US clothing company Gap and the world's biggest retailer Wal-Mart are planning to launch their online retail outlets in China in order to take advantage of the company's rapidly growing e-commerce market, a report by the Financial Times said on Monday.
Wal-Mark will make use of its online platform for promoting sales of the Sam's Club shops, the warehouse chain owned and operated by Wal-Mart in China, according to the UK-based newspaper.
Earlier this month, head of Wal-Mart's global e-commerce unit, Eduardo Castro-Wright, said during a meeting with investors that the company was "excited about the size of the opportunity" for online retail business in China.
Gap, which says that it is planning to launch its first four outlets in China this year in Shanghai and Beijing, will launch an online Chinese sales website next month, according to the report.
China has the largest online population in the world of up to 420 million. The country's online retail sales went up by 117% during the previous year to US$ 39 billion, according to a research conducted by Beijing-based research company iResearch.
Wal-Mart is expecting China to overtake UK and Japan in five years time to become the second biggest e-commerce market in the world after the US, according to the newspaper.
Online
retail sales in the Asian economies are expected to reach US$ 230
billion by then, compared to a forecasted US$ 490 billion in the US, the
report added.
