Sustaining Growth through eCommerce SMEs
Recently there was some good economic news out of the US for a change. Retail sales for the month of September 2010 rose slightly and exceeded expectations. This is the third month in a row that there has been an improvement in the retail sector, and there is now a rising trend that consumer spending is expanding and economic recovery is broadening.
Although there are continuing fears that an international trade and currency war could derail global economic recovery, the outlook for the US for sustained economic growth looks positive particularly now that there has been four straight quarters of GDP growth.
Summer Davos Forum
In my last post, I mentioned that I attended the World Economic Forum’s annual global business gathering in Asia known as the ‘Summer Davos’. One of the themes of the Forum was how to maintain and achieve sustainable growth in Asia. In order to ensure that the world, and particularly the US and Europe, recovered from the economic crisis, this was considered to be essential.
The key points that were made included:
- To sustain economic growth, Asian countries, (and in particular China), need to continue to move from export-led to domestic-led growth.
- At the same time, countries must fight the urge to look inward and contribute to the continued liberalization of global trade.
- Investments in hard and soft infrastructure are key tasks facing governments in order to upgrade Asia’s technological and human skills.
- Innovation and technological advances are the keys to improved productivity of Asian economies.
- The role of small and medium enterprises (SME’s) in driving Asian economic growth should be encouraged.
SME’s and Innovation
The last two points are of particular interest to my company, DHgate.com. I have written previously about the growing realization in China that innovation by Chinese businesses is vital if the country is to move from the low cost ‘manufacturer to the world’ economic model to a more sustainable and productive growth model. My company, DHgate.com, actively promotes this to our Chinese SME clients by offering sophisticated e-commerce trading platforms, training programs and innovations to enable them to provide better and seamless service to their international customers.
I often like to point out that in China there are approximately 34 million SME’s in China and over 11 million of them conduct business by way of ecommerce. However, whilst over 70% of all Chinese exports are undertaken by Chinese SME’s, only 4% of that overall trade is undertaken by way of e-commerce. The point is that there are a huge amount of Chinese SME’s that have yet to take advantage of existing ecommerce platforms which offer a convenient, efficient and low cost method of developing overseas markets for their products.
I strongly believe that the more Chinese companies that are brought into the international e-commerce market, the greater the competition. For international buyers of Chinese products, this will result in lower prices, a greater range of innovative products, better product quality and most importantly, better service.
We’re working hard to bring these SME’s to an e-commerce platform near you.
2 Comments
nursingassistant says:
in fact , as a b2b website, is hard to survival since there are big T in China.
iPhone Application Development says:
Excellent job. You have lighten on very good points. We all believe that economic growth is very important for any country, if it is in the form of simple commerce or ecommerce. But use of technology is not bad and we should walk with it. Ecommerce can sustain growth on a meaningful way. There are very less chances of pitfalls. Thank you for business oriented stuff.
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