For the first time in the Pakistan's history, we are seeing online brands deploying significant advertising budgets for mainstream media advertising. Deep pocketed general classifieds sites like OLX, funded by the South African mega media group Naspers, and Asani, a Schibsted funded company from Norway, have embarked in our online industry's first media war with ads competing for our eyeballs. Rocket Internet, which runs Daraz and Kaymu in Pakistan, recently completed an $8.2 Billion IPO in October of this year. Daraz and Kaymu are well funded and will be pouring capital into the Pakistani e-commerce market in a magnitude not seen here before. Several other Pakistani online players will be launching their TV ads in the coming months, giving new credibility to the online medium and e-commerce. http://www.riazhaq.com/2014/12/e-commerce-in-pakistan-party-has-started.html

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Comment by Riaz Haq on August 5, 2015 at 10:19am

#Smartphone monthly sales averaging 1.5m to 2m in #Pakistan | #3G #4G Mobile Payments Today

http://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com/news/centili-signs-direct-carrie...

Direct carrier billing company Centili recently launched its service in Pakistan with the five largest mobile network operators in the country, according to a press release.

Centili will work with Mobilink, Telenor, Zong, Ufone, and Warid, which have a combined 136 million subscribers in Pakistan.

Centili cited research in the announcement suggesting that smartphone adoption in the country reached 31 percent in 2015, which means that feature phones still account for a large part of the market and play a significant role in the digital society.

Experts predict that by 2020 smartphone penetration in Pakistan will reach 51 percent based on 3G/4G expansion alone. At the moment, monthly smartphone sales are averaging 1.5 to 2 million, with 70 percent of all sales favoring Android-based devices. Centili said it believes this is opening the door for the widespread use of Android in-app payments and it believes it can help bridge the gap in digital purchases in a country where just 2.9 percent of the population owns a debit card.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 22, 2015 at 12:39pm

Billionaires' Startup Brings Black Friday to #Pakistan's Shoppers http://bloom.bg/1FcRfuw via @business

The billionaire Samwer brothers want to help introduce Pakistan’s shoppers to a local version of Black Friday, the November sales binge that kicks off the year-end holiday retail season in the U.S.
It doesn’t matter that Black Friday is an American invention, said Bjarke Mikkelsen, co-chief executive officer of Daraz, the online retailer backed by the brothers’ incubator Rocket Internet SE. Daraz -- operating in Pakistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh -- will team with brands, wireless carriers and advertisers to offer “hundreds of deals” on Nov. 27, he said.
“It’s a shopping event that was created in the Western world,” Mikkelsen, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker, said in an interview. “It’s a way of attracting many people with great deals and big marketing.”
Daraz, a three-year-old company, is getting more funding to bankroll that effort. On Tuesday, Daraz said it raised 50 million euros ($56 million), including 20 million euros from CDC Group, a British government-owned investor trying to create jobs in Africa and South Asia. The rest came from Asia Pacific Internet Group, Rocket’s joint venture with Qatar mobile carrier Ooredoo QSC.
Daraz is taking a page from Amazon.com Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which have demonstrated how hefty one-time discounts and exclusive merchandise can get American and Chinese bargain-hunters to spend billions of dollars. Daraz also plans its own version of Cyber Monday, the online shopping event held three days after Thanksgiving, which occurs in the U.S. on the fourth Thursday of November.
$20 Smartphones
The plans are in the making even though Pakistan currently has only about 30 million Internet users. Neighboring India has 10 times as many, according to the lobby group Internet and Mobile Association of India, yet Pakistan’s $232 billion economy is on track for its fastest pace of annual expansion since 2008.
Daraz draws 6 million visitors a month spending a combined 1 million euros on exclusive offers for Chinese-made smartphones, TVs and clothes, Mikkelsen said. It sells via websites and mobile apps and almost half its deliveries venture beyond major cities, with smartphones as cheap as $20 being a top seller.
Building buzz will be key for a company that started out as a fashion retailer before expanding its wares in November 2014. It partnered with Google Inc. to host Tech Mela, a 10-day online shopping event that preceded this month’s Islamic Eid al-Adha holiday.
There’s little point advertising online when Internet penetration is so low, Mikkelsen said. Instead, Daraz is recruiting taxi drivers and college students to become “brand ambassadors,” or a sales force paid on commission.
“By tapping into a global shopping phenomenon we will create a more powerful event than if we made up a new concept from scratch,” he said.

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