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Text |Zinc scale, author |Star Night, edIntelligence."Black Friday" has just passed, and the nodes of cross-border e-commerce such as Shein, Temu, and AliExpress competing to be the "volume king" have also come to an end. But behind the scenes, logistics, one of the keys to the success or failure of cross-border e-commerce platforms, has also attracted attention again.
Domestic express logistics is involuted, but overseas demand is soaring, so logistics companies are going to sea in groups, whether it is Jingdong, Cainiao, J&T or SF Express and three links and one reach, are brewing a variety of ways to play, going overseas to find a new growth curve. Especially since the beginning of this year, a number of logistics companies going overseas have shouted slogans, vowing to dig out new opportunities from overseas markets and expand their business territory.
It's just that in addition to compatriots who go overseas, logistics companies also need to compete with overseas giants such as UPS, FedEx, and DHL. There's a lot to be done in the vast world, but who can take the lead first?
Domestic express delivery companies have been deploying overseas business for more than ten years, and although they have ushered in rapid development in recent years, they are still in the exploration stage. If you want to be stable overseas, the first thing you must do is to have a solid foundation at home and complete the infrastructure construction for going to sea.
Since the beginning of this year, YTO Express has been going to sea, but 16 years ago, when Yu Weijiao went to the United States to inspect the development of overseas logistics, he saw the Federal Express North American logistics center in Memphis, USA and its highly independent informatization sorting center, and was shocked by a lot. At that time, Yu Weijiao silently made a plan to establish his own airline, "The express company with the plane is not a real express company, and in addition, it is necessary to let information technology lead the development of the enterprise."
Later, we saw that YTO bought 7 aircraft in 2022, and YTO Group changed its name to "YTO International", and then established an airline in 2023. Jiaxing aviation logistics hub "Oriental Tiandi Port" is also stepping up construction, with a total investment of 12.2 billion yuan, and is expected to be put into operation in 2025. All of this refers to the global overseas business.
The strength of air transport is the key foundation that determines the overall development of the future, which is the consensus of express delivery companies. As of July 2022, SF's aviation fleet has reached 73 aircraft, a number that has since reached 84, and SF Express is also the first company in the domestic express delivery industry to have its own full freighterJD.com, on the other hand, owns 17 aircraft and has established air logistics centers in several cities.
According to the data, in 2022, China's investment in express infrastructure will continue to increase, and its service capacity will continue to increase, with all business outlets reaching 4340,000 places, with 161 domestic express special cargo planes, with 36 transport vehicles80,000 units, the business volume has been realized"The annual average is 10 billion"to"The monthly average is 10 billion"A huge leap forward.In addition to increasing capacity through purchase, logistics companies will also choose to cooperate with airlines to charter flights. For example, Cainiao reached a strategic cooperation with Singapore Airlines in 2018, a charter flight cooperation with a number of Middle Eastern airlines such as Emirates Airlines in 2020, and a strategic cooperation agreement with Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport and Shenzhen Airport in 2022 and 2023 respectively to jointly build an air cargo center and introduce a number of international air cargo source routes.
There is also J&T, also in August 2022, J&T Express signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with HNA Cargo, HNA Aviation reaches more than 300 cities across the country, has more than 2,000 domestic and international routes, and more than 600 aircraft, which can quickly empower J&T with mid-to-high-end capacity.
The cross-border logistics method using international air special lines is called international special line logistics, which is more time-efficient and cost-effective than traditional postal parcels and commercial international express delivery, so it has become the mainstream logistics mode of domestic cross-border e-commerce. When SF Express, JD.com, Cainiao, J&T and other enterprises go overseas, in order to enhance their competitiveness, they will improve the strength of air transportation as an important deployment of infrastructure.
In addition to building infrastructure, major logistics companies are also fighting for speed and service.
Not long ago, Cainiao and AliExpress teamed up to launch a 5-day delivery for global parcels. According to the data of Cainiao International Express, before this year's Black Friday, the stock volume of AliExpress's Cainiao cross-border preferred warehouse increased by nearly 9 times compared with last year, and most of the goods will be shipped to countries covered by the "Global 5-Day Delivery" service.
At the end of August, TEMU officially entered Southeast Asia, with the Philippines as the first battle. According to the information on the official website, Temu has chosen J&T Express, J&T, the international business of J&T Express in Southeast Asia, as its logistics partner, with a logistics delivery time of 5 to 10 days.
However, a few years ago, overseas consumers had to wait at least 60 days to receive goods from Chinese e-commerce platforms. With the improvement of the infrastructure of logistics enterprises, this time has been directly shortened to one-twelfth of the original, which once again demonstrates the strength of the "infrastructure madness" to a certain extent.
Before this year's "Black Five", SF Express and JD.com have made the same efforts. For sellers who use Amazon's online "Buy Shipping" service, SF Express has launched the value-added service of "Compensation for Late Arrival" during peak season. During the event period from November 15th to December 31st, sellers can enjoy a 9% discount on shipping from China to the United States, and promise to compensate for late arrivals, and pay the freight proportionally, with a maximum compensation amount of 300 yuan for a single ticketJD.com exempts some overseas warehouses from storage rent for new warehouse distribution customers, and at the same time, some overseas warehouses can also be exempted from peak season surcharges.Speaking of which, in fact, it is necessary to mention the construction of local logistics networks for logistics companies when they lay out their overseas business. All of these companies are pursuing a view from the previous wave of globalization: think globally, act locally.
At the 2023 Global Smart Logistics Summit in June this year, Wan Lin, CEO of Cainiao Group, announced that in the future, it will build an overseas local logistics network at the pace of 1 to 2 countries per year, and operate key logistics elements in key overseas markets such as Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.
JD Logistics also believes that it is very important to speed up the construction of local warehouses, but the direction is to choose local warehouses and distributions that combine with their own cross-border e-commerce.
In July 2022, JD.com first spent 500 million yuan to buy the logistics warehouse in Milton Keynes, England, and in October of the same year, it sold 3The RMB6.8 billion** acquisition of supermarket chain Tesco at a distribution centre in the northern English city of Doncaster. Recently, JD.com has invested about 21 again4.3 billion yuan, successfully acquired Goldman Sachs' large logistics asset portfolio in the United Kingdom.
According to JD's financial report, as of the first quarter of this year, JD Logistics has operated more than 1,500 warehouses, including the management area of the cloud warehouse ecological platform, and the total management area of JD Logistics' warehousing network has exceeded 31 million square meters.
At present, domestic cross-border e-commerce logistics is mainly divided into two modes: direct mail and overseas warehouses, the former has a longer chain, and the user places an order and ships from ChinaThe latter is that the goods are transported to the warehouse of the destination country in advance, and the goods are shipped directly from the local area after the consumer places an order, the chain is shorter and the timeliness is stronger, so in the past two years, the market share has shown a significant upward trend, and it has also forced logistics companies to speed up the improvement of timeliness services when going to sea.
It is not difficult to see from the above development trends that when domestic logistics enterprises go to sea, they are no longer like the crazy battle in domestic competition, but all aspects need to be tested, which is also a strategic adjustment that has to be made in the face of a broader market.
As Hou Junyi, vice president of J&T, previously said to the 21st Century Business Herald: "We believe that ** is only one aspect of competition, and related competition is universal in any industry." Through large-scale, refined, information-based and intelligent operation and management, we can reduce our costs, feed back this value to the society, reduce the overall logistics cost and proportion, promote the economic activities of the whole society, promote consumption, and enable more businesses to send more parcels. ”
Part of the reason is that the strength of logistics companies to go overseas is partly the reason, but in addition, there are objective environmental factors behind the acceleration of the process of Chinese logistics companies going overseas.
First, the scale of China's cross-border e-commerce platform overseas market continues to expand. According to iiMedia Consulting**, the size of China's cross-border e-commerce market will reach 295 trillion yuan. The increasing influence of AliExpress, Shein, Temu and TikTok provides a natural opportunity for domestic logistics companies to go overseas.
Second, the business layout of overseas logistics giants is different, leaving ample room for development. In the market outside of China, FedEx, DHL, and UPS are known as the "Big Three" and have long been known for their high-quality services. However, the fees of the "Big Three" are high, and the cost of cooperation is too high for start-ups. More importantly, the "Big Three" have not penetrated into the domestic cross-border e-commerce business at present, and this is precisely the blank area for future development. Thanks to this dividend, domestic logistics companies have also avoided head-on confrontation with overseas giants when they go overseas.
In general, the quantity of orders, efficiency, infrastructure, and reputation are all necessary qualities for logistics companies to go to sea, so the strength improvement that can be seen today is still making preliminary preparations, and the time for take-off has not yet come. A new round of competition around the integration of upstream and downstream resources and the optimal allocation of resources will continue for a long time.