Credit Suisse: Taobao Mall's B2C market share reached 59% in Q1 2012

May 7, 2012, Credit Suisse released a research report today, reviewing the recent trends in China's Internet industry.

The following are the main contents of the report:

In China, as PCs quickly shift to mobile Internet, investors are paying more and more attention to mobile Internet players. In addition to those large-scale leading Internet companies, Shenzhen startup Easou Technology's Easou Search (Easou.com) has also gained a large market share.

Navigation websites are an outdated business model in the United States, but in China, navigation websites are usually bundled with domestic browsers and play the role of the first "entry point" for Chinese netizens. In this area, we compared several mainstream websites, including hao123.com, hao.360.cn and 123.sogou.com.

The survey found that China Telecom is the largest broadband service provider in China. In addition, 50.1% of the respondents said that their monthly broadband service costs are RMB 50-100.

Industry Trends

1) E-commerce: In March, the number of unique users (UV) and page views (PV) of mainstream e-commerce platforms stabilized. In the first quarter of 2012, Taobao Mall's share of the entire B2C market reached 59%, a month-on-month increase of 12 percentage points.

2) Search engines: Page views of all major search engines have declined; Baidu still dominates the paid search engine market, with a market share of 78% in the first quarter of 2012.

3) Social Networks (SNS): On a year-on-year basis, page views and unique user visits of mainstream social networks remained flat; Sina Weibo rebounded in March.

4) Online video: According to data from Alexa, an online traffic analysis agency, Youku's traffic ranking dropped one more place, and the page views and unique user visits of other major video websites continued to decline.

5) Portal websites: Sina is still the largest portal website in China, with the highest advertising revenue, but Alexa data shows that Tencent ranks first in traffic.

6) Mobile Internet: Domestic mobile browsers are in a leading position in this industry.