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The Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Deepening Reform and Promoting Chinese-style Modernization, which was deliberated and adopted at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, proposes to "deepen the reform of the foreign trade system" and "support various entities to orderly lay out overseas circulation facilities".
Since the beginning of this year, the mainland's cross-border e-commerce trade has continued to grow steadily. Cross-border e-commerce and new foreign trade infrastructure such as overseas warehouses are synergistically linked, reducing intermediate links, reaching consumers directly, and promoting the optimization of foreign trade structure and the stability of scale.
The picture shows a panoramic view of the automation of the overseas warehouse of the barn in Düsseldorf.
Photo by Li Haoyang
Data sources: General Administration of Customs, etc
Drafting: Wang Zheping
At 8:30 a.m. local time, in front of the 3rd warehouse of the barn overseas warehouse in Düsseldorf, Germany, a column of container trucks lined up neatly, waiting to be unloaded and put into storage, and the warehouse manager Shi Lei walked into the office quickly, changed his uniforms, and assessed the amount of tasks for the day.
At 9 o'clock in the morning meeting, the personnel required for each process were assigned, and the day's work began.
At 9:40 a.m., the first truck was ready to go. "The goods on this vehicle will be sent to all parts of Germany and neighboring countries via a transshipment center." Shi Lei said that the positioning and function of overseas warehouses are very clear, and they are important logistics nodes connecting the two domestic and international supply chains.
With overseas warehouses, the efficiency of foreign trade enterprises going overseas has been greatly improved.
The logistics time is shortened exponentially. In the past, merchants prepared goods in China, and customers placed orders and then sent them from China to the final destination, even if it was by air, it took 5 to 10 days to arrive in Germany. Nowadays, packages sent to Berlin can be delivered the next day or the next day after leaving the warehouse, which is comparable to the domestic logistics timeliness.
The overall cost has dropped significantly. "Foreign trade cross-border warehouse logistics can be roughly divided into three sections, the first journey is port-to-port transportation, the middle is overseas storage, and the last journey is overseas delivery." Shi Lei introduced that the first leg is generally transported by container, which can carry a large number of goods at one time, thereby reducing the freight cost of unit goods. Overseas warehousing improves operation efficiency and inventory turnover through refined operation and customized warehouse and professional warehouse services, thereby reducing costs. Because the goods are closer to the end consumer, the cost of distribution, especially multi-warehouse combined distribution, is lower; In addition, the bargaining power of large-scale overseas warehouses and local terminal distribution service providers is strong, which further reduces comprehensive operating costs.
The service chain is more perfect. The difficulty of returning goods is a major problem that plagues foreign trade enterprises, and overseas warehouses effectively solve this problem. Taking the export of clothing with a high frequency of return and exchange as an example, if there is no overseas warehouse, the return involves the entry of goods, the process is long and troublesome, and many merchants choose to give up the return of goods, resulting in a waste of resources.
At present, the competition in the international trade market is becoming more and more fierce, how to help foreign trade enterprises cultivate new competitive advantages?
The barn divides the storage into standard, smart, high value, large and other categories, and different types of storage conditions and management methods are different. Taking large items as an example, in order to meet the delivery needs of customers in multiple online and offline scenarios, the barn has built its own truck distribution capacity; In the smart warehouse, the large-load jacking robot and the box-type storage robot cooperate on the same site, doubling the operation efficiency. In the peak season last year, the outbound capacity of Germany's smart warehouse has reached an average daily peak of 20,000 orders.
"Our goal is to become an 'end-to-end' fulfillment supply chain integrated service provider." Chen Huahui, general manager of the barn overseas warehouse, said that in recent years, the barn overseas warehouse has expanded its business of picking up and collecting, trunk transportation, customs clearance and declaration at the domestic end, while continuing to optimize overseas truck services, improve trunk line and terminal delivery capabilities, reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Today, the barn has a total of 170,000 square meters of overseas warehouses in Germany, and more than 4 million parcels were shipped in the first half of this year, a year-on-year increase of about 40%. Looking at the world, "we have set up more than 1.6 million square meters of self-operated overseas warehouses in more than 30 countries, serving more than 20,000 enterprise-level customers. Chen Huahui said.
At 5:30 p.m., when the work of the warehouse was completed, Shi Lei returned to the office to do inventory: "All outbound orders are cleared every day, this is our most relaxed moment." ”
Further reading:
Overseas warehouses connect the dots into a line and weave a thread into a network
People's Daily reporter Luo Shanshan
In June this year, the Ministry of Commerce and other departments issued the "Opinions on Expanding Cross-border E-commerce Exports and Promoting the Construction of Overseas Warehouses", proposing to "promote the high-quality development of cross-border e-commerce overseas warehouses". According to the data, at present, the mainland has built more than 2,500 overseas warehouses with an area of more than 30 million square meters. As an important node of cross-border trade and overseas logistics, overseas warehouses are stepping into the fast lane of development, opening up the "last mile" for enterprises to go overseas.
Overseas warehouse, as the name suggests, is a warehouse located in an overseas market. From a single warehousing function to an "end-to-end" full-link comprehensive service, overseas warehouse enterprises continue to improve their service network. With the vigorous development of cross-border e-commerce, consumers have higher requirements for the timeliness of logistics fulfillment, and the establishment of warehousing points close to the terminal consumer market can prepare goods to overseas warehouses in advance, so as to realize the rapid distribution and turnover of cross-border goods in overseas markets, and improve the "last mile" layout of cross-border e-commerce logistics.
In recent years, with the continuous innovation and optimization of services by overseas warehouse enterprises, overseas warehouses are not only "inventory points", but also a new type of foreign trade infrastructure with comprehensive service functions, and an important part of the foreign trade supply chain. Some overseas warehouses can provide multiple services such as exhibition, after-sales, and maintenance for overseas enterprises. For example, Yiwu Mall Group has established overseas warehouses in Dubai, Mexico and other places, and adopted the "pre-exhibition and post-warehouse" operation mode of "overseas warehouse + exhibition hall". There are also some overseas warehouse enterprises to expand the domestic end of the first mile collection and logistics services, building a closed-loop service system from the exporter to the importer of foreign trade.
Nowadays, overseas warehouses scattered all over the world connect the dots and weave threads into a network, crossing the mountains and seas to open up a new path to the sea. According to the latest data released by the General Administration of Customs, in the first half of this year, the mainland's cross-border e-commerce import and export was 1.22 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.5%, 4.4 percentage points higher than the overall growth rate of the mainland's foreign trade in the same period. From 1.06 trillion yuan in 2018 to 2.38 trillion yuan in 2023, the import and export of cross-border e-commerce in mainland China has increased by 1.2 times in five years.
In order to improve the efficiency of logistics turnover, many overseas warehouse enterprises have accelerated intelligent and digital transformation. Warehousing and storage of goods, involving a large amount of information entry and goods handling, some warehouses process up to tens of thousands of outbound orders per day, in order to achieve orderly deployment of orders, management is not small. Through the information intelligent platform, real-time collection, transmission and processing of commodity information can be realized. Combined with big data analysis, the system can predict the sales trend and inventory demand of goods, and carry out inventory allocation and replenishment in advance. This not only ensures the timely supply of goods, but also avoids the risk of overstocking and unsalable. In the process of sorting and distribution, robots and automated sorting equipment can handle a large number of orders efficiently, stably and accurately.
In the interview, some companies expressed new expectations for the high-quality development of overseas warehouses. Among them, standardization construction is a high-frequency word. The combination of "cross-border e-commerce + overseas warehouse" has cultivated new momentum for the development of foreign trade, but it is still a new thing, and it still needs to be explored by relevant departments, industry associations and enterprises, improve industry standards and norms, guide the legal and compliant development of overseas warehouse enterprises, and better help Chinese enterprises to go global.
Published in the "People's Daily" 2024.8.5 2nd edition People's Daily reporter Luo Shanshan
Editor: Shu Mengqing
Source: People's Daily's WeChat public account