SHEIN ranks among the world’s $100 billion unicorns

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Author / Big Brother

Editor / Little Sister

Chinese cross-border e-commerce company SHEIN has recently completed a new round of financing, and its latest valuation is likely to exceed $100 billion, making it one of the world’s $100 billion unicorns, along with Byte Jump, Ant Financial, Spacex and AliCloud.

Compared to other Internet giants, SHEIN is not well known in China, but in overseas markets such as the United States, SHEIN’s name rings a bell.

In a street interview, a YouTube blogger asked 10 random overseas female users, and all but one said they had never heard of SHEIN, while the other nine said they knew of SHEIN or had experience buying clothes from SHEIN.

Currently, SHEIN is ranked No. 1 among iOS shopping apps in 54 countries and No. 1 among Android devices in 13 countries. The Chinese company, founded in Nanjing in 2008, has overtaken Amazon as the most downloaded shopping app in the US and worldwide.

In fact, SHEIN is not the only unknown Chinese Internet company that has achieved great success in overseas markets, and as one of the fastest growing industries in China, Chinese Internet companies are far more competitive in overseas markets than one might think.

Overseas market: big fish in big water

With the top of the traffic and regulatory pressure, the growth rate of each segment of the domestic Internet market has slowed down significantly in recent years, while the overseas market, which has a broader space, is still a blue ocean.

In 2015, the growth rate of domestic e-commerce peaked, and after 2019, it dropped to less than 10%. In contrast, China’s cross-border e-commerce in recent years to achieve leapfrog development, 2017-2021, cross-border e-commerce market size from 90.2 billion yuan to 1.98 trillion yuan, a five-year growth of nearly 10 times, with an average annual compound growth rate of 116%.

As a result of the domestic and international growth rates, the share of cross-border e-commerce in the total national e-commerce transactions is rapidly increasing, from less than 1% in 2017 to nearly 5% in 2021.

In terms of e-commerce, in addition to SHEIN’s great success in the European and American markets, Tencent, Ali, and Jingdong have entered the Southeast Asian e-commerce market through Shopee, Lazada, and JD Central, respectively, and have quickly become leading brands in the region.

For example, the breakout SHEIN, one of the first cross-border e-commerce companies in China to replicate the live-streaming with goods and social e-commerce model abroad, a commonplace marketing tactic at home, has played a great role abroad and can be described as hanging on to foreign rivals. since 2016, SHEIN sales have grown from 1 billion yuan to 100 billion, starting with women’s clothing in China, in just five years, to achieve catch up with traditional clothing giants such as ZARA and HM.