Cross-border e-commerce boosts firms’ export opportunities: Seminar

 

Hanoi (VNA) - Cross-border e-commerce is serving as an effective channel for companies, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to ship products abroad in the context of COVID-19, Deputy Director of the Hanoi Department of Industry and Trade Tran Thi Phuong Lan has said.

She made the remarks at a recent seminar on such commerce with Amazon and the export opportunities for Vietnamese businesses. Hosted by the department, it brought together nearly 300 firms.

They were advised to study various tasks in order to devise suitable e-commerce operation strategies and succeed.

Assistance packages were also introduced to help Vietnamese firms export goods to the international market.

E-commerce has been a bright spot in the country’s development, with an average growth rate of 14 percent over the first three quarters of 2020. Bolstering the application of e-commerce and the digital economy is therefore vital amid the global spread of COVID-19, the seminar heard.

Complexities brought by the pandemic in the early months of this year have hampered exports from Vietnam and those from Hanoi in particular.

The capital earned an estimated 13.19 million USD from exports in the first 10 months of 2020, up a mere 0.1 percent against the same period last year.

Given that e-commerce accounts for 8 percent of Hanoi’s retail sales and services revenue, the city ranks among Vietnam’s top localities in the e-commerce development index.

Hanoi is set to arrange more similar events and in-depth training courses on exports via e-commerce for local companies as well as enhance logistics infrastructure development, in cooperation with major e-commerce platforms of the world, Lan said./.