SEAFOODNEWS.COM [I.Wshang] translated by Amy Zhong – September 25, 2017
Clearwater’s sales have ballooned by five times in the Chinese market, much of it due to the T-mall e-commerce platform. The T-mall platform of Alibaba has become the first choice of Canadian companies while entering this new market.
As statistics show, Chinese online shoppers buy 83 percent of their fresh food from the Alibaba T-mall platform. And the platform has been increasing its fresh food imports to maintain market status within the past few years. It has become the first choice of many Canadian companies such as Clearwater in their development of Chinese market.
Recently, Clearwater made an announcement in Shanghai that it designed small boxes of Arctic surf clams with net content of 150g specifically for Chinese consumers, available in T-mall. The company also hosted a seafood promotion event and invited Chinese consumers to taste high-end seafood from Canada.
On May 18, Clearwater signed a cooperation agreement with T-mall. The company mainly sells Arctic surf clams and lobsters on its online store. It has successfully entered the Chinese e-commerce market and finished its upgrade. Its sales volume in China has skyrocketed by five times within the past five years. Clearwater intends to provide more fresh food to Chinese consumers through this platform, according to Clearwater CEO Ian Smith.
Clearwater’s T-mall store not only provides Chinese consumers with more quality seafood from Canada but also promotes the continual increase of the seafood export to China. All this began about 10 years ago when Clearwater first introduced its seafood to China. Now Chinese consumers can gain access to its wild seafood like lobsters through the T-mall platform as well as retail channels like supermarkets. In June and July, Clearwater provided two new seafood products to Chinese consumers: frozen lobsters and scallops. And it plans to sell more types of seafood online in the coming 12 to 18 months.
The value of Chinese fresh food market is close to 1 trillion yuan (~$151 billion U.S.), while the market penetration is less than 3 percent of e-commerce companies. However, they’ve shown growth at an annual rate of more than 50 percent. T-mall, a leading e-commerce company in China, is now importing more and more fresh food. Apart from Canadian seafood, king crab from Chile, Boston lobsters and orange roughy from New Zealand also sell well on that platform.