Public, private sectors rev up support for cross-border e-commerce
- By Zhang Jiaqi
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 14, 2020
In 2004, the second year after SARS raged across China, Diane Wang founded DHgate.com. Over the years of ups and downs, the B2B e-commerce trading and service platform has helped many small- and micro-sized enterprises to conduct business across the border. This year, when COVID-19 broke out, she felt that the website's mission became even more important.
Wang said she has seen China's trading companies going through much hardship since the outbreak. At the beginning of the year when the epidemic began to plague the country, businesses faced difficulties in maintaining operations and filling orders from abroad. Now, the spread of COVID-19 has eased in the country but swept across the globe, hitting the companies a second time and bringing along serious new challenges — decreased demands, plunging logistics capacity, and notable pressure on cash flow.
"The year 2020 can be a year of life and death for many small- and micro-sized enterprises in the foreign trade sector," Wang said during a live TED-style webcast by business magazine China Entrepreneur. "So it is urgent to make routine-breaking moves." Fortunately, both the government and e-commerce platforms in China have mounted up their support for such companies.
Non-guarantee concessional loans
Leading the DHgate.com team, Wang made her moves to offer help.
On Feb. 5, the third day after the Chinese New Year holiday, DHgate.com updated the agreement with the state-owned China Construction Bank (CCB) on an e-commerce loan product that they launched together last December, lowering the interest rate for cross-border sellers on the platform from 5% to 4.5%.
Beyond the financial aspect, the platform also offers support on logistics. It invited China Post—one of the major logistics providers for exporting e-commerce goods from China—to brief companies on logistics services during the outbreak and answer their questions in a live webcast. It drew more than 12,000 views and prompted nearly 1,000 online interactions.
Charter cargo flights
Wang was never fighting against the setbacks during the trying time alone, as the country witnessed rapidly developing cross-border e-commerce businesses.
Xu Ping, head of the Henan Bonded Group, has been doing her part to cope with challenges in the field, one of them being international shipping.
While participating in an online cross-border e-commerce development forum on March 22, Xu said the cargo-carrying capacity of international passenger flights is down over 80%, and charter flights came to be the only solution for transporting cargo over trunk international air routes.
On April 8, the first charter plane of China Gate Logistics (CGL)—a subsidiary of the Henan Bonded Group—took off with cross-border e-commerce cargo as well as donated COVID-19 prevention supplies, and headed for Europe.
With a price 20% lower than the market price offered to the companies in the Henan Bonded Logistics Center, the cargo spaces had been booked up within three days after being opened up for application.After the cargo plane landed in Belgium, the cargo went through customs clearance and went on expedited routes to other European countries.
Now, the Zhengzhou-Liege European charter flights operate twice a week regularly. CGL is also planning to offer charter flights to North America soon, with a frequency of three times a week. The first flight to New York has been scheduled for May 1.
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