Tobacco Asia

68 tobaccoasia / Issue 4, 2018 September / October The QR code is commonly applied in code- scanning payment, anti-counterfeit tracking, ad- vertising promotion, and membership service. Furthermore, its common application scenarios also include electronic ticketing, registration, pro- duction management, public transportation and healthcare, etc., covering almost every aspect of work and life, and growing to be indispensable. With the use of QR codes, companies can cap- ture a variety of effective data, such as gender, age, consumption level, shopping time, shopping preferences, shopping frequency, geographic loca- tion, and other effective information, and develop a corresponding user consumption report, allow- ing them to speculate on consumption trends of a certain group and provide data support for r&d and promotion. As an industrial company that has studied the early application of QR code technology in the industry, CT Guangxi achieved excellent results. In 2015, it took the lead to develop a QR code application system, which not only serves tobacco companies but also moves beyond the industry to provide technical support for the economic development of Guangxi province. According to statistics, in 2015 alone, CT Guangxi's QR code scanning was used 30 million times, and the plat- form exchanged a total of 440,000 gifts with the average daily redemption gift reaching 1200 times. The Zhenlong WeChat official account "cap- tured" 700,000 users in a short period of time. The mature QR code system not only satisfies the marketing needs of the company, but also em- barks on the path to foreign technology output for both customers in the tobacco industry and those outside the industry. CT Guangxi has explored a viable path of diversifying the taste of tobacco, di- versifying the main business of tobacco, and the Internet+ transformation of the tobacco industry. CT Zhejiang pilots "internet+tobacco" Located in Hangzhou where Alibaba is headquar- tered, CT Zhejiang naturally has many advantages in its application of Internet+. The company has gained experience through cooperation with Ali- baba in terms of innovative monopoly administra- tion, brand marketing, and loan settlement, and thus established three major cooperation direc- tions between the tobacco industry and Ali (in- cluding Ant Financial), respectively the anti-coun- terfeiting and smuggling, marketing management, and third-party payment. Especially in the area of anti-counterfeiting and smuggling, CT Zhejiang and Alibaba have achieved good gains in practice. At the beginning of 2018, the first case of the ille- gal heat-non-burn cigarettes occurring in Ningbo, Zhejiang province was solved, in which Alibaba's team provided strong data support. Last year, the Yinzhou Tobacco Monopoly Administration of Ningbo, Zhejiang province re- ceived a report that some consumers bought a car- ton of fake cigarettes on an e-commerce platform. After checking, the police confirmed that the re- ported product was cartridges of heat-not-burn cigarettes. In 2017, STMA had made it clear that heat-not-burn cigarettes shall fall under the tobac- co monopoly law supervision. On August 28, law enforcement officers began an in-depth investiga- tion into the case. Up till now, 13 suspects have been arrested in this case. They have seized more than 3,500 cartridges involved in the case and de- tained one delivery vehicle for the crime, which in- volved RMB100 million. The case has raised wide- spread concern in the society. In the investigation process of this case, which was listed by Alibaba Group as one of the top 10 cases of 2017 anti- counterfeiting, the application of big data was re- markable, In the Internet era, big data applications are everywhere. In order to improve the efficiency of case investigations, CT Zhejiang and public se- curity sub-bureaus set up a data analysis center to fully collect data on all aspects and use big data to drive cases. In the meantime, Alibaba's team also provided strong data support for case detec- tion. Faced with thousands of transaction records, big data has become increasingly important. Big data has also driven the arrest process. Through the tracking and analysis of suspects' consumption data, the behavior track and activity area can be worked out, and sometimes the suspect's activity range can be reduced to less than 50 meters. Undoubtedly, the cooperation between the tobacco industry and BAT in the future may be further strengthened. On the one hand, internet giants represented by Baidu, Ali, and Tencent working with the to- bacco industry is so that they can continuously expand their business. On the other hand, the reason why the tobacco industry has actively em- braced internet companies is to keep up with cur- rent development trends and achieve a win-win situation. The two sides are expected to expand cooperation in big data, AI (artificial intelligence), IoT (internet of things), retail services, financial services, and smart logistics.

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