How should Sichuan build a major agricultural platform to share in the 460 billion yuan dividend?
Our reporter Leng Yiting
The Financial Investment News reporter has learned that at the first Zhejiang County E-commerce Summit held on the 13th, Alibaba proposed a plan to invest 10 billion yuan over the next 3-5 years in the Thousand Counties and Ten Thousand Villages plan, establishing 1,000 county-level operation centers and 100,000 village-level service stations nationwide, increasing rural entrepreneurial opportunities and driving rural e-commerce development. This undoubtedly opens up e-commerce development space for Sichuan, a major agricultural province.
Rural shopping may surpass urban
E-commerce has been developing vigorously in recent years. According to the "2014-2018 China E-commerce Market Competition and Enterprise Competitive Strategy Analysis Report" released by the Forward Industry Research Institute, in 2013 China's e-commerce market transaction scale reached 10.2 trillion yuan, up 29.9% compared with 8.5 trillion yuan in 2012.
Rural e-commerce is gradually becoming the new darling of the e-commerce industry. The "Rural E-commerce Consumption Report" shows that over the past three years, Taobao's rural consumption share has been continuously rising, from 7.11% in the second quarter of 2012 to 9.11% in the first quarter of 2014, and predicts that the national rural online shopping market scale will reach 180 billion yuan in 2014. Xie Yang, inspector of the Rural Economy Research Department of the Development Research Center of the State Council, predicts that the total national rural online shopping market may exceed 460 billion yuan in 2016, and will continue to narrow the gap with the urban online shopping scale. Due to rural advantages in geography and population, along with the increase in internet penetration in rural areas and the improvement of logistics infrastructure, in 10 or 20 years, the rural shopping market may surpass the urban one.
As a major agricultural province and a major population province, developing rural e-commerce is undoubtedly a huge opportunity for Sichuan. Recently, the Sichuan Provincial Government issued the "Sichuan Province E-commerce Industry Development Work Promotion Plan", and has designated e-commerce as one of the five emerging pioneering service industries to be prioritized for cultivation and development.
Sichuan's rural resources need integration
Li Xiang, general manager of Mianyang Yongxiang Technology, told the Financial Investment News reporter that Sichuan's e-commerce has just started, but is developing very rapidly. Sichuan has excellent resource advantages, and coupled with strong policy support, various regions and counties have proposed new ideas for developing e-commerce, and rural e-commerce in Sichuan will have very good prospects.
However, due to the particularity of the rural market, the expansion of e-commerce cannot be accomplished overnight. At the same time, for Sichuan, there are still some regional problems. Among them, an irrational industrial structure is one problem; another relatively prominent problem is that there are few large platform enterprises, and there is a lack of a major platform to integrate rural resources across various regions. Li Xiang also pointed out that another major obstacle to Sichuan's e-commerce development is the lack of an innovative spirit. In fact, many individual operators started engaging in rural e-commerce long ago, but the vast majority simply copied the marketing models of other electronic platforms, which destined them to be unable to grow big and strong.
Although the prospects of rural e-commerce are promising, the road ahead is still bumpy. As Gao Hongbing, dean of the Ali Research Institute, said, on the consumption side, the commercial foundation of the rural market is currently weak, and farmers' consumption needs cannot be satisfied; in the production segment, the production-supply-marketing system for rural means of production has just moved from closed to open, with low commercial circulation efficiency and lagging market information, and these costs are ultimately borne almost entirely by farmers; and in the sales segment, sales channels for high-value-added agricultural products are still not smooth, and agricultural product e-commerce also suffers from problems of being "scattered, low, and few". Solving these problems requires the intervention of e-commerce platforms to provide support in technology, concepts, and commercial ecosystem resources, and also requires the government to actively act in infrastructure construction and creating a development environment.