Cross-border e-commerce becomes new engine of China's foreign trade

①: Cargo trucks wait to be loaded at the customs clearance center for the cross-border e-commerce of the Alataw Pass comprehensive bonded zone in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. [Xinhua/Ding Lei]

②: Staff members transport cross-border goods in the Jinyi comprehensive bonded zone in Jinhua city, east China's Zhejiang Province. [cpanet.cn/Hu Xiaofei]

China's cross-border e-commerce has developed rapidly in recent years, becoming a new engine driving the high-quality development of the country's foreign trade.

China's cross-border e-commerce jumped 16 percent year on year in the first half of 2023 to 1.1 trillion yuan ($153.9 billion). Of these, exports through e-commerce increased by 19.9 percent to 821 billion yuan, while imports reached 276 billion yuan, up 5.7 percent.

The value of the country's cross-border e-commerce imports and exports exceeded two trillion yuan for the first time in 2022, reaching 2.1 trillion yuan, an increase of 7.1 percent compared to 2021, according to customs data. Last year, the country's cross-border e-commerce accounted for 4.9 percent of its total foreign trade.

Data from the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) showed that the proportion of trade through cross-border e-commerce in China's total foreign trade has risen from less than 1 percent in 2018 to about 5 percent at present.

"Cross-border e-commerce, as a new form of foreign trade, is becoming the new normal of foreign trade," said Zhao Ping, president of the Academy of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

According to Zhao, there are three trends in the development of cross-border e-commerce, namely, the normalization of market demand, increasingly improved bilateral and multilateral rules, and the rise of independent cross-border e-commerce sites.

With the continuous development of cross-border e-commerce, new business forms in the sector, including overseas warehouses, have been improved at an accelerated pace.

Overseas warehouses have become an important channel and driving force for cross-border e-commerce enterprises' export growth because of the flexible operations advantages of stocking in advance, batch transportation, and local returns and exchanges.

Suncha Technology Co., Ltd., a company that mainly exports bamboo chopsticks and chopping blocks based in Yuhang district, Hangzhou city, east China's Zhejiang Province, is increasing input on overseas e-commerce platforms.

"After overseas customers place orders on e-commerce platforms, we can directly deliver goods from overseas warehouses, which not only provides them with a better shopping experience but also helps improve our company's reputation and popularity," said Yu Jiaqi, an executive of the company.

China currently has more than 100,000 cross-border e-commerce entities, over 200,000 independent cross-border e-commerce sites, and about 690 cross-border e-commerce industrial parks located in comprehensive pilot zones. It has signed bilateral e-commerce cooperation memorandums with 29 countries and regions.

China has rolled out a package of measures to promote the development of cross-border e-commerce. The MOFCOM said it will foster a model of cross-border e-commerce plus industrial belts, and promote the exports of more characteristic products based on the country's 165 comprehensive pilot zones for cross-border e-commerce. It will guide these comprehensive pilot zones to further improve service platforms and instruct overseas warehouses to use these comprehensive service platforms to realize one-stop comprehensive services.

Shanghai recently launched a comprehensive service platform for overseas warehouses, and issued an action plan to promote the high-quality development of cross-border e-commerce in the city.

East China's Shandong Province aims to build 20 characteristic cross-border e-commerce industrial belts, nurture 100 renowned brands with international competitiveness, and incubate 1,000 emerging cross-border e-commerce companies by 2025.