E-commerce company defies gloomy trade outlook

At a time when complaints about soft overseas demand dominate, Shenzhen OneTouch Enterprise Service Co has managed to generate a 300 percent surge in exports on its platform in the first 11 months of the year.

The company provides online foreign trade business outsourcing services for small enterprises and individuals.

Founded in 2001, it joined Alibaba Group, China's biggest e-commerce company, in 2010. It has registered about 300 percent growth in foreign trade every year for the past three years, said Xiao Feng, deputy general manager of the company.

Shenzhen OneTouch is expected to facilitate imports and exports of $1.8 billion this year, compared with $600 million last year.

With foreign trade of $670 million in the first half of this year, its ranking among general trade businesses in the country leaped from 94th last year to 13th this year.

It was serving more than 9,000 clients in mid-October, with its one-stop services covering finance, customs clearance, logistics, duty rebates and foreign exchange management.

It helps cut the management cost of its clients by as much as 50 percent and logistics costs by 10 to 30 percent.

With manufacturing costs constantly growing, small foreign trade companies urgently need to concentrate on services to improve profitability, Xiao said.

As international trade becomes increasingly subdivided, related services have also split, becoming more costly, leading to a demand for concentrated services.

With the combined demand from clients, OneTouch is able to bargain with banks and other service providers and receive better services from the government, Xiao said.

OneTouch facilitates trade financing to its clients from banks, helping its clients meet capital demands and banks lower their risks.

Shenzhen OneTouch is one of several businesses engaged in new foreign trade models, which have driven the imports and exports of Shenzhen and Guangdong province, said Zheng Jianrong, deputy director of the provincial Department of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.

With a 6.4 percent growth, Guangdong, a champion of foreign trade in the past two decades, beat both the national increase of 5.8 percent and most coastal provinces in foreign trade in the first 11 months of this year.

As a new foreign trade model, OneTouch helps lower the cost of foreign trade, raise efficiency and lift the competitiveness of the export commodity supply chain, says a research report of Zheng's department.

Zheng said the foreign trade growth of the province is expected to slow slightly next year.

Traditional foreign markets, which make up more than 70 percent of the exports of Guangdong, are expected to remain soft, with the European Union looking discouraging in the coming years, trade with Japan registering negative growth and trade with the United States expanding slowly.

On a more positive note, emerging markets, including Africa, South Korea, South America, ASEAN members and Eastern Europe, will present significant potential.

Guangdong has seen an improvement in creating brands and quality export products, as opposed to mere processing capacity.

Domestic policies have become more favorable, including those on duty rebate, export credit insurance and tax cuts.

The provincial foreign trade authorities hope to foster more businesses engaged in new foreign trade models and enable more small foreign trade enterprises in Guangdong to become aware of such services.