(2020 Service Trade Fair) Observation of Service Trade Fair: How many hurdles have to be crossed after cross-border e-commerce "fly into the sky"?

  China News Service, Beijing, September 6 (Reporter Li Xiaoyu) Under the epidemic, the traditional foreign trade door has narrowed, but it has opened a "window" to cross-border e-commerce.

However, to make this window bigger, there are still several "hurdles" to be overcome.

  Zhang Bin, deputy director of the Foreign Trade Department of the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, said at the Cross-border E-commerce Forum at the 2020 E-Commerce Conference held on the 6th that in the context of the current global pandemic, cross-border e-commerce has expanded the space for foreign trade development to provide SMEs More groups have brought new development opportunities.

  Official data show that the total value of China's imports and exports of goods trade in the first seven months of this year was 17.16 trillion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1.7%, and the rate of decline narrowed 1.5 percentage points from the first half of the year.

Among them, exports fell by 0.9% and imports fell by 2.6%.

  Zhang Bin said that the reason why China's foreign trade data was better than expected is that, in addition to the official foreign trade stabilization policies that are super-normal in strength and frequency, cross-border e-commerce is also a major growth point.

  Affected by the epidemic, cross-border e-commerce has become an effective means for companies to explore new markets.

According to official statistics, in the first half of this year, China's customs cross-border e-commerce supervision platform imports and exports increased by 26.2%, of which exports increased by 28.7% and imports increased by 24.4%, which was much higher than the overall growth rate of China's imports and exports during the same period.

  In Zhang Bin's view, considering that the international economic and trade landscape is undergoing profound adjustments, the global economy and trade are unstable, and uncertainties are increasing, cross-border e-commerce will face more new opportunities in the future.

Irish Ambassador to China Li Xiuwen (H.EEoinO'Leary) also said that cross-border e-commerce has become a "critical opportunity" under the epidemic.

  However, three hurdles need to be crossed for the current cross-border e-commerce to achieve rapid development.

  The first "hurdle" is how to enable more small and medium foreign trade companies to participate in cross-border e-commerce and benefit from them.

  During the interview, the reporter found that although many traditional foreign trade companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, have the willingness to transform online, they suffer from lack of experience and have shortcomings in online marketing.

  Xu Danxia, ​​chairman of Xiaobenniao’s cross-border e-commerce platform, said frankly that many people in the industry believe that the restructuring of the global value chain system has become inevitable in the future, but it is difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to respond to this trend in a timely manner due to problems such as lack of funds. challenge.

  The second "hurdle" is how to create a good "soft environment" for cross-border e-commerce.

  There are buying and selling in trade, and cross-border e-commerce naturally depends on whether buyers and sellers can fit together.

Chai Yueting, a professor at Tsinghua University and director of the National Engineering Laboratory of Electronic Commerce Transaction Technology, believes that for cross-border e-commerce to make great progress, effective international cooperation is indispensable.

The most important of these is to strengthen cooperation between different countries in cross-border e-commerce policies and regulations, and reach an operational consensus on laws, policies, market access, etc., to give enterprises "reassurance."

  The key for countries to strengthen cooperation around cross-border e-commerce lies in adhering to the principle of openness, abandoning protectionism, and removing all kinds of unnecessary barriers. In the words of OECD Deputy Secretary-General Nudsen, the current barriers in the field of digital trade Increasingly, it is important to clear the barriers in electronic transactions, payment systems, and cross-border data flows by opening markets.

  The third "hurdle" is how to provide strong "hard support" for cross-border e-commerce.

  Chai Yueting said that with the current increase in personalized customer demand, the expectations for the speed of order response have also increased, which requires the digital supply chain to have efficient operation capabilities.

Although China has many digital management platforms for certain regions and industries, not many have crossed national boundaries. In the future, international cooperation should be strengthened around building digital supply chain platforms.

  He said that the reason why cross-border e-commerce has not suffered much in the epidemic is largely because logistics has remained basically stable.

But in fact, there is still a lot of room for strengthening cross-border logistics information interconnection.

In the future, countries should explore effective cooperation methods to further reduce the logistics costs of cross-border e-commerce.

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