China has witnessed a boom of rural e-commerce with 780 villages each having online shopping transactions exceeding 10 million yuan (1.5 million U.S. dollars) in 2015, according to a report released by Alibaba.
AliResearch, the research arm of the Alibaba Group, issued the report on Tuesday saying that this was a surge of 268 percent year on year. E-commerce prosperous villages are called "Taobao villages," as business is mainly conducted via Alibaba's trading platform Taobao. In addition to the transaction volume, a Taobao village should have more than 100 businesses, or at least 10 percent of households involved in e-commerce, according to AliResearch.
The 780 Taobao villages are located in 17 Chinese provinces and regions with Zhejiang, Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces having the most. AliResearch found that rural e-commerce business clusters are taking shape in these coastal regions, where Taobao villages are modernizing thanks to encouragement from their local governments. This year also saw the emergence of rural e-commerce in the northeastern, mid- and western provinces and regions of Hunan, Yunnan, Jilin, Liaoning and Ningxia, where Taobao villages appeared for the first time. Among them, 176 Taobao villages are in impoverished regions.
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