The "2024 New Landscape Report on Digital Trade: Seizing Overseas Opportunities and Achieving Key Leaps," released by Deloitte, mainly explores the development of digital trade in the Asia-Pacific region. It covers cross-border trade trends, new characteristics of China's trade, the potential for digital trade to go global, enterprise overseas research, and key elements for future development, providing comprehensive market insights and development direction references for the industry.
1. Asia-Pacific Cross-Border Trade Continues to Develop with High Prosperity
- Trade Growth and Strengthened Regional Cooperation: Trade in the Asia-Pacific region continues to grow, with import and export trade in goods accounting for 40% of the global total in 2023, reaching nearly USD 18 trillion, and is expected to grow to USD 18.5 trillion in 2024. Regional free trade agreements such as RCEP continue to release policy dividends, promoting the improvement of regional value chain cooperation systems. The Asia-Pacific region has become an area of active trade and investment and close value chain collaboration.
- Digital Technology Drives Value Chain Reconstruction: Digital technology empowers the real economy, providing more market players with opportunities to participate in global value chains, driving innovation in enterprise R&D, production, and marketing models, increasing enterprise value creation and differentiated competitive advantages, and accelerating value chain reconstruction and upgrading. However, the development of the digital economy varies across Asia-Pacific countries, with some facing issues such as incomplete digital infrastructure, which restricts the digital transformation of regional value chains. There is a need to strengthen innovative technology platforms and government regional exchanges and cooperation.
2. China's Trade Rides the Waves and Presents a New Landscape
- From Product Export to Global Operations: The internationalization process of Chinese manufacturers and traders has entered a new stage, with more enterprises embarking on deeper internationalization, moving from product export to overseas operations, achieving "local entities, local operations, local supply chain" integrated fulfillment. Cross-border e-commerce enterprises continue to deepen localization, and in the future, Chinese overseas enterprises will grow into locally rooted localized enterprises.
- Brand Going Global and Expansion into Emerging Markets: Chinese product exports are moving towards "Intelligent Manufacturing in China" transformation and upgrading, with an increasing proportion of high value-added export products. Branding has become a trend, and cross-border e-commerce provides opportunities for Chinese enterprise brands to go global. Emerging markets represented by Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are experiencing strong growth, attracting Chinese enterprises to explore business opportunities. Their e-commerce is booming, and trade entities have increasing demand for high-quality local service ecosystems. Improving infrastructure supporting environments helps unleash trade vitality and upgrade potential. Meanwhile, cross-border e-commerce is flourishing, with platforms, sellers, and service providers continuously optimizing roles and functions through segmentation and collaboration, promoting the prosperous development of cross-border e-commerce.
3. Asia-Pacific Digital Trade Going Global Potential Index
- Assessment of Overseas Environment and Market Classification: The overseas environment for digital trade in major Asia-Pacific economies is assessed from two dimensions: growth potential and market size, and divided into four categories: high-potential markets (such as Indonesia, Malaysia), mature markets (such as Singapore, Japan, South Korea), early-stage markets (such as Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos), and nascent markets (such as Brunei). High-potential markets have large populations, rapidly increasing internet penetration, and strong e-commerce growth momentum; mature markets have developed economies, high levels of digitalization, and active international trade; early-stage markets have relatively low market size and maturity in digital trade but are growing rapidly; nascent markets have overall lower market maturity and slower growth rates.
- Analysis of Core Overseas Countries
- Malaysia: The digital economy drives cross-border trade growth, the e-commerce market scale is developing rapidly, the digital payment system is well-developed, and the construction of digital free trade zones encourages SMEs to participate in digital trade, with the potential to become a data center hub in Southeast Asia.
- Thailand: Strengthening digital infrastructure construction, attracting investment from global tech giants, the government fosters a digital innovation environment, and the widespread application of cutting-edge digital technologies empowers cross-border e-commerce, promoting the development of digital trade.
- Vietnam: The digital economy is growing at a super-fast pace, the government has introduced policies to advance digitalization, cross-border e-commerce management mechanisms are being improved, logistics service levels need to be enhanced, and Vietnam is expected to lead the growth of digital trade in Southeast Asia.
- Singapore: Leveraging its status as a global business center and international logistics hub to promote the prosperity of digital trade, actively building a digital trade system, utilizing headquarters economy advantages, and adjusting payment policies to enhance digital trade competitiveness.
- Japan: Government digital strategies drive the development of digital trade, playing an important role in the formulation of global digital trade rules. There is room for improvement in e-commerce penetration, and the government is vigorously promoting cashless payments to lay the foundation for e-commerce growth.
- South Korea: Launching digital strategies to enhance global competitiveness, the cross-border e-commerce market is expected to continue rapid growth, but overseas e-commerce companies dominate. The Korean government actively participates in the formulation of digital trade rules and simplifies payment processes.
4. Digital Trade Enterprises Going Global Research and Analysis
- Enterprise Profile and Market Distribution: Small and micro enterprises are the main components of cross-border e-commerce going global, and industry competition is fierce. Overseas enterprises mainly cover North American and European markets, followed by Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia, with low shares in Central Asia and Africa. Mainstream demand categories include home furniture, clothing and footwear, digital 3C, etc., while brand building is relatively low in pet supplies and medical health categories.
- Enterprise Insights into Industry Trends and Strategy Choices
- Trend Insights: Most enterprises are optimistic about the prospects for cross-border e-commerce development, believing that product branding and premiumization, the emergence of new segmented tracks, and channel diversification are future growth drivers; some enterprises are pessimistic, mainly affected by external factors such as market competition, policy regulation, and operating costs.
- Brand Building: Enterprises generally attach importance to brand building, believing it is crucial for long-term business development. Product quality and meeting local needs are key factors. Most enterprises plan to increase investment in brand building, and fierce competition is the main difficulty in brand building.
- Digital Technology Application: Big data analysis and artificial intelligence are the most widely used digital technologies by enterprises. The priority of technology application is related to business needs. Enterprises pay attention to data privacy and security and take various measures to protect data.
- Overseas Localization Trend: Enterprises are optimistic about overseas localization operations, with most planning to maintain or increase investment. The main reasons include compliance requirements, reaching consumers, and platform requirements. Enterprises value localization operations, focusing investment on product and team localization, believing localization can increase sales, etc. However, some enterprises have not yet carried out localization operations due to business scale, cost, and other reasons.
- Enterprise Strategy Choices: Most cross-border e-commerce enterprises plan to establish independent sites, with diverse strategy choices. Some focus on platforms, some combine platforms and independent sites, and a few focus mainly on independent sites. Enterprises emphasize "refined" operations, clearly defining target audiences, optimizing product pages, tracking customer feedback, etc. Some enterprises choose to concentrate on individual platforms or open stores in bulk on multiple platforms, with business focus on core markets or multi-market layouts.
5. Key Elements for Future Asia-Pacific Digital Trade Development
- Digital Technology Optimizes Cross-Border Trade Processes: Digital technologies such as generative artificial intelligence and SaaS play important roles in various aspects of cross-border e-commerce. Cross-border payment services are expanding into comprehensive cross-border financial services, optimizing seller experience; generative AI helps reduce costs and increase efficiency in marketing and sales; SaaS services provide development opportunities for independent site players, and industry technology applications continue to expand and deepen.
- Continuous Optimization of Industry Ecosystem Drives Development: In terms of policy ecosystem, the implementation of RCEP has increased ASEAN countries' attention to cross-border trade, and countries are formulating and improving relevant policies; in terms of service ecosystem, Chinese e-commerce platforms provide support for cross-border sellers, such as funding, localized operations, and technology output; in terms of service models, managed models are diversified, with semi-managed models following fully managed ones, giving merchants more choices.
- "Localization" Becomes a Priority Development Strategy: Cross-border e-commerce "localization" runs through the entire chain from front-end operations to back-end supply chain and enterprise management, including localization of teams, products, marketing, logistics, and operations, to better meet the diverse consumer preferences and market demands of ASEAN countries and enhance competitiveness.
- Industry Players Move Towards Diversified, Branded, and Refined Development: The development of the cross-border e-commerce industry is driving enterprises to transform from "micro multinational enterprises" to "cross-border small giant enterprises." Brand strength, channel strength, and operational strength have become key competitive factors. Enterprises focus on diversified channel layouts, such as expanding independent site construction and combining platforms with independent sites; promoting branded development and increasing investment in brand building; deepening the concept of "refined" operations, including refinement in products, marketing, after-sales, and management.
- Data Privacy Protection and Compliance Trends: Countries attach importance to data privacy protection and accelerate legislation. Cross-border e-commerce enterprises need to pay attention to the regulatory dynamics of target countries, improve data compliance levels, and avoid legal consequences. Measures can include sorting business data, adjusting server deployment, cooperating with third-party security companies, and training employees. At the same time, cross-border e-commerce faces compliance constraints in international trade and enterprise operations. Platforms and sellers need to work together to address these challenges. Platforms strengthen communication with target markets, establish internal systems, and train sellers; sellers comply with platform and local regulations to avoid compliance risks.
