The China (Nanning) Cross-border E-Commerce Pilot Zone completed 37.91 million cross-border e-commerce orders in the first 11 months of 2020, with an overall turnover of more than 1.8 billion yuan ($275.38 million), up 211 percent year-on-year, said Liang Peizheng, director of the Nanning bureau of commerce, on Dec 24.

The pilot zone has now been home to nearly 100 e-commerce companies since it began operation in 2018, of which 39 of them settled in the zone in 2020. It has finished construction for a number of major projects, such as the ASEAN cross-border e-commerce incubation center, as well as the cross-border e-commerce big data center.

Nanning, a regional international city that is opening to cooperation with ASEAN countries, has turned cross-border e-commerce into a new growth pole for local foreign trade under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the help of the construction of the pilot zone.

The cross-border innovation service center of Southeast Asia's largest e-commerce platform Lazada has settled in Nanning, speeding up the cultivation of cross-border e-commerce talents.

The Nanning bureau of commerce has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Cainiao Network, the logistics arm of Alibaba Group, in November, aiming to push forward the construction of a logistics hub for Southeast Asia in Nanning and optimize the cross-border industrial chain.

The overall clearance time of cross-border e-commerce products has been reduced from over eight hours to around one hour in the pilot zone.