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This report analyzes how digital adoption and evolving consumer habits are reshaping South Korea’s retail, media, and payments landscape.

Ten years after its establishment, Amazon Business is expanding its seller network and product selection to serve an 8 million global organization customer base, which has grown 33% from 6 million in 2023. Many of the capabilities that individual shoppers enjoy on Amazon’s B2C platform—broad selection, cost savings, and advanced technology—are being applied to its B2B marketplace to help organizations work smarter and more efficiently. As Amazon Business continues to innovate, it is poised to compete for more sales from companies seeking to save time and resources.

Digital’s rapid adoption in recent years has made it the dominant medium with which people spend time in China, Japan, and South Korea, with consumption booming in India.

Social network user growth will be slow on a worldwide level, but 2025’s meager 2.9% increase will still equate to more than 115 million new users. Facebook remains in the lead in most countries and regions, even though its share of internet users is declining.

The news: Influencer marketing is leading the way in attention metrics, with viewers in India spending 2.2 times longer viewing ads with influencers before skipping, per Kantar research. The average skip time for traditional branded content is 7.9 seconds—but for ads with influencer content, that number jumps to 17.8 seconds. Our take: While a necessary part of the media mix, traditional ads are not enough to drive consistent growth—and partnering with reliable influencers will prove valuable as social media represents a critical path to purchase. Influencer voices are able to cut through the noise of social media.

Despite high penetration of social networks among internet users in Asia-Pacific, population-wide adoption lags. As such, we expect 209.6 million new social media users in the region between 2025 and 2029.

The news: Amazon has partnered with delivery firm Gopuff to bring ultra-fast delivery to several UK markets, including Birmingham, Cambridge, Leeds, London, and Manchester. Our take: Amazon’s focus is crystal clear: Get orders to shoppers’ doors as fast as possible. In the US, it has pushed next-day delivery as the new standard—even as it rapidly expands same-day service. In some cases, delivery happens within hours (for example, a Prime Day order we placed at 6 am today arrived at our door by noon.) To extend that promise beyond urban hubs, Amazon is investing over $4 billion through 2026 to triple the size of its rural delivery network. By year-end, it expects to bring same- or next-day delivery to more than 4,000 smaller cities and rural communities. Speed isn’t just a perk. It is the key component within Amazon’s growth strategy. The faster the company delivers, the more frequently consumers turn to Amazon for their everyday needs—and the harder it becomes for competitors to keep up.