With the establishment of efficient direct mail and express channels with 240 cities in 138 countries and regions, Beijing has witnessed about 20 percent of the country's international airmails exported here.
In 2017, China customs in Beijing approved 32.59 million declarations of retail exports, an increase of 62.8 percent over the previous year. The value of retail exports reached US$555 million, a year-on-year growth of 108.65 percent.
The number of the declarations of retail imports allowed in Beijing reached 3.07 million in 2017, increasing 246.06 percent over 2016. The value of these imports was US$209 million, a year-on-year growth of 291.96 percent.
Since customs supervision was officially launched at the Beijing Postal Company's cross-border e-commerce export supervision site on April 5, 2016, the total value of the e-commerce retail exports has reached US$2.66 billion.
Relying on Beijing's strategic positioning as the centers of international exchanges and scientific innovation, China customs in Beijing has provided efficient and convenient customs clearance service for cross-border e-commerce enterprises in the country's busiest air and rail hub.
The main cross-border e-commerce products directly imported included food, health products, bags, clothes, shoes and hats, kitchen utensils, small household appliances, and electronic products. The imports were mainly from Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia.
The largest concentration of direct import packages was at the Beijing Capital International Airport (BCIA), which utilized smart and paperless inspection and sorting process.
"If the overseas online shopping goods arrive at the BCIA in the morning, the packages will be delivered to the buyers at dusk," said Jiang Ming, vice president of a logistics company at the airport. "For customers from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, it takes at most 36 hours from the shipment abroad to home delivery."
It used to take three to four days from landing to customs release for the cross-border e-commerce goods. Now, it only takes 15 seconds to sort the goods, which require no inspection. Over 10,000 packages go through this process every hour, Jing said.
In 2017, 3.82 million cross-border e-commerce packages were cleared on-site at the airport customs in Beijing, an increase of 521 percent over the previous year. Among them, 2.86 million were imported, an increase of 434 percent, and 0.95 million were exported, an increase of 1,126 percent.
China customs in Beijing has worked to minimized clearance time with every means, achieving a daily clearance rate of 16,000 packages last year.