With respect to market share, in the 1st quarter of 2019, Tmall.com’s total sales increased by 28.2% over the same period of last year, accounting for 61.8% of the market share, ranking first. The total turnover of jd.com increased by 18.9% year on year. Its market share was 24.3%, ranking second. Suning.com ranked third with its market share hitting 6.7%. The market share of vip.com and gome.com.cn was 3.6% and 0.7%, respectively, ranking fourth and fifth
Due to year-end promotions, the Spring Festival holiday and other factors, the first quarter is usually a traditional slack season for the E-Commerce industry, yet some major events always happen in slack seasons: on one hand, adjustments and deployments in advance provide sufficient time for adaption and enough preparations for the coming of the hot season ensuing; on the other hand, events, news and topics in the slack season can draw people’s attention to manufacturers actively or passively to enhance marketing vigor more or less in the slack season.
In March, Alibaba Group became a shareholder of STO Express through investment, leaving another footprint on China’s logistics map. By then, Baishi, Yuantong, Zhongtong and Shentong of the “Four Tong and One Da”, the leading groups in China’s express industry, all have Alibaba on the list of their major shareholders. In an industry highly interdependent with E-Commerce, express manufacturers will inevitably attract Alibaba's attention. But compared with other industries that Alibaba invested in, Alibaba doesn’t mean to control express manufacturers across the board, but to ensure that they can develop independently and flexibly. This is actually due to the “platform-oriented” mentality of Alibaba in the field of logistics. After Alibaba founded cainiao.com, it’s mainly been focusing on storage and intelligent network building to provide digitalized basic services for logistics companies and express companies. Except for investing in express manufacturers with well-fledged trunk network, in recent years, Alibaba has successively invested in Wanxiang, Shengbang, Dongjun, Zhima Kaimen, Huangmajia and other landing distribution manufacturers to complement the transportation from local storage to C-terminal customers, and highly effective and high-quality distribution capacity in particular. Gradually enhanced capacity on this aspect is actually thanks to high requirements for distribution during the rapid development of Tmall.com, and also provides a more solid basic logistics platform for the open and new retailing system to empower more small-and-medium-sized businesses.
In 2019, jd.com also accelerated its reform in logistics business. After the official launch of personal express service in the end of last year, jd.com has been expanding this service’s coverage to more cities. According to the latest news, the personal express service of jd.com has accessed to 50 cities. Meanwhile, jd.com logistics also adjusted the salary system for deliverymen. Although this move ignited many disagreements, it’s still a necessary measure for jd.com logistics to develop its personal express service as a main business. Unlike dispatching under the self-supporting E-Commerce system, personal express service will not depend on company assignments but individual deliveryman's initiative and ability to exploit and maintain business orders to a great extent. Therefore, it’s natural for its salary system to resemble express companies’. Currently, China’s personal express service mainly lives on E-Commerce parcels. Although emerging E-Commerce platforms are potential partners for JD.COM to expand its businesses, JD.COM can hardly grab express business from its main E-Commerce competitors due to data confidentiality, competitiveness and other reasons, which poses a significant challenge for the further development of personal express service.
As a robust performer in business statistics recently, suning.com also has made a remarkable move in the first quarter: in February, suning.com announced its official acquisition of 37 department stores under WANDA DEPT. STORE. Since Alibaba vigorously layout off-line department entities, suning.com also made a strode in acquisition to complement its self-built off-line stores. Before this acquisition, off-line business of suning.com mainly relied on “Two Big (Suning Plaza, Suning.com Plaza), One Small (Suning Store), Multiple Focuses (Suning.com Cloud Store, Redbaby, Su Fresh, Suning Sports, Suning Theater, Suning Jiwu and so on) as its carriers but lacked large-sized department forms. After WANDA DEPT. STORE was included into the commercial system of suning.com, it not only enriched the latter’s retailing scenario, but also strengthened the influence of suning.com in main commercial cities by virtue of stores in core business areas of the first-tire and the second-tier cities. Suning.com values the layout of its off-line ecology, which is not only reflected by the acquisition, but also the growing number of its stores. According to the latest statistics, on the basis of about 1500 newly-opened stores in the first quarter, suning.com has managed to own over 12000 off-line stores by the end of this March, which lays a firm foundation for the rolling-out of its smart retailing from cities to towns across the country.