While sales of salmon online have been slow to pick up steam, turnover of seafood products including live lobster, black cod from Alaska and pre-cooked fish and shellfish is picking up in China’s booming digital marketplace.
The rise in the prevalence of what Robin Wang of SMH International – which helps market Alaska seafood to the Chinese and Asian market via various e-commerce platforms – calls “young, white-collars” has been a driving force behind online seafood sales. The convenience that e-commerce offers this busy, tech-savvy demographic is significant, with suppliers of seafood and perishables looking to capitalize, Wang explained during a panel on e-commerce at Seafood Expo Asia last week.
SMH International, using Tmall and testing out other online platforms in Asia, has seen success with Alaska seafood and species like black cod, and is looking for more success with lobster.
“Alaska seafood has been doing very well in China – big progress every year,” said Wang. “We introduced black cod. The result is very good, as was expected. Started out supplying just enough seafood for one week, and it sold out.”
“Lobster in this market it getting very popular, too,” he added.
Norway has been seeing some gains in e-commerce as well, especially with pre-cooked products, explained fellow panelist Sigmund Bjorgo, the Norwegian Seafood Counci's director for China and Hong Kong. This is primarily because such products are easy for consumers to prepare at home, but also largely due to the efforts of Chinese distributors.
“Who is pushing this sale online? It’s not the Norwegian exporters, it’s the Chinese distributors. They’re working directly with Tmall or other platforms to do the sale,” Bjorgo said.
One exception to the success has been salmon, which Bjorgo has been a tough sell.
“With salmon, we have a market access challenge,” he said. “Today, the approximate market share for e-commerce on all salmon consumption in mainland China is 2.5 to 5 percent.”
“How important is e-commerce for salmon? Hardly important because 80 percent of the salmon consumed in mainland China is in restaurants. The home consumption only consists of around 20 percent. Where do consumers buy the salmon to consume at home? You have off-line retail, you still have restaurants, you can pick it up at a restaurant and then go home, and then you have e-commerce. The channel that has grown the most is definitely the latter.”
But salmon sales online are on the rise, albeit slowly, Bjorgo said.
“In 2015, salmon sales online grew by 44 percent. Now it’s at quite a small level in general, but it’s growing. For a species being sold on a platform that only came into focus for Norway in the last three years, those results hold promise," Bjorgo said. "I think we need to look at it with a broad perspective. The first time we starting looking at e-commerce and online sales of seafood was back in 2013. It was only three years ago that we started to realize that this is coming, and at that time it was very low volumes, we were thinking of salmon and hardly any other seafood from Norway on e-commerce."
