TrendForce: China's November 11 Online Shopping Festival Promotes Lighting E-Commerce Sales

The emergence of online and mobile shopping in China has changed the distribution structure of many industries, including the lighting industry. Due to the popularity of LED lighting products on online shopping platforms, the LED lighting market scale could go up on a yearly basis. At the latest, the proportion of lighting products sold through online channels is expected to reach 30% in 2017, according to "2015 Chinese Lighting E-Commerce Market Analysis" released by LEDinside, a subsidiary of Trendforce. 

China’s lighting e-commerce market scale is around US $2.349 billion in 2014, 14.4% of overall China lighting market, according to LEDinside Senior Analyst, Figo Wang. The market witnessed a shopping platform that boosted the total transaction value of lighting products up to 16 times the average daily transaction volume during the November 11 Online Shopping Festival. 

Alibaba-owned TMall and Taobao are key players of the Online Shopping Festival. TMall announced it recorded RMB 194 million in sales for lighting products within 24 hours, and Taobao  RMB 259 million. Together their revenues from online lighting sales add up to approximately RMB 450 million.

There have been doubts over whether Taobao and TMall's figures are reliable due to the widespread “click farming” phenomenon – a means used by some retailers to boost their online popularity. But since “click farming” is not a new issue—the same thing happened the year before— perhaps the growth rate can still be estimated reliably. The entire transaction counts for light source products are up 101.62% from last year, 37.20% higher than luminaries counts. 

“2014 turnover is 38.88% more than same period last year, while trading volume is up 53.87%. The fact that turnover growth is slightly lower compared to trading volume growth is normal since it reflects decreasing LED lighting product price.” said Wang.