She is a representative of female entrepreneurs and was the CEO of Aliba's company. Due to logistics and distribution problems in the Middle East, he resolutely resigned and went to Saudi Arabia to do express delivery.
In just two months, iMile cross-border logistics was established, and in the following four years, iMile expanded to 10 countries, making billions of dollars, becoming the express delivery that Saudi Arabia understands the most e-commerce needs. She is the founder Huang Zhen.
In this issue, Shang will tell her legendary experience.
Huang Zhen was born in a very ordinary family, and her parents were hard-working workers.
Through his own efforts, his father has won his own identity and status little by little, and at the same time, he has also brought help to the people around him and created his own personal value and social value.
Seeing her father's successful entrepreneurial deeds, she realized that value can not only be created through her own efforts, but also bring help to the people around her.
Huang Zhen's first job was overseas sales at Huawei, and later she was transferred to Africa to take charge of the overall business in a middle Eastern country.
In 2015, Huang Zhen left Huawei to join Alibaba. At that time, Ali happened to set up a joint venture company in the Middle East, considering that Huang Zhen had experience in overseas sales business, so she became the CTO of this joint venture company, responsible for the landing of cloud computing.
It is precisely because of Ali's job that she has come into contact with a large number of domestic entrepreneurs who have gone to the Middle East, and it has made her feel that Chinese enterprises have begun to globalize the process, and the continuous output of Chinese-made brands is the trend of the times.
These have become important factors affecting her to resign from Ali and start her own business.
More than ten years of overseas work experience makes her particularly good at dealing with foreigners, and the practical experience and training of working in Huawei and Ali not only makes her more familiar with the application of Internet technology, but also cultivates her keen business judgment.
There, she met the plight of many e-commerce users. Having lived in the Middle East for a long time, she understands the real needs of consumers and Chinese merchants.
Coinciding with the great reshuffle of the middle east's e-commerce market in 2007, data analysis at the time showed that e-commerce sales in the Middle East reached $8.3 billion, and it is predicted that in 2022, it is likely to quadruple to $28.5 billion.
Huang Zhen saw the development trend of e-commerce and was eager to seize this shareholder wind and stand at the outlet and soar.
But she knows that the root cause of the development of e-commerce is the logistics infrastructure behind it. The reason why China's Taobao and Pinduoduo have been able to rise rapidly, express delivery has played a very important role behind this. Therefore, it is particularly important to establish a courier company in the Middle East.
In fact, there were many Chinese e-commerce platforms in the Middle East at that time, but they could not find a courier that really understood their needs.
The reason is that the infrastructure of the Middle East is not perfect, the regional division is relatively vague, and the local house number and geological situation are very complicated. Many consumers will describe it clearly when writing the address, resulting in the courier in the delivery of the object, according to the above address can not be found at all, the delivery efficiency is extremely low, the user experience is also very poor.
Secondly, in Middle East logistics, the connection between cross-border e-commerce and customers in the market is very fragile. Consumers are extremely distrustful of merchants, and they think that merchants and logistics companies are one. Therefore, in the case of returns and exchanges and unqualified products, they will choose to skip the merchant and directly find the logistics party to return the goods.
For Chinese entrepreneurs doing cross-border e-commerce in the Middle East, the lack of a good and stable express delivery service is a headache for them.
At this time, Huang Zhen, who understands the real situation of China's express delivery market and the real psychology of Chinese cross-border sellers, founded iMile cross-border logistics with the support of strong localization technology and service experience.
So how did Huang Zhen carry out her own strategic planning? She always insists on facing the pain points of logistics development in the Middle East, and must combine it with her work experience to solve the problem of Chinese sellers in the terminal logistics distribution service.
Therefore, she set up a warehouse in the UAE market to facilitate logistics docking with the country. As the main foreign trade port of the six Gulf countries, the UAE can not only reduce logistics costs, but also reduce the time of logistics and transportation, bringing convenience to sellers and consumers at the same time.
Secondly, in the model, e-commerce sellers implement centralized collection in China and enter iMile's purchase warehouse in China. The goods are collected and sent by air to Dubai, where customs clearance is then entered into iMile's self-built warehouses in the Middle East.
Finally, it was delivered to the consumer by iMile's delivery team. Items that have been refused visas will also be re-listed. In order to ensure a good user experience, iMile adopts a direct operation mode of downwind.
Moreover, Huang Zhen proposed that China's advanced technology and talents be introduced to the Middle East. Continuously increase investment in technology. They have established their own address database in the Middle East, through the collection of information, verification of addresses, keyword confirmation to establish an address library and terminal delivery and a series of digestive systems.
Couriers can use iMile's app to make an appointment with the other party in advance, and as iMile's information base becomes more and more perfect, the address accuracy rate and signing rate are also getting higher and higher. This address library is also the first custom address library in the Middle East with detailed information.
Even if the information filled in by the user is not perfect, the courier can find their specific address based on the historical information in the information base, and then send the object to the user.
Huang Zhen's goal is not one country, but more countries to enter the Middle East. For example, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. These countries also have a variety of problems of address imperfection. The address problem is solved, which opens the door to the express delivery market in these countries.
At present, in the middle east express market, iMile users have covered 40%. The Uae, Saudi Arabia and other countries iMile has also been successfully landed. The Mexican market iMile won the operating license in just three days.
During the peak periods of Ramadan and Black Friday, iMile can reach 500,000 orders a day. Although it is far from the domestic order volume, in the Gulf countries with a small population base, iMile has now become an industry giant in the middle east express delivery business.
Currently, iMile is the most digital logistics company in the Middle East. The cooperative customers not only involve hypermarkets such as AliExpress, Carrefour, and noon, but also expand into the field of live e-commerce.
Huang Zhen herself said that they also face local competition, but she believes that iMile has a unique advantage: that is, a local business style and the ultimate level of operation.
In the four years since she founded iMile, Huang Zhen has made nearly one billion yuan in profits. Last December, ByteDance invested $10 million in iMile. This also made the company start to attract attention.
Investors asked Huang Zhen two questions: what can iMile use to beat express delivery giants such as DHL; e-commerce logistics talents are fiercely competitive, and what do they rely on to attract excellent talents?
Huang Zhen believes that as a company with Chinese express delivery experience, they clearly know and understand the real needs of cross-border e-commerce, and continuously improve users' likability in the technical experience through China's powerful Internet technology. Most importantly, as a newly established company, iMile has no historical baggage, nor does it have an "idol off-chain", what they have to do is to serve the needs of e-commerce.
At present, the company has more than 2,000 people, of which 70% of the business leaders are non-Chinese talents, and the employees come from more than 40 countries. Management talents come from Alibaba, Huawei and other companies. The core backbone is still the early employees, who have witnessed the growth process of iMile from scratch, from small to large, and in the process of winning battles again and again, they have also found their own value.
Huang Zhen often told herself that she should accept her imperfections and reconcile with herself, as long as she survived, everything would be fine. What are your views on Huang Zhen's entrepreneurial experience, welcome to leave a message in the comment area.
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