Chinese companies' overseas trade saw robust growth despite uncertainties in the global trade environment, sales data from international wholesale marketplace alibaba.com showed, further proof of the tenacity and competitiveness of the Chinese economy, particularly in the private sector. 

Alibaba.com, the online cross-border trade service provider under Alibaba Group Holding, saw double-digit growth in both revenues and profits for the past three years, according to data sent by alibaba.com to the Global Times on Thursday and Friday. 

During this year's March Expo, alibaba.com's annual online promotion held in March, alibaba.com's online trading volume also more than doubled, the data showed. 

Zhang Kuo, joint general manager of alibaba.com, said that the platform saw rapid growth in buyers across the world. "Growth has been fast in multiple regions including North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia," he told the Global Times on Thursday evening. 

The growth in those regions was fuelled by the rising trade of different industries. "For example, we found that photovoltaic exports, particularly in certain cities in East China's Jiangsu Province like Suzhou and Wuxi grew very fast this year via alibaba.com, as buying demands were rising fast from European customers," he said. 

Trade of furniture and clothing also saw relatively fast growth between Chinese sellers and Southeast Asian buyers recently, he disclosed. 

Customs data showed that China's exports rose by 0.6 percent on a yearly basis in the first seven months, to about $1.39 trillion in US dollar-denominated terms.

Alibaba.com also made a plan to further help domestic companies, especially in the private sector, to engage in cross-border trade. 

One of the platform's moves will be to promote the exports of "industrial belts" in China, the regions where certain industries are grouped together such as the small commodity industry in Yiwu and the 3C industry in Shenzhen of South China's Guangdong Province. Alibaba.com has set warehouses in some of those industrial belts. It has also opened special transport lines like the China-Europe air transport line and the China-US sea transport line for some of those regions. 

Alibaba.com will also partner with alibaba's financial arm Ant Financial to upgrade the financial services for both buyers and sellers on the platform, by making changes such as providing local currency and multi-channel payment network and increasing the success rate of large, one-time payments for cross-border trade, the company disclosed. 

Global Times