On November 14th, David Wei, former CEO of Alibaba and Chairman of Vision Knight Capital, visited MU Group. President Tom Tang warmly accompanied.
David Wei first visited the showroom, followed by a discussion session. Tom Tang introduced the company’s operational status, business model, market structure, product development, and future plans. He highlighted the company’s ongoing efforts to accelerate the integration of traditional foreign trade with online and offline channels, as well as its digital transformation. The company is vigorously expanding cross-border B2C operations through platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok, while also positioning itself on online B2B platforms such as Alibaba.com, Made-in-China, and Global Sources. The company believes that the cross-border B2B sector will give rise to world-class companies.
MU Group aims to seize the opportunity of shifting from “Made-in-China” to “Chinese brands going global”. Learning striving from Huawei, culture from Alibaba and branding from P&G. We aims to become the first Chinese full-category supply chain management company to go global, providing global customers with Chinese products and services of extreme cost performance. We are committed to the strategic direction of “All-category, Omnichannel, Globalization, All-platform, All models”. This will provide the company with more opportunities to directly sell products to global retailers, including e-commerce platforms.
David Wei shared his thoughts and understanding on various topics, including the digital transformation of traditional foreign trade, e-commerce project investments, and the development of the cross-border industry in Ningbo. He emphasized that the digital transformation of traditional foreign trade must be based on the online digitization of workflows, establishing customer profiling models, and using system capabilities to share the burden of individual business tasks, while synchronizing efforts across the front, middle, and back offices.
In the front office, customers must be visible through the creation of an open online showroom and digital catalog system based on digital buyer tools, continuously fostering customer usage habits. The middle office should empower the business by leveraging AI to improve coverage, conversion rates, repurchase rates, and penetration, while consistently enhancing customer management systems, communication tools, and product databases. In the back office, internal and external coordination is key—streamlining cross-departmental processes internally and integrating high-quality supply chains externally, with a data-driven approach to improving efficiency.
As global trade declines, cross-border e-commerce continues to grow against the trend, and the new round of competition requires careful planning of project investment budgets at different stages. Cross-border e-commerce needs to focus on differentiated competitors, concentrating on specific regions, channels, categories, and brands, and building up initial momentum before expanding outward. For low-price ceilings, the focus should be on maintaining the brand while expanding the product category, broadening from a single product to a range of segmented categories to eliminate off-season lulls. For high-price ceilings, the strategy should be to maintain the category while expanding the brand, using new price points to attract different levels of new customers.
The rapid expansion of the “Four Tigers” of cross-border e-commerce (TEMU, SHEIN, AliExpress, TikTok) and Alibaba.com has made it possible for all categories to create new hits, requiring different product selection logic and operational strategies for different platforms and stores. Rather than engaging in price wars, the focus should be on price-performance ratio—only by daring to set prices can a business model and financial model be created for each category.
Relying on its advantageous port resources and strong commercial foundation, Ningbo has taken multiple measures in areas such as policy support, platform development, and logistics optimization, making it an important hub for cross-border e-commerce in China. Vision Knight Capital, which has been involved in the cross-border e-commerce sector for over a decade, is highly optimistic about the development prospects and investment environment of Ningbo’s cross-border e-commerce industry.
Vision Knight Capital, founded by David Wei in 2011, is a private equity fund focusing on investments in internet, new channel, consumer brand empowered by internet, and B2B platform/services/products empowered by internet sectors in China. Currently, it has helped more than thirty portfolio companies grow into unicorns and even super unicorns, including Smoore, Anker, POP MART, JD Logistics, and more.
