At 1:30 p.m., November 3, 2022, the Business School of Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) held the 16th Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series online through Tencent Meeting. Professor Li Jiatao from the HKUST Business School was invited as the keynote speaker of this lecture, and more than 50 people (including teachers, master and doctoral students, and undergraduate students) attended this lecture.

     Professor Lin Song, dean of the Business School, presided over this meeting and introduced Professor Li Jiatao’s resume. Li Jiatao is currently the Li Guowei Chair Professor of Business at the HKUST Business School, the chair professor in the Department of Management of the HKUST Business School, the director of the Business Strategy and Innovation Research Center of the HKUST Business School, a senior scholar at the HKUST Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), an academician of the Academy of International Business (AIB), the vice chairman of the AIB, and the chairman of the 2018 Annual Meeting of the AIB. Professor Li Jiatao is a senior expert in international business strategy and is committed to promoting corporate strategy research in emerging countries. Since 2016, he has been serving as the associate editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), which is a top international business journal.

    Professor Li Jiatao first introduced the special issue topics in JIBS to the teachers and students of the Business School, and shared his opinions with them in combination with the paper topic “Digital Platforms as a Channel to Enter Foreign Markets: Overcoming the Liabilities of Foreignness and Complementorship”. This research adopts the data of Amazon.com and JD.com, i.e. the leading e-commerce platforms in the United States and China. The research results confirm that: in comparison with the condition that the supplier serves as a platform owner, the sales will be lower if the supplier maintains control through selling as a third-party seller. Besides, the research findings suggest that the penalty for retaining control will be smaller for companies with stronger brands, and those companies whose consumers prefer digital business models. These findings provide new insights into how multinational companies leverage digital platform channels to enter foreign markets.

    After the sharing, the attending teachers and students actively participated in the discussion about the topic of the lecture delivered by professor Li Jiatao, and the professor answered their questions in an enthusiastic manner, further deepening their academic exchanges.

    The “Excellent Academic Forum” is an academic exchange platform established by the Business School to fulfill the mission of “contributing new management knowledge”, which focuses on cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development dilemmas in the discipline of business administration and the Chinese enterprise management practice, and brings together frontier ideas and innovative ideas in China and abroad, so as to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.