When the wind blows, even pigs in the vent can fly; when the wind passes, even dragons can lie down. The power of trends is very strong. From the perspective of the e-commerce industry, how do we view “small and beautiful”? What kind of industry development trends do we need to grasp? What kind of trends will China’s economy have as it develops further? There may be many different summaries of future trends.
One of the characteristics of China’s economy is its large population. The advantage of a large population was mainly reflected in cheap labor in the past, which is an important advantage for China’s exports and national competitiveness. Now that wages have risen and income levels are high, this large population has begun to manifest itself in different advantages. The biggest competitive advantage it brings to us is that we have a huge domestic market. For example, many industries such as communications equipment, high-speed rail industry, nuclear energy industry, etc. are very competitive abroad. We can see that the most important source of advantage for these industries in competing with overseas is the huge domestic market. support. For our country, the advantage of a large-scale market is a very important advantage. The rapid development of industries with economies of scale is an important trend for China’s economy in the future.
On the other hand, as people’s income levels increase, personalized needs and niche markets emerge in large numbers, which is also a very important trend. These two trends seem to be a bit contradictory. One is a large-scale market, and the other is a segmented, niche market, with segmented and personalized needs. How can our companies fit in with these two trends at the same time? I think the companies with the strongest competitiveness and the best life in the future are likely to be those that use the current Internet technology to combine the two advantages well. We need to combine them, use current technology, and use a model of continuous innovation. Some people say that in the past, Producing 10,000 shirts per hour is a very impressive thing. Now, producing 10,000 different shirts per hour, personalized shirts, is even more impressive. In other words, scale and personalization must be combined.
I have also come into contact with some leading figures in the cross-border e-commerce industry. I don’t quite understand some of the innovation models they talk about, but they sound very fresh. For them, they have their own understanding of what “small and beautiful” means and what kind of innovation models there are. “Small” refers to small product segments, small enterprise scale, and focus on target markets.
In fact, I remember that when Alibaba was first established in 1999 and 2000, there were not only Chinese and English websites, but also websites in Russian, Arabic, Japanese and many other languages. At that time, When Alibaba was in the market, it wanted to occupy many markets. After running for a period of time, Alibaba found that it could not sustain. After the transformation, many small language websites were shut down. Now many large enterprises and large platforms are no longer pursuing niche small language markets. But many of our small enterprises have actually done a lot of solid and in-depth work to open up these overseas markets during this period.
I am actually very curious about the “small and beautiful” model. There are many niche regions, niche products, and niche links in the niche industrial chain. Everyone thinks that there may be room for development in the future. Some “small and beautiful” regions or products or certain links in the industrial chain are now weak links, but if new entrepreneurs enter these categories, enter these regions, enter these links, and really dig deep, they will be able to have better development. In the final analysis, the beauty of “small and beautiful” enterprises lies in their focus and professionalism.