Flour and camel milk powder are popular on the Chinese marketplace JD.com
The third day of Deputy Prime Minister Serik Zhumangarin's visit to China was held in Beijing.
E-commerce, construction, food, medical facilities and pharmaceuticals – in Beijing on August 16, 2023, Deputy Prime Minister - Minister of Trade and Integration Serik Zhumangarin held meetings with business giants in these areas.
The first meeting was held with the Vice President of the Jingdong Group Corporation (JD Group) Larry Lee. Last year, the company was ranked 46th in the Global Fortune 500 world ranking. Internet platform JD.com , along with Amazon and Alibaba, is one of the most popular and largest in the world. Unlike the other two giant retailers, JD.com she delivers goods to customers herself. The holding employs 560 thousand employees, half of whom work in the delivery sector.
As Serik Zhumangarin noted at the meeting, e-commerce is undoubtedly the future of world trade.
We have studies according to which more than 85% of people under 40 today make purchases online. In Kazakhstan, the share of e-commerce is about 13% of retail domestic, we plan to increase to 20%. JD.com it facilitates the simplification of doing business, expands the opportunities of small and medium-sized enterprises, consumers. And this is very interesting for us, helping small and medium–sized businesses to use the advantages of the digital economy is one of the components of our work.
In May of this year, during the state visit of the Head of State Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Xi'an, in this city, the National Pavilion of Kazakhstan opened on the platform JD.com . In the first hour of the pavilion's launch, more than 10 thousand orders were received, and during this time 80% of the products presented were sold out. More than 106 thousand users have subscribed to the pavilion.
We are interested in cooperation through the national postal operator Kazpost. In the near future we plan to reduce the cost of sending mail. We are ready to provide the delivery infrastructure, but to integrate with the global infrastructure, your information systems need your help. Kazakhstan has adopted amendments to the legislation on e-commerce. We are currently working on a new project, creating a hub in Kazakhstan with a multimodal transportation system for the consolidation and distribution of goods with high added value. The choice of goods is based on the principle: the smaller and more expensive, the better. We offer to cooperate in this direction.
Kazakhstan already has a successful experience of opening a pavilion and bringing enterprises to the Alibaba platform. This tool for supporting exporters has already shown its effectiveness – exporters have signed contracts worth about 300 million US dollars. Cooperation with global platforms serves as an impulse to promote non-resource exports, increase the volume of supplies of goods from Kazakhstan, as well as to open up new opportunities of interest to domestic companies.
In turn, Larry Lee noted that Kazakh flour and camel milk powder are in demand and are actively traded on JD.com .
Online purchases are now replacing the previous offline format. You mentioned studies where a group of buyers under 40 prefer to buy online more. And according to our research, people over the age of 46 who were not previously used to buying online changed their habits after the COVID-19 pandemic. We value our reputation and product quality very much. Some consumers say that our prices are higher than at other sites. But most consumers in China today are willing to spend more for quality.
Chairman of the Presidium of NCE «Atameken» Raimbek Batalov, who was present at the meeting, offered to send a pool of Kazakhstani projects who could trade on the site JD.com . Also, to create a joint program to teach Kazakhstani businessmen the rules of selling products on the site. For his part, Larry Lee noted that food products are sold well in the National Pavilion, and suggested establishing cooperation to consider the supply of such goods.
Today JD.com does not deliver goods to Kazakhstan through its delivery service.
«Kazakhstan is a large territory. As soon as you have established internal transportation and logistics, more goods will be sold, and we are interested in this. We could increase trade turnover together and work on improving the products that enter the Chinese market», - Larry Lee suggested at the end of the meeting.
Following the meeting, the parties agreed to continue negotiations on the establishment of logistics and supply chain of goods with representatives of Kazpost.