Thriving economy
Bonded areas in the region prove key logistical hub of nation's rapidly growing internet shopping industry, writes Yue Wang
Zhengzhou's rapid economic growth has been boosted by e-commerce. The city is riding the wave of online shopping by making international purchases cheaper and easier to buy for the nation's 649 million internet users. Zhengzhou is one of the six cities selected to run a pilot cross-border e-commerce project that was jointly approved in 2013 by the nation's General Administration of Customs and the National Development and Reform Commission.
Under the project, Zhengzhou has two bonded areas, the Henan Bonded Logistics Centre and the Xinzheng comprehensive bonded zone, whose special tax rates enable overseas goods stored there to be sold at about 20 to 30 per cent less than domestic market prices, analysts say.
That gives Zhengzhou an advantage in the mainland's booming e-commerce sector, where the transaction volume for overseas online shopping topped 140 billion yuan (HK$177 billion) in 2014, an increase from 74.4 billion yuan in 2013, according to the Hong Kong-based research group, Fung Business Intelligence Centre. Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com are among over 300 companies using Zhengzhou as a product-import portal.
Zhengzhou also established the city's own e-commerce site, wgyp.com, to sell foreign goods shipped into the Xinzheng bonded zone to Haitao.com, where mainland shoppers buy overseas goods online. Alibaba went a step further in December 2013, when it started an online platform, The Zhengzhou Industrial Belt, dedicated to the city's manufacturers. It also chose the Henan E-commerce Industrial Park, a 200,000-square-kilometre zone within the Zhengzhou hi-tech district, as a base in central China.
Companies on Alibaba's Zhengzhou platform sold more than 1 billion yuan's worth of goods in 2013, and that number is expected to rise to 6 billion next year, according to the Henan Electronic Commerce Association.
Their counterparts in the bonded zones have imported more than 100 million yuan of apparel, baby products, cosmetics and other goods into Zhengzhou.
