Page 27 - BNE_magazine_bne_July2019_20190707

bne July 2019 Companies & Markets I 27
It added: “Even though e-commerce in Turkey has been growing stably at over 10% each year, it is still in its infancy with a share in total sales less than 5%. The SMB [small and medium sized business] opportunity alone is significant with potential for 10x expansion over the next few years.”
3mn SMBs
There are around 3mn SMBs in Turkey, but iyzico says only a fraction of them use digital payments and e-commerce infrastructure.
Founded in 2013, iyzico provides secure payments to over 300 marketplaces, with over 400,000 personal sellers of different sizes, as well as to 30,000 online merchants that use its checkout solution.
iyzico serves global and local merchants including Amazon, H&M, Zara, Avon and Sahibinden and generates Turkish lira (TRY) 5bn ($858mn) worth of annual transaction volumes.
PayU has invested more than $500mn in the e-commerce industry since 2016. The company is looking to position itself to profit from rising internet adoption and e-commerce in emerging economies, and Turkey boasts the Middle East’s largest economy and a relatively young population. The focus of PayU on payments, one of the fastest growing areas in
Russia's internet major Mail.ru launches own voice assistant
bne IntelliNews
Russian internet major Mail.ru launched its own voice assistant called Marusya in test mode, Vedomosti daily reported citing unnamed sources.
Reportedly, Marusya's functionality is currently limited to information queries and launching music from Mail.ru's social network VKontakte, which could later be expanded to food delivery, e-commerce, ordering taxi, etc.
Vedomosti claims that the development of the assistant cost $2mn. In May 2018 Mail.ru's main rival Yandex unveiled an AI-driven voice assistant Alisa, analogous to Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google Home assistants, which was integrated in Yandex's smart speaker and voice assistant
finance, puts the company in position to take a share of an industry that Boston Consulting Group forecasts will produce $1 trillion in new revenue through 2027.
“We are constantly looking for ways to augment the naturally high organic growth in our markets by investing in new technology, as well as market consolidation,’’ Mario Shiliashki, head of payments at PayU, said in a phone interview with Bloomberg. “Being a leader in high growth markets will help us to grow faster than others.’’
Focus on faster growing markets
PayU is focused on faster growing markets such as Russia, India and African countries where online payments are not yet out of their infancy. It has also invested in the Indian payments sector and in the Intercontinental Exchange Inc.’s cryptocurrency venture.
Naspers last month proposed moving most of its internet businesses to a new listing in Amsterdam. It holds a 31% stake in Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings, which is valued at around $130bn, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Iyzico’s founders will retain a small, minority stake in the new combined Turkish business, according to PayU.
Russian internet major Mail.ru launched a voice assistant Marusya in test mode.
device Yandex.Station (Yandex.Stanciya).
Alisa is also integrated into Yandex.Avto system that will be installed on the dashboards of over 2mn vehicles produced by Avtovaz, a major recent win for Yandex.
The launch of Mail.ru's Marusya "is expected and a natural move for one of the largest internet companies in Russia," BCS Global Markets commented on June 17.
"It has a wide set of services to integrate into the assistant, which could offset it having less expertise in search and speech recognition (basis for voice aid), for instance, Yandex," BCS GM analysts note.
www.bne.eu