(Graphics/GT)
B&R meets B2C
Chinese e-commerce companies are beefing up payment and logistics services in countries and regions along China's "One Belt and One Road" (B&R) initiative, helping to both promote the government's plans for the initiative and expand the companies' own customer bases. Alibaba, through its global retail site AliExpress, has been among the most active companies expanding along the B&R. Alibaba founder Jack Ma Yun proposed creating a private-sector Electronic World Trade Platform to specifically support the initiative. But just because Chinese companies are eager to expand abroad doesn't mean that oversea countries are ready for them.
Li Guibin remembers feeling both "excitement and anxiety" the first time his company sold products directly to Russian customers online. Li is Chief Operating Officer of the Beijing-based women's apparel company Zhong Ding Tai Feng.
The year was 2015. Zhong Ding Tai Feng had received more than 2,000 orders from Russian buyers in the first hour of the "Double 11" mega sale on November 11 through AliExpress, Alibaba's global retail site.
Li was excited about the volume of the sales, but anxious about their execution. It took more than an hour for many customers to pay for their purchases as a flood of orders paralyzed the shopping platform and overwhelmed Russia's banking system, Li told the Global Times on Wednesday.
It was then that Li realized that some countries were unprepared for cross-border e-commerce.
Since then, however, things have got better. In early 2016, Alibaba's in-house payment unit formed an alliance with the Russian bank VTB to offer a reliable shopping experience for Russian consumers.
"Russia's banking system processed 15,000 of our orders without a hitch during 2016's Double 11 shopping festival," Li said.
The figure was double the number of sales the system handled in 2015, he noted.
The improvements in Russia are just some of the advances that Chinese e-commerce platforms have helped facilitate to smooth out transactions with countries and regions involved in China's "One Belt and One Road" (B&R) initiative.
The B&R initiative span 65 countries and regions, connecting 4.4 billion people and representing about 40 percent of global GDP, according a report by the World Bank.
Following the 'Belt and Road'
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the B&R initiative to create a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa.
AliExpress aims to build a "Cyber Silk Road" in line with the initiative, the company stated in a press release to the Global Times on April 10.
Speaking at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia in 2016, Alibaba's founder Jack Ma Yun said the most important regions for his company were those along the B&R route.
Apart from Russia, Alibaba has also formed partnerships with Kazakhstan, Singapore, Spain and countries in Southeast Asia to improve logistics and payment services.
In early 2016, Ma proposed establishing an Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP), which he called a private-sector initiative to support the B&R.
In its latest step toward creating the eWTP, Alibaba announced on March 23 that it planned to set up its first digital free trade zone outside its home market in Malaysia. The digital free trade zone would, with support from the Malaysian government, seek to improve logistics and financial services to boost trade and e-commerce across borders.
