Global Subscriptions and Recurring Payment Market 2021

As COVID-19 lingers, major online retail and payments players are opting the subscription model

This new report reveals continuing interest of consumers and businesses to the subscriptions business model together with recurring payments. The market is set to grow across the globe in the next five years, and many companies are adjusting their business model to the new trend.  

Global subscriptions and recurring payment markets are to grow in the next five years

After the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the subscriptions and recurring payments markets accelerated, as consumers were restricted from visiting physical stores and saw new economic advantages in the model. This was substantiated in  several studies cited in the publication: about four in ten global consumers chose a new subscription after the beginning of the pandemic, as reported by a 2021 survey. For businesses in post-pandemic times, an even more revealing fact is that almost a quarter of the new subscribers in the United Kingdom did so because they liked the simple idea of such purchases. Overall, the subscriptions markets in the countries considered in the report were forecasted to grow in absolute values, though growth rates were set to be lower than during the first waves of the health crisis. 

Consumers worldwide prefer certain product categories to sign up for 

On the global scale, “Boxes”, “Video”, and “Multiservice subscriptions” were the top three subscription categories in 2021, however, in 2025, “Multiservice subscriptions” were expected to outpace “Video”. In Europe, furthermore, 2021’s share of consumers using subscription services was similar to the global one and was forecasted so through 2025. Additionally, one of the leading subscription categories, Subscription-Video-on-Demand, was set to count almost half a billion users in Asia-Pacific in 2025, while in Latin America, the figure was predicted to be about one fifth of APAC’s, though growth rates are higher in Latin America.  In one of the main subscriptions markets in the world, North America, in 2020, the growth rate was especially pronounced in the sector of consumer retail products and digital media, according to the report.

Please note: For this report, the purchase of an Enterprise license allows up to ten worldwide users of an organization access to the report