CEOs themselves get behind the wheel of delivery trucks, as Thai retail giants vie for the "minutes-level instant delivery" market across Southeast Asia.
Text by | WANG Yi
On March 27, at the headquarters of Cainiao Group in Hangzhou, CP AXTRA, a retail giant under Thailand's Charoen Pokphand Group, officially signed a memorandum of strategic cooperation with Cainiao.
Two days earlier, at Cainiao's warehouse in Wuxi, Xie Yuchen, CEO of CP AXTRA, had just spent a full day working as a "warehouse operator" alongside robots, and test-driven a new energy van dedicated to "last-mile" delivery for the first time.
Speaking of this experience, Xie Yuchen said: "Cainiao has a well-developed digital system and robotic warehousing facilities. Even a novice can easily complete picking and packing tasks with extremely high efficiency."
According to Wan Lin, CEO of Cainiao, the Wuxi warehouse has been operating stably for eight years and is currently "one of the best-operated warehouses" of Cainiao, with nearly 1,000 robots scheduled to operate simultaneously on the same site.
The management team's hands-on experience has intuitively verified the performance of Cainiao's logistics technology in terms of efficiency and ease of use, and also laid a solid foundation for the signing of this memorandum of strategic cooperation: this retail giant active in Thailand and even the entire Southeast Asian market is joining hands with its Chinese technology and operation partner with firm determination and a pragmatic attitude to systematically replicate a retail revolution that has been proven successful in China in the local market — the instant retail and forward warehouse model.
The two sides launched digital supply chain cooperation back in 2023, and now the partnership has been upgraded to a strategic tie-up. This cooperation, which originated from the pursuit of efficiency, is directly targeted at the core of competition in the Southeast Asian retail market in the future.
01 The CEO Steps in to Drive a Van: When "The Elephant Turns Around" Meets "China Speed"
Hands-on experience has long been a working habit that Xie Yuchen has adhered to since he worked in Thailand.
In the past few years, he has often sorted and packed goods together with employees in CP AXTRA's warehouses in Thailand. For Xie Yuchen, this is not only a way to understand front-line operations, but also to test the actual performance of the Warehouse Management System (WMS) and Transportation Management System (TMS) under their cooperation.
This down-to-earth management style stems from his anxiety and strategic thinking about the transformation of traditional retail.
Last November, when CP AXTRA and Cainiao officially reached a strategic cooperation, Xie Yuchen mentioned that "in the past era, the big fish ate the small fish, but now no matter you are a big fish or a small fish, the fast fish can eat every other fish."
This reflects the widespread sense of crisis among traditional retail giants under the wave of digital transformation.
Affiliated to Thailand's Charoen Pokphand Group, CP AXTRA operates two major brands, Makro and Lotus's, with businesses covering 10 countries, which is undoubtedly a huge "fish". However, as e-commerce in Southeast Asia explodes and consumers' requirements for delivery timeliness shift from "next-day delivery" to "same-hour delivery" and even "minute-level delivery", this "big fish" must make itself faster and more agile.
To this end, Xie Yuchen has set three major transformation tasks for the company: digital transformation, adapting to drastic changes in customers' demands for "same-hour delivery" and other services, and comprehensive upgrading of the supply chain.
His personal practice in Wuxi once again convinced him that Cainiao's "China Speed" and technical system verified through extreme scenarios are exactly the answers CP AXTRA needs. On the one hand, Cainiao's stable technology verified by extreme scenarios of the level of China's "Double 11" and rapid implementation response have become key advantages.
On the other hand, the Cainiao team also has extremely fast execution speed. According to the project team, Cainiao dispatched a 30-person on-site team in the first week of cooperation, and the core system went online in three months. This joint co-creation model ensures that the technology can deeply adapt to CP AXTRA's huge and complex business scenarios, providing a solid engine for its "elephant turning around" transformation task.
Returning to retail itself, whether it is improving business efficiency with the help of digital systems, AI or robotics, technology is always a tool. For the ultimate goal of cooperation, both Xie Yuchen and Wan Lin have expressed similar views, that is, to jointly explore what value new models and new technologies can bring to customers.
"For our end consumers, creating lower prices, better experiences and better service forms for them is our common goal," said Wan Lin.
02 The Southeast Asian "Model Room" of China's Instant Delivery
Judging from the results of cooperation, a series of quantifiable data have initially verified the feasibility of "China Speed".
At present, multiple key digital supply chain systems jointly developed by CP AXTRA and Cainiao have increased the picking and packing efficiency of Makro stores by 140%.
According to the data revealed by Xie Yuchen at the scene of the signing ceremony of the strategic cooperation memorandum, the order processing volume of a single picker of CP AXTRA has now jumped from 5 orders per hour to 12 orders. More importantly, in the wholesale business with an average customer unit price of about 700 RMB, through the optimization of multiple digital systems, the daily delivery order processing capacity has increased from 15,000 orders to 100,000 orders, with the total daily average order amount reaching about 56 million RMB.
This supports the explosive growth of its online business — the daily online order processing capacity of a single store has risen from 300 orders to 1500 orders, a full 5-fold increase. Relying on this efficiency leap, CP AXTRA has become the number one online wholesale and retail company in Thailand in 2025.
Looking ahead, with the signing of this strategic cooperation memorandum, the cooperation between CP AXTRA and Cainiao has moved from single-point efficiency improvement to a new stage of systematic model replication and ecological co-construction. Its strategic blueprint is clearly visible:
The first is to build the dual "digital + physical" cornerstone of instant retail. In terms of digitalization, the cooperation between the two sides is extending from key digital systems such as in-store warehouse management and transportation management to the overall warehouse network layout and other aspects.
In terms of hardware, the two sides have already launched the forward warehouse construction plan, landing in multiple locations such as Bangkok, Thailand, which is the core measure to replicate China's instant shopping and forward warehouse system to Southeast Asia. By deploying small warehouses at urban nodes to realize the proximity of commodities, it is the physical premise to achieve the "same-hour delivery" experience.
The second is to pursue higher-level competitiveness from AI and automation. Xie Yuchen has mentioned his interest in AI and large models for many times. He believes that in the face of the changeable market environment in Southeast Asia, such as weather and sudden demand, AI can provide more flexible supply chain decisions.
Based on this market feature, Cainiao is also working with CP AXTRA to explore the use of AI large models to optimize the supply chain, and gradually introduce automated robot solutions. However, the two sides have reached a consensus that the introduction of technology should match the stage of business development, adopting a gradual path of starting with semi-automation and upgrading step by step, rather than blindly pursuing high-profile full automation.
Wan Lin also revealed that Cainiao is developing a new generation of robots, which have already been applied on a large scale in its own scenarios, and "will probably be announced to the market soon".
On the basis of supply chain upgrading, from a higher perspective, CP AXTRA is launching comprehensive linkage with the Alibaba ecosystem through cooperation with Cainiao.
Xie Yuchen clearly stated that the cooperation with Cainiao is "the beginning of broader cooperation with the Alibaba Group". At present, CP AXTRA is planning to introduce commodities into the Chinese market through Tmall Global, and explore access to Alibaba Cloud and Tongyi Qianwen large model.
This means that this cooperation has gone beyond the simple export of logistics technology, and evolved into an all-round ecological linkage covering logistics, e-commerce, cloud computing and AI technology, drawing a grand vision for CP AXTRA to become "the leading retail technology platform in Southeast Asia".
03 A "Joint Co-Creation" That Defines the Future
The strategic cooperation between CP AXTRA and Cainiao provides an excellent sample for observing the overseas expansion of Chinese retail technology. Behind it lies clear business logic and industry enlightenment.
For CP AXTRA, this is a precise acceleration that compresses the trial-and-error cycle and cost. Facing the high growth and imbalance of the Southeast Asian e-commerce market, building a mature instant retail system on its own is time-consuming and extremely risky. The introduction of Cainiao is essentially the introduction of a full-link solution covering algorithms, systems and operations that has been verified by the most complex market in the world.
This enables it to build the core barrier to cope with future competition at a faster speed and higher certainty — the ultimate efficiency driven by data algorithms, and the instant experience supported by the reconstruction of the warehouse distribution network. Xie Yuchen once put forward a "three-year vision" to make CP AXTRA "truly become a retail technology company", and this cooperation is the key lever to realize this vision.
For Cainiao and even more Chinese technology enterprises in their overseas journey, this cooperation is also expected to verify the feasibility of "capability and model export".
Wan Lin proposed that Cainiao is "driven by two wheels: globalization and logistics technology", which is a very unique enterprise in the market that has both global logistics business and R&D capabilities for logistics and supply chain technology. Its technology has been tempered in a large number of domestic business scenarios, where technology and business are interdependent, and a set of competitive market-oriented solutions has been formed at the same time. Cooperation with overseas retail partners also helps them understand the local market faster.
Taking the cooperation with CP AXTRA as an example, from coping with Thai consumers' habit of "signing for parcels in person" to adapting to the packaging material supply chain in different countries, what Cainiao demonstrates is not a simple copy and paste, but the ability to deeply understand and integrate into local market scenarios. This kind of joint co-creation that respects localization and is oriented to solving practical problems is the key for Chinese technology enterprises to take root in overseas markets successfully.
From the perspective of the whole industry, in the past, the competition of e-commerce in Southeast Asia mostly focused on traffic acquisition and front-end marketing, while the cooperation between CP AXTRA and Cainiao is shifting the competition focus to back-end supply chain efficiency and experience.
When local retail giants begin to systematically integrate China's instant retail model, they will set new industry standards in terms of cost, timeliness and experience, thus forcing retail and e-commerce players across the region to accelerate their own digital transformation of the supply chain.
This may mean that a new round of retail competition centered on efficiency and experience has quietly kicked off in Southeast Asia.
The current cooperation is a strategic choice made by the Thai retail giant based on deep recognition of "China Speed" and "China Solutions", and it is also a key step for Chinese logistics technology to move from product export to capability and model export. When CP AXTRA, which is determined to become a "fast fish", is deeply tied to Cainiao, China's leading logistics technology enterprise, the new retail blueprint they jointly draw in the Southeast Asian market is accelerating from concept to reality.
This is not only a cooperation between two companies, but also an important experiment that is taking place and shaping the future business form of Southeast Asia.