Cross-border e-commerce steps up imports

BEIJING: In a recent conference with representatives of several Pakistani small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Luke Liu found they didn’t know the Chinese market well. The country has exported many mined and cotton products to China, but a lot of suppliers—e.g., those of handicrafts—felt at a loss when dealing with Chinese customers.
“While they expressed extreme interest in tapping into the huge Chinese market, they knew little about it, they didn’t understand e-commerce and they were not even aware of whether China gives access to their products,” Liu told Beijing Review. As senior director of business development at JD Worldwide, the cross-border e-commerce platform of China’s e-commerce giant JD.com, Liu has attended many similar meetings, through which he has gained knowledge of the needs of merchants of all kinds from different countries. And he and his team have set out to optimize solutions.
The continuous efforts of experts like Liu have led to China’s high performance in cross-border e-commerce, which has taken off over the past five years, growing 10 times to 1.92 trillion yuan ($269.35 billion) in 2021, accounting for 4.9 percent of the total value of imports and exports, and 3.1 percent of the imports, according to the General Administration of Customs of China. In under one decade of development, China’s cross-border e-commerce has thrived at a rapid pace, becoming a new growth driver of imports in addition to traditional channels.
–The Daily Mail-Beijing review news exchange item