Digital Roundup – 13 September, 2019 

Yahoo Japan Acquires Zozo This week’s digital roundup sees search veteran Yahoo’s Japanese arm purchase online retailer Zozo for $3.7 billion. The move is said to be a direct counter measure to combat the growth of Rakuten and Amazon in Japan.As part of the deal, the founder of Zozo Yusaku Maezawa has sold 30% of his own stake in the company leaving him with between 5-6%. This has also resulted in him stepping down as chief executive officer. Despite this move, he is still expected to attend events and continue to be the main face of the brand as it’s founder.

In Yusaku Maezawa’s comments on the deal, he expressed his desire to pursue other personal interests. For a long time, these have been rumoured to include being one of the very first people to travel around the moon with Elon Musk’s space program. Time will tell!In Japan, Rakuten is in the midst of launching a wireless telecom service while retail giant Amazon has made an aggressive push in to the fashion retail space. It is rumoured that Yahoo’s Paypay online shopping mall will link with Zozo to create a synergy that is expected to benefit both parties greatly later this year. Asian Audiences are Most Likely to Stream Around 8 in 10 (78%) Asian TV content viewers are streamers, compared to 65% of TV content viewers overall, according to new Horowitz Research.The Asian audience is now estimated to spend over half (roughly 52%) of its time watching streamed content versus less that 39% of traditional TV platforms. The push toward streaming is said to be driven by audience desire for international content and greater overall diversity than is available to them through traditional paid TV.Of the streamed content, Netflix remains a power provider with almost 40% of the market . This number is also growing steadily. That said, Sling Tv and Directv Now are also now emerging as major players.The issue currently is that due to Asia having such diverse linguistic and cultural niches across the continent, it’s hard for any single paid TV platform to deliver all that is required. The reality is that the diversity of content and the access to a greater pool of entertainment has been either entirely non-existent or incredibly expensive via standard TV viewing methods in the region to date. This gap is a calling that streaming services and on demand digital content can easily fulfil.