China’s talent gap in rural e-commerce will hit 3.5 million by 2025, report projects

China’s rural e-commerce market, projected to reach about US$240 billion this year, faces a ‘huge talent gap’, according to the China Agricultural University

Social e-commerce platform Pinduoduo is becoming ‘China’s largest platform for talent development’ in the sector, researchers from the university say

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Fruit farmer Zhong Haihui, from from central China's Hunan province, has started travelling around the country to do live-streams from local orchards. Photo: SCMP/Chris Chang

Published: 7:15pm, 11 Jun 2020Updated: 9:29pm, 11 Jun 2020

Chinese e-commerce platforms have been zooming in on expansion in the country’s rural areas and lower-tier cities amid the slowdown in the country’s major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but they are facing a major barrier: a shortage of skilled talent, according to a report.

The report by the China Agricultural University (CAU) in Beijing, released on Wednesday, projected that the talent gap in the rural e-commerce sector would rise from 2.1 million in 2021 to 3.5 million in 2025.

“China's internet-powered agricultural production has just entered a second stage of rapid development, and faces a huge talent gap,” CAU professor Guo Pei said in the report. “The government needs to set up a friendly policy environment for institutions and e-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo and [Alibaba Group Holding’s] Taobao to foster more talents and push rural e-commerce into a new era.”

The rural e-commerce market is projected to reach about 1.7 trillion yuan (US$240 billion) this year, according to data from China’s Qianzhan Industry Research Institute. There were 13 million e-commerce merchants based in China’s rural areas as of the first quarter of this year, state broadcaster CCTV has reported.

Alibaba, the parent company of the Post and China’s largest e-commerce group, has already developed thousands of “Taobao Villages” – clusters of online sellers in rural China – since 2009. Meanwhile, JD.com, the second-largest in the market, has created rural service centres providing technologies such as drones to expand its logistics capabilities.

But it was social e-commerce company Pinduoduo, the third-largest e-commerce platform in the country, that the CAU report said was “becoming China’s largest platform for talent development” in rural areas.