The Key Issues of
Retailers' Supply Chain Management in Chinese Market
By
D. L. ZHU and J. SHI
D. L. ZHU
School of Management, Fudan University,
Shanghai, China
Introduction
The retail industry of China got remarkable development since 1992, when the Chinese government began to partially open up its retail market to foreign investment. The foreign retailers introduced many new retailing formats, which had not even existed in China, including Convenience Store, General Merchandise Store, and Specialty Store and so on into China. As a result, fierce competitions are taking place among the retailing enterprises.
Table 3 compares the managerial data of Chinese GMS (General Merchandise Store) with the ones of oversea. From it, we can conclude that, the Chinese retailing enterprises, including the foreign retailers' subsidiaries, are in low effectivity.
Table 1: the comparison of GMS managerial data of China and Oversea
| Chinese GMS | Oversea GMS | |
| Average net profit ratio (%) | 10.8 | 17 |
| Food average net profit ratio (%) | 5.26 | 17 |
| Fast-consuming goods Average Net Profit Ration (%) | 12 | 16 |
| Managerial Fee of Sales (%) | 15.6 | 14 |
| Average margin (%) | -4.8 | 3 |
Resource: Gu(2002).
What causes the problem? In this paper, we will focus on the issue of supply chain management to reveal the reason. Concretely, we will pick up the key issues relevant to retailers' SCM happened recently, and analyze the background and reason of these.
