for Web-based employee training. 2.9MM emerging tech courses completed by employees. 194K employees actively engaged in re-training. 61% share of promotions received by re-trained employees. Meanwhile, more than 50% of freelances updated skills within past 6 months, Non - freelances is 30%