Visit my new blog for updated post on e-commerce statistics

The last time I wrote about e-commerce statistics in Malaysia was 2-3 years back, which you can read it here. It's time to get some updated figures, thanks to PayPal's "Online and Mobile Shopping Insights" study.

Malaysia's online shopping market size was RM 1.8 billion in 2010, estimated to be RM 5 billion in 2014. It's safe to predict that our e-commerce market size is around RM 2-3 billion for this year.

Well, this post is all about charts and figures. Read on to get a glimpse of e-commerce outlook in selected countries of Asia Pacific. Hopefully, you will get a rough idea on those markets that you are not particularly familiar with.

eCommerce statistics in Malaysia is hard to come by and I have got quite a number of requests on that. Thankfully, there was a special report on Oriental Daily News (yes, the no.4 Chinese Daily) last week presenting updated stats from IDC.

Again, sampling methods used in generating the statistics are not known but the stats itself might be useful as a reference.

Internet Users VS Buying Online



Can you believe it? More than 8 million Malaysians (half of our internet population) have actually bought something online. No doubt, most of the numbers are contributed by the airlines and I am not sure whether online financial activities, bill payments etc. are included as well.

Malaysians started their internet experience with dial-up internet during the early nineties.

Broadband (or narrowband) is only available since year 2001.

Come November, internet will be celebrating its 40 years anniversary.

Internet only exists in Malaysia for less than 20 years.

Broadband penetration rate in Korea and Singapore is more than 90%.

According to MCMC, broadband penetration rate as of early 2009 was 21%.

Malaysia's Government aims to achieve 50% broadband penetration rate in 2010.

But, PC penetration rate in Malaysia was only 44% in early 2009?

Opera has provided an useful benchmark on popular mobile destinations in Malaysia as well as other selected countries, via the State of the Mobile Web, May 2009 report. Malaysia enjoys a growth rate (as in unique users) of 249.6% since May 2008, third highest in Southeast Asia after Vietnam and Philippines.

Top sites ranked by unique users
1. google.com
2. friendster.com
3. facebook.com
4. yahoo.com
5. myspace.com
6. youtube.com
7. my.opera.com
8. wikipedia.org
9. tagged.com
10. gamejump.com

Comparing to the report in Oct 2008, tagged.com is a new entry in this recent report while the sole local site utusan.com.my has dropped out from the top 10 list. If you look into Southeast Asia region, Malaysia is the only country without a local site in the top tens among countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and even Brunei.

Continued from Online News Portal in Malaysia...

After looking at the online figures, let's check out some of the selected Peninsular Malaysia statistics from Analysis of Print Media by MSA.



Total newspaper circulation is generally on the rise since 1998. Actual figure for 2008 should have stood higher though if data from Nanyang, Malay Mail and Weekend Mail are included.

According to comScore (via The Edge), the average daily readership for local news portal in March this year was about 2.8 million, 10% of our population. Many believe that online news portal has hit mainstream since the political tsunami in last March. Citizens started to flock into these sites looking for (almost) real time and unfiltered updates. Imagine how popular Twitter would have been in Malaysia then?

Some of those sites (without mass circulations) are still maintaining lot of their audience since then. Malaysiakini's position as no.1 is both surprising and impressive considering that it is on paid-subscription model (for English content).

Allow me for a Che Det-ish posting here:

1. The world population currently stands at 6.77 billion, with 4 billion or 60% of them are from Asia.

2. The world total internet users currently stands at 1.6 billion, with 660 million or 40% of them are from Asia.

3. Asia's internet penetration rate currently stands at 17.4%, the second lowest region after Africa. The world's average is 23.8%.

4. It shows that the Asia's (internet) market is so huge, yet with so much potential and room for growth.

How fast things change, Facebook seems to be no.1 in Malaysia already since I last posted 5 months ago (while Friendster was still leading).

Proof? Alexa. Facebook has moved up from no.8 to no.5, whereas Friendster has dropped from top 3 to no.7.

However, Friendster is still leading in terms of web searches. This is probably contributed by heavy searches such as "Friendster layouts" for teens who like to decorate their mini-hompy (pardon my Korean slang here).

Akamai has recently released The State of The Internet - Q4 2008, and it's nice to see that Malaysia is one of the 10 Asia Pacific countries appended in the report. However, even to compete in this region, there are still some catch-ups to do in terms of internet penetration and broadband adoption.



Note: 10 Asia Pacific countries surveyed are Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan.

After skipping 2007, MCMC has just released its third in the series of Household Use of The Internet Survey for 2008. Besides the usual demographic and socio-economic data, it's good to see that trends of household internet users are also being sampled this time around.



Following are the selected facts and figures, especially on those not included in 2005 and 2006.

Have you been wondering what are the most used browsers (on web and mobile) in Malaysia? StatCounter does provide an useful reference to this with its sampling method as the following:

Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites.

Remember YouthSays? They have recently conducted a survey sampling 10,280 young Malaysians on what brands being consumed. Well, YouthSays is generous enough to share the data with us in the following slide:

By looking at Malaysia's E-Commerce Habits, it is not difficult to guess that local eCommerce acceptance is being stimulated with the emergence of Air Asia. Where do Malaysians spend? Without any outright statistics, let's find out the top sites (with high local traffic) in each category.

Auction & Shopping


Lelong (Alexa rank in Malaysia: 45)
eBay Malaysia (64)

We only have one obvious local player with eBay-like auction model, other than eBay itself. Lelong has been around since 2000 and claims to have 1 million visitors per month. Strangely, it also has a Facebook-like social network site.

Debate over the most popular programming language can become a passionate battle, something like between Manchester United and Liverpool. But does it really matter, as long as programmers being able to get the job done on time and within budget? Football fans (stakeholders) no matter which camp you are from, would be just as satisfied after being presented a high quality match (software project).

Still, it is fun for football fans to check out the league table ranking every end of the season, whether they earn the bragging rights against their rivals. Thanks to TIOBE, we have a programming language "league table" as well. Bear in mind that, the ranking is not about the best, but the most popular programming language based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors.


(Image Source)

Note: ASP and ASP.NET are not considered by TIOBE as programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and technologies such as AJAX.

This post is summarized from the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey on entertainment media usage. The sampling is based on 26,000 online users from 52 countries, with 500 Malaysians involved. In this survey, digital media includes video (movie, TV show, music video, short video), audio and video game.

How do Malaysians fare?

- Rank #5 in digital media consuming nation. (5 from Asia Pacific are in the top 10 - Philippines, China, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.)
- Rank #7 or 53% having streamed digital media in the past month.
- Rank #9 or 41% having downloaded digital media in the past month.
- Rank #3 in spending over 20 hours a week watching streamed or downloaded content from the Internet.

Yes, according to State of the Mobile Web, Oct 2008 report by Opera, Malaysia has the highest mobile internet user growth in Southeast Asia. Although the usage is measured solely on Opera Mini, it is still an useful benchmark on mobile internet adoption and trend in this region.



Opera Mini has only 0.06% market share compared to both desktop and mobile browsers, but nevertheless it has big market share in mobile browsers. This is because it is being shipped on major mobile manufacturers and available to various mobile operating system (excluding iPhone OS), making it the alternative browser of choice for mobile users.

Facebook has just released its official statistics, selected facts as below:

More than 140 million active users
The fastest growing demographic is 25 years old and older
Average user has 100 friends on the site
More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the US

How many out of the 140 million users are Malaysians, and what about the demographics? AllFacebook does provide an useful estimation tool for us to delve into the figures.

Google has released the most searched terms in 2008 (up to November). It is a great way to recap the year by looking at the search trend and curiosity around the world in this year.

There must be reasons why Google is cooler than Yahoo. Unlike Yahoo's Year In Review 2008, Google brands its year end compilation as Google Zeitgeist 2008 (Zeitgeist means "the spirit of the time"). Another cool factor, we have statistics reflecting major event or emerging trend in each selected countries.

Let's start with Malaysia, followed by other Asian countries. Before that, you need to understand this: "Fastest Rising" represents zeitgeist as its search volume increased sizably in 2008 compared to 2007, while "Most Popular" shows the largest search volume for 2008.

Friendster is still no.1 social network in Malaysia, in almost every aspects. MySpace used to be no.2 in Malaysia but has since been overtook by Facebook in 2008.

comScore (source)
Measurement: Unique visitors from Malaysia, in May 2008.

1. Friendster (3,024,000 unique visitors)
2. Facebook (758,000)
3. MySpace (735,000)

Observation: Friendster is at least 4 times bigger than Facebook or MySpace!