FICO: Research shows that Chinese consumers are the world's most enthusiastic about mobile e-commerce

A recent international research result shows that the proportion of Chinese people using smartphones and other mobile devices to conduct business activities has become the highest in the world.

A survey report recently released by FICO, an internationally renowned forecasting and analysis agency, shows that consumers in China, South Korea and India are the most mobile. The percentage of mobile phone users in the three countries using mobile e-commerce applications every day is 51%, 50% and 49% respectively, the highest in the world.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China recently announced that the transaction volume of China's e-commerce market has reached 7.5 trillion yuan (RMB, the same below), among which the mobile shopping market has grown particularly rapidly. According to statistics from iResearch Consulting, as of the second quarter of 2013, the transaction volume of China's mobile shopping market reached 37.52 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 181.1%.

In mid-2013, FICO conducted an online survey of 2,239 adult smartphone users in 14 countries in Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America to study whether consumers in different countries prefer to handle banking, government affairs, medical care, insurance, retail and other matters through mobile phones, the Internet or in person.

The survey results show that mobile apps in the retail, banking and insurance industries are the most popular. Among the apps provided by retailers and financial institutions, consumers in various countries are unanimously keen to use the alarm program for risks such as suspicious transactions, and more than 72% of respondents believe that such applications are attractive.

The report also points out that in industries that urgently need to communicate with consumers, merchants are more motivated to use mobile platforms. This trend is most obvious in the retail industry, where mobile phones provide merchants with a convenient way to build brand loyalty among consumers and provide preferential information.

In this survey, users in the United States, Japan and France are the least willing to use mobile phones for business activities among the 14 countries. The report also pointed out that more than half of consumers who own smartphones in the world are willing to choose traditional Internet transactions or face-to-face transactions due to concerns about the protection of personal information and lack of trust in e-commerce.

The 14 countries include: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.