Alibaba Digitizes CES: Technology Reshapes International Trade

The 2019 CES International Consumer Electronics Show will be held in Las Vegas on January 8th, US time. CES, which began in 1967, has become the vane of the global consumer electronics industry. The number of companies and the number of participants has extremely high requirements for venues and services. In general, in addition to the pavilions where large enterprises are concentrated, there will be national pavilions, industrial pavilions, and sub-branches where SMEs are concentrated. If the company holds a press conference, it will be concentrated in hotels and convention centers around the pavilion.

This raises a number of problems: the number of venues that can be accommodated is limited, and there are always people around the world who cannot be present for such reasons. Even if you go to the venue, if you want to go to the CES pavilion, you often need a lot of time and good physical strength. In this case, the participants probably have to spend time on the products they care about, sometimes even large. Lost in the pavilion like a maze.

This year, there is a good way to alleviate this situation: Alibaba.com (Alibaba International Site) cooperated with CES 2019 to move the exhibition online to build a business platform for buyers and sellers around the world.

Zhang Kuo, co-general manager of Alibaba's SME International Trade Division, said: Alibaba is a global trade platform for global buying and global sales. Technology inclusiveness can make the world have no difficult business.

Move the show to the line

In fact, Alibaba.com (Alibaba International Site) and CES 2019 cooperated for the third time in a row after 2017 and 2018.

In 2018, Alibaba.com first introduced online video live broadcast to the online conference venue to achieve online and offline linkage. In this exhibition, Alibaba.com will be fully displayed under the theme of “Data and Technology Empowerment, Reshaping Global Trade”. The changes brought about by technological change to global trade, especially in the four developments of “new technologies”, “new services”, “new trends” and “new data”.

According to Zhang Kuo, at this CES show, Alibaba.com (Alibaba International Site) will focus on “real-time translation of video calls”, “immersive video selection”, “picture search” and “VR factory”. The four new technologies provide a new on-site and online service experience for professional traders to find and search for products and communicate efficiently through Alibaba.com.

Zhang Kuo believes: ""A lot of high-tech Alibaba including some digital technology is partly concealed, and the ability of high-tech is second to none in the world, so in CES itself we provide some products and technical capabilities to show how to give small and medium-sized businesses around the world. This is one thing we have to do.""

According to previous predictions, there will be 160,000 people attending CES in 2019, some of whom are individual participants, and most of them are representatives of business enterprises. Nearly 500 Alibaba partners will participate in CES this year. To this end, Alibaba built an online CES zone to allow global buyers who could not get on-site to see the digital video content of exhibitors.

In terms of technology, Alibaba's real-time translation of video calls will be jointly developed by Alibaba.com (Alibaba International Site) translation team and Alibaba Dharma Machine Intelligence Technology Laboratory, integrated with camera face recognition. Technology, speech recognition technology and machine translation technology.

At the CES site, when the buyers from different language environments stand in the defined area, the camera in front of the screen recognizes that the face is facing the screen, then the video call function can be activated. When both the buyer and the seller speak into the microphone and perform voice communication, the content will be presented on their own screen in real time, and will be translated into another language and presented to the other party's screen.

At the same time, if exhibitors want to understand the strength of the supplier, wearing a VR helmet can see the factory situation thousands of miles away. The buyer opens the Alibaba client and scans the products to know which suppliers can supply. This is Alibaba.com (Alibaba International Site) using virtual reality technology to customize the recommended video content of the merchants, and present the detailed internal environment, production process and research and development conditions of the seller's commercial entities in different countries and even continents in front of professional buyers. In order to obtain an immersive and intuitive experience, it also avoids the loss of time and cost caused by the boat and long-distance travel, making the overall process more efficient and convenient.

Zhang Kuo said that in fact, Ali itself has done some profound technical fields. The general starting point is to solve some core business problems, such as translation and real-time progress based on language communication. “We are based on artificial intelligence big data products, and rapid iterative optimization immediately brings business value. These things are iterative in Ali with technology.”

Traditional offline exhibition changed

Founded in 1999, Alibaba.com (Alibaba International Site) is the first business segment of Alibaba Group and is now the world's leading cross-border trade B2B e-commerce platform. The platform has 150 million+ registered members and generates 300,000 inquiries every day. At the same time, the platform has 10 million active overseas buyers covering 200 countries and regions. The platform is available in 16 languages and has a 5900+ product category covering 40+ industries.

Alibaba International Site hopes to empower SMEs to help them better carry out international trade. The exhibition is an indispensable part of trade.

As one of the most watched and involved professionals in the world, one of the most influential consumer electronics exhibitions, the information, introduction trends and technology released during the CES exhibition are almost at the forefront of the consumer electronics industry. Leading the development trend of the industry, many technologies launched in CES will have huge demand in the world in the next few months or even weeks, from raw materials, technology implementation and related sub-category innovations. See its influence.

""What did Alibaba.com join to change CES?"" After the first opening of the Design & Source Showcase in 2018 by CES and Alibaba.com, the technology will directly expand the trade exchanges at the CES site, providing a new and extremely high level of global procurement for consumer electronics. The platform of sharp effects has facilitated the search and purchase of goods by buyers and sellers and the conclusion of foreign trade transactions. Here also partially answered ""What did Alibaba.com change CES?""

The cooperation between Alibaba.com's leading platform in the world's foreign trade basins and top-level exhibitions is to use technology and data empowerment to bring the industry's most cutting-edge technological developments to the scene and intuitively change the experience of industry transactions. For example, Alibaba.com applied artificial intelligence to “video real-time translation” and applied VR technology to business recommendation. At the same time, the exhibition will be expanded from offline to online, bringing first-hand information to the audience who can't come to the exhibition in the world, and expanding the influence of the exhibition itself;

“The suppliers we exhibited last year had a 300% increase in the number of tour shows and buyers in the month. It is better to understand that this is a high-quality content, but if you go to CES to exhibit these products and technologies, you also have some unique things. Turn it into a digital content that can be displayed online to hundreds of merchants. I show this video is to use mobile phones to show the effect, cross-border trade online and offline, and PC and border increasingly mode, you just Explaining the world's buyers and sellers on the mobile phone will have a very good effect."" Zhang Kuo explained.

After 20 years of data accumulation, Alibaba International hopes to redefine something based on these experiences. ""How to help the original offline exhibition through digitalization, let it become an online exhibition, digitally can extend the boundaries of these goods to do things, and the scope of doing things, this is what we hope to empower these businesses, through us Operation empowers merchants to let them cross-border trade."" Zhang Kuo told reporters.

Reshaping international trade

The traditional offline exhibitions have changed due to the intervention of technology. This kind of change extends to the trade field like the “butterfly effect”: technology to improve trade efficiency services, and trade development puts forward new requirements for technological evolution.

Alibaba International Site digitizes goods or trade through the Internet, connects buyers and sellers around the world, and makes it easier for buyers and sellers to trade with data and information matching. Business becomes easier. ""In the technology company, your technology always solves some practical problems. The big problem we solve is how to digitize and reconstruct cross-border trade through data. This is a big subject for us."" Zhang Kuo stressed.

In recent years, the volume of global trade has shown a sharp increase. Zhang Kuo said: ""We have seen online transactions on the entire International Site, whether it is online payment buyers, or the growth rate of online trading volume can maintain a three-digit growth, at least within the last three years. , so this is a big change for us.""

This also allows Alibaba to see that through Alibaba's technology may help more global SMEs to do business more conveniently.

In December 2018, Alibaba International Site officially announced the launch of the ""Digital Sea"" program to help small and medium-sized export enterprises to open source and reduce expenditures and obtain more orders.

The program is a package of digital products, tools and services that cover all aspects of cross-border trade. The core of these is the comprehensive digital upgrade of existing products and service matrices around the precise matching of buyers and sellers, brand marketing, credit guarantees, payment finance, basic logistics and cross-border supply chains.

Alibaba.com understands the needs of overseas buyers, and has evolved from a simple “search for goods” to a stage of strong optimization and improvement of all links in the foreign trade. Alibaba.com's empowerment for overseas buyers is to provide them with better products and services at all key points. For example, the “Pay Later Online Microfinance Loan” service solves the problem of cash flow management for small and medium-sized buyers. The need for operation, and “video real-time translation” facilitates direct communication between buyers and sellers in different languages. “Trade Assurance” provides buyers with reliable and traceable traces for buyers and sellers. Trade security, etc.

“The deterministic demand for accurate, timely and safe logistics of global trade has spawned the launch of our “Worry-Free Logistics” service, which combines the deep cooperation of our own platform infrastructure, rookie and external logistics service providers. And the platform, upstream and downstream, front-end and back-end coordination, in order to enable us to achieve the 'China-US 5th Day' service commitment, and in the entire link we will introduce the 'blockchain' technology to achieve logistics clearance The safe transmission and storage of documents provide further protection, and it also reflects the fact that 'technology is to improve trade efficiency services, and trade development has put forward new requirements for technological evolution'."" Zhang Kuo said.

Cross-border trade needs to solve the trust problems of both partners, lower the threshold of trust, and make cooperation more convenient.

For these small and medium-sized enterprises around the world, in addition to seeing some vendors online, they can directly connect with vendors through the network in the future. The current situation is: Alibaba will help the world to see all the content they exhibit at CES after helping SMEs to digitally upgrade. At the same time, through the digital capabilities to help these Chinese companies to go abroad can expand their range of technology buyers. In Zhang Kuo's view: ""Digitalization of business opportunities is mainly due to these two problems. One is their own ability, and the other is to empower these small and medium-sized enterprises through digital operating systems.""

A more effective match between demand and the real ability to provide production capacity and product supply is the core problem that Alibaba International Site is now solving.

The participation of Alibaba International Site in CES means that the International Site's capability boundary, after 20 years of accumulation, has been able to get out of the trade field. With the possibility of reshaping global commerce, it also has the ability to define the future. Zhang Kuo said: ""This exhibition is the new format of global trade that we have defined.""

Ali International is aggregating the power of ALI, rookie, Alibaba Cloud, Nail and Dharma and other Ali economies and ecological partners to build a new digital foreign trade link and improve the digital commercial infrastructure on this new foreign trade route. . For example, Dharma's intelligent translation technology for International Sites can identify 43 languages, allowing buyers and sellers to communicate without worry.