China Day 7 (Tianjin)
Today we learned about E-Commerce in China. This lecture was taught by Dr. Zheng Qi. According to the professor online retailer's are on the rise in China as there are now around 513 million people with an internet access in China (CNNIC). Online retailers (B2C) only made up a very small proportion of total retailer revenue's in recent years in China in comparison to their consumer-to-consumer (C2C) counterparts but, according to Michael Ruan of iResearch, the B2C market is in for a boom in the coming years with projections estimating that the online market should more than quadruple by 2015. Not so surprisingly, data shows that the majority of online users in China lie within the western zone near the Pacific Ocean in places such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hong Kong. If the internet can expand into eastern rural China this will certainly cause the B2C market to boom at an even higher rate. In addition, the professor talked about internet access in different categories, such as how many male to female users there were, age differentials, location, and so on. Another interesting tidbit of information shows that the number of online delivery services has expanded from 5000 companies in 2000 to over 15000 companies in 2010! The USA still has the upper hand on percentage of internet users and online shoppers but the numbers show that the Chinese markets are becoming much more ripe for the pickings in comparison to the United States. It's certainly not a bad time to get into the online retail business now, eh?
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