The "2024 Cross-Border Logistics Industry Development Trend Report" is released by the Tanjie Big Data Research Institute, mainly discussing the development status of the cross-border logistics industry, the challenges it faces, customer group characteristics, development trends, and related cases.
1. Industry Development Overview
- Current Situation: China's cross-border logistics, amid global supply chain changes, foreign trade resilience, and international cooperation opportunities, needs to address new challenges and match new business models to enhance competitiveness. Foreign trade shows resilience, cross-border e-commerce is developing rapidly, but global supply chain restructuring and changes in trade situations bring tests.
- Market Size: Cross-border e-commerce drives the vigorous development of cross-border logistics. In 2024, the market size of cross-border logistics is expected to reach 2.66 trillion yuan. Cross-border e-commerce is growing well, but the logistics industry faces challenges such as fluctuations in sea freight prices.
- Total Number of Enterprises and Regional Distribution: In 2024, the growth rate of cross-border e-commerce logistics enterprises will reach its peak, but the total number of enterprises is slowing down, and the industry is entering a reshuffling period. Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and other regions lead in the number of enterprises, forming industrial clusters.
- Profit Situation: Industry concentration is slowing down, siphon effect is obvious, revenue scale is steadily increasing, but small and medium-sized logistics enterprises face many pressures. The industry will develop towards resource integration and improving independent operation capabilities.
- Challenges: Including increasingly strict compliance requirements, high and volatile logistics costs, low degree of digitalization, diverse customer needs that are difficult to accurately grasp, etc.
2. Customer Group Insights
- Amazon Sellers: The European and American markets are stable, emerging markets are rising, FBA logistics competition is fierce, and special large items are a blue ocean market. Sellers are mostly focused on categories that improve quality of life, concentrated in coastal areas, with weak financial strength and a tendency towards price wars.
- Alibaba International Station Sellers: Europe and America are still the main markets, while Southeast Asia and the Middle East are attracting attention. Sellers are concentrated in coastal areas, mainly small and medium-sized enterprises, pursuing quality-of-life product categories, with some categories impacted by emerging platforms.
- Traditional Foreign Trade Sellers: Benefiting from the "Belt and Road Initiative", East Asian trade is booming. Most enterprises have been established for more than 5 years and are key to cross-border logistics enterprises expanding market increments. Enterprises are concentrated in coastal areas, small and medium-sized enterprises are active, and ocean and air transport are favored.
- Freight Forwarder Peer Sellers: Concentrated in Guangdong, Shanghai, and other regions, newly established and enterprises without official websites are targets for expansion, and cross-border logistics enterprises can integrate resources.
- Independent Website Sellers: Canada ranks first in quantity, foreign trade enterprises have stable and large shipment volumes, Chinese sellers have more contact information, and non-Chinese sellers have needs for overseas warehouses and last-mile delivery.
3. Development Trend Insights
- Layout of Emerging Platforms and New Businesses: Emerging platforms have become the focus for cross-border sellers to explore incremental markets. Direct mail small parcel dedicated lines and third-party overseas warehouse models are developing rapidly, and industry concentration is expected to increase.
- Capturing Incremental Opportunities in Emerging Markets: Emerging markets such as Russia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are rising, the "Belt and Road Initiative" is booming, new routes are emerging, and cross-border logistics enterprises can seize opportunities by optimizing services, providing professional services, and solving last-mile delivery problems.
- Seizing New Dividends of Digital Technology: The needs of cross-border sellers drive the specialization and digitalization of logistics services. Technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence help enterprises enhance competitiveness, achieve full-process tracking of logistics elements, reduce costs and increase efficiency in marketing and customer acquisition, innovate and improve organizational management, achieve high-quality business growth, and comprehensively enhance customer service.
- High Customer Unit Price in the Era of Low Profit: Cross-border logistics enterprises can increase customer unit price and expand business value chain space through strategies such as expanding products and customer groups, building trust, stabilizing customer relationships, and tapping into demand.
- Differentiated Capabilities to Break Through the Market: Market competition is shifting to products, services, and sales efficiency. Enterprises need to gain insight into customer needs, leverage digitalization to enhance competitiveness, and break through with differentiated capabilities.
4. Case Sharing: Introduces the digital and intelligent transformation paths and achievements of a certain e-commerce logistics company in Shenzhen, a certain logistics group in Shenzhen, and a certain international logistics company in Shanghai in terms of precise customer acquisition, efficient reach, and internal collaborative management.
