Steven Wang: In the past 2-3 years, the full-fulfillment model in cross-border e-commerce has seen explosive growth, creating significant demand for fulfillment warehouses in the Pearl River Delta region. For example, last year, cross-border e-commerce giants SHEIN and TEMU established millions of square meters of fully-managed warehouses in the region.

Driven by the full-fulfillment model, cross-border e-commerce platforms like SHEIN, TEMU, TikTok, and AliExpress, as well as logistics companies, have set up consolidation and fulfillment warehouses in core cities of the Greater Bay Area, including Dongguan, Guangzhou, Foshan, Panyu, and Zhaoqing. This led to a continued rise in demand for e-commerce logistics real estate in the Pearl River Delta.

However, new changes have emerged since the beginning of this year. The available global freighter capacity has mostly been fully utilized, and there is a lack of incremental growth in global air freight capacity. Additionally, over the next 5 to 10 years, the amount of new freighter capacity that can be added globally is very limited and will not be sufficient to support the high growth demands of cross-border e-commerce. This directly led to a slowdown in the logistics growth driven by the full-fulfillment, direct-shipment model.

With air freight unable to meet the high growth demands of e-commerce platforms and the lack of additional capacity for the direct-shipment model, e-commerce platforms have shifted their focus to "sea freight + overseas warehouses." The semi-fulfillment model is gradually becoming the mainstream. As a result, demand for overseas warehouses has surged, and the need for local logistics assets in overseas markets has sharply increased, while demand for domestic warehouses has relatively decreased. The need for domestic drop-shipping warehouses and consolidation warehouses has shown a downward trend.

Warehouses, as immovable assets, require companies to take a rational approach to investing and building them while considering the dynamic development of the industry. The pace of change in the cross-border e-commerce sector is extremely fast. Just two or three years ago, there was a shortage of warehouses domestically. Now, with the lack of incremental air freight capacity and the bottleneck faced by the full-fulfillment, direct-shipment model, domestic demand for e-commerce logistics consolidation and drop-shipping warehouses is starting to decline. This fully reflects the rapidly changing nature of the cross-border e-commerce industry.

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WeChat Public Account: Cross-border E-commerce Logistics Baixiaosheng