The growth of China’s traditional foreign trade exports is more based on labor dividends and resource dividends. Overseas buyers choose Chinese suppliers more because Chinese suppliers’ products are cheap, and international purchasing giants like Wal-Mart squeeze the surplus value of Chinese manufacturers to the limit through super-large orders. It can be said that the money earned by China’s traditional foreign trade for a long time is not earned, but saved.
The most typical case is the profit distribution of Apple mobile phones. Apple takes 99% of the profits of Apple mobile phones, while Chinese suppliers work hard and finally earn less than 1% of the meager profits. At the same time, they are also facing the danger of being replaced by markets with cheaper labor such as Vietnam at any time. The root cause of this tragedy is that our traditional foreign trade exports have long been at the bottom of the value chain. In the era of traditional foreign trade exports, many high-quality foreign trade companies have also begun to carry out their own branding and overseas channel expansion, but they have paid high market costs, because in overseas brand operations and overseas localized market expansion, China’s small and medium-sized foreign trade companies are at a disadvantage in terms of talent, capital and resources. Online cross-border e-commerce has, to a certain extent, broken this bottleneck. Chinese suppliers can directly connect with overseas retail end customers, promote Internet marketing, establish and promote their own brands, and expand their own markets. By participating in the front-end sales link of the value chain, Chinese suppliers can not only earn production profits and sales profits, but also earn value-added profits brought by personalized customization and brand premium.