China courier ZTO Express handles record 10 billion parcels

SHANGHAI - Chinese courier giant ZTO Express had handled 10 billion parcels this year by Tuesday evening, setting a new world record by annual business volume of a single express delivery company.

The record came just a day after the Double 11 shopping festival, also known as Singles Day shopping festival, when ZTO Express received more than 200 million orders.

The festival was first designed by Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall on Nov 11, 2009, a day celebrated by many young Chinese as Singles Day, and has become one of the largest online shopping sprees worldwide.

Tmall's gross merchandise volume on Singles Day came in at 268.4 billion yuan (about $38.34 billion), up 25.7 percent from a year earlier.

The shopping festival, joined by many Tmall rivals, drove China's express delivery enterprises to handle a record 535 million parcels Monday, an annual increase of 28.6 percent, according to China's State Post Bureau.

The record number of packages epitomizes the rapid development of China's express delivery industry amid an e-commerce boom. The Chinese express delivery sector is expected to handle over 60 billion parcels this year, a sharp increase from over 10 million in 2014.

The rapid business growth has led to a decline in the cost of a single package. Lai Meisong, chairman of ZTO Express, said ZTO's transportation cost per kilogram of goods was 2 yuan in 2010, and it has now dropped to only 0.6 yuan.

The decline in shipping costs allows consumers to buy more goods with less money, and also helps more quality products reach faraway consumers.

Lai said the express delivery industry will strive to reduce the logistics costs of the whole society, adhere to green development and aid poverty relief and rural vitalization in the future.