EMS central to China's cross-border e-commerce export boom

China Post’s cross-border e-commerce has boomed. In the past five years, the proportion of cross-border e-commerce retail exports has increased from 2.2% to 7.7% and, in 2019, total transactions exceeded a staggering one trillion. Competition is strong and so China Post has introduced measures to ensure that EMS continues to grow and meet e-commerce needs.

Central to this increase in growth has been the introduction of e-EMS in 2014. e-EMS is a cross-border e-commerce solution for e-retailers with the same end-to-end performance as EMS, prompt Customs clearance and is targeted at low weight items with sales prices set to each 50g instead of 500g to reduce sellers' costs. e-EMS has been a huge success and, by 2019, it accounts for over 40% of total outbound EMS volume.

China Post participates in the nationally unified customs declaration platform, the Golden Gate Project. EMS items benefit from electronic customs declaration with the result of saving time, costs and improving the safety of items. Alongside this, there has been a significant investment in improving network efficiency through new IT systems and the integration of major processing centers. To further improve, China Post is at the forefront of innovation and application of new technology such as automatized processing of mail and intelligent posting and delivery, even including a pilot of driverless collecting and delivery vehicles!

Measures have been taken by China EMS to upgrade the customer experience by offering more choice. EMS customers are able to do online manifest printing, have options to make track and trace easier (Telephone, official WeChat or website) and now have more e-payment options. A dedicated marketing team now looks after EMS and there is in-depth cooperation with major cross-border e-commerce platforms.

These growth measures have been phenomenally successful but competition is fierce. As part of the EMS network there is still scope to further improve EMS for the entire Asia-Pacific region by focusing on light weight cross-border e-commerce, improving performance and establishing new EMS routes with more EMS partners. More business cooperation will ensure that EMS keeps growing and can take advantage of a predicted cross-border e-commerce growth rate of 20% for China in the next 3-5 years.