PChome Online Inc., the largest ecommerce group in Taiwan and pioneer in 24-hour guaranteed delivery, held its first annual Investor Day on Monday, March 5 to highlight the company's focus on investment in artificial intelligence, open infrastructure, and mobile transactions. Joining Chairman Hung-Tze Jan to execute these new strategies are Yun Su, General Manager of PChomeStore, Kevin Tsai, General Manager of PChome Online, Vicky Tseng, General Manager of PChome eBay Co., and Eric Chung, General Manager of PChome Interpay.

PChome's new management team at PChome's 2018 Investor Day. From left to right:
Kevin Tsai, GENERAL MANAGER, PChome Online, Vicky Tseng, GENERAL MANAGER,PChome eBay Co., Hung-Tze Jan, CHAIRMAN,PChome Online, Yun Su, GENERAL MANAGER, PChomeStore, and Eric Chung, GENERAL MANAGER, PChome InterPay.

Last year was filled with many achievements for PChome Online Group. Each selling channels demonstrated impressive growth in the following areas:

Consolidated revenue from all channels reached NT$29.4 billion.
B2C platform (include PChome24h Shopping), achieved double-digit performance for 10 consecutive months of growth. The 3C and appliance sales on this platform soared, with performance rising 23% in 2017, beyond the other online and physical channels' 6.2% and -1.7%.
Ruten Auction reached more than 2 million sellers with NT$275.2 billion gross merchandise volume in 2017.
PChome Stores, the B2B2C platform, counted 70,000 total vendors in 2017 compared to 24,000 vendors the previous year. This 192 percent YoY growth was possible due to the discontinuation of the shop set-up fee in 2016.
In January 2017, PChome introduced Taiwan's largest mobile marketplace called Personal Store that allows consumers to shop on their smartphone for over 200 million products and pick up purchases in convenience stores as a direct competitive response to both big and small ecommerce players alike.

Building upon the successes of 2017, PChome Online Group will continue to make each platform stronger individually as well as collectively building revenue opportunities in the upcoming year. To begin with, PChome Online Group will utilize a combination of big data and artificial intelligence to power its first core business model in 2018.

For example, PChome's Ruten C2C marketplace has access to huge amounts of demographic data that can be sold to sellers and advertisers on the platform as eMarketing tools. Each transaction provides access to data such as age, location, gender, payment type, age group, etc. This data can also help create smarter chat bots, and personalize the shopping experience of consumers.

To further expand on this, PChome will provide users with the option of an overall membership which will provide convenience to customers and allow the company to combine the data of every PChome platform (containing over 10 million active members) to provide a huge data pool and revenue stream.

The second focus strategy PChome plans to roll out in 2018 is opening up its infrastructure to all players in the ecommerce ecosystem. The order system, applications, logistics, and payment options that PChome has spent nearly two decades building will be available for use on social media platforms, other external websites, and more.

Finally, PChome will bolster its mobile commerce efforts to further its share of the growing m-commerce market in Asia-Pacific. According to the eMarketer Asia-Pacific Retail and Ecommerce Sales 2017 Report, Mcommerce sales in Asia-Pacific totaled USD $1.027 trillion in 2017 accounting for 76.1% of ecommerce sales. As of January 2018, PChome's personal store added 100 million new products in a year, and was up to 10 million convenience store pickup deliveries and NT$4 billion turnover in a single month. Additionally, the Ruten platform receives 47 percent of total orders from mobile devices and 51 percent of total traffic to the marketplace is mobile. PChome is dedicated to further expansion in the m-commerce space in 2018.