Each policy clause that affects the cross-border e-commerce industry needs to be paid attention to by e-commerce sellers. The proposal of the national top-level cooperation initiative “One Belt, One Road” has brought huge opportunities to the cross-border e-commerce industry. E-commerce sellers should seize this opportunity and strive to expand e-commerce activities to overseas emerging markets.

15.1 New Trends and Changes

The “One Belt, One Road” initiative has brought new overseas market opportunities to Chinese cross-border e-commerce sellers. These merchants must seize the opportunity and steadily expand overseas markets based on rational analysis of the overseas market environment.

15.1.1 Large brands compete for the cross-border e-commerce market

A statistic from the United Nations Industrial Program shows that among global brands, only 3% of world-class brands have nearly 60% of the global market share, and their product sales have reached half of the global sales of similar products. Today, Chinese e-commerce companies active on e-commerce platforms have transformed and begun to develop brands. Many of these large brands have occupied overseas markets and half of the overseas market.

Since the “One Belt, One Road” initiative was proposed, major Chinese brands have been encouraged and have begun to expand their market positions to overseas markets.

According to the “2018 China’s Top 50 Overseas Brands Report”, big brands in the fields of mobile games, electronic products, fashion apparel, and home appliances have begun to divide the e-commerce market share outside China.

Take the smartphone market as an example. In November 2018, Xiaomi’s third quarter report for 2018 showed that its international revenue increased by 112.7% year-on-year, with overseas revenue accounting for 43.9%. Although Xiaomi has been engaged in smartphone business for a short time, it has achieved very good results.

In the global high-end mobile phone market share rankings in the first quarter of 2019, there are five Chinese smartphone brands. Huawei occupies 16% of the market share, ranking third in the global smartphone market, and OnePlus occupies 2% of the market share, ranking fourth in the world.

In Russia, Chinese smartphone brands have occupied 45% of the country’s smartphone market share. The main mobile phone brands occupying this share are Huawei, Xiaomi, ZTE, OPPO and vivo.

From the smartphone market, it can be seen that large Chinese brands are competing for the cross-border e-commerce market.