BEIJING: The Chinese enterprise building an e-commerce platform in Pakistan, has a plan to extend it for all South Asian countries in future.
“We are building an e-commerce platform called GETU in Pakistan. In the future, we plan to build it as a comprehensive e-commerce platform for all South Asian countries,” Gao Chao, Deputy General Manager, China Pakistan Hongan (Hangzhou) Technology said on Thursday.
“Currently, there are more than 500,000 registered users on our platform. In the next few years, we plan to build a comprehensive e-commerce platform with annual sales of millions of users,” he told China Economic Net. He said that his company had established a branch in Pakistan in 2019. At present, it was self-operated, and it would also open investment in the future, adding, “Both Chinese sellers and Pakistani sellers can enter our platform. Our products are not limited to certain specific areas, but take a high degree of richness, the supply method of the whole category.”
Gao Chao said, at this stage, the company was still mainly focusing on light industrial products. It hoped to sell high-cost-performance light industrial products made in China to Pakistan, and also provide better, newer and higher quality Chinese-made products for ordinary Pakistani people.
Speaking of the impact of the current epidemic, Gao Chao said that Pakistan’s e-commerce business had basically stalled during the epidemic. Pakistan had adopted a series of epidemic prevention and control measures, including lockdown of the cities, resulting in no way for our goods to be distributed.
He said that in fact, if the epidemic situation was not taken into account, this year’s sales were expected to reach 10 million levels, and the number of users was also expected to exceed one million levels. “It now appears that our expectations may be adjusted, but not too much. From our development stage, now, we are still in a relatively preliminary stage. We regard the current period as a process of accumulating strength, and we will wait until the epidemic situation to exert force. In general, the company is not too panic about the current situation,” he said.
In addition to the Covid-19 epidemic situation, Gao Chao said that there were some difficulties while operating in Pakistan but in general, Pakistan was a market that was more suitable for his company. “Because of its very large population base, Pakistan may be transformed into a huge demographic dividend in the future,” he added.
