During the two sessions this year, "gradual formation of a new development pattern with domestic and international cycles as the main body and mutual promotion of domestic and international cycles" was proposed for the first time.
Since then, the dual-cycle development pattern has been emphasized many times.
In September, "Building a new development pattern with the support of the construction of a modern circulation system", the general direction became more specific.
Short words and long meanings, interlocking.
As a result, the fundamentals of economic growth will also enter a new normal: from the past "promoting internal externally" to "promoting external internally", based on the local and intensive cultivation of internal circulation will become a long-term strategy.
One
With a flick of a finger.
From a longer-term perspective, the recent strategic decisions can be called a major adjustment in China's development path in the past 20 years.
In 2004, China’s economy’s dependence on foreign trade—that is, the ratio of total import and export trade to GDP—reached 70%.
In 2019, this ratio dropped to 31.87%.
This shows that China's economy has already bid farewell to the early stage of relying on foreign trade alone to support it, and that the internal cycle of intensive cultivation has a sufficiently broad strategic depth.
The ratio of external to internal has changed from seventy-three to thirty-seven, but there is no need to worry too much about the situation of foreign trade. In fact, China's foreign exchange reserves of more than US$3 trillion have always been ranked first in the world.
This only shows that investment and domestic demand have topped the troika of GDP driven by "foreign trade, investment, and domestic demand."
The world-famous investment has been talked a lot, so I won’t show it for now.
Let's talk about domestic demand.
At present, China's consumption volume is roughly the same as that of the United States, and its contribution to GDP is close to 60%.
First conclusion:
First, in the next 20 years, domestic demand (consumption) will play a more important role in GDP contribution. If the previous "seven three openings" were the result of natural evolution, this time "internal circulation" and "construction of modern circulation" "System" is the high-level blessing;
Second, different from the status of the previous supplementary channels, in the next 20 years, the digital economy represented by Alibaba will rely on the invisible supply chain upgrade to play a strategic role in the production-distribution-consumption link. Become the main platform for "China's consumption moves."
two
In 1999, two things happened in China, both of which had something to do with the then Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.
The first one: On November 15, 1999, at the building of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, China and the United States finalized an agreement to clear the biggest obstacle to entering the WTO, and finally succeeded in joining the WTO two years later.
As a result, China has completed a thrilling leap from a pure internal cycle to a dual cycle of internal and external.
Joining the WTO will give China's economy a greater driving force than many people think.
As mentioned earlier, in 2004, China’s economy’s dependence on foreign trade reached an astonishing 70%.
From then on, Chinese SMEs began to earn foreigners' money.
The continuous inflow of foreign exchange income, coupled with the introduction of technology and the layout of the industrial chain, helped China to leap from an "export processing economy" to a "world factory".
Second: This year, Jack Ma, a young entrepreneur who had worked in a company under the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, established a website in Hangzhou to promote Chinese SMEs to foreign markets: Alibaba.
Ma Yun has an extraordinary perseverance in helping Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises sell their goods abroad.
At the beginning of 1997, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation wanted to establish the China International E-commerce Center and sent an invitation to Ma Yun, who decided to abandon the China Yellow Pages.
The Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation gave the center 2 million yuan in start-up capital and promised 30% equity of the core entrepreneurial team.
Ma Yun was very excited to bring five brothers north from Hangzhou. Six people rented a room of 20 square meters. They worked hard for 15 months and achieved a net profit of 2.87 million yuan.
But the core entrepreneurial team gets only a few thousand yuan a month's salary.
In September 1999, in the Lakeside Garden Community of Hangzhou, the eighteen arhats collected 500,000 start-up funds to establish Alibaba. The main business is still to promote Chinese suppliers overseas.
Personal struggle and the course of history met in a wonderful way in the second half of 1999, and rushed forward in the same direction in the following 20 years.
three
In 2000, the first Spring Festival Gala of the 21st century, Zhao Benshan and Song Dandan's sketch "Hourly Work" contributed two classic jokes.
"You just leave your house, the entire net, and go online." "I haven't been fishing for many years. How can I have a net?" "I'm talking about computer surfing, the Internet."
"My shoes, Adidas; pants, Pushkin's; clothes, Clinton's; belts, Yeltsin's. Look at me again, I use world-class brand-name cosmetics in my pocket. What."
These two jokes predict two major trends that will change the Chinese economy in the future: the popularity of the Internet and the advent of the era of consumerism.
The intersection of the two is e-commerce.
For a long time, people’s personal consumption has been regarded as a pure consumption behavior. “The new three years, the old three years, and the stitching and patching for another three years.” To curb personal consumption and prioritize the development of heavy industry with limited production resources. The collective unconscious from official to private.
As the core symbol of the planned economy supply system, the "food stamp" completely withdrew from the historical stage in 1993.
From 1997 to 2000, China's economic growth continued to decline.
The senior management realized that the most direct and main reason was insufficient domestic social demand. Among the social demands, consumption contributed the most to economic growth, and the key to stimulating economic growth was to stimulate household consumption.
Song Dandan criticized Zhao Benshan in "Hourly Workers" on the Spring Festival Gala in 2000, saying that "you are not good at consumption", and it is no accident.
In 2003, Jack Ma established Taobao. Three years later, he defeated foreign rival eBay and became the leader of domestic e-commerce.
In places like Qingliuyan Village in Yiwu, Sijiqing Garment Wholesale Market in Hangzhou, Shahe Garment Wholesale Market in Guangzhou, etc., young people with a keen sense of smell rent a house and start their own businesses with a single cable, and they have become "Taobao earning millions". legend.
In 2007, Taobao's annual turnover (GMV) was about 40 billion. In the same year, China's total retail sales of consumer goods was 8.9 trillion yuan, accounting for only 0.45% (12 years later, this proportion will become 15%).
But Taobao's growth rate is very fast. In 2008, registered users exceeded 100 million. In September of that year, Taobao's monthly transaction volume exceeded the tens of billions mark.
Since then, the "Chop Hand Party" and "The Woman Behind Jack Ma" with the slogan "Buy, Buy, Buy" have become the best spokespersons of the consumerism era, and the annual Double Eleven night has become the second only influential nation after the Spring Festival Gala. carnival.
The peak logistics order of Cainiao's platform reached 1.292 billion in one day, which is equal to the parcel volume of the United States in the past month.
four
If the United States, the world's largest consumer country, is used as a reference, since 2000, the scale of China's consumer market has been an upward curve.
In 2008, China's retail sales of goods was only about half that of the United States.
By 2019, China's consumption scale is already equivalent to 95.67% of that of the United States, and it is expected to be equal in 2020.
However, the consumer goods retail industry in China and the United States are in completely different circulation environments.
After 150 years of development, the US retail industry has been very mature. The distribution channels of consumer goods have been ruled by various chain giants: shopping malls, outlet malls, department stores (such as Macy’s, Sea Sri Lanka), supermarkets (such as Wal-Mart), warehouse stores (such as Costco), convenience stores (such as 711), etc.
The circulation of consumer goods in China did not gradually break away from the planned economy supply and marketing system until the late 1980s.
In 2000, husband-and-wife shops in cities, community supermarkets, and small shops in rural areas were still the mainstream.
Chinese e-commerce companies, represented by Taobao, have grown up on such a relatively backward retail soil and have changed lanes to overtake.
At present, Alibaba's annual turnover has exceeded US$1 trillion, surpassing the sum of Amazon and Wal-Mart, becoming the world's largest online trading platform.
(Ten years, Ali's Tmall double eleven sales soared 5000 times, from 50 million to 268.4 billion yuan)
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the contribution rate of consumer spending to GDP growth in 2019 reached 57.8%, and the proportion of consumer spending to GDP has increased for eight consecutive years.
Among them, e-commerce is no longer a supplementary channel for social commodity circulation, and has long become an important pillar supporting national consumption.
The annual turnover of e-commerce leader Alibaba already accounts for 15% of China's total retail sales, about one-seventh.
In the first half of this year, the total retail sales of consumer goods affected by the epidemic fell 11.4% year-on-year.
With the lockdown of cities and communities across the country, online retail and courier brothers stepped forward to bring a brighter appearance to the domestic consumer market.
In the first half of the year, the national online retail sales of physical goods bucked the trend and increased by 14.3% year-on-year.
The national online retail sales of physical goods accounted for 25.2% of the total retail sales of consumer goods in the same period, an increase of 5.6 percentage points over the same period last year.
This means that in the first half of the year, a quarter of consumer goods in the whole society were realized through online shopping.
Fives
If we look at it from the perspective of the production-distribution-consumption chain, in the past 20 years, Ali has detonated a brand new circulation industry revolution.
There are millions of merchants on the Ali platform, connecting 1 billion consumers and reaching more than 200 countries and regions.
One-seventh of the output value of China's consumer goods is transformed into hundreds of millions of express parcels per day, flowing on this platform.
A set of commercial infrastructure precipitated by the Ali e-commerce platform, including payment (Alipay), logistics (cainiao + major express companies), cloud computing (Alibaba Cloud), etc., not only serves Ali, but also the entire major e-commerce and local life industries They are also sharing.
In the first half of 2020, the white goods giant Midea defeated Gree, which had been invincible for a decade, and became the country's largest air conditioner manufacturer.
This is because during the epidemic, consumers who stayed at home chose to place orders online, which caused many Gree potential customers to choose Midea online.
It is worth noting that Midea’s sales in China accounted for 55% of online sales, surpassing offline sales for the first time.
This is the result of a two-year betting transformation.
At the end of 2018, the 50-year-old Midea made a rare organizational restructuring and established a business department in China, with the former general manager of the e-commerce company serving as the president.
Since then, Midea has not only sold goods on e-commerce platforms, but has reshaped the production, transportation and sales supply chain.
Through the supply chain of Tmall and Cainiao, Midea has overturned the traditional sales agency model and production and sales system of home appliance companies: established an integrated membership system to directly accumulate loyal users; realized the "full network, one inventory" model, and eliminated the distribution warehouse and distribution warehouse. Use the shortest link to reach consumers directly; realize the whole process platform design from production to sales end, visualize production capacity, and deliver as fast as 3 days; use consumer big data to reverse order and incubate young brands.
Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Alecchi, Coca-Cola, Mengniu, Lenovo, Xiaomi... Thousands of large Chinese and foreign brands have also launched in-depth cooperation with the Ali platform, and directly trust some of their inventory to the Cainiao supply chain.
Conclusion
In the past 20 years, China's digital economy has started from zero and has become a pole of the social circulation channel.
It is conceivable that due to the birth of the aboriginals of online shopping, the share of the digital economy in the market will continue to grow in the next 20 years.
Correspondingly, the integration of the real economy and the digital economy will be closer.
Consumption-circulation-production, e-commerce-new retail-new manufacturing, changes have already begun.
In the next 20 years, this is the most certain basic disk.