Baoding, Hebei: E-commerce industry accelerates
2024-08-08
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A cross-border e-commerce company in Baigou New Town, Baoding City, Hebei Province, sells backpacks to overseas markets through live broadcast. Photo by Feng Yun
The Zhili Zhenpin Brand Exhibition in Baoding attracted internet celebrities to select products and live stream them. Photo by Li Fang
On a summer night, walking into the Qianshi e-commerce live broadcast base in Lixian County, Baoding City, Hebei Province, the display area is full of specialty agricultural products. The live broadcast room is bustling with anchors interacting with the audience and promoting local products.
Han Zhen, director of the Baoding Municipal Bureau of Commerce, introduced that in recent years, Baoding has regarded the e-commerce industry as an important engine to promote the high-quality development of the city's economy. Through top-level design to consolidate the foundation, leading enterprises to build platforms, and enterprises to participate in coordination and linkage, the e-commerce industry has achieved high-quality development. In 2023, Baoding's online retail sales reached 47.85 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26.4%. In the report "2023 Douyin E-commerce Industry Belt Development in This Year", it ranked eighth in the sales volume of urban commodities in the country.
Improve the system
"Baoding has obvious location advantages, a good industrial foundation, an excellent business environment, and its e-commerce industry is developing rapidly with great development potential." Last November, at the 2023 Asian E-Commerce Ecosystem Conference held in Baoding, Zhang Weizhi, Chairman of the World Electronic Ports and Logistics Organization and tutor at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education Center of the School of Philosophy of Zhejiang University, was full of confidence in the development prospects of Baoding's e-commerce industry.
At present, e-commerce is the "dream factory" for entrepreneurs and the "gold mine" for entrepreneurs.
In line with the development trend of new business forms, Baoding City regards the cultivation and expansion of the e-commerce industry as an important support for strengthening the industry, promoting consumption, and expanding employment. It has issued a three-year action plan for the development of the e-commerce industry, ten measures to promote the construction of "three products" in the online consumer market, and ten policies to support the high-quality development of e-commerce. It clearly provides support in terms of land, funds, talents, finance, and supporting services.
Baoding e-commerce companies with annual operating income exceeding 50 million yuan and annual online transaction volume exceeding 100 million yuan will be rewarded and subsidized, as well as well-known e-commerce and cross-border e-commerce companies that settle and register here. High-end e-commerce talents will enjoy preferential policies such as entrepreneurship support, housing subsidies, children's schooling, and life services. At the same time, financial institutions are encouraged to provide e-commerce companies with tailor-made financial service solutions, set up e-commerce industry development sub-funds, and support schools and enterprises to jointly build off-campus e-commerce training bases.
Build e-commerce public service platforms at the city and county levels to provide e-commerce operations, supply chain optimization, brand building, omni-media marketing, data analysis, finance and other services. According to the characteristics of county product distribution, build nine smart cloud warehouses in batches to solve problems such as scattered product storage, low logistics efficiency, and high enterprise operating costs. All administrative villages have access to and coverage of fiber-optic broadband and 4G networks.
Build a comprehensive platform for municipal network market supervision and services, implement the "Safe Consumption to Help Rural Revitalization Project", strengthen online intellectual property protection of geographical indication brands, and optimize the development environment of the network economy.
Competition in the e-commerce industry is ultimately a competition for talent. Baoding City has vigorously promoted the e-commerce talent training project and launched the "100,000 E-commerce" public welfare training project. Through training on basic e-commerce knowledge, practical skills, short videos, and live e-commerce, 100,000 e-commerce operators were trained throughout the year, providing talent guarantee for the leapfrog development of the e-commerce industry.
Baoding has also adopted the method of training through competition and improving quality through training to cultivate e-commerce talents. Among them, the first live broadcast with goods charity week competition attracted 74 groups of players and teams from the province to participate, and more than 400 county-specific products from 98 enterprises in the city participated in online and offline sales. The total sales of the live broadcast room reached 18.76 million yuan, the total number of views reached 5.26 million times, and the number of fans increased by about 150,000. The online sales demonstration and leading role of products from the leisure food, home furnishings and textiles industries was obvious, and a network marketable product selection library was established.
With policy guarantees, strong support, superior environment and a gathering of talents, Baoding's e-commerce ecosystem is becoming increasingly perfect, and the momentum of high-quality development of e-commerce is strong.
Leading
Yam and wool textiles are traditional specialty industries in Lixian County. Chen Weiwei, head of the Qianshi e-commerce live broadcast base in Lixian County, said: "Through the government's platform, we established an e-commerce base. More than 300 local 'new farmers' dared to 'try new things' and joined the live broadcast. Live broadcast has become their 'new farm work'."
Driven by enterprises, supported by policies and guided by the market, Lixian County has formed a huge e-commerce industrial cluster by developing five e-commerce fulcrums: county-level e-commerce public service centers, live broadcast bases, logistics distribution hubs, township trade centers, and village-level convenience stores. There are more than 14,000 active online stores in the county, directly employing and driving more than 90,000 people, with annual online sales exceeding 7 billion yuan.
Relying on 27 county-level characteristic industrial clusters with digital transformation, Baoding City has built a new e-commerce development pattern of "one base, two centers, and multiple nodes" and a logistics space construction pattern of "one ring, two hubs, three clusters, and four channels".
Today, Baoding has 4 provincial e-commerce demonstration bases, 10 provincial e-commerce demonstration enterprises, and 1 digital commerce enterprise of the Ministry of Commerce. Lianchi District of Baoding has become one of the key bases for cultivating the live broadcast industry in the "Internet Market Supervision and Service" program.
Baoding Digital Media Live Broadcasting Industry Base is an e-commerce industry project carefully built by the city, with a total investment of 50 million yuan. It is a public service platform for the live broadcasting industry that integrates digital command, e-commerce operation, supply chain optimization, brand building, data analysis, talent training, financial services, logistics cloud warehouse, and corporate services. It fully promotes the development of the digital e-commerce industry. So far, 26 merchants and enterprises have settled in, creating annual sales revenue of 20 million yuan.
In order to give full play to the driving and enabling role of the e-commerce industry, Baigou New City has specially established a digital transformation empowerment center for the luggage industry in Baigou New City, and completed the construction of 12 modules such as "Regional Enterprise Public Service Platform", "Digital Transformation Diagnostic Platform" and "Baigou Enterprise Strategy Exchange". At the same time, through cooperation with the official platform of Douyin to create the "Baigou Luggage Industry Belt" project, more than 600 service providers have signed contracts, and the transaction volume will reach 820 million yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 35.5%. Si Xu, general manager of Baoding Shengshizhixing Luggage Manufacturing Co., Ltd., said: "The integration of industrial upgrading and e-commerce open source development has achieved remarkable results. The company has increased its product innovation efforts and produces 1.5 million luggage annually. At the same time, it conducts business with third-party platforms such as Alibaba National Station, Chengxintong, and Taobao. Luggage is exported to the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Southeast Asia and other countries and regions, creating annual sales revenue of more than 60 million yuan, of which online sales account for more than 80% of total sales."
At the same time, Baoding City actively carried out "one-to-one" precise docking with e-commerce platforms such as JD.com, Alibaba, Meituan, Pinduoduo, Douyin, and Kuaishou, driving the upgrading of local platforms. At present, the local area has reached cooperation intentions with multiple e-commerce platforms on e-commerce training, live broadcast competitions, and smart cloud warehouse construction, and successfully introduced cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba International Station and Amazon and independent station marketing positions.
Relying on the JD Supermarket open platform, a large number of merchants in the city's paper products industry belt, including Libang, Yusen, Dr. King, Shukle, and Dreamweaver, have achieved e-commerce development, with annual transaction volume increasing by more than 100% year-on-year.
Data provided by Alibaba International Station shows that Baoding companies have opened more than 1,200 stores on the platform, with export volume of US$130 million and an average annual compound growth rate of 15%.
Integrated Development
On March 26 this year, the 1688 Baoding Industrial Belt Cultivation Project with the theme of "Platform Empowers Quality and Strengthens the City to Promote High-quality Development" was launched in Baoding City, attracting more than 300 manufacturing companies to participate. Based on the characteristics of Baoding Industrial Belt, digital capability level, online service capabilities, credit of business entities and other multi-dimensional standards, Baoding City and the 1688 platform jointly launched the "1688 Baoding Industrial Belt Digital Map" online resource, through a series of activities such as continuous training empowerment and compliance guidance, vigorously supporting manufacturing companies to accelerate the pace of digital transformation and promote industrial upgrading.
Haisen Huachong Import and Export Trading Zhuozhou Co., Ltd. is a company engaged in pet food and supplies. Xie Rui, the company's business manager, said: "Previously, most of the company's products were sold overseas through cross-border e-commerce platforms. The export volume of cat litter alone accounted for 20% of the country's total exports. We hope to use the 1688 platform to expand the domestic market and drive more Zhuozhou companies to enter the pet food and supplies industry chain."
The new e-commerce model is accelerating its integration with the real economy, improving the efficiency of production and sales matching, and providing small and micro businesses and "white-label" businesses with opportunities to "overtake on curves" and "break through development."
In the past, Gaoyang towels were limited by factors such as limited consumption radius, and some products were not compatible with the national market in terms of consumer positioning and brand competitiveness. E-commerce has opened up new development space for Gaoyang's textile industry, and the new market development situation has also forced textile companies to continuously upgrade. Various textile companies have changed their development methods, optimized their product structures, and rationally allocated various resources to continuously improve their competitiveness. More than 100 companies such as Sanli and Yongliang in Gaoyang County have established independent research and development institutions, invested in the application of a number of high-tech technologies, and the proportion of products using new materials such as bamboo fiber has reached more than 45%.
The coordinated linkage of the e-commerce industry has promoted the healthy development of Baoding's characteristic industries. At present, the city has the Baigou luggage industry with an annual transaction volume of 40 billion yuan and products exported to 194 countries and regions; the Mancheng household paper industry, which accounts for a quarter of the national household paper market and has been awarded the title of the national consumer goods industry "three-product" strategic city; the Gaoyang textile industry, which has more than 2,000 e-commerce stores and more than 600 cross-border e-commerce companies; the Lixian wool spinning industry, with online sales exceeding 6 billion yuan and an annual express delivery volume of 109 million pieces, as well as Anguo Chinese medicinal materials, Laishui hemp walnuts, Lixian hemp yam, Shunping specialty fruit, Fuping jujube and other characteristic agriculture. (Economic Daily reporter Song Meiqian)
Source: Economic Daily
