New growth engine for China-ASEAN trade: E-commerce

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"China and ASEAN has great potential for cooperation in e-commerce," says Wang Xun, Vice President of the World Trade Centers Association on the 15th China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit (CABIS) which concluded on Thursday in Nanning, capital of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

“However, e-commerce is still at a nascent stage in Southeast Asia,” Wang said that ASEAN countries could cooperate with Chinese enterprises to create more ASEAN's own cross-border e-commerce platform.

“The technological and channel advantages of Chinese enterprises can drive the development of related industries in Southeast Asia, and the cooperation between the two sides will further promote the development of bilateral cross-border e-commerce, “he added.

Chen Zhou, Vice Chairman of the CABIS also called to bring China and ASEAN “E-commerce Silk Road” closer together. “This vast potential market of online shoppers offers more and more business opportunities to enterprises from both sides,” he said.

China-ASEAN Cross-border E-commerce Cooperation Forum./CGTN Photo

Over 260 million people living in ASEAN countries are Internet users, representing the fastest-growing regional population of people with online access anywhere in the world. But a report noted that the E-commerce sales in Southeast Asia reached 9 billion US dollars in 2015, up 29 percent from 2010. The figure accounted for less than 1 percent of the global online sales.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of companies in ASEAN are seeing e-commerce as a new growth engine for China-ASEAN trade.

Many Chinese e-commerce companies have already launched campaigns in ASEAN, improving bilateral trade. JD.com, for example, sold more than 115,000 Thai durians to Chinese customers in a single day in May, a record on its fresh food e-commerce platform.

Suning.com, another e-commerce platform in China, operates a China-ASEAN e-commerce platform, which was established in late 2016. It has had well over 1.2 million orders and sales over 26 million yuan.

Statistics show that the annual value of China's e-commerce market stood at 5.5 trillion yuan (868.5 billion US dollars) in 2017, up 28 percent over the previous year. About 10 percent of the volume came from offshore products.