E-commerce firm Zall to expand Singapore operations

SINGAPORE digital banking licence hopeful Zall Smart Commerce Group on Wednesday said it is expanding its Singapore operations and scaling up its investments in the Republic.

The Chinese business-to-business e-commerce group will invest in its Singapore business, including the Commodities Intelligence Centre (CIC), and in technology to further enable small and medium enterprises in the Republic and Asean to trade more freely across the region, it said in a statement.

It is also increasing its recruitment efforts, with a number of open roles for its operations and trading teams in Singapore.

CIC - launched in 2018 under a joint venture between Zall, the Singapore Exchange and Global eTrade Services - is a global trading platform for physical commodities. Zall said the platform helps companies reduce transaction costs and optimise the efficiency of their supply chains.

In its statement, Zall said CIC had recorded sales revenues of about US$1 billion in H1 2020, despite the impact of Covid-19. This sum is more than CIC's total revenue for 2019.

In addition, the number of customers on CIC's platform increased 20 per cent compared to last year, it added. The platform has over 5,000 registered users to date from countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and China, Zall said.

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Peter Yu, chief executive officer of CIC and Zall Group International, said the CIC platform helps businesses build resilience against pandemics by giving them the opportunity "to mitigate crises by diversifying revenue sources and extending their global reach of their supply chains".

Yan Zhi, Zall's chairman, said the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of leveraging cross-border growth opportunities, especially between Asean and China, to build more resilient supply chains.