• China will overtake the USA to become world’s largest digital economy
• Major players from the Far East eclipse US big four (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon)
• Statista releases new Digital Economy Compass – a standard work for the digital business

Hamburg/New York, 27/04/2017 – China will soon overtake the USA in the digital business. According to calculations by analysts at Statista, the volume of Greater China’s digital market will outgrow that of the US market as early as 2018. As a result, China will be the largest digital economy before becoming the world’s largest economy.

These projections are based on data from Statista’s Digital Economy Compass, a new comprehensive compendium on the global digital market. It examines the competitive development of the platform business in eCommerce, eTravel and Digital Media: already, the four Chinese major players Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei have achieved impressive figures and are increasingly operating on a global level.

“In the foreseeable future, the growth of the US big four will be increasingly challenged by their Chinese counterparts,” says Tobias Bohnhoff, Head of Market Analytics with Statista. “Furthermore there is no major player from the West that has comparable reach or impact on the global digital landscape.”

A comprehensive overview of the platform business

The Statista Digital Economy Compass highlights the figures and factors behind these developments and provides a comprehensive overview of the platform business in the key markets of the USA, China, and Europe. It analyzes the trends and gives deep insights into the hard facts of different sub-segments, from media and marketing to connected cars, smart homes, and fintech.

Special attention is given to the influence of the driving forces cloud, social, mobile and voice-control. In addition, specific chapters cover the topics of venture capital, “Who will beat who in the platform business?”, and cutting-edge technologies like AI, AR, and VR. “With the Digital Economy Compass, we have created a standard work for the digital business,” says Felix Wegener, analyst for digital markets at Statista. “It is a reference work full of fundamental and useful statistics, which every decision-maker in the digital business should definitely bookmark.”

Download this chart here.

The complete Digital Economy Compass is available at https://www.statista.com/page/compass. Follow Statista’s “Fact or Fake” videos on Vimeo.

About the Statista Digital Economy Compass

With the Digital Economy Compass, Statista presents a standard work for digital businesses. The study analyzes the trends of the platform business on the basis of current drivers such as cloud, social, and mobile and features an overview of a large number of relevant key figures on markets, individual segments, and companies. It thereby provides one of the most effective research solutions for marketing and business development experts in the field of digital business. The data from the Digital Economy Compass is based on analyses and forecasts from Statista’s Digital Market Outlook team. More information about the Statista Digital Market Outlook including its methodology and data modelling can be found at https://www.statista.com/outlook/digital-markets.

About Statista

Statista GmbH operates Statista.com, a leading data and business intelligence portal. Statista provides its customers with considerable efficiency and cost benefits when it comes to locating business-relevant information, primarily in the form of statistics, on a single highly-relevant platform. The portal offers a vast pool of data in German, English, French, and Spanish, which is collected in accordance with customer needs and expanded on a daily basis. The platform provides access to some one million statistics covering more than 600 industries from over 18,000 sources, consisting of, in three equal parts, data from Statista’s own collections, data from partners, and data from publicly available sources. Furthermore, Statista performs extensive market research studies and publishes renowned rankings and top lists for different industries and countries (e.g. “Best Employer”, “Best Law Firm”, etc.). Statista also designs custom infographics for its customers. For more information about Statista please visit www.statista.com.

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