Tencent Smart Retail Chen Fei: Go in both directions with retailers and grow together

"The five years of smart retail are also five years of two-way development and common growth with retailers. Tencent Smart Retail has served customers in more than 20 industry segments and reached strategic cooperation with more than 600 leading retail companies, of which 1/10 of the customers are more than one billion or even more than 10 billion. ”

On September 8, at the 2023 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference, Chen Fei, vice president of Tencent Smart Retail and vice president of Tencent Cloud, said.

Four years ago, Tencent Smart Retail proposed the concept of "private domain" to help retail enterprises build their own brand mini program official websites in the WeChat ecosystem and accumulate independent and controllable consumer digital assets. Nowadays, the private domain has become a normal business model, and gradually moving towards the whole domain, releasing higher value in the user stickiness and transaction volume of the enterprise.

Facing the era of global operation, retailers provide a complete set of capabilities and services covering digital strategy, digital application, and digital infrastructure to help merchants do a good job in global digital operation and achieve long-term sustainable growth.

Chen Fei, Vice President of Tencent Smart Retail and Vice President of Tencent Cloud

The following is the full text of the speech:

Good morning, and welcome to the Smart Retail Session of the Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Conference.

This past August, Tencent Smart Retail celebrated its fifth birthday. In the past five years, we have always been committed to becoming a business growth partner and digital transformation assistant for merchants, and this process is also the process of working with our partners to solve problems and restore growth resilience under the changes in the external environment and retail ecosystem.

In 2018, smart retail was officially established. In 2019, we introduced the concept of "private domain" to help retailers regain brand autonomy through private domain in the face of traffic plight. When the epidemic hit in 2020, doing private domain became a general consensus among retailers, so we refined the Four Forces methodology to help merchants build private domains in a rule-based manner. As more and more merchants devote themselves to the private domain, we have proposed to create 10 billion-level, 50-billion-level and 20-billion-level private domain growth targets with the industry in 2021.

Nowadays, the private domain has become a normal business model, and gradually moving towards the whole domain, releasing higher value in the user stickiness and transaction volume of the enterprise. In 2022, we put forward the concept of global operation and help merchants break down internal barriers and move from private domain to global domain. This year, we have seen that the retail industry is accelerating the evolution of business models, consumer relations, and technical capabilities, and the demand for global digital operation is becoming more and more obvious.

2023 is a year of evolution and a key year for global digital management. We provide retailers with a full set of capabilities and services covering digital strategy, digital application, and digital infrastructure, helping enterprises effectively implement global digital operations. In terms of digital strategy, we work with customers through CaaS consulting services to sort out their businesses and design a global digital blueprint with a clear path. At present, nearly 200 of the customers we serve have in-depth CaaS strategic cooperation with smart retail. In terms of digital application, we fully cover the entire business chain of "research-production-supply-marketing-service" of retail enterprises, and provide corresponding digital solutions and capabilities. In terms of digital infrastructure, cloud, security, big data, and databases constitute our foundation, escorting retailers' digital applications and business growth. More and more retail enterprises choose Tencent Cloud as an important partner, and have extensive and in-depth cooperation in cloud native capacity building, security, data analysis and application, data intelligence and other modules.

There is one story that impressed me deeply. In April last year, Wal-Mart, a Shanghai guarantee company, was disturbed by rush sales and abnormal traffic, and there was a sudden surge in traffic in the Mini Program system, which affected the normal consumer experience. Our team of architects immediately analyzed the reasons and put into the assurance actions: (1) Relying on the elastic scalability of Tencent Cloud, the system can be rapidly scaled horizontally and greatly improved the bearing capacity of the system; (2) For abnormal traffic, the cloud security team and Walmart security team were joined forces to upgrade security policies and effectively intercept abnormal traffic; (3) Cooperate with the production and research team of Walmart's science and technology department to quickly upgrade the system architecture, isolate the traffic in the areas affected by the epidemic, and optimize product interaction, effectively improving the user experience. There are many such stories, based on the technical support of Tencent's public cloud, which escorts Walmart's high-intensity operation in a special period.

In addition to providing digital tools, as a platform, Tencent Smart Retail also fully supports the business evolution and growth of retailers from multiple dimensions such as global listing, talent construction, and service provider ecology.

For example, together with authoritative experts and institutions in the industry, we have successively released the "Global Operation List" and the "Global Digital List" to help more retail industry participants find benchmarks and find a smart retail transformation path suitable for themselves from cutting-edge successful practices.

In terms of global talent construction, as Tencent's first official knowledge learning and certification service platform focusing on global operation in the retail industry, Tencent Smart Retail Academy continues to integrate Tencent's internal and external high-quality tutors and think tank resources, and launches a series of high-quality courses and talent certification services. In addition to hundreds of head enterprises with in-depth cooperation, 25,000 small and medium-sized enterprises have taken the initiative to join, training and certifying 600,000 people for the industry, and hope to get out of more head enterprises.

In terms of the co-construction of the service provider ecosystem, nearly 1,000 service providers have signed up for the "Thousand Domains Plan" of the smart retail service provider certification system. We open up platform capabilities such as tools, traffic, data and services for certified service providers to jointly provide high-quality solutions and services for retailers.

The five years of smart retail are also five years of two-way development and common growth with retailers. Up to now, Tencent Smart Retail has served customers in more than 20 industry segments and reached strategic cooperation with more than 600 leading retail companies, of which 1/10 of the customers are more than one billion or even more than 10 billion.

Retail is the oldest commercial civilization of mankind, the torrent of retail convergence, the grand national economy and people's livelihood as high as the temple, and the fine as the stitch and thread of the rivers and lakes, firewood, rice, oil and salt. Retail moves forward with history because it makes almost perfect choices and evolutions every time. In the future, Tencent Smart Retail will continue to play a good role as everyone's business growth partner and assistant for digital upgrading, so that we can develop and grow together and seek a broader market and a better future! Thank you!

Leifeng Net