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03:28
The World Trade Organization has forecast a decline in international trade of up to 30 percent this year. While many of China's export companies have seen their business shrink this year, they have been finding ways to survive and thrive. Meanwhile, the Chinese government will launch an initiative to support the domestic sale of goods intended for export.
Shanghai Rongheng Lingerie is no exception. Orders worth more than half a million U.S. dollars have been canceled since the coronavirus outbreak - one of them is an order from its French client, which left them with 10,000 items of lingerie sitting in the warehouse. The company soon found a way to move them out of the warehouse and into local Shanghai shopping malls with no profit but at least cover the costs.
Meanwhile, China's e-commerce platforms have been lending a big helping hand for small and medium-sized export firms. Shanghai e-commerce platform Aikucun came to the rescue by waiving guarantee fees and cutting operation and warehouse charges for exports. Vendors were getting 80 percent payments on their sales within seven days, which was a big help with cash flow problems.
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"Many export firms' products are of high quality. And they had favorable prices and well-managed supply chains. So we made full use of our resources on the platform to help them, and made sure they had their quality guarantees," said Guo Jianmin, senior vice president of Aikucun.com.
Tech giant Taobao and Pinduoduo have also launched similar services. More than 100,000 exporters are now showing their products on Pinduoduo. While selling exports in the domestic market has turned out to be a good temporary solution for their destocking problem, some export companies are now thinking even more in terms of longer-term development of the local market.
Han Qian, deputy general manager of Shanghai Rongheng Lingerie RD Center, expected that the company's sales in the domestic market will reach 1 million yuan (about 141,018 U.S. dollars) by the end of the year and that sales could reach 20 or 30 million yuan within three years, roughly equal to all their current sales in the United States and Australia.
"In the past, we mainly designed products suitable for consumers from European countries or the U.S., which are different from those for Chinese women. The pandemic has forced us to expand our business in the domestic market, and we're now working on designs for China targeted at modern women aged between 25 and 35 in first-tier cities," Han said.
The Ministry of Commerce said domestic sales of export firms jumped 17 percent last month, so now people can buy their favorite exports ... right around the corner.
