Thai companies join in Singles Day sales promotion

A university student stays up late for Singles Day promotion at her dormitory in Beijing, Nov 11, 2016. [Photo/IC]

BANGKOK - Thai companies, after setting up their own online stores on Chinese e-commerce platforms, are joining in the Singles Day promotion on Friday, an annual 24-hour online shopping spree.

Products from Thailand, a country visited by millions of Chinese tourists yearly, have gained popularity among Chinese customers in recent years, which encouraged the Thai businesses to set up their flagship stores on Chinese e-commerce platforms.

"We set up the online store on Alibaba's Tmall about a year ago and our sales reached an amount of 1.84 million yuan ($295,000) on Singles Day last year," said Li Jin, chief of Namu Life's flagship store on Tmall.

The company's cosmetic brand Snail White has become popular as its advertisements in Thai language can often be seen on social media, especially an adaptation of the fairy tale Snow White to publicize their products, which was watched over 1 million times on Youtube and over 6 million times on China's Weibo.

"Thanks to the e-commerce platform, we can talk with our customers directly and understand them better and thus to provide them with better products and services," Li said.

Another Thai cosmetic brand Thann sees their online store as a showcase to attract more buyers to their offline stores in China.

"We set up our online store on Tmall a few years ago as a showcase of our products, because these e-commerce platforms are so powerful and they did help us in attracting more customers to our offline stores," said Ren Li, general manager of Thann China.

She added that their online store offered discounts on some products that they want to popularize during the 24-hour promotion this year.

Moreover, the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP), the largest private company in Thailand, is setting up online shops on these e-commerce platforms and expressed their willing to join in the Singles Day event.

The group is now working together with a team of Chinese youths who started their entrepreneurship recently, to set up an online store on Tmall to sell Thai Hom mali rice.

"We plan to sell our Hom mali rice online to Chinese customers directly, which make it more convenient and efficient in the selling process and also will probable lower our cost," said Vivat Ausavanop, associate vice president of CP.

Vivat added that CP is ready to learn more about the Singles Day shopping festival and will be part of it when the time is ripe.

"We started our entrepreneurship here to encourage Thai enterprises to set up store on e-commerce platforms, because we think those 'cheap and fine' products of Thailand may win popularity with Chinese customers," said Pang Jingyuan, a member of Nebula Technology & Commerce, or the company cooperating with CP in establishing the online rice store.

Pang believe that Singles Day promotion has become more and more influential in China and around the world, so their team advised their partners to join in the trend.

Jack Ma, founder and chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba, said during his visit to Thailand in October that his company was going to work with the Thai government to help small business in the country to develop and boost e-payment, so that more Thai products may be sold on their e-commerce platforms in the future.

Alibaba's sales amount of the Singles Day promotion reached 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in just 6 minutes and 58 seconds after Friday came to China, compared with 12 minutes and 28 seconds in 2015.

The total sales amount of Alibaba reached 91.2 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) during the 24-hour event last year.