By Xie Fang
Ma Yun, founder and chairman of the Chinese e-commerce titan the Alibaba Group, disclosed on Thursday that the group would partner with the Cainiao Network, China’s leading logistics network developer, to build a state-smart logistics backbone network, as the China Securities Journal reported on Friday.
The plan was unveiled by Ma at the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit held in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province. According to Ma, the total investment for the project would amount to RMB 100 billion.
Ma said that one of the main objectives of the project was to lower the proportion of the logistics cost in China’s GDP from the current 14 percent to 5 percent.
According to Ma, the project will be comprised of a domestic logistics network and a global one. He promised that customers would receive their parcels within 24 hours after placing orders through the domestic network, while the global one could make sure that packages would reach recipients within 72 hours.
“China’s logistics industry has entered a golden era,” said Ma. “But we will soon face the challenge of processing 1 billion parcels per day rather than the 100 million parcels we currently deal with every day.”
Wan Lin, CEO of the Cainiao Network, who also attended the Global Smart Logistics Summit, noted that it took Cainiao five years to build a world-leading smart logistic network. “We are now at the beginning of a new era for the logistics industry,” said Wang.
Wan disclosed at the summit that Cainiao would establish logistics hubs in Hangzhou, Kuala Lumpur, Moscow and Dubai to improve its infrastructure.
In fact, Alibaba and Cainiao have already joined hands to explore China’s logistics market. On May 30, the two companies announced that they would invest a total of $1.38 billion in ZTO Express, one of China’s major express delivery service providers.
