In the first quarter of 2020, online retail sales in Quanzhou, a city in East China’s Fujian province,  hit 38.15 billion yuan ($5.4 billion), achieving year-on-year growth of 6.1 percent which was 8.5 percentage points higher than that of the province, according to the Quanzhou E-commerce Center.

Officials said Quanzhou's online retail sales accounted for 37.7 percent of Fujian's total, ranking it first in the province.

During the period, the city’s B2C (business-to-consumer) online retail sales totaled 28.85 billion yuan, accounting for 75.6 percent of the city’s online retail sales, an increase of 7.9 percent year on year.

The city's rural online retail sales reached 28.24 billion yuan, accounting for 74 percent of the city's online retail sales, up 8 percent and 4.9 percentage points above the province's rural online retail sales growth.

To help e-commerce enterprises overcome the operational difficulties caused by the novel coronavirus pneumonia epidemic, Quanzhou introduced a series of measures this year designed to support them expand their business, and to support foreign trade enterprises and cross-border e-commerce enterprises.

As at the end of March, the number of Quanzhou online retail monitoring platform stores has reached 336,000, officials said.

They added that e-commerce development is inseparable from logistics and as of April 8, there were 722 logistics companies in the city, 685 of which had resumed operations since the coronavirus outbreak, with the resumption rate of freight companies reaching 94.9 percent.

In addition, the city's 12 provincial express distribution centers and 121 express licensing companies have all resumed operations, with 1,513 postal express delivery points now having fully returned to normal work.

As of April 8 in the year, the city’s express delivery business volume has reached 160 million packages, an increase of 22 percent year on year.