General

"This year, the foreign trade environment was' not easy ', and the foreign trade people were' not easy '. From recently to the end of the year, people often asked: Will it be better next year?" At the scene of the final of the "Digital Foreign Trade True Cow Award" held a few days ago, Zhang Kuo, president of Alibaba International Station, said, "In the past year, the resilience of Chinese foreign trade people is the greatest confidence we have in the future."

Behind the order of 200 million yuan

A single transaction of nearly 200 million yuan! This is the largest order Shenzhen Shuoteng Technology Co., Ltd. has received this year, and also the largest order this company has ever received.

When talking about this order, Luo Chang, the person in charge of the enterprise, was relieved. "Behind every big foreign trade order, there are countless people silently working hard and making efforts. The team of Shuotang Technology spent many years before and after getting this single order of nearly 200 million yuan to enrich their own strength; the financial and logistics partners of Alibaba International Station worked together with Shuotang for eight months to implement this order."

In fact, this is not the first time that Shuoteng Technology has received a large order. As early as May 2020, Shuoteng Technology obtained the largest single overseas order of the company at that time - 3.46 million dollars, equivalent to more than 20 million yuan, through Alibaba International Station. More importantly, although the business was negotiated, the two parties did not meet and the other party paid directly.

On the same day, Luo Chang excitedly sent a circle of friends, "The two sides have not met for business cooperation of tens of millions of yuan, and the factory has not even come to the site to review the advance payment of millions of yuan, which can only happen in today's e-commerce era."

In Luo Chang's view, the support needed to complete a large order is invisible when the supply and demand parties do not meet. Overseas customers require small and medium-sized enterprises in international trade to complete the construction of their comprehensive capabilities from the aspects of touch, transformation, order, delivery, service, etc. The cost and effort are huge. Through the Internet platform, customers can use 3D factory viewing, video conferencing and other digital high-tech products to try to approach the real situation and enhance mutual trust.

"At this time, it is particularly important for SMEs in international trade to take advantage of cross-border e-commerce platforms to achieve their own high-quality growth and build their own digital strength expression and delivery capabilities. This is also a place where people in charge of foreign trade manufacturing enterprises need to constantly think, innovate and learn," Luo Chang said.

"Dominate the screen" of e-commerce for the elderly

In this regard, Zhang Fucai, general manager of Shanghai Sixiu Composite Cloth Co., Ltd., who just celebrated his 70th birthday, has his own experience. Twenty years ago, Zhang Fucai, who was laid off from state-owned enterprises for six years, decided to start his own business. To this end, he borrowed 300,000 yuan from his friends and sold the house in his hometown at a discount. Time flies. Zhang Fucai's company now has dozens of employees, with an annual sales volume of more than 100 million yuan. More than 90% of the company's export business comes from the Internet platform.

In 2007, Zhang Fucai registered for Alibaba International Station. In 2011, his company gradually abandoned domestic sales channels and focused on foreign trade. Many customers have not met in the past 10 years, but have always insisted on cooperating with him on Alibaba International Station. This makes Zhang Fucai feel incredible.

At first, Zhang Fucai had only one Alibaba International Station store. But in the next five years, he opened six more in a row. Zhang Fucai attached great importance to reputation, so he opened Jinpincheng Enterprise for each store.

Zhang Fucai did not know foreign languages, so he recruited five operation managers and more than a dozen e-commerce international trade clerks for seven stores, which mainly exported clothing fabrics, bedding, pet products, etc. Others admired him for his courage. He smiled and replied, "I'm old. If I don't work hard, I won't have time."

Zhang Fucai always likes to describe himself with the words commonly used by young people: "To be big, to dominate the screen." In order to make his product "dominate the screen" in Alibaba International Station, he uses almost all promotion tools, "For example, the keywords of the through train are the fastest way to come. The words I promote can accurately find the target audience. After all, most of the customers on the platform rely on search to find the source of goods".

In recent years, Zhang Fucai has made greater efforts to improve the weight and star rating of his stores. "In addition, some of our stores are very old, which will leave a deep impression on customers. Under the normalization of the epidemic, most new customers are found from e-commerce".

Where does the newly increased foreign trade come from

This year, opportunities and challenges undoubtedly coexist for China's foreign trade merchants. For the endless "black swans", China's foreign traders did not "lie down", and the achievements were hard won.

According to the data released by the General Administration of Customs, China's total import and export value in the first 11 months of this year was 38.34 trillion yuan, an increase of 8.6% over the same period last year (the same below). Among them, the export reached 21.84 trillion yuan, up 11.9%; Imports reached 16.5 trillion yuan, up 4.6%; The trade surplus was 5.34 trillion yuan, an increase of 42.8%.

Recently, when enterprises across the country go to sea to "grab orders", they often see the pages of various major media. In this regard, Zhang Kuo said that "incremental" in 2023 will once again become the key word of China's foreign trade. "Helping SMEs in international trade find new growth in the global market will be the core task of Alibaba International Station next year."

Zhang Kuo believes that China's foreign trade as a whole is expected to develop a "U-shaped" rebound trend curve in 2023. "'U-shaped bounce' instead of 'V-shaped straight bounce'. Recovery takes time, but recovery will come."

Zhang Kuo said that the recovery of overseas market demand is a highly probable event that can be expected. Judging from recent data, the inflation rate in Europe and the United States is falling from a high level, the inflection point of overseas inventory will also occur next year, and overseas demand will recover next year. As a leading indicator in the field of foreign trade, the number of active visits and high-quality business opportunities of a series of cross-border e-commerce platforms represented by Alibaba International Station are continuously rising, which is a clear signal. The increase does not mean returning to the era of "barbaric growth", but will come from the optimization of industry structure to a large extent. In this process, the digitalization of foreign trade is still in its infancy, and digital foreign trade will be the most determined increment.

"It can be expected that the incremental space of digital foreign trade is huge, and it is also the most certain increment of foreign trade in the future." Zhang Kuo believes that, under the epidemic situation, digitization was originally an emergency measure for many international trade enterprises, but after the epidemic situation, the use habits of digital foreign trade services will be irreversible, and this advantage will certainly continue. Affected by this, the improvement of digital foreign trade service capacity will become a powerful guarantee to seize the new increment.