English version translated by XU Xinyuan (Wayne)

In the winter of 2023, Shenzhen was still carpeted in a rich green. In the T1 building of Shenzhen Alibaba Center, LANDING Shenzhen international trade team and OKKI, an enterprise SaaS tool under Alibaba.com, successfully held a joint event themed “Overseas Direct Customer Development for Freight Forwarders and Long-term Risk Management and Prevention”.

On the culture wall of Alibaba Center, there is an obvious sign reading “Shenzhen’s speed is too fast to break”, demonstrating the spirit of pragmatism and innovation of this city.

This is an attempt of cross-border cooperation in the foreign trade service industry and a dialogue among China’s top Internet technology, internationalized law firms and corporate decision makers in the foreign trade industry.

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Entrepreneurs visiting Alibaba ｜ Culture advocator  Qidi

I

“Living better” and “Going farther” – the survival breakout of freight forwarding enterprises

The guests attending this event are mainly from medium and large-scale freight forwarding enterprises in Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The topic concentrated on two key points: the development of overseas direct customers for enterprises, and the long-term risk management and prevention.

The development and management of overseas direct customers is the shared demand and pain point for all the companies in the foreign trade industry.

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Mr. CHEN Zhuanghao, director of the Okki CRM system

Mr. CHEN Zhuanghao, director of the Okki CRM system, delivered his sharing under the logic of the timeline to split various work scenarios in the traditional foreign trade business chain. Then, Mr. Chen reconstructed the foreign trade business chain in three major sections of “clues development”, “customer management” and “order system”, clearly demonstrating the index quantization method in different stages of different business and the management methods of data improvement.

This CRM system has connected the business flows of different foreign trade enterprises, putting together different functional tools and pages, which are necessary in traditional foreign trade working scenarios, into a single interface, so that workers in foreign trade industry no longer need to bury themselves in multiple pop-ups, greatly enhancing the working efficiency.

Meanwhile, this system has linked the flow of information of foreign trade enterprises by gathering all the data of the main business processes in a single perspective, which will greatly cut decision-making costs of entrepreneurs and enhance the accuracy of decisions.

If overseas customer development and management is to “live better”, then long-term risk management and prevention is to “go farther”.

Combined with practical cases, Mr. ZHOU Shichao, the senior partner of LANDING Shenzhen, delivered his speech to analyze the legal risks from the perspective of business and the perspective of management respectively. The key of risk management of business end is to prevent external risks while the key of risk management of administration end is to mitigate internal risks. Keeping the internal and external balance is the prerequisite for stability and going farther. The entrepreneurs present conducted a heated discussion on the difference between practice and legal compliance and the topic of dispute resolution.

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Mr. ZHOU Shichao, the senior partner of LANDING Shenzhen

In terms of common management problems such as transferring orders to other companies without authorization, Mr. Zhou also gives solutions different from traditional legal teams. In addition to the most basic legal risk control, Mr. Zhou also gives other alternative solutions combined with business management and legal methods, such as partnership, equity incentives, and fission entrepreneurship.

II

It takes ten years to create Okki CRM and opens the new AI era for foreign trade industry by Alibaba

In 2013, China surpassed the United States for the first time to become the world’s largest exporter of goods, and it was also in 2013 that Xiaoman Technology Co. Ltd was founded, becoming the first company in China to bring cloud computing and SaaS tools to the foreign trade industry.

During the past decade, China’s foreign trade industry has seen rapid development, and Xiaoman Technology has also been growing in upgrading its technology and solving the problems of foreign trade industry, attracting top technical talents and foreign trade industry elites from all over the world, and receiving the acquisition of Alibaba.

The new future has arrived. The Internet era realized the linkage of industries through the circulation of information flow. In today’s AI era, intelligent decision-making methods will bring about upgrades in all industries.

The latest Xiaoman SaaS system is called OKKI, which has access to the world’s leading AI system, been trained with the high-quality negotiation tactics in AI industry, and will be used as a foreign trade assistant to improve the conversion rate of negotiation for foreign trade workers. 240 million buyers and 1.5 million registered sellers on Alibaba.com may be the first batch of foreign trade workers to use this system. It is foreseeable that the working decisions of domestic foreign trade workers will become more intelligent and more accurate in the near future, which will also greatly promote the development of China’s foreign trade industry.

The in-depth integration of AI technology with the industry in China is an inevitable trend for the survival of enterprises and the development of the industry, and the in-depth service of Chinese international law firms with vertical industries is an inevitable requirement for the construction of the rule of law related to foreign affairs in China.

III

To build high-quality cause of the rule of law related to foreign affairs, LANDING lawyers providing legal service for foreign trade workers

As of 2022, over 180 million people work in foreign trade industry in China and the number of China’s foreign-related lawyers has exceeded 12,000. Compared with a decade ago, the cultivation of China’s foreign-related legal personnel has made great progress, but still presents a large gap.

Under the guidance of “Specialized Services, International Vision”, Shanghai LANDING Law Offices has set up over 40 branches or offices in 16 foreign countries, with business covering world’s leading economies, organizations and regions, such as European Union, Association of South East Asian Nations, African Union, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Organization of American States, etc. LANDING has developed into one of the Chinese law firms with the widest presence in developing countries along the “Belt and Road”.

As one of the core cities in Greater Bay Area, as well as the important maritime gateway of China’s mainland, Shenzhen is closely gripping the direction of future development. LANDING Shenzhen boasts three core legal professional fields – foreign trade, international investment and customs business, among which the legal service for foreign trade mainly serves for China’s foreign trade enterprises and freight forwarding companies.

“It is our duty as lawyers to help every client who comes to us for consultation to solve their problems, but we also hope to bring value to our clients’ industry and our legal industry, which I think is our mission as foreign-related lawyers.” said Mr. ZHOU Shichao, a senior partner of LANDING Shenzhen. Mr. Zhou believes that in order to be a good foreign-related lawyer, not only do we need to stick to our professional legal knowledge, but we also need to know how to understand the industry from the client’s point of view.

The essence of increasing the legal knowledge of the public is not only to convey the law, but also to publicize a mindset of identifying questions.

IV

The foreign trade industry entering a new era, embracing changes and winning the future

On the culture wall of Alibaba Center, there is another low-key sign reading “You’re only a subway ride away from the sea.”

Out of the Shenzhen Bay Park Subway Station, people can approach the seashore of Shenzhen. Likewise, transporting the commodities to the port has been the lives of foreign trade workers by generations. Nowadays, over 180 million people are working in China’s foreign trade industry.

Today’s world is experiencing an unprecedented major change in a hundred years, and the foreign trade industry is still facing many unstable factors. However, “always changing” is the unchanged rule of the world.

Up till now, the development of China’s foreign trade industry has not only built the business links between China and the world, but also maintained a platform of equal conversations between Chinese culture and the world’s diverse cultures. The development of foreign trade industry in China has long been not a single upstream and downstream trade. In the new era of foreign trade, I believe that this kind of cross-border cooperation will bring more surprises to the development of the foreign trade industry.