Dr Zhi Han

In the past decade, China's food retail market has undergone significant restructuring driven by platform firms, enhancing omni-channel capabilities across the sector, and bolstering the resilience of domestic retailers. These shifts have contributed to the exit of numerous international food retailers. Despite this transformation, there remains a lack of understanding regarding the economic geography of China's food retail market, especially in terms of digital platform operations. This paper aims to conceptualise two major Platform Business Groups (PBGs), Alibaba Group and Tencent-JD.com Alliance, and investigate their respective roles in the omni-channel transformation of Chinese food retailing. Drawing on forty semi-structured interviews and diverse quantitative and qualitative sources, the study conceptualises two distinct PBG models shaping the market: Alibaba's 'Integrated PBG' and the Tencent-JD.com Alliance's 'Cooperative PBG.' The research explores how the two groups utilise online analytics directly through foodstore subsidiaries and indirectly by providing omni-channel digital services to third-party food retailers.

This paper conceptualises the industrial and institutional co-evolution of the Chinese import cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) industry, led by digital platform firms, over the decade 2012–2022. By drawing on empirical interview data and extensive secondary material from industry and government sources, and applying Gong and Hassink’s (2019a) framework of industrial-institutional co-evolution, we develop a three-phase conceptualisation to assess how industrial and institutional dynamics have developed in tandem, leading to significant regional development through CBEC pilot zones. Contrasting with research that has implied limited agency of industrial actors in a Chinese state-led institutional environment, our analysis explores how leading platform firms have successfully legitimised their role in the sector through government engagement and lobbying activities. Further, and in contrast with recent regulatory tightening with respect to the wider activities of platform firms, the technological infrastructure and associated data transparency offered by the platforms has led the Chinese state to set aside oligopolistic antitrust concerns in its regulation of this industry.

Economic geographers exploring the globalisation of food retailing have argued that retail TNCs might secure a foothold in host markets by deepening their territorial embeddedness in regional logistics and supply networks, consumer markets and cultures, and property markets. Yet, over the past decade in China, hitherto one of the most prominent foci for food retail TNC entry, the market has rapidly morphed in ways that have profoundly challenged the ability of international food retailers to deepen or even maintain their territorial embeddedness, with divestment an increasing reality. This paper argues that the advantages retail TNCs initially enjoyed (e.g., superiority in store format design and planning; marketing and IT infrastructure; favourable host market regulations; and efficient sourcing/logistics networks) have atrophied in the face of a maturing retail market characterised by strengthening domestic retail competition, less favourable host market regulations, the rise of digital platforms and markedly shifting customer expectations. As such, a reformulation is required that identifies how three imperatives - which we term online integration, offline reconfiguration and strategic reinforcement - crosscut the existing dimensions of territorial embeddedness and set the context for the strategic responses of retail TNCs and their highly variable effectiveness. More broadly, the paper exposes the dynamic, multi-agent and temporal nature of the retail embeddedness process, with the retail TNC and their strategic responses set against a host market context of intersecting stakeholders, institutions and regulations that are themselves also in a constant state of flux.