UNCTAD urges developing countries to grab $22trn e-commerce opportunities
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has appealed to the developing countries to grasp the rapidly growing opportunity of electronic commerce – e-commerce – worth around $22.1 trillion in 2015, up 38 per cent from 2013, or risk falling quickly behind.
The electronic commerce – e-commerce which is worth around $22.1 trillion in 2015 is indeed a rapidly growing opportunity for over 138 developing countries including Nigeria.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) made this disclosure again recently at the launch of a new e-commerce initiative ahead of UNCTAD 14.
Mukhisa Kituyi, Secretary-General, UNCTAD said: “A huge divide is opening between countries that are exploiting those opportunities and those that are not.”
The new initiative, called “eTrade for All”, brings international organisations, donors and businesses under one umbrella, easing developing country access to cutting-edge technical assistance and giving donors more options for funding.
UNCTAD said that by providing new opportunities and new markets, online commerce, it could help generate economic opportunities, including jobs. However, while more than 70 percent of people are shopping online in Denmark, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom, the situation is different in most developing countries. In Bangladesh, Ghana and Indonesia, for instance, just 2 percent or less of the population buy online.
Kituyi citing the new UNCTAD data said that E-commerce which includes both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), respectively valued at around $19.9 trillion and $2.2 trillion each.
This trade is typically domestic, but is now becoming more and more international.
The new UNCTAD data indicated that e-commerce is growing rapidly, with emerging economies accounting for most of this growth.
China now ranks as the world’s largest B2C e-commerce market, both in terms of sales and in number of online shoppers, while Brazil, India, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation have also all moved into the top 10 e-commerce markets.
