Good news for China’s e-commerce behemoths struggling with a sluggish economic recovery: the State Post Bureau announced on Tuesday that the number of parcels sent this year had reached a new high of 120 billion items, “reflecting the upward trend of the country’s consumer market.”
With an average of almost 100 deliveries per person so far this year, China is the leading market for parcel deliveries both in terms of volume and intensity. The United States shipped 21.2 billion shipments last year, compared to 88.8 million deliveries from India, the nation with the largest population in the world.
Fresh flowers delivered from Kunming in the southwest province of Yunnan made up the 120 billionth package the bureau had counted on Monday night.
It was shipped to Chengdu, in the nearby province of Sichuan, via high-speed rail, with an expected arrival time of Tuesday afternoon.
With just one month remaining in the year, China’s shipment volume has already surpassed 110.6 billion parcels shipped in 2022, an increase of 8.5%.
Due to the nation’s vast transportation network, its millions of couriers, and the delivery companies operating there, the country has become a leader in parcel delivery. The South China Morning Post’s owner, Alibaba firm Holding, has a logistics division called Cainiao, which is getting ready to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. J&T Global Express, an Asian courier service firm headquartered in Shanghai, began its US$450 million initial public offering this year.
The agency claims that November had a very high shipping volume, with daily shipments reaching 430 million products as the delivery industry “entered its peak season.” November 11 is Singles’ Day, the biggest shopping day in the nation. The so-called Double 11 festival was started by Alibaba in 2009 as a one-day celebration, but these days, sales begin weeks in advance.
According to Mo Daiqing, a senior analyst at the Chinese e-commerce research institute 100ec, the effectiveness of parcel delivery “proportionally reflects” the expansion of China’s e-commerce sector. In the post-pandemic era, online purchasing “has been recovering this year,” Mo continued.
This year, Beijing has prioritised growing domestic consumption. From 2020 to 2022, when tight COVID-19 pandemic control measures upended ordinary life, economic development dramatically slowed. This year’s recovery has gone more slowly than anticipated.
The central government fully embraced “the fundamental role of consumption in economic growth” when it unveiled a massive strategy in August to increase consumer spending.
In the third quarter, things started to improve for a few significant e-commerce platforms. In the three months ending in September, PDD Holdings, the company behind the low-cost shopping websites Pinduoduo and Temu, almost doubled its revenue, enabling it to surpass Alibaba in terms of market capitalisation.
The bigger competitors of PDD likewise saw consistent development. During the same period, Alibaba’s sales increased by 9% to 224.8 billion yuan (US$31.5 billion), and its operating profit increased by 34% to 33.6 billion yuan. Competitor JD.com revealed a 1.7% increase in revenue to 247.7 billion yuan and a 33% increase in net income to 7.9 billion yuan.
- Published By Team Hongkong Journalist
