China has set up 46 new cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zones. Cross-border e-commerce accelerates the creation of a new pattern of foreign trade
Affected by the new coronary pneumonia epidemic, China's foreign trade has faced severe challenges that have not been seen for many years. But at the same time, cross-border e-commerce has released huge development potential. From January to February, China's cross-border e-commerce retail import and export volume was 17.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36.7%.
"Traditional foreign trade has been severely hit by the epidemic, and it is necessary to further leverage the unique advantages of cross-border e-commerce, carry out online marketing, realize online transactions, guarantee orders, guarantee markets, and guarantee shares, and help foreign trade overcome difficulties with new formats and new models." Minister of Commerce Assistant Ren Hongbin said. Many experts said in an interview with the Economic Daily-China Economic Net reporter that the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce has fully demonstrated its leading role in the innovation and development of foreign trade.
Online advantage is outstanding
Cross-border e-commerce is the fastest-growing trade method in the Internet era. It can break through time and space restrictions, reduce intermediate links, solve the problem of information asymmetry between supply and demand sides, and provide new development opportunities for more countries, enterprises, and groups. This also reflects the trade Inclusive development. With the spread of the epidemic around the world, traditional offline channels have been blocked, and the demand for online purchases has continued to increase, giving play to the advantages of cross-border e-commerce.
"During the epidemic, cross-border e-commerce has become an important channel for the development of China's foreign trade, which fully shows the leading role of cross-border e-commerce as a new format for the development of foreign trade innovation." Zhang Li, director of the Institute of Electronic Commerce of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce, said.
For products that are urgently needed by consumers at home and abroad, such as anti-epidemic materials, cross-border e-commerce platforms provide a quick and convenient way to purchase, enabling efficient and fast global supply and demand matching. "At the beginning of the epidemic, facing the serious shortage of domestic epidemic prevention materials, both domestic cross-border e-commerce enterprises and foreign-funded cross-border e-commerce enterprises responded actively to the cross-border e-commerce public service platform, effectively assisting the cross-border e-commerce market players And offline parks, make every effort to ensure that port epidemic prevention materials enter the country through cross-border e-commerce to meet social needs. "Shen Yuliang, director of the Institute of World Economics, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said.
Zhang Li believes that the advantages of centralized procurement channels formed by cross-border e-commerce companies in recent years have been effectively exerted in the procurement of import and export materials, end-to-end distribution, etc., creating a "global centralized procurement-fixed point direct delivery" model of epidemic prevention materials. To a certain extent, cross-border e-commerce has enhanced China's foreign trade's global supply chain procurement capacity.
"Cross-border e-commerce is a new model for companies to explore the international market and played an irreplaceable positive role during the epidemic." Wei Hao, a professor at the School of Economics and Business Administration of Beijing Normal University and director of the National Import Research Center, said that as the epidemic spread worldwide The demand in the international market has obviously shrunk, and the original export orders of Chinese enterprises have been canceled in a large amount in the short term. Under such circumstances, some Chinese enterprises have started to export from offline to online, and are engaged in cross-border e-commerce exports. On the one hand, they are actively looking for new corporate customers through the cross-border e-commerce platform; on the other hand, direct retail business is effective Opened up new businesses and new markets.
"Cross-border e-commerce logistics and overseas warehouses have become important supports for" stabilizing foreign trade. "Zhang Li said that the epidemic has posed a direct challenge to logistics and distribution. China's cross-border e-commerce logistics enterprises have shipped through charter flights and overseas warehouse storage, etc. Various methods ensure the timely delivery of cross-border e-commerce goods.
Comprehensive test area expansion
The development of the epidemic situation has not affected China's cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test area to expand again. On April 7, the State Council decided to set up 46 new cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zones. In addition to the 59 approved, there will be 105 cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zones nationwide, covering 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. The development pattern of linkage between the land and the sea and the mutual cooperation between the east and the west.
Zhang Li said that on the one hand, the expansion of the encirclement is to support the active declaration of localities and increase their enthusiasm for the development of cross-border e-commerce; on the other hand, it shows that the country fully affirms and strongly supports the new foreign trade format of cross-border e-commerce. This also further shows that the previous cross-border e-commerce experiment has achieved positive results and can be replicated and promoted in a wider range and innovated in a wider area.
Statistics show that in 2019, China's cross-border e-commerce retail import and export volume reached 186.21 billion yuan, five times that of 2015, with an average annual growth rate of 49.5%. The role of the comprehensive cross-border e-commerce pilot zone in the development of foreign trade has become increasingly prominent.
At the same time, "cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zone is the main platform for the transformation and upgrading of China's foreign trade enterprises, which is of great significance to the transformation and upgrading of foreign trade enterprises." Shen Yuliang said.
The cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zone has become a new high ground for innovation and entrepreneurship. There are 37 incubation bases and platforms in various comprehensive test areas such as "Creator Town" and "Public Creation Space". In 2019, more than 6,000 cross-border e-commerce enterprises will be added. Up to now, there are more than 3,000 enterprise brands in the cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zone, and more than 1,200 overseas warehouses have been built in the comprehensive test zone.
Wei Hao said that through the regional expansion effect of cross-border e-commerce and the increase in the number of enterprises, the adverse impact of the epidemic on the traditional trade model has been made up, and it has become a new kinetic energy to promote China's foreign trade growth, which is conducive to the steady development of China's foreign trade.
"The purpose of establishing a cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zone is to encourage more places to promote cross-border e-commerce innovation and development." Zhang Li believes that from this perspective, the cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zone can not be built much, but instead It's more good. The establishment of a cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zone is to support the cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test zone enterprises to gather domestic and overseas circulation elements by strengthening the system construction, platform construction and characteristic construction of each comprehensive test zone, and guide enterprises to reconfigure, integrate and upgrade Channel resources, according to the development laws of cross-border e-commerce and market demand, build a comprehensive cross-border e-commerce service system from the supply chain, value chain and resource chain, forming a standardized development and innovative development situation in each comprehensive test area, driving China's cross-border E-commerce continues to innovate towards high-quality development, thereby injecting new momentum into the sustainable and healthy development of the global economy.
Break through development bottlenecks
In recent years, the scale of China's cross-border e-commerce has expanded rapidly, becoming a prominent highlight of trade growth. The development of cross-border e-commerce has promoted the traditional foreign trade enterprises to "touch online", and also prompted domestic e-commerce platforms to start expanding overseas markets through investment, mergers and acquisitions, and self-built platforms.
"After years of development, China ’s cross-border e-commerce business environment has been continuously improved, and a convenient, liberalized, and standardized development pattern has been formed." Zhang Li also said that new formats such as video and live broadcasts have made cross-border e-commerce innovative development effects. Continue to expand. In particular, the continuous improvement of the cross-border e-commerce service system has driven China's logistics, payment and other digital infrastructure to the world, driven the export of Chinese rules and standards and the international development of Chinese services.
Shen Yuliang said that with the development of cross-border e-commerce, China has formed a leading cross-border e-commerce platform. These platforms started earlier in the international e-commerce platform and are relatively large in scale. At the same time, the cross-border e-commerce public platform has also promoted the formation of a cross-border e-commerce ecosystem in China.
But it should also be noted that there are still some problems in the development of cross-border e-commerce. "Cross-border e-commerce logistics channels are not convenient enough, countries have uncertainties regarding cross-border e-commerce regulatory policies, the lack of anti-risk capabilities of SMEs, and the level of implementation of cross-border e-commerce support policies in various regions still needs to be strengthened Development of border e-commerce. "Zhang Li said.
Shen Yuliang said that at present, in terms of cross-border e-commerce imports, the direct mail model is more affected, but the bonded stock model is less affected. From the perspective of cross-border e-commerce exports, due to the impact of overseas epidemics, logistics distribution is blocked, which may cause short-term logistics lag and long-term global stock preparation difficulties. In the future, China's cross-border e-commerce needs to actively build a global supply chain and maintain flexible supply.
In the next step, China will encourage enterprises to improve supporting services for overseas warehouses and promote the construction of overseas warehouses. At the same time, support domestic cross-border e-commerce platforms to "go global"; support all kinds of foreign trade enterprises and production enterprises to cooperate with international e-commerce platforms to achieve common development. At the same time, we will improve the cross-border e-commerce industry chain and ecosystem, support various cross-border e-commerce comprehensive test areas to gather manufacturing and production, e-commerce platforms, warehousing logistics, financial risk control and other enterprises to develop logistics, payment, express delivery and other service industries To drive local enterprises and upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry chain to “touch online” and create a favorable environment for the development of cross-border e-commerce. (Economic Daily-China Economic Net reporter Feng Qiyu)