On May 3, Minmetals-Ali Steel Platform (tentative name), which has been officially put online, greeted the first order and successfully fulfilled the transaction. This also means that the Platform, which is considered a unicorn in the industry, has officially stepped into the war of e-business.

After China Minmetals and Alibaba declared the establishment of a joint venture to forge the vertical B2B steel e-business platform last December, the outside has been full of expectations and speculations about the joining hands of the “offline No.1” and the “online No.1”.

While receiving media interview, Zhao Wei, CEO of Minmetals-Ali Steel Platform stated that the previous Minmetals Xinyilian and 1688 Steel Channel have been positioned as “third parties”. After the new platform is put online, positioning will not change and they will continue committing themselves to forge an open and fair steel platform with self-operating abilities. They will fully grasp the industrial characteristics of “overcapacity at the upstream and mass volume at the downstream” to optimize the entire steel service ecology from steel plants to end users.

It is reported that Minmetals-Ali Platform currently focuses its business on the circulation service providers, which are dubbed as “steel partners”.

“Steel partners” is a general term for cooperative partners certified by Minmetals-Ali Steel Platform and they are the businesses who serve the end buyers in the steel trade and provide the after-sales services, such as the supply of goods, warehousing, processing, logistics and distribution.

“Those high-quality steel trade merchants with certain service ability and awareness of e-commerce are the important cooperative partners of our Platform and our “partners”. The Platform will not replace them, but instead will make them stronger. We hope to enable all the partners, well serve thousands of end buyers and really help the micro, small and medium sized enterprises through the multiple service functions of the Platform”, said Zhao Wei frankly. If B2B business only establishes platform without the partners, it will be very difficult to effectively match supply and need. The market is too big, the industrial chain is too long and the attractiveness of a platform itself is limited.

“Compared with the big order and purchase in the traditional steel trade, our transactions are more related to micro and small buyers with small quantity and more frequencies. From the current survey of the industry, 5-30 tons should be the rough range of each purchase by small and medium buyers.” From the first order on the Platform, it can also be seen that the end user and the seller completed a purchase of 2.33 tons of cold steel sheet after inquiring through free calls by the Platform “soft phone” and by going through a series of steps including order generation, buyer’s confirmation, online payment, and delivery of waybill.

Data show that, in 2015, the number of e-commerce enterprises engaged in steel trade and its related services was nearly 300, accounting for one third of the e-businesses in commodities. According to the incomplete statistics, by the end of 2015, the number of registered users on domestic steel e-business platforms was over 660,000, with the trade volume over 100 million tons and the turnover more than RMB300 billion.

According to insiders, the steel E-commerce platforms active in the market still remain in the process of shifting offline business to online, most of them still remain at the stage of exploration and there hasn’t been a mode that has generated remarkable value for the industry chain.

As to this, Zhao Wei stated that Internet is evolving from the partial interconnection of information, goods and channels to the entire interconnection of the industry chain. For the steel industry, such evolution will break the original business mode and reshape the relationships between enterprises and enterprises. “The new Platform has just been set up and many methods are being tried, including how to enable our cooperative partners, taking root in the segmented markets and industries and gathering more buyers to the Platform, and we explore, ponder and implement such issues every day. We hope that Minmetals-Ali Steel Platform can bring warmth to the industry, make steel warmer and rekindle the dream of a prosperous steel industry!”

It is understood that Minmetals-Ali Steel Platform is currently at the stage of trial operation and focuses its business majorly on the Pearl River Delta areas.