Abstract
China’s food retailing sector has experienced wide-ranging market restructuring and digital transformation during the past decade (circa. 2012-2022). As transnational retailers were declining and increasingly divesting from the Chinese market, increasingly powerful digital platform firms entered the traditional store-based food retail market and promoted an omni-channel transformation of the sector. Such market dynamism makes China’s food retail market worthy of study and represents a contemporary context in many ways overlooked by economic geographers and cognate business studies scholars in recent years.
The overarching aim of this thesis is to conceptualise the development of China’s retailing economy during the 2010s, advancing the understanding of its structural change and digital transformations. More specifically, the research explores three particular trends that emerged during the past decade, which lead to three distinct, but related, empirical studies. These trends encompass the decline of food retail transnational corporations (TNCs) and their divestment from the Chinese market; the rapid growth of the import cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) industry and its fast-changing institutional environment; and the rise of digital platform firms and their role in the nationwide omni-channel retail transformation across food retailing.
The empirical data that supports the thesis comes from forty semi-structured interviews with key informants, including senior executives from traditional store-based retailing chains and digital platforms, government officials, experienced industry consultants, and academic researchers. Importantly, the primary data were also complemented and triangulated by a wide range of secondary quantitative and qualitative materials, which encompassed information gathered from industry databases and publications, media reports, statistical yearbooks, company annual reports and official websites.
The first empirical study contributes to the economic geography literature relating to retail globalisation by reconceptualising the evolving processes of territorial embeddedness of food retail TNCs, as the key competencies that had initially propelled them to success have atrophied in the face of a rapidly developing host market. The second empirical study conceptualises the industrial and institutional co-evolution of the Chinese import cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) industry over the past decade. The third empirical study conceptualises contrasting business models established by leading Platform Business Groups (‘PBGs’) to inform our understanding of the omni-channel transformation of the Chinese food retail market.