Big Data: opportunità e sfide per l'industria del retail in Cina

Big data is disrupting almost every industry, leading to both opportunities and challenges for the businesses and people involved. This is particularly enhanced in China, where the biggest number of online internet users in the world (1.4 billion in 2018) constantly generates enormous quantities of data. Through data-analytics tools, companies in China are transforming users' data into insights and profits, while creating new data-driven business models in order to satisfy the highly demanding and constantly changing consumer market. With few e-commerce juggernauts dominating the retail industry and gathering big amounts of data, due to their business models, the study explores how Chinese and foreign companies can benefit from big data without owning considerable amounts of data nor the data scientists to exploit them. Four different opportunities are given to these companies that will have to choose the one which best suits their needs after carefully analysing four aspects of their business model: purpose of the data exploitation, market position, retail channel and market segmentation. Big data services can considerably increase companies' performances and revenues in the Chinese market, but they undoubtedly expose businesses and people to growing risks. While companies may face risks concerning the dictatorship of data, the overdependence from the big data services and the creation of data oligopolies, the people providing their data in exchange for better products and services will find themselves threatened in terms of privacy, discrimination and probability punishment.