PDF《Taobao Villages》

s welfare and strives to create employment in rural areas. Fostering the growth of ecommerce in rural economies ( Villages 4.0 ) might be an attractive solution to connect unique local products with urban purchasing power as an economic and employment stimulus for countries with a distinct rural character. Stefan Pantekoek Resident Director FES Shanghai Representative Office Sergio Grassi Country Director FES Indonesia Coordinator Economy of Tomorow in Asia Jakarta, February

2019 5 Executive Summary ? The key success factors for Alibaba and its subsidiary online marketplace Taobao are: aggregation of supply and demand information, free user registration and high-quality value- adding services. Furthermore, together with its Alipay payment platform and Cainiao Logistics it has become a quasi-monopoly platform for trading, data and web flow. ? The growth of Taobao.com has created new clusters of commerce, production and services. Ali? Research (a research institute of Alibaba Group) defines a Taobao village as follows: a large number of online merchants co-exist in a village that do business mainly through Taobao.com, depend on the Taobao ecommerce ecosystem, and achieve economy of scale and synergy. In 2018, there were 3,202 Taobao villages in

24 provinces, municipalities directly under the central government and autonomous regions in China. Taobao villages were highly concentrated on the east coast of China, where the biggest marketplace of the world C the city of Yiwu C and the Alibaba headquarters is located. ? In the garment industry, the search function for identical products on Taobao.com and Alibaba.com has exacerbated the price war among producers and sellers. The emergence of online trading platforms has led to more clothing categories and smaller order sizes. The lifecycle of clothing products has become shorter and shorter. Businesses/organizations/ individuals along the clothing supply chain are more specialized, therefore claiming unique competitive advantages in certain domains while collaborating with others to achieve all- win synergy. ? Low production and low living cost in urban villages, informal employment and distributed production might be more suitable for the low- price small-batch orders from Taobao.com. But the workplace as well as living conditions in many Taobao villages and urban villages producing for Taobao are poor. Informal employment gives rise to thorny labor issues, such as child labor and wage arrears. Local governance is challenged because governance costs are disproportionately high compared to the rather low contribution of the informal economy to local fiscal revenue. ? The lessons learnt from the Taobao village experience in China are: It takes the concerted efforts of the government, private companies behind the platforms as well as organized labor to mitigate the drawbacks of informal employment related to Taobao villages and to fully benefit from the inequality-reducing potential of the platform economy in a rural setting.

6 Introduction The platform economy is a new economic pattern based on modern information technology including the Internet and cloud computing that aims at meeting diverse demands by integrating industrial supply chains and value chains and by improving the allocation of available market resources. The platform economy is of great importance to Chinese socio-economic development. The retail platform operated by the Alibaba Group is a poster child of the Chinese platform economy, with its Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV)1 during the Alibaba Group'

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2016 fiscal year exceeding RMB