According to Shen Weihua, Deputy Director of Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce, "Accelerating the development of cross-border e-commerce and exhibition economy is an important task to cultivate new dynamic energy of the business economy, expand the new path of high-quality development of the business, and strengthen the function of global resource allocation, and enhance the capacity of Shanghai International Trade Centre".

The recently held municipal government press conference released the two important documents “Shanghai Municipality to Promote Cross-Border E-commerce High-Quality Development Action Plan (2023-2025)” and the “Shanghai Municipality to Promote the High-Quality Development of the Exhibition Economy to Create an International Exhibition of the Three-Year Action Plan (2023-2025)”.

This article will summarize the main key tasks proposed in this newly released action plan for cross-border e-commerce, which includes:

• Shanghai encouraging leading cross-border e-commerce enterprises to set up headquarters in the city, and give support for customs clearance, taxation, foreign exchange and credit insurance to key enterprises of high-quality cross-border e-commerce foreign trade in Shanghai；

• Promoting cross-border e-commerce postal export landing, according to the provisions of the cross-border e-commerce supervision site hardware and software investment and other costs;

• Formulate a pilot program for the cross-border e-commerce retail import business of medicines and medical devices;

• Support the transport of exported goods and returned re-exported goods in combined packages outside of China.

• Promote the construction of overseas warehouses, especially support the development of intelligent, diversified services, and localized overseas warehouses, in order to encourage small, medium, and micro enterprises to rent overseas warehouses, and explore the use of blockchain, big data and other technologies to provide supporting services for export collection, foreign exchange settlement, and tax rebates.

• Support enterprises to apply cross-border e-commerce tax policies; for enterprises that cannot collect foreign exchange on schedule for the repayment of foreign exchange loans due to special reasons, lending banks can handle the procedure of purchasing foreign exchange to repay loans;

• Provide discounted support to enterprises who declare relevant trade financing products through the Shanghai International Trade "Single Window";

• In terms of strengthening exchanges and co-operation and creating a good industry ecology, Shanghai will explore the establishment of a school-enterprise practical training cross-border e-commerce vocational skills training system, and support qualified cross-border e-commerce professionals to settle into such system.

• As for the convention and exhibition economy, the relevant programme proposes that by 2025, the total annual convention and exhibition area in Shanghai is expected to exceed 22 million square metres, of which the proportion of international exhibitions in the total exhibition area will reach 80%.

Cross-border e-commerce, as a new mode of foreign trade, has become an important “new arm” of Shanghai's foreign trade efficiency and quality. Shen Weihua, Deputy Director of Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce, introduced that in the first half of this year, the scale of cross-border e-commerce in Shanghai has achieved an import and export volume of 141.96 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of up to 84.0 per cent, while Shanghai enterprises have built more than 138 overseas warehouses, covering an area of 1.79 million square meters.

The Shanghai Municipality will subsequently closely focus on the construction of comprehensive cross-border e-commerce pilot zones and continue to promote the development of cross-border e-commerce. It will also focus on the following three areas of work: firstly, in-depth implementation of the "Outbound Excellence" action plan; secondly, accelerating the development of cross-border e-commerce empowered by digitization; and finally, continuing to promote the construction of cross-border e-commerce demonstration parks.

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