China’s Four Great New Inventions in Modern Times

A number of China’s technological innovations have been making their moves in the world. Among them, four stand out with a reputation of China’s “four great new inventions” in modern times, which have made the daily life of the public more convenient. They are not actually inventions in technical term, however thanks to China’s huge scalability, the following 4 phenomenon have been pushed to a whole new level leading the world.

Dockless Shared Bicycles

There are over 30 bike-sharing companies in China that operate around 10 million bicycles for shared use to individuals in dozens of Chinese cities.

Although the service of shared bikes originated from Western countries, China surprised the world with a business model of station-less shared bikes that spearheads the sharing economy.

Compared with traditional shared bikes, dockless bikes allow users to simply pick up or park a bike anywhere on the street, instead of at designated docking points.

By combining GPS, smartphone apps, mobile payment and Internet of Things technology, China’s system of dockless shared bikes provides the public with a convenient and affordable transport alternative.

To unlock a bike, you need to scan a QR (Quick Response) code on a shared bike through a smartphone app. To finish riding, you manually lock the bike and pay for your ride though mobile payment services that are connected with the bike app, such as AliPay and the WeChat wallet.

China’s two leading bike-sharing operators, Mobike and Ofo, have been gearing up for global expansion.

Mobike entered Singapore in March and Manchester, Britain, in June. Its distinctive orange bikes can also be spotted on the streets of Florence and Milan, Italy. This September, Mobike is set to land on the soil of London. Ofo, similarly, has begun operating in the United States, Britain, Singapore and Kazakhstan.

In the financial market, the two rivalries have also gone neck and neck. In June, Mobike raised $600 million in a Series E financing round led by China’s Internet titan Tencent, the largest in the global bike sharing industry to date. Now, the company’s total funding has reached nearly $1 billion. In February, Ofo also raised $450 million, which valued the company at $1 billion.

High-Speed Train

Boasting low cost and quick delivery, China has built the world’s longest high-speed rail (HSR) network. Branded as a “name card” for China, HSR runs at speeds of 250-350 kilometers per hour (km/h).

By the end of 2016, China had a 124,000-km railway network, which had the world’s largest HSR network of more than 22,000 km. It had operated 2,595 high-speed trains by 2016, which took up 60 percent of the world’s total high-speed trains.

HSR service debuted in China in 2008. Since then, the country has witnessed an average annual growth of over 30 percent in passenger trips, according to statistics from the China Railway Corporation. By 2016, there had been more than 5 billion passenger trips on China’s bullet trains in eight years.

Currently, China is working on next-generation bullet trains with a maximum speed of 400 km/h. By 2020, one fifth of the country’s 150,000-km railway network will have been HSR, linking more than 80 percent of major cites across the country, according to data from the National Development and Reform Commission.

China’s HSR has also gone global. In 2014, China completed the construction of its first overseas high-speed rail in Turkey. In June 2015, China and Russia inked deals for 770 km of track connecting Moscow and Kazan.

In October 2015, China and Indonesia signed a joint-venture agreement on the construction of a high-speed rail between Jakarta and Bandung. Besides, the China-Thailand railway is currently under construction.

Alipay and WeChat Pay lead China’s move to a cashless society, so customers can scan for purchases. FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY

Alipay, , is China’s leading mobile and online payment service, established in 2004 by China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. During the online transaction process, Alipay acts as a third-party platform, on which buyers pay for their goods by imputing payment passwords or scanning payment code on the Alipay app installed on their mobile devices.

Mobile Payment

Besides, Alipay can also be used for transferring money from one Alipay online account to another account, or from the online account to a bank account by binding a debit card to the online account. It is such convenience that enables China to edge its way towards being a cashless society.

On top of that, users can pay family or personal bills through Alipay, such as water and electricity bills.

Alipay also supports cross-border online and in-store payment, which allows users to make purchases on international websites and apps with Alipay.

Far back in 2013, Alipay exceeded PayPal as the world’s largest mobile payment platform. Thanks to the massive user base and various payment scenarios in China, online and mobile payment has enjoyed absolute advantages in market competition.

In the first quarter of 2017, the market share of Alipay and its major rivalry Tenpay (Wechat pay) reached respectively 54 percent and 40 percent, according to Chinese market research and consulting company iResearch.

E-commerce

With around 731 million Internet users, China has been the world’s largest and fastest-growing e-commerce market. In 2016, online shopping in China saw a growth rate of 26.2 percent, generating 5.16 trillion yuan ($767 billion), according to a report on China’s economic data by the National Bureau of Statistics.

Last year, Chinese people bought more food online with a growth of 28.5 percent. Clothing sales rose by 18.1 percent in the year, while items like mobile devices took up nearly 12 percent.

E-commerce now accounts for 15.5 percent of the total retail sales in the country. Thanks to lower costs and fewer licensing requirements, the bar for individual merchants to open an online shop in China has been set lower than the threshold for opening a physical retail store.

E-commerce has also injected fresh vigor and vitality into the economy of rural China in recent years. In 2016, e-commerce created more than 20 million jobs in rural villages, with over 8.1 million online business owners. Rural buyers also contributed 894 billion yuan ($131 billion) to China’s e-commerce sales last year. Leading operators in China’s e-commerce market include JD.com, and Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao.

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

The post China’s Four Great New Inventions in Modern Times appeared first on WeChat Official Agency.

While the last 2 years have witnessed brutal for brick-and-mortar stores worldwide, China’s retailers have experienced a “new retail” revolution, driving an increasingly stronger national consumption.

It is fueled by pioneering technology companies like Tencent, Alibaba, JD.com and involves traditional shopping center owners, Wanda, Suning, etc. A key milestone erected near end of 2017, Tencent, who owns WeChat, becoming the first Chinese firm to be worth more than $500 billion and surpassing Facebook to be the world’s fifth-most valuable company.

New Retail is merging online, offline and logistics all together create a dynamic new world of retailing.

The changes that initially predicted by Jack Ma of Alibaba are arriving so swiftly and so dramatically that each month seems to bring with it a big new preview of what retailing will look like everywhere, as China sets a pace for the rest of the world. Indeed, with millions of mom-and-pop stores now taking on new life as order-and-delivery stations for e-commerce, with food delivery platforms such as Meituan 美团fulfilling more than 18 million orders per day, and with more than 60 times more mobile payments than the US, wherever retailing is headed, China is already there.

For international brands hoping to sell in China, survival means moving equally fast to capture this future ahead of competitors, both incumbents and digitally savvy upstarts. It won’t be enough merely to keep up. Brands will be required to get ahead and help shape the vast changes, even as they completely overhaul the rules of engagement.

Consumers

People are no longer viewed only as consumers. The most forward-thinking brands now also see them in the role of co-producers. In the past, with relatively limited consumer insights, it was sufficient for a brand to identify target consumers and determine their needs. Now, armed with a comprehensive—and dynamic—profile, brands have new missions, such as finding ways to stimulate consumer needs, identifying look-alike consumers and turning consumers into brand ambassadors who effectively co-create the brand.

Merchandise

Products are advancing from commodities to being part of the consumption process and an integrated consumer experience. As the old business-to-consumer (B2C) model evolves from the simple goal of meeting mass demand to a world of consumer-data-inspired personalized products and delivery, the best brands are determining how to integrate products with the overall experience of not only shopping but learning about a product, using it and recommending it.

Stores

Stores have extended from online-only or offline-only into a seamless Omni channel experience that’s fully integrated, in which people shop while enjoying content or while spending time on social networks, for example, as well as in stores or on e-commerce platforms. Among the new moves that winning brands are making to get ahead: creating occasions beyond the constraints of time and location.

How should brands change?

The strongest positioned brands take a systematic approach to outpace rivals to outpace rivals in New Retail. They are gaining an edge by using the emergence of New Retail as an occasion to build a new consumer-centric model while at the same time creating operations that are more efficient. 

Build a new framework with customers and data

The best brands start by acknowledging—and acting on—two fundamentals of New Retailing. They need to put customers at the heart of their operations, with full consideration of the end-to-end customer experience, from awareness to purchase to referral. In addition, they commit to embedding data and smart technology into their operations, breaking down the data silos within their organization for cross-function interconnection and extending their links with the broader ecosystem. In the past, they may have used internal CRM data to provide insights that informed functional business decisions. Now they need to continually refine the data and engage in test-and-learn exercises to develop and act on broader, deeper and constantly changing consumer insights.

Develop new flexibility and efficiency in R&D, supply chain, marketing and distribution

New Retail is having a big effect on every corner of a brand’s operations. Yet companies can transform those operations to take advantage of retailing’s new realities while making them more efficient in the process. For example, as they continually hone products to serve personalized consumer needs, brands must adapt to shorter R&D cycles. Pioneering companies now take an interactive approach to R&D that allows for timely changes in design and planning based on real-time consumer behavior. Importantly, they also view their consumers as participants in the R&D process, engaging with them early in product development, conducting consumer testing before production and connecting frequently before a product launch to enhance loyalty.

Similarly, brands are reinventing supply chains, making them flexible enough to adjust to real-time frontline sales results and the more accurate estimates enabled by artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, block chain and other emerging technologies. Companies selling in China are at the forefront of this movement to use smart technology.

The most advanced among them integrate with all parties in the supply chain, analyzing the full spectrum of available data to improve visualization, analysis and supply chain automation. They make the required investments to choose the right service providers, manage the data and improve the operating efficiency of their supply chains.

Nestlé has reaped significant benefits from its “One Set Inventory” unified supply chain, which serves different channels (business to business, business to consumer, offline to online and others), sharing both logistics service and inventory. From a single hub, Nestlé ships to different channels instantly, choosing the destination based on insights generated by real-time data. The move has dramatically improved turnover efficiency, with the online product shortage rate dropping from 22% to 5%. It has lowered logistics costs, reducing cross-region delivery from 60% to 10%. In addition, the new supply chain setup has improved delivery timeliness for Nestlé. Now nearly 80% of orders are delivered the same day or next day.

New Retail changes the game in marketing and consumer management, too. The digital ecosystem that encompasses purchase, payment, delivery and all the other customer touchpoints provides the opportunity to reach consumers whenever and wherever they are online. That is why winning brands have extended the horizons for digital marketing. For them, online is not limited to a sales channel but becomes a consumer-centric closed loop for unlocking business potential. These companies collect data whenever a consumer uses an app to hail a taxi or process a payment. They integrate offline and online data. From this composite of transactions they gain insights that help them develop and deliver personalized marketing messages to the same customer touchpoints, constantly refining what they learn and how they market. It’s a shift in philosophy that turns marketing from a brand expense to a brand asset.

Finally, distribution is being reinvented with New Retail. Under the old and painful multilayer network, stores—especially traditional trade—had limited control and transparency, there was a lack of sufficient data and the costs of distribution were high for limited channel penetration. Leading brands now rely on streamlined electronic route-to-market (e-RTM) models that help them reduce costs with fewer levels, expand their coverage, and gain visibility into real-time inventory and sales data while improving point of sale and channel relationships. A key lesson they’ve learned as they build and adapt to these new digital route-to-market approaches: honing brand strategies to gain the most from e-RTM and thoughtfully selecting business partners based on the unique characteristics of their product categories.

Transform the organization and operating model for digital

Building a framework and operations around customers and data are critical for brands hoping to master New Retail. However, those big moves will not yield sufficient results without redesigning the organization to make full use of New Retail’s power. Among the most important considerations: The organization structure needs to allow for seamless coordination among functions, something that traditional organizations rarely accommodate. Also, the organizational design needs to reflect the company’s stage in its digital transformation. For example, in a company in early days—in which digital’s major role is that of a new sales channel—the digital team will be most effective if it operates within the sales unit. However, for companies much further along on the digital transformation, digital should be a standalone business unit that integrates resources across all functions, with a decentralized and agile operating model that fosters fast decisions.

While the ultimate goal is to be able to move quickly, brands need to recognize that developing enterprise-wide agility does not happen overnight. It is a multistaged journey that typically takes two to three years to complete.

Many brands entered the era of New Retail not only with limited capabilities for acquiring and analyzing data, but also with organization structures and operating models that make it difficult to share and act on insights gained from that data. Winners understand the need to organize for data.

As New Retail takes root, the brands that thrive will acknowledge that the changes they make today—the new capabilities they develop and the operating model they devise—won’t necessarily help them a year from now. New Retail is a work in progress that will require brands to constantly refine and reinvent themselves for new occasions, new formats and the steady flow of new ideas that will define retailing tomorrow.

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

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From Imitator to Innovator: Evolution of WeChat In 7 years

In China, more than 80 percent of smartphone owners are actively using this mobile App WeChat. That’s almost a billion of users; more than the population of the US, Russia and the UK combined.

At its start, WeChat was just a replicate of WhatsApp Messenger with push-to-talk feature, also known as walkie-talkie. But now it has evolved as a mixture of WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Apple Pay and many other apps that westerners are familiar with.

As this “king of Apps” in China near its seventh birthday, its developers are considering the app’s future: In addition to copying and mixing, they are trying to create something new.

Cross-platform for the win

The App was launched on iOS in early 2011, and ported to Android right afterwards. At first look, it looked just like WhatsApp with its somehow similar green icon and user-friendly interface.

But under the hood it was carefully crafted to penetrate the Chinese market. Most Chinese phone players didn’t need to register for an account to use WeChat. They can sign in with their mobile phone numbers or other social media accounts.

It sounds very normal to people nowadays. But at a time when mobile operators asked extra charge for inter-operator texting, it was a killer function.

Cross-operator availability is the key for WeChat’s initial success. It’s huge for the App’s developer, Tencent, whose desktop-dominating messenger QQ had a struggle in the rising mobile market.

Tencent buried their company name deep inside WeChat. A lot of users were not even aware they were still on Tencent. The ad-free experience was also very different from previous Tencent software.

WeChat also provided location-based service, enabling users to find other nearby users. The App was called a “one-night-stand tool” for a while.

People-to-people, money-to-money

WeChat succeeded in gathering mobile users, but it needed more to keep them following.

In April 2012, Tencent introduced social networking to WeChat. It works mostly like Instagram. You share your photos on your stream and watch others’ stream at the same time.

It’s still one of the most popular ways to share photos with friends in China. Other ways to enhance communication include a sticker shop copied from famous Asian chatting App Line and a “game center” for users to compare their mobile game scores.

These features helped WeChat to reach 200-million-user milestone in the same year. But Tencent wanted even more. If you get tired of sharing photos with friends, you can share it with everyone by making your account public like a blog.

WeChat’s enormous users attracted salesmen, who used public accounts to distribute coupons with potential customers. The method was so widely-used that Tencent eventually added online payment to WeChat in 2014, igniting the wildfire of person-to-person wholesale model in China.

Small change indicates big confidence – WeChat used a Nasa satellite photo of the blue planet with Africa the Human’s origin. After Sep 2017, WeChat quietly changed the photo to an APAC centered view taken by a China’s own geostationary orbit satellite.

This move threatened Alibaba, who owns Taobao, the largest online shopping platform in China back then. Alibaba founder Jack Ma started to fight back by building his own messenger Apps, but none of them have come near where WeChat has gone.

At the same time, WeChat Pay cut a big chunk off from Jack Ma’s decade-lasting online payment empire. According to data company iResearch, the market share of Tencent’s payment platform in China rose from 10 percent in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017, while Alipay shrank from 80 to 54 percent during the same time.

Kill other Apps

As WeChat became a must-have for Chinese mobile users, Tencent went on to stabilize its monopoly by merging even more features into the App, including car hailing, hospital appointment, civil service and many, many more.

In 2016, head of the WeChat team Zhang Xiaolong announced a new plan to make all other mobile Apps unnecessary.

Dubbed as “Mini Program,” Zhang created an App store inside the WeChat App.

For the phone users who do not want to install too many Apps, this is absolutely good news. Open WeChat and you have everything at hand.

Demonstration of WeChat’s Mini Program. Users can access mini-apps by swiping down the recent conversation list. The mini-app is listed in system multitasking UI as a standalone app.

Any App maker can share WeChat’s vast fan base, WeChat Apply team believes the Mini Program is a game changer and has passed its initial stage and in 2018 it will become widespread a lot more.

So after seven years of development, what will the Chinese App market dominator do in the future? Stay focused on WeChat Apply to for more updates about the WeChat annual gathering.

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

The post From Imitator to Innovator: Evolution of WeChat In 7 years appeared first on WeChat Official Agency.