This group of Chinese sellers decided to "rush out of Amazon"

"Do business on the tip of a knife." Guangdong businessman Luo Songming has been engaged in cross-border e-commerce trade for 7 years, and the past two years have been the biggest ups and downs since her career. She entered the cross-border e-commerce industry not early, but she has witnessed great changes in the industry in just a few years.

In the early years, it was not difficult for cross-border e-commerce merchants to make money. Even newcomers to the industry can get started quickly. Luo Songming sells tools and auto and motorcycle parts on Amazon, she starts from "shop goods", only needs to upload a large number of products, regardless of quality, sales are "not bad". By the beginning of the epidemic in 2020, online consumer demand was blowing out, and the sales of several Luo Songming's stores nearly doubled. Also in 2020, the cross-border e-commerce industry also broke out of well-known brands, Xiyin (SHEIN), Anker Innovation, etc. "out of the circle" in 2020, and new enterprises and capital continued to pour in.

Fast forward to 2021, but the industry quickly felt "cool". Since April of that year, global e-commerce giant Amazon has banned more than 600 Chinese brands and 3,000 seller accounts. In July, the EU VAT reform was officially implemented, which hit a large number of Chinese sellers. Coupled with the downturn in overseas consumption, the introduction of social media privacy policies such as Facebook, the freezing of funds in PayPal, and the soaring logistics costs, the industry has rapidly diverged. A number of large sellers in the industry were affected and even forced to shut down.

In 2022, the sales of Luo Songming's stores fell by 30%, and profits were also compressed to a trough. She began to change her business strategy, from a single Amazon platform to the development of multi-channel such as independent websites. Jiangsu and Zhejiang businessman Zhang Liqing turned into a service provider in 2021 to provide computing power support for cross-border e-commerce and other enterprises. "The industry has passed the stage of barbaric growth, and after experiencing the reshuffle of the industry, it has returned to a more rational state."

But rapid iteration keeps happening. Since the end of last year, emerging platforms such as Temu and TikTok Shop have attracted much attention, and markets such as Southeast Asia and Latin America have risen rapidly, allowing many sellers to see new opportunities.

When more and more sellers "escape" Amazon, how will the road of "global sales" of Chinese goods continue? As an important carrier of China's supply chain going overseas, cross-border e-commerce is brewing new changes.

In Zhejiang Yiwu International Mail Exchange Bureau, a batch of outbound mail of different sizes is automatically identified and sorted by the mail supervision system of Yiwu Customs, and sent to the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany and other countries and regions. Photo/Visual China

"Black swans" emerge endlessly

"The epidemic, inflation, disasters, wars, the oncoming waves in 2022 have made people dizzy." This is the summary of 2022 by Shen Xiaoyan, vice president of investment promotion and category operation of Dunhuang.com.

This is a very different way from a few years ago. In the past few years, with Amazon's strong support for third-party sellers' open logistics system and domestic policies, some domestic Taobao merchants have also turned to cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, copying Taobao's set of methods onto cross-border e-commerce platforms. The feeling of many sellers is, "On the cross-border e-commerce platform, it is not an exaggeration to say that you can sell anything by grabbing a handful of things." ”

From the data point of view, in the past five years, mainland cross-border e-commerce has made rapid progress - the import and export volume has increased from 1 trillion yuan in 2018 to 2.11 trillion yuan in 2022. At present, 165 cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones have been set up across the country, becoming an important carrier and platform for cross-border e-commerce development, covering 31 provinces and municipalities.

But the good times did not last long, and many sellers found that Amazon "can't do it". When he first entered the cross-border e-commerce industry, Luo Songming chose auto parts products. The competition of auto parts products is fierce, and the off-peak season is obvious. In the boom season, sales can be maintained even during the off-season. But from 2021, Luo Songming chose to increase the category of household tools to make up for the vacancy in the auto parts off-season.

Luo Songming has several stores, each store has two or three hundred SKUs (minimum stock unit), the unit price of customers is in the range of $20 to $150, except for high-unit price products can reach 30%, most of the product profits are about 15%.

"Profits have fallen to a low point in the past year." Luo Songming said that platform fees have increased rapidly in the past two years, among which customer acquisition costs and logistics costs have increased significantly. In terms of customer acquisition, Luo Songming mainly relies on Amazon traffic. The advertising mechanism on Amazon's platform is an auction model, where whoever bids higher gets exposure. "The industry is getting more and more involuted, and merchants are bidding higher and higher."

Luo Songming introduced that two years ago, the price of single-click advertising was still 0.3~0.5 US dollars, and now it has risen to 1.5 US dollars. For Xie Enzhi, founder of Hangzhou Mengpet Technology Co., Ltd., traffic fees have also increased exponentially. Xie Enzhi sells pet products in North America through cross-border e-commerce platforms, and when he started his business in 2018, his annual advertising investment only needed about 100,000 yuan. Now, even if 60% of customers are old customers, they need to invest 200,000 to 300,000 yuan every year to push the flow.

Generally speaking, there are three main types of fees charged by Amazon to third-party sellers: platform intermediary fees, platform advertising fees, and storage and transportation fees. The earnings report shows that in addition to its three pillars of business, Amazon's advertising business has also begun to grow rapidly. In 2022, Amazon's advertising revenue reached $37.74 billion. In 2015, advertising revenue was only $1 billion, and the growth rate was "on the rocket".

The increase in customer acquisition costs has also been accompanied by the tightening of other platform policies. In 2021, Apple launched new privacy rules, and the iOS 14.5 system added the "App tracking transparency" function, which had a great impact on the advertising effect of Facebook and other platforms. In addition, overseas social media has also tightened the supervision of Chinese sellers. He Zhiyong, VP of cross-border e-commerce platform Hugo Cross-Border, analyzed China Newsweek that due to the problems of empty packages in the early cross-border e-commerce, the platform policy is gradually strict, and Chinese sellers opening Facebook advertising accounts are easy to be banned, increasing compliance costs.

Logistics costs have also risen sharply. Due to the pandemic, factory production has been interrupted from time to time. "Once a product is out of stock, its ranking on the platform will immediately drop, the exposure will also decrease, and the customer experience will also decline." Luo Songming said that in order to replenish the goods, he had to pay more costs to adjust the goods. Coupled with rising raw material prices, profits are getting thinner and thinner.

Xie Enzhi lost a sum of money last year due to delays in goods. Due to the blockage of the Shanghai port, Xie Enzhi had a batch of goods that arrived 17 days late. "The customer deducted $9,000, which is equivalent to the customer's business for a year." In the past two years, sea freight prices have risen 10-fold, and Shainzhi said that a container freight can reach more than $16,000. This year, logistics costs have declined significantly, and now container freight rates are around $2,300.

Inventory risks are more pronounced. "During the epidemic, customers were worried about the shortage of goods, the order volume was relatively large, coupled with the high logistics costs, the freight rate of a single product skyrocketed. Now the cost has come down, but the goods in the hands of customers cannot be sold. Xie Enzhi said. According to Hugo Cross's survey of 785 cross-border sellers, 21% of sellers are most concerned about inventory digestion for risk factors in 2023.

Li Daqian, head of cross-border business of fascial gun brand Pineapple Jun, told China Newsweek that many companies are clearing inventory in 2022, which will have an impact on profits. Pineapple Jun is an industry and trade integrated enterprise in the production of fascial guns, and has achieved a leading position in domestic e-commerce platforms before doing cross-border e-commerce. In 2020, when Pineapple Jun tried cross-border e-commerce business, it aimed at the European market, and was still negotiating sponsorship with the local football team. In July 2021, the EU tax reform system was officially implemented, "For non-necessities like us who sell for more than $100, the impact of tax reform is very obvious." Li Daqian said that this also accumulated a large backlog of inventory, which was not sold out until Christmas at the end of last year.

The international situation also has a great impact on some platforms and sellers. After the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, international payment platforms such as Visa cut off payment business in Russia, resulting in Russian consumers being unable to shop through cross-border e-commerce platforms, and the sales of some merchants also fell off a cliff. The impact of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has also spread to Africa, Wang Ai, head of the cross-border e-commerce platform Jiku Government Affairs Department, said that after the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Ghana's currency depreciated by nearly 60% in 2022, and consumers' purchasing power declined rapidly, while Jiku's market share in Ghana reached 90%, and the transaction volume was greatly impacted.

The "good times for spreading goods" are over

In 2022, when inventory is high, multi-channel risk diversification has become the choice of many sellers.

Not only the wave of store closures in 2021, "Amazon is cracking down on Chinese sellers every year", which makes many sellers lose their sense of security.

The watershed wave of store closures occurred in May 2021. A number of domestic cross-border e-commerce stores on Amazon have been blocked one after another, funds and goods have been frozen at the same time, because Amazon has also warned and closed illegal stores on a small scale, so it has not attracted much attention. With the announcement of some listed companies one after another, saying that due to the impact of Amazon's store closure, its cross-border e-commerce department may suffer major losses, and the incident began to continue to ferment.

On July 6 of that year, listed company Tianze Information announced that due to suspected violations of Amazon platform rules, the company's cross-border e-commerce Youkeshu has added about 340 new blocked or frozen sites in 2021, and the suspected frozen funds are about 130 million yuan. The company's monthly operating income has rapidly fallen from about 45 million yuan in January 2021 to nearly 1 million yuan in May. ST Huading announced on August 5 that the stores involved in a number of brands of Shenzhen Tongtuo Technology Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company, were suspended by Amazon, and funds were frozen, and a total of 54 stores were prohibited from sale and closed, suspected of freezing funds of 41.43 million yuan.

For this large-scale "store closure" incident, Amazon's answer is that these blocked stores have "manipulated user reviews." Simply understood, these stores have swiped orders, and there are many "fake reviews".

Moreover, unlike the previous Amazon only blocked illegal stores, this time Amazon expanded the scope of the ban to brands, that is, all stores that sold the brand were blocked. According to statistics from the Shenzhen Cross-border E-commerce Association, since May 2021, more than 50,000 Chinese sellers have been blocked on Amazon's platform, causing an estimated loss of more than 100 billion yuan in the industry.

Not only the big sellers who have suffered heavy losses, but also the entire Chinese cross-border e-commerce industry, only then began to realize that deep dependence on Amazon is the biggest hidden danger in this industry.

Like many Chinese merchants, Luo Songming, who first started doing cross-border e-commerce, pursued "small profits but quick turnover". Amazon merchants can be divided into shop type and boutique type, shop type merchant "win with more", open dozens of stores, upload hundreds of products every day. Of course, product quality is also difficult to control, and Listing (product detail pages) will not even be maintained. In times when the cost of customer acquisition is low, this strategy works, and consumers are attracted to place orders at low prices.

Due to the uneven quality of their products, such businesses are also prone to receiving bad reviews. In the early days of the industry, some Chinese merchants responded by "brushing praise", which was also one of the reasons for the subsequent wave of Amazon store closures.

In the era of brushing orders, quickly achieving scale through the crazy distribution model is indeed a feasible path, and the essence is only to move the most basic foundry model of China's supply chain to the line. But the wave of store closures has become the last straw that crushes the shop model. The closure of stores has led to the "extremely high inventory" of some sellers, which cannot be sold at all in a short period of time, which directly leads to the closure of some companies.

After Amazon's lockdown, many merchants began to try independent sites. Luo Songming is one of them, but two years later, the independent station has not improved. "The advantage of independent stations is that there are no restrictions on promotion and drainage, and they can also share risks." Luo Songming said, but because the website is completely dependent on off-site drainage, the cost is high and the effect is poor, and there has not been much cost.

The difficulty of doing independent websites is that the early traffic cost of operating independent websites is very high, without Amazon's traffic as a basis, independent website sellers can only direct traffic to the website by placing ads on Google and Facebook, but the traffic accuracy of such platforms is far less than that of e-commerce platforms.

Pineapple Jun began to do an independent station this year, Li Daqian introduced, in the past, the idea of cross-border merchants independent station is explosive station, only rely on drainage to sell goods, may sell hand cream today, sell massagers tomorrow, the span is very large, there are very few real brands, resulting in the stability of independent stations is not high. After the platform push was restricted by the privacy policy, a group of independent website sellers were affected and shut down.

"Many merchants only use independent websites as a single channel, but a good brand needs to reach users across all channels, including offline, and only after repeatedly reaching users will they remember the brand and form a continuous purchase." Duan Ruochang, managing director of Index Capital, revealed to China Newsweek that on the other hand, with the rapid growth of super independent sites such as Temu and SHEIN and large-scale purchase of traffic, the traffic cost of small and medium-sized independent websites has also risen rapidly, thus affecting the conversion effect of independent websites.

On the one hand, getting rid of the label of "heavy dependence on Amazon", on the other hand, getting rid of the "store" path dependence, are the "two roads" chosen by many sellers, but each one is not easy to go through.

Luo Songming's several stores have not been closed by Amazon, but she has gradually abandoned the road of "paving" and turned to boutiques. "For the seller of the store, the cost of pressing the goods is too high, as long as the product has sales, you need to always stock the goods of this product, but many products can only sell a few pieces a month." Too many products will drain Luo Songming's energy, and she wants to focus on key products.

Luo Songming is a trade-oriented merchant and needs to cooperate with upstream manufacturers, which also leads to relatively weak control over product quality. "Some products cannot break through the bottleneck of sales, and from time to time they will receive bad reviews, and the customer experience is not very good, which will lead to a decrease in the repurchase rate and poor store data."

By making a brand, consumers will continue to buy on the platform, and the platform will also tend to support stores with high unit price products. "In addition to advertising fees, transaction fees are also Amazon's main source of income, the higher the unit price, the more transaction fees the platform earns, and it can also improve the user's purchase experience and retain users." Luo Mingsong said.

"Shop-type sellers have passed the best of times." Wang Yiliang, head of the strategy department of Dunhuang.com, said that factors such as Amazon's centralized store closure and changes in the rules of media advertising platforms are constantly compressing the living space of store-type sellers. "Most cross-border e-commerce platforms are increasingly inclined to support boutique sellers, overseas brands and industrial belt ODM factories, because most of the goods of shop sellers are not in stock, and consumers have to wait a long time to receive the goods. In addition, most of the products in store lack more high-quality product content information, and do not have obvious advantages in personalized customization and cost performance. ”

For trade-oriented merchants, branding has become the only way to go. Xie Enzhi has been engaged in B2B trade for ten years, and in the past ten years, the pace of global trade development has become faster and faster, and he believes that the intermediate links between buying and selling will continue to shrink, which means that the future survival space of trading enterprises will become more and more limited.

Xie said that as the information gap narrows and customers become more sensitive to prices, trade-oriented merchants also need to establish their own moats such as branding, development and patent protection. In addition to SHEIN, Anker Innovation is also one of the successful breakthroughs in the branding of the cross-border e-commerce industry. However, many people in the industry believe that the road of Anker branding is difficult to replicate and unique. Anker started with ordinary wholesale foreign trade and gradually transformed into R&D and sales. Compared with marketing investment, Anker is more prominent in research and development. According to the research report, in January ~ September 2022, Anker Innovation R&D investment was 699 million yuan, an increase of 40.10% over the same period of the previous year.

The capital market is also forcing sellers to transform their brands. Neo, founder of FBAFlipper, a cross-border e-commerce merger and acquisition, told China Newsweek that he sold his Amazon store for two years in 2020 for a good price. He set a business strategy at the beginning of his business: pursue high profit margins but not sales. When the company was sold, the store had only 10 SKUs, but it could reach $5 million in annual turnover and 30% profit after taxes in the European market. Because of the good operation of the store, he became the first Amazon merchant to realize the acquisition of the store, and began to engage in the merger and acquisition industry.

In the past two years, Neo found in the process of matching mergers and acquisitions that investors tend to acquire stores with long life cycles and high repurchase rates, and sellers who are store-type sellers, lack of features of goods, account warnings by Amazon, product reviews below 4 stars, and continuous decline in profits are basically not eligible for acquisition.

Hot money "cools down"

From the third quarter of 2022, Neo began to feel the tightness in the capital markets. As the Fed continues to raise interest rates, investors are more cautious. Last year, the standard for Amazon's cross-border e-commerce mergers and acquisitions has been raised. "In 2020, we often looked at projects under $1 million, and since last year, the capital has mainly focused on projects of $3 million or more than $5 million."

Project valuations are also falling. In 2021, the transaction multiple of the highest project made by Neo can reach 6.1 times, and by 2022, it will drop to about 3 times. "This year may still be a relatively light year, if the Fed cuts interest rates, the funds will return, and the industry will gradually return."

In the primary market, financing has also undergone a turn. Index Capital secured the largest financing in the cross-border e-commerce industry in 2021, raising US$720 million. According to index capital statistics, in 2021, in the financing transactions of cross-border e-commerce brand companies, the valuation level of many companies exceeded the sales by 5 times, and the valuation level of non-head enterprises basically exceeded 3 times.

"At that time, the valuation premium was too high, and the market was in a serious state of short supply." Duan Ruochang said that in the cross-border e-commerce dividend period that began in 2019, the industry developed rapidly, and a lot of hot money poured into the market. The emergence of brands such as SHEIN and Anker Innovation has also attracted investors' attention to cross-border e-commerce.

For investment institutions, in the period of rapid development of the industry, it is very involuted to look at cross-border e-commerce projects. An investor said that in 2020, a cross-border enterprise that made consumer brands announced in the market that it had only seen the top five investment institutions, which also caused investors to "block the door" in the office.

By 2021, due to the impact of Amazon's store closure wave, a group of large sellers in the industry suffered heavy losses. The risks of the cross-border e-commerce industry have been put on the table, which has also gradually "cooled" the capital market.

Duan Ruochang said that financing transactions in 2022 will basically return to normal levels, mostly at valuations of 2 to 3 times, and the market is healthier and more rational. Since the beginning of this year, the primary market has gradually balanced, and the top 10% of projects are still hot targets chased by capital, and it is difficult for waist enterprises to raise funds.

In terms of the type of financing enterprises, service providers have attracted more attention than brand owners in the past year. "When the cross-border e-commerce dividend disappears, due to the increase in costs and the decline in profits, the first to be affected is the brand owner, so it is not favored by capital." Duan Ruochang said, "When the operating status of brand owners deteriorates, the demand for service providers is higher, which is beneficial to service providers. ”

Wang Yiliang, head of the strategy department of Dunhuang.com, said that according to statistics, there will be a total of 27 financings in the cross-border e-commerce industry in 2022, of which 9 are related to overseas brands, and the remaining 18 enterprises are service providers.

The hot service provider industry has attracted many sellers, and Zhang Liqing transformed from an Amazon seller to a service provider that provides computing power support last year. "People who sell shovels make more money than people who dig for gold." He said that compared with service providers, cross-border e-commerce sellers have a longer and more complex operation chain and take greater risks.

However, as more and more people join, the service provider industry is gradually involving. Service providers that make quick money and do not pay attention to the real needs of users are also gradually eliminated. Duan Ruochang said that when the cross-border market is growing rapidly, there is a type of demand in the market that is one-click copying, that is, quickly copying the goods of other stores. As the rules of the platform became stricter, such service providers also went out of business.

Emerging markets bring new imagination

When it first entered the cross-border e-commerce market, Pineapple Jun supplied wholesalers on Amazon, and the B-side business still accounts for half of the cross-border e-commerce business. Subsequently, Pineapple Jun chose to directly target overseas consumers and sell on AliExpress, Shopee, Latin American local e-commerce and other platforms. "Our choice of anchoring local e-commerce in emerging markets may be an opportunity before Amazon gets involved."

Left: Cainiao's GFC (Global Order Fulfillment Center) in Frankfurt, Germany. Photo/IC Top right: Many domestic products go to Southeast Asia through Shopee. Picture/IC Bottom right: People browsing AliExpress products on their phones. Photo/Visual China

Emerging platforms are also a channel that cross-border e-commerce sellers pay special attention to. This year, Li Daqian plans to focus on e-commerce and plans to increase investment in the TikTok Southeast Asian market. In 2022, TikTok Shop's cross-border business covered six markets: the United Kingdom, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, and its sales in Southeast Asia grew rapidly. Hugo Cross's survey of 836 cross-border sellers showed that 12% had already set up shop on TikTok Shop.

Some people in the cross-border e-commerce industry said that TikTok is still a "traffic cost depression", which is lower than other traditional social media traffic costs. However, due to the imperfection of the industry ecology, user consumption habits and algorithm accuracy need to be improved, and it cannot carry too high conversion goals in the short term.

Li Daqian plans to make efforts in the Southeast Asian market this year. Since the second half of last year, Pineapple Jun has entered Southeast Asia's Lazada, Shopee and other e-commerce platforms, and its sales have maintained growth every month. "International policies and industrial transfer have promoted the economic development of Southeast Asia and increased consumption capacity." Li Daqian said, "Southeast Asian e-commerce accounts for a relatively high proportion, users have e-commerce habits, and they are very optimistic about the Southeast Asian market." ”

As a mature market for cross-border e-commerce, the growth rate of the United States has slowed down significantly in recent years. According to data released by the U.S. Department of Commerce, total U.S. e-commerce sales in 2022 are estimated at $1,034.1 billion, up 7.7% from 2021, and growth rates have fallen below double digits, the lowest since 2009.

Compared with the slowing growth rate of the US market, emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and Latin America are growing rapidly. According to the "2022 Global E-commerce Market Forecast Report" released by eMarketer, among the top 10 countries with the fastest growth in e-commerce market size in 2022, Latin American and Southeast Asian countries are the mainstream. eMarketer expects e-commerce sales in Southeast Asia to grow by 20.6% in 2022, totaling $89.67 billion.

Pineapple's current overseas markets are concentrated in Eastern Europe, South Korea and Brazil. Affected by the EU tax reform policy, Pineapple Jun then focused on the South Korean and Brazilian markets, and its sales in AliExpress Korea increased by 33 times year-on-year in 2021. For merchants, the core problem of cross-border e-commerce is logistics, it is not easy to find a suitable overseas warehouse, pineapple Jun chooses to deliver through AliExpress Weihai warehouse, the fastest three days can reach consumers.

It is not only Li Daqian who is optimistic about the Southeast Asian market. Duan Ruochang believes that Southeast Asian users are young and have great consumption potential, and new business flows represented by TikTok are rising rapidly, and the e-commerce transaction volume in Southeast Asia is doubling every month.

However, the Southeast Asian market is also considered to be deficient in infrastructure development and purchasing power. He Zhiyong said that the Southeast Asian market will have a large increase in the future, but it is difficult to be used as a market for incubating brands in the short term, and many categories have been occupied by European and American brands, and it is difficult to break through.

In view of the low purchasing power in Southeast Asia, Li Daqian plans to invest in more cost-effective products that are more suitable for the Southeast Asian market. Since last year, Pineapple Jun has been launched on the two major platforms of Lazada and Shopee in Southeast Asia, but at the beginning it was in a state of "increasing revenue without increasing profits". "Southeast Asia's profits are lower than those in Eastern Europe and Japan and South Korea, and coupled with the increase in platform fees, it was in a state of negative profit in the first few months."

However, Li Daqian regarded the negative profit in the early stage as the cost of promoting the brand, and it is expected to return to positive quickly. Duan Ruochang believes that in emerging markets, there are no obvious differences between brands in other countries, and being on the same starting line is an opportunity for small and medium-sized brands to break through.

The Latin American market is also in the spotlight. He Zhiyong analyzed that the Latin American market has the natural advantage of being out of season, providing a market for sellers to inventory. However, the Latin American market is subject to customs clearance difficulties and logistics problems, and some companies choose to build supply chains in Latin America.

Jiku is a cross-border platform focusing on Africa, which has been running for 8 years and covers 19 countries and regions in Africa. Huang Qianyu, head of Jiku's operations, told China Newsweek that the categories preferred by African users are mainly 3C electronic products. In recent years, a group of Southeast Asian business merchants have begun to pay attention to Africa, "African buyers do not pay attention to brands, but due to the scarcity of goods, the gross profit margin is higher, such as Yiwu's jewelry accessories cost 5 yuan, can be sold for 15 yuan." ”

Since the beginning of this year, with the decline in logistics costs and the recovery of production, even in the off-season, Pineapple Jun's cross-border e-commerce business still increased by 20% in the first two months. "The goal this year is expansion, the momentum in the off-season is relatively good, and I hope to grow by 50% throughout this year." Li Daqian said.

Ms. Luo's store sales have yet to return to where they were two years ago, but she has regained confidence in the industry. "Last year's Black Friday peak season sales were not very good, this year should be a recovery compared to last year."

On March 19, Xie Enzhi boarded a plane to the American exhibition and met new and old customers who he had not seen in several years. At the exhibition, he found that there were more products from Vietnam and the United States, but Chinese products still had an advantage in comparison. "The United States is sparsely populated, lacks a diversified industrial belt, the supply chain still relies on imports, and many materials and processing costs are still advantageous to China."

(At the request of the interviewee, Luo Songming is a pseudonym)

Published in the 1087th issue of China Newsweek magazine on April 10, 2023

Magazine title: Chinese goods "sold globally", where is the next step?

Reporter: Jiang Zhiyu