E-com in India to grow 4-fold by 2022: Worldline

03 Apr '19

3 min read

The Indian e-commerce market could grow four times and touch $150 billion by 2022, according to a report by payment and transaction processing company Worldline India, which claims tracking the trends around payments, especially in China and India. The projection is based on the growth in digital payments and income and a surge in Internet users.

The company recently released the report detailing the major trends in digital payments in both the nations.

The merchant categories with the highest volume and value of transactions in 2018 were grocery stores and supermarkets, restaurants, service stations, clothing stores and hotels, which accounted for about 45 per cent of transactions, the report said. The categories remained the same for both credit and debit card transactions.

The number of transactions at point of sale (POS) terminals, electronic devices used to process card payments at retail locations, increased by up by 26 per cent from 4.6 billion in 2017 to 5.8 billion in 2018, while the share of card transactions at POS terminals to total card transactions remained constant in the 35-38 per cent range, says a press release from the company.

The value of transactions at POS terminals rose by around 27 per cent from ₹8.8 trillion in 2017 to ₹11.3 trillion in 2018, while the share of value of money spent through cards at POS transactions to total money spent through card transactions at POS terminals and ATMs went up from 25 per cent to 26 per cent during the same period. The number of POS terminals increased by 17 per cent.

Twenty nine per cent of all transactions done on POS terminals were done through credit cards and they translated to half of the total amount spent on POS terminals.

The number of ATMs decreased from 0.22 million in 2017 to 0.2 million in December 2018. However, cash withdrawals have bucked the trend of reducing ATMs; in 2018, cash withdrawals stood at ₹32.69 trillion, a rise of 21.2 per cent over 2017.

In 2018, the total number of credit card transactions was 1.68 billion, an increase of 24 per cent over the previous year and the total number of debit card transactions was 13.62 trillion, an increase of 16.1 per cent over the previous year.

The number of transactions done on mobile wallets in 2018 was 3.98 billion, an increase of 33.4 per cent over 2017, while the value of transactions in 2018 was ₹1.73 trillion, an increase of 81.46 per cent over the previous year.

In 2017, the ratio of non-cash transactions to gross domestic product (GDP) in China stood at 45 compared to 20 for India, said the report. Almost half of e-commerce transactions in China are done via wallets, with Alipay and WeChat Pay accounting for 92 per cent of mobile payments.

The report cites numbers released by the People's Bank of China. In China, the number of mobile payments stood at 25.71 billion transactions in 2016, which rose to 37.55 billion in 2017 and 42.81 billion for the first three quarters of 2018. In terms of value, mobile payments accounted for $23.45 trillion in 2016, $30.18 trillion in 2017 and $29.63 trillion for the first three quarters of 2018.

The transactions last year in China were likely worth around $40.9 trillion. (DS)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India

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