E-commerce: win-win cooperation of China and Spain

"Orders from Spain have increased by a large margin year on year after we entered the Spanish market. Most buyers are common Spanish people," said Li Hang, manager of DHgate.com overseas market department.

Spain is now the third largest overseas market on the world business map of Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce company. In 2015, Alibaba started cooperating with the postal office of Spain and building warehouses overseas, which halves the time it takes to deliver commodities from China to Spanish consumers.

Experts predict China's cross-border e-commerce will continue to increase fast in several years.

The boom also opens the Chinese market to foreign companies. So far, 53 Spanish brands of garments, cosmetics, wine and ham are sold on Alibaba to Chinese consumers.

The National Informationalization Plan during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20) released by the central authorities proposes to prioritize the building of the Silk Road of the internet, and sets the target that China should form bilateral and multilateral trade and economic cooperation channels with the Belt and Road countries based on cross-border e-commerce and digital trade.

The trade volume of China's cross-border e-commerce reached 6.3 trillion yuan (US$914 billion) last year, among which 80 percent are export.

Koh Chin Yee, a researcher of Asian affairs with the National University of Singapore, said that the economic globalization has a characteristic that the more open it is, the more capable it is to innovate and generate win-win benefits. China is undoubtedly a major driving force in boosting current world economic growth.