For years, luxury brands around the world have been slow to adopt digital. But the pandemic has sped up the process, forcing many to pivot and innovate during a time when a large number of transactions are happening digitally.

Amazon and Alibaba continue to expand into Western Europe—Amazon with hopes of capturing a greater European consumer base, and Alibaba selling luxury European goods to its tens of millions of consumers in China.

The way consumers in China are shopping for luxury goods is changing amid the pandemic, with more purchases happening locally because of shelter-in-place protocols and travel restrictions.

Once relegated to the children’s market, virtual characters are entering the mainstream in China. Fictional as these digitally rendered avatars may be, they hold real jobs, from pop star to influencer, to even news anchor. And they’re becoming increasingly interactive and humanlike, thanks to improvements in technologies such as AI, motion capture, and virtual reality (VR). Recent advancements in augmented reality (AR), in particular, have enabled virtual avatars to step out of social media and make live appearances alongside flesh-and-blood celebrities.

“Women hold up half the sky,” former Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said. More than fifty years on, women in China are doing so online, driving digital trends and fast becoming a cohort that marketers ignore at their peril.

Luxury brands soon followed suit—a move hastened by the near-total absence of tourists from China, who make a huge contribution to France’s luxury brands in normal times. Our revised estimates assume a minimal impact on ad spend in France in Q1, since the steep escalation in infections and lockdown only came in mid-March.

The first is a short survey offered via mobile; it contains a key set of 50 questions and reaches mobile-only respondents (who tend to be younger, less affluent, and concentrated in emerging markets).

Luxury brands soon followed, spurred in large part by the sudden cut-off of tourism from China and other Asia-Pacific countries. Consumers in Asia are among the keenest buyers of France’s luxury brands.

Ownership of virtual reality (VR) headsets had slipped between 2018 and 2019, from 7.4% to 6.8%—but this remained greater than comparable shares in many other countries, including China (5.0%) and Indonesia (4.7%). Smart-home products are gradually taking off as well, reaching 11.9% of respondents in H1 2019. Here too, penetration was markedly higher among affluent web users and females.

Between H1 2019 and H1 2020, ownership of desktops, laptops, and/or tablets declined most sharply in developing markets, including Brazil, China, Egypt, and India—all countries where the focus has long been on mobile devices and services. But the same trend appeared to a lesser degree in several other countries too, including France, Russia, Sweden, and the US.

China is the by far the world’s largest ecommerce market, and also the world’s most penetrated ecommerce market. We forecast that buyers in China will produce $2.090 trillion (RMB14.440 trillion) in ecommerce sales this year, representing 53.4% of the global total. In China, 88.3% of internet users will participate in ecommerce in 2020, and 41.2% of all retail sales will take place digitally.

In India, the young and the affluent are rapidly adopting smartphones and enthusiastically increasing internet and digital video time, but time spent with traditional TV is still growing.

All of the EU-16 countries combined represented about the same amount of cross-border ecommerce as China, far and away the most important market for cross-border sales today. We estimate that it will account for $144.11 billion in 2019, up 18.5% from the previous year. Several factors contribute to cross-border shopping in China, which is often, but not exclusively, driven by more affluent consumers.

Already No. 1 in ecommerce, China will overtake the US this year to become the world’s largest overall retail market for the first time.

Consumers in China, whether buying at retail outlets or street stalls, are using proximity mobile payments—largely supported by QR codes—and reducing their dependency on cash.

China and India continue to rank first and second. As a result, Asia-Pacific remains the leading region, with 1.89 billion people using social networks in 2020. Where will the most new users emerge? China will post the most sizable increase, with 58.3 million more users than in 2019. India will gain 31.8 million social network users, while Brazil will add 10.0 million.

Growth of retail sales in China is declining, due to economic and geopolitical challenges, and will not overtake the US until 2021. But retail ecommerce has continued to flourish in some surprising ways under these current circumstances.