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Increased digital adoption paves way for further exploration
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Innovation: Bank Mandiri President Director Darmawan Junaidi (left) and Deputy President Director Alexandra Askandar (right) attend the opening ceremony of Smart Branch by Mandiri. The newly revamped program offers digital customer-centric features connected to Bank Mandiri’s Livin’ digital channel.
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ecent rankings published by the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Center (WCC) reveals that several ASEAN countries have a strong ability to adopt and explore new digital capabilities and technologies. These countries include Singapore (4th), Malaysia (31st), Indonesia (51st) and the Philippines (56th).
This ranking illustrates the importance of national factors in driving digital transformation among companies and digital adoption by societies. It is a so-called digital nation as it results from a combination of digital talent, digital regulation, data governance, digital attitudes and capital availability.
In the past decade, the adoption of digital technologies continues to increase even today, albeit at a slower pace than during the pandemic. One of the visible impacts of the digital economy is on world trade. The digitalization of commerce has created so-called cross-border e-commerce. This allows manufacturers to sell their products directly across borders to individual foreign consumers.
This reality has brought the digital transformation of trade to a new level, in which cross-border e-commerce has become a major part of international trade. Thus, despite trade disruption due to COVID-19 and its containment policies, e-commerce has emerged as a critical factor that ensures the supply of daily needs and medical supplies globally.
At the local level, e-commerce shopping provides a practical alternative to brick-and-mortar stores. While retail centers were closed and people’s mobility was restricted amid the pandemic, e-commerce has provided a platform to allow transactions through safe channels.
At the global level, global e-commerce increased from 13.8 percent of total retail sales in 2019 to 18.8 percent in 2021. By the end of 2022, it was estimated to have reached 19.7 percent (Statista). Along with this, the global e-commerce revenue also experienced an increase at the start of COVID-19. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of global e-commerce companies has a positive figure for revenues from 2019 to 2022, such as Sea Garena in Singapore (78 percent), MercadoLibre in Argentina (61 percent), Pinduoduo in China (55 percent), Shopify in Canada (49 percent), Amazon in America (21 percent), Alibaba in China (21 percent) and Coupang in Korea (18 percent).
Despite a slowdown in the overall economic activity, key trends suggest that e-commerce still has room to grow.
