The great mall of China
The next big thing in retail comes with Chinese characteristics文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/286.html
Almost everyone in China knows “Austin” Li Jiaqi. The 28-year-old “Lipstick Brother”, started out flogging make-up products in Nanchang, a provincial city, and now sells them to millions by live-streaming on Taobao, part of Alibaba, China’s biggest internet retailer—once shifting 15,000 sticks of lipstick in five minutes. Some will recognise Chen Yi, nicknamed “Little Monster”, a 24-year-old girl-next-door from the coastal city of Qingdao who sells sunscreen, snacks and lots more besides to her 20,000 followers on WeChat, a ubiquitous messaging app: a nice supplement to her day job as a bartender. More obscure but no less enterprising, farmers and fishermen show off juicy apples or prize lobsters in short videos, digital showmanship accompanied by new delivery networks that allow city dwellers to procure the produce.文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/286.html
As online shopping has soared, even before covid-19 added extra fuel, Chinese internet firms have dreamed up new ways to engage consumers. In contrast to Taobao, the new ventures do not yet make money. But they are growing apace.文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/286.html
Chinese tech firms are pouring fortunes into them. Some of this capital flows straight back out as subsidies to entice buyers and sellers to the platforms, which clearly cannot go on for ever. But the effervescence is here to stay—and Westerners are only starting to notice. “If you want to see the future, look at China,” Mark Schneider, boss of Nestlé, the World’s biggest food company, instructs his executives. Lubomira Rochet, head of digital marketing at L’Oréal, a French beauty behemoth, contrasts the bottom-up, “consumer-centric” vibrancy of Chinese e-commerce with the West’s “tech-driven”, top-down approach.文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/286.html
Some Western tech executives dismiss the Chinese experience as a function not of creativity and enterprise but of structural forces. They cite China’s higher mobile share of e-commerce—90% versus 43% in America (see chart 2). Others put it down to a concentrated market, where the top three firms, Alibaba, jd.com and Pinduoduo, account for more than 90% of all digital merchandise sales, a state of affairs that is beginning to trouble Chinese trustbusters, who on December 24th announced an investigation into Alibaba (see box on subsequent page). In America the online titan, Amazon, and its two challengers, Shopify and eBay, accounted for less than 50%.文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/286.html 文章源自The Economist Digest-https://te.qinghe.me/286.html
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