The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore has completed the first live digital trade with China to address the challenges of paper-based cross-border trade.
The trade transaction involved the shipment of canned food from Xiamen, China, to Singapore, with China-based food exporter COFCO Industrial Food delivering the goods to Singaporean food distributor Yit Hong.
This pilot trade utilised an electronic Bill of Lading (eBL) facilitated by IMDA's blockchain-based TradeTrust system and Beijing’s AEOTradeChain (a trade cooperation network launched by the Beijing TradeTech Alliance).
TradeTrust allows for digital trade documents to be authenticated, provenance traced and digitally processed to mitigate fraud risks.
In March this year, IMDA, in partnership with local industry players, successfully executed the world’s first paperless, live cross-border trade in which liquid chemicals were shipped from Singapore to Thailand.
According to IMDA’s estimation, by promoting the digital transformation of shipping and export processes, the document-processing efficiency of COFCO Industrial Food can be improved by over 80 percent, and the business operation cost can be reduced by over 30 percent.
The trade with China was facilitated in partnership with the Beijing Two-Zone Office, through the "International Information Industry and Digital Trade Harbor" initiative under the Chinese ministries such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the IMDA.
Moving forward, the Beijing Two-Zone Office and IMDA will promote more trade digitisation pilots and use cases like trade financing.
These pilots will focus on promoting the decentralised digitisation of transferable documents such as eBLs and cultivating the use of an open, neutral and trusted framework to transform cross-border trade and trade financing processes to benefit businesses.
