China's e-commerce market has kept stable development. The e-commerce transaction volume continues to grow rapidly. In 2007 1H, the e-commerce market in China still retained its robust growth momentum with the transaction volume exceeding 1.32 trillion Yuan.

Looking back on China's e-commerce market in 2007 1H, two giants in the market attracted a great amount of attention through their efforts: Alibaba and Netsun. On February 6th, 2007, Netsun (002095), which is known as the No. 1 among all shares associated with the Internet in China, officially declared to the public that it would copy the successful model of ChemNet and select 100 partners among China's specialized websites to create 100 industry-leading websites similar to ChemNet.

Although its financial performance of 2006 was rather weak, Netsun has continued to expand. On June 5th, it acquired Zhejiang Zhongfu, signifying the first step towards the creation of 100 "ChemNet" websites. This helped its share price increase to 92.50 Yuan, running counter to the general decline of the market. It also announced that it would increase its sales by 20-40% in the next half of the year.

Meanwhile, Alibaba, which hates being overlooked, disclosed once again that it would soon be listed. It announced in March that it would conduct comprehensive and in-depth cooperation with industry websites. After which time, it released four large industry websites, namely ef.china.alibaba.com, chem.china.alibaba.com , fw.china.alibaba.com and ec.china.alibaba.com . The highly consistent industry selection has indicated that competition between Netsun and Alibaba is on the way.

The firefight between these two e-commerce giants proves that the existing third-party e-commerce platform is seriously lacking industry characteristics. In addition, specialized e-commerce applications and services with sharp industrial characteristics are now brewing a market with more potential.

According to the CCID Consulting's survey, the industrial development of e-commerce has indicated the gradual maturation of e-commerce applications. With the gradual upgrading of enterprise applications, comprehensive service platforms offered by traditional e-commerce service providers will start to face greater and greater tests. Enterprises gradually tend to gather along industry chains in e-commerce applications.

Meanwhile, the dispersed demands of different enterprises also starts to show the effect of industrial gathering, thus helping to create demand for specialized industrial e-commerce services. Besides the models of Alibaba and Netsun, the newly emerging regional e-commerce platforms as well as the e-commerce platforms created by government and carriers all select to access the market via industrial e- commerce. However, lack of good understanding about industrial characteristics and in-depth integration of the industry chain are the main problems faced by e-commerce service providers.