Speech @ Forum on e-commerce and modern logistics

This forum co-organized by the EU-China Information Society Project was to assess the state of current e-commerce and logistics (as they go hand in hand) in China. Some quick facts gathered at this event:

• On the logistics side, the cost of transporting goods in China is apparently still in the 20% range vs. 10% in more developed places and there are numerous inefficiencies. At the city level, logistics can help improve the economy as it attracts businesses and support the city development.

• Our presentation dealt with the e-commerce side, and what could be learn from EU and other countries to see how to stimulate the market by improving the regulatory framework.

The main ideas we put forward were:

(1) Defining the limits of e-commerce is not so easy. We gave numerous examples illustrating this situation (Ctrip, Taobao, Alibaba, +8*, m-commerce, online stocks trading, IM-commerce). Especially, there is very little difference with ‘offline commerce’ aside from the data management and security issue.

(2) e-commerce promotes entrepreneurship, creates jobs, stimulates businesses and provides better value to consumers and businesses. We gave some examples from overseas like eBay (over 1 million users make a living on eBay), Rakuten (close to 60,000 businesses have opened shop on this ‘online shopping mall’ in Japan) and Naver (Korea’s largest online portal, which integrates a shopping channel on its main page).

(3) Over-regulating is largely counter-productive, as Internet (and mobile) are essentially just another distribution channel.

(4) One of the main challenges is to build trust online and increase e-commerce literacy.
It was a rather large event and no time was allocated to Q&A. There will likely be a more focused follow-up event in the coming weeks.