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The View
How China’s e-commerce playbook can help emerging economies transform
- Emerging markets, like China’s, have the advantage of a sizeable young population that is highly adaptable, if not already at home in the mobile digital era. Better yet, by learning from US tech leaders, emerging markets will have the best of both worlds
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Ben Crawford is an experienced CEO with a demonstrated history of leading public companies in the internet industry.
After decades of being regarded as “the world’s factory”, it’s no exaggeration to say that China has reinvented itself to become a global tech leader. It is already home to over half the world’s artificial-intelligence (AI) unicorns and has produced internet titans like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – also known as the BAT.
As the nation slips into its new role of being a leading innovator, especially in areas like e-commerce and mobile, it offers important lessons and reflections for other emerging economies.
To begin to understand China’s meteoric rise is to also realise the crucial role that the internet has played in all of this. This is hardly surprising when considering the internet’s potential to bring radical change across all industries and sectors. It impacts people’s lives in every way and paves the way for exciting developments in industries like robotics, AI and health care.
Similarly, internet commercialisation has also been a linchpin of economic growth, with more than 40 per cent of the world’s e-commerce transactions taking place in China in 2017, up from only 1 per cent a decade ago. By 2022, China’s e-commerce market is forecast to reach US$1.8 trillion. The effect this will have cannot be understated.
At the most fundamental level, e-commerce hits right at the core of an economy, creating myriad opportunities for small- and medium-sized businesses and changing the face of retailing, logistics and supply chains. All of this catalyses the growth of the economy significantly.
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