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Growth in more mature markets like China and Australia will be low from now on, while consumers in South Korea and Japan will remain somewhat disinterested. Digital video viewership next year will be very high in South Korea (74.3% of the population), but sub OTT services have not caught on as deeply there as they have elsewhere. The same is true of Japan.

It helped tourists use their domestic wallets to make payments in South Korea, launched a digital storefront solution for brick-and-mortar businesses, rolled out end-of-year shopping campaigns with merchants across Asia-Pacific, and brought three of its mobile wallets to Thailand.

This year, the country will overtake South Korea in ecommerce penetration to clinch third place in the global ranking—behind only China and the UK. Indonesia’s ecommerce growth is being steered by several incredible regional tech giants. Regional titans’ austerity measures will stunt digital commerce growth. The blistering growth of the pandemic era is already behind Indonesia.

Penetration is high given the dominance of specific mobile messaging apps in certain markets, such as WeChat in China, Line in Japan, KaKaoTalk in South Korea, and WhatsApp in major Western European countries. By 2027, WeChat will have reached almost 900 million users in China. North American adoption is significantly lower than the global average.

At 79.1% of the population, the usage rate in Canada ranks second worldwide among the countries we forecast—behind only South Korea. Social media and video apps have driven mobile usage up. There are 24.5 million mobile social media users in Canada this year, according to our estimates, equal to 95.4% of social media users.

Asia-Pacific is well represented in the top 10, with the presence of Taiwan and South Korea along with China, Australia, and New Zealand. However, Japan and the countries of Southeast Asia are at the opposite end of the rankings. Digital transformation is at very different stages across the region.

Brazil will be one of only five countries worldwide where Instagram will have outranked Facebook by 2025, including Germany, Japan, Spain, and South Korea. What to Watch. Facebook risks becoming a relic of the past. Three in 10 Facebook users in Brazil agree that the platform has become an obsolete social network, according to a September 2022 Opinion Box survey.

The UK and South Korea were longtime Nos. 2 and 3, respectively, in global rankings for ecommerce penetration, but both consumer cultures seem to have reached (or passed) their saturation point for digital buying. China is different though, possibly because of the energy its innovative and hypercompetitive homegrown ecommerce companies bring to the market. What are the implications?