BEIJING, March 1 (TMTPOST)— China’s Minister of Transport Li Xiaopeng reiterated that the ministry will implement a special action plan to reduce costs, improve quality, and enhance efficiency in transportation logistics, during a press conference held on Wednesday.

Five days before this press conference, the fourth meeting of the Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs also proposed researching effective ways to cut logistics costs across the entire society.

In 2023, China's total logistics costs amounted to 18.2 trillion yuan, or about 14.4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This represents a year-on-year decrease of 0.3 percentage point, the latest data showed. Nonetheless, it fails to meet the requirements for the high-quality development of the economy.

Currently, "Price for Volume" remains the primary means of competition in some logistics service industries. Logistics companies engaged in a price war in order to secure more package delivery orders. Despite the overall low logistics prices, the total social logistics costs are still relatively high.

Therefore, reducing the total logistics costs is not simply about lowering logistics prices. Influenced by factors such as the rise in costs of labor, land, and other resource elements, as well as the slowdown in the growth rate of the logistics market, efforts to reduce logistics costs face even more severe and complex challenges.

"Low cost in a single link and high overall operational cost for the entire chain' is the most significant contradiction in the current operation of logistics, and 'inefficient allocation of logistics resources and low circulation efficiency' is the key factor leading to the chronically high logistics costs," Li noted.

To address the bottleneck, it is evident that constructing transportation network hubs, and creating a digitized and intelligent logistics system might become crucial points of development.

Additionally, "encourage the development of new logistics models that combine with platform economy, low-altitude economy, unmanned driving, etc.," may drive new forms of logistics economy, Li said. The term “low-altitude economy” refers to a spectrum of economic activities occurring within low altitude airspace, defined as the space of 1,000 meters above ground. 

In the past two years, both platform companies like Meituan and logistics companies like JD Logistics and SF Express have been developing drone transportation technology in the low-altitude space.

Consumers have also begun to accept drone deliveries. The low-altitude economy and unmanned driving technology represent efficient utilization in spatial dimensions and innovative efficiency explorations in terms of technology. The maturity of unmanned driving technology will determine the efficiency of personnel and delivery time in future logistics.