■This year’s top trend “sold over TikTok”

At the end of each year Japan’s Nikkei Trendy Magazine  releases a ranking of the top 30 trends to hit Japan for the year and in this year’s publication released on November 3^rd, the number one trend for 2021 was “sold over TikTok”. TikTok is well known among young people as a platform for posting short videos accompanied by music, but as of recently, it has expanded into the realm of E-commerce. It was chosen for the ranking due to the number of products that were sold after having videos posted on TikTok. This July, TikTok’s subscribers exceeded 3 billion users for the first time on record, and in 2021 Q3 (July-Sep), the total expenditure by TikTok users exceeded the previous quarter’s by 39% at 535 million USD.

TikTok’s large influence on consumer spending has as of recently been a driver for other E-commerce platforms as well. E-commerce platform Shopify (SHOP) started expanding their services via TikTok last October, and BASE (4477), a Japanese company providing services to assist people in creating their own online shopping sites announced on September 29^th that their merchant sites would be able to use TikTok for gathering customers and promoting their businesses.

Enigmo (3665) 1,073 yen（12/11 closing price）
・ Established in 2004. The company manages a social shopping site called “Buyma” on which Japanese living
overseas register themselves as “personal buyers” or exhibitors, and find trendy items to exhibit/sell to local
Japanese over the site. Sony Group (6758) is the largest shareholder.
・ For their FY2022 First Half (Feb-July) results announced on 14/9, sales revenue was up by 20.9% at 3.583 bil
yen while operating profit was up by 21.5% at 1.369 bil yen compared to the same period the previous year.
Since they expanded their business by working with a private international logistics service to ensure the safe
and speedy delivery of their items and upgraded their payment infrastructure, the number of members rose by
15% and number of items handled rose by 15% compared to the previous year.
・ Prospective annual performance: an increase in sales revenue of 15-25% to 8.139-8.846 bil yen, an increase
in operating profit of 1-16% to 3.063 to 3.519 bil yen. In Nikkei Trendy Magazine’s Top 30 Trends of 2021,
“Cross Border E-Commerce” was ranked number 12. Buyma, with more than 8.5 million members spanning 164
countries now has German international courier DHL on their side to put an end to their delivery issues. The
upcoming winter season is expected to be very cold due to La Nina and they expect to be selling a lot of winter
items.