BEIJING, April 26 (Xinhua) -- Compared with three years ago when booking air cargo flight and waiting for connecting flight to some cities usually take several days, it needs much shorter time for Zen Bird's Nest, a Malaysia bird’s nest brand, to deliver the local delicacy to Chinese customers.
Zen Bird's Nest attributes the significant change to the convenient cross-border logistics and warehousing networks brought by Chinese E-commerce giant Alibaba Group, whose electronic world trade platform (eWTP) initiative, dedicated to helping global small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) participate in global trade, turns into reality alongside debut of the digital free trade zone (DFTZ) of Malaysia.
-- No slack seasons through the year
Going live since November 2017, the Kuala Lumpur-situated DFTZ, the first experimental zone outside China servicing the eWTP concept, helps enable Malaysian SMEs and even individuals to benefit from global trade.
Now for many Malaysian SMEs engaged in cross-border E-commerce to China just like Zen Bird's Nest, there are rarely slack seasons through the year.
Zen Bird's Nest is a typical Malaysian producer of quality bird's nest products. Thanks to Alibaba Group's packed exporting of technologies, it has become the biggest Malaysian exporter of bird’s nest products to China in 2018.
While three years ago, Zen Bird's Nest was merely a business to business (B2B) supplier of dry cup-shape bird's nests for urban pharmacies in large Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.
As part of the DFTZ comprised of both physical and virtual zones, a super regional ehub dedicated to providing E-commerce, logistics, cloud computing, mobile payment, and talents training for Malaysia businesses, is being developed in Kuala Lumpur by Alibaba Group's logistics arm Cainiao Network Technology Co., Ltd. (Cainiao) and its local partner Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad.
With the Kuala Lumpur ehub's early programs already put into operation, Zen Bird’s Nest now only needs to inform Cainiao of the delivery dates and volume and information about cargo flights available based on Cainiao's cross-border logistics system will be soon at hand.
-- eWTP brings digital biz path to Malaysian SMEs
Proposed by Alibaba Group founder and executive chairman Jack Ma in March 2016, the eWTP is a private sector-led initiative envisioning a world comprised of e-roads connected with ehubs providing all necessary infrastructures for global trade.
Aiming to lower the trade barriers and provide more equitable access to markets for SMEs around the world, the initiative has built digital business paths to the huge China market for Malaysia.
Together with the fast customs clearance system brought by establishing the afore-mentioned ehub in Kuala Lumpur, Zen Bird's Nest's products now reach Chinese customers at a much faster speed. It demands only one eighth of time needed in the past for Zen Bird's Nest's products to pass the customs at present.
Zen Bird's Nest is only a miniature of Malaysian SMEs benefiting from the eWTP initiative since operation of the Malaysian ehub in the past year and beyond.
Data with Tmall.com, China’s largest business to customer (B2C) platform under Alibaba Group, shows Malaysia topped other countries along the B&R routes in terms of exports to China in the past 12 months since March 2018.
Apart from the doubled volume of Malaysian commodities on Tmall International, a global site of Alibaba Group for foreign wholesalers and retailers to directly sell their products to Chinese online shoppers, logistics cost much shorter time than the past for Malaysian commodities to reach Chinese consumers, with average logistics time needed down by as high as 40 percent.
Via close cooperation with Tmall.com, Zen Bird’s Nest can arrange logistics and purchasing more precisely by taking reference from the former's big data on consumer demand and promotion activities.
In the meantime, Malaysian bird's nest farmers can decide in a more scientific manner whether they need to build new nesting houses thus the entire bird’s nest industry chain of Malaysia gets optimized, triggering more needs for Zen Bird's Nest to expand its corporate size.
-- Significantly enabling the digital Silk Road
Via packed exporting of cross-border E-commerce related technologies, including cross-border logistics, cloud computing, payment, customs clearance, etc., Alibaba Group, together with their partners around the world, cements the digital Silk Road to a large extent.
As early as in 2013, Alibaba Group has already set up Cainiao, a logistics big data platform company, with a host of investment firms and logistics operators, which, as analysts interpreted, is very helpful for it to integrate resources and "go global".
By taking advantage of its advantages in logistics big data, Cainiao forged close partnerships with global logistics operators and develops a series of cross-border logistics products to link logistics chains in different countries and different languages environment with technical languages.
In key cities alongside the Belt and Road routes, Cainiao laid out advanced cross-border warehousing and logistics facilities. In China, the company built more than one million square meters of bonded warehouses in cities including China's top 10 port cities such as Hangzhou, Shanghai, Ningbo, Guangzhou, Zhengzhou, and Chongqing. Around the world, it deployed more than 200 warehouses in Russia, Spain, France, the United States, India, and Southeast Asian nations for cross-border logistics.
What's more, Cainiao cooperates, via the Universal Postal Union, with a number of postal service operators in the world’s large economies including Singapore Post, Correos, United States Postal Service, Russian Post, Correos Chile, etc. and can deliver goods to as many as 224 countries and regions worldwide.
Noticeably, Cainiao opened cross-border postal routes to east European countries including Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Hungary, and Estonia and ASEAN nations including Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam and dozens of special cross-border logistics routes including the widely known Hangzhou-Moscow and Hangzhou-Liege (Belgium) intercontinental shipping lines and Zhengzhou-Liege Sino-Europe rail line.
Based on these, over 10 global fulfillment centers (GFC) have been founded by Cainiao in cities at home and overseas including Hong Kong to serve countries and regions along the B&R routes.
Up to date, Cainiao's highly efficient cross-border logistics networks, together with technology exporting of Alibaba Group's inclusive financial services provider - Ant Financial, one-stop import-export service platform - One Touch, Tmall International, and Alibaba Cloud, have helped the eWTP go outside.
Via giving numerous SMEs from different countries easier access to global trade, Alibaba's eWTP is significantly enabling the digital Silk Road, which goes beyond national boundaries and creates unprecedented opportunities for people around the world. (Contributed by Duan Jing, edited by Sun Huanjie)
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