The end of de minimis – just “propaganda”? #LTM134

I think the problem is that the people driving it fell for their own propaganda here.

Let's Talk Marketplace.

The Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lohmer and Vanity Dichter.

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to a new episode of let's Talk Marketplace.

Just Ingrid behind the mic today.

And it will actually be like this for most of the upcoming episodes as well.

Maybe you already read the great news on LinkedIn.

Valri having a baby soon.

So at the moment she's slowly merging into maternity leave and we'll take a step back in Q1.

So, yeah, I will of course miss my better business half here on let's Talk Marketplace.

But not to worry, she'll be back.

And until then, I will keep our conversations going and I will do so with the help of great guests and great Marketplace topics.

Starting today, actually, because we've got a topic that is, I don't know, it couldn't honestly be more up to date.

I think maybe you've seen the big headlines.

In mid November, the EU wants to put a stop to the flood of cheap small parcels entering Europe.

I looked up some numbers.

Last year alone, I think some 4.6 billion low value shipments under a worth of €150 landed in the EU.

That's roughly 12 million parcels a day.

So.

Yeah.

And over 90% of them came from China.

So I guess the question is, is that it?

Yeah.

Will that be enough to slow down the ranks of Tim Wu Xi and Aliexpress and all the other Chinese players waiting in the ranks?

Yeah.

Spoiler?

I don't think so, but we'll see.

And we'll dive more into this.

And I'm really happy to.

Who truly understands China's digital economy and who agreed to join me for our recording today in a true China speed fashion?

Because I think I asked him two days ago and now he's already here.

Bjorn Ogdevani, seasoned expert on China commerce and co founder of the highly recommendable China Briefs.

Bjorn, great to have you here and it's great to meet you finally in person.

So would you briefly introduce yourself?

Hello, yeah, Bjorn Ebini.

I'm joining you from not so sunny Hamburg this morning and I've been working on the intersection between, let's say, digital innovation and marketing, customer service, product strategy, stuff like this for like over 20 years.

And my Imaginary job title, as I like to say, is practical visionary.

I'm trying to find new stuff, new trends that are not in the mainstream that, but I think will be soon, try to figure them out, do nice keynotes around them.

But then also.

And that's where the practical part comes in.

I help my clients figuring out what to do with these trends.

So doing actual projects.

And this also helps me learn more about these trends.

So that's basically the setup for over 20 years.

And.

The problem was a couple of years ago that I used to go to the US to find new trends.

I still, well, these days, a little bit less like to be in the US but I stopped seeing new trends there.

AI is a little bit of change, but in general, not much has happened over the last 10, 15 years.

There's nothing that have been really rethought.

And that's how I ended up in China, because I thought maybe there is something interesting to see.

And the second one was nobody here knows anything about this.

And so I changed my mission a little bit from just looking to the S, to looking worldwide and mainly focusing on China to find new stuff, but still doing the same things, figuring them out, explaining the clients and do projects around them.

Where do you get your information from?

Especially if you're talking about China.

So what are your main sources?

LinkedIn is a very good source if you have a good.

Friends list or follower list and you get a lot of interesting feeds from there.

There are lots of websites where you find new stuff.

So it's actually pretty easy to follow new things from here.

To understand China, you have to be in China, but you don't have to stay there.

You have to visit regularly, but you don't have to live there.

And it is already, well, six, seven, eight years ago that these things happen.

So I don't always have to be at the cutting edge.

I see.

How do you keep from not getting depressed?

I mean, Come on.

Whenever you look to China it's like yeah, that's the hard part.

Living in two not time zones but speed zones basically.

Yeah, that's indeed a problem.

Okay, right, thank you for that.

Okay, so I guess we can jump right into it.

Before we dive into the conversation on China commerce with Bjorn, a very quick note from our partner Channable because if you have been thinking about selling to the Switzerlands, but refrain from it because it's still too complicated, you know, customs, vat, onboarding, the whole package, then maybe you should check this out.

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And with this sellers from the EU can tap into the about 3 billion market with zero onboarding fees and even without a Swiss VAT registration.

Automated customs fast go live.

Two business models to choose from.

So that's all lot simpler than you might think.

Tobias also provides some very concrete best practices.

So you should look for clean product data, for correct brand naming.

Strong descriptions and high quality images and tools like Channable help merchants meet those Swiss data standards effortlessly.

If you're curious to know how onboarding really works at Galaxus and whether Switzerland might be your next growth market, then you should check out the full interview on the Channable blog.

You will find the link in the show notes.

Okay, so let's start out with the question that I posed in the beginning.

I've briefly lined out what this new exemption from the de minimis rule is going to be.

So the EU ministers have agreed on this.

There's a political agreement on it.

It still needs to be put into legislation of course, but that will happen over the next few months.

So I guess the €150 threshold will fall sometime in Q1.

What will that do to the Chinese players at the moment?

I think you already answered the question sufficiently.

Nothing.

Basically nothing.

Okay, that's harsh.

I wouldn't have said nothing.

Maybe, but yeah, please elaborate.

Not what they hope it will do.

I think the problem is that.

The people driving it fell for their own propaganda here because that was the line of reasoning that they pushed for the last two years or so that this is the problem.

And to get something out of the way up front, there is a role to play for the regulator and that's in product safety and keeping everything in line with the law.

I think we don't have to discuss about this.

Dangerous products shouldn't be sold in the eu.

No question about this.

Also IP problems and all these other things where it's about compliance.

It makes nothing but sense for the regulator to make sure that this is happening.

So we shouldn't talk about this because it's obvious and everything that's happening there should happen.

So.

But if it comes to, to be.

Fair is not happening in a way.

Because there's a lot back to these.

12 million parcels a day that can't be checked over.

But it's not the problem of Shein and Temu, it's a problem probably also of Amazon Marketplace and.

And we just bought something from a physical retail store that.

Some electric thing from China that looked pretty dangerous after using it two, three times.

And that was just a physical store.

So it's a general problem.

But that's what we are talking about.

We are talking about for example customs.

And the problem with customs is it's, I think around, I'm not so sure, but I think it's around 13% on average.

We're talking about that TAMU or SHEIN have to pay once these €150 threshold is away.

So what's the problem?

I think they already raised prices or doubled the prices on many products.

They can just swallow the 13% and that's it.

So that won't change anything.

And.

What will change something is that probably our processes are not prepared to do this.

These €150 threshold wasn't there to accommodate she and Temu, AliExpress.

And all these other companies.

It was there because we weren't able to check all these parcels and because we have not digital processes, but we have probably still a lot of stuff happening on paper.

So.

I have no idea what happens once the customs have to check every parcel that comes in there and it probably will hit lots of people who are not from Temu and she and sending in parcels and packages and well.

This is really one of the things how to really enforce it, as you say, because the flood of parcels will just stay the same, I guess.

Yeah, right.

But I mean everyone's been talking about this €150 threshold.

I saw that like all over, all over LinkedIn as well.

There were lots of posts by high profile retailers, for example, asking for this threshold to fall.

And yeah, I think also at least the German association for Trade.

Has published a quite triumphant press release, I think when that came out and saying, yeah, now this is what we have been fighting for.

And now you come along and say, yeah, it won't really make any difference.

So what is this?

I mean, I used the word propaganda and I did this on purpose because like, for example, one of the urban myths that those people have been pushing was that Shein and Tamil were splitting packages to come below the.

€150.

And that never was true.

I mean that might have been true in several.

Separate instances, but as far as I know, the average order value for them was always below €50, let it be €100.

So twice of that.

There weren't much packages above €150.

So why splitting them?

That never really made any sense.

It might make sense for AliExpress, when I buy something more valuable because they sell stuff that's one thing costs more than €150.

But how do I split a laptop?

Yeah, I can declare it wrongly.

But you mentioned the number of packages.

Is that happening in certain instances?

Yeah, might be.

Is it happening on a systemic scale?

That's really a problem.

I doubt it.

And the other question was always tax evasion.

Yeah, that's one thing is this customs thing, it's 13%.

I think they are happy to pay these 13% if it's insured, that it goes quickly through customs.

But the other thing was tax evasion.

They are not really paying the value added tax they are supposed to pay.

And that's actually pretty easy to evaluate this claim because you have the numbers of packages.

Rough number at least, and you have the average order value.

So if you multiply this, you have a rough number of revenue and then you take for example for Germany, 19%.

Then you know how much.

At least the ballpark number, how much VAT we should get.

And if that would be way, way below what people would expect, then probably we would have heard about it a long ago.

We never hit any numbers about this.

And that's probably because everybody knows there are irregularities on single instances.

But this not a systematic problem, not.

On a systemic scale.

Yes, I would agree.

And I think this is what we also saw.

Make the retailers pay vat, basically vat, the big VAT reform.

And we did see some drop in Chinese online sales when that came along, but.

It wasn't long term.

It just didn't take them very long to adjust to that.

And now they have just included the VAT into their calculations and they're back stronger than ever.

So might be just the same thing happening next year.

And the real problem is this problem is the fact these companies, Chinese companies, are very well equipped for optimizing towards regulation.

Yeah.

You throw a new law at them, they just comply.

And so that's also a problem if you think you can stop them with this.

Yeah.

So this is merchandise that have been imported through the regular processes.

In all the ways how all types of products come into the eu.

And yeah, then it's more or less game over.

Yeah, that's just a normal seller that sells stuff through normal channels.

Hopefully all the stuff they are selling was inspected.

Like everything that comes in the EU is supposed to be inspected.

And then all these little parcels and packages that we don't want to bring on an individual basis into the EU because it's also bad for the environment, no matter how much customs and taxes they pay.

And probably Temo also would like to do local warehouse things.

They like it better than sending all these packages.

At this point.

We have to find new solutions.

And I'm not sure how much of these 80% is still is already reality.

They don't want to tell me.

So.

Maybe they are far off, but then they are there next year.

But what we have seen in the us, once.

Trump terminated the minimus the next day.

I have a nice screenshot from that.

All the searches on TEMU in the US turned up local search results, stuff that was delivered locally.

And so that will be happening here too.

So that's the reason why I don't think that will bring much change.

Yeah, that was really.

That's a good point you're making.

How little the Chinese players were affected by whatever Trump threw at them in the us they didn't much care about the de minimis, they didn't even much care about the high tariffs.

So I think they're now up to what, 54 or something in the US so I don't think they will even break a sweat when dealing with the 13 or 17.

I think the 150% was a little bit too.

Less, too much.

That was a bit too much.

But that didn't last very long.

And that's think now they're down to 54.

So.

And that doesn't seem to be much of a problem.

So.

Yeah.

Okay, so is there anything that we can throw at them that will, you know, keep them out?

Because this is what I keep hearing from local or from EU retailers and brands is we have to keep them out.

This is.

This is not our business.

We don't want them here.

The customers don't agree, obviously, because the numbers are growing and growing and growing.

But is there anything that we can do to keep them?

Yeah, I mean, we are in a market economy, so that means competition and we have to react to competition and just hoping that politics will solve this problem.

I'm not sure.

That probably won't be a solution.

So we have to find different ways.

We have to learn from them.

And we also have to understand that it's.

Temu and Shein are just the first ones to arrive.

Yeah, AliExpress was here a long time ago and we never really noticed them.

I'm not sure why.

I'm not sure why AliExpress hasn't.

Wasn't able to become the TEMU of today because.

Well, they are working on it.

They are working on it.

I just.

Small.

Yeah, it's less.

But if you look at the transparency reports that they now are offering for the eu, they are also growing quite strongly, especially in Southern Europe, so.

Exactly.

That's also an interesting thing that when Chinese are coming to Europe, they have firstly focus on Italy and Spain and not so much on the Nordics or on Germany and.

But.

So.

And there's more to come.

Yeah.

And they said that that's not really interesting for them because there was much more growth in China.

Germany is pretty small compared to.

Chinese.

Business and in Europe, it's too fragmented, too complicated.

We.

We stay in Asia or we stay in China.

That was their message back then.

And now we have two things.

We first have the problem that the growth in China is no longer there, at least not in the way that it used to be.

And the other thing is that she and Temu, but also TikTok, showed there's really big money to be made in Europe despite all the fragmentation and there's no competition.

Nobody here knows what to do against them except relying on politics.

And that's something that probably more and more Chinese players will attract.

And so we have no other way than.

Start Competing with them on new ideas, concepts, better products, better services, stuff like this.

I think you raise an interesting point here with saying that we are basically leaving the door open to them because we don't have real competition for the area that they are attacking, which is mostly low to maximum mid price areas.

And to be honest, there is not really a platform or another player inside the EU that is really looking for that low price in price entry area.

And even Amazon has been moving up into a mid size, mid range price in the last years.

So have you just, I don't know, left this, this area for the Chinese to play with and just left?

I think the problem is even bigger because the thinking that China is only about cheap stuff is based on our experience from the last, I don't know, 50 years or so.

If we look at the last 5,000 years, there was something that was called the Silk Road.

Why was the Silk Road called Silk Road?

Because silk came out of China, which was the most luxurious products for thousands of years.

Porcelain in the US is called China because that also came over the Silk Road.

Marco Polo didn't go to China because he wanted to get cheap plastic stuff, but because it was the richest country on earth and he wanted to get all the luxurious stuff from there.

So if companies or brands that think today, okay, we don't produce cheap stuff so we are safe from Chinese competition, they probably should think twice because we will see much more high quality stuff coming out of China.

We have to realize that our iPhones, which is the most complicated product probably in consumer electronics these days, comes from China.

So Chinese can build the real cheap plastic stuff for one Euro that we get on temu, but they can also build very complex stuff like an iPhone and high quality fashion brands for example, that probably will come out of China that will compete with the current luxury brands.

And.

That'S how we should approach this problem, seeing it from a much wider angle than just.

All these cheap plastic things that can be flown in little packages.

So what do we do about it.

Starting to compete?

I mean, I'm not really an E commerce expert.

I'm more an expert on digital transformation in general.

So I see things not in silos, but more in a holistic way.

And every industry right now has this problem.

The solar industry, cars, new energy.

Pharmacy.

Yeah, all these companies suddenly realized how much progress China made and that they have to compete.

That's the problem.

Yeah, of course it's a problem, but we have to get better.

That's probably the answer.

And if we look to at E Commerce.

E Commerce is one of my prime examples for showing that.

We've been talking about digital change for like 20, but what we are actually experiencing is digital stagnation.

Not much has changed in E commerce over the last 20 years.

Lots optimization has been taking place, a B tests and making Click here more and stuff like this.

But never has anybody really thought how can we rethink E commerce, retail and stuff like this in a fundamental way.

And that's what's happening in China every day because of this intense competition there.

If you have a good idea that works, you know that Tomorrow there will five others and the next after that is 50 others who have the same idea.

But they can only steal yesterday's idea from you, not tomorrow's.

So the easy solution is you have to come up with something new tomorrow too.

And that's a problem for us because we think I had an idea 10 years ago and I want to write for this for the rest of my days and that that will no longer be possible.

It's a sad story, but actually in the sense of progress, it's actually a good thing.

Just have to be quicker.

Talking about quicker and innovation.

This is something that I also wanted to raise with you after another short break him.

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Talking about revolutionary ideas and change.

You've been at the Co Create Europe event from Alibaba a few, I think, weeks ago, and I read crazy stuff about what happened there and what was shown there.

And it, I guess it showcased very much how innovative the Chinese commerce and the Chinese industry is at the moment.

Maybe just line that out for you.

What did they present there?

It actually was boring.

Not crazy, but in a good way.

Okay, yeah.

First of all, it was not Alibaba.

Yeah, that's a very important thing.

It was Alibaba.com.

They have a big naming problem here, but they probably can't much do about it.

The thing is, when Alibaba started, it was basically a B2B platform and the original business is still Alibaba.com.

yeah.

And when I talk to clients about Alibaba.com, they think it's probably the website of Alibaba and all the stuff that Taobao Tmall, all these AliExpress, that's all Alibaba.

And it's not.

The website is called Alibaba Group.com.

so Alibaba.com is a totally different business.

And Alibaba.com is the original core business of Alibaba because before they did the B2C stuff and that's B2B sourcing.

That's why I said it's boring.

But it's also not boring because it's actually a very interesting service because you can buy 200 million products from all over the world.

Of course, most of the manufacturers are from China, but there are also lots of other companies from all over the world.

And I think the biggest market is the us.

The second biggest market is Brazil or so.

It's truly international.

And.

It'S very interesting that nobody here knows anything about this, neither the seller nor the buyers.

That's at least my impression when I talk to my clients about this because I always have to first explain what Alibaba.com actually is as a business.

And the event was actually last Friday, so it's not that far away.

Basically just came back from there and it Was called co create because.

It was an event about creating products, basically also selling them.

But there's also the creating parts is an integral idea of the whole operation.

And what they showed was how AI can be used in this context.

Like for example agentic AI, which is the probably biggest hype right now on on LinkedIn.

And what my job usually is see these trends and try to generalize from this learnings insights that we can use also in other areas.

And this whole Alibaba AI using AI stuff Alibaba.com using AI stuff is actually a good example for how what we can.

What kind of insights we can generate from these things.

Because if we look at agentic AI also at AI in general, what we often get is nice demos, very impressive demos on LinkedIn or on YouTube, but not much business value out of it because it always stays in the proof of concept pilot phase.

Never really gets scaled into business.

And one of the reasons is like for example, agentic buying that we have the vision that in tomorrow or in a year or in 10 years, who knows an agent will do all the shopping for me.

And that's what everybody is raving about.

That's what retailers are anxious about, that no longer the customer shows up as his agent.

How realistic is this?

Like if I want to buy a blue sweater, will I just tell the agent buy a blue sweater and he comes back and I have a blue sweater at my doorstep?

Probably not.

It's probably doing the whole buying thing might happen in a few years or might not, I don't know.

But it doesn't make much sense right now to get too occupied with this idea.

And what we can learn from companies like Alibaba.com is focus on the part of agentic AI that actually makes sense to do.

And that starts.

And also AI.

Yeah.

And that starts with search.

I haven't found anyone.

Maybe Rufus.

I'm not sure if that actually works with Amazon.

I've never really tried it.

But most of the search that we do is still very much text driven.

I type in a certain product that I want and then I get overwhelmed with results.

Then somehow I have to find the product that I want.

Why isn't anybody using AI to help me with that?

That I actually can find the stuff that I want?

I've started using ChatGPT Atlas for this.

That I don't ask Amazon to give me a product.

I ask Atlas to find a product for me that I think that I want.

And this search enhanced or AI enhanced search, that's something that is pretty Obvious, nobody's doing this.

And that's.

You can find on Alibaba.com if you look for something.

You get tens of thousands of suppliers who can give you this product, and it's extremely difficult to find the right one.

And the AI search can help you find the right choice for you.

So that's one of the things that they have.

Introduced there.

So that's the question, what should I buy or where should I buy it?

But another question is if I was invited by Alibaba.com last year to the Olympics for an event where they introduced a lot of this stuff already.

So a lot of this stuff is actually not.

Was not introduced on Friday, but last year, we just haven't realized it.

And.

I realized that there is actually a very interesting question that we don't talk about much is what should I sell?

Yeah.

Once I have certain merchandise sitting in my warehouse, it's very easy actually to sell it.

Right.

You have Shopify, you have Amazon, you have lots of options.

But the question is, what should I get to sell?

And last year at the Olympics, that was together with the ioc and they have a special project for former athletes who want to start a business by selling stuff around their sports.

And those are people who might have a fan base who might find it easy to sell to these fans, but they don't have their products.

And Alibaba.com and the AI and all these things helps them to find the products that they can sell through market data analyzers.

You can.

There's a.

If you go to my YouTube page and scroll a little bit download, you find a video from the IOC event where they demonstrated.

That was a former pro tennis player who's now very much into pickleball.

And the case was, I now want to start a business selling stuff around pickleball.

And she threw this at the.

@alibaba.com's AI.

And the AI came back with a couple of suggestions for groups like equipment, fashion, shoes, stuff like this.

And she then decided for shoes.

Then together with the AI, they specified the products.

What kind of special requirements does the shoe for pickleball has?

Then after having that, the AI helps her to find the right supplier, negotiate the contract, and then in the end, she actually has a container of shoes that she can sell.

And that's what I meant by boring.

That sounds kind of boring, but it actually solves a real problem.

And what they introduced revolutionized the way that you could source products.

Exactly.

But it doesn't make a good, compelling LinkedIn demo.

That's what I meant by boring.

It's not a video like flying cars or something like this.

But what they introduced last Friday was that they put AI agents into the platform that does all this.

Yeah.

That means that the AI generates a table with potential suppliers.

Then I can ask, okay, what are my landed costs, including shipping, customs, all these other things that I have to add to the price to know how much this costs, what I want to buy.

That's a pretty difficult task.

Yeah, boring.

But difficult.

But necessary.

And he stops saying boring.

This is all really.

Yeah, yeah, come on.

I mean, just to sum that up.

Branding and all these.

I do the storytelling for this.

Okay.

I mean, this is my job.

This is the way sourcing works.

But very often when I talk to customers about this, they start to yawn because they want to see nice AI generated pictures.

Yeah.

Where are the pictures coming in?

The AI agents then are being used to check all the different supplier requirements, the customs.

It becomes the suppliers sitting in different countries.

I have to do research on the customs and all these kind of things.

And then it generates a nice table that shows me how much I actually have to pay, which is work that probably take days or even weeks.

Sometimes.

They show a video how this can be done within minutes.

And that's pretty crazy.

Yes.

But it's also, and that's again, my job to generalize these things that shows you a way how you can use AI agents today in a sense, in a way that makes total sense, business sense.

And we are not doing it.

We are focusing on the buy the blue sweater part for me.

And that's what I find always interesting, using these examples to.

Change our thinking towards other directions.

But if you're in sourcing.

That'S a pretty interesting, compelling offering that they got there.

And that was just the second question.

I can offer a third one if you want to.

Yeah, Just going into this for a bit, because I'll give you a storyline for your yawning customers.

What this is going to create in the future is a whole tsunami of new D2C brands that actually, very quickly that can come to the market within weeks, days even, absolutely target their.

Target group perfectly and with a very good calculation behind the production of products.

So this is a problem for brands, I think, but because there's going to be, it's going to be much, much easier to push new products on the market that are not here yet, especially in.

In the D2C area.

What you can also do is you can use Alibaba.com's picture search or photo search.

Feature to find supplier of everyone.

Yeah.

Like for example, my daughter came on on Saturday and wanted to buy a D2C brand watch.

I don't mention the name.

And they wanted like the typical Instagram TikTok kind of D2C brand and they wanted to sell the watch for €100.

And I took out Alibaba.com, take a pic, took a picture of the watch and I can buy it for €2 on Alibaba.com.

yeah, it looks the same.

Probably we have to do more research to see if it's still the same product, but it looks quite similar.

But that's also a problem.

Yeah.

Suddenly you have an unbelievable amount of transparency.

And you have to justify why you want to sell this thing for €100 that I can actually buy for two.

I offered to buy 10 and then she could pass them around in the class.

But yeah, that's also a big problem that we probably will face quickly.

And it's also something that I always like to show when I talk about Shein and Temu.

I show a bag that was that I can buy on Amazon for like €19 and you can buy it on Temu and shein for like 8 and 6 Euros or something like that.

And then I let people ask, what do you think the same bag is sold for in China?

And usually nobody really gets the price.

It's around €1 and it's sold around €1 still with profit.

So you very often the question is not why is it so cheap on Tamu, it's more why is it so expensive on Amazon?

On Amazon or some.

Or maybe even in the brand store, if they are.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is a whole new, as you said, field of transparency that we haven't known so far.

And I think this will goes way.

Beyond customs and taxes.

Yes.

And it will affect brands that can't hide any longer behind the great branding strategy.

Because if the product is just the same as the one on Alibaba.com, it's really hard to.

Justify the higher price just through branding.

And that's it.

As you say, this is a much bigger.

Especially if the branding, not very.

Is boring too.

Right?

Yeah.

We're not very inventive.

But I can give you one last question that can be answered using Alibaba.com services and that's who can make this?

Yeah.

I have an idea for a product and I can describe it, but I don't know where to get.

Could be a very complicated thing.

And Alibaba.com has a.

An app that's called Axio Accio, which is basically a chatbot for products.

I can put in there my prompt describing the product and Axio tries to build a supply chain for me for this product.

I can even ask it to check with market data if this product has a.

Successful business ahead of it.

I can generate or visualize drafts of it, pictures of this and then I can use those which I can modify, which I can then use to find suppliers.

And so the whole process of I have an idea to I have a product that I can sell is also supported here without actually picking out products, just with the idea.

That's a pretty interesting thing for somebody who wants to start a D2C brand.

That all comes back to that actually that creating and selling products is going to be a matter of days or weeks and not a matter of months anymore.

So hooray.

After the tsunami of retailers and platforms coming from from China, I guess that will be a next the next wave coming from DTC brands that are all active on these platforms and are coming for us.

Yeah, that is really an interesting outlook.

Thank you for breaking down what happened at the co create and I agree with you in, in that case that it's not a very.

It's.

It's not an Instagrammable topic in a way.

It's not a YouTube.

That's what I meant.

YouTubeable topic because it's much more complicated.

It has a much further reach than everything we are talking about at the moment.

I absolutely agree.

Yes.

Thank you very much for your insights, Von.

That was really interesting and it was great having you here.

Yeah.

Thank you for inviting me.

Right.

I hope you all can digest what we said today because I think it was a lot.

Thanks for listening to us and you could make me as always, very happy by following us or rating our podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube and also leaving your comments and telling us what you think about this new Chinese wave that is coming.

Yeah.

Next week we'll be talking a bit more operative business.

I'll have an expert over to debate whether Black Week on Amazon is still working or not with some very up to date figures and numbers from the market.

So that is also going to be interesting.

So tune in next time and thanks for today.

Bye bye.

You listened to let's Talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lommer and Vanneri Dichtel.