PayPal, the Internet E-commerce giant ebay's online payments agency, recently announced it will enter Japan's online payment market. This is PayPal's first foray into a regional market without ebay support.
Since the acquisition of ebay in 2002, PayPal has relied on the parent company's powerful online auction business to obtain stable buyers and sellers account growth, and thus achieved good results, brand awareness has also increased significantly. But in the Japanese market, PayPal will start from scratch in this mature market, negotiate with retailers and shopping websites about cooperation agreements, and attract new users to register.
"We have just entered this market and the market share is very, very small, so we think there are a lot of opportunities in Japan," said Andrew Pipolo, head of marketing operations at PayPal at a news conference in Tokyo, Andrew Pippolo. ”
ebay withdrew from the Japanese online auction market in 2002 due to strong competitive pressure from Yahoo Japan. At present, Yahoo Japan still dominates Japan's online auction market. For ebay, this is a rare setback. By 2007, however, ebay signed a small cooperation agreement with Yahoo, allowing Japanese users to buy ebay products via the Yahoo Japan website.
Pippolo said Japan is the world's second-largest online consumer market, an attractive market, with online turnover of more than 6.7 trillion yen last year (about $76 billion trillion), which is expected to break 12.2 trillion yen (about $139 billion trillion) by 2014.
Currently, PayPal has more than 87 million accounts worldwide and supports trading in 24 different currencies. PayPal hopes to use this advantage to lead Japanese businessmen into the international market. In addition, PayPal also has a customer service center, allowing Japanese users to use Japanese to complain about problems encountered in overseas transactions.
Pippolo declined to introduce PayPal's specific business objectives in the Japanese market, but expressed the hope that PayPal's growth rate would exceed the average growth rate in the Japanese market. Pippolo said that PayPal has been preparing for the operation of the Japanese market, the recent establishment of an office in Tokyo, now has more than 20 employees. This February, PayPal said it planned to increase the number of employees in the region to 2000 by the end of the year.
Last week, ebay released its second-quarter 2010 earnings, which showed that ebay's net revenue for the second quarter was $2.215 billion, up 6% per cent, and a net profit of $412.2 million, up 26% year-on-year. ebay's earnings for the second quarter were 1.398 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 11% per cent, a total turnover of 12.53 billion dollars and an increase of 13% per cent, and net revenue of PayPal, the online payment business, to 817 million US dollars and an increase of 22% Total payment of 21.39 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 28%
After years of development, ebay's online payment business is bound to surpass E-commerce sites, said John Donahue, chief executive of ebay, Donahoe.
ebay's close relationship with PayPal has also provoked some discontent. Earlier this year, some ebay sellers in the US filed a class-action lawsuit against ebay, accusing ebay of violating antitrust rules by asking them to use PayPal to deal with online sales.