E-Commerce and Industrial Upgrading in the Chinese Apparel Value Chain

By Fuyi Li, S. Frederick, Gary Gereffi. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2018

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT The economic and social gains from electronic commerce (e-commerce) that promote innovation, industry upgrading and economic growth have been widely discussed. China’s successful experience with e-commerce has had a positive effect in transforming consumer-goods sectors of the economy and motivating economic reform. This article looks at how e-commerce reduces barriers to entry and enables firms to move up the value chain by using the global value chain framework to analyse the impact of e-commerce on the upgrading trajectories and governance structures of China’s apparel industry. For large Chinese brands, e-commerce has enabled end-market diversification. For small- and medium-sized enterprises, e-commerce has facilitated entry with functional upgrading as well as end-market upgrading. In the “two-sided markets” created by platform companies, the “engaged consumers” are the demand side of this market, and “e-commerce focused apparel firms” are the supply side of the new market. Consumers and platforms are more directly involved in value creation within this emerging internet-based structure.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91f861f5987a6409064e37a4e102e49bb34856bc