The world's leading home furnishing retailer, Ikea, opened its online flagship store on Alibaba's e-commerce platform Tmall recently, showing the Swedish industry leader's confidence in the Chinese market as the coronavirus outbreak is coming increasingly under control in the country.

It was also the first time Ikea has set up shop through a third-party platform since its establishment 77 years ago.

Since opening in Shanghai in 1998, Ikea has set up 30 standard stores, one small store and two experience stores in China. According to Ikea China's chief executive officer, Anna Pawlak-Kuliga, although some offline stores have yet to reopen due to the outbreak, "relying on digital strategy to adjust the working mode of offline stores and diversify online channels, Ikea can still well meet the shopping needs of Chinese consumers anytime and anywhere".

Shanghai has the largest number of multinational company (MNC) headquarters on the Chinese mainland. At present, while MNCs are resuming work and production in an orderly manner, they are embracing the internet economy with Chinese characteristics through cloud sales, cloud exhibitions, cloud training and cloud customer services.

To solve delivery difficulties due to the epidemic, Wyeth Nutrition (China) has cooperated with SF Express and initiated a free express service. The company's online sales grew more than 200 percent in February compared to the same period in 2019.

During the outbreak, Jungheinrich Lift Truck Shanghai set up a live broadcast channel through the video-sharing app Douyin, also known as TikTok. According to Bao Wenyan, the company's head of marketing, customers can see product details during remote communication with sales staff through a live broadcast, which was helpful during this challenging period.

Two headquarters-based service trading enterprises engaged in third-party testing and certification services have also turned to online approaches.

The German testing company TUV Rheinland, has organized more than 50 cloud classes since Feb 17, gathering more than 50,000 people. The contents involve standard interpretation, professional and technical training, as well as outbreak-related topics such as home office information.

Geneva-based SGS's headquarters in Shanghai started remote real-time testing during the outbreak. Customers can remotely communicate with engineers and analyze data from field tests in real time via mobile phones and computers.