E-commerce fair boosts trade innovation in Wuxi

The 2024 Yangtze River Delta Cross-Border E-Commerce Fair is being held in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, from Tuesday to Thursday this week in a bid to implement the national strategy of integrated development in the Yangtze River Delta.

It was designed to foster new forms of foreign trade and improve the convergence of industrial clusters with cross-border e-commerce.

Exhibitors from various provinces and cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui participated in the fair, which featured four main exhibition areas covering household daily necessities, home appliances, light industry textiles and clothing, automotive parts, gardening, new energy outdoor energy storage and electric vehicles.

More than 20 leading cross-border platforms made a showing, including Amazon, TikTok, eBay, Google, Temu and Lazada.

Representatives of more than 400 high-quality factories, as well as 20,000 professional buyers, gathered in Wuxi to engage in professional supporting activities aimed at facilitating brand globalization and driving the cross-border activities of enterprises.

Wuxi has established a public service system for cross-border e-commerce. It offers specialized services encompassing cross-border transformations, customs clearance logistics, brand promotion, digital marketing and talent development for the city's foreign trade enterprises.

Since its inception over two years ago, Wuxi's cross-border e-commerce service platform has catered to more than 1,000 enterprises. The city's cross-border e-commerce import and export volume reached $10.45 billion last year, accounting for 10.4 percent of the city's total import and export volume.

From January to May, the city's cross-border e-commerce import and export volume reached $4.74 billion — 11.3 percent of the city's total import and export volume.

In recent years, Wuxi has been fast-tracking the development of air cargo routes to enhance the cross-border movement of goods procured via e-commerce. The opening of a freight air route from Wuxi to Mexico City in April has significantly boosted the volume of cross-border e-commerce parcels.

Looking ahead, Wuxi aims to further strengthen the "Five Chains" of the cross-border e-commerce industry — the industry chain, supply chain, value chain, innovation chain and service chain. The goal is to leverage cross-border e-commerce to establish the city as a bench mark for innovation in the field.