US retail giant Wal-Mart said it had signed an agreement with the Shanghai government to set up a China e-commerce headquarters in the city to boost its presence in the fast-growing market.
Under a memorandum of understanding signed on Monday, the company will strengthen collaboration with the city government on training of personnel and offer Chinese consumers “a wider selection” of products online.
“The scale of online sales in China is expanding rapidly and is projected to match US online sales in the next few years,” Wan Ling Martello, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president of Global eCommerce, said in a statement.
“We are very optimistic about China’s e-commerce market and its growth potential,” she said.
Wal-Mart said last month it had agreed to buy a minority stake in Chinese online grocery store Yihaodian (一號店), or “No. 1 store” in Chinese. It did not provide financial details of the deal.
Consumer online spending in China nearly doubled to 513.1 billion yuan (US$79.3 billion) last year from a year earlier, accounting for about 3 percent of total retail sales in the country, according to the China e-Business Research Center.
That figure could exceed 1 trillion yuan in the next two years, the institute said in a report released early this year.
Highlighting the growing appeal of China’s Internet market, foreign companies such as Adidas, Gap and Wal-Mart have opened online stores in the country, which has the world’s largest Web population at 477 million.
Wal-Mart’s first-quarter net profit rose 3 percent to US$3.4 billion as strong international sales offset weakness in its home market in the US.
Mexico, China and Chile had the highest percentage sales increases for the quarter ending April 30 compared with last year, the company said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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