Image source @ Visual China
Wen | those things on the Internet, the author | Yongyule
The cross-border service provider has completed a financing of more than 100 million yuan.
If you seriously turn over the financing heat of cross-border enterprises, you will find that 2021 is actually the hottest year for cross-border e-commerce service provider financing.
According to the monitoring data of the e-commerce big database "Dianshubao" under the Network Economic Society, there will be a total of 50 financing incidents in the field of cross-border e-commerce service providers in China in 2021, with a total financing amount of more than 7.15 billion yuan.
According to Tianyan, Coral Cross-Border completed more than 100 million yuan of Series A financing led by Mingyu Venture Capital this year.
Founded in 2016, Coral Cross-Border focuses on providing safe and efficient cross-border capital settlement and related comprehensive services for cross-border trading enterprises through cross-border resource integration and service innovation integration, and providing comprehensive integration solutions for cross-border trading enterprises.
So, why is cross-border e-commerce service provider financing so hot at present?
According to the data released by the General Administration of Customs, the annual import and export scale of the mainland will reach 6.05 trillion US dollars in 2021, and the total import and export value of trade in goods will increase by 21.4% compared with 2020; the import and export scale of cross-border e-commerce will reach 1.98 trillion yuan, an increase of 15%.
From the perspective of import and export structure, cross-border e-commerce grew rapidly in 2020, with 2.45 billion votes inspected and released through the customs cross-border e-commerce management platform, an increase of 63.3% year-on-year.
In the first half of 2021, the mainland's cross-border e-commerce import and export still maintained a good momentum of development, with cross-border e-commerce import and export of 886.7 billion yuan, an increase of 28.6% year-on-year. Among them, exports were 603.6 billion yuan, an increase of 44.1%; imports were 283.1 billion yuan.
It is true that in the face of the huge market, with the continuous entry of follow-up cross-border e-commerce service providers, Coral Cross-border may face fierce market competition.
Coral cross-border routes to sea
Although they are also cross-border e-commerce service providers, if you compare Coral Cross-border with other cross-border e-commerce service brands, Coral Cross-Border is different from them.
First of all, compared with the cross-border service brands in the service chain of Sky Cloud, Fastlane, Qupital Bridge, etc., which are in the single service chain such as finance or marketing or payment, Coral Cross-border is broader and more complete in the service chain.
Cross-border e-commerce is divided into cross-border e-commerce transactions and cross-border e-commerce services.
According to the direction of import and export, cross-border e-commerce can be divided into export cross-border e-commerce and import cross-border e-commerce; according to the type of end customer, cross-border e-commerce can be divided into B2B mode and B2C model; according to the ownership of goods, cross-border e-commerce can be divided into platform type and self-operated type; according to the business category, cross-border e-commerce can be divided into vertical and comprehensive categories; according to the operation mode, cross-border e-commerce can be divided into trade type and product type.
In addition, the entire cross-border e-commerce industry chain also includes related service-oriented ecosystems, such as cross-border e-commerce logistics service enterprises, cross-border payment institutions, marketing and agency operation enterprises.
Coral cross-border is a cross-border service provider that focuses on the entire service-oriented ecology.
Secondly, in the field of digital cross-border settlement solutions, which are the hottest cross-border services, Coral Cross-Border has different advantages.
In order to create a more comprehensive and convenient digital cross-border settlement solution, we provide customers with a full range of one-stop cross-border financial services for foreign exchange settlement/payment.
In fact, as early as 2021, Coral Cross Border has officially launched an upgraded version of "e-Qida" with Standard Chartered China.
In order to continuously promote trade facilitation and better help small and medium-sized enterprises to trade across borders, Coral Cross-Border and Standard Chartered China have gathered the superior resources of both sides to actively seek changes, focusing on the import purchase and payment of foreign exchange business, adding export settlement business, from supporting Chinese enterprises to service trade import settlement to helping Chinese enterprise brands go to sea.
Reach cross-border trade cooperation with service trade enterprises including logistics, freight forwarding, machine wine, tourism, etc., as well as small and medium-sized import and export enterprises such as general goods trade, and newly empower the existing solutions of "e Qida" to provide more convenient and lower cost one-stop digital cross-border settlement/payment solutions.
In addition, Southeast Asia, as a new outlet for cross-border trade development, has Standard Chartered Bank as an endorsement, or will have a positive impact on the cross-border coral.
In the Southeast Asian e-commerce market, local stores are favored by domestic sellers with a series of significant advantages such as platform traffic support, fast logistics timeliness, complete categories, low platform commissions, and fast payment collection speed.
However, due to the inability to dock with local managers, the inability to declare store closures, information and language barriers, there are many problems in the local store transaction methods of many domestic sellers that need to be solved.
And "e Qida" has such advantages.
Corals cannot escape the tide of industry competition
In recent years, SAFE has successively issued a number of favorable policies to facilitate cross-border payment and settlement.
It is based on this, the support of favorable national policies and the huge demand for cross-border trade markets, a large number of cross-border payment solution providers have emerged.
Through digital cross-border payment solutions, it helps cross-border trading enterprises to process large numbers of orders, reduce the risk of exchange rate fluctuations, and improve the development efficiency of their global business, but these service providers have different growth trajectories and focus on development areas.
For example, Lianlian Cross-border Payment opened its business territory in 2013; PingPong was established in 2014 to provide low-cost collection services; SUNRATE was founded in 2016 and rapidly deployed globally with a high-growth trend, with branches in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Jakarta and London; Xtransfer, as a rookie in the field of cross-border payment, was established in 2017 and provided a variety of cross-border financial services.
Although it is in the same field as coral cross-border, there are different development directions between brands.
PingPong and Lianlian cross-border payments focus on providing collection services to cross-border e-commerce sellers, as well as VAT payments on e-commerce platforms.
Like Payoneer and Worldfirst, as veterans in the field of cross-border payment, they have a large number of cooperative enterprises and platforms that can provide more comprehensive collection services.
SunRATE, which is based on innovative technology, license qualifications, banking and card organization network, has built a diversified solution including international payment, corporate credit card, foreign exchange, global collection, etc., not only cross-border e-commerce, but also for cross-border trade enterprises, financial institutions, industry platforms to provide fast and accurate solutions.
However, coral cross-border is based on the proportion of small and medium-sized sellers in cross-border export e-commerce is higher than 80%, and the ability of this part of the seller to prevent capital security risks is a relatively weak pain point.
Adhering to the innovative model of "bank-wide channel settlement" without third-party institutions, from the perspective of the settlement path, the model adopted by Coral Cross-border shortens the capital circulation link than the traditional path.
However, it is worth noting that although the model adopted by corals across borders is simpler, it does not have too many advantages.
First of all, taking the advantages of real-time transparency of coral cross-border exchange rates and T+0 arrivals, SUNRATE, which was also established in 2016, has also realized the payment service of providing payments to 130+ countries around the world, real-time exchange rates of 100+ currencies, and T+0 arrivals.
In addition, SunRATE has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Standard Chartered Bank in 2020, sunrate and officially announced the joint launch of a one-stop intelligent foreign exchange payment platform solution "Huieda" and achieved profitability in 2020.
Unavoidable performance pressures
As more and more banks launch GPI, customer satisfaction with cross-border payments by banks is no longer limited to speed, transparency, etc. Banks need to seek differentiated operations, combine customer needs and their own characteristics, continue to promote GPI services from both depth and breadth, and improve the quality and efficiency of cross-border payment services in an all-round way.
In fact, looking back, Coral Cross-Border and Standard Chartered Bank launched an upgraded version of "e Qida", which is more for the purpose of adding export settlement business on the basis of import purchase and payment of foreign exchange business, and its purpose is actually more business growth.
In terms of performance, although only cross-border collections, from the perspective of coral cross-border Southeast Asian cross-border collection revenue data, the annual cumulative transaction amount (GMV) of the platform in 2020 will increase by more than 100%; the global collection business GMV will reach 5 billion US dollars, and the business growth rate will be 300%, of which the Southeast Asian market is the main growth point of performance, and the performance is eye-catching.
However, in the 2022 Series A financing, the entry of Mingyu Venture Capital has undoubtedly increased the performance pressure of Coral.
In addition, there is also an impact on the mainstream trading platforms of the market.
First of all, the current coral cross-border bank-wide channel settlement scheme has supported mainstream platforms such as Tokopedia, Shopee, TikTok, Lazada, etc., and Platforms such as Bukalapak, Blibli, JD Indonesia, Orami, Bhinneka, Elevenia, Zalora and other platforms will also be launched.
However, according to the "Future Shoppers 2021" report by wunderman Thompson, global marketing communications agency, social e-commerce occupies an important position in the Thai market, with 66% of Thais saying that they shop through social platforms, higher than the global average of 44%, of which Facebook is the most popular platform.
However, with regard to the young population of Thailand's main consumer population, social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Thai forum Pantip, which are active, do not appear on the platforms supported by Coral's cross-border localization settlement scheme.
Secondly, to some extent, B2B as a more traditional, easy to be ignored, but the urgent need to innovate production capacity products and services to promote the industry to accelerate a blue ocean market, the future entrants must not be more than this.
This means that in this field, coral cross-border while improving settlement schemes, it has to face competitive pressure from peers.
Even if it is to obtain financing to expand investment in technological innovation and research and development, and to fill the talent team, in such a large and wide market, even if the cross-border payment platform has not yet entered the mature stage, there are still many places where coral cross-border needs to be improved or even broken.