Today, when the global economy is in urgent need of recovery, continuous opening up is one of the important "two legs" of China's future economic development. In an increasingly saturated domestic market, Chinese companies need to seek new opportunities abroad in order to survive in an uncertain future. "Going to sea" has also become one of the hottest words in recent years. A large number of Chinese companies set up "sails" to carry their products and services overseas. Compared with the traditional "going overseas" model of exporting single-manufactured goods and cheap electronic products, the current "going overseas" model of Chinese companies is more diversified, such as "technology going overseas" represented by artificial intelligence, Internet technology, and green energy. , "Brand Going Overseas" for IP export, and "Ecological Going Overseas" for cultural output, corporate services, and the export of the entire industrial chain.
On June 8, "Fortune" (Chinese version) released an inventory of "China's main overseas companies worth paying attention to in 2023", which introduced the current situation of Chinese companies going overseas from seven "main tracks", and listed recent observations It is a Chinese overseas enterprise that constantly explores new fields, achieves new breakthroughs, and has growing influence. On June 9, the 2023 Amazon Cloud Technology "Tide to the New World" Sea-going Day event was held in Shenzhen. Xie Jingwei, Executive Editor-in-Chief of New Media of "Fortune" (Chinese Edition), presided over the roundtable forum themed "Cloud Supports Hundreds of Industries, Co-exploring the World", and representatives from overseas companies from the digital Internet field, physical industry field and enterprise service field, as well as enterprises going overseas The top executives of Amazon Cloud Technology, one of the service boosters, shared the most authentic experience and the deepest insight in the process of going overseas. The guests had a wonderful discussion on topics such as current challenges, future opportunities, and how cloud technology can empower enterprises to manage security and compliance, do a good job of localization, and accelerate innovation.
Sail out to sea, digitally native to seize global opportunities
In the current upsurge of Chinese companies going overseas, Internet companies are undoubtedly a force that cannot be underestimated. Compared with the "predecessors" manufacturing companies going overseas, the Internet industry no longer needs to compete in overseas markets by sacrificing profit margins like the early "labor-intensive industries". In this wave of Internet going overseas, many Chinese Internet companies have seized this rare historical opportunity of "being on the same starting line as the world". While quickly copying the successful experience of China's Internet to new markets, they are also constantly innovating according to local conditions.
Shoplazza is a company that focuses on providing products and technical solutions for global B2C e-commerce. The company provides enterprise-level solutions for 360,000+ merchants around the world through the core product global independent station (Shopping Cart) SaaS. The platform merchants cover more than 100 countries and regions around the world, and consumers are located in 150+ countries. Daewoo Infinity is a global Internet technology company, with a variety of audio and video and AI tool APP product matrix, covering more than 100 countries and regions around the world, with more than 200 million monthly active users. Its advertising platform bridgemile helps overseas brands reach more than 1 billion users in emerging markets. As a major feature of contemporary Chinese Internet companies going overseas, both Dianjiang Technology and Daewoo Infinity anchored the international market at the beginning of their establishment and quickly integrated into the local market ecology.
Dianjiang Technology initially focused on providing simple, convenient and cost-effective e-commerce website building tools and solutions for customers who are interested in cross-border e-commerce. However, with the expansion of the scale of global import and export cross-border e-commerce, Dianjiang has integrated the platform into a relatively complete cross-border e-commerce stand-alone solution to solve the problems of product selection, supply chain, creative materials and Payment and other pain points.
As an Internet company, Daewoo Infinity did not invest in the Southeast Asian and South Asian battlefields that have become the "red sea", but quickly decided to focus on the Latin American market, which has a large population base and excellent market potential, as a focus for development. From the initial tool products to audio and video products, to AIGC products; from App products on the To C end to advertising platforms on the To B end. Facing the rapidly growing business, Daewoo Unlimited uses a mature cloud service provider to liberate itself from the complicated infrastructure and execute and focus on the business itself more efficiently. In addition, Daewoo Infinity believes that compatibility and overall ecology are of great significance for Internet companies to go overseas, and Amazon cloud technology has helped his company realize this.
Amazon cloud technology covers 31 geographic regions, 99 availability zones, 115 Direct Connect sites, and more than 400 edge nodes around the world, serving 245 countries and regions around the world, with more than 200 major categories of cloud services, ranging from breadth and The depth is to meet the technical needs of different enterprises. In addition to Dianjiang and Daewoo Infinity, more than 120,000 customers have benefited from the support of Amazon cloud technology, including Lalamove, HABBY Games, Heguan Technology, etc.
Rooted in the local area, driving new momentum of the industry
Since China's social reform and opening up 45 years ago, the rapid development of China's economy has brought about earth-shaking changes for all Chinese companies. As the absolute main force of enterprises going overseas, the Chinese entity enterprises headed by the manufacturing industry, which have grown by leaps and bounds from the wave of reform, have become the main force that cannot be underestimated in the fields of high-end manufacturing, intelligent manufacturing, and the Internet of Things.
TCL and Tuya Smart are undoubtedly the most topical companies in this track. The former is TCL, which has three core industries (photovoltaic new energy and silicon material production, semiconductor display, smart terminal products and services), and the latter is Tuya, a global IoT developer platform currently cooperating with more than 10,000 Chinese factories intelligent.
During the discussion, the three most frequently used words were "globalization", "localization" and "user insight".
As a physical enterprise, TCL started to expand overseas in Vietnam in 1999. After several major milestones, it has now carried out business in 160 countries around the world. The strategy it adopts is Glocal (global layout + localized operation). The global layout of physical enterprises relies on the linkage of industrial chains in various regions, and digitalization is the most important starting point for overall planning. Taking TCL as an example, even if it only makes one hardware product, it needs digital services to improve the experience of overseas users.
Tuya Smart is an IoT developer platform under the special business model of "B2B2C". Its co-founder and COO Yang Yi emphasized the experience of "user insight" and "building the last mile by yourself". The first is to try to walk ahead of customers when going overseas, become the "eyes" of customers, discover real market needs and bring good use cases and directions to customers. Secondly, open up the entire business process, assist customers to establish an IoT industrial chain, and form a closed loop of product circulation and service in the entire industry. Thirdly, Tuya Smart has established 8 regional headquarters around the world, established sites in more than 30 countries and conducted localization attempts. The localization team acquires the sense of body and touch of front-line users, quickly passes it on to the internal team to form technical implementation, and then provides the products required by end customers. Tuya Smart's "short, flat and fast" development link promotes the rapid launch of products and quickly occupies the market. Yang Yi introduced that currently, Tuya Smart has more than 700,000 developers around the world and has helped more than 7,600 brand owners complete their own development and applications.
Going overseas is not a simple process of going abroad, it is essentially a process of global operation of enterprises. "You can even understand the transformation process of how an enterprise becomes a global enterprise." said Zhu Yi, General Manager of Industry Solutions of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China. Whether it is the global strategic layout and technological iterations established by TCL, or the needs of "thousands of people and faces" that the development of Tuya's smart platform must respond to, the "globalization" and "localization" of physical enterprises going overseas are essentially customer-oriented. Developed as the center, the "people-oriented" customer personalized experience is extended, so as to enhance the brand power and market recognition overseas. This also has extremely high requirements on the framework and cloud computing capabilities of cloud service providers.
One is the high degree of freedom and high compatibility required for framework development. In addition, the digital applications of IoT devices and smart terminal devices are inseparable from data storage and exchange on the cloud. Stable cloud service providers will provide enterprises and end users with more Safe, stable and convenient experience. When SAIC MG went overseas to India, it keenly grasped the needs of local customers for a sense of technology, and cooperated deeply with Amazon cloud technology to realize the vehicle intelligent network connection function, and at the same time integrated Amazon Alexa into the smart cockpit function, which was a great success in the local area.
Break through the wall with all our strength and win the new journey of enterprise service
In the context of global digital transformation, Chinese companies going overseas in the past two decades have experienced a journey from exporting labor-intensive products to innovative thinking and digital-driven products going overseas. In this wave of going overseas, a group of companies whose businesses cover network security, open source databases, advertising and marketing platforms, human resources services, legal services and other fields have formed a brand-new service ecology for going overseas. In the past, when it came to enterprise-level service software or application services, European and American companies such as Amazon Cloud Technology, Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle came to mind immediately. But in fact, with the favorable policies of opening up to the outside world and the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, China’s IT industry has bred a large number of outstanding overseas companies in this field over the years.
As a "To B" enterprise that provides services to enterprises through the cloud computing model, ByteDance ByteHouse attaches great importance to the technical empowerment of cloud service providers to enterprises. ByteHouse is a cloud-native data warehouse that provides users with an extremely fast analysis experience and can support real-time data analysis and offline analysis of massive data. ByteHouse utilizes its second-level elastic expansion and contraction capabilities and enterprise-level features built into the product to empower overseas users to achieve digital transformation and even go to the cloud. By providing standardized services and intensive resources to help users reduce costs and increase efficiency, large-scale analysis instances can be created in a short period of time, and subsequent iterative expansion is also a one-click, minute-level experience.
The stability, speed and reliability of the server framework become the guarantee for ByteHouse to provide customers with powerful computing power services. Li Qun, head of ByteHouse products, especially talked about "long-termism" and the cooperation between ByteHouse and Amazon Cloud Technology's Marketplace, which helped ByteHouse quickly integrate into the huge ecosystem of Amazon Cloud Technology Marketplace, reducing ByteHouse and the companies it serves. Discomfort and associated costs in the cloud process. Relevant companies don't have to worry about data transfer and support on the cloud when they go overseas, and can focus on overseas business expansion, which will get twice the result with half the effort.
SoundNet is the pioneer and leader of global real-time audio and video interactive services. It provides developers with convenient API calls to build a variety of real-time audio and video interactive scenarios within the application. The SoundNet SDK has empowered more than 200 scenarios in more than 20 industries, including social live broadcast, online education, game interaction, and IoT. The real-time audio and video minutes supported by the SoundNet SDK have reached 50 billion minutes in several months. Dai Meng, the person in charge of regional solutions of Shengwang, believes that the key to the successful experience of going abroad of Shengwang is to provide customers with customized solutions according to local conditions, use relevant cloud platform technology to solve problems, and help "customers quickly implement POC". The key to its core RTC service is to reduce the response delay during transmission, so that every user can reduce the end-to-end delay, get the best experience, and improve the customer's perception of use.
As a cloud partner of ByteHouse, Amazon Cloud Technology has provided similar enterprises with a lot of technical assistance and business development assistance. Especially in terms of technology, Dai Wen, director of the Solution Architecture Department of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China, said that security and elastic scaling are very important to the needs of overseas customers. Amazon Cloud Technology hopes to help "enterprises continue to learn, avoid excessive technical confidence; actively adopt New cloud technology" to transform products, and then obtain technical compound interest. At the same time, Dai Wen also mentioned that Amazon cloud technology can also help enterprises connect to a "bigger cloud ecosystem". When an enterprise goes overseas to a region or country for localized operations, enterprise services must be integrated into the local technology ecosystem to operate normally. The Amazon cloud technology platform can help related enterprises on the same platform to jointly carry out market expansion, resource sharing, and technology connection.
Where is Chang'an?
As mentioned in the inventory of "China's main players worthy of attention in 2023", Chinese companies have now entered a brand new "age of great voyages", and they are striving to move upstream in the global value chain. Taking the three key areas of enterprises going overseas in the past ten years as examples, this roundtable discussion focused on the unique opportunities and challenges faced by Chinese enterprises going overseas. Service companies are an important driver of this trend.
When a company goes overseas, it will go through four stages: formulating a strategic plan for going overseas, building infrastructure for going overseas, realizing business innovation, and integrating into local operations. At each stage, from Amazon cloud services, to Amazon's global business system, to the joint partner ecosystem, Amazon adheres to the concept of customer first, from digital transformation plan planning, overseas compliance consulting, insurance consulting, industry overseas consulting, talent Training, cloud migration, customized industry solutions, product iteration and business innovation based on AI/IoT/data analysis, better marketing and customer acquisition, supply chain management, better after-sales customer service experience, sustainable development of enterprises, etc. Full link to realize one-stop escort. Among the four stages of going overseas, in the first two stages, Amazon cloud technology helps enterprises "go steady", and in the latter two stages, it helps enterprises "go far".
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy once said: "There is no compression algorithm for experience." In other words, the accumulation of experience cannot be simplified and replicated. In the more than ten years since Chinese enterprises went to the sea in the cloud, Amazon Cloud Technology was the first cloud service provider to escort the overseas enterprises. Especially in the six aspects of security compliance, global customer practice, infrastructure, more than 200 types of cloud services, global partner network, and global business system support, Amazon Cloud Technology has a large number of customer practices, industry accumulation, and ecological aggregation. It is precisely because of the rich experience and capabilities in the field of going overseas that more than 80% of Chinese companies going overseas choose to cooperate with Amazon Cloud Technology and jointly achieve brilliant results.
In 2023, when the global economic development is quite uncertain, it is gratifying to see that China's physical manufacturing, electric vehicles, new energy, technology services, pan-entertainment and other products still maintain their competitiveness and continue to develop overseas. Just like the golden age of the era of great geographical discovery in the 16th century, contemporary "adventurers" who go out to sea are not only looking for hidden "treasures" on the "blue ocean", bringing cultural and economic exchanges to distant places, but also exploring and establishing The new business model and game rules will also affect the future world economic development pattern. Of course, risks exist. New overseas companies and companies with aspirations to go overseas must accurately grasp the situation, and should not be superstitious about cutting-edge technologies and successful models. They need to identify their own corporate positioning and avoid possible commercial risks. However, we can firmly believe that a new generation of "trend runners" will surely be born among Chinese entrepreneurs with profound accumulation and perseverance. Where is Chang'an? Only under the hooves of horses.