Tom Group, which narrowed its net loss last year, has started to ramp up the mobile retail capabilities of its e-commerce venture with China Post after the operation saw sales volume double. Tom’s Chief Executive Ken Yeung said he agreed with Jack Ma, Chairman of Alibaba Group, that e-commerce in China was entering a golden age and that online transactions would make up about 30% of the country’s total retail sales in the next five years. Beijing Ule E-Commerce, which Tom and China Post rolled out in 2010, provides an e-commerce platform that supports online and offline store integration, distribution and logistics, and marketing and promotion to merchants. Unlike Alibaba’s market-leading Taobao online retail operations, which rely on third-party logistics service providers, Ule.com is backed by the resources of China Post. This infrastructure includes 52,000 postal outlets, 150,000 postal delivery workers, 80,000 postal vehicles, 433 train carriages, 16 cargo aircraft and three ships. Ule.com’s gross merchandise value, the total worth of goods sold, reached CNY500 million.

Alibaba Group Holding, China’s largest e-commerce company, plans to join hands with partners to build a logistics network across China that can support CNY10 trillion worth of transactions a year within the next decade. It will take the lead in a CNY100 billion investment in the network by teaming up with industry players, banks and the biggest express delivery companies, including Chinese retailer Yintai Group and private conglomerate Fosun Group, Alibaba said. China’s logistics industry has been criticized for its inability to satisfy the great demand of e-commerce delivery. Alibaba aims to make deliveries between any two places in China within 24 hours once the network – China Smart Logistic Network – is finished. “It’s like building a road so that cars can run on it,” said Yang Lei, public relations director of Alibaba. He added that Alibaba will not do the deliveries itself, just like it doesn’t sell things itself but instead builds the infrastructure for others to sell. Alibaba and its partners will set up warehouses across China and build a data system that tracks trade and delivery information of suppliers, sellers and buyers to improve the efficiency and quality of deliveries, Yang said. A new company will be set up, and Jack Ma, Alibaba’s Chairman, will act as the Chairman, while Shen Guojun, Chairman of Yintai Group, will be CEO. Xu Yong, Chief Consultant with the express and logistics website cecss.com, said that Alibaba’s promise to deliver packages in 24 hours will be hard to fulfill. A single logistics network may also prevent Alibaba’s e-commerce rivals, such as Jingdong Mall, from joining, Xu added. Jingdong Mall, the second-biggest business-to-customer website in China, has established six logistics centers, covering more than 300 cities across China. The company is building up a warehouse and logistics system in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Last year, China’s express delivery industry had CNY106 billion in revenue, a year-on-year increase of 40%, according to the State Post Bureau. The number of packages delivered last year increased 55% from a year earlier, and Ma Junsheng, Director General of the State Post Bureau, expected the figure to increase by 40% this year, hitting 8 billion, the China Daily reports.

China’s burgeoning car and consumer electronics markets coupled with trade growth in Asia would help fuel a boom in sales revenues for logistics company Dachser. Global revenues from the firm’s air and sea logistics division are targeted to double to €2.2 billion by 2017 under Dachser’s five-year plan, Edoardo Podesta, Managing Director of Dachser Far East, said. Air and sea contributed €1.1 billion to group revenues of €4.2 billion last year, with the balance coming from Dachser’s European and food logistics divisions. Podesta said Dachser Air & Sea Logistics would expand its presence to 49 countries in the next five years, up from 28 last year. The number of air and sea logistics branch offices would grow from 141 to 220 by 2017. Dachser entered Vietnam and Malaysia last year after forming joint ventures with local partners. Podesta said the Vietnam operation, whose majority shareholder is Dachser Far East, would grow next year, with an office in Hanoi by the second quarter to add to the one in Ho Chi Minh City. The next target would be Indonesia, and then an office in Myanmar in “two or three years”. The group has €1.3 billion to invest over the next five years, although a large slice is earmarked to expand its European overland transport network. The firm has just won an ocean freight deal from a European lift manufacturer to handle all equipment exports from Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou to other Asian countries. Dachser Far East also has a contract logistics deal with a German carmaker to collect parts from its Chinese suppliers for delivery to its factory in northern China. Podesta said Dachser established a 10,000 square meter distribution center in Wuhu, Anhui, for Continental, a German parts company that supplies components to Chinese car plants. He said the Chinese car market was a growing business with “a lot of opportunity. It’s an industry that will remain very solid in the next few years”. Consumer electronics also offered “large growth but with much smaller volume”, the South China Morning Post reports.

China Merchants Group, which celebrated its 140th anniversary in December, said it would continue to invest in Hong Kong’s logistics sector in light of growing domestic consumption on the mainland. The year ahead would be challenging, especially for the shipping industry, due to the uncertainty in the global economy and excess capacity, said Fu Yuning, Chairman of China Merchants. The port business, on the other hand, would be in a much better position as cargo demand would improve slightly. Formed by Qing dynasty official Li Hongzhang in Shanghai in December 1872, China Merchants operated its the first commercial ship to Hong Kong in January 1873. The group set up a branch office in the city after that and moved its headquarters to Hong Kong in 1949. It is the oldest mainland enterprise operating in the city. Fu said Hong Kong had played an important role in the opening-up policy of the past 30 years and it would continue to capitalize on the economic growth of the mainland. “Hong Kong, with its status as a free port and free economy, will serve as a good supply chain base to support domestic trade on the mainland”, Fu said. Hu Zheng, Vice President of China Merchants said the company was looking for acquisition targets in China, but he ruled out any plan to acquire overseas logistics companies.

The Changchun International Logistics Economic Development Zone in Erdao district, Changchun, Jilin province, is the only logistics economic development zone in Jilin. Its gross domestic product (GDP) reached CNY7.9 billion in 2011, three times that of 2006. Its fixed asset investment was nearly CNY9.6 billion last year, nearly six times that of 2006. A series of large trading centers are under construction, such as a home decoration center, a pottery, and a porcelain trading center. Xinglong Bonded Zone is only about 700 meters from the Changchun International Logistics Economic Development Zone, which means much of the resources of both zones can be shared. By 2015, the zone aims to attract 50 large-scale modern logistic companies to set up regional headquarters and realize a GDP of CNY19 billion.