In challenging market, ChemChina gets e-commerce boost

Guo Yanfei, chief commercial officer at ChemChina Petrochemical Co, shares insights on e-commerce with his colleagues. CHINA DAILY

Professional buyers now have online access to chemical products from China National Chemical Corp and its subsidiaries after the industrial giant launched a foray into e-commerce at the beginning of the year.

A top priority and the latest innovation, the initiative aims to help the company's marketing transformation and tackle overcapacity in the chemical industry, said Ren Jianxin, president of the company also known as ChemChina.

Liu Yawen, chief commercial officer, or CCO, for e-commerce at ChemChina said "the first move was to build dedicated e-commerce sales teams".

"People with bachelor's degree or higher and under the age of 40 are eligible to become leading members no matter how long they have worked here. This is not commonly seen in large State-owned enterprises."

The headquarters and its nearly 100 subsidiaries have all built teams, which have a combined staff of 600, including 104 CCOs. Those with master's degrees or above account for a large proportion.

"At the very start, some of our senior managers did not know how to carry out the project and some even thought it was impractical", Liu said.

So Liu invited several well-established Chinese e-commerce companies to outline their business structures, operational procedures and the services they can provide to meet ChemChina's demands.

She also invited two professors from Tsinghua University to give a four-day lecture covering development trends and current applications of Internet marketing, as well as practical case analyses.

As well, Liu and other senior officers at the headquarters set up a performance evaluation system and a mechanism of awards and penalties for the e-commerce employees.

She also created an online group on WeChat, the dominant mobile social network in China, to include all CCOs, who are required to report their daily e-commerce business performance.

"What I want is a competing environment to push them to learn and make progress." Liu said.

Some research institutes innovated to sell their testing services online and meet potential customers.

Liu and her team also made a market survey to understand customer concerns about the new business model such as payment procedures, logistics and transportation safety.

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