Aomaijia launches its first Australasia sourcing office in Sydney with group CEO Meggie Liu heading the Asia-Pacific roadshow
Aomaijia gives Australian and NZ manufacturers a dedicated overseas brands e-commerce platform, cutting out agents and maintaining better control of their branding and distribution into the world’s biggest market
5 September 2019 | Marcus Reubenstein
One of China’s fastest-growing e-commerce businesses, Aomaijia officially opened its Australasian procurement and supply chain office in Sydney today. It’s the fifth such international office with other procurement centres in Paris, Los Angeles, Seoul and Tokyo.
Aomaijia Group also today signed agreements with five leading Australian companies Sukin, Kids Smart, NESTLE Australia, b.box and TASMAN UGG. They will join a number of other leading Australian brands headed by Swisse and Blackmores, which are already available across the e-commerce platform. In total Aomaijia sells more than 100,000 product lines across 3,000 individual brands.
Aomaijia distinguishes itself by only dealing directly with manufacturers, or their appointed agencies. Speaking in Sydney today at the signing of these agreements, Aomaijia Group CEO, Meggie Liu, says, “The Aomaijia platform was created to give suppliers, like those in Australia, control of their branding in China but also control over distribution, sales volumes and ultimately their profits.”
Having been in the CEO role for three years, Ms Liu brings a wealth of international bricks and mortar and e-commerce retailing experience to Aomaijia. Across 12 years she moved from being Beijing merchandising director of Walmart, to national merchandising director of Home Depot China and then national product director for Amazon China.
Aomaijia’s online store is called aomygod.com and the company has significant financial strength from its parent the HK-listed Aoyuan Group. A diversified conglomerate specialising in property development it reported gross earnings of RMB23.7 billion ($A4.9B) in the first half of 2019
Unlike China’s two best-known online retail platforms, Taobao and T-Mall, Aomaijia almost exclusively sells international brands. This makes the platform entirely focused on supporting the branding strategy of international manufacturers.
One of its other unique advantages is that it allows suppliers to track their customers through tailor-made CRM software solutions.
Aomaijia’s business to consumer sales rest on three platforms, a mobile phone app; an online retail site (www.aomygod.com); and a mini sales program operated on the WeChat social media app, which has more than one billion users.
A unique part of its e-commerce model is that the company has physical stores in key locations across all of China’s major first-tier cities, with plans to open up to another thousand stores within the next three years.
The stores feature online kiosks for specialty orders and allow buyers to sample new product lines which may not be familiar in China. Giving customers the chance to test products also reassures them of authenticity, a key selling point in China where consumers are increasingly wary of fake products, particularly in supplements, vitamins and infant formulas where Australian and New Zealand brands are very highly regarded.
At the launch, NESTLE Oceania’s Head of Cross Border Development, Matthieu-Nicolas Quentin said, these stores are a great competitive advantage, “Aomaijia does not just offer product displays, Chinese consumers are highly demanding, they want to know everything about our products and that’s the role this platform plays.
“Although NESTLE is not a new brand we are relatively new to cross border selling, so we are looking for partners who can educate consumers about our brands which they may not be familiar with.” Established in 2015 in Guangdong (China’s richest province by GDP) the company launched its online platform the following year. In first half year of 2019 the company’s total customer base grew more than 200% and it now has more than 30 million registered users across its three digital platforms; it expects to see similar growth in customers and sales volumes in the short to mid-term.
