Moreover, we predict that China, the US, the UK, Japan, and South Korea will constitute the top five through 2025. India Will Be the Fastest-Growing Ecommerce Market This Year. Although India’s total retail sales growth dropped dramatically in 2020, ecommerce is soaring. We expect digital sales to leap 27.0% this year, as more retailers launch or expand their online stores.

How we got here: South Korea may have broken the dam, but it’s been close to cracking for a while. Apple and Google have faced several lawsuits in the US and the EU in recent months. And laws that mirror South Korea’s have recently been proposed in both markets, too.

Google described the legislative process in South Korea as rushed, and Apple said the provisions would undermine parental controls, privacy, and trust—which have been tentpole features of the Apple brand. Both companies are lobbying politicians to block passage in South Korea.

China, Japan, and South Korea have the lowest podcast listener penetration of the markets we forecast. YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts are the top three biggest platforms globally with YouTube performing particularly strong in markets with a smaller native podcast market. Language barriers affect available content.

South Korea was the first country to pass a law ending Apple and Google’s stranglehold on their respective app stores. The ruling gives mobile app users the freedom to choose which provider they use to make in-app payments, and developers can choose how they’d like to get paid. US senators introduced a bill last month designed to curb anticompetitive app store policies.

In 2021, TikTok will have surpassed Snapchat in monthly users in each Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and Vietnam. The US will join that list in 2023, followed by Germany in 2024. TikTok is also challenging Instagram.

Besides the two giants, only the UK, Japan, and South Korea had more than $100 billion in ecommerce sales in 2020; Germany will join that club in 2021. The regional rankings will look much the same in 2021 as they did in 2020, though every area is showing a much bigger number and an upshifted trend line compared with 2019.

Instagram Will Be Bigger than Facebook in South Korea in 2020. As in Japan, Instagram is coming to Facebook’s rescue in South Korea. In fact, people in South Korea have migrated to Instagram more quickly than we had anticipated. In November 2019, we predicted that Instagram’s user base in the country would surpass Facebook’s by the end of 2021.

For mobile, the fastest countries are United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Qatar, China, Cyprus, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Australia, and Bulgaria. For broadband, the world’s fastest countries are Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Romania, Switzerland, South Korea, Chile, Denmark, and Liechtenstein.

Instagram Will Pass Facebook in South Korea in 2020. Facebook has managed to cut its losses in Japan, but that’s not the case in South Korea. In 2020, user growth will drop by 6.5% in the country, with total users falling to 12.5 million from 13.4 million in 2019. That comes on the heels of a 10.2% decline in 2019. Since 2018, Facebook has lost 2.4 million users in South Korea.

South Korea. Out of all the countries we forecast, TikTok will have the lowest growth rate in South Korea in 2020. It will have 3.3 million users in the country, up 20.9% over 2019. Local social media app Band enjoys significant popularity, according to research by MobileIndex among Android users in June 2020.

Rounding out the top five countries were Japan, South Korea, and the UK. More like this:. Report: Time Spent with Media Overview 2021. Article: Oculus adopts Facebook's core business model with ad integration. Article: The UK is the third-biggest tech unicorn hub worldwide.

Elsewhere, South Korea became the first country to end Apple’s and Google’s payments duopoly on their respective mobile platforms. This was seen as the first domino to fall toward breaking up the firms’ tight hold on their developer, payment, and app ecosystems. The EU, the UK, and India are also zeroing in on Apple’s App Store dominance. What’s next?

The strongest declines will be in Japan and South Korea, where Facebook has been losing users for the past several years. Even India will experience a decline in 2021, after posting the strongest growth worldwide last year.

An even bigger long-term milestone was the official launch of 5G services by all four major networks in the US, as well as the leading networks in China, South Korea, the UK, Germany and a handful of other countries. The arrival of 5G will enable all types of new services due to its higher network capacity, lower latency (lag time) and faster speeds.