Chinese city to set up e-commerce sites

The e-commerce drive is led by the southern Chinese city of Jingjiang, which is implementing an Internet platform to serve hundreds of small and medium-sized manufacturers.
The SMEs will be connected with e-commerce sites to boost sales of food, baby products, garments, sportswear and footwear sectors in the 10-country Asean Economic Community (AEC).
Chen Yijuan, chief executive of Jinggianggo.com, Jingjianggo.com, the Internet platform spearheaded by the authorities in Jingjiang, said more than 100 firms had signed up to take advantage of the e-commerce business model.
“We’re acting like an incubator for these SMEs, which have no experience or skill in retailing on e-commerce sites. We can show them our experience and coach them how to make use of the Internet to reach overseas customers in Asean countries and other markets.
“For example, we will help them create attractive websites to attract potential customers and arranging payment-transaction systems,” she said.
Chen also runs her family’s private enterprise producing plastic and other toys as well as baby garments for domestic and export sales. It posted US$40 million (Bt1.35 billion) in total sales last year with a significant portion coming from online sales in China.
China currently has the world’s largest network of netizens at more than 600 million, with a fast-growing number of consumers buying goods on the Internet.
In the huge Chinese market, Taobao, owned by Alibaba Group, is the predominant e-commerce site. In addition to Taobao, Jinjianggo.com Jingjianggo.com, the Jingjiang site will work with eBay and Amazon, which are based in the United States, to promote online sales of Chinese products in export markets worldwide.
Chen said Jingjiang had chosen Penang in Malaysia and the Philippines as the sites for opening warehouses and logistic centres for distribution of Chinese products in the AEC where member countries have lowered import duties on most products to zero to create a free-trade area.
Under the framework of Asean-plus-China, Chinese goods also enjoy the tariff privileges.
Customers in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and other Asean countries can order the Chinese products on e-commerce websites anywhere at any time for delivery to their homes or offices via the two distribution centres in Malaysia and the Philippines.
Chen said these two distribution centres would be invested by local businesspeople with connections to overseas Chinese from Fujian province.
In addition, the Jingjiang authorities will also push for the set-up of distribution centres in South Korea and the US to tap their markets.
As China’s traditional exporters have experienced a growth slowdown in key markets around the world, Beijing has turned to the so-called Internet-plus strategy to drive e-commerce, which still has room to grow due to its infancy stage.
Besides e-commerce, China has been promoting online news on websites and mobile devices in the past few years with more than 200 websites currently licensed to publish original news content, features and analyses.
This content is then used by more than 10,000 websites and mobile sites, the latter of which have gained popularity in the past few years due to widespread availability of cheaper mobile devices.
In addition, China has developed social media such as WeChat and Weibo as its versions of Western-style messaging services and Facebook with English and other foreign languages on top of Chinese language.
WeChat and Weibo have been integrated into news, e-commerce and other websites to create a vast network of netizens and consumers.