China retail giant Suning held its annual spring conference this month; as the largest O2O retail enterprise in China, this meeting does not just announce Suning’s strategy and development goals for 2018, but also serves as a bellwether for the whole retail industry in China.
Looking back at Alibaba and Suning’s 2017, it is possible to predict some trends for Chinese retail in 2018:
Shifts from traffic-centric to consumer-centric
Deepening penetration of mobile internet and the introduction of many different devices and device types has caused user and traffic bases to both expand and fragment compared to before. Traditional e-commerce enterprises have enjoyed many years of expanding user bases and increased traffic, but these trends have begun to reach a bottleneck, forcing them to find new traffic.
Cooperative ventures such as the “Jingdu” (JD-Baidu) and “Jingteng” (JD-Tencent) plans reflect this trend, but cannot solve the problem of finding new customers alone. Zhang Ji...
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