This is the second post (of three) about Mary Meeker's 2019 report on Internet Trends. The first was yesterday. You should read that post first since this one simply picks up where that one left off. If you have no idea who Mary Meeker is, then you can find out there.

Fulfillment

Different types of business fall under fulfillment, but outside the US, there are enormous changes developing very fast in a way we don't have in the US. I doubt that you have heard of most of these companies, but some of them are big and still growing very fast (for comparison, don't forget that the US adult population, those who might initiate e-commerce, is about 250M):

• Pinduoduo (China) connects consumer preferences to manufacturers. It has 433M buyers, roughly doubled in 5 quarters.
• Meituan Dianping (China) connects consumers and local businesses, with about 6M merchants, roughly doubled in two years.
• Rappi (Latin America) digital delivery platform that can "deliver anything in 30 minutes for less than a dollar". 8MM orders, doubled in 4 months. See the graph.
• Tokopedia (Indonesia) improving product delivery across 17,000 islands, around 6M merchants, doubled in a year.
• Shopee (Southeast Asia) mobile-first social commerce, $10B in gross merchandise value, doubled in a year.
• Reliance Jio (India) expanding online-to-offline commerce, 307M subscribers, doubled in a year. Jio data usage doubled in a year.

In finance, mobile payments are not really taking off in the US in a big way, whereas in China (and Sweden), cash is getting to be obsolete. Mary didn't mention these statistics, but it helps to have them in the back of your mind: there are about 1B credit cards in the world, 2B bank accounts, but 6B mobile phones. If you are starting from scratch, you are not going to "invent" credit cards, you are going to find a way to use phones.

In China, vendors at the side of the road—and even beggars—have a bar code so that they can take mobile payments. I just read last week that in China, the digital payment system in a McDonald’s went down, and they were reduced to taking cash, but most people left without making a purchase since they didn't have any cash or couldn't be bothered to deal with it.

But there is also a lot more going on in finance as these areas of the world largely bypass the type of banking and credit card system that we have in the US and Europe.

• Alipay (China) 1B users, doubled in two years. Not just #1 mobile payments platform in China, but also a provider of loans, wealth management, insurance, etc. to consumers and small businesses.
• Toss (South Korea) Digital payments and financial services. 12M users, doubled in a year.
• Revolut (Europe) Personalized banking, 4M users, doubled in 10 months.
• Nubank (Brazil) Banking and credit. 9M customers, doubled in a year.
• MercadoLibre (Latin America) E-commerce digital payments, 389M transactions, doubled in two years.
• Grab (Southeast Asia). Rideshare-driven digital payments. Transaction value up 4X in a year.

Images

Smartphones with cameras have turned out to completely change people's photography habits. It turns out that the most important thing about a camera is not the image quality or the lens, but whether you have it in your pocket—and you always have your smartphone with you. The number of new photos taken each year has gone from 0.7T in 2013 to 1.3T in 2017 (that's over 40,000 per second). And sharing of images has gone up: Instagram monthly active users have gone from zero in 2010 to 1B today. Over 50% of tweets on Twitter have images or video too, not just text.

As Mary puts it:

People have always been visual—our brains are wired for images. Writing was a hack, a detour. Pictorial languages are we all started to communicate and now we are coming a full circle.

Digital Payments

Digital payments are now over 50% of day-to-day transactions globally. Slack and Stripe, managing transactions and billing, are both growing. But in some ways, they are in the customer relationship management, assisting companies to have recurring relationships and good experiences with their customers.

Data

Data is now fundamental to how people work and the most successful companies have intelligently integrated it into everyone's daily workflow... Data is the new application.

That is from Frank Bien, CEO of Looker just last month.

Surveying retail customers, 91% prefer brands that provide personalized offers and recommendations. 83% are willing to passively share data in exchange for personalized experiences. 94% willing to actively share data in exchange for personalized experiences. On the other hand, despite those numbers, the politicians are pushing in the opposite direction, most notably with the EU's GDPR and some of the proposed new regulations.

Data is increasingly held in enterprises and, especially, the cloud. The amount of data in the enterprise passed that held by consumers last year, but more and more is held in the cloud and that percentage is predicted to pass both in a couple of years.

Mary pointed out that the data volume and utilization is increasing faster than human adaptability, at least as in a quote from Astro Teller. As a result, consumers, businesses, and regulators are increasingly drinking from a data firehose.

A significant percentage of adults are online "almost constantly". In the US, 39% of 18-29 year-olds (up from 36% in 2015, which is a surprisingly small increase) fall into this category, along with 36% of 30-49 year-olds *up from 28%). One result of this, and the perception of health and sleep issues, is that 63% of adults are trying to limit personal cell-phone use, and multiple companies like Facebook and YouTube introduced wellness and time-tracking features.

Of course, social media is one of the areas where people spend a lot of that time. But growth in social media, as measured by minutes online, has stopped (well, it's 1% now, down from 15% a couple of years ago).

News

People are getting what they want. In research done a few years ago, it was discovered that when it comes to news:

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