China ICT (Info Communications Technology) Industry, Infra, Commerce, Exports: News & Discussions

[ahojunk]

Alibaba is leveling the playing field for those in rural areas and generating employment. Good job!

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Online titan not just about e-commerce anymore
WATARU KODAKA, Nikkei staff writer
December 21, 2015 7:00 am JST

Wang Qin, manager of a Taobao Village shop in Zhejiang Province, purchases goods online for elderly residents. The picture was taken in October.

SHANGHAI -- Alibaba Group Holding is branching out into the real world, opening shops in villages and pushing its online payment service in urban areas.

These are the two prongs of the Chinese e-commerce giant's strategy to expand its "online economic zone."

In a Zhejiang Province mountain village of 2,000 people, many of whom are elderly, there is a shop with a signboard that reads "Taobao Village." The store is part of Alibaba's new "1,000 counties and 10,000 villages program."

Wang Qin, 28, manages the shop. Villagers go there to get their daily necessities. Farmers go for seeds and other agricultural products. Wang keeps the store stocked by buying stuff via Taobao, earning a 1% commission.

Taobao is an Alibaba-operated e-tailer. The plan is to open Taobao Village shops in thousands of rural communities across China, where more than 600 million potential new customers live.

Moving into the real world

Zhejiang-based Alibaba is also venturing into the urban jungle with an aggressive marketing campaign for Alipay, which allows shoppers to pay for purchases via their smartphones. The service essentially does the job credit cards and cash already do.

Smartphone users can also use Alibaba chat, social network and other apps to discover popular restaurants and other businesses. Then they can choose to pay for their purchases with Alipay. For participating restaurants and other merchants, the online payment platform could help them bring in new customers.

With these new rural and urban advances, Alibaba is planting itself more firmly in China's brick-and-mortar economy, where more than $4 trillion worth of transactions take place every year -- worth nearly 10 times more than those made in China's online economy.

Alibaba well knows the online marketplace. In fact, Singles Day -- an online shopping extravaganza every Nov. 11 -- was an Alibaba brainchild. This past November, Singles Day sales reached 91.2 billion yuan ($14.07 billion), up 60% from the same day in 2014.

Singles Day is not a mere sales promotion campaign. It is designed to showcase the use of big data, cloud computing and mobile innovations, according to Daniel Zhang, Alibaba's chief executive.

The 91.2 billion yuan total was about 14 times more than what Alibaba brings in on an average day and required Alipay to process as many as 85,900 transactions per second during peak hours.

In a way, Singles Day has been an experiment to help Alibaba learn to cope with the large numbers of transactions it expects to be placed at any instant now that it is expanding its footprint into villages and pushing Alipay hard in cities.

Linking 1.3 billion wallets

Alibaba was launched in an apartment in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, in 1999. Starting with Alibaba.com, a business-to-business e-commerce site, the company then began Taobao, a consumer-to-consumer platform, and TMall, a business-to-consumer e-tailer. It has also developed other e-commerce platforms in China. Nearly 400 million people now shop via Alibaba, spending $400 billion a year.

Alipay, launched in 2004, is Alibaba's biggest strength; it was devised when China had no online payment system.

The platform connects consumers' "wallets" via the Internet. A 31-year-old female company employee in Shanghai said she uses Alipay "almost every day" to buy things at convenience stores and even to pay her utility bills.

But there is a sense of crisis at Alibaba due to market saturation; just about everybody in cities, especially young people and middle-income consumers, already buy stuff online -- either from an Alibaba site or a rival platform.

Tencent Holdings, a leading social network provider, has invested in Jingdong Group, China's second biggest e-commerce player. Already, Jingdong's market presence is growing -- and it has rolled out its own online payment system.

With a client base of 400 million WeChat users -- WeChat is China's biggest chat and voice over Internet Protocol app -- Tencent is a threat to Alibaba.

In China, just because a company enjoys a competitive advantage today doesn't mean it will be a winner tomorrow. Aware of this dynamic, founder Jack Ma is keeping Alibaba in the rapid growth stage.

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[ahojunk]

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'Internet Plus' changes people's lifestyles in China
(chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2015-12-30 13:42

"Internet Plus", an action plan, was first presented in a Chinese government work report in March this year. It aims to integrate the Internet with traditional industries and fuel economic growth.

Now, the notion of "Internet Plus" is buzzing in China. People are changing their consumption and lifestyle habits, as more and more industries mix with Internet technology.

A woman shows the new farmer-oriented mobile phone app that provides online financial service, in Jingning county, Gansu province, July 29, 2015. The online service involves more than 20 types of business, including deposits and withdrawals, sales and purchases of agricultural products and agricultural technology and can function as an online bank, e-commerce site, rural finance tutor and loan source for farmers. [Photo/Xinhua]

A man introduces an agriculture application system, in Yushan county, Fujian province, July 29, 2015. The system uses Internet technology to monitor the growth of vegetables and fruits. [Photo/Xinhua]

An employee of Didi Kuaidi shows a senior citizen how to book a car by using the touch screen device at one of the many Didi stations installed by the company in Shanghai neighborhoods, Oct 15, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

An employee of the Bank of Lanzhou shows a client how to deal with business by scanning a two-dimension code to sign up to a hospital's WeChat account, Lanzhou, Gansu province, Aug 14, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

A couple show the handheld devices that can make emergency calls to a hospital and can contact family members if they require assistance, Hefei, Anhui province, Dec 29, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

A poster show a hospital's WeChat account, Guangzhou, Guangdong province, Dec 29, 2015. Patients can register and pay fees online by scanning the two-dimensional code to sign up to the hospital's WeChat account. [Photo/Xinhua]

A Peking Opera actor performs at a ceremony to celebrate a Peking Opera app launch in Beijing, May 23, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

A deliveryman of Chinese food delivery company Ele.me prepares to deliver meals in Shanghai, March 24, 2015. [Photo/IC]

 

[ahojunk]

Jack Ma: great potential in rural internet development

From CCTV
Length: 1 min 54 secs

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I hope Jack Ma's vision come to fruition as this will help the rural folks tremendously.

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[ahojunk]

I like this "Rural Taobao" which benefits the rural folks greatly.
It gives them more choices, information, convenience and access to finance/credit.
When they start selling their produce via "Rural Taobao", it will lift lots of them out of poverty, if they are doing it properly.
Rural Taobao will allow these rural folks to sell to a much wider market.
Alibaba should expand it to more countries, especially those in the developing world.

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China e-commerce firms tapping rural dollar
PUBLISHED: DEC 1, 2015, 5:00 AM SGT
Esther Teo, China Correspondent In Beijing

In Dongan village, in Jiaxing city, Zhejiang province, the shopping fever brought on by Singles Day, which falls on Nov 11, strikes many. Here, some villagers, including several elderly ones, gather at Alibaba's service centre to browse the Taobao online shopping website. This is the first time that Dongan's villagers can take part in the annual shopping event, thanks to Alibaba's outreach efforts. It is one of 6,000 villages across China that are now covered by Rural Taobao.

Many, like Alibaba and JD.com, are turning to the country's immense interior in search of fresh profits

Mr Wang Deyou used to have to pick up his online purchases at a nearby township, about 40 minutes away from his village of Zhuting in eastern Shandong province.

This year, for the first time, his Singles Day purchases of a water heater, a television set and a portable car-wash machine, which came up to more than 4,000 yuan (S$884), were all delivered right to his doorstep.

"It feels good to finally enjoy the services and convenience of cities. After all, more than half of China's population live in villages," Mr Wang, 32, told The Straits Times.

"Ma Yun has finally recognised the purchasing power of the common people," he added, referring to Mr Jack Ma, founder of China's largest e-commerce firm Alibaba.

While the world of online shopping might seem dominated by young and well-educated urbanites, industry giants like Alibaba and rival JD.com are turning increasingly to the country's immense interior in search of fresh profits.

Alibaba said recently that it will come up with a new online shopping event for Chinese New Year to tap rural consumption after villagers chalked up purchases worth more than 10 million yuan within the first eight minutes of Singles Day, the annual Nov 11 event seen as China's equivalent of Cyber Monday in the United States.

A farmer in Wenzhou, eastern Zhejiang province, even plonked down a 500,000-yuan deposit for a Porsche Macan, making it the most expensive buy on Cuntao, or Rural Taobao, Alibaba's online shopping website targeting villages.

Indeed, it was the first time Zhuting village, with about 2,000 residents, participated in the Singles Day event, which racked up record-breaking sales of 91 billion yuan in the 24-hour period.

A Taobao rural service centre had opened there last month, allowing residents' purchases made on the Rural Taobao website to be delivered directly to their homes, finally solving the logistics sector's so-called "last mile" problem.

Zhuting village is just one of the beneficiaries of Alibaba's wider strategy, announced in October last year, to invest 10 billion yuan in logistics, hardware and training in a bid to push its e-commerce model into 100,000 villages over the next three to five years.

The plan is to start by selling popular items such as washing machines, televisions and clothing, while gradually building up an online platform for farmers to sell vegetables and fruit to the cities, the company's executives had previously said.

Due to high commission fees and transportation costs, rural consumers often pay more for these household appliances than their urban counterparts.

Rural service centres, often located in villages' main convenience stores, are at the heart of Alibaba's new strategy.

As China's rural residents tend to be older and less familiar with technology, the centres provide computers for browsing and buying, help to ensure timely delivery of goods, and have trained Alibaba representatives on hand to provide assistance.

Mr Chen Xiaolong, 28, is one of the firm's young, Internet-savvy recruits. He assists some five villages in Shandong's Yanzhuang township, and said that while villagers were initially sceptical about online shopping, doubting the quality of the products they might receive, the idea has gradually caught on as positive experiences spread through word-of -mouth.

In fact, it was so busy on Singles Day that he had only two hours of sleep as villagers flocked to the service centre in droves.

"Even the elderly are getting more comfortable with the idea. I helped a 75-year-old grandmother buy a mobile phone on Singles Day," he told The Straits Times.

"But for those who are unsure, we tell them to buy known brands, such as Haier for home appliances, so they can be assured of a certain quality and can also compare the discount they are getting at physical stores," Mr Chen added.

E-commerce growth in the countryside now outpaces that in the cities, although less than a tenth of online purchases made on Alibaba platforms - which have an 80 per cent share of China's online market - were shipped to rural areas in the first quarter of this year.

The rural online market is estimated to be worth 460 billion yuan by next year, more than doubling from 180 billion yuan last year, according to Alibaba's research division.

The figures are even more staggering when taken in their entirety. China's e-commerce market recorded 2.79 trillion yuan in revenues last year, a jump of 50 per cent from the year before. This is equal to the entire economy of Austria last year.

As Beijing attempts to shift from investment-led growth to consumption-driven growth in the light of a slowing economy, e-commerce firms are finding that their strategies are dovetailing with government policies.

The Commerce Ministry said recently that it will encourage more e-commerce and logistics firms to expand into rural areas in a bid to create more jobs and provide better information access.

Said ministry official Kong Lingyu in May: "Building information sharing, financing and credit systems will be priorities to facilitate the development of e-commerce in rural areas, along with cheaper mobile Internet and logistics services."

Analyst Philix Liu of market research firm Mintel told The Straits Times that China is likely to see a rising number of rural entrepreneurs, with more graduates and migrants returning to start online businesses.

"But e-commerce firms are still in the early stage of developing the rural market so I don't expect a prominent national economic lift in the short term," he said.

"In the long run though, I would speculate that rural market growth would have a stronger and more positive impact on China's growth."

Until then, Mr Wang is more than happy to play his part. "This is just the beginning.

"After a good first experience, I will definitely be buying more things online now," he said.

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An Alibaba rural service centre in Jinjia Village, Tonglu, Zhejiang province. E-commerce growth in the countryside now outpaces that in major cities. Alibaba expects the rural online market to be worth about 460 billion yuan ($74 billion) by next year, more than double the 180 billion yuan last year.

A customer checking a parcel at the Alibaba rural service centre in Jinjia village. Products ordered online are transported to such centres which are often located in the villages' main convenience stores. This means rural consumers can get their online purchases delivered almost to their doorstep.

Wantou village in Binzhou city in Shandong province is one of China's more than 200 Taobao villages. More than half of its 1,700 households make a living selling things online. Reflecting its e-commerce leaning, one slogan pictured here (above) reads: "Rather than running to and fro outside, isn't it better to stay at home and Taobao?"

In delivering goods ordered online to rural areas, logistical challenges are overcome by whatever means possible. In Longnan, Gansu province, entrepreneur Lee Yonglong faced a road block when he tried to deliver a parcel to a village. The alternative route required him to wade through an icy river stream (above) for about 30 minutes.

An Alibaba logistics worker (above, in red) helps to deliver parcels to Mudun Island in Sihong county, Jiangsu province, using a speedboat. Due to the island's inaccessibility, Alibaba opened a rural service centre on it. Mr Tian Qianchun (seen here in the boat) is the island's sole Alibaba representative and has been using his own speedboat to deliver goods.

 

[JSCh]

'Taobao village' on the move to deliver perfect holiday
(chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2015-12-31 13:36

Employees of an online store process orders in Qingyanliu village, East China's Zhejiang province on Dec 29, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]​

E-commerce has delivered prosperity to Qingyanliu, a village in East China's Zhejiang province. With many residents operating online stores, it has been dubbed the No 1 e-commerce village in the country and is also referred as the Taobao village.

As Chinese Spring Festival nears, 3,000 online stores in the village are busy preparing for the crucial holiday season. According to the local authority, the village is expected to see total online transactions reach 4 billion yuan ($616 million) in 2015.

The truck is on its way in Qingyanliu village to deliver the goods, Dec 30, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

Workers of an online store arrange goods in Qingyanliu village, Dec 28, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

Workers of an online store arrange goods in Qingyanliu village, Dec 28, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

A villager poses with Chinese knots as part of a promotional photo shoot in Qingyanliu village, Dec 30, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

A man teaches marketing to online store owners in Qingyanliu village, Dec 30, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]​

 

[ahojunk]

• More villagers become e-retailers
• Not only are they becoming increasingly big online spenders but China's villagers are also quickly embracing e-commerce as retailers.
  
  Taobao Villages, where at least 10 per cent of households make their living by selling products online and conducting at least 10 million yuan (S$2.2 million) in e-business every year, are rapidly emerging across the country as the Internet transforms the way of life of entire rural communities.
  
  At the end of year 2014, there were 211 such villages, compared with just 20 in 2013, according to Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce company with an 80 per cent share of the online shopping market. Taobao is the firm's online consumer-to-consumer platform.
  
  One example is Beishan village in Zhejiang province. While residents used to sell baked sesame buns known as shaobing, many are now online vendors of outdoor equipment such as tents and sleeping bags.
  
  Beishan's fortunes changed after one of its residents, Mr Lu Zhenhong, started buying sleeping bags directly from manufacturers and selling them online in 2006. His business grew and he eventually established his own brand, BS Wolf, a reference to the name of his home town.
  
  As of last year, there were more than 300 Taobao stores selling mostly outdoor gear and more than 600 people working in Beishan's e-commerce sector. Collectively, they churn out more than 200 million yuan in annual revenue, according to a Shanghai Daily report.
  
  Another example of a Taobao Village is Wantou in eastern Shandong province, where grass and willow wickerwork is its 600-year-old traditional handicraft.
  
  In 2008, its first online store was launched and, today, Wantou's 1,700 households run more than 1,000 online stores selling wickerwork products.
  
  Some 30 stores on their own generated an annual turnover of more than one million yuan last year.
  
  Alibaba said Taobao Villages are concentrated mostly in the coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Guangdong, Fujian, Hebei and Jiangsu. They account for more than 90 per cent of the total number.
  
  But the phenomenon is spreading, with four villages in the inland provinces of Sichuan, Henan and Hubei making the list for the first time last year.
  
  But there are risks involved. Vicious competition and poor quality control might lead to problems and eventually cause these small businesses to fail.
  
  Esther Teo
• Straits Times

 

[ahojunk]

Possibly another Singles' Day madness but on a smaller scale perhaps, to benefit the rural folks.
Good job Alibaba!

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Alibaba plans five-day ‘farmer’s festival’ to drive e-commerce in Chinese hinterlands over Lunar New Year
With aid of Rural Taobao and Cainiao Logistics, nation’s online shopping juggernaut aims to tap broader Chinese market with series of events for this Spring Festival to build on success of Singles Day

Bien Perez
UPDATED : Friday, 15 January, 2016, 9:20pm

Two elderly men stand in front of a ‘Rural Taobao’ workstation in Louyan village of Fenghua, Zhejiang province last month. China’s Alibaba is moving to capitalise on the largely untapped e-commerce market in China’s less developed regions.

Alibaba Group, which pioneered the Singles Day retail event in China that falls on November 11, is poised to make an all-out assault on the mainland’s largely untapped rural e-commerce market, with the launch of a five-day Lunar New Year online shopping festival from Sunday.

The world’s largest e-commerce services provider has mobilised affiliate Cainiao Logistics to bolster its “last-mile” delivery network in more than 270 counties and about 13,000 villages to support the new festival, an Alibaba spokeswoman said.

Cainiao’s big-data analysis and logistics infrastructure, including warehouses in five provinces, are expected to enhance delivery services during the festival.

One of TMall rural partner finds out the measurement of an elderly folk before ordering a sweater online. This is in Louyan village of Fenghua, Zhejiang Province.

“Based on Cainiao’s big-data analysis, merchants on Alibaba platforms can deliver products that are expected to sell well to Cainiao’s county-level operations centres in advance,” the Alibaba spokeswoman said.

Those products are expected to arrive at the door of consumers in as little as 24 hours after the online orders are placed.”

Rural Taobao, the unit of Alibaba responsible for developing e-commerce business in the Chinese hinterlands, is spearheading the new online shopping festival with consumer-to-consumer platform Taobao Marketplace, business-to-consumer site Tmall.com and group-buying service Juhuasuan.

“The 11.11 shopping festival is designed for netizens, while the Chinese New Year Shopping Festival is created for farmers,” Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma Yun said last month when the company first spoke about its rural shopping initiative.

We aim to enable rural customers to access an extensive range of New Year goods from home and abroad, while making agriculture products from rural China more available among urban customers
ALIBABA CHIEF EXECUTIVE DANIEL ZHANG YONG

Rural Taobao’s mandate includes organising free Chinese opera performances for rural communities and sponsor 13,000 rural service centre managers to host 10,000 New Year’s Eve dinners for the elderly, children and the disabled in each village with cuisine from all over the world.

It will also arrange for more than 500 premium overseas brands — including Uniqlo, Huggies, Estee Lauder and Lancome — to be available for the first time in the countryside.

Tmall Global, which runs the platform for overseas online merchants to sell in China, has opened a cross-border “online-to-offline experience centre” in the showcase district of Yujiapu in Tianjin, an industrial municipality near Beijing, to enable consumers in northern China to purchase branded products curated from around the world.

In addition, Tmall Global will work with eight country pavilions and some of the world’s major supermarkets, department stores and duty-free shops to provide premium goods during the festival.

“By hosting the sale, we hope to help sustain our traditional culture while also injecting new elements into the festival,” Alibaba chief executive Daniel Zhang Yong said last month.

“We aim to enable rural customers to access an extensive range of New Year goods from home and abroad, while making agriculture products from rural China more available among urban customers.”

Based in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, Alibaba did not provide any estimates for the festival’s gross merchandise volume (GMV), which represents the total value of goods sold online during a specific period.

Alibaba posted total GMV of US$14.3 billion, all settled through its Alipay affiliate, on November 11. About 68.7 per cent of that was taken up by mobile transactions.

 

[ahojunk]

China Expands Cross-border E-commerce Pilot Zones to 12 Cities
2016-01-15 20:02:38 | Xinhua | Web Editor: Chu Yiming

China will set up 12 more pilot zones for cross-border e-commerce, the State Council said on Friday.

The State Council approved the establishment of zones in Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hefei, Zhengzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Dalian, Ningbo, Qingdao, Shenzhen and Suzhou, according to a statement released by the State Council.

The move followed the approval of a pilot zone in Hangzhou, where e-commerce giant Alibaba is headquartered, in March last year.

The new pilot zones will model themselves on Hangzhou while taking localized development measures, the statement said.

By experimenting with new models for technical standards, business procedures, regulatory mechanisms and other areas, the new zones aim to provide transferable experience to businesses nationwide.

The zones will attract businesses, help create jobs and nurture new business models to boost foreign trade and stimulate the economy, the State Council said earlier in a meeting.

The expansion of the pilot zones came at a time when the country is facing sluggish foreign trade. Total export and import value for 2015 decreased 7 percent year on year, falling for the first time in six years.

The Ministry of Commerce predicted that the trade volume of cross-border e-commerce in 2016 will reach 6.5 trillion yuan and will account for 20 percent of China's foreign trade in a few years.

 

[ahojunk]

No kidding!

Cargo ship auctioned on taobao.com

 

[ahojunk]

Alibaba is venturing into more areas of online activities....

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Alibaba Ups The B2B Ante
ByPYMNTS | Posted on January 14, 2016

Chinese eCommerce conglomerate Alibaba is once again bolstering its business-to-business capabilities.

Reports in the South China Morning Post on Wednesday (Jan. 13) said Alibaba revealed having more than 25 partnerships with credit rating agencies and financial institutions throughout the globe as part of its strategy to link SMEs on its platform with working capital.

The collaborations mean small and medium-sized enterprises can use Alibaba to connect to cross-border trade finance, as well as to a new credit reporting tool, reports said.

“To Alibaba, regardless of B2B exports or imports, the ecosystem is very important,” said Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang at a conference in China on Tuesday. “The Alibaba mission is to make it easy to do any type of business.”

At present, only Chinese companies can access funding from Alibaba and its banking partnerships. Existing bank partners include MYBank, Bank of China and China Merchants Bank.

According to the company’s president of B2B operations, Sophie Wu, the firm has begun work to launch a new credit rating system for Chinese suppliers, slated to debut later this year. Dubbed credit.alibaba.com, the platform will provide a credit score for businesses based on ratings aggregated from traditional credit scoring companies, as well as data from the Alibaba platform itself.

“By building up the credit profiles of Chinese SMEs based on business-related data, Alibaba.com’s credit reporting service can help overseas buyers identify trustworthy trading partners and provide Chinese suppliers access to innovative financing options,” Wu said.

Alibaba had already entered the credit scoring industry through its financial unit, Ant Financial, which launched a credit scoring offering last year in a collaboration with China’s central bank.

The development of a credit scoring service and the expansion of its SME trade financing efforts follow an agreement made in December with trade show corporation UBM, a deal that reports said will see Alibaba encouraging connectivity between buyers and suppliers at events.

 

[ahojunk]

Online shopping in the Orient
BY THO XIN YI
Saturday, 16 January 2016

I was balancing four parcels in my arms when a fellow passenger in the lift – a man in his 60s – commented, “Shopping for the upcoming Spring festival, eh?”

I smiled, but then the lift door opened before I could ask him if he shopped online, too.

Since stepping foot in China two-and-a-half years ago, virtual shopping megamall Taobao and its sister site, Tmall, along with Amazon China and JD.com have played an indispensable role in my life.

Before I got familiar with the neighbourhood and the city of Beijing in general, these online platforms were my go-to saviours to source necessities, ranging from plants to lightbulbs.

In fact, when I tried to find out from acquaintances where to look for certain things, their replies were always the same: “Just look it up on Taobao. You can find everything you need.”

True enough, it has seldom let me down.

The millions of sellers on Taobao do not only offer locally produced merchandise but also products from all over the world, including 3-in-1 coffee and instant noodles from home.

Just a few clicks and the items will be delivered within days by the express delivery companies.

While shoppers have to exercise caution to discern the authenticity and quality of products a lot of the time, Taobao is convenient, affordable and hard to resist.

Even friends back home have been lured by its wonders.

My friend, Tze Chin has been a loyal shopper for years, relying on Taobao for toys, children’s apparel and household essentials.

“If we compare the prices and take international shipping costs into consideration, the same items are way too expensive in Malaysia,” she said, adding that it was worth the wait for the forwarder to collect the items on her behalf in China and then send them to her at one go.

The hardcore Taobao fan also raved about the image search function in the Taobao mobile app, which allows her to snap photos of an item that she is looking for – a dress on another shopping site, for instance – and search for similar product on Taobao.

More often than not, the search will lead her to cheaper products.

The increasing popularity of Taobao in Southeast Asia has prompted the e-commerce giant to establish its presence in Singapore in September 2013 to meet the needs of its customers in the region, particularly Singapore and Malaysia.

“The focus of our local team in Singapore is to create an enhanced experience for users in the region, in the areas of payment, logistics and user interface,” Alibaba Group international B2C division marketing head, Karen Lam said.

Women’s apparel, consumer electronics, bags, luggage, toys and children’s clothing are the popular categories among Malaysian Taobao users.

During the online shopping festival on Nov 11 last year, which saw Taobao raking in US$14.3bil (RM62.6bil) in gross merchandise volume, Malaysian shoppers also joined in the festivities.

The top five categories of products purchased by Malaysians were dresses, handbags, T-shirts, mobile phone cases and vacuum cleaning robots.

The only setback for Taobao’s Malaysian users is that the interface is in Chinese, which means only those who read Chinese can use Taobao with ease.

Taobao said it had no plans to roll out an English-language website at this moment.

“Our platform displays user-generated content and product listings from our millions of sellers, and the majority of them communicate primarily in Chinese.

“Having said that, we do offer English translation of certain phrases on important pages, such as the order placement and payment pages, to facilitate the check-out process for our overseas buyers,” Lam said.

Home to 600 million people, South-East Asia offers a huge opportunity for Taobao.

“There is also a huge gap between Southeast Asia and other markets in terms of e-commerce penetration in retail sales, which implies significant growth potential for online shopping in this part of the world,” added Lam.

 

[JSCh]

Feature: Internet adds spin to China's circular economy
Xinhua Finance 2016-01-19 11:17 BEIJING

Life has been hard for Jin Yuhua and her husband. They moved from Shandong Province in 1997 and have worked as trash collectors in north Beijing since.

In sweltering heat and freezing cold, they sit on an old tricycle outside a housing compound, waiting for someone to buy rubbish that has a tradable value -- newspapers, plastics bottles, old appliances and the like.

The development of the Internet seemed almost irrelevant to their livelihood, but an O2O (online to offline) application is now changing their lives. When they began to use Bangdaojia, an application that allows users to request a garbage pickup on their smart phones, they went from waiting aimlessly in the street to offering a door-to-door service by appointment.

And much to their surprise, application developer Beijing Incom Resources Recovery Co Ltd offered them formal employment. Incom built its reputation on its plastic-bottle collecting machines that reward depositors.

By the end of 2015, Incom had recycled 18 million plastic bottles in Beijing through more than 3,000 machines. Incom general manager Chang Tao believes the machines, based on the Internet of Things, have something in common with the O2O application: they are changing the final destiny of rubbish.

Like many other garbage collectors in China, Jin and her husband are the start of the long recycling chain. They usually sell garbage to small waste collection agencies, which will resell it to recycling enterprises.

As the cost of processing recyclable materials is high for licensed recycling enterprises, says Chang, their price offers are less competitive than unlicensed agencies. As a result, a lot of garbage goes to underground collection and processing centers.

"I have been to some illegal processing centers on the outskirts of Beijing that exude a pungent smell. They don't have sewage treatment or proper environmental protection facilities. The chemicals are discharged into rivers or the earth, causing secondary pollution," Chang says.

"Incorporating Internet technology into the recycling chain not only expands the raw materials base, but also shows us who is recycling and where. We use the Internet to monitor recycled garbage and make sure it goes to legitimate factories where it is processed without pollution."

The recycling sector is one of the beneficiaries of Chinese government's "Internet Plus" initiative to enable more businesses to harness the Internet. GEM, a listed company and one of the forerunners in China's recycling industry, is trying to make a difference with the Internet.

GEM launched its O2O platform Recycling Brother in Shenzhen in August 2015 and promoted it in other cities including Wuhan, Jingmen and Tianjin. Users can sell any kind of trash that has a recycling value through the platform's detailed refuse classification.

With more than 3,000 offline garbage collectors joining the project, the platform's daily collection reaches 300 tons. Zhang Yuping, general manager of the Recycling Brother, says GEM has strengthened capacity in recycling materials since it was established on 2001, but encountered bottleneck in development.

"The problem is the lack of raw materials, which is also a problem for China's recycling industry. We are competing with underground collection centers and I hope this O2O platform that allows us to collect materials directly from the user will help," Zhang says.

More than eight cities, including Beijing and Shenzhen, have been exploring refuse classification since 2000, but so much is still randomly discarded due to the lack of workable methods and poor public awareness.

Zhang says the O2O platform's detailed refuse classification system to some extent solves the problem of incomplete waste sorting. And the rewards for selling garbage will promote the "trash-to-treasure" concept and encourage more people to participate.

"The 'Internet+Recycle' mode is viable commercially and environmentally. We have carried out extensive cooperation with local governments and hope the joint efforts of government, enterprise and individual will promote the circular economy," Zhang says.

China's Central Urban Work Conference held in December 2015 called for creative city management. Pan Yonggang, vice president of the China Resource Recycling Association, thinks 'Internet+Recycle' helps the government to promote management standards and innovation.

"The contribution made by thousands of migrant workers like Jin Yuhua, has been indispensable to China's recycling industry. The new trend is turning them into more-organized industry workers, to build a healthy collection system, which is essential to develop a circular economy," Pan says.

With recycling enterprises benefiting from the Internet, some Internet-based start-ups such as Zai Shenghuo and Ai Huishou have also branched into the recycling industry.

Pan is happy to see this, but he also advises that O2O-based refuse collection cannot survive without proper offline garbage management: "A well-Integrated recycling system needs both."

 

[ahojunk]

Can e-commerce save China’s luxury goods market?
Editor's Pick 22-Jan-2016.

French luxury brand Louis Vuitton is seeking to sue three counterfeiters who sold fake Louis Vuitton products on Taobao, Alibaba's e-commerce marketplace, between 2011 and 2014, according to information released by Beijing's Haidian District Court earlier this month. One of the counterfeiters made a profit of 1 million yuan ($152,367) from selling fake goods online, according to the court information. Louis Vuitton is demanding damages of 250,000 yuan, and as this is a relatively small amount, it seems the brand's main interest is to deter counterfeiters.

Luxury goods consumption in China has undoubtedly shrunk, due to the overall economic slowdown, the government's campaign against austerity and extravagance, and Chinese buyers' increasing preference to buy overseas in order to benefit from lower prices. Another recent issue has been the depreciation of the yuan. In response, leading brands such as Prada and Burberry are limiting the opening of brick-and-mortar stores and even closing some existing ones. More and more labels are also shifting their strategic focus to e-commerce sales. There may still be a problem with sales of counterfeit goods, but online platforms in China could offer new hope for luxury brands.

There are several factors in favor of global luxury companies' digital efforts. The majority of luxury goods consumers in China are younger than 45, which roughly coincides with the age of active Internet users and frequent Internet buyers.

In terms of brand communications and operations, online channels can be a cost-efficient way of narrowing cultural barriers and cultivating consumer loyalty. Off-line advertising campaigns and publicity events are generally time-consuming and require a substantial amount of human resources and capital investment.

But international luxury brands need to pay attention to several aspects in order for their e-tailing pain to achieve better traction. First, they need to offer more reasonable prices. The fact that prices are currently higher in China than overseas is a big part of the reason why Chinese consumers are less eager to buy luxury goods in the domestic market.

Second, they need to pay attention to the social comparison factor that influences Chinese consumers' decisions on buying luxury goods. Unlike the US and Japan, luxury consumption is not simply individual behavior in China. It is prompted by social causes, and buyers pay attention to what products people in their age group or professional category are buying. Desire for status symbols and self-reward are two important psychological motives for Chinese consumers' willingness to purchase luxury goods. Companies can tap into this by designing more appealing and even personalized interactive interfaces when cooperating with e-commerce platforms in China. For example, Burberry has teamed up with WeChat to launch an interactive messaging service that allows users to "unwrap" the brand's products via tapping, swiping and shaking. It also enables users to create a personalized digital Lunar New Year envelope to send to friends and family, a move that potentially enhances the role of social influence in Chinese luxury consumption.

There are some things that Chinese online retailers need to do as well. First is getting rid of vendors that sell knock-off products. Even though this may take time, a platform that can build a transparent ecosystem with zero tolerance of counterfeit goods will be the one that international luxury brands are most eager to cooperate with.

As the online luxury market in China is being reshaped, 2016 is expected to be an eventful year. It may see the disappearance of small-scale online retailers known for selling fake goods, and the emergence of new partnerships between international luxury brands and Chinese e-commerce giants. And Chinese consumers will be the true beneficiaries.

 

[ahojunk]

Now, that is one good looking delivery person

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Online shopping company to hire foreign couriers for Spring Festival
By Gao Yinan (People's Daily Online) 14:14, January 27, 2016

An e-commerce supplier in China plans to recruit international students to be couriers so as to ensure efficient express delivery services during Spring Festival, China Business News reports.

Online shopping sites are short-handed due to an exodus of workers for weeks before and after China's Lunar New Year, which falls on Feb 8 this year. But in a competitive market, companies such as JD.com, Cainiao and Alibaba have promised to keep business normal, at least in major cities, during the festive season.

Suning Tesco suggested its customers should not feel surprised when opening the door and seeing a foreign guy saying, "Here's your delivery!" as the company is inviting foreign students to be couriers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing and Chengdu.

Foreign couriers are trained with courier skills, etiquette and Chinese culture and custom during Spring Festival and start working from Feb. 1.

Besides the shortage of employees, the express delivery industry was hit hard by the cold front that swept most parts of China.

Facing a slew of delays, the speed of parcel deliveries has slowed by 20 percent from Jan. 20 to Jan. 24, largely due to the bad weather, according to statistics from Cainiao and Alibaba.

Couriers are also facing other barriers, such as traffic congestion and frozen fuel tanks.

 

[ahojunk]

Alibaba revenue jumps 32 percent
CNBC.com staff | @CNBC
12 Mins Ago
Carlos Barria | Reuters

An employee walks past the Alibaba logo at the company’s headquarters outside of Hangzhou, China.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's third-quarter revenue rose 32 percent, helped by the holiday shopping quarter, and beat analysts' average estimate.

Shares of Alibaba rose more than 3 percent in premarket trading immediately following the announcement.

Revenue rose to 34.53 billion yuan ($5.25 billion) in the quarter ended Dec. 31, compared with the average analyst estimate of 33.33 billion yuan, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Alibaba posted adjusted earnings of 99 cents a share.

Gross merchandise volume (GMV), or the total value of goods transacted on its platforms on China retail marketplaces, rose 23 percent to 964 billion yuan.

Alibaba competes with smaller rival JD.com, which has focused on more affluent shoppers in China's biggest cities, a strategy that may be paying off in an economy that last year grew at its weakest pace in a quarter of a century.

While the two companies calculate the total value of goods sold, or GMV, differently, JD.com's GMV grew 82 percent in the nine-months to September while Alibaba's rose 34 percent, suggesting China's biggest e-tailer was losing market share.

Earlier this month, Alibaba Chief Executive Daniel Zhang said the company will pivot towards "first-tier" cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, after having trumpeted a push into China's countryside, as well as abroad.

— Reuters contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to say gross merchandise volume rose to 964 billion yuan, not 964 million yuan.