China-Europe freight trains

As air cargo companies finds solutions for cross-border e-commerce, so does shipping businesses on the ground, especially China's enormous rail freight sector.

On April 7, China's State Council put forward a string of measures to boost cross-border e-commerce and foreign trade. It plans to establish 46 new cross-border e-commerce pilot zones in addition to the existing 59 ones, and make further efforts to smooth international freight channels such as China-Europe freight trains and improve cargo connections.

Even before this call for action, those cargo transport trains had already been on the move. On April 6, the first China-Europe freight trains specifically for postal parcels left Chongqing with 42 containers of international parcels and two containers of relief supplies, scheduled to arrive in Lithuania on April 13. A new line of freight trains was also opened from Xi'an to Barcelona on April 8, and trains from Wuhan have also begun to resume normal operations.

According to data from China Railway, in the first three months of this year, the China-Europe freight trains fulfilled 1,941 runs and sent 174,000 standard containers, up 15% and 18% year on year, respectively. The number of runs and containers sent in March both registered record highs.

Suggestions and more calls for action

"What we should think amid the outbreak is how to be worthy of the chances brought by the crisis, and make progress and get stronger," DHgate.com's Diane Wang said.

Recalling that many companies managed to rapidly adapt and go online in order to survive the 2003 SARS outbreak and thrive, Wang said the digital transformation amid the COVID-19 outbreak will again be very important.

She also called for coordination among cross-border e-commerce companies as well as for more efforts from the Chinese side to help other countries build their e-commerce ecosystem.

Henan Bonded Group's Xu said she noticed that cross-border e-commerce already gained more traction among people and small- and micro-sized enterprises around the world amid the outbreak.

She said the outbreak can be an opportunity to promote cross-border e-commerce—a new growth engine for foreign trade—as the habits of people across the world come to change and the sector come to realize what it falls short of, such as the last-kilometer delivery in overseas countries.

Speaking at the same forum as Xu, State Council Counsellor Tang Min said that, despite non-contact sectors seeing an overall rapid growth in the past two months, individual companies did not necessarily see such a trend in their businesses.

However, “confidence is more important than gold during the unprecedented hard time,” Tang said. Addressing companies coping with impacts of the outbreak, he said, "You are not fighting alone. The country, the government, the industrial associations, the customers, and many others are with you."

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