Weekly Insights Jun 3, 2016

Executive Summary

• This week, the Fung Global Retail & Technology team attended the ninth annual Global E-Commerce Summit, which was held in Barcelona and which centers on trends and developments in global e-commerce, cross-border trading and omni-channel retail.
• Facebook-owned Instagram launched Instagram Business Tools, giving retailers and other businesses a better way to understand user data and interact with users. The new tools make it easier to turn a post into an ad and also allow businesses to get information on how many users saw a particular post, how many click-throughs a post generated and how many users have seen the brand’s posts during the past month.
• Sportswear producer and retailer Adidas has unveiled a robot-run factory in Ansbach, Germany. Called Speedfactory, it is equipped to turn customized production into an automated process. The company stopped manufacturing shoes in Germany more than two decades ago in favor of lower-cost production in Asia, where it employs about a million people.
• In Latin America, the number of car journeys ordered via the Uber app tripled during the first four months of 2016, making the region the company’s fastest-growing market. Brazil is expected to surpass Mexico to become Latin America’s number one Uber market this year as Brazilians seek supplementary income in response to the recession and as an influx of tourists visit the country in August for the Olympic Games.