In recent years, as the steel industry has fallen into a trough, industry enterprises have broken through everywhere, and steel e-commerce has sprung up. The steel industry wants to use Internet technology to find a new direction for development. However, each e-commerce company has fought on its own, which has largely restricted the development space of steel e-commerce. How to use Internet thinking more deeply to transform the predicament of industry sales has become a top priority.
In the view of industry insiders, in today's Internet boom, it is inevitable for the steel industry to connect with the Internet. It is necessary to use Internet thinking to cut into the pain points of the industry and give full play to the inherent characteristics of the Internet to serve the transformation of the steel industry.
The sales field has always been the focus of pain points in the steel industry. Due to the existence of large-scale steel trade links, the entire steel trade process involves standards, quality assurance, warehousing, logistics and other links. Some industry insiders pointed out that due to the characteristics of the industry and historical reasons, there is a lot of room for my country's steel industry to connect with downstream industries.
At present, there is a lack of effective information communication and business docking between my country's steel e-commerce companies. Many companies simply realize the Internet by copying traditional sales platforms to the Internet. Although there are also third-party professional e-commerce platforms in the market, from the overall development of steel e-commerce, it is still "mountains stand on many hills and each claims to be the king".
In order to open up information communication between steel enterprises and steel e-commerce companies and form a truly effective electronic steel sales network, it is urgently needed to build infrastructure in the field of steel e-commerce - a series of service information covering production, circulation, warehousing, etc., such as production information, inventory information, quality assurance information, logistics information, etc. of enterprises and merchants, can be circulated freely and smoothly.
Industry insiders pointed out that this information system is the infrastructure of the entire e-commerce circulation. It is deeply buried at the bottom of the entire e-commerce system, but provides important information support for all e-commerce systems, and is accompanied by important functions such as inventory locking and fund clearing. This means that the information systems that are now independent of steel enterprises and steel e-commerce companies will be effectively communicated and shared.
Experts pointed out that this logic is similar to the "central counterparty" model in the financial market. All traders enter the market through their respective market makers to place orders, and finally complete the transaction through the trading system between market makers. Once a market maker is unable to complete the transaction with the customer, the market system between market makers can be used to call the positions of other market makers to assist in completing the transaction with the customer.
Obviously, the difficulty of building a "central counterparty" market system in the steel sector is much higher than that of a highly electronic financial market, because it also involves the common standards of steel varieties, warehousing confirmation, logistics assistance, and fund settlement. Zhang Long said that this work is quite difficult. First, in the spot circulation market, the product standard logos of various steel companies are different. Although there are national standards, there is a lack of unified logos between detailed products; second, the ERP system interfaces of steel companies are not unified. If they want to connect to the same system, they must carry out software and hardware transformation; third, the lack of awareness of enterprises, and they are worried that there will be no business secrets after the system is connected.
Industry insiders said that building such a steel e-commerce cloud platform is more based on the long-term, and how much resources enterprises are willing to invest in the cloud platform is completely under their control. This platform can produce scale effects in the sales field, relying on the cloud platform to form a high-speed docking supply and demand information network, and cooperate with offline warehousing and logistics systems to build a new national steel marketing network to avoid mismatching of steel prices due to opaque supply and demand.
If we look at the transformation of the steel industry from an Internet perspective, we can start from the sales field and match supply and demand online with an open cloud platform model. This can greatly reduce the sales costs of steel companies, improve sales efficiency, help steel companies reduce costs and increase efficiency during industry downturns, and promote industry transformation and development.