Nearly 500,000 e-commerce operators are based in Shenzhen, ranking first in the country, according to a report on China’s e-business industry released by Qcc.com, an enterprise credit inquiry system platform.
As of October, there were some 2.65 million e-commerce entities registered in the country. The number of those from Shenzhen accounted for 18.7 percent, meaning that one out of every five e-commerce players in the country is from Shenzhen.
Guangdong Province, with 706,100 companies and self-employed people engaging in e-commerce, has become the top province in the country in terms of the number of e-commerce businesses, followed by Zhejiang Province which has 348,800 operators, according to the report.
The country’s maternal and infant sector holds the greatest number of e-commerce businesses (117,800), followed by the pet sector (54,500) and liquor sectors (31,100).
The report also suggested that the number of registered e-commerce companies grew by over 80 percent year on year on average from 2010 to 2015.
After 2015, the rate dropped to around 30 percent. At the same time, self-employed e-businesses became a new trend as social media started gaining in popularity as a way to sell products.
As of June, China had 749 million online shoppers, accounting for 79.7 percent of the total netizens, according to a statistics report on China’s Internet development released by China Internet Network Information Center.