China E-commerce World’s Biggest in 2013
I buy a lot of stuff and services online, often much cheaper than in retail stores.
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Cyberspace is the new frontier as China is poised to overtake Japan and the US as the biggest e-commerce market in the world next year.
Suning Appliance Co Ltd, China’s largest electrical appliances retailer, has its own online retail website for several years; Alibaba has continued to expand by consolidating taobao.com, etao.com, tmall.com, ju.taobao.com, Alibaba Small Business, Alibaba International Business and Alibaba Cloud Computing – all under its wings – into one huge marketplace.
Vancl, Yihaodian, 360buy.com and Suning have gone one step further with their applications for licences to set up their own express delivery companies.
Every now and then, new online retail companies will don advertisements at subway stations and on subway trains.
On Tuesday, Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Shen Danyang said at a press conference that in the first three quarters of the year retail sales from e-commerce transactions in China reached 806.2 billion yuan (C$128.3 bil), which was up by 44% from the corresponding period last year.
He said the bank card penetration rate was 46.3% while average spending by the use of bank cards grew by 24.3%.
The ministry’s e-commerce division head Li Jinqi was quoted by China Business News as saying that e-commerce grew by more than 30% between 2007 and 2010 and the number of online consumers in China reached 210 million by the second-half of the year.
China is expected to overtake Japan and the United States as the largest online retail market in the world next year.
The proportion of e-commerce sales against the total retail sales of consumer goods surpassed the 1% mark in 2008 and increased to 4.32% last year, he said.
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