According to the report from Zhongjin, the mainland's 618 shopping festival is over, and e-commerce has remained resilient this year. It rated Alibaba-SW (09988) and Kuaishou-W (01024) as "outperforming the industry", with target prices of HK$109 and HK$75 respectively.

The report stated that the total online physical product retail sales in the first five months increased by 11.5% year-on-year to 4.8 trillion yuan, showing significantly faster growth than the total social retail sales of goods. This is mainly due to e-commerce platforms focusing more on consumers, actively adjusting their own strategies to cater to user choices, and further enhancing their competitiveness in terms of price, user experience, and service. The bank judged that the performance of major shelf e-commerce platforms in Q2 may exceed expectations.

The bank pointed out that after the growth of content e-commerce traffic and GMV slowed down, and the increase in channels decreased, the motivation of sellers to use existing channel profits to subsidize incremental channels may weaken. When content e-commerce tries to transform into a shelf model, it will fall within the range of advantages of shelf e-commerce, and the investment of shelf e-commerce in price, consumer experience, and service will further consolidate its own advantages.

Looking ahead, some e-commerce platforms will strengthen their screening of merchants and their ability to eliminate the weaker ones who lack competitiveness in quality, price, service, and other links, which means the traditional model of using existing channel profits to subsidize incremental channels may be difficult to sustain.