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Dec. 24 (NBD) -- After the early stages of market grabbing and barbaric growth, logistics, a traditional and everyday industry, became eager to shake off its labor-intensive and low-tech labels.

It is widely believed in the industry that the rapid development of the intelligent logistics which integrates artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies will promote the transformation and upgrading of the upstream and downstream businesses along the industrial chain, and this sector will become the backbone of continuous optimization of "new retail".

Since the new round of retail reform, the Internet behemoths, represented by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com ("BATJ"), have accelerated the integration of the online and offline business, during which "intellectualization" of the seemingly traditional logistics domain has sparked a bitter fight among those Internet giants.

On December 10, Tencent-backed Internet of Things ("IoT") startup G7 announced that it had raised 320 million U.S. dollars, which marked the largest fundraising by an IoT startup globally and made G7 one of the most valuable IoT firms in the world.

On December 3, one week before G7's announcement, Alibaba's Ant Financial co-led the funding round to invest 1 billion yuan (144.9 million U.S. dollars) in Shanghai-based cloud logistics services provider Keking. One day later, Ant Financial led another investment in smart road freight startup Sinoiov.

This July, Baidu announced the investment in Chinese commercial vehicle leasing business Lionbridge Logistics, setting foot on smart logistics.

JD.com is also an active player in the smart logistics domain. In addition to building an unmanned delivery fleet on its own, JD.com also invested in tech companies including robot maker CSG and solution and service provider for automatic pilot Idriverplus.

Xu Qiang, vice president of Yunmanman, a freight transportation and logistics mobile app operator, predicted that at the end of 2018 or in early 2019, there will be two to three super unicorns in the smart logistics sector. In the future, judging whether a smart logistics enterprise can stand out from the crowd depends on whether it has these three elements, namely work force, money and data, Xu said to NBD.

G7's chief financial officer Zhang Jielong said to NBD that be it e-commerce or retail, the delivery experience relies heavily on the cost and efficiency of logistics service which is determined by logistics infrastructure.

A veteran investor in the logistics and new retail industries told NBD that in the future all logistics infrastructure will be information-based and the informatization process will create huge opportunities in the smart logistics industry.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn